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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Lino Demasi's LiveJournal:
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| Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | | 10:27 am |
How did you know?
Oh Safeway. How did you know I was looking for a free sample of ultra thin pads with tru-fit wings? You made my day. |
| Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 | | 9:01 am |
I was sitting on a bus this morning near the SFU campus. I looked out the window and it was raining. I looked out the window on the other side of the bus and it was snowing. |
| Sunday, February 1st, 2009 | | 9:25 pm |
Curse you Maple!
I've been programming using maple for a class and observed some interesting behaviour. I'm making a series of functions to work with multivariate polynomials. At one point, I created the polynomial x^2*y^4 - 7*x^5 + x*y*z-z^6*x^3*y^1 and converted it into my internal format. When I do output from my internal format, things are sorted in terms of the exponent of x, then y, then z. So the output should be -7x^5 -x^3yz^6 + x^2y^4 + xyz. But, instead I get the exact output of what I put in! It would seem that maple has created a reference to this polynomial in it's internal format and when I create a new copy that is equivalent to it, it points back to the first copy, and thus gives me the original ordering. If I trick maple and tell it to output my polynomial in terms of variables a,b,c it comes out in the desired format. But, if I just try and tell it to switch the x variable to something else, it still doesn't come out quite right. Some of the ordering of the yz is out of order, which must be a relic of how the subterms of my expression were stored internally and it's again pointing to those terms. While this was interesting, it is also a bit annoying because my output doesn't look how I want it to. |
| Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 | | 7:44 am |
Score one for the good guys
As most of you are probably aware (although, as I found out yesterday, some people don't actually know), I recently moved to the Vancouver area. When Kaitlyn and I moved, we hired Two Small Men with Big Hearts moving company to get our belongings here. Just to recap the list of problems we had with them
- They took longer than the 10-20 business days they claime
- They lost my whiteboard and a work table
- They overcharged us by several hundred dollars
The biggest problem is really the third item, the other two were somewhat minor. The stuff was only two days late, but we did get it eventually. We didn't purchase the optional insurance for protection against loss or damage, which would have cost more than the total value of what we lost. But the fact that they overcharged us by several hundred dollars and then didn't return my "calls" (an e-mail as requested by the person I spoke to on the phone and then a fax so that I had a record) really rubbed me the wrong way.
Fortunately, we paid for this large purchase on our Mosaik MasterCard, so I called them up and asked them what I could do about it and they sent me a form to fill out with a section to include about what the dispute was. Instead I sent them 10 pages of invoices, printouts of photographs of weigh station receipts, and mathematical calculations as to exactly how much I was getting hosed.
This was done back in October. Well today we are victorious. Our MasterCard account has been credited for the exact amount I was seeking. In the end it cost us about $15 in cash ($10 to fax the stuff and $5 in interest), but taking them to small claims court probably would have cost us a lot more since we would have to do it in Ontario, and as you should recall from the first sentence of this post, I live in Vancouver. |
| Wednesday, December 17th, 2008 | | 12:05 am |
Aeroplan makes me angry. For a mere 2 cents per point I can give my points to someone as a Christmas gift! For example, I could give 6500 points (at a cost of $130) to someone so that they could spend them on a $50 amazon gift card. In order for me to tell them how stupid this is, I would have to phone them, which is not worth my time. |
| Friday, December 12th, 2008 | | 8:43 am |
Snow!
We have snow. If I didn't have to mark exams all day there's no way I'd be going in to campus. I'll have to bring pants in case buses get cancelled and I need to walk down the mountain. I can't even see the next street over. It's snowing and foggy. |
| Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 | | 7:46 pm |
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| 5:54 pm |
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| Saturday, December 6th, 2008 | | 6:39 pm |
Iron Chef Lino
Today's Iron Chef contest consists of the following ingredients:
- Chocolate Chip Cookies
- Pasta
- Chicken
- Sausage
- Bacon
- Parmesan Cheese
- Mozzarella Cheese
- Olives
- Pickles
Your mission is to use as many of these ingredients as possible to construct a single, edible dish.
I skipped out on the chocolate chip cookies and the pickles. The rest were combined into a soup. Starting with some chicken broth, I added garlic, some spices, the parmesan cheese, the olives and the baocn. I cooked up the chicken and sausage and then added it diced to the mixture. After letting it simmer for a bit, I put in the pasta, and then topped it all off in the bowl with some mozzarella. It was delicious.
I think I'll go have a cookie now though. |
| 4:24 pm |
It's hard to figure out target audience some times
While doing a search for the book "Graph Theory and Computing" I came across a page from amazon with the book. I followed the link since they sometimes have pages available to view. They did not have pages of the book there, but if I wanted to, I could have added the book to a baby registry. |
| 3:06 pm |
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| 11:29 am |
Seen on a bus shelter sign on the way home "1 in 5 people survives 'condition x', let's reverse the trend" I mean sure, I know what they're trying to say, but it really sounds like they're saying that 20% is too high a survival rate. |
| Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 | | 11:36 pm |
Over the last few weeks all I've really had to worry about for school has been these two large projects and one large assignment. The nature of these things is that I can't spend more than an hour or two at once working without going crazy. Thus, what else to do in the down time but play video games? And I've been quite busy. On the 29th (Saturday) I finished Phantom Brave, which I thought was a pretty decent game. I started YS: The Ark of Napishtim that same and beat it on the 1st (Monday). It was enjoyable, although it was really short. On the 1st I started Grandia II, and I've played 12-15 hours over the past 3 days. I'm also really enjoying this game. My progress has been updated on my games list, but I won't be satisfied until all the RPGs on the list have a date under the "last beat" column. |
| Thursday, November 27th, 2008 | | 8:17 am |
Hell Weeks
Last week, this week and next week have been and will be crazy busy. I've had 2 assignments, 2 projects and a presentation. One assignment is over and the presentation is in 10 minutes. The next assignment is due tomorrow, and the projects are due approximately next week. Oh, and then I have to do some marking this weekend, which turned out to be less than I was expecting, which is good. Also, we had a house-guest for 4 days, so I spent some time visiting. By the end of this, I'll have read 7 different papers on various topics in math. The fact that the projects and one of the assignments is all about reading papers makes it a lot worse, since sitting down and reading a paper in one sitting and having it all make sense just doesn't happen unless it's only 4 pages long. The ones I have are each on the order of 20 pages, which means I have to read them about 10 times to absorb everything enough to say something meaningful about it. But I can't read it 10 times in a row. I'd go crazy, and I wouldn't absorb anything. So, in conclusion, I have lots of work to do and shouldn't be spending time posting things. |
| Friday, November 21st, 2008 | | 8:04 am |
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| Monday, October 20th, 2008 | | 8:29 pm |
1. Bill Clinton 2. Alfred Hitchcock 3. Kaitlyn 4. Queen Elizabeth II 5. Vin Diesel 6. Emma Watson 7. Obama 8. McCain 9. Pee Wee Herman 10. Jon Bon Jovi 11. Andrew Wiles 12. Vincent Van Gogh 13. Shakira 14. Vanilla Ice 15. Tina Fey 16. Obama 17. Everybody in Def Leppard 18. Rick Astley 19. Jim Henson 20. Buzz Aldren 21. Sly Stallone 22. Rodney Dangerfield 23. Bob Barker 24. Sean Connery 25. Kaitlyn 26. McCain 27. Stephen Harper 28. Brad Pitt 29. Meatloaf 30. This makes no sense. |
| Friday, October 3rd, 2008 | | 1:02 am |
Thoughts on the leader debate
There's been a lot of talk about the conservative governments "intensity based targets" for carbon reduction. Basically, companies are doing well if they reduce their emissions/unit of production. There has been a lot of focus on production from the oil sands in particular. The other parties are saying it's bad if they increase production by a factor of 5 and decrease pollution by a factor of 10%/unit. Is it really bad? We intend to harvest all the oil out of the sands eventually, so if we can reduce the pollution/unit how is that a bad thing? I'm not an expert on pollution; I don't know if it's bad for it to all come in a clump or if it's better to be spread out, and what the optimal point is. You could argue that in the future we might have better technology to reduce the amounts even further, but I don't see any way to get a good conclusion of where the production line should be from that argument. I'm failing to see the relevance of the green party. Their big thing is the environment, but it's now an important issue to a large portion of Canadians and so it's being addressed by the other parties. I'm also struggling to differentiate the Liberals Bloc, NDP and Green parties. So far they seem to agree about the conservatives (personified by Harper) being wrong and have somewhat similar ideas otherwise. I think so far in the debate I'm most impressed by Gilles Duceppe. I'm only about 40% into it. |
| Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 | | 12:31 am |
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| Monday, September 8th, 2008 | | 7:18 am |
Events of yesterday
*Doorbell* *Knock on Door* *Kaitlyn answers door* <upstairs neighbour> We just got a new couch and are getting rid of our old one. Do you need a couch? Kaitlyn and I (well, mostly Kaitlyn, but I helped) cleaned it up and it's now in useable condition. This post brought to you by (and from) our new (and only) piece of furniture. |
| Monday, August 18th, 2008 | | 6:54 am |
Moving day!
Movers are coming in ~2 hours. So much to do, why am I posting to lj? |
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