Vancouver/Whistler won the bid for the 2010 Winter Olympics by a 3-vote margin. Congrats, guys!
This is good news for lots of people, including those of us who like snowboarding (or if you really must, skiing), as this will probably lead to the addition of facilities and runs at what’s been called the world’s best mountain. It’s where I learned how to snowboard.
Three Python postings in The Happiest Geek on Earth:
artima.com has a six part interview with Guido van Rossum on his wonderful programming language, Python. In the series, they cover the language’s orgins, its design goals, productivity, contracts, strong vs. weak typing and the community. A worthwhile read.
The whuffie cycle is a quick on these days — within 12 hours of my post on Paul Baranowski’s Lessons Learned from Peekabooty (which appears on the main page of the Peekabooty site), Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing wrote a post, which in turn caught the attention of Slashdot. The end result: Paul got a deluge of email, all of it very supportive, and a lot of it asking: “Okay, if C++ and Java aren’t viable languages for development, what is?”
Paul’s answer: Python. He’s got a response to all those who asked, and it’s in this essay, What Language Do You Recommend?
(By the bye, I’m the one who got him hooked on it. Guido should get me to do publicity for him.)
At the end of the last Critical Mass ride, a number of us ended up at Dundas Square, where I took the time to play The Hokey Pokey for some kids. Someone captured the moment:
The rest of the photos, which includes my friend Rick Conroy, another bike-riding accordion-playing kind of guy, are here.
Just a quick note to all my blogging friends: I updated the blogroll yesterday (see the right-hand-side column of this page). If you link to me and you’re not there, drop me a line and I’ll add you to the list.
My parents, bless ’em, made sure that my sister Eileen and I didn’t end up becoming fussy eaters by exposing us to as many types of cuisine as possible. This is an asset in Accordion City, North America’s most multicultural metropolis, and is required when enjoying cultural mash-ups such as the “Chicken Satay Burrito” from the sandwich shop down the street from my house.
When I was younger, my parents had to deal with cases where the children of their friends coming over for dinner were fussy eaters. The adults were there for the Filipino food — if you’ve never tried it, a very oversimplified way to think of it is “Chinese food cross-bred with Spanish” — but sometimes the kids wouldn’t eat anything “strange”. The universal “safe food” for these culinary cowards was the hot dog, which my parents prepared as the Emergency Fussy Eater Food. The hot dog is safe, familiar…and bland.
(But sometimes, it’s not bland enough. I remember seeing an American ad for a brand of hot dogs whose name I forget. The “mom” in the voice-over said the particular brand of hot dogs being hawked weren’t “spiced as much as the other ones”.)
The hot dog’s come so far from its much tastier, spicier German origins that it now requires dressing up. Hence the North American tradition of hot dog condiments. The condiments aren’t really a bad thing — I’m rather fond of the sweet-and-sour taste of corn relish and sauerkraut on my bratwurst from the nearby 24-hour hot dog cart. I draw the line at coloured ketchup, though.
Condiments are not the final frontier. Just as late-night TV once marketed things that turned tomatoes into roses and potatoes into starch Slinkies (or it the plural spelling “Slinkys”?), we now have the Octodog. It turns the humble hot dog into a octopus shape.
Who knows, maybe it’s a way to slowly ease kids into eating calamari.
(Thanks to Asparagirl for the link.)