Jasna and I just got back today from a spur-​​of-​​the-​​moment camp­ing trip. We’d been want­ing to have a couple days just for the two of us for a while now, and our sched­ules aligned, so why not? We thought camp­ing would be more fun and relax­ing than any­thing else, and I’ve wanted to see the towns along the Grand River forever, so we com­bined the two and went to Rock Point Pro­vin­cial Park: it’s vir­tu­ally right where the Grand River emp­ties into Lake Erie and neces­sit­ates driv­ing along the Grand River, a fairly nice drive.

I’ve got a grand total of 3 pic­tures from the trip and I’m happy with that. It wasn’t the sort of trip to you take to take pic­tures of. Appar­ently the park is known for its fossils, but we didn’t go hunt­ing for those, either. We went down to the beach a few times — twice for moon­light swims — and spent most of the rest of our time in our camp­site sit­ting around and talk­ing and enjoy­ing one another. We got a nice camp­site with fairly good pri­vacy and shade, and none of the camp­sites dir­ectly around us were taken. It was pretty much the per­fect couple of days, only because we were together.

Jasna bought me an e-​​reader! She actu­ally bought it before we’d planned on going on the trip, but I guess this seemed a good time to give it to me, and give me an easier time read­ing. It’s a Kobo, which I adore. I’m actu­ally a bit of a freak in that I’m some­what anti-​​paper: I often prefer read­ing on screen to read­ing on paper; maybe it’s a side-​​effect of grow­ing up with a com­puter. The Kobo has a really beau­ti­ful dis­play and is easier for me to read than any­thing I’ve ever read from, CRT, LCD or paper. The dis­play can’t refresh very often — maybe once a second or some­thing like that — and it’s super low-​​powered which makes it unsuit­able for any­thing but read­ing, which suits me fine. I have only two com­plaints: firstly, that the font size is typ­ic­ally too big, but that’s a cri­ti­cism of the books that are format­ted for it, not the device itself; and secondly, that it’s really dif­fi­cult to skip for­ward or back­ward a lot of pages at a time. With paper it’s easy to do a bin­ary search for the page you want, but the Kobo seems determ­ined to make you do a lin­ear search.

I did bring my laptop, but only so I could do just enough work to make my guilt levels fall to the point where I could genu­inely relax. It turns out that’s about half an hour, ha! I’m still more or less pleased with how the thesis is progressing.

I had this crazy idea to start up a new web­site today, spe­cific­ally a wiki.

Jasna’s veget­arian and I’m semi-​​vegetarian (“flex­it­arian”, Wiki­pe­dia informs me), only because I’m a picky eater and the veget­arian options out­side of what we pre­pare at home often aren’t great.

Envir­on­mental reas­ons are cer­tainly the primary reas­ons for both of us. Meat is inher­ently inef­fi­cient: for most anim­als humans eat, it takes some­where around 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter to make 1 Cal­orie of animal mat­ter and it would make a lot of sense envir­on­ment­ally — and prob­ably eco­nom­ic­ally as well — to cut out the middle man and just eat the 10 Cal­or­ies of plant mat­ter. That inef­fi­ciency leads to increase land usage, water usage, soil erosion, etc. There are other envir­on­mental prob­lems, such as sewage and meth­ane emissions.

Well today I was lament­ing to myself that there really is no resource for find­ing out exactly what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are! To be sure, draw­ing the line at meat is a little arbit­rary. Veget­arian food, espe­cially meat altern­at­ives like TVP, can go through a lot of pro­cessing and, for all I know in my ignor­ance, end up being just as bad as meat. On the other side, for all I know, also in my ignor­ance, there are some meats out there that really aren’t a big prob­lem at all.

So I have a vis­ion: what if there were a wiki that allowed con­sol­id­at­ing inform­a­tion and maybe even ori­ginal research into what the envir­on­mental costs of foods are?

I don’t know if it’s prac­tical at all. To gauge interest I did my best at ask­ing an unbiased sur­vey while keep­ing an eye on the “Envir­on­mental dam­age from hus­bandry” option. My biggest fear is I’d just be cre­at­ing a web­site for myself that no one else will ever read; I already have one of those.

The closest thing I’ve found to what I’m look­ing for is food­ori­gins but it’s not really aim­ing at the same thing.

I don’t know. I’ll mull it over for a while longer. At stake is $10 for a domain regis­tra­tion and how­ever long it takes to set up a wiki these days.

I’ve always loved remote con­trolled cars. I think at one point in ele­ment­ary school I even lis­ted R/​C car driver as a future pro­fes­sion of mine. While I did have some actu­ally really nice cars as a kid, one dream of mine which never came to fruition was to put a video cam­era on the car. It would be like being trans­por­ted to a mini­ature world where everything is huge and cars go orders of mag­nitude faster than they should.

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I still have a few minutes before 2010 so I thought I’d write a little some­thing while Jasna and I are sit­ting on the couch watch­ing cel­eb­ra­tions on TV with her parents.

Well, first off I think I need to take more pic­tures, the evid­ence for that being that the above is my favour­ite pic­ture I took this year. It’s our fat­test cat, Pin­cho.
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Since I moved out east to Ontario I’ve never really done a proper Christ­mas here. I’ve either gone back out West to my par­ents’ or they’ve come out to Toronto and we’ve done Christ­mas some­where else.

This year Jasna wanted a Christ­mas. She grew up in Ser­bia where Christ­mas is a reli­gious hol­i­day and observed in Janu­ary. They do the tree/​Santa/​gift thing on New Year’s but I sup­pose it’s not quite the same, so this year we decided to do a real Christ­mas. We bought a proper (arti­fi­cial) tree, which you can see above and dec­or­a­tions and what­not. We bought stock­ings, too, though I some­how missed get­ting them in that picture.

We’ll still be doing Christ­mas proper some­where else, but at least we’ll have our own build-​​up to Christmas.

I’m cur­rently hanging out at my gate in Pear­son air­port. In a couple hours I’ll be on my way to Paris and tomor­row morn­ing I’ll catch my con­nect­ing flight to Ams­ter­dam and then I take the train to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sis­ter, Ana, and her hus­band, Andre.

Jasna and I aren’t very good with sep­ar­a­tion, though I think this time went bet­ter than most. It could be that it’s a shorter sep­ar­a­tion this time — five days, in con­trast to Jasna’s recent two-​​month trip — or that we’re too tired from last night’s Hallowe’en party to get as worked up. Maybe we’re just get­ting bet­ter at it, though. It’s not like no tears were shed, but I think we did rel­at­ively well.

Unfor­tu­nately today my cam­era bat­tery decided to crap out on me. The upside to this is Jasna lent me her (very awe­some) DSLR cam­era for the trip. I’ll try to keep pic­tures of blondes down to a min­imum. Mostly I’m excited to see Ana and Andre, but I think they’ll be busy most of the time, so I’ll prob­ably ven­ture into Ams­ter­dam at least once to enter­tain myself. I brought the cam­era cable with me, so watch my photo gal­lery in the next day or two for pic­tures to start appearing.

The con­fer­ence — and my present­a­tion there — I haven’t thought a whole lot about yet. I’ll have to dis­ap­pear to Eind­hoven, which I think is only about half an hour from Utrecht — but then again maybe everything’s half an hour away from everything in the Neth­er­lands, who knows — and see what’s going on there. I’m fairly excited to see what FOPARA ends up being like since this is the first year the workshop’s being done. I’m espe­cially excited to see the Hume pro­ject people, like Kevin Ham­mond, since I’ve never met any.

I should say there’s still a lot of work that’s going on behind the scenes, work even on what I’m going to present to FOPARA. While I was in Cal­gary we decided to put in a new typ­ing sys­tem based on bunched logics which deals eleg­antly with a lot of the prob­lems with peeks that we’ve been sort­ing out in Pola, plus some new features.

Today marks the 3 year anniversary of Jasna and I! It sim­ul­tan­eously feels like a long period of time and a short period of time to me. Look­ing at a pic­ture of her from three years ago (to the left) it does seem espe­cially long. It feels like we’ve had a lot more than three years of love and joy and grow­ing fit into those three years.

That pic­ture, if the EXIF data is to be believed, was taken 3 days after we got together. We fell in love and built a shared life here in Lon­don — now we’re liv­ing together even — and before too long we’re both going to gradu­ate and hope­fully plan our future life together, forever.

I love her!

Jasna and I just got back from a camp­ing trip to Bruce Pen­in­sula National Park with our friends Matt and Emily. I’ve put up the pic­ture gal­lery.

It was good times, even if it was pretty cold, mean­ing swim­ming took a bit of forti­tude. We made it to the grotto this time, which was pretty excit­ing, right by the entrance to the grotto Emily even found a saska­toon bush! Since we were so far north I sup­pose they were still in sea­son, because I got a good ten ber­ries off it. We went to the Indone­sian place in Tober­mory, too, which was a first for me. It’s well worth the price, just for the veget­able soup alone.

Sadly it was rain­ing too much, so we packed up and left last night instead of this morn­ing like we’d planned. Boo.