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.

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.

Right, so sadly that never happened as a kid, largely due to the fact that the smallest video camera in my day weighed as much as a small child and used a full-sized VHS (or BetaMax!) tape to record. But thanks to advancements in camera technology, Jasna getting me an awesome car for Christmas, and some help from a roll of duct tape, I finally managed to put this dream into action.

Across the street from us is an elementary school. Cruelly five days a week there are kids there (the nerve!), which means I can’t play there, but on the weekends it’s free. It’s an open sea of hard packed snow—almost ice, but not quite—which makes drifting a lot of fun, and it has a nice area of some fenced off trees that make a wonderful obstacle course. I took the camera there today to show up my mad skills.

Well so I’m posting this video mostly to show the absurd hilarity of it. Turns out if there were a tiny little driver in a remote controlled car, he would be subjected to shaking and whiplash so severe he’d probably pass on within a minute. Highlights of the videos include hitting a tree, hitting a post so hard at the very end that the camera came off, and minutes upon minutes of the horizon jumping up and down. If I ever try this again, it’s either going to have to be on smooth pavement or I’m going to have to have to find a way to stabilize the camera better. I should point out that, even by R/C car standards, the shocks on this car are really soft.

P.S. Yes, there will be a video of chasing the cats around, at some point (duh). We have to clean up the apartment better before making any such videos public, though, you understand.

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.

Personally—and I never pass up an opportunity to talk about myself—the year surprisingly turned out really well. I taught my first university course, Networking, and had a lot of fun with it and actually won an award for it. I’m actually regretting a little bit not applying to lecture again, but I suppose it would be better choice to try and graduate if I can. I got to meet Jorge Cham at the Western Research Forum (where I also won an award, since this paragraph is devoted to bragging). I also started officiating (Canadian) football this year, which has been a long-time dream of mine, though I can’t explain why it never occurred me before to do it. I ended up winning Rookie of the Year for that. Of anything happening next year I’m definitely most excited about reffing again: it’s really a shame you can’t make a career out of it.

The downside to getting on with my thesis is that I have to think about what I’ll do when I’m done. Next to “how are the cats?” probably the most common question I get is about what I’ll do when I’m done, and the official answer is that I have no idea. The current plan is to avoid thinking about it for as long as possible and pick the most awesome option when forced to (or the least annoying, for the pessimists). I might have to revise that plan at some time.

If I can avoid talking about myself for a little while, the highlight of the year was definitely going to the Netherlands and especially to Utrecht to see Jasna’s sister Ana and to meet her husband, Andre. Regardless of whether I made him into a Haskell convert it was pretty awesome to meet him and stay with them and help move their furniture.

As seems to be a common trend lately, I feel fantastically optimistic about the upcoming year, and I expect life to continue getting better. The most important thing in my life, of course, is Jasna, and our relationship is better than ever.

It’ll be a good year and decade to come.

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.

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.

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!

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.