For work today, I had to go to SFU Surrey for the Surrey Open House. Of course, I went representing Computing Science as we spread the word about the pending-Senate-approval Software Systems program in Surrey, SoSy for short, and, of course, the good word about Computing Science.

I did something that Diana Cukierman, one of our professors at SFU who is currently teaching CMPT 120, did for one of her lectures. This is the “make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich” exercise.

For those not familiar with the exercise, which I first did in high school in English 8, here it is:

1. Ask your audience (in my case, the individual(s) who came in and checked it out) to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
2. Get the instructions from them.
3. Make sandwich based on their instructions

Of course, with computers, one needs to realize that they are not as smart as we would think they are. You need to be precise and detailed with your instructions, as the computer would not know how to do something that you would consider simple.

To illustrate what I mean, I will take my favourite example (which unfortunately was not said):

1. Take the bread
2. Place peanut butter on top of bread
3. Place jelly on top of peanut butter
4. Place bread on top
5. Enjoy!

That will result in something extremely silly, with a whole loaf of bread squished by a jar of peanut butter and a jar of a jam of your choice (strawberry for me) with another loaf of bread on top.

Some interesting things from running the exercise for around four hours:

• Talked to an elementary school teacher. This pretty much gave her inspiration to do something similar with her class. She also mentioned that doing computing science outreach with elementary school teachers, which would be quite interesting.
• Someone wrote on the instructions: “Now do the PEANUT BUTTER JELLY DANCE“. Needless to say, I did not do it because a) I did not have a banana suit and b) although it would probably have been fun, I was at work.
• I got my picture taken at random. I think my face kinda said “what the?” in said picture.
• Someone else wrote on the instructions “Say I scream for ice ice cream aloud” (that’s what it said – no typo here). This was due to the fact that co-op was giving out free ice cream during open house and dressed up WIL Fraser in an ice cream cone (basically, a large-ish cutout of an ice cream cone with ice cream, then cut out a section for WIL’s face to show)
• One of the instructions I got was “make sandwich”. “Sorry, can’t do that. I don’t know how!”

It occurred to me that something was missing (besides the banana suit and music track if we wanted to make this silly) was some great geek humour. And of course, what better to related to Computing Science than this timeless classic on XKCD.

Basically, a mash-up post covering what happened over the past while. I’ve been busy with other things and it makes everything just kinda crazy.

Dine Out Vancouver 2008

Dine Out went through quite well this year. I went to four different places this year.

First up with J.J.’s Fine Dining. This is located at the VCC Downtown Vancouver campus and is actually ran as part of the culinary arts program VCC has. I have gone there in the past for their buffet on Fridays and it was pretty awesome. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the dine out experience. The thing that stood out strongly was the fact that I was never asked for how I wanted my steak done, which left everyone who ordered the steak entree with well done steak. Even those who stated how well they wanted their steak done never got their requests made either. I can not exactly blame them though; the restaurant is a training facility for up and coming chefs and servers after all.

After that came a trip to The Cannery Restaurant. This restaurant is located within the Vancouver Port and one will need to go through port security to get to the place. At $35 per person for dine out, it was a worthwhile experience. The food was absolutely delicious and they do something new as well, which was quite interesting. Most restaurants would give you bread and butter. Others would give you bread and a mix of balsamic vinegar and olive oil. Here, they give you a mix of balsamic vinegar and lobster oil, which is quite good. Definitely going to be going again next year if possible.

A camp later (which will be talked about below) and before the snowstorm that saw SFU closed for two days, I found myself at Horizons Restaurant on Burnaby Mountain, a short bus ride (and if I did what I was planning to do, a hike up) from SFU. The food was quite delicious and the night view of the city was beautiful.

Finally, I went to Gramercy Grill. This small-ish West side eatery on Arbutus had a pretty good dine out menu. Usually, you cannot get quite full from the various dine out experiences, but the portions served up were quite large and I left fairly full. Maybe that was why they charged extra for extra bread..

All in all, the whole dine out experience this year was quite good and I look forward to next year’s Dine Out Vancouver!

Winter Camping

When my co-workers found out that I was going camping in the snow in late January, they were in disbelief and going on about how cold it is and all that stuff. Some were curious about winter camping too.

To be honest, before heading off, I was quite nervous myself. Ever since I became a Scout leader, the winter camping component of the program was done with a winter camp at the Mount Seymour group campsite, which usually would not have too much snow. The campsite we went to this time around was the Cambie Creek site at Manning Park, home of the annual Rovent camp for Venturers and Rovers. Usually, what the site would look like is a big open field full of snow, several feet deep, providing good opportunities to do very awesome stuff like snow caving, snowball fights, tobogganing/sledding, snow sculpting, and, of course, camping in the snow.

Of course, the Manning Park campsite itself is a lot colder than what the Seymour site is, so various safety concerns were going though my head as the date loomed closer. “Would the kids get frostbite? Would they be warm enough? Did we prepare them well enough?” The list went on.

Thankfully, the camp itself was one organized on an Area level (so various Scout groups together at once) and with everyone’s joint efforts, the kids were well prepared and the camp went without incident.

I guess the biggest highlight of the entire camp itself happened on Friday night before everyone else got in. After going in and setting up the various shelters for first aid and stuff, I took some time to shut off my headlight and just look up. The skies were clear and you could just see all the stars in the sky. It was really beautiful and made me wish I had a camera that would be able to take such detailed pictures.

五月雨 ~samidare~

Astute readers would perhaps recall a previous post that mentioned that I wanted to try out a game called 五月雨 ~samidare~. Well, I found the game and holy crap is it hard. But like all shooting games of the variety, 五月雨 ~samidare~ is all about observing and understanding the various shot patterns to dodge them effectively; however, the game makes that somewhat easier with a rechargeable shield that absorbs the shots to temporarily increase your firepower as opposed to a finite number of screen clearing bombs.

However, despite the shield and all that, the game itself is still not easy. Just give it a go; you can see why I say that for yourself.