The weekend before last was Sarah's birthday and as part of
that, last weekend we took a trip to Victoria, BC. I've got a map of our trip locations and photos. Not all the
photos are on the map but they're all in the trip photo set on Flickr. It turns out there's a lot of tourist intended
activities right around our hotel which was in the inner harbor and downtown Victoria area. As such we didn't get a rental car and did a lot of walking.
On the first day we checked out the Royal British Columbia Museum which had
some interesting exhibits in it and the Undersea Garden which was interesting in that its like a floating aquarium but was a bit grimy. There was a group of Japanese tourists next to us during the
undersea show in which a diver behind the glass in the ocean would pick up and parade various animal life. The group all repeated the word starfish in unison after the show's narrator and one of
the tourists was very excited to see the diver bring over the octopus. The diver made the octopus wave to us while it desperately tried to get away.
We flew in and out of the Victoria International Airport
which is a smaller sized airport. Although we needed our passports we didn't need to take off our shoes -- what convenience! The US dollar was just a bit worse than the Canadian dollar which was
also convenient. The weather was lovely while we were there and I only got slightly sun burned.
I just installed vmcNetFlix which lets you watch your on demand NetFlix movies via your Vista Media Center or any Media Center
Extenders like the Xbox 360. It works well but fails poorly with some cryptic error messages and long timeouts. Be sure to get NetFlix on demand movies working in your browser before installing
this plugin. Once I did that everything worked very well.
To test it out I watched Ong-Bak: The Thai Warrior in which Ting must travel from his country village to Bangkok where he works with his cousin in the city to recover his village's stolen religious artifact. Its a mix of Perfect Strangers, Street Fighter and Pad-See Ew. Martial arts movies, like porn and video games, aren't required to have a strong plot but Ong-Bak has a fine plot line and enjoyable Thai martial arts. I saw the Tiger Knee in there several times. An enjoyable movie that reminded me of watching martial arts movies with my friends in high school.
My GPS was stolen last night or this morning and I'm missing it already. For instance when I drove to Novus glass repair to get my front passenger window replaced I drove down the wrong road for a while.
When I got out of my apartment this morning there was a police car sitting in my parking lot and the officer asked me: "David? ... What'd you leave in your car?". My face must have changed a lot when I had the following sequence of realizations: (a) a police officer is asking for me by name, (b) I'm not in trouble, (c) my car must have been burgled, and (d) my GPS must be stolen.
The officer was waiting outside my complex because someone had reported my car's broken window to the police in the morning. The officer was very courteous and upon taking my date of birth noted that we were born on exactly the same day. The window's safety glass was shattered and lying in tons of tiny pieces all over the passenger seat, my glove box was open and the middle armrest where I keep my CDs was open. Nothing appears to be missing other than the GPS, the GPS power cable, and the GPS dash mount. Adding insult to theft, the their scattered my CDs throughout my car and didn't take any of them, insulting my taste in music.
My car's window should be repaired now and hopefully the rain that came in through the broken window until I covered it with plastic bags (classy!) didn't do any permanent damage.
When I woke up this morning for some reason I was thinking about Polytope Tetris, my N-D Tetris game, and specifically generating Tetris pieces in various number of dimensions. When I first wrote PTT I thought that as the number of dimensions increased you could end up with an infinite number of non-equivalent crazy Tetris pieces. However this morning I realized that because you only get four blocks per piece there are only a possible three joints in a single Tetris piece which means that you only need three dimensions to represent all possible distinct N-D Tetris pieces.
Below is the table of the various possible pieces per number of dimensions and sorted by the number of joints in the piece. Notice that the 'J' and 'L' become equivalent in 3D because you can rotate the 'J' through the third dimension to make it an 'L'. The same happens for 'S' and 'Z' in 3D, and 'S+' and 'Z+' in 4D.
| Joints | Name | 1D | 2D | 3D | + |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | I |
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| 2 | J |
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| L |
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| 3 | O |
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| T |
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| S |
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| Z |
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| T+ |
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| S+ |
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| Z+ |
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| Total | 1 | 7 | 8 | 7 |
As a consequence of not realizing there's a finite and small number of N-D Tetris pieces, I wrote code that would randomly generate pieces for a specified number of dimensions by wandering through Tetris space. This consists of first marking the current spot, then randomly picking a direction (a dimension and either forward or backward), going in that direction until hitting a previously unvisited spot and repeating until four spots are marked, forming a Tetris piece. However this morning I realized that continuing in the same direction until reaching am unvisited spot means I can't generate the 'T+' piece. I think the better way to go is keep the list of all possible pieces, pick one randomly, and rotate it randomly through the available dimensions. Doing this will also allow me to give distinct pieces their own specific color (like the classic Tetris games do) rather than picking the color randomly like I do now.
sequelguy posted a photo:
This dragon head sculpture actually breathes fire at night. Note the burnt brush around the head.
sequelguy posted a photo:
Apparently Frank Lloyd Wright designed this chair.
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