backtracking and howling all in one night

I finished up my mid-term exam on backtracking algorithms and data structures – which went better than expected – and hurried down to the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival opening night in time to catch Farley Mowat (in person for the audience Q & A) howling like an alpha wolf.

The film was “Finding Farley” – a story about a woman, a man, a child and a dog voyaging from the west of Canada to Cape Breton to meet Farley Mowat, Canada’s beloved author and naturalist. I only caught the last twenty minutes and I loved what I saw.

crazy red squirrel

Over the last few days, as the weather turns colder, a certain enterprising adolescent red squirrel thinks it’s a great idea to build his winter nest inside our bird-feeder. He just can’t believe that no one else has thought that this great source of never-depleting food would make a grand winter hideaway – not that it’s made of glass and is constantly battered with winter winds. A room with a view indeed!

Update: The squirrel is officially insane. He chases everything from the garden – rabbits that are five times his size, any bird that dares to look at the bird-feeders, …

weakening the nobel peace prize

Nobel Peace Prize winners of the past: Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, Nelson Mandela. 2009: Barack Obama? Ironic that Obama was awarded the Peace prize on the day that he was meeting the Joint Chiefs of Staff about increasing military presence in Afghanistan and while he is tending two major wars.

I like Barack, but this is just embarrassing celebrity worship. Please let him accomplish something with some measure of consistency over time before presenting awards. This would have been a lot more meaningful after his presidency (depending on his actions of course). Or maybe it was just another way to take a shot at the hated George W. Bush. Obviously, worse people have won this award (think 1994 – Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin), but I hold the people I like to a higher standard.

recursion

Recursion (F’s my mind), (F’s my mind + 1), (F’s my mind + 2), . . ., (F’s my mind + (n – 1)).

void I'mScrewed(n) {
    if (n == 1) {
        return True;
    }
    else {
        I'mScrewed(n - 1);
    }
}

Yup, I’m screwed if this is on the exam.