The Monkey Puzzle

 Life, Pop Culture  No Responses »
May 172009
 

Or, What Shannon learned at the ROM that made her laugh

I went with Alan and Courtney to the ROM yesterday, so we could see the dinosaurs and make dino-noises. Actually, Courtney and I were the only ones making dino-noises and Alan was trying to act like he didn’t know us, a pair of twenty-somethings stomping around the dinosaur exhibit dino-roaring every few minutes. It was great fun, and if you’ve been to the dinosaur exhibit at the ROM, I’m pretty sure you’d agree it definitely brings out the kid in you.

Let me tell you one of the things I learned about yesterday. There is a tree called, ‘Araucaria araucana’, whose common name is the ‘Monkey Puzzle’. It is considered to be one of the world’s oldest living coniferous trees, and is considered a living fossil. Anyways, the common name of the tree came about because some British bloke in the 1850′s was showing off one of his trees, and his friend said that “It would puzzle a monkey to climb that”. How crazy is that? Read more at Wikipedia.

I love random trivia like that. Hope you all did too.

The ROM was great fun. Courtney and I hadn’t had a chance to hang out for a while, so that was fun, and Alan took pretty pictures of dinosaurs and other things. We were there most of the afternoon, and then we had dinner and watched Better Off Ted for a bit. I also traded some books with Courtney, so now I’ve got some new stuff to read. It was all in all, a very fun day.

I also finally got around to watching the rest of Heroes, and it was weak sauce. It’s pretty bad when the most badass person in an episode is Peter Petrelli. Wish they’d just cancel this show and move on to some other awesome sci-fi show.

 Posted by Shannon Patterson at 6:30 pm

Eleanor Rigby

 Reviews  No Responses »
May 152009
 

Douglas Coupland - Eleanor Rigby

Douglas Coupland - Eleanor Rigby

Douglas Coupland
2004

Eleanor Rigby is told as a memoir, written by Liz Dunn. She looks back at the point in her life when her son Jeremy came into her life. She was 36 and he was 20, and suffering from a very progressive form of Multiple Sclerosis. It also recounts the events that lead up to Jeremy’s birth and adoption. The book then jumps to the present, where Liz meets with Jeremy’s father for the first time since he was conceived. Like most of Douglas Coupland’s books, this book isn’t so much about plot as it is about capturing moments and moods, exploring concept. Though there are lots of plot points, this book is really about one woman’s loneliness, and about how her son’s life and death lifted that veil of loneliness, if only for a short period of time.

I enjoyed this book. It wasn’t one of my favourite Coupland books (those being Girlfriend In A Coma, All Families Are Psychotic, and Hey Nostradamus!), but I really felt like Liz was a real person, an every woman who you could pass on the street without noticing. I didn’t really connect with her personally, but I certainly empathized with her, and I can’t deny that I wanted to see her have a better life than she did. It was a nice break from sci-fi, though. Also, I have now read all of Douglas Coupland’s novels (except God Hates Japan, which was only published in Japan, in Japanese).

 Posted by Shannon Patterson at 1:32 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Weekend Fun

 Life  1 Response »
May 142009
 

I had a great weekend.

Friday night I drank half a bottle of wine while eating tacos and writing Javascript. After two glasses of wine, I had to stop with the Javascript. It’s too hard to write bug-free code after that. I can still work on CSS, though.

Saturday morning I went to Waterloo to hang out with one of my bridesmaids, Kathryn. We just sat around her living room and talked, and then later we hit up a grocery store. She has lost a lot of weight on Weight Watchers and looks absolutely incredible. I haven’t done so well, but I keep trying.

Sunday I went to Toronto and met up with two friends from university, Esther and Natasha. I haven’t seen either of them since graduation, and we had a lot to catch up on. We had a long lunch at a dim sum restaurant, and then wandered around some used book stores downtown (BMV and the World’s Biggest Bookstore) near the Eaton’s Centre. I bought a lot of books:

  • Isaac Asimov – Forward The Foundation
  • Isaac Asimov – Robots And Empire
  • Isaac Asimov – The Robots Of Dawn
  • Stephen Hawking – A Brief History Of Time
  • Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse Five
  • Kurt Vonnegut – Welcome To The Monkey House
  • The Smoothies Bible
  • Tipsy Smoothies

The Asimov books are the ones I need to finish up my collections of Robots novels and the Foundation series. I haven’t read any Kurt Vonnegut, and I’ve heard lots of good things about his writing, and the Smoothies books are for my wedding, as we’re having make your own smoothies (including booze!). We wandered around downtown, and just sat around in Nathan Phillips Square for a while. It was a lot of fun. I picked Alan up at the airport on my way home and he told me all about ACen, and then I fell asleep soon after we got home.

It was a great weekend.

 Posted by Shannon Patterson at 6:38 am

Weekend To-Do List

 Life, Projects  1 Response »
May 092009
 

Alan is off at Anime Central in Chicago this weekend, so I’m on my own for the weekend. To celebrate having the apartment to myself, last night, I worked on my Secret Project while drinking wine and sorting my music collection. I also made tacos.

Let me tell you, tacos and wine is the epitome of classiness. After the second glass of wine, my Javascript-writing skills went to shit. The wine made me sleepy and I was asleep in my comfy chair watching 30 Rock by 10pm.

Today I woke up super early and re-factored my CSS to make the classes and IDs make more sense (panel_right got moved to the left a few days ago…) and I’m just waiting for 8:00 to hit so I can go do laundry. This morning, I am going to the St. Jacob’s Market with Kat, one of my bridesmaids, and then tonight I don’t have plans. Probably read or more work on my Secret Project.

Tomorrow I am going to the ROM with two university friends I haven’t seen since I graduated. I graduated 3 years ago I think. So it’s been a while. I’m really excited to see them. The tomorrow night, I’m going to pick Alan up at Pearson, and come back to the apartment to fall into bed, completely exhausted.

Sounds like a fun weekend.

 Posted by Shannon Patterson at 7:31 am

Google’s Big Brains Makes My Normal Sized One Hurt

 Uncategorized  8 Responses »
May 072009
 

I’m working on a secret project, and part of that secret project involves having a sidebar that can be hidden. a la Google Reader, Google Maps, the file manager in Gnome., or lots of other places. It got me to wondering how they did it. Google reader, for instance, has this fun little arrow icon.

google_arrow

But here’s the fun part: This is not actually an icon, it’s a box. It took me about 15 minutes meddling inside Firebug to figure out how they did it, and I shall explain it, so that I can fully understand it, so that I can use something eerily similar. To start, here is a box with a border of 15 pixels:

 

Now, let’s draw this same box, but let’s change all the border’s colours:

 

See how the borders miter? So what google has done, is shrink this box down so that the arrow reaches a point. They set the width and height to 0px, and all the borders miter in to a point:

Now, if I were to set all the borders to the background colour but one, I would get a similar arrow:

And if I were to make the border width a reasonable size, I would get:

The style on the final div is:
width: 0px;
height: 0px;
border: 5px solid;
border-color: #EEEEEE red #EEEEEE #EEEEEE;

How badass is this?

 Posted by Shannon Patterson at 8:38 am
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