The Inferno

Truer words were never spoken.

Watch this little snippet by George Carlin, something I have been telling everyone I know for years.

I just got back from a weekend spent up at Anderson Lake, which is in the north of B.C., on the road from Whistler to Pemberton. It is a region of unsurpassed beauty and brilliant calm. I went there with my girlfriend and we stayed at her cottage, which had a sauna. Believe it or not, I never thought I’d spend 15 minutes in a 90 degree sauna, emerge into 15 degree weather and then jump into the frigid lake, which was only 6 degrees or so. The things some people do for fun! Anyway, it was great, I trekked to the Lost Falls, found some snakes, hiked up and down some trails, ate a plethora of hot dogs, played Chess and Scrabble with everyone and generally had a great time. This bucolic getaway is here, in the red rectangle on the map:

Mareija’s family and everyone else was exceedingly nice over the entire weekend, which was pretty awesome. I’d love to go back, although I must admit my swimming is pretty shaky, not having swum in forever.

Here are some pics and videos of this beautiful place. The cottage is situated on the edge of the lake, around 30 minutes by boat from D’Arcy. The boat we went there in was much slower than the boat we returned in. The videos taken at the end show the raw power of the boat we returned in. The ride was much bumpier and much shorter. In any case, the entire weekend was a blast.

Pictures

Videos

Just the dash of cynicism you needed to get your day going:

Taken from here.

What can I say? I haven’t degenerated into one of those useless people with a domain name and a blog and nothing to say, you know who you are! Haha. I’ve been really busy, with my last semester of school and whatnot. Without further ado, here is a 15-puzzle solver I’ve been creating, it’s almost done. Any bug reports would be appreciated. I know, it’s no excuse for slacking off, but I must leave my Wolkenkuckucksheim and apply for a real job soon and enter the blistering torrent of humdrum that is a working Joe’s life. Or not, we shall see.

Here’s the 15-puzzle if you want to play it: My 15-Puzzle

The puzzle can be played by clicking the “Scramble” button or by loading a predefined board. The format for a file with a predefined board is 4 lines of digits separated by a space, with a 0 for the blank spot, as so:

2 3 4 5
7 14 13 12
10 0 8 9
1 6 11 15

Here’s an explanation of the rules: 15 puzzle

My puzzle doesn’t cache any of the results and the random scramble isn’t skewed, well as un-skewed as you can get on a regular PC. This is unlike a lot of sites where the “Random” simply repeats one out of a finite set of cached puzzles.

I’ll post the source code in a couple of weeks.

This is priceless!