Better looking through Photoshop

We all know that photos in magazines get doctored to make people look good, but it doesn't stop you from feeling a little inadequate anyway, right? Well, go to this website in the portfolio section, check out their before/after celebrity photos, and you will be cured! It is unbelievable and quite disturbing what they will do to someone's image in the name of beauty. I actually think it is kind of sad that people have their crow's feet and knobbly knees airbrushed away - isn't that part of who they are? I was particularly amused by some of the women who have been scaled horizontally to look thinner. What a crazy world we live in. I think I preferred the before shots in almost every case - they look like REAL people, goddammit!

Sort it!

This one is for my programmer friends only. Today I learnt about a funky little algorithm called the radix sort, and how with some simple adaptations it can be used for floating point data too. I'd recommend reading this article by Pierre Terdiman that explains it all very clearly.

Fine dining

Steph and I had a great meal last night with Steph's parents. We went to the William Tell restaurant in Downtown to celebrate John's birthday (Steph's dad). It is a Swiss restaurant, and many items on the menu are classic Swiss dishes. It was expensive, but we all enjoyed the food we had. Check out the picture of Steph's dessert! Yum.

The service was something else too. They brought out our main courses under silver lids, and then two waiters whipped them off in sync after counting to three. A little eccentric, but somehow charming. I thought the quality of the meal was up there with our previous fine dining favourites, Provence Marinaside and Blue Water Cafe. Recommended for a special occasion.

More ski trip photos

I finally got round to getting together some more photos from our recent skiing trip to Kamloops. I picked my favourites from everyone else's photos and added them to ours. You can find them on our .Mac homepage here (or follow the link over on the right). Some of the pictures are fantastic. Enjoy!

Back to (driving) school

I had my first driving lesson today.

Whoa. Let me step back a little. I've had a UK license for 15 years, but when you become a resident of British Columbia your entitlement to use it expires after 90 days (which for me was around Christmas time). Unfortunately, there is no gentleman's agreement between Canada and the UK regarding license qualifications so they won't just hand me the B.C. equivalent. I have to pass a Canadian driving test. Doh! There's a knowledge test, medical and vision screening, and a road test. I passed the knowledge test only last week - that bit was pretty easy. The road test is more scary, so I figured I would get myself a bit of proper tuition before I attempted it.

And man, was that a good decision. After so much time behind the wheel, you develop some bad habits. I would say I am a decent driver, probably a little safer than average. Of course, everyone probably thinks that, and when you see the other drivers on the road you know that a lot of us must be kidding ourselves. I soon realised that important little things like mirror - signal - manoeuvre (or mirror - signal - shoulder check as it is here) had gotten a little lost along the way. Fifteen minutes into the lesson and I felt like a learner again. Apparently, I wasn't even turning the steering wheel right! Eeek. I'll have to practice hard and concentrate like hell if I am not going to screw up on the day.

On the plus side, I might end up being a better than average driver at the end of this, which would be nice.

Addictive little retro shooter

Thought I'd share this with my fellow nerds, so that they can burn their free time like I have been :) There is a game available on XBox Live Arcade called Geometry Wars 2. A guy called Mark Incitti has written his own version for PC and Mac, and it is ace. Find the executables on his website. He seems to knock out a new version almost every day too - you can find more info on the latest version here. Have fun!

Cool touch-sensitive screen

Check this out. Some guys have invented a multi-point force-sensitive touch screen. What that means to you and me is a way of working with a computer that beats the pants off a mouse. I want one. But twice as big.

First visitors

My first blog post ever. Yay!

Steph's parents are arriving today from the UK. They'll be our first visitors since we moved out here in September. They are here for a few weeks, with a break in between when they take a trip to Seattle. Our spacious apartment might feel a bit small for a while, but I reckon I'll get used to it. At least we have a second bedroom for guests to sleep in, complete with bargain Ikea beds :)

They have lucked out on the weather too for the time being. After 46 out of 49 days of rain in December and January, it has been dry and sunny for the last week and a half here in Vancouver. Let's hope it continues for them!