Chris's Random Ramblings
Kelly made her public singing debut with The Taken at the Pot Belly on Friday night. Hugh took some photos which are up here. They all did really well and I'm really looking forward to their next performance!
Went for a walk up to the top of Mount Coree which is on the western border of ACT/NSW. All the pine trees were destroyed in the fires a couple of years ago so part of the trail is like walking through a moonscape. The higher areas which were native bush are regenerating quite nicely though.
On the way up I was passed by numerous 4WD vehicles who seemed to be out wandering the firetrails for fun (including an L-plater). The weather was surprisingly very nice at the top, and while I had lunch there were no other people, but quite a few birds circling, chasing each other.
Just as I was getting ready to leave the place turned into a bit of 4WD parking lot though and all the wildlife disappeared. I wonder if those people know what they're missing out on when they travel in big noisy vehicles. Certainly the higher petrol prices don't seem to have discouraged many people from driving around all day!
If Canberra is the capital Australia why do I always end up sending my passport to Sydney to get a visa for a foreign country?
Canberra seems to have many more (per capita) sports and community clubs (like Labor clubs) than Adelaide where I grew up. I was talking about them to a work colleague today and realised that the best way to describe them is "McDonalds for Adults". Cheap, dodgy food with poker machines and big screen televisions substituting for playgrounds and happy meal toys. I wonder if the meme "Sporting clubs are the McDonalds for Adults" will spread at all.
Whilst in the US I spent a couple of weeks working with the teams in Toronto and Watson who work on K42. It was a great opportunity to discuss some new ideas and clarify the existing ones about where we're headed with research into memory fragmentation. The hypothesis we came up with is that we should be managing memory in larger, variable sized chunks than the current more common 4k (or with large pages up to 16k-64k) pages.
The idea is that the main advantages would be cache friendlier memory management data structures, a natural reduction in fragmentation of memory and added flexibility to be able to utilise hardware large page support. I've written up a summary if the ideas and shorter term plans for research on the K42 wiki.
I've put up all the photos from our recent trip to Canada and the US. I'm especially happy with the ones of the Grand Canyon region. I can definitely recommend taking the effort to travel to the North Rim instead of the more popular South Rim. The views are just as spectacular, if not more so as you're at a higher altitude looking down on the South Rim, but importantly its not nearly as crowded. There were quite a few places where we had the lookout to ourselves. Also you get to visit Zion National Park along the way which was also very impressive.
Was riding to work this morning and was just before Commonwealth avenue bridge going up Vernon circle when I got hit by something in the back. Most likely from one of the guys who passed slightly later yelling at me out the windows of their vehicle. I've been riding to work for a few years now and its the first time I've ever had something even thrown at me while riding. Ben has been riding for quite a bit longer and has a few interesting stories.
Kind of stung for a while, but doesn't seem to be bruised. I did manage to get the licence plate number so I rang the police and reported it. Will have to wait and see if anything comes of it. Rode into work pretty fast so perhaps the extra adrenaline of having stuff thrown at you can help.