Well, wasn't 2011 a piece of work? Lots of things happened, some great
and some lousy. Let's start at the beginning.
In January we were taking Thomas the cat to the vet for excessive skinniness,
strange loss of hair and general geriatric decrepitude. It turned out he had
fleas, some kind of allergy which was giving him red spots all over, and lots
of weird growths here and there: under his tongue, on his head, and probably in
his bowel too. We treated him for fleas and gave him antibiotics for a while to
clear up his skin problems, and put him on a permanent course of prednisone to
treat his various tumours. (He's eighteen years old, so the growths are just
because of old age.) We prepared ourselves for his imminent death; however, a full year later he's not dead yet, and indeed seems healthier than ever.
At the end of January Blake took off for Hawaii for work. I
wasn't invited, which was particularly galling given that, you know, Hawaii in
January. Not to mention, we hadn't been on a proper not-visiting-mum trip
since before Cordelia was born. So come March Break I decided we should go
to New
York for the week. That holiday was more successful and fun than I
expected it to be—the girls are at the perfect age to travel with.
(Which is a bit ironic, now that I think about it, considering we won't
have the money to go anywhere in the forseeable future.)
In May Greg Wilson and I
published the paperback edition of
The Architecture of Open Source
Applications (Volume 1). In the process of publishing the book
I learned an immense amount about TeX, typesetting, book production
and publishing on Lulu.com, as well as getting a lead on
a copyediting job. I enjoyed the whole process so much that I made it into a
business. So far I've had a handful
of jobs and made some good connections, and I'm looking forward to
growing the business this year.
February through June we were in reno upheaval. Our 80-year-old plumbing
started leaking and we somehow decided, with impeccable North Toronto
logic, that the only possible solution was to put a powder room in the
basement and completely redo the upstairs bathroom. I've been meaning to
post about that... It took a long time because our contractor usually runs
much bigger jobs, and her trades were sneaking our bathroom in between
other jobs. But when it was all finally done it was very satisfying and
lovely.
In the middle of June one of the kindergarten students at the girls'
school was hit by a car and killed. It shook up the staff and a lot of the
parents pretty badly, and it's been on my mind a lot ever since. The
little girl who died was the same age as Cordelia, and she was out with
her mother when she was killed—actually her mum was hit by the car
too. Imagine the fodder for rumination and imagination and nightmares
that provided... It's a bit ridiculous that it would take something like this,
but it made me understand that the continuing existence of
my children is a gift. Anyway, that's a whole post on its own, really.
At the end of June I took a plane to Tokyo (by myself) to visit Dave. I'd
never been to Japan, and it was a grand adventure.
By the time I got back from Japan the girls' summer vacation was well underway.
The girls were at camp for a couple of weeks, then we went to Saskatchewan
for a couple of weeks, then shortly after we came back the girls went to
the cottage for a long weekend with Baba and Zaida. I felt like the
real mooching-around-Toronto part of summer didn't start until the middle
of August, but then we did manage to do our usual round of the Toronto
Islands, High Park, Harbourfront, and a few trips to the park. I love
summer.
I have to say I don't think anything terrifically interesting has happened
since September. Greg and I have been working on the second volume of
the software architecture book. (This time I'm actually going to copyedit
the book, which will both be fun and educational, and improve the book.)
Cordelia likes Grade One, Delphine likes Grade Three, Cordelia likes
gymnastics and
Delphine likes ballet. We're all pretty content to carry on into the new year
as we've been carrying on.
The other day I was reading a
tweet from Neil
deGrasse Tyson, and it got me thinking… If you were going to cut a circle into
three equal pieces using only two cuts, what would the angle to cut them be?
(Θ in the diagram over on the right side there.) So I asked on
Twitter, and eventually
got a reply. This is my attempt to reconstruct the reasoning behind the
answer.
The easiest way to figure this out, I believe, is to cut the circle in half,
and then figure out what line divides the semicircle into a 2/3rds to 1/3rd
ratio. So let’s do that, and label the points A, B, C, and O (for the origin),
as shown on the left. We’ll also label the angle AOB as ɣ, because we'll be
using it a little more later.
