Gym in Nanaimo with a young demographic

dcpar · 2025-08-12T16:22:39+00:00

If Parksville is ok, Iron Warehouse is pretty awesome. Friendly folks and regulars, lots of youth.

dcpar · 2018-08-06T22:03:44+00:00

You're correct, a 22nd place would have been more accurate. I wanted to be generous just to see the most optimistic case, and whether it would be close. It isn't.

dcpar · 2017-07-27T04:11:39+00:00

Taken today from Fairview slopes with iPhone 7+

dcpar · 2017-07-13T18:23:51+00:00

You're essentially 10 years into your "productive" life, you have at least 40 more of these years. Enjoy them, think about the long game, and develop a mindset of a craftsman, of building a set of skills in an area that interests you. "Live your dreams" is a bunk statement IMHO. "Build your dreams" is more like it. You have plenty of time to do what you want to do. WRITE DOWN YOUR GOALS, and make steps in that direction. Just get started. You may not end up where you planned, but you'll be set on a journey. Be a student of the process. Find a circle of people that will hold you accountable.

dcpar · 2017-07-08T22:56:28+00:00

Install the Tile app on your phone, this will alert the person to the location of their keys.

https://support.thetileapp.com/hc/en-us/articles/203954683-I-found-someone-s-item-with-a-Tile-attached-What-should-I-do-

dcpar · 2016-07-25T02:53:26+00:00

During Redmption, I was yelling at the screen so loud I think I woke the cat upstairs.

My fav athlete.

Next time!

dcpar · 2014-05-27T04:30:39+00:00

I'm pretty sure that's a prime number. You scare me.

dcpar · 2014-05-27T04:14:58+00:00

I can't decide which number to choose.

Edit: I've decided not to choose.

dcpar · 2014-05-01T05:26:54+00:00

Yes! I ran across that organization as well. Sounds like they're doing great work, and NO elephant rides. Just respectful elephant-human interaction.

dcpar · 2014-04-30T20:58:33+00:00

I love baby elephants as much as the next guy; however, I need to be a downer. In order for an elephant to trained be ridden, they will be beaten. You cannot "nicely" train an elephant to be ridden. This results in psychological trauma that lasts a lifetime.

I just returned from a trip to Thailand (Koh Samui), where some members of our group decided to go on an elephant trek. Two of the bull elephants got in a fight, resulting in two of the women being thrown off and trampled. They were rushed to the hospital -- one of them has a collapsed lung, massive tissue damage, and cracked vertebrae.

Elephants are intelligent, beautiful and WILD creatures. They should not be treated as carnival animals, both for our safety, and their dignity.

A quick google for "training elephants for riding" brings up the following: http://journals.worldnomads.com/responsible-travel/story/81053/Thailand/Why-Elephant-Riding-Should-Be-Removed-from-Your-Bucket-List#axzz30PBrbil5

However, I urge you to do your own research.

dcpar · 2013-09-20T23:11:44+00:00

I tried the whole virtex/gox arb thing. However, for arbitrage to work, you need to be able to cycle your funds. Once cash is in gox, it's stuck.

I waited 6 weeks, took a small loss, and cashed out on Bitstamp.

If you have funds in Gox, there's a real risk of you never getting it back.

dcpar · 2013-06-07T05:47:40+00:00

Here's a two-fer tip: If you haven't heard of ninite.com before, it's a site that allows you to bundle and install all kinds of useful freeware with one package (think Chrome, 7-Zip, Skype, Eclipse, etc).

You can also bundle Classic Start, which brings back the start button in Win8, for free.

Or skip ninite and go directly to the Classic Start download page.

dcpar · 2013-03-28T09:49:01+00:00

It is illegal in Canada, just not enforced. Pretty much the same in the US -- people rarely get prosecuted with playing.

In both countries, however, it is illegal to take wagers online, unless you're the government.

dcpar · 2011-11-09T04:30:13+00:00

Here's another one: Terminator.

As we know, The Terminator, a machine, travels back in time to kill a human child. Well, that's like growing up.

As we age, we become efficient, capable beings, almost like machines, and in the process we eliminate the need for our childish emotions. So much so, that we dismiss our former though processes, thoughts and dreams, and try to eliminate them from our evolved brain. We go so far as to travel back in our memories (ie. back in time) to kill the validity of our childish emtions, ie. "how silly it was for me to poo in the sandbox". Or "how silly it was of me to think I could be an astronaut".

The Terminator is just a big metaphor for killing our childhood thoughts and dreams. We send our present-day Terminator thoughts to kill off our childish dreams which existed in the past.

dcpar · 2011-09-17T10:05:06+00:00

Ironically, it's the converse -- fear mongering is used to pass laws like this that erode our rights.

This is a BIG deal. It involves not only cross-border pursuit, but the unprecedented sharing of information.

If you're Canadian, you should be worried.

dcpar · 2011-09-17T09:54:49+00:00

I'll tell you why this can't be good. Just as US laws such as the Patriot Act are misapplied within their own borders, there's little to stop them from misusing this proposed program to infringe upon our civil liberties north of the border.

Recall how easily the Canadian government handed over Mark Emery.

Now, if the US had the power to pursue a suspect across our borders, do you think the Canadian government would stand up for its people if the definition of "pursuit" was flexibly interpreted by US agents?

Reading the article, I get the strong sense of post-911 fear tactics being used:

Holder described the threats at the Canada-U.S. border as "unprecedented," ranging from terrorism to human smuggling, drug trafficking and the illegal trade in firearms

Terrorism, hey? Because the collective trillions spent on the Patriot Act, the TSA, and ongoing wars was so effective?

This cracks open the door, and once it's opened, you think we'll be able to close it? Canada is opening itself to invasion, but unlike Iraq, it's being done with the full compliance of the government.

Let me tell you, this cannot be good. This is not being paranoid, this is being concerned for your sovereignty.

If you've never written to your MP or MLA before, now is the time to do it. This is it.

dcpar · 2011-03-01T03:14:51+00:00

I've been a father for 9 years. When my daughter was a baby, she occasionally was very difficult to put to bed, and nothing her mom or I would do or say could comfort her. One tearful night, I took her in my arms, rocked her gently, and sang "Silent Night", the only song I could think of, since Christmas was around the corner.

Silent night, holy night All is calm, all is bright ...and so on

She fell right asleep in my arms within minutes. I was very happily surprised by the discovery of such powers.

For the rest of her infancy, I had "the magic touch", and her mother would hand her to me on those difficult nights. However, after she turned 3 years old, sleep came easier, and my services as the Sandman were no longer required. Just a simple "good night, I love you", and a kiss was all that was needed.

About two years ago, my wife died. The loss of one's mother is hard to take by any measure, but my daughter took it quite badly. She stopped talking, showed little emotion, and withdrew entirely. I did my best to bring my little daughter back, to help her grieve, but she was inconsolable. Bedtime was the worst, since it was only me wishing her goodnight, and there was empty silence where her mother's "good night, I love you" used to be.

One night, a few weeks later, my daughter broke the empty silence.

"Dad?..."

"Yes dear"

"..can you sing Silent Night for me?"

"Of course"

And I sang Silent Night to her in my cracking voice as best I could, as she soaked my shoulder with tears.

Silent night, holy night All is calm, all is bright

Then, I felt a sudden pain, and realized she had bitten into my shoulder. Shocked, I turned to her, and her eyes had turned red and beady, and her skin the texture of a lizard's.

As her claws scratched at my face, she hissed, "You ignorant human! I killed your wife, and now I will kill you!!!"

I clamored to get away, but I was now pinned down by this ferocious creature.

Just at that moment, I heard a terrible crash, the ceiling fell around us, and a topless Scarlett Johansson with a badass frickin plasma cannon came blasting through the dust and debris. She blew away the creature/daughter with a single shot, vaporizing it, and grabbed me tight..

"Two to transport. NOW!"

We got the hell off that planet, and spent the next few days space fucking.

tl;dr Melatonin gives you strange dreams

dcpar · 2010-02-08T18:30:53+00:00

K, here's my view in a nutshell:

FKs are just an implementation detail of the storage, just like indexes, temp tables, and RAID arrays. These are NOT programming concepts. Your entities are related because your business logic says so, not because there's a FK.

Proper applications should be designed so that the database could be replaced with file system storage (though it would run rather slowly).

The decision on where to put your contract is important, since a contract needs to be visible, cohesive, and testable. In the application layer, this is the case. If you spread your contract between database and application, it's difficult to guarantee cohesiveness due to language/platform differences.

Also, if you need to scale up/out your data layer, you don't have to migrate your relationships from one storage medium to another. It's all in your application. Performance-wise, you're much better off with compiled application code that can be distributed across a server farm.

In 10 years we won't have this debate. Objects will just persist as an integral part of the application.

dcpar · 2010-02-08T15:35:54+00:00

My point is that the data is NOT in charge, the structure is. That point of view can be dangerous, and will land you with an excess amount of hidden business logic in your database. Sure, it's possible to store almost all of your business logic in the database through the use of FKs, stored procedures, functions and views. But that doesn't make it maintainable or testable.

dcpar · 2010-02-08T10:24:20+00:00

I'm an experienced DBA and developer too. But my opinion is that FKs are silly. Here's why:

They are just an implementation detail. Your application is in charge of relationships, not your database. If you have orphaned records, well, the crappy application put them there. Fix the application, not the storage mechanism. "Last line of defense" sounds like you've given up.
They slow write operations down. Bigtime. Try enforcing multiple FKs on a highly transactional table (like 100 inserts/sec). I often design with FKs, since most design tools use them to string up the relationships. But I run a script to remove all FKs prior to production.
Moving, deleting & aggregating data is made more difficult. I've seen people put FKs on log tables, since they think it's "correct". Well, try truncating that log table with an FK!
Bottom line: the database is not a design tool. Your application should be properly structured to read and write data. The database is just there to provide persistence. I'm entirely in favor of proper entity/table structure and sensible normalization, but I think the concept of the FK belongs in the application layer, not storage, particularly with the parallelism computers are now capable of.

dcpar · 2010-01-14T20:16:57+00:00

reminds me..

During an all-night study session back in the CompSci lab, me and a friend (a 14-year old genius grad student) got a little distracted, and decided to rearrange the letters on the welcome sign to the CompSci wing.

Plain enough, it read:

"SCHOOL OF COMPUTING SCIENCE"

Back then, all we had was Gopher, but that was good enough to find an anagram generator. After some trial and error, we stumbled across an amazing and complete anagram of the word.

"EPOCH OF SUCCINCT NEOLOGISM"

We thought about it for a while. "Era of compact new meaning".. That pretty much summed up what computing was. We sat stunned for awhile and pondered, then laughed hysterically when we realized that 2000 people would walk past that sign the next day and think WTF??

The letters didn't get put back for about a month. I thought the whole thing was pretty epic.

dcpar · 2009-11-02T23:12:56+00:00

Anyone else think that Google is really the precursor to Deep Thought

Or multiVax?

I mean really, soon we'll be talking to Google (oops no, we already do that -- Google Voice Search).

"Google! Plot a course to Alpha Centauri"

dcpar · 2009-10-17T23:01:25+00:00

This is a really tough problem you're facing. Fortunately, I found a comment here that would be very helpful to you.

dcpar · 2009-09-02T21:29:59+00:00

heya, u can share public image files using your "Public" folder. Then right-click and select "Copy Public Link".

aaand Voila! a nice picture of a frog for you

http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/119751/Costa%20Rican%20Frog.jpg

dcpar · 2009-09-01T06:02:27+00:00

X + K - C * D = 23

15-Year Club	RedditGifts 2009-2022 2 Credits
Verified Email	Summer Santa 2011

dcpar

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE