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Kate and I went ice skating with friends last night.  I was surprised to find I could still skate – especially as it’s been about 3-4 years since I was on roller blades and about 5-6 years since I was on ice skates!  The last time I recall being on ice was when Brad and Wolf took me skating in Vancouver.   Yes it involved hockey sticks, and yes I wasn’t very good, but it was good fun.  Last night I didn’t have a stick.  I did have figure skating skates though and that caused all sorts of problems with my turns.  I didn’t fall over though, that’s a start!  Turns out they have an ice hockey team here, and they are quite good.  I’m guessing the team consists of Canadian students studying here…

I was wondering around London a couple of weeks ago.  Besides the rain, it was lovely.  I spent the rainy times inside the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Monmoth Coffee Company.  I’ve recently learnt how to take panoramic photos, so check out some of my attempts.

The atrium of the British Museum

The freaky ghost people are a little funny…

The rest of my pics are here

The start of the Canucks season has been too tepid, plagued with inconsistency and injuries — its been tough to tune in and discover we’re behind (which has happened alot)

In other hockey related miscellany – see the NHL suspension flow chart – aka Dammit Pronger

There’s a C++ API available for Starcraft BroodWar, which allows you to interact with the game using a program

And there’s a competition on to create a Starcraft AI that compete with one another (and humans)!!

I read about this on Slashdot, where the monkeys are usually extra amusing.  And they didn’t disappoing.  The first three comments that I read rocked.

1) What could possibly go wrong? Let’s teach our AI systems how to do battle… against humans. Skynet anyone?

2) at one point the AI will realize that it’s far easier to beat the human by hacking in to military computers and nuking the player.

3) Then the human players will black out the sky

Huge grin on my face when I read that one.

Check it out, it’s looking like problems already…

Oxford Circus X-crossing

But I just finished reading the Harry Potter series.  I thoroughly enjoyed them, probably because it was easy reading making them easy to pick up and easy put down.  I can see why kids get engrossed in them though, there are so many aspects that just about everyone could relate to (adult and child alike).

I can’t help but feel that the movies detract from the books.  The movies give you faces to the characters which meant (for me) that I put less into forming images of the characters myself.

But, all in all, worth the read.  I need to find something else now and that’s the bit I don’t like about reading, finding the next book…