Events

I hope your celebration of Beethoven's birthday was as awesome as mine: shopping madness for Christmas. It is hard to find time to get away. I stole a parking spot from a big truck (not altogether intentionally) and, in one line, sang four Radiohead songs to myself.

Sarah and I went out in the cold to see the lights in downtown Denver. It was kind of fun, kind of chilly. I miss the shopping district in Seattle for that kind of expedition. And the steel drum band. There was a dude on a recorder, though.

Where we were, there's just an outdoor mall. We had thought they lit the state capitol, but we didn't see anything when we went by. The US Mint was just red in the top tower. They were showing Miracle on 34th Street, the original, on a big screen in a park.

I've been enjoying a set of computer programming problems called Project Euler. Basically, they are math problems that would not be easy to solve without a computer. We the people can solve problems that were beyond the world's mathematicians for centuries. They are not that easy to solve with a computer either, as the design of the program is the key, but every solution program should end in under one minute.

I've been taking the opportunity to learn a programming language new to me, Python. I learned Common Lisp in grad school, so a lot of the concepts are familiar to me. Still, it's been fun to make functional little programs that can run on basically any computer. I haven't been doing math problems just for fun since high school, basically, so it's been neat to get back to those roots. I could reflect on the circle of life, the more things change, nothing new under the sun...