There was Christmas, where I got a lot of very thoughtful and useful gifts, and got to spend the day with family, which was great as always.  Even though our routine is almost the exact same every single year (almost down to the minute), it never gets old.  One thing that has changed, though, is now my sister actually has to wake me up in the morning.

Christmas night Shauna came down, and she stayed until the 30th, when we drove back to Kamloops for New Year’s Eve.  It was a really good visit, I thought, and I’m glad we weren’t at each other’s throats by the end of the 7 days.  There was one day when we had a hard time thinking of anything to do, but that wasn’t even that terrible.  I do think though, that we are both pretty much shopped out for a little while.

So now I am back home, and hopefully I will be able to motivate myself to clean my room a bit before the break is over.  It really is getting out of hand in there.  Unfortunately, I also have some work-related stuff that I have to get done before I go back, which is one of the consequences of taking such a long break.  The world does not stop just because our office is closed.

Also I am planning on writing a program to solve a certain type of puzzle that Shauna got.  I’m not sure if she left it here, but I can still do it just the same.  Essentially the puzzle is a 9×9 grid with flat sides on each puzzle piece, and similar patterns matching each edge.  In the case of the one Shauna got, there is either a top or a bottom of a turtle on each edge.  There’s 4 different turtles altogether, and some appear twice on the same piece.  The tricky part is that each piece could potentially be in any place, because there are no defined “edges”.
On a similar note, I also am writing out plans to write a program which will “learn” to write new programs.  I might write some about this later, but probably not for a few posts.  Shauna complains when I write too many “boring” posts.

So I’ve been playing around with this most of today.  Basically it takes a 200×200 pixel image, and starts using random iterations of polygons to try and get closer and closer to reproducing the original.  It starts off with 50 invisible polygons, and begins cycling through them, changing their shape and/or colour.  It then computes if the change makes the composition closer to the original image.  If it does, it keeps the change, if not it discards it.  Repeat this a million times, and it actually does a pretty damn good job.

Just spreadin the word.