Tuesday, November 11, 2003
It's the end of class and my mind is very, very mushy...
Plowed through a lot of stuff today, all of it having to do with Object Oriented programming concepts applied to C#. Initially, I didn’t understand why we were learning about fields instead of properties in our demo projects, though as time went on I began to understand the logic. Initially I was glad that we were skipping through the majority of the section example code and going straight to the labs, but I am beginning to remember why I never went after becoming a full-fledged programmer -- too many details to remember, and at heart I am not a details person.
Having said that, a lot of stuff is percolating through my grey cells, but I no longer expect at the end of it to say that I am a C# programmer. I will definitely know enough to work through code, understand the basics of what is going on, and likely even be able to alter existing code to some extent, but I am lost when told to do something from scratch. I also know that the more I practice, the better I get at a thing, so if I want to master this I will have to play with the code.
What this course is definitely good for is that I finally have the chance to learn the basics from somebody who knows what they are talking about, and our instructor definitely knows his stuff.
My thoughts this time of year have always turned to my Father, who fought in WWII, and whose exploits in the desert war were documented in a couple of photo albums he had. I remember as a kid always being fascinated by them, and how reticent Dad was to talk about his experiences. About a month or two before he died, on a visit to the family home I pulled out the photo albums and asked him to tell me more. I wish I had had a tape recorder! He did manage to fill me in on some of the stories behind the pictures, especially the ones where he was clearly with friends, and explaining some of his happier experiences there: being a guest at a local wedding, building a boat to sail the Nile with his buddies, his photos of “native life” in Egypt during the war. There were also some stories for which there were no pictures, such as his meeting Churchill as part of an honour guard (they preferred tall men, and Dad was 6’1”). But I gather, largely from his sister, that the war was a soul crushing affair for him, and that it took some time for him to regain the weight he had lost and his naturally cheerful upon his return home.
So on Remembrance Day I tend to this not only of the sacrifices of those who gave their lives in wartime, but also for those, like my Dad, who spent 6 years away from the people he cared about. Sacrifices need not be total to be sacrifices.
Am writing on the day after, on my way to my C# class. Boy, you can certainly tell the political leanings of the newspapers by looking at the headlines.
- Sun: “Left Hook”
- Toronto Star: “Miller Wins in Toronto”
- National Post: “Miller Wins in Tight Race” (or something similar)
- Metro: “Miller Time in Toronto”
- 24Hours “Carey On”
I find the National Post headline funny considering that the pundits were all positing a very narrow margin for the win between Miller and Tory, pegging it at less than 10,000 votes or so. The actual vote margin between the two was larger at almost 35,000 votes - much larger than the pundits had thought. So “tight race” seems to be a bit off the mark.
<rant>Yesterday I picked up a copy of the Sun somebody had left on the lunch table at a sub place I went to yesterday. I read their take on Miller on page 4 - ugh, journalism, if you can call it that, at its worse. The usual “tax and spend” epithets were tossed at Miller, and somewhere in their he was likened to a “clone of Bob Rae”, and in bed with the unions, all the while praising Tory to the hilt and making him look completely clean - the fact that he has never held public office before, and was former CEO of Rogers - the cable company everybody loves to hate - never came up. And next to this was a column where Miller was said to be courting the gay vote. Well of course he is - what candidate wouldn’t? Miller apparently has a good record with this community, but the way The Sun slithered this article alongside the wretched opinion piece made it seem like siding with Miller was somehow “siding” with gays. Transparently yellow journalism. Ugh. Guess that’s why I never normally read The Sun...</rant>
We went out en masse to vote at the local polling station. It was significant for Erika if only because this was the very first election she voted in since she officially became a Canadian citizen a couple of weeks ago. We took the kids with us and they played tag around the Mennonite church hall where we could cast our vote. Was impressed by the automated reading machines which took our results on a piece of paper and were fed into a fax-like device.
Afterwards a curious Vanessa was interested in what all this was about. Sandra Bussin’s campaign headquarters was across the street, so we all went over there so that she could find out more about the process. Bussin wasn’t there, but a couple of her assistants kindly took the time out to tell Vanessa what the local democratic process was, and why it mattered. Both kids were also given a cookie and Vanessa came away satisfied with the results, proudly carrying away some campaign gear she was handed by Bussin’s people.
The fax-like machine I fed my voting page into must have accounted for the speedy rate at which the results were known. I tuned into CBC Radio 1 at 8pm and by 8:16pm they confidently predicted Miller to be the new mayor.
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