Sparks of the Day

Mike and I went to the Young Centre for the Performing Arts to see one of the Shakespeare plays. We rushed to the play and this time we made it, yay! We arrived (after running in high heels) 5 minutes before the show started. We could buy the tickets which were half price of the normal and they were really "last minute tickets" .

The play was performed by talented actors and actresses, nicely put on stage and had a fine sense of humor. There were songs played and sung from the artists which gave the show an ecstatic impression. I liked the character of the old "fool" and his acting was very very well done. The story is one of the typical "princess falling in love with a prince" and everything is so ideal and every word is so nicely and poetically put on.

The language used was one of N.A accent with some "thy-thou" Shakespearean style. I would have enjoyed it more if it was English accent but well, we are in Canada after all and maybe the audience prefers that kind of accent

Mike was wondering if Shakespeare were to live in out times if he could have been that successful in stages all around the world for so many years. Maybe yes..but maybe not, given how many people write nowadays. He might have made a good cut but he might have been not that successful. And it is the style he used the language which make people ponder the classical plays, quite different and not easy to understand at the same time.

Mike, his father and I were in talk about new ways of fighting cancer. The presentation was held at MaRS from Dr.Robert S.Kerbel from the OICR.

The idea of killing the blood vessels around the tumor is not a new one, it has been around for more than 40 years and it gives good results for early stage tumor and cancers. The problem is when the cancer reaches the metastatic phase; which makes it non-curable any more. The goal of the research is to slow down the process and give some more years to the patients. The factors that trigger aggressive cancer were called angiogenic and the therapy was trying to create the antiangiogenic effect. Eventually, the trials were giving to the metastatic patients a combination of low but more often doses of chemotherapy and another drug which aimed vessels. Unfortunately, the actual cost of metronomic drugs is very high and most of the provinces in Canada, incl. Ontario cannot afford to support it. So, the battle continues.

Mike and I were invited at a wedding on the weekend. The ceremony and the party took place in a big banquet hall. The weds were of Persian origin and the colours of the wedding were mostly Persian : the food, the ceremony and the music. It was a combination of traditional and modern wedding with a lot of influence of N.A style.

We could speak with a couple of people, but most of the time the music was loud and we preferred dancing or going out and breathe some fresh air. Most of the people knew each other and I found it difficult to participate in their conversation amid my efforts. There was a guy playing bongo which gave some tone to the music, but some times the music was that loud that could choke the rhythms produced by bongo. We had people coming over and taking pictures of us while dancing. Well, we should probably think about a career in dancing lessons. At least it sounds more fun than programming



Mike needed to work the day after and we left a bit early. The day after we felt so exhausted that we spent most of the time sleeping. A couple friends of mine came over for a long visit and we enjoyed chatting with them and watching some old Albanian movies in black and white.

Holding his hand on my chest

feeling drunk from fresh kisses

and lose myself smelling his scent

The week went by quickly but for some reason it felt a tiring one to me. I had a lot of routine work to be handled and I hope by next week I can start working one something more fun. I had an eye exam on Monday, which washed out the whole day. Because of the drops I could not stand any light and I got a headache for a couple more days. On the plus side, the ophthalmologist told me I won't need glasses for at least in the next five years. Thursday was the assembling of the new bed set we got. It took almost an hour just to get all the packaging out of the door into the bins outside the building. My brother and his kids paid a short visit to us yesterday evening. It was nice to talk to him and to my little niece. I surprisingly still call her my little niece even though she is taller than I am. As of today, the day is pretty much gone doing little chores around the apartment. Well, I hope my next week will be more exciting.

Yesterday was my first time at the XP users' group meeting. It went for about two hours, in one of the classrooms at Ryerson University. There were four presentations mainly on the topic of team work in an agile environment. The first guy was presenting the behaviour of people in four major categories and he raised questions about the possibilities of interaction between people from different categories. It sounded to me more as those polls from newspaper. In real life depending on the situation and type of the problem, one person can fall in any of the categories. The second presentation was on "customer on site". An interesting successful experience, only that the presenter used some times unnecessary confusing words that could take away the attention of the audience. Also the pitch of her voice head no ups and down, yet sounded veru monotone. One feedback that came from her was the fact that together with the advantage to have the customer working together with QA and development, there was a risk of that "customer" to loose the feedback from her own team. The third presentation was given by one of my collegues and I liked the way it was presented according to "Takahashi Method". The last talk was mostly an idea/chart how to introduce people to agile methodologies. The chart seemed very clumsy and the presenter seemed more of the person that will be talking then listening to the people who will be needed his advise.

There were not many tech discussions after the talks and majority of people headed home. Anyway, all in all it was an OK discussion group, some discussion but kind of more formal than needed to be. Unless there is a really hot topic, the XP users meeting was not worth sacrificing the tenfold more fun PyGTA meetings.

I was at Cafe' Scientifique' monthly discussion yesterday. The topic was about the impact of ecotoxics in our urban environment. There was a professor at UofT, a research scientist and a coordinator from science center who gave their opinions and facts about how danger are the everyday products we are using for our health and urban environment. The studies have shown a lot of risk in the plastic products with a scary example of the baby bottles. And what was more horrific is the "declaration" that they were made of organic materials. The plastic material used to make those bottles leeches when hot liquids are poured in them. The mothers seem terrified when learning the fact but they still use the plastic bottles until the government issues a law to ban the production.

Another issue is the fact that most of the products of everyday use come from outside Canada , Wallmart is getting every day cheaper This brings the risk of non-inspected materials used to make them. Until some real risk is shown there is no way to check all of them. On the other side, studies show that there is not discovered a "safer" way to make certain plastic reach the durability of replaced materials such as glass or metal. But this does not mean we should agree with this reality. And the effects might be seen in the grown period of the child toward the adolescence.

Surprisingly, the rural areas were at the same danger and at the same level of the exposure that the urban area is. Reason why, water carrying the toxic materials, lakes, rivers, creeks. The GTA and all south Ontario is getting bigger and bigger every day that we cannot tell the difference any more when one city ends and the other starts. The suburbia is creating "the commodity of space" but it is destroying the environment rapidly.

There is green space but that consists only of some grass and flowers around the garden. The wild life has disappeared and the vegetation is suffering. When there is smog alert people doubt what to do, stay home surrounded by toxic materials that our furnitures and electronics are made or challenge our respiratory system.



Around 20 years ago, North America was a lead in protecting the environment and public health compared to Europe. The non-smoking laws were in function many years before Europe. Nowadays, it seems that Europe is more concerned and is acting more aggressively toward environmental issues. Well, how can we not mention Sweden:-) No more than a month ago the government presented a project called SymbioCity which is promoting sustainability solutions for urban development on cities in Sweden.

Maybe is time not just looking at the parties programs if green is mentioned but asking ambitious plans how to have fun healthy cities and environment friendly.

This has been a long winter, cold and hills of snow all around the city. The days are getting longer, the sun is shining hard but there is no chance this mean winter will fade away. I am a summer person who enjoys nice hot weather, swimming in the beach and walking in short sleeves. And this winter is killing my mood and all my hope for a nice flower blossom spring.

It has been a period of worries and some severe headaches. The weekend was just a wash-off, stayed in bed for the whole Saturday and major part of Sunday. My back muscles were stiff and I think I had a cold too.



At work, there has been much more demand due to one of my colleagues leaving. Now I am practically in charge of the whole activities and I am trying to code and do some refactoring as well. As soon as I figure out how to organize routine things in as less time as possible I am thinking in working on some side project. I have been procrastinating it for almost a month now. The main reason is that the specifications are not that clear. I probably need to sit down and figure out that first before I start coding. Maybe creating a small project menu with as much details on the steps as possible can help me getting out of confusion.

I had a problem at work related to rounding of numbers for financial calculation.

The problem is that the code was having a slight error yet important. Something in the lines of 1.44-1=0.43999999. It was a flaw in the code that I am trying to figure out.

The solution provided was not correct. It resolves the problem to 2 decimal number and fills the rest with zeros. I was told that IBM has libraries for financial standards and calculation rules.

I was at PyGTA yesterday where there was a presentation of using Lorenz attractor. The guy was trying to show how fascinating math is and intended to give his code and demo to schools. The idea is to give children an insight how wonderful math and engineering are. We know that most of the kids would like to become a singer or movie actor/actress but we also need kids that enjoy science and engineering. That reminded me of the WIE(Women In Engineering) which promotes engineering to high-school girls and this might be something interesting for their activity.

Yesterday was the family day officially, but I spent it with my friends. We went to the Bayview mall where there was an antiquaries sale. My friend is very fond of antiques, whereas I am more of modern approaches. I have never found any interesting the Victorian style in anything. To much of a floral pattern on anything. Then we headed for a brunch and a long chat. As the day was still young we thought of going to a movie. " The bucket list" was the best choice. A nice story, funny and touchy at the same time. It was very interesting to see how people create friendship in all sort of situations and how important and invaluable part of our life they are. And then off for a delicious ice-cream. Mike's server is officially now our multimedia center even though one of the couches was to small to fit in and we both sit on office chairs. As I was not in a mood of doing anything, Mike and I ended up watching a couple more funny movies for the rest of the evening. All in all I feel relaxed from the long weekend.

Sunday, it's the birthday of my nephew and I am trying to buy him something really nice. He is very "commercial-driven" and what toys and games the other kids at school have, become his present desire. He was at my place last week and showed interest for playing chess and I though a little board might be interesting. For sure he doesn't like to receive money 'cause he didn't care when I gave him some cash for Christmas. Well, not easy with nowadays kids. Probably I need to see what's trendy for kids of his age and buy something to make him happy.

Mike and I watched an interesting episode from Smallville yesterday before going to bed. I was feeling so bad that a mean person was trying a very ugly trap for a nice honest person. And surprisingly, in the morning, we both had dreams with characters from the movie. Well, as they say what we see and do during the day comes in weird form in our dreams. Carl C.Jung had a whole theory about dreams and scientific interpretation of them. He goes as far as to our ancestor events. In my case I simply consider it traces of strong emotions whereas Mike is all about Python, hehe

It has been two full days of programming in Java at work. I have been exposed to programming tools and techniques. One of my colleagues, a senior level programmer, sits with me and checks my code or give suggestion for using better techniques. I am getting the look and feel of running the projects in Eclipse. Hibernate is an interesting mapping of the databases in Java. Practically it takes care about everything, from creating a connection to updating the tables in database. The user still needs to do the mapping of the table fields with the corresponding application data.



We planned to go to a presentation about stem cells organized by cafe scientifique tonight. The place was so crowded then even standing had become a challenge let alone finding a chair to sit. Usually, in these kind of gatherings, the speakers give a general talk and then there are questions . The first questions are kind of boring but even when the discussion gets interesting, the time is up and people have to leave the place. So, that's why we ended up walking home from downtown drinking a very nice ginger-milk bubble tea.