Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna: November 3rd Service (BETA)

The mp3 file embedded above is a copy of an edited version of the "sermon" given at the November 3rd, 2013 Sunday service at the Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna. I consider this recording to be in "Beta" (i.e. there are some kinks that need to be worked out), but so far as I can tell the recording (which is taken directly from the mixer's output) sounds fine. Enjoy!

Dreams of Mars (Draft 1)

Similar to my last post, I have again been assigned to write a 600 to 1000 word story upon a particular theme. In this case, I was to analyze the poem "Utopia" by Wislawa Szymborska, which won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. I was then to explore this theme through a 600 to 1000 word narrative. I have decided to post this narrative now, in its current form, because the most likely edits I will be making will be exclusively to meet school requirements, such as including certain types and numbers of different parts of speech. The full story is below.

A Night at the Roadhouse

I began thinking about a narrative set at a motel along the Eyre Highway due to personal interest in these very isolated roadhouse towns. I soon afterwards realized that this would meet the criteria of an upcoming school English assignment quite well. Below is the full story, fleshed out for the assignment.

NOTE: The assignment required me to start this with "it was a dark and stormy night". I didn't choose to do so on purpose.

Tribute to Toby (YouTube Repost)

BONUS: Spanish Version!

New Blog URL

While I don't update this blog often, I thought it might be a good idea to mention the fact that I have changed the URL. While aspiethoughts.blogspot.ca will still redirect, the new correct URL is Blog.RobertCasey.me.

Friendship Algorithm in Java

UPDATE: Source code fixed and updated below.


UPDATE: Currently trying to nail down a problem with the loopcounter at the end of the code. I will update the source here as soon as it is fixed.

For Geek Pride Day (May 25)/ 42 Day (25+05+12), a super double geek-out! I took the Friendship Algorithm from the second season of The Big Bang Theory and spent about an hour converting it into Java code in Eclipse. The result is an extremely convoluted but functional bag of Java loops that accepts input of answers to the original flow chart's questions and goes down the proper path for the answers. Full source code below.

My Entirely Improvised Story that I Told to Victoria (Or, On The Origin of Pugs)

Tonight I was putting Victoria to bed, and as usual had to improvise a final short story after the main one(s) to finally get her to bed. Tonight I improvised based on what was around and told the following story (which I have slightly improved for this post):

Once upon a time there lived a beautiful princess named Victoria. Now Victoria was lonely in her castle because she didn't have a prince yet, so she decided to get a dog. When she caught 2 dogs, she found them to be too rowdy and not cuddly enough, so she changed them into the fun kind of dog she was thinking of using a bit of her magic. She made them have short, push-in snotty faces, short legs and body, a fat tummy, and a curly tail. She named the new kind of dog the "pug", because it rhymed with "hug", which is what she wanted to do to them. WHen she finally did meet her prince, Harry The 3rd And A Half, he loved the dogs as well, and spread them throughout the land. Thus from then on everyone loved pugs. THE END.