Pirata Sum

Have a Laugh at Yourself

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 16:02:42 -0800

I think this pretty well captures the web of mutual perception despite the exaggeration and humor.

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Pretty

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 06:30:25 -0800

Water Dance from Alex Cherney on Vimeo.

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The Books that have Influenced Me.

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:55:00 -0700

It has been a while since I've made a substantial post here, and I'm sorry for that. I've recently embarked on a new business with my wife, and haven't been in the right mind space for writing blog entries, much less have a lot of time for doing so. Up to now, Twitter has been a better barrel for shooting my thoughts out into the world. I'm still following my plans for posting here that I announced earlier, but at a much slower pace than I hoped originally.

This post is inspired by a friend of mine who has posted on his blog about the 20 authors that have influenced his thinking the most. I find this an attractive exercise, but to avoid getting all Facebooky about it by doing the exercise on autopilot as it was transferred to me, I'm going to change around the exercise a bit. I'll write about the books that have influenced me the most, and I'll also explain why.

Alex and I have been friends for years, so there's actually quite a bit of overlap in the lists. Friends have similar tastes and they share those tastes when it becomes clear that they haven't happened on good book independently.

This is something that I'm going to have to do in parts, since I've found that I tend to assimilate books differently than most. They go down into the depths where I can't see them easily and it takes something on the scale of a deep sea-recovery operation for me to collect my thoughts about books that have influenced me. There are plenty books that I admire, think are beautiful, that have changed my opinions, but they are not on this list. These are the books that have influenced me and helped make me who I am.

So here it goes, the first 4:

Any Hardy Boys Book

Why any? This series of books is the sort of thing I was reading when I was developing the habits of a life-long reader. How could any books be more influential, in the end? I could throw in any number of things, like the Lord of the Rings, or Dune, but those books were read when I was a little order. The Hardy Boys were what I remember reading at the very beginning of my novel reading life, around the ages of 7-8.

The Pirates

Rather than repeat myself, I'll just refer you to my Why Piratasum?.

The Chrysalids

Each year in the high school English curriculum where I was living, there would be two novels that would have to be read. The Chrysalids was on the list for Grade 9, if I remember correctly. I can't remember the others very well, nor the order, but I think that Who has Seen the Wind?, Animal Farm, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The Lord of the Flies, The Two Solitudes and The Stone Angel were all in there somewhere as well (how do you know I grew up in Canada?). There were a few others I remember fondly, like Hugh MacClennan's Voices in Time, but they were in the final year curriculum, which was not common to all students, and I took 3 English classes in the last year of high school. The core high school English curriculum where I lived introduced us to some good books.

The Chrysalids was special to me first because the story took place in Canada. At the time I read the book, I had not read many books where the action was set in the country where I lived, with the added thrill of having that place projected into an alternate reality, and I found the very idea exciting. I still get the same thrill, whether it's reading Timothy Findley, or, more recently, Terry Fallis.

This tale of post-apocalyptic mutants being chased and abused also appealed to me because I felt like a bit of a scorned mutant myself at the time (there's still a distance between me and the crowd today, but that's the considered choice of an individual, rather than a terrible verdict issued by a group). We all like seeing what is familiar, but when one is young and sees one's own experiences reflected back at oneself, writ large, it helps processing those experiences. The Chrysalids is a book that I've always had lurking in the back of my mind.

The Republic

Fire across my mind. That's the best way to describe The Republic's influence on me. I ended up reading it twice in my first year of university in two different courses; little did I know then that it was the beginning of a life-long relationship. The relationship was intense at first; when I stopped studying Political Theory, I had a detailed outline of the book in my head and could paraphrase almost any point of the argument. It's been over 10 years now since I've read it cover-to-cover. This neglect of the Republic was by choice, I wanted some time to let it sink in. Now that I'm no longer intimately familiar with it, it's time to get reacquainted with this old friend. My mind is returning to it frequently now that I've got people working under my responsibility, and the problems of dealing with others are more immediate for me than they have been for some time.

Why the Republic? From the premise of making a defense of Justice on its own terms, even if acting justly brings one a poverty, scorn and nothing good from the crowd, to the framework of the response, assuming that justice in one person is the same thing as justice in a city, to the response, that philosophers must rule if there is to be justice in the city, even if the philosophers have no interest at all in doing so. The book is filled with dubious characters, outrageous propositions, wild trains of argument and fantastical stories. When one considers the content of the book outside the attitude of reverence that we are trained to hold for old books like this, it seems incredible that this book is one of the foundations of a 2000 year-old domain of human activity.

How could I not be influenced by this book, the Glaucon aspiring to be a Socrates that I was and still am?

There's a method to the madness of the Republic, which is not a philosophical essay, a drama nor any other literary mode that has appeared since. Attempts to mimic the art that Plato achieved in this book fall short, from Galileo through Montesquieu to Roger Scruton and Jane Jacobs. Plato chose a form of argument that was meant to use the dead letter as a vehicle for living thought. If you would like a contemporary image of the Republic, think of the Young Ladies Primer from Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age; far from being a collection of Socrates' or Plato's opinions, it's a device for conferring information, but also a practical training device that teaches through interacting with it. The Republic is filled with tricks and traps and dead ends, all intended to sharpen the thought of the reader to the point where they can see the truth of the base argument of the book. It's a training device for the use Glaucon in his quest to become Socrates, for convincing Glaucon that he should become Socrates is not all that different from actually transforming him into Socrates. It's a book that lives and grows with the reader.

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Waterboys: Fisherman's Blues Live

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 15:23:10 -0700

Sometimes when watching videos on YouTube, you come across one that makes you sad that you weren't there at the show. This is one of them for me... what fun!:

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Love is the Answer

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 05:16:00 -0700

A relation is strict if it never holds between an element and itself; a relation is reflexive if it always holds between an element and itself.
...

Exercise 4.1 Give an example of a relation that is neither strict nor reflexive.

Stepanov and McJones, Elements of Programming

The answer came to mind immediately; love. It is neither strict nor reflexive, nor is it symmetric (if you love someone, they necessarily love you), nor is it transitive (if you love someone and they love something else, you necessarily love that something else).

Maybe that is why it gives us so much trouble! Love is a very disorderly relation.

Success in love is measure by the degree that we can make it symmetric and transitive. It's a tough ladder to climb, finding the order in love, but the rewards for doing so more than pay back the effort.

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Johnny Thunders Live at the Speakeasy

Sat, 11 Sep 2010 08:57:18 -0700

Here's a blast from the past, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers doing "Chinese Rocks" from the Live at the Speakeasy:

I can't find it on iTunes (I don't want the excerpts on Born to Loose) nor in other locations. Anyone know where I could find it?

This is one of my favorite albums of all time. I don't know why other than to say it makes feel great every time I listen to it, the stuff from Born to Loose is fine, but it just isn't the same without the between-song patter, insults and rantings.

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Sent From My iPhone

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 02:22:00 -0700

When one first gets an iPhone, the mail program is set to put "Sent from my iPhone" as the signature to all your email. When I was setting mine up, I removed it, preferring not to advertise Apple's products in my personal communication.

After about a year of use I put that back as the signature on things sent from "my iPhone". I found that the mistakes I made when writing emails on the phone were so egregious and so frequent that I felt I needed a way to say "I'm really not a moron, but it's hard to edit text on this phone and sometimes the predictive typing produces surprises that get past the last edit". It's similar with all phones, I imagine, small screen, small keys... a difficult environment in which to avoid writing like a cretin.

I've discovered that writing long emails on the phone are big no no. Its hard to write at length without being able to get a bird's eye view on the text; this is the view that phones are unable to give. Moving around large chunks of text efficiently is also difficult, so one tries to avoid doing it. Long messages written on a phone are often rambling and repetitive and perhaps a bit incoherent in places... enough to get one's friends worrying about one's equilibrium.

These problems may be painful, but they are a small trade off for being able to participate in that world of communication that Arthur C Clarke described in 1964:

First drafted, but not sent, from my iPhone

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How Free Are You When Apple is Counting Your Heartbeats?

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 04:52:00 -0700

Let's take a quick look at the state of freedom and privacy in the mobile computing market, shall we? This is a multi-part post where I'll survey some disconcerting developments in the mobile computing industry.

Apple's Latest Patent Application

Apple Inc. recently made a patent application for a system that will "protect" iPhone/iPad users against theft and Apple against people who would try to get control of the software on their own phones ("unauthorized users"). Here's some of the summary from the patent application:

[0004]In some embodiments, an unauthorized user can be detected by comparing the identity of the current user to the identities of authorized users of the electronic device. For example, a photograph of the current user can be taken, a recording of the current user's voice can be recorded, the heartbeat of the current user can be recorded, or any combination of the above. The photograph, recording, or heartbeat can be compared, respectively, to a photograph, recording, or heartbeat of authorized users of the electronic device to determine whether they match. If they do not match, the current user can be detected as an unauthorized user.
[0005]In some embodiments, an unauthorized user can be detected by noting particular activities that can indicate suspicious behavior. For example, activities such as entering an incorrect password a predetermined number of times in a row, hacking of the electronic device, jailbreaking of the electronic device, unlocking of the electronic device, removing a SIM card from the electronic device, or moving a predetermined distance away from a synced device can be used to detect an unauthorized user.
[0006]In some embodiments, when an unauthorized user is detected, information related to the current user of the electronic device (e.g., the unauthorized user), the current user's operation of the electronic device, the electronic device's location, or any combination of the above can be gathered. For example, information such as the current's user's photograph, a voice recording of the current user, screenshots of the electronic device, keylogs of electronic device, communication packets (e.g., Internet packets) served to the electronic device, location coordinates of the electronic device, or geotagged photos of the surrounding area can be gathered.

There are two points of concern here:

1. The invention implies the collection of biometric data on the user of the iPhone/iPad (the iPhone has a forward facing camera now and one can expect that the same will be true for the iPad in the near future).
2. "Jailbreaking" is defined as "unauthorized use".

Everyone should be concerned about private companies collecting biometric data on their users. They cannot be trusted to keep other forms of data safe (data theft seems to be a regular occurance in the corporate world), so there is no reason to expect that this even more sensitive data will be any better protected. While one can see the sense in the use of biometric data being collected by corporations on their employees for the purpose of restricting access to company secretes, it is seems that that there is too much harm done to the public good (privacy) in allowing them to collect the same information simply to secure the use of a purchased consumer item.

The really insidious part is point 2. The US courts have recently ruled that the DMCA Act (the American law regarding digital locks and copyright protection) allows for the breaking of digital locks on the iPhone.Apple's response to this legal reverse is to find another way to get at jailbreaking. In the grand old tradition of censors, the route they've chosen is protection of the user. Jailbreaking is a sign that the phone has been stolen, or that an "unauthorized user" has taken the phone in their possession.

Why Monopoly?

The whole reason for Apple trying to prevent jailbreaking of the iPhone and iPad is not so much to censor what goes on the devices for political or moral reasons (though a little bit of both goes on), but because they want to maintain their position as the sole distributor of software for the devices through their App Store. They do not want the competition of other distributors, like Cydia. There are three reasons for Apple wanting to keep this control over software distribution on the iPhone:
1. Maintain a certain consistency for the end user's experience with the device.
2. Keep the platform secure.
3. $$$ / monopoly control

Now, the first two points can seen to be as goods that Apple could conceivably provide in an open marketplace of software distributors. In fact, these are real goods and point 2 would be enough in itself to give Apple's App Store a big leg up over other potential software distributors. They are not good reasons for keeping the hardware/software platform closed.

The real reason for preventing other application distributors operating on Apple's mobile devices is point 3. This is something that is in Apple's, or, more precisely, in Steve Jobs' DNA. When Apple has been under Jobs' direction, it has always been a company that has sought as much control over its software/hardware platform as possible. Jobs' view is that people exercise their choice before they chooose to enter his walled garden; once they are in, he gets to make all the rules.

This way of doing things on the desktop nearly sunk Apple in the 90's (Apple did belately drop the control over the software and hardware platform in a last ditch attempt to stave off bankruptcy in the mid-late 90's). Mobile devices tend to favor this approach a little more because they are so intimitely tied to one's personal life, and then design and integration matter more. Design and feature integration are much easier to do on a closed platform.

Why would this be his favorite way of doing business? It makes for bigger profit margins, yes, that's for sure. On the other hand, Apple's near failure in the late-90's shows that large profit margins aren't necessarily going to ensure success (nor will they ensure failure, as a lot of tech industry people assume on the basis of that example). After thinking about this for a little bit, I've come up with my own answer to this question.

It's all a question of management of risk, and where you want to "allocate" the risks one takes. For Steve Jobs, the favoured place to take risks is in R&D and the creation of new products. The monopoly control over the already existing products provides the revenue necessary to enlargen the ground over which Apple can take risks with new products (think: iPod, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV) The first, in particular, was a huge gamble that Jobs bet a weak and faltering company on. The second was a gamble that took a stabilized but small company past its competitors (Apple now has more market cap than either Dell or Microsoft). If you listen Jobs speak enough about these issues, you realize that the whole question of innovation is really what he cares about. You can see it in things he says from his high-minded Stanford Address to caustic responses in his tussels with reporters.

Jobs made Apple 2.0 (Apple Inc. as opposed to Apple Computer) into a huge success on the basis of some wild gambles where he depended on his own intuition about what would be a success in the marketplace. While he makes huge gambles like this, he can't be making gambles with the profitability of the devices on a micro-level. That's the main reason for keeping the hardware/software platform as integrated and closed as possible.

So mobile devices are a better medium for Jobs' favoured business model and relentless pursuit of innovation. The question is whether his favoured way of doing business is good for the rest of us. Does his desire to innovate trump all concerns for privacy and freedom? Economic and political theory suggests that it is not, but this question of private versus social good cannot be decided in the abstract. A good part of the decision is made by people and what they will tolerate; they will vote with their money and their support or lack thereof for various laws. People have the choice to enter Apple's walled-garden and/or strengthen it. This patent has given me pause to think before buying another Apple mobile device to use as my main device for whatever purpose. What do you think?

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John Galt Seen Commenting on CBC Story

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 00:59:00 -0700

This was taken from a CBC story about the flooding in Pakistan and the move toward providing aid to the flood-stricken country. As ever, there's a Randian around to provide the solipsistic view of the world, happiness, success and compassion.

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How to Unstuck the Date Range in Google Analytics

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:06:00 -0700

If the title to this post means something to you, then you know how annoying the thing I'm referring to is. You've tried clearing the cache, you've tried clearing all your cookies, you've tried pagan rituals, you've run out gibbering into windswept fields, shaking your fist at the fickle gods who left you in this wretched state, still when you load Google Analytics reporting for a particular site, there's just one date range dated back a few months now that it displays on load. Every time.

That date range taunts you. It makes you change it every time you want up-to-date data. You search and search, but you can't find out how to stop it from mocking you with its presence every time Google Analytics loads.

Maybe you've got a bookmark that you use to go straight to the reporting page for your site? Go take a look at the URL that bookmark points to. At the end of it is the string "&pdr=2010012320100222" or something similar (lots and lots of numbers). That's the culprit that is keeping the loaded date range fixed in some fossilized past. Just remove it from the bookmark.

Follow the bookmark. Breathe easy; at long last.

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Bagels and Bodysnatchers

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:41:00 -0700

This story seems to have caught everyone's attention today. I decided to dedicate this song to the good professor and her quest to get her bagel in the face of Starbucks' Kafkaesque wall of language:

Ok, ok, I was just looking for a flimsy excuse to post more Radiohead music, but it is à propos, you have to admit.

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Ceremony (covered by Radiohead)

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:56:00 -0700

This Joy Division song never fails to bring a smile to my face, pure Aufhebung. And I'm glad to have discovered Radiohead, some 15 years after the fact. You're never too old to learn new things, nor too old to have dreams, and mine sometimes form and dance to the jangly guitars of 80's-90's brit rock.

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The Prisoner's Dilemma: A Reader's Experiment

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 10:59:00 -0700

I started reading Playing for Real this week. I know that I promised to write on some PR books earlier, but I'm going to pick some low-hanging fruit to buy some time as the stuff on PR is harder to write about than I was anticipating. So on to the Prisoner's Dilemma, which will be the first thing talked about in the book!

The Prisoner's Dilemma

I think that anyone who has studied the social sciences in the last 20-30 in university knows about the Prisoner's Dilemma. It's the standard game used to teach the elements of Game Theory to new students. The game is usually set up with a story:

Two gangsters are arrested for a crime. The DA offers them each the same deal individually during interrogation: If you confess and your accomplice fails to confess, then you go free. If you fail to confess but your accomplice confesses, then you will be convicted and sentenced to the maximum term in jail. If you both confess, then you will both be convicted, but the maximum sentence will not be imposed. If neither confesses, you will both be framed on a minor tax evasion charge for which a conviction is certain
pg. 9, Playing For Real

What's the best thing for each gangster to do? According to the standard analysis, the best strategy is to always confess. This analysis is presented as a payoff table, where the results for all choices made by the players can be presented at once.

	Cooperate	Defect
Cooperate	-1, -1	-10, 0
Defect	0, -10	-9, -9

The payoffs for defecting (confessing) for each player are 0 and -9, while the payoffs for cooperating with the other player (not confessing) are -1 and -10. It is easy to see from that analysis that in the end it is better to defect, even though if both cooperate, they only go to prison for a short time. This is fine, but I've always wondered what would happen if one actually turned it into an experiment. I wondered about it, but couldn't be bothered to perform it myself until I started reading this book.

The Experiment

I wrote a program that simulates the purest version of the prisoner's dilemma. No repetitions of the game with the same players, no consequences for the choice (lowered trust, etc...) other than what are in the payoff table. Since the "players" are chosen freshly for each game, no learning effects. They just choose to cooperate ("doves" in Binmore's words) or defect ("hawks"). I wrote the program to run 100 000 games and to collect the total years of prison "won" by the doves and the hawks and average that out over the number of times the game was played. Here is the program I wrote in Ruby to run the simulation*:

The results are that when one runs with an even population of doves and hawks, the doves average around 5.5 years per play and the hawks average 4.5 years per play. If you change the proportion of players, it only changes the number of years everyone gets. The more doves than hawks you get, the less years everyone gets. The more hawks there are in the population, the more years everyone gets. Try it out for yourself and see the what happens!**

This does show that the real problem with the Prisoner's Dilemma is that if it is a game played frequently in a society, it is a game that produces bad results for the players, with people going to jail and commons tragically being destroyed (if the players choose the optimal strategy, defect). So if one is disturbed by the Prisoner's Dilemma, it is best not to argue against it (as people frequently do,) but to try to avoid creating situations where it exists in favour situations that embody more "sociable" games.

* I won't claim that the code here is an example of good coding. But if you do report data that has been handled by an automatic process, you should be publishing the code. This is the only way that the reader can be sure that they are getting true results and the reader can help point out your errors, if any.

** I didn't bother writing a program that would run this one multiple times and put together results just because the results are so startlingly regular within a quite small margin of error, even to the "naked eye". If you need more precise results, than that is your exercise as an active reader.

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Sintra and Ericeira

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:52:17 -0700

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We went for a quick vacation in Ericeira and took a day trip to Sintra this weekend.

Some beach, some sun and some relaxation. Oh, and some photos too!

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Christmas is Coming!

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 09:02:21 -0700

In case you haven't noticed, we're getting closer to Christmas. I'll beat even the most enthusiastic retailers to the punch and get the ball rolling. Enjoy!:

David Fonseca is a Portuguese pop singer who sings mostly in English. Very good music; check him out on his YouTube channel

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Chomsky Talking about Wikileaks

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 06:35:19 -0700

Here's Noam Chomsky talking about Wikileaks and what he thinks is more significant news:

The issue of nuclear contamination of Iraq through vaporized depleted uranium is one that does need more exposure.

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Small Writing Tools that Make a Difference

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 04:17:00 -0700

There are all sorts of software out there now to allow you to analyze your writing for stylistic problems. You don't actually need to go and pay for this sort of thing, as there are plenty of free tools out there that you can use to take the rough edges off your writing. Here's an article about a small set of shell scripts that a professor of Computer Science wrote to "replace himself" when advising graduate students. The scripts look for things like "weasel words" and passive voice; the usual culprits of bad academic writing (or bad writing of any form).

Reading this article also brought up the memory of something that I posted on Facebook a long time ago, the GNU Style and Diction tools. These tools analyze a piece of writing for the difficulty of its writing using stylometry tools like the Flesch-Kincaid readability index, which measures how many syllables you are using per word, and many others.

Some quick research (the Flesch-Kincaid wikipedia page, if truth be told) shows that even those of you who don't use a *NIX operating system (Linux, OS X or a BSD) can access these free tools as services on the web:

1. http://writing.teiru.net/fog/
2. http://labs.translated.net/text-readability/
3. http://www.addedbytes.com/code/readability-score/

Maybe I should start using these tools in a systematic way! I'll try it for a while and we'll see what comes of it.

Here are the results using this post as the example:

GNU Diction (finds and brackets words and phrases that are frequently misused for further review):test.txt:1: [There are] all sorts of software out there now to allow you to analyze your writing for stylistic problems. test.txt:1: You don't actually need to go and pay for this [sort of] thing, as [there are] plenty of free tools out there that you [can] [use to] take the rough edges off your writing. test.txt:1: The scripts look for things [like] weasel words and passive voice; the usual culprits of bad academic writing (or bad writing of any form). test.txt:3: These tools analyze a piece of writing for the difficulty of [its] writing using stylometry tools [like] the Flesch-Kincaid readability index, [which] measures the how many syllables you are using per word, and many others. test.txt:5: Some quick research (the Flesch-Kincaid wikipedia page, if truth be told) shows that even those of you who don't use a *NIX operating [system] (Linux, OS X or a BSD) [can] access these free tools as services on the web: test.txt:11: I'll try it for a [while] and we'll see what comes of it. 12 phrases in 9 sentences found.

And here are the results from using Style on the same text:

readability grades: Kincaid: 10.4 ARI: 11.8 Coleman-Liau: 8.6 Flesch Index: 66.1/100 (plain English) Fog Index: 13.7 Lix: 45.1 = school year 8 SMOG-Grading: 11.2 sentence info: 999 characters 230 words, average length 4.34 characters = 1.36 syllables 9 sentences, average length 25.6 words 33% (3) short sentences (at most 21 words) 11% (1) long sentences (at least 36 words) 3 paragraphs, average length 3.0 sentences 0% (0) questions 44% (4) passive sentences longest sent 41 wds at sent 7; shortest sent 11 wds at sent 8 word usage: verb types: to be (4) auxiliary (4) types as % of total: conjunctions 5(11) pronouns 11(25) prepositions 11(26) nominalizations 1(2) sentence beginnings: pronoun (3) interrogative pronoun (0) article (2) subordinating conjunction (0) conjunction (0) preposition (0)

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Julian Assange Interviewed at/by TED

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:32:00 -0700

Here's Julian Assange, the public face of Wikileaks, being interviewed by Chris Anderson, the head of TED. It's a good interview, Anderson asks all the important questions that need to be asked of an organization that specializes in leaking secret documents. You've heard a lot about him and Wikileaks, listen to what he has to say about of himself:

It's amusing to hear him talk about the problems that they've had scaling their organization given their new-found popularity.

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An Accurate Portrayal of Steve Jobs' RDF

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:39:30 -0700

Enjoy, you won't need to understand Chinese to understand this:

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Bom Jesus --- Braga

Sat, 10 Jul 2010 09:35:00 -0700

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Went to Bom Jesus in Braga today. Had some great roast kid for lunch and visited the Sanctuary complex. What a beautiful place! It's quite calm despite all the visitors, and I can imagine it being a great place to go to reflect and meditate or even work if one brings a laptop along.

The staircase up to the Sanctuary is very interesting. At each landing, there is a fountain. Each of the fountains is dedicated to each of the senses and then to Acquinas' three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity. In short, the staircase is Aristotelian (through Acquinas) ascent to God. Each sense and virtue has three biblical quotations associated to it. In addition, the senses get two prophets associated to each of them and the biblical quotations are taken from the Old Testament. The Theological Virtues each were associated to quotes from Paul's Letters.

In a future visit, I'm going to have to record all the quotations and take pictures of the statuary so I can go home and do a full study of the story being told as one ascends the stairs.

We happened to witness a wedding mass inside the church and fêted newly-weds with a refreshing ice cream afterwards. All-in-all, it was a relaxing and recuperative visit.

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