Monday 21 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

And so, to the highlight of the entire year’s dance calendar: The Christmas Dance.

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Wednesday 16 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, last night was my last Rock & Roll lesson of 2009. It was pretty damned cold outside (−1°C). There was only 7 of us. That maybe sounds like a lot, but it means there’s, like, 3 couples plus me. In the entire dance hall. Which was also slightly chilly.

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Monday 14 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Not a huge number of us tonight.

Much to my surprise, Steve actually remembered that he had promised to start teaching us the Jive. As you might imagine, this is quite an energetic dance, so he decided we needed to “warm up for it”. And we did that by doing lots of fast dances. By the time we got to the Salsa, I was really too tired to dance properly. By the time we started the Jive, I was basically out of it.

I can see why Linda says she “doesn’t get” the Jive. I don’t get it either. Much like the Quickstep, it seems like far too awkward and ineligant to be considered any kind of dance. Similar to Rock & Roll, it features a backstep. Unlike the R&R, the backstep is the slowest step, not the fastest. And that’s about all the resemblance. The other steps are to the side, on tip-toes. This does evil things to your calf muscles, but more to the point it made the souls of my flat feet hurt.

Still, only 5 days until the Christmas Dance now…

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Wednesday 09 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, here we are again!

As expected, no Linda last night, just Laura. Given that she’s Debbie’s daughter, I was a little worried that she might be quite strict, like Debbie is. But actually she seems fairly friendly. We didn’t really learn anything new, just going over what we’ve already learned. (She probably doesn’t have a very precise idea of what we do and don’t know.) I was initially quite worried that there were only very few of us, but more turned up in the end. (Including that little old lady who can’t actually dance. *sigh*)

Apparently next week is the final week. Then it’s just the Christmas Dance and the New Year’s Even dance to look forward to — yay!

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Friday 04 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

It can be really frustrating trying to depend on things which are the product of somebody’s hobby.

If you’ve ever done it, you will recognise the truth of this statement. For example, I just tried to install Gtk2hs. Now therein lies a story…

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Thursday 03 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

Disclaimer: I am a Haskell addict. My opinion is meaningless.

Haskell is a purely-functional language. It has non-strict evaluation semantics, an extended Milner-Hindley type system with automatic type inference, and monadic containment of side-effects.

One of the standard newbie questions is “what the heck is a monad?”, to which the standard answer is “a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem?”

Obviously, if you happen to be a professor of mathematics, this answer is entirely satisfactory. If, however, you’re just Java Programmer Dude, this probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. Now, I could sit here and explain what all these terms mean (they’re not nearly as complicated as they sound), but that’s not the point. The point is, Haskell is a language designed by mathematicians. You’re going to meet a lot of exotic technical terms while working with it. Don’t let that put you off.

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Thursday 03 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

For some reason, Linda didn’t have her CD collection with her on Tuesday, so we had limited music available to dance to. We’re still working on the Shoulder Spin and the Catapult; I now have some idea how the latter is supposed to go, but I’m useless with it.

We’ve long known that there are several variations on the basic Rock & Roll steps — extra mini steps involving heels, toes, flicks, hops and so forth can be added in there. But on Tuesday, Linda decided to make us dance the whole dance while doing flick steps. The result was… shambolic at best. But that’s the nice thing about Linda’s classes; it’s a complete mess, but everybody has a laugh anyway.

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Thursday 03 Dec 2009 by Orphi the AweKid.

It’s just like make-believe.
Each night it’s New Year’s Eve.
Each day it’s Christmas Day.
You make me feel this way.
It’s gonna snow outside,
The weather will be cold.
But I’ll be wa^aa_arm this winter!

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