• Blog

    The Great Stone House

    December 4, 2018 - By 

    May you enjoy a short discussion, based on four chapters of Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens: No Man’s Land, The Rapid, Alone n the Wilderness, The Great Stone House. Joshua : Two boys. Jamie was from Toronto. Awasin lives in northern Canada. Tina : How did they become friends? Joshua : Jamie moved to northern Canada. The two became neighbours, then friends. As they played and worked together, Jamie learned a lot from Awasin. When they were on a hunt with a group, they were assigned to stay behind with two other men. Jamie and Awasin became impatient and left. First,…

  • Blog

    Leaving Toronto for northern Canada in the 1940s

    November 1, 2018 - By 

    I enjoyed my first book review here. Now, I am enjoying the book Lost In The Barrens by Farley Mowat, published by McClelland & Stewart. Jamie was a young person who left Toronto “to take up a new life in the subarctic forests of northern Canada.” He met his uncle, Angus, who was confident that Jamie would love his new rugged life, and he was proved correct, as Jamie became fascinated by the country from the very first few weeks of travelling in it. I like how their meeting is described, especially what Aungus said to the young man: “I’m thinking you’ll…

  • Blog

    Date Format

    October 31, 2018 - By 

      The following tables are for a developer’s reference, to show the Date Format in Swift 4.   Using dateStyle and timeStyle properties let formatter = DateFormatter() formatter.dateStyle = .full formatter.timeStyle = .full let dateString = formatter.string(from: Date()) Tuesday, October 30, 2018 at 9:48:38 PM Pacific Daylight Time     Using format strings let formatter = DateFormatter() formatter.dateFormat = "y, M, d, E, h:m:s, a" let dateString = formatter.string(from: Date()) 2018, 10, 30, Tue, 9:54:37, PM  

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    The island of Quadra and Vancouver

    September 4, 2018 - By 

    A book review I have been reading a fascinating book about European navigators who charted many continents and oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific. The name of the book is Sextant, by David Barrie, published by HarperCollins. One such interesting explorer was the English man named George Vancouver. One of his goals was to map large sections of the western North American continent. He sailed in the years 1791 – 1795, spending his summers in Hawaii. Sounds like a nice assignment. One episode in his journey of tedious map-work stands out, when the captain visited a Spanish settlement in Nootka…

  • Blog

    Remainder Operator

    August 1, 2018 - By 

    Basic Operators in Swift Addition (+) Subtraction (-) Multiplication (*) Division (/)  Remainder Operator (%)     (similar to the Mod or Modulo operator in some other languages) The Remainder Operator Here is a brief explanation of the remainder operator (%) as it works in the Swift language, quoted from Swift’s website: The remainder operator (a % b) works out how many multiples of b will fit inside a and returns the value that is left over (known as the remainder). Note: The remainder operator (%) is also known as a modulo operator in other languages. However, its behavior in Swift for…