We all know the Grand Canyon as one of the seven natural wonders of the world, today I learned why. As one of the locals described: ‘Pretty amazing for a big hole in the ground’. Being the closest to the south entrance, we visited the South Rim of the canyon. A trip to the visitor center taught us there were no easy hikes (except for the going down part), so we didn’t attempt at one. A hike down the canyon and back up is a two day endeavor. A shuttle bus took us along the scenic route, dropping us off at three viewpoints. Standing on the edge, stunned by the view, we were accompanied by some California Condors circling above us. However, their view must have been more impressive, being able to stare down right into the 4000 feet (1200m) deep canyon. ...

Yesterday, we drove from Saint-George to Page, Arizona. The Pipe Springs National Monument happened to be on our way, so we made a stop. Turned out there wasn’t much to see. A 30-minute ranger-led tour made it worthwhile though. During the tour through the Winsor Castle, she told us about the Mormons who used to live there. The Fort manager, also head of their Mormon church, married 58 women, resulting in plenty of children to work the Fort. ...

We started the day with a short drive to Zion National Park. On our way we came across some colossal rock formations, layered with different shades of red. Since the park is almost entirely car free, we took the shuttle bus along the scenic route. We got off at different stops, to take short hikes to the park’s natural treasures. The Emerald Pools were first up, followed by the Weeping Rock and a riverside walk to the Narrows, which are architected by the Virgin river. Wading in the river gave us some much needed refreshment after a long day of hiking. ...

Yesterday evening we spent the night in a town called Tonopah, which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Today we continued our trip to Zion (Utah), driving hundreds of miles through the Nevada desert, getting sunburned on the way. There was not a soul in sight, except for cattle crossing the road, who seemed to be waiting for us to pass to say hello. We just arrived at St. George, which is a launching point to Zion National Park. ...

These skyscrapers are, other than the enormous mountains, the redwood sequoia on top of them. Some of these trees are the same height as a thirty story building, which is higher than the Statue Of Liberty. It’s almost impossible to capture these giants on camera. After a short hike between the sequoia, we drove off to Yosemite Valley to discover the Yosemity Falls. Although the falls must be more impressive in Winter, they were still worth visiting. ...

While I’m writing this, the girlfriend and I are on our way from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park. We have spent two full days visiting ‘Fog City’. During these two intensive days we were able to see everything we aimed for, maybe more. Financial District This part of town is definitely worth a visit. The multiplicity of skyscrapers merging into the San Francisco fog, is an impressive view. When the fog has gone, the shadows the buildings cast on each other are just as amazing. ...

Last week, I resigned from my job at Ferranti Computer Systems. Three years ago, days after receiving my Graduate Diploma in Applied Computer Science, I had my first real-world working experience at Ferranti Computer Systems. The first project I was assigned to, was a project for the Antwerp fire department. Along with two other graduates and four seniors, I was thrown in at the deep end. I always had solid grades in school, and was fairly confident that I grasped the material I was taught. Was I misguided (!): it only took me a few days to realize that I knew nothing about building software. It immediately became clear that I had to start learning and probably would need to keep at it forever, if I ever wanted to get remotely good at this. ...

The latest addition to my [data structures and algorithms in JavaScript](https://github.com/JefClaes Data-structures-and-algorithms-in-JavaScript) is the merge sort algorithm. There are four main steps in the merge sort algorithm (from Wikipedia): If the list is of length 0 or 1, then it is already sorted. Otherwise: Divide the unsorted list into two sublists of about half the size. Sort each sublist recursively by re-applying the merge sort. Merge the two sublists back into one sorted list. I found it a lot easier to understand the algorithm by just looking at this diagram (also from Wikipedia). ...

If you have been reading my blog lately, you know that I’m implementing some data structures and algorithms in JavaScript. So far, I have blogged about simple sorting algorithms, the stack data structure and the queue data structure. This week I have also implemented a doubly linked list. I started writing a post about that last implementation, but I didn’t like where it was going, so instead of writing about it, I have pushed everything to a public Git repository. ...

Davy Brion made a comment on my JavaScript stack/queue implementation on Twitter last night: Any reason why you don’t immediately set elements to [] at declaration in your stack/queue example? var elements; this.push = function(element) { if (typeof(elements) === 'undefined') { elements = []; } elements.push(element); } Yes, I made an overoptimization, and a bad one. In this implementation, you save a few bytes in memory if you initialize the stack, but don’t push elements. This might have made some sense 15 years ago, but today a few bytes are very negligible compared to the cost of evaluating the elements reference on every push call. ...