Spaghetti Hierarchies

Some years ago i invented a new anti-pattern - the Spaghetti Hierarchy. This is where your inheritance path gets so horribly tied in knots that adding a simple new feature takes about hundred days. This is because that feature is implemented by cutting-and-pasting into all the children - which have multiplied exponentially - and of course randomly dropping important parts of the feature as you go.

So today was spent banging my head against this "al dente" mess of end-of-life code and trying to at least get the spaghetti to resemble fettucini, without wasting too much effort on it, and therefore make it a little easier to comb into neat strands. You may have noticed that almost anything in Computer Science can easily be defined and explained using pasta.

After removing the more stubborn strands of now semi-linguini from my forehead we made for the slopes. The snow in Fornet was excellent and, for once, it wasn't blizzard or whiteout conditions. Rather pleasant actually.

The sunset view from the Combe a Floret run was, well, you can just look at the photo.


And finally we headed for Champion where we bought no Italian foodstuffs whatsoever.


Ok, so it's a photo of the supermarket. i think it adds culture and depth to this online diary. The more we use this little (palm-sized) Ixus camera, the more impressed i am with it - it seems to get the exposure just right most of the time - i'd have to recommend it if you're looking for a cheap point-n-shoot. Just don't buy it in Geneva.

Tomorrow we're off to Chamonix - a one hour and twelve minute trip from Montriond. We're going to, after much research, ski the Brevant and Flegere ski domain. i've been warned that blues are reds in Chamonix and quite a lot of the ski runs i can see on the piste maps i've downloaded seem to be coloured in black - so either the printers ran out of the other colours or it's a bit steep.

We're going to take it easy and see what we can find. It's a very strange phenomenon that piste difficulties vary from region to region. In Les Gets, black runs are really red, but in Avoriaz, many blue runs are probably more red or at least purple and some of the red runs really could be black. It's not just steepness that seems to determine the colour, some are marked red because they're isolated, very long, or involve a difficult drag-lift, or have a short tricky section somewhere on them. It seems that some blue runs are only that colour, when they might otherwise be red, because that's the only way home!

In short, the colour of the runs seems a little arbitrary sometimes and very subjective, so we'll just have to make up our own minds about Chamonix.