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Welcome at Germany
(29 Jan 2007 at 11:49) |
Hello everyone! I am in Germany. A common funny idiom here is to say "welcome at _____" (also "welcome in _____" or "welcome on _____") instead of "welcome to _____". That cracks me up every time. Did you ever consider underlining the underscore? It looks like this: ____. Actually it turns out that a lot of people prefer to speak their native language instead of having people like me chuckle at their speakos but I will still laugh anyway since I can't understand what they're saying so what else am I going to do? Getting to Germany like all international travel was a bit painful. I rebroke my glasses on the plane and since superglue is not a TSA sanctioned gel or liquid I had to put them back together using tape from the post office at the airport. Sometimes they fall apart when I'm just sitting there, like they slowly peel off my face like I'd imagine glasses would do if the frames were made of ice and I had a very hot bridge of my nose. That's okay, post office tape means my vision is First Class durch Flugzeug nerdstyle. Yesterday I was so jetlagged or food poisoned that I was up almost the whole night vomiting. I call such traveling sickness/food poisoning La Giardia, ha ha. Now that I am more synchronized with the rising and setting of the sun I think I'm doing okay.
The reason I came to Germany is for this conference on Web Programming, since my thesis project is sort of about web programming now. People here are very concerned with some words that I don't know what they mean, like "ontologies". I guess it is pretty ironic to not know what "ontology" and "semantics" mean. The conference is in a German computer science castle called Schloß Dagstuhl. This castle is way out in basically Nowhere, Saarland. (One of the locals asked us Americans, "What are you doing out in such a village?") I'm not sure I really understand what we're supposed to be doing here, but I think tomorrow when we break out into smaller groups I'll get it better. I prepared a ~30 minute talk about my work but when I got here someone forwarded me an e-mail that I didn't get that said our presentations should be 3 minutes, so I made one of those early this morning and then they changed their minds and said 2 minutes. Here is my 2 minute talk of a 'burning question'. If you don't have Flash 9 then you will probably only see pictures of fire and Skeletor. | |
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ICFP trip, contest report, race, etc.
(23 Sep 2006 at 16:22) |
The thing that chewed up all my time was my trip to ICFP 2006. For it I prepared and delivered three talks. The first two were in ML Workshop and they were called ML Grid Programming with ConCert [paper] and A Separate Compilation Extension to Standard ML [paper]. You need the Flash 8 player or later to view these, so you might need to upgrade. These are kinda straight-up research stuff, and also perhaps less exciting than usual because I was saving all my vim for my third talk. These talks went well but nothing particularly special.
All through the conference I had the odd but cool experience of being recognized by people who know my name from research or fonts or music or games or whatever. I guess these people probably see my blog so thanks! I'm sorry for not having much time to hang out more...
The third talk was the ICFP Programming Contest, which I spent weeks preparing for. The ICFP Programming Contest is a yearly open programming contest that the academic conference organizes; we organized this 9th incarnation. The contest itself, which ran July 21–24, was a huge success and the most ambitious ever in terms of its organization. You can check out the slides from the talk (again, with Flash 8 or later) but much better would be to watch the presentation video (130Mb Quicktime) that Malcolm Wallace shot. If you don't want to download 130Mb (for some reason it refuses to stream) you can check out the almost unwatchably low quality google video version. But really, go with the Quicktime. Also it's like an hour long so if you wanna fast forward to the end, my feelings won't be hurt. Isn't it a little eerie how, if you are wearing matching "Cult of the Bound Variable" logo polo shirts and conference badge and the same glasses and haircut, one can look so similar to his advisor?
 That's why I usually prefer to wear brighter orange shirts in group photos because like nobody has one of those.
The conference itself was really fun. I had a good time at the talks that I was able to make it to, and a much better time talking with all the smart people—some old friends—that attended over beers and hippie west coast food. There are a lot of great breweries in Portland, my favorite of which was probably Bridgeport. I can't believe that I somehow forgot that one of my favorite American breweries, Rogue, is in Portland. I also missed out on Powell's outrageously enormous book store, so I will have to go back some day with more free time.
I did get a chance to wake up bright and early and run in the Portland Race for the Cure, which they claim to be the largest West Coast race "event" (that means that when they say 46,000 participants they are talking about the Run and Walk for the Cure and Row for the Cure and Sleep In for the Cure), but it was quite fun and a nice way to see a new city. Also, as respects my last post, I felt a little bit good about the fact that I witnessed the very front of the pack (5–10 guys) go the wrong way and have to be turned around. Hah! Those were like, pros. The only other thing to say about the race is that I think my Pittsburgh training has been helping on hills, because when we came to the one like 3.5% grade hill in the whole race I started to be a lot faster than the local like permanent press runners and that was a pretty nice feeling. There were no chip timers and I have no idea how I did really except for my own inaccurate stopwatching, so I guess I have to wait patiently for the hand-tabulated chads like in the old days.
What else? On the flight home I saw a major lightning storm from above, which was perhaps the coolest thing I've ever seen while flying. The whole sky was lighting up all over, and every once in a while a huge bolt would shoot down to the planet or occasionally upward. Highly recommended.
So now I am back in town and ready to spend some time on projects and relaxing and friends. My birthday is in four days, in fact, when I turn 27. I'm going to try to finish my entry to the KVR VST Plugin contest (prodding will help, Destroy FX fans), catch up on some reading and video games and sleep, and then ease into my thesis. Talk to you again soon! | |
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OMG go steelers, pt. 2
(05 Feb 2006 at 16:01) |
XL It's an extra-large Superbowl! I don't normally get excited about sports, nor do many of the people I know, but cripes, when all of the people around you are united by this charming town pride, it is impossible to resist.
Some of my friends live out of the country and might not really understand what I'm talking about. The short story: The Superbowl is the largest sporting event in the US. Bigger than Olympic figure skating. People scream and beat each other up over it like the World Cup. Of course, it is ultimately pointless—nothing happens if your city wins, other than everybody goes rioting in the South Side or equivalent (which happens if you lose too, it's just like a happy riot instead of an angry riot). Here's the deal particularly this year: the Pittsburgh Steelers used to be a dominant team in the 1970s, winning four superbowls in that era. We haven't won since then. This year we won a series of upset games to win the league championships from last place, the first time this has ever happened (?). Pittsburgh, which is still sort of searching for its new identity after having grown out of the Iron smelting era, suddenly has something to be excited about again: Superbowl victory!! Moderately inappropriate or surprising Steelers/Pittsburgh pride sightings:- The city buses flash like61C Downtown via Oakland
Go steelers! - I saw on the news a sign in front of a church that said:THINGS TO DO:
1. GO TO CHURCH
2. PRAY FOR STEELERS - The car horn, which I have always maintained should be replaced with two sound effects: one that shouts "Emergency! Emergency!" and the other that shouts "I'm an asshole!" now has a new meaning: "OMG go steelers!!" Honking can be heard at any time in any part of the city.
- Everybody has these Steelers flags attached to their cars, so that the entire town is like a weird funeral procession that's not going anywhere in particular, but it is a bit like the traffic signals have correspondingly evaporated, and they do have police stationed around to cordon off particularly riotous areas of town
- Like speaking of which, we went down to the Strip District yesterday, which is Steelers merchandise city, and there are kids everywhere with football heads and an old man who could probably barely walk under the burden of all his buttons and jerseys, and a man playing the "Here we Go" song on his flute—flute!—and everyone is just walking in the streets or dancing in the rain like a national holiday
- Did I mention that the Superbowl itself is in Detroit, not even in Pittsburgh?
- Our zoo's baby elephant loves the Steelers (icon hint: the "terrible towel" is a piece of merchandise invented by Myron Cope, famousest radio announcer for the Steelers, which fans wave at games or like, out the windows of cars just in case you forgot that we're going to the superbowl, or is placed in the windows of jewelry stores and coffee shops and boutiques in Shadyside as a sort of insurance against the Steelers rioting mafia, who maybe will like smash your window or boycott your establishment if you do not openly declare your sports team alignment)
- If you throw a rock at a tank in Iraq your rock might be deflected by this terrible towel
- Tom posted about his blog on it! wtf?
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OMG go steelers!!
(21 Jan 2006 at 17:41) |
 OMG go Steelers! I can't help but get into football when all of Pittsburgh is so excited. I even made two cover versions of the ubiquitous "Here We Go" Steelers themesong. They are: "folk" version and "techno" version. Cortney helped record the latter!
Speaking of blogs and Steelers, I can't help but pass along "Ben Roethlisblogger." Now when someone is like, NFL quarterbacks do not talk like teenage girls on their blogs, you have positive evidence to the contrary. | |
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Today's Radar Game
(09 Dec 2005 at 12:25) |
Today's radar game is one that exercises your powers of description. Sick of mere adjectives to describe the weather ("It is cold today"), hack weathermen and -women in 1992 turned to the use of flowery adverbs. How is the weather? It's bone-chillingly cold.
When I'm walking outside and it is at the extremes of hot or cold, the appropriate adverb "bone-chillingly" (for cold) or "oppressively" (for hot) always sets firmly in my brainpan, sort of like how some obsessive-compulsive persons count each step as they walk. But what if, some day, I'm thinking, Boy, today is bone-chillingly cold and then the next day it's twenty degrees colder? I don't even know any adverbs that imply more freezons per unit volume.
So here I solicit the help of my fine radar-readers, a fun game: Please respond with your most extreme adverbs for describing both hot and cold weather.
Your answer must be in the form of an adverb. Adjectives are too weak.
To get the snowball rolling, I will start with one: paint-strippingly cold.
The winner of the contest wins one life-time supply of entropy. Contest end date: End of universe. No purchase necessary or possible. Chance of winning: 0/∞ | |
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Artbus: Solidarity?
(01 Dec 2005 at 12:40) |
1200×448 version Phew! Well, that took a long time, but here is my submission for the Pittsburgh "Art in Transit" project. Pittsburgh artists are having their work displayed in place of advertisements in buses around town. I'm not sure when they'll be displayed, but since I passed a qualifying round earlier, I understand that this is pretty much guaranteed to show up in buses around pittsburgh. Please let me know if you see it!
Click on the image for a bigger (but still not very big) version. If you want to zoom way in, you can also try this 7.7 mb TIFF (16,800 x 6,600), which will probably crash your computer or this 53kb flash file which looks better anyway.
(PS. Hint I'd like to send back to myself at 2:00am last night: Photoshop has dithering enabled by default when converting between color spaces. Dithered files are huge, and take a lot of memory! Turn it off under the advanced color management settings. Wow, look how you don't run out of memory and hard drive space any more, keeping you up all night!) | |
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I Got the Cup!!!
(20 Nov 2005 at 17:40) |
800×533 version Here are some pictures, both from my new flash experiments and from the punch and pie party.
For reasons unknown, much of this party revolved around a game where you stand on one leg and try to pick up a bag with your mouth. Because I start closer to the ground and am pretty flexible, this was totally easy for me, so I upgraded to the cup game, where I do the same thing with a Dixie cup. This was just barely out of my reach for several tries throughout the evening, but I eventually got it!! See above. I think this picture is so hilarious (particularly the genuine excitement of the guy in red); big ups to Marcus for capturing it. Sorry it didn't make the Post-Gazette.
Tomorrow afternoon Mike and I head back to CT to visit the dad and the rest of the family and to eat the thanksgiving. | |
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Brian and Sarah got married!
(23 Oct 2005 at 00:02) |
 Phew! Sarah and Brian got married. I have to say, some people have a lot of stamina, and those people are not me. I am rather exhausted after helping out with this wedding, and there are lots of people who did at least ten times as much work. Anyway, it was totally worth it. Sarah and Brian are two of my favorite friends, and the wedding was unanimously declared to be wonderful.
Aside from offering my minivan for mum and chuppa hauling, and being a groomsman (and all that entails..) my duties were twofold. First, prepare a bachelor's party. For this, the usual beer and scotch and Halo sufficed, plus an added twist: in order to preserve and fortify Brian's manliness (which superstition dicates is stripped of him upon getting married, being the reason for a boys-only evening), I bought a bunch of "man" costumes like beards and nunchucks and fake cigars and elvis sunglasses, then we posed him a variety of humiliating postures, and photographed him. The best of these photographs were shown at the wedding reception thanks to a bit of cooperation from the bride. (And I will post them soon..)
The second duty was the "first toast," which I was deeply honored to give. [For you wedding neophytes, as I was only yesterday, this is the toast that accompanies the grand entrance of the bride and groom into the reception after the ceremony.] I don't deny shedding a (happy) tear or two when preparing it (uh, in the car right before the wedding) and during the delivery! Although I was really nervous in preparation, I got a lot of people complimenting me on it afterwards (and I made Sarah cry, but that is easy) so I think it went well. I figure I should post it, since I went to the trouble of typing it up (though I ad-libbed the actual one, for max flow): Hello everyone. My name is Tom 7 and I've been honored with the duty of giving the "first toast." I don't know what that means, but I know that at the end I just need to say, "to Brian and Sarah," and then you guys clink your glasses and they kiss and you drink or clap and I raise my hands like this or whatever. But--wait--not yet. First, I want to tell you a Brian and Sarah story, and it's the story of how they started dating.
The story starts one summer a few years ago when Brian and Sarah and I and several other people who are here tonight were at a party, playing a game sort of like "truth or dare"--Sarah's invention, actually, where the truths or dares were written on little community chest cards like this (card). It came Sarah's turn and she was forced by the truth card to admit a crush on "someone in this room," and that turned out to be, of course, Brian. I'm really glad that this card came up, because compared to some of the dares in there, this was pretty much the best luck Brian and Sarah could have had.
Well, look, I'm just trying to book-end this story, so I don't want to go on about that party, but it's important to mention that at this point we came up with the idea of going on a road trip. The idea we invented was the "random road trip," where we would just hop in the car and drive with no particular destination in mind, with no potential for "are we there yet?" At the time I guess I supposed this was just one of those crazy party promises that would be forgotten by the next morning.
But in fact, after a long long night and a memorable walk--or--roll home, and then just a few hours of sleep, I got a call from Brian the next morning, proposing just such a random road trip. And despite how little sleep we all had, there was a certain vigorous excitement to his voice, and my friends know that I can never resist Brian's plans, and so we went: Brian and Sarah and Tom on a random road trip, which ultimately took us to Columbus Ohio.
Now what I didn't know at the time, and what is the reason that I am even telling this story at their wedding, is that in those few hours, I'm talkin' maybe five hours, between rolling home and leaving on the road trip, Brian and Sarah had decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend.
This random road trip that we went on was easily one of the most fun and most memorable weekends of my life. We played with glow-sticks, ate grits at a waffle house in the middle of the night, got kicked out of a Budweiser factory where we had discovered the most amazing device, which was a beer spigot in the sky like six feet in diameter, climbed on broken machinery at the fairgrounds, and a hundred other tiny things we'll never forget.
This whole random road trip they never let on that they were a new couple! Even when we stayed in this absolute horror show of a hotel room (according to one patron, "this place can get kinda 'off the hook' at night"), a double room, Brian was gentleman enough that he and I shared one bed, and Sarah the other!
In retrospect, it is obvious why this trip was so fun: I was witnessing a new couple's first day together, and that sense of excited wonderment, where everything, even Columbus Ohio, is interesting and beautiful. They've got a name for this: love! And I'm happy to say that it lasted, and that there's still a palpable sense of this joy whenever I spend time with them. Guys, this one was meant to be.
So, thank you for sharing the random road trip, and your first day, with me. (Don't worry, I won't ask to come on your honeymoon, too.)
So now that I've gotten choked up a bit, just enough to betray my manhood but not enough to, you know, get anything wet, I can say the stuff we talked about before that makes this a toast, and you know what to do:
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. and Mrs. Brian and Sarah. To love! | |
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next map is de_awptopia
(05 Oct 2005 at 00:21) |
 I have been playing a lot of Counter-Strike recently, I guess just because it's one of the few multiplayer FPS games that it's easy to find opponents in. Someone has made a "deathmatch" mod for it where instead of all that boring waiting and paying for weapons and planting bombs and stuff, you just spawn instantly with infinite money every time you die. This is hilariously great. It has helped me finally appreciate why people love the AWP so much, but at the same time, I think it has basically burned me out on the game. I mean, how many terrorists or counter-terrorists can you kill before concluding—like the great self-aware WOPR computer in the prescient Matthew Broderick film "WarGames" did—"A strange game. The only winning move is not to play?"
After getting bored tonight I tried to play a pacifist version of counter-strike deathmatch. Instead of shooting those terrorists, I tried to convince all players that we had had enough fighting, and to get them to cooperate towards a common goal. I figured, perhaps it is not "terrorist" versus "counter-terrorist" but "freedom fighter wearing desert fatigues" versus "freedom fighter wearing SWAT body armor," in which case, isn't what we really want in the end just freedom? And since we are trapped forever within the strangely cyclic streets of de_dust2, perhaps an acceptable substitute for true freedom would be to demonstrate mastery of our environment, even if through the cruelly destructive Edward-Scissorhands appendages of our AK-47s and deagles? Perhaps by, you know, painstakingly shooting every barrel in the entire level until it winds up at the Counter-terrorist—ahem—"freedom fighter" spawn point?
The picture above shows my small success: I was able to free every barrel in the level (except for one which was thoroughly stuck inside a car) and get them all to the center by shooting and shooting them. Those other freedom fighters, perhaps misunderstanding my intentions, did kill me hundreds upon hundreds of times in the process. Some joined in—that is, I definitely saw some guys shooting at barrels and tires, but they might just have been trying to shoot me and missing. No matter. de_barrelworld: pwned! Why didn't the department of homeland security think of that? | |
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You're at the CONCERT? Do they have a SMOKE MACHINE?
(10 Jun 2005 at 17:35) |
Last night I went with Heather and Stephen and Rachele to see the Pixies on their Reunion/Sellout tour at the "Chevrolet Ampitheatre" in Station Square. Since this is called the Chevrolet Ampitheatre and is in Station Square and sells corn dogs and $7 plastic cups of pee-pee beer and was part of the "Miller Light Concert Series," I was deliberately de-psyching myself for this concert so that I wouldn't be disappointed. This appeared to have worked!
I found it remarkable that for a band of this importance, we were able to get up almost right in front of the stage (by the end of the concert, there was just one row of people ahead of me), even though we arrived only about 15 minutes before the concert was scheduled to start. I guess that a lot of people go to concerts for different reasons than me (e.g., pee-pee beer, bumping elbows in a huge sweaty crowd far back from the stage, etc.) after all. I was also surprised at how well-behaved the crowd was, for the most part. There was more drunken moshing and crowd-surfing at The Shins (memorably, during the extremely sedate New Slang?!?!) at CMU!
The opening act, a "rock and soul" outfit called "The BellRays" were exactly appropriate. I mean this in an unflattering way: with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, they provided an experience that is critical to a great concert, i.e., some element of suffering in order to reach the rock climax. (For comparison, think of Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer," which is in no small way strengthened by the fact that the verse part sucks so badly in contrast to the chorus. Or, imagine walking two miles to see Fugazi play a concert. Now imagine walking two miles in the sewer to see them—which is better?) They did not play for any longer than was necessary to achieve this purpose. But let me go on nonetheless, for it is oh so more indie rock to complain about bad music than to gush about good. As you can guess from their tagline, the band is composed of "rock", i.e. two guitarists who looked comically like Wayne and Garth (Garth would extend his finger into the air to apparently indicate "number one" at the end of every song) and a drummer with ridiculously overwraught facial expressions; and "soul", i.e. a bizarrely hypersexualized diva, who at one point informed us of the conspiracy: "They go on telling you that everything should feel good. That's what they want you to believe." Whaaa? Did she miss the Just Say No campaign or what?
It was one step up from a bunch of guys paid to cover Hotel California in a bar, in that they were clearly putting a lot of energy into it, jumping up and down and sweating all over their guitars and high heels, but being impressed with that would be rather like being impressed by someone who plays tic-tac-toe really really hard.
The Pixies were great. I'm sure this has to do mostly with growing up owning relatively few albums, a small set that included every Pixies album, but I realized during the show that I basically like every Pixies song. This is something I can't say for many bands, even for bands I like better than the Pixies in general. (I will admit to getting a bit annoyed by "Nimrod's Son" by the second verse, but I think that was more because I was thinking, "Why are they playing this instead of Alec Eiffel?") Joey's guitar playing was tight as hell, and I was really happy that all the little things I remember from the recordings were replicated on stage; when Frank encouraged "Rock me, Joe..." in Monkey Gone to Heaven I almost shed a tear (though it may have been sweat). Aside from a few surprising omissions from Tromp le Monde, they played everything I had hoped for, including "The Holiday Song" from the Come on Pilgrim EP (!).
In conclusion, although it is quite possible that this reunion is a sham that may implode at any moment, if you are or were a Pixies fan then I highly recommend seeing them on this tour before that happens.
Now, I just need Polvo and The Beatles to reunite, and... | |
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