On Tuesday we listened to Michael Dell deliver the SC'08 keynote. The first part was interesting when he covered a bit of historical ground of high performance computing. The second half degenerated a bit towards a Dell marketing talk with slick slides of Dell servers, laptops, etc. Not as informative as it could have been. Meanwhile, David Patterson's keynote the following day was much better: computer CPUs are going parallel, and that's that, so we better start learning to program concurrently and come up with new and interesting apps to make use of parallel cycles. I guess this has been brewing for some time, but it looks like chip manufacturers have no other choice, so computing's next evolution starts now. I suppose we really should start teaching concurrent programming in freshman courses.
Later that afternoon we took a cab ride to Strait Music. I was looking for a nice-sounding china cymbal, and the only real way of choosing cymbals is to hit them. Most stores (the good ones anyway) will let you do this, at the risk of annoying all other store patrons. Here, they had a kind of closed-in patio room where they slid shut glass doors so you were in this kind of glass cymbal booth where I could hit all the cymbals there with abandon. And I found one, too. A nice 18" Meinl china cymbal that I plan on using on tunes like John Lee Hooker's This is Hip if and when the Hoodoo Hounds pick that song up again.
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