Kingston, ON (Queen's University)

Kingston is actually a very beautiful town, perched on Lake Ontario. Around here are the Thousand Islands, an archipelago of islands that straddle the U.S.-Canada border in the Saint Lawrence River as it emerges from the northeast corner of Lake Ontario (I shamelessly got this from the Wikipedia entry). The left pic above is the view from my hotel room. Nice, eh? The pic at right is of Loughbrough lake, just a little ways out of town, close to my friend's house. I'm not sure why but I've always envisioned Kingston as some kind of suburb to some large, stinky industrial town. I told this to people I know here and they laugh, saying, no this isn't Hamilton.

My friend works at Queen's University, where I am currently visiting and attending the PhD defense of a former Clemson undergraduate (he just passed, btw, congratulations!). The pics above are of my friend's labs (not the new PhD, although he had worked there doing his Masters). I've known my friend for 10 years now, having met at CHI 99, when I was just starting out my academic career and when (and where) I conceived ETRA, partially inspired by his paper there (and by a workshop that I happened to have missed that year). He's turned some of that work into a spinoff eye tracking company, and moved on to other types of human computer interaction projects. He's a pretty innovative guy. It's funny—when I hear people proclaim they're going to reinvent the interaction paradigm (currently our familiar desktop metaphor, based on windows, menus, icons, and [mouse] pointer, or wimp), it's hard to believe them. This guy is likely to do so without even having to say so. He's just probably going to do it.