I, Trekker

Windows in a Box

2011-05-14T15:07:00.001-04:00

I'm giving virtual machines another go...last time I tried VMware, I thought it sucked. It wasn't free, and what it did not support firewire or accelerated graphics. I don't know (yet) whether this is any better, but I'm giving VirtualBox a try. The idea is to run an eye tracking server in the virtual machine so that I run my OS X client at the same time and thus have both server/client running on one machine. This way when I travel (if I travel with this particular eye tracker), I won't have to lug two laptops around, just my Mac. We'll see how it goes. Right now I have Windows 7 installed, or rather, confined to its virtual box and the eye tracking software is running; I just need to hook it up to the eye tracker itself via USB and see if that works. I was told it would work with Parallels, but I'm going the el-cheapo route first. So far so good...if it works as I hope, then I'll post more on which eye tracker it is and how I find software development for it. Everything should work in Qt, my platform of choice. Oh...the funny thing about Windows is that of course the major part of the installation was Windows Update, what else?! You can see that yet another update was successful :P

Eye tracking station upgrades

2011-05-10T16:07:00.000-04:00

I haven't updated the blog in a while, it's been a busy semester. However, it's ending with a lab upgrade that I've been working towards for about a year now. Ever since one of the Windows machines driving one of the eye trackers gave up the ghost and died. It was an old Sun w2100z machine probably past its life expectancy. A replacement was found, but I think they nearly had to pull it out of surplus for me. So this time around instead of mucking about with very large workstations, I decided to replace both server/client at each eye tracker with a Mac Mini. You can see the two little silver boxes in the pic. Each Mac Mini has 8 G of RAM, an Intel Core Duo chip and an Nvidia GeForce 320M chip with 72 GPU cores. Not bad for such a little box! One Mac Mini will be used to run Windows to power the Tobii eye tracker, the other will be used as the client workstation. Since most of my programs work under OS X, I'm hoping that I can develop some cool eye tracking demos on them. Including real-time heatmap rendering and GPU-based scanpath comparison. I'm now just waiting for software installs on them, and testing whether the 400-800 firewire cable will work between the server and the Tobii (it should).

Let there be light!

2011-02-21T15:21:00.011-05:00

I had a couple of blog posts in my head that I wanted to put up here, one just from just a couple of days ago, but I don't have the pics handy...instead I'm sitting here waiting for my photon mapper to finish, so I thought I'd write a bit about that...kind of a technical post. I'll try to add a brief pictorial progression so you can see what I'm talking about. At left is a basic ray-traced image that we started with this semester (in a class I'm teaching). It's fairly simple in that we have two spheres, one (the blue one, well it's sort of blue, maybe more like chrome) more reflective than the other, which is more diffuse. There are three lights in the scene but they only show up when reflected (point light sources). The ray tracer demonstrates several concepts: object-oriented hierarchy (spheres and planes are objects), recursion (the rays shot into the scene are reflected recursively), list processing (all objects are on a list), and basic file input/output. Fairly simple, an image like that takes about 3 seconds to render.

The next image in the progression would have been the same as the first, as we explored parallelism. With chip makers now producing multi-core chipsets, one may wonder how to take advantage of the multiple cores or CPUs on the chip? The ray tracer is very well suited to this because each pixel is processed the same way. If we had as many CPU cores as pixels, we could assign each on a one-to-one mapping. My desktop machine in my office has 8 cores, so a simple speedup is to let each of the 8 cores process each of the h/8 rows of pixels. The trick here is to make sure to avoid race conditions, that is, don't let any more than one core write to a piece of shared memory. The ray tracer, in its original conception, had this problem, so this turned out to be a nice exercise, complete with garbage images if done incorrectly. The solution called for each ray to maintain its own state info, which makes perfect sense thinking in parallel. Once that's done, multi-core parallelism is pretty easy, requiring basically one line of #pragma compiler directive to use OpenMP and voila! An almost k-factor speedup for k cores available. Coincidentally, the solution also leads in to the next step of the ray tracer evolution, and that is getting transmission to work right, like you see at right: we not only have reflective objects but transmissive (transparent) ones now.

Once we have the notion of independent rays (in terms of memory access anyway), then it's not a huge conceptual leap to think of photons instead of rays. These are shot from the light sources within the scene in a stochastic (random) sort of way. They reflect or transmit from/through objects just like rays, except that there's a finite number of photons—each makes its way through the scene unlike rays which recursively spawn new rays at each intersection point. Based on random conditions, photons eventually stick to surfaces, like shown at left. One of the goals of this type of photon mapping is to be able to render caustics, or focused concentration of photons, more or less. When rendering, what's important is the number of photons per unit area (why not volume?), that is, their density is what we're after. (Note: for those of you observant enough, you'll see that the photon map I have here doesn't match the other images—you're correct; this photon map, with only one light source, is what I used for debugging. It was clearer using one light that the caustic was not showing up opposite to where the light source was—turns out I was calculating distance incorrectly, d'oh!)

Sum up the photons' "flux" per ray intersection point, divide by their squared radius, and presto! We have caustics. Photon mapping also demonstrates a key aspect of careful program design: at each intersection point one has to find a number of the closest photons. The image at right shows 20 photons sampled at each intersection point from 2,000 initially shot out (fairly small numbers all told). With these numbers the image is rendered in about a minute. Increasing those numbers by an order of magnitude to 100 samples from 10,000 photons initially shot yields about a 9-minute render time. Meanwhile, increasing yet again to 500,000 photons and 500 samples takes...I don't yet know, still waiting...on the order of hours I expect. Ding! Just done "baking": 188.6 minutes, yup 3.14 (pi?) hours. The key aspect of program design is this search for closest photons—the program uses a kd-tree to find the k-closest photons in O(log n) time. It has to do this for every intersection point, of which there is a very large number. If no kd-tree was used, then the search would take O(n) every time, and I suspect it would have taken a lot longer to complete, perhaps days. So was all that extra number-crunching time worth it? Below are two images (10,000 photons on the left 500,000 photons on the right) that match the photon map above. See the difference? One could argue that the caustic boundaries and the caustic itself are a bit crisper in the image at right, but are they worth three hours?

Happy New Year!

2011-01-01T14:05:00.002-05:00

2010 is history. Its last month was unseasonably cold. I'm not sure if that's official meteorologically speaking, but at least it seems that way to me. A cold December, with snow at Christmas. We've gotten spoiled by the hot summers and both long for the return of warmer temperatures. I remember when in years past Corey would be out mowing the lawn in December. Not this year; it's mostly a stay inside kind of winter. And at least two more months to go. Hopefully March will bring back nicer weather as it usually does.

And when inside, why not fire up the fire place, and take out a good book, and boil up some tea. That teapot is something Santa left last year. Our old "brown bettie" had chipped (mainly due to my clumsiness), so I wanted a replacement. I found this little cast iron pot and am quite pleased with it. Although a touch small, aesthetically I think it's very handsome, and being made of iron should be indestructible. As for reading, it's 2011, and it's the year of the electronic book. Just before Christmas the University was kind enough to equip me with an iPad, which I mainly intend to use for teaching purposes. Corey found a good app for this, PenUltimate, and I tested it with our home projector. I think with a decent stylus, I should be able to use this app for scribing lecture notes. The app produces electronic PDF notebooks of notes, which I put online for the benefit of my students. Another app, PDF Expert, has fairly nice SFTP transmission utilities which allows me to transfer PDFs from the iPad to my web server. So with both of these tools in hand, I think I'll be set for class when they start up again in just a couple of weeks. In the meantime, why not use the iPad's touted "killer app" for reading electronic books. Some say they can't seem to swtich to this style of reading, and prefer the traditional feel of paper in their hands. I thought I'd be like that too, but the iPad's iBook app (free) is growing on me rather quickly. It holds a small library of (free) books, the font is nice, its sepia coloring looks like a book, you can bookmark pages and highlight text. The highlighted text looks irregular and imprecise just like the real thing, except that the way in which you select text is precise to the letter. Very nice. This precise selection of words is also handy when looking up words in the dictionary—this feature I have to say is really well done. On the iPad you get a nice little window that pops up with the word's definition. I've already looked up a bunch of words having read several of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes adventures, Rudyard Kipling's Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, and Philip K. Dick's The Eyes Have It—all pretty much short stories. Right now I'm reading Honoré de Balzac's The Marriage Contract. My brother suggested both Balzac and Descartes so I wanted to follow up on his recommendation—I've got Descartes' Discourse on the Method... bookmarked. It's a little profuse in its prose, but not bad for scientific observations made in the 17th century. The gist of it is: assume nothing, divide and conquer, verify each step. I suppose a fairly basic approach today, divide and conquer in particular is certainly a well known approach to algorithmic design. Still, I suppose someone had to write this down, and it's held up for over 400 years. Btw, the other nice feature of electronic books is that the bookmarks transfer over to your various ereaders: iBook is available on the iPhone as well, and when I transfer reading between the two devices, each "knows" where I left of previously. Quite convenient. No more dogearing paper books. The only nuisance with this is that you have to be on the grid...the net is becoming as much of a dependency as electricity...

Milford Sound

2010-12-25T12:53:00.001-05:00

Our last stop on our New Zealand road trip was Milford Sound. There really isn't much there at Milford Sound apart from the lodge and campground (RV hookups for us) and the quay from which boat tours depart daily. On advice from the campervan people from whom we rented the vehicle I booked a powered site at the lodge (which we later found out was sold out). We also picked the smallest boat tour of Milford. The small boat was the best choice I think—not overcrowded and able to get close to the fjords (to see the waterfalls for example).

The fjords here are truly spectacular, although the weather can be somewhat unpredictable, meaning often cloudy and/or rainy, as it was when we visited. When sunny it must be really fantastic. The way the cliffs line up visually is also interesting: apparently when surveying the coastline, Cook (I think it was Cook) had missed the entry to Milford, not seeing it from the ship. One major annoyance here were the black (sand) flies. They were all over the place. They didn't bite, but were a real nuisance. The Maori legend had it that the flies were there so that tourists wouldn't stay too long and spoil the scenery.

The waterfalls pictured above was one of three (if I remember correctly) to which the boat came close to. So close in fact that at one of them I got pretty soaked when standing on the bow (just for fun). The boat also got close to some of the wildlife in the area. There were supposed to be penguins, and I think I saw three in the distance, but I wasn't sure if they were penguins or seagulls. We did get close to some seals lounging on the rocks. They found a fairly windy perch, which we were told they did to keep the flies off.

Horsing Around Te Anau

2010-12-19T16:07:00.001-05:00

A couple more pics from Te Anau (this was me trying to shoot behind me with my left hand). When we were in Queenstown we saw an ad for horseback riding, but since we went on the jetboat, we didn't have time to go on a "horse trek" as they call it. So when we checked in to our campsite in Te Anau, Corey noticed a horseback riding pamphlet and so I called them. We were going to go for a late afternoon ride, but when we called they said they'd pick us up in 15 minutes! So we quickly changed, and walked out to wait for the pickup. I wasn't sure what to expect, since most other "rent-a-horses" I've been on have basically been lazy...they were hard to control and would only pick up some enthusiasm on the return leg. The place we went to, Westray Farm provided me with the best horseback riding experience I've ever had. Not only was the horse nice, responsive to my gentle steering with the reigns, but the trek itself was excellent—it wasn't just a out-and-back half-hour walk, this was a long, circular trek up a hill and around a couple of animal herds. We first walked through a herd of curious cows, and on the way back we split a group of sheep. The terrain was also the most challenging I've ever been on horseback—on the way down there were a few steep parts where I felt I really had to lean back in the saddle. The horses were rescued from a former life of racing. Perhaps that was why they were fairly nice: maybe they were grateful for their new life. Mind you, perhaps because they were race horses in their former life, a few of them were a little flighty. I may have been laughing in the pic below because Corey's horse was one of these (she got stuck with the type of horse that I usually get). She eventually switched with the farm owner's horse who then had to discipline the misbehaving horse (had to give it a whack on the neck to stop acting up :)

Road to Te Anau

2010-12-10T10:09:00.007-05:00

After our brief stop in Bluff, we went in search of our next campsite. It was supposed to be some sort of Holiday Road campground close to the beach. The online description sounded good, but when we got there, boy was it ever a dump! And of course only one set of toilets was opened, making them unisex. Corey said no way was she going to be showering there and so off we went in search of the other campground in the proximity that offered a "farm experience". The farm experience was night and day difference—very well maintained place, nice toilets, and baby sheep! So Corey made the right call moving us to this place, as it was most pleasant. The lambs were quite friendly, especially when hungry.

Lamb feedings were at 8am and 6pm (sharp!) with the lambs bleeting rather loudly, reminding everyone when it was time. The lambs got milk bottles while the goat and adult sheep got solid food in pellet form. The farmer/campgroundskeeper gave us quite a bit of info about his farm, number of sheep, etc. One new factoid was that sheep are born with a long tail. But as they are rather poor self-cleaners, the tail gets bobbed, either at birth with some kind of hot iron, or like these lambs, they get a rubber band tightened on the tail, which, due to lack of circulation, eventually drops off. I dunno which method is less painful. On the one hand hot-knifing the tail would hurt, but it'd be over quickly. On the other hand the rubber band has to be worn for a while, and I'm sure it can't be very pleasant. Another interesting observation was that sheep have horizontally-slit eyes (unlike cats who have vertically-slit pupils, weird huh?).

After our most pleasant stay on the farm, we got on the road to Te Anau, which would be something of a staging point for our trip to Milford Sound. It's a good idea to do this as the road to Milford is fairly tricky (think old road to Whistler, especially that old 13 or 17 mile stretch that used to be fairly crappy to drive), and there are no gas stations at Milford. On the way to Te Anau we stopped at this outlook to take a look at the Tasman Sea. It was a pretty blustery day. Later in Te Anau the fellow whose horses we rode told us that out here fishermen can only go out 56 days of the year due to these high winds. Btw, as you can deduce, most of the pictures were taken by Corey. She got mad at me the other day for using her photos that she took with my camera. I don't know what the big deal was, but truth be told she does take really good photos, and I've neglected to give credit where it's due. Sorry about that, hopefully I've now corrected this omission.

Bluff

2010-11-25T12:41:00.005-05:00

Another shot of the camper. This was at a nice "rest area" or kind of lookout on the scenic route to Invercargill. The lookout was out on a meandering river (at right in the image, beyond the trees, so just slightly obscured). It was a pleasant enough place to have lunch. The road was not very busy and so the place was pretty quiet. Except for the occasional lamb bleeting. As (bad) luck would have it, however, we weren't alone at this picnic site for long...just a few minutes later another campervan full of what sounded like French rolled up. Of course they came out with their Gauloises, or whatever brand they were smoking...stinking up the place (I used to be one of these stinkers—I'm glad I'm not anymore, especially since we used to smoke inside vehicles, I bet the campervan would have stunk if we had kept that up).

Speaking of the campervan (I got up this Thanksgiving morning, fairly lazily, and my mind drifted back to waking up in the campervan, I guess I kind of miss it a bit :) here is what the interior looked like. I have to admit that its creature comforts were quite good. Behind the driver's seat was the dining table which doubled as a bed although we never set that one up. Instead, we ended up sleeping above the cab. You can't quite see it in the pic, but there was a mattress up there and a ladder that would let us crawl up there. It was a bit squishy, but manageable. The back of the van had another bed (in all there were three, as this was a 6-berth van) that we mainly used as a sofa. We slept there the first night but the fridge noise was a bit too loud. The fridge is under the stove, to the left of the sink. The tall white door you see is the toilet/shower. All of this equipment is very similar to a large sailboat, and most of the onboard systems are the same, e.g., electrical, including panel on which you had to turn the water pump on/off, water, with usable and waste water holding tanks, gas, and diesel. I can't now remember whether the sailboat we were on was the same but I think so—I'm pretty sure it too had a diesel engine and propane for cooking. The procedure on both, if I remember correctly, was to keep the water pump off unless you were actually using the water as it tends to drain the house battery and pressurizes the water lines. Everything else could be on, and had to be on, to provide load when the truck was plugged in (to "shore power" as we'd called it on the boat). The van also had an inverter somewhere which provided alternating current for regular household appliances (like hairdryers or what have you; for me it was iPhone charger, which served as the morning alarm clock).

Later on that day we reached Invercargill, although we actually circumnavigated it, as it were. Here we are arriving at the "end of the world", well, at least the paved or road-accessible world. We are at the top of a pedestrian-accessible lookout just south of Invercargill, at a town called Bluff. From here we could see the town as well as Stewart Island, which I think is the southernmost piece of land before Antarctica. Behind us was some kind of industrial harbour where we could see large tankers getting loaded. There may have been an aluminum smelter or something back there, I don't quite recall what the nature of the industry was. At the end of the road was this signpost on which you can find distances to other destinations, e.g., London (18,958 km), New York (15,008 km), Sydney (2,000 km), etc.

Tautuku Bay

2010-11-20T13:18:00.000-05:00

This picture deserves special mention. On the way to Invercargill from Dunedin we stopped at a lookout point: Florence Hill Lookout, with views of Long Point and Tautuku Beach (Bay). To me this looked like my "Zihuatanejo", a beach that a character in the movie Shawshank Redemption escaped to. It was meant as kind of a place for retirement. And at the end of the peninsula you can see little shacks that look idyllic for finally getting away from it all...it's so remote that, according to the wikipedia entry, the huts are only accessible by all-terrain tractor. It may be that the weather here is likely to be pretty harsh most of the year, but on that day it looked rather inviting.

Road to Dunedin

2010-11-20T12:53:00.000-05:00

Our first destination was on the east coast: Dunedin (pronounced Doo-nee'-dyn), I think the largest of the cities we would visit. The drive from Queenstown took a couple of hours (was it three?) and it took me a while to get used to driving the big rig. Originally we had booked a two-person van, sort of like a small VW bus. They didn't have them so we went up to the next size, a 4-berth van like the one seen here but a bit smaller. When we got there they said we'd been "upgraded" to this 6-berth behemoth. It was roomy on the inside allright, but was a bit of a pig to drive.

Most of the roads were like the one shown here: pasture after pasture after pasture. And of course most dotted with sheep. In some cases cows or even deer (for venison). And all on the left side naturally. The campervan's steering wheel was on the right with the gearshift (automatic) to my left. I think our first choice was to be a stick shift, but I'm actually glad we ended up with an automatic. I've driven left-handed stick before (in Australia), and although I got used to it fairly quickly, the car I had then was much smaller.

Driving the behemoth was particularly perilous on one of the narrowest roads I've ever driven, Highcliff Road, or something like that, on the way to the royal albatross rookery. I don't think we actually have a shot or video of this road, however. I think my passenger was a bit too freaked out to be shooting camera. I think the GPS was to blame for this road selection because it was a bit of a shortcut over top of the cliff instead of skirting around the shore, like we chose to do on the way back. We didn't stay long at the rookery because in effect it was closed to visitors. This is the only place on earth where the albatross nest on land, or populated land at least. I think they also nest on some uninhabited island somewhere, but this is the only place that you can get to and see them in their natural habitat. So we were greatly disappointed to find out that we had happened to have been there in the three week period when they're nesting young and humans are not allowed to set foot there.

In Dunedin I was also hoping to do some shopping (always on the lookout for a nice jacket), but we got there too late and all the shops were closed by the time we managed to get in to town (this was the evening previous to our rookery excursion). We got to the "holiday" campsite (I think they're all called holiday-something-or-other). It was fairly nice, with fairly good facilities but I suppose it took us a little bit longer than usual to get settled in as it was our first one. And it so happened that the powered site we were to take was already occupied when we got there. So a bit of a mixup. We had powered sites at all four of our campsites. This was a smart move booking everything in advance as I think at least two of the sites were close to being fully booked (the last one surely was). All but one had good pump-out facilities, like the one you see here, where I learned how to dump out both of the campervan's holding tanks (grey and black water both).

Queenstown, NZ

2010-11-20T11:59:00.001-05:00

The Rydges is where we stayed the first few nights in Queenstown before taking a few days to drive around the southern part of New Zealand's south island. This is also the hotel where the Asian Conference on Computer Vision was held, where I presented a paper at one of its workshops (on gaze sensing). Although eye tracking depends on computer vision techniques, this workshop was on a slightly different topic, more on eye detection and estimation of the direction of gaze rather than on eye tracking per se. Think of surveillance video, now try to estimate what people in the video are looking at, that's what the workshop's main theme was on. The paper I presented was on an automatic means of distinguishing eye movement patterns made when watching video. The tie-in to computer vision is that we compared eye movements made by humans with those predicted by a computer vision algorithm.

And then we went boating! I think this may have been the same jet boat ride that I once saw in a Warren Miller ski movie many years ago. In the winter Queenstown is a ski village, not unlike Aspen, Telluride, or Kelowna, for a few examples. I think Warren Miller may have filmed some skiing here and so it's likely that he may have also filmed the Shotover jet ride that we went on. It's only a 20 minute or so ride but it's pretty unique. Because the boat has two jet engines (instead of propellers), it can skim over very shallow parts of the river bed. The drivers are also well experienced and they get damn close to the rocky cliffs of the canyon we were in. They also spin the boat 360 degrees like you see here.

Toward the evening we went on a slightly slower craft, the TSS Earnslaw that you see behind me. This boat was constructed in the same year as the Titanic. This one had clearly survived and still sails today between Queenstown and Walter Peak Station, a sheep ranch (station == ranch in Kiwi). At the station, we enjoyed a traditional roast beef and Yorkshire pudding dinner. We missed the sit-down (first class) service and so made due with the buffet. I actually skipped the roast beef and went for the lamb shanks. After dinner we saw sheep dog herding and sheep shearing demonstrations. On the way back I took a look down to the Earnslaw's engine room. The vessel is driven by two coal-powered steam engines and functions as it would have done 100 years ago. There were two guys shoveling coal and an engineer who would control engine speed in response to the captain's commands relayed by the old-fashioned rotary dials (e.g., ahead full, full stop, etc.). After a couple of days in Queenstown we would embark on our road trip around the south island...

Flight to NZ

2010-11-06T14:35:00.001-04:00

The flight to NZ is quite long: 5 hrs (ATL-LAX) + 12 hrs (LAX-AKL) + 2 hrs (AKL-ZQN) = 19 hrs, and that's just in the air, not counting layovers and time spent going through security. New Zealand's security is fairly strict about food and soil being brought in (I saw a little beagle sniff out some kind of pepperoni in one bag and a small bag of carrots in another—the dog could also sniff out food that was there but recently removed). They gave us a bit of a scolding for not declaring our hiking boots in our bags (which we really consider as running shoes). At left is a shot from the rear window of the plane as we approach NZ. The plane landed at about 07:50 so this is dawn as seen from the plane. The image doesn't do it justice, the eye could pick out the colors of the spectrum fairly easily.

At right is a shot from the plane from Auckland to Queenstown. The south island has some pretty steep looking mountains, reminiscent of the Rockies, but with less foliage. Queenstown, as it turns out, is an adventurer's destination. Beside a couple of ski hills around here (too late for that unfortunately, we're here mid-spring), there is also a large glacier lake here. So there are various sporting activities one could do here. Queenstown reminds me of a small alpine town, similar to Aspen maybe, or more like Kelowna rather, because it also has a kind of "ye olde British" feel to it, sort of like Victoria. Maybe it's like a blend of all three. I would love to try skiing New Zealand, but the length and cost of the flight really make that rather unlikely.

Below is a pic as we were being driven into tow—the cab driver took us on a scenic route and stopped at a nice vantage point. Below, to the right (at far right), is roughly where our hotel is at. Across from the little bit of water is a tree-covered peninsula. That is something like a tiny Stanley Park, that juts out from the town that is at the bottom of the peninsula, and at bottom right, unfortunately just out of the picture. In town are numerous restaurants, pubs, and various kinds of shops. Our goal today is go walk around there and look at various things (me, a leather jacket of course :)

Oct.22 Gig at Wingin' It

2010-10-28T13:19:00.000-04:00

Our last two gigs were to near-empty audiences. I think at the last gig at Friar's Tavern at one point literally the only person in the audience was our soundman. It was strange but we treated it like practice. We'll be back there Dec.3 and hopefully it'll be more like Wingin' It depicted above at our last gig, Oct.22. I much prefer playing to a full room and at this gig we had a good turnout. In the pic someone wanted to blurt out something over the mic, so I got a couple minutes' break in which I could snap a quick pic on my iPhone. So you get to see what the room looks like from the drummer's point of view. This was probably one of our better gigs: we played well and I think the audience was getting into it, especially during the third set when we tend to play faster, more recognizable stuff. The Allman Brothers' One Way Out has a rather recognizable riff (and ride cymbal) that the audience usually responds to pretty well. I think we played that song particularly well and I had a blast banging out those snare rolls at the end of every verse.

Dylan

2010-10-20T12:43:00.000-04:00

This past weekend we went to the Dylan concert held on campus in what is normally the basketball arena. An excellent show for which we had pretty decent seats except maybe a bit too close to the stage. It was great seeing Dylan and his band up there, but the sound was, for us, imbalanced as it was mainly directed toward the left ear. The highlight, for me I think, was Ballad of a Thin Man which they played at a pretty fast tempo. Come to think of it, they played most things at a pretty fast pace, which I rather enjoyed. I'm always being told by my band mates to slow down, but I think a slightly faster pace is better enjoyed by the audience.

Hounds at Friar's Tavern

2010-10-20T12:39:00.001-04:00

This is a shot from The Hoodoo Hounds' gig on Oct.1. It's a new(ly refurbished) place called Friar's Tavern (the old Explorers'). The stage is pretty small there, but we managed to fit somehow. My drums were right behind our front man who said that I was trying to beat the snare through his head :) I like my snare to snap when I hit it, what can I say? For this gig our front man brought in some fancy equipment that can analyze the room acoustics and automatically balance the output while canceling feedback. It does this by having you stick a microphone in the middle of the room while it sends out white noise through the speakers. Some home theater systems do this as well. I think we sounded pretty good that night, but unfortunately we played to a non-existent audience. It ended up being a practice gig for us with the only person applauding being our sound man...Another gig is coming up this Friday (Oct.22) and hopefully there'll be a larger crowd.

Luggage refit

2010-09-11T09:49:00.006-04:00

When traveling on business, I take my favorite piece of luggage, the rolling folding garment bag. I bought this a few years ago, and it's now been on several trips and has been hauled around various city sidewalks in different weather. It's gotten beaten up a fair bit. The last such trip that I remember it was on was Copenhagen in winter time—I remember rolling it to the hotel from the metro on cold, slushy pavement. That did a number on the bag's bottom that tends to drag on the ground when I overstuff it. I've been re-applying duct tape to the bottom as a way to prevent more damage, but having to replace this every trip was becoming a sticky, gooey mess. The last trip I took it on (to San Antonio), the bag came back with the handle screws ripped through the bag's top fabric (maybe the third time this has happened). I knew it would happen, it was only a matter of time. Previously, the plastic backing that was there had broken and so the only thing between the handle bolts (on the outside) and the nuts (on the inside) was fabric. It couldn't last. So for a long time I've been thinking about some kind of backing, but I couldn't decide on what to put in there. Plastic? That would break sooner or later. Wood? No...I can't remember what made me finally think of it, but aluminum was finally what I came up with. At the hardware store I found two cheap pieces of aluminum that seemed just the right size: one for the inside, the other as a kind of guard plate to replace the duct tape. The above pics show one of the plates (trimmed with tin snips) going in. I had to drill four holes and had to get the alignment just right to get the handle to line up. At bottom are two more pics of the outside. The plate took 12 bolts (stainless) to hold in place. I used rubber washers to prevent moisture from seeping in. I used oversized fender washers underneath all the nuts to ensure that they don't rip through the plastic/fabric. Hopefully this will hold for a while.

Oh, I should also add that the wheels you see above are roller-blading wheels that I bought at a sporting goods store. I've replaced the factory-made luggage wheels twice now. Both times they (Victorinox) were good enough to send me a pair for free, but all three pairs (including the original) were fairly cheap plastic things, which these sort of rubber bands glued to the outside. All three pairs wore out rather quickly. The roller-blade wheels are solid, roll pretty well, and hopefully should be more durable. So far so good—the couple of trips they've been on they've performed really well. And they're fairly distinct so picking out the bag from the rest similar black rollies on the luggage carousel was fairly easy. That aluminum backing plate should also help.

Real-time heatmaps

2010-08-03T12:45:00.005-04:00

Some of you already know what the above images are about, but I'm so happy about getting this to work, that I thought I'd post a blog about it. It happens to coincide with the end of this year's REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) program during which I had 5 undergrads in the lab working on several eye tracking projects. This year it was all about video, which prompted me to develop the program responsible for drawing the above images. Collecting eye movement data (x,y,t) over video is what I worked on in Barcelona. It took me pretty much most of those 6 weeks to get enough C/C++ code together to be able to display video while recording gaze data. Once that was done, I handed the program over to the REUs who then ran four studies and who also extended the program to do various other things. Meanwhile, the whole effort motivated me to figure out how to display the captured data atop the video frames as a means to visualize the recorded gaze data. The algorithm for generating the above heatmaps is pretty straightforward and is well-known. Step 1 involves dropping a Gaussian point-spread function at each gaze location, growing the resultant heightfield with as many gaze points as collected per each video frame. Step 2 requires finding the maximum value in the heightmap. Sounds easy, but for an NxN image, it takes O(N^2) operations. Step 3 then requires normalization of the heightfield (division by the max value). Step 4 then recolors the height (luminance) by mapping it to the rainbow color palette. The last two steps, which can be combined into one, together take another O(N^2) steps. The image above at left was created this way for a data set of 24 scanpaths (sequence of gaze points) on the CPU. Looks good but it's slow (took about a minute). The image at right took only a fraction of a second and looks almost identical. The trick here is to use the GPU to reduce the number of operations form order O(N^2) to O(log(N)) for the max value localization and O(1) for the recoloring. On one particular workstation with a decent graphics card I observed a 700-fold speedup due to these reductions. That just blew me away, which is why I'm so excited about this development. I recently moved that bit of GPU code onto my video playing code and sure enough, even for a fairly large data set (oh, about 8 people or so), the code appears to play the video at real-time (30 Hz) rates. I suppose I should take timings of this just to confirm how long it takes...this could make a nice little paper someplace. Other eye tracking types might like to know how the whole thing is put together...

Reedy River Gig

2010-07-12T15:49:00.003-04:00

The pic is back from our gig on July 7th. Right in the middle of a heat wave, when it went up to 98F. If I look like I'm trying to concentrate, I was. I don't know whether it was the heat, the Gretsch drums, or something else or a combination of factors, but I was not having a good first set. I think it played ok, but I know I made a couple of flubs here and there. I pulled out my old Gretsch drums but I haven't played on them in a very long time. Lately I've been playing on the Tama rockstar kit I traded for my old Pintech electronic set. I like the Tama's larger toms and I think its compactness—one less floor tom. The Gretsch kit has two floor toms and maybe because of that seems more spread out. I remember missing the right crash symbol because it was out of my immediate reach (had to stretch for it). So after the gig I transferred the bass drum's resonant head (with the band name on it) onto the Tama kit and bagged the Tama kit. I don't think I'll be using the Gretsch kit any more, so it may be time to start looking for a new owner for that kit. Right during setup I busted a resonant head on the small 10" tom...it sounded kinda crappy the rest of the night, another reason for a lackluster first set...once I got into the habit of going for the second tom, and the temperature went down, the second set was much better.

Greenville Gig at Reedy River

2010-07-06T21:44:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow the Hoodoo Hounds play at the Reedy River Nighttime Concert Series. Just ahead of this gig we got a story on us printed in the Greenville News, our local city paper, as you see above. The full story can be found here.

4th of July

2010-07-05T16:21:00.002-04:00

As soon as I got back from Barcelona, it was straight back to work. I was already a week behind on my meetings with this year's REU students, so it's been pretty hectic. Today is the last day of the 4th of July long weekend, and since I'm stuck at home on the couch, I thought I'd update the blog. Somehow I managed to pull my left pec muscle a couple of days ago, which is why I'm sitting here coding and not out on the boat. I guess it must have been lugging the new sailboat battery that did it, but I can't be sure. All I know is my left pec is so painful that it's difficult to breathe. I wanted to get out on the sailboat, give it a nice cleaning, and putt around on it, but I'm having trouble moving around much. It's nice to have caught up to some badly needed coding, but it's really nice outside, too... Hopefully this goes away by tomorrow, because that's when I need to load up the truck with my drum gear for Wednesday's Greenville gig. Tonight is band practice, when I'll see how I can play in this condition. Major annoyance. Anyway, above is a short video of the fireworks that the city of Clemson puts on every year at the YMCA beach. We get out there on the motorboat and sit and watch (a major reason for getting the powerboat back in '03 I think it was—the idea was to have it on the water by July 4th—I think we got it in the water just in time). This is the first video upload I've done on the blog, hopefully it turns out ok. I shot the vid on my iPhone, so it may be a little blurry, although I think it managed to focus itself fairly well.

BCN-AMS-DTW-YOW

2010-05-30T08:40:00.006-04:00

Although I had the option of taking the train to Barcelona's BCN airport, in the end I decided to cab it. It was either spend 6 hours at the airport or get 6 hours worth of sleep. I went with the sleep and hit the sack at 9pm. Got up at 3am, hailed a cab (lots of them around), paid the 26 euros, and checked-in. The airport was surprisingly busy for 5am—I pissed off some American ladies by cutting in front of them in the queue, but then jumped back out when I saw the "elite" line empty. Due to my frequent flyer miles I am privy to this service and so it took me 5 mins to check in vs. standing in line for what looked like it would take 30 mins–1 hr. Security was fairly smooth throughout the trip, including Amsterdam's Schiphol. The plane closest to the window in the pic at right is at the gate from where I departed and on a similar plane, the Airbus A330.

The AMS-DTW flight was its usual 7-8 hour duration, this time I watched the Academy winning Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart, and it was about the only thing left in the selection that I hadn't seen that I was interested in. I'd already seen Sherlock Holmes (very good, btw, if you like Guy Ritchie movies, as I do) and The Book of Eli with Denzel (also pretty decent). Oh I forgot! I hadn't yet seen The Damned United about British football ca. 1967—1974 and about Brian Clough, a coach of that era. It starred the guy who played Frost in Nixon/Frost, and it was surprisingly very good. After that flight, I had sushi at DTW then hopped on to the flight to YOW where I am now. I decided to stay a few nights in the University of Ottawa student dorms to save a few bucks—46 a night is hard to beat, although I have to use the common washroom and I now miss having my own kitchen! Even though I thought that the little kitchen in the Barcelona apartment was pretty dinky, it's particularly good for breakfast items, something my stomach is now demanding :)

(Temporary) Exit Strategy

2010-05-27T04:25:00.005-04:00

Yesterday as I went to the grocery store (yet again—this time I only needed a few things, which seems more like the style of shopping done here: come in for a few things instead of the large, weekly shopping normally done in the US), I thought I'd go in to the Sants Estacio train station to check on trains to the airport. It turns out this station, directly on the route of the airport train, is right across the street from the grocery store I go to. The store happens to be just past the gym where I go work out every morning, which happens to be right in front of the Parc Industriel, a small little park with grass, trees, and water. To get to the water, you walk past this little grove of trees and playground where parents and kids show up in the afternoon. Once you ascend a tall flight of steps, you're then looking down on the water. I suntanned there last Monday where it was a bit quieter than the beech (no nagging masseuses or beer salesmen). Sorry for the poor picture quality, I just used my old cell phone to take them.

The Sants is a fairly large train station, and happens to be the first station I arrived at the first time I visited Barcelona. Back then I had wanted to get to Plaza Catalunya, which meant transferring at this station. Well, suffice it to say that although I succeeded, I was still somewhat confused as to how I managed it. Remember back then I hadn't really fully understood the three train systems that exist here. In fact, back then, I took the Renfe train to Catalunya, never managing to locate the metro lines that also go there (although now that I think about it, on my second visit, I think I did manage to switch to a metro line). Now, of course, on my third visit, this station looks mush less bewildering. And since it's walking distance to my apartment, and I already have a metro train ticket (which works on all three train systems), I think I'll just take the train to the airport Friday night instead of hailing a taxi. It'll save a few euros and kill some time. And it's a good thing I inquired at the station for the schedule, because it turns out there's some kind of strike going on, and so the train schedule's a bit messed up. No problem though, in fact, this Friday it seems to be in my favor as the last train is later than usual, leaving after midnight, which would suit me just fine. One minor issue is that the train station is at the older airport terminal, which means I'll need to catch a bus to Terminal 1 when I get there. Hopefully everything is still running at the airport as I basically intend to spend the night there...that's my "temporary" exit strategy, meaning my exit to Ottawa from where I come back to Barca for one last week (of vacation).

More shopping (and more laundry)

2010-05-21T04:45:00.007-04:00

The other day I took the metro to (what I'm guessing is) one of Barcelona's larger malls, the Diagonal Mar. I think it's one of the larger ones, although it wasn't quite as large as Greenville's own Haywood Mall. What's more, Haywood Mall has more "upscale" stores than Diagonal Mar, e.g., the latter lacks stores such as Williams-Sonoma. So I'm thinking there must be other more posh malls around here somewhere. With Barcelona's population of 1.6 M compared to the 1.2 M spread out between Greenville-Spartanburg-Anderson, surely there must be another ritzy "Galleria" type place here somewhere, no? Or maybe the stores are just smaller and more spread out throughout the city? There is, for example, a Henckels store devoted to that brand, specializing in cutlery (knives) and personal hygiene products (nail clippers, etc.). It's a pretty ritzy store, but not in any mall, just on a little side-street off Las Ramblas.

Maybe the mall is a North-American concept, I don't know. In contrast, Barcelona has many, many shops, each specializing in particular things. I'm not exactly sure where they're all located, however. There are various "village"-like communities throughout the city. Las Ramblas, for example, has a large number of specialty stores, and just off Las Ramblas there are various higher-end stores like the Henckels shop I mentioned. But Las Ramblas caters to tourists as well as locals, so I'm not sure whether the locals actually do their shopping there. Meanwhile, other "villages" such as where I am (Hostafrancs) has its own number of shops. I was told that each of these "villages" also has its own town hall, or ajuntament (which I think is Catalan) and so it stands to reason that each little area is also its own little shopping district. This is not uncommon, e.g., many large cities have their "little Italies", or "Chinatowns", I'm just not familiar with them all here in Barca. I did, however, find the official FCB store, and bought myself two jerseys. I have the traditional blue-maroon one, and I also bought this neon-yellow sleeveless one. In the pic (rather dark, sorry) I'm wearing the neon-yellow one, just before heading off to the gym in the morning (it's dark because I have the balcony doors closed).

My apartment building, all "fresh and clean"

2010-05-21T04:28:00.007-04:00

When I first got to the apartment almost a month ago, I was dismayed to find its facade blocked by a scaffolding, covered up by a blue mesh. I suppose I should have taken a picture of it, but instead I took the time to complain to the landlord. Luckily he was both responsive and reasonable and knocked 20% off the rent due to the inconvenience. Well, I couldn't really open the balcony doors cause there were workers out there, I couldn't stand on the balcony without almost hitting my head on one of the scaffolding levels (one of the walkways was right at my eye-level), and I couldn't really see outside due to the blue mesh covering up the whole thing. The landlord had informed me that this would go on till about mid-June. Happily, they finished ahead of schedule, and as of yesterday the scaffolding's gone! Yesterday I enjoyed a couple of Leffe beers on the balcony (mine is the one at bottom-left, obscured by the tree), watching people milling about below in the afternoon sun. The good weather appears to have finally returned as well—I'm in shorts again today, as I was the first week I was here, all the time in between it's been rather chilly and one week it was raining fairly steadily all week long. Saturday there's a 30% chance of rain, but Sunday and Monday look good at 21 C and sunny, and it's a long weekend here, to boot! Should be a nice weekend and then next Saturday it's off to Ottawa!

Apartment cooking

2010-05-21T03:59:00.009-04:00

Here's how I make use of my small apartment kitchen. In the pic I'm just getting ready to cook Penne with Calamari and Malvasia. At right is some bread I broke up and that I'm going to toast in the tiny oven just behind the little tray on which the bread sits. On the stove I have water boiling for the Penne, and my main pan for combining the rest: whole canned tomatoes that you see behind the small cutting board on which lies the sliced red onion. To the right of the tomatoes is a tiny little espresso cup that I use for small amounts of spices, in this case there's about a teaspoon of crushed red pepper flakes in there. Just behind the pot with water and against the backsplash is the thin, tall bottle of sherry (jerez) that is subbing in for Malvasia wine. This wine was a good choice for this dish as it is sufficiently sweet and so I think a good sub for Malvasia (the bottle itself also makes a good rolling pin!). On the counter, in front of the cutting board is my block of Manchego cheese, the famous Spanish cheese (very good, btw), and behind that at the far corner is my plate of cut up squid (Calamari). All of these ingredients get combined into a very tasty dish that, in this particular instance, made 4 servings. To save some money, I basically at this dish all week :)

The finished dish is shown at left, with the Manchego cheese sprinkled on top—it eventually melts and "gooeys" up the dish. The Calamari was excellent, although I wouldn't recommend extending this dish four days the way I did, I just did that to see how far I could stretch it, next time I'll likely cut the ingredients in half. To the right you see the finished product of the previous weekend's meal, one for which I used the sherry wine as a rolling pin (to roll out the puff pastry), and one of my personal favorites, Beef Wellington, partially because it calls for beef fillet and partially because I liked the way Gordon demonstrated making it on TV; his own excitement is almost inspiration enough to make you want to try making it. The beef makes it somewhat expensive (about 11 euros in this case, but it made two servings), but the result is very tasty, especially if you don't overcook it. I was a bit worried about that with this little oven, because I had trouble with the pizza I made the weekend before. I couldn't get the pizza dough to bake properly, which led me to think that the oven was on the cool side. That may have worked in favor of the Beef Wellington, because the beef turned out good (pink on the inside), but the puff pastry appeared to cook fully. I had more pastry dough than I needed, but I erred on the thin side which I think was wise—the thought of "double-wrapping" had crossed my mind, but fortunately I banished the thought. In retrospect I think double-wrapping could have ruined the dish by potentially undercooking both meat and dough. And, curiously enough, in this oven, the bottom of the dough was more burnt than raw, as it's turned out before back in the oven I've used in the US. All in all, although the kitchen is rather cramped (the stove top burners are too close together and too close to the controls), it's fairly serviceable.

Shopping (and laundry)

2010-05-15T15:55:00.011-04:00

It seems like my two most frequent activities are shopping and doing laundry. Lacking a dryer, clothes take two days to dry, especially since I can't always hang them out outside (it's been raining quite a bit here lately, reminding me of Vancouver). So you have to plan carefully: am I going to need those jeans tomorrow or Tuesday? Thus far, my best strategy seems to be to do laundry in the morning while I'm at the gym, this way the washing machine is done when I get back and I can hang the clothes out while I'm at work. In the meantime, if I'm not doing laundry or working, I go shopping—lacking a car it's better to do make smaller shopping trips more frequently than doing the one large weekly shopping excursion at home. Above in the pic is the Mercat d'Hostafrancs, the large market that is just across the street from my apartment. The above pic is of the front, my apartment is across the street from the back of the market. One annoying aspect of this is that I get to hear all the delivery trucks when they arrive in the morning. Early in the morning...

Inside the market, you have a bunch of stands where each one offers some sort of specialization: vegetables, meats, fish, sausages, cheeses, etc. I think one stand offers figs and peanuts. I've bought fresh veggies here before, as well as a really good, fresh piece of cod. That was really tasty; I found on online recipe on how to prepare it in my little oven, with (if I remember correctly) bread crumbs and garlic. I also added some pepper flakes to give it a kick. But actually I don't shop at this market that often because I found (I was told about) a pretty decent grocery store just up the street (just past the gym where I workout every weekday morning).

The grocery store is called Esclat and it doesn't look like much from the outside. Inside, the top floor has basic house stuff like kitchen towels, light bulbs (expensive for some reason), etc. (think Wal-Mart but not as huge). Downstairs is the grocery store, which pretty much has everything I need. I had trouble finding yeast, for example (for making pizza dough) but I found it here. They also have a good meat selection, good cheeses, and a good deli. I haven't yet ordered anything at the deli, but I probably should start buying my ham there as I'm not too thrilled with the packaged selection. Their seafood section is also quite decent, particularly for their squid selection. I bought 450 g today for making a calamari and pasta dish later this week—that's about two of those large squids that you see on ice in the pic (to the right of the large, white what I think are cuttle fish—I don't have a recipe for cuttle fish but if that's what they are I think they're really tasty as well; one of my favorite sushi choices). They're fresh and the lady cleaned them out for me right then and there. She spoke really fast so I didn't quite catch what she said but caught the word limpio which is to clean. Well, I didn't really get a chance to say "yes, please" before she went ahead and started. But having done this job myself (taking out the squid's spine and ink sack, and cutting off its eye and beak), I recognized what she was doing and smiled and said something like si, gracias because I was happy to see her doing this for me. Today I also bought some lamb chops and some beef fillet that I'm cooking up as Beef Wellington for dinner. It's resting as I write, hopefully the little dinky oven I have managed to cook it properly...buen provecho to me :)

A Night at the Opera

2010-05-09T04:44:00.006-04:00

Friday I was invited to the Liceu Opera: Richard Strauss' Cavaller de la Rosa. Richard? Yes, not Johann. It was interesting. With three acts with two 30 min intermissions, the opera didn't end till 9pm or so. And it started at 4:30pm. The story behind the opera was an older woman who realizes her affair with a 17 year old boy won't work and so she lets him go by setting up this mission for him to deliver a silver rose to a young lady as an engagement present on behalf of this other fellow. The idea is for the boy to fall in love with this girl, which he does, etc. It's somewhat complicated, one of those "you'd have to have been there" type explanations.

The interior of the opera house was very nice. I was told it is something of a "gift" from Madrid to the Catalans, and so the building's exterior and interior styles are not really indicative of Catalan taste. That's about the only way I can express it. After the opera we walked around town and my friends showed me the Catalan style of building exemplified by the Palau Musica, where they said I should go see a show there some evening. If I go I'll take pictures so you can get a comparison of the buildings. Here, at the Liceu, was my first operatic experience. What struck me about the stage was that it had HDTV-like dimesions: it seemed as though I was looking at a super high-res TV set, that had depth. Perhaps that's what TV is trying to emulate: the live stage? This "live TV" also had subtitles! Do all operas provide this service? I had no idea. The white bar above the stage is where they're displayed.

The subtitles are also available in a little electronic window in the back of the seat in front of your own. And the subtitles are the reason why I got tickets to the opera in the first place. The department that invited me here (Traduccio i Interpretacio) is the department of translation and interpretation, and subtitles is what they do (among other things—they also train interpreters, like the ones that work at the UN, e.g., as portrayed by Nicole Kidman in The Interpreter which I watched coincidentally just before coming here). The university has a kind of mini mock UN classroom that they use for training purposes. And subtitles is what I'm now doing as well—the code I'm writing is for eye tracking while watching video, where the video contains subtitles. I'll describe that in another post, once I get my code working...

23 Robadors

2010-05-09T04:20:00.005-04:00

While at ETRA earlier this year I met a guy who was studying (or working?) in the UK but who was from Barcelona. When I told him I'd be here and that I'd like to play the drums somewhere, he suggested 23 Robadors. So I went. I found the place (23 Robadors is the address but I'm using it as the name of the place, which I think it may also be), it's in a dodgy sidestreet side of Las Ramblas, close to the Liceu metro stop (where the opera is, which I'll write about next). Robadors can also mean "thieves" and so the street is aptly named. 23 Robadors is right next to a gay bar and some sort of other establishment fronted by what appears to be a large "woman of the house" if you get my meaning. So when I asked the owner of the bar about playing there he seemed somewhat surprised that I'd found the place. Well, apparently jam night happens every Wednesday, except that some Wednesdays the jam is really a performance by what I think is the house jazz band. And of course the Wednesday I showed up was one of those nights. I brought my sticks but hid them the couple of hours I was there. There was no chance of jamming and the guys that played were actually very good and there was no way I was going to match the drummer playing that night. This guy was really quite imaginative in how he used the kit, various mallets, brushes, sticks, etc. He played the rims of the drums, he played with the metal ends of the brushes, he was all over the place, and made it look easy. I think he did the one-handed roll at one point, it was pretty impressive. However, the venue there is a little too "beatnik" for me, reminding me of that Happy Days episode when Richie almost runs away with this beret-wearing crowd. What happens in this bar is that you sit there watching the performance. You shouldn't move or make any noise while they play. I dunno, not really my scene; I rather like a bar where you can walk around, talk, maybe dance, etc. So I'm not sure if I'll come back here, I think I'll try the Harlem Jazz Club instead. That place, although it features jazz in its name, claims to have blues jam sessions on Tuesdays. We'll see...

Barceloneta

2010-05-09T03:26:00.011-04:00

Last weekend was warm and sunny so I went to the beach: Barceloneta. Above is a shot of the street that leads there, a fairly long walk from the closest metro stop. Today isn't as hot so I may go to the park instead. The whole week was rather cold in fact, with early on in the week the cold accompanied by rain. Not nice. Today is a bit better but still on the cool side. Of course (as it seemed was often the case in Vancouver), weather underground reports a sunny day tomorrow (Monday). Well, hopefully that will hold out until next week, as I'd like to return to the beach.

When you get to the beach and look right, you see that large building—looks like a W hotel. At left you see Frank Gehry's gold fish sculpture that he created under commission for the Olympic Games in Barcelona in the 1990s. Reminds me of the dancing buildings we saw in Prague, also his design. The Czechs were somewhat divided on that piece as it doesn't quite fit in with the architecture. Is that the case with the fish? What do you think? Art or eye sore? Personally I guess I don't mind it. It's something to look at, it glitters, it gives the beach something distinctive, maybe in the sense of Sydney's opera house, Vancouver's sails (of the Pan Pacific hotel I mean), but perhaps not quite on that scale. I plunked my towel behind the thing you see below; I'm still not quite sure what it's supposed to be. I didn't go up to it so I don't know if you can enter the thing, are there stairs? Is it a public toilet? Changing rooms perhaps? I suppose it can serve as a landmark that people can use to meet at (I heard a group behind me use it that way, e.g., "we're behind the blocks"—they were speaking English). The beach was somewhat crowded so don't expect a lot of privacy here. In fact, one major annoyance are the masseuses and beer salesmen walking around pestering everyone. One is constantly asked "Massage?" or "Beer, cerveza?" Some of the pushier masseuses will stand there and bug you if you ignore them. Irritating...I wonder if they're all over the beach or just in the section I was at (I was close to restaurants and the pedestrian mall, so right in the touristy area).

After the beach, I grabbed an Italian-style gelatto and went to Port Vell, it's at the end of the wooden walk with the wavy iron bars you see in the pic. I've been there before, there are a couple of nice restaurants there and a shopping mall. I was looking for kitchen towels and other things for the apartment, but that mall mainly has clothes and not really worth going into.

Port Vell is right at the bottom of Las Ramblas, the main touristy boulevard I've written about before. (Btw, is it "La Rambla" or "Las Ramblas"? It's both: "La Rambla" refers to the actual street, e.g., similar to how one would use "the boulevard" for example. In this case, the whole length of the boulevard is a series of sections, each called differently, e.g., "La Rambla de Florets" which then changes to "La Ramble de something-else", and on down the street. So it's really a set of "Las Ramblas". I suppose technically it would therefore be incorrect to simply say "La Rambla" as then one could come back with "which one"?) At the top of Las Ramblas you have Plaza Catalunya, and the metro of the same name. I catch the metro there when I'm either going back to the apartment or to work, as Catalunya has both the TMB metro and the FGC surface trains I wrote about earlier.

Quick travel note

2010-05-09T03:08:00.006-04:00

I took these shots while in transit to BCN, but I didn't have a chance to upload them until now. This is a reminder of how to get through security at Schiphol with a very short layover, e.g., like the one we'll have next month: only 50 minutes, assuming on-time arrival. What you see above is the security checkpoint heading through to the D gates (where the plane to BCN will likely be, probably D67 or something like that). The crowd of people is fairly large, even at 06:00, as above. The image at right is a few steps further in—notice the vertical monitor at left. This monitor has a list of flights with a short connection and is there so that if your flight is listed you can get in to the fast lane (at left). The 06:55 flight to Barcelona was listed and if I were on that flight I would have gone through the fast lane. As it was, I was on the noon flight, so I went through the "elite" line that was a little shorter than normal. The whole thing moves fairly quickly even though beyond the passport control one has to go through x-ray screening. I think I was through there in about 25-30 minutes, so I think I actually could have made the 06:55 flight even through the normal lanes. But later in June we'll go through the fast lane at left. Below are some shots of BCN's new international terminal.

The morning commute

2010-05-02T05:33:00.014-04:00

The first leg of my commute to work starts at the Hostafrancs metro station. I get on the train heading to Fondo on line L1 and get off at Catalunya, possibly the largest station in the system (a large hub of several train lines). There are I think three train systems in Barcelona, the metro is one of them, then the Renfe trains are another, and there's a third, the FGC. I have to get on FGC train S2 or S55 to get up to the university.

To get to the FGC trains, I have to walk through a couple of connecting tunnels and the L3 line metro stop (it's strange to me why a metro stop platform should act as a thoroughfare as it tends to cause human traffic congestion, but that's how it seems to be organized). One could surface from the metro station instead and get to the FGC trains via the sidewalk, but may as well stay underground.

At one point in the series of tunnels I come to this central round connecting hub. You can then choose to surface (see the light at left?), head into one of the L1 or L3 metro lines (where I'm coming out of), or head into the Renfe train platforms, as you see at right. It's difficult to make out in the pic, but above the entrance to the tunnel you see the train numbers that are there—S2 and S55 should be there. Why the distinction in train services? I think it's because of differing management companies: Renfe is one, the TMB is the other (managing the metro), and the FGC, or Ferrocarrils Generalitat de Catalunya. For me, the distinction between the S lines and the L lines is patterned after the German organization I found in Munich: I think of the S lines as "surface trains", whereas the L lines are metro lines.

After turning into the FGC doorway, it's one more short tunnel and then through the ticket machines onto the train platforms. Here I just need to glance at the train departure times to figure which of the S2 or S55 trains is departing next and from which platform. In the pic at right I think it's the S2 that's coming in. Once I get on this train, it's a somewhat lengthy ride up to campus. There, once I get off the train, it's just a quick jaunt up a hill to the Traduccio i Interpretaccio building, and into the office my hosts have let me use.

Last week although I was busy settling in, doing reimbursement paperwork, skype'ing with a student back in Clemson, filling out my faculty activity system (FAS) info, I actually got some good coding done. I'm working with ffmpeg and am in the middle of ripping apart a one-file playback example, splitting it up into its logical components—the one file was 2600+ lines of code. The code is difficult enough to figure out without having to scroll back and forth up a 2600 line vi window. Video playback is complicated by the use of numerous codecs and synchronization between video, audio, and subtitle streams. However, these components make it fairly logical to break up the one large file into. After I've finished doing this, the idea is to marry this code with my eye tracking code so that I can capture eye movements over video, which is why I'm here in Barcelona in the first place. I'll write more on this stuff later, as the programming effort progresses.

Typical work morning

2010-05-01T14:29:00.008-04:00

I'll try to give you a visual diary of my typical work day. First part is the morning. I get up—yup, it's dark in here with no windows. I've set up my iPhone on the night stand to act as my alarm clock. It's usually what I do when I travel, the iPhone charges and then wakes me up. After I get up, I put on my workout clothes and head out the door to the gym. I found out about this place during my advance web research. Google and google maps are really helpful tools for this sort of thing. I usually try to do this when I travel so that I get a sense for where a place is situated and what is in its proximity. So with the gym, I was happily surprised to find that it's just up the block from the apartment.

Above you see the main street that I cross on my way to the gym. It's Carrer de la Creu Coberta in the Hostafrancs district, with a metro stop of the same name. Pretty much right underneath my apartment is the Mercat d'Hostafrancs, one of a handful of these types of markets with fresh produce and meats. I pass by this market, then cross the main street then head up the narrow alley up to the gym.

That's the gym, pretty decent place actually. Where you see that domed roof is where the weights and aerobic machines are. There's a pool in there but I don't have my speedos here and I would also need a cap (I know not why, but those are the rules). I run in with my weight gloves and sweat towel. I do my "CBL" workout that I actually got from some weightlifting guy I met on a plane once. He said to spread out the body parts so that each gets rested, so C is for chest, B is for back, L for legs, and that's three days' worth. I finish off with shoulders and biceps/triceps and that's five days' worth and a full week. Each day I do "burpies" and aerobics, either jog on the treadmill or recumbent bike, each of these for 30 mins. The whole thing takes about an hour and by the end I'm awake :)

Once I get back from the gym, I make breakfast. Right now, that's ham on toast, OJ, coffee, and plain yogurt with honey. I catch up on the news (Drudgereport), down my coffe, and it's off to work. I'll write up the one-hour commute in my next post. But right now (Saturday night), it's time to head out to Plaza Catalunya and La Rambla to get some tapas and cervezas.

My digs in Barca

2010-05-01T13:36:00.008-04:00

Here's my apartment in Barcelona, taken the day of arrival. It's a fairly roomy place with a somewhat cramped kitchen, which you can see to the right in the pic. In the pic you see the dining table (where I've since set up the laptop), with a "two-story" closet directly behind the table. It's somewhat strange: when you open the sliding doors, there are two levels, with the top level too high up to reach from the floor. Presumably, one is meant to use this from the loft above the table. There's a bed up there, but it only has about two feet of headroom which makes it a touch cloisterphobic. So I sleep on the "ground floor" where there was a kind of couch that could be opened up into a two-mattress (side-by-side) bed. There's a fan above, which is another reason why I chose that sleeping location. Overall the place isn't bad, it's location is excellent, but it's a bit dark with only one window. And currently, I can't really open the window up in the morning cause there are guys out there working on the scaffolding. I hadn't expected this scaffolding there, and hope that they finish up before I leave...there's a nice porch out there that I'd actually like to use.

My impression of the kitchen was initially somewhat low as it lacks a full-sized oven (although I knew about this when I rented the place, I just didn't think it would make such an impact in person). It does, however, have a small "desktop" oven (like a toaster oven) that actually works fairly well...I baked fresh cod in it a couple of days ago and it turned quite well. There's also a small baking pan that fits inside so I think I'll be able to make simple casseroles in there without too much trouble—so long as I can find all the ingredients. One major redeeming quality about the kitchen is that it came equipped with Bialetti coffee makers (there's three of them here—two small and one tiny). It's also equipped with other basic things that hopefully I won't need to add to. So far so good. The fridge is small, but also seems to suffice.

Here is the bathroom and laundry. The shower has pretty low pressure and is supplied by a small water tank shared with the washing machine. To the right of the washing machine you'll see "the dryer"—two clothes lines outside the sliding glass doors. The world's slowest dryer: it takes two days for stuff to dry. This poses a bit of a washing schedule challenge. It's best to string wet stuff up in the morning to maximize what little sun filters in back there. I think I have this figured out though: run the machine when I go off to lift weights at the gym. This takes me about 90 mins within which time the machine finished, especially when on the "Quick" setting. My first try I started the machine after my workout while I hopped in the shower. Not only did I get the hot/cold water fluctuations but I ended up waiting two hours for the washer to finish. I must have used the wrong setting, but still, I've never seen a washing machine pull so many cycles. I think the best approach with this machine is "early and often". Do laundry early in the day and don't let the clothes pile up.

My office building at UAB

2010-04-28T07:25:00.005-04:00

I've had some issues with network connectivity, so thus far this is the only pic I've managed to upload (emailed from iPhone over wifi a couple of doors down from my office...never mind where I was :) Anyway, this is where I'm at, and should be pretty much every day for the duration. I saw on Facebook that an old college friend of mine is now living in Calgary. Which reminded me that I did a co-op semester there, happened to be during the 1988 Olympic winter games. And it struck me: being here in Barca is very similar to doing a co-op semester. Only 20 years later, ha ha :) Mind you, the co-op semester in Calgary would have been about 4 months, not just the one. I seem to have forgotten most of the details, however :) Gotta go catch the train back to town (about an hour commute each way). Tonight after dinner I'm going to head out to watch Barca v. Inter Milan—the semi-final match in the League of Champions. I'm told that around here everything stops when Barca plays. Which brings back another parallel memory: Barcelona, to me, is similar in many ways to Montreal. A large reason for that comparison is the cultural distinction the Catalans embrace as do the Quebecuois. Furthermore, Catalan, the language, is a kind of mixture of Spanish and French. So hearing them say "D'accord" for example, reminds me of Quebec. And the somewhat curious neural association (in my head) between Spanish and French (when I want to think and speak in Spanish, French bubbles up to the surface, it's really weird and somewhat annoying) also brings up the Montreal association. I feel like accenting everything I say with Tabarnacle! or one of my other favorites. I'll have to ask my friends here if they have their own colloquiusms.

Checking in on the sailboat

2010-04-25T08:48:00.008-04:00

Proof that I visited the sailboat at least once this year. The boat needs some work, here are some TO DO items I want to tackle when I get back from Spain:

new engine (maybe a Honda 9 HP, 4-stroke, electric start?)
new battery (old one's dead)
mooring line snubbers (get new ones or get rid of WestMarine ones?)
solar fan (old one stopped working, this is a must!)
oil lamp (I lost the glass for the current one, may as well replace it)

Those are the main things. Other than that, the boat needs cleaning and it needs its sails unfurled (undoubtedly a number of wasps have taken up residence). Other more long-range TO DO items include checking out the boat's electrical system, installing a wire bus (to clean up the wires), flexible antenna (replacing the car antenna that's in there now), putting in longer speaker cables, and installing the fan that's been sitting in a box for a few years now. I'd like to do more sailing this year, and split boating evenly between the sailboat and the motorboat so that Tippy II isn't used exclusively. Lake Keowee's nice and I'd like to take Pudgy out even if it's just for a barbeque lunch and some swimming.

Update at semester's end

2010-04-21T13:58:00.005-04:00

This is the last week of spring semester classes and the last week I'm home before flying off to Barcelona for 6 weeks. I was hoping to clear off everything on my TODO list so that I could spend the entire month of April working on code that I want to use in Barcelona as well as with the next bunch of REU (Research Experience for Undergraduate) students that are going to be inhabiting my lab for 8 weeks this summer. But of course as soon as I had cleared my list, a whole pile of stuff suddenly rushed in to fill the void, mainly the writing of 2 papers and 2 proposals. One paper didn't get done, the second did, following a late night of writing till 3am (resulting in the paper's on-time submission and a cold that set in immediately thereafter :P ) The 2 proposals also went out on time, with the second of the two coming down to the wire as well. I have a third one I'm working on presently, but I'll have to fine-tune that one remotely. At left is me wrestling with hardware that isn't working properly, but that we need to get going for an existing grant we're working on. The pic kind of reminds me of the work I did as a grad student over 10 years ago! I hate to leave stuff like this in inoperable condition, but time's run out.

Meanwhile at home, I knocked off stuff I had to do around the house, including bug spraying the house exterior and crawlspace, getting the oil changed on the truck, and installing the second garage door opener. The latter and a gig at Backstreets consumed two of three free weekends I had at home after returning from Austin. I haven't had much time to update the blog with anything else and the only pic that I think I managed to capture was one afternoon when driving back in a thunderstorm. You can't really see it very well in the pic, but there were sheets of rain coming down. It was a welcome rain actually, washing off green layers of pollen that had accumulated in the days before. It was like driving through a badly needed carwash. I should probably wash the car again before I leave as it's starting to look green again. Maybe I'll do that today as I have to split early and get my haircut—I tried leaving that to the last minute so that I won't have to get another one until I get back home. When I return I will have 5 REU students waiting for me in the lab and I'll already be a week behind!

Austin's Omni downtown

2010-03-21T20:06:00.003-04:00

Aspen skiing was great. Getting in and out of Aspen, however, was an adventure I would rather not repeat. Getting there we were delayed. Getting out also was no picnic. We knew there was a winter storm coming, but had no idea what kind of chaos it would cause. Most flights out of Aspen were canceled. We weren't sure about our flight, but the suggestion we got was to get out of Aspen by road. We rented an SUV for a small fortune, and I drove it 6 hrs to Denver. Later we found that our flight out of Aspen (to Chicago) had indeed been canceled and at the time we were also told that should that have happened, the chances of getting out of Aspen would be slim until about Tuesday. So from Denver we flew out to Chicago and spent the night at O'Hare. Not fun. We found two benches that we slept on, but I think I only managed about one hour's worth. The vacuum cleaner lady kept me up for what seemed like hours. The flight out was delayed by about twenty minutes by de-icing of the wings. They first (what looks like) steam off the wings and then apply this green goop that looks like anti-freeze. Once we got home it was a mad rush to get the cats out of "jail", and then home to pack. The next morning I flew out to Austin. This time I had to trouble with the flights, but I was lucky to have booked the flight and hotel way in advance. The flight was oversold by 8, and several people couldn't get on. The hotel I think is also booked solid, partially due to SXSW: South by Southwest, some kind of music festival that is just ending today. I missed most of it, but the shuttle driver told us that yesterday there were thousands on 6th street. I'm not sure what remains of it tonight, but I'm hungry and it's time to go out for dinner, so I'll find out. The conference starts bright and early tomorrow morning at 8:30.

Back to the Highlands

2010-03-21T19:53:00.004-04:00

This is I think one of my favorite lifts on the Highlands, although the runs that lead to it are all quite difficult. This is Temerity, and it's the lift that you take up after doing the bowl. On the last day I skied Soddbuster, a kind of steep chute that reminded me of a long version of the Soudan Coulouir on Blackcomb. What also interesting is that there are several runs that I had just found that are to the left of the chair (when looking up). They are all kind of hidden within trees and I think all of them have fairly interesting (and challenging) moguls. Below is a pic of Mushroom that I saw on the map but couldn't find immediately. I finally found it below where skiers get picked up by the cat to go to the bowl. The reason why I liked the Temerity chair, I think, is because it reminded me a lot of the old blue chair on Whistler. I don't think that the blue chair exists anymore. Last time we were there, the blue chair was replaced by something larger and faster. I dunno; that new lift, while faster, seemed to lack a certain "familiarity". I'm not sure how else to describe it, but Temerity had this feel to it. Maybe because it was somewhat slow and quiet. You felt like you were getting a well-deserved rest after getting through the tough terrain that you had to get through to get to.

Snowmass

2010-03-21T19:49:00.003-04:00

I don't think I took too many pics on Snowmass although it's a pretty decent mountain with lots of terrain. Sheer Bliss is a good chair with very good runs. Right near the top of this lift is the poma lift pictured above. They called it something other than poma lift, but that's the name I remember for this contraption. The terrain up there is some kind of ptarmagan territory, although I didn't see any of them. Actually, after all the buildup, the run down was rather uninteresting. Just this sort of flat road.

Inside the Highlands Bowl

2010-03-21T19:37:00.005-04:00

Inside the Highlands Bowl. At left is the shot I took after skiing down just about the first drop-in of the bow. I was then standing at the bottom of my run looking up at the rest of the drop-ins that one has to hike to to ski down. I'm too lazy to hike all that way (takes about 20 minutes I was told), but I've heard that "G-5" or "G-8" is worth the hike—that's the run where you can just make out where the skiers are. The shot at right is after I skied down a bit, further away from the bowl. The ski-out is fairly nice, with somewhat flat moguls that you go through to get to the cat road that takes you to the lift.

The pic below is of the run I took down into the bowl. There was one other guy after me, which gives you an idea of scale. I'm looking straight up, so you can see that the run is somewhat steep, but not too treacherous. The snow this year was much better than last year as it was a bit colder so not as slushy.

Here we go again

2010-03-20T08:42:00.001-04:00

The return trip looks worse than the outbound leg. This time a winter blizzard came down from BC and arrived in Aspen the day of departure. The Aspen-Chicago flight was cancelled and anticipating that I decided on renting an SUV to make the 6 hr drive out to Denver. The flight made it out to Chicago where we spent the night sleeping on airport seats. Now we're waiting on the flight home which is already delayed 19 minutes. Why? Maybe due to the storm that caught up to us. It is now snowing in Chicago and de-icing is required.

Highlands Bowl

2010-03-18T19:29:00.004-04:00

Despite United's best efforts, we finally arrived in Aspen and set about getting our ski gear (rentals) and settling in to the hotel (crappy wifi connection so I'll have to write more later). We lucked out with weather again and again and got 4 straight days of fantastic sunshine. At left is a pic of the Highlands bowl and the only way of getting there: by snowcat. I didn't see that stick in the frame, so it looks odd, sorry about that, but I had to hurry and get my skis off before boarding the cat. This one was full, kneeling room only. The best way I can describe the cat ride is like getting on the plane for a skydive: kinda smelly due to the exhaust but exhilarating because of the expectation. I dunno if others got this, but just about every time I boarded the plane for a skydive, I got drymouth from the excitement. As Patrick Swayze said in Point Break: "100% pure adrenaline, other guys snort for it, jab a vein for it, and all you gotta do is jump". Here, all you gotta do is get on the cat. More later...

Grand Junction

2010-03-14T14:08:00.001-04:00

Too windy to land in Aspen, so they put us on a bus at Grand Junction.

Aspen Do-over

2010-03-14T03:46:00.002-04:00

That should be a picture of beautiful Aspen...instead it's a shot of the microwave indicating the time early this morning. United screwed up yesterday delaying our outgoing flight by 3+ hours (we didn't hang around long enough to see when they actually few out). Since we had missed our flight we would have had to spend the night in Chicago. And because of course it wasn't United's fault (I heard "ATC", "weather", a litany of the standard B.S.) we would have had to pay for the hotel. Since I'm already eating the cost of the first night's stay in Aspen I decided to just come back home and spend the night here. So this morning it's a do-over for the incompetents at United. Let's see if they can get us to Aspen this time. I am thoroughly amazed at how consistently incompetent this airline is. Unfortunately I could not find anything else flying into Aspen. Next time I'll do everything I can to avoid United. Anyone reading this, please join me in boycotting United. I really think they want to go out of business. And I think they should.

"Cat towers"

2010-03-04T12:16:00.003-05:00

I snapped this pic this morning as part of my (winter) morning routine. The routine involves sending the cats outside for the day. In the winter they don't always want to go. Harley, the black and white one, hisses and tries to bite me. She's gotten better about the biting, but she'll still express her displeasure by hissing. Even when she's in that little bed of hers. When she's there, in the "cat towers", I just grab the whole thing and she gets a "magic carpet ride" to the door. I sometimes sing "Up, up, and away, on a magic carpet ride". Sidney, the grey one, clues in as to what's going on and she jumps down and runs under the bed. I then have to employ the "angry cat mom" technique of grabbing her by the scruff of her neck to pull her out. Funny thing that—I guess they retain this from kittenhood, but they still appear to respond the same way as when mama cat would grab them this way: they kind of go limp. Sidney even curls her tail under. When the weather gets warmer, both cats look forward to the outdoors, so in a matter of weeks I think some of this behavior will subside and in fact they'll start meowing to be let out.

At the WSBF studio

2010-02-26T18:36:00.002-05:00

The pic is from our live session last Friday at WSBF, Clemson's radio station. We played a two-hour show from 7pm-9pm that included about an hour and twenty minutes of us playing (all originals save for one cover that usually play as our opening number), followed by about 20 minutes of interview with the band. I think we played well despite the fact that we couldn't hear the singer. Usually when we play gigs we have monitors (speakers) through which we can hear what the audience hears. This is useful for keeping place within songs (e.g., "is this is the first verse or the second?") as well as for anticipating changes. (Having just seen Michael J. Fox at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics' closing ceremonies reminds me of what he says to the band in Back to the Future: "Try to keep up and watch for the changes" :) My strategy was to keep an eye on our front man, basically trying to lip-read what he was singing. It was a pretty fun gig, and I think we may end up with recordings of the songs—maybe we'll cut a CD, call it "The WSBF Session" or something :)

A Dump of Snow

2010-02-14T10:10:00.004-05:00

Here's a shot I took at about 3am, the morning of Feb.13. I'd just come in from playing a gig at Backstreets. It started snowing around 1pm and I don't think it let up till about 12 hours later. It dumped anywhere from 1-4 inches I'm guessing. They forecast 1-2, but it looked more like 4 to me. People around here freak out when it snows—they buy up all the milk and bread and they have no clue how to drive in the stuff. The next day we saw two cars in ditches. I drove the truck in 4WD and had no problems. About the only issue I have with this kind of weather is with water pooling in the garage. Seems the builders graded the garage floor with a slant towards the house. When the snow melts off the vehicles the water flows towards the house wall. So at 3am I had to pull out the car and sweep out as much water as I could. Today, only 2 days later, most of the snow's gone already. It doesn't last long around here.

Wet Winter

2010-02-14T09:43:00.006-05:00

It's been a wet winter this year, raining quite often, sort of like...Vancouver! (Vancvouer's on the brain I guess because of the Olympics—we're watching excellent footage in high def.) I think I heard it's an el niño year. But that's ok, it fills up the lake, which is a good thing, as it allows us to canoe back there. The cats still haven't summoned enough courage to hop into the canoe as we cast off, but it looked like they were thinking about it this time. Instead, they elect to sit on the dock and wait for us to come back. And being winter, it's fairly cold out so we don't stay out very long.

The other activity that the dock affords us is sitting on it in camping chairs. I don't recall where we got them, but they're the kind that have built-in leg rests and cup holders. We make use of both features, sometimes bringing down a cooler with beers to have something to put into the cup holders. It's more fun to do in shorts and sandals than it is presently in winter coats. But it's still nice to sit there and look out on our pond. And if you look closely, you'll see at least one parachute out in the distance over the trees. They're from the Flying Tigers DZ at the Oconee County airport, which is fairly close. I think they're nuts for jumping in February. It's got to be pretty cold up at altitude. I remember my biggest complaint from when I used to jump in the cold was how thin my gloves were. It's really cold on the hands. I bet they're not going to 10,500 this time of year but just doing hop-and-pops. Anyway, they're fun to watch.

This shot is the view of the dock from the corner of our deck. It's nice to see the water from up here. In drought years it was disappointing to look out in this direction and just see meadow. I just hope the Corps keeps up the level through summer. I think the lake level right now is about the same height as it was when we put in the dock back in 2003. Since then I think we've seen two droughts, the first broken by remnants of hurricane Ivan (if I remember correctly), the second possibly the worst drought we've ever had when the Corps let the water drop I think almost 20 feet that's just ending right now. I think the Corps was expecting tropical storms that never came. We'll see what they do with the lake this year. Hopefully it'll be a good year for boating.

Wireless Headphones

2010-01-21T16:37:00.003-05:00

My wireless (Bluetooth) headphones just came in today. They are Sony's DR-BT160AS model and they worked with my iPhone out of the box, almost. Along with having to pair these with the iPhone (not a big deal), I had to learn a couple more acronyms: A2DP (Advanced Audio Distribution Profile) and AVRCP (Audio Video Remote Control Profile), both profiles of the Bluetooth networking standard, as far as I understand it, along with the HFP (Hands Free Profile). What these mean: HFP means you can use the headphones in "headset" mode, for talking on the phone. HFP, as I found out by pairing with my workstation, is lower quality audio (monoaural) than when using the headphones in "headphones" mode. Presumably, then, A2DP basically means transmission of a higher quality stereo signal via bluetooth. So what's AVRCP? This would allow the headphones to control playback of the iPhone's iPod with the next/previous buttons beyond just the volume up/down and play/stop. Which just means that while I can play/stop music and adjust volume, I can't skip tracks. Why only this limited AVRCP support I don't know, but as it often happens, hopefully Apple will add this in in the next software update...as for me, the next evolution of skiing with music is here: no more wires, woo hoo! Can't wait to try this out...it sounds good but it also means that I have to haul around yet another charger!

January Forest Walk

2010-01-21T11:57:00.007-05:00

This past weekend was unseasonably warm, reaching 70 F at one point. Almost like spring making an early appearance. It was short-lived unfortunately as it's dropping back down to the 40s today, accompanied by rain. While somewhat unpleasant, we need the rain to fill up the lake. As you see in the pics, right now the water is down again. Although this prevents canoeing, it does allow excursions over the beaver dam to the spit of land between what we call the boat and the tree channels. The tree channel, what Harley is looking at in the pic at right, is much deeper than the the boat channel, which is at present pretty much dry. It's amazing to think that we were able to take our power boat down this channel one year (and one year only). To get to the spit of land, we first cross a small creek into which someone has dumped logs that Harley used to cross in the first pic. In the middle you can just make out Sidney climbing a tree located in the spit of land. I think they sometimes use these trees to get an overview of the land below as this is the "land of the tall grasses", wherein they're forced to hop over taller sections or weave through tunnels presumably made by the beaver. At bottom you can see both cats making their way back towards the beaver dam. Sidney is behind Harley somewhere; she's usually more difficult to spot as she blends in better with her surroundings.

New Garage Door Motor

2010-01-17T20:45:00.014-05:00

Time to do some handyman stuff today. Our old garage door motor (still hanging from the ceiling in the pic) crapped out this weekend (a holiday weekend—I suppose that's good as it gave me an extra day to do this, although I really didn't want to as I had just replaced the printed circuit boards a couple of years ago to be able to use our vehicles' built-in HomeLink garage door buttons). If your vehicle is equipped with HomeLink then you likely have garage door buttons built in to your rear-view mirror (like in our car) or overhead console (like in our truck). So when buying a new one (lying in the box on the floor) I made sure it supported HomeLink.

The new motor with its rail and direct drive assembled on the floor. Our old one was a chain-drive unit. At the store they had three types of units: chain drive (cheapest), direct (screw) drive (middle-of-the-road), and belt drive (top-of-the-line). I'm not sure why belt drive was the most expensive. I'm pretty sure that belt drive is better than chain drive, but I also thought that direct drive topped them all. At least that's how I think it is with motorbikes (my first bike was a chain drive, my Harley has belt). The main reason for my thinking of direct drive's superiority is that it does not need tensioning—both chains and belts will need to be tensioned somehow. The screw, on the other hand, just turns in place while the little carriage attached to the door gets pushed/pulled as the screw turns. What was interesting about this setup was how it got connected—via this coupling and sleeve. Not very hard to assemble at all.

Ok, here are two shots, one from when I thought I had hung the new motor correctly, and the next from its final position. See the difference? I botched my first attempt because I followed the instructions to the letter—install the motor and rail lined up with the door center. Wrong...the door center lacks bracket supports to which the door J-arm needs to connect to. Just off-center, however, there is a metal bracket that even has pre-drilled holes for various garage door motor manufacturers. Sure enough, when I looked more closely there were holes pre-drilled for Genie brackets. The center of the door is quite flimsy and after I had first screwed in the bracket I was really afraid that I could rip out the screws by hand. So I was quite relieved to find the metal support, even though it was off-center. And that's how it was set up initially, so it made sense. But, that meant that I had to reposition the whole damn thing a second time. Oh well, once I had that metal cross-member hung from the ceiling at the right distance, repositioning the head unit a couple of inches wasn't a big deal. So at right you see the final installation. Now of course, the HomeLink still doesn't work! So I'm back to square one—how to reprogram the vehicles so they can actually use the stupid garage door opener? I'll try tomorrow...

UPDATE: The next day I google'd for the solution and found it (how did we live without google before? Or the internet for that matter—a large number of manufacturers' manuals can be found online these days). The trick is to press buttons 2 and 3 simultaneously and hold for a few seconds. The lights flash and what I think happens is that the HomeLink unit either resets itself or gets put into learn mode. I guess it doesn't reset itself because button 1 still worked and all I wanted to do was program button 2. After pressing 2 and 3 simultaneously, press and hold 2. Wait for that to blink. Then go up to the motor head unit and press its button. Then press (and hold? I don't remember now!) button 2 in the vehicle. The slow blink turns to a rapid blink, I guess to let you know that it's detected the motor head's signal. Of course the best part is when button 2 is pressed again and the damn door actually starts moving! Anyway, both doors are working once again and hopefully this post will remind me how to install the replacement motor unit for when the other old chain-drive unit conks out.

Leidseplein

2010-01-11T06:52:00.005-05:00

I took some pics on the way back to Leidseplein last night. At left is the Grasshopper where I had dinner a couple of nights ago—the rather dismal T-bone. The place is a large three-story building with the restaurant on the top floor and bars on the two floors below. I wouldn't really recommend this place. I should have stuck to pub grub.

Beyond the Grasshopper is a maze of little streets with numerous bars and Amsterdam's famous coffee shops, like the one you see here. I had tea there the other day. Looking on the map, I think this maze of streets extends out quite a bit. Behind it (east of it maybe) is the red-light district. While I was waiting for my brother to show up at the train station (his train either to or from Frankfurt was delayed, I don't recall which now, in any case I think his return trip was much better: the combination of ICE (Inter-City Express) to Frankfurt followed by the TGV to Saarbrucken), I walked around this maze of streets and almost got lost. Good to have a GPS handy. In my case I used OffMaps on my iPhone which doesn't cost me anything to use so long as I remember to pre-load the right map tiles at the right resolution.

Leidseplein is a small area with bars and restaurants that's slightly farther away from the main downtown area that is close to the central rail station. Both the Paradiso and Bourbon Street are in this area. The pic shows the Irish pub where I had the salmon. Behind me is where the Bourbon Street is located.

Last night a three-piece band played at Bourbon Street. They were pretty good, with excellent drumming on a couple of Santana numbers. Kind of reminded me of Sparkling Apple that we used to see in Delta, back in the day. I had a couple of pints here and then decided to pack it in around midnight. The bar I think was open till about 4, so I thought that all the trams would also be running as late. Oops! Turns out I missed the last tram by about 20 minutes and had to hike it back to the hotel on foot. Only about a 20-30 minute walk, so it wasn't too bad. Just before I left I noticed this rather funny piece of artwork on the bar wall that I don't remember seeing the night before. It's the Rolling Stones Geriatric Tour poster :)

Amsterdam

2010-01-10T13:52:00.022-05:00

Saturday morning I hopped on an SAS flight to Amsterdam. I booked myself a room at a fairly inexpensive hotel (Hotel Bellevue) that is right across the street from the central train station (the blue dot in the GPS map shows approximately where I am—I got upgraded to a double room that is quite nice). Last time I was in Amsterdam we only had a couple of hours to walk around—only enough time for a pint, and then it was back on the train to Schiphol. So this time I decided I wanted a slightly longer layover so that I could explore more of the city and also finally get to gaze at the paintings of the Dutch masters. Saturday night my brother came in on the train and we went to a place called the Paradiso, where we took in a pretty good blues show (the Paradiso is supposed to be one of the best places around here for live music—kind of like Greenville's Handlebar or Vancouver's Orpheum I think it was called, or was it the Roxy, I don't recall now, but it's the place with the bouncy wooden floor where I saw Jeff Healey—it was the Commodore Ballroom, thanks M!). Afterward we went to Bourbon Street, another live blues place, where I intend to return to tonight (it's just a tram ride away, so getting to and back is quite convenient). Tonight, as in Copenhagen, I had dinner at a pub and ordered salmon (both times). And both times the salmon was excellent. Some kind of gastro pub thing going on. Meanwhile last night's T-bone steak here was rather dismal (my brother's right on this point: don't order steak in Europe :) (I'm looking forward to Austin, TX in a couple of months, I wonder if McClusky's is still there.) I have a couple of hours to go before they open up Bourbon Street so I think I'll walk around and take some pictures of the area around here, the party zone...

Today I went to the Rijksmuseum where the Dutch masters' works are shown, in particular Rembrandt and Vermeer's famous paintings (e.g., The Nightwatch and the Kitchen Maid; the former is huge, reminding me of Matejko's Battle of Grunwald). Their painting style (along with the Vedutismo, e.g., Canaletto) is my favorite. Rubens is also quite good (and the collection in Munich is worth seeing). Unfortunately, they don't let you take pictures in the museums I visited, with the second being the Van Gogh. I honestly don't see why Van Gogh was exulted to such high status—personally I think his paintings are rubbish. He lathered on the paint so that some of it was so crusty, it looked like some kid had squeezed out colored toothpaste onto canvas. One or two of his paintings were ok, and they certainly were more "vibrant" than the realists' (e.g., looking at them the paintings had a type of moving quality to them, akin to a scintillating grid type of illusion). The museum background on the artist stated that Van Gogh resisted and refused formal training. Not that I'm an expert, but having now walked through several art galleries, I would have to say that in general the lack of training is quite evident in Van Gogh's work. He didn't seem to have a good grasp of lighting, nor were any of his portraits really convincing. In my view my guess as to why he was so "troubled" in life is because he was a failure—as far as I could tell from the paintings' descriptions hardly any really sold well, until perhaps after he shot himself in the chest and died two days later. Maybe that was the only way he could get the paintings to sell? :) The best portrait of Van Gogh that I saw there was not a self-portrait but rather by one of his friends. The best part of the Van Gogh museum (for me) was the Alfred Stevens exhibition. I've never heard of Alfred Stevens before, but his paintings are superb, mainly of well-to-do femmes fragiles in luxurious outfits. And the way he painted those outfits, the various types of cloth and materials was truly remarkable. Check out the two pics below from the museum's website—notice how he painted the cloth folds for example. The only disappointment was the incomplete panorama of "The History of the Century", with portraits of French artists and authors, painted by Stevens with Henri Gervex. There were only two sections of it on display whereas I think originally it was a 360 degree painting that was done for some world exhibition. I don't recall all the facts about it now, only that I wished the whole thing would have survived for us to see.

ITU Copenhagen

2010-01-10T13:33:00.004-05:00

On Friday I visited the IT University in Copenhagen and acted as one of three opponents to a PhD candidate. He gave an hour long talk and then I and the other two opponents posed questions for about another two hours. After the defense, we deliberated in that little hanging room to the right of the pic. Afterward we went out for dinner followed by a couple of drinks.

The day before I walked around Copenhagen and visited the National Museum of Fine Art and the National Museum of Denmark. The art museum was quite good, with a large collection of realist paintings, my preferred type of art. The national museum was also excellent with Denmark's history dating back to the stone age! There were oak coffins with skeletons that still had holes in skulls from trepanning operations, a large number of flint ax heads, then going up through bronze, iron, all the way up to 2000. Great stuff. Of course I felt obliged to go find the little mermaid as well—kind of a Copenhagen must-see, I think.

When I wasn't walking I got around town via the metro. Coincidentally enough, it's very similar to Vancouver's SkyTrain, on which I was just on a week or two before Copenhagen. Copenhagen's metro is similar in size with just two lines, and it too pops up from underground like at this station at the ITU. My hotel in Copenhagen was close to one of the central downtown stations and the morning when I left I also took the metro to the airport. Most convenient, especially since it runs 24 hrs a day, which I think Vancouver's SkyTrain should do as well.

Copenhagen

2010-01-06T14:39:00.001-05:00

Højbro Plads. Looking at The Dubliner, an Irish pub (what else? :)

New Shoes

2010-01-04T17:04:00.002-05:00

New set of Contis...not cheap :P I should make a note of the exact model so that I can order them myself next time. They are: Continental ContiProContact SSR 225/45 R17, same tire all the way around.

Birthday lunch

2009-12-28T14:57:00.004-05:00

Yesterday we went out for my brother-in-law's wife's birthday lunch. We went to Maurya, an Indian restaurant on Broadway. My brother-in-law's wife picked the place, partially I think because it featured a lunch buffet. Now normally "Indian" and "buffet" to me would suggest crap food (as I don't like curry and buffets can have pretty crappy food). Here, however, the food was truly fantastic. Not overly spicy-hot, but very flavorful. I can't remember all the dishes I had now, but I do recall the Tandoori chicken was my favorite. The shot below has most of what was offered—the cooked spinach was very good (creamy) although I don't think it needed the baby corn in it, the rice and beef something-or-other (like a stroganoff) was also delicious. I don't know how expensive it was but definitely a place I'd go back to. The only gastronomical disappointment this trip was not being able to go to Tojo's and doing the omakase. Next time, perhaps.

A night out on the town

2009-12-28T14:39:00.004-05:00

On Canada's Boxing Day (Dec.26), the biggest shopping day of the year I think, I went to Oak Ridge mall via the SkyTrain. Actually all the time here I've been making good use of Vancouver's Light Rapid Transit (LRT). Where I'm staying is situated right by one of the stations which makes moving around the city quite convenient. At Oak Ridge I wanted to buy myself an iPhone, to replace the one I lost in Barcelona. I thought maybe it'd be a touch cheaper here with the Canada/US exchange. Nope, Apple wanted $799 for the model I want and wouldn't let me leave the store without locking it to a Canadian service provider. So there goes that idea. I'll have to wait till I'm back in the States. The wireless bluetooth headphones I want to pair to the iPhone were also more expensive than what I could get them for online—that's going to be the next evolution in my skiing music system. Some 20 years ago I used to ski with a bulky Sony Walkman tape deck strapped to my chest. The thing was heavy and difficult to control (buttons were inside this case; flipping tapes was a hassle). Currently I ski with one of those postage stamp-sized iTunes shuffles and wired headphones. Pretty decent and lightweight system. However, I met a British guy at lunch who had an iPhone and bluetooth headphones—no wires! "The way of the future," he said, and I agree! I've already ordered the headphones. They should pair up with my laptop as well which should mean wireless music on my next flight to Europe.

After Oak Ridge I went down to Richmond to go out for sushi with my brother. I should have taken pics of the excellent sashimi we had but we ate it up so fast there wasn't time. I should probably take note of the sashimi I like: uni (I think that's what it was, the creamy urchin), tako (ocotpus), and the giant clam, but I forget its Japanese name. I tend to like the gummy stuff. I should have also ordered mackarel but my brother said he didn't like it. Oh, one other thing was the quail egg in warm sake. Very tasty. On the way to where I'm staying I decided to keep going on the SkyTrain to Yaletown to get to the Yale, a hotel downtown with a decent live rhythm and blues bar at street level. I had checked their schedule beforehand so I knew there'd be a band called Mud Dog playing but I've never heard of them. They reminded me of Steve Earle (e.g., the song Copperhead Road). They were pretty decent and the harmonica player was outstanding!

Blackcomb

2009-12-24T11:49:00.003-05:00

The second day skiing was sort of the reverse of the first: ski Whistler first, then hop on over to Blackcomb. Part of the reason was that both days the only sunny slope that we could see was Blackcomb's 7th Heaven. It seemed to be the only sunny patch on both hills both days. And it looked like it had some moguls on it. So back on the Peak 2 Peak, but the other direction this time. I took a snap of some of the factoids about the gondola. In case you can't read them in the image:

World's longest unsupported (free) span for a lift of this kind
World's highest lift of its kind
World's longest continuous lift system

It runs at 7.5 m/s and takes 11 mins to cross the 3 km (1.8 mi) span. The haul rope (46 mm in diameter) is 8,850 m long. The shot at bottom is from Blackcomb's 7th Heaven, back towards Whistler. But I blew this shot because Whistler is to the right. I should have panned to the right to show Whistler and the two bowl chairs, but I was trying to capture the sun. The sun is there, and it was sunnier than the picture suggests.

Whistler

2009-12-24T10:59:00.013-05:00

Ah skiing at Whistler/Blackcomb... Started off going up Blackcomb. The first day mainly in "socked-in" conditions, in a cloud most of the day, with the sun peeking at times. I don't know Blackcomb well as I used to prefer Whistler. The intention was to ski some runs and then get to Whistler via the Peak 2 Peak, a modern marvel of engineering.

The gondola between the two peaks is unique. A touch creepy, suspended at about 1,500 above the valley floor, but actually very convenient—you don't have to ski down to the bottom to get to the other mountain. Which is good because you don't have to ski through all the "sitting ducks" on the flats near the bottom. That should be particularly handy in the spring when the snow at the bottom gets slushy.

Skied Whistler the remainder of the day. The Harmony Bowl, the preferred ski area back in the day, has changed drastically. The old blue chair (a double!) is long gone, replaced by a high-speed quad that goes up to where skiers used to hike, the top of the bowl. I suppose that's a good thing, but on the other hand it eliminates the old blue lift line, which used to be an excellent mogul run. Added to this chair, there was yet another chair, the Symphony chair was situated way back in what looked like a new back bowl behind Harmony. We never got to ski there really since the chair, while running, wasn't allowing people on as the mechanism at the top kept freezing. Yeah, it was cold! And your truly decided not to wear a sweater, thinking that spring skiing attire was perfectly acceptable in December. D'oh! Froze my butt off, particularly since we couldn't find good mogul runs to warm up on. No mogul runs on Whistler? Strange. One of the highlights, however, was the Dave Murray downhill, pictured here. This is the ending point of a pretty hairy run they've set up for the 2010 olympics. Yes, I skied down the same run that we'll see the athletes ski down in February. And I've gained a new respect for these guys. How they can fly down this run at their speeds boggles the mind. I can't wait to see them on this one part, that seemed nearly vertical to me. It wasn't long but it dropped right into a flat spot, compressing the snot out of your legs. There was also a bunch of netting all set up for the skiers. I bet there'll be a few wipeouts.

Dinner at Araxi

2009-12-22T21:37:00.008-05:00

Last night we had dinner at Araxi, the high-end place that we heard of on Hell's Kitchen, as it is the place where that show's winner will go to work early 2010. It was just down the road from where we're staying (Mountainside Lodge), a couple of buildings away from both Whistler and Blackcomb gondolas.

Here are my two dishes: grilled octopus followed by venison. The octopus was tender and not as tough as when I made it. I wonder what the secret is, must be longer boiling time. The venison was really good. It doesn't look like much but it was actually just the right amount and everything was prepared really well. Even the parsnip on which the venison pieces sat. Parsnip? I've never heard of it, but I really liked it and look forward to trying to make it at home. It's just vegetable I think and hopefully won't be too difficult to prepare. Tonight we scale down the choice of restaurant and go to a BC favorite, The Keg. It's a chain but I like it. Looking forward to a nice steak after a full day of skiing.

Barcelona Home

2009-12-14T21:58:00.004-05:00

I never updated the blog upon returning from Barcelona. Part of the reason is that I've been particularly busy this semester with a large number of projects happening all at the same time. Last week (last week of school) I had two out-of-town visitors, right in the middle of final exams. Not the best timing, but then again a whole bunch of other deadlines all piled up at the same time. ETRA papers were due, including reviews of a dozen or so papers. I submitted three long papers and three short papers. Now I'm working on completing two more papers for submission to Graphics Interface. Deadline two days from now. Five long papers in about as many weeks? Crazy! Anyway, back to Barcelona...beside meeting up with my brother and my professional activities, another mission objective was to scope out an apartment for my stay there next May. I ended up reserving what you see in the picture—it's billed on the Barcelona Home web page as "an apartment in the middle of a shopping area". I went there via metro to check it out. I should make a note to myself: the web page states it's by the metro station Espanya, but actually I think it may be closer to Hostafrancs. Right by that metro station is where I saw some of the stores that I think I can use for buying basic supplies like groceries. I've also started putting up some recipes that I would like to try while living there. Besides this I guess I should also start assembling music to bring with me. Of the recent bands that I've found, I really like these:

Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters (blues, mainly instrumental)
Los Straitjackets (surf, also mainly instrumental)
The Blue Hawaiians (surf)
The Blasters (fast blues/rockabilly)

The Blasters are the latest band that I heard on Rasio Paradise. It's one of those rare finds where the entire album is really good. All of the above albums are like this. Surely stuff I'll have to bring with me to Barcelona next year. And a pair of mini speakers...

The Water is Back

2009-12-03T21:42:00.003-05:00

The other day it rained all day and that brought the water back filling up the lake. Our dock is floating once again. Even the rear floats are floating. I don't think it's done that since several years ago. For the past two or three years it's been sitting on dry land, so it's a real thrill to see this view. And right now in late fall, with the leaves down, we can see quite a bit of water from our kitchen door windows. It's really nice to see the sky reflected in the water. The view below is from our dock just after sunset. It's nice to be looking at water instead of a meadow.

Meal Plan

2009-11-16T11:40:00.006-05:00

This week I decided to try my hand at a few of my favorite recipes. On Saturday I made our homemade pizza, Pizza Rustica with Wild Nettles. I found this recipe in the back of a Coastal Living magazine issue. It looked interesting, save for the wild nettles. I don't know what those are or where to get them so we usually substitute kale. This is a type of "pizza bianco", or a pizza that lacks that the traditional layer of tomato paste. Instead, this particular pizza has as its base layer a paste of roasted garlic. It is then topped with a finely diced red pepper flake and thyme leaf seasoning, followed by four cheeses along with the chopped up kale. I highly recommend this recipe along with the accompanying pizza dough recipe, which I also made the same day. I'm pretty slow in the kitchen, so it seemed like the whole thing took me 3 hrs to make, but it was well worth it.

Sunday was such a nice day that I thought, why not barbeque something? Later this week I'm making Gordon Ramsay's Beef Wellington, so I wanted something other than steak. Some time ago I came across this Salmon on a Plank recipe in an in-flight magazine. I think I've written it up in this blog some time before. From another previous BBQ experiment with octopus, I had grilled Belgian endives, that I thought would go well with salmon. Unfortunately I'd forgotten where I saw that recipe for grilled endives, but luckily I found something similar in Mario Batali's Italian Grill.

Batali recommended Endive with Marjoram and Provatura on the grill. It looked simple enough, I happened to have the cheese (Provolone) left over from the pizza and we had a lemon. It seems like it's just a basic vinaigrette that is used to coat the endives before going on the grill. I was actually surprised that Batali didn't suggest a pinch of red pepper flakes to the vinaigrette, so I added it thinking he'd just forgotten. The cheese atop the now tangy endives combined really well and balanced out the sweet spice rub on the fish. My only trouble with this dish is that the fish takes way longer to cook on the grill than what the recipe suggests (more than double the time I find). My timing was a bit off so I had to hold warm the endives in the mircowave. Seems kind of lame but it didn't seem to spoil them; they still had enough of a crunch. Pretty good, simple dish in all, the pic (my presentation) doesn't really do it justice I'm afraid.

Warm November weekend

2009-11-16T11:23:00.006-05:00

This past weekend was especially warm for November (went up to 75F) and particularly notable for the return of the water in our lake. The remnants of tropical storm Ida dumped about 4-8 inches of water over a two-day period, resulting in about a foot of water topping off the lake at 660 ft, its "full pond" level! We haven't had the lake at full pond for what, 3 years now? Last year it was about 15 feet below, precluding us from ever launching our powerboat the entire year. This year we had the boat out but almost had to pull it out due to decreasing lake levels. Luckily we had a fairly wet early fall which allowed us to keep the boat in till just past Halloween. Now, with Ida's contribution, our dock is floating (yes, floating!) on a foot of water, for the first time in a long time. The water has actually submerged the beaver dam behind the house allowing me to canoe out to the lake (Corey missed out, attending the SuperComputing conference).

I'm home alone this week but luckily I was only given one gardening-related task, and that is watering the whatever-those-leafy-plants are underneath the deck. I also took a pic of the grass germination, thinking that Corey might like to see that. I also took the leafblower out and cleared the deck as it was starting to accumulate. I did a couple of other things around the house, but mainly I've been focusing on the meal plan and figuring out what to cook and how to do it. That and of course taking the cats out for walks in the forest. Below is a pic of Sidney finding something that must have been particularly odiferous. She rolled around in it for quite some time. I think Harley later found it as well. Lucky for me the scent was detectable only by the feline proboscis and not mine. Mine's a little stuffed up by a cold. Luckily it must be a low-grade variant because it's not too debilitating, only just slightly annoying.

Shoring up the foundation

2009-11-16T11:11:00.003-05:00

The above pic is of our eastern wall, as seen from within our crawlspace. Back in August I happened to notice that a supporting concrete block column had its top block tilted such that it was no longer supporting the main beam on which the house sits. This was partially due to the sinkhole that formed behind the column and partially due to the side wall having sunk into the ground signified by the large fissure in the block and brick. You could see the outside light through this fissure, which clearly was not a good sign. As one of my friends used to say, "you could see large sums of money stuck here and we'd need a professional crew to come out and yank it out for us" :) Yeah, you could clearly see that the repair work would run into the thousands. I don't have a pic of the leaning column, but the pic above is of the finished job. It took the crew about three trips to get all this done. First, they noticed that our builder hadn't used a wide enough foundation so that they could not sink down the steel support jacks to lift the house up from the inside. So they had to come back to dig outside the house to install these metal girders beneath which they could put in the jacks to hoist the house. In doing so they cracked the sewer drain pipe and shifted the wall such that there was a noticeable 2-3 inch offset between the lifted wall and the wall above (that luckily hadn't caved in yet). So, on their third visit, they sunk in these anchors about 5 feet outside the house, then connected those to the anchors you see in the pic. There are large nuts on these anchors so that we can tighten up the anchor system in the case of the wall shifting in further into the crawlspace. In the end, I think they did a decent job of fixing this potentially disastrous foundation problem. Glad that's over!

Laptop reconfig

2009-11-13T03:54:00.002-05:00

In getting ready for my upcoming trip to Barcelona, I decided on trying to dual-boot my MacBook Pro so that I wouldn't have to bring two laptops with me. I need a Windows machine to run a portable eye tracker that I have on loan that I'm going to demo over there. After numerous re-installs and false starts, I think I finally have a winning combination: Windows 7 (32-bit) with OS X Leopard (10.5.8). However, I set up the dual-boot partitions and am using the Windows drivers from the Snow Leopard (10.6) DVD. I was hoping that I could switch over to Snow Leopard and just go with that, but that upgrade broke too many things that I need so I had to roll back to 10.5.8. Similarly with Windows—I first went with XP. After getting that going, following a multitude of Windows Updates to SP3 et al, XP crapped out in insisting on installing some SQL Server service pack...over, and over, and over again. I finally got fed up with it and thought why not try Windows 7. I first tried the 64-bit version, but that crapped out the eye tracking software (wrong driver). So, a clean re-install once again, this time with the 32-bit version. The screenshot above captures one of many frustrations in doing the lengthy install—occasionally (and there are more than one of these occasions) everything just sort of blanks out while Windows is "processing" something. I swear it seems the only improvements Microsoft ever implements are aesthetic, meanwhile, their underlying OS can never do anymore than 1 job at a time. So much for "multi-tasking", IMO Windows still can't. I wish they would just throw in the towel on their ancient DOS-based OS and switch to a Unix-based "enginge" under the hood, like Apple did. But to be fair, the Mac isn't without its frustrations, either. Snow Leopard, Apple's 64-bit OS isn't all that ready for prime time either. Or at least the stuff that I use (fink) hasn't really caught up to it. Or maybe I'm behind (I still use Qt 3.3). Anyway, I had to clean install that side of the MacBook as well, and re-installing all the fink stuff takes about as many hours as re-installing Windows (maybe longer even because fink has to compile everything from source). Hopefully by the end of today I'll be back to where I was a couple of days ago with the new tracker, as seen below.

NWA flights to YVR: how's that merger coming along?

2009-10-05T09:56:00.002-04:00

I'm trying to book a flight to YVR for Christmas...maybe I'm trying to do this too early? Maybe I should abandon attempting to do it via NWA? I'm not sure what their problem is, but it's pretty frustrating. They offer tantalizingly low fares ($374 per person), but when I click on the suggested itineraries, I either get an error or a message stating that that itinerary is no longer available. I've tried numerous approaches, varying dates and times of departure, several airports including Charlotte (CLT), Asheville (AVL), and Greenville-Spartanburg (GSP). The latter is the most convenient but seems to cost $100-$200 more for the convenience. ATL is a mess, I'd rather avoid having to fly through there. CLT is nice and I wouldn't mind driving up there and the itineraries offered are pretty decent...flying through Cincinnati (CVG), Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP), or Salt Lake City (SLC). I'd like as few hops as possible, with a decent time of departure (e.g., noon-ish). Some of the combinations look really good, every one I select comes up as no longer available. Which is why I thought the screenshot at left was pretty funny: eventually I managed to blank out the entire date adjacency grid except for that tantalizingly low but unavailable fare. It could be the NWA/Delta merger, but even Delta for similarly low fares comes back with "We're sorry. The fare you chose just sold out. See our lowest available fare below." Give it another week maybe? I'll keep looking at this and see how things change, but at the moment it's pretty laughable.

The illusive ellipse

2009-09-26T09:58:00.008-04:00

Well, it took me a while, but I finally got my ellipse fitting code working. And I couldn't have done it without Google. I've no idea anymore how research could have been done before the advent of the Internet and more importantly search engines. You'll see what I mean as I explain the picture. The pic contains two ellipses. The first, the one in white is the reference, or known, ellipse. In other words, I specified its quadratic equation and am just drawing it. Then, I also randomly pick points on the ellipse and use those to sample the original ellipse and then to fit a new ellipse to these points. The fit ellipse is shown in green. The sampled points show up in yellow. The reason the points are not on the ellipse is because they get shifted and scaled by the algorithm used to fit an equation to the points. The ellipse fitting code is due to Fitzgibbon, Pilu, and Fisher and a few other authors, particularly Halír and Flusser, and this superb WSCG '98 paper. I had most of the math coded up but what held me up was calculation of the generalized eigensystem. I had code to calculate eigenvectors before, but that was for symmetric matrices. In the current situation, the key matrix for which I needed its eigenvectors was not symmetrical. It took me about a week's worth of looking at everything but that one line of code to finally come around to thinking that it had to be this one routine that I've been using for years that could be messing up. Eventually, I came across the Template Numerical Toolkit that has freely available C++ code to calculate the eigenvectors that I needed. Once I plugged this in, everything worked. And as an added bonus, I came across this paper on A Fast Bresenham Type Algorithm for Drawing Ellipses that uses integer math to draw ellipses. I've known (and had written code for) Bresenham circles and lines, but I'd never written up the ellipse drawing code. It was really rewarding to get everything running finally, and I think the Internet made getting this done relatively quickly. I mean, how did people do this before? Via hand-written letters? Faxes?

Dinner out

2009-08-16T12:39:00.008-04:00

Rudy's
Meal for two including drinks and service, $120.

A couple of nights ago we went out for dinner at Rudy's on Ram Cat Alley. This location has a spotty history. It has changed hands several times as restaurants come and go. I think this is about the third restaurant to occupy this location. This time, it's been bought by the same people that run Pixie & Bill's and Calhoun Corners in Clemson, so maybe they know what they're doing and the place will stick around for a while. I guess one downside of this restaurateurian monopoly is that it may lead to very similar menus at all three places. But, at least it gives us three choices of atmosphere. I personally don't care for Pixie & Bill's although locally it's quite popular. To me it's just a large, open dining room with no particular distinctiveness. I like Calhoun Corners and I like where Rudy's is, because it's not far from home and we can get there via a couple of back roads instead of the main highway. And the interior is pleasant enough. As to the food, I guess we need to sample enough things to be able to settle on favorites. The appetizers were quite good: I had the prosciutto wrapped scallops, Corey had the hummus. My scallops came with sauteed leeks with warm corn, red pepper and black bean relish that had a nice kick to it (due to the red pepper). One downside was the mojito: it took them several long minutes to bring out, and when it finally arrived it was grossly underwhelming (especially after all the hype preceding its delivery). It seemed like they used some kind of mix instead of freshly squeezed lime juice. And with only one mint leaf showing in the glass, there seemed to be no hint of muddling of mint leaves whatsoever. Sorry, but my mojito is much better.

For the main course, I had the rosemary crusted lamb loin chops in pinot noir demiglace, Corey had the fish and chips. The rosemary crust was interesting, reminiscent of the bread crumbs in butter topping I sometimes use to top green beans or brussel sprouts when making my traditional pork chops. The lamb was good, going together nicely with a glass of Rodney Strong pinot. Corey said the black cod was good, but perhaps not as good as the fish and chips we had in Aspen.

Perhaps the highlight of the meal was the dessert: the homemade pretzel crusted key lime pie. Oftentimes the key lime pie is too tart, this one, however, was very much like a key lime cheesecake, balanced nicely with the crunchy pretzel crust and the sweet raspberry cream sauce drizzle. Very tasty. Together with traditional coffee and Bailey's, a nice way to finish off dinner.

Hell's Kitchen HD

2009-08-11T20:06:00.004-04:00

A couple of weeks ago our old 32" Sony TV finally gave up the ghost after about 10+ years of service. So we decided to go digital and upgrade to HD. You practically can't avoid doing so these days. After looking at various options, we went with another Sony, this time a 46" HDTV. I was considering a Samsung or an LG maybe, but we went with the Sony, partly for aesthetic reasons partly because the old worked pretty well for so long we figured this one should last a while as well. It's a 240 Hz LCD model with conventional (fluorescent) backlight. I kinda wanted an LED backlit model because I thought it would be brighter, but the Sony is working out pretty well. Unfortunately, along with upgrading the TV, we also had to upgrade the cable service as well as our Tivo box. Everything has to be HD and for that it all costs a little extra. After upgrading our cable service, I couldn't notice the difference from our old Standard Def (SD) signal. Finally, today I clued in that the HD channels (just a handful of them) are sitting on these decimal channels, e.g., 63.3. Now that I've dialed into those, wow! what a difference. We're getting the signal coming in at 1080i resolution and it looks pretty damn crisp. I've also hooked up our BlueRay DVD also in 1080i so that shows up nicely. Finally, the DVD player also feeds our HD projector, our only 1080p feed. I don't recall what our projected image on the wall measures, but I think it's about 75" or so, or maybe even more, possibly 96". There are still a few kinks that need to be worked out (e.g., Tivo doesn't list the HD programs; I'll have to call them), but other than that we're all HD now. I finally get to see Hell's Kitchen in fine detail :)

My next car?

2009-08-09T15:28:00.002-04:00

Maybe it's the Bond movie, I don't know, but I sure like the look of the modern Aston Martins. I saw this one in Kingston, and then I saw another one parked outside the W. Hey, there's a dealer in Atlanta. It lists a few of the models in their inventory: ballpark about $150,000, ouch! A little more than what I paid for my current car :) Well, I can at least look. And CHI is in Atlanta next year, hmmm, maybe I can combine academic conference with a test drive, heh heh :)

Me, the food critic

2009-08-09T14:57:00.010-04:00

I just finished reading Jay Rayner's "The Man Who Ate the World", where he (a food critic) goes around the world to dine at fine (e.g., three Michelin star) restaurants, including ones in London, Paris, Dubai, Tokyo, and New York. The more I read and learn about food (preparation), the fussier I seem to get. One point that Rayner, as well as other writers including Bourdain, Ramsay, make about the whole restaurant experience is that you don't want to eat crap food and you want decent service. Pretty simple, no? Rayner's point, particularly at the more expensive places, is that you're paying for these dishes and service and the experience should be enjoyable and memorable. Yes, I do remember the $70 steak I had in Boston's Smith and Wollensky three years ago. And yes, I do remember the shoddiest dinner my wife and I have ever had at the Marriott in Cocoa Beach. The best vs. the worst, where I didn't mind paying for the former and I resented the fact that they were charging for the latter. I know, it sounds somewhat prissy to complain, but in some cases it's well deserved. Like at this place, the Houston "steak house" at the YUL airport. (Meal for one, including glass of wine and tip: $60.) Inattentive service served along with an uninspiring steak. I had the notion that I'd have a big lunch, knowing that I won't be fed on the planes home. So I had dinner for lunch and opted for the tenderloin. She brings out chicken tenders. "What's this?" I asked after which we clarified the misunderstanding concerning the word "tender". When the steak arrived, it was just ok. For a $34 piece of meat to be just ok is really unacceptable. It was cooked ok (medium rare), but it was just kind of gray, both in appearance and taste. It lacked something. Some kind of spicy, tingly crust is what it needed. I've cooked better steaks on my BBQ than this flaccid grey matter lying on my plate beside the overcooked veggies and what seemed to be powdered mash potatoes. Like Rayner was about some of his meals (at top places no less), I was quite disappointed about this meal, although such dismal experiences help better understand (sympathize with) his complaints (as well as his praises, which I can also appreciate when I find them).

Back in Montreal

2009-08-09T14:22:00.009-04:00

I caught the train out of Kingston on Sunday morning. "Renaissance equipment" I think they called it, meaning more modern I guess. True enough I suppose, it seemed a bit more modern looking than the train I was on to Kingston. The seats were fairly comfortable, great at reclining, with some storage underneath for my backpack, but with hardly any legroom! Plus they did away with space for luggage so you had to check it in and then pick it up at baggage claim upon arrival. Still, an enjoyable ride. I think I'm starting to prefer trains to aircraft. After checking in to my hotel I wandered up and down St. Catherine street and found out that it was the last night of FrancoFolie, a set of free outdoor concerts showcasing Francofone talent (or lack thereof :) Here are the first two acts I saw—the first one was ok, the second was more funny (to me) than anything else. It was this muscle-building, long-haired metal band, composed of a guy playing a kind of electronic contra-bass (like a standup bass, but being electronic it was this skinny thing hanging off his shoulder), guitar, and drums. After the first song the shirt went off and off he went twirling his head groaning out Metallica-like grunts. In French! About the only things I managed to catch was the swearing in between numbers, e.g., all my favorites including Hostie, Chalice, and of course Tabernacle! I don't know what prompted him to issue these blasphemes, but it was quintessential Quebecois. Actually I rather enjoyed this bit, not so much the music. Occasionally though the drummer would show off his double-footed technique, which was cool.

The next three acts consisted of a rap group ("The first rap duo out of Montreal!" I was told by a guy helping staff the event earlier in the afternoon), some folk-like ensemble in the mall, and this kind of Brazilian/French fusion band. The rap act appeared to be very popular. I once again had no clue as to what they were rapping/complaining about, but it seemed angst-ridden (much like the metal appeared to have been), and the audience seemed to enjoy it (with the exception of the mall act, all outside acts were accompanied by whiffs of various herbs being smoked by the crowd—gotta love it, Canada is way less uptight than the US of A). The mall act was actually pretty good. It lacked a drummer, instead the percussionist sat on some kind of box that acted as bass and snare to fairly good effect. They would include various instruments including some Indian-looking sittar type thing, a tuba, sax, etc., etc. Anyway, they sounded pretty good with the only crappy number being one where the sax player sang in "phonetic English" as I believe he said he was attempting to due. Well, it was just plain mockery of English, he should have stuck to singing in French which he did much better. The Brazilian act was possibly the highlight of the evening, particularly the drummer. She sang in Portugese but spoke French in between numbers. At one point the drummer launched into this kind of fast-paced, instrumental percussion number evoking visions of Rio's Carnivale (which I've never experienced but imagined it to sound something like what the drummer was doing). I was quite envious of his rolling technique. How the heck did he manage to play that with such good pace and clarity? The last act I saw was these two Francofone girls doing rap yet again. Meh. About the only good thing about this last venue was that I could find a seat on which I could munch on my street-vendor hot dog and $5 beer. Afterwards I caught the Metro home, where I realized that AC/DC just finished playing (judging by the hordes of people with AC/DC t-shirts and red devil horns worn on the head). I stayed at the W, a kind of swanky hotel with its own night club that I was told about a couple of times. Very trendy, and a bit pricey ($10 Coronas, can you believe that?). Still, it was enjoyable to a certain extent except for this annoying club song that I keep hearing here and there: "My dream is to fly over the rainbow so high". Ugh, I can't stand that song, but every time it comes on in these "clacker bars" invariably all the clackers start singing it and flinging their arms up in the air. It's kind of sickening and yet curiously amusing :) It appears that I'm a member of the Starwood hotels group which owns/runs the W and as a perk I had late checkout (4pm). I took advantage by sleeping in till about 10am and then made my way leisurely to the airport where I now sit chewing up bandwidth writing up last night's escapades.

Kingston, ON (Queen's University)

2009-08-07T14:10:00.004-04:00

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.

Delta late again

2009-08-06T09:40:00.003-04:00

Delta, Delta, Delta...of course they came in 90 minutes late into Montreal. There was a huge queue through Customs, and so I ended up missing my 4pm train to Kingston. Luckily there was one more at 6:30, but I had to cough up another $30 to rebook the ticket. I had a couple of hours to kill in Dorval, so I had dinner consisting of Canadian chocolate bars: O-Henry, Aero, Wunderbar, great stuff you just can't get in the states. There was even some kind of giant Kit-Kat bar that had some kind of gooey toffee squeezed in between the cookie sheets. The train itself was decent, it even had power and sporadic wifi. Wifi didn't quite work, they said they were having problems with their satellite connection, but because of that they made the service free. So I managed to check my email once or twice without having to pay. Not bad. Not quite as convenient as Germany's S-bahn, but not too bad. I made it to Kingston by 9pm, then went out for a couple of quick beers and calamari. When ordering calamari I was pleasantly surprised to find that they could fix it either in the deep-fried fashion (yuck) or the unbreaded way with sausage and tomato. Yes, to the latter. It was similar to the Batali dish we make except for the sausage/pasta substitution. Not bad. Today I'm off to find the University and get some lab demos.

Delta service

2009-08-05T12:17:00.001-04:00

Amazing how ever since the Northwest/Delta merger started Delta's service rapidly went downhill. 90 minutes late getting into ATL, now we're sitting here waiting for a new fuel sensor. I still have a train connection to make in montreal. Come on...

Salmon on a plank

2009-08-05T08:35:00.003-04:00

A couple of weekends ago we tried grilling salmon on a plank, following a recipe I found in a magazine on the plane that I posted last month. I bought a couple of cedar planks at the store and followed the recipe. The planks are fairly expensive and yet nothing really special. I thought they'd be smooth at least, but nope, they looked like a 1x6 you'd get from the lumber yard. You have to soak the plank for an hour before sticking it on the barbie, and each plank is reusable about three times. (We've done this twice now and the second time the board starting crackling, so I guess they're right, it might start catching fire on the fourth try :) Along with the novelty of using wood as the grilling surface, I found the recipe's spice rub really tasty. Here it is:

2 Tbsp. brown sugar
1 Tbsp + 1 tsp. paprika
1-1/2 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. chopped fresh oregano
3/4 tsp. freshly gnd. black pepper
1/2 tsp. minced garlic

I guess I really like the combination of brown sugar, paprika, garlic, and a bit of salt and pepper. I don't know how much the oregano contributed, but all I can say is that I really like the rub—I was even eating it dry after coating the fish and drizzling olive oil on it. The only two problems I have with the planks is that (1) the cooking time required seems longer than the 10 minutes the recipe gave, and (2) the planks are somewhat messy, leaving little shavings and charcoal on the counter (and Corey says they stink up the kitchen). However, I think the plank imparted a nice flavor to the fish, giving it a woody kind of aroma. Very good indeed.

Saucer peaches

2009-08-05T08:22:00.004-04:00

"Well, they're in! The Mackinaw peaches!" That's what I thought when I tasted these—saucer (or doughnut) peaches (Mackinaws don't exist, that was a fictional peach that Kramer was going nuts about on a Seinfeld episode). "It's like a circus in your mouth!" I concur! It was a kind of revelation to me because for the longest time I was really averse to peaches because of their hairy skin. I just couldn't stand the feel of those little hairs on my tongue. These little mini peaches looked kinda cute so I bought a few. When they're ripe these things split nicely, you just pull the pit out, and then you eat both halves of the remaining "doughnut". They taste great, and for some reason the skins of these little guys doesn't bother me. Maybe I can eat peaches again! Maybe my aversion to the hairy skin has subsided. That'd be great cause they're pretty tasty fruit. But, as with the Mackinaws, are they only around for two weeks out of the year?

iPhone CalDAV annoyance

2009-07-20T11:14:00.006-04:00

Apple still hasn't gotten this right. It's almost there, but not quite. I'm talking about the CalDAV two-way communication between Google calendar and iPhone's iCal. The communication is only one-way at the moment. Upon updating iCal on the iPhone, the phone connects with google and updates the calendar. All well and good. Upon updating iCal on the desktop also updates google, BUT NOT the iPhone. The only workaround I've found is to go into the Settings → Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and then for each calendar you want updated change the URL by replacing the %40 with the @ symbol (like I'm doing in the pic), then launch iCal and wait for it to connect up with google and grab all the events. I hope Apple fixes this annoyance soon.

Update (Friday, July 31, 2009): I posted the essence of the above on Apple's bug reporting site shortly after I wrote it up. For some reason I didn't think I'd get a response from them. To be fair, they did (and quite quickly at that) fix an OpenGL problem a few years ago when I sent them code exploiting the lack of functionality. Actually, in retrospect, I remember being quite impressed that within a few weeks a software update patch came out fixing that very problem (among other things). So I don't know why I was skeptical this time. Maybe because of my own lack of understanding of what was going on under the hood this time around. Anyway, I explained to them what I wrote above. They got me to install some code on the iPhone to enable logging. But, after going through the paces with logging turned on, I could not reproduce the problem. My sneaky suspicion is that maybe that logging facility code contained more than just logging. I'm wondering whether they didn't just get me to test some patch of theirs. Well, so what if they did...iCal now seems to be working, and I was happy to report back that the problem has been resolved. It seems to be on my iPhone anyway :)

We have rubrails

2009-07-11T13:15:00.001-04:00

Today I went out to the sailing club to help with workday activities. I don't often come out but today I knew they were going to be working around our boat so I wanted to pitch in and make sure we got a rubrail installed (yes, I've hit the dock coming in before). The only other time I came out was to clear shrubs and this time I wanted to do something more mechanically oriented. So I got to drill and drive. In fact I screwed in the truss boards you see in the pic and I fastened the rubrail around our slip. The sailboat and slip are in pretty good shape. Now to test out the swim ladder :)

Will I get home tonight?

2009-07-07T17:25:00.004-04:00

Uh, guess which flight I'm on. Not only is it the last one out of here (Dulles) tonight, but it's (a) already delayed, and (b) dropped off the list of flights shown at the gate (where I am currently). That doesn't look good. It could mean they've (a) changed gates or, worse, (b) cancelled the flight. Like Delta's never done that to me before. And what the *@$Y(@*# @*$#%@@ )*&&^$!(*$!!! is it about Atlanta that all the flights leading up to mine were also all delayed? Like I said...I hate flying through Atlanta. I wonder when I'll get to sleep tonight and where? Yes, I have slept on the Dulles floor before. Not fun. And the only good sushi restaurant here is literally 50 gates away down the concourse.

gogoinflight

2009-07-06T17:28:00.001-04:00

Thouht I'd try this new in-flight wifi service. Mainly to see how much it was. $7.95 for the duration of the flight isn't half-bad considering boingo costs about $9.95 at airport hotspots. Mind you, this is the "mobile" plan so I can't switch over to the laptop. That costs $9.95, making it comparable to boingo. This could be really useful if I needed to sync up with my svn repo in-flight. Right now though I'll just goof around with email and blogger, keeping an eye on battery life.

Good thing they're not charging by the byte (yet).

Something new to try on the barbie

2009-07-06T17:18:00.001-04:00

Saw this in the in-flight magazine. Looks interesting. The article says pine may impart good flavor as may oak. Just need to find one of these planks (or go off into the forest? :)

ATL

2009-07-06T15:51:00.002-04:00

I hate flying thru Atlanta.

Update: I guess this deserves an explanation. The reasons are that ATL is just too damn busy, the airport is too crowded and too "old". It feels too cramped compared to the larger, airier airports such as DTW, CLT. And what's worse, Delta always seems to screw something up with puddle-jumper flights in/out of ATL. It's happened often enough for me to think it routine that Delta will cancel a half-filled flight so that they can bump everyone and fill up a later flight to GSP. It saves them fuel but it inconveniences (the hell out of) passengers wanting to get home. This time around they managed to botch the incoming connecting flight. We sat on the tarmac at GSP for 40 minutes before departing because (they said) ATL was too busy. Can you imagine that? I dunno, this time around I suppose it could really have been the weather cause it was a pretty bumpy ride there.

Note to self: avoid flying through ATL at all costs...fly NWA through Detroit, Memphis, or Cincinnati instead. And if that becomes phased out, I'd rather drive in the beamer an extra couple of hours to fly out of Charlotte. Much nicer airport than ATL.

Lake Hartwell: Now a No-Fun Zone

2009-07-04T15:12:00.002-04:00

The "no-fun zone" seems to have followed me from Vancouver. Yup, there are cops on boats out here on Lake Hartwell as well. They always seemed kind of pissed off to me, maybe because they're forced to wear shirts and ilfe preservers while everyone else is in bathing suits. This guy was actually from the Department of Natural Resources or the DNR. He was checking for the 5 items every boat is supposed to have on board: life jackets (one per person), throwable life preserver, fire extinguisher, audible signal, and boat registration. We had everything on board but forgot about the boat's horn. And we don't have a whistle or air horn on board. Still, he didn't cite us although he seemed to be busting every other boat out there. I wonder how much each citation is, but I really don't want to find out. We should buy a cheap whistle and keep it on board just in case.

T-60

2009-07-04T14:52:00.004-04:00

On Friday, July 3rd we went out on our powerboat in search of the T-60 buoy on Lake Hartwell. A few years ago I went on a poker run on my Harley and one of the stops was at the T-60 Grill, a restaurant on the far side of the lake. Lake Hartwell is quite large and yet it seems like restaurants with lake access are few and far between. Pitcher's restaurant used to be a fun place quite close to us, but because it's more or less a seasonal enterprise, it kept changing hands and finally closing. Right now its dock is still there but floating empty. Pity, as it was a fun place to go get some beer and wings on your boat. Anderson has Charlie T's, just about the only place left open with a dock where you can still do this. T-60 Grill was supposed to be another such place, serving "The Buoy Burger" among other things, but it's really far away. One time we went on the trek to find the place, but because we stopped to swim every so often, we never did quite make it. The grill is (was?) named for the T-60 buoy that marks where the restaurant is supposed to be. Here's the buoy, but where's the grill? We didn't see any dock with a gangway up to a restaurant. It didn't matter, we brought our own sandwiches anyway. And it's the journey that's important, not the destination, right? Something like that. On this occasion, the journey was so long I ended up burning my scalp. We were also so tired after this trip that we actually packed it in and did not stay for the 4th of July fireworks. It's usually pretty fun to sit there on the boat while they go off above your head, but this year we picked up anchor and headed in. Today I'm sitting inside keeping my head out of the sun. I'll be out later to BBQ some steaks, but I'll wait for the sun to go down a bit before.

Scanpaths

2009-06-25T22:11:00.003-04:00

Funny how things happen. I've been working on my implementation of scanpath comparison for what seems like years now. Then I came across an interesting experimental protocol that I've never heard of before that suggested a very simple and hopefully effective means for collecting eye movements to test my implementation. So above you see my eye movements as I twice look at the sequence 1-2-3-4-5-A-B-C-D-E. The key to scanpath comparison, IMO, is getting character labels assigned properly to clusters of fixations. This yields a string for each scanpath, in this case I have s₁ = abcdefaghijkllm and s₂ = nbecefaghkijollllp. Using string-editing that is used by both DNA sequencing practitioners as well as the diff program, my program produces S_s = 0.61 and S_p = 0.79, which are sequence and position similarity indeces, respectively, in this case "repetitive". There's more to this, but it's going into a paper that I'm working on. My REU students are collecting more eye movement data for me to compare a larger set of scanpaths. I think it should be a decent paper when I'm done with it.

libraw1394, libdc1394, OpenCV, and OpenGL

2009-06-16T11:45:00.004-04:00

This summer with a bunch of visiting undergrads interning in my eye tracking lab, I thought as a side project we'd explore real-time face and eye detection. Ever since I visited UBC to attend a PhD candidate's defense (I was the external reviewer), I became interested in cameras from Point Grey Research (or PGR). They're pretty well-known as good "Digital Cameras", particularly for computer vision applications. I put the term in quotes because although your run-of-the-mill store-bought camera is also digital, the DC cameras differ from consumer-level electronics such as digital video recorders (DVRs) or webcams. The PGR cameras are supposed to adhere to the IEEE 1394 bus specs, and thus are to some extent software-controllable. To do this in code, one has to learn a collection of new Application Program Interfaces, or APIs, namely APIs to libraw1394, libdc1394, OpenCV, and OpenGL. libraw1394 is the low-level library that is used to actually talk to the hardware (1394 controller card that puts commands on the bus). The higher-level library libdc1394 is what is mainly used in C/C++ code to open a connection and start video streaming. The latter relies on the former, being a kind of wrapper that abstracts away the really nitty-gritty stuff at the bus level. OpenCV is a higher-level abstraction still, allowing the programmer to apply various known computer vision algorithms to the video frames pulled off the camera. (Technically speaking, one can just use OpenCV and let it act as a wrapper for libdc1394, but libdc1394 is supposed to offer various useful techniques for camera synchronization and hardware pixel culling that may or may not be in OpenCV, so it's probably a good thing to learn anyway.) If you google for "OpenCV face detection" or "OpenCV eye detection" you'll come across code examples of how to do what's pictured above. The only hitch is that those examples all draw the resulting face and eye rectangles directly onto the image frames that they process. Coming from a graphics background, however, I of course would rather use OpenGL to draw those rectangles. Sounds easy enough, but the problem is keeping all the coordinate frames straight. Face detection, as given by the examples, uses a shrunken image to do its work (for speed). This implies a coordinate scaling operation. Meanwhile, eye detection uses image segmentation (stipulation of a Region Of Interest, or ROI) within which to search for the eyes. This implies a coordinate translation, or offset. Meanwhile, two other transformations are needed to normalize the frame coordinates and then to scale them to the display dimensions, remembering to flip the y-coordinate to re-orient the origin to the lower-left (computer vision types think it is at the upper-left, whereas computer graphics types think it's in the lower-left). It took me a couple of days to get all this squared away, but I was finally rewarded with the code being able to locate my face and eyes—at least when you're looking at the camera, I think the algorithms used are therefore not rotationally invariant. Anyway, it turns out that face detection is fairly popular these days. The latest version of Apple's iPhoto uses it and lets you label faces in your pics. Having done so, it will go and search your library for other pics where it thinks that person may also be in. It works fairly well.

Are we having duck?

2009-06-16T11:05:00.009-04:00

Delicious! A couple of weekends ago mein bruder visited the area and came over for our version of bistecca fiorentine. I don't remember now whether any photos were taken or whether I wrote about that, but we "invested" in a 3 lb, 3 in hunk of T-bone (with the tenderloin part no less) and prepared it a la Mario Batali's grilling recipe. It turned out excellent, warmed to the perfect 120 F interior that is medium rare. Mein bruder only stayed for one night, but we had actually prepared for two, having bought a pair of ducks for the night before the Italian fare. Since he didn't show up, we were left with two ducks in the freezer. So, consulting Batali's grilling book once again, I found a recipe there for "spit-roasted duck" that sounded fairly appetizing and relatively simple. We decided to try it after a day of soaking in the sun on our deck. The only trouble was our lack of rotating spit. However, I knew our BBQ (Weber model 2000LX—I need to record its model number for reference) had these little grooves made in its metal casting to support a spit, but of course, it was an extra accessory that I needed to find.

Saturday I went out in search of a rotisserie attachment to our barbie. I thought the same hardware store from where we bought the grill some 10 (?) years ago might actually have the right thing, but like in the movie Color of Money, when we rolled up to the store, we found an empty hulk of a building. Guess it went out of business. So on to ACE hardware. I found a kind of el-cheapo universal rotisserie ($40 vs. the "right" Weber type that runs about $80) that I thought would fit. The trouble with this thing was that the motor attaches to the shelf, which is really too low for proper operation. As a result the motor was raised halfway out of its mounting bracket. It would pivot precariously upon every rotation. Meanwhile, fixing the duck onto the spit was an adventure in itself. Those little metal prongs that are meant to hold the bird in place didn't tighten very well and my technique for skewering the duck wasn't good in the first place. We ended up really man-handling the bird onto those prongs to get it to stay. I was afraid we'd find the duck had fallen off at some point.

Eventually it turned out ok. One had to be somewhat vigilant because the spit would recoil out of the motor socket and would therefore stop spinning. If the motor had been fixed to the iron casting I suppose this would not have been a problem. But with this cheapo system the "fix" was to walk up to it and squeeze it together to re-insert the spit rod into the motor housing and watch it spin up again. After about 1 1/4 hrs the duck was done. The sauce for it was sort of Asian, based on orange marmalade, containing rosemary, garlic, and balsamic vinegar. Pretty tasty. The burnt parts were a result of the spit not spinning, but tasty nonetheless. We still have one more duck in the freezer. Not sure what to do with it, but I do like the idea of spit roasting: all the fat renders off so that the result is a less greasy duck than what you get out of the oven (at least that was my perception of it). We ate the whole thing with me getting the lion's share, leaving the bones and carcass for the makings of duck stock.

Shiny New Laptop

2009-06-07T20:47:00.003-04:00

I just received a new MacBook Pro, courtesy of the School of Computing (thanks!). As it happens with new machines, one has to get through the pain of installing all types of software onto the new box. Everything from Apple stuff (iLife, iWork) to free but useful software such as Adobe Reader, Fink, and yes, even Microsoft software as well. I use Office on the Macs just to be compatible with Windows (l)users. I thought it was a bit funny that while some things installed ok, Microsoft's Office installation just sat there for about half an hour (I took a screenshot out of boredom and amazement). I think I was supposed to press some Ok button that got obscured by the Installer, but as the screenshot shows, how was I supposed to guess that? It just looked like it got stuck. Anyway, tonight the software install process continues. Now it's Fink complaining that it can't add ptex. WTF? I NEED latex/pdflatex, that's one of my bread and butter pieces of software. Not sure why it's compaining, but in the meantime I have to perform various reboots due to other things going in...we'll see how it goes.

Adventures in movie making

2009-05-31T14:29:00.007-04:00

I was trying to fix the aspect ratio of a video that we want to submit to a conference along with a paper for review. Turned out to be a bit of a hassle. I got my mits on iLife '09 and iWork '09 and so have a new version of iMovie with which to do this. I couldn't believe that iMovie refused to import mpeg clips. Incredible! Only AVI or DV. What is up with that? Which developer bozo decided MPG clips weren't worthwhile? As you can imagine this ticked me off to no end. Lucky for me, some kind hearted programmer came up with MPEG Streamclip that transcodes various video formats and gives this away for free. This saved my butt. After that I just had to hunt around iMovie's well concealed options to find the "fit" option instead of the "crop" default. Another braindead decision there to make "crop" the default. I also don't like iMovie's hyper-active scrubbing feature, but eventually I got used to it. I have to say the old iMovie was in many ways easier to use.

No Fun Zone (now under construction)

2009-05-31T13:46:00.011-04:00

Vancouver's Skytrain line to Richmond is nearing completion. Construction of this line (as well as others) has caused major traffic headaches around town. It should get better when construction completes. Along with this line to Richmond there's also a line to the airport. I think these may open in September. Richmond, and Vancouver in general, has grown and changed significantly. No.3 Road (where this pic was taken) was just packed. The area around False Creek has also changed dramatically. I happened to luck out with good weather: sunny and warm. Only the third such weekend this year I was told. Lots of people out and about downtown, eating out at sidewalk cafes, rollerblading, biking, suntanning even. It was a little chilly for me at one point, being now used to the sweltering heat of the south.

Vancouver seems to be going bike happy. Here we came across some kind of bike awareness rally that was making its way up Main St. There are bike lane markings on some of the larger streets and the area around False Creek has special bike lanes, similar to the bike lanes I saw in Munich. Except that here the distinction between pedestrian and bike lanes is not as strictly observed. In Germany the bikers really protect their turf and yell at any pedestrians walking in the bike lane. Here it was much more haphazard. Maybe because every other person is probably stoned. Lot of the wisdom weed wafting through the air. They should just legalize it. It's probably already the largest cash crop in BC anyway. Same thing in the states. Prohibition ain't working. And if it went legal, drug-related gang violence would probably drop down to next to nothing.

But it's still the "no fun zone" :) Cops everywhere of course, like on the water here. We took a little water taxi across False Creek to walk around in the sun and lunch time on Saturday. Two nights before when returning from the New York Dolls' show, we went through a road block. Some things haven't changed it seems. There were lots of other nice boats beside the cop boat. Sometimes I think it would be fun to live aboard docked here in False Creek. But then I know someone who had done so and told me that the experience can be singularly described as damp. Seeing Vancouver on a warm and sunny day can really skew one's perception of what it might be like living here again. Particularly on a boat. Still, it's a nice thought.

Suppose we did live aboard a nice yacht here in False Creek. If we were retired, you could probably walk to most things you'd need or take the Skytrain. I don't know about getting to work. We took the train from Main and Terminal up to Burrard. The station there is underground. I was amazed how they managed to fit that in downtown. Construction must have been a horrible mess, but the end result is rather nice. Vancouver has a metro, imagine that! Once it spreads out a bit I think it could be quite useful. Right now there are only a couple of lines. One aspect I found puzzling is that for the longest time when I lived there Vancouverites were against putting up any sort of highway overpasses because it would spoil the view. Yet that's just what the Skytrain is. Does it spoil the view? I think it's ok, but I suppose it could have been just as effective as let's say Munich's S-bahn, or surface trains. I don't think it really needs to be raised. And if they are willing to build underground stations, why not do that throughout? It's strange to me, but at least the city has something now. Vancouver traffic was always a mess. If I were to live in Vancouver I think I'd prefer living downtown and using public transport.

When walking around False Creek we took time out to smell the flowers. Very fragrant although I don't know what it is. In Polish I think my Mom would call this "Bez" but what is it in English? As I say, it was giving off a very nice fragrance. (Update: Mom says it's Lilac.)

New York Dolls

2009-05-29T12:32:00.003-04:00

Last night we went out to Richard's on Richards to see the New York Dolls. "Straight up rock-n-roll" was the description and it fit. They rocked out traditional-sounding rock tunes. I guess they were mostly originals although I remember hearing a bit of Spoonful that I recognized as it's one of my favorites that we play as well. We used to play that number as fast as the Dolls but lately we morphed it into a more slower bluesy version. I still put in a bunch of drum and cymbal fills in the chorus which I think fits this particular tune and the Dolls' drummer was doing something similar as well (although better of course :) The opening band was The Clips (if I heard them correctly). It was a three-piece band with I think a girl on bass and a girl drummer. The singer? It was hard to tell. S/he sounded like Holly Golightly but I think it was a guy. Kind of an androgenous character. Anyway, after three days of conference, it was great to see some live rock-n-roll. I love seeing good live performances. Richard's has changed from its 80s glitterati days, but I think for the better actually. It's quite a good live music venue.

Things to do in Kelowna

2009-05-29T11:40:00.006-04:00

One of the event-organized outings at GI 2009 was this three-hour boat tour of the lake. The boat itself was a bit of a rip-off in that they were charging fairly high prices for dinner plates. A friend of mine had the right idea in running across the street for a cheap but filling pita before the cruise, thereby omitting the need to pay larger sums for food. I suppose there was potential for more fun than actually experienced (the boat sported a hottub as well as a dance floor) but us computer conference people are a somewhat sedate crowd. Still, some of the lake views were quite nice. There were really rich-looking houses at one end, complete with boat docks and boat floats. Some of the houses had a funny feature: as they were positioned high up on a steep cliff, their way down to their boat dock was via a really, really long staircase, or elevator that some had put up. I thought our hill that we have to transcend to get to our powerboat slip was a hassle, it's peanuts compared to those cliffs. I should have taken a picture... On the other end of the lake we saw a yacht race. Lake winds got pretty high towards the end, I was suprised how windy it could get there.

The next evening there was no organized outing so it was up to conference goers to self-assemble. Two factions split with one group leaving early in search of dinner. I was in that group and we found a Keg with very good steaks and tasty beer. The first group then split again with a few having to leave to catch flights and the rest off in search of the second group. They were found at Memphis Blues, a kind of BBQ place with lots of meaty plates. Some of the menu entrees' descriptions read "more meat", "still more meat", and so on. The group then went off in search of music. I like live music and asked the Memphis server where it could be found. It was to be found at The Blue Gator, with this lone guitarist being the sole entry on the bill. I usually dislike the lone guitarist because they always seem to degenerate to playing sappy ballads, like Sweet Caroline. This guy was better. He had his laptop churning out the drum and bass tracks to which he played along. He started with some Stevie Ray Vaughan and also some Knopfler, playing Dire Straits' Sultans of Swing. He managed to pull off the latter very well although the ending is tough to play (so I hear, I personally don't play guitar). He then degenerated into some kind of metal stuff, but it was still enjoyable. This is where the computer conference people monicker originated. After some heavy metal tune he'd yell out "Computer conference people, yeaaaaaaaa!" and raise the index-pinky rock-n-roll salute. I thought that would make an excellent t-shirt: picture the arm raised in the background with the text "computer conference person" in the foreground. I dunno, I think it's funny.

UBCO

2009-05-25T09:52:00.006-04:00

My flight to Kelowna was supposed to take off at 14:50 yesterday, but as you can see, it got delayed. I took that screenshot partly because it looks like my flight is the only one leaving late and partly to show off YVR's mobile flight schedule. It's just a web page, but I think it's pretty cool in that you can display what you see on the monitors on your mobile device. And for free. All airports should do this. Unfortunately a large number of them charge for wifi and one (DFW from what I recall) even charges for power. Anyway, you get what you pay for so the connection would drop occasionally (I couldn't email via the iPhone for some reason), but at least it was partially there.

That flight to Kelowna was hot! It's like they don't use A/C up here. Maybe those little air vents weren't working. Mercifully it was a short flight. So now I'm in my dorm room (residence) at UBCO (UBC Okanagan). It's pretty tiny with a shared bathroom. I don't think there's anyone next door; from the outside looking in it seems my neighboring dorm is being used for storage, so I might have the bathroom all to myself. They gave me a building that is up several flights of stairs so I feel like I have to climb up here every time I return. Meanwhile, the campus looks like it's just developing—construction everywhere, and it looks like it's closed for the summer, there don't seem to be any students around. Kelowna proper is a $2, 40-minute bus ride away. Hopefully there'll be something to eat around here because I don't think the bus is very practical for something like lunch. I brought some Canadian money we had sitting in one of our drawers at home. Turns out the $2 bill is something of a collectors' piece: none of the bus drivers wanted me to use it ("You still got a two dollar bill, eh? Better hold on to that, probably worth $3 today."), so I got the ride into town for free. Had to get some "toonies" to pay for the ride back. A cab ride I'm told is $40, so it makes sense to ride the bus. The schedule says they're serving breakfast in 20 minutes so I better cash in on that.

Flight to Vancouver/Kelowna

2009-05-24T16:36:00.006-04:00

Caught the early (06:10) flight out to DTW, then on to Vancouver. That meant that I had to get up at 03:00 to drive up to GSP. At least the roads were empty. I lucked out and got bumped up to first class on the flight from DTW to YVR. Extra wide seats, lotsa legroom, and a fairly decent, free in-flight meal. Pretty nice views of the mountains just a few minutes before landing. What is that–Baker? Mount St. Helens maybe? The pilot didn't say although he tried pointing out other landmarks. I usually sit in the aisle anyway, so I didn't see too much, but did snap this one pic.

Pretty nice spread for breakfast: an omelet, sausages, taters, OJ, fruit salad, and a croissant. I should've gone for the bagel instead of the croissant, but all in all fairly decent. In YVR I grabbed eggs benny for lunch. Yesterday we cooked up a 3", 3 lb T-bone (bistecca fiorentine) for dinner with my brother. I think the steak turned out quite well and boy that was a huge piece of meat (the guy cutting it for us at Whole Foods said it was an "investment" :) I don't recall if anyone took photos. Maybe we should have cause I don't think we'll have anything like that again for some time.

Now I'm sitting at YVR waiting for the puddle-jumper out to Kelowna. Enjoying free wi-fi. Surprise, surprise! I thought for sure they'd be charging for that here. Maybe it's part of the 2010 Olympics preparations, I dunno. Looks like for the flight to Kelowna it'll be one of these turbo-props. It may even be the same one as in the pic–this one left for Kelowna a couple of hours earlier. I guess I could have made the earlier flight, but I decided for a longer layover so that I wouldn't miss it. I should be getting in to Kelowna around 4pm or so. And then it's on to the UBC dorms.

Road Trip to Orlando

2009-05-19T09:55:00.006-04:00

Last weekend I drove down to Orlando, FL for a brief (two-night) reunion with my folks and brother. He had just flown in from Germany, where he currently resides, to attend a conference. My parents flew in for the reunion as well as some relax time in the sun by the pool. We celebrated my brother's 50^th as well as a couple of other accomplishments. I decided to take the beamer down for a couple of nights, seeing how it's just a "short", 9-hour drive. I've driven down to Florida before, and 9-10 hours is about as far as I want to go in one stretch. The beamer's seats and cabin appointments (iDrive including satellite radio and iPod connection) make the drive tolerable if not outright enjoyable, but still, 9 hours sitting in one spot is getting to be about all I can take (compared with the odd 22-24 hour jaunts we embarked on out of Texas, e.g., to Chicago or Taos, some 15+ years ago now). On this trip I decided to try the route via Athens, GA. As you can tell from the map it entirely cuts out the Atlanta leg of the trip. I don't know what it is about Atlanta, I neither like to fly nor drive through there. It's just too packed. Hartsfield (the airport) is always a zoo and the roadways are just about as bad. On the way back I managed to get stuck in a major traffic jam, which seems to occur just about every time I drive through there.

The apparent shortcut through Athens actually adds a bit to the duration of the trip. According to Google maps, only about a few minutes, but I think I managed to shave off an hour on the way back by sticking to the interstates and driving through Atlanta. I guess part of the reason for the time savings is the speed permitted by the interstates. Although the limit is 70 mph on most stretches, one can often exceed this to about 90 mph without looking out of place. On the outbound trip, that's harder to do as it's mostly smaller roads, often only two-laners, like what you see in the pic here. The interstates usually provide at least four lanes although in places it feels like two due to the left lane hogs (a major personal pet peeve of mine). Occasionally, though, you can latch on to a skilled driver in another vehicle and then get out of the small clusters of vehicles that accumulate behind these bozos that occupy the left lane. I managed to fall behind a couple of such "rabbits", the first I followed all the way from Orlando out to I-10, just below the FL/GA state line, a nice stretch of road. We were both doing about 90, a speed the beamer has no problem attaining. In fact, accelerating to 100 (for passing purposes) is accomplished quite easily as well. And it doesn't even feel very fast. Gotta love those twin turbos and the sound insulation as well as the sound system. I made the trip back in about 8 hrs, with only one stop for refueling.

Home Theatre 2.0

2009-05-10T09:27:00.006-04:00

Our old projector that I had bought circa 2002 was starting to show its age—a green dot would show up in the center of the screen. I read somewhere that when this happens the only way to fix it is to overhaul the projector's innards and that it wouldn't just be a simple matter of replacing the lamp. Since we watch a lot of movies (via Netflix) we decided to replace the projector. I took the opportunity to upgrade the resolution and go with a 1080p High Definition projector from Epson, the PowerLite Home Cinema 6100. I looked online at http://www.projectorcentral.com/ to get throw measurements and reviews. Our projection wall is only so large and the projector sits at a certain distance from the wall, so we have to get one that can adjust its throw. This Epson model does that and is true 1080p, meaning it's the highest resolution you can get at the moment. It's also 3-LCD and doesn't have a color wheel so we wouldn't get the rainbow effect that some of the 1-DLP projectors would exhibit.

Since we were upgrading the projector to HD, I took the opportunity of upgrading the DVD player to Blu-Ray as well. I got a Samsung BD-P3600 that comes with WiFi connectivity. So above are two shots of the wall when projecting Quantum of Solace and Master and Commander. Can you tell which one is in High-Def? It may be hard to tell because I took these around 9am, so the contrast isn't that great and the scenes are somewhat dark. (Master and Commander was Blu-Ray, Quantum of Solace was not.) I think to really see the difference we would need a test pattern of some sort, e.g., some checkerboard floor extending out to infinity. I think the HD format would show less aliasing than the older format which I think is about half the lines of resolution. I think the resolution is much improved, and we can also now get video-on-demand from Netflix via the internet (and Pandora music as well, but that doesn't work as well since the music doesn't seem to want to stream in 5.1 surround so it makes more sense for us to stream music via iTunes and connect to multiple speakers [also via WiFi] to the living room amp and to speakers in the kitchen, as we currently do—we use the Apple airport stations that just plug in to the wall and connect to a pair of speakers). Both the projector and DVD player were less than the cost of the original projector. And of course no more green dot!

Back in the studio

2009-05-09T10:45:00.006-04:00

Last month (Apr 17) The Hoodoo Hounds went back to the studio. We went back to the same studio we went to almost two years ago now (see sound check). I usually don't like identifying people by name in these posts (unless they want me to), so I'll just say it's the studio up towards Central, in this one fellow's basement. He's got it pretty well decked out with good recording equipment, including a variety of mic's and a computer. He knows what he's doing and I'm always impressed by the sound of the playback in my headphones. The only real difficulty for me is that the drum track gets recorded first. Which means that I get minimal band accompaniment. A professional drummer would likely just count out what he's supposed to do. I'm not a professional drummer :) So while I am still learning to count, I sometimes get lost in the song, e.g., which verse we're on, etc. It is much easier to play when you hear the rest of the band playing along. Anyway, we managed to get four tracks down: Got the Blues This Morning, Daisy Mae Blues, Crossroad Blues, and Sheepnose. Sheepnose is a fairly long number with various fills. I almost had it right on the first take, except that I forgot about the extra solo verse in the middle. So as our front man was showing me the measure count on his fingers (which really helps), I thought we were in on our last verse and so I started to do the ending. Meanwhile, he kept on counting, as did the rhythm guitarist who was playing rhythm to help me keep my place. Now by this time I was already pretty wiped—it takes me about an hour to set up, and I had already been playing for about four hours without a break (two takes per song if I remember correctly). So on to take two...on this take I kept track of where I was but somehow managed to botch the ending. Luckily, the sound producer can do some "magic" with the software to fix that in post :) It was a long day, but now I'm done. Later this month the rest of the band is going back in to lay down their tracks. I'm really looking forward to hearing the finished product, I think the new songs should be pretty good.