Robot Dreams

This past weekend I spent the afternoon at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History. From a human perspective it's personally old and historically old. Personally because it's been around before myself, my parents, and my grandparents where born. And historically because it stores for display Nature's history. Last time I was there, I went with my immediate family to both look at the dinosaur exhibits and to watch my nephew look at the dinosaur exhibits. This time around I, actually we but more about that later, went to see the Aztec exhibit before it closed. Unfortunately, there's no picture taking in the exhibit so I can't show that. Instead I have two panoramas of one of the Haida Totem Poles in the main hall, and of the main hall looking at the South entrance:

So that's the "old" stuff... The "new" stuff is whom I went with, my new girlfriend Cynthia! And since she reads this blog (hi Cynthia) perhaps she will grace it with a comment OK, so you may be asking what the two parts, other than going together to the Museum, might have in common. Well it turns out that Cynthia is an archeologist currently studying the Maya in Belize, although she's obviously not in Belize right now.

There where two things good about today... The weather was much better than predicted yesterday. And I joined friends from the Evanston Drinking Liberally in the Oct. 27 Chicago Peace march. And there was one bad thing about today... Every public transportation train was a distressing mishap. The attempt to take the Metra train south failed, as the train that would get us on time was canceled because of a derailment (it derailed in the yard). Taking the alternate CTA trains was delayed because they are working on the subway, and hence it's rerouted on the L-line. And on the way back, the Metra now, was delayed without reason for half an hour. But with all that we still managed to enjoy the march from Union Park to Federal Plaza. I'll tease with what has to be the best "no war" sign in the whole march.

The rest of the pictures on the flip side...

I will never really understand how far the universe will go to strike at the least expected, yet most predictable if you have a perverse opinion of the universe, time. Here I was just getting back from the Hawaii vacation, getting back to the usual intermittent work and starting to talk about the ongoing Thot project, since nothing really pressing was going on, and I get called for the possibility of a huge amount of new work. The thing is that I just about rely on such things happening by now. As every time in the past that we try to get back to Thot stuff starts happen that prevents us from working on it. Needless to say I've been stressing out about this new work for the few weeks since then. And now that I get back word from our proposal, I'm even more stressed out. Thinking about the ramifications, and the planning, and much more. But then again I tend work better under stress... Needless to say I'm looking forward to tonights Drinking Liberally, seeing as I can use the drinking to relax a bit from the events so far. With that in mind I leave you with a bit of hilarity from last weeks Drinking Liberally...

Going back to the beginning... We where staying in the expensive side of the island. Not that there is anything non-expensive in any of the Hawai'i islands, but Kailua-Kona is the vacation, resort, multi-million dollar locale. It's also where the political center of the island has been before the U.S.A. came along and swallowed up the islands. Strictly speaking on the second day there, since we arrived late afternoon Wednesday, we did some errands and walked around town. What better way to start this set of photos than with the terribly numerous, and yet very hard to find, gecko's of Hawai'i.

A few days ago I got back from a week vacation to Hawai'i, the island and state. This is the second time to the state, last time going to Kauai. And this time I had the better planning and preparation to avoid the malfunctioning camera incident that hit me when I went to Kauai. There isn't much to say about Hawai'i other than if you have a very short list of places to visit before you die, put it on your list. Now since I took a lot of pictures, 447 just on my digital puny camera, it took a few days (5) to just process them into a shape I could post 138 of those. And obviously it's going to take some time to blog about them all. But if you are impatient you can find them all on the photo section of my home pages. The only warning about this set of images, is that they are big, so stretch your browser window as much as you can to really enjoy the views. So a big aloha, from the bottom of Honaunau Bay, to you and keep on reading to see the rest of the photos...

OK, I must admit the title of this entry is mostly random, except for the "Drinking Liberally" part. Tonight I went to my first drinking liberally "event". If it wasn't obvious, politically speaking, I'm a liberal by U.S. standards. But I guess it comes naturally from being a minority from a US non-state that has a tradition of political fervor. It was fun, and I look forward to repeating the experience. Mostly this is an exercise for me in realizing, given recent past political history, that just voting isn't enough to change things. And on to the programmatic, and unrelated aspect of this post, except maybe related in the drinking part... Here's another autostitch set of images. In this case of the garden in the Aspen Physics Center taken while at BoostCon07.

Another year goes by, and my nephew is one year older. Today I went to Dante's birthday party. It wasn't a big party like the early years, but there was a pinata (sorry no pictures of that one). The really important parts of any birthday party where there, friends, presents, and food. Speaking of which here are two of those important items:

As to the order of importance of those two, that is a constant battle!

Shortly before I went on vacation to Kaua'i North Shore, Princeville Google started it's second Summer of Code foray. Like usual I can't resist making suggestions and put together a very short page in the Boost Wiki with two project ideas, the first two Boost.Build ones. Like the proverbial snowball rolling down, many other people added ideas. And at some point, one day past the deadline, Boost was accepted into the SoC. And right before I left for Hawaii, I joined the mentor list for Boost SoC projects. So here I am in vacation, having fun, except for the part of loosing my wallet at the beach, and the Boost SoC wheels keep grinding.

So I come back a week later, one week ago now, and a few thousand emails of all kinds have accumulated (yes I got more than 3000 emails in one week). After quickly parsing a small percentage of the email, I go look at how the Boost SoC applications from students and find 130 still active applications to go through (44 of them had already been tossed out by the other mentors). Yikes I would have never expected so many students wanting to do work for Boost. As it turns out Boost is one of the top projects in the SoC, in terms of number of submissions. So here I am, late at night evaluating more applications. In this case for 2D Geometry Computation, and I've already gone through and evaluated the Boost.Build related ones (turns out there where a small number of those), and the ones for a Generic Tree Container.

I have my own theories as to why students would gravitate to wanting to work on Boost libraries. But I'd like to hear from others, since I haven't been a student for a long time now. What drives students to Boost and C++?

PS. I'll get around to posting the pictures, mostly underwater ones, from the vacation soon.