Versailles

I've been increasingly involved in the community of the
Unitarian Church in Pittsburgh.
I went to a lovely picnic there after service this morning,
and spoke with many of the members. One in particular told
me a wonderful story, which I relate here.

It was toward the end of the picnic, and I was looking for
a friend to say my goodbyes. I was standing around looking
lost, when an older man in a green T-shirt approached me.
He had a name tag reading John McCarthy, I believe. I
happened to be writing my name down to sign up for a
name tag, so he observed my last name. He started telling me
of his family in Ireland.


I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I was hesitant to get into this
discussion in the first place. There was a particularly
attractive young woman I was eager to speak with before I
left, and I was mostly listening out of politeness at
first. But what followed was one of the best stories I've
heard first hand in my life.


John's grandfather was basically
kicked out of the house (off the farm, actually) in Ireland
for marrying a Scottish woman. They emigrated to the US
and ended up outside Pittsburgh. His grandfather worked
as a plasterer and his mother did laundry for the wealthy
steel magnates in the mansions nearby their more meager
home. His father, the eldest of 4 boys, upon graduation
from elementary school, faced the (parent's) choice of
attending high school or going to work at Kaufmann's, a
department store. His mother told everyone that John Sr.
was going to graduate from high school, get an office job,
and help put the rest of his brothers through college!

After college, John Sr. was drafted into the army to
fight in WWI. He was such a good student in school,
however, that they pulled him off the front lines to be a
stenographer for the officers. He served this position
throughout the war. At the end, ready to go home to his
family in Pittsburgh, an officer approached him asking if he
would remain in the army a few more months. "Why?", he
asked. "We would like you to come to href="http://history.acusd.edu/gen/text/versaillestreaty/vercontents.html"> Versailles and record
the meetings that will be taking place there. He became
an official stenographer for Woodrow Wilson, Clemenceau,
Orlando and Lloyd George. He remembered Wilson vehemently
objecting to the one-sidedness of the treaty, counseling
compassion instead of revenge. He suggested, in John's
presence, that there would be another war if such a
"treaty" were enforced on the Germans. Indeed.

Walking out of the meeting room, I spotted the following
framed quote from Albert Schweitzer:

"The only ones among you who will be really happy are those
who will have sought and found how to serve."

It is a wonderful place.





An awesome falafel place in Berlin




A great book I read while travelling. In English of course.
I thought it was funny to see it in German.





The new Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

This American Life

My life has been decidedly enriched by the radio show
This American Life.
It's basically a hodgepodge of stories from around the
country, usually on a theme given for the week,
eg. babysitting. It can be profound, ridiculous,
insightful. It is always touching, and consistently leaves
me smiling. Different kinds of smiles, but smiling always.

If you've never heard the show, check out the "Our
favorites" section. "Notes on Camp", "Act V" and
"Babysitting" are all phenomenal. So touching and

PS: I get a "Daily Ray of Hope" email from the Sierra Club.
One the other day was cute:

"The journal Mountain Gazette claims that it is printed on
paper "biodegradable with soy ink so environmentally benign
that, instead of recycling it, you can just pour milk on it
and eat it. The fiber content is guaranteed high."


My next few blogs will have pictures from my time in Europe last month.
This is Berlin at night.

Nelson's Ledges

Nelson Ledges

I just got back from the most strange camping experience
I've ever had. Rachel invited me and Katie, along with 8
other friends. Eliza was in town, as she was driving
cross-country with her brother who just graduated from some
school in Florida. I met her in Seattle. We went salsa
dancing after I saw Deborah Voight in Lohengrin at Seattle
Opera. There were a ton of fun people, and the weekend was
fantastic. Nelson's Ledges , however, was a mix of wonder
and disaster. There was horrendously loud music playing
until (I'm not exaggerating) about 5AM. It was like some
kind of huge party in the woods. We were unprepared for
this, as it was advertised as "family camping". We managed
to have a good time nonetheless, playing scrabble, smoking a
huge hookah, listening to the other Sean play guitar and
sing, and reading from Bloom's book of children's stories.
As if to make up for all the drunk, high, rude people,
however, nature offered us a marvelous lake (a filled in
quarry) and some truly strange geology. Check out the
pictures.

Alexandra Nechita

I was recently reminded of an experience I had walking
around Boston a few years ago. I was on Newbury Street,
shopping with a friend of mine. Well, I wasn't shopping,
but she was. Thus, I thought myself totally justified in
stepping into a little art gallery for a breath of fresh
air, so to speak. I immediately noticed very large
canvases, something like Picasso (one of his myriad styles
anyway) but vibrantly colorful and intriguing. I asked the
owner about them. They were painted by a young artist named
Alexandra Nechita .
She was 12 at the time of the painting. I think she's 18
or so now. Wonderful...

Erin McNulty

I just found out a daughter of my first music teacher,
Vivian McNulty, is a dancer in the San Francisco Ballet.
This has to be one of the most difficult jobs to get of
any profession. An
article from our town paper, when she
landed the apprenticeship (before she got into the main
company).
The SF Ballet Roster . What an unbelievable
achievement. Congratulations Erin!

Thoreau has a blog

A blog worth reading...

http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/

Sousa

I live in a building with elevator music. Heavy, classical
elevator music. Often it's kind of cool to hear Stravinsky
(I heard Rite of Spring last week) and Beethoven (9th
symphony?!) et al. But this morning at 9:00 I was forced to
travel 5 floors to the sounds of a Sousa march. This was
too much. I tried with all my might to ignore the
oppressive brass (and *@%^ing piccolo), but my mental and
concentrative powers were not up to the task. I burst out
the door as from death himself. I think I'm going to take
the stairs more often...

Abi

I got Abi Tapia's
new cd in the mail today. She's a fantastic
singer/songwriter in Austin. I saw her live in Pittsburgh
last year. She's the cousin of a friend of mine here. I
love her story... She decided she wanted to be a musician
about halfway through college. She picked up a guitar, took
a few lessons, and started writing. A couple years later she
released her first (real) CD, and this is the second.
Go the website and listen to Calamine Lotion and Hand Over Your Heart.
Fantastic lyrics! It's so humbling to be privileged enough to study
music for umpteen years with tons of expensive lessons etc
and have someone like Abi come along, pick up a guitar, and
show you what it really is to be a musician. Humbling, but
wonderful just the same...

Vixens, and Ceremonial Running Shoes

Wow... an entire month without adding to my blog. I have
an excuse! I was working like a maniac on the final draft
of a paper for
CADE-20 in Tallinn, Estonia. I was then in Banff for
a math conference,

Densest Packing of Spheres . Tom Hales and Sam Furguson
were both there. I met
Noam Elkies .
While all his
mathematical, musical and chess accomplishments were
astonishing, my favorite trick was when
and he showed me how he could whistle and hum at the same
time... different voices of Bach fugues!.

Now I'm back in Pittsburgh, for about 10 days. I'm off
to Yellowstone with Barnaby and then home with my family for
a week. Why does the summer feel like it's almost over?
It's not even June.

I spent the last couple days putting my neglected cd
collection in my computer. I found a bunch of stuff I
hadn't heard for years that I forgot I love (the Bernstein
Mahler set), and some
things I owned but never listened to. One of these
is Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen. Amazing little
opera! This discovery alone repaid my work tenfold.

Here's an IM conversation I had recently. It made
me laugh.

"Do you have tennis/running shoes?"
"ummmm, yes but no"
"huh"
"i do but...they're more symbolic than anything"
"We could go running... with your symbolic running shoes"
"we could, but we will not. They're ceremonial"

Attn: B.F. Skinner fans

(They couldn't resist the last sentence...)

"The latest issue of Make Magazine volume 2 from O'Reilly publishing has an article on a cockroach controlled robot. Roboticist Garnet Hertz has mounted a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach that drives a small mobile robot around by walking on top of a Kensington trackball. There is a row of proximity sensor triggered LEDs that shine light in the roach's eyes, making him steer the robot since roaches instinctively avoid light. Garnet's web page 'Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine' details the project with several images of the roach in action. Debugging the project is inherently impossible."

Why I Love Macs

Have you ever wondered, "What would happen if I
accidentally deleted my operating system kernel?" Well, I
can not tell you from experience that it's not that bad with
a Mac! I was trying to figure out why an installed program
(XSB-Prolog) wasn't working. It looked like a reinstall was
needed, so I was deleting the old version. Somehow it was
storing some files at the root level (/), so I typed
"rm xsb*". Of course, I got a "permission denied" error, so
issued the superuser version "sudo rm xsb *" Oh, wait. Did
I really put the space between 'b' and '*'? Uh, yeah.
Kernel, gone. Indexing data structures, gone. Luckily, the
kernel was in memory, so I quickly typed "unison all".
**Thank God*** that command worked and I watched with a kind
of perverted glee as I watched all my work from the last 3
days (bad bad bad to wait so long to unison...) be saved
on my remote (cmu) computer. Phew! Now what about all
those files in the generic "download" folder that aren't in
my unison tree? Could I still save those? (Dozens of cds
copied from the library that didn't get organized... bad bad
bad to wait so long to organize...) I brought the computer
to school (being careful to tell the power manager "sleep
never!"). I typed a few keystrokes and, ... keyboard gone.
Mouse gone. No interaction whatsoever. Oh, well. I can
just check out all those cds again. What about all those
pictures of my dad I collected from Nancy for his 80th bday?
I guess I can get her to send those again. (Why weren't
those backed up?) Hoping for nothing more than a day's
worth of agony reinstalling all my software and
reconfiguring everything, I put in the Mac restore dvd.
After 15 minutes, to my surprise and wonder, my old system
files were simply copied to an "Old System" directory. Not
erased. NOT ERASED???. What kind of uberOS is this?
Somehow it figured out that the old version (of which the
kernel was missing) was newer than the one I was trying to
install, so it simply copied the old system stuff to "Old
System" and restored EVERYTHING!!! I had to get some
programs from the old /usr/local and reinstall some System
Preferences stuff (like uControl) but that's it!!! It took
about 2 hours. (Update: the new iLife also died)
Anyway, I'm actually writing code now, instead of installing
software. Thanks Mac!

On the lighter side, my friend Chloe saw a book on my
shelf... Her comment:
"A Guide to Latex... (confused) Why?" :)

Cirque du Soleil

I had one of the most wonderful experiences of my life last
night. Cirque du Soleil is in Pittsburgh on a tour. It's
basically impossible to describe in words how magical the
night was. The tent was a beautiful blue and yellow canvas
swirl. It wasn't very big inside, and we could see the
entire (almost circular) stage very well. The show was
called Varekei. From their website

"The word varekai means "wherever" in the Romany language of
the gypsies the universal wanderers. This production pays
tribute to the nomadic soul, to the spirit and art of the
circus tradition, and to the infinite passion of those whose
quest takes them along the path that leads to Varekai."

There was a forest of tall golden trees (poles) in the back
where throughout there were numerous creatures bounding
about, often 25 feet above the ground. The show began with
a man dressed all in white with two long white feathers for
wings falling from the sky. After some inspection from the
multifarious and fantastical inhabitants, he was drawn into
the air on a diamond shape net. A spectacular, but at the
same time elegant and beautiful acrobatic routine followed.
He reminded me more of a wonderful dancer at a ballet than a
traditional acrobat.

There followed a number of beautiful scenes in this truly
ballet-like story. (There was hardly a word spoken.)
Some of my favorites:

A trio of probably 8 year old Asian children carrying 7'
ropes with bowls attached to either end. They had a
routine where they would get the ropes spinning and toss
them 20' into the air while doing somersaults, flips and
spin kicks underneath. A highlight was when they were
standing on each other's shoulders 3-high while the top two
continued to spin their ropes. They were so intense and
professional. It made me smile...

Another acrobatic scene: There were benches with a declining
angle (like a decline bench press). One would lie on the
bench and hold his feet up. Another would somehow launch
himself onto the awaiting feet. The top one proceeded to be
hurled in continuous flips and twists, often finishing
standing on the feet of the reclining one. It was a tour de
force in balance and charisma. It was literally
breathtaking (as were so many of the acts...)

Hands down the best juggler I've ever seen, or even hope to
see. There were the usual pins, balls, etc at which his
skill was superlative. But there was
wild new stuff as well he started throwing up these straw
summer hats at an angle above the audience. The hats came
back to him slowly (as when you throw a Frisbee diagonally in to
the air) while he was throwing others at other parts of the
audience. Meanwhile he was running a large circular loop
around the stage. It was so charming and funny. Just
marvelous.

A duo of acrobats on a simple ropes from the ceiling. They
did a symmetric dance. The symmetry was twofold. First
horizontal. Then vertical when one did a handstand and
variations using his two wrist ropes while the other
imitated his actions below. It was fantastic. (We heard
some enchanted middle aged women gawking at their awesome
bodies after the show...)

I've left out a dozen scenes, each worthy of comment, but
alas I have about 100 hours of work to do before Friday. I
remember when Cirque came to NYC. The tent was even on the
path of my long run, when I ran on Randall's Island. I
looked at the tent with envy, but decided I couldn't afford
the $80 ticket. This time I got lucky and, thanks to a
wonderful friend, found aa $20 ticket. The ticket is worth
every penny, and in retrospect I would have forked over the
$80 had I known what I know now.
If you ever have an opportunity to see them, it is truly a
magical, artistic, profound celebration of all things
beautiful about humanity.

(I found these pictures on the internet (had to turn my
camara off) but they convey a good sense of the environment)

Mitsuko Uchida

I drove to Cleveland yesterday to hear
Mitsuko Uchida
play two Mozart concerti, 14 in Eb and 23 in
A. It was such a beautiful performance. I was in the
second row and was only about 20 feet from her. She was
conducting as well. Her enthusiasm and spirit are
intoxicating. I didn't know the Eb until I checked out the
CD from the (wonderful)
Carnegie Library. I listened to it about 10 times
before the concert, and I'm so happy I did. It took some
time for me to find the magical spots (even though, in
retrospect, I know there are many). The A major is one of
the greatest works of art. I talked with Barnaby on my way
to Cleveland and he made the comical comment "Mozart was
AMAZING in A major". Indeed.

James Gaffigan"
conducted some early symphonies in between
the two concerti. I remember seeing him as a senior at NEC
conducting some Mozart opera scenes when Eve was playing in
the orchestra. Though I initially rolled my eyes when I
recognized who he was, I was charmingly surprised. He was
wonderfully clear and expressive, and had lost the
gratuitous showmanship he showed
when I saw him 4 years ago. He did a terrific job.

The most upsetting event of the day was seeing the vandalized Rodin sculpture at the back of the Cleveland Art
Museum. In 1970 some jackasses protesting Vietnam thought
it would be appropriate to destroy an irreplaceable work of
art with 3 sticks of dynamite. They remounted it with the
bottom torn open. It made me sick to my stomach to see such
a ridiculous sacrilege. Einstein's quip about the infinite
stupidity of man came to mind (along with a long chain of
invective).

Websites

I feel the overwhelming need to plug three funny websites.

Google Gulp is really funny.


Pigeon Rank is hysterical if you studied B.F. Skinner
in Psych 101 like I did.

Overheard in New York.
It's a bunch of random overheardcomments posted by readers.
My current favorite:

"Central Park"

Jogger1 : "This run is totally just a warm up for a night of
hot bondage sex."
Jogger2 : "Yeah, totally."

Spring

Three! Yes, three 60 degree days in a row! Life is good.
Spring started off amazingly well. I went to the
Emerson
concert on Monday. They are so amazing! They started with
Beethoven op 18, which I wasn't really that excited about.
But thank goodness they didn't do anything more "serious",
because Shostakovich A major was next. My God that was
awesome. The violist was unbelievable, and they had really
good communication, esp the cellist. He was always looking
around smiling and nodding. It was great. Brahms f minor
piano quintet was last with
Jeffrey Kahane , who was fantastic!
Such a wonderful musician and pianist! It
was the best performance of that I've ever heard. I heard
Fleisher do it at NEC, which was great given the
circumstances, but this performance was transcendent.
(Nothing against Fleisher. His recordings are forever
hanging in my Hall of Genius).

I've been really lazy lately. I don't know what's wrong.
I was probably depressed it was taking so long to install
DB2. I don't know how systems people do it. Staring at seg
faults and *!#&ing backtraces make me want to puke. Now
that it works, though, it's pretty fun and I have energy to
work again. I ported my prototype from ML to Prolog which
was fun. Now I just need to write a Prolog-SQL compiler and
I'm set.

I ran into Sara at the yoga studio last
night. I love
practicing over there, and it was so fun to chat and laugh with
her. We're so wonderfully similar. I'm so lucky to have
found a teacher and friend like her. Thanks Sara!

I held my recitation outside yesterday. (Day 1 of the
three day 60 streak!) It was great! I ran to the art store
to buy some newsprint and wrote with big markers. We had
the first "class discussion" ever, which was fantastic.
Someone asked a question to which I didn't know the answer.
I told them as much, but I knew there were basically only
two ways to think about it, and everyone
started discussing which it should be amongst themselves.
The setup outside was different, as we were in a circle
instead of the stupid row setup. Maybe I'll set up class
like that from now on. Hmmm... might be weird in a
classroom.

On the way home on Monday, I ran into Allie for the first
time since we broke up. It was nice to talk to her again.
Kind of weird... It wasn't as tumultuous as I thought it
would be, but it still left my head spinning a bit. Still
processing...

We learned about Natassa's PAX data placement algorithm in
class on Monday. Astonishingly, she decided not to patent
it. In her words
"I really believe that education implies free dissemination
of ideas, and the very concept of a patent opposes that. I
would feel hypocritical to choose to become faculty and at
the same time patent PAX. It was not an easy decision given
how much money were involved, but I sure am proud of
sticking to my principles :)."
I am so inspired by her decision! My good fortune seems
boundless these days.

All this stuff in 3 days!

"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening, that is
translated through you into action. And because there is
only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and
if you block it, it will never exist through any other
medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It
is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how
valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions.
It is your business to keep it yours. Clearly and directly,
to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe
in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware
directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel
open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction
whatever, at any time. There is only a queer divine
dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest, that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than others."
-- Martha Graham

Easter

I had two goosebump moments yesterday. I went to the Andy
Warhol museum downtown. There was an exhibit of photographs
of dancers. Everyone I've heard of (which is admittedly not
many) was there: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Martha Graham, Mark
Morris, Jose Limon, Alvin Ailey, Cunningham/Cage together
(that was a beautiful one), Cunningham in a beautiful solo
dance shot. It was totally breathtaking. I finally started
liking (as opposed to "appreciating") Warhol's
work as well. His "Flowers", a dark green acrylic grass
with bright huge fluorescent flowers was awesome.
I even got into Marilyn and Jackie this time.
The other one was watching "The Company" at night. The
movie was fantastic and real (in the California, "that's
real, man" sense), and the Joeffrey dancers were fabulous.
Even Neve knocked my socks off. She's a beautiful dancer!
The injury scenes were so well done. Understated, but the
understatement enhanced the emotion of the whole thing. The
relationship web was also true to my experience. Highly
recommended!
Now it's Easter. I'm writing a talk and practicing Haydn string
quartets. I had an Eckhart moment while practicing. I'm
trying to transpose all the parts on both Bb and A
clarinet. Some clefs come easy, treble (obviously), bass,
alto (from all those years of playing C clarinet parts on
Bb). Some are coming along: mezzo-soprano for bass on Bb,
Some are not: baritone (for playing a C bass part on A
clarinet). I'm thinking of how cool it will be to be fluent
in all those clefs so I can play whatever part I want on
whatever clarinet makes the key easier. But I found myself
missing the present moment, enjoying the harmonies, the
physical sensation, while my brain is bouncing around trying
to decide what to do next. I continually forget that I'm
perfect already. That I won't be a happier person when I
can do all those transpositions. (I remember Cindi Lee's
comment in yoga class, "Being able to put your head on your
shins will not make you a happier person") It was a nice
reminder of that simple lesson.
Plans for the day: a massive optimization, half a talk,
website maintenance, dodecahedral plates spinning,
databases reading finished. That's all! And I still have
American Splendor checked out from Blockbuster. Hmmm...

The Carnegie International

I managed to make it to the
Carnegie International exhibit last weekend. I'm
enjoying modern art so much more in my old age! It's one of
the oldest modern exhibits in the country. Founded in the
late 19th century by Andrew himself, it's had the work of
all the big European and American artists (that nowadays hang
solidly in the permanent collections of big museums) when
it was still new (and mostly hated). Some of my favorites:
Mary Cassatt, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Camille
Pissarro, George Rouault, John Singer Sargent, and Richard
Serra.

This time I got museum goose bumps at two works. One was by

Julie Mehretu . There were 3 huge canvases, about 8' X
5'. The most impressive to me I describe as Jackson Pollack
with a pencil. It's a wonderful angular and geometric
chaos. I kept coming back to that one. I wish I had taken
a picture, but the lines wouldn't have come out well due to the
angular camera skew.




The second was a hexagonal room on which each wall was
projected a video of scenes of a man and woman walking
(individually) on the streets of Paris. There was a Phillip
Glass soundtrack playing in the background, which I
immediately recognized, but have no idea where I've heard it
before. The artist's name is href="http://www.cmoa.org/international/the_exhibition/artist.asp?rondinone">
Ugo Rondinone The work is called Roundelay. I just
felt myself walking in the countless cities where I've
wandered, always in a different state of mind, after
different things, thinking or not thinking, directed or
undirected. I wondered what those people were thinking,
where they were going. The streets were empty, stark,
severe. The Glass music was hypnotic. One of the first
times I've thought his music was perfectly appropriate.





I'm so lucky to get to experience this kind of work! I
still remember my favorite exhibit of all time. Chuck Close
at the Met. But that's a whole nother story.

With Appreciation and Gratitude.

Sean

PS: (How curious.. "a whole nother"... Never seen that written,
probably because it's wildly wrong. Ah, the beauty of
sinning with the spoken word...)

Natassa

Natassa talked about her PhD work today in class. She
was a student of DeWitt's at Wisconsin. She was interested
in (architectural) resource utilization of processors
running database programs. She found some amazing stuff,
eg. that the processor was only doing useful work at most
%50 of the time, the rest spent mostly waiting for memory
requests. She had a nice comment in the middle of the
lecture somewhere. To paraphrase:

"It was the most miserable time of my PhD work. I had just
done all sorts of tests and generated millions of numbers.
I was just kind of staring at them for weeks. I had no idea
what I was looking for, but I KNEW there was something
interesting going on."

And she found the interesting stuff! I like her. She's
such a database person.
I was talking about an idea for a theorem database with her
yesterday, and all through my exposition she's firing ways
of how to represent the knowledge in relational tables.
Pretty funny how different people approach the same
problem.

"A common mistake people make when trying to design
something completely foolproof is to underestimate the
ingenuity of complete fools." -- Douglas Adams

Bach

I've been out of it lately. I forgot to go to my chorus
rehearsal on Wednesday, and almost forgot to go to my
recitation. I'm not even going to imagine Bob's reaction if
I would have forgot to go. I almost forgot the chorus
rehearsal tonight, even though I've been reminding myself
all day. I don't know what's up.
The rehearsal was painful from 7 until 9:30. I didn't
want to be there, I felt terrible about missing the last
rehearsal, and I wanted to go home. We were even singing
music I don't like. Some Renaissance and Baroque crap.
Finally, at 9:30, after 2.5 hours of rehearsal, my back sore
from standing the whole time, and totally irritated, we sing
a 5 minute Bach cantata, Unser Leben Ist Ein Schatten.
"Our life is a shadow". It almost drove me to my knees it
was so beautiful. Simple, elegant, clever, expressive. I
have no idea why we sing anything else. It is just magical.
I recalled Beethoven's remark about Bach.
"Not Brook (Bach) but Ocean should have been his name". It
made my day, my week even, and gave me hope. Thank you,
Ocean.

MIA

It's been some time since my last entry. The main reason
for this is that I was working like a maniac trying to
finish the Hol-Light implementation of the real closed
fields decision procedure by the CADE deadline of last
Friday (which turned into Monday morning due to the kindness
of the organizer). It was an awesome work effort on my
part. I don't think I've ever been so productive. I would
wake up early, around 6, and work on it until I had
something at school. Then would return immediately from
school and work until 2 or so. This continued for nearly 2
weeks. I finished! The final example of the paper
completed while I was sleeping on Sunday morning. It felt
very good to have such focus and drive. It's funny what
deadlines can do. As a result though, there's a hole in my
electronic memory, so I'm going to try to fill some gaps.

What's happened in the last 2 weeks? The paper was a nice
accomplishment. John Harrison wrote the bulk of it, as I
was frantically working on the code. It was great working
with him, and I hope to keep our collaboration going. Right
now the biggest problem is the ridiculous inefficiency of my
implementation. Correctness was hard enough though, so I'm
a little hesitant about diving into an optimization phase.
Ahh, back to the past.

I went home for my dad's 80th birthday party! It was a
surprise. I flew home on Thursday night. I slept at
Barnaby's place in SF, then took Caltrain to my mom's in
SJ. On Friday I put together an iPhoto slideshow of a bunch
of old pictures of my dad that I had scanned in the week
before. It came out really nice! There was some good
music, (Five for Fighting, Edgar Meyer and John Larson) and
I made some little comment slides that explained some of the
pictures. It was a great deal of work, but I'm so
wonderfully happy I did it. Anyway, I got to the house
where the party would be an hour early and hid in the
upstairs bedroom. I was still editing the slideshow, so the
time went quickly. When everyone had arrived, there were
some short speeches celebrating my dad, and then I was
ushered in by his great friends and, after some surprised
hugs, we all watched the slide show. The party was really
fun. My dad likes gambling games a lot, so the theme of the
party was "McLaughlin's Games". When you arrived, you were
given a bag full of 80 "McLaughlin Nuggets" (pennies). Then
there were a bunch of game stations (21,Craps, Roulette,
Poker, etc.) where you could attempt to win other people's
nuggets. The one with the most nuggets at the end of the
night got to choose first from the pile of door prizes.
Everyone got a prize, and they ranged from exotic beers, to
nice wines, to flowers (for the ladies) and nice chocolate.
It was such a good time! There was even air hockey upstairs
for the more physically minded. It was a magical night.

The trip was very short. I left on Sunday night. I was
suppose to leave at midnight, so I went to the city early to
have dinner at the dive Indian place around the corner from
Barnaby's. We stuffed ourselves, and in the process of
talking lost track of time and I hopped on BART just a few
minutes too late. I got to my gate at SFO 5 minutes late,
and I had to be put on a different plane. The redirected
flight went through Houston, so I wanted to call Rodolfo,
but it was 5AM when I got there, and I didn't have the heart
to wake him up. In the Houston airport I saw potentially
the worst realistic sculpture I've ever seen in my life.
It's George Bush, "casually" throwing a jacket over his
shoulder. It was so bad I took a picture:




Immediately after that assault, I found this humorous scene
on the departure screen.



Got Windows?

I finished Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. It was
mostly wonderful. I can't imagine a life in the trenches of
WWI, and am I'll equipped to say anything wise about war or
suffering. It's still in the queue of books awaiting quote
entry, so I'll leave with something from Aeschylus, a quote
that is on the tomb of Robert Kennedy. It is perhaps the
soul of Helprin's novel. And indeed, many others.

"In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop
upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."