Tag: event

The Kiss

I was just going through a box of old photos when I came across my all time favorite, the kiss. Melissa lived in Paris her junior year of college and I went to visit her over the semester break.

This photo was taken January 1, 2000. The previous night we celebrated l’an 2000 at the Arc de Triomphe, before walking 12 miles across town back to her dorm. On January 1st we watched a parade (I seem to recall a number of French police officers on rollerblades). Following the parade we walked to the Eiffel Tower and took this photograph. I framed the photo with Melissa in front of the tower. I then rested the camera precariously on a fence post, set the timer, and ran over to her. As I heard the shutter click I knew we had a keeper. We developed the film at a French camera shop so the prints have thin white borders all the way around (as is the style there).

A few months later two straight male friends of mine from ASP saw this photo and decided to imitate it when they backpacked through Europe together. Unfortunately, I don’t have a copy of it, but it was pretty funny.

The Geoffender

You read me my rights and then you said “Let’s go” and nothing more.

– Blondie (as covered by The Mr. T Experience).

The Iron Coder competition from the recent C4[2] conference I attended had a required API (iPhone OS’s CoreLocation) and a theme (paranoia). I actually did take a couple hours on Sunday morning to throw together a submission. Sure, it wasn’t going to be polished, but still creative perhaps. I figured several people would do something like a crime map. I tried a variant on that, dealing only with one (particularly nasty) type of crime.

The app I threw together is quite simple. You press the “Geoffend” button. The app determines your location from the iPhone’s built in GPS. The app fetches from the internet and displays a list of registered sex offenders who live near your current location. If that doesn’t induce paranoia, I don’t know what will. I call it Geoffender (combining Geo with offender).

I got the app working in the iPhone simulator on my computer, but I ran into problems running the app on my actual iPhone hardware. I recently acquired a new iPhone, and I hadn’t yet set it up for development. When I tried to set it up before the contest I absolutely could not get it working. I tried everything. The iPhone platform is pretty well locked down. In order to do development you have to have various digital certificates and keys from Apple. I have these. The problem is installing them correctly is not completely straightforward. So the demo was a no go.

It’s just as well. There were many other submissions to the contest which were much better. I also learned a few things, so the time wasn’t wasted.

The C4[2]

This past weekend I travelled up to Chicago to attend a Mac software development conference called C4. This was the third year the conference was held (named C4[2], the previous two editions were C4[0] & C4[1]), though it was the first time I attended it.

It shares much in common with WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, yet there are many stark contrasts. WWDC has been growing at an unmaintainable rate. This year there were around 5000 attendees. This C4 conference had 170 attendees, including many well known and respected names in the world of Mac software development. Both conferences include technical presentations on various development topics. WWDC sessions are presented by Apple engineers, but C4 sessions are presented by other application developers.

C4 is not widely publicized and I just happened to find out about it by reading other developers’ blogs and Twitter posts. I quickly became excited and signed up a few hours after registration opened, which was fortunate because it filled to capacity a couple hours after that.

The trip started last Friday morning when I rode the Pocket Rocket to the train station in Champaign. Melissa accompanied me on her bike to see me off. When we arrived at the station I folded up the Pocket Rocket, put it in a big nylon carrying bag, walked in, picked up my ticket, and sat down in the waiting room. The Amtrak train was almost an hour late, but before I knew it I was showing the conductor my ticket and boarding the train. This was a somewhat new and interesting experience for me, as I had never ridden on a train around these parts.

I arrived in Union Station in Chicago and headed straight to the food court, as it was past lunch time by now. I lucked out to find a Mexican restaurant, where I could get a veggie burrito, connected to a Cinnabon.

After partaking in the delicious meal I headed outside, unpacked my bike and rode off. I had a little time to kill before the start of the conference so I took a quick trip over to the lake shore path. Next I hit up the Michigan Ave. Apple store. I arrived at the hotel where the conference was to take place plenty early and waited around for a few hours. Lots of other conference attendees were arriving during this time and I chatted with a few of them. The conference started with a dinner and a couple opening sessions. It was after 11 pm before the conference ended. I whipped my bike back out and rode about four miles north to my cousin Scott’s apartment, where I would be sleeping. Or so I thought.

I arrived. We caught up a bit and talked about bikes. I met his friends. It was now approaching midnight and his neighbors were still having a raging party upstairs. The music was unbelievably loud and people were literally jumping up and down. I finally fell asleep somewhere between 1 am – 1:30 am. The party was still going on. Thank goodness I can sleep through anything.

I woke up bright and early at 6:15 am. At some point Friday evening a bicyclist from Chicago I knew from races we have done together contacted me and suggested I join his team for their Saturday morning training ride. I hadn’t been expecting to do this sort of thing, so I was a little unprepared, but I like to be spontaneous. I met riders from the XXX Racing team at Wicker Park and we took off heading north.

Chicago has ridiculous traffic, lots of stop lights, and plenty of potholes. I had been wondering how these guys trained in this and I got a crash course (not literally) in big city training. A group of nearly 60 (3-4 times the size in my normal training rides) rode about 25 miles to Highland Park. It was a pretty easy pace on the way up. Half (including me) turned around and headed back to Chicago. The ride back was a lot crazier. It basically turned into a road race where 20 or so riders were all jockeying for position at 28 mph. Meanwhile traffic was all around us. We had to slam on our brakes for a couple stoplights. It was a little more dangerous than my typical training rides, but it was never out of control. I handled it pretty well on my little bike and I got lots of surprised comments about how well the bike did. I love this little thing.

I ended the 50 mile ride back at Scott’s, then showered and biked back downtown to the conference. There were more interesting talks all afternoon. Between talks, during meals, etc. I met lots of really interesting people who were working on a wide range of projects. There were developers who worked solo in their spare time, people from small, 3-15 person companies working in small teams, people (like me) from medium, couple hundred person companies, all the way to people from Adobe, which employs thousands.

That night was a pizza party, where I met more interesting people. Again I rode back to Scott’s late. Again his neighbors were throwing a wild party. Again I fell asleep despite them.

I slept in slightly longer before Scott and I took a ride down the lake shore path all the way to his office at the University of Chicago. We almost went past Barrack Obama’s house, but Scott couldn’t remember which street it was on. I tried out his fixed gear bike and he tried out the Pocket Rocket. It was an interesting experience. After my recent purchases, a fixed gear bike is really the only kind missing from my collection… but I’m not in any real hurry to get one. It was a little too weird for my tastes. I never really felt safe and secure on it the way it do on… well, any other bike.

I attended more conference sessions on Sunday afternoon. The conference ended with a coding competition, somewhat similar to the defunct MacHack conference. Eight or so developers showed off simple iPhone programs they had written using GPS/location functionality with the theme “paranoia.” There were apps detailing crimes that had take place near you, all the way to a “spy” stealth distress beacon. The eventual winner was a little off-topic, but was technically interesting so most attendee voters overlooked that detail. Somehow it combined an iPhone, a Wiimote, and a Mac to build a simple gesture based drawing program. The contest winners were awarded a MacBook Air, and dozens of software applications donated by conference attendees (including a free copy of my application Mathematica).

The conference had ended a few hours before my train was to depart back to Champaign so I rode around downtown for an hour or two.

Chicago’s Magnificent Mile

The Sears Tower

After my joyride I returned to Union Station, packed up my bike, and went straight to the food court… only to find everything closed. What? It was 6:45 pm. In a panic I went back out and walked a couple blocks, lugging my heavy backpack and my bike in its bag with me. I found several restaurants. All were closed. Ridiculous. Time was running out so I went back to Union Station, bought $10 worth of overpriced junk food, and boarded the train home. The Fig Newton’s were good, but I would have preferred dinner.

The ride home was fairly smooth. I fell asleep pretty quickly in my exhausted state. When I woke up a short while later I set an alarm on my phone to ensure I wouldn’t sleep through my stop in Champaign. It worked. Another short bike ride later I was finally home and very quickly fell asleep in my comfortable bed.

So that was my weekend, and as Melissa speculated, I was rather proud of myself to have done the entire thing without the assistance/hinderance of an automobile.

The Pizza Dilemma

Homer Simpson: “I like pizza. I like bagels. I like hot dogs with mustard and beer. I’ll eat eggplant. I could even eat a baby deer. La la la la la la la la la la. Who’s that baby deer on the lawn“

As some C4 attendees are complaining on Twitter, ordering the right kinds of pizza for a group of people presents challenges. There are people who like meat. There are people who like veggies. Some of the meat eaters won’t eat veggie pizza. Some of the veggie eaters won’t eat meat pizza.

In this particular case there was apparently an abundance of veggie pizza and not enough meat. That’s unfortunate for some. On the flip side, I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I’ve eaten pizza in a group who has ordered all meat pizzas, except for one cheese, and everybody goes straight for the cheese… leaving a hungry vegetarian and a bunch of uneaten meat pizza. This has happened to me literally dozens of times in the past 10 years (mostly in college).

The solution to the pizza dilemma is obvious, yet people often get it wrong. Order fewer meat pizzas and fewer veggie pizzas, while adding a boat load of plain cheese pizza. Sure, cheese may not be the favorite of some meat eaters or some veggie eaters, but they will eat it. Some may argue they won’t… but those people are wrong.

So instead of running out of meat pizzas and having meat eaters go away hungry, or (as is more often the case) running out of veggie pizzas and having the veggie eaters go away hungry, everyone will be able to eat cheese when their favorites run out and nobody goes away hungry.

The Synchronized Swim

Melissa & I watched the olympic team synchronized swimming event while eating lunch this afternoon. It reminded me of how close I accidentally came to being a synchronized swimmer a few years back.

I was doing masters swimming at the University of Illinois at the time. One of the girls who swam on the team was also involved with synchronized swimming. They had a performance coming up and each of the girls on the team was supposed to find an untrained male to try to perform a routine during the show, mostly as a joke. Anyway, none of the girl’s guy friends were willing to do it so she asked the guys on the masters team. I was the only one who did have a schedule conflict (or was honest enough not to claim I did) and after much begging I (somewhat reluctantly) agreed.

I guess it might be fun. I do like to entertain.

The night before the performance I received word from the girl that very few others actually found guys to participate in the routine, so it was scrapped at the last minute. I was a bit relieved, but also a bit disappointed. Who knows, I could have been the next synchronized swimming star…

The Fit

I started playing soccer when I was six years old. I wasn’t particularly good, but I happened to be on a really good team that year. We made it all the way to the league championship game. And lost.

I threw a fit, the likes of which you wouldn’t believe. I was so upset I refused to take part in the team picture after the game. My dad tried to pick me up off the ground and place me in with the rest of the team for the team photo and I wanted no part of it. This photo of my fit has become a family classic.

The Antidote

There were a couple incidents at the latest Critical Mass rides in a few major cities. Unpleasant altercations with a motorist in Seattle and with a (horrible, by the looks of it) police officer in New York (watch the video). Of course there are two sides to the stories, and as you can imagine in these cases both sides claim the other started it.

If you’re not aware, Critical Mass is a group of “bicyclists” who meet the last Friday evening of every month and ride through the city completely blocking traffic and generally disrupting motorists as much as possible. I think the idea initially was to protest how bicycle unfriendly many cities are, but it seems to have degenerated into lets go get rowdy and piss people off.

I hate Critical Mass.

Why? I ride my bike every day on city streets. I obey laws. I signal turns. I am courteous to automobile drivers, pedestrians, and other bicyclists. I respect them and I hope they will respect me also. Critical Mass riders antagonize drivers one day a month, and then I ride on the same streets as those drivers every other day of the month. Am I one of the rude, disrespectful Critical Mass riders? No. But motorists don’t know that. It’s very easy to stereotype and think all bicyclists are the same (just as it is to think all motorists are the same).

A funny thing happened last November when I was in California on a business trip. I was riding around San Francisco on a friday evening when I came up to the back of a group of 20 or so bicyclists on Market St. At a stop light one of them looked over at me and noticed my Dahon Helios XL and turned to his friend and said “Hey look, this guy’s got a Helios.” Anyway we started talking and apparently he had the same bike. I asked what was going on and he informed me I had stumbled upon a Critical Manners ride. They described it as the antidote to Critical Mass. This group has the same basic mission as Critical Mass (to demonstrate the need for more bicycle friendly cities), but they obey traffic laws and are generally nice to people. The ride is organized by the San Francisco Bike Coalition. I rode with them a few blocks until I reached my destination. It was a good time.

We’d probably all be a better off with a little more manners and a little less mass.

The 4th of July

What a day. First we headed over to the Freedom 5K at the Assembly Hall. This race is huge and neither of us had ever done it before. Since we ran over there we didn’t have any place to put our race t-shirts, so we stuck them in a bush and picked them up after the race. It started at 11 am, rather late for a summer running event. The temperature was much cooler than usual for this race (though it was still hot for running, in my opinion) so there was a rather large turnout (by far the largest I’ve seen for a Champaign-Urbana race).

I started out a little fast, but not ridiculous. We ran down the fresh asphalt of Kirby/Florida before turning north on Lincoln. There were lots of spectators on Lincoln. They weren’t necessarily there to see the race, but rather to reserve the best locations to watch the 4th of July parade that would be starting in a couple hours. Almost two miles into the race we passed a popcorn stand, the smell of which kind of made me want to hork. By the time we turned back onto Florida and crossed over into Champaign again the smell of the fresh asphalt was really getting to me. This was the third mile of a 5k and my heart rate hit 193 (the highest it’s been in years). Fortunately, the end was in site.

I finished in 17:46. In most other area races this would be good enough for a placing somewhere in the 3-5 range, but in this huge race (with lots of good high school aged competitors) it was good enough for 23rd. I’m a little skeptical the race was actually 5k. A couple mile markers were definitely in the wrong place and my GPS indicated the course might be a little short.

Melissa had a good run as well, finishing in her fastest time ever for a 5k. I stuck around for a while after the race to pick up medals for both us, each placing 3rd in our respective age groups. Unfortunately, I passed most of the time waiting for the awards ceremony by standing in the sun and now I have a painful tank-top shaped sunburn on my back and shoulders to show for it.

Our medals. Getting the same place in the same age group (male & female), they are identical.

After the race we ran home, showered, ate, then hopped on Big Red to ride the couple blocks over to the parade. Champaign County Bikes was again part of the parade so we found the other bicyclists and joined them riding in the parade. We covered the 2 mile route at very slow speed, seeing lots of friendly faces (including a few we recognized) along the way.

Our tandem (Big Red) was one of the crowd favorites, but there were a few other neat bikes which the crowd liked even better. In particular, the tandem-recumbent-one-rider-rides-backwards bike and the custom-welded-double-tall bike received the lion’s share of attention. It was a good time.

After the parade we walked a few houses down the street to a neighborhood block party/cookout. Our neighbors are all very friendly, and generally much older than us. It was kind of funny when one of them mentioned how nice it was to have people under age 50 at the party. Again, a good time was had by all.

Finally, we got Big Red back out and headed over to Parkland to watch the fireworks. They used to be held within walking distance at Memorial Stadium, but since the stadium is under construction they moved them across town to Parkland. It was a long haul, but the roads were relatively traffic free (I think most people arrived early).

The fireworks were pretty good. We sat on a little blanket in the grass. Afterward we had a long ride home. We avoided most of the traffic by sticking to side streets. We arrived home late. It was a long, exhausting, fun day. It’s a good thing we got to sleep in until 5 am this morning.

The 2008 WWDC Keynote

Yesterday was the keynote presentation for the 2008 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco. The big news Steve Jobs announced during the keynote was a new iPhone revision with faster cellular networking (nice in theory but only available in major cities, i.e. nowhere near where I live), GPS (yay), a lower price tag (yay), better battery life (yay), a non-cracked screen (I suppose the original model has this feature as well, until you drop it on concrete), and a higher monthly service fee to AT&T (boo).

2008-06-10-Cracked-Screen
Stupid cracked screen

Even more interesting to me is the iPhone 2.0 software (which will also be available for first generation iPhones) which allows 3rd party applications to be installed and run. This was originally announced a couple months ago but a few more details were provided during the keynote. There were also lots of demonstrations from 3rd party developers who have been working on games, productivity, and educational applications for the iPhone. Who knows, maybe the DataBook software will be available on an iPhone in the future…

The Missing Christmas Gift

For Christmas at my grandparents’ house we often do a gift exchange where each person in the exchange gives a gift to one specific person rather than every other person. The idea is to make things simpler. To decide who gives gifts to whom* we draw names from a hat.

This past Christmas there was a mistake somewhere (we still don’t really know what happened), but at Christmas one person ended up with two gifts and another ended up with none (sorry Dad). Either somebody bought a gift for the wrong person, or the same name appeared twice in the hat.

Anyway, while cleaning out my office today (I have the day off work for the Memorial day weekend) I came across the two name tags Melissa & I drew from the hat: Marcia & Barb. I apparently kept these for some reason, perhaps to use as evidence in the eventual trial…

These were the two people for whom* Melissa & I bought gifts. So it wasn’t either of us who screwed up :)

(*) According to John Gutzmer, the word “whom” is the formal version of “who.”