Campus shut down this past Monday. Forget the fact that all the grad students are still around and doing research. They shut down the libraries, the eating establishments, the heat in my building... for crying out loud! Guess I should just start my vacation. Here I was going to do some research...
Last weekend was fun even though it rained all weekend so I had to cancel my Christmas present to Chris. Reschedule really. It was a disappointment but I can still give it to him after our vacation. We went to an ADP dinner in Berkeley on Friday night, and a party at Steph's house on Saturday night. I made chewy chocolate gingerbread cookies - my delicious specialty. But mostly I slept a lot and lounged around and read Anne's new book and knitted. Pretty mellow.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Monday, December 19, 2005
Thanksgiving Photos, etc
Chris and I
Henry
Matt and Chris
Devil Dog. Just kidding - it's only Serra.
Matt, Cece, & Chris
Grandma Jean, Grandpa Paul, Dave, Cece, Matt & Chris at Thanksgiving Dinner
Chris likes getting birthday presents!
Chris enjoying a couple of his gifts early - ski socks and a camping pillow from my parents.
My ginger - this might be a repost.
I thought this photo was hilarious - Johnny and Kelly doing their impression of anime.
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
Asimo
Honda just released a new version of ASIMO, their humanoid robot. The videos on their webpage are worth downloading the new version of Flash for, I think. What's most amazing about this robot is it's running ability. Unlike most "running" robots, this one is actually and technically running - this means there is a point during its gait in which both feet are off the ground. Granted, it's only .08 seconds, but it's still an advance. Really, the coolest thing about Asimo is that it exists - Japan is clearly the place to do robotics because they're actually trying to put robots into every day life. The closest we come in the US is the Roomba/Scooba line (automatic vaccuum cleaner/mopper for those not in the know). I also heard about an automatic mower somewhere.
We saw a demo of Asimo sometime last year and it was cool but clearly very scripted - the parts that were most interesting to me as a roboticist weren't emphasized and were not really demonstrated. Of course, automation is very susceptible to the demo effect, wherein you tell people to interact with the robot and it just poops out.
The Japanese view of robotics demonstrated by the Asimo robot was more clearly demonstrated a couple of years ago when Sony brought their Qrio robots for a demo. They spent like a half hour showing off the choreographed dance capabilities of the robots. Look! They even can do a synchronized fan dance! Then they showed us like 5 minutes of the robots autonomous abilities - they had a little ball that the robot could track with its eyes and then walk over and kick. The robot actually had an almost creepy way of moving - creepy in that it was so human-like. And when it lost sight of the ball it would turn around looking for it and then eventually find it, walk over, and kick it. This is the type of thing that gets me excited. Then they had an encore of another 15 minutes of dance routines.
In case you were wondering, Asimo stands for Ass Smashing Intelligent Monster. Chris and I laughed so hard when we read that in the paper...
We saw a demo of Asimo sometime last year and it was cool but clearly very scripted - the parts that were most interesting to me as a roboticist weren't emphasized and were not really demonstrated. Of course, automation is very susceptible to the demo effect, wherein you tell people to interact with the robot and it just poops out.
The Japanese view of robotics demonstrated by the Asimo robot was more clearly demonstrated a couple of years ago when Sony brought their Qrio robots for a demo. They spent like a half hour showing off the choreographed dance capabilities of the robots. Look! They even can do a synchronized fan dance! Then they showed us like 5 minutes of the robots autonomous abilities - they had a little ball that the robot could track with its eyes and then walk over and kick. The robot actually had an almost creepy way of moving - creepy in that it was so human-like. And when it lost sight of the ball it would turn around looking for it and then eventually find it, walk over, and kick it. This is the type of thing that gets me excited. Then they had an encore of another 15 minutes of dance routines.
In case you were wondering, Asimo stands for Ass Smashing Intelligent Monster. Chris and I laughed so hard when we read that in the paper...
What a lovely box!
I was hanging out with Anne last night and we were being crafty. She made a couple of bracelets as presents for people and then started cutting pages out of a magazine to make an origami box to put the gifts in. I admired the way she made the box and then it sat on the table while we finished our crafts. When I was about to leave she said "Here! I want to give this to you!" I was very pleased, "Oh thanks! It's really cute!" And I was about to move on in the conversation and she seemed taken aback... "Uh..." she says, "There's something in it!" I about died laughing. I hadn't seen her put anything in the box so I assumed the box was the gift. It was like that old joke. I was laughing so hard then it didn't occur to me to open it up so she had to prompt me, "You can open it now if you like!" She had gotten me a really nice filigree charm like one of hers I've always admired. What a nice gift! A pretty trinket and a good hard laugh.
I actually downloaded a Christmas carol yesterday. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by BNL and Sarah McLachlan. Usually I don't like carols but I make an exception for this one.
I actually downloaded a Christmas carol yesterday. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by BNL and Sarah McLachlan. Usually I don't like carols but I make an exception for this one.
Monday, December 12, 2005
More knitting weirdness
People will knit anything. I found this one while searching for "tit hand" on Google - don't try that at work, trust me. Guess I need to type in "Tokyo Institute of Technology Robotic Hand" if I want to find the non-obscene results.
This weekend was fun! Chris and I went dancing at JAMMIX and discovered that it's a way cooler dance than stuffy ol' Cubberly. It was a younger crowd and more dances that we know (what was up with all that Bolero at Cub?). Saturday we ran errands, generally biked around, and played Celebrity with some friends who were in town. (Turns out Winnie The Pooh is a hilarious celebrity to try to charade...) Sunday I had bookclub and we biked to the water temple, which is finally open again after a very long break. A very fun relaxing weekend.
Oh, also I read The Sparrow recently, by Mary Doria Russell. I recommend it highly but the beginning is hard to get into... just skim ahead until they begin their journey if you're getting bored...
This weekend was fun! Chris and I went dancing at JAMMIX and discovered that it's a way cooler dance than stuffy ol' Cubberly. It was a younger crowd and more dances that we know (what was up with all that Bolero at Cub?). Saturday we ran errands, generally biked around, and played Celebrity with some friends who were in town. (Turns out Winnie The Pooh is a hilarious celebrity to try to charade...) Sunday I had bookclub and we biked to the water temple, which is finally open again after a very long break. A very fun relaxing weekend.
Oh, also I read The Sparrow recently, by Mary Doria Russell. I recommend it highly but the beginning is hard to get into... just skim ahead until they begin their journey if you're getting bored...
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Get in, get out
Over celebratory lunch at the Faculty Club today Jack (a newly defended labmate) was recalling how he remembers attending his first lab meetings, seeing so many people interested in joining the ARL and feeling anxious wondering if he would be able to get in. Prof. Canon added - "And then you spend the next too-many-years feeling anxious wondering if you'll ever get out." Yeah, that about sums it up. Oh, and here's a little wmv clip of what The Simpsons have to say on that topic.
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
That's not a rhombus!
Once a month I'm part of a program called the Young Astronauts. We go to a school and teach 4th and 5th graders about science, engineering, and space. This week we were teaching about structures and Mike drew a triangle on the board and asked what it was. "A triangle!" And he drew another triangle adjoining the first one (like the structure of a bicycle) and asked what that was. One kid yells "A rhombus!" and another yells "That's not a rhombus!" We were practically in tears. I mean, where do they come up with these things? Probably just that their teacher taught them about that shape, but still.
We did a contest with the kids - they had to build a little bridge structure out of tape and paper that could span 10 inches while holding a much weight as possible and weighing as little as possible. Usually we encouraged them to build some kind of truss type structure with the paper rolled into tubes. One group was having troubles though and I got to them kind of late - they had just rolled the paper into little tubes and hadn't actually done anything with them. I told them to tape a couple together (we were running out of time!) and that would be their bridge. It was unbelievable - it was about half the weight of any other structure and held as much as any of them! Crazy. Just paper rolled into tight tubes and taped 4 across. It was a fun class.
Last weekend was fun too - on Friday we had the White Trash Tapas party - we went to Chili's and ordered dinner off the appetizer menu. I don't think I need anything salted or fried for a year. After that we went to Matt and Anne's house and played celebrity, which was really fun. Oh, and for dessert we had carrot cake that Anne and I made and Chris said was the best carrot cake he'd had in years. Yum.
Saturday we went to a pot luck at Brandy's house and I got to see Chris play with Amelia - she's awfully cute. Chris even says so when Brandy's not listening. After that we went ballroom dancing. We learned some new cha-cha moves and danced until our feet begged for mercy. Then on Sunday I went up to Kabuki with Steph S - there was a long wait so we walked around Japan town and when we came back we got called pretty quickly. It would be good to note that things really clear out there around 6pm on Sundays.
So it was a very fun and relaxing weekend. Yay!
We did a contest with the kids - they had to build a little bridge structure out of tape and paper that could span 10 inches while holding a much weight as possible and weighing as little as possible. Usually we encouraged them to build some kind of truss type structure with the paper rolled into tubes. One group was having troubles though and I got to them kind of late - they had just rolled the paper into little tubes and hadn't actually done anything with them. I told them to tape a couple together (we were running out of time!) and that would be their bridge. It was unbelievable - it was about half the weight of any other structure and held as much as any of them! Crazy. Just paper rolled into tight tubes and taped 4 across. It was a fun class.
Last weekend was fun too - on Friday we had the White Trash Tapas party - we went to Chili's and ordered dinner off the appetizer menu. I don't think I need anything salted or fried for a year. After that we went to Matt and Anne's house and played celebrity, which was really fun. Oh, and for dessert we had carrot cake that Anne and I made and Chris said was the best carrot cake he'd had in years. Yum.
Saturday we went to a pot luck at Brandy's house and I got to see Chris play with Amelia - she's awfully cute. Chris even says so when Brandy's not listening. After that we went ballroom dancing. We learned some new cha-cha moves and danced until our feet begged for mercy. Then on Sunday I went up to Kabuki with Steph S - there was a long wait so we walked around Japan town and when we came back we got called pretty quickly. It would be good to note that things really clear out there around 6pm on Sundays.
So it was a very fun and relaxing weekend. Yay!
Friday, December 02, 2005
Fun Lunch
Chris and I were walking over to the student center today and I was saying how what I really wanted for lunch was fried plantains with red beans and rice. This was just talk though because nothing at the student center will serve me that. Except for today there was a world arts festival going on and the Afro-caribbean food stand was serving blackeyed peas and rice with fried plantains. I'll take that!! I need to have these arbitrary food wishes more often!
After that we walked around the fair and there were these cool paper/pressed flower art works that I really admired. I had decided to buy one and Chris asked to buy it for me - he said if I hadn't tried to buy it myself he was going to sneak back over and buy it for me. What a guy.
Of course then I got accosted by the environmental organization guy who wanted to talk about how I should give his organization money to help with lobbying. He gave a confusing argument - mostly related to how the state wants to be able to drill for oil in California's wilderness areas. I asked him if there was much oil there, and he said, no but people would want to drill it anyway. (I've never heard of there being any oil in California - it would be like if they wanted to build a diamond mine here or something...) Took awhile to shake loose of him, but it was an interesting discussion. I'm one of the few people he talks to who knows the difference between national parks, wildernesses, and forests and furthermore Chris is winning me over to the usefulness of logging in a national forest. The one bad part was that this guy claimed an oil company could drill on government land and then charge taxpayers for the cost of building roads and stuff there. That doesn't seem right. Anyway...
After that we walked around the fair and there were these cool paper/pressed flower art works that I really admired. I had decided to buy one and Chris asked to buy it for me - he said if I hadn't tried to buy it myself he was going to sneak back over and buy it for me. What a guy.
Of course then I got accosted by the environmental organization guy who wanted to talk about how I should give his organization money to help with lobbying. He gave a confusing argument - mostly related to how the state wants to be able to drill for oil in California's wilderness areas. I asked him if there was much oil there, and he said, no but people would want to drill it anyway. (I've never heard of there being any oil in California - it would be like if they wanted to build a diamond mine here or something...) Took awhile to shake loose of him, but it was an interesting discussion. I'm one of the few people he talks to who knows the difference between national parks, wildernesses, and forests and furthermore Chris is winning me over to the usefulness of logging in a national forest. The one bad part was that this guy claimed an oil company could drill on government land and then charge taxpayers for the cost of building roads and stuff there. That doesn't seem right. Anyway...
These IM Quotes are Not Funny
To you anyway... Chris always makes me laugh though.
You can cite those two other papers and say, "First proposed by Doofus & Dimwit in [3], convex optimization in the loop offers a number of advantages blah blah blah", and then you're covered and no one will bother to read those old papers.
Chris: did you have to use config and/or configure during the build phase of glpk?
Teresa: yes, i did
Chris: oo. that could be tough.
Chris: config(ure) is typically an auto-generated shell script, which tries to configure the source tree for building on the current platform.
Chris: so if you're on a windows machine, it gets it ready for building ON windows, FOR windows.
Chris: but you need to get it ready for building ON windows, FOR VxWorks.
Teresa:
Chris: so you might need to do something like this:
Chris: unzip and configure it on your mac.
Chris: then copy the configured source tree over to the windows machine.
Chris: then try building.
Chris: that way you're at least configured FOR a variant of unix, before you start building.
Teresa: ok
Chris: but even that probably won't work completely.
Chris: you're going to have to edit some makefile by hand probably.
Teresa: oh this sounds like so much fun i can't hardly stand it
Chris: or you may be able to set some options during the configure step to tell it that you want to build for vxworks, instead of windows, even though you're on a windows machine.
Chris: it's going to be a blast.
Chris : you're heading into the 8th level of unix source code porting hell.
me: is it ominous that whenever i get back from vacation louie usually behaves much better?
chris: yeah. I think he's starting to show signs of rebelliousness. As a precaution you should have him deactivated and replace him with dewey.
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