I have finally finished uploading our Vegas trip photos to Flickr. Check them out via the links below:
Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6
Kathryn and I didn’t expect to enjoy Vegas as much as we did. And we are surprised to find ourselves wanting to return some day for another visit. There must have been something in that blue paint:
Our Vegas trip went well and is best summarized by this video:
A larger high-quality version in M4V (MP4) format is here: http://oranchak.com/vegas-large.m4v (it’s about 280M).
The trip was a blast; it was fun exploring the casinos, sampling the fine dining, enjoying the luxurious spa and massages at our resort, trying out the nightclubs, visiting Hoover Dam, hiking Red Rock Canyon, riding the rides, and seeing the shows (Blue Man Group and Spamalot). One of our favorite moments on the trip was posing with one of the dudes from Blue Man Group (see about 5min 44sec into the video). AWESOME show.
But don’t ever go to Vegas if you are trying to save money. Yikes!
We’re off to spend a week at the luxurious Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas! Several reality TV shows were filmed there, and it was also the site of 2007 MTV Video Music Awards; how odd it is that the resort is also the venue for the mental health and substance abuse treatment conference that Kathryn will be attending during the week. Seems like she’d be able to apply any newly acquired skills almost immediately to inhabitants of the resort.
We have been looking forward to this trip for a long time. We’re hoping to catch some shows, see many attractions, check out The Strip, ride the rides at The Stratosphere, and visit Red Rock Canyon (check out this incredible panorama). All without going bankrupt. I very much doubt Vegas lets you leave with your pockets full.
Don’t worry, Iris, we won’t spend your college fund. Hopefully.
I bought Iris a triops kit a while back. Triops are like sea monkeys, but cooler. You get these tiny, dried out eggs that are in a state of diapause, or dormancy. Just add distilled water at the right temperature, and watch the triops hatch and grow. But the eggs in the kit did not hatch, despite our best efforts. So, I sent away for replacement eggs, received them a few days ago, threw them into a tank of distilled water. A day later, the swarm of dot-sized triops emerged:
There are so many! There has to be at least thirty of them in there. I was only expecting to see a few little hatchlings. But after reading about Ryan’s experience with triops cannibalism, I imagine the triops count will dwindle over the next few days.
A few weeks ago, I brought Iris to her preschool, and we were alarmed to see that a fire crew was there. It turned out they were just putting out a small fire in the nearby woods. Someone must have dropped a cigarette there or something. I walked Iris into the school, and we talked about the fire for a while. I mentioned to her that I thought it was caused by a cigarette thrown from somebody’s car. But Iris had another theory. She said: “I think a bad birdy did it.”
She may be right.
(illustration unceremoniously lifted from Dave Shelton’s site).
An unrelated Iris story:
Iris has a pair of pants that have little embossed hearts attached to the botom of the legs. After several washings, the hearts started the crack a bit. So, one day, she takes a look at the pants, and says to us, “my heart is broken!”
It was sad to have to come back from our London trip. We had a lot of fun experiencing the city with Chris, Angel, and Eris. London is such a fascinating city and there is just so much to see. We are always struck by London’s diversity of cultures; walking down a busy street, you’ll overhear dozens of different languages being spoken. Our rental apartment was very nice. It was situated on the relatively quiet Pembroke Street near the busy streets of Kensington High Street and Earl’s Court.
Our spacious and comfortable apartment was home to a vast array of hard-to-use and barely-working appliances with extremely confusing user interfaces packed with incomprehensible hieroglyphics. The combination of bizarre buttons, confusing instructions, and malfunctioning appliances generated a nine-day-long comedy of errors that added some frustration and entertainment value to our vacation.
We can’t go to London without sampling a pub, so Kathryn and I picked one at random on Kensington High Street. She tried to order an amaretto sour, and the bartender had no idea what we were talking about, even after we explained how to make it. OK, how about a cosmopolitan then? Nope, that also stumped the bartender. So Kathryn finally settled a gin and tonic. I looked at the draught taps and fancied a pint of bitter. The bartender then told me the bad news that all the draughts were empty. What kind of pub is this? Do you in fact have anything whatsoever to drink?? Somehow I ended up with an amaretto mixed with Pepsi. Luckily, there were thousands of other pubs to choose from and I was able to sample some British ale.
We visited many popular tourist spots: The London Eye (awesome views of the city from the top of an enormous, slow-moving ferris wheel), Big Ben / Parliament, Kensington Gardens, Trafalgar Square (the opening ceremonies of this year’s Tour de France happened here during our trip), St. James’ Palace (obligatory tourist vs guard photo op), “Theatreland” in London’s West End, National History Museum (site of the fascinating GECCO “Complexity and Evolution” keynote by Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert and Steve Jones, SoHo, Chinatown (many awesome types of Asian food – ALL IN ONE PLACE!), Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, Science Museum, Amora sex museum (the world’s first “sex theme park”), London Trocadero (cool entertainment complex with a huge arcade and casino), Picadilly Circus (I got a free tart here), the Tower of London (so many stories about famous executions, so little time), St. Paul’s Cathedral (incomprehensibly huge and beautiful), Tate Modern (the building is as stark as some of the modern art it houses), Millennium Bridge (Angel made it across despite her fear!), the Bramah Museum of Tea & Coffee (the McCubbins enjoyed high tea there), and the Carnaby Street shops (there is a very cool toy store there called Playlounge).
The food. Oh, the food. London is a glorious cornucopia of dishes for every palate. While there we sampled stuff like Iranian food at Yas Persian restaurant (bad service, incredible food), pan-Asian food (Japanese, Chinese dim sum, Thai curry) at Ikkyusan restaurant, fresh baguettes, pub food, fish and chips, Greek cuisine, gourmet hamburgers (so big and juicy you gotta eat em with fork and knife), and halal kebabs. Chris and Angel are great cooks so they made coq au vin at the apartment – YUMM!! Seriously, we need to get Jon and Kate AND Chris and Angel together on our next trip somewhere, so we can really benefit from their combined cooking knowledge. We’ll eat like kings!!!
Chris and Angel had the hankering for dim sum, so we all went to a dim sum place in Chinatown. The dim sum was awesome. Except for the chicken feet.
Iris and Eris had a lot of fun as well. I think we wore them out a lot with all the walking through the city. Plus, they wore each other out because they are such good friends and play very well together. Exhausting for the parents as well! Iris and Eris both say that their favorite thing about visiting London was riding the trains. Mind the gap!!
GECCO Conference
A highlight of the trip for me was attending the GECCO evolutionary computing conference and presenting my poster, the culmination of a toy project I started last year in a graduate course in Genetic Algorithms. Chris also went to GECCO. He’s a legitimate computer science researcher (he does R&D for a living for APL), so he got to go as part of his job to present his paper (Using Genetic Algorithms for Naval Subsystem Damage Assessment and Design Improvements). I went to GECCO mainly as a newbie bystander, since I don’t yet have as much research experience. Which made me quite starry-eyed when I saw all the cool research going on.
We saw many tutorials and presentations – the speakers represented many countries: Spain, England, America, Italy, Germany, Romania, Poland, Iran, Czech Republic, Portugal, Netherlands, and Australia. It was a good feeling to be part of something so globally-reaching. The first tutorial we attended was John Koza‘s introduction to genetic programming. He gave us a fascinating tour of solving problems with genetic programming by essentially making computers program themselves using evolution-inspired techniques. The automated inventions arising from the techniques are fascinating – some have even infringed on existing patents for inventions previously designed by humans (example).
(an odd side note: John Koza also invented the scratch-off lottery ticket).
Other interesting tutorials and presentations we attended:
The keynote event was very interesting. Richard Dawkins, Lewis Wolpert, and Steve Jones, well-known in biology circles, answered questions about complexity in evolution. The fascinating discussion was punctuated by some hilarious anecdotes. For example, Wolpert described how he got into biology in the first place, and was once asked why he was so fascinated with evolutionary development. His answer: “My nose is too big, and some of my genitals are a bit small, and I want to understand this.” Steve Jones joked about how many sociological things, from acne to zoophilia (from A to Z), can be mistakenly explained using evolutionary language. For example, acne can be a way to make sexually maturing but financially bereft young males undesirable to females. And zoophilia can be a way for shepherds (and sheep) to gain a survival advantage, since “the sheep like it”, and will congregate with shepherds that will give them this extra love. Another Steve Jones quote: “I am a geneticist. And my job is to make sex boring.”
After the keynote, the attendees poured into the poster session held in an overly narrow hallway in the natural history museum. “Nibbles” of food were provided, which is an overstatement of how little food was actually provided: a few handfuls of nuts in small shared dishes. I had fun meeting people while explaining my poster; there were a lot of interesting people at GECCO. Many of the people I talked to about my poster had good ideas on different ways to apply the art-generation color-matching technique to other areas.
There’s me in the blue shirt explaining my poster. It was kind of like being in grade school again, standing with a science fair project poster. Photo credit: Kumara Sastry.
Ah yes, turns out I’ve done this before… but it’s been 17 years! (photo is from my junior high school yearbook)
Fractals! I just can’t get away from computer graphics and fractals. This is a picture of an old math fair project from my junior high school yearbook.
Hmm, I’ve regressed to my childhood. This level of self-indulgence can only mean that the ending to this blog post is overdue!
Kathryn sat at the intersection, waiting to turn left. A truck with an attached trailer sat at the same intersection, in the lane next to her, waiting to go straight. The light turned green, and both vehicles tried to go their separate ways. But the truck’s trailer got snagged on Kathryn’s front right bumper, and dragged her car into the intersection. And she had a work client in the car! Luckily, there were no injuries – just body damage to the front right bumper. Both drivers pulled over and exchanged information and filed the police report. At this point, Kathryn found out that the other driver owns an auto body shop. He even gave her a business card!
Coincidence? Who knows!
I drove down to the site of the accident to drive Kathryn’s car to a different auto body shop to get the repair estimate. Her car is still sort of drivable – the only thing dodgy is the right front tire, which has some as yet non-fatal gashes in it. When we told the other auto body shop the name of the guy who was driving the truck, they recognized his name, and told us that he had filed for bankruptcy at some point in the past.
So, that got the conspiracy theory gears going in my head. Now I’m really starting to think that the guy was desperate for business!
I had too much fun with the Face Transformer web toy, a gizmo that transforms a photo of a face into different ethnicities, ages, and artistic styles:
From left to right: Original, baby, child, teenager, old, Afro-Caribean, Caucasian, west Asian, feminized, Modigliani, Boticelli, El Greco, Manga, Apeman, drunk
From left to right: Original, baby, teenager, young adult, old, Afro-Caribean, Caucasian, west Asian, masculinized, Modigliani, Boticelli, Manga, Apeman, drunk
From left to right: Original, baby, child, teenager, old, Afro-Caribean, east Asian, west Asian, masculinized, Modigliani, Boticelli, Manga, Apeman, drunk
Click any of the montages above to get to the larger versions on Flickr.
This is from a batch of interesting valentine cards saved by Kathryn’s grandmother. I think the cards are all from the 1930s and 1940s.
This one says:
"If you were born in the month of June, you will marry a widow with a ready made family of ten. This will save you all that trouble."
YIKES!!!
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone!
Today we received a holiday ham sent to us through Heavenly Ham by family members in Texas. The delivery guy handed me a small card with our family members’ greeting hand-written on it by somebody at HeavenlyHam.com. When I saw the following, I immediately recognized that the card was transcribed from a web-based form:
Yes, it says “Chris & Critters”.
An explanation for those of you that don’t speak HTML:
In HTML, if you want to write “Bob & Nancy”, you can’t just write the “&” directly, because it has a special meaning to HTML: it begins a character entity reference. In your HTML source, you have to write it as: “Bob & Nancy”. The browser will show this as “Bob & Nancy“. Well, someone at HeavenlyHam.com had the tedious task of hand-writing all the Web-form-submitted holiday greetings to include in the shipments of delicious goodies. This unlucky person didn’t translate the “&” back to “&“. Which amused me immensely, because I: 1) am a web developer, and 2) am easily amused.
