This time of year I always miss Southern California (despite my previous taunting.) Not every place gives you a front row view of some of the most spectacular wildfires in the country. I have fond memories of crusing around for two whole days taking pictures of the Williams Fire in 2002 (day one, day two). I guess no one state can have everything.
I flew back home yesterday. Turns out hurricane Rita wasn't nearly the monster of destruction people were expecting. We had no trouble getting to the airport and catching our flight. In fact, we even caught an early flight.
Friday was the last day of the "conference" part of VL/HCC. Another smattering of good papers. The most interesting papers (see the list) for Friday were: 1) "Easing Program Comprehension by Sharing Navigation Data" by Robert Deline et al at HIP group in MS Research and 2) "Achieving Flexibility in Direct-Manipulation Programming Environments by Relaxing the Edit-Time Grammar" by Birnbaum et al from Washington University in St. Louis (about the JPie project).
Saturday was the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations tutorial and workshop. The sessions were lead by Alan Blackwell, and he did an excellent job, per usual. I was particularly fascinated to be on the "business end" of a research workshop.
Overall, VL/HCC '05 was a great experience. I hope I can attend again next year, especially because it will be in the UK and co-located with PPIG and SoftVis.
Since the conference is in Dallas, hurricane Rita is getting our attention. Dallas is far enough away from the hurricane that no one is worried about a direct hit, but residents of Houston are evacuating to Dallas and obviously air traffic in Texas is going to be affected. Rita is supposed to hit ground very early Saturday morning and I'm scheduled to leave Saturday evening. I guess I'll just have to wait and see what happens.
I'm enjoying the conference. There are a steady stream of interesting papers. Several of the presentations today were very interesting, but I don't really feel like typing up the details. ;-)
The banquet at South Fork Ranch was fun. The mansion at the ranch is amazing. Very luxurious, but nothing like seeing an "old money" mansion back east. We had an excellent dinner with steak and salmon. Delicious.
I would have posted yesterday, but I had an apache meltdown. Gentoo changed the structure of the apache configuration files to better match the apache upstream. I did not discover this until after the emerge was complete and the apache service refused to restart (due to the old configuration), but that's another story.
The conference has been going great thus far (yesterday and today). The graduate student consortium was very interesting and the personal feedback was informative and helpful. Despite being the last to present, people seemed genuinely interested in my research, asked good questions and made thought provoking comments.
Today was the first day of the general conference. It's fascinating to see new research and ideas. I love being able to mill around and talk to top researchers during the breaks, probe them with questions, and get their advice.
We had a clean sweep of OSU students for the "End-User Debugging and Testing" session. It's been exciting to see OSU perform so well. It's great to see my peers give solid presentations of interesting research.
This evening we had a reception to give people an opportunity to mill around, discuss research, and ask each other questions. The reception started at 6:30 PM and I stayed around talking until 10:00 PM. I can't believe how fast the time flew.
Tomorrow is another full day. After all the paper presentations during the day, we are going to the South Fork Ranch (a.k.a. the set of "Dallas") for a banquet. I'm looking forward to another great day.
I traveled to Dallas today. I'm attending VL/HCC this week. I'm thrilled. Last year I went to Rome--this year, Dallas. The venue isn't as exciting, but the conference should be great! The time change is messing with me a little. I can't believe it's almost midnight Dallas time.
Tomorrow is the Graduate Student Consortium. Graduate students applied to participate. We have the opportunity to present our research to domain experts and graduate students for feedback. I found it very helpful last year, so I'm optimistic for tomorrow's session. The only bummer is that I'm presenting dead last at 5:00 PM.
I better get to bed and get some rest. I'll keep you posted throughout the week.
"Blond theme has not been updated. Instead it has been replaced by the
SUV theme. The SUV theme is extremely manly and dark and should make
the media stand out more." ROTFL!
That's right, cinelerra 2.0 is out. Yippee! Read all the details in the changelog.
Another funny quote on the main cinelerra page about the relationship of cinelerra to cinelerra-cvs:
"They moderate what parts of our fork get into their fork while contributing anything they want while we moderate what parts of their fork get into our fork while putting in anything we want, which makes it pretty much even."
I tweaked my neck on Saturday and proceeded to be in immense pain for the rest of the weekend through Tuesday. Pain was radiating all the way through my right arm and down through my whole right torso. I couldn't find any position that felt good. Ironically, burping (and hiccuping) was one of the most painful things I could do.
I spent my labor day weekend flat on my back watching TV most of the time. I suppose that's what other people did too, but it just doesn't seem the same when it isn't by choice.
Of particular note, when I was finally able to see the doctor on Tuesday, he prescribed a muscle relaxer. Boy do those things wipe you out. I could hardly keep my eyes open on Tuesday I was so tired. I suppose I shouldn't have been operating that forklift all afternoon (just kidding.)
The good news is that I was feeling well enough to go back to work yesterday and today I have very little pain. Now it just feels like a very sore muscle.
Once again, I find myself on a DVD authoring kick. The only difference is that this time I have a wiki for all my notes. If you are interested in DVD authoring in a 100% Linux environment, then you might want to check out my DVD Authoring area in my wiki. (Yeah, yeah, just accept the SSL cert. I'll have to get a Thawte cert one of these days.)