Author Archives: zach

I am sitting in Christina’s tiny apartment in Kitakyushu listening to her practice koto. Earlier, she returned from a flower arranging lesson with some flowers, which she re-arranged here after riding home with them on her bike. Before she left, though, there was a rainbow:

While Christina has been at work, and doing various other things, I have been working on a couple iPhone/iPad apps, and doing a bit of wandering on my own.

The first weekend I was here, we took a trip up to Kanazawa, and Osaka, which was pretty interesting even though it was really hot. The following weekend we cleaned up the apartment, and went to see the Tobata Gion, which is a local festival where the men from each of the four parts of Tobata build floats and carry them around saying, “YOI-to-SA!” They also bang on drums. On Saturday evening, they built a pyramid of laterns on the floats, and they all parade around together banging on the drums, and so forth, which was very impressive.

On the Friday following the festival, there were fireworks nearby, just at the other side of the train station over the straight between Tobata and Wakamatsu. Japanese fireworks are pretty great. I’m looking forward to seeing more in Tokyo the weekend after next. This past Sunday after the fireworks, we took the Shinkansen down to Fukuoka to do some shopping. Christina bought a new bento for lunches, and I found some more oatmeal to eat for breakfast.

Since then, I have been doing some more coding and a little more wandering. This weekend I think we are going to try to go visit Mojiko and Shiminoseki. I don’t have my usual photo-editing software along with me, so I won’t be posting more pictures until I get back to California, or more likely, after I manage to move myself to Zurich.

I have been having a good time in Japan with Christina. I got into Fukuoka late last Friday night, and the next day we wandered around Dazaifu. There, we saw the stone garden at Kōmyōzen-ji, a Zen temple, and Dazaifu Tenman-gu, a Shinto shrine. Then we headed back to Kitakyushu after eating some delicious ramen. On Sunday, I was very jet-lagged, and we mostly sat around at home. During the following week, I found out that my PLDI paper was rejected in spite of the good reviews. On the other hand, I also found out that I’ll be visiting ETH Zurich for an interview during the first week of March, which should be exciting. I am sad about the PLDI paper not getting in, but I’ll be able to make some big improvements and rerun the experiments on a bigger machine at the Intel lab, and resubmit to OOPSLA at the end of March. Anyhow, what I’ve been doing while Christina has been at work is working on said improvements.

This past Saturday we ventured up to Kyoto on the shinkansen. I will make another post about that because now it is time to make French toast.

It has been a long time since I wrote anything here. To correct my previous post, I did end up going home for Thanksgiving thanks to finding a cheap(er) ticket on the Sunday beforehand.

So, what’s new? After submitting my paper to PLDI, I took some time off, and then focused my full attention on writing my dissertation. Except for a wonderful trip to Disney World with Christina and her parents, and then to Pittsburgh for Christmas, I worked on it non-stop until this past Tuesday when I sent off a complete draft to my adviser.

The trip to Florida and Disney World was really great. I very much enjoyed seeing the Hall of Presidents with the new animatronic Obama, and finally getting to ride the Tower of Terror. There was also lots of delicious food! The picture above is from the Osborne  spectacle of Dancing Lights. It has a lot of lights =)

The reviews for the PLDI paper came back the week before last, and they were largely positive. I am expecting the paper to get in based on the scores it got, but I won’t find out for sure until Friday or Saturday after the program committee meeting is over.

The most exciting news, though, is that I am headed to Japan this Thursday to visit Christina! I am going for about two weeks, and we are going to take the superfast shinkansen up to Kyoto for one of the weekends. It will be exciting fun. Now is a great time to make  the trip since I won’t have much work to do until I get comments on the dissertation back from my adviser. Also, I just sent off a few job applications, and I don’t expect to be hearing back for a couple more weeks due to reference-letter-writers needing at least a couple weeks to write reference letters. While Christina is at work, I will likely start working on my “Job Talk,” which is an hour long presentation I’ll have to give about my dissertation work when interviewing for research positions. I will probably also do a little coding, as fighting with powerpoint for any more than a couple days in a row tends to drive me a little crazy.

It so happens that 28 is half the sum of its positive divisors, that is (1 + 2 + 4 + 7 + 14 + 28)/2 = 28. Numbers like this are called “perfect.” (The next bigger one after 28 is 496, and there are likely infinitely many of them.) It is also the case that I turned 28 this past Thursday. So, now my age is perfect =)

My mom is visiting this weekend, and took me out to lunch at Chez Panisse on my birthday. I had some tasty soup with various vegetables cooked in duck fat, and then chicken with prosciutto wrapped around it along with mushrooms and green beans and polenta. For dessert I had ice cream with chocolate sauce. It was very tasty.

That night I went to Triple Rock with grad student friends, and as it was Thursday, drank some of their excellent Monkey Head Ale, which we have taken to calling Monkey Beer. They serve it in 1 liter bottles with a picture of a monkey on the side, and it is a bit on the strong side, but it is also a little sweet, so it’s best to drink it slowly =) Afterwards, we played some Rock Band in the CS grad student lounge. It was a pretty good birthday, I think.

On Friday, my cousin Ben drove up from Los Angeles with his girlfriend to go to the Treasure Island Music Festival on Saturday. They stopped by Berkeley on their way into the city, and we met up. I showed them around campus a bit, and we had an early dinner and chatted for a couple of hours, which was nice as I hadn’t seen him since Andrew’s wedding more than a year ago. I will have to find some time to head down to SoCal to visit him at some point.

Other than that I’ve been working pretty much non-stop. There is lots to do before December!

This past month has been filled with work. I have been working on the dissertation, which involves a lot of tedious rewriting and reformatting, mostly. I have also been working on a slightly crazy idea I had over the summer. When I started playing around with it, I didn’t think it would pan out, but after a couple months of hacking, the results are starting to look pretty good, so I’ll probably try to write them up, and submit to PLDI again this year. Hopefully I’ll be able to rope a couple of the guys at the Intel lab into helping with the writing, and then it won’t be too big a distraction from dissertation-ing.

I have also found out that my advisor is going to continue funding me in the Spring. I’ll continue working with the ParLab OS group while looking for a job.

My brother Mike and his new wife Anna were married on Saturday at Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburgh! Actually, they were married on paper as of a few months ago for logistical reasons, but now it’s official. Mike and Anna asked me to be The Photographer for their big day. I took about 700 pictures, so I’ll likely be post-processing for the next few weeks, but I’ve managed to post a quick, random-ish sample up to flickr.

Anyway, I got into town after an uneventful flight on Thursday evening. On Friday, I helped get my parents’ house ready for the party that would happen after the ceremony. I also went to the dentist (no cavities!), and got a haircut. That evening, we went to Phipps for a rehearsal after a quick dinner of carry-out Chinese food, and I figured out where I had to stand to take pictures, and stuff. During the rehearsal, we learned that a bunch of stuff for the G20 meeting is taking place at Phipps, and that Secret Service dudes had been doing lots of snooping around, and such.

On Saturday morning I loafed around until it was time to get ready. My parents were way more nervous and hyper than Mike was, which was not at all unexpected. We arrived at Phipps more than an hour before the ceremony and even ten minutes before the previous wedding was supposed to clear out. I wandered around taking pictures of random stuff and people for no particular purpose until guests started showing up and it was time for things to start. It was a nice ceremony. Anna’s dad ran the show, and my dad and older brother did a couple readings. The ceremony was also very short, though people were nice enough to walk slowly for the most part so that I could take pictures. After the ceremony, I took lots of pictures of a great many of the possible subsets of relations before wandering around outside of Phipps taking photos of Mike and Anna and the bridesmaids (the best man having mysteriously disappeared.)

We went back to the house after the ceremony for the party. My parents had dinner catered by Atria’s, and they did an amazing job. They even sent over a lady to run the kitchen, which for some odd reason was only very slightly more expensive than just having the food delivered. I took a few pictures at the party, but by this point, being The Photographer was interfering a bit too much with things like eating and drinking and talking to people, so I stopped . Hopefully Anna will forgive me. Mike’s best man reappeared and gave an awesome speech in which he delivered a video to my parents containing footage of Mike singing “Friends in Low Places.”

When things started to wind down, I went with Mike and Anna and their friends to the South Side. Any inferences you might make about what happened there based on knowledge of that neighborhood would probably be accurate. The highlight of the evening was definitely at the end, when upon failing to hail a cab, we managed to flag down a limo, which we all piled into, and which took us back to the hotel.

Anyway, it was a fantastic weekend! Wedding photography is Really Hard! And that’s even without factoring in the post-processing, and the fact that my brother can’t avoid making bizarre faces in pictures unless you sneak up on him or make him laugh first.

Tomorrow I head back to California. Hopefully there have been no explosions while I’ve been gone.