Bad at Posting

By zach | Published January 25, 2010

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.

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Kites

By christina | Published January 25, 2010

I got to fly a kite on Sunday! The weather was sunny and relatively nice, so I decided to head outside for a little while and get some new books and things. While I was wandering around, I ran into a kite-flying event. Little kids got to make their own kites, but the adults had brought some more impressive ones by. The biggest ones looked to be at least 10 feet tall! However, the wind wasn’t the best, and although the little kites did okay, the bigger heavier kites had a harder time staying in the air. I was talking with one of the people who was in the group running the event, and they let me fly one of their kites for a little while. I did okay, but once or twice the wind dropped enough that I couldn’t keep it afloat. I had a good time!

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Christmas Lights!

By christina | Published December 1, 2009
Santa's House

Japan has really caught on to the most sparkly aspects of holidays. Most major areas seem to end up with some sort of light displays, twinkling away in a non-denominational Santa-if-anything-centered way. I have to agree that there’s something very alluring about the cheer and friendliness of Christmas. (Apart from the Black Friday sales, that is.) They even get into the music, although in true Japanese style, most of what you hear is sanitized elevator music versions of everything. And everywhere has ads for Christmas Cake and Christmas Fried Chicken. Both of which Japanese are completely unaware are actually entirely Japanese customs.

Tree decorations at the Riverwalk

My favorite decorations I’ve seen so far are these little white abstract tree light things. The color comes from the light reflecting off of the bottom of the rings, which have been cleverly colored by children with markers. I’d like one as a way to make my room feel a little bit more festive, but sadly they were only available to decorate if you were willing to give them to the general decor of the shopping center.

Hopefully I’ll get to go to a few other places and take pictures of the decorations before I head back to the US. Fukuoka will have some nice ones around Canal City and Tenjin, I bet. And then hopefully I’ll be able to take a pile of pictures of Disney Christmas decorations. We don’t really take pictures of Disney much anymore, in my family. It was our usual vacation place when I was a kid (not so hard when it’s less than an hour and a half away), and so we’ve all gotten so accustomed to it we don’t even think to take pictures. But I feel that I may as well try this time around. I don’t go nearly as often as I used to. This is definitely one of the bigger downsides of no longer being in Tampa.

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Deadlines Approach!

By zach | Published November 16, 2009

Some are externally imposed, and others are self-imposed. This Friday is the PLDI deadline. In addition to my own paper, over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending more and more time at the lab working with the people there on a second paper. All of the implementation work and experiments have been done by someone else, but I’ve been contributing ideas, and now I am revising the paper, since mine is in pretty good shape.

I suppose that is the only externally imposed deadline. The self-imposed ones are as follows. 1.) This coming weekend after the papers are finished, I want to finish working on the pictures from my brother’s wedding. I have most of them posted to Flickr already, but there are still a number left to do. 2.) By this Monday, I need to send email to the Professor in the Systems group at ETH Zurich who wants to host me for a post-doc, or whatnot. Mostly to introduce myself, but also to figure out what the process is for applying and getting myself over there, and so forth.

There was a third thing, too… Oh, yah! That whole dissertation thing. I can say that it is coming along well because my PLDI paper is more-or-less the last real content I have to develop for it (whether or not the paper is accepted). I am waiting until early next semester to file, but I want to finish all of the actual work on it between the PLDI deadline and winter break. It’ll be a bit of a slog, but I’ll have vacation in Florida with Christina and her family to look forward to, so I think I’ll be able to make it =)

Other than that, things have been pretty slow. The weather is getting colder. The Steelers aren’t doing so well, but the Penguins are still awesome. I’ll be sticking around here in Berkeley for Thanksgiving since plane tickets got to be too expensive, which I am a bit sad about, but hopefully there will be some potluck sort of deal to go to.

Hopefully I’ll be able to make more interesting posts after all this work is finished!

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I went on a trip!

By christina | Published October 20, 2009

Last weekend I went to Osaka, Kyoto, and a mountaintop temple town called Koya-san.

Shin-Meiwa Kogyo Monument at Okunoin

Koya-san was a town built around the temple built by the founder of the Japanese Shingon Buddhism sect, Kukai. Shingon Buddhism was one of the first sects of Buddhism that wasn’t taken wholesale from China, and it became popular throughout Japan. It is popular for people to have their mausoleums built nearby so that whenever the Buddha returns to earth they will reawaken along with Kukai. Even companies (I remember seeing Panasonic) have memorials there, although I’m not exactly sure how that works.

At some point there were over 1000 temples in the area, each associated with a certain region of Japan. When you went there on a pilgrimage, you went and had a chat with the guy at the main gate, and he sent you along to stay at the right temple based on where you came from. Now there are only a hundred or so temples left, but they still are the only place to stay on the mountain. They do web reservations now, however. I didn’t stay the night, only having learned about the place a few days before I left for Osaka.

Koyasan Street

Being as it is on the top of a mountain, it was chilly, about 10 degrees (Celsius) colder than down in Osaka. Luckily I had read up on Koya-san far enough ahead of time to know to dress a little more warmly. I rented one of the offered audio guides, and had a nice leisurely walk around the town. I also had a vegetarian lunch with one of the local specialties, sesame tofu. It’s a tofu variety made with sesame which has a different texture, more like a mix between a marshmallow and Jell-o. I had a hot-pot meal which was perfect for the chilly weather. Some of the leaves were even starting to turn! It was a nice quiet place and worth the trip.

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Perfect!

By zach | Published October 18, 2009

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!

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By zach | Published October 6, 2009

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.

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Grand Silver Week Trip!

By christina | Published October 2, 2009

My parents came to Japan! I was very excited to see them, and we had an excellent if tiring tour from Tokyo to Fukuoka. They are now on their own whirlwind tour of the standard Japanese Touristy Locales (Kyoto, Nara, Mt. Fuji etc.) and I am at work. I think they have the better end of the deal.

We spent two days in Tokyo, one at Tokyo Disney Sea, and then stopped in Himeji, Okayama, Kurashiki and Miyajima before making it back to my apartment in Kitakyushu. From there we took a day trip to Fukuoka and Dazaifu. By the end I was pretty tired. There’s only so many days of walking (at least) 8 hours a day that I can take.

My parents delved into the exciting lands of Japanese foods, and came out not so enthralled with the ryokan fare (too many unidentifiable foods, and Dad is apparently not a fan of the “rubbery” and “slimy” food groups which are so popular here), but seemed to do well with katsu, gyoza, okonomiyaki, and tempura. The meal at the Italian restaurant was definitely appreciated, however. The okonomiyaki dinner was probably the most adventurous location-wise, being a tiny little 10-seater counter place with the only menu being the plaques in Japanese on the wall, but they had a good time and enjoyed the food. I was pleased! My parents’ favorite dinner was at a restaurant under the train tracks near Ginza called “Andy’s Shin-Hinomoto.” Lots of little dishes to share, and the food was all tasty and well cooked. The only problem was that they were out of potatoes! My mother even tried to use chopsticks once or twice (but generally gave up for the more well-travelled fork)!

In Kurashiki we met the man who had sold his land to the city to make the visitor’s center for the historical area, and listened to him wax nostalgic about the nice garden they had ripped out and his process to move out of his remaining property. It was sad to hear him talk of getting everything ready for his passing, and to hear him talk of the things of his childhood that had been lost and changed, but fascinating nonetheless.

In Dazaifu I discovered that the long line was just for the special exhibit and not for the museum in general, so we went and saw of the prehistoric artifacts but not the special Buddhist artifacts.

Overall I had a great time, and enjoyed myself, and my only wish is that we could have had more time so we could take things more slowly.

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In Which Mike and Anna Get Hitched

By zach | Published September 8, 2009

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.

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Dazaifu fair

By christina | Published September 7, 2009

Dazaifu Main Shrine

On Saturday, I went to Dazaifu for the flea market/antiques fair. I wanted to get some old kimonos to rip up and make into other things, and this is one of the best places I know for doing so. It’s easy to get a silk kimono for under ¥1000, and the way that kimonos are made, you can end up with a reasonable length of uncut fabric. You have to watch out for stains, but with the help of a washing machine, you can often make those better. I came away with a pretty good haul. The Kyushu National Museum is also right near the temple, but I didn’t go in because the line was apparently 3 hours long! And it wasn’t even for some special event.

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