This was a triumph

I'm making a note here:
HUGE SUCCESS.

Ok, so that's not totally what the trip was, but that's how I felt thursday afternoon after my talk. I spent most of tuesday night working on it (again, I'd been working on it for nearly a week), and got a small amount of sleep. I went 3rd in the session, which we'd decided on because it made a nice transition from general biological (but non-DNA) systems to the DNA systems like mine and those in the fourth talk. The whole conference was on Decision and Controls, which is a much different area from mine, and the point of the session was to introduce problems in biology that were molecule-level which controls people might find interesting.

My talk itself was about 20 slides total, and we were scheduled for 20-25m each, plus some questions time. I caught myself speeding up talking early and managed to slow back down: one of the problems when giving a talk is usually speaking too fast, making it hard to understand. Somehow all the pieces I wasn't sure would flow together actually did, even in my practice an hour before the transitions just weren't working, but they did when I actually gave the talk. There were several points I wasn't sure were getting across, and it was really difficult to connect to the audience: we were in one of the grand ballrooms, which could easily seat several hundred, but there were only about 30-40 people in the audience (fairly typical for the biological controls track) and so it was really difficult to gauge how well people were following. I managed to reiterate the main points three different times in different ways, so I'm pretty sure it came across clear. Anyways, I managed to finish and get to the acknowledgments slide right at 23 minutes. Speaking of those, there's some people who I want to thank here, cause they couldn't see the presentation: Mylanda, M^2, Erik and L: Yall kept saying it would be fine and it was. Thank you again for the support. I thought of Mylanda's comment as I was walking up to start the talk and everything seemed easier: (paraphrasing): "You've GM'd tons of games, just think of them as players and you'll do fine".

So yeah. I got to the question section and thought I'd have maybe one or two, about normal for the other talks I'd seen. As one of the other guys who gave a talk in that session put it: "Yeah, when you finished your talk I went to the bathroom. When I came back you were still answering questions." And they weren't just confused questions, but a lot of very good insightful questions.

So the talk went very well (or so I've been assured by just about everyone who went), and the conference as a whole was very good. I didn't understand a lot of the subjects of the other talks, so I spent more time talking with people, working out new ideas on stuff to collaborate with them. I also met someone who I'd known as an undergrad (we'd worked on a learning systems project course together) who's now very well known in the decision/control field, and actually remembered me.

I finally understand!

I think it's been over twenty years, but I finally understand. Jazz is not something that should be experience passively, like listening to a CD without the context. It's meant to be heard live, when you're so close to the performers you can drop some bills in the hat and ask for a request, while they're still playing and no one else can hear you. It's music that you are a participant in, your enjoyment feeds back to the band and it makes you feel good.

That was my experience today, and my personal understanding what it is that I was missing about jazz which before now I've never really liked to listen to. I went out to dinner today with some of the people from the conference, and it was brought up that they were probably going to a jazz club afterwards. I figured I could go to dinner and then go my own way, but at dinner it was brought up that it was Preservation Hall that was being referred to. The only thing I could remember about that name (as I did have a memory associated with it) is that my mom would love to go there or hear the music there (or both). So I went. We got there around 7:20 and were first in line - the doors open at 8pm, it's 10$ to get in, and there's literally about 8 benches and some chairs around the edge of the room, and after that you can stand. No food, drinks etc are served there, and it's a very small space. It was a perfect venue for the music.

Thursday night is brass band night, and the group playing was the New Birth Brass Band. They were excellent the entire night, taking two breaks and playing for about three hours. They had a banjo, bass drum, snare drum, tuba, trombone, trumpet and sax, and all of them were excellent.

There were two things that stood out among the performances: the first was a request, by a couple who were celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary - Louis Armstrong's What a Wonderful World. The entire audience helped sing along while the couple held hands and the band played it for them. The second was something I noticed the entire night: there were many young ones there, babies and very young kids of tourist parents. The babies were super calm and appeared to love the music, and the same for the kids. What a neat experience for them, and what a relief compared to the craziness that is bourbon street.

Uncanny

There's something uncanny here. I finally placed what it is, but those reading probably need some context.

I'm in New Orleans for the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control. Some may recall me working like crazy on a paper/session proposal a few months back, it was for this conference. I'm doing part of a tutorial session on biomolecules and possible feedback/control problems relating to them. (Yes, several cool things, for one I'm actually giving a talk! two, part of it is a small paper that's being published in the proceedings, three, I get to meet other people here and possibly get some people interested in my field.)

Anyways, the uncanny thing since I got here (tuesday) has to do with race: A large percentage of the people I've seen who work here are black. But I don't think I've seen a single conference attendee who was. There's certainly many different races and countries represented here, but it's still a pretty glaring gap. I think what bothers me about it is my own projection of what the people who work in New Orleans think about the conference because of that skewed proportion.

Maybe I shouldn't be bothered though, the people I've met here (both conference attendees and people who live/work around here) don't seem to be bothered. I certainly like being here, there's something about the south and how friendly people are here that I like.

Travel Adventures

Friday's adventures were an exercise in being flexible enough to change plans as needed. The original idea(s) were to get people over to Pasadena, have dinner and play some board games, then go pick up Jonathan at the airport, and hang out for a bit.

Various parts that changed: meeting location turned into Redondo Beach, to make it easier on G&P and Mylanda, and we went to dinner there. The incoming flight was delayed, so timing would seem easier to make board games doable, but dinner took a while, to the point where I had to sneak out early to go to the airport (along with M^2, who came with to keep me company (Thanks!)). The flight ended up being only about 30 minutes late, and we ended up back at G&P's place before the dinner party got back! So there was a short walk over to see the pier and we got back right as they arrived. Then we ate a bit, spent a while talking, and went back up to Pasadena to sleep.

(Yes, I'm trying to catch up on updates, we'll see how that goes.)

Friday Flight

Friday was spent traveling and visiting. Went over to Redlands for my grandmother's birthday celebration, at which there were many relatives and lots of talking and stuff. After that it was a mad dash back home and to LAX for the flight out to Detroit. So I'm now out near Ann Arbor, MI, with Frances and Jonathan, getting ready for our friend M's wedding on sunday.

And that's all that goes in this post, sorry!

Airport Visits

Our return flight was via Jacksonville to Houston to Los Angeles, on a completely different airline than our outwards flight. The first flight was really cold, but pretty short. Not much happened, I curled up on the seat and played a bit of Final Fantasy (PSP) and ate snacks and went ouch my tooth hurts from that. The flight was delayed by about 20 minutes leaving, and since we had approximately a 20 minute break between the arrival and our next flight on the original schedule, this was a cause for worry (which I am too prone to doing. I was also worried about the ratties, even though I'd called and checked on them and they were fine). We arrived and luckily the connecting flight had also been delayed, this one by an hour. So we got lunch and managed to arrive at the gate in plenty of time.

The next flight was pretty good, we were in the row all the way in the back of the plane, but the designers of this one (a 737-800) had left room so these seats could lean back! And with noone behind me, I didn't feel guilty and so went for it. Pretty nice, but didn't help my normal legs cramping problem, oh well. I got really tired about halfway through and dozed off, for maybe as long as an hour. Not really restful, but was too comatose to do anything else. I did get to see the approach into LA, figuring out which freeways I was seeing, and then managed to identify a critical interchange because of its familiarity (the 110/105 interchange) and did some traffic analysis, which proved to be pretty much useless as it took us a while to pick up baggage and make it out to the long term parking lot.

And now we're back, the ratties are happy, and Frances is visiting for a little since she's in the LA area. Went out to dinner and now I'm off to sleep. :)

Florida Wrap-Up

I'm writing this late tuesday night, from home where we have finally returned. Let me wrap up various threads and stuff that happened in Florida while visiting Mylanda:

RPG's: We played two different games of M's, the first being a D&D story we started on our last visit. I especially like my character for this one, though his name will go unmentioned (as I managed to get away with not actually telling anyone it this session). Very interesting to play all the crazy situations we get into. We spent a good part of an hour or more working out how to best attack a group of essentially mushroom-people. It ended up working out very well, and we managed to walk away with a small fortune in loot that may not have been apparent just from the mission statement. The second game is the long running Mage game involving world traveling in the 1940's and rescuing artifacts of all types. We finally continued our investigation into the Great Bear's Nail, an artifact from Lakota legends. Again, I really like the characters in this game which makes it interesting to play. Sadly we were down a few characters, but hopefully more will re-enter the game. We managed two pretty useful magical effects which involved nearly all the characters, allowing us to talk with the shaman from a vastly spatially separated tribe, in addition to working out exactly what trouble the artifact was in. Looking forward to continuing both these stories, hopefully at a faster pace if we can visit M more, or he can visit here.

Console gaming: Lots of Mario Strikers was played, it can get REALLY frustrating on the cup mode, as the computer starts playing very very well. Aside from that though, it's great fun on the slightly easier settings and the normal match play mode where you can set the difficulty. There was also some Guitar Hero monday evening, and we all wailed a bit. I don't recall any especially stunning solos, but one song I played left my hands crippled for that night.

Foods: Whoa, wings! We picked up hot wings monday night to cap off our food excursions, and M decided to test the place's Atomic wings. We also got hickory-smoked BBQ, Hawaiian (pineapple flavored, not exactly teriyaki though as that was another entry), Original Hot, and Cajun (much hotter than the original, in a more black pepper sort of way). I tried one of the Atomic wings, and I normally like pretty hot stuff, though not on the level of M or others I know. One bite later, I conceded defeat. Wow. That was pretty much pure concentrated burn. It took a while for it to cool down enough to make a stab at the other types, which were good (I had the two latter types).

Lots of other stuff I could write here, but I'm tired and want to catch up on posts.

Arrived

We have arrived in Florida! The flight were uneventful, and for once my knees didn't even hurt after the last one. Ok, so the flights were sorta eventful: We saw Waitress on the second flight, and Mal was in it, and he was cool. Keri Russell did well, and Andy Griffith stole the show whenever he was in the scene.

Gone to Florida!

We are setting off on the journey to Florida today, to visit Mylanda and see picturesque Gainesville. Okay, so maybe not the latter, but the first is plenty! The whole gang minus one or two is going to be out there, so it should be a good time. Look for possibly infrequent posts here, perhaps punctuated by some guest blogging or live blogging, as I'll have my laptop around.

Back from SF!

And we're back! Yep, these two posts were made within a few minutes of each other. That'd be because I've been out of internet contact. I did pull up my laptop while in a mall in SF friday, but while there were several wireless networks, the public ones didn't appear to work (I suspect they were public, but only authenticated MAC addresses could be used on them). Oh well, so instead yall just get a pair of posts essentially from saturday.

The trip up and back was pretty uneventful. There was one weird bit with taking the bay bridge into SF: it was during some really heavy traffic, and I was in a leftmost lane. I couldn't figure out what lane I should be in, because some were marked FastTrack or something, and so when I saw a carpool lane (the first I'd seen in SF) I got into that one. We entered the toll booth area, and I was ready to pay the 4$, but the lane I was in came to a booth with no person in it, and it didn't appear to care that I was there (there was a screen, but it was hard to read in the glare, I recall it flashing up a 0$ sorta thing). So we went on, but I had this nagging feeling I was supposed to pay 4$ for the toll. I found out later that the nagging feeling was correct, but for the wrong reason: apparently carpools don't have to pay the toll, but carpools in SF are three people, rather than the two person per car rule in LA. So I shouldn't have been in the carpool lane, and thus would have had to pay the toll. Oh well, I just hope they don't get irritated about the carpool lane thing and fine me huge amounts. Coming back across the same bridge, we were all set to pay the toll, I had figured out which lane type would work (after talking with a native) and let me pay by cash, and then there was no toll booths at all going eastbound. Doh!

Anyways, here's how our stay in SF went: Drove up, got there about 4:30pm or so, received multiple calls to figure out where/what we should do. We ended up needing to delay til about 6:30pm before we'd have something to do, so we went looking for Cody's books, a bookstore I'd heard about. Finally found it after walking in the wrong direction a bit, only to find out that they had closed, and their Berkeley location should still be open. So we went back instead to the huge mall (between Market and Mission, and 4th and 5th). It gave the impression of being huge, with directory displays that didn't just have a flat listing of all the stores, but instead had a touch screen searchable index, and when you picked a store it displayed how to get there. I think it was actually smaller than the Beverly Center mall, but it gave the impression of being bigger. Hard to tell though, we only stayed for a little bit and went to three stores in a localized area of the mall.

We did see a cool store, which seemed extremely niche: It sold handbags, fancy ladies dress shoes, and half-trenchcoat-like coats. I spent a while trying to figure out how that could be economically feasible, but gave up. If you've got ideas, let me know.

After the mall visit, it was time for dinner! This is good, because we'd eaten a long time ago. We first navigated to pick up Weronika, and then headed to Little Italy to meet up with L's parents and sister. We arrived in Little Italy ok, and then spent the next way too long trying to find parking. Finally found it, and had an extremely good dinner at a place whose name I was too tired to note, and thus don't remember.

Zzzzzzz. Then there was a drive again and then sleep. Today, we met up again and L's sister joined us. (I don't know how to write about her - I think she reads this blog already, but I don't like using people's names. Except I clearly don't mind in some cases, so I'm not sure exactly what it is. I almost always keep myself and L partially anonymous in name, but not always other people... Sorry for the digression...) The plan evolved: Go to Berkeley! We found out that Cody's books in Berkeley had closed, at least the location on telegraph. Doh! But there was still Claire, a friend of Weronika and L, whom L hadn't seen in a year or so, so we met up with her for lunch and afterwards went to Games of Berkeley. Lots of great stuff there, we ended up buying a module for Serenity (written by Laura and Tracy Hickman!), and a board game based on Order of the Stick. Also very tempting were Exalted books covering Autochthonians, and one covering Fair Folk, plus 3rd edition L5R and Nth edition Paranoia. (The latter two Weronika did pick up, and I was sorely tempted to). There were also a ton of other things that were pretty cool: Arkham Horror expansions, which one of the store's staff said were excellent, in the we're all gonna die quicker version of excellent. I also saw the Sluggy Freelance cardgame, a Paranoia card game (It's mandatory!), lots of the new Magic cards, some great figurines (both painted - Hero Clix and some Mechwarrior type stuff, and unpainted - lots of great fantasy hero/heroine type ones, saw a great elven ranger that might have been Thiryal), and more stuff I'm forgetting at the moment. Anyways, this took up most of our time and we left late in the afternoon, luckily still early enough to miss the traffic (thanks Lem for the warning about traffic times!), though there was a little but it cleared up quickly.

The trip back was uneventful too, though I thought it worth mentioning that I was going to stop at the Shell on the hill (do people remember that place?), but we ended up needing gas and drinks about 25 miles before that point, so instead we waved as we went by. The only other thing of note was that I was alone in the front seat and we were listening to CD's. At one point we had put on the Postal Service CD I recently got, and it finished and started over. I took it out and asked for another CD to replace it (the case was in the back), and it took a little bit to figure out that the reason I wasn't getting any response was that they were sound asleep in the back. Oh well, I ended up listening to that CD three times through, and the rest got a nap. :)

Gone to SF

We leave today to go up to SF, to say hi to L's parents and then to kidnap her sister back to Pasadena. I think it would be a more devious plan if we actually were to kidnap her, rather than it being a pre-arranged thing where she flies back to Michigan after a week. Speaking of Michigan, it appears her sister got a position with the SF Ballet and will be living there soon! I don't really understand the details, but perhaps I'll ask her to guest blog about it while she is here.

Also, this post is way overdue, as you will see shortly.

Plane Flights

I have decided upon a few rules which apply to traveling and plane trips. If the flight is going to leave at 7AM, you will not get much sleep the night before. Since the trip to the airport usually takes an hour or so, and you have to be there a little early, there are some very early wake-up times involved, and since I tend not to go to sleep before midnight, this means that there's maybe a 3 hour amount of sleep the night before. Not really a good situation, so I think in the future I will try to not take morning flights. In this particular case there were other constraints which meant that it'd have been fairly hard to do anything else, but it did reinforce the badness of morning flights.

The flights we took were actually rather interesting. We went to Chicago and back, without going to the same airport twice. The initial flight was LAX to Chicago O'Hare, and the return flight was Chicago Midway to Ontario. Pretty crazy, we also had a different airline for each flight. They got us there in time though, which is what really matters.

I had a few other thoughts about traveling: if you are going to need to take a taxi one-way and the distance is fairly large (like Evanston to Midway), it may be cheaper overall to just get a rental car, which also adds some extra mobility during the extra time you'll get to use it. This also seemed possibly true for the return: we got into Ontario early in the morning, so I didn't want to ask any of our friends for a ride, but the shuttle was fairly expensive. If we could have done a rental car from there to Pasadena and dropped it off at Pasadena, it would likely have been cheaper, plus we'd have some extra mobility for the day. Some things to think about next time we are planning a trip, for this one I'm just glad to be home and get some more rest. I wish we could have stayed longer, maybe schedule the flights different so that it'd been more restful while there too, but at least now I know some of the pitfalls.

Gone to Evanston

I'm currently out of town, so this is a filler post until I get some more time to actually write. We (L and I) are in Evanston, which is home to Northwestern University, and pretty near to Chicago. We're visiting for my sister's graduation, which was the date of this post (I'm putting it back a day, haven't had internet access for a lot of the time).