I noticed it was time to update my blog today when NetNewsWire displayed the title in red, indicating a stale RSS feed that hadn’t been updated in a month. Sorry about the delay.

Alas, I’ve had a busy month or two. May 11th I graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a BS in Computer Science. An excellent time, but time to get a job now.

May 28th through June 2nd I was in Naples, Italy at AVI 2008. I had a great time presenting our well received poster on the ideas behind VCode & VData, and had the chance to visit to Pompeii. Incidentally, a new release of VCode is pretty much ready to go, so watch for it in the coming days.

June 7th I boarded an American Airlines flight to SJC with a one-way ticket! After attending a most exciting WWDC 2008, I finally moved in to my new apartment in Santa Clara with my roommate Erik.

We do great things here in California. I enjoy going to work every day, and there are lots of cool places to go like WeirdStuff and untold numbers of unfound places. Erik and I went to the Gilroy Garlic Festival this weekend, and Mo even came out for a visit a couple of weeks ago. Charlie is here now too.

[I had intended to put lots of photos in this post, but I’ve delayed it long enough already. Perhaps I’ll update it with photos one day?]

I’m headed to Advanced Visual Interfaces ‘08 this summer in Naples, Italy to present the work Josh and I did on VCode + VData regarding video coding tools. I’m really proud, as it’s my first first-author!

You can download VCode and get more info about it on the Social website.

Enjoy!

So, perhaps you were confused by the last post. If so, I apologize. Finals are a busy time, so there wasn’t much time to explain–this is also why there’s been a break in posting. The link was a blog that was setup during the very intensive finals studying. We commandeered a conference room for a week straight. We even did some original research while in there.

After finals is when the fun really began though.

Coffee on a snowy night with Erik

An icy wall and adorable snowmen outside the Siebel Center

The snowy and icy days were a fun cap to the end of the semester and signaled a start to winter.

Then iPhone came and changed my life

But getting my iPhone was simply fantastic. I can’t wait to start writing apps.

The Latest from the Front Lines of Unproductivity

As an avid reader of xkcd I was of course excited when the author Randall Munroe came to speak at our annual ACM Reflections | Projections conference this October. According to Wikipedia, Randy previously spoke at MIT and WPI, though I can’t say I knew about the WPI event before researching this. At those talks it has become a bit of a tradition to play some sort of prank or disrupt the talk with a thematically appropriate display of some element present in his comics.

It was not original, but compulsory to create some [citation needed] signs–just like the Wikipedian Protester displays. I used the CS Department Plotter, some scrap Foamcor, and spray adhesive to build them.

I got mine signed

But the signs were just for starters. Mo thought it would be a good idea to drop several thousand spiders from the ceiling of 1404, ideally more impressive than the meager number of playpen balls dropped from the ceiling at MIT. So she bought them, and several of us spray painted them red. Unfortunately at this point we did not know how to drop them. A Thursday night investigation of 1404 Siebel informed us that there was no way to access the ceiling. Blueprints didn’t help find any service catwalks, there wasn’t any way we could get a ladder up there. Let me give you the play by play from here on out:

• Thursday - Start painting Spiders red.
• 
• 12:00 AM Friday - Discover there isn’t a good way to reach the ceiling.
  Consider attaching something to the projector screen. Infeasible.
• 2:00 AM - Build the whole crazy remote controlled box thing. Extract some magnets from a hard disk, find and get a Futaba R/C Radio working. Apply duct tape liberally.
• ~Insert some sleep, things get fuzzy around this point. I think I took an exam in the interim as well.~
• 2:00 PM - Purchase balloons, fishing line, batteries
  
  • Add twice as many hard disk magnets to hold box to ceiling.
  • Rebuild latch mechanism, as we found it didn’t work with the weight of the spiders.
  • Head to ACM Conference Room and build crazy balloon rig to get a wire over the rafters in 1404.
  • Get very worried while trying to eat dinner, afraid there won’t be enough time.
• 6:15 PM Yahoo Hack Day Competition finally clears out. We begin hanging box in front of a few people still left in the lecture hall. Everything goes to plan, except the cable that we pulled it up with doesn’t descend as planned. Nobody notices.
• 7:00 PM finish hanging up box
• 
• 7:15 PM Yahoo Awards begin
• 7:45 PM Talk starts
• 7:56 PM Randall mentions something about what would be interesting to drop from the sky on unsuspecting people (in the context of a kite flown 2km high with a dangling string from the line).
• 
• 7:57 PM 2000 red spiders fall from the sky controlled by radio.
• 
  

More Pictures

I think it was a success. We all had fun, and the crazy contraption held up all right. Perhaps the most interesting part of it was getting the wire over the beam in the lecture hall. I’m not quite sure how to illustrate it, perhaps a cartoon is appropriate? I’ll get sketching.

I’m so proud of my new bicycle. I got it at the end of July this summer, from Craigslist in Chicago. Only a bit more than a month and I’ve learned an incredible amount about road bikes. I’m no pro cyclist, but this is certainly an enjoyable activity. According to Bruce, mine is a 1982 example. The components are Shimano, many the original 600 EX parts, other than the brake levers, which were changed to 105 aero style, and the shift levers, that were upgraded to indexed Dura Ace parts. I am especially fond of the intricate styling on the derailleurs. I was even able to get copies of the original catalog and manual.

My Lotus

While I’m very happy, with any purchase of a 25 year old item there is some trouble to be expected. I bought a new seat on eBay; it came with a yucky one. The new one is a pretty blue suede Mundialitta seat. I’ve discovered the non-original front wheel is the wrong size; a 27″ instead of a 700c; and the brake shoes prevented the quick-releases on the brake calipers from appropriately closing. You can see some of these items in earlier pictures in the photo gallery. Fortunately I was able to locate a matching front wheel and after some work acquired it. Brake pads were quickly swapped too. Finally, I noticed the “shimano one key release” cap on my crank bolt is missing–I think it just fell off. Either way, it will be tricky hunting that down. New Continental Grand Prix tires and tubes finished off the restoration; I’m really happy with the result.

Even though I woke somewhat later than planned yesterday, I managed to make it to the BMW dealership before closing to pickup the parts I ordered. Finally my new seat heater elements had come in. About a year ago the seat element went out in my car; I can’t remember the element in the backrest ever working. In typical MacGyver fashion, I thought I’d be able to solder the heater wire back together and fix it for free. My fix worked, but only for a single evening drive with the windows open.

The e36 325i doesn’t seem to be designed around serviceability of seat heater elements. Non-working heated seats are all too common on this car, and I couldn’t bear the defect any longer.

Notice the burnt area.

This time I decided I was ready to fix them for real. It time to remove the seat again, pull off the seat cushion (snapping 4 breakaway pins), separate the leather from the foam by removing a number of demonic little metal rings–to get to the heater element. For the first time I figured out how to get the back of the seat open for this process too. The leather is essentially tucked in around the edge with a plastic spline. The spline is removed by simply pulling from around the edge. It turns out the shell of the seat back is made out of some sort of fiberglass that made it quite light and rigid. Hrm, fiberglass. I always forget to document these projects with more photos.

A helpful how-to detailed some of the steps required, but is focused on retrofit installation of elements rather than replacement.

I arrived home with the parts around 3:30 pm and by 8:00 pm I had reinstalled the repaired seat. Driving home last evening with the windows open I experienced that fleeting summer feeling of a cool breeze and a warm seat. Today was much less eventful; I just changed the oil, flushed the brake fluid, and installed new rear rotors and brake pads. After completing the remainder of service at the dealership I should be back to premium condition. The hours of intricate finger work for that seat repair was most certainly worth it, the new elements seem to keep the seat warmer than ever.

I saw them Friday night at the Double Door. Fantastic. A google search will find you their web presence, for I refuse to link to a certain social-networking website. I only wish there were a way for me to get recordings of their music. A lone mp3 is offered for download and they don’t yet have a compact audio disc for sale.