Bob Baddeley

Back in November I went down to Tampa for work. The project is called InfoStar, and the purpose of the project is to provide information about the Supercomputing 2006 conference to conference attendees. The tricky part, though, is that it’s dynamic data from a variety of sources, it’s available to anyone with an internet-enabled device, and it has to look good on a computer and function well on mobile devices like PDAs and cell phones. This project is my baby. This is my third year on the InfoStar project (and the third year of its existence), and this year I was the project lead. The first year we had a group of about 15 people that were involved. This year, we were 2. I wrote all the code, did all the graphics and advertisements, took care of the hardware, and did all the testing. And all of this on a budget so thin I ended up donating many many hours of my own time.

The site had everything about the conference, including the schedule (updated regularly to reflect room changes and cancelled events), maps of every location, a list of exhibitors and maps to their booths, web cameras throughout the conference area with time lapse videos of each day, relevant news, a photo gallery, a blog, a bulleting board, local weather, a fully functional search engine, and even some neat visualizations of the events at the conference. It was all written from scratch this year in a few weeks. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to test as much as I wanted, or do some things that would have made it more friendly for mobile devices, but that didn’t stop the praise from coming. I had people telling me how useful it had been for them, how they had made it their home page for the conference, how we should be marketing this to other conferences, how they’d love for me to work at their company (including “You’re the one responsible for InfoStar? You want a job at _____? I’m serious.”). Overall the feedback was great, the site worked out fairly well, and people are more enthusiastic about it. Of course, I focus a lot on what didn’t work out so well, what I could have done better, what still needs to be done, and all the other healthy pessimistic thoughts.

If you’d like to see the site, it’s still up: http://infostar.supercomputing.org/sc06|SC06 InfoStar site

The trip to Tampa was interesting. I’ve been trying to explore different places to find one where I’d like to live, so I was excited to see Florida. By the end, though, I wasn’t disappointed to leave. I was in downtown Tampa, and there were absolutely no places to eat. Each evening I tried walking in a different cardinal direction, and by the time I found a place and returned, I had burned more calories walking than I took in, so I was a very hungry boy for a while.

I ventured to Ybor city one night, which was a very positive experience. I found a sushi bar, and as I was about to leave, a loud trio entered and quickly became my friends for the night. We enjoyed some free saki from the owner, then headed over to a fashion/art show a few blocks away, where my new friends knew the live band, and I got to do some swing dancing. Then we had some aloe juice at a jamaican stand (it tasted like liquid salad) before heading to an irish pub. We hopped in a cab and went to a club by the airport, where we eventually separated for the night and I headed home.

The vendor parties were a lot of fun, too. The Microsoft party supposedly cost about a million dollars (but that’s just rumor), and they had a few places to dance. During the conference, people would occasionally recognize me as ‘the dancer,’ which is always pretty cool.

Tampa, though, is definitely not the place for me. It takes a long time to get anywhere. Looking at a map, you’d think I couldn’t have missed the ocean, but apparently it would have been a 45 minute cab ride to get there, so that didn’t happen. I also had a hard time getting used to hearing all the southern accents. As a native to the Northwest, I’m accustomed to clear speech and this was not. Everything was flat, too. There was no profile to the land, but that might just be because it was all underneath concrete.

So overall, it was a good experience, and I did good work on the InfoStar project, making the lab look good and getting some publicity. I got paid to tour a city I’ve never seen before (well, if you consider how many unpaid hours I donated and the number of hours I’m behind at work because of the trip, I actually paid quite a bit for it).

Way back in April I played Safeway’s buy-one-get-one-free deal by splitting with the lady behind me, saving me a buck in the process (look back at April 27, 2006). This time I played a different hand and still did well. It turned out that I had thinned out my wallet before going to Washington D.C. and hadn’t put all my cards back in, so my Safeway card wasn’t in my wallet, and I had no idea what phone number was associated with it. This could have been an expensive mistake. On the other hand, I had grabbed two cartons of eggs (they were buy-one-get-one-free for the 18 count cartons), and had intended to just give one of the cartons to the person either in front of or behind me. I asked the guy behind me if he had a Safeway card I could borrow and offered to give him the carton of eggs in return. He was, of course, willing. So I unloaded my free eggs on him, used his card to save a bunch of money, and left a happy man.

I really think that people get a lot more accomplished when they aren’t so hermit-ish and communicate with other people. This whole culture of being an individual with the iPods in the ears all the time, not talking to anybody or sharing anything is unhealthy in so many ways.

Today I resurrected my camera from the horrors of dust. This wasn’t just ordinary dust on the outside of the lens. That isn’t worthy of a blog entry. No, this was dust on the actual CCD and internal lens. The camera is a Panasonic Lumix FX01, a tiny little digital critter that fits snugly in my pocket and takes great pictures.

Taking it apart was no simple task, especially since I wanted it to continue working after I put it back together again. After deciphering its assembly, I did manage to take it mostly apart. The planning and engineering that go into constructing this little device are incredible. I carefully extracted the CCD and used a special cleaning paper to gently wipe off the miniscule specs on the chip and lens. I put it mostly together again (not quite all the way in case my work was not yet complete) and turned it on. Much to my dismay a grinding noise occurred as the gears for the lens assembly screwed up. It was an ‘oh crap’ moment, and for a lesser camera would have been the sound of its death. My little camera showed its strength and merely said on the screen ‘please turn the camera off and back on.’ I checked the assembly and made a small adjustment with some of the plastic pieces that held the gears together. This time it worked smoothly. I had one more moment of fear when the screen was working but the camera part was showing pure black, but that too was temporary.

The reconstruction complete, I tested once more to make sure the dust was gone, and to my relief the camera was working completely and the specks of dust that had been present in a few pictures were now gone. I have to admit I’m very relieved, and now I’m confident that I can perform the operation again if necessary. It really puts into perspective the stress that surgeons are under; my camera was $300, which is a fair chunk of change but still replaceable, but you can’t put a price on a person’s body, and if you screw up they die. It’s times like these that make me glad I work with computers all day.

I had a good weekend. Friday night I convinced myself to go ballroom dancing. The debate is a frequent one. On one hand, I know it will be attended by the same older folks that go every week, playing the same songs every week. I don’t really get anything out of going; it’s just keeping me from forgetting the dance moves I already know. On the other hand, I’m not going to meet new people by staying in my apartment. So I went. One particular odd thing happened that hadn’t happened in weeks past. During YMCA, nobody was dancing, so I grabbed the lady who teaches dance classes and brought her out there with the hope that other people would come out, too. After all, the electric slide managed to fill the floor. Anyway, the opposite happened. Rather than come out, there were cheers and clapping and everybody stopped to watch. Admittedly, I was showboating a little, but I didn’t expect that kind of a reaction. After that song was a hustle, which is one of my favorite kinds of dance, so I couldn’t sit that one out. I did take it easy with my partner and managed to catch my breath eventually. Once I left the dance floor, people kept coming up to me and asking where I had learned to dance like that, amazed that I had made most of it up on the spot, and awed that my movements were as smooth as glass and as on the beat as a metronome (I’m not exaggerating. That’s really what they were telling me). I’m always skeptical about my dancing because I see all the little mistakes and room for improvement, but it’s nice to get confirmations like that.

Since the dancing ended at 9, and I was still ready for more, I went over to another place, where there was a live band playing latin music (salsa, cha-cha, and merengue). I danced with a few people and had some fun. I really have no qualms about asking random people to dance. Even if they’re not experienced I find that I can get them to pick it up fairly quickly.

Eventually the dynamics of the place shifted and I went back to the first place for some younger club music, but was sorely disappointed. It was funny to watch everyone in a semicircle around the dance floor not dancing. The demographic was heavily skewed towards the non-dancing males, so I stayed long enough to justify the cover and left. Besides, I had a big day planned.

Saturday I woke up a few times. Eventually I woke up at 8 and sternly lectured myself on waking up so late. I had to hurry to shower and prepare all my ski clothes, and had to inhale breakfast. I went with Dave and his girlfriend to Bluewood. The hill opened at 9, but we figured that since it was our first day of the season and she hadn’t really skied before that we would be better off not skiing the full day. We arrived at 11 and had a good 4 1/2 hours of skiing. On my first run I got off the lift, my body said “oh yeah, I remember this,” and I bombed straight down. We had some really fast runs and some really challenging powder and tree runs. I think I could have continued to ski, so we might have done better to arrive earlier, but it was probably good that we took it fairly easy. I didn’t try any jumps, and never got fast enough that my skiis started bouncing, and afterwards I wasn’t very sore at all.

So that night I tried to go ballroom dancing again, but the normal people who put it on weren’t doing it that week because of some medical emergency with their daughter.

The next morning I tried to go skydiving, but the ceiling was too low and didn’t get better all day. By that I mean the cloud level was around 800 feet or lower, and the temperature and dew point temperature were equal, so the clouds could form as low as the ground and wouldn’t be going away most of the day.

So the happy feet were from being able to dance and ski, and the unhappy feet were from the actual dancing and skiing. Saturday evening and Sunday allowed my feet to get back to normal.

I actually visited San Francisco way back in September, but didn’t get around to writing about it because so much happened and when I tried writing I ended up with a few pages of the first day alone. It turns out that by waiting a while, the less important details get filtered out, and the trip condenses, making it more appropriate for writing here.

I had three reasons for visiting San Francisco: to see some friends, to evaluate S.F. as a potential place to live, and to go somewhere I’d never been before. I’d have to say that all three of those goals were successfully accomplished that trip.

Hightlights from the trip include:

• Clubbing friday night, though frustrating, was very different from clubbing in the tri-cities.
• Downtown S.F. Saturday morning with Pier 39, driving down the steep hills, and dinner at Pier 39.
• Clubbing Saturday night at Ruby Sky, dancing to techno at a CD opening party until 3 in the morning.
• Sunday morning Chinatown, dim sum, Alcatraz tour, visit to the beach, cross the Golden Gate bridge, and Highway 1.
• Monday to downtown S.F. again to walk around during the day, then up to Berkeley and the campus.
• Tuesday getting back on the plane.

Of course, that’s a really vague overview of the trip, and a lot happened in between. One of the things that I hated about the Bay Area was the commute anywhere. Sure, there’s tons of stuff to do, but when it takes 45 minutes to an hour to get there, that takes a lot of the fun out of it and really eats into a day. I also realized that the big city is definitely for me rather than a small town. And I found people like me, which is something I haven’t really found here.

I haven’t ruled out S.F. entirely, but it’s not my favorite place to be. I think Seattle still trumps it.

In the last two days I have put in 25 hours of work. And the marathon won’t be letting up for another week. Next week I travel to Tampa for a supercomputing conference, and I am the project manager and sole developer for a project that will be visible conference-wide. In fact, you can see the project I’m working on here: http://infostar.supercomputing.org/ InfoStar, SC06. For the Reader’s Digest version, it’s a web site that allows anybody to get all the information about the conference on any device that can connect to the Internet, including a searchable schedule, maps, bulletin boards, web cameras, photo galleries, a blog, exhibitor information and events, statistics, and even some neat graphic visualizations of everything that’s going on.

It’s a little odd leaving the building so late, having the only car in the parking lot, driving home without seeing any cars, and struggling to find a decent parking spot at the apartment. I’ve also completely dropped my athletic endeavors lately, but that’s also partly because it’s getting dark and cold. I’ve dropped a few pounds (I don’t know where they came from. I’m already skinny), so the headaches of malnourishment are starting to recur.

It’s not all bad. I am developing a really cool application with a lot of features. I get to go to Tampa for a week and show it off. And all this work on project is certainly going to make me look good to the people who dole out the raises and maybe even to the people who are looking for dedicated and creative and smart employees.