2Scientists (blog)

Facebook versus the blog

2010-05-18T17:36:00.004-04:00

So, it turns out that Facebook has taken all my attention away from the blog. In the past year (almost) from my last blog post, I returned to San Francisco a couple of times, good friends have gotten married, we survived Snowtorious B-I-G, my mom and I visited DC like tourists, and we have moved (and I am sure there is more stuff that I am forgetting about). But all those things will have to wait....

A couple of friends recently celebrated monumental birthdays, and the big event of the night was a live Mariachi band. For excessive video footage of said serenade, see below.

August in Wisconsin

2009-08-09T15:04:00.010-04:00

After June and July packed with travel for work, I was able to get back to Wisconsin for a week in early August (before another work trip).

I finally met Joe, Heather's boyfriend. We all had dinner at an Indian place in Madison.

Later in the week, Mom and I had lunch at Cafe Manna in Brookfield, where I drank locally. I highly recommend New Glarus beers--give one a try if you have the opportunity (http://newglarusbrewing.com/).

Still later in the week, Mom and I went to the Wisconsin State Fair. My favorite part (besides the Wisconsin Products Pavilion, of course--for those who don't know, that is where the loaded potatoes, sundaes, Usinger sausages and other Wisconsin edibles can be found) was the baby animal barn.

Congratulations Ed and Jiyoung!

2009-06-12T16:28:00.003-04:00

Here are some of the pictures I took during the four days we spent in the Chicagoland area for a friend's wedding in which Ken was a groomsman.

Kindle DX - Almost There

2009-05-08T15:30:00.007-04:00

On Wednesday of this week, Amazon announced the Kindle DX. I point this out because this may be the first e-book reader that's in the running for suckering me out of my hard-earned money.

I'd say that my work life is split 60-40 between research (finding out what's going on in the machine learning community) and development (writing software that brings these ideas together). It's not easy keeping on top of all that's going on in these two radically different communities.

For the research side of things, you have to keep up-to-date on what's going on in the literature. This means tracking down journal articles and preprints, and that means lots of visits to Google Scholar and plenty of downloaded PDFs. Very recently, I came across Zotero which helps me to keep track of all my notes, references, and the electronic copies of the papers themselves. Once Zotero supports collaboration amongst research groups (so we can point out papers to our interested colleagues and share our reviews), I'd say that I could almost go all-electronic on the research front.

On the software-development side of my profession, you have as much (or maybe even more) to keep current on, but there the reading material is very different. I stopped buying computer books a while ago, as most of them are obsolete within a few years. Programming languages, frameworks, and software architectures are such a rapidly moving target these days. That's why I'm a subscriber to Oreilly's Safari books online. It's a great way to read recent software and technology books without needlessly cluttering your physical bookshelves.

It's safe to say then that most of my reading material is either on a webpage or in a PDF document. With all this digitial media, I'd be great if I could read this content electronically as well. In many cases, I do, but it can be kind of a pain. I'd prefer to read in my favorite armchair, on the couch, or out on the balcony on a nice day. My development laptop is too clunky, uncomfortable, and hot to use while laying down or for long periods of time. My cheap little netbook has such a small screen that sites like Safari aren't easy to read. And I don't really want to haul either out on to the balcony to enjoy the weather while I read. And none of these devices match the effective resolution of the Kindles electronic ink.

So, previous models of the Kindle have appealed to me, but they've failed in the faithful display of PDFs and other websites (so I've read; I've never laid hands on any of them myself). That's been a no-start right there. This new Kindle though, promises native PDF rendering (no conversion process needed) and a bigger screen that's not too far off from the printable area of a letter-sized document. It's pricier than any of the previous models, and I'm not convinced that it's enough of a leap forward for me to take the plunge.

So, here's my wishlist for the future Kindle DX2 (or whatever it ends up being named) in some vain hope that some of it will come to fruition:

Have a tablet-screen so I can hand-annotate PDFs. Most of the notes I make are about specific equations from the papers I read (e.g., re-deriving them in the margins), and no keyboard (physical or virtual) is going to be convenient enough for me to use.

Correlary: The DX does a good job of minimizing the amount of space occupied by the keyboard. Now go one step further and eliminate it.
Make sure that Google Reader is supported for the built-in browser (so I can read my RSS feeds). For that matter, I'd like GMail to just work as well.

Correlary: I'm not interested in paying to subscribe to blogs on my putative Kindle. I'm going to spend most of my time reading within a few meters of one of my own WiFi access points, and I can plan ahead if I need to hit the road. So, just get rid of that whole Sprint/Whispernet thing, and then you don't have to worry about the bandwidth.
Can you do a little better than $490? For such a single-function device, that's a steep price. I think you've got get below the netbook market (around the $300 range now). I suspect that dropping the whole Sprint contract might help with that.
Any chance of opening up a development kit for a Firefox-like plugin environment (or maybe something like an iPhone App Store)? I'd like to see Zotero end up on the Kindle in some fashion, and I doubt that there's sufficient incentive for Amazon to roll that in on their own.
Provide a search capability that indexes the contents of the PDFs. Once I've loaded up this sucker with all my articles and books, I'm going to need it.

Amazon, I know that there are a lot of scientists and researchers like me out there that would love to keep their entire library of journal articles and reference materials on a Kindle-like device, and I think if you roll in some of these features, you're going to see us line up to throw our cash at your feet. At least I probably would.

Thanksgiving for Easter

2009-04-13T17:41:00.008-04:00

Recently, I took two rolls of film in to be developed. I don't think I have done that since early this millennium, and so I had no idea what would be on the rolls. Surprise! It is our first Thanksgiving in State College!

The grocery stores in State College always had free turkey giveaways at Thanksgiving, and so I got the biggest free turkey I could (I think it was 25 pounds), and we fed a small, but hungry crowd. Ken and I were the only Americans at the table, but that made for a relaxing first go at holiday hosting--we certainly wouldn't be ruining anyone's favorite holiday no matter what we did. And that turned out to be a good thing, because I was prepared for the little packet in the turkey, but I wasn't prepared for two packets in the turkey. I took out the neck and thought that was that, and I ended up cooking the packet of organs inside the bird. We still didn't know it was there in the picture of Ken and the bird. Fortunately, one of the guests was still more than happy to eat them, and everything turned out fine.

And then there is me--sampling the, at that time, newly released Diet Coke with Lemon. I was just searching the web to see if that product is still available, and found a site that stated that it tasted like lemon Pledge. That could explain my expression in the photo. Also, please bear in mind that we had just cooked a big holiday meal when looking at the kitchen. What a mess!

Only about ten photos out of a potential 48 turned out. I left the bad cropping for nostalgia's sake. While I did like developing my own film in high school, overall, I am very glad to have left this technology behind for digital!

Well, this isn't a huge surprise....

2009-03-23T20:27:00.002-04:00

While writing and posting my blogs this evening, I read some friends' blogs. Then, it seemed that a meme thing would be fun to do. The character result didn't surprise me (or my dear husband), but the description did. I am happy, really. Antisocial, yes, but happy!

Your result for The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test...

Eeyore

"Do you know what A means, little Piglet?"

"No, Eeyore, I don't."

"It means Learning, it means Education, it means all
the things that you and Pooh haven't got. That's what A means."

"Oh," said Piglet again. "I mean, does it?" he
explained quickly.

"I'm telling you. People come and go in this Forest,
and they say, 'It's only Eeyore, so it doesn't count.' They
walk to and fro saying 'Ha ha!' But do they know anything about
A? They don't. It's just three sticks to them. But to the
Educated--mark this, little Piglet--to the Educated, not
meaning Poohs and Piglets, it's a great and glorious A.

You scored as Eeyore!

ABOUT EEYORE: Eeyore lives in his own thistley corner of the forest and wonders why people don't come to visit him more often. He is master of the Guilt Trip, and is always gently forgiving his visitors for neglecting him. Eeyore considers himself to be smarter than the other inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Wood, and is often exasperated by their habit of having adventures and general merriment.

WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are an anxious person, and you tend to expect the worst. Your friends find you somewhat cynical at times, because you have found that it is best to expect disappointment. You often feel unappreciated by the people you work with, but you rarely actually try and do anything to change that fact.

Your close friends admire you more than you think they do. They wish that you would learn to stop worrying so much and actually start trying to fix what is bothering you. If something is making you unhappy... change it!

Take The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test at HelloQuizzy

National Women's History Month Program

2009-03-23T19:59:00.000-04:00

On March 12, I attended the Treasury Department's National Women's History Month Program, which was a presentation by Dr. Lise Van Susteren. (Yes she is Greta's sister, but what I found to be more interesting is that her father was a judge in Wisconsin.) Dr. Van Susteren was trained by Al Gore to give An Inconvenient Truth type lectures to help teach people what they can do to help the environment. After the presentation, I got to meet her and shake her hand while some of my co-workers asked follow up questions about her talk.

The Hottest New Band in Atlanta!

2009-03-23T19:56:00.001-04:00

http://www.cra.gatech.edu/

Snow Day!

2009-03-23T19:00:00.003-04:00

March entered with a snowstorm that caught us quite off guard. A friend visited us before a business meeting, and that night, we got hit with the most snow that I have seen here so far. His meeting was postponed; the government had a liberal-leave policy day, and so I took annual leave; Ken stayed home as well; and so we got an extra day to hang out and catch up (with some working-from-the- apartment time interspersed). The top picture was from the Sunday night before all the snow, though. We all had our laptops out checking the forecast and coming to the realization that none of us were going anywhere on Monday.

San Francisco Part I

2009-02-14T16:45:00.006-05:00

During the first week of February, I participated in an internal audit of TTB's Compliance Laboratory (our sister lab) in Walnut Creek, CA. My flight to the San Francisco airport ended up going through Miami due to a crack in the plane that I was supposed to take to the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. I ended up traveling from 6am to midnight eastern time. On the bright side, I didn't fly in a plane with a crack in it, and I adjusted to west coast time pretty quickly.

After my work obligation was over, I went back to San Francisco to meet up with some friends. I had some time to kill before they got off work, and so I did some geocaching. The first find of the trip was as the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station that was two blocks away from my hotel. The clouds obstruct the view of Mout Diablo (http://www.parks.ca.gov/Default.asp?page_id=517), but I did get to see it clearly during my stay.

My rolling suitcase was my companion for the day, and again, on the bright side, it was great cover for geocaching in San Francisco. People didn't think anything of it when I stopped randomly, looked at maps, looked confused, and lingered in a place too long.

My favorite caches of the day were placed by a single cacher. This person had painted water colors of buildings in the city and uploaded them to the cache's website so that they could be followed like a scavenger hunt. I have not been very good at finding actuals in cities(physical containers hidden in the middle of very populated areas), especially on my own, but these visual clues made it quite easy and very fun. Those registered at geocaching.com can see the water color of this photo by searching for GC1JETZ.

There are many nice places for hides in the area between the Embarcadero and Powell Street Bart Stations, between Market and Folsom Streets. This picture was taken at the Yerba Buena Gardens. I really enjoyed spending my time in this area of the city.

San Francisco Part 2

2009-02-14T11:19:00.011-05:00

Saturday was a fun day out with friends exploring areas north of San Francisco. We started out by hiking in Muir Woods (http://www.nps.gov/muwo/). After that, we drove along California State Route 1. The part we drove along is known as Shoreline Highway, a winding, two lane road through and over the Marin Hills, along Muir Beach and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It is a very beautiful drive, with views alternating among city, ocean, and rolling hills.

Throughout the day we did some geocaching. They had never been caching before, but they took to it very quickly! We found every one that we attempted.

Next it was on to Stinson Beach. We bought sandwiches and chips at a store in town, then took them to the beach to eat on the shore. It was quite windy and a bit chilly, but people were swimming, or at the very least, wading. I have touched the Pacific before, and so I did not feel the need to this time around.

Finally, we drove to (near) the top of Mount Tamalpais (http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=471). From there, the view of Oakland and San Francisco is amazing. I especially liked seeing the Golden Gate Bridge from this angle--how it peeks out from behind the hills, so unassuming for such a well-known landmark.

Burns Night 2009

2009-01-25T19:17:00.003-05:00

No haggis tonight, I'm afraid, but here's wishing you a pleasant Burns' night.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-20T18:05:00.014-05:00

Despite being encouraged not to by saner minds, I did go into the District on Inauguration Day. Of course, the aerial pictures of the mall and the masses of people gathered there show the scope much better than my video and (mostly out of focus) photos ever could, but they didn't show how crazy the Metro was.

The sheer volume of people taking Metro was amazing, and it was very scary to be in the middle of that for such a long time. The video clip here is the moments after a very loud escalator malfunction that people may have thought was a terrorist event. I missed recording the screaming, but the audio does include people chanting "Walk! Walk!" to try to encourage people to get out of the station as quickly as possible.

Plus, I am not used to seeing such a police presence at my Metro platform! Check out those guns!

Some may have heard about the purple ticket people who got trapped in the Third Street Tunnel (which is also Interstate 395). I walked through said tunnel just before the situation turned for the worse. It was really something to walk through an interstate car tunnel.

The closest I got to tickets for the inauguration was photographing them over people's shoulders. But as it turned out, even many of the people with tickets could not get through security in time to see the proceedings.

All-in-all, it was an interesting time to be in the District, but I am not sure it was worth it to say that I was there--and I did not spend any money other than Metro fare. I cannot imagine the expense and time so many people invested to be there for such an uncontrollable situation.

Christmas Time in Alexandria

2009-01-02T18:04:00.000-05:00

There is not much to report for this Christmas season. Of course there was a feeling of incompleteness, but, as cliche as it may be, I know that Dad would want us to live the happiest, fullest lives possible, and we are determined to do just that.

We spent Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day with friends, and enjoyed a lot of down time during the Christmas and New Year's Holidays.

Plus, Ken had a monumental birthday, which we celebrated with beer and nachos at RFD in the District.

The Crane! The Crane!

2008-12-06T17:58:00.001-05:00

Not very far away from our apartment, construction began several months ago on a new office complex.

We happened to have the fortune one Saturday morning of waking up and seeing a giant cranebe assembled before our very eyes. It's actually quite an amazing process, and you have to be impressed with what the assemblers have to do in order to fit everything together. The slideshow offers a glimpse of what we got to watch while sipping coffee from the comfort of our apartment while the guys in the photos were on the order of 10 or more stories above the ground.

The video below shows them lowering in one of the counterweights. Yowza.

Veterans' Day

2008-11-11T19:35:00.005-05:00

On my first Veterans' Day as a federal employee (meaning this is the first time I had the day off of work) and, coincidentally, the first Veterans' Day since my father (a Vietnam Veteran) died, I attended the Veterans' Day Observance at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in DC. It was a moving enough experience to walk the length of the mall on Veterans' Day, and the ceremony itself was touching, respectful, and inspiring.

Scottish Rite of Freemasonry meets Geocaching!

2008-11-11T19:13:00.007-05:00

On November 1st, I attended a geocaching meet and greet event at the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry "House of the Temple" in DC. It is a gorgeous building, including the bathrooms--I highly recommend it to anyone who has time and is in the area. In addition to meeting more geocachers and touring the building, there was a lecture on the codes and ciphers of freemasonry by Dr. Brent Morris (his credentials are listed here: http://www.freemasons-freemasonry.com/brentmorrisfr.html). It was a fun and informative morning, on another beautiful day in the metro area.

Yes we did.

2008-11-05T20:04:00.004-05:00

Family Visit

2008-11-04T18:11:00.000-05:00

The weekend after our Atlanta trip, Ken's family came to visit us. His brother and sister-in-law had not been to the area before, and so we had the full range of tourist potential available. We went on the Tourmobile, which mainly served to remind me of all the things that we have not yet done in the district, even after living here for over a year. We stopped at Union Station for lunch, and just as our meals were being served to us, we were evacuated!

We spent more time in Old Town Alexandria than in the district. We walked down to the waterfront and saw some of the regular entertainment, most notably the musical goblet guy and the parrot people (these are not their official names). Ken's mom agreed to having her picture taken with a bird on her shoulder.

We took the trolley from the Potomac to the King Street metro station then walked up to the George Washington Masonic Memorial. Ken and I went there with my parents last winter, but there is so much to see and read that I wanted to do it again. Plus, the day was beautiful, and so the view from the top was a consolation for not going up in the Washington Monument (standing in line early in the morning did not rise to the top of anyone's must do in DC list). Also in Old Town, we toured Gadsby Tavern and had lunch there, and went on the Ghost and Graveyard Tour.

But being a tourist is really tiring, and so we also spent some nights in playing Wii. Fun for the whole family!

Atlanta

2008-11-01T15:17:00.004-04:00

In early October, we traveled to Atlanta to visit friends who have recently relocated there. Ken has been to Atlanta before (in fact, it was at an Atlanta APS meeting that Ken first encountered these people who would become his coworkers and, later, our friends), but it was my first time there outside of the airport.

We did some touristy things, but we anticipate being back a few times, and so we didn't knock ourselves out trying to see everything possible. We took the MARTA downtown and saw that many skyscrapers still have broken windows from the tornado on March 14, 2008 (coincidentally, our 5th anniversary). We walked around Centennial Olympic Park, and we went to the Georgia Aquarium, which turned out to be really cool (I was skeptical).

Ken took many pictures of the Atlanta skyline from every place we went (downtown, midtown, GA Tech, Piedmont Dog Park, Jimmy Carter Library and Museum...) but this one at dusk in Piedmont Park is my favorite.

We also went to a great pub in Decatur, The Brick Store Pub. Their Oktoberfest celebration was in full swing, and so we were lucky to get a table (even luckier that it was in a corner of the upstairs where the music was not as loud and the patrons were not stomping on the floor and pounding on the tables like their downstairs counterparts). There were people in lederhosen and beer wench dresses, and I don't think that many of them were the pub staff. There was also a crowd of people getting "warmed up" before a 5k race.

The Godspeed

2008-09-28T13:50:00.004-04:00

The Godspeed, a Jamestown Settlement ship, has been docked in Old Town for the past few days (unfortunately all of them rainy). According to the brochure we received, the Godspeed is a recreation of one "of the three ships that brought America's first permanent English colonists to Virginia in 1607." It will be sailing back to Jamestown tomorrow morning, and so we won't get a chance to see it in full sail in person (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godspeed_(ship) shows a picture in full sail, the Jamestown Settlement website http://historyisfun.org/Jamestown-Ships.htm does not).

McCain has left the building

2008-09-27T16:36:00.004-04:00

I may have mentioned this before, but when the media talks about McCain's headquarters in Virginia, that means Ken's office building. Here is a picture from a recent sighting, complete with Rudy Giuliani. This picture was taken by Ken's boss.

State College Connections

2008-09-27T16:30:00.000-04:00

In State College, we frequented a pizza place named Faccia Luna with friends who, at the time, lived just doors away from the restaurant. Once we moved to Alexandria, we found out that Faccia Luna was started by Penn State alums and that there are four Faccia Luna locations: Scranton, PA; State College, PA; Arlington, VA; and Alexandria, VA--just blocks away from our apartment. We have been there twice with the same friends who now live in Maryland, near my work. The story of Faccia Luna's history can be found here: http://www.faccialuna.com/misc/history.htm. Unfortunately, the Alexandria location does not have our favorite pizza, the salamini suprema, but it will do. After our visit there on Sunday, we spent some time at a really nice playground in Old Town so that the little man could use up the energy from eating half of his dad's slice of chocolate noir cake.

Happy Trails

2008-09-27T16:25:00.001-04:00

Since last Saturday was so nice, Ken and I decided to walk along the Mount Vernon Trail. We walked from our apartment to Rosslyn Metro Station, which was about ten miles. For a nice map, see: http://www.nps.gov/archive/gwmp/mvtmap.html (Rosslyn is north of where the trail ends on the map.)Along the way we passed McCain's plane parked at Reagan National Airport, planes taking off right in front (and then above) us at Gravelly Point, and monuments from different perspectives near Rosslyn.

Awareness Seminars

2008-09-27T16:20:00.000-04:00

On September 18th, I attended the Department of Treasury sponsored seminars for National Hispanic Heritage Month and Dispute Prevention Week. Both seminars were held at Treasury buildings in the District, the first in the Cash Room of Main Treasury Building, and the second in the main lobby of IRS Headquarters (a much nicer area than "main lobby" would lead one to imagine).

The Hispanic Heritage keynote speaker was John Quinones from Primetime Live and 20/20. One of my co-workers pointed out that the lady who introduced the keynote speaker signs our money.

The Dispute Prevention Week seminar focused on domestic violence prevention. The keynote speaker was Yvette Cade, who survived her ex-husband setting her on fire at her workplace. Other speakers included a detective from the Alexandria Police Department, the executive director of the National Center for Children and Families, and the public policy manager of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, who all gave good advice for helping victims of domestic violence.