Thankfully it’s once again the weekend, giving me the opportunity to finally sit down, collect my thoughts, and post another journal entry. This past week has just been brutal; an exam in Financial Market Theory on the capital asset line and it’s derivatives had me stressed throughout the week and on top of the normal reading and work, I had a paper for my Vietnamese course and an outline on my survey paper for my thesis due. Nonetheless, the week passed (not without being abruptly paged at 02:30 for an EMT call), I was able to learn more about the ASL 501 Eye Tracker that Hamilton owns, watched the snow melt, and help out in a closed-beta of the next iteration of the My Hamilton portal.
This past Friday we once again hosted a ’smash’ at 4002A. Inviting our professors and fellow computer science majors, we had a chance to sample a brown ale that we brewed a few weeks ago. In addition, it was a wonderful opportunity to just get to know the professors a bit better and gain some advice for the upcoming semester and future. I am definitely looking forward to the next smash and next week’s ‘Bring your Faculty to the Pub’ event. Later in the evening, I joined Greg for a movie night trivia contest held in the barn and once again was amazed by Greg’s uncanny ability to answer almost every movie trivia question. As an added bonus, he even won a Star Wars trilogy set!
Today was spent mostly doing odd-jobs and laundry. I’ve also been following the success of photo Drop quite closely as it’s truly interesting to see what others think about it. I’ll write more on the initial release shortly but I do want to just mention that I’m truly grateful for the two donations that came in over the past 24 hours. I also had the opportunity to take out my camera and take some photos as the day was truly a perfect autumn one. I’ll close my entry with my favorite two photos of the day, only slightly edited in Photoshop to convert between RAW and JPEG and to de-saturate and crop the photos. Clicking on either one will provide you with a larger 1280 x 960 version. Enjoy!
Skyline Drive
It’s taken me over a month to compile the photos I took of Iceland but in all honesty, I was waiting for the replacement PowerMac. Anyway, like I promised, here is a small collection of the photos I took during my three night visit of Iceland in July with my friend Matti. We were quite lucky in that at least two of the days we were there, the sun was out.
Photos from Iceland
With only one full day left in Finland, I decided that I’d embark on a small journey around the area and capture some photos of Finland and what it has to offer. Here are my favorite photos from today, with hopefully more to come tomorrow.
Lotilan Järvi
Evening at Lotilan Järvi
Two weeks have almost passed since I last wrote an entry so I guess now is a pretty good time to write about my journey home to Finland for the summer. I arrived on July 4th in good spirits, ready to get back to the land of saunas, makkara, karjalan pirakkas, and of course, kalja. For those that don’t speak Finnish, these are the highlights of my time here: 80+ C saunas followed by a swim in a fresh water lake, Finnish sausages that put Nathan’s hot dogs to shame, Karelian pies filled with rice, potatoes, or carrots, and of course, Finnish brewed beer.
The first week progressed slowly while my friend Matti was still in the army. Lots of biking, some running, and plenty of time with the parents. After many swimless days, I finally got to Karjalan Maja, a shared summer house for Karelians nearby, for my first sauna and swim (both were perfect). This past week has been busy and won’t let up until Monday, at the earliest. Twice I visited Tampere, the second largest city in Finland and spent the days there walking around, people watching, and doing odd-jobs. Twice I visited Forssa, about an hour away where Matti will begin his studies at the end of August to help search, and later sign for, an apartment. However, the highlight of the trip took place this past Thursday when all four of us piled into a car at 7:00 to drive an hour and a half to Helsinki to take an almost two hour express boat to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia.
Photos of Tallinn, Estonia
Day two of the conference and things are settling down into a nice routine. The confusion felt yesterday with Apple’s switch to Intel seems to have mostly been forgotten and the focus of the event, Tiger and developing for it, are being pushed to the forefront.
I arrived this morning at the Moscone Center just before 9:00 AM this morning in time for a decent breakfast and plenty of coffee. The first session I attended was Cutting-Edge Interface Design for Mac OS X, a session that gives tips and tricks on how to design for the Mac OS, what to look out for, and of course, presented some examples. A lot of things that I just knew were right were explained and I left the session feeling confident on Apple’s emphasis on UI. Of interest, Mike Matas of Delicious Library, as well as Geoff Pealman of REAL Software, spoke to use on their design and re-design (respectively) of their software. Very interesting session all together.
After a snack and more coffee, I headed to my second and last session of the day, this time on Core Image. I followed along well enough in the beginning, finally understanding how filters work on top of images, and was able to fully appreciate their early source code. As soon as they began to talk about image units, I knew they were far beyond my simplistic approach to images and I left to find an ethernet point (as they are the only way to get online at the conference reliably).
Soon after, it was time for Lunch and Mathieu and I met up with one of my roommates from last WWDC, Padraic, and we had lunch. Chicken faijtas and tortilla chips were served, and as is with almost all mass produced, conference food, it was decent but not good. As soon as lunch was done, it was time for me to head out in to San Francisco and start sightseeing.
Alcatraz from a Distance
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