Today Honda announced a pair of bionic legs to assist in walking for rehabilitation and the elderly. It’s a pretty neat extension of their work with ASIMO (and makes me think Kamen should be in Japan), but what really got me is one of the last quotes in the article:
“Then we will look at welfare as another target.”
I realized I’ve been living in the US a little too long when I read it as “Then we will look into warfare as another target.”
Apparently activists are not only terrorists, but it’s all due to poor software.
“Both Hutchins and Sheridan said the activists’ names were entered into the state police database as terrorists partly because the software offered limited options for classifying entries.”
Today I received my “Economic Stimulus Rebate Check” in the mail.
Being Canadian, I enjoy how the check was dated July 4, and I’m going to be spending it in the UK. It is all rather ironic and symbolic. I need the check to offset the drop in the US dollar that is making our trip drastically more expensive that originally planned.
A lemeur in a white suit with a nasal infection opened for Ben Folds, well, right now. According to students surroundig me currently, he is “less than entertaining.” I considered altering his wikipedia page as part of my Internet civic duty to include this fact.
Honestly, how difficult is it to determine how many delegates each candidate has?
ABC:
CBS:
CNN:
NBC:
NYTimes:
Almost forgot FOX:
Yesterday I finally got around to watching Oldboy, a very disturbing Korean movie based off of a Japanese mange on the theme of revenge. This is revenge on a level of complexity, scale, and style that’s hard to image and not fully appreciated until the very end. I’ll keep this post short since I think my friend Brian put it best:
“It makes me not want to piss off Koreans.”
I’ll second that.
While I haven’t finished converting my RBAC implementation for MySQL to conform to the SQL standard (I wish we had thought of this originally), there has been some interest so I placed my code online. You can find my RBAC in MySQL page here.
Last weekend I took six other IBM interns on a small tour of New York State. We rented an environmentally unfriendly Ford Freestyle, loaded it up with our bags, and hit the highway at around 6:00 PM on Thursday. As many jokingly said, I had planned a week worth of activities and tried to show my friends everything I liked about New York State in one, short weekend. I expected that most wouldn’t be able to make it west after their internship, so I had to pack the days as full as possible. We were able to stay at my parent’s house, which kept the costs down, but kept time delays up.
So what did our entourage look like? In no particular order we have Mark (Netherlands), Maik and Stefan (Germany), Marta and Marina (Spain), Ashwin (India / Rochester), and me (Canada).
The plan was to drive to Buffalo and stay with my parents and use that a home base. The drive most mostly uneventful. Mark drove for the first two hours until we were in Pennsylvania and ate at a small truck stop diner. For some reason our Hertz-provided GPS decided that going through Pennsylvania was the fastest route. From there I drove the remaining five-plus hours to Buffalo. I was always going to drive the remaining two-hours-plus since I know it best, but extremely heavy rains put me behind the wheel early. We didn’t arrive in Buffalo until around 1:30 AM. Perfect time to introduce the international students (except Ashwin for obvious reasons) to Wegmans. What’s not to love about a 1:30 AM trip to Weggies, especially when you’ve spent the entire summer trying to stomach A&P?
Friday morning we attempted to take a wine tour of the Finger Lakes region. We only made it to two, and neither were very good. I can’t be too surprised though. When I started planning the trip, I made certain assumptions about when we would leave the house. Regardless of when we went to sleep (usually 2:30 AM), I woke around 7:30 to 8:00. When you have seven people trying to wake up, shower, get ready, and get moving in the morning (and people don’t use the concurrency inherent in having more than one bathroom) it takes a long time before you are able to leave the house. On the morning of our wine tour, we ate breakfast at Perkins, which was admittedly a bad idea for that day. We didn’t make it to the first winery until around 3:00, and most or closed by 5:30 or 6:00. If I had known we would only have time to two, I would have driven straight to Hosmer and Americana, two of the better wineries on Cayuga (from what I remember from the last time I did a wine tour four years ago). I can’t complain too much about this part of the trip, after our two wineries, I made a detour to Wagner winery and brewery to get a growler of their Oatmeal Stout, which looks like Texas tea and tastes like heaven.
After Wagner, we made it to Taughannock Falls, the tallest waterfall west of the Rockies, and around thirty feet taller than Niagara. It’s a nice park and a decent hike, but it’s not as impressive as the other waterfalls we saw on our trip. That didn’t matter much though; the hike was fun, and due to a slight misreading of the map was about twice as long as expected. Stinky and sweaty, we drove back to Buffalo to pick Stefan up at Buffalo Airport (he couldn’t take Friday off from work), grabbed a quick dinner and finally made it back to Wegmans.
Saturday was Niagara Falls, and a Wegmans supplied European breakfast acquired the previous night. (In total, I think we made three stops at Wegmans.) Apparently my country doesn’t like India, so Ashwin stayed in the US and took advantage of his unlimited Night and Weekends to catch-up with friends while I took the EUs into friendly, cleaner, and more photogenic territory, Niagara Falls Ontario. We didn’t go to the casino (I pointed it out), we didn’t go down Clinton Hills (I pointed it out and mentioned it’s mini-Vegas attractions), and we didn’t see any Canadian Ballet (a term none were–thankfully–familiar with). What we did do, is stop every five feet to take another photo. It’s easy to forget that one of the Seven Natural Wonders is in your backyard. We went on the Maid of the Mist (by the way, I’m well aware I look like a drowned rat) before having dinner at the Anchor Bar.
The Anchor Bar was, in a word, delicious, and enjoyed by all, including the salad-eating Spaniards. The wings were surprisingly mild though. Ashwin and I wanted hot, but were afraid for the others, so we got an assortment. Mild: 10, Medium: 25, Hot:25, and when the hot weren’t enough, we got a plate of Suicide. The Anchor Bar, in our opinion, has started cheating. The Suicide wings used a completely different sauce than the regular wings.
Sunday was our day to drive back, and try to do the things we missed on Friday. This didn’t work. We made it to Syracuse a little after 2:00 and went to Dinosaur BBQ for dinner. This was something Ashwin and I were craving, but we really should have gone to Alto Cinco since New York City (Upper West Side) has a Dinosaur. Now I’m craving a Super Vegan, but we still enjoyed the ribs.
Next I gave a tour of Syracuse University and met up with Adam who was just getting out of work. Apparently, I gave him the tour too, since in the four years he was on campus, he didn’t seem to learn anything about the university’s history.
–This photo needs a little Kill Bill Rza music.
It was actually good to see the campus. A lot has changed since I was there last. They’ve started building Newhouse III which is pretty cool looking, the much expanded CTS building, and the new Management building. I made everyone do the stomp at the dome which made me feel like a silly tour guide.
After Syracuse, Adam led us down to Ithaca Falls, and we made our way to Cornell University. I believe they were impressed with the gorges campus and PhD student friendly suspension bridges. Perhaps one of them will apply to be future a faculty member.
Finally, we made the drive back to Westchester county. Maik drove most of this last leg of the trip. Sitting shotgun was Stefan, and as the night got late they both slipped into speaking German and Maik found himself on the Autobahn, much to the displeasure of the girls sitting in the back where the acceleration (forward, backward, and lateral) is felt most.
In the end we drove a total of 1242 miles, and finally arrived at around 1:30 AM (or at least that’s when I got back to my apartment). The trip was a lot of fun, but extremely tiring, which is probably why it has taken me a week to write this.
Today Mark, Marta, Joshua, and I tackled Bear Mountain. We set off at around 11:00 this morning (just barely morning), made the short 10-12 mile drive, made a few wrong turns, and finally ended at Bear Mountain Inn. It was an interesting site. Hundreds of families were there playing soccer in various fields, grilling food, playing basketball, and basically, not hiking. For the number of people who were at the base of Bear Mountain, we saw very few people hiking on the various paths.
The hike was pretty typical New York hiking woods. It wasn’t too hot, there were several dry river beds, lots the lush woods, and large rock formations. I’ll let the pictures tell the story, since it’s simply easier, though I should mention a few things. It took us around two hours to reach the top. To be honest, there were several paths, and we started on one that didn’t go to the top without realizing it. The hike was quite an exercise too. It wasn’t too difficult, but it certainly make you break a sweat. The hike was easily worth it when we reached the top and ate a little lunch, which was an interesting hodge-podge of bread, boiled eggs, chips, lettuce, and whatever we brought with us. The view from the top was also amazing, and is not captured (at all) by the photographs. They don’t provide any sense of scale, height, or distance, and without a wide angle lens, don’t convey the grander in the least.
What was especially upsetting about the trip was reaching the top though. After the long hike we were rewarded, not by the scenic views, but by kids, cars, and motorcycles. A simple reminder that this is America, and the reason we saw so few people on the hiking trails, is that most were too lazy to attempt the hike and opted to drive instead. You can see the top (denoted by a large tower) around the center of satellite image from Google. For those who were on the trip, an archive of all of the photos is available here. Since each image is 3.2 MB, I’ve scaled them down. If you would like the full resolution copies (3072 x 2304), just let me know.
On Sunday around ten IBM interns and I made a trip into New York. We split into two main groups at the beginning: those who wanted to go to museums, and those who wanted to wander the city. I joined the wandering groups and we walked from Grand Central to Times Square , down Broadway to the Empire State Building. The day was cloudy, so we we decided to pass on going up; perhaps another weekend.
After that we wondered off to Greenwich Village and Soho, Little Italy (where we ate lunch), and China Town, before heading off to Ground Zero. I had never seen the World Trade Center pre 9/11, so it’s really hard to imagine exactly how much the area has changed. Based on the photos and using the surrounding buildings for comparison, it’s almost sickening.
Moving on, went went south to Battery Park, back north through the financial district and Wall Street, and past several court houses (all the time making the Law and Order “Dun-Dun!”). Finally, we took Park Ave. back to Grand Central and the train back to Ossining, about 10 miles north of my apartment.
If you don’t see the humor in this picture, you don’t know what I do.
Finally, it ended at Landmark Diner, which was actually really good. Three of the four of us who made it all the way to the end had enormous three-egg omelets and home fries and cleaned the pates.
So that was my first real trip into the city, as terse as possible, since I’m really not in a writing mood at the moment. My main reason for writing this is to post my pictures for the other member of the entourage. So, here is a tarball.
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