I have a new fish eye lens. It’s a cheap one but I really like the projection (the edges are not too compressed). However I am realizing that what people say about chromatic aberration and fuzziness are very true. It is not a very crisp lens. But from what I have heard it is the only lens which is stereographic projection.

Here are some pictures taken with the lens:

At OrFunner (a burn-a-like event)

At OrFunner (a burn-a-like event). There are fish in the pond.

The Congress St bridge in Austin. There are people standing on it because it’s near sundown and people come out to watch the bats come out.

]]> http://blog.singingwizard.org/2012/09/my-fish-eye/feed/ 0 http://blog.singingwizard.org/2012/08/almost-there/ http://blog.singingwizard.org/2012/08/almost-there/#comments Mon, 06 Aug 2012 01:08:52 +0000 amp http://blog.singingwizard.org/?p=522 My father and I just crossed the Texas border. We are still a 7 hour drive from Austin but this is the last leg in some sense. We will be spending the night at a motel somewhere along I-10. And tomorrow moving into my apartment.

Last night I tripped in the camp ground and skinned my knee and mildly sprained my ankle. I managed to see some of carlsbad caverns today anyway. So that worked ok.

It’s hard to take pictures in a cave, even a lit one. So the carlsbad pictures will be mediocre at best. Though I do have an interesting idea about post processing: could I merge the sharp image of a flash picture with the color and brightness of a natural light image to get a sharper version of the natural light image?

And by the way, we live in the future. I’m posting this while moving at breakneck speed (75 mph) across the west Texas desert on US-285.

Again there  will be more text and pictures about this trip in coming weeks as I work through my picture (around 1500 of them I think) and write up some discussion of the trip. However as a preview. The main take away from this trip is you really need 2-3 days at most of the locations instead of 4-5 hours.

A VLA dish (I’m in front of it, look for the ant sized creature)

Rocks and plants at the Valley of Fires Campground we stayed at last night. (where I hurt me self)

A drapery at Carlsbad Caverns in the “Big Room”.

• Crooked River
• The Bonoville Saltflats
• Kolob Canyons (in Zion National Park)
• The Grand Canyon

We have been camping (except for one night were we cheated and went to motel). The next couple of days will be the VLA (Very Large Array Radio Telescope) and maybe Carlsbad Caverns.

Here are a few pictures. Many more have been taken and will be shared later.

Bonoville Saltflats

Kolob Canyon (Zion National Park)

Grand Canyon (from Imperial Point)

May 28

Once I parted ways with Martin, Kyoko, and Sarah I got on the Shinkansen to Nagoya for the next conference.

That night I stay at a Ryokan, a “traditional” Japanese hostel of sorts. It was of course a tourist trap, but it was also pretty cheap and sleeping on Tatami was interesting. It was pretty good night. I failed to find any of the restaurants I went looking for for dinner, so I ended up just getting convenience store Sushi, which is pretty good in Japan. Also I got a red bean danish, which was awesome. In fact I really wish I could get themhere. That and the awesome green tea ice cream bars. I should try to source them in the US.

May 29

In the morning I had a “traditional” Japanese breakfast involving eggs cooked at the table over a flame and various fishy things. It was good. Then I headed to the conference (WFLP). I was the first to present in the morning and I presented my abstract on evaluating functional programs in parallel using random traversals, “The Random Traversal Technique for Parallel Evaluation of Functional Programs”. It went well and someone told me I was wrong which I was pretty happy about. I mean at least it was interesting enough for someone to have an opinion about. WFLP was only a single day.

Afterwards I had dinner with some folks from the conference and I learned one important thing. There is a lower limit on how bad Soba can be and I’ve already had it. That was so bland and awful. To be fair it was also a 4 dollar dinner (if I remember correctly), so I didn’t expect much. It did give me the sense that even if I try I could probably never make Soba that bad, so I might as well try. I have yet to do it but I do have all the ingredients.

I took the subway a good bit in Nagoya. I liked it. It was insanely clean compared to what I am used to (NYC). The maps were pretty good and most things were at least enough in english for me to guess what was going on. I always managed to get where I was going and I never got lost.

I wandered around on my own a bit after I had dinner with the other people from the conference. I had another not very sweet and very tasty donut and I went looking for Manga to get as a presents for people. I discovered that the “Comic stores” are actually sort of rental spaces. You pay by the hour to hang out and use their library of DVDs and Manga. They have free drinks and things too. I think it’s related to other locations were people pay basically to have a little privacy because they don’t have it at home. Also there was an interesting thing: Pay parking for bikes. You would put money in a machine and the system would lock your bike. I assume you would provide a code to unlock it.

I had a normal hotel that night and I went back and slept the night. By the way the hotels don’t have Wifi. However they do have free internet in the form of an ethernet cable hidden somewhere on the desk in your room. It took me a while to find the cable sometimes, but it seemed to be a standard feature.

May 30

In the morning I had breakfast at the hotel and I made my way to the Nagoya station and bought my train tickets to get back to Narita to catch my plane. My JR pass had expired so I just had to buy a ticket. They are pretty expensive. That trip costed over $130. I also picked up a rice ball (with a little shrimp in it, but I don’t know why. The rice was more flavorful than the shrimp) and a red bean bun like thing to have as a snack later. It was good.

I made it to Narita in plenty of time in fact I had a lot of time to kill and I picked up some hand rolls for the plane and looked for more presents for people though I still failed to anything (in the airport I could find Manga but only in English!). The hand rolls were packed in a quite ingenious way: The Nori was in a little plastic envelope so the rice would not dampen it. So before you ate it you would unroll the roll and remove the plastic and then roll it up again.

In the early afternoon I took off on my incredibly long flight back. The flight from Narita to LA was 9 hours but arrived before it took off (because of time zones), but then I had a 3 hour layover in LAX (which is a really crappy airport). So I killed time by taking some pictures.

I finally made it back to Portland in a haze of sleep deprivation and jet lag. I managed to stay up enough to try to help my jet lag, but it didn’t really work. I ended up sleeping through a 2pm class the next day. But it was OK. I was home and that was nice.

So writing this has made me think about all the good food I had in Japan. I really need to learn how to make rice balls. All they would need is good rice and Nori and maybe some shredded carrots or a piece of fried mushroom (oh that sounds so good). I also need to try to make Soba. Anyway. I hope you enjoyed reading these blogs about the trip.

I would love to see the fall out of craigslist trying to control all that. I think it would explode in their face and be very interesting.

May 26

In the evening I got on the Shinkansen and went to Tokyo to meet with Martin, Kyoko, and Sarah. I met them at Shin-Yokohama and we went to Minato Mirai and rode the large farris wheel. It was pretty cool.

Then we had Sushi. Which was interesting. Raw fish is subtle, but tasty. Honestly I learned through the trip that I prefer raw fish to cooked fish. Also the rice is amazing in Sushi. In fact the rice Shuyu, Wasabi combination is my favorite part. I ate Fugu (puffer fish) but I was not actually that impressed. It was good but not impressive deep fried, but the raw Fugu was really tough and kind of boring. However I really enjoyed the Unagi (I think, it might have been a different eel) and what I think was some kind of tuna. Overall it was very good. Sushi is the only meat that I ate in Japan that I kinda wish I ate more often, but I think I will be happy with vegetable Maki because rice and sauce are my favorite part. That being said, if I go back to Japan (which I would like to do) I would probably eat more Sushi.

Then we went back to Martin and Kyoko’s apartment.

May 27

In the morning we were off to do some sight seeing after a very american breakfast of sweet breads. Japanese food is very seldom sweet and there is very little distinction between foods for different meals. For instance I had beef curry for breakfast one time. Also even the food that are usually very sweet in America are not in Japan. For instance I bought a chocolate donut that was only mildly sweet. It was incredibly good. Soooo chocolaty.

The view from the apartment balcony. This is Kinugasa. Note all the hills. Japan is very bumpy, every veguely flat area is filled with people so most areas are urban with big hills surrounding them.

We went to a sort of shopping area whose name I have forgotten and wandered around some. We saw a traditional Japanese wedding party. I picked up some interesting items like miso pickled ginger and ume balls with peanuts in the middle (they were hallow with the peanut loose so they rattled it was funny).

As you know I’m sure in America Japanese characters are used randomly to make things look fancy and exotic. Well the opposite is true in Japan. They use roman characters and english words to make things look exotic and I think forceful because the roman characters looks crude and blocky compared to the Japanese characters.

We went to a Shinto shrine. I love shrines. As much as I am an athiest Shinto shrines are one of the few places where I feel like gods might actually hang out. They are amazing. And many of them are beautiful and peaceful (this one failed on the last point).

Then we walked to a Buddhist temple (and very pretty bamboo grove). Along the way we say the narrowest car I saw while in Japan and that’s saying something. At the temple we had Macha and sat for a bit. It was very beautiful up there.

Then we took the bus back to the shopping district and got some lunch. We got Soba. This is Marty demonstrating how to properly eat Soba. The noddles and the sauce are both cold. It’s a really awesome summer meal. I want to learn to make it properly. I think it would be hit in Austin in the summer. The sauce is Shuyu and some wine of some kind and a broth of some kind (usually fish based). At the end of the meal I was ate my last noddles and then I stared at my dipping sauce and resisted the urge to just drink it. And then to my joy the waiter came out and gave us hot water (from the cooking of Soba so it’s also starchy) that we could mix with our remaining dipping sauce to make a sort of soup to drink. It was awesome.

Then we went to the train to head to a place with a giant Buddha and some other things. The train stations in Japan has even more advertising than the NYC subways. It was pretty impressive.

Both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines have a tradition of performing a cleansing ritual and I quite like it. They have a trough of running water with ladles and you scope some water and pour some over each hand and then pour a bit in your hand and rinse your mouth. This Buddha by the way is huge (over 40ft tall and over 120tons). It was originally in a building but that building was leveled by a tsunami some 600 years ago, but the statue was left intact where the building used to be. It also survived the earthquake of 1923 without damage. Oh and someone made a pair of shoes for him.

Then we went to a shrine with a huge beautiful garden. There were also lots of interesting statues of warriors and demons. I also got a good look at the bay and actually walked in it.

There was also a small network of caves with a bunch of statues. Each one was a particular known person and there were donation boxes for many of them for people to put 10yen in as in the tradition for a Shinto prayer.

And I also walked down to the ocean.

Oh and for some reason I do not know, the train stop in the station there had a frog with a frog on it on it. ;-)

May 28

Marty had things to do in the morning, so Kyoko and Sarah and I went to a shopping district. It was something like the village in Manhatten. Lot’s out outdoor racks with outrageous cloths and odd sunglasses.

Then we went to an area a little more like lower the area around J&R in lower Manhattan. Upscale department stores, electronics, etc. I, of course spent some time running around in the huge electronics store. But I think the highlights were getting to handle an ASUS transformer. And the Sony NEX display. I have a camera in that line so I was really excited to get to try all the lenses that were available for the line. The had a couple of bodies and bunch of lenses and you could just swap them out and play with them. It was awesome. I do kinda wish I had swapped them onto my camera body instead of theirs so I would have the images taken with all the lenses.

In that area there was a very distinctive and spaceship looking building. Also as usual huge amounts of parked bikes.

When we got lunch I noticed something: All the restaurants had wax or plastic models of food in their window. It seems this is the norm and that there is business in making these models.

In the mid-afternoon I met up with Marty one last time and then headed to the Shinkansen to get down to Nagoya to go to my second conference (WFLP).

This is the first of three posts. The three parts are 1, 2, and 3.

May 22-23

I traveled for 24 hours straight from Portland to Los Angeles to Tokyo to Kobe. The flight from LAX to Tokyo alone was around 10 hours. It was exhausting, but went pretty well. As we came into to Narita Airport (Tokyo) I say a bunch of “fields” that made me think of coming into Kansas and seeing all the wheat. But it hit me this was not wheat. They were rice paddies. Eventually I made it to my hotel in Kobe.

May 24

This was my first day at FLOPS and it went well. I say some talks and I talked to people. It was interesting. That night was the conference banquet so they loaded us onto a bus and drove us to Arima Onsen where we had some time to wander around a little resort town of sorts and we had a rather fancy meal. I spent my free time walking around on my own. I saw some Shinto shrines and a Budist temple. It was all very beautiful.

I also saw some very large wasps (or some other hymenoptera). The more orange ones were just over an inch I think. The black ones almost twice that.

Dinner was neat. There was a whole selection of interesting items. Some of them I enjoyed. Others not so much. There was also Sake which I definitely enjoyed.

And then after that I made it back to my hotel.

May 25

This was my second and final day at FLOPS and there were more interesting talks. The conference as a whole had a focus on constraint logic programming and how to implement constraint logic languages efficiently. There was some talk of functional languages, but the bulk of the talks were related to logic languages. It was all quite interesting. Also I was the last presenter of the day and I presented a paper written by myself and my adviser (Sergio Antoy) called “Compiling a Functional Logic Language: The Basic Scheme”. The presentation went well. I feel like I advertised the paper well.

The view from the lunch room at FLOPS. This is Kobe. Most of the panoramas in these posts are cylindrical projection. This one is stereographic projection.

After the day of the conference I went out of the town with some other folks from the conference. We had some interesting eggy pancake things with meat in them (I was eating meat in Japan). It was interesting. Then most of the people went home and I went to a bar with a 6ft Frenchman (as you can imagine he stood out in Japan). It was good times. Japanese Whisky, Sake, and Ume-shu.

May 26

Saturday. The conferences was over so I wandered the city. I saw a lot of things. I will not describe them all, but here are a bunch of pictures.

This clock was damaged in 1995 earthquake and was placed here as a memorial it still shows the time of the earthquake.

A camera with legos!!!

 

A typical alley in Japan.

Another memorial to an earthquake. This is a part of the pier that was stabilized and then left.

Part of the port of Kobe. Mirikan (actually what it is called) pier is on the right.

A boat whose propulsion was based on super conducting magnets and the left-hand rule. Because they could.

A model train festival that happened to be going on in front of the maritime museum on Mirikan pier. This was taken from the deck on the roof of the museum.

A model train. The were just large enough to ride as you can see in the background. The line in the picture above is people waiting to ride the tiny train. I am told my Kyoko that the guys who build these are called “Train Heads”.

After seeing all this stuff I got my self and my luggage to Shin-kobe and got on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to Tokyo to meet Martin.

---

I was planning to do the entire trip tonight but this is taking longer than I expected. So expect 2 more installments. One for my time hanging out with Martin and Kyoko and Sarah and one for the second conference in Nagoya.

[EDIT: Added picture of Kobe from the FLOPS lunch room.]

• I got back from my Japan trip (which I will post about soon I hope with lots of pictures). Japan was interesting and I presented two papers.
• I have submitted what I believe is the final version of my thesis.
• I walked for my graduation and I should officially graduate in a month or so.
• I am planning my move to Austin, TX and I’m visiting Austin next week to find an apartment and all that. I’m also going to talk to a few faculty members and maybe start some research thought.

I am on my way to Kobe, Japan for FLOPS 2012. I will be traveling for roughly 24 hours: 2.5 hours to LAX, 11 hours to Tokyo, and finally 6 hours on a train to Kobe. That doesn’t add up to 24 hours, but there will be time in custom and things and I’m not sure how I estimated it in the first place. Maybe it will be less.

I will spend 3 days in Kobe and then head up to Tokyo to visit Marty for 2 days and then back down to Nagoya for another conference (WFLP) for my last day and then back up to Tokyo for my last day. It’s going to be quite a trip with lots of time on trains, but I’m kind of excited about the trains so that’s OK.

I have a JR pass (similar to the Eurail Pass) for 7 days (it just hit me yesterday that I will be in Japan for 8 days, so I guess that last trip up to Tokyo will be in addition to the JR rail pass cost). The JR pass does  not cover Nozomi (the fastest of the Shinkansen, “bullet trains”) but all of  the Shinkansen are fast which should be fun.

I am presenting a paper at both conferences. At FLOPS it is a paper I co-authored with my adviser (Sergio Antoy). At WFLP it is a Work-in-Progress extended abstract that I wrote my self based on a class project I did last fall. I’m excited about both, but slightly more so about WFLP because I am the sole author and because I’ve been working with the subject of the FLOPS paper way too much because it is also the subject of my thesis.

In other news, I passed my thesis defense earlier this month and I submitted the final version of my thesis yesterday. So I’m finally done with that and I will be graduating in June with my Master of Science in Computer Science. This is pretty exciting to me. ;-)

In my last post I mentioned the camera I was eyeing. I did get it and I’m pretty darn happy with it. You can see some pictures at my google plus album. I’m thinking about starting to use flicker or something like that for better photo sharing.

Anyway, wish me luck in Japan. It should be exciting. Sadly, I’d really rather have sleep right now, not excitement (and not just because it’s 5:30am). I am looking forward to getting back from Japan and getting some real rest. It has been a really intense term.

I have decided (3 weeks ago) to go to Austin for my PhD. I’m scared but it’s the right choice academically. I will definitely lose something, since I have a several very good friends here in Portland. But who knows maybe I will be able to come back someday. I do like it here.

Regardless, it is decided. So in Aug I will be moving across the country again. Not quite as far as last time, but it’s still a ways. I’ve been thinking about logistics: I will either ship things (FedEx) or drive a mini-van or similar. I’ve already started making some contacts in Austin and I will probably visit there in July before I move. There are a couple reasons. One is that it will allow me to get an apartment. The other is that there are some people at UT that would like to talk to me before the semester starts, including a student who is leaving and I will be continuing their work to some extent (probably, nothing is set about what I will do and there are a lot of options).

Also I submitted my Master’s thesis to my committee. I will be defending it on May 10th (if you are in Portland you would be welcome to come to the defense just email me and ask for location and time), so I still have a lot of work to do to prepare for that and once that is done I need to prepare for my presentations in Japan (see below), so I’m still quite busy but I’m relieved to have the thesis out of my hands for at least the moment. I will still have to do another revision after the defense.

In other news, I’m going to Japan for a week in late May. I have a paper in FLOPS (First author is Sergio Antoy) and will probably have an extended abstract in the WFLP Work-in-Progress session. I will also have 3 days to be a tourist. I have a 7-day Japan Rail Pass, so I will be able to run around Japan in most of the trains. It will be pretty exciting, but also scary. I still have logistics to work out.

I’m planning on buy a semi-fancy camera for the trip and because I like to take pictures of things currently I plan on getting the Sony Alpha NEX-5N. I will be buying it very soon, probably today, so that I have it for my trip.

Also my websites got hacked a while back and I didn’t even notice. Grr. I feel like an idiot. I have now fixed everything and upgraded everything. I am 99% sure there are no lingering backdoors. :-/ I’m going to set up some monitoring scripts, so I will get notified immediately if it happens again.