Salt Lake City

So before I make a post about the actual conference, I wanted to post about Salt Lake City and the fun times I had outside of the actual conference.

The conference was held in the building on the left which is the Grand America hotel that was created for the Olympics. The building on the right is the Little America hotel where I stayed along with all the other student volunteers.

The two hotels were across the street from each other. The UTA train ran down the center of the street and also there were flags provided to use to cross the street and make yourself more visible.

There was snow on the mountains around the city. The city itself is at a high elevation of 1288 m, so none of the mountains around it have any trees on them. It's quite different from the Vancouver area.

On the third night there (Monday) some other students and I checked out a place called the Bayou. It was a cajun restaurant (think New Orleans) with a huge beer menu (Beervana they called it) with 255 beers from around the world. The only strict drinking law left in Utah is that you can't have a double shot. I tried some local beer and some Czech beer and Andrew bought me a beer for my birthday. We all split a slice of alligator cheesecake which was an appetizer, not a dessert. It was not that great - it just tasted and felt like cornbread.

On Tuesday at lunch time I went to check out the University of Utah disc golf course. Unfortunately I missed the train and unlike the skytrain they only run every 15 minutes. I decided to walk and it took me about 50 minutes.

The disc golf course had a great view of the city and I could see the conference hotel waaaay off in the distance. The baskets on the course looked almost brand new but I was the only one on the course the whole time I was there.

I really sucked at the course but it was still lots of fun. I played through it quickly, jogging up to my disc so I could head back to the conference at the end of the lunch break.

The park it was in was right next to the last train station so it was easy to just catch the train after I finished playing.

After I got off the train I took some photos of the city-county building which was a block from our hotel. There were many buildings in the city that looked like castles (most of them churches or temples).

That night I went back to the Bayou, but this time with some professors and a guy from Boeing who we work with. When we left the restaurant it was snowing! Here's the view from the balcony of my hotel room. The snow melted over the next couple days.

On Wednesday morning I got up a little earlier than I needed so I went and took some photos in the courtyard of the Grand America. The hotel was very fancy!

That night a huge group of mostly students went out to a bar called the Beerhive. It had a decently big selection of beers and there were pool tables and a foosball table. We played many games of foosball and I improved a little bit on defense, but ultimately let in a very weak goal and then decided to retire.

When the bar was about to close up, the only three students left, Alex, Andrew and I decided to walk a few blocks north to see the big temple since I hadn't seen it yet. This is the train going by as we walked.

Here's the temple all lit up and looking like a disney castle. It's pretty intense.

When we got back to the hotels Andrew decided to be very safe in walking out onto the street. I'm not sure why, since we didn't even need to cross!

The next morning I took a photo from the balcony of the 2nd floor of the Grand America.

Thursday evening was the student volunteer party. It was on the 9th floor of the Grand America and this is facing north from its balcony towards the rest of downtown SLC.

The party was a really good time as they gave us lots of pizza, wings and beer, and of course we had the good company. There was much mingling and meeting new people.

There was also a little bit of dancing but it never really picked up. It was always just a few people dancing with everyone else watching.

Before the party I went in the pool of the Little America which was half indoors and half outdoors. You could swim under a divider to get to the other half. It was quite chilly outside but the pool was on the 2nd floor and I watched the sun set. I also went in again the next morning really early. The pool hours were 4am-11pm.

After the conference ended in the early afternoon we got a taxi to the airport and then a flight back to Seattle. Overall the week was a lot of fun. Next I'll have to post about the work and school portion of the week, which was the reason I was there!

I am 27!

I had my birthday a couple days ago and now I'm older. Also, I had some new experiences last weekend.

First, on Saturday I went to a football game with some other grad students, but I forgot my camera. It was a BC Lions game at the temporary Empire field. I think I may have seen one of their games before but it was a long time ago. The other grad students were mostly international students who had never watched a football game before.

The game was rather boring. They were playing Edmonton, one of the only teams in the league that had a worse record then them. Edmonton managed to pull ahead and it got exciting at the end when BC managed to tie it up. Then it went into overtime and BC lost. There were some weird calls by the refs that we couldn't figure out which sucked.

During the game there were a lot of little orange footballs thrown into the crowd. Some people took these and threw them at the cheerleaders and lots of people threw them on the field at the end of the game. Also, there were 2 and a half streakers that ran onto the field. One guy made it all the way from one end to the other dodging many security guys and an Eskimos player before he was tackled in the far corner. Another guy knocked down a couple of the security guards before he was grabbed. They announced a few times that any fans running onto the field would be arrested whether they're wearing clothes or not.

So another thing I had on Saturday night which was actually scheduled to start at the exact same time was a LAN party. My friend Nate hosted one and I showed up really late - after the football game and transit back to Surrey. I've never been to a LAN party and I suck at computer games but it was still lots of fun. We played Team Fortress 2 and Unreal Tournament. I also played a little Portal at the end of the night. It was a really late night!

On Monday I went over to my grandmas to celebrate my birthday with a few relatives. My brother, grandma, cousins and aunt were there and we had some ice cream cake with a smilie face on it.

I went there on Monday because Tuesday (my actual birthday) was quite busy. I usually have a few meetings at school plus ultimate in the evening. My research group is busy preparing for a conference that I leave for on Friday. We needed to spend our group meeting looking at our poster and our slides to get them in good shape, but everyone was taking forever showing up and getting ready to go. Finally everyone was there and then they brought in a cake and sang Happy Birthday! By that point I kind of guessed that was going on, but that didn't make it any less awesome. It was a lemon meringue cake and very good. We ate it while having our meeting.

That night I went to ultimate and got the usual hardcore workout. My friend Adam showed up who hasn't come in forever. I had tried to get people to come out to ultimate and/or the pub afterwards to celebrate. So, after ultimate Gordon drove us to the pub where a bunch of my friends were waiting and we hung out for a bit. They bought me a King Kong shot, a dirty martini, and a flaming lamborghini. The shots were quite good when I expected them to be strong, they instead tasted great. It was a fun time and a good casual celebration of my birthday.

I've been busy pretty continuously since then, getting ready for the conference and my normal routine. I went to indoor soccer again this week and some people showed up. We played a couple games of 3 on 3 and hopefully more people show up in the future. Also, I went to the documentary night some grad students organized and we watched Man on Wire about the guy who walked on a wire between the world trade center towers. It was very dramatically done and entertaining. I also went to the swim night and this time we had it at the Newton Wave pool. I swear it used to have a big rectangular pool as part of it but now it's gone...replaced with gyms. Also, the bit of the waterslide that goes outside, that you see from the bus station, is now a lie. It's not part of a functional waterslide anymore, although there are still 2 waterslides.

Yeah, so life has been crazy with me fitting in time for these things around my thesis writing time and my prep time for this conference. Friday we drive across the border and stay in Seattle and then Saturday morning we fly to Salt Lake City where the conference is. I am a student volunteer at the conference putting in 22 hours of my time. Also, I will be making a short 3-minute presentation on Sunday morning, and then demoing our software many times throughout the week. I'm excited.

Thanksgiving Weekend 2010

This Thanksgiving weekend was very memorable for many reasons, one of them not good. 10/10/10 was definitely an unlucky day for us, although it could have been much worse.

So for the weekend I went to Saltspring Island to my parents' new house where my two little sisters also live. My brother Farley and his girlfriend Jenny, and my sister Rebecca and her common-law man Eric, and my other brother Ben also went there for the weekend. We had 10 people in a 2-bedroom + cottage/shed place. Ben's girlfriend Kyla and Jenny and Farley's friend Alex also visited during the weekend.

So those of us coming from the mainland were picked up by my dad and sisters on Saturday afternoon and we decided to go play a round of disc golf. I haven't played that much recently so I now suck at it but it's lots of fun and Saltspring has a nice course. Unfortunately it started to rain harder and so we got quite wet. We also had agreed to meet my sister at a certain time because she wanted to wander around town instead of play. So we ran out of time and I only did 15 holes. I found someone's lost disc with no name on it though so that's good because I recently lost a couple discs.

So later that day we celebrated my birthday because I won't see most of my family again until a while after my birthday. Mom made one of my favourite meals, firecracker casserole, and then we had some birthday cake and ice cream.

Some of us also played Robo Rally which is one of my favourite board games. I brought a few boards games with me. We played a lot of board games over the weekend and I won many times.

So the next day the sun was shining and the rain had stopped even though that wasn't in the forecast. We thought this was awesome and a great day to go for a big hike.

It was a beautiful day but the mountain did not like us. The mountain is Mt Maxwell and the lookout gives more than a 180 degree view of south Saltspring Island and Vancouver Island.

We wanted to hike down from here to the valley below and then have my mom come pick us up.


Of course we couldn't hike straight down because it was a cliff. There's my siblings and my mom in the top left corner of the photo. So what we had to do was hike along the cliffs and bluffs until it gradually got easy enough to go down and cut back around to below the cliffs.

Ok, so then my sister saw a lizard.

Anyway, Ben and my mom were going to meet us later at the bottom so we said goodbye to them and started out.

It was a nice hike for a little while. We jumped across some little cracks and at some places we had to use our hands to get up or down over some rocks. Unfortunately the rocks were a little bit wet from the day before.

We came across some parts of rock like this where people had put in clips for rock climbing up them.

It was near one of these that the unfortunate accident happened. Here I was with my sister Natalie and she was taking a photo of the view. Rebecca and Eric were behind us and my dad had gone on a little ahead below us. So then I went down the next little bit and I was out of site of everyone else. At that point Natalie was going to take a photo of my dad who was below her. Then I hear Natalie say "Oh..dad, are you alright? Are you OK?" and my dad started cursing.

So then I came around the corner and my dad was lying on the slope with his head downhill from his legs and he's holding his leg and his binoculars are all twisted and dangling. His leg had a few gashes in it with a nasty one on his knee and one below his knee that went all the way into the bone! There was blood done his leg but it didn't seem to be bleeding much. I was so stunned and I didn't immediately know what to do.

My dad must have been in a lot of pain but one of the first things he said was to get his binoculars off of him so I helped get the strap from those off of his head and his arm while he turned himself right side up.

Then my sister arrived and took charge. She had recently taken a first aid course for her work. She also had a small first aid kit. We poured some water on the wounds and then I took off my shirt and they tied it tight around his leg to put pressure on the wound. He could still feel his toes and he didn't break any bones.

My dad kept apologizing for ruining the hike, and even at one point said we could continue without him, which was ridiculous. So then we started to hike back up to the parking lot because we were much closer to it than the bottom. We helped my dad climb up and down the steep parts while he hobbled along but the path was quite narrow at some places.

My dad suggested a couple of us go ahead and get a ride from someone at the parking lot. Natalie and I hurried ahead and I ran into the parking lot just as my mom was pulling out. It turns out the two of them had sat at the top for a while and then slowly made their way back to the van following a little bird. It was lucky for us because they were able to give us all a ride back down the mountain and over to the hospital.

It is really good my family now lives on an island that has a hospital. My dad used the first aid kit from the car to help his leg a little as we made our way to the hospital. At the hospital we waited for a few hours while the doctor cleaned up the wounds, tried to find the chip of bone that was missing, and did some stitching and then put 38 staples into my dad's leg. I am extremely grateful nothing worse happened to my dad or any of us and that we got to the hospital quickly and they were able to see him right away.

So after my dad was all bandaged up we helped him into the van and then we drove home and my mom tried to keep it slow driving along the twisty roads. At home my dad was able to hobble up the porch stairs by himself. For the rest of my visit my dad slept a lot or watched TV in his recliner but unfortunately my parents bedroom is upstairs but not behind a closed door and there were a lot of us squished into the living room.

So I setup some of the patio furniture on the bluff down the hill from the house to try and give him a little peace and quiet. We played a game of Settlers of Catan and my mom brought us some popcorn and beer. It was not as epic a location as playing Risk on the shores of Galiano and my 13 year old sister won (she had no beer) but it was still lots of fun. It also got our minds off the earlier part of the day. Ben didn't play but took some photos of the game with my camera.

He also took some photos of Triscuit.

Later that night we had a big Thanksgiving dinner with turkey, stuffing and two pies for dessert but my dad slept through it. He had some later but it's too bad that he was not able to eat with us. We were all thankful for much the same thing - that nothing worse happened that day.

Monday we mostly stuck around the house because we didn't want to go off on any big adventures without my dad and wanted to make sure he was recovering ok. But, again we didn't want to spend all day being noisy in his space.

So there were some antics with this bird that
Natalie loves so much but who actually belongs to Emily.

The bird went into the basket.

They also put the bird on the clothesline.

So the bird went for a bit of a zipline.

I also spent a little time up on the living roof...
but the door closed on us and Farley wouldn't let us back in for a bit.

Then in the afternoon we decided to give my dad full peace and quiet for a little bit and so we walked over to a farm where they make and sell lots of fancy cheeses. They also sell olives from around the world. I bought some cheese that has hot chilis in the bottom. It was really good!

I had to take another photo of Trisuit because she has so much fun peering in the many windows now from the porch that wraps around most of their house.

Oh yes, and my little sister who is much heavier than she used to be insisted on getting a shoulder ride still. She reminds me of Gollum in this photo. Yikes! I also gave my mom a piggy back ride during the walk back from the farm. She's a lot lighter than Natalie.

Overall the one word to describe the weekend is "memorable". Aside from the injury my dad suffered it was a fun weekend with the family. My dad is currently having a tough time recovering but he's a tough guy and I expect he'll get through it in less time than the average person.

The Near Future - October 2010

First the recent past again, then the future. This week has been pretty busy.

I wrote an outline for my thesis and gave it to my supervisors, although I have already written a bunch of pages in some of the parts. It's crazy that the biggest task left is just the writing of my thesis. I'm also working on some analysis of my study data. It's not good. I don't think the numbers prove anything. I learned a ton watching people use the tool and hopefully that's good enough for a master's thesis.

I also gave a presentation to some first year students about our lab and what we do as grad students in it. It went well, I made some jokes and they laughed and hopefully some of them found the subject interesting.

I also went to one of the Vancouver International Film Festival movies with my brother who bought 20 movie tickets. I used one of his tickets but my birthday is just around the corner and he did stay at my house for a week. We saw End of Animal, a Korean film directed and written by someone just out of film school. It was one of the first times it aired outside of Korea and the director/writer and producer were in the audience. The director introduced the film by warning that it might get boring at times. It really wasn't...it was very intense and quite dark. Afterward, the audience asked him questions through a translator. It was pretty sweet to hear directly from the director.

On Tuesday I went to drop-in ultimate and got a good workout. Tonight I went to the pool for some swimming but the damn deep end was closed again for some water polo practice.

So I have a really busy month ahead of me.

I am continuing work on my thesis and analysis of study results. But I'm also doing an internship with a sub-company of Boeing called AeroInfo so I need to get a lot of work done on our software for this.

On top of that I need to prepare for the VisWeek conferences in Salt Lake City from October 23rd - 29th. We have 3 presentations there of varying lengths and a lot of demoing. I will most likely be doing the medium length presentation of 3 minutes. It's at the start of the workshop we're going to along with all the other people who submitted entries to the challenge. The conference should be awesome. I went last year and this year I am again a student volunteer. I should meet a lot of new people and recognize many from last year. I've managed to schedule all my volunteer hours so I have no hours on the VAST presentation days. The conference location in Utah is pretty much the opposite of Atlantic City where it was last year. Maybe I will get more sleep this time around.

In the short term future of next weekend I'm going to the BC lions football game with some other grad students. Also, there is a LAN party at a friends house. I don't think I've technically ever been to one of those. I will most likely be slaughtered in a variety of games.

In the shorter term future I am traveling on Friday to my parent's new place on Saltspring Island for Thanksgiving weekend and also an early celebration of my birthday. Last time I visited the place was to help them move in so I haven't seen it with them all settled in yet. It will be quite the packed house but it'll be lots of fun. We should go play some disc golf and hopefully the weather will be nice so we can go swimming. Maybe I'm a little delusional about wanting to go swimming in a lake in October. I don't think I've done that for my birthday before.

In the very short term future, the students of my research group are getting together tomorrow to plan some programming and how pieces fit together on version 2 of our software. Development has been moving at a snail's pace but hopefully it will pick up soon. I should get some sleep.

The Recent Past - Sept 2010

September was busy. October will be even busier. I haven't gotten around to posting recently because I'm mostly been doing work instead of play and haven't take photos recently. Here's an update on my recent past.

Back near the start of Sept there was a party at Nate's where everyone dressed up as something starting with the letter A. I came as an addict (to alcohol (beer), drugs (ritalin (tic tacs)) video games, and gambling). We played some A games such as Are you the Traitor? and Apples to Apples and ate a lot of A food. I assume, someday in the future we will have a B party.

I've also gotten together with family and friends a few other times. I went and hung out in Vancouver at Rob and Q's place a couple times and we drank mango juice with mango ice cubes, and slices of mango. My brother Farley stayed with me for a week while he did some writing and he came to the drop in Ultimate. For my sister's birthday we made some sushi at her place and played scrabble. I barely beat her. In the last week I was sick for a few days, but I think I'm better now.

I've been going to Surrey drop-in Ultimate since the Spring and for the fall it's back at Newton Athletic park. Not many of my friends have shown up but it's great exercise and still fun. I've also gone to the aqua recreational goofing hour (ARGH) at the north Surrey rec center pool a couple times. It's simply called that by the grad student who organized it so that there is a time when lots of grad students go there together. Unfortunately this last week the deep end was closed for some people to practice water polo. Normally it's awesome though with a climbing wall coming out of the water, ropes up to monkey bars (called the Skywalker), a rope swing, and low and high diving boards. The pool also has hot and hotter sauna rooms.

At school, I did a couple presentations but spent most of my time running a user study and organizing the results. I managed to get 20 participants over the course of 2 1/2 weeks so I am all done now and onto analyzing the results. I kind of doubt I will prove anything statistically but I have a ton of useful qualitative feedback about what works and what doesn't with my text document visualization technique.

Eric and I presented an update on our work on my research groups software CZSaw to the Boeing guys and people from SFU and UBC at our face-2-face Boeing meeting. We have one every term. This time it was a two day thing but the skytrains were totally gibbled on the Friday so I missed most of the second day. Eric and I also did demos of CZSaw at a mini-conference on visual analytics for public safety at the Justice Institute of BC (JIBC) in New Westminster. I think that went pretty well and maybe some day in the distant future we'll work with the VPD.

This next month is going to be busy as I do a couple more little presentations before the big ones at VisWeek. I'll also be working on my thesis and study data analysis throughout. On top of all that there is Thanksgiving weekend, my birthday and then Halloween. I can't really think of anything planned for November. Perhaps I should just delay all my sleep time until then.