Presentation Rot, Statistics, and Other Impressions

Several disconnected impressions. Life is sometimes hectic, sometimes slow.

A company's stab at being funny. Rather desperate.



Here, people are fleeing from what was probably the worst presentation in conscious memory of mankind. It was like bad conference presentations, only release didn't come after 15min. Embarassment all around. We suspected everything from a psychological experiment to a bad case of brain rot.


"You are a statistic" (sure, this is Baltimore) and, strangely enough, "Starbucks - hijo de puta".


"Sue 'em".

Brave New World!

Brave new world, parents on my Mom's new Eee! Only my sister - who is studying something with "...informatics" in the name - is slow to pick up on new technologies... And yes, I haven't shaved.



And, totally unrelated: Such an eBay starting page can probably only happen in the U.S., the land of free choice and no gun control to speak of.
I hope I don't infringe on some wacko copyrights with this picture.

Mom's Visit

As QiLin is busy filevaulting my personal account data (and probably will be doing so all night), these blogs are straight from the phone. All hail Nokia! However, the take much longer to write...

My mom had been here for a two weeks visit. This time was naturally filled with a lot of tours and sights, but unfortunately not quite as many as I had wished for - nor my mom. Somehow, the work here had suddenly become frantic at around the time she arrived here; Taylor had found we were running short on kidneys and MATLAB licenses, both of which conditions were unacceptable.

Still, we've had a lot of time together - more than in many many years; probably even never before. In fact, although it was exhausting at times to juggle all those incompatible requests, it was very nice. I got very much used to her being around... so much that now I feel that nobody cares any more whether I come home in the evening or not, go shopping or not, am anywhere - or not. The room where she had stayed has undergone a strange transformation - it is not the room next door any more, but my mom's room. Only now it is empty, which is very sad.

Nevertheless, the time we were able to spend together (in contrast to her walking around in Baltimore, which she now knows better than I do) was very well invested. More photos e.g. of Washington DC will follow, of course. Baltimore itself is quite worthwhile, too, which I haven't known before.




The Baltimore Cathedral; from what I understand the first Catholic church in the New World, designed and built by Henry(?) Latrobe, known for having a hall at the Johns Hopkins Homewood Campus named in his honour and famous as the architect of the Washington DC Capitol building.

K&R's K

The other day, when I went to the restrooms, I noticed a big bunch of people crowding in the LCSR's main lecture/seminar hall. This happens frequently, the seminars are usually held by interesting people about interesting things, coffee and cookies are usually free, so naturally they draw a crowd. This time, something was different. There were people lining up the rear wall; it is rare to have the whole place filled. On my way back, I stumbled across a guy from the lab who asked me, "did you hear of the seminar now?"

It seems the news weren't spreading the official way, instead being handed down personally... It turned out that this lecture was held by Brian Kernighan himself (the 'K' in Kernighan&Ritchie, the inventors of C at Bell Labs). He talked for nearly an hour about 'The Changing Face of Programming', with his experience of probably forty years and his stature as one of the fixtures of our trade behind his words.

This is the kind of things happening to you here.

Mom Arrival

A few days ago, my mom arrived in Baltimore to visit me.

After only a few days, she's already come a long way in discovering all the cultural differences (yo, respect!) which, altogether, ultimately lead to culture shock. Probably she'll return home before any such shock might set in, and she's a tourist anyway, but I am very interested in seeing how far this process will go with her :-).