kern f

visiting sf for xmas

My wife's nephew, Guo Ao Sky, is staying with us for his winter break, so we thought to show him San Francisco. We did the usual touristy stops but this time we wanted to do them with a twist. I wanted to visit every location from the wwdc 06 conference ad campaign, where they show famous mac developers at famous SF locations. Instead of holding a mac I wanted to hold Nadia at each location.

Of course we got lazy, got out of bed too late, only had half a day in SF, had Nadia to take care of, so we didn't succeed to get to all locations. We started with the "Painted Ladies" in Alamo Square. Nadia was still taking a nap in the car there so no Nadia at the first location.

sf xmas

catching up

Let's see:

We went to Europe in October for three weeks. We let my parents enjoy Nadia, while we first went to my x number of years (where x is the smallest abundant number that is not a multiple of 3) high school reunion. Was kind of weird to see vaguely familiar faces. Made me feel like an amnesia patient slowly regaining his memory. We then drove around Germany and Switzerland (some pictures of Zuerich here). We were supposed to go to Italy too but I was too lazy driving so we stayed at my parents place in Karlsruhe most of the time, swimming and doing bicycle tours.

I have to mention one little anecdote here from our trip (my wife insists): we went to the movies one night in Karlsruhe. We picked a newish movie theater in a fancy modern building that hosts the center for arts too. The movies were mostly mainstream american and at that time of night the selection wasn't that great. So we chose The Guardian. First surprise: tickets had seat assignments. We go to our seats and it's fancy, comfortable love chairs. They serve beer. Cool. Then the commercials start. It goes for a while. Pretty blend commercials that you see on TV too. Interesting they have cigarette commercials too. Didn't think I would see the Marlboro man again. So commercials still playing. We're hitting 30 min since we sat down. We both show signs of impatience. Then finally movie starts. First scene: a man and a woman have an argument in the kitchen. He insults her verbally and she hits him over the head with a frying pan. Hm. The Guardian ? Well, turns out we're in the wrong movie. The guy at the register misunderstood me. We had to walk out because both of us cannot stomach horror movies. So our night out in Karlsruhe was 45 min of commercials followed by a guy smacked by his wife with a frying pan.

What else ?

For some reason I haven't mentioned my 5 min of geek fame yet. I was the original author of a tool that became open source a while back. Cool stuff. I probably peaked back then. These days I do little puzzle snacks.

Oh, and one more thing: sometimes babies have it hard too .

one year

nadia

This blog has just hired a new editor-in-chief Nadia.
She started Oct. 15th (7.2 lb and 20.5 inches) and has already had a positive impact on the site: the blog has been upgraded to mt 3.2, the photos slideshow page has a new thumbnail viewer on the right side when viewing albums, the papers section has a new entry and the blog links sidebar has been cleaned up and has a couple of new additions. But even Nadia admits in a recent interview with "Blog Editors-In-Chief Magazine" that unless she hires new staff writers not much content will come to this blog in the next couple of months.

So in the meantime here's another edition of "piles of cool stuff". A lot of time has passed since the last edition so many cool things accumulated on the observer desk but unfortunately a lot of things were also lost again because they were not recorded right away. What remains is:

• Eric Hehner's "A Practical Theory of Programming" is now available online for free.
• If you understand Spanish here is another cool book about program calculus and algorithm derivation available online for free.
• If you study or teach linear algebra this paper has a very modern example of how wonderfully applicable math is: linear algebra is behind the Google search engine's power to do relevance ranking. The paper is very well written with clear explanations, descriptive examples and exercises. Simply excellent.