so what's a good antonym for "quotidian"?

[jrtom]

Corwin has his own kid-friendly (right size, held on by a strap) sunglasses now, so he doesn't have to use the ones they gave me for wearing home after one of my pre-surgery eye appointments any more. I am in a position to attest that walking across the UCI campus with a sunglasses-wearing 3-month-old in a sling attracts approximately as much attention as doing so while wearing full period Renaissance nobility garb, and many more audible cries of "He's so cuuuuuuute!". (Ah, well.)

The purpose of this particular cross-campus jaunt was to attend the first afternoon session of Human Rights, Technology and the Humanities. I'd read David Brin's The Transparent Society, and while I think there's a few holes in it, I was generally impressed by that, his science fiction, and his blog, so I was curious to see what he'd have to say here.

The short version is that although the discussion was interesting, nothing particularly novel (aside from some references to Kiln People, heh) was said. He comes off a lot like he does in his nonfiction essays and his blog, which actually surprised me in part: I was expecting him to be articulate, informed, and opinionated...but not quite so vehement--or perhaps I should say passionate--in person. (Not excessively or impolitely so, just...surprisingly so.) Unfortunately, like most panel discussions do, this one broke up right about where things were starting to get really interesting, but it was still worth attending.

Corwin, unfortunately, had been having a difficult day, gastrointestinally speaking, and while he's usually OK with being taken out in public (he even sat through most of H2G2 in a rather loud theater--I believe that this is unusual for 3-month-old kids, folks, don't try this with your own), I had to duck into the hall a few times during the panel. However, by the time the talk was over, he was, if not firing cute on all thrusters, at least sufficiently charming that practically the first words out of David Brin's mouth, once I got a chance to talk to him, were a request to let him hold Corwin, to which I acceded. (No camera on me, I'm afraid.) We then chatted for a few minutes about TTS. It was cool.

The moral of the story? Infants make great icebreakers. (Make sure they wear their helmet, though.)



So a couple of weeks ago I trolling Google to make a list of projects that use JUNG (this open-source Java API that I work on--go check it out, we have pretty pictures). In the process, I found a few projects that appeared to be using JUNG but not giving us credit, so I emailed each of them and politely asked them to do something about this. One of these was something called M2K (Music-to-Knowledge), an API for doing data mining and information retrieval on audio and music data. The principal investigator (Stephen) emailed me back, said that M2K actually wasn't using JUNG yet but that now that he'd checked it out he thought it was really cool and was looking forward to doing so, and asked me to attend his workshop at the beginning of June.

Now, normally in this situation I'd talk to my advisor, Padhraic, and Padhraic would cough up the money for the airfare and so forth. (Padhraic is generally pretty well set for grant money.) However, the thing about JUNG is that, despite the fact that I'm one of its originators, architects and lead developers, it's not actually really what I'm supposed to be working on; it's used heavily in my research, and he definitely recognizes its worth, but Padhraic would be much happier if I left continuing development of JUNG to other people. Under the circumstances, I didn't figure that he'd be wild about paying for me to go to a workshop on someone else's work that doesn't even use JUNG yet.

So on the toujours audace! theory (as well as the "what have I got to lose, really?" theory), I laid the situation out to Stephen, and he offered to pay for my travel and all expenses. Padhraic even agrees that it's a great opportunity and is not giving me shit about leaving right before our hypothetical conference paper is due.

Now, this isn't nearly as cool as fdmts's current perigrination; I'll know I've hit the big time when someone sends me on a whirlwind tour of Asia to talk about JUNG or whatever. But still, pretty cool.

The moral of the story? Be diligent in following up open-source license violations, and people will offer you money and travel.

Comments

Cool.

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Hey, somebody's using your stuff. That's pretty cool.

Re: Cool.

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

Actually, in that regard, it's even cooler than that: a few weeks ago someone posted a job ad on Craigslist for which one of the "desired qualities" was experience with using JUNG. (I already knew that lots of people were using JUNG, but the job ad implies both that it's made its way into the mainstream farther than I had known, and that utility with this particular API is a saleable skill. Can world domination be far behind?)

just an fyi

[tildequinn.livejournal.com]

the three month old baby in the movie theater *does* work in general. if i have any regret about ada's younger days, it's not going to more movies.

Re: just an fyi

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

So what, um, "anger management" strategies would you suggest? He was fine until about an hour or so in, and then he started crying and wouldn't stop for about ten minutes, and again later for about five minutes. Feeding him helped somewhat, but hunger was clearly not the only thing bothering him. Ear plugs might be useful, but I'd be worried about irritating (so to speak) his ears. _I'm_ all ears, though. :)

[darcydodo]

Awesome, wish I could've been held as a 3 month old by a famous sci-fi author. :)