Tue Nov 11 01:10:39 2003
There was a time at which I could have been considered a proper diarist. This is not to say that I was terribly proficient. However, I do appreciate the way in which it provides an awareness of the passage of time and serves to seed the memory later in life. So here we go again.

Thu Nov 13 02:13:13
I spent a large portion of the day in meetings. I wouldn't mind nearly so much if they were meetings with engineers, developers, or researchers. Tragically, these meetings seem to be designed to stimulate growth of the pointy variety of hair follicle.

We finally got some code that worked in network processors today. We are behind on the project, but I think that we will be able to start making serious forward progress now.

Upon returning to my domicile I worked on web stuff. I updated links, created my shopping list, and of course worked on the code for the log you are currently reading. I have been fairly productive, but I feel that I can do better.

04:13:39 Friday November 14 2003
Testing one, two, three. My log generator is largely automated now. Brad and I made some serious progress on our NP project. It is late now, so I will cut this post short.

11:42:14 Saturday November 15 2003
I am on my way to Phoenix for SuperComputing 2003. As usual I have packed everything even remotely metallic in my bags to avoid hassle at the security checkpoints. I feel naked without a watch or a belt, but it is better than actually being naked when they perform the body cavity search. One of these days I will muster the cojones to buy a set of these to take to the airport. Until then wish me luck.

02:03:04 Sunday November 16 2003
God I love flying. It is actually worth the fascist screening policies. Indianapolis was beset with that awful post nasal drip from the sky. But, a few minutes after takeoff we burst above the cloud line and into a beautiful white desert. If you were careful you could watch air currents cutting new empty stream beds in the cloud layer below. Later came the approach to Phoenix in the dark. The city is a luminous oasis in the blackness of the desert. It glows a pale orange from the light of a million sodium bulbs.

Does anyone else worry that perhaps aliens looking at the dark side of the Earth would see a tremendous sodium signature from all of the sodium lights and would thus conclude that our planet is a rather nasty little place unsuitable for life? <silence> I guess it is just me.

19:30:47 Sunday November 16 2003
Learned about computational biology at SC 2003 today. There are some very advanced tools. However as my experience with Dr Katy Simonsen and Dr Jun Xie has shown the vast majority of these tools are just begging for a good programmer to come along and clean them up. Find yourself a biologist and get going people.

As a side note this is very cool. According to our presenter: "What the doctors will not tell you is that when the Gamma Knife fails to destroy a tumor it is usually a targeting error and not a biological problem." Very cool. It is fun to use learning for evil.

01:59:53 Tuesday November 18 2003
There were lots of happenings today. Got up early and went to the conference center. I was scheduled for a Globus 3 tutorial. I figured that if I got there early there would be an extra laptop for me to use. Well there weren't any and I was certain that several things needed for the tutorial (most notably Java 1.4.2) would not run on poor little Diogenes. However I installed them and he took it like a champ. It took me a lot longer to compile than other people, but I knew what I was doing and could navigate a command prompt better than most people there. As a result I actually finished before others in many cases. This led to other problems.

The presenters had a cute little visualization that was supposed to help us learn. It showed a fish in a tank with our ip and number of updates when we registered with their service registry. Mike Shuey and I decided that the little Java grid service they were having us write needed a few improvements. So we started hacking. We wrote a little for loop to continuously update our service which led to much breaking of their service registry. We threw strings across the XML hoping to get to name our fish (it didn't work, but did break my fish). We also started stealing other people's /etc/fstab files because the little grid file sharing thing they wrote for us wasn't so careful about keeping us out of places we shouldn't have been. Lots of fun and learning.

At the opening gala for the conference proper (not just the tutorial sessions) we got to play at our (research in Indiana) booth. We had sticky darts and bags and lanyards to give away. Somehow my boss managed to start a holy war. You see, everyone was issued a Microsoft lanyard with their badge. We certainly couldn't have that so we started trading people their Microsoft lanyards for our own. Before we knew it half the convention hall was wearing "Research in Indiana" lanyards. This makes a lot of sense. Many of the companies there are Linux vendors and the like. However, I am still surprised at the success of our anti-Microsoft campaign. Perhaps I should sample people and start plotting falloff of Microsoft lanyards over time. It would be interesting. Sleep now. Keynote tomorrow.

21:18:45 Tuesday November 18 2003
Got up early yet again and listened to the keynote. It was given by Donna Cox. Her main point was that we need to create metaphors in computing that allow researchers to think about their data in helpful new ways. I couldn't decide if she was arguing for or against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. One of the more interesting bits that came out of her presentation was the brain was at various points was viewed as being a camera, an analogue computer, and many other things. She had some interesting graphics. I will try to find them.

Also I discovered that there is such a thing as a corporate magician.

02:03:07 Thursday November 20 2003
After an early night last night I felt much better today. I got up and went to technical presentations I learned about a distributed debugger and the Cray X1. I took a lot of pictures at the convention today. I will post them RSN. This evening the department sprang for a big dinner at a place called Sam's Cafe. The service was lousy, but the food was good.

02:30:59 Friday November 21 2003
Not a whole lot interesting at the conference today. I attended some mediocre technical presentations this morning. By the time noon rolled around I had given up entirely. I wandered around downtown Phoenix all afternoon. I saw an old Carnegie library and the Mining and Mineral Museum and the capitol building. Photos coming soon.

14:57:14 Sunday November 23 2003
I arrived safely back in Indiana Friday night. During my layover in Cincinnati I met a soldier who was on his way back to Iraq. He had been out there for three months. He had been home on leave and was on his way back for another three months in the desert.

Saturday was spent lazing about the house. I did manage to mulch all the leaves in the yard so the grass won't die. In the evening I took John out to eat at Sapgeddies for his birthday. Of course his actual birthday was on the 19th, but I was in Phoenix during that time. Later that evening Castor and I sat around reminiscing about people from high school and middle school.

02:19:57 Tuesday November 25 2003
Pictures as promised. Spent the majority of today doing actual work. Wrote some code for Jun Xie who wants to seed a a dynamic programming all pairs best match algorithm with the protein matches from BLAST. Her idea isn't bad, but I think it will get stuck on local maxima and won't be an order of magnitude better than random seedings.

I spent the evening debugging code for the project that I am working on with Professor Katy Simonsen. Her project seems much more fruitful. She was a Solaris administrator as a graduate student so she is quite knowledgeable about UNIX and programming. In addition to her competence she has a delightful demeanor. As such she has been a joy to work with.

This evening in a search for an email address I stumbled across the LiveJournal of someone I know. I noticed that so called "blog" entries tend to describe other people and list relations in great detail as opposed to cataloging events as I do here. Even though this is primarily intended as a personal history and a reservoir of thoughts I suppose I must have made it public for some reason. In the future I will attempt to introduce new people to provide context as I mention them in order to make this more palatable or perhaps even "interesting" to others.

03:19:26 Wednesday November 26 2003
I slept through class this morning. Once awake I attended numerous meetings. I was best pleased when Katy helped me track down a bug in her program. Now forward progress can continue.

When I returned home my house mate Matt had already left for his Thanksgiving in Iowa. Matt's girlfriend Sara stopped by to do some laundry this evening. I got the chance to sit down and talk with her a bit, which is something that had never really happened before. I don't really feel that I understand a person until I have had a chance to interact with them when no one else is around. I guess I am something of a scientist when it comes to interpersonal relations. I need to control all other factors and see how this person acts with just me around. Then I can begin to extrapolate how they might react to other people. This is likely why I am always uncomfortable in a group where there are many new people. I can't seem to tell if someone who is upset is upset at something I have done or at someone else. If there is only one or two new people I do all right by interpolating between what I know about most of the group and what I don't know about the new members. It is an inefficient and inelegant way of dealing with people, but it is what I know and it seems to have served me satisfactorily thus far.

03:28:07 Sunday November 30 2003
I am returned from my Thanksgiving holiday. I spent it largely with the family. I was accused once again of having a "Dan Accent". This time by my young cousin Ally. I continue to insist that it should more properly be referred to as "Good Diction".

I also had the opportunity to meet with Amber. She surprised me with the announcement that she would be moving to Glendale California this time next month. Apparently she has decided to take up being a traveling nurse. In keeping with my promise to make more proper introductions I should say that Amber is someone that I know from high school. She and Erica and Laura were best friends. Once upon a time (after the Erica thing was officially over) I did attempt to court Amber. She did not take to it, but apparently I did it with enough tact that we can still hang out now and again. She loves to get postal mail and as such she remains my most active correspondent.