I broke 90!

For the first time in my golfing career, I shot less than 90 on an 18 hole course. I drove very well and for the most part, hit my irons and putted well. I was very bad when I was hitting 30-60 yard pitches and chips, but I can live with that.

It was good to get out and play golf for the first time in a long time. I really should get out and hit balls more often. There is a driving range on the way to work that I should take advantage of from time to time.

Notre Dame vs. Stanford Memories

I've been to quite a few ND-Stanford games in my lifetime. Since I've been a kid, Stanford has been on the Notre Dame schedule on a nearly yearly basis. I think that scheduling arangment has worked out for both teams. Notre Dame gets a team it should beat every year and Stanford pulls off an upset every few years.

I remember quite vividly watching Stanford beat Notre Dame a few times as a kid, but I didn't start going to these games every year until I got to high school. Bellarmine made everyone do 100 hours of community service over the course of a year. Bellarmine, being a Catholic school, also had a good group of alumni that went to ND. Somehow one of them managed to convince Bellarmine that there was a "service" oportunity at the Stanford-ND game. The event was one of those 25 dollar lunches that benefits athletics. I'm one of those who thinks that gifts to a University that go to athletics shouldn't be tax deductible at all, but that's another blog post. This was about as good as community service can get. You get there early, put up some tables, eat lunch, take down some tables, and watch a football game. I even got a free shirt that I still wear once in a while.

Recently, my memories of Stanford-ND revolve around watching games in the rain because the game is always in November. The games also tend to be a night. Brrr.

Today's game should be exciting: a battle of low teams when it is not raining during the day. Go Cardinal.

Things I'm thankful for

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This is a great excuse to end the title of a blog with a dangling preposition!

I'm thankful for a lot of things, so I'll make a mildly serious list as I watch the Macy's parade in HD.

- Page Rank

Page rank is what makes me visible in Google. I'd like to thank all of you who have added hyperlinks from your page to my page.

- Code Green Networks

They pay me to work on interesting computer science projects. I have to be greatful for that.

- Football

Football is the ultimate violent chess match. I am thankful for IM, college and pro football.

- Asparagus

Definitely the best vegetable. Makes great beef and asparagus stir fry.

- ddclient

This has saved me from having to explicitly update my IP address to DNS every few days. Horay!

- Stanford University

I learned an unbelievable amount from an incredible number of unbelievably talented people.

- Firefox Spellchecker

Spellchecking is so much more convenient on the client side rather than having to send my pourly spelled emails to GMail and back.

- Los Altos United Methodist Church

Definitely the best thing in Los Altos. Very key to my upbringing and my outlook on life.

- Giants' baseball

I know they are going to be dogmeat this year, but what is more enjoyable that being able to watch a game a day all summer. Here is hoping they get at least on bat in this offseason. I'd be willing to give up a wide variety of young pitchers to get a bat that is under contract for a few years.

- My family

As with every family, there are a lot of ups and downs but there are a lot more ups than downs.

I hope you all enjoy a couple of days off work.

Kickball and Ceramics

In the past few weeks, there have been a lot of things have happed that have caused me to tell myself, I should blog about that, but I've realized that I'm never going to have time to put everything down in this blog that is important to me. There are a couple of things that I cannot pass up the opportunity to discuss: ceramic sculpture and kickball.

One of the things I did was go to my friend Leslie's ceramic sculpture (not pottery) show. I'd never really seen a lot of ceramic sculpture in my life and it has some very unique properties. Unlike a stone sculpture, ceramic sculpture can be glazed many bright and interesting colors. Unlike painting, which can have wonderful colors, it is three dimentional as you can walk completely around a piece to experience it. It took the best of both mediums and put it all into one. Some of the pieces are quite huge and incredibly intricate. I was quite impressed. Plus there was beer at the reception.

One of the other key experiences in my life the last month has been the triumphant kickball season in which we went undefeated in the regular season only to fall in the championship game. Our team was a lot of fun (and also quite talented) but we came up a run short in the final game. In spite of how much I've learned to enjoy the game of basketball, it is a lot of fun to play some sports that are by nature designed to be very relaxed and enjoyable. This is not to say that playoff kickball is not intense (there were plenty of unkind things directed at the umpire), but its nice to play a sport and watch the center fielder make a one handed catch and not spill his beer. Plus you get a T-shirt.

Balloon Report

The balloon prank is over. In the past few days, I've personally witnessed the inflation and destruction of over 600 balloons. We managed to fill a very large office completely to the top with balloons, using one motorized pump and 2 hand pumps.

Our victim softened the prank a bit by arriving 4 days later than we anticipated. At that point, some of the balloons on the bottom were beginning to deflate. He was much surprised and was a very good sport about it. Some of us are going to try to edit the video and put it up on youtube. I'll do my best to get a picture of the popped balloons.

So the summary is that pulling this prank is relatively easy, you just have to have about 80 bucks for balloons, some sort of balloon blowing device other than someone's lungs, and a good number of man-hours to pull it off. If you pull this prank, you get as a bonus the chance to pop a ridiculous number of balloons, which of course is good fun.

Balloons and Basketball

At work, we are slowly working to fill a co-worker's office completely with balloons. This initially sounded like a great idea, a harmless office prank with enough fun to go around for everyone. Then we moved past the high level planning stages and into the practical planning stages and we realized the daunting tasks we had ahead of us.

The office is about 10'x10'x10' so that means we need about 1000 cubic feet of balloons. Even the largest balloons are barely a cubic foot so we are going to need at least 1000 balloons. A human being can blow up and tie a balloon in about 30 seconds tops. This rate cannot be maintained for many consecutive balloons, so if we conservatively say that someone could do the rate of one balloon per minute, this could take 1000 man minutes. Fortunately, this task is easily parallizeable. Unfortunately, everyone involved in the prank also has a day job (that is we should probably keep doing work). Even with 5 full time people, it could take 200 minutes (over 3 hours). This does not include the time spent packing the office, which will grow as the office reaches capacity.

We were able to find both an electric pump and a hand pump which speed up the process considerably. We don't have firm plans for how to deal with the packing issues, but hopefully those can be dealt with. As of now, we are about 1/3 full. I'll try to get pictures at some point.

So far, the experience has been a good one and has been very good for team building. Lets hope this doesn't end like this. I do think the victim in this case is wound considerably less tight.

I have basketball 3 nights in a row this week. I'm past night #2 and my legs are done. We'll see how I'm feeling tomorrow. I'm still looking for my lost shot. If someone finds it let me know because I'm tired of missing 10 foot jumpers.

Junior has finished first at the Urban Challenge!

This doesn't imply it has won, but they completed all their missions first! As lame as it sounds, it is a big victory for science and humanity!

Knowing what I knew after the last Grand Challenge, I am blown away by how far people have progressed in a couple of years.

DARPA Urban Challenge

Today as I write this, the "Urban Challenge" to drive autonomous vehicles is unfolding. I'm watching the live video feed and these cars are amazing. These things can stop at stop signs, wait for human driven cars before continuing, stay in their lanes, drive without lane markers and a number of other things. These difficulties are at least ten times harder than the 2005 Grand Challenge of desert driving. I am blow away that the technology could progress this far in two years.

Four of the 11 cars are out at this point. Junior the Stanford Racing Team entry is still going strong.

Sebastian Thrun, the leader of the Stanford Racing Team, is one of my heroes in life. He is both a terrific scientist and a terrific motivator and project manager. His stated goals (to me after the last DGC) and to the media are nothing short of revolutionizing the way we drive and live through robotics. From the video, I am tremendously impressed with their simple and elegant design that does not rely on brute force and massive computing power, but sophisticated algorithms and minimal hardware and human preparation.

The one thing I'm disappointed about is the Stanford Racing Team is their new website. Things were much better in 2005 :).