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On soccer, promises and hair cuts
Both my daughters have been playing soccer for a while now. And for another
little while, I had been promising that if they ever scored three goals in a
game, I'd shave my head.
As the attentive reader may have guess by now, that day finally came. This weekend saw a suburban tournament in nearby Oak Brook, and lo and behold Anna scored three goals in the first game! So home we went, out came the tool and she rather professionally separated me from my hair. So today on day two of the new look, a friend took this picture of me (scaled down from 2.4mb to around 80kb) at the same tournament:
They actually played just about the best soccer I have seen them play, won their group (with three shutouts!) and lost a hard-fought and well-played final 2:4. And today the weather even cooperated as one can see from the photo. Nice weekend, all told. And yes, the head feels kinda nice ;-)
Sat, 11 Aug 2007
UseR! 2007: Two talks and a new R package 'RDieHarder'
The first UseR! conference in North
America ended yesterday. I gave two talks and updated my
presentations
page accordingly.
One talk was joint work with Steffen Moeller (who had also presented our work in Italy in June, and I added that presentation too), David Vernazobres and Albrecht Gebhard and concerns automated building of around two thousand (!!) new Debian source packages for all CRAN and BioConductor packages for GNU R. I plan to send something to debian-devel on that in a day or two as well because the time is right for some feedback on this.
The other talk was on about RDieHarder. This is joint work with Robert G. Brown and uses his DieHarder library for random number testing (that I've added to Debian a few months back). It allows R to both runs these tests, and to further analyse and visualize the test results. I finally uploaded RDieHarder to CRAN a few days ago -- in fact, my CRANberries rss feed of new CRAN packages had it show up the morning of the presentation. And now that I've added a webpage about RDieHarder I can finally say it's been released.
Thu, 14 Jun 2007
Toronto the good
Went to Toronto last weekend for a wedding. Couldn't have been nicer -- on
Toronto Island with its nice view of the city. The ceremony got slightly
rescheduled because of the massive storm coming through last Friday
afternoon which forced everything inside. Only drawback was that the party ended
too soon due to ferry schedule.
Caught up with some friends in town and glanced and a few of those fancy new digs that have come up since we left in 2000: the Opera house, lots of construction at the AGO and the neat building next door, the intriguing chrystal at the ROM. Always nice to come back, especially with the very nicest weather as it was last weekend.
Sun, 30 Oct 2005
Coincidences, coincidences
Funny how another one page
google job ad
appears in the
biz section
of the
NY Times
the very same day another overly congratulatory
article,
complete with picture of the three head honchos, open that very section.
Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.
Back from Buenos Aires
I just got back home a few hours ago from eight wonderful days in and around
Buenos Aires. Main event of the trip was the wedding that made us go in the
first place as well as hanging out with everybody else who made the trip, but
seeing the Argentina - Colombia qualifier for the 2006 World Cup in the River Plate stadium wasn't
too bad either. Definitely a highly recommended destination, especially
during the winther season.
After a visit to the grocery store, I have parsed the accumulated entries in
the main mailbox twice and sent a couple of follow-ups, glanced at work email
on my Blackberry, and am now confronted with 7 mb of procmail'ed
email from various lists, and over 2100 message in the RSS/Atom reader. Yikes, that'll
take a few days ...
Email woes
Looks like email to me is travelling rather erratically through the
debian.org domain. Given that some of the (supposedly) incoming mail is
entirely predictable from web archives of the respective lists I am
subscribed too, it would appear that I have not gotten everything that went
out in the last few days. Worse, a few fresh Debian
bug reports haven't made it to me either. I hope the Debian listmasters
and admins can do their magic and improve the flow soon, their work is surely
appreciated.
Back from vacation
We were gone to a small town on
Lake Huron for a week and two weekends, and returned last Sunday. Vacation
was great: finally finished a novel I had been stuck in for way too long,
read another, ate a lot, drank like a fish, run some 60 miles in seven days,
hang out on the beach with the kids, and stayed clear of computers and all
things online for a week. Felt good, actually.
Since then I spent last week catching up on a mountain of email, fixing a few bugs and upgrading a few packages, and doing a few little things like getting the bike back from its annual inspection. No real programming work yet other than adding a few items to the Quantian TODO list; not sure when the next release will be. Beancounter needs an update too, hopefully soon.
Fri, 04 Apr 2003
Nothing much new, really
It's been really busy at work, and I haven't had a chance to do much about
work outside of keeping some of the Debian packages up-to-date.
As for Quantix, I am getting seriously behind on my promises on putting up a few pages. Hopefully next week. In other news, Detlev Steuer pointed out that Quantix (as a name) is already taken -- after a short exchange, we concluded that Quantian would work.
Mon, 24 Mar 2003
Back from Vienna
Returned yesterday from the excellent DSC 2003 conference, and was rather tired. Now it's early in the morning, I am still tired and need to get a few things in order before I can head off to work to deal with a different email queue...
