Last week my sister, Lisa, and brother in law, Lorne, came to visit me in Berkeley.  I posted some pics: here.

We did quite a lot of stuff in one week – although, my favorite was renting bikes and taking them over the Golden Gate into Sausalito (taking a ferry back to downtown SF).  At the end of the day, I said that I really needed to get on buying a bike because I could have been doing that every weekend.  And, behold!  When I came back from work the next day, this was waiting for me in my studio:

(Although, I walked right past it without noticing until I got curious why there was a helmet on my pillow.)

Here are a couple more of the better pics:

I went on a 4 hour back ride today all around the East Bay shore including the Berkeley Marina.  Loves.

Somehow, I didn’t take very many…. hmm. Anyway have a look: click here.

Just for fun:

I’ve discovered the root of all my problems!  It turns out my grand parents shared the same Great Great Great Grandfather.  Although, If I do the math, everyone has 16 Great Great Great Grand Fathers who would have a total of approximately 1000 Great Great Great Grand Kids.  So, it is not too surprising that two of them would get together in rural Canada

Anyway, I have been working on one of my projects, www.deslippe.org, recently.  I am getting close to putting everyone with the Deslippe name on the tree at least.  It is interesting, because I think I might be able to connect everybody alive who has Deslippe as a last name (because I think the top of the tree was the very first Deslippe; i.e. he changed his name on arrival in Quebec).  Check it out if you are a Deslippe: www.deslippe.org.

I saw the movie Sicko yesterday.  It was quite well done, and I suggest everyone (living in America or just wanting to gloat at America) to see it.  It reminded me of this article I found on Digg the other day:  10 Things America Would Have if it was Actually a Democracy.

I should point out that I am aware that the US is actually a Republic and not a Democracy, which has its own benefits, like protection in situations when the majority is wrong.  And yes, this fact does, in a way, defeat the point of the article, but it is worth a read anyway and suggests there is some discrepancy between the people’s opinion and the government.

Seriously, get your act together Africa, Australia and Antarctica. It is the last that really gets me…

Out of my window, it sounds like the Russians have finally gotten around to bombing San Francisco. However, it is just the fireworks that are going off. I just got back to a Barbecue at my my grand advisor’s (the advisor of my advisor) sweet Oakland Hills house. I almost drank as much beer as I brought, which if you include the food I got for free, makes the whole thing most worthwhile

When I was in Florida, I built a Linux box for my parents, which so far seems to have taken off well (although part of the success was simply getting the internet connection to run at the advertised). So far it seems to work well, and I have been able to log in and run updates and keep the system up to date and safe remotely. Someone should clearly provide this service to a large number people. Additionally, I host on my home computer a website for my sister (myboysandme.com) and my mother (mothermarilyn.com). When it is all put togehter, there seems to be a huge market for administering personal computers that is not being tapped (although Google looks like they are about to pounce on it). I might consider this more seriously once the next releases of Ubuntu and Fedora come out.

I’m back, and I have pictures. Here are some notable ones:

My New Nephew

My Old Nephew

Notice the License Plate

Uncut

WW2 Memorial

As you can probably tell, I didn’t get a chance to go the Holocaust museum since I only had about 2 hours of spare time. Instead, on Tuesday, I walked to the WW2 memorial which I hadn’t seen before.  It is easily the nicest memorial in DC. I particularly like all the metal castings (is that the right word?) depicting scenes from the homefront and battlefront. I took a bunch of pictures of them. Take a look – here.

The conference was very nice. I met a lot of people who do relatively similar research, although the most interesting talks I heard were on origami and image recognition (i.e. how programs could identify the subject of a picture without human input).

I got an LG vx8600 after dropping my old phone with an already dying battery in the pool (you might remember that this was a replacement for one I left in a cab in Denver). The new one is quite nice in that it is very slim and can play mp3s, take video etc… It actually stores everything on a 2 GB micro SD card which makes it extremely easy to sync with linux (i.e. ignoring included crapware). Good work LG on not being evil.