Thank you, Gustav
So the SWAT team members are just getting back to our regular jobs again. It was a fun month, but it feels good to be fixing holes in my own code instead of finding holes in others'. Having said that, work life is cool, I should be off probation soon, and we think we've found a way to take apart the walls on our offices. I'm thinking of adding some panels from the magenta offices across the hall. Also my plant (it is, we have discovered, a hedera helix, aka English Ivy) is doing excellently (or some other word that means "excellent, as an adverb"). I think I've figured out how they decided which plants to give us as moving-in presents back in august: all of our gift plants are listed in the top 10 for plants that remove toxins like benzene and formaldehyde from the air - the things that cause Sick Building syndrome. Clever guys, these IBM folk.
The Dominican was fabulous. I won't write the whole thing up, I have already told the story many times. Suffice it to say that I had a really great time - the great that isn't on the surface either, but the great that gets right down to your spine and the base of your neck - where you genuinely feel groovy. Haggling with the vendors off the resort rocked - one of the best parts of the trip. $200 US for a box of cigars? I think not. :)
Home life is super - Amy appears to be dangling on the proverbial cusp of having a job, and if her references can just stop getting laryngitis, we'll be all good. What's more, tax time is coming up, which is extra-nifty because I am expecting something of a pleasant refund, and with refunds come big reductions in debt, and maybejustmaybe a set of 10.5g clay/composite casino grade poker chips in leather carrying case. We'll see. But I've been really good this year, so maybe santa can hook the easter bunny up with the tax man, or something. Maybe they're all really the same guy. Spooky.
I got an email yesterday from the discovery channel. One of their documentary producers is doing a segment on AI and found the tutorial site I did with Eyal. She was quite complimentary, which was cool, and called me Dr. Nightingale, which was fun, while it lasted. :) She wanted my advice on interview candidates for the segment - who could I recommend who was "a dynamic individual who is currently working on an AI project." I pointed her at Doug Lenat and the Cog project at MIT since other parts of the email seemed to suggest them as appropriate. I tried to downplay her mention of Rodney Brooks. For those who may have watched one of these AI documentaries before, Brooks is the guy with the little insects that are controlled by simple, adaptive analog circuits, instead of digital circuits with programming. It's not that I dislike the guy, his work actually reminds me a lot of the neural net stuff I found so fun in university, it's just that he's constantly being interviewed by these people, and he always seems to be subtly calling everyone else in AI dumb. I dunno, maybe he's right. :) At any rate I thought it was cool that this person wrote me - and even cooler that I might in some small way have influenced her decision. I asked her when it will air.
I don't think Holst's Jupiter will ever stop giving me goosebumps.