Average Robot Prices Relative to Labour Compensation

From The Economist:

Chicago - Day 4

To we travel home, and it is a sad day, so I'll be brief.

Check out at 12:00, take taxi to State and Lake, hop on Orange line to Midway. The defender of our safety confiscate my toothpaste and a jar of Nutella. Fly for 4 hours to LAX, wait for 1.5 hours for Ida's connecting flight to SJC.

Take the Fly-Away bus to LAUS and gold line to Sierra Madre. Lisa pick me up and we arrived home around 7:30.

Chicago - Day 1

Taking the green line from IIT, transfer at Roosevelt to Red, dismount at Chicago. The walk to Avenue Hotel is pretty taxing since the weather is warming up again.

After checking in, I decided to tour around the premise. Apparently the penthouse on 40th floor is under construction and no one bother to lock the door, so I help myself in. The view is facing the lake and extremely gorgeous. The pool, located at the same floor, is alright. I decided to move on since I need to scout the city.

Do a quick city tour, visit Hancock Tower, water tower, up and down along Chicago Blvd until 12:30PM, take the train to Midway to pick up Ida. By the time we are back I hope that there are rooms available on the upper floor, but apparently most of them have been taken. The manager told me to come back to the front desk around 4.

To pass the hour, we decided to go to have the "Chicago" hotdog, and the concierge pointed us to Portillo's, which is pretty festive and interesting.

By 4PM room transfer is done. We have the 38th floor, the view is better and although the manager told me that there is a possible construction noise from the top, we don't (and won't) hear anything, in fact, we couldn't head the construction noise from the ground floor (unlike the 28th floor) anymore. Talk about weird ...

Tonight we go to Café Spiaggia Restaurant, everything is good, except my own food. The veal is fatty, I was warned and I am fine with it. It is nice that the veal is fatty since the skin and fat is crusting very well, but the meat is dry. I am not enjoying my meal, but I do enjoy the Navy Pier though. It is good to view Chicago from the pier at night.

Portillo's Hot Dogs

100 W. Ontario
Chicago IL 60610
Tel: (312) 587-8910

http://www.portillos.com/

We were hungry and tired, since we haven't gotten the room that I want yet. Since we have 1 hour to burn, we decided to get a quick grub. Portillo's Hot Dogs was recommended by the concierge and it is within a short walking distance, remember: we were hungry!

Anyhoo, the menu is great and the service is good to the crowd that expect fast food. The ambiance of the 30's gangster paradise also works.

Spiaggia Cafe

980 N Michigan Ave # 2
Chicago, IL 60611
Tel: (312) 280-2750

http://www.levyrestaurants.com/

I like the table where we were seated, it is a small table facing the window and Ida had a great view of Michigan and Walton. The service and the recommended wine is great. The appetizing squid was excellent, the soft shell crab was scrumptious, too bad: the veal was too ... dry, apparently the fat couldn't seal in enough juice.

Gibson's Steakhouse And Bar

1028 N Rush St
Chicago, IL 60611
Tel:(312) 266-8999

http://www.gibsonssteakhouse.com/

I should have known better and avoid [WR Chicago] rib cut, instead I am salivating over Ida's sirloin. Life is not fair, sometimes ...

YAPC NA 2008 - Day 4 - Checking Out

Checked out at 8:45AM sharp. Met pm at front desk, and I amazed that there were two Patrick Michaud(es) attending YAPC.

I had problems with the dorm's nazi rules:

1. No coin laundry - and I couldn't get some credit after fiddling through the website.
2. 9AM check out time - with 150$ late penalty!!
3. Student lounge (by TeeVe) is steamy HOT, although it is cold outside.
4. There is only one washroom per floor, and the man/ladies washrooms are staggered, men on 2&4th floor, women on 1st and 3rd floor. I stayed at 3rd - now you know why I complained.
   

Head to student lounge, catching up on caffeine, emails and rss feeds. Left IIT around 10 to downtown.

YAPC NA 2008 - Day 3

Woke up crappy but all in one piece.

Attend James E Keenan - ‎Parrot and Perl 6 Workshop‎, it was horrible since I couldn't full compile the Parrot code, the configure.pl bitched about cl not found. Coke told me to run configure.pl --verbose and I realized I was missing ws2_32.lib file. I thought I need to install PDK, but the session ended before the PDK was downloaded.

[Skipped lunch]

Lightning Talk has already begun when I showed up and I could only remembered: cog frag was talking about PyConf.

Googlemen were creepy and confusing. They played bad cop and bad cop very well.

[Met Rich Derr and Robert Pfankunche with Jen for dinner @ Rock Bottom Brewery]

YAPC NA 2008 - Day 2

It was a bloodier morning since I couldn't sleep well, and as I found out later, no amount of coffee could sustain my attention.

I like all of the morning presentations:
Maxim Grigoriev - Perl XML Binding framework (PXB) - A bit slow and Maxim totally blew the time but I like it since it synced with my wavelength. Managed to see that my implementation of data structure of XSD resembles Maxim's data structure. I think I am on the right track with my project.
Dave Rolsky - Fey(::ORM), YA(F)ORM - should I implement this for data check for importer?
Perrin Harkins - Scaling Databases with DBIx::Router - I don't think I would use this, but it is a good presentation and knowledge.
Stevan Little - Moose - A post modern object system for Perl5 - It was a good presentation but I'll reserve the comment about Moose to myself.
Patrick Michaud - Rakudo: Perl 6 on Parrot - It was interesting, but my bio-sign was running low. Pardon the snore.

[Lunch at the China Town with Alvin and Jen]

Skipped Kent Cowgill -Testing Code and Assuring Quality and Leonard Miller - Perl::Critic and Perl::Tidy, Your guide to better programming practices since I had to run to dorm, suffered from stomach problem.

[Attend job fair]
DRW Trading Group only hires local Chicago resource (no telecommute).
ITA only hires local Boston resource (no telecommute).
CheetahMail hires QA manager/engineer local to Manhattan (no telecommute).

I enjoyed Patrick Michaud - Building Compilers with the Parrot Compiler Toolkit but I totally blanked on Bob Rogers - Advanced control structures in Parrot.

[TPF Perl / Eclipse Integration Project BOF is cancelled]

No matter ... banquet and auction afterwards were entertaining. I won a book (Google Apps Hacks, 1st Edition, by Philipp Lenssen), an ActiveState t-shirt, and 2 pins for $55.

BeerBoF was almost a dud, Jeremy was half awake, but thankfully Devon saved the day by rounding up some people for TheGreatDalmutiBoF. Magog and gang showed up later to combine MartiniBoF.

Slept at 3AM after consigning Jeremy's bags at the front desk.

Downloaded And Installed FF3

To help the world download record pointed out by Andrew Johnson.

YAPC NA 2008 - Day 1

Groggy as heck, I dragged myself to Hermann Hall to meet Jen and Alvin.

The first day of the conference was pretty boring. The whole morning was dedicated to the newbie's guide speeches such as:
Karen Pauley - The Bluffer’s Guide to the Perl Community - OK.
José Castro - How to get the most out of a YAPC - Good.
Josh McAdams - Welcome to YAPC::NA 2008 - To the point.

But: Jim Brandt - TPF Annual Report - is interesting, and Larry - Keynote - was surprising since Larry gave a technical presentation. No philosophy speech? ... Yawn ...

[Lunch alone since I needed to work: fixing RFT code].

Next 2 were alright, nothing new if you have wrangled code for 10+ years:
Michael Schwern - Skimmable Code: Fast to Read, Fast to Change
Fred Moyer - Handling the Ball of Mud

I was only interested in Adam Kennedy's session on Strawberry Perl - Achieving Win32 Platform Equality, it pretty much stroke an accord with me, since I too, experienced problems with ActiveState's PPM library. If I couldn't find any of the PPM that I want at uwinnipeg, I considered myself out of luck. Hopefully, I could managed to make Strawberry Perl works.

I couldn't decide which last speech I should attend, but I finally picked: Chris Dolan - PAR + FUSE + PDF - I found the explanation of FUSE and the PDF data structure very interesting.

After the sessions, I went to eat @ Bubba Gump in Navy Pier with Bruce Gray, Jen, Alvin and Suda.

YAPC NA 2008 - Day 0

The trip began awfully since I had to wake up early in the morning and I haven't packed yet (I fell asleep right after I got home last night around 11 PM). Southwest tested me again, for being late, but I made use of the flight delay to catch some serious sleep, I knew that I wouldn't get any good sleep in the airplane.

And ... a fidgety she elephant planted her arse next to me ... oh bother.

Midway was busy as a zoo when I arrived around 3PM, but I managed to navigate my way through, bought a ticket, get to the CTA's platform. The walk was pretty arduous since the weather was hot and muggy, plus the strap was digging into my shoulder, note to self: no more bringing beers and a bottle of wine when traveling with the duffel bag.

The travel to IIT was good, I was supposed to transfer from Orange line to Green line at Roosevelt, but I didn't know which direction to go, the people of Chicago were friendly enough to let me know which car I should hop on.

I was drenched in sweat when I arrived in the dorm YAPC check in area since I had to walk a quarter mile from the 35th station. The dorm check in and YAPC registration process was fast - Thanks McAdams!

... opening my bag - I realized that the defender of our safety riffled through my checked in baggage. thank god they didn't steal my beers and wine ...

After getting myself situated, I decided to go and visit the Parrot hackathon happening downstairs.

Rolsky's plane was late, so we (the anti pre-conference gathering/vegan/vegetarian crowd) were waiting for him. Mark from Summersault bussed us to Soul Vegetarian, we went ahead first but arrived last since we took the local street. The food and the companies were good and I went to sleep as soon as I uploaded some pictures to flickr.

Father's Day BBQ

Went to Simi Valley for Father's Day BBQ, Lea & John's family decided to push the event a day forward since I am not going to be available this Sunday.

Packing For YAPC::NA::2008

Pack lite, there is laundry machines in the basement.
1. 4 days worth of clothing.
2. Quarters
3. Italian wine and Lagunitas IPA
4. Chargers, ethernet cables, adapters.
5. Bread+jams (emergency meals)
6. Camera.

Net::SMTP::TLS

For no apparent reason, I poked around mail client setup for gmail last night and I found it mentioned STARTTLS on their SMTP setup. Several month ago I didn't find any working Perl module to send email via google, so I decided to conduct a little search again using that keyword.

Enter Net::SMTP::TLS.

use Net::SMTP::TLS;
my $mailer = new Net::SMTP::TLS(
   'smtp.gmail.com',
   Hello   => 'gmail.com',
   Port    => 587,
   User    => 'tracelogger@gmail.com',
   Password=> 'pwd',
   Timeout => 10,
   Debug   => 1,
);
$mailer->mail('tracelogger@gmail.com');
$mailer->to('anybody@world.com');
$mailer->data;
$mailer->datasend("To: anybody\@world.com\n");
$mailer->datasend("\n");
$mailer->datasend("Sent thru TLS!");
$mailer->dataend;
$mailer->quit;

Kucinich Begins Impeachment Process For GW Bush

And so it begins.

iPhone 2.0

Looking at the spec sheet:
Pro:

• 3G - [pray] - AT&T signal is good in my area.
• Photo geotagging

Con:

• Microsoft Exchange solution using ActiveSync + Cisco IPSec VPN? Stupid - should use BES instead.
• Enterprise-grade networking via Cisco - WoW - The malicious hacker, that steals your phone, gains instant access to your intranet.
• 2.0 megapixels camera - What? So 2007.
• 30 pins dock connector - Kill this shit already - use USB.
• Battery - I still couldn't swap the limped bunny?

Q:

• GPS - what is the chipset? WTF is assisted GPS?
• BT - what services are available besides headset?

I wouldn't consider this POS if not for multi touch.

OCTA #472 Is Online

Arrived at Tustin this morning and OCTA #472 began serving the Tustin commuters.

Side notes: I am baffled that Tustin is considered podunk station by Amtrak (not stopping here). Jeez - it is the closest rail stop to SNA.

Statistics

It sucks when you or your family is part of the bad statistics. Today, my older sister joined the unemployed statistics of June 2008.

Me? I am happy that I am still part of the employment side, albeit the job is brain damaging and non challenging.

OCTA #472 NB

3:46
3:56
4:26
4:46
4:55 <- sweet spot
6:05

Amtrak Burns

I am burned by Amtrak today. Supposedly, A595 was to departed from Irvine at 9:56PM, but it hadn't arrived from San Diego until 11:56PM. The trip to LAUS took roughly one hour and I arrived around 00:50, instead of the scheduled 11:00PM.

Since the last Gold Line train left LAUS at 11:54PM, I have to take the earliest one to Sierra Madre at 3:45AM.

I am having so much fun waiting for 3 hours at LAUS. What a nightmare.

Nokia N800 For Cheap

Micro Center cut the price of N800 to USD 220, need to check for availability at the Tustin branch.

OCTA Route 471 Is Retired

OCTA is retiring route #471 and replace it with route #472 (with changes).

Thank god, it is not affecting me.