obfuscated.org

The Kid and I went to the open house at JPL today. It was pretty cool. They had all sorts of sciency stuff out to look at and sciency people out to answer questions about the sciency stuff.

There was a machine learning booth towards the top of the campus where they demoed some of the technologies that I worked with at Yahoo Research. They had an SVM hooked up to the audio input of a Mac, and when you spoke in to it it built a model of your speech and used it to determine who was talking at any given time. Not surprisingly, it worked really well. Those wacky kids at JPL and all their science. It was a lot of fun to show The Kid a live demo of the sort of stuff that I worked with.

Also worth noting: big ups to public radio for letting me know that this event was on. Hooray for community news that focuses on science from time to time.

Here are eight great reasons to love the Hollywood Bowl in 2006:

1. Prairie Home Companion
2. Sergio Mendes
3. The LA Philharmonic performing “Bugs Bunny on Broadway”
4. Tom Jones (Tom $#@!%&*@ Jones!)
5. The Flaming Lips and Thievery Corporation
6. The LA Philharmonic performing Mahler’s First
7. James Brown
8. Willie Nelson and Neko Case

Just seeing these shows would be good enough for me. The Bowl makes it so easy and so affordable to see great, great acts like this. For one person to see all of these shows, the total cost is under $75. That the same price as one or two shows at a similarly-sized venue with the same sort of acts, and you usually can’t bring your own food to the other places.

The Bowl is one of my favorite things about summer. I can’t think about living somewhere other than Los Angeles without wondering where I’ll see big names live without going broken in the process. Thanks, Hollywood Bowl. You really do make summers for me.

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Some dude runs around and smashes huge ice walls with his fists. That’s about it.

I can’t stop playing.

I got the call via email today to represent for Pasadena at this year’s BarCamp Los Angeles. Unfortunately, it in part conflicts with Lebowskifest LA, so I don’t know that I’ll be able to make it — I could in theory go on Sunday, but I don’t know that an evening of bowling and white russians is the best lead in to a technical gathering of this magnitude.

Anyway, if any of you nerds out there in nerd land have that weekend free, it looks like an entirely cool weekend. Anyone who’s everyone in LA’s tech scene is going to be there, so at the very least it’d be a great place to network. Gavin is on the tentative speakers list, and if his stuff is any indicator of what’s in store for BarCamp, it’ll be super informative as well.

I don’t know if it’s on or if TLI just got served, but I do know that this east coast/west coast narnia rap battle is damn damn funny.

Thanks to Jill for the link!

Hey, Stpehanie and I made the news! CBS 2 / KCAL 9: Your Source For Southern California’s Breaking News, Weather, Traffic and Sports: Tour Noir Los Angeles With The 1947 Project

Center of the Earth
Originally uploaded by Corey Porter.

When you fire up Google Earth, it presents you with a “default” view that you can zoom in on. As it happens, this default point is two blocks from my parents’ home in Lawrence, KS. I’m told that the corner of Crestline Drive and Compton Square (Compton is the name of the owner of the apartment complex located at that intersection) became the center of the default view because the engineer who entered the defaults once lived in these apartments.

Carter and The Kid in a BMW 530i
Originally uploaded by corey_porter.

Carter, The Kid and I went to the “Taste of Lexus” event today (photo set). Held out at Dodger Stadium, it’s a chance for people to come out and drive Lexus’ cars around like idiots.

The event itself was pretty swank. There were some cool freebies, great free food, and the facilities were quite cool. Lines for the cars were relatively short, and they didn’t hassle you for pushing the cars. Good times. Here’s a quick run down of what we drove.

IS 350

The first car we drove, it was easily the most exciting as well. It’s small, light, powerful, and handles wonderfully. If you’re all about spending a lot of money on a car that has much more performance capability than you’ll ever be able to legally use, this is your car. I’m not by any stretch a car guy, but I was genuinely impressed by this one. It was as fun to drive as the Corvette that I drove at a GM event a few months back.

(Note to Carter: I will agree before I am even told that if I were to spend more than 30 seconds driving a Corvette then I would know now and forever that it is the greatest car ever made.)

GS 450

This is Lexus’ luxury/performance line. It had lots of low-end power, but its handling was crap. I felt like I was at sea because of the body roll. Carter, who is a somewhat more aggressive driver than I am (note: he’s actually a much more aggressive driver than I am), pretty well got it to go sideways around a couple of turns. Not a good sign at all.

BMW 530i

This didn’t have the speed off the line that the GS 450 did, but it handled almost as well as the IS. I felt much better pushing this in to turns than I did the previous car. On the down side, there were way too many wheels and knobs and lights on the inside. What’s that all about?

SC 430

Lexus’ little convertible was fun to drive. The handling wasn’t great and the power was sub-par, but the stereo sounded wonderful and the top was down while I spun its tires around the slalom course they had set up. I wouldn’t buy one of these, either, but it was definitely fun to drive.

GX 470

The Kid’s favorite car, this was a pretty typical SUV. It handled for crap and was under-powered for its size, but it sure was big and noisy. Why do people buy these stupid things?

RX 330h

The hybrid SUV (based on the Camry frame) was there as well. We drove it. It was nothing special. If you want to make people think you’re cool because you drive a hybrid but you still want to piss people off by driving an SUV, this is your car.

All in all, this was a fun event. You can’t beat the price (free), either. If you get a chance to go to one of these things, I would recommend doing so. They really are a lot of fun.

Skeleton
Originally uploaded by corey_porter.

The Kid and I went trick-or-treating tonight (photo set). As we have for the last few years, we went up to the Halloween block party in Sierra Madre. It’s a super-impressive deal; a bunch of houses put what has to be weeks of effort in to decorating. There are hundreds of jack-o-lanterns, flying ghosts, graveyards and all manner of spooky and cool. If you’re looking for something to do next Halloween, I can’t recommend this enough.