eichin

Driving to work this morning, had the "noisy thumpy driving music" playlist on, Birdhouse in your Soul came on, and I did what I usually do - hit "back" every time it finished, listening to it on effective repeat and singing along for half an hour. Like you do (even if it isn't still 1990.)

Got to thinking, though. The lyrics are (ignoring the surrealism and rhythm) an alternation between the main character wanting love and attention ("I'm your only friend" "watches over you") *and* simultaneously being simple, of limited function, and untrustworthy ("one note" "not actually your friend" "countless screaming Argonauts") but sophisticated enough to express this.

Now, the holy grail of AI is AGI ("artificial General intelligence") and the holy grail of software development (since the 50s, *waves* at cobol) is "a programming system you can just talk to and tell what you want it to do." We're making a lot of progress on the "conversational" AI stepping stone, with Siri/Alexa/Assistant (hint, google, build an AI to help you *NAME THINGS*) so it's reasonable to see this sort of thing start to collide, plus you have tools like Kite (an AI assistant python programming environment which suggests "relevant" code snippets) so people are definitely playing with/working on this kind of thing as we speak.

But what's the next step there? Say you have a programming system that you can just talk to and describe the task. Say it's met the other basic goals of AI by being a piece of software and easily copied (no "soul" magic or other mysticism; even if it takes a lot of memory today, Moore's law is still cranking on that just fine.) What's the most common software out there? Embedded software. What's a particularly rising embedded software niche? The Internet of Things. There are hundreds of "internet controlled lightbulbs" out there, it blew right past "joke" and into "security threat" filling the shelves of Home Depot.

So sure, you've got your artificial intelligence system that's sophisticated enough to understand a human's vague idea about a piece of code and make it happen... memory is cheap, it just works, so just drop the whole thing into your lightbulb production line (how many routers or smart-televisions ship with an entire development environment *today* because it's easier than not doing it? It works, ship it!)

"... but I'm a little glowing friend but really I'm not actually your friend but I am..."

Finally got out to Mount Auburn Cemetery for a bunch of photography (apparently that's Not At All Creepy and No Really, it's been a public park/destination for 188 years, get over it) and got around 500 pictures in 4 hours, with at least half a dozen new species. Quite an amazing day!

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=mountauburncemetery&user_id=35034350551%40N01&view_all=1

As of mid-June, I'm leaving Nokia/HERE and joining Right Hand Robotics; it's both a long-overdue return to the startup world *and* a long overdue career change - though I'll certainly be applying lots of software experience, fundamentally they *build actual things* which will be quite a shift.  I'm very excited, the overall enthusiasm level at Right Hand is tremendous.

This also means I'll be spending time around Cambridge again, but most of it will be working :-)

As the entire world has figured out (I've even seen a translation of the press release in what I think was Thai) MetaCarta has been acquired by Nokia. This is a positive, even rewarding, thing... Nokia brings lots of resources to the table, and is building a global geographic search service ( http://maps.ovi.com/ - no, you probably *haven't* heard of it, at least if you live in the US, but they do own NavTeq...) (ovi is Finnish for "door") and MetaCarta's team and technology will be an interesting and even important part of that.

Of course, the last time I worked for a company with more than 150 people was HP/Apollo, an experience which contributed somewhat to my working only for small startups for the last 18 years :-) But this is a new century, and the part of Nokia we're plugging in to seems to "get it" in ways that are unexpected for a large multinational with a somewhat diverse set of products... so we'll see how that goes.

Even before the acquisition, this has lead to more travel for me (a week in Berlin talking to their engineers and exploring the city, for starters.) Since we're working mostly with people in Berlin (not Espoo) there may be more of that in my future.

(On a related note: at this point, 3 of the 4 IP lawyers I've interacted with professionally are tall and blonde. That's not enough to extrapolate from, of course :-)

While I'm here - after seeing a poster session at Pycon (in Atlanta, mmm more travel, mmm ribs) about the Georgia Tech CS-through-python-and-robots curriculum, I picked up the textbook (and the toys :-) and started working through it, in order to finally put some structure to my robot-related flailing, aiming towards something more real than a magpie-like accumulation of robot hardware. We'll see how that goes; if nothing else, it's entirely non-work-related (Nokia owned Puma for a while, but got out of robotics altogether in the early 90's.)

On the photography side of things - Amazon had a very deep discount on the Canon Rebel XS just before Christmas, so I took the opportunity to see "just what is the deal with DSLRs anyway". My conclusions so far are that they're great for fast wildlife shooting (with an appropriately large lens - I'm staying on the edge of the slippery slope and only using the 18-55 kit lens and the widely recommended 55-250, which still disappoint me in terms of reach compared to the superzooms) and they're *wretched* for anything more casual than that - mirror noise makes them unsuitable for shooting at conferences or lectures, limited live-view makes them useless for shooting "drive by" when your attention is primarily on something other than the camera. I didn't bring the Rebel to Pycon (mostly indoor lectures, plus the hassle of airports, made the SX10IS a much better choice) but now that it is Spring (and I have taken 4400 shots with it) I am taking it out for bird and wildlife photography.

On the wildlife side, I recently saw my first red-bellied woodpecker http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4140871515/ and my first turkey vulture http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4299091075/ (which lead me to learn a new if somewhat archaic word, "feaking".) It's still more about making shiny pictures, for me, but "ooh I've never seen one of those before" is interesting too... as is "doesn't that bluebird http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/4320304776/ know it's winter?"

One last bit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eichin/sets/72157622977363009/ is my first "exhibition"! Small, ad-hoc, and amateur - after talking with the owner of the new coffeeshop in my building (Central Brew) about the photography I do (and the camera I *always* carry/wear) he asked if I wanted to put up some pictures. They've been up since January - I've actually been asked for some Spring pictures to replace them with, so I'll have to make some new choices - it's just nice to have some independent indication that maybe I'm getting the hang of this :-)

Experience with the little packraft last year convinced me I wanted something that was a little more boat and a little less portable; thus the Airis Sport 11 above, full scale inflatable kayak - weighs as much as a fiberglass one, but fits in it's own custom backpack that fits the back seat of the Mini :-)

On the camera side, I'm still averaging a little under a hundred pictures a day (mostly weekend bursts but starting my weekdays dragonfly-hunting in the front yard helps too) and I've abused the SP-550UZ enough to need to get it repaired twice now; it's due for a third, Canon's photokina announcements disappointed me, so I'm now using the SP-570UZ. A little bulkier, so it has MORE BUTTONS which turned out to make things like manual focus easier to get to - but the 20x lens really provided enough additional "reach" (in terms of, for example, picking up a turtle in this picture that I didn't notice in person) that I'm happy with the extra size, even if it is always on me.)

I've also settled into a comfortable shooting and captioning workflow with the EEEpc with kphotoalbum for captioning and tagging, and a handful of python scripts to sort and upload. Yay cheap hard drives :-)

I've also gotten more adventurous about going places with picture taking specifically in mind; aside from the regular trips to local wildlife hotspots, this year I've been to Chicago , Los Alamos , the VLA , and Camden, Maine . (So also "yay cheap 16G SDHC cards"... everything else is getting more compact and portable/nomad-friendly - but not bandwidth...)

Of course, I haven't gotten any better at writing more often :-)

One of the reasons I've stuck with smaller cameras instead of going DSLR is that I've felt that the really interesting pictures are more a result of opportunity than hardware - and having a camera always on hand has more value than the extremes of shooting range.


This shot demonstrates that :-) This juvenile hawk was under an evergreen bush on my front sidewalk; I was eating breakfast and saw a pair of cardinals come screaming out of a bush, saw some movement below, and realized suddenly "that's not a squirrel..."


(I am looking forward to the actual return of spring, but the birds in my yard seem convinced that it's already here :-)

Off to scenic New Hampshire... L. A. Burdick's original cafe/restaurant is in Walpole, NH (where Larry Burdick himself lives and works :-) Then off to a fun Suzanne Vega concert (even if she didn't play my favorite song, she made the fans in the audience pretty happy... sadly, it being a benefit concert, there seemed to be a lot of people who were there because it was the thing to do, and she seemed a little nervous about that. But she still has The Voice :-)

I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now...

Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-)

Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I *still* saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting *in* one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.)

Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.)

Last weekend, it was raining... and had been raining for a long time... classic gloomy New England winter-isn't-quite-done spring weather (though the last weekend in April is pretty late in the year for this kind of thing.)

Saturday, stayed inside and hacked. Sunday, decided I'd had enough of this, it wasn't raining all that much and I should at least get out and have lunch. Did my usual trip over to Ice House Pond (got some good reflection pictures, a cloudy sky is interesting for that, but nothing exciting.) Couldn't get up the motivation to do one of the farther-away hikes, so I went over to Great Meadows instead, to see if it was less flooded. Turned out it was, and that meant I got pictures of a Blue Heron and some muskrats up close, along with a nesting goose. I think that was pretty successful, for a visit to an otherwise inaccessible park.

On the way home, I realized that there was still some light, and that it was gloomy and wet enough that the Old North Bridge, the biggest non-shopping tourist destination in Concord, would probably be empty, and that the bridge might be good for getting more wildlife pictures (I've seen ducks and turtles there before.) Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly empty and partly flooded. I waited out a brief "real" downpour, and headed in to the park. Lots of flooding, mostly geese in the river, not that many people around so I got some good angles on the bridge itself.

If you look carefully along the left edge of that picture, you'll see a person standing next to the Minuteman Statue. He saw me taking pictures, and walked over with a camcorder on a tripod, and said roughly "I'm shooting a music video - just a little thing to put up on youtube, I'm an aspiring country singer from Boston - could you take some shots of me with this?"

After pointing out that while I knew the equipment, I didn't actually have any real experience shooting video, I took the camera and did some angles, some zooming, some closeups... listening to the singing and the lyrics (mostly the word "despair" :-) he'd certainly chosen a suitable setting for it. I figured at least he'd be able to use some of the guitar-strumming closeups.


Turns out that, behold the power of modern video editing, a fair bit of it turned out to be useful (it's also up on the artists' own site.) Basically the entire section with him walking onto the bridge, up to the four-frame dancing insert (except for the little reflected-goose interlude) was my shooting.

Conclusions:

• Depressing and gloomy days can still hold adventures


• On days when only crazy people would go out - sometimes you find other interesting crazy people... :-)


• Music videos have gotten a lot easier to produce...

Don't forget, today is waffle day!