Life is catching up with me

Just about two weeks ago, I had the feeling that I had so much time that really the only thing that could fill it was to write this blog.

Now, life has been catching up with me on all fronts, and I find myself falling back into bad blogging habits. The pace of my work has picked up considerably, and next to that, there’s so much bloggable fun stuff going on that I hardly have the time to write about it.

So let’s just summarise the highlights of the past few days:

• On Sunday I went to see the NextFest as planned. It was pretty cool: They had lots of robots — including one that looked so lifelike with its artificial skin and subtle facial expressions that I mistook it for a real human for a second –, and future space suits, and a device that will highlight the veins under your skin, and lots of other stuff. The singing rabbit robots were a bit of a disappointment, as they did have a darkened room with a few hundred of them, and they were supposed to perform a specially composed opera, but they didn’t sing. There were also two different video games in which the player was filmed by a camera and inserted into the game world, where they had to touch falling balls, or fight against evil sprites. This would probably not be so difficult to implement yourself, and perhaps it would be a fun little project to do in my copious spare time.The lifelike android (who reminds me a bit of Lex Luthor in Smallville; I wonder if that’s intentional):

  

  One of the camera-based video games: You can see the player (shown to the right) very faintly at the center of the screen to the left; watch for the colour of his shirt.

  

  The coolest game of the entire exhibit was Brainball, in which each player wears a bunch of EEG electrodes on their head, and there’s a little ball on the table that moves towards the player with the higher stress level. The really nice part about this game is that the little ball on the table actually physically moves, and so it makes the game look like a match between two telepaths.
  

• On Monday night, we went to Rock ‘n Roll Karaoke at Arlene’s Grocery in the Lower East Side; I must say that I’m beginning to like the LES better and better for its quirky little shops and bar and cafe scene. It was fantastic: They had a real live band that would accompany karaoke singers, with admissible songs ranging from the Beatles to Iron Maiden. Most of the singers were actually pretty good, too; but the atmosphere was so friendly that even the singers who really sucked got a warm applause. It was great fun, and I’ll need to go there again and perhaps sing too. :)

• Yesterday I went to visit Rutgers University to see a talk (a classical semantics talk with a handout, on a topic that my advisor worked on thirty years ago, but very accessible and fun nonetheless) and meet some people. I must say that one thing I really like about American universities is that they give you free food whenever they can get away with it. In this case, pretty good Thai food before the semantics talk.

Phew. Now today I’ll go run some errands, try to pick up the computer for my office, finish my slides for the talk tomorrow, and start putting redundant constraints into the constraint-based planner that I’ve also implemented over the weekend. Then tonight I’ll go to my third Big Apple Chorus rehearsal and presumably become a regular member. No rest for the enthusiastic.