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Awful King County Metro Changes Coming Up

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I just found out that King County Metro is planning to cut off service for Route 27 at 12th Avenue at non-peak times. This is awful.

Route 27 is the only bus that takes me directly to my office. It already takes me 40 to 45 minutes with that bus; in fact, I can walk faster, which I do when the weather is nice. Coming back from work on the 27, or any bus for that matter, is already bad enough with the current service running outside of peak times. I would have hoped that service improves instead of being cut. I guess buses are really more intended for the homeless, who don’t care where the route ends, and not for people who aren’t going home from work at 6 PM yet, when peak time ends.

If these changes go into effect, I guess I’ll just drive every day. That means I’ll have to pay for parking, but I’m not going to change buses and spend two hours every day commuting in the company of the drunk, drugged, and unwashed when I can drive to work in under 15 minutes.

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Back from SPLASH 2011

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I returned from SPLASH 2011 in Portland tonight. I attended only the Educators’ Symposium on Monday and the first day of the conference proper, but it was worth it. And how could it not be, given that it was so close, in Portland, even though the still-new-for-me title “SPLASH — Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity” has something very hippy-like.

I got to see Corky, Vivek and Vincent again, my doctoral advisor and two of my collaborators. I ran into a bunch of people I had met before, like Matthew Flatt, Eelco Visser, Michael Ernst, and Eugene Wallingford, but Igor Peshansky was one of the few people who seemed to recognize me as well. Thanks, and that’s just the way it goes for folks like me.

Vivek and Vincent did a great job with our DrHJ demonstration. Of the other presentations that I watched, I think PREFAIL impressed me the most. That was really good work. I liked the idea of the DSL to test languages and wish I’d had something like that for my work on Mint. And Zef Hemel’s mobl language demo was just damn cool.

I’m glad that I got to go, and I wish I had had more time, time to stay and be involved. I have more interests and responsibilities now, but I enjoy keeping in touch.

Here are some pictures:

Portland from the top of the Hilton, where the Educators' Symposium was held.
Portland from the top of the Hilton, where the Educators' Symposium was held.
Turing Award-winner Ivan Sutherland speaking.
Turing Award-winner Ivan Sutherland speaking.
PREFAIL Talk.
PREFAIL talk by Pallavi Joshi, UC Berkeley.
PREFAIL Talk, finishing slide.
PREFAIL Talk, finishing slide.
Integrated Language Definition Testing Talk.
Integrated Language Definition Testing Talk by Lennart Kats, Delft University of Technology
Integrated Language Definition Testing, example slide.
Integrated Language Definition Testing, example slide.
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John McCarthy Died

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John McCarthy, Turing Award winner and one of the luminaries of computer science, died yesterday. I’ve spent the evening after the SPLASH Educators’ Symposium listening to McCarthy’s OOPSLA 2007 keynote speech (mp3).

Dick Gabriel introducing Stanford professor McCarthy's keynote at OOPSLA'07 in Montreal
Dick Gabriel introducing Stanford professor McCarthy's keynote at OOPSLA'07 in Montreal

John McCarthy was one of the earliest collaborators of my doctoral advisor, Robert “Corky” Cartwright. They worked on first-order programming logic in 1978 (Recursive programs as functions in a first order theory) and 1979 (First order programming logic).

McCarthy was on Corky’s committee. In Germany, the doctoral advisor is called “Doktorvater”, doctor father. If I haven’t quite lost a doctoral grandfather, I have at least lost a doctoral granduncle.

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It’s Not Warm on Mt. Rainier

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I wanted to check if I could squeeze another weekend of camping in this year, so I went to weather.com and typed in Mt. Rainier. It looked great: 23 Celsius on Saturday (73 Fahrenheit).

Mt. Rainier Weather
Mt. Rainier Weather

That did seem a bit odd, though, considering the temperature is hovering between 10 C (50 F) and 17 C (63 F) in Seattle. It turns out, that weather is for Mt. Rainier, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC. In Mt. Rainier National Park, WA, it’s snowing:

Mt. Rainier National Park Weather
Mt. Rainier National Park Weather

Oops.

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