Stuff that doesn’t quite fit anywhere else.
Apologies for the downtime yesterday — my host decided to move me from one machine to another, more powerful machine. But they literally gave me no notice. I got the email telling me about it after the site was already unavailable to me! As a result I wasn’t able to warn anyone or put up any redirectors or anything.
Service seems to be back to normal, so we’ll see.
(Above, a photo of Ensenada’s harbor, with cruise ships docked, in the persistent light fog that is shrouding all of SoCal and Baja lately — you can click on it to get a larger image).
Yesterday I gave a magistral conference at CICOMP ’07, in Ensenada, Mexico. This was my first time to Mexico, first time driving through Tijuana, seeing Baja California, etc.
The talk was basically a reworking, in Spanish, of material from other talks centered on A Theory of Fun and game grammar. Given the audience of mostly compsci students, it was mostly new to them. It was fun giving a talk in Spanish — it’s been well over a decade since I had reason to speak the language regularly. I only had to fumble for words a few times.
I have many observations about the experience overall:
This was invaluable, as was this.
And everything looks fine. The filter from the air conditioner was truly horrendous, nearly solid charcoal colored. Here’s some pics from the way back. Click on any of them to get larger versions…
This is what the smoke is looking like over the southern LA area. It was like this in Anaheim (where even the mighty big hotel AC systems couldn’t combat the smell of smoke), and pretty much all the way down to San Juan Capistrano.
