Graphing
Never again will I force myself to use
gnuplot!
Never again will I have to edit the EPS output by hand to get the graph looking just right!
I have at last got a satisfactory ocaml graphing solution. Well satisfactory in the sense that it has drawn one graph for me so far:
The red/pink line is my heart-rate during my previous run (about 5 days ago... far too long a gap) and the blue line is the measured rate during this morning's run. The first major drop after about 30mins is when I stopped running and started resting. I notice that my HR dropped to a plateau at about 120bpm last time but not this time. I don't really know why although it could be linked to the weather -- today was beautifully fresh while 5 days ago it was pretty hot and humid.
Now to make the graph plot data in real-time from simulations. Did I mention that it uses
OpenGL
under
ocaml
via
lablgl
- all pretty fantastic tools.
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Visit to NYC
John, Michael and I popped into NYC to do the standard tourist thing. Everything went pretty smoothly apart from the odd hiccup... missing our train in the morning (just had to have another coffee), taking the wrong subway (could have sworn it said "uptown") and walking in the wrong direction (next time perhaps we should bring a compass as Michael suggested).
We went first to the Empire State Building where we saw -- and participated in -- the worlds longest queue (TM). Rumour has it that the
Petronas towers
in Kuala-Lumpur has a longer one but I frankly don't believe it. From the 86th floor (just below the "dirigible mooring mast" -- alas there were no airships going up today so we had to take the boring old lift) we got a pretty cool view of Manhattan:
It's a bit unfortunate they have to put up such a big fence to prevent people jumping/falling off.. it really obscures the view.
Also from the top you can see the World's largest department store (Macy's) and the World's most green island statue (the Statue of Liberty):
Next on our tour of Manhattan we headed south to check out the financial district and the site of the World Trade Center. I was quite impressed that they'd repaired the site's transport links -- the PATH station was functioning normally. It was also interesting to see quite a lot of damage to nearby buildings still remained after all this time.
While waiting for Donald Trump to give his approval for the plans to redevelop the site into some kind of memorial, there is an official set of memorial plaques as well as copious unofficial memorials from members of the public:
Next we headed further south to Battery park where we took a "sea taxi" out to have a close-up look at Liberty island:
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Memorial Day Parade
The Memorial Day Parade went by the office window this morning so I nipped outside into the sunshine to take some photos. Unfortunately I missed the guys with bagpipes at the beginning... the whole thing took me a bit by surprise because I thought it wasn't scheduled to start until after lunch. The parade itself consisted of a varied bunch of people from members of the military, firefighters, ambulancemen, people in historical costumes and boy scouts. In between the groups of people and the bands were a selection of interesting vehicles:
Some pictures of the marching people:
Naturally I took some video snippets... unfortunately they're in a mixture of different formats -- sorry if none of them work for you.
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Back in Princeton for the summer
I flew back to the US on monday and am here for the rest of the summer, until
september 3rd. I left Eleanor my laptop + isight + usb headset and we managed to get video-chatting working using iChat over her new broadband connection -- very cool. It doesn't seem to use a great deal of bandwidth... according to ethereal:
packets/sec
bytes/sec
So even though she's on the smallest NTL broadband package which has a monthly bandwidth cap of 3GB, she should be able to run a 30kB/sec video chat for about 30hours continuously before reaching the limit.
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The folly of monorails
I used to be a big
fan of monorails
... but no more! I took the train from Princeton to Newark airport on sunday evening on my way back to Cambridge. When the train arrived at the airport I wandered up the escalator to the "airtrain" monorail terminal and discovered that it was full of very angry people. I'd have taken some pictures of the events but I feared that I might become a victim of "airtrain rage" rage myself. Unfortunately the monorail had (partially) broken stranding the passengers at the terminal. Even more unfortunately the terminal is probably only 1 mile from the airport itself but it's not possible to walk or drive from there-- the only access to the building is via regular train and monorail. A lot of very angry people missed their flights and were taking out some of their agression verbally on the "airtrain" staff, who didn't seem to know what was going on.
Luckily for me I left plenty of time (5hrs or so) to get on my flight so I was fine. After a total outage of about 1.5hrs the system was working well enough to ship people to the parking lot, from where they could walk to all the terminals.
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Gratuituous hardware pictures
More fiddling with my new camera:
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Monorail, Monorail!
I was pleased to see that Newark airport has a monorail system. Always makes me think of the Simpsons...
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New Office
My new office over in Princeton is coming along nicely. Sandy put together a bunch of bookcases and attached a notice board to the wall. This is the last time the room will look tidy; it'll soon have my junk all over it:
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Just to taunt Anil
Here is a picture of a plate of singapore rice noodles (with chicken) from Tiger Noodles, Anil's favourite. It was pretty good!
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Glass of champagne at Tiffany's?
Since we were passing, we popped into Tiffany's and bought this engagement ring:
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(sorry photo is a bit out of focus)
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I knew I should have bought a decent camera on this trip :)
After we bought the ring the nice people at Tiffany's gave us some champagne:
It's not every day you get to write this kind of blog entry. Wow.
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Visiting New York
We braved the winter weather to visit New York over the weekend...
Since we were on 5th avenue, we popped into the Trump tower looking for some icecream -- as you do when the outside temperature is well below freezing:
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Mmmmm icecream
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I have no idea what this is supposed to be
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Finally arrived!
We finally arrived on monday after a fairly bumpy flight. Although it's cold it's certainly pretty:
Not even Tiger Noodles escaped the deluge of snow:
The hotel (Nassau Inn) is very nice and in an excellent location. What impressed me most was the flower they managed to make out of tissues:
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Flight cancelled, due to snow
When Eleanor and I got to Heathrow on saturday we found out pretty quickly that -- due to lots and lots of snow -- many of the airports on the US east coast had closed. Fortunately for us we found out while we were still on the ground (anything beats being diverted to Atlanta).
BA offered us a selection of alternative flights but the only one that wasn't either (i) too early in the morning or; (ii) destined for JFK was on monday afternoon so we decided to start our holiday early in London. Happily the weather was good:
Alas the London eye was closed for maintenance so we couldn't actually ride it:
The famous anti-war protester was still camping out in Parliament square:
There are certainly lots of statues in London:
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