Moving to Wordpress

I've made the jump to Wordpress, so now the new and improved bylog can be found here.

Istanbul, Briefly

Amy and I recently went to Istanbul so I could present a paper at Privacy in Statistical Databases 2008. The following is a short summary of our trip.

Smoking, cats, and yellow taxis are ubiquitous in this city. Refrigeration, ipods, and trash cans are not. We would wake up in the morning exhausted, which I would like to attribute to jetlag. The food was good, though not great; I enjoyed most of what I tried, including the ice cream, pizza, and Kebap and excluding the cold seasoned-rice-in-a-mussel thing at the fancy dinner accompanying our cruise up and down the Bosphorus. The old churches and mosques made me shake my head in wonder, and some of the ancient artifacts in the archaeology museum still have me shaking my head. We explored the city and walked on two continents in weather that was by turns pleasant, blustery, and drizzly. They call the largest bazaar the Grand Bazaar, but the grandest in my opinion was the Spice Bazaar, the name of which evokes thoughts of exotic far eastern sights and smells. It lived up to its name. In addition, I managed to make my presentation without any results too disastrous and feel more informed for being at the conference.

The More You Know

You just gotta love PhD Comics. They describe the truth of a graduate student's life so well.

I still haven't made a significant move to make my new blog. I'm paralyzed because I haven't quite decided if I want to buy my own domain or not.

This intermittent posting is for the birds. By the end of August I hope to have a new home on the web for the bylog and a renewed commitment to blogging. There's no guarantee, but I can see it in my mind's eye.

I Will Really Be Here

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the sun does not appear,
I will be here.
If in the dark we lose sight of love, hold my hand and have no fear.
I will be here.

I will be here, and you can cry on my shoulder;
When the mirror tells us we're older I will hold you
And I will be here, to watch you grow in beauty
And tell you all the things you are to me
We'll be together.
'Cause I will be here.

Tomorrow morning if you wake up and the future is unclear,
I will be here.
As sure as seasons are made for change, our lifetimes are made for years.
I will be here.

I will be true to the promise I have made
To you and to the One Who gave you to me.
I will be here.

A little while ago, Amy and I sang a Steven Curtis Chapman song (the partial lyrics of which are above) at a wedding. It was fun, and the song says some really nice things about commitment between a man and a woman, doesn't it?

A little while later we sang it again, this time in the living room of a man and woman, the latter being just out of the hospital after brain surgery to remove a potentially deadly tumor. And this isn't just any man and woman; these are Amy's parents. Now the song isn't just nice; now it grips your heart and makes you really think about waking up to a sunless world, about crying on the shoulder of that one to whom you've committed your suddenly tenuous life.

I haven't much thought about music in this way since Tom went through a time of draining sickness, how that music put to words aren't just empty platitudes when someone is lying on a bed wasting away, not just another pretty melody when you woke up this morning beside your wife and the future was, actually, unclear.

People don't usually speak in poetry, and thus this is one of the great powers of music it seems, to say things that you might not otherwise say, and in a way that you never could.

I love you mom (both of you).

YouTube

Just a couple of YouTube videos that I think are hilarious.

Laughing baby. This is the 10th most viewed video on YouTube all time.

Frozen Grand Central. People just stop moving on cue in the middle of Grand Central Station.

My First Citation

I hope this isn't too self-aggrandizing, but I got my first citation!

Ok, so I wasn't the first author on this paper, and it was something I did as an undergrad which has little-to-nothing to do with what I do now, but it's still exciting.