The Blogg

Although no one cares, I’ve been blogging about my fantasy football drafts over the previous two years, so I suppose I should do the same. Fellow pigskin prognosticator Ryan has already provided his analysis of the first draft here

In the long-running HT Fantasy Football league, I pulled draft position 8/12 this year. (12/12 in 2007, 9/12 in 2006, 6/10 in 2005. Seriously?) The first five picks went with the undisputed best 5 RBs in the game, then Tom Brady, then the player I was hoping to get, Marion Barber. I could have taken Marshawn Lynch, but the Bills are just so bad. I could have taken Frank Gore, but I’ve never been a fan. Last year he had a dismal 6 TDs, and almost as many fumbles (4). I could have taken Ryan Grant (great player, but the contract holdout scares me) or Clinton Portis (can he stay healthy?). Seeing none of those options palatable, I bit the bullet and selected wide receiver Randy Moss. Sure, he is coming off of a fantastic year (1493 yards, 23 TDs), but there is no way that will be repeated. Given Moss’s attitude problems in Oakland, I am very afraid that if things do not go his way from the beginning the entire season may be in the toilet.

I needed to take a running back in the second, and those mentioned above, plus Maurice Jones-Drew were gone. I’m not a Laurence Maroney fan, and every potentially great back left had issues — Larry Johnson was one of the very best for years but was terrible last season, Jamal Lewis screwed me a few years ago, Brandon Jacobs can’t stay on the field, Michael Turner has never been tested as a starter, Willie Parker can’t find the endzone and has new competition from a rookie, and Reggie Bush catches the ball well but can’t seem to take it up the middle. I followed conventional wisdom and took Johnson, but I have no confidence in him.

In the third I was able to get my second starting running back, Reggie Bush. He is certainly not great, but this was one pick that I did not have to think very hard about.

In the fourth I would have considered an exceptional QB, but Brady, Manning, Romo, Brees, Anderson, and Palmer were all already gone. Those remaining were mediocre enough to wait for. If there were a really good RB left I would have jumped at the chance to fill my flex spot, but none of Kevin Smith, Selvin Young, Thomas Jones, Edgerrin James, or the others seemed worth it. It looked like the right time to fill my second receiver slot, and the highly rated ones still on the board were Anquan Boldin (contract dispute, bad attitude), Chad Johnson (same), Wes Welker (very good, but I already had a Patriots receiver), Marvin Harrison (old and recently injured), and Roy Williams (pretty good). Williams looks like the best choice, but I went with his teammate Calvin Johnson. Why? As a rookie last year Johnson had 90% of Williams’s yardage and scored 80% as many touchdowns. If he has the prototypical “leap” that second-year receivers are supposed to have, it would not surprise me if the totals were reversed this season.

In the fifth I was able to fill my flex spot with one of few remaining definite starters at RB - Matt Forte. He is young and untested, but he has to be better than Cedric Benson, right?

At this point I realized a fairly significant blunder — both of my WRs had the same bye week. I would have liked to take a top-tier TE or perhaps a backup RB in the sixth round, but I decided I needed to shore up my WR depth for that week. I passed on picking up one of the revitalized Jets receivers to take Roddy White, a decision that I may well rue. To put up 1200 yards on such an atrocious team as the Falcons were last year you have to good, right?

With my RB/WR house in order, I took a talented but underused TE in the seventh: Vernon Davis. In the eighth I got my second WR for week 4, Santana Moss. With Jason Campbell back under center, I think he should have a very good year. The selection of quality QBs was looking awfully thin by the 9th, so I invested in the sometimes good Jake Delhomme.

At this point I had to attend to another matter, so the autopicker selected the Pittsburgh defense, kicker Adam Vinatieri, tight end Owen Daniels, and quarterback Jason Campbell for me. I returned in time to snag a marginal journeyman WR, Darrell Jackson, and the handcuff to my questionable starting RB, Colby Smith.

Overall, I cannot say that I really like my team, but there are few places where I wish I had made a different decision. I would say my best pick was Matt Forte in the 5th; he has tremendous potential for a player taken that late. Of course, he may also turn out to be a dud. My worst pick was Calvin Johnson in the 4th, not because it was too early for him, but because of the way it tied my hands later in the draft.

As for the other teams: Best pick by Manzo was RB Ray Rice in the 10th. The way McGahee is playing, Rice has a good chance of being the starter before the season is over. Worst pick by Manzo was kicker Nick Folk in the 9th. Best pick by Dave was WR Muhsin Muhammad in the 14th. Now that he has escaped “where wide receivers go to die”, he may have a surprising season. Worst pick by Dave was WR DeSean Jackson in the 7th. He won’t be getting many reps on offense this year unless Curtis’s injury drags on longer than expected or he really shows up Reggie Brown. Best pick by Regina was RB Brian Westbrook in the 1st over unhappy and unpracticed Steven Jackson. Worst pick by Regina was kicker Rob Bironas in the 12th. Best pick by Andy was WR Chris Chambers in the 7th, who should enjoy a renaissance in his first full year as a Charger. Worst pick by Andy was QB Marc Bulger in the 8th. I am very suspicious of Bulger, and Andy already had a good QB. Best pick by Lisa was QB Kurt Warner in the 13th. If he can keep his hold on the starting job, he should be a very nice backup to Brady for her. Worst pick by Lisa was Anquan Boldin in the 4th. I don’t trust a guy who so hates his team and coach. Best pick by Mark was Marion Barber in the 1st (damn you!). Worst pick by Mark was RB Kevin Smith in the 4th. Denver coach Mike Shanahan never seems to keep a starting RB for more than a few games. Best pick by Kevin was WR Patrick Crayton in the 10th. Worst pick by Kevin was Rudi Johnson in the 6th. I don’t know if he’ll even be a Bengal for very long. Best pick by Ryan was RB Ahmad Bradshaw in the 10th. He will get carries, and starter Jacobs has been injured frequently. Worst pick by Ryan was RB Ronnie Brown in the 7th, although it will look like genius if Ricky Williams can’t stay off the reefer. Best pick by Marr was RB Jerious Norwood in the 11th. Atlanta’s new coach should be more willing to use him than slimy Bobby Petrino. Worst pick by Marr was the New York Giants in the 10th, which will be anemic without Strahan or Umenyiora. Best pick by Kurt was RB Darren McFadden in the 4th. He had many worst picks, and seemed not to care at times.

The second league this year is one in which you can keep players on your roster at the end of the season by forfeiting a draft pick from the round before where he was taken in the previous year. My ship finally came in, and I was given the 1st draft position out of 10. As a result, I got a team that I feel very good about for this year and the next several. I started by spurning the player likely to put up the most points this year, RB LaDanian Tomlinson, in favor of the much younger RB Adrian Peterson. He should be very good this year and, while nothing is guaranteed in football, has a chance to continue dominating for much of the next decade. During the rest of the draft I took RB Maurice Jones-Drew, WR Marques Colston, WR Santonio Holmes, QB Carson Palmer, RB Rashard Mendenhall, TE Dallas Clark, RB Chester Taylor, RB Ray Rice, WR Patrick Crayton, RB Ahmad Bradshaw, QB Philip Rivers, WR DeSean Jackson, TE Tony Scheffler, WR Sidney Rice, the Arizona defense, RB Andre Hall, and kicker Jeff Reed. That’s an average of 24.9 years old for my likely starters (excluding the kicker), and most of my backups are below that threshold. In spite of drafting for future years, I think I got a very good team for this year. My best pick would be young star WR Santonio Holmes in the 4th. My worst pick was probably Rashard Mendenhall in the 6th. He is going to be a good player in this league, but I took him too early. What is worse is that I could have safely made him my 7th round pick and thus given up less to keep him next year, but did not think of this consequence of picking on the turn.

By the way, there are players and other people who will say that fantasy football is ruining the sport. I could not disagree more. While I was a fan of the Eagles for some time before I started participating in fantasy, I am now familiar with the skill players on most teams, and will watch and care about the full slate of games that I can get live every week. What amazes me is that fantasy mostly appeals to people who are both sports fans and nerds, a group that I would expect to be very small. In contrast, the game is actually ridiculously popular.

Today’s newspaper included an article titled “SAT scores steady for 2008 grads; participation rises”. I would link to the electronic version, but it is slightly different and does not include the parts that are relevant to this discussion. (The same thing was true in my last entry, and I have noticed it other times as well. Can anyone explain why the online and print versions of articles would not be identical?)

Anyway, the article contained two choice quotes from Gaston Caperton, current president of the College Board. The first was “It’s essential that all students strive to attend college — and then succeed in their classes and, ultimately, graduate.” The second, “We’re gratified to see that our country is moving increasingly toward being a nation of college graduates.”

On it’s face, this sounds like a reasonable sentiment. Certainly it is a positive that colleges are becoming more diverse and that potential students that would in years past have been unable to advance their education for financial reasons are now earning advanced degrees. In fact, it is good that college admissions agents are recognizing that the playing field is not level, and that applicants with less than stellar records but exceptional circumstances may be excellent students. The problem is with the attitude that all young adults, regardless of aspirations or aptitude, should attend college.

Simply put, a student who is neither interested in nor prepared for academic rigor has no business in higher education, and their presence there pulls the entire system down. College is not a second high school, a place to receive vocational training, or a 4-year vacation. Most schools are happy to report ever increasing credentials of their incoming classes, yet actual capabilities seem to be in the middle of a long, slow decline. University administrators (and the College Board, naturally) have every incentive to increase their enrollment as long as they can claim that quality is not decreasing. They need to keep their graduation rates high, so professors are pressured to make their courses easy. The result is that students who really want to learn must do so on their own, and they end up primarily paying for a piece of paper that, with lowering standards, does not say much about their capabilities.

With a healthy dose of luck I will be teaching in two years, and I am not looking forward to trying to avoid leaving any “children” behind without in the process leaving them all behind where they should be. I have already had one experience teaching, and at the time I definitely catered too much to the students who were not well prepared, to the detriment of those that were.

Please note that I am not saying that a college education should be denied to anyone who actually cares, and who has done the work necessary to be capable of properly participating in their courses. My complaint is with the people that go to college simply because it is the thing people in their social group do at that age, and with someone irresponsibly encouraging this behavior.

I have been a subscriber to the Lehigh Valley’s dominant daily newspaper, The Morning Call, for a little more than two years. It is not a fantastic paper, but has generally done a good job of covering local and state news, passing along national and international news from the AP, and providing entertaining commentary on laws, news, and sports. Their primary columnists, Bill White and Paul Carpenter are worth the price of admission themselves. However, things have not been going well recently.

On July 21 the newspaper announced the closing of several of its regional offices and lay-offs of 35-40 of its then 166 newsroom positions to offset a significant loss in advertising revenue. At roughly the same time, they raised their subscription rates for 13 weeks of 7-day delivery from $55.25 to $60.97. Because I had already been thinking that both the money spent on my subscription and the time spent reading the paper each day could be used more wisely, I called the Call’s customer service with the intention of dropping my subscription to only the Saturday and Sunday copies at a price of $29.25. I really like having a physical product that I can take wherever I am going and read, but getting my news online would not have been a great privation.

When I called and explained the reasons for my decision, however, I was offered the same service that I had been receiving at the bargain price of $40.00, locked in for 2 years. Not being one who can deny a good deal, I accepted. Unfortunately, I have noticed a significant drop in quality, particularly in the copyediting department. I do not know exactly what policies are common in the newspaper business, but I would hope that someone who has not previously seen or worked on any of the content would read the entire proof before it is sent to the printer. If this is not the case, many embarrassing gaffes could be prevented by a single additional salaried position that requires little beyond a moderate reading comprehension level and attention to detail.

Consider today’s Sunday newspaper, in which I found the following glaring errors:

• The article Allentown mayor weighs trash station plan contains two errors, one grammatical and the other presumably typographical. First, “… into cubes for more cleaner, more efficient transportation …” and later “Pawlowski said is aware …”. As of 10:44 on Aug 17, these errors persist in the online version.
• The article Two old McCain lawsuits come to light changes font in the middle of the article. Obviously this is not visible in the online version. In fact, the article I have linked does not have the same title or exactly the same content as the print version.
• The new Point / Counterpoint section of the opinion page (strangely not on the Morning Call website) had an article attributed to “Ed Perry” that started “Turzai, 49, is a state representative …”. The opposing viewpoint was attributed to the same person mentioned at the top of his column.
• I was not keeping track at the time that I found it, but there was another article containing a repeated word (e.g., “John said said that Jane …”).

It is unrealistic to hold the newspaper to a standard of no errors, but this is ridiculous. Considering that I only read approximately half of the articles, either the errors are fortuitously skewed toward those that I find interesting or there are others still waiting to be found. If this continues, even $40 may not be a reasonable investment.

On Tuesday I saw The Deb Callahan Band, a blues quartet (vocals, guitar, bass, drums) from Philadelphia. They were enjoyable, but inferior to the similar Sarah Ayers Band across the board. Afterward was Lil’ Ed & The Blues Imperials from Chicago. Lil’ Ed plays slide guitar and sings, his brother plays bass, and he has a drummer and a second guitarist who also sings lead on a few songs. Lil’ Ed is not quite the vocalist that Frank Bey is, nor can he match the intensity of Tommy Castro’s guitar work. (To be fair, I’ve never been a big fan of slide players.) However, he and his band put on a good, entertaining show. I believe this is the first time I have seen someone seriously playing a bass using only the tip of his thumb to pluck the strings. As befits this suboptimal technique, his playing was adequate but in no way remarkable. After being told they could play one song as an encore, the band decided to play two. In response, the festival cut power to the mains at 11:00 sharp. (When you’ve been successfully running a festival in the middle of a city for 25 years, I guess you have to take your commitments to the city pretty seriously.) The band kept playing, and you can hear just the sound of the monitors and amplifiers on stage for part of the last song.

I had a ticket to see Earth, Wind, & Fire on Wednesday night. On Tuesday afternoon I had the following conversation with my wife. Rachel: “Do you need this receipt for your Boston tickets?” Me: “No” Shredder: “Whirr Crunch Grind” Me: “… but I do not my ticket for tomorrow night” Rachel: “Your what?” Fortunately, the actual receipt remained intact, and for a $5 reprinting fee the box office was willing to replace my ticket. Quite a generous policy, since I could have just given it to someone else.

This time I arrived plenty early and got a spot at the very front of the plebe section, in hopes that I would be better able to hear the band over the excitement of the crowd. For a while that worked, but about a half hour in a very intoxicated, very loud woman moved up beside me. She proceeded to talk, yell, and whistle her way through the concert. It would have been bad enough if she was someone dragged along by a friend, but she seemed to know the lyrics to every song. If it was not quite clear enough how much of a jerk she was, for the encore her party decoupled the barrier separating our section from the more expensive seats closer to stage and ran through. As I was leaving the show I was amazed by the volume of litter people left behind; the entire field was covered in trash. Not a good night for my opinion of humanity.

Fortunately, the concert itself was quite good. The band is still very tight and Philip Bailey’s voice is simply extraordinary. What impressed me most about the show is that they really stretched out. I would estimate that at least a third of the concert was, or at least appeared to be, improvisational solos. There are not many headlining bands that would have the nerve to do that, nor many audiences that would put up with it. Of course, they also played through all of the hits that I wanted to hear, including “Shining Star”, “In The Stone”, “September”, and “After The Love Is Gone”.

My Thursday evening started at Americaplatz with Last Waltz Ensemble, a tribute to Bob Dylan & The Band. If I am going to listen to this music I would rather that Dylan were singing it, but they also did a good show. Next up was Ryan Shaw, a powerful young soul singer with a rocking band. I try to avoid watching American Idol at any cost, but I think this guy would fit right in there. His guitarist supported the melody well without getting in the way and impressed when featured. His bassist was truly exceptional, adding a very funky undertone to the music and playing a solo that could be “Portrait Of Tracy” for a new generation.

On Friday I saw Fusion Jazz Trio, which consisted of a drummer, bassist, and keyboard player. Their music drifted into the wasteland of “smooth jazz” a few times, but was mostly good, straight-ahead jazz-rock fusion. The most interesting part of the show was the bassist playing entirely with his fretting hand for a few bars while kneeling and shaking hands with a very young fan. Then I moved on to Americaplatz to see The Difference, corporate band of Air Products, inc. and, according to the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, the best corporate band in America as of 2001. They did a set of mostly classic rock covers well executed. My night ended at Festplatz, where Mingo Fishtrap, an 8-piece funk band from Texas. They were also quite good, and filled the dance floor to capacity.

Saturday started with Eric Steckel & CTB at Americaplatz, continued with Todd Wolfe at Americaplatz, and then Eric Steckel & CTB again at Liederplatz. Todd Wolfe and his band played a very psychedelic blues-rock that was ok but not my thing, and you could hardly hear his keyboard player. I did not pay close attention to the first Eric Steckel show, but was front and center for the second. The place was so packed that I was lucky to have found any seat; I only did so because a couple with a baby decided to leave. I was quite disappointed that the first hour of the second show was exactly the same setlist as the first show. Surely they have enough material to have put on 3 hours of unique music. At 18 years old, Eric is at least as good as I remembered him, and Craig Thatcher was thoroughly enjoying playing along with his former student. In fact, he was much more animated for this show than he had been fronting his own band a few days earlier. If you like good rocking blues music with some excessive guitar histrionics, you should really check this kid out.

On the last day of the festival I checked out the Sensational Soul Cruisers at a very wet and rainy Americaplatz. In addition to a full Motown-style band, the Soul Cruisers has four lead vocalists. While not quite what I was expecting, they were very polished. They had been scheduled for two sets with a half hour break in between, and while lightning caused an early closure of the stage, they were able to revise the schedule to play for nearly as long as originally intended. I then made my way over to Volksplatz to see the Blues Brotherhood, the local tribute to the Blues Brothers band and movie. I’ve seen them before, and they continue to be a competent but not fantastic band held together by good choreography and banter by “Jake” and “Elwood”. We made it to the Volksplatz trolley stop by 10:50, but at 11:20 no trolley had arrived and we began the long walk across the river.

For the second year in a row, I had a fantastic time at the festival for very little money. I’ve seen a lot of criticism of Musikfest in the newspaper and local blogs recently, but I have almost all positive things to say about it. I am very lucky indeed to have such a mostly free event so close to home. Now, to try to catch up on all the work I did not do during the last 10 days …

After spending part of nearly every day at Musikfest last year, hearing some great music, and eating some delicious, overpriced food, I had every intention of doing the same this year. So far I have been successful, although I’ve been arriving later than originally planned and trying to keep my concession purchases to a minimum.

On Sunday I went to Americaplatz in time to hear the Sarah Ayers Band (Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Drums). I had seen the band last year and gave them a fairly lukewarm review. I do not know if the change was in their personnel, their philosophy, or my tastes, but this year I thought they were excellent. Sarah has a powerful voice that is equally effective clear and pretty or raspy, but this I already knew. She had a great rhythm guitarist who put a psychedelic vibe over everything, although he was not an incredibly flashy lead player. It would probably be as accurate to say he plays the wah-wah pedal as to say he plays the guitar. Her bassist was also quite talented, and had a great growling tone that I would love to emulate. They played mostly well-written original tunes.

Next up was the great Tommy Castro Band, 5-piece (Vocals / Guitar, Tenor Saxophone, Trumpet, Bass, Drums) blues / rock / soul band that recently won Contemporary Blues Album of the Year at the Blues Music Awards (formerly the W. C. Handy awards). As anticipated, they blew me away. It took a couple of songs before they got the mix right, and even then I would have preferred a bit more of the bass and vocals, but it was close enough. They played a bit more than an hour and a half, with interruptions for a 15-minute break and replacement of a busted snare drum. Castro’s guitar playing is hot, and he knows how to work a crowd, but I find his vocal stylings to be just good enough. The rest of the band are good musicians who mostly stay in the background, as would be expected of professionals backing one of the biggest touring performers in the genre.

On Saturday I went back to see the last half hour or so of B C & The Blues Crew, another band that I recalled as being mediocre. In this case, my opinion has not changed in a year, although they did a nice stripped-down version of “Tequila Sunrise”. I was really at Banana Island to see Geoff Achison & The Souldiggers. Geoff may be the most unique guitarist I have ever heard. He started out doing
some remarkable things on acoustic guitar, a bit like Michael Hedges, and then continued these crazy techniques on electric as well. I can remember seeing the following things: detuning the instrument while playing it, lots of harmonics, slapping and tapping, pushing down on the strings behind the nut, varying picking from right beside the bridge to over the fretboard, and picking while simultaneously and continuously adjusting the volume and tone knobs on his guitar. Apparently he came up with these techniques while trying to imitate sounds heard on records but without knowledge of effects. Some may say that his playing depends
too much on gimmicks, but I found it all quite musical and entertaining.

It seems that Achison is old-school, and “The Souldiggers” consists of whatever session musicians he has hired to back him in the region where he is currently playing. In this case, he had previously played with drummer Chris Pagano and bassist Evan Wagner a few times 6 months earlier, but then did this gig after a brief rehearsal that afternoon. Given that, the two were consummate professionals. They kept firmly in the pocket through a set of unusual and challenging material that was practically unknown to them. At times, you can even hear Geoff yelling out the next chord to them as he is apparently improvising an ending. Unfortunately, the bass was mixed rather low. They played mostly originals with a few covers that had been significantly re-arranged. Although the music was steeped in the blues, the cliche that it “defies categorization” applies well. Songs were generally long and composed of multiple sections and guitar soundscapes.

On Sunday I went to Liederplatz for Frank Bey & The Swing City Blues Band. Frank Bey is quite a vocalist, and would be worth the price of admission to see even if it were not, as in this case, free. His backing band of BGVs / Tambourine, Saxophones, Trumpet, Keyboards, Guitar, Bass, and Drums were good bug not great, which is reasonable for a regional cover band. The keyboards were way too loud in comparison to the other instruments, and the keyboard player kept using awful patches like spacey bells. Give me a simple electric piano or organ sound any day. Like most of the other performers I’ve seen so far they were labeled as blues, but their music branched out quite a bit into soul, rhythm & blues, and other musical styles. They did not really swing much at all, so that part of the name seems a bit disingenuous. An abnormally large percentage of their setlist seemed to be in 6/8 time. Overall, a very enjoyable performance.

On Monday I made it to Americaplatz in time to hear just two songs from The Mayor & His Cabinet, a classic rock cover band fronted by former mayor of Bethlehem and current executive of Lehigh County Don Cunningham. They are not great, but they put on a decent show. Afterwards was Craig Thatcher & Friends, a regional band playing blues and classic rock. Thatcher himself plays guitar and sings lead vocals, while his friends handle Saxophones / Harmonica, Keyboards, Bass, Percussion, and Drums. The band is remarkably good, and I would like to see more of them. The last part of their set that I was able to see was a series of covers from the career of Eric Clapton, which were spot-on. The band sometimes does shows that are all Clapton tunes, and Thatcher himself even looks quite a bit like Clapton from a few years ago. Unfortunately, I had to leave in the middle of “Layla” to make it to the ticketed Boston show.

We (my father and I) had to wait in line to get into River Place to have our bagged folding chairs and my backpack checked. Annoying, but not a significant problem until my turn came up. I was told that I would not be allowed to bring my 4 D-cell Maglite into the concert venue. If you do not know the area, it would have been impossible for me to take it back to where I had parked without missing half of the concert. On the advice of my father I hid it in some bushes, but had little faith that it would be there when we returned. Remarkably, no one had taken it. When I returned I thought I was about to be removed from the line again as the security guard felt all through my bag. Strangely, he acknowledged that I had a camera but left me through in spite of the “NO CAMERAS” signs where tickets were being collected. Thankfully, my digital recorder was in a pocket, which apparently do not get checked.

I am guessing the reason my flashlight was deemed objectionable is that it could be used as a weapon. Indeed, I carry it because in addition to light it also provides a deterrent to any would-be muggers roaming the streets of south Bethlehem. But why should they care to keep weapons out of this one venue while leaving the others alone? Much more seriously, they must be aware that much more dangerous weapons could be, and probably were, smuggled in. Anyone could have carried a knife or small handgun on their person and no one would have blinked an eye at them. Given the sheer number of people involved, it is a virtual certainty that there were dozens of pocketknives on the premises. Finally, if they are going to prevent people from bringing in articles from an unpublished list of contraband items, the least they could do is hire one more person to work as a claim checker, taking things that need to be left outside, labeling them, giving their owner a unique tag, and at the end of the show redeeming those tags for the confiscated items.

The concert started rather strangely. As we were walking in the keyboard player was riffing on “Smoke On The Water”, presumably as part of a sound-check or warm-up. When he finished a guitarist started playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” ala Hendrix, and halfway through the band joined him and it became the first song of the set. Impressively, the band was able to faithfully reproduce live the songs meticulously crafted in the studio 30 years ago. They played through all of the hits you would expect to hear and some deeper cuts from their back catalog, and sounded good. Notably, the guy they apparently found through youtube does indeed sound just like Brad Delp.

I had one problem with the concert, besides my treatment at entry: it was not loud enough. I am not one that requires ear-splitting to be satisfied, but when you are at a rock concert and the yelling and clapping of the people around you can almost completely overpower the music, something is terribly wrong. I do not remember having this problem last year, but there were not nearly as many people at those shows. I realize they probably cannot boost the levels of the speakers hanging off the stage without making the expensive seats unusable, but a second sound tower for those of us sitting in the way, way back would not be too much to ask.

For those readers who know me personally, contact me if you are interested in recordings of the Tommy Castro Band, Geoff Achison & The Souldiggers, Frank Bey & The Swing City Blues Band, Craig Thatcher & Friends, or Boston. If you do not know me, get an account on Dime-A-Dozen and wait patiently for me to seed them there.

You know what’s annoying? When you know that you are a hair’s breadth away from sneezing, but it won’t actually happen until you let your guard down. Of course, that’s not the only thing. I am also annoyed by continuous draining of the sinuses through the nose, the ever-present mild headache that results from sinus pressure, that raw burning in the back of your throat, the asthma-like symptoms that I get with an infection, the dry, cracked lips that result from dehydration, general exhaustion, shivering in an 80 degree climate, and the fact that by this time tomorrow or the next day I won’t be able to lay down flat without causing an uncontrollable coughing fit.

Yep, my ever-frail self has a cold again. At times, it boggles my mind that with all of our advanced technology and culture, we are still basically helpless against these viruses. Sure, we have medicines designed to make the symptoms less severe, but recent studies have shown that, at least in young children, they are no more effective than placebo. Because of my inherent distrust for pharmaceuticals, I probably have a reverse-placebo effect: if I think I have been medicated, I start to feel worse. Others will claim that super-high doses of Vitamin C or other herbal remedies are effective, but the science seems to indicate otherwise. Basically, our immune system gets no help from modern man.

Thankfully, the only thing that I *needed* to do this week was today, so I can spend the next two days sleeping as much as possible and wiling away the miserable hours when I cannot. I am quite aware that I am a pathetic sick person, and that many people go about their lives relatively unchanged while suffering from the common cold or much worse. I know that I am lucky to have this disease over others; I haven’t had serious gastroenteritis in 7 years, and I’d take a week of the cold over a day of that. If I were to ever contract a *real* illness, the kind that other people manage regularly, I would probably see how petty my complaints are. But that doesn’t make it easier.

About this time two years ago I wrote a post about my frustration with Broderick Bunkley and other professional athletes and agents who act like children when it comes to their compensation. Sure enough, Bunkley was basically useless that year, primarily because he chose to not report for training camp on time. He had a good season in 2007-2008, but I am sure he would re-do his rookie season if he could.

This year the same sort of things are happening. The Eagles managed to sign all of their draft picks on time and had no contract holdouts, but we still have the same sorts of attitudes. After some speculation that he would not do so, star running back Brian Westbrook showed up. While talking to the press, however, he revealed that “holding out was a possibility”. I applaud his decision not to do so, but he should not have even considered the option. He is currently in the third year of a 5 year, $24.9 million contract. As one of the very best running backs in the league (the best, depending on the statistics you use to make the determination), he should be paid more. But the point is that he signed a contract, and he should honor it. (His current contract was, surprise surprise, the result of an extended holdout.) If he continues to play at the level he has over the last few years, he will be able to get a very lucrative contract when this one expires in 2010.

Lito Sheppard has similarly come to camp but made it clear that he is not satisfied with what he is being paid or the possibility of not starting. If I were a very good worker and my employee planned to demote me and hire someone from outside to take my position, I would be understandably upset. I would not, however, go whining to the media or threatening to stop doing my job.

I realize that professional football players have a somewhat unusual situation in that their employer may terminate their contract at any time, but if the player does so he may not sign with any other team. It is not a level playing field, and that sucks, but it does not excuse this behavior. In exchange for this, players get paid exorbitant sums of money to do jobs that at least 50% of men would do for free if given the opportunity.

Around the league is more of the same. I have not followed other teams nearly as closely as the Eagles, but a quick perusing of the sports page reveals that running back Steven Jackson is holding out from the Rams camp, Devin Hester considered doing the same with the Bears and will do so if negotiations break down, Kurt Warner is unsatisfied with his compensation in Arizona, and so forth. But certainly the biggest story is Brett Favre’s second un-retiring. After quite clearly telling management he was retiring from football, he now wants them to accept him back as their starter or cut him loose for another team to pick up. It should be obvious why either of those options would be unacceptable to the Packer administration. But Favre is not interested in what is best for the team; he is looking out for number one (or in this case #4). He has said he is tempted to “call their [Packers management] bluff” and show up for training camp, recognizing that it would cause a media circus. In the same interview he admitted to feeling “a little bad” for Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers. The situation his selfishness is putting Rodgers in should make him feel much worse than that. Favre has a reputation as a superb athlete and a good guy, and I am not sure why he is so desperate to throw that away.

There is one Eagles player who did not come to camp, although for “personal”, non-contract reasons. I can think of lots of good personal reasons to skip camp: maybe he is at his mother’s deathbed, or helping a friend through a psychological crisis, or something. The fact that the team is calling this an unexcused absence, however, makes it seem unlikely that he has such a noble reason for not being there. If he would just make a press release, or authorize the Eagles to do so, stating exactly why he is not there we could all rest a lot easier. He might be the best right guard in the league, and not having him for the season would be a significant blow to our Super Bowl aspirations.

On a completely unrelated note, Chris Cocca pointed out this to me. High-larious.

I had the opportunity to attend the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s AAAI Conference in Chicago from July 12 - July 17. For those friends and family who were interested, I kept a fairly detailed log of my time there, although the quantity and quality deteriorate as time goes on. You can follow my travels on the CTA’s Central System Map, which covers most of the area I was in.

I could not fall asleep until after 4:30 am on Saturday night, which was not a good omen. I woke up before my 10:00 am alarm, somehow, and was on the road by 10:30. Traffic on 476 S and 95 N was not bad, so I make it to the economy parking lot at Philadelphia International Airport just before my self-imposed deadline of 12:00. The US Airways ticket counter at Terminal B was absurdly long, but had very few people working. Those that were all seemed to be catering to specific groups of which I was not a member: first class passengers, corporate fliers, people with small children, etc. I had been hoping to deal with a live person, since this was my first time flying and I was unaware of the proper procedures, but eventually gave in and used a self-service kiosk to print my boarding pass. When doing so I was offered the choice to upgrade to first class for $100, which I find to be absurd. I do not know what percentage of the airplane’s volume is reserved for first class passengers, but I certainly hope it is small. Anyone who is willing to spend an extra $100 for a slightly more comfortable seat for 3 hours is far too wealthy.

The new security screenings were lots of fun. There is no signage whatsoever to tell you what you should do. Instead, there was a woman at the metal detector occasionally yelling instructions, but you were lucky to have heard them in time. One of her directives was to remove all laptop computers from carry-on bags. Unfortunately, I did not hear this until my luggage was already being screened. Another worker seemed like I had added a great strain to her day as she removed the laptop and then sent it and the bag through a second time while I muttered apologies. Extrapolating from what I saw, I would have to guess that they have more than 100 Transportation Security Administration employees working simultaneously at that airport, which seems excessive. I vaguely remember riding along to either drop someone off or pick someone up from an airport when I was much younger, and my recollection is that we were inside the terminal with them. I suppose these were more innocent times.

After a brief stop for lunch, I made it to the gate with about 20 minutes before they were starting boarding. The flight itself was as uninteresting as the seat was uncomfortable (that is, very). I did enjoy the beginning and end of it, however. I had an excellent vantage point to see what was going on with a window seat just a few feet behind the wing. The view just as you break through the top of the cloud cover is one that really must be experienced to be understood. That two small wings and a lot of forward thrust can propel a giant cylinder up through the air is quite remarkable.

Upon landing in Chicago I had the fun of baggage claim. As far as I can tell, anyone could take any luggage they felt like and, unless the actual owner of the bag noticed and made a point, no one would stop you. In fact, you would not even need to have been on a plane. Anyone could walk in from the street and take whatever they desired. The fact that this does not happen constantly restores a bit of my faith in humanity.

I took a 10 minute bus ride to the blue line train, which I then rode for at least a half hour to get to the stop nearest where I would be staying. Along the way I learned two things: First, you do not actually need to take the ‘A’ train if you want to get to Harlem. The Blue Line will get you there also, although it may not be the Harlem you intended. Second, the Chicago Transit Authority is not just one of the greatest albums of the 1960s; it is also a remarkably thorough and well-oiled machine. Within the city they run 8 different trains, 2 subway lines, and more than 200 different bus routes. That beats what I have seen of SEPTA and LANTA hands-down.

I then had to walk perhaps a mile and a half before I found the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Marie Robertson Hall, where I would be staying. This is by far the nicest residence hall I have ever seen. The hallways have the exact look and feel of a hotel. The rooms themselves are actually apartments containing four private bedrooms as well as a kitchen, living room, and two bathrooms that are shared. Being quite exhausted from carrying my luggage around, I laid down for about a half an hour.

Marie Robinson Hall	My Bedroom
The Kitchen	Common Area

After this mini-nap I went for a walk. My first stop was an Italian cafe, where I was surprised to find “Panzerottis” on the menu. (The Panzarotti with an ‘a’ is what I thought to be a fairly regional food to the Philadelphia / Southern New Jersey region. It consists of what is essentially a calzone or stromboli that has been deep fried.) Franco’s will be pleased to know that while this was good, it definitely could not compete with the home offering. The outside lacked that pitted, salty, greasy goodness, and while the crust was large, there was more air inside than anything else. After another mile walk I found a grocery store, where I bought myself some iced tea and sunchips for the week. Walking back to my housing with groceries reinforced my knowledge that I would not be able to hack urban living.

Massa, Source of 3 Dinners

When I got back, both sweaty and exhausted, I was very much looking forward to a shower. As I was just about to start taking one I noticed something odd — we lacked a shower curtain. Rather than spraying water all over the bathroom, I decided to see if the front desk could help me out. While I was there, another guest was complaining that he had not even received towels or bed linens. They searched various supply stations for a shower curtain for a half hour, but found nothing. Eventually, they decided to steal one from a room into which no one had yet checked in. After my eventual shower I went to bed at the absurdly early hour of 9pm, due to lack of sleep the night before, an hour lost to Central Time, and the fact that I needed to be at my volunteer position by 7:30 the next morning.

On Sunday I experienced much more of the CTA, not all of it positive. I dragged myself out of bed at the unholy hour of 6am and began following the instructions for taking mass transit from the student housing to the conference center: walk 2 blocks north to Roosevelt, take the #12 bus east to Michigan, then take the #3 bus south to McCormick Place. By 6:40 or so I was at the stop on Michigan, but I waited and waited for a #3 bus to no avail. Around 7:15 I pulled out my massive transit map, where I found out that on Sundays the #3 bus does not start running until 7:25. Not wanting to be late, I got on a #4 bus that I thought would take me at least close to my destination. I disembarked near Michigan & Cermak and started walking in the direction I thought I needed to go, asked someone for directions, then turned around and walked the correct direction. The result of all this was that I arrived at 7:45, probably no earlier than if I had just waited for the #3 bus.

Working the registration desk was a rather simple task, and there were 5 of us doing what was really a job for 3. There was much to be done until the workshops started at 9:00, but after that the morning dragged on as people continued to trickle in. It was interesting thumbing through the registration envelopes while searching for a name and finding those of luminaries whose papers have been influential to your own work. In my section (J-Q) I noticed Richard Korf, Steven Minton, Tom Mitchell, Ray Mooney, and a few others. Unfortunately, the only one of them that arrived while I was working was Korf, and I had only a very brief chance to introduce myself to him. There was also exactly one person that I remembered from ICAPS, Siddharth Srivasta.

The previous conference that I attended (ICAPS 2007) provided continental breakfast at the beginning of each day and snacks during the coffee breaks between each paper session. I was hoping for the same thing here, but I found no breakfast and the only things served at the coffee breaks were coffee and tea. By the time my shift ended at 12:30 I was quite hungry. (On Tuesday through Thursday, the coffee breaks did include snacks.)

I walked west on Cermak to find some lunch and stopped at a walk-up establishment called Baba’s. Here I had my first sampling of “authentic” Chicago cuisine — the Italian beef sandwich. This consists of thinly sliced beef and cheese, served warm in a hoagie roll, and yet is nothing like a cheesesteak. Rather, it is much closer to a French dip. The difference is that the au jus is poured directly onto the sandwich as it is being made (making it much easier to walk around while eating) and that the beef is cooked with tasty Italian spices. It was quite delicious, and I predict I will have another one before leaving. I declined a bag and sat down on a bench outside the convention center to eat. At this point I was immediately reminded that I was in the Windy City, as everything not nailed down tried to blow away. Next time, I’ll take the bag.

The Hyatt Regency McCormick Center

Baba’s Famous Steak, Source of 4 Lunches

After lunch I got on the #21 bus, which took me to Cermak / Chinatown. There I boarded the red line train with expectations of exiting it at the Clark / Division stop. Unfortunately, I discovered that, due to construction, the red line was being re-routed over the purple line instead. I instead got off at Chicago & Franklin, then walked to Wells & Franklin, from which I took the #66 bus to Dearborn and Franklin. From there I got on the #22 to Clark & Goethe. I walked a bit more, again got directions and discovered that I was going the wrong way, and eventually made it to the Chicago History Museum.

Skyline from Cermak / Chinatown Station

The museum was interesting, but I would have preferred more emphasis on those things that were uniquely Chicago-an (the importance of being a transit hub, first by sea and then by railroad, to the city’s growth; the meat-packing and steel industries; the Great Chicago Fire; the Haymarket Square incident; the Gangland era and the St. Valentines Day Massacre; the ‘68 Democratic National Convention; the World’s Fair; etcetera). In particular, I thought the museum’s coverage of Chicago’s importance in the history of jazz and blues music was quite poor. They had a small section on this, but it was filled mostly with concert posters captioned with “[performer] was from [place], but frequently played in Chicago”. Any musician that toured North America would perform frequently in Chicago, simply by virtue of its size and location. There was no mention at all of the important migration of jazz out of New Orleans to Chicago or the recording of Louie Armstrong’s influential Hot Fives and Hot Sevens albums, and only scarce mention of the fact that the city inspired one of the most important sub-genres of blues music. This should probably merit a museum of its own. All of this was indeed covered in the museum, but there was also large portions of it devoted to things such as the Native American settlements in the area and fur trade throughout the 18th century. This is important, of course, but not really that much different from the history of every other North American settlement during the time period. There was also a large section devoted to visual art made either about Chicago or by artists associated with Chicago. This was interesting, but somewhat unnecessary due to the fact that the city has a Museum of Contemporary Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, and at least one other facility devoted solely to visual art. There was also a small temporary exhibit dedicated to the band that took its name from the transit authority and then, under threat of litigation, the city itself, containing concert posters, instruments, and commendations from the city council and state legislature. As a fan of the band, I appreciated this.

Leaving the museum, I took the #36 bus south. Both the transit map and the marquee on the bus stated that it went south to Polk & Clark, but when we reached Van Buren & State, the driver kindly asked if I knew that was the last stop. When I responded that I thought it went to Polk, she said that it never does. I walked for a bit, then took the #29 bus down to Roosevelt & State, then got the #12 to Roosevelt & Halstead, from which I could walk back to the housing. I ended the day enjoying a gelato and complimentary wifi at Massa, the Italian cafe where I had dinner the night before. Once again, I was in bed and asleep not long after 10:00.

On Monday I woke up at 6:00 again, although there was no need to on this day. I stayed in my room, taking care of various things, until around 8:30. Then I walked to Roosevelt & Halstead, took the #12 bus to Roosevelt & Michigan, and walked north on Michigan to a curious restaurant naked Yolk, where I purchased a delicious freshly-made cinnamon roll. I then walked across Michigan and through a section of Grant Park, snapping pictures as I went, before reaching 11th & Columbus. Here I waited about 25 minutes for a #10 bus, which I took to the Museum of Science & Industry.

Aaron Montgomery Ward Gardens Plaque	Walking Figures Perspective 1
Walking Figures Perspective 2	Grant Park Statue
Panoramic View Part 1	Panoramic View Part 2
Panoramic View Part 3	Panoramic View Part 4
A Flock of Segway-ers	Central Section of Museum of Science & Industry

I found the museum to be not properly about science or industry, but about the intersection of the two: engineering. This suited me quite well, because I suspect that my general interest in the area and education would mean that I already have the superficial knowledge that can be provided by a facility such as the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. I had the option of purchasing admission to a variety of special exhibits and demonstrations with my general admission, and I am glad I chose not to; after the passage of 3.5 hours I realized that I had only seen the first floor of three, and that I needed to leave in about 2 hours. Fortunately, the exhibits on the second and third floors were both smaller and less interesting to me.

The first section I visited was filled with a collection of photographs of various industries and feats of engineering. This turned out to be actually one of the more interesting segments. I paid special attention to the four or five photographs of the Packard automobile factory, since I have seen “Number One” in the lobby of the building where I work (Packard Lab).

I next went through a room with models of a great many sailing ships and steam-powered vessels, as well as small artifacts from seafaring in those ages. This was fairly interesting, but would have been more so if they could manage to have all of the models built to the same scale, allowing the viewer to see the relative sizes of the different ships. Beyond this was a room with several generations of automobiles, both those designed for general passenger use and ones designed specifically for racing. Apparently there was an early competition for self-propelled vehicles that ran a course starting in Chicago, and of scores of applicants only two complete the track. Interesting stuff. There was also a large Foucault pendulum hanging through one of the staircases, much like the one at the Smithsonian.

On the other side of the first floor was a fascinating exhibit on the U-505, a German U-boat that was captured by the United States Navy during World War II. At this point I realized that photography was permitted throughout the museum and started taking advantage of it. There was much information about the remarkable operation that allowed the sub to be damaged but saved from destruction and towed from the coast of Africa to Bermuda. In addition, the actual submarine was held in a large hall in the museum, with many placards explaining the uses of its various external and some internal components. Although it would seem very tiny to be inside of it within the vast ocean, I am sure, the submarine was staggeringly large. In addition to displays on how the engine drive, ballast tanks, diving planes, weapons systems, and other important technical components worked, there was also much information about life in a submarine, the typical foodstuffs that would be packed for a long journey, and other, more personal aspects. Tying everything together were exhibits of many small artifacts recovered from the ship such as binoculars, uniforms, tools, code books, and even two Enigma machines. Along the way were displays explaining the more general history of both submarining and World War II, and an extensive collection of American propaganda posters from the time urging men to join the Navy, women to join the WAVES, and everyone to prevent loose lips from sinking ships. I declined the additional-fee guided tour of the inside of the submarine, but still easily spent an hour and a half absorbing everything in this section.

Port Side of U-505	Starboard Side of U-505
Sail of U-505	Rudder and Screw of U-505
Aft Torpedo Tube of U-505	Engine Removed from U-505

I next went to the Henry Crown Space Center. It had a number of interesting artifacts, including an engine from one of the Apollo rockets and one of the Gemini capsules. While not as complete as the Air & Space Museum in Washington, D. C., it had good coverage. I found the sections on plans that NASA and their equivalents around the world have made for replacing the Shuttle program and continuing to expand the ISS most interesting, because I was largely unfamiliar with them. The first floor also contained a section on farming technology, which I only gave a cursory exploration, and several children’s sections.

Apollo Rocket Engine

Gemini Capsule

The museum contains a cafe where I stopped for lunch. Not wanting to eat too much and desiring to experience another traditional Chicago food, I got a hot dog. (I am not, however, quite sure of its authenticity.) My plans were stymied when I was delicious-looking baked potato soup and was forced to get some of that as well.

I hurried through the Networld section of the second floor, presuming that I should already know anything explained there. It appeared to be a reasonably complete overview of computing technology and especially the Internet. I had to fight to resist the urge to run through screaming, “It’s not a dump truck, it’s a series of tubes!”. The second floor also had a section on genetics, with a focus on the ethical questions surrounding the exploitation of it, and one on railroads. Most of the rest of the second floor required either waiting in long lines, waiting for a demonstration to start, or purchasing admission to a special exhibit.

Significant portions of the third floor were closed for construction, but there was a wing devoted to aircraft and one devoted to chemistry. For me, the most interesting part of this was a wall-sized copy of the periodic table of elements, with each entry highlighting any unusual properties of the element and a few uses of it that a typical person might encounter, when appropriate. As it was approaching 4:00 and the soles of my feet were crying out in agony, I took the #10 and #12 buses and my feet back to housing.

Jetliner, Similar to One in which I Arrived

Jet Engine

I found the museum fascinating, and appreciated their permissive stance on photography. If I had been able to take the time to explore the second and third floors as thoroughly as I did the first, I could easily have filled the time between when the museum opened and when it closed without doing any of the optional extras. I can only speculate, but it seemed that they did an excellent job of balancing the needs of children and adults. I do, however, have a few suggestions for ways the museum could be improved. I noticed three embarrassing grammatical errors on placards within the museum. There were also many places where placards were placed so low that it was necessary to kneel or squat in order to read them. It was not always clear whether I was viewing an actual artifact or a reproduction. In some cases, it almost seemed as if they went out of their way to obscure this. For example, there were videos in the section on the U-505 that were of a quality that they could easily have been shot from one of the airplanes used in the capture. It was only after they started showing the actions of the sailors inside that it became clear that the video was a reconstruction. Finally, both here and the Chicago History Museum made extensive use of audio/visual stations. I recognize the importance of multimedia in drawing people’s attention, but the audio can be very distracting as you are trying to read something else. It would also be nice if a transcript of these videos were displayed beside them for those who would like to simply read the material and move on.

After a shower and much-needed rest, I headed to the conference center for the opening reception, where I attempted to overcome my innate introversion and make some contacts. For the most part, I was not successful in finding the sort of people that it would behoove me to know, although I got to speak briefly with Pat Langley, whom I had already met. I started by taking my plate of cheeses and breads to a table of Master’s students from Michigan, then moved to one filled with neural network researchers from Canada, Germany, and Russia.

AAAI Opening Reception

Following the reception was the video competition, in which videos designed to educate and motivate students to enter the AI field had previously been judged and awards were given out. Unfortunately, only a 30 second trailer of the winning videos was shown, so it was rather difficult to understand why they were selected.

I then went to dinner with a prestigious group of people: David Aha [Naval Research Lab] and his wife and son, Marc Ponsen [Massstricht University] (a briefly former colleague of mine), Susan and Ian Craw [Robert Gordon University & University of Aberdeen], David Wilson [University of North Carolina, Charlotte], Michael Youngblood [University of North Carolina, Charlotte], Kalyan Gupta [Knexus Research], Michael Floyd [Carleton University], Sabine Hauert [Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne], Hector Munoz-Avila (my advisor), and one other person whose name I unfortunately cannot remember. We were going to take taxis to Gino’s East at Ontario & Wells, but ended up squeezing the 14 of us into a limousine designed for 12. At Gino’s East, where the walls were all plastered with approved graffiti, I had my second authentic Chicago food experience: pizza. Unlike the familiar dish, this had cheese directly on the crust, an 1/8 inch thick sausage patty above that, and then about an 1/8 inch of sauce on top. An interesting and tasty idea, but I think I prefer our East Coast variety. While waiting for dinner and then eating I had several good conversations.

14 AI Researchers in a 12 Passenger Limousine

Geno’s East at Closing Time

Everyone else was returning to the convention center, where they had hotel rooms, while I looked for CTA transportation back to the student housing. The only bus that used the local stop only ran until late afternoon and it was nearly 11:00, so I was searching my map for an alternate route when someone interrupted to offer me directions. I ended up allowing him to walk me several blocks to the closest blue line train stations, listening to his story. Being the softie that I am, I allowed him to convince me to give him $20, ostensibly to be used for a fee to acquire the state identification card he would need for a job interview the next day. Was his story true? Probably not, but he did save me nearly that much in cab fare, was pleasant conversation for 15 minutes, and was clearly substance-free. As soon as I got home it was straight to sleep.

Tuesday started at 7:00, when I was able to help out some other conference attendees who had just arrived and not yet figured out the transit system to McCormick Place. I was able to enjoy about 45 minutes of Internet access before the first session of the day, enough to read a backlog of emails but put only a small dent in my RSS feed. The opening ceremony was as uninteresting as it sounds, and Eric Horvitz’s presidential address was not much better, focusing on the historical context that most of the attendees surely knew quite well.

I then attended a session on Planning & Scheduling. The first paper was on temporal planning, using an idea of splitting durative actions into sets of simple actions with additional preconditions and effects to ensure they obey the proper durations in spite of any interleaving that may happen, and using some insights about these temporal constraints to constrain the search for a plan. The second was about probabilistic planning through compiling probabilistic domains into equivalent deterministic domains and using statistical sampling to reason over plans. Both of these were very good. The third presentation was about scheduling any-time algorithms, which was less interesting to me. The session chair arrived late and was ineffective, so the first two presentations each took 25 minutes, allowing only 10 minutes for the third.

My second session was on search, and contained one particularly good talk by Richard Korf. He described the process of space-optimizing a search to find the longest shortest-path in an example problem domain, reducing the space complexity to only 2 bits per reachable state. It must have been an excellent presentation, because I was able to anticipate the central idea several slides before it was provided.

At lunchtime I ate another Babo’s Italian beef sandwich, and convinced Dr. Munoz-Avila to do so as well in spite of his cholesterol concerns. We dined with a group of people from the Carlos III University in Madrid, several of whom are working in the same hybrid of planning and learning that I am. They had several entries in the current ICAPS competition on planning and learning, and their explanations of how much time this took away from basic research confirmed our decision not to attempt to enter ourselves.

After lunch I attended an invited talk by Mark Newman on studying graphs. I was already aware of much of the background that he provided through my interest in web hyperlinks and online communities, but he presented it in a very interesting and useful way. His own work focused on the connection between social networks and the spread of disease, and the ways that properties of the network could be used to protect against pandemics. This was also quite interesting, but I had much difficulty staying awake and focused through the second half of his talk.

For the third block I went to a session on search in planning, but stayed for only the first talk. After the one that looked particularly interesting to me (a theoretical study of the effectiveness of various heuristics across a variety of planning domains, by Malte Helmert), I went out and spent 40 minutes recovering from lecture fatigue and emptying the rest of my RSS inbox. My final session of the day was a Nectar (important papers that were originally presented in other, more specific conferences, but have applicability to the general AI community) session on planning. I should have realized this in advance, but was disappointed to find that the three papers were all ones I was familiar with from ICAPS the previous year.

At the end of the day Dr. Munoz-Avila and I had a meeting with Dr. Qiang Yang and one of his students from Hong Kong University, with whom we are collaborating on a project. The student was unaware of the recent rescheduling of the meeting, so the three of us had drinks in a restaurant that was part of the hotel and discussed the work only sparingly.

After observing several talks, mostly Malte’s, I realized that mine could be much improved with a relatively small amount of work, so I spent the rest of the evening working on changing its aesthetics in a room at the conference center where I could get Internet access and then at Massa, where I also ate another Panzerotti with Nick, a student from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who was staying in the same apartment as I. I got to bed around midnight again.

Wednesday morning was much the same. The morning invited talk was about extrapolating back the human genome with the genomes of other species as they branched off from the same path we took back to a common ancestor of all mammals, fish, and birds. Very little of the work has been done yet because only the human and mouse genomes have been completely sequenced, but based on incomplete data they have already found certain genes that are very similar among all non-human species in this line that have been studied and quite different in humans, and have been found to be somehow involved in the construction of a certain part of the brain during fetal development. The talk was quite interesting, but did not discuss any specific AI techniques used.

I then attended the IAAI invited lecture, which was about cognitive prostheses. Despite the title, this was not about cybernetics, but simply computer programs that offload some reasoning that person would normally need to do themselves to computer technology. The main example was a new computer-based instrument for military aviation that would synthesize the data provided by many sensors into a supposedly intuitive interface. The presentation was very well written and explained, but I did not find the topic especially interesting. I then attended a session on ensemble learning, mostly because a paper on clustering looked interesting. Unfortunately, none of the authors of that paper showed up.

After a lunch of a hot dog from Baba’s, I went to the afternoon invited talk by Stuart Russell (of Russell & Norvig fame). I was expecting an excellent talk, and was not disappointed. Most of his time was dedicated to arguing for the use of first-order logic over less expressive reasoning systems. Fortunately for me, he also talked briefly about some work on a new formalism for HTN planning, which helped to motivate my own work.

I presented my paper in the next session. The presentation went well, and I got several good questions from people who seemed to find the work worthwhile, which was encouraging. We also got a bit of a dressing-down from our friend Pat Langley due to our lack of a slide listing related work (of which his is the most important). I have never considered this information to be within the scope of a 15 minute talk, and judging from the presentations I have seen while here neither do most people, but his point is valid. In the future I will include this information at the end, where I can discuss it if there is time and if not at least show that I intended to so as not to offend anyone.

I then attended a session on recommendation and collaboration on the web. I was hoping there would be something here about recommender systems, but found this not to be the case. There was, however, a good paper by Jennifer Golbeck, who made up at least a third of the bibliography of my depth study survey of models of trust for the web.

After the technical program for the day, the ballroom was opened for a reception, poster session, and system demonstrations. I first stopped at a demonstration by Dan Morris of Microsoft Research of a program called MySong, which takes as input monophonic sound data and uses hidden Markov Models to create a chord progression to match the provided melody. It has several variable settings that can control this by changing “happiness” — essentially whether it uses a major or minor key — and “jazziness”, which balances the concerns of choosing a chord that will be consonant with the melody notes and choosing a chord that makes reasonable harmonic motion with those around it. I sang jazz standard “Secret Love” into his microphone, and with the proper tuning of parameters it produced something quite musical, although not identical to the traditional arrangement. I talked to him quite a bit about his work and my related honors thesis from Ursinus College.

I then looked for the buffet and was pleasantly surprised to find simply excellent food. I ate macaroni & cheese, shredded pork, three cheese ravioli, chicken ravioli, garlic bread, capicola, prosciutto, romano cheese, chocolate cake, and a chocolate-covered strawberry. There were also many other options that I did not try. There was really no comparison to the meager provisions of the opening reception. I observed several other demonstrations and posters, but the only other notable things were two posters on teaching AI: one on a re-implementation of the FF planner in well-documented Java that students could modify, and the other an introductory course in which a dozen students collaborated over a single long day to design and partially build a text-based MMORPG.

Thursday morning I checked out of the student housing and dragged my luggage over to the conference center, where my advisor was kind enough to allow me to store it in his hotel room for the day. There were two competing invited talks this morning; I chose one on sentiment analysis, which essentially meant mining the web for people’s opinions on products and classifying them as positive or negative. It was interesting but not ground shattering. The next session I attended was on ontologies, and I got almost nothing out of it. The next was reasoning about action and change, which was actually pretty good, although mostly irrelevant to my work.

I had lunch at Baba’s again (there are basically no other options in walking distance) and had another Italian beef sandwich. While the others had been delicious, this one had apparently been made earlier and sitting, which resulting in a dry, mostly cool meal. I then went to a session on human-computer interaction on the basis of a recommendation from my advisor that any paper by one of the presenters was worth seeing. I found none of this work particularly useful, although it was presented well. Finally I went to a mixed session on reinforcement learning and an invited short talk. I was able to follow the first RL paper but not the second, and the invited talk was a condensed version of a seminar that I saw Tom Mitchell give when he visited Lehigh last year. There was nothing in the last session that looked relevant, so I stopped in the GGP competition for a moment, then took the #21 bus to the red line train to the blue line train to a shuttle to O’Hare International Airport. I tried giving away my transit pass, which was still useful for a day and a half, but no one would take it. I arrived around 6:30 and found out my flight was delayed to 9:10.

General Game Playing Competition	The Tarmac Outside my Gate
No Loaded Firearms? What A Rip-Off	The Lazy Inventor of the Horizontal Escalator is My New Hero

Flying in the dark was rather less interesting than in daylight, and my ears were in a state of discomfort for the entire 40 minute descent to Philadelphia. This surprised me, because I would have attributed this problem to changing atmospheric pressure, and I assume that the cabin of an airplane is kept near 101.3 kPa throughout its journey. I did not make it back to my apartment in Bethlehem until after 2:00 am, which made for a long day.

In summary, my experiences at AAAI 2008 were great. I saw many interesting talks and met many knowledgable people, although the opportunity to engage them in significant conversation was more limited. Most of the papers that were relevant to my work were all crammed into the first day, which is good because my ability to concentrate on presentations decreased throughout the conference. Overall, I think I found ICAPS last year more valuable. The breadth of AAAI is both a blessing and a curse. It is good to see what is going on in diverse fields, but most of it is presented at a level such that I lack the background knowledge necessary for more than a superficial understanding of what is being discussed.

On the weekend of June 28-29 Rachel and I went to a cabin near Williamsport, PA with some of my closest friends from high school (Bob & Sam Groff and Adam Shivery), as well as my best friends from college (Ryan & Lisa Michaluk) and two friends of the Groffs named Bob (II) and Katie. Ryan, Lisa, Rachel, and I drove up on Friday night as soon as all of us were finished work. The drive went smoothly until we were perhaps 5 miles away from the cabin. At this point a fog like I have rarely seen billowed in, obscuring my view to about 15 feet. Even within that limit it was difficult to make out much of anything. Our directions were not quite right, so we were quite fortunate to have Bob and Sam drive up behind us. Between their knowledge of the area and more powerful headlights we got there safely.

After unpacking there was a rousing game of poker, interspersed with Sam dealing a game called “golf”, none of which was for any money. I did quite well, frequently throwing my winning pots to a less fortunate player. When we grew tired of this we moved on to a game of something else that I cannot currently recall, and then to bed.

Front of cabin

Back of cabin

Bunk room

Main room, with Lisa walking to sink

I was displeased to be woken around 9:00, but some yummy egg, cheese, and bacon sandwiches made it a bit better. After breakfast we went down to the very cold creek and spent some time wading and otherwise enjoying it. When we returned we made lunch of hamburgers, hot dogs, and macaroni and cheese. Toward the end of lunch Adam surprised us by showing up early, but without his wife. After lunch some people took naps while Bob, Adam, Ryan, and I taught Bob II to play Magic: The Gathering. At some point through the evening there was dinner of shish-ke-bobs and baked potatoes and games of Pit, Catch Phrase, and Trivial Pursuit. When the womenfolk went to bed the men played poker for actual money. Now that it mattered I became neither good nor lucky, and lost my $5 investment twice.

Ryan bravely tests the water

The pristine creek

You can pick your wife, and you can pick your nose, but only Ryan can pick his wife’s nose

Sam and Katie go wading

Ryan and I take the “man way” through the rapids

Time for pollination

View from the porch

On Sunday we were again roused early. We stayed only long enough to eat a breakfast of pancakes and pack our things before people (including myself) began to go their separate ways. A good time was had by all; thank you to the Groffs for their planning! See the rest of Lisa’s photography here.

If you are a semi-regular reader, you may have noticed my blog was down for much of the last week. Sorry about that, it should be back in commission for a little while at least. It seems that I have terrible luck with electronics. In the last two months I have had serious issues with every computer I own.

The trouble started about two months ago when the right-click button on my laptop’s touchpad started malfunctioning. I am not exactly sure what is happening at a low level, but the most significant symptom is that occasionally if I click the right button to open a context menu, it instead selects an arbitrary action off of that menu and executes it, rather than showing the menu for even an instant. Thus, my attempts to open links in a different Firefox tab sometimes resulted in starting to compose an email with the link as its body, creating a bookmark, or switching the page direction. This was quite annoying, but I have learned to ctrl-click for new tabs, which cuts down on at least 90% of my right-clicking.

Next the hard drive in my desktop machine died, choking so badly that the BIOS does not even detect anything attached to the IDE controller. This was not a big problem because I had no especially important data stored only in that location, I only rarely used it as anything other than a jukebox, and my wife had been trying to convince me to turn it off, saving power and heat production.

Then about a month ago I found that the lid of my laptop swung much more freely than it used to. It will still more or less stay in a position if it is close enough to a right angle that the gravity vector is almost parallel to it. Looking for a reason for this change, I discovered that the clips holding the left hinge to the body had pulled out, and were not willing to be inserted by the amount of force I trusted myself to apply without breaking something else. This is quite annoying, but manageable.

Around the same time I noticed that the power button on my laptop would only work if the machine was held perfectly horizontal at the time. As time went by, it seemed to be even more finicky. On Thursday night and Friday morning I could not get it to start from any position. When I took it to my lab to attempt surgery, it started right up of course. Since then I have not turned it off, and am hoping to avoid doing so for a long time. This, obviously, could become a serious problem.

While I was in Chicago I noticed that computers on my home network stopped responding to any requests from the Internet at large. Since no one was at home, I could do nothing about it until I returned Thursday night. When I did so, I found that the router had simply not automatically restarted itself after a brief power outage. Only a minor inconvenience, and a reminder that I should really buy a UPS when I can scrape the funding together.

While I was at work the next day, however, I found that all of my machines except the router were still basically unresponsive. When I came home and ran some diagnostics it appeared that the problem needed to be either the NIC in my router or its PCI controller. Replacing the NIC solved the problem, but I have a vague memory that this machine was destroyed 2 or 3 other Ethernet cards, possibly in the same circumstances. Thankfully, I should be able to get a wholesale replacement from the same Erekson repository of old and unwanted machines that yielded the first one.

We needed to replace my wife’s laptop about a year ago when something exploded on the mainboard, and I’ve lost two subwoofer amplifiers in my car and an instrument amplifier. I also have a network hub and a WAP that died, and my current WAP needs to be power cycled every few months when it gets messed up. I am considering doing some freelance work fixing people’s computer problems, but I am not sure I should be allowed to touch any equipment that I do not need to.