Aussie Food

Well I am back from Australia and I'm totally jet-lagged! I slept till 2pm today. Now it's after midnight and I'm running forced alignments. But maybe jet-lag isn't the right word - all that's happened is that I'm finally on a 'normal' grad student schedule.

Sometimes when I tell people that I've been to Australia they ask me what's good to eat down there. I am not clever enough to come up with a full response off the top of my head, so I usually just say meat pies. But there are a few other things which I shall list here:

1. Passiona - this is a passion fruit flavored soft drink. It's delicious. I'm always amazed that passion fruit isn't bigger here in the states, cause it is SO SO good.

2. Tim Tams - chocolate cookies, or as they say down there "biscuits". I used to love these, and I got a box of them as soon as I could find one last week. I have to say, having gotten a bit older, I have less of a sweet tooth so I wasn't as excited by the Tams as I used to be. But they're still quite good!

3. Meat Pies - OK they are a very important part of Australian cuisine. Any respectable pie shop will have quite a selection of pie flavors. Your standard meat ones are ok, but my favorite is usually a vegetable curry. It'll have potatoes and other veggies, in a nice curry sauce. Mmm, mmm.

4. Kebabs - so they're not really Australian per se, but they are quite a staple down there. I think meat pies & kebabs are like their replacement for our McDonald's and Taco Bell. (Well they do have McDonald's, or Mackers, as they call it, but I don't think people eat that type of fast food as often as we do here.) Kebabs are especially good at 2 or 3 in the morning, after you've been "out on the piss".

4. Beet Burgers - lots of places offer a slice of beetroot on your hamburger. I was quite weirded out by this the first time I tried it, but it's really good. Last week I got a "works" burger, which included beetroot, egg, carrot, pineapple, onion, and BBQ sauce. Oh man it was delicious. With all that stuff I couldn't really taste the egg but it gives it a nice texture.

5. Barramundi - a local fish. I had some Barramundi & chips last week and I wasn't too impressed. But I remember when I was in Sydney I had a really delicious Barramundi sandwich. So I think it's normally good, my fish & chips were just too greasy for my liking.

6. Weetbix - best breakfast ever. It's a cereal that's very filling - in England I believe they call it Weetabix. Brett Lee (a big Aussie cricketer) eats it, so clearly it is the breakfast of champions. I loved it because it actually keeps you full for more than an hour, unlike most breakfast cereals. Also it's kind of fun to watch it as your pour the milk because it absorbs a ton of milk - you can literally see the milk level drop.

7. Beer - We all know that Australians love their beer. I had a James Boag's while I was down there, which was one of my favorites. Other favorites are Cooper's Sparkling Ale, and the classic VB (Victoria Bitter).

Here's a nice little ad to convince you to travel to Australia... (I wonder if this is where the shrimp on the barbie thing comes from?)

Gentlemen's Clubs

Some of you may have heard me talking about Juno, my new favorite bar in Seattle. It's inside the Arctic Building , home of the former Arctic Club (for men who had found gold in Alaska).

I think the idea of those clubs is fascinating, and I hadn't spent too much time thinking about how sexist it was, since they are such a relic of the past.

But it turns out, in Australia those clubs are alive and well! (Or, full of oldies but alive, anyway.) In the paper this morning was this very interesting article. Apparently, the clubs have always given honorary membership to people high-up government positions such as state governors. But now that there are some women governors, those women are being excluded from the clubs.

In general I'm all for boy's night out, but that just seems a little crazy to me. What if they had a female prime minister? She could unlock the nuclear codes (or the mutant kangaroo codes, or whatever) but not step foot inside the men's club? Strange.

I don't think that those type of clubs should be made illegal, because in some sense it's fairly harmless. Private organizations should be allowed to be private, and have control over who they invite in. But I just thinking it's telling about the way society is here, versus in the U.S.

If Baz Lurhmann wrote about scripting...

Backup your data.

Find doesn't return files in sorted order. it never has; it never will.

Comment your code. oh, never mind. you won't understand the power and beauty of commenting your code until 20 years from now when you look back at your code and have no idea what you were trying to do. Your code is not as easy to understand as you imagine.

Enjoy the man pages. Use them every way you can, don't be afraid of them. They are the greatest free tool you will have access to.

Never put dot in your $PATH.

You might use vi, you might not. You might use exec, you might pipe to xargs. Don't worry about comparing yourself to your fellow programmers because everyone's different.

Accept that new languages always come along and outperform their predecessors. when you get old, you'll be stubbornly using perl while everyone will be telling you to use the latest new language.

Let your elders keep using fortran.

Always use full paths.

Give read permissions freely, but be careful who you give write and execute permissions too. That includes yourself.

Be careful whose advice you buy.... but trust me on backing up the data.

What I am Good At

I just had a new experience today while surfing the web. (Hey, I've got a script running, it's OK.)

I actually got an ego boost from taking a test! And really, I kind of needed it, because the research is not going so well. This article is very interesting and has a link to the test in it.

Gut Instinct and Math Ability

I did the test and got 25/25. Yay for me! :)

P.S. If anyone can think of a way I can turn this skill into something useful, please let me know.

Road Trip Revised

Back in April I wrote about all of my fun post-graduation plans.

After that, I spent the next couple months working on my thesis. Of course I had to squeeze in the thesis work between planning the Boat Party, going to Indianapolis for a family reunion, visiting Irene in San Diego, tutoring at the IRC, and taking a Spanish class. Needless to say, I did not graduate in summer as I had once hoped. So, since much has changed, I thought I'd post a revised version of my 'road trip':

September - Our paper did get accepted, so I am traveling to Brisbane to present the paper at Interspeech 08. I am actually leaving this Thursday.. yipes!! Not ready yet!! Australia will be awesome. I'm meeting up with a friend when I get there, and we're going to hang out on the Sunshine Coast for a couple days. So, even though I'm not graduated yet, I get to do a bit of surfing! I'll be at the conference the whole week, and hopefully I can get a bit of thesis work done while I'm there. I was really hoping to be farther along by now... but I think that's always how it goes with a thesis.

October - I'm still doing a very shortened version of the road trip (and I'll continue to work on the thesis remotely.) Sean and I are going to a wedding in Sacremento on the 11th, so I am going to drive down for that. Then I'll continue down to Phoenix - probably stopping in Santa Cruz for a couple days to surf. I'll get to Phoenix in time for my 10-year high school reunion - I already bought tickets for the dang thing, so I'm going. I will hang out in Phoenix for awhile, and probably visit Tucson and New Mexico. In late October, I'll be taking the Amtrak to New Orleans, stopping in Houston on the way.

November - On the 3rd (my 28th birthday, BTW) I will fly from New Orleans back to Seattle. My latest in the series of thesis-hopes is that I can defend in November. This is also seeming somewhat unlikely at this point, but you never know. Either way, I will spend most of the month diligently writing perl, running experiments, classifying speech... you know, the usual. But here comes the exciting news...... I have a friend who is from India, and she is getting MARRIED in Chennai, India on Nov. 22/23rd. Oh man I am excited about this. I have never been to India, nor have I seen an Indian wedding. It is going to be spectacular!!! Now, if I was graduating, I would definitely spend a few weeks over there. I really, really want to go to Goa, and the Maldives!! But since I am only about 30% likely to graduate by then, I will do a quick trip for Thanksgiving week and then come home. (Do you think I can list my graduation date on InTrade so people can bet on it?)

December - Graduate, or die trying! And go to Minnesota to see my dad's family for Christmas.

January - The part where I go surfing in CA gets pushed back to here. I have friends all over CA so I'll drive around (assuming my car still works.... *hope hope*) visiting people, surfing, and hanging out. Probably no Cabo trip. I'll save this one for a future time when Sean can take a chunk of time off and go with me.

February - To Costa Rica! I decided to push back the Costa Rica trip so that Sean could visit me. He will be traveling to the Arctic for work in March (very exciting!) so he will be quite busy up until March, and then gone for most or all of March. So I'll stay till April and hopefully I will get lots of visitors.

May - Come back to Seattle. Start planning Boat Party II. My latest pet job idea is to become a bartender. We will see what happens! I will still probably look into technical editing since it would be super fantastic to have a job that I could do from anywhere.

Stuff Engineers Like #5 - Having Complicated Hobbies

If you are not an engineer, you may have a hobby such as skiing, scrapbooking, watching Nascar, etc. These fun activities allow your brain to relax and de-stress at the end of a long day, or on the weekend.

Engineers relax in a different way. Like an athlete who cross-trains, they like to work out all the different areas of their brain. Common engineering hobbies include: rebuilding old automobiles, HAM radio (building radios and antennae, learning Morse code, etc.) , building and flying model airplanes, and writing open-source software.

Now let's not stereotype! Some engineers do like to get in a good workout. However, if an engineer is going to exercise, it usually involves at least one spreadsheet. The exercise should be organized and goal-oriented. There is probably a reason why the website hundred pushups spread throughout my lab like wildfire. I once had a co-worker who liked to run and came up with a "difficulty" metric for each run that he did, which combined distance and elevation change.

If you ask someone about their hobbies, it may not be immediately obvious whether or not they are an engineer. But if you dig into the details a bit further, an engineer's "engineer-ness" will usually present itself. For example, many people brew their own beer who are not engineers. However, if the person has built their own equipment to brew the beer, it is much more likely that they are an engineer. To be absolutely sure, ask them if they keep detailed logs of each brew complete with what went well and lessons learned. (This 'logging' question goes for just about any hobby - you are essentially asking the person whether or not they like spreadsheets.)

If you are interested in getting into a particular hobby, an engineer is a fantastic person to ask. They will have done extensive research on the subject, and can point you to several websites/books/local stores/other resources. Just make sure you have some time set aside when you ask your engineer about his or her hobby - and don't feel overwhelmed! The spreadsheet is usually optional.

Great Depression Tidbits

I attending the September SPOA (Seattle Peak Oil Awareness) meeting last week, and it got me thinking about what life might actually be like if/when we do get into a peak oil situation. By the way, according to this great, great, great article that I just read, that might be coming up very soon. The article is about predicted future supply of oil in the next 7 years here. It's a tiny bit dry, I mean, if you're not into reading spreadsheets showing numbers for oil production in different scenarios, but I thought it was quite fascinating.

Anyway, what life would be like... so I started reading on wikipedia about the Great Depression. There were a few things I read which I think really drive home a message about how much of a dramatic adjustment this kind of economic crash would be now - due to our lack of practical skills and ties to our land.


1. "While some unemployed came to the cities looking for relief (especially African Americans), it appears that even larger numbers of unemployed returned to family farms. For the first time ever, the movement of native population was away from cities and toward rural America." story here

How many people do you know who have relatives on a farm? What's the stats on farming? I think about 2% of Americans farm, or something like that. I know a girl in Ballard who has a big garden. It's like... a mini-farm.

2. "A "Hoover wagon" was a car with horses tied to it because the owner could not afford gasoline; in Canada, these were known as Bennett buggies" story here

I actually had thought about this myself, and I'm trying to convince Sean to keep these weird towing bars on his van, in case we need to hitch it up to horses someday. Of course, we don't have horses. I know less people who own horses than I know who grow any of their own food.

3. "Some of the men who were forced to live in these conditions possessed building skills and were able to build their houses out of stone. Most people, however, resorted to building their residences out of box wood, cardboard, and any scraps of metal they could find. Some individuals even lived in sewer mains." story here

Do you know how to build a house? Cause I don't. Sean pointed out to me that many people would be better off living in their SUVs than trying to construct a shack out of corrugated tin anyway, which is a good point. And then if you can just find a couple horses, you've got a mobile home!

Thesis Music

Lately I've been making playlists on youtube - as a free alternative to actually downloading and paying for music. :)

I thought I'd share my latest mix, cause it helps me get pumped up while I'm trying to work. BTW if you have any adrenaline-charging music that you think I should add to the list, please let me know!

Pump UP

Oil Reserves - kind of a big deal?

I thought that our 'strategic' oil reserves were kind of a big deal. And of course, hurricane Gustav shutting down production in Mexico is kind of a big deal.

So my question is this: why did neither Bloomberg nor Associated Press mention in these articles that the U.S. is releasing 250,000 barrels from reserves?

I had to read that tidbit from some shady outfit called the AFP, who reported on it here .

Linux Sucks!

Hi everyone. I will preface this post by saying that I spent my entire labor day weekend working. Laboring, as it were. And in fact it really wasn't as miserable/lonely/soul-vaccumingly-boring as I thought it would be.

It wasn't pleasant though either.

Anyway, I would like to share a special secret with you. I feel like the Indiana Jones of Linux, because I have uncoded a secret message. The people who wrote linux already knew that it sucked. In fact, they encoded it in a simple command

ls (linux sucks)

Yeah so here's a funny thing about ls:

lark [1023] ls 005/ | head
sls-20000711-005-001.misc
sls-20000711-005-001.ref
sls-20000711-005-001.wav
sls-20000711-005-002.misc
sls-20000711-005-002.ref
sls-20000711-005-002.wav
sls-20000711-005-003.misc
sls-20000711-005-003.ref
sls-20000711-005-003.wav
sls-20000711-005-004.misc


lark [1024] ls 005/* | head
005/sls-20000711-005-001.misc
005/sls-20000711-005-001.ref
005/sls-20000711-005-001.wav
005/sls-20000711-005-002.misc
005/sls-20000711-005-002.ref
005/sls-20000711-005-002.wav
005/sls-20000711-005-003.misc
005/sls-20000711-005-003.ref
005/sls-20000711-005-003.wav
005/sls-20000711-005-004.misc

See how those two things are different??? HILARIOUS.