personal

Letchworth is a very scenic state park located less than an hour away from Rochester, NY. It makes for a very nice day trip, especially at this time of year.

See more Letchworth photos here

Took a trip with the family to Cape Cod this past weekend. It wasn't my first time there, I went a couple of times when I was younger, but it was the first in at least 10 years.

While I brought my camera, I regret not taking more pictures of the beautiful scenery. I only grabbed a couple of snapshots at the last beach we went to, Nauset Light Beach right before leaving. Regardless, I highly recommend the cape for a vacation, there are some gorgeous beaches and plenty to do for people of all ages.

Enjoy!

Camping is always a fun activity, especially in the scenic Adirondacks. Even if you maintain a busy lifestyle or are not a big nature person, I still think its important to take some time every once in a while and relax and unwind in a natural setting.

See more camping pictures here

Now that it's been just about two years since I finished grad school (doesn't the time fly), I figure it's about time I did something about the stack of study sheets I am sitting on. See I personally found one of the most effective ways of studying was coming up with single (or very-few) paged study sheets; they are a great way to summarize all the important info, they give you a simple / single reference to refresh up on and review the material at any point, and sometimes professors will allow you to bring them into the exams.

Of course one of the best parts about coming up with study sheets is reviewing and writing the material down in your own way, but it also helps to have other people's notes, so as to tackle the subject at a slightly different approach, and to make sure your are not missing anything fundamental. Luckily I saved alot of my study sheets since Freshman Year all the way through my Masters at SU, and now I'm releasing them under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Most of the scans turned out great, but I apologize for the few that are cut off. My scanner will scan letter sized documents and little / nothing else more, and some of the pages I used for notetaking were larger than that, filled with my notes to the borders. Regardless, the vast majority should be of high quality and can be accessed here (see the course taxonomy and my statistics study sheet, perhaps the most concise one ever ^_^). Enjoy!

Massive Attack just released their 5th studio album, Heligoland, the first in 6 years since 100th window. One of the few artists I like enough to buy their cds brand new, nevermind on release day, I enjoy most of Massive Attack's work, including this new album. IMHO though perhaps not as good as Mezzanine or Protection overall, it still has a number of great tracks including Splitting The Atom, Pray For Rain, and Paradise Circus. Definitely a playlist recommendation for anyone into this type of music.

So for anyone that didn't know (which is pretty much anyone I didn't personally tell) I was living in the Boston area this past summer, and working out of an office RH has near there. Adding it to the list, this brings the cities that I've lived in or at least seen a substantial part of when visiting to Syracuse, Cairo Egypt, Raleigh NC, NYC, San Franciso CA, Boston MA.

I've also been to Washington DC, Montreal, Toronto, San Jose, the Amsterdam Airport :-) and a slew of other places, but I didn't stay / visit for long and don't have much of a recollection.

They say home is where the heart is. Say what you want about Syracuse (and believe me there are a million crappy things about living here........ though the same number if not more good things) it's still my favorite place to live :-)

I just found the "Domestic Manners" font that I really like and feel is very good for extended text editing (terminal, coding, blogging, etc). Installing it for Fedora users is really easy:

sudo yum install dustin-domestic-manners-fonts
fc-cache

You can set it in vim / your vimrc with:
set guifont=Domestic\ Manners\ 8

Also you can select it in the gnome-terminal font settings.

Attached are two screenshots of the font in action.

We'll I'm back in Ruby-land, my next project that I'm looking to release soon will be written in that.

I can't say I'm sad to be done w/ C++ for a little while, quite the contorary, while I still like C++ very much and it has a large place in the software world, no one can deny Ruby is just easier to write (at the expense of performance of course).

So I just whipped up a quick Haiku about Ruby ;-). This is the first one I've ever written so its kinda historic (and fun, look out for more in future posts):

Beautiful ruby
code as if you are speaking
programmer at ease

First off I selected the best photos of my trip and uploaded them to flickr for everyone to see. Flickr caps the upload bandwidth per month, so I will slowly add the others as I go along. They currently can be found here (sorry not organized or sorted in any way yet).

Next, if you missed anything you can see a day-by-day log of my activities here:

1. Preliminary Itinerary
2. Day 1
3. Day 2
4. Day 3
5. Day 4
6. Day 5
7. Day 6
8. Day 7

Now that my great California adventure is over I have a few afterthoughts. Overall from what I've seen California is a great place with beautiful weather and lots of awesome ourdoors activities. On the other hand things are pretty pricey and there are a few other reasons why I'd only want to visit and not live there. Overall this is what really stood out:

1. There are alot of asians (one out of every three or four people everywhere I went) and hispanics. Just saying
2. There are alot of homeless people which bums me out (pun intended).
3. Most people definetly have a 'relaxed' attitude, which is a curse and a blessing. While it means most people don't sweat the small stuff, it also means people taking things a bit too slow for my pace (including walking and driving). I prefer the 'go-go' attitude of NYC on this count personally
4. There is alot of tech. It was very cool overhearing people's conversations about the famous tech companies where they work at, and seeing the headquarters of some of the biggest tech companies
5. There is alot of great food including awesome burritos.
6. Everyone is environmentally friendly to the extreme (eg people pick cans out of the trash and toss 'em into recycling bins, there are often parking discounts for hybrid cars, carpool lanes exist to encourage sharing rides, etc.). While this is great it can get a tad prentious.
7. Bring money. As mentioned everything is horribly overpriced, and you will spend alot of money if you are every the Californee way, especially if you plan of eating out alot
8. Enjoy outdoors activities. Given that the weather allows you to be outside year round and that there is a plethora of outdoor activities, one would be a fool to not see some of the natural beauties california offers. While San Fran (and the other cities) is nice, my favorite parts of the trip were the nature bits by far
9. Enjoy San Francisco. Its a great city including the iconic Chinatown, Golden Gate Park, Haight / Ashberry, the Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman's Wharf, Lombard Street, Coit Tower, and many other great locations.

Overall a great trip with very few if any hickups (possibly the only thing is the airline losing my luggage today). Big thanks to my friend Dave who put me up for the week and drove me places, I hope to return the favor one day.

Yesterday was my last day in California. We got up early and grabbed some McDonalds breakfast before heading to Big Basin Redwoods National Park. The road there was cool, full of scenic views of the Santa Cruz mountains and treacherous paths. When I say that last bit I mean it, as we got towards it the road became a single narrow lane for both directions with cliffs on one side and the curving mountain on the other (which made determining if anyone is coming in the opposite direction impossible at times). Regardless we made it fine, and we rewarded by the best outdoor experience so far.

Not only were there many fewer people at Big Basin that at Muir Woods, but the trees seemed to be much large and there were many paths leading in all sorts of directions. We touched only a fraction of the park as it is enormous.

After taking lots of pictures, we headed back, stopping at Hakone Japanese Gardens on the way. This was a very calming and relaxing area full of traditional Japanese tea houses, ponds w/ waterfalls, bamboo forests, etc. Though not large, it is a very chill place to go and just relax.

We drove back to my friend's place where I finished packing after which we headed out to eat. Finally my friend dropped me off at the BART train station in Fremont and after our goodbyes, I took the train to San Fran International Airport and flew home. (all flights were on time though my luggage has yet to make it).

Make sure to check back for one final post on my thoughts of the trip and the locations I visited as well as a select set of the many pictures I took.