Of Roommates and Waterfowl (an interlude in Munich)

After a delicious delay in Philly, I ended up: flying into Frankfurt; scrambling to catch a bus to Darmstadt; and scrambling to catch a train to Munich, where I will spend three days. I didn't sleep on the flight, or on the train, so by the time I walked into my apartment I'd been awake for... ... ever? About 30 hours, I guess.

So I walk in:
    Me: "'Allo, ich bin hier!"
    Roommate: "Allo!"
    Me: "Wie geht's?"
    Roommate: "'Come see who lives with us now!"
    Me: "We... who lives... what..." [ticks. slowly.] "Did we get a kitten."

No. No, we didn't.

We got a duck.

Yes really.

My roommate's a hassle but she's interesting.

Apparently she got her as a duckling, then after ten years of having a pet duck, put her in some kind of waterfowl sanctuary. While I was in Canada, the roommate visited the sanctuary; she disapproved of something she saw (of course), so she reclaimed her. She's been looking for a sanctuary that meets her impossible standards ever since.

She's super cute. (The duck.) And bitey, but it doesn't hurt much. She's a running duck – she can't fly; they move kind of like roadrunners. Running ducks are strange! They're kept for meat and eggs, and they walk themselves to the market in (fairly adorable) droves. She's very long and slender, and weighs about two pounds total.

She also hates me. And stinks. She comes when my roommate calls her, though; I don't know that I would have credited a duck with that much brain. They go out to a pond or the English Gardens at least once, usually twice a day, so the duck can swim.

So now I live with a stinky duck that hates me? I guess?

ISER and Québec City, Pt. II

Man, I'm going to have to step up the pace here.

Fortunately, I've said most of what I have to say about Québec City. It was beautiful, it was expensive, the weather was perfect – really, I can just post pictures. Mostly of the group-sponsored events, too:

The Château Frontenac, as viewed from the dinner cruise down the River St. Lawrence. The first one was taken on the way out; the second was taken only about 20 minutes later.

It was a very pretty cruise.

I should also add that it was delicious. I've never been to French-speaking Canada before; I was surprised by (1), how many people speak no English at all (and scoff at my grade-school French); and (2), how very French the food was. Butter, cream, fondue, raclette, crêpes everywhere... I lost about two kilos in the first few weeks in Germany, and gained it all back in four days. Plus, I don't eat pork or beef. Usually this means I can just say "I don't eat red meat" and be fine – but this trip had edge cases. I ended up being offered boar, elk, and horse! (Note: horse is absolutely freaking delicious.)

The third sponsored event <!!> was a dinner at the Manoir Montmorency, which has a footpath to Montmorency Falls. This pano was taken from a wooden overlook that juts out through the trees...

The wooden overlook, seen from the bridge; and the falls themselves. It's almost impossible to capture the size and noise of Water that is Getting Serious. Waterfalls are amazing.

The final day of the conference, I ended up with a group of people going to dinner with the Local Activities Chair, the guy who's a prof at Université Laval. Dinner segued into drinks at this "place I know," which, over the course of the evening, gradually segued into "the conference organizers buying rounds of shots for the grad students." I ended up in a tipsy and very impassioned argument with a post-doc from UBC about whether machine learning could be used to tell whether a fish was an Asian Carp or not, based on accelerometer readings once it had swallowed a computer.

I took the last day of the trip to explore the city, as I often do. I had a friend again (NTD), this time someone I knew from RSS last year; we bought two pints of incredibly ripe strawberries from the farmer's market, and walked around for hours, stopping at a microbrewery and a busy deli, generally admiring the randomness of being Somewhere Else. Conclusion: Québec City is very picturesque, but not otherwise all that interesting...

At some point we decided to follow the sound of running water. This was just tucked in between some buildings, with trees on three sides. Strawberries were eaten. Life was discussed. Mild sunburns were obtained.

I present unto you: broccosheep!

Then, on the way back to Germany, US Air told me they were going to strand me in Chicago overnight. I managed to ask if they could strand me in Philadelphia instead, to which the ticket agent said, "Uh... sure?" So I was home by 11pm, that night, and stayed for a good meal and some concentrated relaxing on the back porch before catching an 8:30pm plane the next day. It was a wonderful and wonderfully timed little reprieve. It never hurts to ask for what you want.

ISER

ISER – the Internation Symposium on Experimental Robotics – is, by its nature, fascinating.

Some background:

The academic robotics community values new ideas above applications of existing ideas. I agree with this, to some extent. It’s hard to solve a novel problem, and it’s obviously critical to the research baseline of Are Things Getting Better. Applications are critical too, but somewhat easier – in theory, it’s just coding up an idea on a physical system.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”*

Pretty much as soon as you start trying to apply your (or someone’s) neat new ideas to actual physical robots, you discover that your simplifying assumptions are too simplified, or your algorithm doesn’t cover that one case that comes up 90% of the time, or everything is theoretically perfect but it just doesn’t work because your perfect motion planning makes the robot overheat.

Building and programming a robot that can just sit down and play chess with a human (vids: robot, me talking), with whatever pieces you care to use and without special boards and whatnot, took months. In the actual chess competition, we destroyed the other entrants. And the question I got – at the competition, and on the resulting paper – was, “I don’t understand. What’s novel?”

I feel bad about how wordy this is. So, lookit! A robot playing chess with an adorable child!

On the one hand, a robot that actually plays chess with actual humans, duh. On the other hand – the getting-hired-in-academia hand – nothing. We made existing stuff actually work on a new platform, with all the engineering headaches and discoveries of simplifying limitations and so on that that implies. No really new ideas. All we did, with months of effort by a lot of really smart people, was take a lot of existing ideas and demonstrate that they actually worked, or in some cases, didn’t, and used them to build a system that did something that hasn’t been done before.

That’s nothing.

Me, I’m too junior to have an opinion on how stupid that is. That’s an opinion I can have after getting tenure, maybe. But enough tenured people got fed up enough with it, or wanted to see Honolulu enough, or whatever, to form ISER, which is basically the “Look, my robot can do things!” conference.

So the conference was awesome. There were papers about using robots to control invasive fish populations (by tracking the fish, sadly, not by zapping them with underwater lasers, sadly); about using pictures of scenes to figure out what parts of rooms look navigable (the parts with people in them); no using a robot to make cookies; on following directions... all kinds of brilliant stuff. Some of it was vision-only, or quite theoretical. The only thing all the talks had in common was that someone actually tried something to see if it worked.

(Well, that and being presented by people whose universities could afford to spend insane amounts of money on hotels, food, and conference registration fees for a second-tier conference. No scholarships at ISER. Still, it was a lot of fun.)

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* This quotation, which exists in several forms, has apparently been attributed to Yogi Bera, Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, Albert Einstein, etc...

ISER and Québec City, Pt. I

For the first of my two trips back to North America (sheesh), I went to Québec City for ISER, the International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. ISER is an okay conference, not a super-top-tier one, but I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the papers overall.

I've also heard people refer to ISER as the "robotics travel club". I wondered if people were just being snide, for some reason?  Well, here's the list of places ISER has been/will be held. Essaouira; Québec City; New Delhi; Athens; Rio de Janeiro; Singapore; Sant'Angelo d'Ischia, Italy; Waikiki; Sydney, Australia; Barcelona; Stanford; Kyoto; Toulouse; Montréal.
 
So... no! Clearly the people in charge of ISER are using it partly to fulfill their travel itches – or, more charitably, they're trying to attract good people by making the conference appealing. Since there were three <!> banquet/cruise/organized event type things (instead of one), and since there was no lower-cost student registration (which is unusual), I'm leaning towards the former.

So it shouldn't have surprised me that Québec City is amazing.

Left: the conference venue.  O.o  Right: the building across the street that my hotel (and the American consulate) were in.

The castle-lookin' thing is the conference venue. That's the Château Frontenac. The castle was built in the 1890s, specifically to be a luxury hotel. (I looked it up after a colleague looked up at it and said, "Wait, did they add all those windows when it was turned into a hotel?" Well, no, actually. Good catch.) I stayed in a nearby boutique hotel, which was half the price and twice the character – internally, the castle rooms are boringly hotel-ish.

People differ on whether the jet-lag is worse going from the U.S. to Europe, or vice versa. I've mostly heard people say it's worse going Europe-wards. Well, in keeping with my usual level of inverted sleep schedule, it was the opposite for me. It must have been Wednesday or Thursday before I really woke up.

A panorama of more-or-less what I saw when I left my hotel, including a better view of the Château. Also mountains, blue sky, water, etc., etc. Another good word for Québec City: expensive

I actually presented at this conference. It went exceedingly well; it was a little too early for me to be as nervous as usual (I want to say 11am? I don't remember now). One of the conference organizers sent mail to my adviser commenting that I had given a good talk, which is always super helpful.

(I'm going to start trying to write useful descriptions of my papers. My ISER paper is here (sorry, super bare-bones, I'll clean it up after sleep). Comments welcome!)

From here I pretty much only have pictures, which I'll make Pt. II, because boy, these keep getting long.

Life in Munich (the one with the bitching)

Some people have fussed at me about not actually saying much after moving to Germany. This is partly because I suck at this, okay. It's not you! But also, it turned out to be a fairly rocky landing, and I generally try not to talk too much about grumpy stuff. So, if you don't want to hear me being grumpy, skip this bit. This is a full-fledged rant, and then I'll go back to more travel and less travail.

Gromp the First: Housing

Historically, Bavaria (the German state that Munich is in) has had 13 years of basic schooling, and the other states have had 12 (with all the hassle you might imagine that entails). So, this year, Bavaria switched to 12 years, meaning that twice as many Bavarian freshman are starting university this year. In addition, Germany abolished mandatory military service last year, freeing up another (roughly) 20% of a graduating class. Meanwhile, TUM is one of the better universities in the country, and Munich is widely regarded as the best- or second-best place to live.

Summary: a lot of young people are moving to Munich this summer.

Speaking of living in Germany, next time you think the U.S. has maybe too many choices of
Heinz ketchup, I invite you to consider the possible alternatives. Curry-mango isn't too bad!

Finding housing was interesting time-consuming awful hard. I wrote dozens of people and posted to multiple websites over the span of a few weeks, and maybe three people responded, two of them with flats that were inconsistent with my minimum requirements ("being able to get to work"). Nonetheless, that left one flat! Which I moved into. (Really, it's a WG – Wohnungsgemeinshaft, or a multi-bedroom flat shared with other people.) I live with one other woman.

She's an interesting, smart lady, a recently-laid-off networks engineer who was born in Iran, got citizenship in Canada, and has now lived in Munich for 25 years. She has some interesting stories drawn from years of traveling the world to set up and support telecommunications networks for Siemens.

She's also really difficult for me to live with. Functionally, The Rules make it difficult to cook, clean, or be home; no guests, no before-or-after-hours activities. I stay in my room and play with my computer.

This is the "gromp" post, but it should be noted that this is the window in my room over my desk, c. 8:30 pm every single day. It's huge and all German windows open several ways, including WIDE OPEN. Being stuck in my room isn't exactly a cupboard under the stairs.

I gave up on cooking two weeks into living here, and I haven't made anything that requires heat since.† I shower and do laundry in a very constrained fashion, and, well – mostly I try not to go home. And it's sad, because I really do like her, as a person. A person I don't live with.

And I haven't even mentioned the duck.‡

Of course, I have no friends, since I just got here and barely speak the language; and Germany kind of closes at 8 pm (and Sundays). So since I don't want to go home (and I don't want to go drinking alone), I'm pretty much at work.

Gromp the Second: Work

Which would be okay if work was an academic lab, with other students I might conceivably befriend. But I got bait-and-switched by communicated insufficiently with the lab I'm at. I'm actually working at a small company. <!!> Most of the people around me are a bit older, actual grown-up employees, who go home at six to their existing friends and spouses. I get in at normal morning working hours <horrible face> and wear moderately grown-up clothing. I've seen the professor I'm supposed to be working with maybe twice, ever, literally – he certainly won't be writing me any recommendation letters.

Meanwhile, I've twice been invited to the lab of the guy who was my first choice to work with here. (He didn't answer the email in time.) It's awesome. Everyone is awesome, they've actually already invited me out to do social things a couple of times, people work at all hours on all kinds of neat things, wearing whatever the hell they want, as long as the papers get out.

Sigh.

But: I'm going to stop fussing now, because where I am is neat, friendly, research-focused small company. Everyone is nice, and everything I've asked for (computer, practice talk audiences, robot time) has been provided enthusiastically.

Yeah, this is what I'm complaining about. As everyone knows, I get happier as more robots get introduced to my environment. :-) The one on the right is a custom Meka, with a homemade "neck" to mount a Kinect on. It's sweet.

In short, it's actually a great environment. I mean that! It's just not what I expected. I'm complaining only because I know what small, neat, research-focused company life is like; right now I'm trying to build academic connections. (I know, I know, cry me a river.)

The End

So I didn't write much initially because I was lonely, miserable at home, dissatisfied at work, undergoing the usual transplant shock, and, of course, super busy. Now I'm lonely-ish, dissatisfied at home, getting stuff done at work, and super busy but kinda productive. Things have improved across the board. And they will continue to do so for the next month.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled mostly-travelogue. But it's not much of a blog about my summer if I never say anything about how I'm doing, which is: getting better, thanks.

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† That's not quite true – Marc took pity on me a couple times in Darmstadt. But if you've known me for, oh, six or seven minutes, you know that cooking is important to me.

‡ I will talk about The Duck in due time, I imagine.

Valencia, Pt. II

So the conference ended on Friday. By Friday night I felt like I might be coming down with something, so I bailed on plans to go to Madrid with my roommate. (I had never met her before we decided to share a room. She turned out to be a smart, sarcastic, bossy, hilarious woman who ordered me around all week. Being put in my place by a woman half my size produced a sort of bemused yes-ma'am behavior. I suppose this is informative.)

So I slept, and then Saturday met up with Alex P, now a friend. (I ran into him earlier in the week when he was panicking seriously about his talk, and dragged him to a deserted room for a couple of practice runs – of such thing are academic bonds formed.) So we had Saturday to explore Valencia, as my flight left rather early Sunday.

Neither of us was feeling beach-y, me because I didn't have gear, and Alex because he had too much (a very, very nice camera). So we went through the science museum at the City of Arts and Sciences, which is composed of buildings that seem to be largely empty. The architecture is of interest, but mostly for viewing from outside. The museum is neat.

We didn't even know about Gulliver! I actually recognized him before we found a sign! (What we saw vs. Gulliver from above.) The little ropes hanging off him are climbing ropes for children, and climbing they were, which makes the overall effect very Gulliverian.

Then we went to the center of old Valencia and just... wandered. We saw the central square, the cathedral, and lots of random cityscape. A nice dinner was had, and many photos were taken – unfortunately, mostly not by me. Traveling with someone with a nice camera makes you lazy.

Many of the pictures I did take were just of ornate, interesting buildings. Lots of random apartment buildings in Valencia (and, y'know, the rest of Europe (and Asia)) that would be some historic monument in the States. This isn't even the most interesting face of the cathedral, just the least blurry.

We went to see the Cathedral. It was closed by the time we got there, but there were a number of floats being set up for some kind of festival that weekend, some of them amazingly ornate.

Most of the floats had neither dragons nor eagles, but c'mon, did you really want to see those?

I didn't see flamenco dancers. :-( I wanted to, but it runs very late (as in, the dinner starts at 9pm). Actually, from what I saw, Spain runs very late.  People stay out eating and drinking until 3 a.m. during the week. I don't know when they sleep. Maybe people really do sleep for three hours at midday? The conference schedule was not arranged to make this possible for me.

So that's all I did in Valencia! Pretty boring for how long this post is. Next up:  Back to Munich!

Valencia, Pt. I

Sidebar: I'm going to write these catch-up entries partly in the present tense – not to be revisionist, but because it's easier, as I transcribe snatches of chats and handwritten journal paragraphs. Anything to make posting more likely...

So stop one is... Valencia!*

Unfortunately, very little interesting happened in Valencia.

It's entirely my own fault. I had a paper deadline (the big push for my ISER paper, which is more babbling about robot navigation**) and at this point I'd actually been sleeping about every other day for almost two weeks as I got ready to move to Europe, finished off papers, was jetlagged, etc. So for the first half of the week I alternated between writing all night and sleeping from the moment talks ended. Some of it was adapting to the schedule on which my advisor is now able to, well, advise – which is, starting late my afternoon and going into my wee and not-so-wee hours.

But hey! I wrote that paper sitting at a wooden writing desk in one of the hotel's many tiny lobbies, with the curtains wide open and cool air on my face as I looked out over the sleeping city. It felt so... European! (T: "Perhaps tomorrow you can have some sort of teeny coffee." Me: "Maybe if it's followed by a much larger coffee." T: "I imagine you surrounded by teeny little empty coffee cups.")

The conference was hosted by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, which looks like quite a new campus, and is very pretty.

Some interesting building on campus that told me when it was time to get off the bus!  I really liked it.

These were all over campus. Based on my experience off-campus, they are to keep drivers from totally mowing
pedestrians down every few feet?  But hey, they're iconic and attractive. Also, Accidental Shadow Self-Portrait!

AAMAS isn't really my cup of tea. There were a few relevant tracks, but apparently most of the robotics people have kind of moved off into their own conferences (excepting (at least) MTaylor, with whom I got several lovely meals). I did see one paper by an acquaintance/colleague who's working on stuff very similar to mine and a few papers I should have been more interested in.

So I really only spent one day touristing in Valencia. Pix from that... *drumroll* Next Post.

Also, anyone who has traveled with me knows my annoying fascination with stitched panoramic images. I can't help it! The world is big! And interesting! And WIDE.

The original is huge, and you should click!  but it probably still doesn't capture the
awesomeness of a lovely campus, with art, in Spain, in summer? Honest. It was nice.

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* Actually, if that's true, then Stop Zero is Darmstadt, where I slept on Marc's couch for a couple of days while we got me caught up on Europe time, bought me a burner phone, and so on. However, I have enough random stops in Darmstadt that I'm planning to skip over them unless something of interest happened.

** I've been thinking about adding blurbs to my papers so I can post a link saying, basically, "Look here's what my ISER paper is actually about yada yada!" Would anyone actually follow such a link?

The Itinerary

This is just straight-up a list of what I've done in what order, in the interests of reminding me what I want to post (and what the summer's been like).


  • 31 May: Philadelphia→Frankfurt. I stayed in Darmstadt for a couple of days to recover from jet lag (which wasn't too bad) and visit with Marc (which wasn't too bad).
  • 3 June: Frankfurt→Valencia for AAMAS.  Not the best timing, but my summer funding (from NSF) is contingent on attending this conference.
  • 10 June: Valencia→Frankfurt. One more day getting settled with assistance from Marc, then I'm away on a train to Munich. I get to spend almost a whole week there!
  • 16 June: Frankfurt→Québec City for ISER.  Actually presenting at this one. Going through Frankfurt means another 3-hour train ride from Munich to Darmstadt. This is the trip where I find out that flying from Europe to North America is the bad direction, jet-lag-wise.
  • 22 June: Québec City→Philly. This was not deliberate, I got stranded in North America. But I'll always take any chance to stop by Philly :-)
  • 23 June: Philly→Frankfurt→Munich. No Marc, but I get to wander Darmstadt a little, then get another... two whole days of work done!
  • 26 June: Munich→Edinburgh. Woot! Scotland! This is actually close to my favorite bit so far (despite my customs experience).
  • 2 July: Edinburgh→Munich. Oh, ha ha, I'm just kidding! Actually:
        ○ 2 July: Edinburgh airport. Argue with EasyJet. Edinburgh→Stansted. Scramble to reserve a hostel spot. Stansted→London! Explorations!
        ○ 3 July: London→Stansted→Munich.
        ○ 6 July: luggage arrives in Munich, from... Narnia?
  • 21 July: Munich→Toronto after accomplishing two whole weeks of work. (Almost.)
  • 29 July: Toronto→Munich.
  • 31 July: Munich→Darmstadt.
  • 1 August: Europa Park! Okay that's not exactly a trip, but it's a 2½-hour drive each way and we spent 8 hours there, so I'm counting it.
  • 2 August: Darmstadt→Osterspai.
  • 3 August: Visited Cologne. Cathedral! Whoah!
  • 4 August: Visited Koblenz, then Osterspai→Darmstadt.
  • 5 August: Darmstadt→Munich.
  • 11 August: Munich→Innsbruck→Munich. A castle and a golden roof were visited, and our intrepid heroes touched the ceiling of the world.
  • 12 August: Munich→Hohenschwangau→Munich. In which more castles were seen! Many fine castles! And also the one in which trains were missed and adventures ensued.

Whew.  Maybe it's just me, but that seems like a ton of traveling. But I'm almost done with the obligatory work parts, and from here on out it's just weekend trips to various cities (because, why not?).


Man I love traveling. Good thing too.

Starting Over

This is my personal blog, which has languished for lo, these many moons – enough moons that it makes sense to start over.  (The only-slightly-less-neglected blog about random stuff that catches my geek fancy is still at http://pangeek.blogspot.com).

I'm going to start writing here again, hopefully for long enough to capture some of the events of the summer of 2012, which I am theoretically spending in Munich (in practice I'm spending it all over the damn place). My intention is to start by posting about the things I've already done, before they escape my mind forever. I have pictures to joggle some of those neurons, too. So. More to come! (I hope.)