dancing tetrahedra

It’s not as glorious as my smoke videos of old perhaps, but I’ve finally got some decent video of my current research work. What’ you’re seeing is a tetrahedral mesh of a cube with the tetrahedra (pyramids) colored according to their quality. As the quality improves, their colors shift toward green, and when they’re good enough, they disappear. At the bottom right is a histogram of qualities for the entire mesh. Should be a fun little clip to show when I give the talk at the International Meshing Roundtable in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

who knew budgets were so fun?

Now that we’re hitched, and we both have an income, Les and I figured it was time to sit down and actually figure out how much money we make and how much we should spend. This is actually much more fun than you’d think–for us at least.

We’re both naturally pretty tight-fisted when it comes to recreational spending, conditioned from years of college (and then grad-school) living. Over the years, we’d reached a balance where we still ate out plenty, and spent smartly when we did, but overall didn’t buy too many toys and tried hard to buy the peanut butter when it’s on sale two for one, switch to the cheaper car insurance provider, go for the bottom-of-the-barrel airline seats, etc. We’re a match made in heaven in that we both consider food our number one luxury item, though I certainly still have an electronics itch I need to scratch from time to time. We’ve also been blessed with generosity from our families and from the government (mad props to the National Science Foundation, yo) so that we’ve somehow managed to emerge (well, I’ve almost emerged) from our extended adolescence debt-free, which I think in our generation is akin to having won the lottery.

Our goal with the budget was to eliminate guilt from our spending. Meaning, if we knew exactly what we were making, and how much we had to spend on what, we could go out and order the fancy Okinawan beer with our sushi care-free–it’s all in the budget! So, you can probably guess how we divided things up. After taking care of all of our bills and savings, we heaped giant slices of the pie into groceries and eating out. I am giddy with excitement about produce boxes, farmer’s-market beef, and plenty of trips to restaurants around Berkeley and the City. We’re food-rich!

I also want to take a moment out to plug the awesome spending-tracking website wesabe. It’s like flickr for your spending–you send it all your transactions, then tag them, and you can see how your spending adds up, compares to other people, get tips and discuss ways to save money. Plus it has this hypnotic Firefox plugin that automatically logs into your bank and downloads your transactions, so you don’t even need your banks cooperation.

last post from berlin

It’s 6:11am here, and Leslie’s in the shower. The place is spotless, the better to recover the full security deposit. The last thing to get packed, of course, is the wireless router, but the time has come to snip our internet umbilical. Just 22 hours of travel stand between us and sweet, sweet home. What a summer it’s been. We’ll see you all soon.

geocoding added to gallery; also comments

I just can’t stop! The Google Maps plugin for Gallery is just too whizzy not to use. So, I’ve started adding lat/lon information to albums in gallery:

gallery geocoded

Also, I finally fixed commenting. You should see a little “add comment” thing underneath each photo, and you can also click the little icon at the top. We’ll see how spam proof this solution is…

the first overt youtube post…

That’s right, folks, I’m entering the world of 2005 right here and now: inline flash video! I felt I should do it so I could bring you the genius of The Michael Showalter Showalter:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlPZq8llJJ4[/youtube]

These guys have been hit or miss since The State, but I think this is them back at the top of their game.

…and that was prague.

We just got back from what’s scheduled to be our list sub-trip, Prague. We gave our selves three days to see the city, which doesn’t seem like much, I guess. After the first day, which was dominated by a 4-hour walking tour of all the famous sights, we had trouble filling day two (maybe just because of our aching feet), and after a thwarted attempt to see the Simpsons movie (oops! only in Czech) and go to a “climbing bar” (oops! closed and replaced by trendy hotel), we gave up and retired to the Hostel. We took it easy on day three, but did revisit the castle more thoroughly than we had on the walking tour, and we glanced at (but did not enter, because we’re cheap) Kafka’s house on the castle grounds.

Next we endured 6 hours in a compartment of a train with every manner of family–first two people our age with a two year old son who was not happy about traveling on a train for 6 hours, and then a family of four with a 6-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son. These compartments are not big (in 2nd class) and you all face each other, knees interacting, trying to be polite, but really what I wanted to do was toss the squirming children out the window by the end of it (I didn’t; that sort of thing is also illegal in Germany).

So now it’s Tuesday, we’ve got just shy of three weeks left here, and with no more trips it’s time to dig in and figure out what else Berlin has to offer. Michael will come join us a week before we leave, which should be awesome, as he starts his second 10-week tour in Dresden.

We should have some Prague pics up soon.

still in germany

Yep, we’re still here. We went to Amesterdam last weekend, and posted the few pics we took there on the ol’ gallery. We just happened to be there the same weekend that Ali was meeting up with Karen to head on to their awesome-sounding trip to Italy, so we grabbed some dinner with them. Ali had his nice new camera with him, and got some great shots of what is really a beautiful and perfectly functioning little city.

We’ve been catching our breath back here a bit, and I’ve been working on the camera-ready version the mesh-improvement paper I wrote with Jonathan, which was finally accepted to the International Meshing Roundtable. So I guess I’ve got a trip to Seattle coming in October.

Next week we’re heading to Prague, and then we’ll have just a couple more left before we pack up. It’s amazing, the slowness and quickness of the way time passes over here.