Back from Hawaii

Sorry for the lack of posts but we just got back from a trip to Hawaii! I presented a paper at the AAMAS 2007 Agents conference. We had fun in Hawaii, especially Eris. Check out the latest pics on my flickr photostream.

Do you see what I feed...

I just found something interesting in my preferred feed reader, Google Reader's, interface. It has a "shared items" thingiee where I can mark any post in any of my subscriptions as "shared". These shared items are then re-feeded to a custom feed that anyone can subscribe to (for me, this feed is here). So subscribe to this feed, and I will mark any really interesting stuff as shared. Who knows, maybe you will find a cool new feed to read.

Jet Set Part 1

I just got back from bidnezz in Monterey, CA. It's a pretty nice city with a couple neat things to do...I went to the aquarium and 17-mile drive. Both are entertaining (if expensive).

On the 17-mile drive sits the Lone Cypress, "one of California's most enduring landmarks". It's a pretty cool 300 year old tree that sits on a rocky outcrop overlooking the Pacific. When I got there, I saw this sign:



Jeez, a trademarked tree?! Well how do you like these apples:



:P~ on you Pebble Beach Co. And your drive wasn't worth the $9 I paid either. For the same price I can get into Shenandoah and go on a 105 Mile Drive!!

Nerd Alert!

One of my hobbies is playing the card game Magic: The Gathering. I am a relative newcomer to this game and I only started playing about two years ago (during the "Kamigawa Block" for the other magic players out there). I do enjoy playing, I think it's a fun game.

One of the manufacturer Wizards of the Coast's tricks is that they constantly print new magic "sets" of cards, and "rotate out" old sets. The sets older than about two years are no longer legal for so-called standard play. Old cards can be played in other types of tournaments ("Legacy", "Extended", etc.) and in casual play. This is one of the ways that they keep interest in the game alive, or for the more pessimistic of you out there, how they keep us addicted.




A magic player may try to buy cards and build interesting decks to play against others. This is called "constructed". Another option are tournaments where you must buy unopened packs of cards and make decks from this limited pool and play against others doing the same. This is called "limited".

Recently I changed from attempting to be a good constructed player, which I don't have the skill, patience, or money for, and change to pretty much a limited-only player. This makes the game a lot cheaper to play since I can only play limited tourneys maybe once a month at about $20 bucks a pop.

Yesterday, Dream Wizards, DC's local crack dealer, ahem, card store, held a pre-release tournament for the latest and greatest magic set that's coming out. I went and played, had a lot of fun, but didn't do too well...overall I went 3-7 in games and only won a paltry amount of prizes (2 packs, worth about $6). Maybe I just got unlucky....or maybe I just suck at magic.

If you're gonna spew...spew into this

So Eris was sick this week with some kind of stomach virus. She had to miss three days of school. Not to mention she honked in the car (the word "projectile" was used). This is what a virus does to a 3.5 year old:



She's feeling a lot better now though. Today Uncle Joel is giving her an reading test! I'll report back on that later.

Eris and Ethan bowling

A couple of days ago my brother in law Rett and I took Eris and Ethan duckpin bowling At Perry Hall Lanes.




Duckpins are fairly closely tied with my hometown of Baltimore. It's like ten-pin, but the balls are smaller, the pins are smaller, and you get three rolls instead of two. Fun for kids right?

Well...

Next time we'll go to a place with gutter bumpers. Perry Hall didn't offer them. Combine that with an uneven lane that rolled balls to the left made for kind of a frustrating game for the kids. They still had fun as kids will but it could have been a lot better. Duckpins are hard! I rolled a mighty 49. Eris "won" (she insisted she did anyway).

The place was very Bawlmer, and it even had snowballs. They weren't great, but hey, I have to drive 20 minutes for snowballs out here in Frederick. Freez-King out here makes good snowballs but doesn't have egg custard flavor. Snowballs were pretty huge when I was growing up. We used to walk to the snowball stand for a buck and then the second-run movie theater for another $2 when I was a kid growing up in Arbutus. Good times.

Eris and her great memory

Yesterday we were hanging out over at my sister-in-law Joy's place with her husband Rett, my moms-in law Jean and Eris' cousin Ethan. We needed to figure out what to make for dinner and of course when someone mentioned steak, I was all for it.

Now not much is better than tenderloin tournedos and for a big party like us five + two kids it can actually be done (relatively) inexpensively if you buy a whole tenderloin from somewhere like Costco. Whole tenderloins are sometimes called "PSMO's" (pronounced pismo) for "Peeled, Side Meat On" because the 'loin is peeled of fat and a piece of meat called the chain is left on the side of the main steaky part.


A PSMO


A cute girl with a PSMO

As it happens I have done this before for just our family because if you have a foodsaver, a big freezer, and a taste for red meat it can be economic to get a PSMO just for a family of three. Alton Brown of Good Eats did a pair of episodes on using up a PSMO which was very helpful. In the episode, Alton pretends to buy 10 or so PSMO's from Costco.

Eris has only seen this once but it must have been memorable for her. She rarely forgets anything. Whenever we see or talk about PSMO's she always says "How many PSMO's did the boy buy?", of course referring to Alton. "He bought 10, but we don't need 10, we just need 1", she usually answers herself. At dinner yesterday, she was also reminding herself to "try the pink parts", one of the things i say to her when meat is too tough. I had forgotten all about that but of course she didn't.

I guess it's all that red meat we feed her.

People are weird

Exhibit A. Pet strollers:



I don't get this. First, you don't "walk" cats. Seriously, they don't like it. Secondly, if you want a cat to see and/or smell outside, why not open a window? And if it's an outdoor cat, why not just let it out? This isn't a dog. Maybe they are hoping that somehow the cat will evolve into a superbeing capable of folding space...

Eris and Iris...

Two Greek goddesses, one of chaos, one of the rainbow. In this lifetime, though, they are good friends:

What's that taste in my smoothie...

Hmmm, not sure I want that extra stuff in my smoothie. And I have to pay them?!

GBTW and STFU

So we are back from vacation and we had a good time down at the beach. The last couple of days were not as great as the first, and as a final insult we had to change a flat tire on the way home with help from Dave and Kathryn. Travel this time was a big pain...10 hours to get down there and about 10 to get back.

Even Panera screwed up my order...and all I wanted was some nice roast beef!! I got turkey instead.

No I can't have a roast beef sammich.
<--- Not mine

Who invited this guy to the beach?!



Angel got some kind of stomach flu yesterday and spent the day in bed (or in the bathroom). Hopefully today will be better.

Let's go shopping!

Isn't it funny how you go away on vacation and end up doing everything you do at home? It still feels special to go to the grocery store within walking distance of the ocean. I know Iris and Eris think so.

Hi all, I am posting from sunny Williamsburg, VA. We just had a fun day at Busch Gardens with our friends Dave, Kathryn and Iris. The highlight of the day was when we brewed a special tea:



Mmmm. Sweat-tea. With preschooler sauce!

(L to R: Me, Dave, Angel, Eris, and Iris)

We're planning a trip to London. Airfare is expensive, so on a tip from Fark, we were able to get driving directions from Baltimore to London!!! The one bit in the middle may be somewhat challenging though...

This is me and my beautiful daughter Eris. She was playing in the ice and decided to climb a tree.

Just messing around.

Hi everyone! My name is Chris McCubbin, and I am a Computer Scientist researcher. Some of my more "creative" friends have dubbed me "El Savanto" because (supposedly) I can be a bit absent-minded at times but at other times can tell you how RSA Encryption works.

One of my friends made a blog and his settings were not behaving quite well so I made a blog to play around with my own settings to help him out. Who knows, maybe I will update this occasionally. Grab an RSS feed from below and a google reader account so you can get updated when I post instead of checking the site every day like a drug-addicted monkey. Lates friends :)