Aussie directness

Cairns itself has very little going on. Everything is a drive away. Most touristy things are privately owned, and even the national parks and like have to be reached using tour services ostensibly to reduce the impact of unherded, isolated visitors. This means that there is heavy advertisement and commission-based sales of tours. Truth and moderation are a casualty of the whole setup. It's hard to get information on anything that doesn't involve a $100 tour.

Sunday, we went to a botanical gardens in the north of the city. The gardens has plants from tropical rainforests all over the world. Across from the gardens was a boardwalk that went into the rainforest. We started out at the top of the canopy with light-loving, tall trees. And then you walked into the understory with ferns and the like. And as we walked further and further, the soil got swampier and swampier. The trees and plants changed slowly, finally culminating in paper-bark trees and mangroves. And adjacent to the garden was a 300m hill that overlooked the airport. It took us 40 minutes to climb, but the views from the top of Mt. Whitfield was worth the effort. We could see the Pacific, the rainforest and planes taking off.

We found an elderly couple already at the bus stop to go back. "It's 13 degrees in Adelaide and raining," the lady told us. She was enjoying the heat, but it was still a bit much. "But you don't burn do you," she commented to my wife, "the sun doesn't affect dark skin as much."

Monday afternoon, we took off to beaches north of Cairns (Palm Cove, see picture on right). The water was cold (23C) and it was very, very windy but we did get into the water. Don't know how it'll be on Thursday when we go to the Great Barrier Reef. But however cold it is, we're going.

Coming back, we chanced on a shack that advertised itself as the "Outback Opal Mine". We got off the bus and went in. It was not a mine -- it was just a shop with a wall that was made to look like a mine. A scam. But the scam served its purpose because A. bought a few opal earrings to give as gifts. The blues were great and the milky white didn't look as good. "It'll look good on your skin," the saleswoman told my wife, "the white won't look good on a woman from England, but on your skin it'll look quite good." Apparently, Australians are a lot more casual when it comes to mentioning race -- I have a hard time picturing an American making the same comments.

The old fangled way of taking a photograph

Thursday evening (it's Saturday morning for me now: I'm blogging from Sydney airport, but it "feels" like it was last evening), A. and I took advantage of a 5-hour layover in Los Angeles to catch up with R., someone I who I went to elementary school with in Africa. R. brought her cousin along. A young, teenage cousin. We asked the cousin to take a picture of the three of us at the Tapas restaurant.

When I go on long trips, when I'm not sure when/if I'll be able to come across a battery charger or if the voltage/plugpoints will fit, I make sure to turn the LCD screen on the back of my digital camera off because it is a power hog. Besides, I've found that photographs taken at arms length have a greater tendency to shake -- if you squish your camera against your face, that's a
great way to stabilize it. So, I take most photographs the old-fashioned way: by looking through the view finder, not by composing it on a LCD screen.

Anyway, we asked the young girl to take a photograph and I told her to look through the viewfinder. She had no idea. She kept the camera at arms length and said she didn't see anything. I pointed out the eyehole to her, but she still couldn't get the idea that you could look through that peephole to take a picture.

Real-time Java

I finished (I think) the talk I'm going to give at the radar conference in Oz. The talk deals with creating the downstream data processing algorithm to assemble adaptively scanned phased array radar data. The talk is online (Powerpoint slides) now.

What I didn't say on the slides (doesn't belong in a scientific presentation) is that the program is written in pure Java. Real-time data processing in Java? Well, the time's here.

A few months ago, I reimplemented one of the simpler severe weather algorithms (the single-radar VIL algorithm if you are interested) in Java just so that we could do a time comparision against the heavily optimized C++ version that is running in real-time. The Java program was (wait for it ...) 5% faster. And this was without any serious effort at performance tuning or optimization. Of course, I knew going in Java's performance bottlenecks, so the program dealt with built-in arrays instead of the Collections classes. The C++ version uses STL's vector. Inspite of having to use built-in arrays, the Java program was significantly easier to write. But you knew that already.

This algorithm is the first real-time one (in WDSS-II) that's been written in Java. The first of many, I hope.

Book swap instead of presents at a birthday party

The New York Times has an article talking about parents who ask for money for charities instead of birthday presents at their kids' parties . The article quotes Miss Manners suggesting that it's bad to spend your guests' money on your charities. I would tend to agree.

There's a better way to avoid excess.

The 5-year old was born on the same day as one of his classmates. The two kids wanted to share a pool party even though both sets of parents offered to give them separate parties. (Count me a proud father).

Then, they agreed to my wife's suggestion of being less extravagant with gifts. They asked their friends to each bring a book. At the party, we had the kids sit in a circle, sing "Happy Birthday", and pass the book they'd brought along to the person to their left. Thus, every kid left the party with a book. We bought M. (the other kid) a birthday present and M's parents bought S. one.

The parents didn't feel bad, because they had brought something: just not for the birthday kid. And we didn't buy goodie bags (each guest left with a book). The birthday kids got to feel special because they got a nicely wrapped birthday present, but didn't end up with 24 articles destined to be played with once and discarded. Only one kid (a 2-yr old sibling of one of the 5-yr old guests) cried because he wanted to keep the book he came with. Based on that, the idea won't work for 3-yr old parties, but for 5-year olds and older, a book swap is a very workable solution.

Mr. Modest

A fellow in my class in Washington DC this week showed up on Tuesday wearing a University of Texas Longhorns shirt. When I teased him about it (Oklahoma and Texas have a long-standing rivalry), he offered that his affection for Texas was genuine.  He said he'd represented Texas in Track.

Today, when I mentioned that I was going to Cairns, Australia next week (for a radar conference), he piped up that he'd been to Australia three times.

"Three times?", I asked, "how come?"

Turns out he was a world-class athlete, participating in several international sporting events. He even ran in the 1984 Olympics.

Feel good mush

I finished reading the latest Harry Potter book (Deathly Hallows) yesterday. This book is poorly plotted and badly imagined. But then, none of the previous ones in the series is any good.

I read the first book when it came out just to know what all the hullabaloo was about. The point system at Hogwarts and the rules of Quidditch were both incredibly innumerate. And since these were both major components of the plot, it was obvious that the author could not create a realistic world. Unlike, say, Tolkien in the Middle Earth books.

It's surprising to me that the Harry Potter books are as successful as they are. They're feel-good mush. But then, I did read every single one of them. So, what's up with that?

Smokies not up to par

We spent the weekend in Smoky Mountain National Park.  I've been there earlier -- about 10 years ago when we stopped here enroute from Ohio to Florida. That was in winter and the park seemed gorgeous.

Somehow, the park didn't impress this time. Maybe it's just that it's summer after a season of patchy rainfall. But, it may be that I've seen more of the country now. Since that winter visit to the Smokies, I've been to Big Bend and Yellowstone (my top two). I also think the Ouachita mountains and forest in Oklahoma and Arkansas are as beautiful, and not as crowded. There's even a scenic drive that cuts across it.  In other words, maybe my standards are higher.