Interesting news

Viva Las Vegas! Sarah, Alex, and I are heading to the City of Sin for my first professional conference, Worldcomp '07. A short version of my thesis was accepted as a conference paper, so I am going to present it at one of the couple dozen simultaneous conferences, CVIP '07 (which stands for computer vision and image processing). I'm also on a mission to see other interesting papers and tutorials, and to network. Unfortunately, we won't be there in time for John Holland's keynote the first morning, unless they schedule me for Monday and we have to change our plans. I'm interested in some of the other conferences too. There is one dedicated to AI, another one for machine learning, another one for data mining... parallel processing, software engineering, knowledge engineering, semantic web... it's all there.

We will have 3 luxurious nights to live it up. If I have my druthers, the poker room at the Rio and the World Series of Poker bracelet events will be on the itinerary. We're staying at the Tropicana, so if you aren't doing anything June 25-28 and would love to vacation (hotels.com + southwest.com) among the pimps, high rollers, snakes, and sleaze of it all, come on down.

I got sucked into The Once and Future King, which is, so far, a funny sort of book, so I am reading it back and forth with Sons and Lovers, a tragic sort of book. I feel like Homer in the one where he's a truck driver and he takes big handfuls of uppers and downers in combination so he can drive across the country without sleeping.