Interesting stuff; I had to get some after reading about it in Collapse. It was good, but very sour with a note of lye that hit the back of my nostrils after a few bites. Also, it is a bit pricey. Buffala yogurt is better overall, and will remain preferred lunchtime dairy snack.

Bought a Chunky Monkey MilkShake with my lunch frozen burrito today. Had more calories than the burrito, but it tasted better. I probably won’t make a habit of it, however I will likely try the other two flavors sometime before they are pulled from the market for poor sales.

While at CVPR 2006, I noticed that a lot of people wanted to tackle big Vision problems – things like getting a whole scene out of a single image, or constructing object finders out of sketches. Marr had 18 citations, so I finally got around to reading the whole thing – not just skipping over the parts that seemed out of date or just plain wrong. And a lot of it is wrong, with other books like Forsyth and hoary Horn providing a better technical idea of what how the field is shaping and how to put the basic ideas to use. However, Marr is a good introduction to ideas about how research in vision, and other such fields, should be done, if not in any usable form today. Next, I’ll read Aliomonos’ old thing. If I was in Biology, I get the feeling this would be reading Darwin after reading Gould, or whoever the hot one is now.

An excellently made and thoroughly depressing flick that suffers from Spielberg’s interesting recent tick of having multiple endings. On top of that, I had to deal with Spielberg’s squeamishness about nudity, which only made the love scenes more out of place. While I enjoyed the movie as a whole, its end, especially the final shot, seemed unearned. The movie was better when it was about people and their attempts to bring order from chaos through the application of more chaos. Its constant reminders and symbols of home and family felt forced, especially when intercut with the technically and thematically more successful action sequences.

For breakfast this morning, I poached a couple of eggs (from TJ’s) and toasted a whole wheat english muffin, put some of the spread on the muffin, and added some Niman ranch ham to make a tasty breakfast sandwich. I had tried the spread plain on a muffin a few days earlier, and it was just too much. However, it was pretty good on the mcmuffin.

I showed FF Coppola’s ‘The Conversation’ for movie night last Thursday. The discussion afterward was pretty good. I always like how a flick can take you inside a person’s head. The Conversation offered a good counterpoint to ‘Rear Window.’ I suppose I’ll have to see ‘Repulsion’ and ‘Blow Up,’ and a bunch of other related movies, too. So, it goes. (Afterward, we decided to show ‘Fanny and Alexander’ next Thursday.)

When I left my powerbook on the edge of my desk and returned to find the adapter prong bent beyond repair, my first destination was the apple online store, which carries replacement power adapters for $80. However, I checked OWC, who carries a replacement adapter for only $35. The adapter is old school – a white variant of a similar adapter that came with my 2001 Dell. The led is on the converter, not the ring, and it doesn’t have the classy apple styling, but it does the job, and at less than half the price, so I can’t complain.

The midterm has passed, and we haven’t had to defend or present any of our pieces to the rest of the class. While I’m continuing to do fairly straightforward drawings in class, my projects have become progressively odder – and, somehow, less satisfying. For my fourth project, I’m trying to develop some kind of written language of human form. I don’t think it is going to work out.

These cheese dogs are fine – probably a bit better than the Oscar Meyer variety, but I don’t think they are as good as Nathan’s. I’ll give them another shot next week (I still have six left in the pack).

Floyd’s is probably my favorite barbershop, with a sardonic take on the barbershop tradition. For $22 bucks (plus tip, of course) they aren’t the cheapest cut in College Park, but their offer of neck shaves and back massages, not to mention their internet access, make up for the price difference. Patricia, who I saw this afternoon, was better than my last barber, but I still think Wie gave me the best cut – and understood that I really wasn’t kidding when I said I knew nothing about haircuts.