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ChiPy, March 2007
Monday, March 12, 2007
I attended the Chicago Python User Group last week, lured there by the mention that ChiPy member Ian Bicking works for the One Laptop Per Child project and would be bringing his own beta test 2 Children's Machine to the meeting. The little alien laptop destined to save the world is a topic I've become very curious about, especially now that one of my side projects is directly related to kids in computing. I've also been curious about Python for a while and have been looking for an excuse to go see what Pythonistas are like (turns out there's Ruby-hate, just like how Rubyists have Python-hate!). On top of all that, the meeting was being held at the Chicago Google office, so of course the Google fangirl within demanded that I check it out.
The night turned out to be quite an exciting series of misfortunes and mistakes, starting from the moment I decided that the Metra schedule seemed "inconvenient" so I'd try driving downtown for once. I mean, going with Metra would entail the complication of catching the train, the waste of an entire hour each way (while the drive only takes 40 minutes each way, according to my Google map), AAAND it would cost like 8 bucks, so driving makes sense, right? Oi, where do I begin...
(1) Traffic was shockingly bad. I mean, everyone warned me about this, but I didn't understand how bad. Also scary was the realization that I had no cash or I-Pass and thus no way to pay for tolls and the parking meter. After some digging around I discovered $4.50 in quarters in my backpack, but before I could feel any amount of relief about that,
(2) the ramp I needed to get onto was closed and there were no signs to tell me what to do instead of the ramp. This got me panicky so it was a while before I realized I should stop and ask for help. After getting the reroute info from a gas station attendant, I casually asked, "Oh by the way, how long will it take to get downtown?" He stared at me, eyes wide. "In this traffic? It's RUSH HOUR. It'll take AN HOUR." I only had 30 minutes till the meeting started, so I found this rather uncool, but what made it very much uncooler was that
(3) I made some kind of wrong turn right as I pulled into the city. Somehow when I read "Merge onto N Union Ave via the Lake St/200 N exit 51 A," it got all jumbled in my brain and I ended up on Lake St somewhere. Soon I found myself on what looked like the edge of town were it was weird and dark and completely empty. Did I mention the roads are really weird? For some reason, I've never noticed the big flashing yellow lights and 5-way intersections and the fact that everything seems broken-down and twisted, like some haunted nightmare video game. After a several minutes of trying to get back on track by pure determination alone, I stopped to dig around for a map and finally figured out what I had to do to get to the right street. It was a great feeling to have finally made it to my destination until I
(4) realized there was no place to park anywhere near the building. So I kept driving farther and farther away, still not seeing any place to park. Finally when I called out to some guy walking along the street for help, he directed me to a parking garage. Yay -- and look, they actually accept credit cards! I was so excited that I paid it "the credit card way," instead of the normal and much smarter "ticket" way, but I didn't see a problem with this till later. Off I went, parking at the first empty spot I saw before hurrying into the elevator and ending up in some lobby. I approached two workers in the office next to the lobby to ask them a question about how the credit card thing is supposed to work, when they simultaneously yelled at me, "AVIS IS THAT WAY" and pointed to the Avis office behind me. I'm all "Huh?" so they yelled it again, "Avis IS THAT WAY." I found this very, very creepy, and it wasn't till several hours later that I realized the map I was holding had the Avis logo on it. Ah.
(5) Even with maps in hand, I was completely disoriented when I got back on the streets and had to ask for help again. Thankfully some friendly woman pointed me in the right direction: "Just go over the bridge!" It was like arriving at the Promised Land when I finally got into the building, 1 hour late for the meeting. The first thing I noticed when the elevator opened onto the Google floor was that there were dozens of security cameras pointing straight at me. Er, it was probably just 4 cameras, and pointing in different directions, but it's times like this that everything seems worse that it really is. There were also some very snazzy spotlights shining the Google colors along the walls, but at the moment they only served to heighten the creepy effect. After a minute or two, a security guard appears and ushers me in after I claim to be there for the Python meeting. (I later learn he is actually the "front desk.")
I'm brought to this lone computer sitting in the hallway. "Go ahead and print out a nametag for yourself," he says cheerily. In my stressed out state, I must have appeared to be a completely idiotic computer-illiterate person, because he actually walked me through the entire process of the very simple and brilliant Google custom nametag printer.
"Type in your name where it says Name."
Ok.
"Now just type in shy pie where it says Host."
Shy pie? What's shy p—
Oh, ChiPy!!
After that, everything was smooth for a while. Despite being so late, I only missed the first presentation, on Unicode -- something I did want to see, but hey; in the happy yellow GoogleCafeteria, surrounded by a huge crowd of interesting-looking geeky people with beers, I was finally starting to calm down and feel pretty good about myself.
Soon Ian went up and discussed the OLPC effort and how he hoped to organize some Python sprints for Sugar UI development. He then passed the laptop around, much to my glee. It's a very nice, sturdy object that opens in an interesting way once you get past the cute lock system provided by the folded-over antennae parts. I remember thinking two things as I got my hands on it. Firstly: the feeling of balance seemed off, because the flipped-up screen half is thicker and heavier than the keyboard half. Secondly: the plastic shell was EXTREMELY GREASY by the time it was passed to me, even though it had only been touched by maybe 7 people at that point. Ew!
It had quite a novel screen which reminded me of a TI calculator's, only with the ability to light up and display colors. Another observation is that the keyboard is very small, making it basically unusable for adult hands. It was, nevertheless, very fun to poke those soft, gushy green keys and the funny little touchpad made of some hard fibrous-looking material. The UI was intriguing, but kind of too slow and underdeveloped to really experience much of. (Looks like it's possible to get an image of the latest version of the software here).
For the next presentation, Pete Fein demoed Grassy Knoll, his full text search web service. It's a REST interface to PyLucene, which is Java Lucene embedded in cPython -- twice as fast as Lucene and fun to write for, but finicky, hard to build, and bad with threads. Right now Grassy Knoll outputs JSON, but eventually Pete plans to make it language agnostic and give it multi-threaded server capability.
After the meeting I had a good time chatting with Bradley from PSIG about life and love and his personal library of thousands of math books. I also learned that he's an accomplished horn player and he got me all inspired about taking up the trumpet again. Hopefully I will this summer!
(6) Back to my adventure on the streets... it wasn't long before I realized that I had no idea what parking garage I had parked at. Yeah, this is where the ticket would have helped. All I remembered was that it had an Avis office and it was somewhere either near or on Lake St. It was probably a half hour of wandering before I remembered that the first floor of the garage was painted blue and named Paris. I decided to ask some random attendant in some random travel-related building if he knew of a parking garage with a Paris first floor. Amazingly, he actually did know what I was talking about and was able to point me there. It was quite relieving to get back to my car around 11PM -- time for a nice quiet drive home, I thought to myself. It seemed this would be the case, until
(7) a huge truck got in my way right when I needed to change lanes to get onto I-290. I hoped that there'd be another ramp if I kept driving, but when several minutes went by with no sign of such a thing, I attempted to go back downtown and drive back out again. I had to do this twice, wasting at least another hour and bothering yet another gas station attendant in the process.
Well I made it home eventually :D. My little travel experience ended up costing about 4.5 hours and $14 plus gas, which is more than twice the time and money it would have cost to take the train.
It's not every day I can create a 7-part horror story out of my own ineptitude, so I intend to make the most of what I learned. While at the ChiPy meeting, I had assured a couple different people that "from now on I'm taking the train." But as I drove home, I decided that the worst thing I could do now was to give up like that. I've always tended to dislike and avoid doing the things I'm naturally bad at, but I'm beginning to see this as a big flaw. Maybe I do lack a sense of direction, maybe I am terrible at reading maps, and maybe I always get massively lost when I rely on my instincts while traversing new streets, but that's not what I want for myself and I think I can change it. So, I'll definitely be driving there again, and I'm going to keep at it until I become good at all these things (or until I get lost forever, or get myself killed trying). I'll use the train if we're talking rush hour though :)
Sidenote: I talked to so many strangers that day (some of whom I actually didn't mention because this entry was getting so long), and nearly every one of them seemed to overflow with altruism in the ways they helped me. Chicagoans have changed my view of humanity as a whole. I wish I could have stopped with some of those people to exchange life stories.
Someday I hope to find that I've become the sharply-dressed, smart-looking businesswoman striding down the city streets knowing exactly where she's going; the one to whom hopelessly lost, out-of-breath youngsters come with wrinkled Google and Avis maps in hand. Till then, Chicago pwnz me. <3
1:07 AM
Comments
Now you know why I'm a Metra fan ;-)
Everyone's had their "overwhelmed by the city" experience, it was just time for yours. You have the right attitude to get back on the horse, however. That's the only way you'll own the city yourself :-)
Posted by rentzsch at March 12, 2007 10:59 PM
Think about GPS. I have Garmin c530 with improved detection (accuracy 15 feet and faster processing) but without text-to speach (so cheaper) and love it. I can read maps (and do orienteering for fun) but GPS really helps. Thanks for sharing.
Posted by Peter Masiar at March 13, 2007 9:27 AM
Ah, I keep forgetting... here's my Mr. A quotes from Math 1218 so far... hopefully a few will evoke grins:
"That formula would drive me nuts! But... I'm nuts already, so I guess maybe it'll drive me sane."
"So you take A intersect B and then the complement of C complement... what's the complement of a complement? Right, it's a second date."
"I know the quadratic formula is a horrible thing, but when you die and go to heaven, I hear that they ask you one question, and that's it. What's the quadratic formula? And you know, if you don't answer correctly, they cut the cord and you go all the way down to the other place, where you'll see ME, because all math teachers go to hell!"
"I had a dream where all of these darn rabbits were gobbling up my entire yard! I was probably thinking about this math problem..."
"Now, I know this derivation goes over like a fart in church..."
Mr. A: "When you derive something, what do you make sure not to do?"
Students: "Um..."
Mr. A: "Don't drink. Right? Don't drink and derive!" *laughs* "Yeah, I'm full of 'em."
Student: "Yeah, you're full of something."
"Don't bet the farm on it."
*coughs loudly* "Man, gotta stop drinking that whiskey."
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Posted by Weien at March 14, 2007 3:03 PM
"Really, this is as good as it gets; practically all the quality you get in a two-dozen pack of root vegetables!"
Posted by a ring salesman at March 16, 2007 4:36 PM
I realize they're trying to help people with the cheap laptops, but it seems like their effort is misdirected. Help them develop the infrastructure in their countries so that in a generation or two they will be able to afford full blown laptops... It's the whole fish vs fishing pole deal. (As much as I love computers they aren't the be all and end all)
Posted by unfair at March 22, 2007 3:16 AM
We have to grab some gps navigation when we go out even just within our town! LOL. I feel your pain. VZ Navigator helps if you're with Verizon.
Getting lost can become an adventure. It's the traffic that eats my patience up when I go to Chicago.
Posted by carmelyne at March 29, 2007 6:21 PM