I think this is the longest stretch of time that I have spent away from the blog. As anticipated October and November were absolutely mental with work, most of which was self inflicted. Apart from sitting for hours at a time writing code, writing words and preparing presentations, I had a fair share of travel. I lost track of all the flights I had, but they included several trips to London, trip to Denver, and trips to the dot and the semi-colon.

He's young, handsome and tanned (Berlusconi about Obama)

What have you got in your head? stones?

You are an unsharpened diamond

...there were a lot of Indians, it was a very brown town.

The sandwich I get from uni almost makes the 2 hour trip to get there worth it.

A fresh crusty ciabatta with a tiny bit of butter, smoked salmon, 2 slices of bree cheese, a few finely sliced cucumbers, all topped up with some creme fraiche. Can't beat that!

A humourous way to mark a moment in history.

I've uploaded some pictures of Columbus (Ohio). Now you can see for yourself how interesting the place is.

After lunch I was wandering aimlessly around the hotel, and I happened to meet a random stranger. He started talking and I started chatting with him. He was complaining that he's going to have the most boring 7 hours, packing candy for tomorrows hockey match. I pricked my ears, "what hockey match?", I asked. He told me that the blue jackets were playing, so I asked if tickets would still be available today, just 1 day before the match. He made a quick phone call to check for me, and confirmed that tickets were still available. While he was walking with me to show me where the ticket office was, I asked who they were playing. They were playing the NY Rangers! How cool is that!

The only other time I came to the States (also for a conference), I had got a ticket to see the NY rangers, even before getting to NY. That time I had a major screw-up with flights and missed the match. This time with the greatest serendipity possible, I got a ticket for tomorrows match between the Blue Jackets and the NY Rangers. Woooooohooo!!!

Yes, him! He sneaked out of a seedy ally while I was walking to the hotel yesterday night after the banquet. He crept slowly from behind, jabbed me in the ribs and screamed, "LADDDDYYYYYY". Did you guess now? I met Seamus!

I had to come all the way to this godforsaken state in the US to meet him again. I think the last time I saw him was after I hooked up with the chick. There was that little story with him and bob the ghost, the one who used to live in Rathmines. Been quite a while since then. He was still 13.

Well I must say the kid is alive and well. Ok, maybe not so well, living like a parasite in the side streets of Columbus, but hey, he got here and we met. What else do you want. He found out that I was coming over and decided to make an effort to meet.

The other great thing was that Thomas Brown's lately adopted pet wasn't there. Apparently the 3 legged dog was held at customs when the two stooges tried to sneak him in the US. Now you tell me, who tries to sneak a rabbis infested, 3 legged dog in the US. I mean you can try to sneak in a bottle or two of explosive liquid, but the dog. Come on. Btw, Thomas Brown was detained too.

After all the effort Seamus went through to meet up, I couldn't even be pissed off at him. Not even after what he did. It was like the good old times. Maybe even better. He could get a Dr. Pepper here, instead of Pepsi.

We spent the night chatting away, browsing through the channels looking for an episode of family guy. At night he slept in the shower, and by morning he had already vanished again.

Yesterday I arrived in Ohio for the VisWeek 2008 Conference. Just a brief hello from the conference, hopefully even though doubtfully I'll write a bit about the salient interesting points. (Note: These will only be posted in the tech section).

Updates!

• Day 1
• Critics in the InfoVis community

In the last week the family has been stretching itself beyond its usual culinary comfort zone. This week alone we had beef lasagne (prepared under the 1hr mark), beef and spinach cannelloni, and yesterday a Mexican tortilla wrap dinner. Just reading this paragraph almost makes me want to hide away from the scales.

I cooked my fair share of tortilla wraps when I was still living in the dot, but I always found it a bit tricky getting them served all warm in time. What mommy S and aunty S did yesterday was a nice do-it-yourself idea. They prepared a couple of bowls with different tortilla fillings like minced beef, home made guacamole, tomatoes, sweetcorn, onions, sour cream and green peppers, and everybody prepared his own tortilla. It was also interesting seeing a pizza-tortilla mashup by our resident Italian. Poor J had some stones roaming around his body, we're not entirely sure whether they were in his kidneys as he claimed or in his mind.

In November the housies promised to try and push for a Slovak home made dinner, cooked by a Slovak. Whether they'll manage to get that has yet to be seen though.

Via Today's Big Thing

This green tea with peach tastes like mushroom tea

You get designs from the universe to proof you wrong

I'm imagining you with a family, LOL!! Full of little kids shouting and farting ... LOL At least one of you is a bit mature and everything. we need somebody to take care of us, not us taking care of a mini-me! LOL

S: Do you know someone called Mike
R: Yes it's Mike :P
S: ah, ok ok
R: did he send you some email and you didn't recognize him?
S: no it was linked in. it was too formal and stuff, I know him in a different way :D

You're aristocratic

Until a couple of weeks ago I thought that the word Quagmire was a surname. That's what happens when you start taking Family Guy too seriously. Well, it turns out that quagmire is a word which means:-

1. soft miry land that shakes or yields under the foot
2. a difficult, precarious, or entrapping position

Talking about Family Guy related matter. Check out this clip from the new series. It's an absolute pearl!

As soon as I saw a guy solving a nonogram, on his phone in Japan, I knew I was going to get into nonograms again. Nonograms are logic puzzles played on a grid using numbers as clues. This descriptions sounds a bit like Sudoku, but that's where the similarity ends.

The square grid is empty, and the clues are at the side of each row and column. Your task is to colour certain squares in the grid according the given clues. The clues are a sequence of numbers, for example 3, 4, 7 of consecutive coloured squares, separated by at least one or more empty squares. In the case of the above clue, it means that you have to colour a sequence of 3 squares, then have 1 or more blank squares, a second sequence of 4 coloured squares, white squares and a final sequence of 7 squares. Typically when the puzzle is complete a picture is formed.

These puzzles can be called many different things, amongst them: Hanjie, Paint by Numbers, Pixel Puzzles, Oekaki Logic, and Tsunami.

If you want to try out some puzzles the Sapphire Games site offers some interesting puzzles you can play online. I even managed to find a nice version of the puzzles for the Pocket PC from Conduits. The Japan Puzzle website has a good list of links for PC programs and other platforms.

With the Sudoku craze still alive and slowly evolving in a Kakuro craze, I think there's a good market for nonogram puzzle books.

Nowadays updates are coming in batches. Ah well, I'm too busy living life instead of writing about it. This update is a bit of a diary style update, probably more interesting to me when I’m 67 then to the rest of the world. Will mindspill still be up when I’m 67?

The weekend after returning from Japan was a very eventful one. On Friday I flew to London for the best concert line-up I could ever dream of in the last 10 years. Anathema, My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost were all playing together to celebrate Paradise Lost's 20th Anniversary. The fathers of doom death metal playing together in the same gig, at the Forum in London. It was such an event that a couple of hardcore friends from home, Cyprus and Finland also came to London for the gig. We were a group of 6 dottians, 1 Finn and 1 Romanian. The concert was fantastic. I had very low expectations from Anathema and was positively surprised them. I was very surprised by My Dying Bride as they are quite peculiar live. Their stage presence is quite atypical and they played many old songs which was nice to an extent, but a bit surprising. I'm very curious to see them live again. Paradise Lost were good, but not really surprising. In the end the 3 bands came out on stage together and opened some champagne, soaking us wet since we were at the very front.

After the gig we spent the rest of the evening looking for a watering hole, but we only managed to get a single drink from the only two pubs that were open. I spent half of the night with my friends, and the other half travelling to Bratislava for a wedding. I arrived at the wedding place at 1pm and the wedding started at 2pm. Just barely had the time to pee and have a quick shower.

Slovak weddings are long. Very very long! The wedding started at 2pm and finished at 4.30am the following morning, but we only managed till 3am. There were some interesting traditions during the wedding. First, before the mass, there was a small reception and the bride and groom came to greet the guests and formally thank their respective parents. After mass at the local churc, we returned back to the hotel for the wedding dinner. We were seated at the most multilingual table, with 4 languages spoken at a time; Slovak, Hungarian (the wedding was in the Southern part of Slovakia were most people speak Hungarian), English and German.

After the starter (prosciutto crudo with parmesan shavings and melon), the waiters were carrying the soup plates and dropped one plate on purpose. All of a sudden, people rushed from their chairs and started jumping on the broken glass. Few minutes later the bride and the groom came with a broom and started sweeping the glass. (Traditionally only the groom does this). Each time they were almost finished, somebody hit their dustpan and they had to start all over again.

At midnight the bride stepped on the dance floor, and people start paying money to dance with the her. Each guest danced for a few minutes until the next paying guest took over. Traditionally, towards the end of this dance, the groom has to pay for a dance. Other guests then pay to dance with the bride, forcing the groom to up the ante for the final dance.

On Sunday I went to the in-laws to say hi, and have some delicious Slovak food. Say that I’m guided by my stomach, and you’d be saying the sacrosanct truth. I had to take a 3 hour bus at 3.30 in the morning to get back to the airport on Monday, but it was worth it. The duck, red cabbage and dumplings were delicious!

On Tuesday there was another concert. Nile came to play in a small pub in Dublin. There was an overwhelming majority of tall people at the gig, and I felt a bit like a dwarf amongst them. I enjoyed the gig even though there were some morons who threw things at the band. I never saw this happen before, and it was quite disgraceful. The band was understandably pissed off at this too.

Last Saturday we had a big BBQ in the house. A troupe of Italian friends of M, came over for a visit to Ireland, and we prepared a BBQ in their honour. Apart from the Italians we also had a German corner, and an East European corner (formed of 2 people). We supplied pork chops, chicken wings, kebabs, jacket potatoes filled with cheese and bacon, sausages, homemade pizza, bruscetta, rice salad, potato salad, leaf salad, more sausages, pineapple and melon (bbqed). In addition to this the guests got their own food too, so we ended up with loads of extra food. We probably have enough for the rest of the week. Well since summer only came in the last 2 weeks it makes even more sense to live now, before hibernating in winter.

Clever as ever, the Japanese have combined an animal shelter with a teahouse to create the Tokyo phenomenon known as “cat cafes.” To understand why the Japanese would pay ($8-$12 an hour) to play with someone else’s cats, you have to ... (continue reading at Josh Spear)