This is a reanimation of the Vicaribus blog as lived by Miro Kazakoff and Ehren Foss in 2004 and 2005. The photos may be spotty.

Berkeley is a Nuclear Free Zone

Posted by ehren

Mutterings from the peanut gallery argue that we've had enough of these "fixit" or "Ehren putters around and does stuff" posts. "You should start having adventures already," they say. Monday, I promise.

That Chris is a peculiar character has never been disputed. At first glance, he is a cross between The Brain (from "Pinky And..."), the Incredible Hulk, and the dancing baby from Ally McBeal. On Thursday night I met Matt, one of his program-mates at Berkeley (who lived across the street from me for a while at Random Hall, but that was too far to socialize). After he gave me a sentence description of his research -- "Stuff with learning and memory, mostly" -- he asked if I wanted more detail. I laughed and said not at the moment, since I was still a little worn out from Lucas' loquatious but intense musings on a diverse set of intellectual persuits. It was due to Lucas that I was overheard while pumping diesel Wednesday having a strange one sided conversation "So chimpanzees can recognize themselves in mirrors? Ok. Orangutans can't. Do they attack the mirrors? Indifferent? I see. Wow..." Par for the course as far as people talking to themselves in Berkeley goes, but at least I had a cellphone.

Thursday morning Chris met me for an 8am run up and down campus, and then I got lost trying to find his apartment to take a shower, and then I had to move the bus (overnight parking ended at 8am, and it was a 2 hour zone). It was a frustrating 3 hour project to park the bus and find wireless, which I believed to be urgent as Client A possibly wanted a delivery of the demo Sunday (turns out no, it will be next week instead). I begrudgingly re-learned one of the most noisome lessons of the winter tour, which was that once parking and utilities are found in an urban area, don't mess around trying to find better parking or more convenient internet: You will waste your time. The bus is missing some paint along the starboard roofline. No comment on that at this time, Senator.

Wednesday night we went out for internet, sushi, and attempted to see "Kung Fu Hustle." We sat in the theater for about an hour discussing a variety of things, including a minor aside about how the electronic music artist Aphex Twin managed to encode images of his face in a log(frequency) vs. time graph of one of his songs. Eventually we realized that they weren't going to show the film (the theater was empty), figured out the snafu with our tickets (no 10:15 show on weeknights, yet they sold us tickets to it), got vouchers, then spent some time at Au Cocquelet (?sp).

Late Thrursday afternoon Lucas informed me that he had spent the better part of the day trying to encode images in soundwaves using Matlab:

1. Find image
2. Threshold and pixelate image
3. for each vertical slice through the image, a present pixel must correlate with a set of sinusoidal components
4. generate the signals (reverse fast fourier transform?)
5. listen
6. realize it doesn't sound very musical

It wasn't working yet, but the progress was impressive, and we talked a bit about continuous vs. discrete time approximations of the audio in question -- I was straining to dredge up my Signals & Systems knowledge from... 4 years ago?), and how one might render the sounds pleasant but keep the visual information in the graph. So far:

1. Map sets of pleasant harmonics over the generated signal
2. remove or muffle that which doesn't overlap with the intended (musical) waveform
3. wash, rinse, repeat.

Science is great.

We saw "Kung Fu Hustle" successfully -- a strange but entertaining Looney Tunes meets Quentin Tarrantino meets Crouching Tiger -- and retired again to Au Cocquelet with Matt -- favored by Lucas since it does NOT offer free wireless, and therefore productivity is possible -- where I ate a big slice of carrot cake and we talked about schizophrenia, academics (with a astounding density of high functioning versions of various mental troubles), and a host of other stuff before retiring.

I took the BART back to Oakland, was yet again pleasantly surprised to find no parking tickets, then went to pick up Miro. He seemed very pleased to be back on the bus. We stayed up until around 2 talking about our respective visits to the East.

We are both undeniably excited about travelling again. We're ready. We know what was missing in the winter. The bus -- damn me for saying it -- is basically done, and more livable than ever. It's almost time to weigh anchor.

And one more time, if anybody knows anybody in the SF area who needs to go to a BBQ this weekend, they should know where to find us.