Posts Tagged life
Stockholm: I’m lucky to have made it back
Amazingly, I made it home to Virginia yesterday. With many travelers still stuck, I was very fortunate.
Monday 4/19/2010
On Monday I did my last run through the paths and trails behind KTH. I caught up to another guy who was running at a pretty good clip. We ran together for a bit, but then it was time for me to turn around.
The rest of the day was spent in a classroom at KTH set up by the faculty for those at the conference who were stuck. In the room, I got some work done and checked the forecasts for the ash cloud. The cloud had left Scandinavia for the time being, allowing Monday’s Stockholm – Chicago flight to leave, the same flight I was scheduled to take Tuesday. Another guy I knew from the conference had stopped by and said his mom was able to leave that afternoon on an Icelandair flight to New York. I took those two things as a good sign, but I was still skeptical that we would be able to leave.
Throughout the conference and the following days, I was quite impressed with the KTH campus. The lecture halls were very nice with stadium-style seating. Smaller classrooms provided large desks with plenty of workspace. With 8,000 undergraduates and 7,000 graduate students, it accounts for nearly a third of Sweden’s university-level education. It was quite larger than William and Mary, with many large lecture halls we used for the conference sessions, as well as large hi-rise style buildings. Still, it was condensed into a space much smaller than many U.S. universities of its size. I have no doubt that the excellent facilities were made possible in part due to generous government funding.
That night, my adviser and I ate at a Thai place down the street from the hotel. When we returned, we packed everything up and noticed on the airline website that we were supposed to report to the airport by 7AM for check in. Since it appeared that web check in was disabled, the airline probably wanted everyone at the airport early to check everyone in with plenty of time.
Tuesday 4/20/2010
On Tuesday I awoke at 5:30AM and miraculously discovered that Stockholm Arlanda was open and that our flight was still scheduled to leave. I emailed Sarah back home that we were heading to the airport and she hadn’t even gone to sleep yet since it wasn’t even midnight. My adviser and I left the hotel by 6AM.
The sun woke me up nearly every morning during the trip and we gained at least 30 minutes of daylight in the time I was in Stockholm. There were automatic awnings that would cover the hotel room window in the afternoons and I realized that their purpose was to block the midnight sun during the summer months. On the day we left, the sun woke me up at 5AM and the night before, it was twilight well after 8PM.
Another interesting note is that everyone in Stockholm seemed to follow the same schedule. When we left for the airport yesterday at 6AM, there was barely anyone out on the streets. However, during the conference the week before, when I would go out to run at 7AM, the streets were packed with commuters. On the weekends, the city and KTH were deserted. Even the university library was closed on the weekends and nearly empty after 6PM.
We made our way to the subway and then to the high speed airport train, which got us to the airport just before 7AM. The international terminal had rows of check in counters, all but two were deserted: our flight and a Continental flight. A TV crew was interviewing a few sparse passengers about the crisis. Fortunately, unlike the massive Continental check-in line, our line was much shorter. Apparently, many booked on our flight were Swedes who decided to stay home.
After being issued boarding passes, we hung out in the deserted gate area. My adviser and I talked to a guy sitting next to us who worked for a company that produces industrial-grade robots and sensors.
Amazingly, we got on the plane and it left within 30 minutes of its scheduled departure time. There were plenty of open seats and I was able to get a nice window seat with nobody sitting next to me. There was plenty of legroom again, which made the 9 hour flight bearable. The pilot announced that we passed over 100km from the volcano, but nobody could see anything out the window. We passed over Norway, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador, all of which consisted of rock, snow, and ice. We passed over so much snow and rock, it made me realize how much of the world is probably uninhabitable and how fortunate I am to live somewhere relatively warm.
Though we left late, we arrived in Chicago only a few minutes after our scheduled landing time. We had less than an hour and a half for our connection to Norfolk. I rushed through immigration and customs and got on the train to the main United terminal since I had no boarding pass for the next flight. Once in the main terminal, I tried to check in using an automated kiosk, which told me to see an agent. After several minutes in line and little time left before the flight departed, I got to see agent. The agents were interested to hear firsthand what it was like in Europe and Scandinavia. When I got my boarding pass, I realized it was at a gate at a faraway concourse and ran with my bags for what seemed like a mile and a half to one of the last gates in the terminal. With the clock ticking down, I raced around people in the jammed terminal passing gate after gate until I finally got to the Norfolk flight.
Oddly, when I got to the gate, my adviser was already there. He had told me to go ahead after leaving the Stockholm flight because immigration might be slow. Apparently, there was another check-in desk for United in the arrival hall for the international terminal, which would have sped things up for me. Regardless, we both made the Norfolk flight, and by yesterday evening, I was home.
Sarah came to pick me up and on the way home I realized how nice the weather was: warm sun and leaves on the trees with green everywhere. On the national news, there was coverage of people stuck in airports in Europe and in the United States, but more flights were running.
Overall, it was a good trip. The conference went very well and I saw many good presentations relevant to my field. I met a lot of new people from everywhere, and I saw a lot of Stockholm. I really liked Stockholm — except for the cold, I could see myself living there, which is saying a lot since I don’t really want to live in a city. The excellent infrastructure with subways, high-speed trains, fast and cheap internet, separated bike lanes, and large parks made Stockholm very appealing. The people were very friendly and accommodating to visitors.
The getting stuck part was frustrating, but as evidenced by the news, it could have been much worse. There are many others who are still stranded, but hopefully everyone will be back where they want to be soon. I think a few things happened that really saved the day: 1) not booking any connecting flights in Europe, 2) using Skype to call the U.S. airline reservation number immediately after hearing the news about the volcano to get a new flight, 3) sticking to the rebooked flight and not attempting to take a train or bus to another airport in Europe, and 4) getting lucky with the ash cloud in Scandinavia. Skype was a real help since we had no working mobile phone and international calls were cheap.
As my adviser and I discussed, this trip is one we’ll remember for quite some time.
Another Weekend in Stockholm
It’s still doubtful that we’ll be able to leave again on Tuesday, but there is hope, since the Swedish airport authority said that they may allow flights into and out of Arlanda tomorrow. Furthermore, the BBC weather maps predict the volcano ash will pass to the south of Norway and Sweden by the beginning of the week. It’s a better than nothing chance that we could leave, but I’m not holding my breath. Furthermore, the air crews and aircraft all have to be in place by Tuesday.
Yesterday, we took a trip to the Vasa Museum, which houses an absolutely massive wooden warship. The ship was built by Sweden in the 1600s in its fight against Poland and sank as soon as it put out to sea. It was recovered in the 1950s and restored over a 20 year period before being placed inside the museum.
I’ve seen plenty of wooden sailing ships at home, most were very small, but the Vasa is a giant. Its size was probably part of the reason for its downfall — the prevailing argument is that it was too top heavy and did not have enough ballast. From the keel to the top of the mainmast must be well over 100 feet: the ship seems like the Spruce Goose of its time.
Last night I went out with more stuck conference attendees to a bar near the waterfront. The average price was about $10/pint, but “pints” here are a noticeably larger 0.5L (16.9oz), not 12oz as in the United States. The place I went to had a large selection of beers, but not too many I hadn’t heard of.
Today we went out to the Royal Palace, meeting up with Alexandra, but this time we saw the changing of the guard, toured the insides of the palace, and the crown jewels. Interestingly, the woman operating the ticket office commented on my William and Mary ID, for it seems the concept of royalty has a different meaning in places that have monarchs. The changing of the guard involved a military marching band playing a few songs and marching around. The Royal Apartments were ornate, but were no Versailles, although a room in the Royal Palace was modeled after the Hall of Mirrors. The Treasury, which contained some of the crown jewels, was most interesting, with a guide explaining the historical significance of different crowns, maces, and orbs.
Since Alexandra was also stuck here with a canceled flight, we walked back to the train station to see if she could get a ticket back in the direction towards her school. She estimated the travel time would be about 30 hours. The train station in Stockholm was packed, with the ticket office handing out numbers to those who wanted to purchase tickets. The line was probably several hours long, so we just left. More than likely, trains towards Copenhagen were sold out for several days. It’s fortunate that Europe has the rail system it does, for if air travel was stopped in the United States for more than a few days, it would be much worse.
Later, we went back over towards where the Vasa museum was to find the zoo. We circled around it but could not find a way in. Finally, when we reached the entrance, it was 10 minutes from closing. We walked back along the waterfront and I headed back to the hotel.
While I was out today, I ran into several people from the conference. I saw one guy from the hotel who mentioned that he knew of people heading south into Spain or Morocco to fly to South Africa and then catch a flight from there to the United States. I ran into some others from the University of Illinois in a grocery store who predicted the winds would shift just in time to allow their Thursday flight to leave.
At this point, we will wait and see what happens with our scheduled Tuesday flight. If it doesn’t go, then we will probably start to think about alternatives. A group from the conference is considering chartering a bus to Madrid, but their airspace has been closed intermittently and I’ve heard the hotels there are booked solid. There is also a ferry that runs from Denmark to Iceland: we could take a train to Denmark, take the ferry to Iceland, and fly back home from there. Surprisingly, Iceland’s airport is allowing flights to and from the United States.
If we do consider finding an alternate route home, we will have to consider the costs of leaving a city that we know well with residents that speak good English and are pretty tolerant of foreigners. We also have to consider the probability of something else going wrong when traveling overland long distances, connecting on different trains or even buses. Bus and especially rail routes are extremely packed because of all that’s happened, with many being sold out for days. By the time we travel a week and a half to get home via land and sea, the airspace may have opened up anyway.
At this point, time is starting to pass. I haven’t done any work and I really should, at least to keep my mind off of being stuck here. My adviser and I may go to KTH to find an office and get something done. At the end of the week I am supposed to meet with my fiancee and the pastor for our wedding but I might not be able to go. I wonder what would happen if I were stuck here for months or even for the rest of my life (I’m sure this won’t happen, but I am thinking hypothetically). However, my sister has lived abroad for quite some time, so I’m sure I could adapt like she has.
Not a plane in the sky
I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be home in a few hours, but instead, I’m still here in Stockholm.
There seems to be a huge difference between the US and EU portrayals of this event. Everyone in the US seems surprised when I tell them that air travel is essentially stopped for the foreseeable future, while the EU media are spelling doom and gloom. Some are discussing government airline bailouts similar to what happened after September 11th.
Plenty of people from the conference are still staying in my hotel and most have rebooked flights for some time next week. They seem optimistic that the winds will shift or the eruption will die down in time for their flight to leave. I don’t think anyone really knows.
At this point the ash cloud covers most of Europe, so any airport remaining open is destined to be crammed with people trying to get out. There really isn’t anything I can do but sit tight and see what happens. If my flight is canceled on Tuesday, then it will probably be time to think about finding another way home.
In the meantime, my legs are getting beat up from the running, especially on the trails and hills. Walking around in the city probably doesn’t help either, and unfortunately, I don’t have a bike that I can borrow. The trails sure are great, though.
Today, a few of us still here took a bus tour around Stockholm. We drove around much of the city and saw a few things I hadn’t seen when walking around. The best tidbit I learned was that Swedish soldiers and sailors once received a 2 liter daily beer ration. Two liters of beer per day!
Tomorrow we may go to one of the nearby museums. Laundry is now another thing to do on my list since I’ve been here a week and could only pack but so much.
Stockholm: CPS Week
While my Stockholm trip to attend CPS Week has gone well until today, I suddenly find that my travels are far from over. Thanks to the ash cloud ransacking the UK, Europe, and Scandinavia, Sweden may become my new home for awhile. I really seem to be a marked man when it comes to air travel.
Day 1: Saturday 4/10/2010
When I arrived in Norfolk, there was a mix up at the ticket counter – the web check-in boarding pass I printed the day before was invalid and it took some work for the ticket agent to print a new one. When we arrived in Chicago that afternoon, it was a very long trip from the B concourse island to the international terminal. We had to go under the ramp, into the main terminal, and take a train to the international terminal, a good 15 or 20 minutes. Fortunately, the terminal was not busy and we were able to check in at the SAS counter without any issues.
The TSA agent checking my boarding pass at the O’Hare International Terminal commented about me being from Virginia; she said she had never been there. When I travel to other parts of the country, I always get interesting comments from the locals about me being from Virginia. In Palo Alto, a waitress commented that it was cold in Virginia, when at the time I remember it was really much warmer at home than in Silicon Valley. When in Gloucester visiting an old roommate, I got a comment from his neighbor that I was from “Virginny.” I’ve also heard another Massachusetts resident (who attends school at William and Mary) refer to “Virginny,” as well. Hollywood always portrays Virginians with thick backcountry accents when the reality is nothing of the sort. Some have the Tidewater accent, but it’s unnoticeable to the untrained ear.
Also, there were no restaurants in the O’Hare International terminal: 8 bucks for a pre-made sandwich. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long until the Stockholm flight departed. I noticed that nearly everyone waiting was Swedish, for there were no blue American passports that I could see. Once on the plane, I realized we lucked out on the seat assignments and got extra legroom since we were just behind the premium economy section.
On the flights, my adviser and I talked about the direction of my career in school and afterwards. Placement at a faculty job would probably require more time in school, perhaps up to another year, while a research lab may require less. It’s all about gaining enough experience to do what you want to do. It was interesting to talk to him about the possibilities since he has experience in both industry and academia. Both have benefits and drawbacks and there is no way I want to close the door on any particular track just yet. Just this week I talked with some other students in our department about the time required to complete a Ph.D., and those Master’s students involved in the discussion were wary of spending years in school to graduate. I would not be opposed to spending another two years in school as long as I worked hard enough to get some good papers published in the hope that I could get a good faculty position at a research university. From the looks of it, I have plenty of time to think about it and decide.
Day 2: Sunday 4/11/2010
As usual, I didn’t sleep much on the plane, only short bouts of 10 or 20 minutes. The sun came up quickly and the clouds parted, giving us a view of jagged mountains and snow and little sign of life. Before landing, the ground was covered up again by thick fog, which we soon descended into.
Though it was 7:30 in the morning, the airport was almost completely deserted. Immigration and customs was a breeze considering we were the only flight arriving at the time. A high speed train took us from the airport to the Stockholm Central terminal; a speedometer read well over 200kph as trees and buildings flew by. I doubt any train at home travels anywhere near that fast. From the train terminal, we took a subway two stops until we were near the hotel. One thing I found odd was that the subway tickets had to be purchased from one of several convenience stores surrounding the subway entrance. In the subway terminal, there were no ticket machines or windows and no signs indicating where tickets could be bought. Instead, we had to ask someone at the entrance looking for freeriders where we could purchase tickets.
The city was mostly deserted, though it was a Sunday. Stores were closed and nearly nobody was on the subway or walking around on the streets. Even the school where the conference was to be held was nearly empty of students with the library closed. Weatherwise, the day started out cloudy but later the sun came out, with temperatures in the lower 40s – pretty much a December or January day at home. It’s a good thing I brought my heavy coat.
The hotel had a room available as soon as we arrived, which was surprising since it was only 9 in the morning. My adviser and I slept for a few hours and then headed out in the afternoon, exploring Gamla stan and the area around the conference. We walked by the parliament building and the Stockholm Palace, taking a ton of pictures.
To me, it seemed as if everyone was pretending that the weather was nice. People at coffee shops sat outside at tables, wearing winter coats while being punished by the wind. Others stood in lines at ice cream stands, despite the 40 degree weather. Plenty more were out running and biking. I suppose weather can be much worse in Stockholm.
The crowds picked up some in the afternoon, but there were few restaurants around our hotel so we settled on a Mongolian BBQ place. I’ve been to similar places at home, but in the brief time I’ve been here there wasn’t anything interesting that caught my eye. Just the usual McDonald’s and a few other places labeled “American Grill,” or “Steakhouse.” I travel thousands of miles to get away from American food, among other things, but it seems I can’t escape it.
Day 3: Monday 4/12/2010
Though sleep was better than the previous night, I still had trouble. I almost never sleep well on trips since it’s always hard for me to adjust to new environments. I got up before 7AM and went out for a run beyond the university where the conference was, noticing there was a large park I could check out, so I headed that way and was surprised. City blocks now packed with commuter traffic and sidewalks packed with people suddenly gave way to a vast forest with tons of dirt trails. Plenty of other people were out running and biking.
I tooled around on the trails for awhile and headed back. I was surprised that traffic would stop even if it looked like I was about to cross the street. In addition to the trails, there were large paved paths with marked lanes for bikes and pedestrians. Sweden seems to have solved the bike path problem so prevalent in the United States. By making the paths wider and by separating pedestrians and cyclists, cyclists can cruise the bike paths without having to dodge pedestrians. In the city, sections of curb separated bike lanes from vehicle traffic, also decreasing the chance of a bicycle accident.
On Monday, there were a handful of workshops; I attended one on “Cooperating Objects,” which appears to be a new buzzword in the embedded/sensor networks community. A few people spoke about event detection and machine learning, with ideas similar to my research. There were easily several hundred people, much more than at previous conferences I attended, people from all over the world.
At the reception Monday evening, I met Alexandra from Romania, who attended school in Slovenia. It was interesting talking to her, considering that we are from very different and faraway places, yet we work in the same field. We hung out quite a bit between breaks throughout much of the conference and through her I was introduced to a few others from Eastern Europe. At school, it can feel very insular with few people to share your work and ideas with, but at a place like this, everybody is doing the same thing, and they come from everywhere.
Day 4: Tuesday 4/13/2010
Tuesday was a long one. I was up at 6:30 to run, with plenty of daylight. I explored a different part of the park than before, but ended up by a factory. I’m still surprised at the number of trails in the city.
The plenary speaker seemed to be more of a biologist, speaking about human and animal brains as a control system. There were quite a few talks in IPSN about machine learning and/or event detection so it was interesting to see others’ approaches to similar problems. Later on, there was a poster and demo session which lasted until nearly 7:30 at night.
During the poster/demo session, I met a guy from the University of Utah which had concocted a sort of “x-ray” vision with 802.15.4 radios – I remember reading about this on the internet a few months ago. Link quality between radios would change due to people moving about in the room, and with enough links, the moving people could be localized. Apparently, his paper based on this was rejected mostly because nobody believed it.
Day 4: Wednesday 4/14/2010
On Wednesday, I hit the motherlode for trails when out on my run. On previous runs I seemed to hit dead ends – running into roads, office buildings, or even factories, but today I found a trail that took me out to the rest of the park. There were plenty more trails and open space by the time I had to turn around. It was also sunny right from the start instead of morning fog.
The IPSN tracks were pretty interesting, again with a few on event detection and machine learning. One group took a twist with a technique I used in my paper that I hadn’t thought of. I also went to the CPS conference sensor network track, but didn’t really see too much differences compared with the typical sensor network research.
Day 5: Thursday 4/15/2010
I ran again in the morning, out to all the new trails I found the day before. Unfortunately, the clouds returned. At the conference, my adviser’s adviser, Jack Stankovic, was the plenary speaker. During his talk, he used the example of a storm in Chicago as a reference to real time job scheduling. The next day, I was supposed to return home via Chicago – hearing about any airline problem in Chicago was the last thing I wanted to think about. This example eerily foreshadowed the problems to come for my return flights (through Chicago).
There were a few other sessions in the IPSN track that were interesting – at least one other event detection paper that was related to my work. Then, in the afternoon, it was time for my presentation. Since I was in the sensor networks track of RTAS, most people were in the concurrent IPSN track, so I didn’t get a huge audience.
Just before the presentation, I found out about the ash cloud coming from Iceland. One of the other people in the room mentioned about flying back through Chicago the next day, as were my adviser and I. He then mentioned something about maybe not getting back, and that’s when I found out about the ash cloud causing a huge mess in the UK and northern Europe. It was headed to Sweden next.
With this on my mind, it was my turn to present. I thought I did reasonably well and finished on time, except that I rearranged my slides just before the presentation and wound up having a backup slide placed ahead of my last slide, causing me to skip through it.
Following my presentation, my adviser and I locked ourselves in a discussion room in the university library and proceeded to call the airline reservation number to get a new booking. The earliest we could get was the following Tuesday, over four days away. Weather reports stated that the cloud might stay for days or weeks. I walked back to the hotel and extended the hotel reservation until Tuesday while in the lobby other conference attendees scrambled to adjust their plans.
At the very least, I’ll get to see more of Stockholm and Sweden, though the weather isn’t supposed to hold up. Fortunately for this week it has been fairly warm and sunny. We’ll have to take it day by day to see if the ash cloud will dissipate enough to allow us to go home. If Tuesday comes and goes and there’s no sign of the cloud letting up, it might be worth a try to head south via train or bus through Denmark to somewhere where I can fly out.
Quote of the week: “Imagine there’s a storm in Chicago…”
My trip to Stockholm for CPS Week has been great, until today, when everything went sideways. The sessions were interesting, I met new people from everywhere, and my presentation went well.
Then came the unwitting harbinger of doom in the form of an example by this morning’s plenary speaker, Jack Stankovic. In his presentation, he spoke about airline scheduling as an example for real time assurance. “Imagine there’s a storm in Chicago,” he said, continuing on that airlines will have to cancel flights and rebook passengers.
As soon as I heard that, I knew I was in for it. My adviser and I were supposed to head to Chicago tomorrow on our way home, but now there’s an ash cloud covering much of Europe. We are rebooked to return Tuesday, but the eruption could continue indefinitely. Everyone is scrambling to rebook their flights and extend hotel reservations, but if this continues, we may be better off swimming home.
In the meantime, I’ll at least get to see more of Stockholm and Sweden.
Hello, my name is {Mark, Mike, Max}
But not Matt. I’ve always introduced myself as Matt to anyone new I meet, whether it be new students in the department, people at conferences, or just running into someone when I’m out. However, it seems the miss rate for my name is pretty high if I see someone I recently met more than once. Either I am not speaking clearly enough and/or Matt just sounds too much like Mark, Mike, or Max. Maybe whoever it is I just met only remembers that my name is short and starts with an M.
I could try introducing myself as Matthew and see how that goes. Or, I could say: “My name is Matthew, but you can call me Matt.” I started going by Matt in elementary school, but maybe it is time to switch back. I’ve already listed my name as Matthew on papers.
No longer the Vickers, but still holding up
Posted by Matt in general, microfracture on December 16, 2009
Quite a bit has happened in the past few months since I’ve written anything substantial. With school picking up, it’s hard to write since both activities draw from the same energy source.
Today marks the first time since my knee surgery, nearly a year and a half ago, that I’ve run for seven consecutive days. The last time I ran six days in a row was at the beginning of September, and I felt awful by the end of that streak. From mid-August to the beginning of September, I ran about five or six days in a row and then took the other days on the bike to try to alleviate the completely trashed feeling from running. By the end of September, I had been running about six miles on the days I ran and started to feel more smooth doing it, but I was still pretty beat up.
Part of the beat up feeling was more than likely due to me favoring my non-surgery leg when running. I had been fighting an adductor strain on my right leg that gradually got worse until I was unable to walk without limping. While my left knee felt fine, my right leg hurt just about everywhere. At first, I thought it was just the humidity, but as the summer ended, the problems persisted, and I was forced to stop running at the beginning of October. From then until the beginning of December I spent most of the time on the bike, with a few botched attempts at running once my thigh problems calmed down. However, within the last few weeks I’ve been able to restart running while keeping everything under control. With the introduction of cold weather, it’s a lot easier to run than bike, despite buying warmer clothes to ride in the cold and rain.
At this point, I’m certain that I’ll never feel as good running as I did when I was on my college team. On the team, even on the worst days after a race or hard workout, I still felt light on my feet and able to cruise through a 10-15 mile run without thinking. Today, each step I take is a considerable effort, like I have to drag myself through five or six miles. Comparing how I felt when running on the team with how it feels now reminds me of a passage in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. A character in the book compares the power of a bandsaw to other saws and a Vickers machine gun to other firearms:
[T]he most noteworthy thing about the bandsaw was that you could cut anything with it and not only did it do the job quickly and coolly but it didn’t seem to notice that it was doing anything. It wasn’t even aware that a human being was sliding a great big chunk of stuff through it. It never slowed down. Never heated up.
Guns could fire bullets all right, but they kicked back and heated up, got dirty, and jammed eventually. They could fire bullets in other words, but it was a big deal for them, it placed a certain amount of stress on them, and they could not take that stress forever. But the Vickers in the back of this truck was to other guns as the bandsaw was to other saws. The Vickers was water-cooled. It actually had a fucking radiator on it. It had infrastructure, just like the bandsaw, and a whole crew of technicians to fuss over it. But once the damn thing was up and running, it could fire continuously for days as long as people kept scurrying up to it with more belts of ammunition.
Before my surgery and when I was on the team, it was as if I could just go forever and chew through any workout or race, “firing continuously for days.” I never slowed down and rarely heated up. There were limits, of course, but reaching them required hundred mile weeks, punishing pace runs, and draining interval workouts. Like the Vickers, there was also quite the support infrastructure of coaches, trainers, and teammates. But now only running a few miles is “a big deal” for me. It places quite a bit of stress on me, though it is easier than in the late summer. I’m quite sure I’ll have to spend a lot more time on the bike, but maybe I’ll get to the point where I’ll want to run a race.
With respect to school, I’ll be travelling to Stockholm in April to present a paper at RTAS. I’ve been working on several projects related to event detection with accuracy guarantees, which will probably form the basis for my thesis. I also went to RTSS in Washington, DC two weeks ago, but only a few tracks were on wireless sensor networks, but most were about job scheduling and cache replacement policies with the latest multi-core architectures. I’ll also be starting a project with mobile phones with a few other students in our department, which should be interesting. The traditional concept of wireless sensor networks entails small devices with cheap sensors and the processing power of a scientific calculator. However, mobile phones have considerably more power as well as onboard sensors and have more potential for practical applications that people would actually use.
It’s interesting that I spend much of my time writing, creating presentations, and sketching out designs and high-level solutions. About half of my time is actually spent programming. It’s probably a good thing since it gives me a balance between different tasks. Writing papers and creating presentations can be tedious since it can be difficult to cram in months of work into a short paper or presentation. It’s also difficult to create a good balance of high-level descriptions and details to keep people interested but not get confused. When working with a small group of people on a project for a long time, it’s easy to get stuck in a box and not consider things that outsiders would see as obvious. Working with a few other students on my next project should help with this.
It’s when I run into my old teammates that I realize that despite being in the same town and same school that things are really different. One of my teammates got married a few weeks ago and at the wedding, it really hit home that I’m living in a new era. We’re no longer kids. School has taken on a whole new meaning. My relationship with my longtime girlfriend has also taken on a new meaning. Many of the people and the places are the same, but life is different.
Another whirlwind tour
I’m glad to say that my second segment of travel this summer is over. While I like the concept of going somewhere different for awhile, I don’t handle it well. When I travel, I tend to have trouble sleeping and also usually have trouble with the food. If I was in one place for more than a day or two, I would adjust and it would probably be better, but the trips as of late have been too fast to allow me to get used to a new environment. I still feel like I’m recovering from last week.
That said, it was an interesting trip, or sequence of trips, covering Boston for a paper presentation and then to Charlottesville for a Wireless Sensor Networks “retreat”. The first thing that happened started several days before I left to Boston, tripping on a downed branch in the street which nuked my ankle and plantar fascia, as I later found out. I got up when it was still dark out the morning I left for Boston and went running only to find my foot in incredible pain. It was the worst plantar fascia pain I’ve ever had, despite having trouble in that area plenty of times. So after getting back I found myself unable to walk without searing pain in my heel and barely able to limp around. This, right before a day of airports, subways, and walking around Boston.
Fortunately, the flights did go well this time around. Everything was basically on time going out and coming back from Boston. I left last Monday morning, connected through Washington, and took a shuttle flight to Boston. I had to take a bus from the terminal to the T station which was tricky since there were several buses that all looked the same but went to different places. The subway was straightforward but I did have to change trains once. It dumped me out two blocks from the hotel and I just walked limped from there.
In an effort to save the department some money, I went a day late. It turned out that when I got to the hotel in Boston on Monday afternoon that there were no sessions scheduled for the rest of the day. I had hoped to sit in on a few to see what everyone else was doing and to be sure that I had about 20 minutes to present. Since nothing was going on, I dropped off most of my junk at the hotel and went outside to walk around, despite my heel pain. I figured I might as well take advantage of being somewhere else besides school for a change.
Clearly, people in Boston know a good day when they see one and get out when it’s nice. This was the first time in awhile that I had been there when it wasn’t winter. The previous times, the Charles was iced over, snow piled up, and winds whipped through the streets. Not many people were out then. This time, I walked through Boston Common and it was packed. I didn’t realize there was a pond that you could swim in. I went up and down the streets near the hotel, found some food, and went back to the hotel to crash. As tired as I was, I didn’t sleep.
My presentation was first thing Tuesday morning so I practiced the night before and hoped that the length would be about right. I wanted to get up early and run in Boston before I presented, but I realized that my heel pain was too great to do that. When I got to the conference room where I was to present, there was only one guy in there in charge of the projector. Nobody else came, not even the session chair, until five minutes before I was to start. After I got going more people showed up including another professor from William and Mary who also had a paper. Fortunately, everything went well and I handled the questions without any real issues.
The next trick was getting back since I had to go to UVA the next day. I was booked on a 3 PM shuttle flight from Boston to LaGuardia, but that would give me less than an hour to connect. If there were delays, I could miss the connection and get stuck, as I experienced little more than a month ago. I wanted to get on an earlier shuttle flight but when I booked the ticket, the system wouldn’t let me. Interestingly, the book I was reading had a character that took a shuttle flight to LaGuardia and then was able to return anytime without charge since it was considered an “open” ticket. I’ve also heard elsewhere that you could just change your ticket on shuttle flights if there was room. Since the flight out had few people on it and the Boston shuttle terminal was nearly empty when I arrived, it seemed that changing my ticket wouldn’t be limited because of full flights. I got the subway and bus back to the airport and got there early to see if I could leave sooner. Nope, the gate agent demanded 50 bucks. So much for all the hype over “open” tickets. Another guy asked the same question, but apparently arriving an hour or two early was worth the money to him.
I sat in the empty Boston airport for several hours while two other shuttle flights left for New York, both with very few passengers. Finally, when I got on my plane, I was assigned an exit row where the seat in front of me was removed. I had double legroom. I guess I was rewarded for waiting. The flight back to Norfolk was a little late and I managed to get home at 8 that Tuesday night. This time I really did crash and slept for over 11 hours. Yet another big day was coming up.
On Wednesday I left home for Charlottesville and picked up the other student in our group, Zhen, from Williamsburg. We got there Wednesday night and stayed at a hotel that was hopefully within walking distance of where the meeting was the next day and Friday. Since I couldn’t run and was still in pain, I took my bike with me so I could explore Charlottesville in the early morning hours before everything started. Biking was interesting since it was dark and there were a lot of big hills compared to Williamsburg. On Thursday morning, my headlight came off its mount and shattered all over the pavement. I had to get a new one.
My adviser told us that the retreat was to be held in the rotunda, which motivated the choice of hotel since it was within walking distance. I had been to the rotunda before and it seemed weird since it was only really one room where tours were given. I asked him several times if that was where it was, but when we got there Thursday morning the doors were locked and nobody was around. I had the number of a UVA grad student which told us that it was at the business school, which was nowhere near the rotunda or the Computer Science building. He couldn’t say where in the business school it was, and after looking at a map, the business school complex was huge. We might never find where we were to go. Somehow we managed to find the right room and building after running into a knowledgeable receptionist right after we walked in the door of the first business school building we found. We got to the right room 45 minutes late. Other UVA students laughed when I told them that my adviser said the meeting was in the rotunda.
The retreat was more or less an informal series of conference-style presentations. Most everyone was a UVA student presenting on a work in progress. There were lots of unsolved problems which led to all kinds of nasty questions. It appeared as though some students didn’t practice since they went way over time or were cut off entirely with zillions of slides left. The few that finished early were given plenty of discussion to fill in the gaps. There were lots of interruptions, especially from the professors, and usually the adviser of the student would cut in with some difficult question about something that hadn’t been fleshed out yet.
The retreat went all day Thursday and then Friday until just after noon. There were a lot of demonstrations, including that of a fall detection system for the elderly where the user would wear several accelerometers and gyroscopes. One of the students with sensors taped to his shirt and legs fell down on the floor five or six times, which was pretty amusing, especially since the system didn’t indicate a fall until the last attempt. There was a breakout session where my group discussed future applications and system designs. An interesting thing that came out of that was the release of more iPhone/Google Maps-style APIs for third parties to make use of the deluge of data from sensor networks. Someone commented that very soon you’ll find a microphone, panoramic cameras, among other sensors on every street corner, essentially providing a live Google Street View. Imagine what someone could do with that: follow people remotely as they go about their day or generate a tag cloud of things people are discussing the most and break it down by location. When I got home, I noticed that Google Maps now has a traffic congestion tool that uses GPS and speed readings from mobile users to determine if a road segment is congested. Stuff like this that people currently consider to be invasive is going to be more commonplace and acceptable.
After all that I managed to get back home last Friday afternoon. Since the traffic was such a mess in the tunnels, I wound up going through some nasty parts of Portsmouth to get around everything, something I hadn’t done before. It took me as long to get from Charlottesville to Williamsburg as it did to get from Williamsburg back home.
Overall, the trip was probably worth some of the fatigue and heel pain since I gave a conference presentation and got a fair amount out of the retreat. With the start of the fall semester, most the travelling is done for awhile and it’s time to get going on work that I haven’t been able to get to since I was gone.
Microfracture: 1 year
Posted by Matt in microfracture on August 16, 2009
One year ago, as I headed into surgery, I wondered if I would ever be able to run again. This week, I ran over five miles every day with today as an off day on the bike.
Last week I was at home for the first time in awhile and while I was out running, I saw a guy who I always used to see in the early summer mornings before I headed to work. He asked where I had been and I told him what had happened. I said I was lucky just to be out there.
I don’t feel like I used to. Five miles is hard and it beats me up good. The loop I’ve been doing at home is probably more like 5.5 since I used the GPS once and I used to be able to do it in 31 – 32 minutes with little problem. Now I struggle to keep it under 40 minutes. While many others have returned to where they were following similar procedures, I’m guessing I won’t get back to high mileage weeks and workouts and long runs. The risk of undoing everything is too great and I’ve heard of people who pushed a few track intervals too hard and were in pain again the next day. For now, I plan on supplementing the running with biking when I get too beat up. I’ll probably gradually increase the amount of running I’m doing until it feels more comfortable.
Maybe in ten years some of those experimental stem cell injections will be common practice and I could get something like that if what’s left of my cartilage wears away.
Yesterday, in the middle of my run I tripped on a branch that came down with all the rain and storms. I twisted my left ankle so bad it hurt the rest of the day and irritated the plantar fascia. It was the same twisting that I think contributed to the whole knee mess in the first place, so that little move has me worried. After a day on the bike, I’ll see how it goes. I don’t know if I’ll ever run on any trails again after all of this just to keep myself from tripping or twisting my left ankle. But, even in the street I still manage to hit something.
Everything has improved significantly in the past year and hopefully it will hold up into the future.
I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore…
… I’ve forgotten what I’ve started fighting for.
It’s always easy to sit and do nothing when things go wrong. It’s easy to just let the problems exist as they are or to hope that someone else will take a crack at solving things all on their own. It’s hard to make that initial effort to get issues resolved and put everything back on track so that once again all is well.
In working on a TinyOS crash course for my adviser, I ran into a problem when installing everything on Windows. There appeared to be a bug in the source code, which would make compiling programs difficult. I could just let this bug be and hope that someone else will fix the problem and wait for them to check in a corrected version. Living with the bug in place would make Windows TinyOS programming pretty miserable. Then I realize that this is the reason why I am here. Instead of letting things be and suffering, I can try my best to fix the bug and make things work again.
Sometimes I must give to those which benefit me, whether it be to those who provide open source projects or to others who have made my life what it is. To stay the course and overcome difficulty, there are times when I must remember that this world is a two way street. When things come unglued, I must contribute in order to make the world right again.
Even if the problem beyond repair and things cannot return to how they once were, I can say that at the very least I made a solid effort.
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