Kyle->GetThoughts();

29 May 2008 @ 11:31 PM MST

Current Music: None
Current Mood: Tired

I just got home from dropping my cousin off in Springville. As I pull up to my house I see a fifth police car parking across the street near the Busath Photography building (which has been up for sale for a while now). After I park and start walking to my door, a sixth police car pulls up and parks. None of the cars have their flashing lights on, and they are all empty. One of the vehicles is parked askew and facing the wrong way-- probably the first to arrive on the scene. I don't know what happened, but it's caused all sorts of hub-bub, and it looks like the entire Provo City Police Department is on the scene, or will be before it's over.

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22 May 2008 @ 12:09 PM MST

Current Music: The Killers - Bones
Current Mood: Annoyed

I spent about an hour on Monday getting the swamp cooler at my house working because it was getting up into the mid 80's inside the house.

Today I had to turn on the heat because the temperature in the living room was 59 degrees.

I hate Utah weather.

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21 May 2008 @ 12:49 PM MST

Current Music: Hoobastank - Running Away
Current Mood: Pretty good

I created a new theme today. The feature image is one I took from the window of the hotel room in Paris. It looks out over the rooftops of the neighboring buildings.

Throughout the trip to Europe, include the brief stay in Las Vegas while traveling, I took approximately 1110 pictures. Yup, that's a lot of pictures for sure. Having flipped through them I pulled out 18 that I though might be print-worthy. After cropping, enhancing, etc, I came up with 6 that I will get prints of (and place on the Ettrik website for buying).

Here they are:

This was taken at the atrium at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
coy tree

This is part of the view from the hotel room in Paris.
Paris rooftops

A side view of Notre Dame.

The doors of the Louvre.
Doors with light hitting the ground

The Eiffel Tower as seen from the Hotel des Invalides.
cannons with Eiffel tower behind

The Eiffel Tower at night.
Eiffel Tower lit, with reflection

These were the best pictures that I got. Man I wish I had a nice Digital SLR to take cool pictures with.... someday.

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16 May 2008 @ 11:10 AM MST

Current Music: Red Jumpsuit Apparatus - Face Down
Current Mood: Recovering

Previously I had written about not being accepted into the Workshop on Preference Handling at AAAI this summer. It wasn't a huge surprise. What was a surprise was that while I was in Europe I got an email from the organizers asking if I'd like to prepare a poster presentation instead. Even though I got home two days after the "deadline" to respond I am still going to be able to participate. So this is kind of exciting. I think at this point everyone in our lab will be participating in the proceedings of AAAI 2008, which is really cool, our advisor is really excited about it. AAAI is basically the top conference for Artificial Intelligence work, so even getting in as a poster presentation for a workshop is pretty cool considering it was my first submission to anything ever.

So if anyone's going to be in Chicago on July 14 from 11:00-12:00 you can come watch me present my preliminary work as a build up to my thesis work.

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14 May 2008 @ 08:23 PM MST

Current Music: None
Current Mood: Tired

Will, my little 2.5 year old nephew, just called me. (I had been talking to Erin about 10 minutes prior, so he managed to call me again.)

I picked up and said hello, and then didn't hear anything for a minute. Then I heard him say something, and eventually he got the phone orientated and started telling me about riding his bike, and nursery, and all the exciting things in his life, like getting to fly on the airplane to Connecticut next month. I could only understand about one out of three sentences, but it was still awesome. I asked him questions and he answered them.

In the background I could hear muffled sounds of Erin talking, who must have been asking something like, "Will, what are you doing?" to which he would respond, "I'm talking to Kyle."

As the conversation progressed Erin and Bryce must have become concerned since we were talking for about 4 minutes when I hear Bryce say, "Just let me see it for a minute, (Nooooooo! -Will), Hello?" So I said, "Hello" to Bryce and then laughed about the nice conversation I was having with Will.

My nephew is the first person to call me since I've been back from Europe, how nice of him.

:-)

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11 May 2008 @ 09:16 AM MST

Current Music: American Music on British Radio
Current Mood: Getting very tired and sore

Hello all. I'm just popping in from an internet cafe at Trafalgar Square in London, just outside the National Gallery, which I just finished walking through. I saw such favorites as 'Madonna of the Rocks' by da Vinci, the chair by Monet, as well as one of his Sunflowers, and works by Manet, Boticelli, and many others.

The weather is bright and sunny, perfect for walking about. Which is good because we'll be walking down to see Big Ben, Parliament, Buckingham Palace, and such soon.

Paris was incredible. I don't even know how to say anything else about it right now, I loved it. I much prefer Paris to London. The Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, Notre Dame, Crepes, Versailles, it all is just so amazing. Overall, Paris was cleaner, with many more interesting things to see (in my opinion).

This is basically to make everyone jealous of my trip.

The weather in both cities has been perfect. We're all getting pretty tired though, we've been walking like 8 miles everyday that we've been here. I know I'll be a little depressed when I see my credit card bill, since the Dollar is doing terrible compared to the Euro and Pound, but oh well, I'll probably never be in Paris or London again, so I may as well have fun.

I'll provide more detailed posts about the trip once I return.

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5 May 2008 @ 01:45 PM MST

Current Music: None
Current Mood: Excited

So we'll be leaving for LA in about 20 minutes, we're just waiting on some final packing to occur. I thought I'd pop in here to provide an update with the unwanted excitement we've been experiencing.

We went to the Feast Buffet at Sunset Station on Friday night. It was good, we've been before and it's a fairly decent buffet for $12. After dinner Erin started feeling unwell, stomach sick. Having not eaten anything different than the rest of us we decided it wasn't the food (and it hit really quickly, like within 10 minutes of finishing dinner). She threw up when we got back to Josh's brother's place. She felt mostly unwell throughout Saturday and Sunday. Sunday night she was kept awake by progressively worse symptoms and pain.

At 5:30 Josh took her to the Emergency Room at St. Rose Dominican Hospital. Not exactly how we wanted to start the day. She just got out of the hospital at noon. We were planning on beginning our drive at 1:00, so we're still on time for our plans, but things were getting pretty rough there for a bit. The doctor wasn't sure if she was going to be released in time or not. She's dehydrated, but feeling much better, with a fistful of prescriptions which we will get filled we'll be on our way to Europe, and hope that we don't have any further health problems.

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3 May 2008 @ 12:17 PM MST

Current Music: None
Current Mood: Waking up

My journey has begun. We're currently in Las Vegas, acting as our staging grounds for the drive to Los Angeles. Our flight for London leaves out of LAX on Monday evening. In London we will immediately transfer to Luton airport (the taxi driver will be holding a sign with my name on it!), and fly to Paris. We'll stay 3 days in Paris, and then return to London for 4 days.

That's about all I have to say at the moment.

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