Last weekend Josh, Erin, and I went to Las Vegas from Wednesday to Sunday. We mostly wanted to get out of Provo, and Las Vegas happens to be convenient in that we can stay at Josh's brother's for free.

Here's a picture I took just after the sun went down on Thursday. I'll admit that it didn't quite come out like this when I took it, I used a photo editor to adjust the contrast and the brightness appropriately. Now if I had all sorts of fancy cameras like Mike, I'm sure I could have taken lots of nice pictures, but as I don't, I take what I can on my point'n'shoot Nikon 5600.


Sunday was Erin's birthday, so in celebration we went to Tournament of Kings at Excalibur on Saturday evening:

It was rather fun. It's a medieval tournament consisting of jousting, racing, melee combat, and then a battle of the forces of good against the forces of evil. You get seated by nation, and cheer on your king. We were seated in Spain, but our king didn't win. You get dinner served before the event, and eat while the first parts of the tournament happen. Dinner begins with authentic medieval Pepsi soda. Then dragon blood soup is served in a shallow bowl with a handle for drinking (you eat all the food with your hands). The main course consists of a small chicken, broccoli, a roll, and steak fries. Dessert was some type of pastry. We all had lots of fun, with Josh making sure to be extra loud for all of us.

After the show we walked down to the Bellagio to check out the ever-changing display in the atrium. This time it was decorated with a Route 66 theme, containing some element representing each state on the historic roadway. The displays always contain the magical jumping fountains and we stayed to watch them for a bit. And no, I don't know who the angry looking Chinese guy in the background is.


We left the atrium to watch the fountains outside, which are always my favorite thing to see. We only saw a couple of shows this time, but I got some decent pictures. I just wish the Bally's building weren't there, but sadly my photo-editing skills aren't good enough to remove the building without destroying the picture.


[This Entry]

On Friday our apartment teamed up with an apartment of girls who have a Karaoke machine. We setup the projector and stereo out on our patio, hooked up the Karaoke machine, and had a fun evening of people performing often terrible, but occasionally quite good, renditions of various songs.



The next day Brady, Josh, Lynette, and I went miniature golfing at Trafalga on the Windmill course. I won with a score of 48 (5 under par) followed by Josh at 55, Lynette at 56, and Brady at 64. Here's a picture of us taken in front of the castle (visible from I-15):



We returned to the apartment and enjoyed the fabulous cake that Erin made for me:



Then we went up to Orem to see the fireworks that were part of Summerfest.



After the fireworks we went back home and watched Nacho Libre, apparently we should have invited Will along, since I hear that he is currently under a twice-a-day limit on Nacho Libre.

[This Entry]

So It's getting to the point where I nail down my exact research topic and start doing the actual research. I've been reading through many pages worth of research papers trying to determine what other people have done and, more importantly, if what I want to do is different. I have a 2-inch 3-ring binder that I'm keeping the papers in, it has a lot of papers in it. So at the moment this is what I want to do for my research:

If you remember back to when speech recognition was just a baby you'll remember that the early applications required the user to train them. So I figure, the field of music query is fairly new, I can require the user to go through some training. I want to make a system that keeps track of all sorts of information about the songs it knows, and then have the user recreate certain pieces so the system can learn how the user will interact with it. In my mind I see this as not being limited to just whistling, if the user wants to hit things as drums or sing or whatever the system will learn how to correlate that information with the piece that the user is recreating and then adapt to the user's style. Of course, I don't know if this will really work yet, but we'll see how it goes.

My birthday is on Saturday. For the last few weeks I haven't been all that excited. Last year I threw myself a party, which was fun, but I don't feel like going through that much trouble again and, looking at my credit card bill, it appears that I can't really afford to. So I had no plans at all. I wanted to go miniature golfing this past weekend, but I ran out of energy and gave up. So I've decided to move miniature golfing to this weekend as a sort of birthday celebration, then I figure we can head back to the apartment have some cake, play some games, and maybe watch a movie. But, we're also organizing a Karaoke night on Friday outside on the projector. So the weekend should, hopefully, be fun.

Sometimes I forget how old I am. I remember a couple weeks ago when I had mentioned that my birthday was coming up and someone asked how old I'd be, I had to think about it, in fact I had to do the math to figure it out. I had forgotten that I'm 21, and that I will be 22 on Saturday. I guess a lot of it is that I've been living with 24 and 25 year old guys for a while now. And I've graduated so I feel like I should be older.

We (Josh, Brady, and I) play games a lot. It's pretty much our only form of entertainment at this point. So most nights we'll get together and play a board game. For a couple of weeks we were playing a lot of Scrabble. Just recently Brady purchased Boggle, so we've been playing that too. They're fun. I like the fact that we enjoy playing games that I would consider at least more "intellectual" than a lot of games/activities. I played a fair bit of both of these games in high school, so I'm pretty decent at them. We enjoy playing, and I hope Brady and Josh don't get too annoyed that I always win. I do give props to Josh for finding 'stories' the last time we played Boggle, that was good.

We've also decided to try and do a little reading group type thing. We decided to read "Fahrenheit 451" and talk about it. Then we're going to read "Bridge To Terabithia" (we went and watched the movie last week). When we went to the movie I hadn't realized that no one else had read the book, so they were all pretty shocked when Leslie died. I've finished "Fahrenheit 451" already, and I've been reading "Atlas Shrugged" - it's written in a similar style as Dostoyevsky; but simpler to read, and faster moving (though not much faster). I am enjoying it, but still waiting for it to go somewhere and actually draw me into the story.


[This Entry]

[This Entry]