I just came back from watching this much talked about movie -- it's a fabulous movie, I think. It's a very good portrayal of the "real story" (or at least as real as the story we have documentation on) and shows each of the characters well. The messages and motifs are left in tact, and it appears that Mel Gibson still had some artistic interpretation inserted in.
One thing confused me -- I don't understand what the Devil carrying the sort of old, evilish baby at the end symbolizes? Anyone got any takes on that?
Great movie, go see it, and especially see the movie if you have read the old and new testaments.
Guten Morgen!
This month and semester is off to a great start! Parallel programming is a really cool class, as is getting access to a large cluster of IBM Power5's.
Hopefully I'll be able to incorporate some of the techniques I learn from this class into future programs I write.
Also, this month, aside from being really frigid, has been very good to me! I get to go to two joyous weddings in March, and I may also get the chance to meet
Ken Rehor, one of the original creators of VoiceXML.
I also had a few job interviews lately, one with Amazon.com (which had quite a comedic end to it -- I think the recruiter was probably laughing when she got my email after the interview -- needless to say, I don't want to work there), one with BeVocal (which went very well and I liked a lot), and I may have one with Scansoft soon, too. Looks like the jobs are out there -- don't lose faith for all of you who are looking :) And if anyone out there needs help, I have contacts at lots of companies, especially on the west coast.
I am also getting plans ready for a trip to Germany after school ends in March! Should be the perfect respite before starting work. Not to say that I don't have some business planned to do there soon.
At school, we had a fantastic talk about RFID from one of the Vice Presidents of SAP Labs' research center in Palo Alto -- I'm going to try and schedule an in-person chat with them over spring break.
I do believe a Mr. Bill Gates is coming to CMU in a couple weeks -- will be quite interesting to hear what's on his mind. Maybe I can find a plush penguin to give him as a thank-you-for-visiting.
I'll be out in San Francisco from March 6th - 13th,. and would love to chat with any of the bloggers out in the bay area -- especially would love to chat with the now famous Mr. Robert Scoble. Robert, would you care to do lunch or dinner that week and have a nice chat about the future of lots of technologies, from speech to RFID to user interface design?
There's also a lot of behind the scenes things going on with me in the dialogue systems world :)
The one bit to share is a great way of explaining what I'm working on (Special thanks to my dear friend Lauren at Pitt for help on coming up with this):
Think of the speech recognizer as your ears. Think of the text to speech engine as your brain. Think of the dialogue system as your brain. I work on the brain :)