Posted by Skrud at Monday, January 15th 2007 at 9:34am
The last day of CUTC was a blast, despite the TechTeam presentations early in the morning, and the fact that we didn’t end up winning (I’m only slightly bitter).
The Second Life seminar was interesting despite the fact that I was struggling to stay awake. I really was listening and enthusiastic, I was just tired. Second Life itself seems pretty cool – I like the idea of a development platform, that anyone can use, that just so happens to be in the context of a massively multiplayer game world. I downloaded the client at the hotel so I’ll give it a try sooner or later.
The Google keynote was also pretty good. We learned about a lot about Google’s mobile apps, since that’s what they’re developing in the Waterloo office. We also learned that Google does your laundry and dry cleaning for you, has free mechanics for its employees, and lets you bring your dog (but not cat) to work. The best question at this keynote session was going to win an iPod Video.
I walked up and asked “The problem with mobile apps isn’t lack of innovation, it’s the cost of using mobile internet because of the high fees that telecom companies charge per kilobyte. What’s Google doing to ensure that people can afford to use GMail and Google without paying a ton of money in bandwidth costs, especially for people like the students here who likely won’t have data plans?”
I got a really good answer, too. Google has been working on something called the “Google Transcoder” which essentially dumbs down web pages for your cell phone. This includes the ability to shrink images on Google’s server before it gets transmitted to your phone, saving valuable KB as well as the ability to block images completely.
But I didn’t win the iPod. Some other guy won the iPod and I didn’t even understand what his question was about – neither did the Google speaker. Oh well. I got a consolation prize from Fiona, a Microsoft programmer that was mingling with us throughout the conference. She gave me a handy Microsoft Wireless Optical mouse, because she thought my question was better. Thanks a lot, Fiona!
Finally we had the TechTeam awards ceremony and banquet. Our delegation was dapper as hell.
Our fellows from across the hall at University of Ottawa (and our best friends at the conference) forgot to bring fancy clothes:
But that’s okay, because we got Table 42.
CUTC 2007 was a blast! Thanks to everyone we met and hung out with! It’s a shame the SFU guys couldn’t make it this year, but hopefully we’ll be able to go to their NTCU conference in May.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, geek, tech, toronto | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, January 14th 2007 at 8:42pm
This year at CUTC they replaced the “ThinkTank” with the “TechTeam”. TechTeam was a competition, where delegates who signed up for a particular team were then split up into groups and given a case study or challenge. On the final day, in the morning, you present whatever it was you were supposed to do and the winning team gets a prize.
The prizes were things like $250 gift certificates to Future Shop for each team member, for example. ATI gave out Radeon 9200 graphics cards (which Matt and Alex won, along with a couple of University of Ottawa students and a Waterloo student). I was on the Intel/Lenovo team. The prize: a Lenovo N100 Laptop for each team member.
I joined a team with four McGill students: Kevin, Yang, Yiming and Francois. Our mission was to bring all the laptops to Montreal. What we had to do was develop a desktop PC solution for a logging (as in forestry) company in northern Manitoba to use outdoors in order to log their logging operations. And we spent many hours working on our design and presentation, and actually showed up in suits for the presentation. I thought we had a fighting chance at getting those laptops.
But alas, we lost to a team that had actually managed to contact people in the forestry industry and professors of social studies at their universities to get some real data, and they had a fancy 3D spinning model.
I still had fun doing the competition, though.
You can look at PDF of our presentation if you’re interested.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, tech | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Saturday, January 13th 2007 at 8:36am
Day 2 was amazing. The opening keynote from Intel was interesting and fun. Following that was a presentation from General Dynamics about the helicopter they’re designing to replace the archaic, museum-worthy Sea King.
I went to a seminar about The “Cool” Internet, by Prof. Parham Arabi from U of T. He’s been working on projects that attempt add “smarts” to web applications. For example, he presented ModiFace which allows you to upload pictures and mix and match facial features. All you have to do is drag a box around the face – and the software is capable of automatically picking out features like eyes, nose and mouth, and realistically blends them into another face. Another project was ViewGenie which is capable recognizing people or objects in a photo, and then finding those same people in other photos. In the example we saw, the software was able to pick out the same person from the back of his head! It was really interesting, awesome stuff.
Then there was the TechExpo, which is CUTC’s career fair. There were booths for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Siemens, Nortel, Linden Labs, Evertz, Motorola, RIM, and others … I spoke to lots of people and planted a number of resumes. Apparently, Apple is hiring lots of people to work on OS X…
The Linden Labs stuff also looks interesting, since they recently open-sourced the client code to Second Life, and they’re looking for people to work on developing the platform further. I downloaded the Second Life client and I figure I’ll give it a shot. It seems like cool stuff to work on. (If you’re so inclined to give Second Life a shot, make sure you say that “Skrud Salubrius” referred you.)
Dinner deserves a post all its own… for now I’ll just say that we ate at the best restaurant ever.
It turns out there are some University of Ottawa people on our floor, and so we had a good alcoholic hallway sit, chatting and hanging out, while my TechTeam worked on finalizing our presentation for this morning. I ended up checking out the club party at this place called Flirt – and it was pretty damn lame (except for Iourri rocking out like crazy).
Now I’m sitting in my suit, at the breakfast table, waiting for my presentation time. I’ll tell you about the TechTeam after we give our presentation. But you can imagine that if I’m sitting here in my suit, that it’s got pretty high stakes.
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, geek, tech | 1 comment
Posted by Skrud at Thursday, January 11th 2007 at 10:22am
Here I am at CUTC for the third year in a row. It’s opening keynote time, and the speaker, John Polyani is actually pretty interesting. He’s been telling us anecdotes from his lifetime of scientific research, which are fun to listen to. Yet for some reason I keep tuning out every other sentence or so and I’m only getting a few pieces of the whole keynote. Maybe that’s because it’s too early in the morning.
We arrived yesterday afternoon after a 6.5 hour-or-so bus ride (spent watching Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Godzilla Final Wars and playing MarioKart DS on the WiFi). The hotel is the Hilton Toronto, which has a very superficial beauty.
The lobby is gorgeous, as is the bar and on-site super-fancy restaurant, but the conference room’s ceiling is cracked and looks like it’s going to fall. Also, there is no wireless internet for us. We actually have to pay to use the internet in our rooms and on the conference room WiFi – $13/day – absolutely ridiculous. We’re at a technology conference., it’s sacrilege to not have access to the internet while we’re here. Sure, they set up a lab with some 50 PCs for people to use, but I don’t think 400 people are going to be able to share very well. I miss the Holiday Inn on King which hosted CUTC two years ago. That place was awesome.
Attendance also seems to be pretty sparse compared to previous years, but that’s possibly only because today is the first morning of the conference. Last year, we didn’t arrive until lunchtime on the first day. I haven’t seen anyone from SFU yet …
Here’s hoping the conference picks up!
Tags: 2007, cutc, events, geek, school | 6 comments
Posted by Skrud at Sunday, June 4th 2006 at 11:43am
For some reason, Hydro Québec seems to think it’s a great idea to do power-line maintenance on a Sunday when everybody’s home, as oppose to in the middle of a weekday when nobody’s at my house except for maybe a delivery man. As soon as I woke up this morning, and couldn’t hear the comfortable, reassuring electric hum that my electronic devices give off I knew something was wrong. Luckily my laptop has a built-in modem. Dial-up is a lot worse than I remembered it.
Anyway, this is a pretty good opportunity to get caught up on missed blogging.
Noah visited Montreal last week from Vancouver, B.C. He’s one of the SFU people that I met at CUTC 2005, and he’s going on a lengthy tour of Europe for the next month(?). He had an 11-day stopover in Montreal, so I showed him around.
We started off at … McKibbins, and then Brutopia, and Dundee’s, Hurley’s, St-Elizabeth’s Pub, a shisha bar, and the beer festival. There was also a SOEN BBQ that I brought Noah and his friend Janis to, hoping to introduce them to some of Montreal’s top-quality geeks. They were both a lot of fun. You can read all about Noah’s adventures on his blog.
I really need to get some coffee (our coffee machine is electric and I don’t think we’ve ever foreseen the lcak of electricity as a barrier between grogginess and glorious caffeination). The family’ll be going off to brunch soon, though, to meet with family friends visiting from the U.S. I’m supposed to introduce some people to “Montreal nightlife”. Unless they like beer as much as Noah, I doubt I’ll have anything interesting to show them… :\
Tags: beer, cutc, life | no comments
