Tini, Nuno, and I went to Stevens Pass today. It was a beautiful beautiful day. Blue sky and sunshine. The snow was not great. The runs were a bit icy but the beautiful day made up for it. No powder unfortunately :-(

Stevens Pass is not like Whistler for sure, not even close. However, it’s nearby (it took us 1h45m in the morning to get there). We also got a nice surprise when we found out that since we are Edge Card holders (for Whistler) we were entitled to a free Stevens Pass “Advantage Pass” (the equivalent of the Edge Card) at no cost. This saved us around $90 and we got to ski the entire day for free (the next time, the lift pass will be $10 cheaper). What a great surprise :-)

On the way back, we drove around 40mi towards Seattle only to find out that a bridge got damaged by a track. We had to drive all the way back, pass Leavenworth, on to Highway 97, and then I90. A 3 hour detour :-( I made sure that there was some excitement on the road by refusing to refuel at the various Shell stations on the way*, which meant that we almost run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere. We were practically on fumes when we reached a gas station :-)

 

The usual panorama :-)

And here’s a video I made with various clips (using my iPhone) and photos from the day. Unfortunately, Facebook didn't let me upload the version of the video with "Somebody Told Me" by The Killers as background music (due to copyright). It's soooooooo much better that way!

 

* For a number of years I’ve been boycotting Shell stations after their exploits in Nigeria.

I loved, of course, Michael Palin in all the Monty Python sketches and movies but I used to be soooo envious (and still am) of his travels for his documentary series. He’s been to 94 countries and not just touching down... he’s really visited and explored those countries.

BBC News has a 5-min interview with Michael Palin. I was smiling as he mentioned in this interview all the wonderful places in Peru that were also part of my month-long adventure back in 2001! What a wonderful experience that was :-)

If you haven’t watched his travel documentaries, I highly recommend them. If you haven’t watched any Monty Python, you are really missing out on some excellent comedy :-) (granted, it’s not to everyone’s taste :-)

This reminded me of John Cleese whom I had the fortune to see live here in Seattle few weeks ago. Time to watch “Life of Brian” or “The Holly Grail” again? :-)

The photographs that made it to the final round of the Bing homepage contest are amazing. The winning one is a photo of the Seattle skyline. It’s gorgeous.

Justin Kraemer/Justin Kraemer Photography
This photograph of the Seattle skyline won the second Bing homepage-photo contest. It will be featured as Bing's background image on Jan. 6.

(source “Seattle skyline wins Bing 'hometown pride' photo contest”, from “The Microsoft Blog”, SeattlePI blogs)

The skiing season has started really strong. After the great snow at Crystal Mountain few weeks ago, I went to Whistler for the weekend with Tini and Nuno. We also met my very good friends (and usual skiing buddies when I go to Whistler... they practically live there in the winter :-) Theoni and Simran. Simran (yes, I still owe him $5 for taking his top off in the snow at the end of last season) is an amazing skier! I think I just had a breakthrough in my overall slalom style when coming down black diamonds as a result of a tip he gave me.

The first day was absolutely amazing. Great snow and great weather. The second day was wet :-( It rained so we didn’t ski all that much but we still had fun chatting.

Tini, Nuno, and I also explored a couple of bars. It wasn’t as busy as usual but I guess it’s only the start of the season.

 

Simran and Theoni at the top of Blackcomb.

With Nuno at the top of Blackcomb.

  
Following Nuno with my camera as he was skiing down. Then up the mountain again.

It was a gorgeous day (the back of the Blackcomb mountain)

 

Before the last run of the day (facing towards the village).

  
 
 
Out and about at Whistler village. We HAD to go to the Longhorn saloon since Tini was part of the marketing team of the Windows version with that codename :-) I am not going to say what I am doing with the melted chocolate and the spoon :-)

And here’s a video of me skiing down with my iPhone in my hands (and yes, falling after hitting Nuno’s skis :-) There is another good clip but I do not have permission from Tini to post it :-))) This was taken on Sunday, so visibility and conditions were not great :-(

It looks cool too :-)

Thanks again for the credit to our book (tentative title “REST in Practice”).

I was forwarded a translated to Greek version of the “Bar Stool Economics” anecdote. It effectively tries to exemplify how the American tax system works. It uses clever language and math to hide the fact that the system is indeed biased towards larger savings for the richer. It also makes the assumption that the richer want to contribute to the common good and that the majority of the society does not understand the difference between absolute vs percentage-based savings.

It turns out that the anecdote is attributed to Dr. David R. Kamerschen, Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Georgia. However, after just a simple check, it turns out that Dr. Kamerschen was not the original author. I guess someone wanted to add “authority” to the anecdote by simply adding his name :-(

I always believed that the more one earns, the more they should be taxed (not in absolute amounts but as a percentage of their income at an increasing scale... without upper limits that further amplify the imbalance of wealth accumulation in favor of the few). It’s as simple as that.

The New York Times has a nice article (“A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing”) about the “Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery” book, which also happens to include my “A platform for all that we know: creating a knowledge-driven research infrastructure” essay :-) Check out my October blog entry about the book.

It’s great that the article focused on Jim Gray’s observations around data-intensive computing, the availability of scientific data and literature online, and interoperability. Jim’s work and thinking continues to inspire me. I am soooo honored to have met and worked with him. He’s inspired so many!!!

Just read Guilherme’s interview over at InfoQ about Restfulie. Nice read.

It’s great to see that our (upcoming) book is already helping people create Web applications and frameworks out there.

“Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson will release a book on using the web as one's infrastructure in early 2010 and after reading it I finally got to understand how hypermedia fit into the rest scene.”

Guilherme was very kind to give us credit but it’s his engineering effort and ideas that created a buzz and brought attention to Restfulie. Great great work!

I think that Restfulie beautifully captures the hypermedia concepts and helps developers build hypermedia applications.

I can’t wait for our book to become available (I’ve been working on a chapter most of the day today) so that more people can read about our take towards REST and hypermedia when building distributed applications. As everything else that we’ve done, I am expecting some controversy, which is good (TM) :-)

I realized today that I didn’t write* about my long weekend in London over Thanksgiving (Nov. 26 - Dec 1), which was absolutely amazing! It was a very last minute thing but it turned out to be great, as it is usually the case. I had such a beautiful time.

I spent some time with my friend Renata, drunk few beers with Meropi and her friends, and briefly saw Paul Watson together with Jim for lunch. I stayed one night with the two Dr. Webbers at their place, which was absolutely great. We had a great Indian dinner and few drinks. I miss hanging out with my pal Jim :-( Ian Robinson also dropped by and we chatted about the book (on which I am working at the moment) and just hang out. It was great seeing him!

I enjoyed the main part of the weekend with Natasa, who traveled from Greece. We walked a lot, went to a great Mexican place (keep forgetting its name) with the two Webbers, Ronnie Scott’s for an excellent Jazz night (Lucinda Belle was great and Soulive were amazing), saw Wicked (the musical), watched Disney’s Xmas Carole in 3D at the IMAX in London, went to see “The Habit of Art” at the National Theatre (it was absolutely amazing!!!), visited the Globe theater (where Shakespeare’s plays were performed), danced at the Fabric (enjoyed the dancing but the club was not great), tasted different ethnic food, drunk too much wine, and chatted a lot :-) I loved it!

It was a memorable weekend. One of those that makes me want move there. I keep having such weekends in London. Hmmm!!! Jim, will you twist my arm a bit more? :-)

Here are some photos...

       

 

* Sorry Lee… yet another travel trip report but not the one you wanted :-)

I just watched “The Rage in Placid Lake” (an Australian indie film), which was cute. I liked these lines delivered by the main character towards the end of the movie.

“There are moments when you know what you need to do.

If you stopped and analyzed it, it’d be crazy.

You’d lose pros and cons and so think “no”.

But you don’t think, you are listening to yourself. These moments can save us.”

I spent my afternoon at the Pacific Science Center today. I went there for the “Animation” exhibit, which I enjoyed very much. However, I was mostly taken and pleasantly surprised by Chris Jordan’s photography exhibition.

Chris is a Seattle artist (photography) who, after a long career as a lawyer, gave up his job and became an artist. Through his work (at least the collection I saw), he’s trying to bring awareness to our impact on the environment. His “Running the Number” collection is about portraying statistics through visual means. This is not about scientifically visualizing the numbers but about creating images that tell a story about our way of life, an allegory of our impact on the environment, a powerful depiction of what the numbers tell us but we, still, don’t listen.

The (digital, in some cases) photography is great. Chris does his own research on numbers and cross-references them from different publicly-available sources (e.g. government data). He uses the most conservative result from his findings, which is still enough to shake us. Here are few examples I noted down...

• 106,000 cans (e.g. soft drinks) are used a day in the US.
• 100 million trees are used each year to make paper for JUNK mail!
• 380,000 KW of energy is wasted in the US every minute of the day!
• 2 million plastic bottles are used every five minutes in the US.
• 200,000 Americans die from cigarettes every 6 months!!!
• 28,000 barrels with 42 gallons of oil are burned in the US every two mins!
• 1 million plastic cups are used in airline flights in the US every 6 hours!
• There were 29,569 handgun-related deaths in the US in 2004 :-(
• 426,000 cell phones are retired in the US every day! This is just crazy.
• $12.5 million is spent on the war in Iraq per hour!

One of Chris Jordan’s quotes that I liked:

“The pervasiveness of our consumerism holds a seductive kind of mentality. Collectively we are committing a vast and unsustainable act of taking, but as individuals we each are anonymous and no one is in charge or accountable for the consequences. I fear that in this process we are doing irreparable harm to our planet, our culture, and our individual spirits.” (Chris Jordan, from his “Running the Numbers” exhibition at the Pacific Science Center).

I say that we should all rise to the occasion and stop being anonymous, become accountable, and spread the word about the unsustainable way in which we treat our environment.

This is fantastic!!! Fully deserved and I am sure many more recognitions will be added to his great record.

The “Tony Hey” student award was established to honor Tony’s contributions to e-Science. I am thrilled!!! I am also honored and humbled to have worked with Tony!!! :-) Congratulations!

Tony Hey, Roger Barga, and I were asked to contribute an essay for an MIT Press book entitled “World Wide Research – Reshaping the Sciences and Humanities”, edited by William H. Dutton and Paul W. Jeffreys. We decided to write about “Research Platforms and the Cloud”.

That was a couple of years ago but I believe that the topic of our contribution is definitely still relevant today. The space was limited so we couldn’t expand our thoughts as much as we wanted but I think the essay gives a good idea of our thoughts at the time.

I had a look at the print-ready draft of the book and it looks great. Some great names in Science and Technology have contributed their thoughts.

Here are few words from MIT Press’s announcement about the book.

Experts examine ways in which the use of increasingly powerful and versatile digital information and communication technologies are transforming research activities across all disciplines.

Advances in information and communication technology are transforming the way scholarly research is conducted across all disciplines. The use of increasingly powerful and versatile computer-based and networked systems promises to change research activity as profoundly as the mobile phone, the Internet, and email have changed everyday life. This book offers a comprehensive and accessible view of the use of these new approaches—called “e-Research”—and their ethical, legal, and institutional implications. The contributors, leading scholars from a range of disciplines, focus on how e-Research is reshaping not only how research is done but also, and more important, its outcomes. By anchoring their discussion in specific examples and case studies, they identify and analyze a promising set of practical developments and results associated with e-Research innovations.

The contributors, who include Geoffrey Bowker, Christine Borgman, Paul Edwards, Tim Berners-Lee, and Hal Abelson, explain why and how e-Research activity can reconfigure access to networks of information, expertise, and experience, changing what researchers observe, with whom they collaborate, how they share information, what methods they use to report their findings, and what knowledge is required to do this. They discuss both the means of e-Research (new research-centered computational networks) and its purpose (to improve the quality of world-wide research).

Forthcoming July 2010