Cloud, Lisp and a Broken Down Bus

Hey Ho…to SF we go

• Well, that was my intention.

So um…here’s the story:

• I got to my bus, but the bus was a bit late, so the lady at the desk suggested I change my connecting bus to a later bus (just an hour later). This was perfect, so no worries.

• When I got to the connecting bus, we got on, and all was well, and an hour into the route from LA, the bus started overheating. The bus driver said “sorry guys..and thanks for your patience, but I’m going to have to turn this bus around…I don’t think if this continues we’ll even get to San Jose!”

• No worries..we were down an hour at most. Hopefully, there would be a working bus once we got back to LA, and we could continue, just an hour down

Or not…

• We got back to LA and the bus driver had had it. He said “I’m going home. Screw this!”

• So a bus of about 30 of us had no driver lololol. Frantically, the logistics guy for the station was calling someone, and he said it usually took two to four hours to find a new driver.

It all ended well!

• We got a fresh new one, who was nearby, so it took him about 45 minutes to get to us… but it was already 4am.

• So we left around 5am, which was the time around which we would have ARRIVED in SF.

Good news

• The driver was in a great mood and kicked up the speed, and I got into SF by noon, just in time for lunch! So a win-win! I thought everything to be immensely amusing!

So on to training

• Got my Certificate!

• I plan to complete the labs and also get my $200 credit as well tonight.

• Another late night, but I’m also going sailing tomorrow :)

Highlight of the evening…Lisp!

• I went to this AMAZING Meetup…the Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group.

• I actually recognized some persons from Clojure Conj! The group was wonderful and smart! A lot of the group also has experience in compilers, which I think ties in nicely with my group (ie the Santa Monica Haskell group).

The Spread

• They had amazing food and I also had two glasses of red wine. It was a classy event with great company!

They were quite generous!

• I’d like our Haskell group to meet, so I wrote a kind note thanking them for their hospitality. The location was Factual in SF, which is on Geary and O’Farrell.

• Ben, who records and edits the group’s videos, uses a Lisp programme to edit the video easily, which I thought was neat!

The actual lecture

• It was on Roger Corman’s Lisp, and he was THERE!

• He learned Lisp because his jazz musician teacher was actually writing a generative Gregorian chant programme in Lisp!

• He had postcards from his professor that were mix of music notation, English and Lisp! They were delightful because you could see he squished in all the parentheses and would still find a way to sign his name; Arthur.

• He called it PowerLisp because it was produced on a Powerbook :)

• He showed us disassemblers and assemblers called through Lisp code. I had never seen that before, so was absolutely amazed by that, particularly as I had done a bit of writing Assembly code for Reverse Engineering through my hackerspace!

• He demo-ed a Minesweeper Lisp which uses neural nets to find mines. It runs a generative algorithm that helps it detect where the mines are and learns from that. It was really cool!

Questions

• He mentioned AutoCad and Embedded Lisp. Is this really true!?

• He mentioned Arden syntax.

• Also, fuzzy logic/ continuations

• He recommended “Lisp in Small Pieces” as a great text. I will definitely look into that! It’s by Christian Queinnec.

In the end

• It was 100 percent worth it!

• I learned so much, made some new friends, and may even be in a Googs video (wearing a Haskell tshirt! Haha!)