Expanding musical horizons

After a good weekend with the Hobsons, I left on the train on Sunday afternoon so that I could attend another concert in Davis that evening. This was "Bach's Birthday Celebration", and was my risk-taking event when I booked various concerts, etc. at the UC Davis Mondavi Center. Perhaps some explanation is required!

As a general rule, I have found that I don't enjoy classical music which involves singing (Handel's Messiah is a notable exception) — opera leaves me cold. So, booking for a concert of choral Bach music was a bit of a gamble.

Well, the gamble paid off — the concert was superb! It was put on by the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra, which has a HUGE choir (there must have been well over a hundred singers). They also had four soloists (I though the bass was a bit weak, but the other three were very good), and a very good sized orchestra.

The programme included:

• The Magnificat
  
• Lutheran Mass No. 4 in G Major
  
• St. John Passion (excerpts)
  
• Cantata #11 (Excerpt)
  
• Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring
  
• Komm Suesser Tod
  

The last song was written by a Norwegian composer in honour of Bach: a lovely a capella song in a Bach-like style.

Another Cycling Adventure

Dedicated readers of this exciting blog, may recall the cycling adventure of 9 October last year when I cycled from Davis through to West Sacramento to visit the Social Security offices (and returned into the teeth of a howling gale!). Today I decided to take a different route and cycled up to Woodland (a small town due North of Davis). The main reason was to visit the Target superstore there to find a suitable birthday present for someone who turned 13 today. As spring is starting to settle in and it is a beautiful, sunny day I set off on my bike. The round-trip was just under 30kms, so quite a nice ride after a rather long ride-less spell over the worst of winter. However, just like my ride to Sacramento the wind was not cooperating! Fortunately, this time I had the head wind on my way to Woodland and was able to simply gear down and slog away (average speed: 18.8km/h — better than I expected, actually).

I'm not sure why Woodland exists. It seems to have a juvenile reform centre, a bunch of newish housing developments (which look they act as a cheaper housing option for people working in Davis — the supply-and-demand factors in Davis are much the same as in Grahamstown, chasing rents and property prices sky high) and some large shops (the afore-mentioned Target, CostCo [think Makro on steroids and with much higher quality!] and Best Buy [a popular computer/hi-tech chain]). Oh yes, and (even more bizarrely!) a few hotel chains, which I suspect are trying to capitalise on the proximity of Sacramento's airport.

I had a successful shop at Target (perhaps a little too successful — I ended up buying some T shirts for myself too!), and treated myself to coffee at Starbucks before heading for home. And, of course, now I had a tail wind! :-) Average speed 27.4km/h, including a brief stop to visit a geocache on the route home!

Sacramento Airport

One last posting from my trip: on my return to Sacramento, I took a photo of the very interesting pillars in the baggage claim area of the airport. As you can see, they've been "decorated" to look like piles of abandoned luggage! Rather cute, appropriate art-pieces for an airport.

Hawaii

I've already mentioned some of the aspects that I found really appealing about Hawaii, but at the risk of sounding repetitive, it is really beautiful! The conference was held in the Hilton Hawaiian Village: a cluster of several large tower blocks. Some of these seemed to be time-share/condo accommodation, and several were more traditional hotel blocks. Interspersed between the tower blocks were beautiful tropical gardens, swimming pools and "streets" of shops and restaurants, giving the "village" feel to which the resort's name alludes. The photo below is the view from the balcony of my room: you can see something of the gardens and the Pacific in the distance through the palm trees.

The state of Hawaii consists of several islands, of which Hawaii itself is the largest. However, SAC was held on the island of Oahu in the state capital, Honolulu. Interestingly, Hawaii only became a state relatively recently (1959). The locals pronounce the name with a distinct glottal stop between the i's: as Hawai'i. And one last random fact: if you drilled down through the centre of the earth from my hotel room you would come out in Western Botswana (alternatively, you could invert the coordinates and plot it on Google Earth, as I did!) — it really is on the other side of the world from "home", and the time zone difference back to SA was a full twelve hours.

The Hilton resort is right on the North-Western end of the Waikiki beach (my hotel room was at the coordinates N 21°16'56.50" W 157°50'10.76", if you want to check it out on Google Maps or Google Earth), with its own enclosed lagoon as well as access to the Pacific. Despite the fact that I had a slight cold, I couldn't miss the opportunity to have a swim in the Pacific, which was very pleasant (a little "fresh", but much better than the North-Californian version of the Pacific, which is icy even in mid-summer!).

On the Wednesday morning, I slipped out of the conference and took a tour to Pearl Harbour. That included entrance to the museum there and a visit to the USS Arizona memorial. The Arizona is a battleship that was one of the ships sunk during the attack on Pearl Harbour. Her main ammunition store was hit by a bomb and she sunk very quickly at her mooring bay in shallow water, so her main deck is just a few feet below the water level, with the base of a gun turret and a few other bits sticking out above the water. She also holds the remains of the 1700 or so people who died aboard her on that morning (retrieving the bodies would have been too difficult and dangerous, given the state of the wreck), and the memorial is a very sombre and meaningful reminder of the impact of the events of that day. The memorial takes the form of a large "bridging" structure over the centre of the wreck, with view ports out of the sides and into the water below, and a large marble wall inscribed with the names of the dead. The ship also holds a large reservoir of oil, which leaks out slowly (about 40l per day, our guide reckoned) — I have a photo of the slight oil slick produced.

On the way back to Waikiki, our tour bus took us through some of central Honolulu, including the state capitol building and the only royal residence on American soil: the 'Iolani Palace, used by the last two traditional monarchs of Hawaii.

On the last night of the conference, the organisers had arranged a dinner at the Polynesian Cultural Center up in the North-East of the island (the Center is run by the Mormons to provide employment for students at the adjoining campus of Brigham Young University). The dinner featured various forms of Polynesian dancing (including the famous Hula and a fire-dance — see the video below), and Polynesian foods (shredded roast pork, lots of sweet potatoes and coconut on all the deserts!). As the Center was a one-hour drive from Waikiki, it was quite late by the time we got back after the dinner.

SAC 2009

My excuse, or rather reason, for being in Hawaii was to attend the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2009). That is a large (about 500 delegates), international (lots of European and Asian delegates) conference with several "tracks" focusing on different aspects of computing. I had helped with reviewing the submissions for one of the tracks on Coordination Models, which is the general area in which my own research falls. The Coordination Models track had a single session, on the Tuesday morning, but there were several others dealing with a number of other related topics (distributed systems, computer networks, mobile and internet computing) that had presentations of interest.

Again, there were some very useful papers and I made some good contacts with various people. Next year SAC is to be held in Switzerland (why do they keep choosing such expensive venues!), and I hope to be able to submit a paper on some of the work done during my sabbatical.

On to Hawaii

With the two conferences back to back, I had one day (Sunday 8 March) to get from Tennessee to Hawaii. That was a good demonstration of just how big the USA is as it took most of the day and involved a change six or seven time zones. I say six or seven, because Sunday 8 March was the day that most of the USA (Hawaii being one of very few exceptions — I think Arizona also refuses to participate) switched over to daylight savings time. In order to get to the airport in Chattanooga on time, I had to catch the 4:00am shuttle bus, which meant getting up at 3:30am, which my body believed was actually 2:30am, as DST had kicked in at 2:00am that morning!

Getting to Hawaii meant three flights: Chattanooga to Cincinnati, Cincinnati to Salt Lake City, and lastly Salt Lake City to Honolulu. I arrived in Honolulu at about 4:00pm (or 10:00pm Chattanooga time) feeling rather shattered after very little sleep the night before and a lot of travelling.

My first impression of Hawaii was the warmth, and then the openness. Given their beautiful climate a lot of buildings are very open to the elements: the airport, for one has open-sided walkways leading from the main terminal area out to the departure areas (this photo was taken at dusk when I left, so the quality isn't great — the gardens below are outside the departure-side airport lounges for first-class, etc.). Likewise, the hotel (a rather expensive Hilton) where the conference was being held had an open reception/lobby area (there were some huge wooden louvre screens along a few sides that could be closed if necessary, but I never saw them shut — you can see them in the photo below, which is of the back, more enclosed side of the reception area; the front was completely open). And many of the restaurants and bars in the complex were either completely open or had large expanses of windows or sliding doors that were just kept open all the time. The end result was a wonderfully relaxed, out-doorsy feel almost all the time.

The SIGCSE Symposium

Of course, the reason for being in Chattanooga was to attend the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) Technical Symposium. That is probably the leading venue for the discussion of computer science education and attracted a large (1200 or so) crowd, from all over the world. I found the conference to be incredibly stimulating (I wondered if some of that had to do with immersing myself in teaching and learning issues after eight months of pure focus on my research!). In particular, there were some excellent panel discussions on various topics.

There was also an exhibition of various things of interest to the educational community, with especially good displays of textbooks from all the main publishers.

The SIGCSE community is a very warm bunch, and they went out of their way to make first-timers feel at home, including hosting a luncheon one day just for the first-timers, and a few committee members and "pioneers". At the lunch we informed that we were now officially adopted into the SIGCSE "family"! It was the 40'th SIGCSE Technical Symposium and so there was a cake-cutting ceremony one day, with everyone singing "Happy Birthday"!

It was interesting for me to see a number of authors of textbooks that I have used walking around "in the flesh".

Several of the sessions (and in fact, partially the "theme" of the whole conference) dealt with addressing the rather stagnant popularity of Computer Science as a field of study, particularly for female students, and there were some very good presentations on ways in which these issues might be addressed.

I left with a bunch of new ideas for teaching, a long list of textbooks to try to get out of various publishers, and a strong desire to try to get back again in the future. Next year in Milwaukee?!

Chattanooga

Getting to Chattanooga was tiring, mainly because I had to wake up at 4:00am to get to the airport for the flights. Yes, flights — there's no direct connection, so I had to take a flight from Sacramento to Atlanta, followed by a (very short) hop from Atlanta to Chattanooga. Chattanooga's airport is about the size of Port Elizabeth's, I'd guess — reasonably respectable. I was staying in the Holiday Inn, which was one of the "official" conference hotels, although it was a few blocks (about a 10–15 minutes walk) from the Chattanooga convention centre — a very impressive, huge convention/conference facility, which seemed to be quite new.

The Holiday Inn is an interesting hotel, as it is on the site of the original Chattanooga station, and of course, Chattanooga is famous because of the old Glenn Miller song, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", which arose because of the importance of Chattanooga as the Southern terminal of the original railway down the East coast of the USA. When rail travel died an unfortunate death, in the 1950's and 1960's the station was abandoned until it was bought and converted into a hotel. The hotel reception area is in the very grand station building (the main photo above), with two restaurants and several guest rooms in converted railway carriages. There are also a couple of blocks of newer, standard hotel rooms, which I had booked to stay in (the room rate for the railway carriages was considerably more than that for the standard rooms). Well, on my first night the roof of my room started to leak, and the only other rooms available were a smoking room (not an option, thankfully) and a railway carriage room, which they kindly let me stay in for the standard rate! The accompanying photos show the outside and the inside views of the room (excuse the mess!) — it was rather fun!

Needless to say, much of the town and the hotel traded heavily on the Choo-Choo theme, and there was an excellent, HUGE model train display at the hotel. This photo shows only a very small part of it.

While the down-town area of Chattanooga is rather run-down with many derelict old buildings, they are clearly making a huge effort to recreate the town as a venue for tourism and conferences, etc. The conference had a formal dinner/reception on the Thursday evening, which was held in the Tennessee Aquarium, just a few blocks from the convention centre. That is a very impressive, very big aquarium spread over two buildings: one for rivers and for the sea (I did have to wonder just how fresh the sushi was and whether the inhabitants were impressed with seafood being served right in front of their tanks!).

Way overdue...

but in my defense, I've been walk-about! More specifically, for the past ten days I have been travelling the breadth of the USA to attend two conferences. The first was the SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) Symposium, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the second was the Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC), held in Waikiki, Honolulu, Hawaii. Both conferences were very good (if very different), and both locations were good.

I had both of these conferences in mind as possible events for my sabbatical, but was rather surprised when they turned out to be back-to-back. In some ways that was quite convenient, as the "triangle" airfare worked out a little better than two separate return trips would have been. However, the fact that they were on opposite sides of the USA did make the travelling a little hectic!

I'll post a bunch of blog entries with various bits and pieces and photos over the next few days. For now, I just want to say that Hawaii is beautiful — leaving to come back to Davis yesterday was not easy! (Note to the CS Department: if I don't come back in July you might just want to start the search in Hawaii!). And to just to get you hooked, the attached photo was the sunset on Tuesday, on the beach in front of the hotel!