Coffee with Ralph

After a few hours of electronics and halloween shopping, André and I ended up at the Sambuca Cafe in Little Italy, NYC. As usual I chose only the most awesome thing on the menu, which was a double espresso with Sambuca. Or a double Sambuca with espresso. Every mouthful, I breathed in a warm hit of good booze and breathed out a high waft of boozy goodness. Ralph sat at the next table and seemed pretty content with his place in the scheme.

Other snaps from the day's meanderings:

• The fountain at City Hall Park. [Video]
• The schedule for the Australian Cricket Tour of India 2004 at Eight Mile Creek, "the undisputed home of Australian cricket in New York City".

Breakfast at Tom's Restaurant

You go to eat somewhere that's really famous, and friends told you you should go to, you ah, expect the food to be good. And when it turns out to be truly awful, you know, you feel kinda wierd. Like you just got hit in the head by a curveball, but you're padded up to play cricket.

In fact, I have only myself to blame for ordering pancakes with bacon at Tom's Restaurant. I could have left it at that. But when the enthusiastic waiter offered to make a nice cappucino-like drink, apologising for not having an espresso machine -- well, I would have felt like an asshole to turn down the offer. WHACK! I didn't expect the coffee and the maple syrup to taste so similar. Wake up, this food is crap!

MIT Media Lab

André and I did a few Annodex demos and chatted to people at MIT Media Lab today. Ted Selker naturally harshed us for not doing user studies before implementing the system infrastructure; and Henry Lieberman and some of his students quizzed us on CMML tracks and the scope of our metadata. Thanks to Barry Vercoe for arranging these meetings and our seminar.

Afterwards I couldn't help but record a cute squirrel outside the lab.

Boston Gnome Summit 2004

The first day of the Boston Gnome Summit was an excellently disorganized hackfest. Jon Trowbridge showed me how to write a metadata input filter for Beagle, which, to allow full-text search of Annodex media in the Gnome desktop, will involve a nearly trivial amount of C# to import the libannodex C API and pull metadata from disk files. As well as using these filters to index normal files, Beagle has drivers for indexing web browsing histories.