Travel, Technology, Thoughts
My final day in California was spent visiting the NASA Ames Research Centre, the Six Flags Discovery Kingdom and then watching the sunset over San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean.
The NASA Ames Visitors Centre was a disappointment, it looked like it was either temporary or extremely rundown.
My best mate took some time off work to show me around the Bay Area during my visit to California. On one of the days we didn’t really have much of a plan other than that we may go visit the area around UC Berkeley. After playing around on Google, I stumbled onto the website for the USS Hornet Museum. Not really knowing what to expect, other than some fun exploring an old aircraft carrier, we set the car’s GPS navigation and drove across the bay to Alameda.
Visiting Alcatraz was one of the highlights of my trip. My friend and I were fortunate to get some last minute tickets as I was not aware of just how popular it is and how far in advance it sells out.
After a few days in San Francisco I arranged with some of my friends to do a day road trip. Through my travel guide book and messing around with Google Maps I discovered Point Reyes which is around an hour and a half north of San Francisco (or a little more in traffic).
Being a nerd, the main attraction of Point Reyes is that forms a peninsula situated on the Pacific Plate and is visibly separated from from the North American Plate by the San Andreas Fault which runs directly under Tomales Bay.
I spent three days with friends in San Francisco during my stay in California.
On the first of these three days I met up with two friends of mine who work for technology companies. After a tour around a company making autonomous cars we had lunch in at “The Market” which is directly below the Twitter head office. Following this my best mate and I began to walk around the Market Street and city hall area of San Francisco.
In June I took three weeks leave and travelled to the USA and Canada to visit friends who live in various cities.
My trip began on a wet Wednesday morning in Sydney with a 15 hour flight to Los Angeles, followed by a one hour flight to San Francisco. With the exception of getting quizzed about my travel plans by various airline staff and border agents both in Sydney and Los Angeles the trip up with Delta was smooth and after being upgraded to Economy Comfort quite enjoyable.
I use a lot of open source software in my research and work.
In recent months I’ve been modifying the source code of some of open source repositories to better suit my needs and I’ve contributed a few small changes back to the DeepLearning4J and the Snacktory projects.
This morning I’m starting to work on a further patch for the DeepLearning4J repository and I needed to bring my local repository up to date before committing the change. However, at some point over the past few months the DeepLearning4J repository has been rebased and my fork of it will no longer merge.
Read moreIt seems odd to me to be turning 30 as at times I still feel like i’m in my early to mid 20s yet at other times I certainly do feel a bit older than I would still like to be.
A few years ago I had a number of friends turning 30 and some of them were having a little bit of a freakout. At the time I said to myself that by the time I turn 30 I won’t be freaking out like they did. Well I thought that until the day I turned 29 and then over the last year I’ve had plenty of freakouts to a number of my friends.
Read moreFor a second time I headed to the Formula One in Melbourne. This year I headed down just for the Saturday Free Practice and Qualifying sessions.
Overall the day was excellent. Being able to see the new cars and the sheer speed of them through the corners compared to the touring and GT cars.
A great addition to this year’s event was the fan forum stage which had some great driver interviews. I learnt that Kimi Räikkönen can smile and even tell funny jokes.
Below are a few photos and video from the day.
Read moreIn late 2016 I travelled to Canberra for work. It was my first time visiting Australia’s capital city.
Getting to Canberra was an adventure in itself, the original flight I was on was cancelled and then the second flight also got cancelled. In the end I ended up flying on a flight which was due to leave before my original cancelled flight which itself was delayed until after my original departure time. After I arrived in Canberra I caught an Uber to my accommodation in the suburb of Forrest. From there I walked to the centre of the city which is a rather long walk so I rewarded myself with dinner and an Uber ride back to my hotel. The following morning I quickly went to both the old and new parliament buildings before meeting up with my colleagues for a day and a half of work meetings.
Below are some photos from the trip.
