Soylent Red

I was over in London yesterday for some interviews with a Web company. It was a long day, getting up at 4am and arriving home after 1am, but I'm really happy with how it turned out.

I got into the city at 10am and the interviews didn't start until noon so I had some time to wander around and relax. I took a stroll through the park in front of Buckingham Palace, and smiled like a loon upon seeing a squirrel. Then I discovered that the park is pretty much full of them, so it became less of a novelty. But still, squirrels!

I walked for about an hour, ending up at the houses of parliament. I thought of looking for the phone box beside Big Ben that my brother has the number for in his phonebook, so I could ring it and it would look like Big Ben was ringing him. Unfortunately I didn't think I had time, being an hours walk from the place I had to be in an hour's time.

Of course the walk back took about 15 minutes.

The interviews were great. I had four, each of them just one-to-one with one of the software engineers. They asked me some technical questions, a few (very few) sort of general interviewy type questions—none of this "do you have any weaknesses?" or "give me an example of a time you showed leadership" crap—and they each gave me a coding or related problem to solve on the whiteboard. All of them were really friendly and enthusiastic. I was surprisingly comfortable right from the start, and once I started doing well I just lost any hint of nervousness and got really into the swing of it.

A few people had suggested that a good question to ask an interviewer is what they like about the job. You wouldn't believe how psyched everyone in this company is to work there. They all got so animated about it, it was really encouraging.

I got an email this morning saying that I should hear about the interviewers' feedback tomorrow. I don't want to sound too cocky, but I am very confident. Soylent Red might soon have a little disclaimer that the opinions here aren't the opinions of my employer. :)

Oh, and in case you haven't been paying attention, the company in question is Google.

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A little over a year ago I joined a directory called Movie Extras which deals, unsurprisingly, in the business of supplying extras to movie and television productions. I had a lot of free time, Ricky Gervais's Extras was glamourising the industry, and an ancient Joe Piscepo continued to fade into obscurity.

Nothing came of my listing on the site for some time. I got the occassional email or text message asking if I was available at such and such a date in such and such a place. Inevitably I wasn't. It turned out that production companies don't like to plan very far ahead. "Can you take the next week off to film with us? Including today? What college work?"

Fast forward—that's an industry term for running a film at faster than real time in order to skip quickly into the future—to this Monday, when I got a call from Coco television to play a bank raider in a re-enactment of of a robbery in Monasterevan for RTÃ�'s Crime Call. I accepted the offer, at the same time composing the beginning of my inevitable Oscar acceptance speech some years down the line. Short red hair and a pair of blue jeans were the requirements as stated. But they found in me something that they hadn't expected. The 'X' factor.

By fortuitous coincidence, the show's producer (I think; I never did ask her actual title. It seemed to be anything between casting director and coffee-fetcher) lives around the corner from me. She drove me in for a pre-eight o'clock start. We filmed from eight until 10 inside the bank. When the bank opened for business we moved outside to get the approach and our wild dash to freedom. Then we took a series of shots of the getaway car speeding away. Though it seems the escape can't be described in those terms in the show's voice-over, as there are no witness statements that say the robbers sped away. It's an educated guess. Perhaps they took a leisurely drive.

I was the lead robber, so I got the most lines and the most screen time. Much of it was concealed under a balaclava, but I think there's enough un-obscured footage that I'm likely to be lynched once the show goes out next Tuesday night. Such are the tribulations we screen celebrities must endure for our art.

I'll be interested to see how it all came together in the editing room. No doubt I'll be cringing and peeking between my fingers at the TV screen.

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I had another phone interview with Google this afternoon. Because of the number of applicants they're getting in the Dublin office right now due to their big expansion I was actually interviewed by someone from their London office. She started with what might be the best opening interview question of all time, "Were you one of the people with the big 'Free Hugs' signs on Oxford Street on Saturday?"

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I spent last weekend in London at the biggest annual Join Me gathering, Karmageddon 4. Forgive me if I fail to convey just how overwhelmingly awesome this weekend turned out to be. I've uploaded some photos of the event.

By a brilliant stroke of luck, Regent Street and Oxford Street were closed to traffic all day Saturday. We spent a couple of hours walking up both streets performing random acts of kindness for the thousands of shoppers, performers, workers, tourists, and even police. Random gift giving, handing out Christmas cards, applauding carol singers with ridiculous enthusiasm, and—more than anything else—free hugs. It also seems that many people don't take the advice of their mothers not to take candy from strangers.

The nice an smiley bespectacled gentleman in this photo (the one who isn't me) might be familiar to some of you.

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I spent last weekend in Chester with a bunch of cultists I met on the Internet. This was a far less alarming situation than it would sound. It's a nice cult, more keen on tea than kool-aid. Mass (or indeed any) suicide is frowned on.

Apart from the preposterous amount of time it took to get there and back, I had a fantastic time. Note for people travelling to Halloween parties in another country: airports don't like toy guns in luggage, even checked in. They don't have a good reason for this, but you won't win an argument with them over it.

On Friday I flew to Manchester and took the train from there down to Chester. I stopped briefly in Manchester to collect some elements of my Indiana Jones costume from the awesome Sarah. Without her I would have just been dressed as a man in brown trousers. When I reached Chester I checked into the hostel that we had taken over for the weekend, and then got myself off down to the pub to a disconcertingly enthusiastic welcome. There was much rejoicing.

We spent Saturday afternoon in the middle of Chester giving free cakes and sweets to bemused passers-by. Reactions ranged from eagerness through bemusement, confusion, wariness, distrust, and apathy to plain old-fashioned running away.

The ladies in a very expensive looking clothes shop which we went into despite being convinced it was "too posh" for our brand of frivolity turned out to be very enthusiastic about our random act of kindness. Conversely, the grouchy fuckers in the Jesus shop, who we thought were bound to be friendly, turned out to be rude to the point of meanness. Maybe they don't like pagan rituals like dressing up.

Saturday closed with retiring to a pub. And then another pub. And then a third pub. And then getting thrown out. My theory was that if I went to sleep at all I would be wasting money, so I was among the few remaining at the end of the night.

I took some photos but, just like my vision, most of them were blurry or out of focus. Those that came out well are up on Flickr.

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I submitted my thesis today. This seems like a notable event, only I can't think of anything in particular to note about it. There was a very short queue in the central bureaucracy, I guess. That's rare enough.

Now I play the waiting game...

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Four men stand dotted about a function room, all turned to face a stage where the quizmaster presides over a trivial spot-prize competition. Each of the four has one hand on his head, the other clasped firmly on his buttocks.

The game is this: put each of your hands on either your head or your ass. You can put them both in the same place if you want or, like a communist distributing the fruits of the public's labour, give one to each. The quizmaster then tosses two coins. Two heads on the coins and all of the people with both hands on their head stay standing while everyone else sits down. Simliarly, tails equals ass. The game continues until there is one player remaining. Tradition dictates that this person be labelled the winner.

A simple game. And with a moment's thought, a simple optimal strategy. Clearly in this game placing both of your eggs in one basket is the inferior choice. One hand on your head and the other on your ass gives a 50% chance of staying in the game at each round. The other options have only a 25% chance each. These four remaining men know it. They have played the same position for each round leading up to this and none of them is keen to switch strategies. We are at an impasse.

This is where my faith in humaity begins to disappear. The quizmaster tosses the coins again. A head and a tail. All men remain. Again. Two heads. All sit down. We can't finish without a winner. Stand up and we''l go again. A head and a tail. It slowly dawns on the quizmaster and the assembled onlookers that this game doesn't appear to be nearing a conclusion. The men are asked to change their choices. They all look around at the others hoping that a rival will concede to the request. No-one does. More coin tossing. Sit down. Stand up again. Another draw. Whatever will we do? My mood sinks deeper and deeper. More sitting. Stand up again. And then it happens. Humanity, by the hand (or, in fact, voice) of a lone assailant on reason, loses the battle.

"Change the coins."

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I spent Saturday afternoon on Old Conna golf course in Bray, supporting my cousins in the final of the Barton Cup, the biggest golf competition in Leinster. Or so I'm led to believe. About it being the biggest, I mean; I'm sure about where I was and what I was doing.

The competition had a certain historical importance to it. My grandfather and his brother were the pair that won the Barton Cup for Royal Dublin in 1946. Sixty years later, another pair of Coghlan brothers played in the final for the same club.

Having not lost a single match in the entire competition, they were expected to do quite well. Royal Dublin were already 4-1 up from the first leg of the final, so they only needed two wins from the five matches. My cousins went out fourth and led by a narrow margin for most of the match. They were two up going onto the seventeenth hole, so their opponents needed to win both remaining holes.

The first two pairs had already finished, with Royal Dublin having got the first of the two wins they needed to take the cup. It came down to our guys only needing to draw on one of theur remaining holes.

Which they did, on hole seventeen. They actually won by getting close enough to the hole that their opponents gave them a gimme, so they didn't get the satisfaction of sinking the last ball.

It wasn't quite as spectacular as the 1946 final is said to have been. That one went to a sudden death tie-breaker which my grandfather won with a chip in from off the green from about eight miles away. That may have been slightly exaggerated.

So watch out, whoever plays that final in 2066. You're in for some difficult competition.

I have some photos up on Flickr.

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I spent most of today trying to find out why my experimental results were less than 1/5^th as good as they had been for the same dataset a few months ago when I wrote my paper. It's quite disturbing to run a program for half an hour and have it come back and tell you that you have nothing worth writing your thesis about. Quite disturbing indeed. Especially when the paper didn't even get accepted with the results I used to have, but I'll not get into that.

I was pretty put out, but I was reassured that I had managed to obtain useful results before so it must just be a bug somewhere in my code. I figured it could take some time to find though, as my year's work has become somewhat gnarly along the way for one reason or another. But at least it was just a matter of finding and fixing a bug.

Or was it? The thing is, my first set of results had a little bit of a cheat in them. I'm not going to try to describe the setup in any really meaningful way, because that's basically what this thesis is about and I don't have weeks to write this blog post. But there were some circumstances under which I would get a few correct answers "for free". These shouldn't have been counted with the rest of the results, but they had been when I presented the results in my paper. I noticed this a few weeks ago and decided to fix it. Could it be that removing my "free" right answers had thrown off my whole set of results to the extent that I was seeing?

The obvious thing to do was to root around in the code and revert whatever I changed so that the cheat was back in place. If I went back to getting good results then I would know that the new, bad numbers were just the legitimate results where the good ones were basically fake. This would have been more than a bit bothersome. Now, I'm sitting here writing a blog post rather than, say, chucking myself under a train so you can probably surmise that this wasn't what had gone wrong. In fact I had never even fixed the cheating! Well that was a relief anyway. At least when I did find whatever was wrong it would be something I could fix without feeding my academic integrity to the ducks.

Given the complexity and the sheer quantity of the code involved in this project, and my relative unfamiliarity with parts of it that I wrote too long ago and didn't properly document, I expected to spend the rest of the week tracking down the problem. It took me about two hours of the usual ritual of reading code, adding debugging statements, compiling, running, panicking, reading more code, adding more debugging statements, going for a piss, and finally reading the right bit of code and adding the right debugging statement to find the bug. A one-liner fixed the major symptoms, and a little more work tomorrow will fix it entirely.

I also fixed the little cheat that had been in the system when I generated the earlier results. As I was doing this it occurred to me that it shouldn't actually have any effect on the numbers I was reporting. A quick check bore this out. So not only had I got the results back to being as good as they had been, they were now completely legitimate.

By this time it was almost time for the bus (which I had intended not to get, since I thought I'd need to be in all evening). But I had time to run a couple of more iterations of one or two experiments. I ran through the newer dataset and discovered that I can get precision of 100%, with 97.9% recall (don't worry about what those words mean in this context; what's important is that you can't do better than 100%). And that's under what is intuitively the most difficult set of conditions, so I expect to see the same results under all other conditions on that dataset.

The last 15 minutes of my day in college were very good. How was your day?

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I guess it's about time I related the tale of what happened on Saturday. The summary for those of you too busy to read past the second sentence is that four of us decided, at 2AM on Saturday morning, to walk home from Blackrock to Greystones. Here follows the tale of that event, as recounted by me, in case anyone wants to adapt it into a movie and cast Wil Wheaton as me. We might have trouble getting River Phoenix to play Steve. I'll let the other two fight it out over who gets Jerry O'Connell and Cory Feldman.

I like to think that I've learned something this weekend. Do not create a television series about a group of people who crash-land on an island if you don't know where you're going with it. Don't just make it up as you go along because if you do it's going to start sucking very quickly. Wait, that's what I learned from Seth MacFarlane's Harvard Class Day speech. What I learned from this weekend is that Dalkey is an absolutely beautiful town, but that it's harder to get out of than the Mafia. It's like a beautiful flower. You know, like the ones that have slippery insides that sucker unsuspecting insects in and then trap and eat them.

Let me rewind. The night started in Blackrock, in a pub. We were there to say good bye to a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. I don't know how many links there actually were in that chain. I don't know who the person was, nor where she was going. I think there was mention of New Zealand. Or maybe just regular Zealand (in Denmark). Or Zeeland (in the Netherlands). Perhaps she was on her way to a water park named Sea Land. I really don't know. But I digress. That there was a pub, and therefore alcohol, is the only pertinent piece of information at this stage.

How this circumstance led to the decision to walk the 25 kilometres home is disputed. Some claim it was Stephen's idea. At one point Brian was being blamed. Actually I suggested it first, but I'm not sure that I'll endear myself to my compodriates by admitting that here. By the way, "compodriates" is a word. Look it up. And if you say "I did look it up and it's not a word", that's because you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut. Anyway, whoever gets the blame, we all somehow came to the conclusion that walking home was a terrible idea and that we should definitely do it. There were protestations and cries of "it can't be done" by onlookers. They were ignored. It could be done. It would be done. It was done. But I get ahead of myself.

Two o'clock we set out from Super-Mac's, adequately fuelled for our journey. I had eaten a Super-Mac's bacon burger, thereby making a seven-hour walk through the night only the second most reckless thing I did this weekend. South was easy to find. It's the way that feels like going down hill. We kept our bearings by making sure the moon stayed to our right. Some arguments were made to stay close to the duel carriageway so that we'd know the way. Other arguments were made to go the more interesting route, what might be termed "scenic". These latter arguments may have been made by me. They are what led to us getting... delayed. At three o'clock, still making good time, we arrived in Dalkey. "Nearly there," someone suggested. We found a Shell service station that was still open and there we bought drinks to maintain our fluids. We were going to go about this thing the right way, we thought. Bottled water was the thing. We chatted with some locals, and told them of our plan. They were supportive. They may have wished us luck; I don't remember.

We still had some distance to go, so we said good bye to our single-serving friends and headed in the vague direction of our next stop, Killiney. I don't want to spoil the story, but whoever's working on the movie version should take note: make sure to have a lingering shot of the service station as we leave.

After approximately no deliberation we headed right, which seemed to promise the most southerly route. We passed some really fancy houses. One was a castle, which we referred to as Enya's house, even though it turns out that that's in Killiney. If by some chance there's a spectacularly wealthy Dalkeyian reading this who was woken in the early hours of that morning I would like to take this opportunity to assure them that I didn't participate in ringing any gate buzzers and running away. Well that's not strictly true; I did participate in the running away. We passed a building with a flag flying outside. "Look, a Jamaican flag," I said. "Wait, that's a South African flag." This geographical hiccup apparently didn't discourage the guys from trusting my sense of direction. Which is a pity.

An hour and a half after leaving Dalkey town we came into another town. It must be Killiney, we thought. Then we saw a sign for Killiney pointing back the way we had come. Great, we thought, we must have somehow passed Killiney. Then we saw another signpost across the street, pointing in the opposite direction. It said Killiney. Then we saw a service station. A very familiar service station. Very familiar indeed. So familiar, in fact, that you might suspect that we had been there before. Some of us found this to be hilarious. Some of us did not.

After approximately no deliberation we headed left, on the grounds that it would take us to the coast. It would be literally impossible to lose our way if we followed the coast. We took this axiom to heart. So when the road stopped at a harbour leaving us no road South we climbed over rocks. And walls. And through gardens (which I think belonged to rented holiday apartments, so it wasn't really tresspassing). We went through a lane by a school. Thankfully the gate at one end was open. Regretably the gate at the far end was not. Each of us chose for ourselves to climb over the lower barbed-wire fence or the higher spiked fence. It's difficult to find a "right way" to go in such circumstances. After these fences, some nettles, and another low wall we found ourselves back on a road.

I liked this road. It went South. It had a view of the sea. It sloped downwards in the direction we were travelling. And it had Colby. I think. I mean, he was definitely there, but I'm not sure about his name. I didn't hear it very well, and I don't have a good memory for names. Either way, at this stage he was only "naked guy in a towel". He was leaning out his window drinking a beer at 5AM. Brian asked him for directions, where asking for directions involves saying, "How the FUCK do you get out of Dalkey? We've been here for FUCKING hours! What the FUCK? I hate this FUCKING town!" This apparently didn't bother our new friend, who invited us in for a glass of water. Each. He actually offered beer, but who wants that when they're three hours into a seven hour walk? His oriental lady friend (the guys suggested she was a hooker, but I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt) gave us each a small packet of... I'm not sure. Maybe wasabi. I don't really know what that is. We thanked her, and quickly pocketed whatever it was. Now it's what the ancient Egyptians called a "souvenir".

Colby gave us directions. He also gave us a pretty good description of Bono's house so that we would know which gate to buzz to piss of a celebrity. Hey, if he gets to release How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb I get to wake him in the middle of the night for no reason. An ear for an ear.

We never got as far as Bono's house though. Minutes after leaving Colby's house we passed the South African embassy again. Wonderful. We were back on exactly the same route that had taken us in a circle, only this time it had taken us three times as long to get there from the service station. We threw Colby's directions out the window. Figuratively. We had neither a physical copy of the directions nor a window to throw them out of. We went back to our Axiom of Getting Home: the coast cannot lead you in a circle. At least, not one that doesn't go through Greystones. We weren't about to walk the whole way around the country by accident. So the first chance we got we went down on to the beach.

We walked the beach for an hour and a half until we got to Shankill. Walking on sand is much more demanding than walking on pavement or tarmac, but the beach kept us on the coast and the coast kept us heading home. Complaints were being made by this time. Feet were hurting. Legs were rebelling and refusing to operate properly. A train had passed. There was a DART station nearby. Tired minds began to fit these facts together in creative ways. We asked the guy in the station when there would be a DART to Bray or Greystones. Sixty-seven minutes. Nuts to that, we thought. We'd walk to Bray in that time. So we did.

Right about now a screenwriter would have to "embellish" the story a little bit. The truth is the journey was easy once we got back to a route that we knew. Shankill is familiar. Bray even more so. Perhaps you could add some emotional scenes about Owen's departure to get a bus. That did happen, but it wasn't exactly emotional. I will note that the road over Bray head is a lot longer and steeper than I would have wanted it to be. On the way up I reassured myself that it would be much easier going down hill. I had forgotten the hard-earned fact that on a steep enough hill going down is almost as difficult as going up. It's certainly more effort than the gentle slopes of Dalkey. Not that I was feeling wistful for Dalkey or anything; I think I spent quite enough time there.

I tried to photograph the "Welcome to Greystones" sign in Windgates. I felt it was symbolic. The sunlight reflecting off it foiled my plan though, so you'll have to supply your own symbolism. There are other photos from the trip at Flickr.

I walked in my door at 9AM, seven hours after leaving Blackrock. I could have gone to Paris and back in that length of time. I don't think it took too long though. I'm pretty sure the 46A takes longer than that to get from Dublin to Dun Laoghaire. Needless to say, my legs hurt for a day or two afterwards. But at least I have the memories. And the little packet of someting that might be wasabi.

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