If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Vacation Part 1: Aquarium of the Pacific

April 28, 2013 8:45 am

We went down to southern California for most of the week on a short vacation. We drove down on Sunday and met up with Josh (of Project Runway fame) for dinner. On Monday we met up with him again to go to the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach.

Traffic in the Los Angeles area is notoriously bad, but what makes it even more fun is when they hold a Grand Prix event on the blocks that surround the place you’re trying to get to. The Aquarium had been closed over the weekend for the race, but reopened on Monday. However, they were just starting to take down all of the fencing, barriers, stands, etc. from the race. So roads were randomly blocked off and everything our GPS unit wanted us to do was simply not possible. We finally wandered into a member of the event staff at yet another intersection where our only allowed movement was a U-turn. They were able to tell us how to get to the aquarium.

Heather thought it was pretty great.

Being my daughter, she loved the penguins. Mainly the penguin statues though; which she, of course, felt the need to kiss.

Turns out that having a third pair of hands with us made things much more manageable: one to handle Heather, one to push the stroller, and one to take pictures. Thanks again, Josh!

For somewhat unknown reasons, the aquarium also has a lorikeet exhibit you can walk through. You can buy a little cup of nectar to feed the birds. This wasn’t any of us, just some random other person feeding this bird.

Jess finds the jellyfish to be mesmerizing.

Here’s Heather playing in a touch pool:

Josh meets up with a sea turtle:

And this is Jess’ other favorite thing at aquariums, sea dragons:

And this is where we part ways.

A Long Overdue Update on Heather

April 20, 2013 3:31 pm

Okay, the last real update on Heather was around Christmas, I think. [shame] Here goes!

She walks and runs like a pro these days. And dances. And laughs.

As of her 15-month doctor’s appointment, Heather did not say one single word. Not even “mama” or “dada.” But now, I count 30! For the record, her first word was “eye,” said while poking me in the eye. The second was “bubbles.” Some are very clear, like those two, but others are a bit trickier to decipher, like “flower” (row-ee) and “cheese” (gee). And although she’s been saying “dad-ee” for a while now, she’s just barely starting to say “mama” or, sometimes, “mommy.”

I have an app on my tablet that plays animal sounds, and she loves to imitate them. She’s pretty good at it, too! My favorite is her rooster: “ock-oo-oo!” On a semi-related note, she is convinced that giraffes neigh (they look like horses?) and snails hiss (“snail” sounds like “snake”). I can’t convince her otherwise because I have no proper sound for those animals to teach her.

Let’s see, what else? I completely weaned her around 13 or 14 months when she started biting and refused to stop. We’d been down to only nursing before bed for a while, but with the biting, it stopped being a soothing part of the routine. So I stopped and she really couldn’t have cared less. So we haven’t looked back! She’s a pretty good eater, too. There’s not a lot she won’t eat, though she will sometimes decide she doesn’t want a certain food for a while. A week or two later, she’ll be back to scarfing it down. I would say that her two favorite foods, though, are easily eggs (fried or scrambled) and macaroni & cheese. She’ll eat astonishing amounts of either.

Oh! She now goes to sleep entirely on her own. I don’t think I can communicate how much my life improved when I stopped having to get her to sleep. At her 15-month appointment, Heather’s sleep had gone completely haywire and I was at my wits’ end. Her pediatrician recommended a modified cry-it-out method (with frequent checks) and addressed my concerns about it. I decided to give it a shot, and it worked great! I can now put Heather in her crib and just leave. She puts herself to sleep. It’s fantastic! Although, in the last month or so, she’s started taking a really long time to fall asleep. Like, over an hour. She doesn’t cry–she plays happily in there, and does eventually go to sleep. So I don’t know if I should adjust her nap/bedtime, or if she actually needs that time to herself. We’ll have to see.

Lousy Pics

April 17, 2013 2:45 pm

You guys. I can’t even tell you how freaking adorable Heather is. And I feel horrible that I’ve done such a rotten job of sharing her charms with the world. Fortunately Kyle has put up a couple of videos in the last several months. All I’ve got are a few not-very-good pics from my phone.

This is right after Heather discovered her belly button. She has to pull her huge pot belly out of the way to get to it.

Stacking books. One of her favorite pastimes.

This child loves to be outside. Here she’s helping Kyle rake up leaves.

On this day, Heather was sick. Or majorly teething? I don’t remember. Either way, we were spending some quality time snuggling on the couch.

I’ll do a separate post with more update info.

Heather’s Got Moves!

April 14, 2013 12:47 pm

Heather got up this morning and just couldn’t hold in her dance energy, so we put some music on for her and let her go.

It’s the best 60 seconds you’ll spend this week, I promise.

Automaton Simulator

March 23, 2013 5:20 pm

I posted about this on Google+ a while back, but I’ve updated the site and it’s now much cleaner. I still have a few features I’d like to add in the future, but they don’t really impact the site’s purpose.

Anyway, I present AutomatonSimulator.com:

In Computer Science we study simple automatons called finite-state machines. They are equivalent to various useful language concepts. For example, Deterministic Finite Automata (DFA) can be used to process any Regular Language (i.e., regular expressions, which are infinitely useful). And Push-Down Automata (PDA) can process any Context-Free Grammars.

In the CS course I TA’d for as a student, CS 252, a chunk of the course is devoted to working with these concepts. This usually means developing a working automaton design based on some desired language recognition. For example, make a machine that will accept strings that alternate between “A” and “B”. Or, make a machine that will accept strings that have the same number of “A”s as “B”s.

They’re usually quite meaningless in and of themselves, but the point is to develop the skills necessary to understand how programming languages are created and why, as well as to hone the ability to logically analyze problems and build logically consistent solutions.

Well, we had to do all this work by hand. Drawing out machines, tracing through their execution, finding bugs, and making sure they did what they were supposed to without doing things they weren’t supposed to.

As the TA I had to grade a lot of these messily drawn machines that often didn’t work. It was tiring. So to aid my grading I wrote a simple simulator in Python for each machine type. Then I’d encode each student’s machine into my simulator, run a bunch of tests and figure out from there whether it worked and, if not, how badly it was wrong.

AutomatonSimulator.com is a fully functional tool to visually create and test these types of machines. I took my Python simulators, rewrote them in Javascript, and built a lovely UI around them.

You can save/load machines from your browser’s local storage. Or you can copy/paste machine descriptions to share with other people. A small set of examples is included on the site. You can debug a machine by stepping through an input and you can bulk test a large set of strings with a single button press.

I had fun creating the site and hopefully CS students will find it useful in developing their understanding of finite-state machines.

Something I’d like to do in the future is to build a simple game around the site. It wouldn’t be very involved, but it would challenge the user to build a machine for a certain language and help them make the connections between these machines and regular expressions. We’ll see if I get around to it someday.