Off to Vegas... for KDD

As of this morning, I'm heading out to the ACM SIGKDD 2008 Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. On Sunday, I'll be running the 2nd Workshop on Privacy, Security, and Trust. Let me know if you'll be at the conference and want to catch up! Also, try to stop by the workshop! We have an excellent set of papers and speakers on the docket.

Actually, I'll be in Las Vegas beginning tomorrow night (through Wednesday). From this evening through tomorrow, I'll be stopping by San Diego later today for a quick visit with some friends.

State-by-State Download Speeds

SpeedMatters has released the results for 2008 and Tennessee is ranked 17th for 2008! Up a couple of ranks from last year (and, much to my surprise, much higher than my previous home of Pennsylvania). Granted - the results are not broken down by metropolitan area, but I suspect that the major cities supports have much higher speeds than the rural zones.

New House

As I may have mentioned, Sara and I recently sold our house and moved to a different section of the city. Many of you have have been asking for pictures of the new place, but I've been a bit busy to put together an album of some substance. So, here's a link to the realtor's showcase of the house. I don't know how long this will be up, so check it out while it's still live.

Oh, and for those that didn't hear the news following the purchase - it was only 2.5 weeks into living in the new place that we had part of a sugar maple fall on it! Go figure. There was some damage to the roof and the back chimney, but for the most part we were lucky. And to preserve that luck, we removed the entire tree, which was somewhat unfortunate considering that the tree provided a large amount of shade to the backyard. However, its removal also provides us with piece of mind that our home is safe from an evil tree that simply couldn't keep its leaves to itself.

Randy Pausch Memorial Bridge

It's heartening to hear that there will be a bridge at CMU named in memoral of Randy Pausch.