Spent the day in Pittsburgh…  had an interesting mix. I spent a fair amount of  the day on the phone and blackberry for work.. tough couple of weeks.. but also was able  to spend some quality time here in Pittsburgh..  .. which is even more beautiful than ever.. E.g. These deer were browsing in back yard of Larry and Leah’s house.

Larry and I drove in early to CMU… then I spent a couple of hours on work calls… When I got a break, I dropped into a meeting which Larry had arraigned for Paul Z.   Awesome.. collection of minds again.. neuroscience, engineers, performance artists.. cognitive scientists.

The meetings were all in the newly redone hammershlag hall where I did my time. here. It’s really nice inside now.. they’ve shifted it all to an open office setting…

I noticed that one of the pictures  in the conference room we were using was a chip plot of a project I did in 1989..

Mid day. Paul, Thiego and I went to Craig street for a quick lunch.. we passed the ‘cloud facotry’ on the way.. I used to stair at this thing all the time.. it was made famous in Michael Charbon’s ‘book ‘mysteries of pittsburgh’..   Our friend Bob.. the special effects cheif actully had to drop a real person from te top of one of these towers with out hurting him for a movie of the book .

On our walk back from lunch I found an interesting bumper sticker.. always looking out for these.

Around 2 we went over to the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) to talk to some of the folks there about Paul’s proposed show on the brain.. It was a fun visit.. the center is made up of a pretty eclectic group of folks.

I even spotted Diane and Leah up on the 5th floor

Here’s the center’s robot collection… complete with a Gort that senses you when you walk up to it..

Here’s the view from Don M’s offive.. he’s the director of the place.. what a view !.. The whole site is on land reclaimed when the city dismantled an old steel mill.. now it’s a butifull hitech developent center.. how cool is that ?

We were able to do some student interaction in the late afternoon.. They were doing midterm project reviews in the Randy Pausch center.. Randy helped found ETC with Don  a few years back. Randy made world headlines by giving a now famous ‘last lecture’ here when he was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. a few years ago.   Part of the center now is named after him.

After the presentations, Larry. Leah. Thiego. Paul. Diane and I went down to the strip for dinner.. our friends Rob, Mike and Laura joined us as well.. another good night of ideas and good food.. 

It’s been a good trip.

OK.. time for sleep.. night folks.. nite Sam !
-me

ps. Larry has some original Dr. Suess sketches and prints.. .. check out this original study from ‘Sam I Am’..   what do you make of that Sam ?