:: crapweasel ::
the official blog of
Dave Tompkins

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Fellow labmate Steph Durocher finally finished his PhD (geez... what took him so long?) and now I'm the most senior student in the Beta lab... so I get the seat with the good view... Ocean and Mountains and Trees... oh my!

Finally back in beautiful Vancouver. So nice to be back. I just received and have posted my Teaching Evaluation Comments from CPSC 320 last semester... I really liked the comment that I can read the minds of my students.

For Father's Day, I was doing a little genealogy on my Father's side... going back just 3 generations the (maiden) surnames of his 8 great-grandparents are: Urquhart-Lucas-Tolman-Fletcher-Beasley-McDonald-Hart-Tompkins, which makes him approximately 3/8 Scottish, and 5/8 English.

But what was really interesting, is that when I was little I was told a rumour that my father's grandfather Charles Thomas Tompkins had committed suicide, and I actually found a scan of his death certificate, which gives the cause of death as drowning (suicidal). It also lists my great-great-grandfather as a James Tompkins, born in Birmingham England.

Earlier this week, UBC's own Dr. Alan Hu (who's on my PhD Supervisory committee) appeared on an episode of Vancouver-based Manhattan Matchmaker. I recorded it and created a web-friendly (80MB) version of the episode without commercials, that you can view here. Enjoy.

Last night was the AFI special 100 Years... 100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies. It turns out I currently have 57 of them on dvd. I was a little disappointed that Mr. Holland's Opus didn't make the cut, but I was absolutely thrilled to see that Revenge of the Nerds was one of the 300 nominated films (pdf), even if it didn't make the top 100.

Today I made it to Schwartz's Deli... literally my only to-do item on my Montreal stop-over. So good. And I was able to pick up some of their spices to bring home.

Wow. So I won the best paper award at the AI conference. Not just the best student paper... but the best paper overall. You can read it here. 220 papers were submitted, 47 selected for publication, and they selected mine as the best. The hits just keep on coming.

As I leave for my flight to go to the Canadian conference on Artificial Intelligence in Québec city, I realize the date is 6/6/6. Great day for a flight.