Xmas Lights in Dublin

Dublin's name in Gaelic

A couple of weeks ago Dublin started to put up Christmas lights. The ones on Grafton street were turned on by Michel Buble, while those on Henry street came alive a week earlier by Irish Rugby star Gordon D’Arcy. Tonight, the mayor of Dublin, Andrew Montague, will switch on the lights on O’Connell street. I had dinner with Kostas and went early to take some pictures. You can see more of them on my Picasa album.

Above is OConnell street which should be decorated even more today. I was going to add another complaint about the Dublin buses to this blog entry because I stood around for 20 minutes yesterday waiting for the bus I had looked up to go into town. According to my research the 37 bus was either 15 minutes late or 20 minutes early. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a minor mistake on my part. The bus that goes by my apartment is the 38, not the 37. And the 38 was right on time.
But, they do move around the bus stations! I had to walk to the next one last night going home because the old one wasn't there anymore. I sort of new that because I had this problem once before. Back then there was a sign there telling people where they had hidden the new stop. Last night that sign was long gone since they expected their ridership to have learned the new route by now; except I couldn't remember where it was from last time. Must be old age or the extra beer I had at the pub.

I liked the lights on Henry street better than those on Grafton. Both are popular pedestrian areas for shopping: one South and one North of the Liffey.

I took the above picture on my way to Grafton street because I wanted to show the Ha'penny bridge with the Christmas decoration above it. The pircture didn't turn out the way I had hoped since I had to rush. I set up my tripod in front of a parked car that shielded me from traffic, but just as I was about ready to shoot, the car drove away and left me unprotected in the middle of a busy street.

Grafton street was very busy and setting up a tripod in this mass of people wasn't that easy. I went back after dinner, when there were fewer people, to take some pictures of the Brown Thomas window displays. Like many fancy department stores, they put up elaborate pieces of art on some holidays.

The Nespresso store is in a corner on the top floor of Brown Thomas. That means I have to make my way through the perfume clouds and diamond necklace displays on the ground floor, pass the occasional fashion show on the floor above, where my jeans and the holes in my shirt sleeves don't quite live up to the elegance of the shoppers and models there, to the top floor where they have a nice kitchen department with cool gadgets and utensils that are unaffordable. (We're talking $40 cheese graters! I bought a designer one for $6 at Target last time I was in Albuquerque ;-)
The Nespresso store people are always nice and impeccably dressed. By the time I get there, the heat in the store has usually turned me into a sweaty blob with hair sticking out in all directions. The perfume girls downstairs usually look away or down, while the security guards always seem to debate whether to let me proceed or throw me out.
When I pay for my coffee, the Nespresso people used to ask me whether I had a Brown Thomas card. When I answered No, they would give me this knowing look: what in the world, other than coffee, would I buy in this store? Lately, they don't even ask anymore whether I had that frequent shopper card ;-)

This is were Kostas and I had dinner.

Banking

One of the first things I did when arriving in Ireland was to open a bank account. Direct deposit is the only way to be paid here. As with most things, it is not hugely different from the US, but there are some Irish/European quirks to it. To open a bank account you need a PPS number -- the equivalent to an SS number in the States. After applying in person at a branch of Bank of Ireland (BoI), I was told that it would take three to five business days to activate my account. A credit card would take six months or so, since I had not credit history here.
Two weeks after I applied, I called to inquire about the status of my account. The lady on the phone said the account will go live in a couple of days. (This was in my early days here when nothing would happen unless I called twice. It seems better now, but that may be because I already have signed up for all the services I need.) It took another week to get the ATM PIN in the mail and then another four days to get the ATM card (with embedded micro controller!)
In my contract with IBM it said they would pay me about 1,400 Euro out of my relocation expenses up front, within seven days, to ease settling in and cover the period until the first pay check. Of course that seven day period did not start until I was able to supply them with an activated bank account. So this "immediate" assistance wasn't that immediate at all and I spent a lot of money paying for things through my American credit cards.
As soon as I had an account, I signed up for online banking. The web page said I would receive the PIN in three to five business days, which took two weeks. In case you are keeping track, you know now that the number of quoted days for something to happen here needs to be multiplied by about four to arrive at a more accurate estimate of when it will actually be done.
The PIN didn't work online, so I called and was informed that that PIN is for telephone banking, but she could set me up with online banking. Use the Internet to sign up for phone banking and use the phone to sign up for online banking...
I always felt SLFCU provided the services I need and did so reliably and with low overhead. (Despite that, McConkey called it a toy bank ;-) I was one of SLFCU's early guinea pigs of their online banking. The first version, used with a dial-up modem, was pretty basic, but it worked and didn't require a user's manual. The one BoI provides works too, but it is quirky and looks and feels like it had been designed by the bank's president's eight year old nephew.

Click on the images to see a larger version.

This is the login screen. The advertisement promises a new look, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe the nephew took an HTML 5 class?
After you click on login, you have to enter your user ID, which is an eight-digit number, then it will ask you randomly for either your birthday or the last four digit of your contact phone number. After that, it wants three of the six digits of your PIN.

It randomly changes which three digits it asks for. I guess that is to prevent shoulder surfers from stealing your PIN. The phone company and some other places here have a similar scheme.
Now you are in and can click through to your account to see activity and balances; eight lines at a time. There is a timeout of five minutes idle time. After that it logs you out without warning. If you click on the logout button it takes you to a new screen where you have to confirm that you really want to log out!

There is a way to see more than eight transactions at a time, but it involves clicking a bunch of things and requesting a date range. The picture below is an example.

Look at the description for each transaction. It's complete gibberish. For many of them I have to guess by the amount listed. Two of the credits listed with the helpful description of "-------", were expense reimbursements from IBM. Of course, IBM gives me the sum of what they have transferred, so I have to go look at my expense reports to figure out what I got paid for. One of the "-----" I may have known at one time what it was for, but I don't anymore. The statement certainly doesn't help. For that matter, I don't know what I paid the 60 Euro to UBLE37715 for. The M2309CH was something I paid 14 Swiss Franks for and got charged a 0.46 Euro exchange fee. Whatever it was, it seems I bought two of them, but the second one did not trigger that MRO CHRG fee.
I should mention that the above examples of descriptions as the final ones. For the first day or two after a transaction appears online, it sometimes is even more cryptic. I guess it gets updated and "enhanced" after the transaction has completed.
You can register your cell phone with the bank, which again takes several days. But, once you have it, you can add people and institutions you want to send money to online. They send an activation code to your cell phone, and you can start using the payee immediately.
I can't wait for the redesigned web page coming soon ;-)

My America Trip

I just came back from spending three weeks in the USA, or as they call it there, America. (Never mind the portions south and north of the border ;-) I had a good time and met with tons of people, including some of you!
The Supercomputing conference was, as always, very packed. I had planed to attend a lot of the technical talks, but missed most of them. Instead I talked to people and learned a bunch of things. That's not so different than previous years. What was different was that I was moving in two different spheres: The people I had always hung out with and the, mostly, new people of, and associated with, IBM. Of course, the spheres overlap quite a bit, but it seemed it took even more time this year to meet everybody I wanted to talk to.
That is one of the reasons I switched jobs: to meet and work with new people and get exposed to slightly different ideas and view points.
Now I have to go read all the papers I missed.
Someone in Albuquerque organized, and someone accused me of bringing it along, not so great weather. Then Seattle did its best to be rainy and cold to help me appreciate the weather in Dublin. When I arrived here today, it was actually pretty warm, and no rain ;-)
So, no pictures from this trip, except the one below. Kurt and I were looking for a place to have lunch and I saw the sign advertising the place were we then ate. I'm still trying to figure out the connection between the sign and the display behind the glass. Maybe they are trying to make up for the deficiency of their bread...

Artificial Intelligence

Hello from New York. I've been visiting IBM's Watson research lab for a couple of days this week. I got to meet a bunch of very interesting people working here on the next-generation of supercomputers. This is also the birthplace of Watson, the machine, that a while back won a Jeopardy game on TV.
I started thinking about that as I was listening to the rental car navigation system giving me instructions on how to get here. Some of the ones I've used in the past would scold you if you veered off course and tell you that you had made a mistake and that it now had to recalculate the route; just because of you. This one was a little bit more polite, it would simply recalculate a new route and start giving you directions on how to get back on track.
Driving along, taking instructions, and dutifully execution them, I felt a little bit silly. I was driving this computer to wherever she was telling me to go. If all I'm doing is what she tells me, then why isn't she driving the car, and I can sit in the back and read a book or enjoy the view. I'm sure we are not that far away from that being as common as navigation systems are now.
Artificial intelligence always fascinated me. At the same time I was also always skeptical at how far it actually might go. I still think that we wont have a robot in my life time that is smart enough to tie its shoe laces, but these things have come along further than what I would have thought possible ten years ago.
Watson for example impresses me with its speech recognition capability. Being able to ask Jeopardy questions is important too, but in the end it is just a matter of storage and a search algorithm. More a matter of brute force than intelligence. Listening or reading words and sentences, and making "sense" out of them seems to me much more difficult.
Language is such an ambiguous thing were a lot of context is needed to understand the meaning of a given phrase. In grad school I took an AI class and studied natural language disambiguation a little bit. It's amazing how much knowledge and common sense is required to understand even quite simple sentences.
Of course, no computer actually understands anything, so methods to make good guesses are needed to prompt the correct action from a string of words. An interesting area of study, maybe a little bit scary, and definitely annoying when these machines tell you what to do, and you actually do it and follow their orders because you don't want to get lost in traffic.