Cory Forsyth » travel

Scotland on Rails videos are up

cory — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 14:43:50 +0000

Here's mine, from my talk "Who Needs Photoshop? Creative Image Manipulation in Ruby." This was my first time speaking at a conference. Do I look as nervous as I felt?

Who Needs Photoshop? at Scotland on Rails from bantic on Vimeo.

Engineyard is hosting the rest of the Scotland on Rails videos.

Three is a trend

cory — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:39:56 +0000

I'm speaking at Euruko 2009 tomorrow, giving an updated version of the "Who Needs Photoshop?" talk that I gave at Scotland On Rails in March. This will be the third talk I've given this year. The first was when I talked about the Popularity Dialer at Ignite NYC in February. I submitted a talk idea to Ignite because I wanted to have a chance to practice speaking in public before Scotland On Rails. Ignite was a good place to practice. It was a big, energetic crowd. The talks were at 9:30pm in a club and the crowd had been drinking beers for a couple hours by that point and they were in a pretty good mood as a result. I gave my 5-minute presentation and was on a euphoric high the rest of the night. I forgot what a rush it can be to be in front of a big crowd like that. My Euruko talk is probably the one of the three so far that I'm most excited about. Ignite was pretty nerve-wracking, and Scotland on Rails even more so, but I'm feeling pretty good about talking tomorrow at Euruko. I had a lot of doubts about whether my talk was the right subject matter at Scotland On Rails and was very nervous about how it would be received. It's not a Railsy talk at all, and in some ways it's not even very Ruby-centric. What I'm really talking about is my exploration of image math and how I used Ruby as a tool to do so. There's nothing inherently Rubyish about what I'm doing -- Ruby is one tool of many that are applicable. But I think you can say that about almost any code -- you could always swap out a different language here, a different framework there -- so I'm less concerned about that than I was. I kind of went overboard coding up image processing code in ruby to supplement the talk that's open source on github. I hope someone else gets as excited about this stuff as I am and feels like forking it and contributing. I've also had about a month off from looking at this code and now, revisiting it to get ready for my talk tomorrow, I remember how cool all this stuff really is. Watching my code change images still feels more like magic than programming to me, and it's thrilling to see these things come together. I'll post some of the videos and images I've been creating after my talk.

My talk at Scotland On Rails

cory — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:58:44 +0000

I had the opportunity to speak at Scotland on Rails last weekend. My talk was called "Who Needs Photoshop? Creative Image Manipulation using Ruby." It was my first time giving a talk at a serious conference and I really enjoyed myself although I was pretty nervous leading up to it. The conference was one of the best I've been to. Great talks and really great, friendly people. I have a very high opinion of Scottish people. They're a really amiable bunch. I hope to get back there next year. Here are the slides. When the video becomes available I'll put up a link to it. Update: The videos are now available. Here's me talking. Cory Forsyth Image Manipulation

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Presentations & Slid ruby edgedetection

tripit, my favorite startup

cory — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:39:44 +0000

I twittered about tripit after using their service the other day but 140 characters wasn't quite enough for me to write out the reasons I like them. They're my favorite startup right now because they do a really great job of solving a particular pain that I have had. Tripit is an online tool for managing your travel itineraries. You can forward them the email itineraries that you receive from airlines, hotels, priceline, etc. after you book travel online and tripit parses the email and emails you back (immediately) with a link to your itinerary on their site. Good startups work because they give the people something they want, typically by solving some pain point for them. The time I really got into tripit was when I was booking a lot of flights to travel back and forth to San Francisco last fall. I was chasing cheap hotels with priceline, and booking the cheapest convenient flights I could find, which meant I was flying lots of different airlines and amassing a lot of confirmation emails. My gmail account threaded the emails so in order to look up an itinerary I had to dig through a couple emails in a single thread and check the arrival and departure dates to make sure I was looking at the correct email. It was a huge pain, and I started forwarding all of the emails to tripit. After doing I had a single place to go to where I could see all my flights and hotel stays and easily look up any information I needed, such as confirmation numbers and departure times, for any of them. Like any successful startup should, using tripit made my life better. Once you've nailed the execution of the core promise of your app, like tripit has, there's a lot of opportunity around the margins to experiment with other features. This is often where a startup's revenue will come from, and at the least it's the thing that differentiates them in the marketplace and keeps users from switching to a similar service. In tripit's case, they offer a bunch of useful features, many of which are obvious (flight delay information, links to check in, ads for rental car packages) and some that aren't (a link to seatguru, for example, to give you advice on which seat on this particular model of plane has the most legroom). They also show you some cool information like total number of days traveled and total miles traveled, and there's a world map on your dashboard showing previous trips as blue dots and upcoming trips as red dots. The net effect is that I enjoy using their service so much that I want to book more travel just to see my mileage increase and get more red dots on my map. If you're using tripit and you know me, you can connect to me by inviting me at my gmail address.

1.20.2009 part 1: 5:30am-7:30am

cory — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 03:09:07 +0000

Our day began painfully early, especially considering that we had been up until after 2 getting home from a Frightened Rabbit concert the night before. Jenna woke me up at about 5:30, and we got the crew together and ready to go by a few minutes after 6. I could tell the metro was going to be packed because as we walked down from Dan's house to the Columbus Heights stop in the freezing predawn, folks kept pouring out of houses and joining us on the way there. Little trickles of people were coming from all the side roads, accumulating at every intersection. We barely missed the first metro that came by and had to wait a little anxiously as the crowd grew, and grew, and grew, before the next train arrived. We had to push a little to fit in, and several folks pushed up behind us to get on. I didn't have enough personal space to get my arms up so I let other people's shoulders hold me up when the train departed. At each station that we stopped at a few more people managed to squeeze on. When we got to our destination we stepped off the train and saw...wall-to-wall people leading to the escalators and up to the turnstiles. In DC you have to swipe your metro card on the way out and this caused a pretty serious bottleneck as people jammed up against those turnstiles and fumbled through heavy coats for their cards. We were a few blocks away from our entry point, which was the Blue Gate. Every ticket had a color that indicated which section you'd be in, and each section had a correspondingly named gate. The blue section was one of the closer sections, well in front of the reflecting pool and maybe only about 100 yards back. (This turned out not to matter later as we didn't have a direct line of sight and had to watch the huge monitors like people further back, but we didn't know that yet and were still full of Hope©.) As we got closer to our gate the crowd got thicker until we reached a t-stop near one of the silver gates and came upon a thick, nearly impenetrable wall of people waiting for the gate to open. We had to go single file and snake our way shoulder-to-shoulder through the crowd, weaving in a curvy path through and around. Other people joined our line as we made our way, and at one point I was a few people behind Jenna and Travis and Dan and I realized I could very easily lose them completely, even in plain sight, and next time I caught up with them I should grab my ticket from Jenna and keep it on myself from then on. After about fifteen minutes curving around, we finally broke through the other side of the mass of people and could take our place at the end of the blue line. It was wrapped around the side of some large government building, and so we were actually facing *away* from the capitol when we got in line. It wouldn't be the last time we weren't what was going on or if we were in the right place. It was about 7:15am now, and the gates were supposed to open at 8. Now that we were no longer moving, the biting early-morning cold really started to sink in. The night before we had tried to buy some of those chemical hand-warmers from the CVS but were told that all the stores in the area had already sold out of them, and I was really wishing I had thought to wear more clothes. I put the collar of my pea coat up to keep the wind out a little, and I put on my ear warmer under my hat, but the chilly air still cut right through. The worst of the cold didn't come from the air but from the ground. We were standing on marble, and the cold from the stone seeped up through our soles. Everyone around us who hadn't thought to wear big thick boots was stamping their feet to keep warm. [to be continued tomorrow]

2008's year in Cities

cory — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:07:23 +0000

Every year I make a list of all the cities I spent at least one night in. Here's the list, by month. Cities I spent multiple non-consecutive nights in are marked with an asterisk. Here are the lists for 2007 and 2006.

January

Logan, UT*
Brooklyn, NY*

February

Saint Louis, MO (to visit my friend Patrick at med school at SLU)

March

Austin, TX (SXSW)

April

San Francisco, CA* (work trip for outside.in to see Google, Yahoo, Six Apart, twitter, and some others)
Berkeley, CA*

Santa Monica, CA (5-year college reunion at Pomona)
Pomona, CA
Ontario, CA
Atlantic City, NJ (3rd annual father-uncle-son summer road trip)
Washington, DC*
Ocean City, MD
Virginia Beach, VA
Ocracoke, NC

August

Liberec, Czech Republic* (hiking trip w/ Patrick and Johann)
Bedrichov, Czech Republic
Smedava, Czech Republic
Jizerka, Czech Republic
Prague, Czech Republic

October

Shelter Island, NY (outside.in work retreat)
Bovina, NY

December

Manhattan
St John, USVI

the czech beast

cory — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 14:12:30 +0000

In August I went hiking for 5 days in the hinterlands of the Czech Republic and Poland, and we made this video afterwards:
the czech beast from bantic on Vimeo.

Blue-Ringed Octopus

cory — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:45:17 +0000

My sister is a TA for a Carleton study abroad program in Australia right now, and she just clued me in to their program blog. It's full of gorgeous underwater pictures, like the blue-ringed octopus: Or, as I like to call it, the blue-ringed octopus of death. It uses a type of neurotoxin called a tetrodotoxin that blocks sodium channels and paralyzes you. It doesn't inhibit mental facility, though, so its victims have the gruesome pleasure of being totally cognizant of their fate as they lay motionless and people around them assume they're dead. There are stories of people getting buried alive after a run-in with one of these creatures. The blue-ringed octopus is small but still carries enough venom to poison 26 adult humans. And my lucky sister has seen not one but three of them in the wild now.

Melbourne, Distilled

cory — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 16:05:05 +0000

When I was studying abroad in Melb'n I remember walking down Lonsdale street once when a passing, slightly drunk-looking Melburnian greeted with me an effusive, "G'day mate." I wanly said, "Hi," and he confidently replied, "Yeah, not bad," as he strode past me. That experience has always seemed uniquely Australian to me, and this video captures pretty much the same spirit. (passed to me by the danimal)

List of Places Slept, 2007

cory — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 18:33:31 +0000

At the end of every year I publish a list of all the places I spent at least one night in during that year. Here's the list for 2007. The ones marked with asterisks are places where I spent multiple, non-consecutive nights. Here's the 2006 list and the 2005 list.

*Brooklyn, NY

*Logan, UT (Jan, Sep, Nov, Dec)

*Northfield, MN (May, June, for Jenna's graduation from Carleton)

Ironwood, MI

St. Ignace, MI

Toledo, OH

Willoughby, NY

Tonawanda, NY

Syracuse, NY

Latham, NY

Fes, Morocco (July)

Meknes, Morocco (July)

*Manhattan, NY (July, October)

North Bennington, VT (August)

New Haven, CT (Sep)

*Washington, DC (Nov, Dec)

St John, USVI (Dec)

Christiansted, St Croix, USVI (Dec)

Salt Lake City, UT (Dec)