I have written about UIMA, IBM’s Natural Language Processing framework before. Since then, I had a couple of attempts to get a feel for it. Unfortunately, it kept feeling uncomfortable and confusing. Finally, I figured out why. UIMA’s extensive documentation expects that you are committed to the framework. So, the documentation makes sure you understand full architecture before it lets you near the tutorial. The tutorial itself starts somewhere around section 4.

In Lisbon, they know a good sport when they see one. During their annual Fun and Games Day, people can compete in many sports including Football, Touch rugby and _Scottish Dancing_. While the rules for normal sports are easy to find, the ones used for two team competitive Scottish Country Dancing are somewhat harder to come by. Fortunately, I have the description here, courtesy of Roger Picken: Two teams at a time are taught a simple dance (like Dunnet Head) during each “match” and the winner is the team which performs it best.

Nice, simple typing speed test page. Even with tired hands, I managed to pull good 86 wpm with only a 3 mistakes. I remember buying the TypeQuick software long time ago to learn touch typing, when it still came on floppies and had some really strange copy protection. I remember the pain it was to uninstall the application back onto the floppy disk to make sure the license could be transferred over to the new computer.

The sessions are finally up and like last couple of years have sound synchronized with the slides and transcripts. Like last couple of years, there are some transcription errors. Not surprising given the accents, etc. Still, I wish Sun had given the speakers a way to double check and correct the transcriptions. Given that they will be up for a long time, it is worth making sure things look really well.

New York branch of RSCDS organizes a dance event at United Nations every year. All money collected go to UNICEF. This year we collected 1500$. The floors at United Nations are not all that good to dance on (marble), but it is for a good cause. And it certainly gets a lot of attention from the UN visitors, as Saturday is an open day and we dance right in the main visitors area.