Shawn Lankton Online

While traveling I had a lot of time to read on planes and trains. I occupied that time with a book about a man unravelling the mysteries of life. This book, although it seems very fantastic at times, is put forward not as a fictional story, but as a real-life account of events.

In Tales of Power, the main character and author is the apprentice of an unusual, captivating, and gifted man named Don Juan. Don Juan tries to help Casteneda understand what he calls “The Way of the Warrior” which is a necessary step in learning the “Sorcerer’s Explanation.”I’m not going to comment on whether or not I think it is ‘real’ per se. What is for sure is that the ideas in the book about how to live well, and how to change yourself in pursuit of impeccability are inspiring, and of value to anyone. Let me share one of my favorite quotes:

“The self-confidence of the warrior is not the self-confidence of the average man. The average man seeks certainty in the eyes of the onlooker and calls that self-confidence. The warrior seeks impeccability in his own eyes and calls that humbleness.”

Since I’ve finished the book, I find myself very often wondering what a warrior would do in certain situations. I like looking at things in this way. I don’t have high hopes of one day becoming a sorcerer, but… what the hell, here’s hoping.

As one travels, one will inevitably learn many things. You learn about yourself, about the world, and about traveling as a hobby. Here is a short list of things that struck me as important.

Pack Light

This is always a must in my opinion. Its no fun to walk around with big bags. Even if you’re going to put them down right when you arrive, who wants to deal with all that stuff!? Some tips if you’re packing *really* light (I think Jimi and I had packs that were about 30 pounds).

1. Get a super-absorbent shammy-style towel. In the words of Douglas Adams, “You’ve got to know where your towel is.” And that’s true, a personal towel will come in handy time and time again. But regular bath towels are far too big. Instead, get one of these (I found mine in the automotive section of WalMart).
2. Bring a multi-tool pocket knife. This allows you to mend, destroy, create, and do a lot of things with just one little tool. I actually forgot to bring one, but as destiny would have it, we *found* one after about 28 hours in Europe. It proved priceless for lots of little things. (CAREFUL, don’t try to bring this on a plane)
3. Pack T-Shirts. Sure, they’re not quite as trendy, but its better to have those little guys than lots of annoying shirts with collars and buttons. After a few days you don’t give a damn how you look.

Plan Some
Know generally what’s in the area. Try Wikitravel or just the regular internet. I also like Lonely Planet and Lets Go guides. (Although I would suggest taking select pages or photocopies rather than entire books because they’re huge and scream TOURIST!)

If you’ve got friends where you’re going, know people who have been before you, or are friendly with strangers… Ask other people what to do. It is a lot easier than reading those stupid tourist books, and you usually get quality suggestions. I’d suggest spending a lot of time on this. If it hadn’t been for a friend’s suggestion in Paris, we would have never visited Toulon!

I try to have a sketchy plan for the next 24 hours at all times. It’s good to have this to keep a little focused. However, be prepared to be flexible.
Don’t plan too much
Because I see life as a hilarious adventure, its hard for me to see anything that happens as misfortune. If you plan everything out to the second, it removes a lot of the adventure, and potentially eliminates the hilarity of things going very well or very badly.

If you allow chance to play a big role in your travels, you let in a lot of room for luck. Luck is what really makes the best stories. “We followed a tight schedule and saw all of the sites” is kinof boring. “We really had no idea what we were doing and next thing you know, we were eating crepes wearing a giant chicken suit” is a lot more entertaining. Also, if you are letting luck play a role in your travels, planning to far in advance can mean losing money on non-refundable reservations and things. Plus, if you have to sleep on the street one night… Hilarious adventure, right?

I’ll save the long soliloquy on how much you learn about your self, your soul, life in general, and the human condition for another post… But I think I learned about all that stuff too. Of course, its hard to nail down when exactly that happens.

Here are the pictures from an awesome trip across Europe:

Read on for some stories from the trip.    Click to continue →

UPDATE:
My new post: Sparse Field Active Contours
implements quicker, more accurate active contours.

The well-known Chan-Vese segmentation algorithm from the paper “Active Contours Without Edges,” is a great example of active contours. This technique deforms an initial curve so that it separates foreground from background based on the means of the two regions. The technique is very robust to initialization and gives very nice results when there is a difference between the foreground and background means.

In this video, the curve begins as a square. As time goes on the square changes shape so that it does a better and better job of separating the image into a light area and a dark area.

Below is a download-able Matlab demo. The code is very easy to read, and could be the foundation for lots of other active contour segmentation techniques.

sfm_chanvese_demo.zip (New! Described Here)

regionbased_seg.zip (old and slow)

I recently added some new active contour stuff based on a more complex (and sometimes more capable energy). Check out the latest results, and the full project writeup which is a little older!

This afternoon, I’m off to the Kentucky Derby. This is one of the most famous Horse Races. It happens every year in Louisville Kentucky. My trip out there has been some years in the making since my friend Ian suggested it back in 2005. Finally, I’m only hours away from jumping in the car!

In addition to the “horse race” part of it, the Derby is also a bit like a gigantic keg party. Lots of people hanging out, wearing big hats, partying, and drinking Mint Juleps all day. However, I did some research and might follow this guy to try and win some money! Wish me luck!

Some days you just jump up and down and then do a little boogie-woogie right in the office. Today was one of those days. The day began with a slow start and some celebratory end-of-semester lunches. When I got back to the office and checked my email…

I found out that I got a TI:GER fellowship that will let me work on cool entrepreneurial projects with MBAs and law students from Emory. (*AND* give me a $7,000 per year raise!)

Ok, I took that in stride, and played it cool. Then I got to work on that off-frame tracker I’ve been talking about… I added a non-hacked version of on-line motion model learning, and got some stellar results! That did it. I started dancing. Too bad no one was here to see : )

Its days like this when I really, really, *really* love my job.