Julie, Patrick and I had dinner with my cousin David Schaffer tonight. David is a research fellow for Phillips and is an expert on genetic algorithms. He was one of the founding members of the International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation and an editor for Evolutionary Computation Journal. He was in town for the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation COnference 2004 (i.e. GECCO – cute). It was funny that we are both software experts (though he is much more expert than I), but had to explain to the other what we did. I explained SOA to him and he explained genetic algorithms to me. We didn’t into too much depth over dinner – it was much more fun to watch Patrick try and feed himself noodles and talk about family stuff. However, I think I want to learn more about this – I’m thinking there will be applicability of genetic and evolutionary computation to SOA. Maybe I can get David to write for my JOURNAL.
David is also into genealogy, and he gave me a copy of the family tree he’s been building up over the years. It’s all 20 year old console apps and text files, but he wants to bring it to the web in order to better enable collaboration among family members. Of course, David’s never built a web app before. Sounds like a job for Visual Web Developer 2005 Express! (BTW, what’s the abbreviation for that? VWD?)