Day 3 - The Batumi Library and my new favorite restaurant

Today I went to the Batumi library, and out for St Patrick's day.

The Batumi Library

Doesn't seem to have books, but rather nice tables, and a heat. Perfect conditions for quite work ;)

The mountains seen from the bike path are amazing.

We went for dinner and homemade wine at Keti's restaurant.

Day 2 - "The other side of the port"

Today I explored the town on other side of the port. It was about a two hour walk round trip. 

View Map

I found some ruins behind an active chapel on a hill (it was Sunday).

I also found out that the beach originally had black sand which probably had river stones added to prevent erosion. 

When I got back to old Batumi I bought some lunch (at the same place I got khachapuri the day before, but they charged me 2 lari for bulgar wheat, twice the price of a kebab oddly..) and went for a picnic on the beach to work on a conference submission for one of our apps. It was 17 degrees and I forgot my hat, so I got a bit burned. 

I found that the Batumi Velo stands further along the coast were off, so I wasn't able to park here where I wanted to try the concrete sculpted seating areas.

Day 1 - A bike ride along the coast

I found a website with Georgian phrases. I spidered it and its audio using Httrack and put the results on my Android.

 I went for a bike ride along the coast for about an hour. View Map

I had khadjapuri and pear soda "limonade" in a cafe by the port.

At the cafe, I started putting the alphabet into an IPA table. Very little information is in Cyrillic or roman characters so I will need to read Georgian letters if I want to get anything done. After I came back I imported the data into our app by scraping it from the spidered page using Chrome Dev Tools and outputting it into CSV.

Day 0 - The bike path is real!

I got to Batumi at 5pm, checked into my hostel and went exploring.

Day -1 - Istanbul

I flew to Istanbul, and saw the word "Anatolian" for the first time outside of my Ancient Hittite course.

D3 & FRB: A case study in binding and editable DataViz

We wanted something that could handle a connected graph of thousands of objects in the DOM and not explode with extra calculations. Our solution was to use D3, combined with Montage Collections and  FRB. In this talk I'll demo the results of our investigation (an editable interactive visualization of  nodes in a connected graph).

Code on GitHub

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Day -6

I decided to search for kartveli rather than Georgian on YouTube, found a behind the scenes video for a boy named Georgi auditioning for Georgia Talent, which lead me to a talk show. I watched it a few times, it had a singer who sang in Russian and whose music I had already heard (we often listen to Russian pop music in the office). After about 4 repititions I found some discourse particles for backchanneling, correcting another person's question and clarifying one's previous utterance. It seemed promising so i used keepvid to download it, and ffmpeg to extract the audio and import it into Praat. Which lead me to a YouTube channel full of reasonably natural Georgian, profiling famous Georgians so the vocabulary will be reasonably similar. https://www.youtube.com/user/ProfiliR2