I am … unhindered by talent

After many days of preparing to start to begin to get ready to go on vacation (e.g., packing and cleaning the apartment in Colchester, traveling to Preston, etc., etc.), we are finally here in Spain and can start Having Fun (TM). We first arrived in Madrid, where we had a few hours to kill, so we wandered out and found a restaurant where Sub-Evil got an excellent swordfish steak, and I had some cool aged local cheese of unknown name and description.

We then took a brilliant train to Toledo, checked into our hotel, and wandered the tiny cobbled streets of the old town some. We had a fine dinner outside, with my meal being a stew of sorts made from free range local rabbit. I was having real trouble getting any meat off of one piece until (after much poking about) I realized it was half of the head (split right down the middle, top to bottom when looking at it face one)! (I took photos, but I’ll let you sift through the full set on my “events account” to find those.)

The old town is a gorgeous medieval city with stone buildings crowding in on narrow cobbled streets that are quite something to drive on. Many are so narrow that pedestrians have to step into doorways to make room for the car to pass.

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We just got back from a really fine week at Methwold Old Vicarage, a wonderful Landmark Trust property. The house dates to 1490-1510, and is quite beautiful inside and out. For an American like me, the idea of sleeping in a house constructed in the time of Columbus’s voyage is just too amazing.

The brick front is a veritable sampler of ornate brickwork from the period and remains a real show piece. There are gorgeous carved beams inside, and cool remnants of late 16th century wall paintings in the main bedroom upstairs that are museum quality. And we slept in that bedroom.

Wow.

We’re totally hooked, and definitely planning another Landmark Trust stay before we return to the States this summer!

I have an utter ton of photos. I’ll be posting some to my “main” Flickr account as I have time process them, and I’m also dumping a bunch of unedited shots to my events account. The shot above is a panorama constructed from six different photos of the house. The brick front faces almost due north, so it’s difficult to get any good light on it. This is in the late evening when the sun had almost swung far enough around.

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We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there - it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

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Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

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After a long day of being cultural and scientific in London with Kildegaards a few weeks ago, we got on the Tube back to Liverpool Street and the train back to Colchester. Looking across into the next car on the Underground, I was surprised to learn that a volcano was expected to erupt in Rome!

Turns out it’s a reference to a rugby player in an international match. And here I thought it was gonna be Pompeii all over again, but with more automobiles.

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This is from the morning break here on our first full day at Dagstuhl. I love the look on his face.

Dagstuhl isn’t all heavy thinking and hard work, though. I had a beer with dinner (pictured below); unfortunately it made me very sleepy for a while. I’m such a lightweight…

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We all arrive at Dagstuhl on Sunday night for the week’s workshop. After a long day of traveling we enjoy some of Dagstuhl’s exceptional food, meet with folks, and catch up.

Above is the conversation during dinner tonight. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken, but I think it captures the spirit of the room quite nicely.

And then we (at least quite a few of us) get to work. The photo below was taken at 9:30pm (probably 2.5 hours after the previous one), and there were quite a few people in this lab at the time. And there’s another lab elsewhere in the facility, and the library, and people’s rooms. I’m sure that lots of folks were also hanging out in the coffee room or playing pool, but there were a lot of people working on a Sunday night as well.

It helps if you enjoy your work, and most of these folks are extraordinarily interested in what they’re studying.

While I’m at Dagstuhl this year I’m going to try (amidst all the “real” work) to capture something of what the workshop is like and, more generally, what it is to do (computer) science. This is hard because it’s not flashy high-action bull-riding kind of work, but it’s important, significant work and deserves to be documented. I’m just going to have work harder at it.

I’m also probably going to take more people pictures than I would be naturally inclined to. If anyone finds them self in a photo here and objects, let me know and I’d be happy to remove it.

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It’s late and I’m way tired, but I think the packing is under control (more or less) (sorta kinda) (as well as can be expected) for tomorrow’s grand journey to Dagstuhl. Not sure how much posting will happen from there; depends a lot on how good the wireless is in my room this year.

In the meantime I leave you with this travel (and research) related shot from my excellent visit to Dublin last month: a group of vehicles driving onto O’Connell Bridge. It looks like it’s the middle of the night, but it was actually only a bit after 6pm as everyone was hurrying home from work. Short days in Dublin in December.

Ciao!

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JOCP! It’s been almost five days since I’ve posted anything here, and I have so much backed up in the queue…

There’s a major conference deadline (GECCO 2008) in a few days, and I’m struggling to finish up four different (and only loosely related) papers for submission. On top of that I leave Sunday morning for an excellent week in Germany at a research seminar at the wondrous Schloss Dagstuhl. (Feel free to visit some of my photos from my last visit to Dagstuhl.)

So sleep is short and fun on the blog is shorter still. In two weeks, though, I should be able to get back in the game a bit.

The top photo is of a student (Tyler - now graduated) during a talk he was giving with another student (Andy) at a regional computer science conference (MICS) last April. On the next day the two of them received the best student paper award for this work :-).

I’ve spent numerous hours this week drawing and redrawing graphs and tables, so this is all too reminiscent of my life at the moment.

The photo below is from a beautiful snowfall we had during the Dagstuhl workshop two years ago.

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I can’t really imagine that anyone’s going to want one of these, but just in case…

As a Xmas present for our various family members we used Blurb.com to create a photo book of some of our images from 2007. But hey, you can join the family by purchasing one as well :-). It’s 127 photos on 38 pages, and they have a PDF preview so you can see what you’re getting into before you put your money down.

This was our first use of Blurb, and their software was pretty decent. Amazing, really, how easy it is these days to publish books that no one really cares about. It used to be hard to publish books no one cared about; they regularly gave people degrees for it.

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