It's a little scary how quickly ones' kids grow up. My daughter Sara just turned 14. I've been taking the same photos of her for half her life now:



The bottom right image is from a small gathering Sara had yesterday (too informal to call a birthday party any more), after which I took her and two of her friends to see Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which just opened.

Despite a few awkward transitions near the end, I enjoyed the movie a lot, and thought it was quite sweet. ( Cut for spoilers )

We spent most of this week vacationing in Santa Barbara, where I used to live from 1973 to 1978. Diana found the street names highly confusing (Cabrillo and Carillo and Castillo; Anacapa and Anapamu) but they didn't give me any trouble, I guess because I was already familiar with them. We didn't really spend a lot of time visiting old haunts, though; instead we stayed at a pleasant little motel on East Beach, walked along the beach, visited the zoo a block away, saw the mission and the botanic garden and the natural history musem and the art museum, shopped on and off State Street, and had mediocre service and good seafood at several local restaurants (favorite: Arigato Sushi, on State near Anapamu). The Fiesta was just starting, with all the confetti-egg vendors out hawking their wares, but we escaped before the full crowds of this weekend.

Photos here.

So yesterday my daughter's summer theater class at South Coast Rep had their performance. The troupe (twelve teens, one of them a dead ringer for Bettina Speckmann) performed a play they had collectively written for themselves, "The Robot Cometh".

As we entered and took our seats, the robots marched on stage with placards demanding their recognition. The play itself had three acts, framed by dance sequences involving the whole troupe. In the first act, each actor gave a monologue from the point of view of one of the devices that surrounds us today — a fan, a television set, an automobile — describing what they do from day to day, how they're treated by their humans, their hopes and aspirations (to become a hair dryer and move to Barcelona!). There followed a sequence of vignettes, set in the future, in which two or three humans and robots interacted with each other: a dying old woman discusses freedom with her caretaker robot; a robot in the image of a young girl, her human parents long dead, is kidnapped and sold into servitude; a military robot, more competent than his human companions in arms, wonders why he has never been promoted. Increasingly, the humans are shown as cruel, selfish, poor guardians of the world around them. The play concludes with "Twelve Angry Robots" in which a revolutionary committee debates the fate of the humans once the robots take over.

It was fun, amateurish, informally presented in a tiny theater with no set and simple unchanging lighting, but also thought-provoking and surprisingly deep. It gave me some hope for the future of the world, to have kids (or robots) such as these inheriting it.

Photo gallery here.

This past week we took a little trip to the Kern River Valley in the southern Sierra Nevada for a rafting trip with Kern River Outfitters.

( Read more... )

Or, why I couldn't attend the FOCS program committee meeting last weekend.

( Read more... )

...And it's taken until now to sort through all the photos. In the interest of completeness, I haven't been as ruthless as usual about deleting the questionable or redundant shots, but that led to a lot more time in Photoshop processing them all. The galleries are as linked above, or if you want a single link that leads to all of them, here it is.

Monday evening my kids' school, Vista Verde, held a promotion ceremony for all the 8th graders leaving for high school in a large ballroom generously donated by the Irvine Marriott. Many of the kids had been at Vista Verde for nine years (since kindergarten), so it was a bit bigger of a deal than many other local middle schools' promotions.

The valedictorian, Stephen, lives in our neighborhood, and we've known him since he was a baby; he gave a very impressive speech, one that would have been good even for an adult politician. We also heard an amusing catalog of years and events from the twin class historians (and national-level softball players) who of course wove softball as a metaphor throughout their talk. Many awards were handed out; the surprise of the evening for us was the David Leidel memorial award (named after a local kid who died in a car accident years ago) for persistence and tenacity, which they gave to Sara. They had spelled out her first and last name on the certificate, each letter standing for an adjective that described her and a sentence of elaboration signed by one of her past teachers, and read out the whole thing to her on stage.

Afterwards there was much jumping up and down and taking pictures of each other and milling around in the hotel hallways, and then we took the kids out for ice cream. We weren't the only ones with that idea; we saw two other families we knew at the same ice cream store. School officially ended today — for the first time neither of my kids will be on a year-round schedule, so they'll both have a long summer break to enjoy.

Photo gallery here.

(This is out of chronological order: it will take me much longer to finish processing all the photos from my cousin's wedding last weekend...)

My daughter and three of her friends have been working hard this year to earn the Girl Scouts' Silver Award, and this weekend their troop held the award ceremony for them, complete with certificates signed by the governator. Photos here.

This year's junior high school musical is Seussical. In past years, they've allowed parents at their shows to film the kids as long as the flashes stayed off, but apparently this year the license didn't allow even that, nor could the school videotape it themselves. But they still needed some photos of the kids in their costumes for the yearbook... So anyway I was volunteered, and came in this evening before the opening night's show to take a few posed shots amid the pre-show chaos.



Full gallery here.

Here's the first batch of photos from my new Canon 40D: Vista Verde World Fair, an evening of family fun at my kids' school with an international theme last Friday.

I also took 40 or so mother-daughter portraits Saturday for a girl scout event. For ease of printing at the scene by other volunteers I shot them as jpegs instead of my usual raw mode, and I was very happy by the results of printing straight from the camera.

So far I'm pleased with the new body: metering is more consistent, the color is better, and the greater resolution from six to ten megapixels is enough of an improvement to notice. The photos seem to need less postprocessing work, in general. The new 17-85mm lens is also pretty good, though I wouldn't want to use it for jpeg shooting: you pay for the wide range of focal lengths by some noticeable chromatic aberration, easy to eliminate at raw conversion time (Photoshop has parameters to scale the three color channels relative to each other) but more difficult once the pixels are fixed.

The local girl scouts held their annual International Day event this weekend. Each troop gets assigned a different country; they all dress up in their idea of a national costume, set up pavilions in a big square, parade around the square, and then sell food samples to each other and to their parents and siblings for a dime apiece from their pavilions. My daughter's troop ended up with Indonesia; for their costumes they all wore sarongs (with whatever tops they felt like) and for their food samples they sold klepon, sweet coconut rice-flour -dough balls stuffed with palm sugar and tasting sort of like coconut mochi. A good time was had by all, I think. Photos here.

This was my fifth International Day; photos from past years' events are here, here, here, and here.

On the subject of photography, I finally decided my old D60 was getting tired and replaced it with a Canon 40D, so this weekend's photos may be the last batch from the old camera. The newer one has 60% more pixels, 60% more light-gathering ability, twice the burst rate, and much better autofocus (the D60's weakest point). I chose a package that also included Canon's 17-85 kit lens; when I can do so, I'd rather use primes or my 70-200IS, as I'm sure the optical quality on the 17-85 isn't quite as good and it won't open as wide, but it should make a very good travel lens.

Been a long time since I posted any photos here, hasn't it? Here's a few more from today's Celebrate UCI / Wayzgoose / Earth Day festival. As usual, there were plenty of ethnic food booths, battling SCAdians, classic cars, kiddie rides, and music and dance performances — a pleasant way to spend an afternoon.

As usual for the holidays, I visited my parents in Mendocino and my in-laws in Palo Alto. It's odd how sometimes the things I think about are caught up in location: I was working on one problem in Palo Alto, completely forgot about it while I was in Mendocino, and returned to it anew once I returned to Palo Alto.

Photos now online from my wife's cousin's son's birthday (colors a little wonky, probably only of interest to relatives, but they came out better than I thought they had) and New Years Eve at MacKerricher State Park. It was cold and windy; we didn't stay long, and later caught the very pretty tail end of the sunset (and some very good seafood pasta) at Sharon's in Noyo Harbor. I tried cropping some of these 2:1, even wider than the 16:9 aspect ratio that I usually crop panoramic shots; I think it works well for this subject.

As our annual way to get into the Christmas spirit, we went last Sunday to the Newport Beach parade of lights, in which the boats are all decorated with fancy lights and parade around the harbor in front of a lot of very expensive houses that are also decorated with fancy lights. I didn't keep any pictures of the parade itself this time, though my daughter did. A few of hers even came out not ridiculously blurry. So if you want to see some you'll have to make do with my photos from past years instead. I did take a few photos at the Balboa Pier, where we went for a quick dinner before the parade started, though, including a couple of takes on my annual Christmas photo of the kids and some others of the nice sunset light. Gallery online here.

We went camping in Joshua Tree again over the Veteran's Day holiday weekend with five other families. The usual rock climbing and astronomy ensued, along with a ranger-guided tour of Keys Ranch, a homestead and former gold mine in the central part of the park. Comet Holmes was clearly visible the first night, but it clouded up on the second, giving us a beautiful sunset instead. Photos here.

Nowhere near as many photos from Halloween as usual this year, mostly because the poor air quality from all the wildfires led to all the local neighborhood parties being canceled (funny, that didn't happen in 2003 when the smoke was as bad). But I did take a few snapshots of my kids and their pumpkins. I doubt anyone but me and my family cares about these ones, but here they are. Note Timothy's Aang pumpkin: he's an Avatar fan (as am I). We tried using little muffin shaped electric lights in place of the candles in the pumpkins — the pumpkin itself warms the color of the light so it doesn't look very different, but lasts better and is less annoying to set up.

My neighborhood association put on a party Sunday, complete with tours of a firefighting helicopter. Photos here. Mostly they're just snapshots of the local kids having a good time, but they also include a few of my computer science colleagues: Mike Goodrich (in goofy Junior Firefighter helmet), Eli Bozorgzadeh, and Joan Boyar (visiting UCI from Denmark with her husband Kim Larsen, whom I unfortunately didn't get a good shot of).

It's been almost a month since I took them, but I finally found time to finish off processing my photos from London. Gallery online here. Unlike the other places we visited, I didn't split it into many smaller folders, because the photos were too varied. Subjects included the London Eye, South Bank skater park, Tate Modern, British Museum, Greenwich Observatory, British Library, and the markets on Portobello Road.

My photos from Prague are (finally) online. Sadly, I never did get a good shot of the astrological clock, and the ones from the mirror maze in the Eiffel tower didn't come out. Prague was shut down the first couple days we were there for a couple of national holidays, but it didn't really affect the touristy parts of the city where we were sightseeing.It was very helpful to have local friends; I think we found quite a bit more of the city than we would have on our own.

Another amusing incident happened here, that I also failed to capture on film: in the middle of the Charles Bridge one day, we ran into Subhash Suri with his wife and family (a daughter and son roughly the same age as ours). He's been on sabbatical in Zurich and came over as a tourist for the weekend...

Every year my kids' school holds a "World Fair" consisting of kids' activities, local music and dance troupes performing on stage, a fundraising auction for gift baskets made up by various parents (not a very effective way of raising money, I tend to think -- why not just skip the part about buying bundled-together stuff some of which you might like, and give the money directly to the schools?) and vaguely-multicultural meals. This year's was a little different, in that it also included some booths describing the culture of a handful of other countries. It's still not a very effective way of learning geography, but it is a fun event to bring the kids to. Sara was away at a girl scout beach house sleepover, but Timothy went and enjoyed himself. And of course, I brought my camera. Photos here...

After not shooting much for the last few months, I picked up my camera again yesterday for an excursion to the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, in Irwindale (near Pasadena). Photos here. Ren Faire was a bit of a blast from the past for us, as we were frequent goers long ago before kids (both in Northern California and here, though the Southern California Faire was located elsewhere then), and we enjoyed ourselves again, mostly shopping at the various craft booths and taking in a few stage shows. The weather cooperated as well, staying cool and cloudy with only a little drizzle.

On a related note, I think I've improved the color calibration difficulties I was having with my last batch of photos. I discovered that the program I've been using to view collections of photos while I edit them, iView, has an option to try to do the color correction itself for photos with embedded profiles. Turning that option off brought its display of the photos more in line with how they show up in the browser. So I hope this batch isn't as pale and washed out as that one turned out to be.