I just finished uploading five new sets of photos:

• Mathematical sculpture at Trinity College Dublin. Or sort-of mathematical: the artist may have intended one of these sculptures to model DNA, but to a topologist it looks like a torus link. Apparently every year the Hamilton Workshop on Geometry and Topology uses one of these as a logo, but they're running out: soon they'll have to go with the kitschy sculpture of a buxom Molly Malone outside the college gate.


• Dublin. Or the parts of it that I saw outside of Trinity and Guinness. With my usual complement of graffiti.


• The Guinness Storehouse. Supposedly Ireland's biggest tourist attraction. I didn't take many photos inside, although I found the tour quite interesting; most of the photos are of the 360-degree view of the Guinness brewery that one gets from the bar at the top of the tour.


• Chicago. The weather was not really conducive to photography but I took a couple of shots anyway.


• Graph Drawing 2009. If you didn't go, now's your chance to see what you missed. If you did go, you can see how many photos you and your friends are in. I hope none of the ones I kept are too embarrassing or unflattering. ETA: The GD09 web site now also links to another set of photos by Pranava Jha.

Ok, my Banff pictures are up. Here's a small sample:



More coming later after I sort through the ones Diana took while I was (mostly) going to talks.

After Southern Oregon we took a drive down the north coast of California to visit my parents in Mendocino and see my mother give a reading from her newly published poetry book (from March Street Press). Before Diana and I left the kids and took off for the Canadian Rockies, we had some time for a family hike, and I pushed for Russian Gulch State Park, in part so that I could take a photo of the bridge that now adorns the Wikipedia article on the park. But it was a very pretty hike, with a waterfall at the end, and I took some other photos as well, and even kept a few of them. Gallery here.

Returning to my backlogged vacation photos: after the Rogue River Rafting, the next block of time on my vacation was a visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, where we saw Don Quixote (a new and somewhat metafictional adaptation by Octavio Solis), Much Ado About Nothing (an interesting production set in post-WWII Sicily), The Servant of Two Masters (extremely funny, the high point of the visit), and Macbeth (appropriately dark, spooky, and dramatic). But we also had two free days between rafting and the theater, which we used to see the Oregon Caves and Crater Lake.

Anyone who's been to the lake will know that it's (a) gorgeous; (b) very heavily photographed; and (c) very difficult to photograph well, due both to the very wide field of view that the lake spans from any of its viewpoints and to the striking electric blue color that the water takes on due to being the deepest and purest lake in the US. Nevertheless, I couldn't help trying again (I'd been there twenty years earlier, as part of my honeymoon, but I don't have scans of my photos from that time.) I'm not sure that I succeeded any better than previously, despite this time having a nice DSLR and fisheye lens, but the photo gallery is here.

Earlier this month my family and I went rafting on the Rogue River, as I hinted in my previous post; Diana and I had done this once before, years earlier before we had kids. The trip involved four days of floating on the river, two nights camping, and one night in a lodge, through Rogue River Journeys, the sister company of the one we'd taken on the Kern the previous year.

The weather for the trip was a bit unusual: the first day started nice and sunny, but not too hot (in contrast to the previous week's 110+ degree heat) but ended with a freak thundershower. Some of the rain hit us while we were still on the river but the larger part waited until we were safely under a canopy at the campsite, so it was more exciting than annoying, and we got a great sunset complete with double rainbow. The next day was cold and grey (not the best weather for getting soaked in rapids) but fortunately it warmed up again and was sunny again by the last day.

This was billed as a family trip, so there were many other kids near in ages to ours. Most of the families were from nearby Humboldt County, in northern California, but there was also another Southern California family. Everyone had a choice of lazing away the trip on an oarboat paddled by one of the guides (Sara's choice for the whole trip), participating in the paddling on a paddle boat, or taking small one- or two-person inflatable kayaks down the rapids oneself (the most fun, but also the most effort). Mostly I stayed on the paddleboat, but I took a kayak for the morning of the last day.

Photos here. Most of them are by Diana (I didn't feel comfortable taking my more expensive camera on the water) but I borrowed her camera and took a few shots of the post-storm sunset.

With all my traveling, I'd become delinquent at processing my photos, but I've caught up again (it made it easier that I edited the sets down to half a dozen photos each):

A school concert in which my son played viola, held at an auditorium at the local Lutheran college.

My recent trip to the Netherlands consisting of photos from the sculpture garden at the Kröller-Müller museum, a hike through Zuid-Kennemerland National Park, and the view from Marc van Kreveld and Bettina Speckmann's apartment.

Montpellier, France including a dinner with some other WG participants.

The Sunday before Elena's defense, I went sightseeing in Waterland in The Netherlands (more specifically Marken and Monnickendam, followed by a brief visit to Naarden) with Marc, Bettina, and Elena. It was very pretty, but very wet. After the ALGO conferences ended today I had time to process my photos, and also threw in some from a later visit to Nuenen (birthplace of Van Gogh and the setting for several of his paintings).



The full gallery is here. I still have many more photos to process, so more is to come.

I just returned from a very pleasant several-day visit to Tucson, at the invitation of Stephen Kobourov, to visit him and Alon Efrat. I spoke Wednesday morning about xyz graphs; my talk slides are here.

Wednesday afternoon, we visited the Sonora Desert Museum, and then took a short (one hour) hike into Saguaro National Park, where Stephen showed me some petroglyphs at a site he knew of. We had been planning to do this Sunday, but it rained that day, after which the weather was beautiful. Photos here and here.

I didn't spend a lot of time on photography in Halifax, and only ended up with one picture worth keeping:



I somehow avoided the cliché shots of the lovely little green hilly island across the harbor with the lovely little white lighthouse on it that the English used as a lovely little concentration camp for the forcibly removed local French population in the mid-18th century.

As we get ready to leave Vienna, I've also finished processing my photos from Slovenia. Gallery here.

Some additional travel notes:

• Not in our Vienna guidebooks but worth a visit: the Globe Museum at the National Library and the Museum of Art Fakes near Hundertwasserhaus.
• It's hard to tell without a head-to-head comparison, but Siebensternbraü's Prager Dunkles seems like a good match for Guinness. Ottakringer Dunkles, not so much, though it's ok as dark beers go.
• We didn't make it to the Hofburg, but we did take a tour through Schönbrunn. Other tourists told us later that was the right choice.
• Similarly, in Slovenia, we didn't make it to the more famous Postojna Cave, but we did (as part of the conference excursion) see Škocjanske Jame. Again, the right choice, I think. The first part of Škocjan is just a limestone cave like many others, but the huge underground river canyon in the second part is amazing, like something out of the Lord of the Rings.
• We are bad tourists: we've come all the way to Vienna and not even tried to see anything related to opera or Mozart.

Despite visiting no less than three UNESCO World Heritage Sites on my recent trip to Gyeongju (Seokguram, Bulguksa, and Teletubbyland the Tumuli Park in the Gyeongju Historic Areas), the only photos I took were of Lake Bomun, from my hotel room balcony. Go figure. Anyway, here they are.

ETA: I also took these two (blurry, oh well) while playing with Sariel's camera (and Sigma 35/1.4 lens). And Sariel seems to have kept a picture of the back of my head.

ETA2: Bettina reminds me that I did actually take a couple of shots at Bulguksa with her camera. Here's one:

All of my friends in high school were called David. Several of them were actually named David, and we called the rest David as well to avoid confusion, much as in the Monty Python "Bruce" sketch. So anyway, a couple of days ago as part of my holiday visit to the bay area, I met up with two of the Davids (both actually named David) for a pilgrimage to the Cheese House for sandwiches followed by a hike up Windy Hill. Photos here.

And now I'm back in Irvine and must deal with preparing for this quarter's classes and getting my SODA talk ready and looking at drafts of papers from co-authors and committee work and editorial work and packing for our imminent office move and all that. Sadly, the vacation is over.

Some photos from our recent Christmas visit to Mendocino. There are a couple of family snapshots at the start, but most of them are scenery at Pudding Creek Beach and Big River.

We spent the Veterans' Day holiday last weekend camping in Joshua Tree, at the same campsite with the same group of friends with whom we've been camping for ten years. Quixotic expeditions to find mysterious springs, rock climbing with ropes and scrambling without, campfires, campfire stories, faculty politics and gossip, birthday cake for our newly elected school board member: this trip had all the usual fun. And except for a brief cold windy overcast spell Saturday afternoon, the weather cooperated magnificently.

Photo gallery here.

The late rains this year (it even rained yesterday night) have left the hillsides green and covered with bright yellow mustard flowers. I took a walk the weekend before last in the hills behind my house and came up with these photos. Here's a sample:

Three galleries of photos now up from my recent travels in Mendocino. Two from short walks with the kids into Jack Peters Canyon and up the Big River (the second hike started dry and with even a little sunshine, but a brief downpour caught us on the way back so we came home quite wet), and one of some architectural details from the construction on my parents' next-door neighbor's perennially unfinished house. I mixed in a few landscapes and abstracts of flowing water with the hike shots.

I missed seeing my cousin and her parents (they had Christmas with my parents in Petaluma while I was in Palo Alto) but it was good to see my brother's family again for the several days we were there. Along with the two hikes, we took a few shopping trips into the Mendocino village, but the rain kept us in the house more than usual. At one point on New Year's eve, all five good roads out of town were closed (20, 128, both directions on 1, and the Philo-Greenwood road), we didn't get a newspaper, and even the internet connection went down. We all tried to stay up until midnight for the new year, the kids watching movies while the adults sat around reading (Beowulf for me); Timothy gave up around 10:00 but I think the rest were successful. The storms finally let up the day we left, though continued flooding on the Navarro forced us to take Philo-Greenwood, and we had a beautiful sunset over Marin for our return drive.

A week ago, we spent the long Veterans' Day holiday camping with five other families in our usual spot, Indian Cove in Joshua Tree National Park, as we have most springs and falls for quite a few years now. Anyway, I've finally put my photos from this trip online.

The weather cooperated beautifully — we thought it would be cold, and it had stormed the day before we arrived, but it stayed clear and sunny for us, not too hot in the day, only requiring light sweaters at night. The moon was close to full, so we couldn't see much else through Scott's big telescope, but we had good viewing of its mountains and craters. The plants weren't as lush as last spring, but it was still surprisingly green. I only took a few halfhearted landscape shots, though (including the ones below), and spent more of my time taking snaps of the kids scrambling on the rocks and doing some climbing myself. Lee borrowed my climbing shoes (she has really big feet for an 11-year-old girl) and looked very smug telling me they were hers now; I think she liked their purple color. I'm not as pleased with my climbing photos as I was last time, because I couldn't get the top angle that works best — there wasn't anywhere I felt safe leaning over the cliff with my camera, unroped-in — but I still kept a fair few.

The morning we left, I saw a golden eagle atop one of the rockpiles, but I didn't have my camera on me and it wasn't being especially photogenic. Still, a sight to see.

I'm not sure whose brilliant idea it was to have a spontaneous campout in a thunderstorm... Tyler? Sherri? Anyway, we got an impressive light show, from a vantage low enough in a canyon that we weren't really worried about getting hit, and it didn't really pour until we were in the tents. The weather was a lot clearer in the morning, though it still threatened a little. Not all the kids were sure they liked the rain, but they got really wired on candy, sang "singing in the rain" really loud, stayed up late talking, spent the morning building bridges in the (dry) bed of Trabuco Creek, had a pow-wow in "the hut" (a sheltered place under a tree), got taken out to the nearest Starbucks on the way out (probably just over the nearest hill as the crow flies, a circuitous mile driving), and then spent the afternoon hanging out together watching a movie. Not a bad way to spend the last day of fall break...

Anyway, the photos.

More and larger in the gallery as usual.

My gallery of photos from Ireland is now up. Some highlights:

The first batch of photos, of King John's Castle, were from the day I arrived with Mike Goodrich; we went sightseeing in the city in an attempt to stay awake and fight the jet lag, but not much else was open. The rest are from the day after the conference, when we took a bus tour of the west of Ireland:The Cliffs of Moher and The Burren. We were greatly entertained by the guide's talk about alien species and celtic tigers. But we only had three actual stops, at the Cliffs, the coast in the Burren, and Poulnaborne, also in the Burren. I would have had a fine time exploring any of the many ruined castles and old churches we passed, but we only slowed down for them, no stops. To be fair, the tour was very effective at showing me parts of Ireland that I likely wouldn't have gotten to on my own, and the group of people I spent most of the time with (Elena, Bettina, and myself) were responsible for some of the delays that may have prevented later stops... Anyway, after getting back to Limerick, we decided to make up for the tour's lacks by exploring a nearby ruin ourselves (with the addition of Ileana), including an interesting climb up its somewhat broken spiral stair. We then had a pleasant two-mile walk to town for dinner. So the third batch of photos represents that walk and exploration, and the final shot was while waiting for our table to be ready. The walk back was a lot darker and a little scarier (for those worried about werewolves, anyway), and didn't result in more photos.

Photos from a family walk on the Mendocino Headlands, the evening of July 4th. Almost caught up on my backlog of unprocessed pictures...



The gallery has larger versions of these, and some family snapshots.