What Happens in San Juan Capistrano Stays in San Juan Capistrano

I am off to San Juan Capistrano to spend the weekend with friends!

What Happens at WorldCon 76 Stays at WorldCon 76

I am at the airport — experiencing a lovely 2.5-hour delay in my flight — and will be flying to San Jose, California to attend this year's WorldCon. Several of my friends will be there, so it should be lots of fun.

I am looking forward to geeking out!

(I am also looking forward to getting out of this crowded, shitty airport. LAX is awful.)

What happens at Dragon*Con stays at Dragon*Con

I have arrived in Atlanta. My first Dragon*Con in 6 years starts tomorrow morning!!! 3.5 solid days of gaming and geekery starts morning!!! (That's right. For once, I am actually taking a proper holiday.) Stay tuned for some *awesome* pictures!

My hotel is near where I used to live, and seeing my old apartment complex upon walking out of the metro station felt very weird.

I have pre-registered for 2 games, though I might skip out on one of them because it starts at 10 pm on Sunday, and Monday after the Con ends I will need to prepare my slides for my cow synchronization talk at Georgia Tech on Tuesday. (Once Dragon*Con ends, I am going to switch to my academic visit mode, and I didn't get a chance to make too many of these slides yet, and this is an all-new talk.) The one I will definitely do is the 3.5 D & D adventure called "Into the Nexus" (which is based on the Weis/Hickman series of books on which you think it's based). The one I might not do is in a system called "Spirit of the Century". The adventure seems very cool, but I'm not keen on getting home at 3am on Monday. I'm also going to play in The Cheesegrinder, of course! My pseudodragon monk, who is immune to just about everything (though an anti-magic field would get rid of some of the immunities temporarily, as only some are due to race and monkhood) but can hardly do any damage at all, is ready to go. I finished 2nd overall 6 years ago, and the key is survivability, so we'll see how things go. In making this character, I had to actually look up weapon damage adjustments for tiny creatures! (And, yes, the characters are supposed to be cheesy too.)

As always, I'm also looking forward to the dealer room, the exhibit hall, and the art gallery. I didn't have a digital camera the other two times I attended Dragon*Con, so I expect to take tons of cool pictures. Lots of people will dress up in their finest geekery, so there is also great pleasure even in just sitting down, having some coffee, and people-watching. Plus I have several Firefly, Buffy/Angel, and Star Trek autographs that I'll try to procure. (And I'll try to get pictures taken with these people of course.)

Bring it on.

(By the way, these 3.5 days off constitute a tie for my longest vacation in about 3 years---well, it's tied with the 3.5 days off in a row that I took during my Shanghai trip.)

Pictures from My Winter 2009/10 USA Trip

You can find them here, and I even included a bunch of snarky comments. How about that!

What happens in the United States stays in the United States

Late morning tomorrow, I will start my trek back to the US for the winter. My flight from Heathrow is at 4pm, though apparently all of the cool people are having their flights delayed. We'll see how things go. (Hopefully there won't be any airport liveblogging this time...) I am slated to arrive at LAX at 7:30 pm pacific time, and the plan is to meet up with Lemming (and perhaps company?) there and then head for dinner and then Lemming's place where I'll go online for a bit and then probably crash. Notice the priorities. :)

I'll spend most of the time on this trip in the Pasadena and LA area, though I haven't yet figured out exactly when I'll be in LA (or, more technically, Beverly Hills). The exception will be for a conference (Dynamics Daze 2010) just outside of Chicago from January 4th-7th. More on that conference later.

What happens at Caltech stays at Caltech

I flew to California yesterday, and I am writing this entry from a couple of friends' apartment near the Caltech campus in Pasadena. I am here mainly for my 10-year reunion, though I have been sneaking in some work as well. I am attempting to remain in touch via e-mail and I am also having discussions with local collaborators (tomorrow especially will involve a bunch of research).

The reunion officially starts tomorrow. I will have a continental breakfast and (non-continental) dinner associated with it. On Saturday, I'll be going to an alumni bar-b-que and also giving a presentation on Caltech pranks (along with my Legends III coauthor and two of our contributors). While on campus today, I went to the campus bookstore to buy a copy of my own book. The person behind the desk managed not to notice. :)

One of my goals on this trip was to eat good beef, because that's a bit harder to come by in the UK. We were going to go to Gyu Kaku tonight, but we were late in the game getting our reservations in order, so we're going to Robin's instead. We're also going to be playing some Mario Kart for the Wii tonight, and I may sneak in some Rock Band as well. On Sunday, I'll be running a one-shot D & D game, and on Monday I will transfer over to Beverly Hills to spend some time with family and pre-college friends. On Monday night, I am going to the Dodger game against the Reds. (This will probably be the only baseball game I attend this year. Sigh...) I will fly back on Wednesday and arrive Thursday afternoon. I'll sadly have to almost certainly miss a talk I really wanted to see, but sacrifices had to be made. (I had to miss yesterday's Governing Body meeting, for example, which was such a shame.)

I still have some movies and mathematics articles to write about. I'll plan on trying to catch up on some of that when I get back. I also just had a BEC paper accepted today, so I'll blog on that one when the reprint is out.

What happens in Gainesville stays in Gainesville

Tomorrow morning, I am leaving for my first vacation longer than 2 days in more than 4 years. Zifnab, Lanth, and I are leaving tomorrow to visit Doug Elliott (and Ben Williamson, of course!) and Lemming will be joining us on Sunday. There will be baseball on Friday -- my first live spring training game since 1989! There will also be lots of gaming, and in particular I have an RPG itch I'm looking forward to scratching (and I don't mean the type one might get at DragonCon if one isn't careful).

I will be doing some work while I'm gone. I've got a book coming out and e-mails are flying back and forth about that constantly these days. I'll be getting page proofs for a Section IV of the book on Sunday, so I'll need to do that. I also have several work-related e-mails already in my inbox to which I haven't gotten yet. This includes some network-theory references I need to check out and some discussions on how to organize a paper I will be starting soon. Actually, on the academic side, I have two papers currently in progress and two more that are about to officially become in progress. There is a remote possibility that I'll be submitting four papers next month, but two in April and two in May is a bit more likely. I will shortly be getting official word of my students' 2007 SURF projects, so I'll write a post on that when the time comes. I also got a paper (1-epsilon)-accepted today and there are some very minor revisions we'll be doing asap. I also am supposed to receive page proofs for a recently-accepted paper any day now and I have two papers I'm supposed to review (and for which I will be sending my referee reports after I am supposed to).

So, I'll be getting some work done while I'm on vacation, though I expect to concentrate mostly on keeping up with e-mail so that I'm not too far behind on that when I get back. Plus, I have two days of spring training box scores on which I'm behind. But that's pleasure reading. :)

This is a well-deserved vacation, though it's coming at a time when I am busier than usual. Baseball's opening day is imminent (I might be able to finally listen to Vin Scully again tomorrow!), I need to optimize my fantasy team, I still haven't gotten around to blogging about the wedding I attended a few weeks ago, a physics talk I wanted to discuss briefly, the new TMNT movie, or the Caltech women's ping pong team (though at this point I will wait until after Nationals and I'll include what happens there).