What Happens in San Juan Capistrano Stays in San Juan Capistrano (Wildfire Edition)

UCLA is officially still online on Monday, so I am heading over to visit friends in San Juan Capistrano for an unplanned visit. If we are teaching in person on Wednesday, I will return on Tuesday. Otherwise, I will return at some later time.

Additionally, as in games like Pandemic, the regions of 'evacuation warning' (in this case) are also getting closer to my home region, so it's good to get out of town when it's prudent.

Update (maybe 20 minutes after I wrote the text above, with a scheduled posting for tomorrow afternoon): Then again, it looks like the Pacific Palisades wildfire has taken a hard east (though somewhat north of me) with some regions going from nothing to warning to GTFO very quickly. My region doesn't yet have even a warning, but the prudect act is to GTFO tonight and go to my friends already.

What Happens in Vancouver Stays in Vancouver (2019 Edition)

Today I'll be flying to Vancouver for a few days to visit a friend who I haven't seen in three years. Uncharacteristically for me, I am planning on this being an actual holiday (although I do hope to mostly keep up with simple e-mails to prevent feeling overwhelmed upon my return).

We'll be binge-gaming, and in particular we are going to get as far as we can through Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, which was a gift from my one of recently-finished doctoral students. (The gift actually helped provide an impetus for this trip to happen, as getting a regular set of players for a 'legacy' or other campaign is not easy for me.)

As I'll be playing a Pandemic game, I guess I won't be escaping from networks entirely. :)

What Happens in Provo Stays in Provo

I am at the airport — with a 165-minute delay (sigh...) in my flight — to visit the mathematics department at BYU. I am being hosted by Emily Evans, who is on their faculty and is also a friend of mine from college.

I will somehow deal with the fact that I am not allowed to have coffee on campus. :)

Well Played

It turns out that sometimes you have to be very careful about what you write in the acknowledgements (and biography and preface and the like) of your PhD thesis, because it might come back to haunt you.

When I was finishing up in 2002, I had decided that because that was the only part of a thesis that most people read that I would have some fun in it and put easter eggs of various sorts to amuse my friends and future students (and in general to just be playful with it).

Well, today the introduction right before my colloquium was a bit unusual---and not like any other speaker introduction I have ever witnessed in my career thus far. With some help from the current CAM students (actually, my understanding is that it was their idea), some of my words from that part of my thesis were taken out and used for my introduction instead of doing the usual career path and honors that are typical in such things. My host's flight was cancelled and he could only make it for dinner and had to miss the seminar, and Peter Frazier did the introduction and was thus the MC for the shenanigans. (Peter is now a faculty member at Cornell and was my classmate in Lloyd House back in the day at Caltech.)

Wow. This caught me completely by surprise. Well played. Very well played.

And I probably deserved it. :)

P.S. Some of these CAM students specifically looked up and listened to "Tarzan Boy" just to see what on earth I was talking about in that document!

What Happens in Lyngby Stays in Lyngby

I have an early morning flight tomorrow to Lyngby to visit and give a seminar at Technical University of Denmark.

This will be my second trip to Denmark. My first trip was in 2006 for a conference to celebrate the 60th birthday of this guy.

Update (4/30/11): Here are some pictures from my trip.

My Sister's Visit

My sister Tammy visited me from Thursday afternoon until early this morning. (She left on the 6:30 am bus. I am still reeling from the pain of getting up at 6am today.)

Here is my picture album from her visit.

Our itinerary for Tammy's visit was as follows:

Thursday: Chilling, a bit of crashing for Tammy (and a brief foray to a seminar for me), and dinner and dessert with two of my best friends. Anyway, Tammy got to celebrate her birthday with my friends this year, but I'm sure she'll be having something with her buds back in LA.

Friday: Blenheim Palace, as recommended by one of my friends. Then we got back, had dinner, and went to see "A Serious Man" (which had its moments but was kind of disappointing... the IMDB ratings are shockingly high).

Saturday: London, including an awesome performance of "We Will Rock You" (the musical based on the music of Queen) and some cluster fucks in multiple tube stations. [I suppose that there are a couple of different ways to interpret my phrasing here.] We then had dinner back in Oxford.

Sunday: We took a day trip to Wales. The Brits seem to think that this was crazy. (Going between Oxford and Wales is comparable to going between LA and San Diego, so this seems perfectly reasonable to me.) Cardiff Castle was awesome! And I picked up a stuffed griffon along the way.

Monday: Today we toured Oxford. (I also had a brief foray to give my lecture.)

Visit from Danny

My friend Danny Schwarzblatt, who I have known since I was 4 years old, visited me for a few days last week.

We spent Saturday and Sunday in London. Here are some pictures from those two days. Notice that the Caltech emblem on my jacket is glowing in every shot, almost like some heavenly light is emanating from me. (This jacket has a long history of doing this. It's simply divine.)

By the way, my favorite picture by far from this online album is this one, in which I strike a victorious pose. The shot isn't centered, but when it comes to style points it wins handily.

The visit was quite fun, although my work sadly continued to pile up while I was gone and I am still trying to catch up so I can do more research. (Of course, my plans for my first scientific book are crystalizing and I might already get a deal to do it from Princeton University Press when I go to the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January.) We saw a lot of really neat architecture in London (well, duh) and we ate some really good toads-in-the-hole (sausages and mashed potatoes in Yorkshire pudding) at a local pub that Charlie Chaplin apparently used to frequent. On the way back from London on the second day (we took the train from Oxford on both days), we met a crazy 16-year old named Lucy who is waaaaaaay too immature to be traveling on her own to London. (In some ways, it was good that she has ADD because otherwise I would have been stuck spending more than just a few minutes helping her on her math homework... long story.) Back in Oxford, we walked around to a bunch of places -- including stuff I hadn't had the time to explore before. We went to the top of the St. Mary church tower (whatever the building is exactly called) and the view was spectacular! (In fact, many of the locales in both Oxford and London are really spectacular to look at. It's really one of the great perks of being here --- just walking around and soaking up the history while trying to bring my newfangled style to the place.) Now I just need to find someone with the proper key so that I can see the view from the top of Magdalen College... I also made it a point to have Danny as a guest at High Table so he could see what that is like and to have a dinner with the Monday young'uns crowd in Somerville.

I still need to blog on my first trip to London a few weeks ago (and give a review of The Darjeeling Limited, which I highly recommend), but I'll do that later. I also still need to finish writing an exam, be an Examiner, interview students, and play Zelda:Twilight Princess (not to mention work on Legends IV...).

If you want more details about shenanigans during Danny's visit, let me know.