Surfin’ USA

Summer time is travel time

I am currently sitting in a lecture hall at the University of Helsinki, where I am attending the UAI’08 conference. I will have a poster presentation of some of my research work later today, and I am also involved in some things that my advisor is presenting here. Accordingly, the last few weeks leading up to this trip were very busy with preparation.

The conference will be going on until Saturday afternoon, after which I will have one day to explore the city on my own time, before I fly to Germany late Sunday, to visit family and friends for two weeks. (If you happen to be in the vicinity at that time, drop me an email!)

Backpacking in Yosemite

A few days ago, Teiko and I escaped crowded and busy Orange County for a while and drove up to Yosemite National Park for an extended weekend of backpacking. We made the trip up on Saturday, hiked from Sunday to Tuesday and returned late on Wednesday.

Saturday night we camped in Yosemite Valley, the central area where they have shops and hotels. Early Sunday morning we packed our backpacks and took a bus up to Glacier Point, where we started our 7-mile hike along the Panorama Trail to the backcountry camp in Little Yosemite Valley. With tent, water, food, and other things, I carried 50 lbs. (23 kg) and Teiko had 40 lbs. (18kg) on her back — so we were quite exhausted when we got to the campsite around 6pm that day. We quickly pitched our tent, cooked some dinner and went to bed early.

The next morning we left most of our things at the tent and started the 8 mile round-trip hike, climbing upwards, towards famous Half Dome. The last part is solid granite, which is so steep (I’d guess 80% inclination) that you have to pull yourself up on heavy iron cables that have been installed there. They say that lots of people get scared and turn around when they see the cables — and I have to admit, it is pretty intimidating. But Teiko and I decided that we didn’t drag ourselves up there for nothing, so we slowly climbed towards the top at 8800 feet (2700m), always setting one foot after the other, not looking up, let alone down. And boy, was it worth it! The views from up there are breathtaking! We spent more than an hour on the top of Half Dome before we got ourselves to climb back down again — still scary, but I found it a little easier then the way up. And what a great feeling it was to get off the cables and stand on solid ground again. Somewhere along the way back down to our campsite we then ran out of water (it was a very hot day), but eight long hours after we had left that morning we eventually got back to our tent thirsty but safely.

After a well-deserved good night’s sleep we packed up all our things the next morning and hiked another 5 miles back down to the main valley, where we pitched our tent again for the last night before we went off to indulge in some of the great achievements of civilization, pizza and beer. On the morning of our departure we went for another short hike to pretty Mirror Lake and made some photo stops on our way out of the park, before we eventually hit the road for the drive back south.

All in all it was a really unforgettable experience, even though both our feet hurt quite a bit afterwards and each of us had several mosquito bites that itched for some days. I’m definitely hoping we can return some day and explore other corners of Yosemite…

Obviously, we took tons of pictures over the days and it’s very hard to make a selection for a small gallery here. Therefore I’ll just refer to the extensive album that Teiko put together (click here), which is also the basis for the slide show above. I’ll conclude with a panorama shot of Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, that I stitched together from several images (click for bigger version):

On the road again

Finally, here is the promised update. As I said, the last weeks have been filled with conference submission deadlines and I was mostly occupied with work-related things. In the end we submitted a few articles to different venues, I’m hoping the hard work will be rewarded by a positive response some weeks from now.

Once the deadlines had mostly passed, my parents came over from Europe to visit. They traveled quite a bit on their own, but Teiko and I joined them for an extended weekend trip to Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon. One week later my parents and I went up to the Santa Barbara region for two nights before they flew back to Germany. It was great seeing them again and the traveling was lots of fun! Below are some pictures, be sure to click the thumbnails for the bigger versions.

Back from the dead

Almost three months without any new entries here… my apologies!
I’ve been incredibly busy at work (since it’s high season for conference submissions), so not a lot of noteworthy things happened — and besides, I would not have had enough time time to write about it here.
I am hoping to catch up and share some pictures here over the next few days, so stay tuned.

A few Seattle pictures

I finally got around to downloading and organizing my pictures from the Seattle trip over christmas. I didn’t take that many pictures overall, so there’s not too much to show here. But here we go anyway:

Happy new year

I hope everyone had nice holidays and got into the new year alright. Teiko and I travelled to Seattle over christmas, where we met with her family. Among other things, we explored the city, went shopping and ate a lot of good food, good times. I took a few pictures, maybe one or two will eventually show up here, too.
For New year’s we kept it relatively quiet: We had some drinks and ‘celebrated’ with a nice meat fondue, it was very nice.

Sadly, the holidays are over and now it’s back to work again for everyone. And there’s lots of things waiting to be done, so I’d better get started soon.

Nature calls…

(Second post for today, wow! Make you sure you don’t miss the first one below… )

After eating way too much on Thanksgiving, Teiko and I used the long weekend and finally managed to take two days off to go backpacking in the nearby Cleveland National Forest.

So last Friday we headed into the San Mateo Canyon Wilderness, which is a virtually untouched area where you can basically set up your tent freely. We packed our backpacks with the gear for an overnight outing and hiked 3.5 miles (5,6 km) to the bottom of a canyon, where we pitched our tent at around 6pm; it was already almost dark at that time. We had some trouble falling asleep so early, but eventually managed to get some hours of sleep. The next morning we rose early, packed up our things and hiked back out — this time uphill, so it took us a little longer.

Except for some blisters on Teiko’s heels, it was a great adventure and I can’t wait to go for another trip, hopefully soon. Living in a densely populated area as Los Angeles / Orange County, the calm and quiet of ‘the wild’ can be a very welcome change…

One month, lots of pictures

It’s been more than a month since I last got around to writing anything here, sorry for the delay. Life is busy for me, and things are bound to get more intense with finals’ week coming up. Report, projects, presentations…

Anyway, I decided to finally take the time to share a few pictures that accumulated over the weeks, let’s see… It starts with a guided hike in the Laguna Coast Wilderness for which I joined some German colleagues. Then a picture from San Diego, where I visited Teiko for a day when she was attending a conference. It’s a very nice city, I’ll definitely want to go back at some point.

After the conference Teiko’s friend Sue and her boyfriend Josh stayed in Irvine for a few days and we took them on the same hike that I had learned about just a week earlier.

Finally, as you might be aware, Americans celebrated Thanksgiving on November 22nd; so we got a few friends together and had our own Thanksgiving dinner with everyone cooking and preparing some part of it. The food was truly delicious (and there was lots of it!), everyone had a great time.

Forest fires

In case you are worried, this is the latest status of the wildfires in Southern California and how they concern us here at UCI:
The biggest fires are currently north of LA and around San Diego, which is a good distance north and south of us, respectively. At the time of writing this, just in the San Diego area over 500.000 people have been evacuated and more than 1100 homes have been lost so far. There is smaller fire, dubbed “Santiago Fire”, some 10 miles northeast of our campus, right at the Irvine city limit. This fire is currently 30% contained, but some evacuations have been taking place there, too.

This year has been one of the driest in a long time and therefore dried out vegetation provides a good ground for the spreading fires. In addition to that firefighters all over Southern California are facing frequently changing strong, hot winds from the desert and high temperatures of 35 degrees (Celsius) and more, which renders all fire control efforts incredibly hard. Conditions are not supposed to improve until Wednesday afternoon, when the winds are expected to get less intense and hopefully the situation will improve.

While we at UCI are not in immediate fire danger at this time, the air around here has been thick with smoke and little ash particles ever since the fires started on Sunday. It has improved somewhat today, but it is still a pain to breath and makes my nose run and my throat hurt. Luckily the computer science building has an air conditioning system that filters the air, so I spend most of the day in the office. Over night I stay at Teiko’s new place, which also has a basic air conditioning.

Update Nov. 4th: So the worst is over, all fires are 95% or more contained and no more homes are threatened. The air around here is back to normal, too. A lot of people have lost their homes, though, and the full recovery from this disaster will surely take a while…

East Coast

I’m writing this from my hotel room in Providence, Rhode Island (with free WLAN, yeah!). This morning I flew from LAX to Cleveland and then caught a connecting flight that got me here. Starting tomorrow I’ll be attending a conference at the Rhode Island Convention Center. Actually our complete research group from Irvine came over.
If you are interested, here’s our conference homepage. And this second conference is actually co-located with us, so I’ll try to attend some talks there, too. On Monday aftenoon I have my own little presentation as part of the doctoral student track (which, as the name suggests, is held among doctoral students in the area).
The conference goes until Thursday and I hope to find some time to have a look at the city and the campus of the local Brown University.