Return of the Jedi

I am back with a vengeance. I do apologize to my thousands of blog fans who must have laid awake at night wondering where I was. Facts are, my blogging interest has declined gradually and at the same time I've been quite busy. Planning the summer holidays is just one thing.

Anyway, I went to SIGGRAPH this year - as we had a project pay for the trip this suddenly made a summer vacation in California possible. My girlfriend and son joined me afteer the conference and we roamed the state for 9 days. Fantastic stuff.

The conference was great and very inspiring. There is a lot for both the math geek and the artist, so I guess I was exalted, being somewhere in the middle.
George Lucas is a little gnome, it turned out.

The vacation was very nice too. Thor gave us no hassles whatsoever, which was slightly shocking. He was just happy and interested - and basically charming the pants off all the old people and women he could get close to (oh yeah, and chipmunks). We saw some nice places. San Diego and the Joshua Tree National Park stand out. The former being a very cosy, atmospheric kind of city. Sort of like a Cali-Mexican version of Copenhagen, one might say. Loved it. The JTNP was just impressive visually with the desert ranges and those odd trees...some places packed by the hundreds. And the quietness out there was really something. All of a sudden I felt I had really missed that level of calm - having lived in a small city the past 10 years.

SIGGRAPH pics
Vacation pics

Oh, well - my holidays have been packed, with a couple of weeks in Austria preceding the US trip. I have a lot of musings on all of this - but work needs to be done, so it's gotta come later...