This Saturday I went hiking at Angel Island. It was a pretty awesome day; the weather was nice, and there were some amazing views. You can see all the pictures here.

Here are some of my favorites however:

Mmm. Yes that was a large boat of Sashimi at the end of a long day outdoors.

I spent about 2 hours discussing the technical and scientific details of cameras with one of my friends, and now I really want a nice $1000 one. Do I really need another hobby? Especially such an expensive one? Ponders…

On Sunday, I went back to the Asian Art Museum to finish the galleries. I took a few more pictures there which I added the gallery here. I am going to buy a membership so that I can go back on the special members only party nights when the new exhibits are unveiled. That way I can schmooze with all the rich Asian ladies. The current temporary exhibit is pretty awesome; it is a collection of wook block prints from Yoshitoshi and the similar but much later manga of Tezuka. Yoshitoshi had a pretty disturbed life, and it shows in his prints which are also quite amazing in their similarity to the more modern stuff. Unfortunately photos were not allowed in these exhibits, or I would have digitally copied every piece. Anxiously waits for next exhibit.

Also, am now desirous to visit the Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain. I think I will go there in the spring.

I’m back, and I have pictures. Here are some notable ones:

My New Nephew

My Old Nephew

Notice the License Plate

Uncut

WW2 Memorial

As you can probably tell, I didn’t get a chance to go the Holocaust museum since I only had about 2 hours of spare time. Instead, on Tuesday, I walked to the WW2 memorial which I hadn’t seen before.  It is easily the nicest memorial in DC. I particularly like all the metal castings (is that the right word?) depicting scenes from the homefront and battlefront. I took a bunch of pictures of them. Take a look – here.

The conference was very nice. I met a lot of people who do relatively similar research, although the most interesting talks I heard were on origami and image recognition (i.e. how programs could identify the subject of a picture without human input).

I got an LG vx8600 after dropping my old phone with an already dying battery in the pool (you might remember that this was a replacement for one I left in a cab in Denver). The new one is quite nice in that it is very slim and can play mp3s, take video etc… It actually stores everything on a 2 GB micro SD card which makes it extremely easy to sync with linux (i.e. ignoring included crapware). Good work LG on not being evil.

I leave at 11pm tonight to go to Florida. I am visiting my parents there until monday and both of my sisters will be there for part of the time which is nice.

After than I will go to Washington DC until the Thursday to attend the CSGF Fellows conference. The conference is pretty nice, because the talks are very diverse and not too detailed oriented so that I can understand them. Last year I decided to randomly go to the spy museum which was somewhat neat and somewhat disappointing. I think this year I will go to the Holocaust museum – I have already done all the stuff on the “mall” – so, I’d like to do something new.

Anyway, I will post pictures.