Happy time ended after the mid-term, numerious projects deadlines, piles of papers and tens of thousand lines of code were waiting to be take care of. Everyone was out of shape till the end of the hell first semester.
Luckly in the vacation, without a offically appointed supervisor, I enjoyed half the vacation with newly bought Fuji FinePix 300A DC, captured hell lot of photos in the dorm, back in Shanghai, and all the possible places. It was since then my photographical skills got drastically degraded (since u get photos physically free). I kepted only using the 16mb memory card coming along with the DC in order to "create" some sence of cherishing every shot till now, but situation never turned back ... :-(
Chen Kai (left, college classmate)
and my girlfriend Yang Xiaoyan (right)
Let me just jump across the time line to my recent trip to the US. This chance is given by my boss and the department as an award to publish a good paper on Design Automation Conference '04, and almost FREE.
The presentation on June 10th was a little success (see the black photo on the right), except for the handling of the last question raised by Philip Brisk in UCLA. I was anxious to give the answer which i was not so sure of, resulting in a collection of unordered guffs. Luckly, the session chair came to rescue (maybe unconsciously) by asking an easy question ... actually he seemed answer the question himself and leave me only "Yes" or "No". Even though I was again not so sure about what he was talking about, I said "Yes" confidently because giving "Yes" is always a safe way. Finally I steped down the stage, thinking "cool, maybe someday, i can also become a public speaker" :-) The job was done.
The rest of the days were quite enjoyable. I was stuck in San Diego one day more by strolling a round trip among the beach, downtown, old town, the zoo and Coronado. On June 12th, I finally set my foot on to another U.S. city San Francisco. Living with my uncle's in Santa Rosa, driving/travelling day out and night in, chating with my uncle constantly, I really tasted different samples of real American life including working, education, sports, shopping and ... movies! We went to Stanford, Berkeley, downtown San Francisco, golden gate bridge, even some place near San Jose; we had home cooked Chinese food, self made cheese cakes, outside Mexican food, Chinese steam boat and lots more; we also had 2 tickets for mistakenly parking and car towed once (so for me, San Francisco but not Singapore is a fine city); we went to Charles Schulz's Peanuts gallery to see snoopy, and we met Robin Williams by passing by his fancy jeep... A lot and lot more. 8 days was short, during which, however, I realized that, I also has a family in another continent.
for DAC'04
the monitor...)
uptown San Diego:-p
A "satellite" map of San Francisco from aircraft
at the dusk
( a restuant near Time Square)
