Blog Archives: September, 2003
14 Suitcases
Well, technically it’s not 14 suitcases, it’s 9 suitcases and 5 handbags, but it’s still a lot of luggage for 4 people (3.5 bags per person, to be precise). But that’s all the clothes, books, computer equipment, and assorted other things that I expect to need for a year in England. Let me tell you, books are heavy. And I only took the bare minimum of textbooks.
I’m sending this from my new haunt in Oxford, and now I’m off for a well-deserved vacation (it’s hard working in sunny California for a whole summer!). There may not be any updates while I’m in Paris or London, as I may be doing other things, I hear that the cities are not so bad. See you soon!
California Visit Pictures
Above the Golden Gate Bridge Well it’s been far too long since I last wrote. I’ve uploaded some pictures from Adam and Scott’s visit to California. There are a few Yosemite pictures, some shots from Alcatraz, and some wonderful (I think so, anyways) pics of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you’re ever visiting San Francisco, I highly recommend visiting the Marin Headlands when you go to the Golden Gate Bridge, and driving above the bridge for some great views.
Yosemite panorama
Last week I went to Yosemite National Park with Adam and Scott, and did one of my favourite hikes: to the top of Yosemite Falls. And at the peak, Yosemite Point, I did an old tourist trick: take a 360 degree picture by taking a shot, turning a little bit, taking another shot, turning a little bit, and so on. I was able to stich together the individual shots to create the following photo.
If you click on the photo, you’ll go to a QuckTime VR panoramic movie, which will allow you to rotate the image (it may take a little while to download the movie, as it’s 2.4 MB). (Note that you have to have Apple QuickTime installed. It’s a free download.) If you’re going to come back to the site again and again, I’d request that you download it once to your hard drive.
New paper
I’ve posted a copy of my most recent paper:
Vipul Gupta, Douglas Stebila, Stephen Fung, Sheueling Chang, Nils Gura, and Hans Eberle. “Speeding up Secure Web Transactions using Elliptic Curve Cryptography”.
It’s been submitted to a conference and we won’t hear back for some time now about the result, but you can read a preprint online.
A Modest Proposal (repost)
With today being the traditional first day of school, and today marking the arrival of the dreaded double cohort in Ontario universities, I thought I’d repost an article I wrote in December about the double cohort.
A MODEST PROPOSAL
for preventing the students of the double cohort from being a burden to their parents or professors, and for making them beneficial to the University
No smiling
For those that travel a lot, a passport is a good friend and invaluable ally, without which one couldn’t fly or enter a foreign country, which provides the warm fuzzy feeling of having something Canadian with you while you’re far from home, as you open it and see your lovely mug smiling back at you. But no longer.
As of November 3, all passprt photos must apparently be smile-free. Although my father is often useless (hi dad!), he directed my attention to this article in the Globe and Mail, offering a few more helpful bits of information about changes to the Canadian passport process.
