jonny goes to england

Finally, I’m back from my trip to Tucson, Arizona. For once my flights went smoothly without any delays or anything! I went there from Friday to Monday and it felt like I’ve been away for two weeks (which is good!).

The city itself, Tucson, is not very flattering .. resembles more of a desert boot camp than a city. However, our hotel, built on a mountain (they call it canyon), was very nicely situated and was generous in all regards.

The workshop I attended was co-located at the bigger PLDI conference with a couple of hundred participants from all over the world. My talk went fine and I met some nice students from Italy, Germany and US. Here, a still empty room.

Apart from that I went to the Sonoran Desert and was lying at the pool while small, cute hummingbirds were hovering above my head attacking some flowers! Unfortunately, I didn’t make pictures of them direclty!

Oh right, and I photographed cacti. Many cacti. More specifically, most of them are of the Saguaro species which basically consists of a large phallic (!), monolithic trunk.

The whole valley and canyon is covered in large cacti, some are over 15m high and 150 years old! Here is one of them directly in front of my balcony. The flowers on top are the state flowers of Arizona:

And here a few more from the desert:

On my way back, our plane was avoiding a huge thunderstorm around New York which gave us a totally surreal and amazing view on the storm from above and the outside. Every other second lightnings lit up the huge clouds from the inside and made them look like gigantic, deformed lamps.

Also, I found a nice iPodomat in Houston! Unfortunately, it didn’t accept my credit cards for some reason .. so I couldn’t buy a nano for $140

Here is the flickr set for some more pictures.

Hello. I’m in Arizona and it’s warm. I nearly missed my connecting flight in Houston and probably made a record to run from one Terminal E, through US border patrol, scanning left and right index finger, signing documents, collecting baggage, rechecking baggage, queuing for security check, taking belt and shoes off, putting belt and shoes on, running to the terminal train, driving to terminal B, running down the hallway to my gate to just in time catch the flight to Tucson. However, my effort was rewarded by a terribly boring flight. I guess Texas or Arizona does not make a lot of money out of sight seeing. Not to forget about the baby beside me who just learned to speak and said “nana nana” to everything for 2.5 hours.
Anyway, I’m in a fantastic hotel, spent some time on the pool and today at the PLAS workshop where I gave a talk. What you see above in the picture is the view from the lobby on a canyon out of huge windows. More pics are on the way when I’m back.

One quick fact on the weather. It’s so warm here that I’m unable to eat breakfast outside at 7 (!) in the morning because it’s simply too hot.

Onion Jam. Two words of horror and I had it for lunch. You buy a sandwich with “Ham & Cheese”, but what they don’t tell you is that it contains onion jam! Think of onion jam as sugary confiture with lots of onions cut into ..

In other news, I’m flying to Arizona over the weekend. However, I ended up — in an evil twist — to give the talk at the workshop on Sunday! Title of the talk is Lagrange Multipliers and Maximum Information Leakage in Different Observational Models. Wish me luck.

I just realised that the Phoenix Mars Mission — the lastest mars robot from NASA — is led by Lunar Planetary Lab of University of Arizona… in Tuscon! That’s where I’m going next weekend. So I could pop by at their command center and say hello. I’ll think about it ..

I have yet to experience a smooth return travel. The last few times weren’t really optimal!

Last time when I tried to catch a train from Stansted some moron decided to jump in front of the train at the airport. At 8pm on Sunday at an airport! He didn’t only have the wrong intention, he also picked the wrong place and time, and in turn delayed a couple of thousand travelers.

This time my plane got its take-off slot or whatever late which caused to delay everything else.

Anyway, I think the right formula is to pick smaller airports (e.g. City) where waiting times, take off slots, immigration control, baggage reclaim and suicides are easier to organise and cleanup.

Diese Woche sieht so aus:

• Morgen Geburtstag
• Morgen ein Seminar an City Uni von Sabelfeld, einem Forscher aus Chalmers. Chalmers gehoerte zu den Unis, bei welchen ich mich fuer den Master beworben habe. Ende 2005 habe ich dafuer Goeteborg und Chalmers besucht… jedoch kam es nicht zum “jonny goes to sweden” und das ist auch gut so
• Freitag Abend (sehr) kurzen Abstecher nach Basel vom City Airport..

I’m flying home for a short easter break .. from the 19 - 25 March

Just found a nice site about travel maps in London. The following map shows the travel time needed to arrive at work at the Department of Travel at 9am:

Flying back to London tomorrow!

Just found this very nice google feature to check status of flights, via a lifehacker article: