Well, I'm Back

I'm finally returned from my trip. One week in England, one in California, and a few days in Queenstown. Overall it was a lot of fun. I enjoyed the POPL PC meeting very much; it made me miss research! I had a little time to wander around Cambridge and Oxford ... history fascinates me and it's thrilling just to look at the hundreds-of-years-old buildings and think about the past. At Oxford I gave a talk about Firefox development. In California I spent time with friends, spent a lot of time at the new Mozilla Foundation headquarters, visited Google a couple of times, visited a friend at the Spore development lab, and generally had a great time --- thanks everyone! I gave a radio interview for "The California Report" on KQED, which was fun, although I suspect little of what I said survived editing. I visited Berkeley for a day to give the Firefox talk and meet with various students and faculty --- some old friends, some new.

Queenstown was completely different. It's up in the mountains of the South Island, next to Lake Wakatipu, surrounded by snowcapped mountains. It's very touristy but for all that, it's magnificent. It's early spring so there wasn't much snow; it was chilly and wet at times but overall lovely. We visited Lake Wanaka and Glenorchy, went up the gondola, went jet-boating (recommended!) I managed to sneak away for a couple of decent walks, too. Three days wasn't long enough to get tired of mountain vistas over idyllic lakes and green countryside! Interestingly some of the best views were on our rainy day in Glenorchy (see below). I believe one of the best things about living in New Zealand is that you can easily take holidays in New Zealand :-).

Although it was all fun and a nice change, I'm glad to be at home now eating home-cooked meals and sleeping in my own bed. No more big trips for me this year, I hope. I need to knuckle down and resolve my remaining Firefox 1.5 bugs (including a few embarassing regressions!) and some Novell Firefox issues, and move on with new develoment. I'm also looking forward to spending more time with local family and friends and our local church.