A couple pictures from the recent trip

Andrea posted pictures from our recent trip to Madison and Vancouver. I’m not posting the images directly, but you can browse them online here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/andrea.mire/Vancouver#

Seth and Andrea in their fancy hotel room

http://picasaweb.google.com/andrea.mire/AllisonSGraduation#

Holloway siblings

I survived ICSE 2009

Better late than never, right?

Last Sunday I returned from Vancouver where I was attending the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). I met a lot of great and interesting people. A few that stand out are

• Sherlock Licorish – the soft-spoken researcher from Guyana who told me I was an academic
• Justin Erenkrantz – the President of the Apache Software Foundation who was really down to Earth and cool
• Andy Ko – a professor finishing up his first year at University of Washington. Andy was an all-around great person: articulate, helpful, funny

I also had the honor of hanging out with a couple esteemed colleagues, Drew Stovall and Hyrum Wright, and my wonderful wife.

And a big thanks to the person that made this all possible, Dr. Christine Julien.

Vancouver was an amazing city! I feel extremely glad to be able to see the Pacific Northwest in the late Spring/early Summer. We experienced temperatures  in the 40s to 70 with ample sunshine and a light breeze. By most definitions, near perfect weather. In the eight days we were there it only rained once! Of course, that was the day we were on an open-top zodiac chasing whales, but the experience was too cool to let a little rain get in the way (my retrospective opinion, not the opinion I held while freezing on the chilly waters of the Pacific Ocean). We had awesome Japanese food, terrific Chinese food, a tasty bubble tea, and other ethnic fare that was totally worthwhile.

Before ICSE, we were in Madison, WI to see my sister graduate with her PhD. Her research was about DBMSs on flash disks. Congratulations to her on this momentous ocassion. We’re all very proud!