Recently (July 9-23), I spent some time in the UK. I've been a bit busy since then, and have not had time to write up my activities and post them. Anyway, I've got some time now, so I'm posting now :-). The primary reason I went to the UK was for the FLoC '10 conference (which was held in Edinburgh, Scotland), where I had a paper in CAV. There is more info (including the paper) on my school home page.

We spent a few days wandering around London, which is quite the tourist trap. I went and saw Abbey Road and walked across the zebra crossing, we went and saw the Eye and Tower of London, we saw the Sherlock Holmes museum, we went to Greenwich to sand on the prime meridian, and Windsor Castle. The world cup final (Spain vs. Holland) occurred, and we watched it in an English pub. Naturally, there were many other visits to pubs too... I had to get the full experience, you know ;-).

After London, we went to Edinburgh for the conference. We didn't do much sight seeing while the conference was in session, but we did eat quite a lot of food, including haggis at the fancy conference dinner where we got to here a bagpiper recite the Address to a Haggis before our meal.

After the conference, we spent a day touring Glasgow, a day touring Edinburgh, and a day touring the Scottish country side (including a boat ride across Loch Ness, but no Nessie sighting). It was a fun trip!

Aditya and I took lots and lots of photos, so enjoy! I stitched some panoramas together, and some of them turned out pretty good. Note that there are no thumbnails because the images are huge, and the thumbnail generation program crashes on them. You'll just have to download them (but do it on a computer with lots of RAM, as the images are ~25 MB each). Enjoy!

This weekend I went up to the observatory deck on the capitol, which was the first time I'd ever done that. I shot a panoramic with the camera on my phone. It's not a great camera, but the results turned out pretty well for a camera phone. If you're interested you can check out the original and a cropped version (warning: these images are huge -- around 25 MB -- and will probably take a while to load). Enjoy!

Oh, and the software I used to stitch together the photos was hugin. Not exactly an intuitive interface, but it works pretty well, and it has more buttons and whistles than I could ever want. If you know something about photo stitching that I don't (which is highly likely), I'm happy to furnish the originals for a better attempt.