B&W, color and digital

Some of you told us it would be cool to also have some color pictures... Actually, I already dropped a color slide film for processing more than a week ago. The guy at the shop told me : "ok, you can expect this to be ready within 10 days or two weeks"... I laughed at him thinking he was kidding! But in fact, not at all. Well ok... it's because it's a special slide film (Kodachrome) which is only processed in 3 labs around the world anymore (which of course I didn't know when I bought the film).

Anyway, pretty soon you will get some color pictures too from our trip to Yosemite. Then we are also seriously looking for a digital camera. But don't get this wrong, I'll continue to take pictures with my 20 year old camera system! I even just found a community-based facility for photographers where you can rent darkrooms... So maybe I'll go there to enlarge some of our best B&W pictures.

Goeric

Yosemite

Hi!

The second WE of October (10/09-10/10) we went to Yosemite. I had never been there before: amazing! Such a National Park doesn't exist in Western Europe. The well-known places are El Captain and the Half Dome (we can see this later on the picture "about us"). The fall already gives beautiful yellow and orange colors to the groves and the trees.

We drove up on Friday night and found a quiet place to put our tent nearby the Park entrance. Saturday we hiked to Glacier Point (about 900 vertical meters) which provides a really nice view on the Half Dome. I let you appreciate it on the photos! We watched three guys climbing the North Face of the Half Dome with a telescope. In the evening, we met the Stanford Alpine Club at the camp site.

Sunday we went crack climbing with the other guys of the Alpine Club. I enjoyed it: 3 pitches of 60 meters each! The route was on a rather positive slope, so it was not too hard ;-) But it is not equipped like we are used to and it is somewhat higher that what I had done before... It's called "trad climbing" (=traditional climbing).

We will definitely go back to Yosemite!

Marie

Channel Islands

Hello!

Just to let know that you can find here some photos of our first trip (09/17-09/19) to the Channel Islands.

We went there with Cedric and Maureen. Cedric works at Volskwagen and is allowed to borrow cars... So we drove down in a Pheaton W12 (too bad we don't have any picture to prove this)! Nathalie and Benoit (who visited California for 3 weeks) joined us in Santa Barbara on Friday night and we slept at a friend of Maureen's place.

Saturday we went to Ventura harbour to take the boat to Santa Cruz, one of the Channel Islands. We hiked and then Cedric, Benoit and Nathalie took a swim with sealions. There was a lot of wind at the camp site. Maureen had brought a surprise: a "real" chocolate cake for dessert!

On the wayback Sunday afternoon, the sea was really wild. Lots of fun except for seasick people ;-)

Next time, we will explain our trip to Yosemite. Cheers,

Marie

HighWay316

At last ;-) ...

We now have our own DSL connection in the apartment! This will make things a little easier to go on the Internet. Until now we "squatted" other wireless access points: it's incredible how many networks we can "see" just from our apartment... sometimes up to ten! However, lots of them are protected and those that are not have a signal that is not strong enough. So we often surfed the web sitting in the building's stairway while our neighbours walked by with a smile (you have to imagine somebody sitting there with a headset, talking to his computer --this is when we used Skype to call to Belgium or just somewhere in Mountain View).

Now what about HighWay316? Well in fact we have a wireless router connected to our DSL and we had to find a name for the access point. As in Louvain-la-Neuve we lived at the Rue Haute 21A, we thought that HighWay316 would be a neat reference to our studio and also a good name for a high speed connection point...

Goeric

NLP lunch

Hi everyone!

Each Thursday the NLP (Natural Language Processing) research team meets at lunch time and somebody presents his current work or a tutorial -- for my friends of INGI, this is like our IRM meetings (funny that is also on Thursday, isn't it?), except that here we get free food ;-).
Two weeks ago it was my turn to give the talk: my advisor here at Stanford was very positive about my work! And today it was my turn to take care of the food: I ordered pastas and lasagna (something a little bit different from the Indian food we usually get).

Hoping everything is going fine in Belgium.

Marie
(as they call me here because my first name is too long for American people :-(...)

Belgian weather in California

:-(

The bad weather came in on sunday morning: I was just waking up when I heard a car passing by... It was only a few seconds later I realized something was wrong: I heard water splashing! :-S

This night it was even almost storming, and it has been raining all day... However, we should not complain to much because the temperature is still OK. And, last but not least, rain in Palo Alto means snow in the mountains! :-)

Here are some pictures of Stanford on a rainy day...

Go

Climbing at the Gym

Hi everyone !

Today we went climbing at the gym with Cedric and Maureen... This time we really passed our belay test! MC climbed very well and climbs pretty easily 5.8 routes. Currently I climb routes up to 5.11+, don't know exactly how this translates to the European grading system... but it must be somewhere around 6c.

So this was my first posting... Hope we'll keep with it ;-)

Goeric