i'm sitting in the office working on our siggraph submission. it's shaping up nicely, but i'm about to call it quits for today. gotta meet up with friends for some new years eve celebrating (in our beloved stoeferlehalle here in darmstadt). but i still found some more unpublished pictures (what a surprise) from our diving trip last october. along for the ride: marc, johannes and marc. one of the marc's (the tall guy with the dark hair) will be partying with us tonight (for the books: he's also the dude i do research with, or, to be more precise, my supervisor :-). the images aren't commented, yet, but will be soon. i'm on the run...

yes, i also have some underwater shots, but they're on paper (in the digital age. ts, ts.) and need to be scanned first. will happen sometime after i return from zuerich/snowboarding end of january.

ok. i give up. since life will not allow me to maintain this site as frequently as i'd like (and as i used to), i at least need to get some pictures online. what better date than years end? it's been one fun ride all year long, i've experienced much more than i expected and there's so much more to come! so without further ado, here are some pictures of great moments in (summer) 2003, taken in (and around) vancouver and in san diego (siggraph). it's been a while since all this occurred, but i'll try to remember as many details as possible. after all, what would a massive update be without lots of unnecessary text ;-)

after recovering from two concerts and a festival (which took a day or two of reading at the beach), i finally decided to learn windsurfing. and to my great surprise, it's not that bad. yeah, when starting off on one of those unsinkable boards that is. the weather was so gorgeous and we had perfect wind. i can't speak for the others, but i was on a natural high afterward! very evident from the pictures, i think. gotta do that again. and ed, thanks for posting those shots from the throwaway-waterproof camera!

fun stuff! and we really lucked out with the weather. actually, i was only greeted by rain on arrival, the rest was pure sunshine (except in san diego, more on that further below). eddy and i planned a squamish camping/sports trip two days later, so i decided to spend the day by visiting paula, playing some tunes on the guitar, and then chilling out to a good movie and some more sushi. i'm sure that not a day went by without me indulging in some delicious roll! hmmmm... sushi.

eddy, thanks again for taking the time for this fun trip! i promise to always wake you with NOFX' the decline ;-) sunrise and good punk-rock. what a way to start the day!

early (real early, 4am) the next morning, off to san diego to (finally) go to the mekka of computer graphics: SIGGRAPH. and what an *interesting* trip it turned out to be, all around. andrei, a friend from tel aviv was there. olga, another phd student from tel aviv who i hadn't met before, was there as well (she had a paper in the conference. at age 22. impressive.). we started the *conference* by buying shirts and shorts for the beach so we could keep ourselves occupied during 'not-so-interesting' paper sessions. as it turned out, the only time i needed the swimming shorts was around midnight when we decided to cool-off after a hard day at the conference ;-) we did that two or three times i think, so it must have been hard work to sit through the sessions. hehe.

we snuck into hotel jacuzzi's at night. twice. also very necessary after a full day of sitting. we just did it for our *health*. oh well. perhaps next year i'll be staying in a nicer hotel, not that crammed hostel. but not to complain: siggraph was a blast! it was all i expected it to be and i came back, not only full of ideas and very cool impressions, but also with some newly gained friends. to top it all off, i met the members of the project team i now cooperate with from the ETH in zuerich, switzerland. more on that further below (yes, this is a rather lengthy update...).

i can't believe it, i finally got through the largest update ever on this site! how cool! now all i have to do is make sure it never piles up as much as it did. we shall see. anyway, on to my present life: i just went snowboarding for the first time this season last weekend and it was good! miriam and i had enough snow, one day of sunshine and a half day of snowstorm, just enough to give us some powdery runs before driving back home on sunday. other than that, 180 students have been keeping me *very* busy. marc, anders and i are giving introduction to computer graphics this term and trying to do it good amounts to great time consumption. now, during the two week holiday break, i'm all into our siggraph submission on the physically-based animation of deformable objects stuff, for which i will be traveling to zuerich from january 7th till the 23rd (siggraph dealine is the 21st). truckloads of very interesting and challenging work ahead. more snowboarding after that. and then? teaching, researching and more fun along the way, at least that's my plan.

just a quick one: i'm off to my parents place for the holidays. i've (finally) started sorting all the photos from these past seven months and will post them this coming friday. so until then i wish you all some relaxed christmas days!

we camped out, climbed and mountain-biked for three days up there. good times! and even more pictures of that left to post ;-) ed will be off to nelson for a season of ski-bumming from january till april 2004 (i guess) and i'll surely be joining for at least two weeks (hopefully) in february/march.

so long for now. more to come someday. hope all is well. a.

just got back from a week of diving in hurghada (egypt) with marc, marc and johannes. good fun! also makes it kind of obvious that i am months behind in properly updating this site: i haven't even posted half of my last vancouver trip and all of san diego (siggraph) is missing as well. but now that the endless summer 2003 has finally come to an end, i will get to many small updates soon. yeah, right. one more three day (work-)trip to zurich next week, after which three months of heavy workload await. after that: snowboarding! but first: work!

and i'll be getting back to that right now. as mentioned, many small updates to come in the next weeks, stay tuned. wish you all the best!

just a short one to mention how much i suck at keeping this page going :-) i still have so much vancouver/san diego stuff to post! i've been really tied up in work and life these past weeks, but since summer is now definitely over in this part of the world, i might actually spend some time at home for a change. yes, and also update this page properly with nice pictures and stories. soon. in short, things that kept me nicely occupied these days... work: a short trip to zuerich (what a gorgeous place!), tons of reading (wow, that's new) and mainly research into deformable simulation with guys from the eth-zuerich (which means i'll probably get to go there again. cool :). other-life: catching up with good friends, hanging out in the sun (which we had loads of), going to every party available and, when not overindulging in gin-tonic and the likes, recording some acoustic stuff (my roommate alex converted his room into a recording studio and we've been quite experimental. good fun!).

as the saying goes: time flies when you're having fun. how true.

stefan (one of my closest and dearest friends in the past eight years) is taking off for hamburg this coming weekend (his new job is located there). needless to say, i will have to kick him out with a bang, and although i'm really happy for him, he will be missed. so stef, here's to you: take care my friend, i wish you all the best!

40 degrees celsius in the shade! 25 at night. not so good for sleep and work, really good for hot nights out. ergo: party later at 11pm, but it's time for the first web-update! first off, i just browsed my news pages and realized that i never got around to writing a bit on my stay in belgium. not that this would be too interesting for any of you out there, but this site also serves as my personal logbook, so i just have to write a bit :-) so to sum it up: it was great! leuven is absolutely beautiful and cozy and has cheap, good beer. my talk (on my thesis topic) went really well. i had such a good time presenting that i didn't want to leave the podium after my talk was over :-) if this is the way it will always be in my line of work then i surely am doing the right thing. at least for now :-) he he, you never know... got to know lots of new people who i then also met at siggraph (more on that in a later update). fun stuff. i was warmly welcomed into the graphics research community. cool.

nice, eh? i spent lots of time here in the first week, during which i once again read william gibson's neuromancer (the novel that invented the term cyberspace. yes i am a geek :-), hitchhikers guide to the galaxy and anderweltsliebe, an interesting take on a fictional friend of curt cobain.

i got to move into my old guest-room from back in 2002, and to my surprise they added a nice double bed! back then i slept on this old and way too soft couch. after only a few hours in their cozy living room i already felt as if no time at all had passed. such good vibes! here some impressions from the kommune der 23. strasse.

in the first week we went to see the eels, the slackers (cool new york ska band), had a traditional movie night at the lab and hung out/talked a lot. it was definitely time to catch up on all that had happened in the past 14 months since i'd been there last.

darn, i can't believe how much time updating this site consumes! i'm not even through the first week yet and it's already time to take off for some gin and tonic :-) stay tuned for the folk-music-festival weekend, windsurfing, sushi and camping!

i'm back! feeling pretty rough right now, thanks to nine hours time difference and that great 18 hour flight via dallas, texas. guess i'll be nicely jet-lagged these next days, which will make working tomorrow even more fun :-). but it was so worth it! i had so many great experiences in these past four weeks that i will have to post multiple updates in the coming week(s), including lots of photos. siggraph turned out to be well worth the trip, even more than i had expected it to be, thanks to a very special person (yes, i mean you), some wicked nightlife and lots of newly gained friends from all over the planet. more details will follow soon (yes, with pictures!).

but first i need a few hours of sleep. then i have to catch up with some friends, later today in the beergarden :-) the weather here is tropical! need to get out as soon as my body has partially regenerated. until then, take care.