Philip Fibiger

Three and a half days is really pushing the limit, in terms of acceptable short vacations that require a trip across the country. Especially when there’s two three hour drives between Albany and Ithaca included in that three and a half days. We went back east for my sister’s graduation and a wedding shower Emily’s sister was throwing for us, and while both the graduation and the shower were a lot of fun, I definitely felt like I was almost always in transit or adjusting to time/location changes.

It was neat to be on the other side of the graduation, getting to watch the entire processional rather than just being surrounded by a sea of people in black gowns, sitting up in the bleachers and realizing how many graduates they pack on to the football field. Emily was an R.A. her junior year in a freshman dorm, and so she got to see a lot of her residents walking in the processional.

James Carville gave the convocation address on saturday afternoon to a very partisan audience. He has great command of a room and I thought he was a very relaxed and comfortable speaker. His speech was strikingly short, but I didn’t feel cheated. I guess it was “refreshingly short.”

The weather was great, in my skewed California opinion. It rained most of the time, which was a great change from Los Angeles, but it cleared up for the day of the graduation. Everything back east was really strikingly green and lush. I miss that a lot.

I brought my new camera and found myself taking tons of pictures. The built-in memory stick slot on my little Sony Vaio laptop that seemed so useless when I bought it turned out to be wonderful, letting me easily dump the contents of the digital camera to the laptop hard drive. Every 50 or so pictures, I’d just dump the 128mb memory stick to the laptop, wipe it clean, and start taking more pictures. Someone needs to invent a multi-card reader (compact flash, smartmedia, SD, memory stick, etc) that has a little processor in it that pretty much only knows how to read and write to a firewire device. It could even draw a little power through the firewire cable. So, you could plug it in to any portable hard drive (like an iPod, or one of the other available firewire drives), and have it just automatically dump all the pictures to that hard drive. It’s not too bad to have a little 4 pound laptop to store the pictures on during a longer trip, but it’d be great if I could store all the photos from my trip on my iPod, and not have to lug a laptop around.

Anyway, here are the pictures from the trip.