Pictures from my Digital Camera
Introduction
In the spring of 1999 I bought a Toshiba
PDR-M1 digital camera. It is compact. I can take up
to 60 pictures before having to upload the JPEG images or change the
memory card. All of the pictures are near 35mm quality according to
Toshiba. You will have to decide if you agree with them.
I can even write out a lecture on a pad of paper on an airplane
and include them right away into PowerPoint presentations just by
taking pictures of the pages and uploading them to a laptop. Be warned
that if you do this trick that you may well have quite an audience almost
immediately asking all sorts of questions.
I also have a habit of cutting off the top or bottom
of whatever I am trying to photograph. Now I can look at what I just
photographed and delete what I do not want and retake what I need to.
I have no qualms about taking too many pictures thanks to the delete
feature.
I have included some of my photo collections
here. The
pictures are usually 1280x1024 resolution. Some pictures were taken
using the 2X zoom feature of the camera; these pictures are 640x480
resolution. The granularity is mostly average,
but some are fine.
Family and Visitors
How could I pass up a collection of pictures of my family
and friends?
Alaska
I went to Fairbanks, Fort Yukon, and Anchorage during
my trip to the University of Alaska in June, 1999. Fort Yukon is just north of the
Artic Circle. I took a mail plane up there and back. I took the
Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Anchorage (a 13 hour ride). The
coastal glacier pictures are from my plane flight from Anchorage to Salt
Lake City.
Around the World in 14 Days
I finally did it! The trip was from July 24 to
August 6, 1999. The trip was 22,052 flight miles according to United
Airlines and involved three overnight segments. Luckily, none of the
red eyes were consecutive nights.
First I flew from Newark to Stockholm.
I spent a day there changing time zones and seeing the central part of
Stockholm, which is mostly the old, elegant part.
Then it was on to Helsinki and Jyväskylä, Finland for the ENUMATH
99 conference. This conference is what led to the whole trip since
I had to give a lecture in Finland one week followed by a lecture in Beijing
the next. While I could have gone home between the two conferences, it
seemed like the wrong way (19 time zones versus only 5) to go.
Then it was back to Helsinki and on to Frankfurt and Hong
Kong. The route from Frankfurt to Hong Kong took me over
Erlangen and Minsk, south of Moscow (its lights were clearly visible), north of Almarta, across the southern part of the Gobi Desert and
along the northern and eastern edges of the Himalayan mountains and
Tibet, over Changdu, Guangzhou, Macao, and finally into the new Hong Kong airport.
After a day in Hong Kong, it was time to go to Narita
airport in Japan. The route took me over
Taiwan (right over Taichung, Hsinchu, and Taipei) to Japan and over South
Korea (right over Seoul) to Beijing. Mt. Fuji was clearly visible, but
was missing its ring of snow on its summit.
The visit to Beijing
for the International Workshop on Computational Physics:
Fluid Flow and Transport in Porous Media. This workshop was held
at the Institute for Applied Physics and Computational Mathematics, which is
the equivalent of Los Alamos Laboratory in the United States. For
entertainment, we went to the Peking Opera one night and to the Great
Wall and one of the Ming
Tombs on another day.
After a final visit to Narita, I
flew nonstop home to JFK airport. The trip from Beijing to Narita took
us near North Korea. In fact, close enough that its capital,
Pyongyang, was just visible by the horizon. In contrast, there was too
much pollution over Seoul to see it. There was a
stark difference in the two Koreas that was quite visible from 41000 feet:
one was rural and the other was developed.
The weather ranged from incredibly hot (Newark) to an
ice storm (Jyväskylä). Scandinavia was mostly cold with
quick rain storms from time to time (by waiting 10 minutes, the inclement
weather was easily avoided). Hong Kong and Beijing were hot and
humid. The mountains north of Beijing were comfortably cool, however.