Prelude

Place des Vosges, Paris (Jul 3, 2004)

In the last few days I have been swamped by work accumulated while I was in Arizona watching the clouds, and while returning to Boston. Since I am back, I desperately tried to prepare the presentation for my talk on Tuesday in Paris, but I got interrupted every 5 minutes by something new coming up, so I found myself to prepare the the slides yesterday night finishing at 4AM this morning. Now it’s like I am living in a bubble with my eyes not properly open.

All this rush means that I have neglected a little my blog (less than two posts per week this month, which is well below average) and visiting the other blogs that are constant sources of inspiration . For the next two weeks it will probably not do much better, as I doubt I will have a reliable internet connection next week in Paris, and while in Italy the next weekend I wil only have my parents dial-up. On the other end I am accumulating a lot of pictures that I will post when I will be back, so not all is lost. I am sorry if lately I wasn’t very active in visiting your blogs, I will make up for it in a couple of week at most.

Given that tomorrow I am taking yet another plane to Paris (ok, Visual Field is right that I should not complain too much about this, there are worse places to go but, as they say, “is not the destination, but the trip”), I thought to post one last photo I took this summer in Place des Voges, at a street concert of the Prelude de Paris ensamble. I have posted more photos of this group on this blog, under the Prelude category.

Prelude de Paris (Jul 3, 2004)

The spammer that was attacking this blog filling the entries with comments advertising pills and online gaming sites seems to have stopped for now, so I am trying to open again the comments, and see what happen (I have also increased the security of the site, but more on this later).

In the meantime, I have received an email from the guy managing the Prelude the Paris web site, who has graciously added a link to this site from his pages. The photo is another one of the series I took this summer in Place des Voges in Paris.

Prelude de Paris (Jul 3, 2004)

Another photo from my Paris trip this summer, with another one of the violinists in the “Prelude de Paris” ensamble. As you can notice, they actually have a web page and an email address. I tried to write them to tell about the photos, but I didn’t get any answer. If anybody reading this blog meet them in the Metro de Paris, in Place de la Sorbonne or in Place des Voges in Paris, please give them the address of this page!

Anyway, I am still in Pasadena for my meeting. Spent all day listening to talks about debris disks around young stars, interstellar dust and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons, Kuiper Belt objects and cometary ices... Just after lunch there was also an historical talk about Lyman Spitzer, which is the late astronomer after which the space telescope I am working with is named. Quite nice talk... apart for being a pioneer in space astronomy he was also a good mountain climber, opening several new climbing routes in really scary mountains in Alaska. Mountains and astronomer mix well...