already two and a half weeks ago, scott vanstone died at age of 66. scott intensively pushed, commercialized and invested in elliptic curve cryptography from its beginnings on. he also co-founded the ecc conference series, which i attended eight times.

rest in peace, scott.

the last week, i was in bellevue, attending the 14th workshop on elliptic curves and computation, held at microsoft research. during that time, we also visited seattle a bit. unfortunately, i left my good camera at home, but i took my powershot. which is good when there’s enough light. most of the photos had not enough light. but some are still quite ok, i think. and yes, i was really missing my ultra-wide angle lenses. enjoy.

the strange tower is the space needle, and the troll is the fremont troll.

the last two weeks were pretty much packed with two conferences and a summer school. on august 13–14, i.e. thursday and friday, the selected areas of cryptography conference was held in calgary. then, the week after that, the ecc summer school was held from wednesday to saturday, and from sunday afternoon to wednesday the 13th workshop on elliptic curve cryptography was held. (in fact, this was the sixth ecc workshop i attended, beginning with the one 2004 in bochum. and the second ecc mentioned in this blog; apparently i was too busy to write something about the 12th one held in utrecht last year.)
in addition to these things, several more things happened, some about whom i might write a few words in some more posts.

i’m currently staying in dublin, attending the 11th workshop on elliptic curve cryptography. our view on the countryside has been very brief, basically being limited to the view out of our cabs window on the way from the airport to our hotel. we haven’t seen much more from the city, mainly exploring the way from our hotel to the ucd campus, which means walking next to a big busy street for 20 minutes, walking a bit over trinity college yesterday on the way to the conference dinner, and then seeing the inside of some restaurants and pubs. a very nice pub was a real, completely non-touristic irish pub which we’ve been in two days ago (the only tourists in there being us). it were actually two pubs, connected by a small door and owned by the same person, the difference being a bit the ambient—the one more aristocratic, the other for the plebs—and, suprisingly, the prices, being slightly higher in the aristocratic part. well, and the people were slightly different too, like more suits could be seen in the aristocratic part. opposing to that, we were in a very touristic pub yesterday, with “folk” music and dancing. probably only remotely related to real irish traditions. but very popular among tourists.
another strange thing we encountered is the fact that almost noone here speaks irish. ask a random irish person on the streets, chances are really small he does. well, they apparently learn it in school, but they probably like it as much as the germans like to learn frensh in school: most aren’t able to do a conversation exceeding something like “hi, my name is felix, who are you?”…
this afternoon, we’ll probably see a bit more ireland; planning’s still to be done, we are aiming at something but it’s not sure yet that we can get there in time. if we do, i’ll write about it tomorrow, after my return home. stay tuned.