James Ring’s Photoblog

A while ago, Jeannette and I went to Disneyland! We left SF early in the morning (like, 4am) so we could get to Anaheim around 10. We made it no problems, and we parked the car at the hotel where we were going to stay. The hotel was literally right across the street, and parking was easy!

I was really surprised by Disneyland. I thought it would have been aimed at young kids, and that jaded old men like myself wouldn’t be able to get as much out of it. How wrong I was! It was great, the rides were awesome, the food wasn’t ridiculously overpriced like it is at the theme parks on the Gold Coast.

Unfortunately, we had to cut the day short, because I came down with some crazy tonsillitis thing. I ended up missing a couple days of work that week. Jeannette took really good care of me and, as a reward, she got whatever I had. Sowwy!

I’ll have some photos soon.

I got back from Dublin more than two weeks ago, but I thought I should just briefly write about what I did there.

During the days, I was pretty much at the office all the time, so that shouldn’t be very interesting to you. On the weekend of the 28th of April, I went for a wee road trip around Ireland. I started off in Dublin and drove to:

• Galway

Here I lunched and walked around. There were thousands upon thousands of people crammed into the small centre of the city.

• Doolin

Doolin is a teeny village about 40km south of Galway. I stayed overnight, but it must be the most popular tourist destination in the world: every B&B and hotel within a mile of the village “centre” was booked out (I tried them all!). I finally found a nice B&B about two miles away, and got a good night’s sleep.

Doolin is not far at all from the Cliffs of Moher (aka. the Cliffs of Insanity from the Princess Bride), so I went there the next morning. It was raining and foggy, but the cliffs were pretty darn amazing. They’re very tall, and you get the impression that they go on forever, if only the moody fog didn’t cloak them.

• Cashel

I have to say, I think Cashel was my favourite place. It’s home to the Rock of Cashel, an old castle built on top of a hill. I loved walking around and taking photos. It was so peaceful and green.

• Kilkenny

I just had to have a Kilkenny or two in Kilkenny. I went to a pub in the middle of town and watched County Kilkenny’s hurling team lose to County Waterford (Kilkenny is apparently the best hurling team in the country). The locals weren’t too happy about that.

After this, I walked down the road to Kilkenny Castle, which was really nice. The lawn out the back was about the size of a Canberran golf course: it seemed to extend to the horizon.

Ahh yes, here I am. Good ol’ Dublin, Ireland.

I had a long layover in LA for some reason, but that allowed me time to catch up with Ravi, whom I haven’t seen in a few months.

Here are a few highlights from Hollywood and Dublin!

I wish you could be here Jeannette, I’m missing you already!

Also a big “hello” to everybody back in Australia! I’m missing you too, I promise…

I’m flying to Dublin, Ireland (here, not here ) on the 21st of this month for two weeks. I’ll have one full weekend there, so I promise to take heaps of photos!

I can’t get enough of Monterey. It’s such a lovely part of the world! Jeannette and I spent the weekend there, the weather was sunny and warm, clear blue skies. Great day for a picnic lunch at Pebble Beach (if somebody could buy me a house down there, that’d be great. I’ll pay you back later…)

We stayed at the Seascape Resort at Aptos, and there’s a nice little shopping centre just across the road with a good deli and café. Great for breakfast and picnic lunches!
Here are some photos!

I was in Squaw Valley for the company ski trip. I was kinda tired and the snow was rubbish, so I didn’t do any skiing. However, I did go for a walk which took me a couple of hours. I took some photos along the way!

Hi all,

Sorry I haven’t posted in so long. Life has been very busy and interesting!
Some highlights of the last month or so:

• Dad and Elizabeth came to visit
• we went to a football game (San Francisco 49ers versus the Arizona Cardinals, which the Cardnials won). That was an awesome time
• went to Monterey and Carmel, including the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium
• went to San Diego and the Zoo
• went to San Francisco, including Alcatraz
• went to Sacramento and saw the sweet railroad museum in Old Sacramento… also went for a wander inside the Capitol building, which was surprisingly interesting
• Dad and Elizabeth went home, replaced a week later by Mum and Cathy
• went to San Jose, mostly for shopping
• went to Monterey (again) and drove for some distance down Highway 1… watched the sun set from the gorgeous cliffs of Big Sur
• toured the Stanford (again) and UC Berkeley campuses
• heaps of other stuff that I can’t remember

Here are a few highlight photos:

Our trip continues to Phoenix, Arizona!

As one of the thousands of people who used the TravelTracker to watch Mikal and myself drive around 400 miles from Mountain View to Los Angeles, you will of course be watching the above timelapse video in awe! More details about how we did all this to come!

Oh, and the GPS unit can also spit out altitude and velocity, so we plan to make some cool graphs with those variables. Hopefully we’ll be able to capture that raw data for our drive to Tempe tomorrow, then do some processing on it in the next few days.

Whee!

I went for a walk around the Stanford University campus in Palo Alto, about 3 miles from where I live. The campus is amazing: it’s huge, the architecture is awesome, and the female scenery is excellent!

You should check out my Stanford University gallery!