Richard and I had a nice time at Jonas Clarke Middle School in Lexington, MA. I'm sure that Richard will blog about it relatively soon, as I'm on vacation.

Yesterday I visited my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew in Cortland, NY. Tomorrow they are inducing labor, so in a couple of days I'll have another nephew!

Today I'm in Batavia, NY, the town I grew up in, visiting my dad. We played golf this morning, which is an unusual activity in upstate NY on October 31. At one end of the golf course, somebody was burning a huge pile of leaves, and the ash was blowing onto the course. At the other end of the course, a dog ran out onto the course from one of the neighboring homes. He looked mean but fortunately he was really friendly.

We're in Cambridge, staying at the supercool Hotel@MIT. Tomorrow is USAMTS grading and Sunday is a workshop for parents and students in Lexington, MA.

Richard and I had dinner with Matt McGann and Kiran Kedlaya, whom you might remember from our recent MIT Math Jam. It's always nice to see them.

Having lived for two years in San Diego, I'm not used to cold weather!

Monday I'm visiting my brother and his family in upstate NY (near Syracuse). My sister-in-law is pregnant and she's due "any day now".

We just started an online advertising account with MSN. One of the keywords that I submitted for the account was "amc books". Seems reasonable, right? However, MSN rejected this keyword for our ad campaign.

The reason? "Gambling-related content".

Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of visiting Palo Alto, California. The purpose of the trip was to visit The Teacher's Circle. Basically, this is a math circle for teachers!

One problem that many eager students run into is that their teachers don't themselves have a lot of problem-solving experience, and thus they find it difficult or impossible to teach problem-solving techniques to their students. Fortunately, somebody is doing something about this! I met a wonderful group of really enthusiatic teachers willing to spend a week -- during summer, no less! -- learning about problem-solving mathematics. And I was thrilled to be a part of it. I gave a 1-hour presentation to the teachers that was about 50% problem-solving practice and 50% an advertisement for AoPS.

It was also fun to see Sam Vandervelde, who is one of the co-directors of the program. I hadn't seen him since we were students together at MOP in 1988 (also the place where I first met Richard Rusczyk).

Side-note: for all the talk of huge lines at the airport and showing up 2 hours early for your flight, it only took me 10 minutes to clear security in San Diego, and 3 minutes to clear security in San Jose.

Some photo from the conference I recently went to in Cambridge, England are now online.

Here's me at the formal reception, surrounded by Australians:



Here's me at the fancy conference dinner (I'm third from the front on the right side of the table):



Bird's eye view of the same dinner (I'm in the third chair from the right on the far side of the first table):



Finally, here's a group of us in the pub on the last night of the conference (I'm in back on the left, partially obscured):



View the entire photo gallery here.