I finally got around to 'selecting' and formatting my remaining pictures from the California Trip. The trip was split up roughly as follows:

• Thursday—Drove from Charlottesville to Richmond in the Virginia-equivalent of a blizzard; flew from Richmond to Philadelphia; ate hotdog in 30 seconds while running to the gate post-final-boarding-call; drove from San Francisco to Davis in The Gigantor (rental car) during rush hour.
• Friday—MURI meeting; presented my work on SQL injection vulnerabilities. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the Helix research group (quite literally).

I have no hopes of catching up on six months worth of festivities, so here's the highly abridged version instead; here's what I did during the last 4.5 months:

• I took classes: math, theoretical crypto, and security.
• There was a paper submission around mid-November. As an exercise to the reader: which two photos to the right were taken within an hour after we submitted the paper?
• After scrambling to catch up on class work, I spent most of December and January-to-date studying for the Ph.D. Qualifying Exam. That was earlier this week. The written exam took a grand total of 15 hours, leading to near-blisters from writing.