Back in the USA

I've been offline for a while due to travel to South Africa (a wonderful week vacation, and then a week at an excellent summer school organized by Judith Bishop), then a few days back, then a week in New Zealand (attending another fine meeting, the New Zealand Computer Science Students Research Conference), two days in Australia to see foolish family members who emigrated their from New Zealand, and then back to Berkeley to attend a DOE meeting on future computing and computational science research programs. Finally home tomorrow. My heading is spinning ...