My summer vacation
Having seen many times the classic school writing prompt of "write about something that happened on your summer vacation" used as a way to welcome students back to writing class at the start of the school year, I of course cannot avoid titling my blog post with the same. If the shoe fits... why reinvent the wheel, right?
However, in stark departure from established school norms, I will hereforth proceed to not narrow down my topic to a single event or encounter, but instead, endeavor to recount the full breadth of the experiences of my last vacation.
(Oh, and if it isn't obvious: my vacation involved a trip to the UK and Ireland and my English is still recovering, hence the haughty style above :D It's the same when I read classic English literature, except it's much worse when you are actually in an English-speaking culture.)
Goals
While my vacations are ostensibly not "work", I still try to have a few goals planned in advance to make sure I use the time off as well as I can. For the 2026 vacation, these goals were:
- Visit the Bridges Math & Art conference in Galway, Ireland and soak in the math and cool origami lectures there.
- Visit friends around that part of the world.
- See the solar eclipse on August 12, 2026
- Flex my new foldable keyboard.
- Expand my music collection in the better-stocked stores in the West.
- Take a (hopefully) well-deserved break from programming and work.
I'm glad to say (happy to announce) that I have managed to achieve all of those goals, though for some of them, I needed to do some compromises. Best of all, I have a whole day of vacation ahead to really rest on! 😂
The Bridges conference
My Bridges experience started off a bit muddled: the first lecture presented was on the notorious and exhausting topic of use of machine instructions generated through the multiplication of mind-bogglingly many floating-point numbers, derived through systematic disrespect of established social norms of machine-to-machine communication and information replication, or "vibecoding" in short.
Thankfully, the human element of the conference took over soon after, and I found myself waiting in line for sandwiches next to Sam, Julia and a few other of the cool math-and-dance nerds present at the conference. It was but a foretaste of the rest of the conference to come, as the best part of it was, by far, just hanging around with people and chatting about math, art, and all else that is beautiful. Lunches and dinners were the best time to find people to chat with, and that's where I also met with Jacob and Tuan "Brian" at a delightful and delicious asian restaurant, or with Kanata and Tomochiro at a local fish-and-chips place, and with Izzy and Brook at a vegan restaurant. Outside of meals, the art exposition was a solid choice too, as, predictably, people love to talk about their works on display. Loved chatting with e.g. Emanuela and Zoe there. Finally, there were plenty of conversations in the hallways between lectures, including at least one attempt of me to nerd-snipe a presenter into a topic I thought interesting 😇😇. Thanks to those, I now have assigned reading on Turtle Geometry, by none other than the author of the paper.
Even though I didn't prepare anything to show off at conference myself, the Checkerboard 2 , X-Y Mover, and Triangle Strider experiments were very well received by the people I showed them to.
Overall, I found the conference very inspiring. Over the last ~8 months of work, I almost had no time for math-related fun. More than just scratching that itch, the conference gave me a creative outlet for that kind of hobby math that I enjoy, and fueled me up with new ideas for how to communicate mathematical topics in art.
In term of the presentations, I enjoyed learning about Amman Bars and Euclidean Rhythms, and seeing P5.js on the big stage, but the lecture with the most impact for me might end up being the one on Oliver Byrne and his Euclid's Elements, because of how multi-faceted and thoughtful and deeply Christian (and libertarian 😅) Oliver Byrne's work seems to have been.
Visiting friends
My time before and after the conference was well-packed with visiting friends around Cambridge and Dublin, including family friends I last saw when I was around 3 or 6 and online friends I only knew from writing communities.
Sadly, none of those friends have websites for easy linking to, so I will refrain of naming names.
Instead, enjoy the images:
Seeing the solar eclipse
Given that the Bridges conference was in the same general area of the world as a total eclipse happening less than a week after, my initial ideation for the vacation trip involved traveling to the zone of totality to watch the eclipse. Sadly, that proved to be somewhat expensive (pretty much doubling plane costs), so, instead, I opted to observe a partial eclipse with some of the friends I visited in Ireland.
It was still quite the experience, as it was the first eclipse for many of them, and we all had fun observing the blurry shadows turning into crescents, sunlight gently dimming, and the sky turning navy blue.
I managed to find a piece of darkened welding glass after going through a lot of stores that didn't have any... and it was well worth the hunt. (Hopefully it was a dark-enough piece of glass... forgot to check what is the required shade of welding glass for looking at the sun before actually, well, looking at the sun... oops!) Being able to directly observe the nearby star slowly get occluded was quite surreal.
Flexing my foldable keyboard
This was my first time ever traveling for more than a week without a laptop! (And as I am still traveling as I post this, I am actually phoneblogging! (Publishing still takes an overly-complicated SSH setup, but I will clean that up later.))
Last time I brought my laptop to a conference was at FOSDEM, where I ended up just leaving it at the hotel room after the first day, because lugging it around proved so very exhausting. This time I decided to simplify things further and leave the laptop back home. But, going without a keyboard felt unnecessarily limiting, so I ordered some Chinese-made foldable keyboard, which I fit in my EDC bag in place of all the extra nylon bags.
And it has been a joy to use! I can Colemak everywhere I go (thanks to mod-dh); it has so far survived over a thousand lines of stream-of-consciousness conference notes; it is usable with a lot of Android apps (and makes editing code on the bus actually viable); I can use it on tables, on beds, or on top of the EDC bag itself; and it has been one of the better last-minute random electronic purchases I've made.
Virtually every friend I have shown it to has said it is a very clever idea and has asked where I got it from. I have not spotted any enemies, but if they saw it, I will bet they too will wonder how to get a foldable keyboard. People who never knew me gave curious looks and smiled when I pulled out my foldable keyboard.
And best of all, a cheap foldable keyboard is all you need to get started! And it's far more usable than a Casio watch or a handheld game console...
🎶 Everybody's got a folding keeb; mine is blue and yours is pink....
Growing the music collection
TODO: add a photo of the CDs I bought, when they are no longer at the bottom of the luggage.
Ever since ordering a bunch of CDs and going to a concert around April, I've generally held off of expanding my music collection further. Yet, as I was in the heart of the British Empire and then again in the the music-infused Irish culture, I opted to let myself buy a few music CDs, and keep the music supply fresh.
To that extend, I got... a grand total of 6 CDs--two recommendations from friends, two classical, one discounted bargain, and one gift--along with and 1 boxed movie--the quintessential BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.
With that, my thirst for music is temporarily satiated. Can't wait to get all the disks back to the CD reader at home!
A well-deserved break
Finally, I managed to more or less take a break from half an year of full-time work!
More, in the sense than I am well out of the context of the things I was doing before, so this vacation served as a nice distraction that would allow me to look at problems with a fresh perspective. And because I got to take plenty of walks and bask in the sunlight and do all those things a programmer rarely makes time for.
Less, in the sense that I started the trip with about 5 hours of sleep deprivation (so, 2 hours of sleep before the plane), and kept sleeping about 7 hours each of the days of the trip, so I will still be sleep-deprived after the whole trip has ended. And also, because I had to hotfix some spam detection logic in the middle of the trip.
And yet, it has been a period of rest and reflection, of observing all the goodness of the Lord, enjoying His provision, trusting in His care for all the things I will find when I arrive back at work... next week. Not having an identity based on works to fall back to during the vacation provided a lot of ground for reflection on who I am and who I want to be. Jumping into foreign cities with no plan other than a hotel address and a few locations checked in the morning provided a break from routine, and novelty to enjoy in the moment. I have no clue if any of this will prove life-changing, but at least it was fun.
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