I spent all of last week in the United States; mostly, in Tampa, FL, where I attended Supercomputing ‘06. It was pretty good fun, and the weather was certainly a lot warmer than back home in the UK!

I didn’t spend all my time in Tampa; I also got an Amtrak train up to Orlando and went to Disney World Epcot, Universal Studios, and Universal Islands of Adventure. I took many photos of the Orlando leg of the trip; I’m sure I’ll post all of those, together with all the Tampa photos, online shortly. I’d do it now, but I don’t have Dreamweaver on this particular laptop. I do intend to put the better photos on my Flickr account too, though.

When I’ve not been in the USA, I’ve also bought a house. I may post photos of it when I’m done with all the moving and furniture buying; It’s going to take a fair while before I’m completely happy with it, though, so I’m not sure when I’ll do that!

Today, I also went to see an exhibition of ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. The exhibition is being held at the Leeds Art Gallery, and finishes tomorrow. It is a really interesting exhibit, not least to see Leonardo’s famous, mirror-image handwriting in person! In front of one of the drawings, a woman stood, sketchbook in hand, furiously copying the drawing in front of her (of some berries). Taking a surreptitious look at her drawing, I have to say it was very similar to Leonardo’s original! I’m not sure she could do his handwriting, though.

I love art, but my ability with it is a curious inverse of my ability with the English language; I’m very good with English, and have the technical ability to do pretty much anything I like, but I lack the imagination to write anything that I’d be truly happy with (I am extremely self-critical about everything I write). Conversley, with art (specifically, painting), I have loads of ideas, but almost no technical ability to manifest them. I wonder if taking some painting classes would help, but I fear that all that would happen is that I’d be embarassed by my lack of talent compared to the others in the class. Plus, it’d have to be a slightly more esoteric course; I’m more interested in the expressionism exhibited in a lot of Van Gogh’s work than I am with more literal, photographic styles of painting.