Happy New Year |
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enlarge photo (1.49Mb) | Our
backyard after snow in December. |
Dear Friends, Another year has gone by and we are back to share with you how we are and what we did and experienced in 2003. |
Holmdel,
December 2003 |
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Sasha is
turning 16 on December 31. She is now in
10th grade at Holmdel High School and is starting to think
about
college. She continues to see herself in
the future as a psychiatrist and enjoys taking introductory psychology
at
school. She likes going out with her
friends to the movies, punk rock concerts, restaurants, New York City,
downloading MP3 files from the internet and playing them on her iPod,
chatting
with friends from school on the internet, taking digital photos, going
to
parties in Rio with cousin Dominique, … Oh
yes, she still enjoys going to the mall to shop. Following
the steps of Dominique, Sasha added
two more piercings and now has one on her nose and one on her ear, in
addition
to the one she did on her belly button last year. She
colored her hair dark black and cut it
short. For her sixteenth birthday, Lucia
is taking Sasha and friend Debbie for a week in Italy.
They traveled December 29 and will return
January 5. They plan to visit Rome and
Naples. |
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Alec turned
12 on August 3. He is in the 7th
grade at William R. Satz School in Holmdel. He
enjoys computer programming and advanced math (he
studied
trigonometry and calculus on his own this year) and for the first time
is
enjoying English. In his spare time,
Alec likes going over to friend Adam’s house, takes care of his fish in
his new
aquarium, plays video games, watches cartoons (Sponge Bob, South Park,
…) on
TV, enjoys playing soccer in Brazil with friends Bernardo and Nick and
cousins
Alexia, Thomas, and Gabriel, and surfs the internet.
He is building his home page on the web: alec.resende.info. His travel soccer
activities take up
a lot of his extra-curricular time. During
Spring and Fall, he has a two-hour clinic on
Tuesdays, two-hour practices on Wednesdays
and Fridays,
and a game on Sundays. In the Winter,
there is a one-hour practice and a game on Sundays.
Alec’s team (the Torpedoes) made big progress
this year, winning the Winter league, being co-champion of their
division in
the Spring and placing second in the Fall. They
went from National 3 division last Fall, to National
2 in the
Spring, National 1 in the Fall, and are now finally in the Premiere
division
for the Spring 2004 season. |
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Lucia is
still at AT&T, having survived several rounds of layoffs this year. She works ten minutes from home.
She is still involved with the design of
telecommunication networks and services for large business customers. Off work, a lot of her time is spent
designing and making jewelry (beads). She
set up a little jewelry factory in the guest room at
home, has
displays at a couple of hair salons around Holmdel, and even has a web
site: luciapolverelli.com. This year, she
traveled to Brazil
twice. The first time was for ten days
in February to be with her dad, and the second time was for ten weeks,
starting
June 6. Her management at AT&T let
her work from Rio for five weeks! She
set up a little office at friend Silvia Barandier’s Lagoa apartment
with high
speed internet access and managed to work fine in long distance mode. The rest of the ten weeks were spent with
Mauricio and the kids on vacation in Rio and the south of Brazil. Lucia’s sister, Ana, married Teles in July
and we all drove to Santa Catarina, for the wedding.
After the wedding, we traveled to
Florianópolis, Curitiba, and São Paulo, before returning
to Rio. In Rio, we spent
most of our time visiting
friends, exercising (Lucia even joined a health club), and eating.
Friend Zina
Katz (from Buenos Aires), who we had not seen in over 20 years, visited
Rio in
August while we were there: we caught up on 20+ years of news with (you
guessed
it) more eating and drinking.. As if by
miracle, Lucia and Mauricio gained no weight during the trip!
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Mauricio had
his first experience with soccer coaching this year.
He coached Alec’s travel team during the
Winter and Spring seasons and was assistant coach in the Fall. And the team did not lose a single match this
year! Mauricio has spent a lot of
his
free time playing with digital photography, not only taking photos, but
also
scanning in old photos and slides to build a digital photo library.
Mauricio is
still working at AT&T Research. Despite
another round of layoffs at Research this year and
the continued
attrition of researchers to university positions, work has not changed
much for
him. He continues to work from home
about half of the time, and still collaborates with lots of people
outside of
AT&T. He is, however, worried about
the future of AT&T Research, specially if people continue leaving
at the
current rate. Work related travel took
Mauricio this year to Florida, Brazil (three times), Portugal, Japan,
and
Washington D.C. In the three trips to
Brazil, he worked with his Ph.D. student Luciana Buriol
(who spent 15 months at
AT&T working with Mauricio in 2001-2002). Luciana
successfully defended her thesis during Mauricio’s trip to
Brazil in November, and will be off to a one-year
post-doc in Rome, Italy,
starting January 2004. Mauricio’s most
exciting trip this year was to Japan for a conference in Kyoto in late
August. He took Alec along for the
ten-day trip. Father and son spent four
days in Tokyo, and six in Kyoto, with a one-day trip to Nara. While Mauricio attended the conference, Alec
spent the day with friend Thiago Ribeiro (Celso Ribeiro’s son
from Rio) going
around Kyoto on their own! They had a
ball. In the world of publishing,
Mauricio (with co-editor Jorge Pinho de Sousa of Porto, Portugal)
published a
new book this year: “Metaheuristics:
Computer Decision-Making.” Another
good piece of publishing news this
year was that the “Handbook of
Applied Optimization,” that Mauricio and friend Panos Pardalos
published in 2002, was awarded “Outstanding
Professional and
Scholarly Titles in Computer Science of 2002,” by the American
Association of
Publishers.
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This year
marked the return to Brazil of friend Geraldo Veiga, who was our guest
during
the first half of the year. We all miss
him, especially the kids. The year ended with two weeks of vacation at
home for
Mauricio, a visit of Mauricio’s mom Renalva, just in time for Christmas
and New
Year’s celebrations, and with Sasha’s trip to Italy with Lucia and
Debbie. Renalva will stay with us until
March 8th,
Lucia’s birthday.
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We want to
wish you happy holidays and a wonderful 2004. Hopefully,
we will get together next year. All the best, Sasha, and Alec |