Live from Austin!

Hell may not have frozen over, but Texas has, and that’s almost as rare. Last night we were driving home from Houston when the temperature dropped below freezing, and the car showed a black ice warning light. Soon it began to sleet.

Texans really don’t know how to deal with snow and ice. I drove slowly and carefully, but people who had bought into the SUV myth were overtaking. Unfortunately, no amount of all-wheel-drive or traction control will help if you hit a patch of wet ice. Before long we rounded a gentle curve, and passed a major accident scene. A big patch of smashed glass was by the central barrier, and an SUV was a little further on, pointing the wrong way with its front left corner crumpled. Seconds later we passed another car, similarly wrecked, then another SUV in a ditch.

Fortunately, we had set out from Houston as soon as it began raining, so we were only around 20 miles from home by the time the roads got really treacherous. I found a truck to follow. My reasoning was as follows:

1. Chances are, the truck driver has years of experience driving in all kinds of weather conditions. So, let him set an appropriate speed.
2. He’s got good visibility to see what’s going on up ahead and slow down in plenty of time.
3. Behind the truck, the ice will be broken up somewhat.
4. Anything an 18 wheeler can safely negotiate, I can probably safely negotiate.
5. One of the biggest dangers when driving in icy conditions is inability to brake. In which case, it’s better to be behind the truck than in front of it.

I also did my best to stick to the middle lane where possible. Again, the reasoning was pretty simple: if the car started sliding, I’d have the maximum time possible to let it stop sliding before I ran out of road.

It’s always worth remembering that a 40mph collision with a solid concrete barrier is quite sufficient to kill you. Combine that with a road that may at any moment decide not to let you put on the brakes, and it’s not hard to deduce that doing 50 mph is a bad move. Some of the trucks put their hazard lights on and drove slowly in formation to block the way and stop various idiots from killing themselves, which I thought was very charitable of them.

By around 15 miles from home, everything had slowed to around 6-8 mph. Fortunately, after 15-20 minutes things eased up a little, and we made it the rest of the way at around 20-30 mph.

The final problem was getting from I-35 to our house, the biggest hazard being the big dip in Oltoft Street just west of the freeway. I eased the car to the top of the hill, and tried to start the descent as slowly as possible. I knew that there was no way I was going to be able to brake significantly before I got to the bottom; I took my foot off the accelerator completely, and let the electric motors provide a little drag on all 4 wheels.

As we hit the bottom of the hill and came up the other side, we realized that the power was out–along with all the traffic lights. Fortunately, there was plenty of time to slow before the first junction, and people were pretty much behaving sensibly in the absence of signals. We made it home safely, and I started trying to un-knot every muscle in my body.

Normally at this time of year, the average temperature hits a high of just over 60°F, 15°C. Today the high was 2°C. Apparently it hasn’t been this cold since 1927. But as Texas’s own Bill Hicks might have put it: Remember, increasing incidence of climactic extremes has nothing to do with so-called global warming, and you’d be a fool and a Communist to think otherwise. This is just a perfectly normal bit of freak weather you’d expect every hundred years or so…and so was Hurricane Katrina, and so is this year’s Amazon drought, and so is the sudden lack of ice in the arctic, and so is the freakishly warm Carribean ocean weather that has bleached the coral reefs, and the drought emergency in the western USA, and the heaviest rainfall since records began in Australia, the freak snowfalls in Kazakhstan, the record heat in Prague, the blizzards in the UK, the floods in Cumbria, and the 195km/h storms in Sweden.

Anyway, Houston…

We’d gone there because I have some time off, and it was a fairly cheap alternative to sitting on my ass watching TV all day, nice though the new television is. We both got a religious experience into the bargain; I got mine at the Johnson Space Center, and rothko got hers at The Rothko Chapel, of course.

Theodore Dalrymple writes about the German psyche, and how even now Germans find it hard to feel national pride, or even anger at what was done to them in Dresden. My German roots are distant enough that I’ll have to take his word for that. However, he then goes on to diagnose a deep malaise in modern Germany:

The urban environment of Germany, whose towns and cities were once among the most beautiful in the world, second only to Italy’s, is now a wasteland of functional yet discordant modern architecture, soulless and incapable of inspiring anything but a vague existential unease, with a sense of impermanence and unreality that mere prosperity can do nothing to dispel. […] Nor are the comforts of victimhood available to the Germans as they survey the devastation of their homeland.

Of course, that pre-supposes that modern architecture is “devastation”. Apparently Dalrymple feels that the proper response to the end of World War II would have been to replicas of the destroyed classical architecture and make Germany a kind of Weimar Disneyland with compulsory lederhosen for all.

Instead, the influence of the bauhaus is everywhere. Though a few old Gothic typeface street signs remain, minimalist sans-serif typography is almost ubiquitous. And why not? The bauhaus is a piece of 20th Century culture Germany can be proud of; it profoundly influenced the entire world—and Hitler hated it.

So, I say better to look forward with modern architecture, than to build faux reproductions of the medieval Germanic buildings that Hitler loved.

Collective pride is denied the Germans because, if pride is taken in the achievements of one’s national ancestors, it follows that shame for what they have done must also be accepted.

What can I say? Apparently Mr Dalrymple hasn’t spent much time in the company of ordinary Americans. Even now, US torture is being written off as the responsibility of a few “bad apples”, as the architect of the policy gets moved into the Attorney General’s office, and SUVs sport magnetic “God Bless Our Troops” ribbons.

A young German once said to me, “I don’t feel German, I feel European.” This sounded false to my ears: it had the same effect upon me as the squeal of chalk on a blackboard, and sent a shiver down my spine. One might as well say, “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian.”

Hyperbole aside, it’s not surprising that a regular contributor to the Daily Telegraph would be horrified by the thought of identifying as European. But what’s wrong with saying “I don’t feel human, I feel mammalian”? Am I the only person to have thought that while reading the newspaper?

Coincidentally, National Geographic reports that scientists have successfully fused human and animal cells, and that plans are underway to engineer mice with human-style (albeit very small) brains. There’s an obvious joke about chimp/human hybrids, but I don’t really need to spell it out, do I?

The news from the House of Pain led one person on Slashdot to ask: if we can “uplift” animals to a more human-like state, why shouldn’t we do so? My response was that if we do, they might start thinking and behaving like humans. If you want to know what’s wrong with that, ask a German.

Don’t get me wrong, I know a number of wonderful human beings. I’m just not wild about humanity as a whole. In that respect my philosophy has something in common with that of Bill Hicks (authentic Texan): as he put it, “We’re a virus with shoes”

A question from Dan

What are the top ten places you want to visit before you die (they can be places you’ve already been, if you want to go back)?

Well, I don’t keep a list, so I might miss a few important ones, but here are ten…

I’d like to go to Japan. I think it would probably require that I be accompanied by someone who spoke some Japanese, however.

Paris again.

Rome again, particularly the Pantheon. I could give the Vatican a miss second time around. Generally the Roman stuff in Rome is the stuff worth seeing.

I’d like to go to Dealey Plaza, and visit the book depository. Bill Hicks did, and said that it was obvious that there was no way even a marksman could have shot JFK from there, which intrigues me. I expect there’s not much reason to go to Dallas, though.

Amsterdam, to check it out as a possible place to escape to. [Done!]

The Moon, or at least low Earth orbit. I suspect I’m going to have to learn to live with disappointment, however.

When I was younger, I always wanted to go to Colorado, particularly Boulder. I’m not really sure why, I just did—rather like how I always wanted to go to Canada, and people would always ask me why.

I’d like to go to a Skunk Show. There’s one in Ohio and the big one down in Florida.

Las Vegas. Just to get the full-on USA experience. [Done!]

In retrospect, it was my own damn fault. I should have gone for the peppermint. But no, I chose the raspberry Earl Grey, which is apparently full of caffeine. That, combined with worrying about the day to come, meant that I only got around four hours of actual sleep on Saturday night.

Sunday morning, the taxi didn’t quite turn up. In spite of the fact that I had spelled out the street name, somehow the house number had been omitted again. I walked up the street with my cases and got in the taxi.

This was not the usual taxi company. The usual taxi company had been uncontactable, because like an idiot I’d put off calling to arrange a taxi until ten on Saturday night. This taxi looked like it was about thirty years old. There was no traffic on the streets at 07:30, so obviously the driver charged me the standard rate instead of running the meter. I’m sure when I get back and have to sit in traffic, the meter will be running.

I got to the airport, and took a quick look at the queues. There were several hundred IBM people travelling that morning, and it certainly looked like it. I’d read the small print, however, and knew that since I had an e-ticket, I could check in curbside. The queue there only had two people ahead of me. The downside, of course, was having to stand outside in -14C weather, but I was wearing my serious winter coat and hat.

Security was no problem, and I found myself with over an hour before boarding time. Time for food. Time for next problem. The “restaurants” were only serving breakfast food until 11:00, but I’d be on the plane by then, and the cheap-ass bastards at American Airlines didn’t intend to serve any food, even though the flight was over lunchtime. I ended up picking a Burger King “Croissanwich” and “French Toast Sticks” as the most edible and lunch-like option.

I was starting to feel a little cranky by now, so I listened to Bill Hicks’ “Flying Saucer Tour Vol. 1” to recalibrate my crankiness meter. While I was doing so, someone bearing a remarkable resemblance to Timmy from South Park arrived in the departure area with his two companions. His vocabulary was more limited than Timmy’s, in that he could only say “Uuuurrrrrrgh”, but he seemed to be compensating by really putting all his energy into it. I wondered if he was going to be sitting next to me on the plane.

As it turned out, he wasn’t. Sitting next to me instead were two teenage girls, students, probably on their way down to Florida for Spring Break. They wanted to sit by the window, which suited me fine, so I swapped seats with them. Eavesdropping on their conversation before takeoff was mind-numbing; it seemed to be all about one of their friends, her fashion faux-pas, and how she’d really let herself go and should ease off on the french fries if she had any respect for herself at all. I amused myself by wondering if they’d be appearing in the next “Girls Gone Wild” video.

The plane looked to be about as old as the taxi. It did take off, however, and once it was airborne I stuck in some earplugs and tried to get some sleep. Lunch was an organic low-fat energy bar, one of the selection I’d brought with me. I’ve been to these events before and know that skipping proper meals is an inevitability, even without the airlines and airports conspiring to keep me hungry.

Several hours of intermittent napping later, the plane touched down in Orlando. As I was leaving, I was amazed to hear the family behind me talking about their pet skunk! I seriously considered trying to get an invite to meet it, but what would you think if some stranger on a plane showed an unnatural obsession with your household pet?

On the plane I’d seen some newspaper headlines about the peace rally in DC. I wished I could have been there. On the bus to the hotel I used the phone to check how CNN and the New York Times were reporting the event.

The Wyndham Palace seems to be a more upscale hotel than the Swan and Dolphin. Unfortunately as Team IBM arrived, all the hotel’s computers crashed. The hotel clearly has some serious failover issues—without the computers online they can’t issue room keys, check people in or out, or do much of anything really. We stood around for quarter of an hour while someone coaxed the Windows server back into life. The salesmen did what salesmen do in that kind of situation, which is find out from the staff what kind of computers they are using, what kind of database, and so on. (Not IBM, happily.)

The room turned out to be a reasonable size. It’s on the 21st floor, and looks out over Epcot. The desk has a Hermann Miller Aeron chair. (Which is comfortable enough, but not worth the outrageous price.) I found what was allegedly an ethernet port, but it didn’t work. The TV remote didn’t work either. I reported the problems and went to find a shuttle bus so I could check in for the conference.

The woman at the front desk told me the shuttle buses were leaving from the Conference Center on level 1. I went to level one and looked around. There were a bunch of signs telling me that the Conference Center was on level 3. I went up to level 3 in the elevator, and found myself back in reception. I repeated the process via a different route, in case I had missed something. Frustrated, I returned to reception. This time, a different woman told me to go to the conference center on level 1. I pointed out that I’d just been to level 1, and the signs there had told me the conference center was on level 3.

At that point, finally, she let me in on the secret. See if you can guess what it is before reading on.

Think you’ve got it? Well, here it is: There are two different level 1s. The level 1 you can get to from reception is the hotel level 1, which isn’t connected to the conference center level 1. You can only move between the two on level 3, which is why the signs direct you there. To add to the amusement value, the conference center wing of the building isn’t shown on the floor plans. She told me how to get there—along two corridors and down some escalators. I did my best to appear grateful rather than angry, and wandered off.

The bus took me to the Swan and Dolphin hotels, where the main conference is. I registered, and was given an attendee badge. So far, so good—except I’m an exhibitor. I asked about this and was directed to an exceptions booth. The woman at the exceptions booth asked me what my pedestal number was for the exhibition hall. I had no idea, as someone else had dealt with all those details, and hadn’t thought to tell me. She checked a list of names, and found that I wasn’t on it. She checked the list of pedestals, and said she couldn’t find ours listed there either.

I was pretty skeptical of this last claim, as I’d seen a photo of the pedestal at the previous iteration of the event, held in Spain last week. I asked if I could at least pick up the uniform shirt we’re supposed to wear. I was told that there was no way I could be given anything, even information. Apparently they must have some major problems with unauthorized people maliciously showing up and demonstrating products.

I checked my watch. I was due at a team meeting with the head of software sales in about 20 minutes, and really didn’t have time to argue. I was also tired, and getting distinctly cranky again.

I picked up two Krispy Kreme donuts on the way to the meeting. One of the advantages of having been to half a dozen previous shows at Disney World is that I know the secret location of the cafeteria that has the cheap food and Krispy Kreme donuts. It really is almost like Mission Impossible—down two unmarked corridors, along a third, I’d never have found it if I hadn’t been desperate for affordable vegetarian food at a previous event.

Damn, those were fine donuts.

The meeting was soon over. The person responsible for arranging the pedestals arrived late and stood around by the door, and tried to run away as soon as possible, but I ran after her and caught her. Before long she’d vouched for me and I’d been issued an Exhibitor badge.

I returned to the Wyndham Palace Hotel, exhausted. I picked a restaurant by the simple method of finding the one that was actually open. It had what was allegedly an Australian outback theme—the waiters were dressed like Steve Irwin, only with full length trousers instead of shorts. The decor was eccentrically inaccurate; I’m pretty sure they don’t have gorillas in the Australian outback. The food was cheaper than Disney, which meant I managed to get my first proper meal of the day and not exceed the IBM per diem expenses limit of $32. The food was pretty good, the bread was fresh, and the butter was shaped like a kangaroo. I took a photo of it.

I returned to my room, crashed into bed, and slept for ten hours.

As a Zippy the Pinhead fan, there was something very important I had to do while I was in San Francisco. So we went to a convenience store, and I bought some Ding Dongs. As Zippy fans will know, Ding Dongs are only available in the western part of the USA; in the midwest and on the east coast, they’re known as King Dons. They’re the same thing, just with a different name (for obscure legal reasons, apparently).

I wouldn’t normally eat Hostess baked goods, but I felt a great urge to eat a Ding Dong while admiring the Transamerica Pyramid. I decided to skip the taco sauce, however.

On Sunday we had lunch at Ghirardelli Square. There was a cool frite and crêpe restaurant with DJ-mixed music; afterwards I picked up a little chocolate (of course). Next, we headed for Fisherman’s Wharf…

If you’re ever in San Francisco, I can thoroughly recommend staying at least half a kilometer from Fisherman’s Wharf. It’s a tacky, stinky strip of bad seafood restaurants and stores selling crappy souvenirs. At weekends, it’s also crowded with enough noisy obnoxious tourists to make even the most hardened city dweller feel crowd anxiety. We walked through and satisfied ourselves there was nothing worth walking into, and left as quickly as possible.

The one good thing down by Pier 39 was a homeless guy who was providing entertainment to try and earn his bum dollar; Bill Hicks would have loved it. The guy would crouch down behind two pieces of bush, one in each hand. As a bovine tourist passed, he would leap up and rapidly draw aside the disguise, usually startling the tourists. I kinda felt like giving him money.

I didn’t, for the same reasons I didn’t give money to any of the other beggars: call me unfeeling, but I don’t want to fund their drug habits, whether it’s cigarettes, weed, alcohol, or whatever. So instead I send money to charities that feed the homeless nourishing meals. Sure, giving them the choice between drugs and food is fine in principle, but I figure if they were smart enough to make that kind of choice for themselves they wouldn’t be on the street, would they?

“San Francisco… it’s where the voices in your head kept telling you to go!”

Having said that, I feel I can now admit that our restaurant search for the evening took us to a particularly fine place called Indigo. California cuisine, and quite the most incredible meal I could recall eating in years. A delicious explosion of flavors in every bite. Kinda expensive by my standards, at around $35 per head. Sure, I appreciate really good food every now and again, but I’m more of a diner kind of guy.

People are still talking about the Pat Robertson / Jerry Falwell comments, that America was attacked because the gays, atheists, pro-choice people and ACLU members made god leave us defenseless.

I have to say, I feel quite honored that I’m now on his list four times over. No doubt about it—if they and their cronies ever achieve their revolution, I’ll be one of the first ones up against the wall. In fact, there probably won’t be enough space on my arm for all the tattoos. They’ll have to load me on a Concorde to get me to the camps fast enough.

So Falwell and Robertson are now whining that the evil liberal media are quoting them out of context. If you believe that, perhaps you’d like to read the entire context? It seems to me that “You’re quoting me out of context!” is the favorite excuse of the person who has been caught saying what he really thinks. It’s hard for me to think of an example where someone has genuinely been misrepresented by out-of-context quotation, unless you include ads for Hollywood movies that turn review quotes from “Amazing that they could release this crap” into “Amazing”.

Yesterday I finished off the Bill Hicks CD collection. I really needed something I could laugh at, something that was funny yet at the same time appropriately vicious, morbid and offensive. I can’t help pondering the fact that when Bill Hicks was my age, he was already dead. Ah, if only he had lived instead of Falwell…