Tag Archives: Christmas

Christmas 2010: Flying to the UK

As you may have seen on the news, the UK has been experiencing some freakishly cold weather. The weekend before Christmas was marked by a sudden record breaking cold snap. Chesham in Buckinghamshire hit -26 Celsius, a temperature I don’t think I ever experienced during the years I lived in the area.

Heathrow airport was engulfed in snow and ice, thousands of passengers were stranded at the airport for days, and it started to look as if our Christmas trip to see my family was going to be canceled at the last minute. That would have been ironic, as it was pretty much arranged at the last minute.

The Spanish company that now owns the airport hadn’t foreseen that this winter might be like… well, last winter, which was also freakishly cold and snowy. There weren’t enough staff on hand to clear snow, so by end of day Monday there were still buried planes, and almost all flights were canceled.

On Tuesday, rothko found the BAA web site and discovered that it was publishing a daily list of the lucky planes that were being allowed in or out. That day, the early evening flight from Houston to London was one of the lucky ones. On Wednesday it was listed as a winner again, so we gamely set off for the airport.

In spite of all the TSA horror stories, I have to say that I’ve never had any problems with the staff at Austin. As usual, security theater was a painless procedure, and everyone was friendly. We were soon sitting at the gate for our connecting flight to Houston, sipping a couple of lattes and trying not to feel foolish wearing winter boots. Unfortunately, our mood was rather spoilt when our flight’s departure was delayed by an hour. I’ve come to expect this sort of thing, and this year I had taken multiple precautions. Firstly, I had booked our flights with a two hour gap in Houston. Secondly, I had booked us on the earlier transatlantic flight–so if we missed that, we would still have the possibility of being bumped onto the later flight. It turned out that we arrived in Houston and had time to walk to our departure gate, getting there just as the flight was just starting to board. We got to our cattle-class seats and settled in, and I tried to relax.

It being an overnight eastbound flight, my plan was to skip all caffeine and try to sleep on the plane. I switched my watch to UTC and unpacked my latest piece of experimental travel sleepwear. Desperation has led me to try a lot of purported solutions to the problem of sleeping on planes.

There’s the chemical approach, of course; I tried melatonin, and found that it did indeed make me sleepy and give my body clock a good kick into UK time. Unfortunately, it also left me feeling weird and spacey, and on one business trip I spent a perfectly normal day in the office working with colleagues, only to discover the next morning that I had absolutely no recollection of anything I had done or said. So, now I avoid melatonin unless I can’t get to sleep any other way.

The main problem with sleeping in an economy class seat is that they don’t recline significantly, and your head ends up lolling around and waking you up. So after the melatonin experiment, the next thing I tried was one of those neck pillows shaped like a letter C. Mine was cheap and inflatable, but there are all kinds of fancy ones with buckwheat filling and deluxe covering. My experience is that they’re useless; they don’t stop your head from falling forward at all, and they don’t stop sideways movement enough to prevent a painful crick in the neck.

After that, I tried a wedge-shaped inflatable pillow device that you’ve probably seen in the SkyMall catalog. The idea is that you inflate it, and it fills the space between you and the seat in front. You then lean forward onto it and sleep. The first problem with this plan is that as you sit and inflate what looks like a misshapen beige beach ball, you can’t help feeling like a colossal tool. Once you deal with your pesky self esteem issue by reminding yourself that you will never see any of the people on the plane ever again, you discover that the pillow is designed on the assumption that the person in front will remain in their seat for the duration of the flight and not keep reclining and un-reclining. It also helps if you don’t have anything to eat or drink, and so don’t need to use your tray table. I tried to look past all those snags and sleep on the thing, but it turns out that the inflatable surface naturally ends up bulging outwards, and my head would keep sliding off to one side or the other. I tried letting some air out, but that just made the thing fail to maintain enough shape to rest on. Imagine trying to sleep by hugging a PVC beach ball and resting your head on the back of the seat in front, and you’ll get the idea. Utterly, utterly useless, even though it looks really plausible. Then again, isn’t that the case for so many SkyMall items?

This trip I had a new device to try, and it actually works. That is, it solves the head lolling about problem; there are still plenty of other difficulties you’ll face trying to sleep on a plane, but at least you won’t wake up every time your chin hits your chest. This latest gadget is called Nap Strap. You start by wrapping a belt-like loop of Velcro around the headrest. Once that’s securely in place, you put on an elasticated headband which has two Velcro elastic side pieces that stick to the headrest strap, and gently hold your head against the headrest. The headband also has a soft fabric eyeshade. As far as the tool factor goes, it doesn’t look all that different from the sleep masks people wear on planes all the time. The only gotcha is making sure the strap doesn’t get in the way of any in flight entertainment being enjoyed by the person in the seat behind. Well, that and the price–the Nap Strap seems to sell for an utterly outrageous $99, though I’m pretty sure I didn’t pay that much when I bought it a year or three ago.

So, the head strap did its job, and I slept a little. That is, until the poor ergonomics and hard seat cushion of the seat itself made my butt start to ache… So next time, I’ll be trying a pillow of some sort to sit on.

We arrived at Heathrow on time, and the plane touched down gently–and then started swerving from side to side in a terrifying manner until the pilot brought it under control. But we were down, we had made it, Christmas was saved. I sped through immigration with my EU passport, collected our luggage, and waited for rothko, then we emerged into the arrivals hall where my delighted parents were waiting to greet us.

Google Wishes You Merry Christmas, Launches Google Santa Initiative

Lack of Information at North Pole Leads Google to Draft New Privacy Policies

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – December 15, 2009 UTC – As the holiday season continued, Google Inc. today announced that it is modifying its privacy policies in a new two-part Google Santa initiative.

The inspiration for the Google Santa project came from the realization that Santa has very little information to go on when judging whether people are naughty or nice. Now, thanks to Google’s advanced data mining systems, Santa will be given access to your search history, a log of all the web sites you visit which use Google Analytics, any passwords needed to access them from your Google Toolbar, the contents of your Gmail account, and complete transcripts of any Google Talk IM conversations made in the last year.

“Santa has a clear need for this information,” said Google founder Sergey Brin. “His intuition is unmatched, but his ability to sniff out naughty people will be dramatically improved now that he can search your e-mail and check whether you’ve visited any naughty web sites.”

“Do no evil,” added Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “Because otherwise we will find out, and we’ll tell Santa.”

Google also announced phase two of Google Santa, to launch in January. A new area of the Google Shopping site will enable users to sell coal in a global marketplace.

“By aggregating individual users’ stock of fossil fuels,” explained Google co-founder Larry Page, “we will enable ordinary people to participate in the global energy economy by selling their pieces of coal to their local electricity company.”

“In addition,” he added, “a modest 70% cut of the proceeds will be used to purchase carbon offset credits, making the overall operation carbon neutral, and helping me feel better about my personal Boeing 767.”

About Google Inc.

Google’s innovative web technologies log the lives of millions of people around the world every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google’s targeted advertising program, which is the largest and fastest growing in the industry, provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while recording the browsing patterns of users across almost the entire World Wide Web. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the North Pole. For more information, visit www.google.com.

It’s not all fun and tweeting

For Christmas, we got the budgies a new toy. It dispenses clean white paper in a long strip, so they can chew and shred it. Since they finished demolishing their Xmas tree last night, I put the new toy in the cage.

As soon as he got a good look at it, Chester went into a full scale panic attack. He was flying frantically back and forth, shedding feathers. Lola followed Chester’s lead and panicked too, though she clearly wasn’t sure what exactly she was supposed to be panicking about. I had to hurriedly take the toy back out and hide it away.

As soon as I opened the cage doors again, they both came out and demanded to sit on my shoulders in the office for comfort. Chester’s still a bit jumpy, and unfortunately unlike Lola he hasn’t worked out that I don’t like having my ear preened.

So, looks like I’ll have to introduce the new toy really gradually… Probably starting by hanging it up just outside the cage for a week or so for Chester to get used to it.

The gap between theory and practice

I did one of those online religion questionnaires. I’m not going to reproduce the whole list of what it suggested for me; the interesting part is it rated Buddhism above Secular Humanism. (Specifically, Therevada Buddhism.)

Intellectually, that’s spot on, but the problem I always have is observance. Somehow I seem to be unable to sustain a practice of regular meditation. And without at least that, I don’t see that I could honestly describe myself as a Buddhist.

On the plus side, I managed to keep exercising through until the Christmas vacation; and now that the new year has started and my back has settled down a bit, I’m back to exercising daily, at least during the week. (It didn’t happen this weekend, for various timing reasons.)

Most people manage to keep going to church or otherwise practicing religion, but fail to exercise. I suppose I should consider myself lucky that my problem is the other way around.

Format wars

The New York Times reports that most people have decided to sit out the HD format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD.

I’m one of them. I remember DCC vs MiniDisc. MiniDisc won, if by ‘won’ you mean ‘lingered for a few years longer’. I also remember SACD vs DVD-Audio. Both of those lost, in that even people who have DVD players capable of playing DVD Audio (like me) typically don’t bother to hook them up to support it (like me). I saw an SACD player in someone’s house at Christmas, but it was being used as a CD player.

As the guy from Sony admits, the improvement from DVD to HD is pretty marginal unless your TV is 40″ or greater. This seems to match my conclusions from comparing 1080i OTA HDTV to upscaled DVD on our TV.

Then there are the downsides. The most obvious being the sluggish performance. For Blu-ray, typically it takes 30 seconds after hitting the power button before the disc tray opens; 30 more seconds after inserting the disc before you see menus. Of course, that’s the optimistic case, it can be much worse. Assuming it actually works at all. And to think I get impatient waiting 10 seconds for my DVD player.

Then there’s region encoding. I like being able to buy UK TV shows and movies legally and watch them, and I’m not prepared to go back to having a disc player that’s limited to US releases. So I’m not buying Blu-ray until region-free players become available.

Then there’s ripping video. Sure, it’s kinda specialized, but as iPods and portable video players and video-capable phones become more commonplace, it’s increasingly appealing. I did consider ripping some TV shows to watch on my BlackBerry on the plane this Christmas.

So as far as I’m concerned, wake me when the war is over and I can get a player that plays the winning format, in all regions, for under $300. Until then, I’m not interested. Even if I get a PS3, I can’t see myself buying any Blu-ray discs.

Minnesota thoughts

It wasn’t too bad when the wind stopped–only about -3 to -6 Celsius. When we arrived in Minneapolis, it was actually slightly above freezing.

I managed to screw up my back somehow en route. I’m not sure how. I think it was a combination of nasty airplane seats, improvised pillows, five hours of journey, and cold gray weather.

We managed to rent a Prius. The logic was that although it isn’t 4 wheel drive, on icy roads it’s better to know exactly how the car will handle and how effective the brakes are.

I can’t help wishing that the in-laws lived in one of the pretty parts of Minnesota, like the north east. Down in the south east it’s basically flat and empty.

There are quite a few Mexican businesses. What must it be like to move from Mexico to Minnesota?

On Christmas Day I was laying on the sofa at sara’s grandmother’s house. In my head was “Nation” by Colourbox. I remembered buying the CD in London, sitting on the train at Baker Street and unwrapping it. It must have been 20 years ago. Why remember it now? I have no idea.

Christmas music

I just picked up some more Christmas music from the Amazon MP3 store. For all that I like the iTunes Music Store, the Amazon MP3 store is better in every way.

First off, the selection is far, far better. I say that because I don’t buy DRM I can’t easily remove, so the iTMS’s rather anemic selection of “iTunes Plus” albums compares badly to Amazon’s library.

Secondly, there’s the format issue. For all that 256kbps AAC is theoretically better than 256kbps MP3, in practice I tend to encode with LAME’s standard preset, which averages less than 256kbps and is practically indistinguishable from CD in my personal testing. I think it’s easy to be too picky about digital audio. If I could approach my vinyl-buying self of 1983 and offer him his record library in 160kbps MP3s on an iPod, he’d leap at the chance. So given that the quality is good enough, I’d rather have MP3s I can play anywhere than AAC files I can only play most places.

Amazon have the convenience angle sorted too. In fact, it’s a little bit too convenient–it’s one click to buy an album once you install their downloader. The downloader automatically files everything neatly in folders by artist and album, and adds the tracks to iTunes when it’s done.

But enough about the technical jiggery-pokery. The actual music is what counts. First of all I picked up the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s album of music from A Charlie Brown Christmas. I’m not a jazz fan, and I’m not a big fan of the TV adaptation of Peanuts either, but somehow the soundtrack is perfect.

Next I picked up a couple of Cocteau Twins Christmas singles from a compilation. This is where digital downloads really shine–I can buy two songs for 89¢ each rather than a 4-CD compilation I don’t want.

I then went looking for quirky Christmas music, and found Tis The Season For Los Straitjackets.  I already have a Tijuana Brass Christmas album and a two different Moog Christmas albums. I’m kinda disappointed that Señor Coconut hasn’t tried his hand at a Kraftwerk Christmas album yet.  Ah well, at least there’s the 8bits of Christmas.

Also in my collection are Mark Mothersbaugh’s Joyeux Mutato, and the Illegal Art A MUTATED CHRISTMAS release. Plus, of course, a hefty dose of bootleg/mashup Christmas tracks downloaded from the web.

If anyone has any other recommendations for quirky but listenable Christmas albums, please post ‘em.

London

While we were in England, we got the train from Bournemouth to visit London.

London was an important part of my life as soon as I was old enough to be allowed to travel there without adult supervision. Some people are naturally country folk, some people are city people; even though I grew up in small villages and quaint towns, that was never where I really wanted to be.

I was curious to see how London had changed since I last saw it, nearly 10 years ago. We arranged to stay overnight with Shimrit in Stoke Newington, which Sara amusingly misheard as “Stoat Newington”.

Memories fade, and my main reason for going to London was to take my new video camera and visit a bunch of familiar places and record them; the streets, the buildings, the traffic, the crowds.

We arrived at Waterloo Station, so we started off by wandering towards the Thames and taking a look at the London Eye. The Eye had been built some time after I left the country. I’d seen it on Doctor Who, but not in real life. We didn’t actually go up in it; there was a long queue, and the ride itself would have taken another half hour or so out of our busy schedule. There were more important places to see.

We crossed over to the Houses of Parliament. They were protest-free, thanks to the new “Serious Organized Crime and Police Act”, which bans such serious crimes as holding up a banner outside Parliament. We continued on to Parliament Square, where some Iraq war protesters were quietly camped out along the fence facing Parliament. Across the street, heavily armed police kept everyone away from their elected representatives.

We turned right and headed along Whitehall, past the Treasury and Cabinet Office. Some tourists were gawping at guardsmen outside Horse Guards; it’s good to see that the Queen is doing her duty and keeping the Colour regularly Trooped. We passed the old War Office; and defra, who were probably busy panicking over the latest outbreak of foot and mouth.

Trafalgar Square was disappointingly blemished by scaffolding, tarpaulins and wooden hoardings. It was also full of sky rats, of course, but they’re expected, so you can’t really call them a disappointment. We stopped at a small Italian restaurant nearby for a spot of lunch, then continued towards Leicester Square.

As we walked past the Odeon towards Piccadilly Circus, everything started to get very familiar, and I started to get tearful. The Swiss Centre is still as it was, and the Trocadero hasn’t changed much. Apparently the former is due to be modernized a bit, so I was probably lucky to get to experience it in its retro cuckoo clock glory.

We visited tate modern, of course. One thing we always missed in Boston was a decent modern art gallery, and Austin isn’t much better, though the Blanton does try.

By the evening, we were exhausted. We had some vegetarian curry at a restaurant near Shimrit’s pad, then crashed on the futon.

The next day we tried to take things a little easier, and started off at Oxford Circus for a day of shopping.

Now, I could be misremembering, but it seemed to me that the crowds were far worse than ten years ago. It was a rainy English summer day, but the herds of people reminded me more of the run-up to Christmas. We struggled towards Tottenham Court Road, ducking into stores here and there.

Given the current exchange rate, we tried to buy as little as possible; but inevitably, there were books, CDs and DVDs unavailable in the US which we were unable to resist. We went in to HMV, but tried to limit ourselves to stuff with a single digit price.

We had lunch at The Plaza, which had mysteriously moved the food court up to the second floor and made the basement vanish entirely. Baked potatoes. They’re not nearly as popular in the US. I used to buy one most Saturdays, from a guy with a cart in the Market Square in Cambridge.

Tottenham Court Road is still just like it used to be. I even recognized several of the gadget stores. The infamous Centre Point is still there, and still unnavigable by foot. The Telecom Tower is still visible from Oxford Street, but sadly sanity has prevailed and its existence is no longer an official secret.

The biggest change to London is that there are now coffee shops everywhere. Back in the 90s I had to bring an espresso machine back with me from Italy; now, you can’t walk for more than a minute or two without finding somewhere offering Illy or some other variety of “Genuine Italian espresso”. And tasty snacks, too. I definitely approve.

One good English food item I had forgotten about until I saw them at Waterloo Station was the pasty. I wonder if there’s somewhere in Austin that will sell me a good pasty?

Anyhow, we finished up our day with a little book shopping at Foyle’s and Borders, then got the train back to Bournemouth.

Wii!

Perhaps the kidney stone in the urethra of Nintendo’s supply chain is finally passing, because Wii is now starting to appear in stores. Controllers are readily available, and I managed to put in an order on Toys”R”Us’s web site during one of the 6 minute periods when the console was in stock. So, hopefully in a week or two we’ll be Wii-ing.

Ironically, I finally saw screen shots of a couple of PS3 games that interest me: Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction and LittleBigPlanet. And if Fatal Inertia ends up being disappointing, Sony are working on a real Wipeout for PS3. So I’m fairly optimistic that there will be a good reason to buy a PS3 some time before Christmas.

But right now, I’m much more interested in Zelda, Super Paper Mario, WarioWare, Elebits, Kororinpa, and Prince of Persia: Rival Swords (since I skipped Two Thrones). I also plan to visit some of the GameCube’s back catalog; the cube has been sitting idle since I failed to get component video to work, but the Wii should solve that problem.

John Edwards, man of the people

Democratic Presidential hopeful John Edwards has spoken eloquently about the plight of the poor in America, saying that “poverty is the great moral issue of our century.” In his 2004 speech to the DNC, he said:

John Kerry and I believe that we shouldn’t have two different economies in America: one for people who are set for life, they know their kids and their grand-kids are going to be just fine; and then one for most Americans, people who live paycheck to paycheck.

As the official “John Edwards ’08 Blog” put it recently:

Income inequality means more than 40 million people lacking health insurance or millions more having insufficient health insurance that does not cover preventive care. The gap between the income or wealth of those with the highest ammount (sic) of money in a society and those with the lowest can be a source of disease in itself.

[...] For instance, one study showed that a young man living in Bangladesh where poverty was severe but fairly uniform had a higher life expectancy than a young man living in Harlem, in the USA, a land where income disparity is the worst of any of the so called first world nations.

In the mean time, John Edwards has just purchased a 28,000 square foot mansion on an estate outside Chapel Hill NC, having sold his previous mansion for $5.2 million. The new Edwards estate is expected to be valued at over $6 million.

The main house itself is a mere 10,000 square feet or so. The rest of the floor space is in the recreation room—or rather, the 15,600 square foot recreation building. I can already picture Christmas with the Edwards family; perhaps the kids will play charades on one of the two stages, while John practices his speeches from the other. If they have guests for Christmas and run short of space, the master bedroom is 600 square feet, so they’ll always be able to put 10 extra king size double beds in there.

Of course, last month when John Edwards announced his intention to run for President, he didn’t do it from his home. No, he went to New Orleans, and helped a few poor people renovate a house that is probably smaller than the roofed walkway connecting the two sections of his own humble abode.

For some unaccountable reason there has been a little carping from the peanut gallery. People seem to think that the Edwards lifestyle is a little out of keeping from someone who says he’s so upset by income inequality. Me, I have no doubt that John Edwards cares deeply about the plight of the poor, and I’m sure he’ll be employing a dozen or so to sanitize his toilets, vacuum his rugs, clean his pool, and polish his basketball court. And his squash court. And his four storey observation tower.

Once again, reality is all too eerily reminiscent of a story from The Onion.