Live from Austin!

From the Wall St Journal:

 Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

So there we have it. Dicking around with the clocks twice a year and making life awkward for software developers is not only a waste of time, it’s also a waste of energy and money, at least in places where people have air conditioning in summer.

Digital TV means crystal clear reception from an $8 wire loop antenna. It means beautiful sharp images a meter across with no visible scan lines.

It also means occasionally having to reboot your television.

It’s just the way things are. I have to reboot my cellphone every day or so, or a memory leak eventually causes it to crash. I have to reboot the printer once a month or so. Our answering machine has needed rebooting a few times, too, and the other day I rebooted the car. I haven’t had to reboot my watch, but it does have to sit and calculate for a while when I change physical time zone. I’m sure in a few more years, I’ll be rebooting the toaster whenever it starts burning toast.

Like a Mac, our TV is entirely software controlled, even powering itself on and off when ordered to by the software. There’s no physical on/off switch, just a button that requests that the software turn the set on or off.

Unfortunately, there’s a bug. Every now and again, the software will think there’s no incoming signal, and ask the hardware to turn off the screen to save power. After a second or two it’ll realize it made a mistake, and ask the screen to power up again. It happens very intermittently, I’d guess once every dozen hours or so, but that doesn’t stop it from being annoying. At one point there was a TV episode on the TiVo that would reliably make it happen at a certain point.

So, I wrote to Sharp asking if this was a known glitch with Aquos TVs. They called me back, and had me put the TV into a special hidden maintenance mode. It turned out my TV needed a software update, something to do with a power glitch in Aquos models that support CableCard. I was refered to a local Sharp service engineer, who brought over a couple of flash cards and apparently did the update. So far, so good.

Something about this disturbs me, though. More and more outwardly simple objects that we interact with are controlled by complex software, and we’re apprently still no closer to solving the problem of delivering reliable software. I didn’t feel too bad when the car needed a firmware upgrade, because a car is a really complicated system—especially a hybrid car that needs to control 2 engines at once and trade off energy between them. But TV is conceptually so simple, and it used to involve no software at all. Digital is nice, and all, but because of the need to decode MPEG-2 we’ve quietly lost simplicity of design. And that’s before you even consider the fact that ATSC is a horrible, horrible piece of design-by-committee with 18 different formats.

Squirrels don’t hibernate during winter, but they do slow down their metabolism to conserve energy. Research suggests that their immune systems partially shut down as a result. Perhaps for this reason, squirrels often develop mange in winter.

Our resident alpha squirrel, Blacktip, developed a bad case of fur loss over winter. It started on his neck and chest, but soon spread to his belly and thighs, leaving him pink and itchy. Apparently squirrels usually recover on their own once spring arrives, but this particular critter showed no signs of getting better. I took the feed box away so he wouldn’t spread whatever it was to the other squirrels, and considered my options.

After reading everything I could find on the Internet about squirrel fur loss, it seemed pretty clear that the culprit in this case was notoedric mange–the symptoms matched exactly. Further research revealed that there is a common animal parasite medication that is used to treat notoedric mange in squirrels, as well as in rabbits, rats, and other small mammals. It was pretty cheap, too. The information available on the net suggested weekly doses, for a period of 2-3 weeks. It seemed doable.

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When we arrived in Austin at the end of October, we didn’t expect major problems finding a house. During our visit in April we had spent an afternoon with a real estate agent, and had seen a number of suitable houses.

Sure enough, the first day we went house hunting, sara walked into a place and immediately thought “This is it.” We went back when I had finished work, and I agreed.

It was in Bouldin Creek, part of South Austin, more specifically Travis Heights. It was a newly-built house, extremely energy efficient, with zoned HVAC, high-e windows, the works.

As far as style, the house wouldn’t have looked out of place in New England—constructed with fiber-cement siding to look like wood, with decks front and back.

We put in an offer in November, and it was accepted. We thought we’d be moved in by Christmas…

Being cautious, we arranged for a full independent inspection of the house. Many people don’t bother to get new houses inspected; many people are idiots. Mold is a big problem in Texas, as it is in England, because of the damp and mild climate. Our realtor recommended a local inspector who does a particularly thorough job. Sure enough, there were a number of interesting things about the house.

First off, the foundation was pier and beam. Not unusual, given that the house is in the South Austin hills, but usually the wooden joists of the house rest on metal plates, which spread the load to the concrete blocks of the piers. Plates are added and removed as appropriate to level out the house.

The contractors putting together this house had invented a shortcut. Instead of metal plates, they had hammered in some small wooden shims. As a result, the load was concentrated into a tiny area instead of being spread, and the concrete posts were starting to crack.

They had also not quite put in enough ventilation for the space under the house. In fact, it looked as if they had almost forgotten the whole house part in their excitement at building the foundation walls, as in one place they had forgotten to leave a gap for a beam and had just knocked out a hole with a sledgehammer after the fact, and then filled around the beam afterwards.

The decks were a problem too. They had been built with no gaps between the wooden slats. Seems superficially like a good idea, as you can’t drop stuff between the gaps and lose it. Unfortunately, it also means that water can’t drain from the deck, and gradually pools up. Then the wood starts to absorb the water, and the space under the deck becomes moist, a breeding ground for mold. Finally, the wood rots away, and you have to do major repair work.

My favorite cock-up was the bathroom venting. The way it’s supposed to work is the bathroom vent connects to a duct, which goes up into the attic and emerges via a vent near the top of the roof. That had been too much work for the contractors; they had run a duct across instead, to the soffit vents. Hence the moist air would immediately be sucked back up into the attic.

The good news was that the problems were fixable. We got an estimate from a builder our agent recommended, and put in a revised offer—we’d buy the house if the seller would pay our choice of builder to fix the problems. We wanted the work done by our choice of builder to ensure that The O’Reilly Men wouldn’t be hired to fix the problems they caused in the first place.

[Our builder has found a neat way to fix the decks, too. Rather than rip them off and rebuild them, the plan is to use an industrial covering material to put a single-piece waterproof surface on them. No holes for things to fall into, rain will just drain off, and the result should be more durable than a properly-constructed conventional deck. The downside is that it’s expensive, but it’s cheaper than major structural work, and the final result can be colored to match what the wooden deck looked like.]

So once again everything was agreed. We thought we’d be moving in in January.

Then came the next problem. It turned out that the house and its neighbor to the west had originally been part of one large lot. They shared a separate two-car garage, subdivided into two single garages. Unfortunately, when the builders divided up the original lot, they ran the property line across the corner of the garage.

Our neighbors-to-be had discovered this and weren’t happy about it. The city of Austin wasn’t happy about it either, and had refused to issue a certificate of occupancy for the houses. The neighbors-to-be got someone to draw up a revised plan which changed the property lines to skirt around the outside of the garage. The garage would be entirely on next door’s lot, and an easement agreement would be drawn up to give us perpetual usage of half of the garage for a nominal $10 fee to make the contract legally binding.

Unfortunately, the revised property lines needed to be approved by the city’s property zoning people at their next monthly meeting. In the mean time, our mortgage deal fell through, so we started that process again. Fortunately we’d elected to work via a mortgage agent, so he handled all the re-submitting of application forms and documents. We expected to be moving in by the end of February.

Unfortunately, there was a snag. When the city reviewed the redrawn lots, they rejected the changes because the diagram was missing some essential information. The whole thing had to be sent back to be re-drawn and then re-submitted for the next month’s review meeting.

That was done, and things looked like they were falling into place. We had sorted out the financing, we’d checked the easement agreement was OK, the price and terms were agreed, and the money was ready to go.

It was about then that we discovered the IRS had recategorized my UK flat as a speculative business investment, rather than our only real estate property. There was a rather spectacular tax bill due. Massachusetts wanted a big chunk of cash too. The good news was that we had the money to cover it by April’s deadline. The bad news was that it was the money we were planning to use for furniture and appliances…Oh well, c’est la vie.

The city approved the change to the property lines, and we still expected to move in some time in March. Then our new neighbor asked a lawyer to check over the easement agreement, and the lawyer went nuts. He put in clauses saying that nobody could ever park in front of the garage, even temporarily; that we couldn’t keep housepaint in the garage; and that I couldn’t repair my bike in there either. There was also stuff about not being allowed to play musical instruments in the garage, not that I cared about that; but for good measure, he added a clause saying that no such restrictions applied to next door.

My objection was pretty simple: the agreement said we would split the maintenance costs for the garage 50/50. If we were going to split the costs equally, we should have equal use of our respective halves of the garage. I shot off an e-mail last week. The good news was that everyone agreed the lawyer had been a touch overzealous, it was perfectly reasonable to store a couple of cans of paint in the garage, I could clean and repair my bike if I wanted to, and if people wanted to visit us and park in the driveway that was fine so long as the car was on wheels, rather than on bricks. This was written into a revised contract (yes, even the bit about cars on bricks not being allowed), and everything looked like it would happen some time next week.

On Friday I was out getting some photocopying and faxing done, arranging for the bank to wire the money to the escrow agent, when I got a call from our realtor.

It turned out that the bank who had offered us our mortgage deal was getting pissy. In the last few days, oil prices had hit the US economy, and interest rates had jumped up 0.75%. The bank said if we didn’t complete the transaction that day, our interest rate would be raised 0.5%. In fact, to get that concession our mortgage broker had had to scramble around and contact senior management at the bank and explain the reason for all the delays.

So I finished my faxing and collected sara, and we drove over to the land and title company immediately. We spent a couple of hours reading and signing a couple of dozen pieces of paper. Technically, we completed the transaction “pending funding”—instructions may have been sent to my bank in Boston, by fax and now by FedEx as well, but they won’t act on them until Monday. However, since the money is sitting in my account, cleared and ready to go, I have confidence that I can get my bank to deliver the funds Monday, so we went ahead and signed accordingly.

As for the repair work, that’s starting this weekend, hopefully. The builder says we can go ahead and start moving in. The seller is going to cut a couple of checks and give them to us, one will be given to the builder up front, we’ll hand him the second one when we’re satisfied with the work done. The reason for that arrangement? Well, we’re not the only ones hurting from the delays—the builder found himself sitting on two houses, unable to sell them for almost a year, and for cashflow reasons needed to rely on the proceeds from the sale to fund the repairs. Something of a leap of faith by us, but it’s not going to keep me awake at nights.

I’m the kind of person who reads documents before signing them. There was one exception: the “meat” of the agreement is a 25 page nightmare mandated by Texas state law. Since we didn’t really have any say in what that one said, I just signed it. I have mixed feelings about that—on the one hand, I wonder if a non-state-mandated document might have been readable. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been state mandated and had been (say) 20 pages, I would have had to read it.

The seller’s agent thanked us for our patience. Both realtors agreed that it had been the most protracted delay in closing they had seen in about 35 years of combined experience. Our neighbor-to-be arrived and signed the easement agreement. Everyone seemed relieved that it was finally over.

So it all comes down to this:

After four months of delays, we bought the house we wanted. It’s actually purchased, in a legal sense.

The original contractors, who cocked everything up? They were all fired.

Hopefully we’ll pick up keys to the house on Monday when the deal is funded; then we need to sort out getting our stuff out of storage, and work out who we can bribe to help us unload our worldly possessions.

People often wonder if they should turn their computer off, or leave it on but put it into “sleep mode”. I decided to do some analysis a while back, here are the results.

If you look up the specs, a Sawtooth Power Mac G4 in deep sleep uses about 4 watts of electricity. In MA you pay $0.04823 per kWh, so it costs 4 / 1000 kW * 24 hours * 365 days * $0.04823 = $1.68 per year to leave a Mac sleeping instead of turning it off. So, it’s not going to break the bank.

Heat-wise, conservation of energy tells us that no more than 4W of heat is being emitted by the machine. Compare that to the average human body, which radiates 50-100W (estimates vary, Google if you feel the need to check). So, the G4 isn’t going to heat up the room significantly when it’s asleep either.

What about the environment? Well, let’s assume the worst possible case, that your electricity is all coal-generated. That means emissions are around 0.43kg per kWh of electricity used by the consumer. So in a year of sleep, your Mac would cause the emission of 15kg of CO2. Sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it? Well, according to space research you produce 1kg of CO2 per day by breathing, or a massive 365kg per year. So the Mac is 20x better for the environment when asleep than you are.

What about the hardware? Well, in deep sleep almost all the hardware is powered down exactly as if the machine was turned off. The hard drive, which is the piece most likely to wear out, is powered down. The CPU and RAM are incredibly unlikely to wear out even if you run them 24×7 for the next ten years, at which point the machine will be so obsolete it’s worthless. So turning the Mac off won’t make it last any longer or protect your ‘investment’.

So, I conclude that there is absolutely no economic or environmental need to turn your Mac off. If you have a UPS, you may as well leave the Mac asleep when you’re not using it.

Of course, if your computer is a PC which doesn’t have an Energy Star “deep sleep” mode, the above calculation may be off by a factor of 10 or more. However, most PCs are now Energy Star.

I’d always wanted to see a dam, and as dams go, they don’t come much bigger than the Hoover Dam. Named after Herbert, rather than the more infamous J. Edgar, it’s possibly the most impressive piece of structural engineering of the 20th Century. Hoover gets the credit because as well as being a politician, he was a former engineer, and arranged the contracts between 7 different US states which would allow the project to go ahead.

We arrange a dam tour for under $20 apiece. The bus picks us up from the hotel, and transports us through sprawl and desert to the dam site. Once there we are given a couple of hours to do the official tour and wander around.

The dam itself is one of those objects that’s so big that you can’t perceive how big it is. It’s “won’t fit in a photograph” big, for starters—if you’re close enough to see detail, you’ll never find a wide angle lens wide enough; if you’re far enough away to get it all in the shot, it’ll just look like a small brick wall. Nevertheless, I tried to take a few photos of the outside which I could stitch together into a bigger image. On the left you can see the dam wall, with people and vehicles just about visible along the top. On the right you’re looking down at the turbine rooms 221 meters below; you can just about see a maintenance van parked down there.

Water enters the dam via the inlet towers, two in Nevada and two in Arizona. The dam itself is on the border between the two states, which follows the Colorado river.

The turbine rooms are pretty impressive, and much quieter than I expected. The foreground object is one of the turbine wheels. In spite of the dam’s massive scale, the power output is a modest 1430 MW, less than a quarter of that output by the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State.

The generated electricity ends up inconveniently at the bottom of a gorge, and has to be transported back up the hillsides. Unfortunately, the local rock is rich in iron ore, so cables can’t be run through or across it. Hence the walls of the canyon are clustered with strange angular pylons which lean over and carry the cables through the air to the generators.

The dam took three years to construct, and was built under budget. To achieve that, men worked in horrendously unsafe conditions, braving 60 degree temperatures in summer, working in tunnels filled with clouds of carbon monoxide, and rappelling the canyon walls to spend entire days working dangling from the end of a single rope tether. Though the official death toll was somewhere between 96 and 112, they only counted people who died on site; anyone whose death was slow enough that they could be moved to a hospital first got excluded from the statistics. Memorials on site commemorate the deceased.

The dam as a whole is beautifully decorated in art deco style. The marble floors inside the buildings have iconic circular murals based on Native American symbols meaning “power” or “energy”. Even the public lavatories (men in Nevada, women in Arizona) have polished brass doors and inscriptions. Finally, two winged figures sit above Oskar Hansen’s star map, which provides astronomical measurements that should enable any future civilization or extraterrestrial archaeological dig to date when the dam was constructed.

One final detail is off to the sides of the dam: the spillway tunnels, two emergency flood control channels. In the event that Lake Mead begins to rise to a dangerous level, the excess water can be drained through these massive pipes. The spillway doesn’t look like much in the photograph, but it’s vaguely menacing in person—after all, it’s big enough that you could shove a Boeing 747 down it if you snapped the wings off, and there’s a delightful 200m drop once you get inside. In water flow terms, each spillway could easily carry the entire flow of Niagara Falls, or 5.6 million liters of water per second, traveling at 190 km/h at the bottom!

Of course, dams are controversial things. Some view them as ecologically damaging. Yet in the case of the Hoover Dam, it’s not so clear. Initial attempts to irrigate southern California had led to widespread flooding, and the accidental creation of a vast inland lake now known as the Salton Sea. The Colorado River began cutting through the California desert at over a kilometer a day, and threatened to form a new giant canyon. The system of dams now in place make the river controllable, and have stopped the massive erosion—yet at the same time, the dams mean that the Salton Sea has turned into an ecological disaster area.

Returning from the dam to Las Vegas, we get a chance to see the city in all its glory. It’s really quite amazing, mile after mile of urban sprawl in the middle of a desert, with mountains or tall hills on all sides. Construction seems to be pretty much continuous; if legalized gambling in other states has hurt Nevada’s economy, it doesn’t seem to show.

The bus drops us off at the Hilton, which was Elvis’s home-from-home up until his death. We head for the hotel diner and have an Elvis-style meal, as we hadn’t had time for lunch. I decide on a tuna melt, which turns up in fried white bread with fried onion rings. We eat at the counter. It’s possible to play KENO at the counter too; illuminated boards behind us animate the results of each game. KENO is basically like the lottery, except it has more options for what you can bet on, and you can lose every couple of minutes instead of only once a week.

Next we head for “Star Trek: The Experience”, our real reason for visiting the Hilton. It’s really expensive, but if you’re a Star Trek fan (or the spouse of a Star Trek fan) it’s just one of those things you have to do.

The first section is a kind of Star Trek museum, a complete Trek timeline from the present day onwards. Every few meters there are glass cases with artifacts from the appropriate shows or movies—a model of the Phoenix, a type II phaser, the Nomad space probe, and so on. As sara puts it, “This is the geekiest thing I have ever seen.”

After that you find yourself herded into the “experience”. I won’t say anything about it, because I don’t want to spoil the surprises, but I will say that if I have any complaint to make it’s that it all happened so rapidly… still, the admission fee lets you go around as often as you want, or until you give yourself a neck injury.

The gift shop is a big disappointment. I’ve always wanted a TNG-era science tricorder, but there’s nothing that cool or tasteful. The best toys are the burbling tribbles, and I resist the temptation—after all, it wouldn’t make sense to just have one. You can also stop at Quark’s Bar to have something to eat or drink. We’re still full of grease, so we take look around and leave.

It’s dark outside as we walk to the Stratosphere Casino and Hotel. It’s the tallest building in Las Vegas, and at 350m it’s close to the height of the Empire State Building.

As sara waits, I queue and get tickets so we can go up to the observation deck. From there we are treated to a marvelous view of the entire strip. If you follow the trail of bright lights, you can make out all the big casino hotels. The green one that looks as if it’s at the end is the MGM Grand; Mandalay Bay is just to the right of it in this photo.

For those who enjoy gut-wrenching terror, there’s a rollercoaster on the top of the Stratosphere which lets you get thrown around above a 300m drop, and a new ride called the “X-Scream” which dangles the rollercoaster car over the edge of the track as if there’s been some kind of horrible engineering failure. Personally, I have no real fear of heights, but I also have no real desire to develop one, so we give the rides a miss.

Back down at ground level in the casino, I had noticed a set of SPAM slot machines! We decide I have to sneak a photo of sara playing the SPAM machine, so we can send it back to her relatives near Austin, Minnesota, home of the SPAM factory. Hopefully hilarity will ensue.

I think it is effective to cure or prevent depression and become happy-healthy-efficient that you constrict anus 100 times in succession and dent navel 100 times in succession everyday following the life style of long-lived British as possible.

[…]

I have known 70 year old man who has practiced it for 20 years. His eyes sparkle. He is full of vigor, happiness and joy. His eyes sparkle. He has neither complained nor born a grudge under any circumstance. Furthermore, he can make *** three times in succession without drawing out.

Surprisingly, you are not tired in spite of little sleep and start beginning to feel happier. If you eat sea vegetable as well everyday, your hair will grow back blond or black in 2-3 weeks. You’ll be pleased to realize to become full of energy for the first time. […] Besides shooting out a big blank from your buttock, you can feel as if your root chakra leaked sweet hot mucus. You can feel your root chakra as if it were a exciting womb.

So I think we had better respect doing some proper body-exercise (for example, constricting anus 100 times-denting navel 100 times everyday following the life style of the long-lived British), so that we can begin to erase the dirty stickiness of our bodies and act, talk, and see with abandon, largess, and humor naturally.

—Hiroyuki Nishigaki, from How To Good-bye Depression: If you constrict anus 100 times everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way?

Spent Friday morning clearing up a random disaster… some legacy application that suddenly needed to go out on CD, that had never been designed to run on read-only media. Then I went to the MIT lunch trucks.

I spent the afternoon continuing to learn J2EE and SQL. I now have a simple user registration / login application written, which uses request dispatch and HTML files for look and feel. The book I’m learning from is OK on the Java stuff, but does a really poor job of teaching good systems design; they have all their HTML shoved into the servlets. Ugh.

After that I was hungry and light-headed. Concentrated mental effort seems to make me burn up energy like crazy; I think that’s how I manage to stay a reasonable weight while being an idle layabout. We had curry, but even so I had a mood crash around 23:00. Managed to go to sleep, fortunately.

Now I have to author a DVD for someone at work, process a couple of CDs of photos, and then maybe I’ll do something completely pointless for the sheer pleasure of it.

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.

On the train in the morning, Olga tells us another Russian joke:

Q: What should we do if the Americans launch a massive nuclear attack?

A: Wrap yourself in a white sheet, and crawl very, very quietly to the graveyard.

Q: But why must we crawl quietly?

A: So as not to start a panic.

The train is actually more luxurious than the sleeper train we traveled on in Italy. However, there are no straps or railings to prevent you from rolling off the upper bunk beds, and I don’t get much sleep. The fourth passenger in our compartment is a quiet Russian girl.

The railway station in Moscow is an exact copy of the one in Leningrad, but labeled “Leningrad” instead of “Moscow”. Similarly, three other stations in the vicinity are built to look just like the ones their trains go to. In between the stations there’s a sea of people milling around, trying to sell things, and yelling at each other.

Metro tickets are made of translucent neon green plastic. They used to be metal, but the currency devalued so fast that people apparently began hoarding them, melting them down, and selling the scrap metal for more than the cost of the tokens.

The Metro map is circular with diagonal lines, quite the coolest I’ve seen in any city. We take the train to Red Square.

At this point I’m not feeling too good. Olga’s been feeding us plenty by Russian standards, but my overactive metabolism has been burning it off, and I feel weak, tired, and sometimes dizzy. At least my digestion is just about coping with the temporary return of meat to my diet, unlike XQ’s.

Red Square is neither red, nor square; the “Red” part is from the Russian for “beautiful”. “Kremlin” just means “fortress”, so one should really talk about “The Moscow Kremlin”. Lenin’s mausoleum is still there, big and red and low and boxy.

Most of the square is closed off; apparently there’s a meeting going on in the Parliament building. St Basil’s is closed, so I don’t get to see inside it. We walk across the bridge a bit to see the Kremlin from the river.

We go into ГУМ (GUM), formerly the state department store. Now it’s full of expensive Western boutique stores selling things people don’t need, for hard currency only—stuff like Бзнетон (Benneton) and Yves San Laurent. Millions of people are on the poverty line, but at least you can pay $100 for a sweater.

There are also small Russian shops scattered amongst the chain stores; they too stock a variety of Western goods. I see one store selling ЛЕГО (LEGO); at least that has some value.

We go inside the Kremlin and look around. There are the usual onion-domed church buildings, the parliament building, and a nasty looking Soviet government building. Lots of American tourists are are here, doing what they do best.

Next we head for the old Jewish quarter of Moscow. It used to be lively, full of people and market stalls, but now it seems to be fairly dead. Olga says it’s the same everywhere—there are no Russian tourists any more, just the Westerners who can afford to travel and are prepared to put up with the bureaucratic paperwork.

We cross over to the main entry road, which was demolished and rebuilt to look impressive as you drive into the city. There are large Soviet tower blocks and concrete department stores along its length. XQ says there used to be many bookstalls. Now, there are kiosks selling jeans, cassette tapes, food, drink, and anything belonging to the Soviet Union that wasn’t nailed down. The books that remain are trashy pulp novels and the Russian version of Penthouse, rather than poetry and literature.

We decide to buy Olga lunch. Somehow she never got to eat pizza while visiting us, so we take her to Пэцца Хат. I eat until I’m completely stuffed. When we leave, I feel bouncy and full of energy once more. The clouds have cleared, and the sun has come out.

We get the train to Zagorsk, which houses an ancient monastery. Walking from the station, we get to the observation point on the hilltop overlooking a valley. On the far side is a dazzling spread of onion-domed churches and other buildings. Some have gold roofs, some are deep blue with gold stars. We go there and look around inside.

An Orthodox service is going on in the church with the blue dome with gold stars. We look inside. The room is full of candles and incense; there are icons everywhere. It’s dark, and there’s a monotone chanting. It’s hard to believe this religion has anything in common with the Church of England.

We go to a small hard currency café and buy tea, then return to Moscow by train.

Back in Moscow, in the station, we see an old drunk lying in a pool of liquid. He has apparently just been beaten up by a policeman, and several women are berating the policeman. The old man tries to get up onto his feet, and the policeman kicks him viciously in the chest. He falls backwards, and his head hits the stone floor of the station with a sickening crack. We don’t stay around to see what happens next.

We visit the Moscow University district, and see the much-derided “wedding cake” building. The Soviet Union apparently built a number of them during the Stalinist era.

On the train back to St Petersburg that evening, I sleep better for some reason.