Live from Austin!

Food turned out to be less of a problem than in Berlin, oddly enough. There seemed to be lots of vegetarian restaurants, and we found a vegetarische imbiss at Schantzenstrasse and Susannenstrasse.

I also got the impression that people were more friendly than in Berlin. Then again, perhaps it was my imagination, a side effect of my becoming more used to Germany.

Josef had an original LP from the first release of Autobahn. The band look like big geeks in the photo, and the sleeve credits Conny Plank. (His name was removed from later editions.)

CD shopping was made more annoying by the fact that nowhere seems to take credit cards, not even big stores. If you don’t have an EC card with a PIN, forget it.

Stereotypes sometimes have an element of truth to them. While we were in Hamburg, Josef and Ute helped rothko to polish the text of her German scrapbooking site. The original text talks about the enthusiasm of TLC scrapbookers for the business. For our hosts, this proved to be the most difficult piece to translate, and it took a long time for them to come up with an acceptable German phrase for “enthusiastic”. Apparently the literal translation of the word would be viewed with great suspicion in a business context, particularly when said by an American.

This reminded me of my two favorite jokes about Germans:

1. Q: How many Germans does it take to change a light bulb?
   A: One, and he does it with ruthless efficiency.

2. Q: Why did the German cross the road?
   A: Because the traffic lights indicated that it was appropriate to do so.

We got to the airport for our return at around 06:30. The queue was very, very long. The airline official checked my passport and visa (permanent resident card). Then he asked for my driver’s license. After that, he wanted proof of employment. Fortunately my medical insurance card has IBM’s logo on it.

This is all the result of the US government decreeing that airlines should pay the cost of deporting people. Ironically, if you don’t have a visa at all then you’re OK as far as the airlines are concerned, because it means they’re not on the hook; it’s if you do have a visa that they have to triple-check everything, just in case the visa is fraudulent or you can’t continue to meet the terms of your residence.

Next, we had to queue for the metal detector. My passport was checked again. Then we walked through to the hallway beyond, and walked to the departure gate…where there was another security checkpoint, with another queue. My passport was checked a third time, and everything went through another round of metal detection, this time using a wand.

Just when I thought things couldn’t get more ridiculous, I realized that they were hand-searching the carry-on luggage of every single passenger. I cooperated with removing every single item from my bag, so they could be checked one by one.

The guard noticed the TRIO DVD and grinned. “Trashy,” he commented. It turned out that he had been a fan back in their early days, before they became famous, when they were playing obscure Hamburg clubs. Somehow this puts a more human feeling to the proceedings, and makes it all seem better.

When we got to Newark, we had to collect our luggage. We re-checked it, and it was scanned again. Then, we had to go through security, for what was my third round of metal detection and fourth round of passport checking.

At immigration, I was handed back my documents with a smile and “Welcome home”. Maybe I was fragile from the 8 hours on the plane and the repeated security screenings, but I felt genuinely touched. And not in a full-body-cavity-search kind of way.

Two people are walking through a metal detector on the London Underground. One comments to the other that it’s “a piece of shit that wouldn’t stop anyone”.

Result: they are stopped by police, searched, and charged with an offense under Section 5 of the Public Order Act, which prohibits “Using threatening words or behaviour likely to cause alarm, harassment or distress”.

In other words: pointing out stupid ineffective security might distress the sheep, so pass a law and fine anyone who does it.

Meanwhile, last month Mark Thomas took part in a repeat of a previous demonstration, where people turned up wearing T-shirts in support of the PKK.

Since the 2000 Terrorism Act, UK law has classed as terrorism anything which “involves serious damage to property” or “is designed seriously to interfere with or seriously to disrupt an electronic system”, so long as it’s done with the intent of influencing government. That makes for an awful lot of terrorists; and the kicker is section 13:

A person in a public place commits an offence if he-

(a) wears an item of clothing, or

(b) wears, carries or displays an article,

in such a way or in such circumstances as to arouse reasonable suspicion that he is a member or supporter of a proscribed organisation.

So if your T-shirt causes “reasonable suspicion” that you support an organization that has caused damage to property with the intent of influencing government behavior—like, say, Greenpeace—you can be fined, put in prison for 6 months, or both.

There’s more. Under section 19, if you become convinced that someone else has committed such an offense “in the course of a trade, profession, business or employment”, then you are committing a crime unless you tell the police about the suspect “as soon as is reasonably practicable”.

Security guards made penguins walk through the metal detector.

We arrived at Logan Airport in plenty of time. Given that it was about 35 celcius, I felt it was justified to hire a cab rather than lug suitcases on the T. I did my usual thing and tried to remove all metal from my person and put it in a pocket of my carry-on bag, in a vain attempt to evade the metal detector. Unfortunately, something set off the doorframe detector, and I was given a severe wanding. As mentioned earlier, the security guy even asked me to unbutton my jeans—the buttons at the front set off his metal detector wand, so I think he suspected I might have shoved sharp knives into the front of my underpants. Hey, the terrorists are mad zealots…

The flight was as pleasant as any six hour plane flight can be. They fed us, they remembered that I’d asked for vegetarian food, and there was coffee. So that’s three points for United, zero for American.

We got a shared van ride to the hotel. We were taken on a delightful tour of south San Francisco. It turns out to bear a startling resemblance to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 3… in fact, SF in general reminded me of Liberty City, right down to the hilly Italian district, the maze of tunnels and bridges, the subway, and the look of Chinatown. Our hotel even had dubious looking clubs nearby offering “adult” entertainment. (San Francisco Tourist Office may use the above endorsements in advertising.)

Yes, as you can guess, some corners had been cut in the hotel department. We were at a Holiday Inn on the edge of the theater district, which is one of the seedier parts of town. Also, I’m told, one closest to some of the best restaurants. If the bums had been aggressive, like their East coast counterparts, it would have been unpleasant. Fortunately San Francisco’s homeless seem to be a mellow Californian type, and pretty much leave you alone. Anyway, point is, it was the only place near all forms of public transit and less than $100 a night, so I wasn’t complaining.

Public transit in SF is pretty good. There are abundant buses, which run until 01:30 or so, followed by “night owl” services. There are also trams, which are mostly authentic old streetcars that have been repaired and put into service as a tourist attraction as well as a form of transport. Below ground is a network of more trams; and of course, there are the famous cable cars, which climb some of the more picturesque hills. A $15 pass got us unlimited travel on all of the preceding. To go further afield involved the subway, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Aimed at commuters, it heads out to Berkeley and Oakland and the delights of Contra Costa County.

Well, here I am in Disney World.

I’m here for an IBM internal conference. Pretty much the whole of the IBM software group sales organization for the USA is here, along with Canadians and some Latin American folks. Tomorrow I have the first of many long meetings filled with information that could be communicated by e-mail much more effectively if you could trust sales people to read their e-mail.

The plane trip down was uneventful. I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, said goodbye to Richard and told him he really needs to write more LJ entries, and got the T to Logan. As the train passed over the salt and pepper bridge, I suddenly thought to myself: why am I on a train? Why did I drag my suitcase through the snow when IBM could have paid for a taxi? Ah well, I could use the exercise.

Then I realized that I turned off the heating in the house, because I didn’t want to reprogram the thermostat and leave poor sara to work it out when she got home. Except now she’ll get home and the house will be freezing, and I’ll be down here in Florida basking in 25 celcius sunshine. I’m not sure what I should have done, as the “Hold Temperature” feature didn’t seem to be working.

At Logan I actually made it through the metal detector without setting it off, in spite of forgetting to remove my watch. I can’t work out why sometimes it beeps and sometimes it doesn’t. (Maybe titanium doesn’t trigger it? Except then, surely people would make guns and knives out of titanium?) I didn’t get wanded either, and they didn’t search or drug-test my bag. Nor did they ask me to turn the laptop on to prove it was a genuine laptop.

Discussing random logistical issues with the rest of the team, I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought to cross-check that they’d booked me to check in at the hotel on the same day they’d asked me to fly down to Florida. You’d think that would be the sort of detail you could leave to the travel planners, but of course you’d be sadly mistaken. A quick phone call to the hotel sorted things out, luckily, or I could have been pulling an all-nighter.

My seat was in the last row of the plane. It was narrower than I remember airline seats being, and since the plane was heading to Florida, naturally there was a large late-middle-aged woman wedged in next to me. The flight attendant came back just before takeoff and asked if I’d mind being moved to the front of the plane. I asked if there were any small children at the front. He said no, he was trying to move them back here. I said in that case, I would very much like to move to the front of the plane.

So I found myself sitting next to a cute guy who does something relating to DB2 that I probably would have known what the job title meant if I’d been at IBM for long enough. He was mostly interested in talking to the guy to his right, though, so whatever.

Once again, no food or coffee for security reasons. Since I’d had to be at the departure gate at noon, and there wasn’t any food past the security checkpoint, I basically didn’t get any lunch.

Got to the hotel, checked in, Ryan fell asleep watching American football on TV and I didn’t have the heart to wake him. Rested for a while, then played Nethack a bit. Then we all went out and I finally got my first proper meal of the day.

The hotel room is about what you’d expect an $80 Holiday Inn hotel room to be like. Unfortunately, since it’s a Disney hotel, it’s $270 a night. If you’ve never been to Disney World, the most surreal part of it isn’t the amazing and pervasive fakeness of the surroundings—rather, it’s the prices. I’ll admit I’m no gourmet, but food is easily double what I’d normally pay in Boston. Anyone visiting from a cheaper part of the USA must get major sticker shock. You can easily end up paying $8 for a burger and fries.

Don’t bother looking for me online. I didn’t know it was legal to charge by the minute for calls to toll-free numbers, but apparently it is. I’ll be writing offline then quickly uploading.