Live from Austin!

I just finished my first driving lesson. Well, not strictly my first, but the last time I drove a car was 15 years ago, in England, and it had manual transmission. It seems like a lifetime ago now.

I’ve been in the US long enough that driving on the right wasn’t a problem. In fact, it seems natural. What didn’t seem quite so natural is that the sticks to control the indicators and lights are reversed—but the brake and accelerator aren’t.

As we pulled away for the first time, Somerville’s finest chose that precise moment to drive past our house. It was an omen. Twenty minutes later I was approaching one of those three lane New England junctions with all the roads at weird angles, when I heard sirens and saw that an EMS vehicle was approaching from behind. Naturally the woman in the right lane didn’t want to let me pull right, and pushed ahead into the space in front of her. Accelerating into the junction seemed like a bad move. I did my best to get over to the right as the instructor pushed the horn, and the ambulance got by once the guy in the left lane worked out what was going on.

I also learned that SUV drivers really are the massive assholes everyone says they are, and can’t be relied on to yield right of way at a four way stop even if you clearly got there first.

I give thanks to Charles Kettering, inventor of automatic transmission. I’m sure I’ll get used to only driving with one foot. Still, I can’t help wondering if teaching mathew to drive isn’t like teaching a squirrel to waterski—sure, you can do it, but some creatures aren’t suited to some forms of transport.

As you may have noticed, I’ve not been writing much recently. There are several reasons for this.

Firstly, work has been insane for the last few weeks. The other day the project manager I’m working with actually asked why I haven’t crawled into a corner to whimper quietly. I explained that at Harlequin, I became completely acclimated to having an order of magnitude more work than I could ever possibly do in the time allowed. After a while, your worry circuits just burn out, and you do the best that can be done with the resources available, and document that you did so.

I’ve also been going through some bureaucracy. The necessary paperwork for the sale of my UK flat is now in the hands of the solicitors. It included a copy of my passport, which needed to be authenticated by my doctor, oddly enough—whereas the US has notaries, the UK doesn’t, and instead you’re expected to get stuff signed in the presence of your doctor or priest, or a certified engineer, or some other notionally pillar of the community. Since the person has to have known you personally for two years, my doctor was the obvious choice.

To add to the excitement, said passport is expiring in October, and the bureaucrats in the UK (and various other nations) have decided that you’re no longer allowed to enter the country if your passport is within six months of expiring. I can only assume that terrorists don’t commit atrocities until 6 months before their passports expire, because they don’t want to waste the effort they went to to get the document. “Hey, I’ve paid for the ten years, why not use them?”

So, my passport has to go to Washington DC. They don’t expect or want me to go with it, but it does mean that once again I can’t leave the country until expensive paperwork is done.

Last week Dan brought round an old HP laptop. It had been taken to the store for repair, because the DVD-ROM drive was broken. The highly trained engineers at the store had decided it was a software problem, probably something to do with drivers, and that Dan should just reinstall Windows.

Needless to say, the machine wouldn’t boot any kind of CD, not even a Windows install CD. Instead, the drive made sad little clunking noises. So, I ordered the cheapest replacement drive I could find, and fitted it. Then at the weekend, we started the “Teach Dan Linux” project.

Since the objective was forcible education, we installed Gentoo. So, that was pretty much the weekend gone. For those who care, XFree86 doesn’t work properly on S3 Savage IX cards, but X.org works perfectly. Oh, and KDE takes a hell of a long time to compile on a Celeron…

Today it was time for further adventure. Having spent a month or two studing now and again, I felt ready enough to go to the Mass RMV and get a permit to learn to drive one of those four-wheeled metal contraptions that seems to be so popular. The test was a bit odd, including questions like how many days I have to file a complaint if my license is suspended. Yeah, like I need to know that while driving. Still, whizzed through it in under ten minutes and got my permit.

So tomorrow, I guess I call one of the local schools and arrange some driving instruction, since we don’t have a car. I took lessons and a test in the UK, but that combined the twin nightmares of High Wycombe’s roads and manual transmission. High Wycombe, bizarrely enough, is at the bottom of a crater, so every start is a hill start. To add to the fun it has a lot of one-way streets, an abundant supply of 18 wheelers delivering to shops, and a “magic roundabout” consisting of multiple mini-roundabouts around one huge one, allowing you to go around the big roundabout in either direction. If you recover from that, they let you try the really big roundabout up the hill, which has traffic lights on it.

So yeah, I’m expecting Cambridge and Somerville to be a fair bit easier to deal with. Plus, this time I’m actually motivated.

In fairness to Wycombe, I should mention that it is the best place in the entire universe to buy a sofa. And that just outside is Marlow, which takes us back to Dan. But anyway…

The test was still nerve-wracking, because I still have major issues around examinations. Which could be a problem, as IBM expects me to take some to get certified as a project manager. Maybe it’s time for therapy?

I’ve also finished as much of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time as I think I care to—specifically, everything except the silly final battle. Dammit, Jim, I’m an explorer and puzzle solver, not a twitch gamer. So I’ve purchased Burnout 2: Point of Impact, an educational arcade driving game where you get points for driving as recklessly as possible.

So as I walked through Davis Square today, I looked down and noticed a small ziplock bag filled with powder. On closer look, the crystals appeared to be slightly larger than regular sugar, perhaps similar in size to Demerara brown sugar. The color was off-white, with a touch of yellow, maybe the merest hint of brown. The bag was about 6cm by 4cm and packed fairly full.

I considered what it might be. None of the innocent possibilities seemed likely. It was too light in color to be brown sugar, and too yellow to be regular bleached sugar. Silica gel? Maybe, but who keeps silica gel in a transparent plastic ziplock bag?

OK, I thought, so suppose it’s not something innocent. Cocaine is fine white powder, so that’s not it. Crack comes in rocks, so probably not that either. Overall, and speaking strictly as a non-expert, I guessed the most likely possibilities were heroin or crystal meth. It seemed like rather a lot of powder to be heroin, but since my entire knowledge of typical dosages of heroin is taken from having watched Trainspotting once, I could be hopelessly wrong. I learned quite a lot about the chemistry of illegal drugs at school, but they didn’t really go into much detail about how to recognize and evaluate the quality of a sample.

I considered what, if anything, I should do. Obviously the law abiding thing to do would be to pick it up and hand it in at the local police station. Wait, did I say “law abiding”? I meant fucking stupid. Yeah, I’m going to walk into Somerville PD with a plastic bag full of something I think might be crystal meth.

In other words, thanks to the War on Drugs, I did nothing. I quietly went on my merry way. And then I thought about a recent cartoon by Ted Rall, about a similar situation and the War on Terrorism.

So anyhow… if you dropped your baggie of crystal meth in Davis Square, it might still be outside the Somerville Theater.

eBU is in Las Vegas for the first time. Previous years it has been held in Orlando, Florida, in Disney World; and also in a European city, Berlin one year and Barcelona the next. The move to Vegas has allowed IBM to consolidate and have everyone from around the world attend one huge show.

To be specific, there are 17,000 IBM people in Las Vegas at the moment. That’s enough to fill the conference facilities of the MGM, Mirage and Venetian, with a few hundred excess people at the Paris and a couple of other hotels. Walk the streets and you’ll see IBMers everywhere.

And no, this is not the IBM of the 1950s, 60s, or even 70s. There are no suits and ties. The Brazilians are in party mood: they smashed their sales targets, so they’ve all been wearing bright yellow IBM T-shirts with the Brazilian flag on the front, sitting together in blocks, and starting Mexican (Brazilian?) waves. They look like the Brazilian football supporters who flood the streets of Somerville whenever Brazil wins a game.

There were other people in Las Vegas on Sunday, though. It was also the last day of the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, America’s top porn tradeshow. As I found my way back to my room, I saw a woman with melons the size of… well, melons. And I’m talking watermelons, not cantaloupes. She was wearing a black leather outfit that had presumably been reinforced with kevlar to take the strain, and the rest of her body was somewhere between trailer park and heroin chic. I’ve no idea if she’s famous, and if there are naked pictures of her on the Internet I don’t really care to know where.

Walking home just now, I saw a figure ahead in the darkness, walking through the linear park. A very large, female figure dressed in badly-matched clothing. She was staggering slightly, and weaving from side to side, in the manner of one who is paralytically drunk.

The linear park often attracts the homeless, so I thought nothing of it. Seeing a large drunk female vagrant wandering towards the liquor store on Mass Ave made perfect sense.

As I got a little closer, I heard her mutter something. Several somethings. There was nobody else around. OK, I thought, so it’s the kind of homeless person who hears voices and talks back to them. Nothing unusual there.

I got a little closer still, and noticed with some alarm that the staggering homeless woman was clutching the side of her head, as if trying to staunch a bleeding wound. It occurred to me that maybe she’d gotten in a fight with some of the other bums in the square. If so, I couldn’t really leave her to stagger off to her death with a head wound; I’d have to try and get her some medical attention.

I still don’t quite understand how the whole emergency medical attention thing works in the USA. When the kidney stone decided to bid me adieu and I had to get to an ER in a hurry, I picked MGH on the basis of pure brand awareness, coupled with a knowledge that it was near my location at the time.

Yesterday I discovered I’d actually made a really good choice. MGH is rated as one of the finest, if not the finest hospitals in the Boston Metro area. However, it was pure luck that I knew of it because I’d gone through Charles MGH T-station thousands of times.

Anyway, I had no idea where I’d take an injured homeless person, or if they’d get treatment anyway. Would an ambulance come for them? Would the police need me to make a statement? It was late, and I didn’t really want to learn the answers just now, but I knew I could never leave someone who needed help that badly.

Then I got a little closer, and suddenly I could make out that the woman had a tiny mobile phone in her huge hand, and it was that which she was pressing up against the side of her head. She wasn’t drunk, either; she was staggering aimlessly from the apparent cognitive overload of attempting to walk and speak on a mobile phone at the same time.

Whew.

This is the Rosebud diner in Davis Square. Diners are something uniquely American, and I find it hard to resist the chance to visit them. There’s something about the whole experience, even if the food’s not that great.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with the food at the Rosebud. On the contrary! The only problem with the place is that it’s usually really full at weekends.

Here is the exterior. The digital camera does a particularly good job of picking out the neon. Neon lights are another very American phenomenon, Piccadilly Circus notwithstanding.

I remember when I found out how they got the different colors of neon lights. I’d always assumed they had some kind of lab where they mixed exotic gases to come up with new and attractive shades of color; in fact, the gas is always the same, they just use colored glass. I was so disappointed to discover that.

This is probably as good a time as any to write more about skunks.

We don’t have skunks in England, so I was really excited when I first saw one late one evening. I watched it turn a corner and snuffle off. I knew what it was from watching TV.

“Wow,” I said, “It’s a skunk!”

Genuine North American wildlife! I started to follow it, closing in to get a better look. Sara grabbed me firmly.

“No, mathew, don’t chase the skunk.”

In retrospect, it was a good thing she was there to stop me. I knew skunks could spray, but at the time I didn’t realize they had a range of over four meters.

Having survived my first encounter with mephitis mephitis, I started to develop a certain affection for the little critters. They’re awfully fluffy and cute, even if they do occasionally waft their musky scent through our neighborhood. We even named our local skunk—he’s known as Monsieur Mouffard. (For some reason skunks have to be French. It’s just one of those things.)

A few days later, I had a dream about a skunk. I dreamt was outside our house, when suddenly M. Mouffard came running towards me and leapt into my arms. I held him for a few moments, before giving in to the urge to pet his soft fur. He began to talk to me. He said that he was cold and hungry, and could he sleep under our porch? I agreed, and said I’d feed him, so long as he promised not to spray near the house. He promised.

In real life I haven’t fed M. Mouffard, so perhaps that’s why he hasn’t kept his side of the bargain. I woke up last night at around 2am, and discovered that he had left his calling card. Judging from the nasal assault, someone had annoyed him right outside our bedroom window. I began to get a sense for what it would be like to experience a direct hit, as my stomach churned and I fought off a growing sense of nausea.

Still, he’s darn cute.