Behind These Eyes - July 2001

Monday, 2 July

An unusual day today, in that I finally got in to the office and managed to read my email at about 4PM. This morning I had "health and safety training" first thing, which went on until noon, after which I spent the afternoon at the other building getting my latest server sorted out (put into the rack, hooked up to life support, and the basics of configuring it). To be honest I didn't have much to do with the process in the early stages; the placement in the rack was done entirely by the guys.

A problem happened today that I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of. The GroupWise system (mostly in the US) and the Exchange system (everywhere else) obviously have to be able to communicate, or else none of us could send emails to each other. This communication is accomplished by a GroupWise-to-Exchange gateway, basically a piece of software that is able to understand both sides and is configured to know where both systems are, so it can translate and route messages between the two. Unfortunately it's not the most robust app in the world; it was written primarily to provide a method for migrating from one to the other, the idea being to do this relatively quickly and then shut the gateway down. This one has been running continuously for something like two years now and it's showing the strain. It fails often. Well, sometime over the weekend it went down. An all-staff email being sent by the help desk (which has been converted to GW) didn't reach any of the Exchange mailboxes (that being nearly everyone else at this point). The message, when I investigated, had quite clearly left the GW side of things successfully, which pointed to the gateway being down. Unfortunately, it's in Dallas, where it was about 5AM. I thought it'd be OK to wait until they started arriving at about 7, rather than wake one of them up, but that turned out to be a bad call because they didn't actually fix it until about 9:00 their time, by which time there was a bit of unhappiness. In future I'll wake 'em up. We'd like to bring the connector to the UK anyway. Unlikely that we'll get our way on that one, but we'll see.

Right. A bit more about that "health and safety training". Attitudes toward occupational safety are hugely different here. At a US company (at least all the ones I've worked at), fire evacuation procedures can basically be summed up as follows: Dude, like, leave the building. Here they're much more concerned about it. Whenever I go to the other building, I have to sign in on a log so that if there's a fire, they know to look for me in a place where I'm not normally located. If I call in sick, I have to call the receptionist so that I can be listed as not being there that day. There are fire assembly points where we have to, well, assemble. They have fire drills at least every six months--and they routinely block a randomly-chosen fire exit to force people not to get complacent about where their nearest fire exit is. There are formally-trained fire wardens. If there is a fire (or a fire drill), re-entering the building results in instant, on-the-spot dismissal.

And that's just for fires. If I so much as trip on a stair-tread, they want me to fill out a form about the "incident", even if I don't hurt myself. (This way they can keep track, and if everyone trips over the same stair tread, they can do something about it.)

Don't get me wrong--I'm not complaining about this or saying that it's wrong. I'm just bemused by it all. It's such a far cry from the way things are done in the US.

Created at 22:26

Saturday, 7 July

Massa-%$&£#-chusetts!

The latest batch of Pete-forwarded mail included a 2001 excise tax bill for my Honda. Can anyone suggest a plausible, non-cynical reason why Massachusetts excise tax has a 100% hit rate for noticing when you move into town, but a perfect 0% for recognising when you move out?

I don't know how other states work, having only owned cars in Massachusetts, but in MA, the excise tax system is set up by the state but collected by the towns. Presumably the towns use this as a source of revenue. When you change towns, an excise tax bill from the new town arrives promptly without any effort on your part, usually within about two seconds after you unpack the first box. That part of the system seems to work fine. Yet mysteriously, this bureaucratic efficiency seems to break down at the other end, because right after your excise tax bill from your new town, you get one from your old town. It's also axiomatic that the first few bills from the old town cunningly evade the postal forwarding system, so the first bill you actually receive is the one with DEMAND NOTICE written all over it, and it pre-includes penalties and interest and all those things so beloved of tax authorities, thereby managing to triple the bill right from the word go.

Now, this is where it really starts to frost me. You might think that you could just ignore the bill from the old town and it would all get sorted out internally.

Nope.

OK, ratcheting the optimism down a notch, you might think that, to avoid the hassle, you could just roll your eyes and pay the old town for this year and they'd have it sorted out by next year.

Nope.

Hmm. Well, maybe you could call up the jolly folks at the tax office in your old town and explain the situation, have a good laugh together, and get it settled that way.

Nope.

What you actually have to do is file a form whose name even sets my teeth on edge: an Application for Abatement of Excise Tax. Application! For abatement! The nerve! I don't live there any more and they're acting as if they have a right to tax me anyway, and I have to beg them to see their way clear to grant me an abatement of a tax I don't owe them! And the official procedure at this point is to pay the tax anyway, while they review my grovelling, whereupon they might magnanimously condescend to refund me some portion of it. And in addition to filling out the form itself, I have to send them a copy of my "Plate Return Receipt" to prove that I really did de-register the car. As if they didn't already have that information from the DMV themselves! (I can only speculate on what would happen if I didn't have the plate return receipt. Perhaps I'd owe them excise tax for the rest of my natural life?)

And if you don't file this form, and pay the tax, and gratefully accept whatever fraction they give you back, then they will send you the stupid tax bill again next year. And the following year. And so on.

And if you ignore the whole mess, on the grounds that they have no right whatsoever to tax you at this point and it's their problem, then when you try to renew your car registration (or register a new car), you can't, because they put a hold on your ability to do so. And if you let things degenerate to this point, and you go to the central excise tax office in Wakefield to clear it up and pay your three years or whatever of enormously penalised and interested excise taxes, you had damn well better get a receipt and a written statement that your little tax problem has been satisfactorily settled, because the next time you try to renew your registration, I promise you that the whole thing will still be listed as outstanding, and if you can't produce that receipt etc, you get to pay the whole thing again.

Now, you might think I'm just a tad cynical, but I know whereof I speak. I have changed towns in Massachusetts, um, let's see, ...eight times, during six of which I've owned a car, and every time I have had to go through this fiasco. This makes seven. This time it annoys me even more than usual, because not only do I not live in the town any more, I don't live in the state any more--I don't even live in the country and I'm still going to have to pay this stupid tax on a car I don't even own any more, and beg for an "abatement".

Oh ye great gods of taxation, hear my unworthy plea. Take pity on your lowest servant: condescend to grant me exemption from this tax, that ye in your computer illiteracy have levied upon me wrongfully; but first I beg you to let me pay it anyway, for it is my greatest satisfaction in life to fill out paperwork and send international post; and then I may be content all my days, suspensefully awaiting your clemency and the possibility of a pittance of a refund, which I shall then eagerly convey to my bank during normal business hours, making a special trip there-for, and deposit into my account, incurring currency conversion fees thereon.

Just in case anyone out there is considering moving to Massachusetts, I'll offer you this hint: DON'T.

Created at 22:54

Sunday, 15 July

It's wrong to think that the past is something that's just gone. It's still there. It's just that you've gone past. If you drive through a town, it's still there in the rear-view mirror. Time is a road, but it doesn't roll up behind you.

--Terry Pratchett, Johnny and the Dead

Ngggg!

My head is so full, I'm afraid that if I tilt it even a little bit, things will leak out. Aside from the obvious inconvenience of losing the information, just imagine the mess it would make of the carpets!

Yesterday, you see, I finally took the plunge into the Timesheet App. (Have I mentioned this before? Don't remember, and won't search previous diary entries to find out, for fear that having to store that one extra "Yes"--or maybe "No"--in my brain will push something else out. So if I'm repeating myself, you'll just have to suffer through it, I'm afraid.) IVB has a home-grown timesheet app used by about half the staff to submit their time to Accounts every week. Trouble is, it was written within Outlook. Outlook is the front end program for Exchange, just in case there's anyone out there fortunate enough not to know that. I'm migrating them from Exchange to GroupWise, you see. No more Exchange = no more Outlook = no more timesheet app = no more staff time being billed to customers = no more profit = no more company. Obviously this would be less than ideal, so the timesheet app has to be replaced. It doesn't need to do very much, so an off-the-shelf app is serious overkill. I had a look at it a few weeks back and concluded that rewriting it is within even my limited programming capabilities, so I've been tasked with writing the replacement. Well, what with doing all the other GW-related preparation, I hadn't tackled it yet. That all changed yesterday.

At the moment I am, shall we say, rather focussed, and have been since mid-afternoon yesterday. I had programming dreams last night--not surprising, it usually happens when I have my head sunk deep into something. If I don't knock off an hour or two before bed and do something else long enough (and intensely enough) to purge the programming from my head, it's programming dreams, I'm afraid. Focus is a cool state of mind.

At work this week there were a few minor milestones. (Yard-stones? Mile-pebbles?) I mostly fiddled around with my servers and their configurations. Now that I'm trying to write about it, it seems like I can't remember a tenth of what I've been doing. But. The backup server is finally set up and mostly operational (although minus auto-loader support--that turns out to be a separate module, but it recognises the first tape of the auto-loader, which means I can at least do rudimentary backups). The UPSes are configured and can gracefully shut down and restart all the servers--and in fact got a real-world test the very night I configured them. The disk array management utility is installed and working on all the servers, which will be important in four more months when they start nagging to have their batteries reconditioned. Lots of head-banging against SLP and not being able to find the tree at login, but I think I've found the answer. I set up a newsgroups service, and fiddled the user web page service so there's only one web server running them both. I now have disaster-recovery documentation and materials for all my servers. There's still plenty more to be done, partly because I keep thinking of more things to tweak or services to offer, but that will be ongoing, I suspect.

All the IT staff are now on GroupWise except my manager (who would be, but he was in Dallas this week) and Andrew (who runs the Exchange system and should probably be left as-is until Exchange goes away). I finalised a semi-automated process for bulk-creating users in the NetWare tree, and spent a lot of time fiddling my evolving Exchange-to-GroupWise individual mailbox migration process so that it (a) goes as efficiently and (b) spends as little time at the user's workstation as possible. And somewhere in the midst of all this, I actually spent quite a bit of time writing and polishing on-line help for newly-migrated users. Oh, and I've moved cubes already. One of the help desk guys turned out to be a contractor, who finished last week, so I moved into his cube. It's a slight upgrade because it's next to the windows.

This Wednesday we went to Neil Gaiman's book-reading and signing. We were nice and only brought 6 books for signing. (Mike has about 18 and I have 3, although two of my 3 are in storage in the US because they're duplicates, sigh). It was great; I always like to hear authors read their own work.

Mike is at Brainstormer all next week, which is a sort of mini-Brainshare, so I will have the castle to myself. (It's only in Salford, which isn't far at all, but it's not convenient to have to commute, so he's staying over.) It will hardly be like he's gone, though, because one of the nights we're going to a Mark Knopfler show, and on another we might get together with James and Jo. That's two out of four accounted for, and somehow I suspect that the other two will be mostly occupied with, er, programming.

Meanwhile, for a little light relief, I've started reading Consciousness Explained. Hmm. This afternoon I needed to do something other than programming for a few minutes, but thought Johnny and the Dead would be more my speed at the moment.

And now I'm off to let visions of data-grids dance in my head.

Created at 23:16

Sunday, 22 July

Those gaps happen so easily...

I have a bit of a cold, I'm afraid, so I'm feeling rather unenergetic just at the moment. Yesterday was worse, though, so maybe it's not going to amount to much. I can hope, anyway.

A busy week. Mike was at Brainstormer, so you might think that I took this opportunity to catch up on things--dishes, laundry, gardening...? Astonishingly, no! I didn't do any of those things! Instead, I spent the evenings programming. Not that there were even that many of them--of the four nights Mike was away, we got together for two of them. As Mike already mentioned in his diary entry, one of those was for dinner with James and Jo, at a restaurant called Tampopo, which has become the most recent entry on the ever-expanding Places Tom Must Eat Someday list. Ohhhh, it was wonderful.

And then there was the Mark Knopfler concert. He is, it has to be said, more a Mike thing than a me thing. I like him fine, but aside from occasional "I forgot how good this is" binges, I tend not to listen to him.

Well.

He went up a few notches on the scale. It's astonishing how much difference seeing a live show can make. The energy, the sheer unadulterated fun they're obviously having up there--it's all very catching.

Things started out promisingly--our seats turned out to be in Row 4 on the floor, nearly center. (We thought they'd be about halfway back.) I could easily see everything, which is quite unusual. Frustratingly, we were foolish enough to believe the "no cameras" ultimatum printed on the tickets. Lots of other people brought theirs, using flash no less, and nobody made a fuss about it. And the pictures we could have taken! Row 4, and the lighting was excellent. Unlike heavier shows, the light went more for an artistic effect than an energetic one, which results in some cool effects.

Given that I have no musical talent whatsoever, people who have it always amaze me, especially when they have it in spades. Everyone on that stage made it look like they could do what they were doing without actually requiring conscious intervention from any part of their brain. And to top it all off, they all played multiple instruments. ("They all play guitar," mourned Knopfler at one point. "It's very hard for me.")

And some of those instruments were, shall we say, unusual. Picture if you will: Mark Knopfler, looking fairly ordinary in T-shirt and jeans. Next to him, Ace Ventura, complete with Hawaiian shirt, mugging and capering whilst playing an enormous electro-acoustic double bass, without benefit of bow. On the other side, Wolf Blitzer in business casual plays ordinary guitar (most of the time). Then at the far end, we have a guy in cowboy boots and hat, usually playing a weird guitar that always sounded like it was about to break into the main line of "Hot Rod Lincoln" but sometimes playing electric violin or ukulele. Beyond him is the Welsh gnome of a pianist-slash-accordion player. (I hadn't previously realised that the accordionist career path continued beyond a Kenosha-Kickers-esque polka role, but it turns out it does. For one accordionist, at least.)

What a show. Most of the time it was normal guitars and bass, but for particular songs or parts of songs, out would come the violin or ukulele or double bass or even banjo or accordion--or the whole lot of them at once--and darned if it didn't work. And they were having so much fun! Knopfler kept saying, "We'll play all night, if that's what you want." They didn't, but it was a solid two-and-a-half hours and three encores before they stopped. There were at least two tracks I don't think I've ever heard before, which just goes to show how much material is available to him, between his solo stuff and the earlier Dire Straits material.

It was a seated show, which is a change of pace from the kind of stuff I usually see, but toward the end people began drifting down front, just to get some of that we're-all-together crowd enthusiasm going. The security people, needless to say, couldn't really stop several hundred people, but they did try. Knopfler stopped them: "Hey Mr Security Man, you're spoiling the show. Let them come down."

(BTW, if you've reached this page via a search engine, and you're trying to decide whether to catch the tour or not, I have just one short but emphatic word for you: GO.)

This weekend I'm afraid I've been lounging around, being no use to anyone. I seem to get wiped out very easily. But, of course, in the usual denial, I keep doing things anyway just to prove that I'm Not Sick Dammit. We even attacked the garden again this afternoon; it's been a few weeks and you would not believe what is going on back there. A raspberry plant, for example, that was three smallish leaves when I last looked at it, now had ten-foot-long runners coming from it, with branches of their own. The Horrible Carrots turned into their own little forest. It all looked very intimidating, yet it was actually the easiest weeding I've done so far. It's been (comparatively) dry lately, and things just pulled out of the soil, roots and all, as if they wanted to go. Mike trimmed back the hedge and bushes a few feet and mowed the lawn, as well as tackling the weeds himself. Altogether we spent a couple of hours out there.

Eric (and Linda and Tom) sent me a slightly early birthday present, which turned out to be an enormous fluffy ladybird. Apparently Eric has one, and is inseparable from it, and thought it'd be a good idea if Aunt Lisa had one. Actually it's sitting on my knee right now. We've decided to name it...Stripe.

Created at 23:21

Tuesday, 24 July

As they passed through into the dusty network of corridors Granny reflected, not for the first time, that Nanny had a magic all of her own.

Nanny didn't so much enter places as insinuate herself; she had unconsciously taken a natural talent for liking people and developed it into an occult science. Granny Weatherwax did not doubt that her friend already knew the names, family histories, birthdays and favourite topics of conversation of half the people here, and probably also the vital wedge that would cause them to open up. It might be talking about their children, or a potion for their bad feet, or one of Nanny's really filthy stories, but Nanny would be in and after twenty-four hours they'd have known her all their lives. And they'd tell her things. Of their own free will. Nanny Got On with people. Nanny could get a statue to cry on her shoulder and say what it really thought about pigeons.

--Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

Big day tomorrow: I'm migrating the first real users to GroupWise. (IT staff don't count. They don't react to problems the same way as real users do. When you tell an IT person that you are having problems with their mailbox, their first question isn't "Will I lose anything?", it's more like "What sort of problem?") It's only two users, which seems a good size for a first nibble.

You might think that, like Mike, I'd be avoiding doing anything major just prior to going on holiday. Ordinarily that'd be the case, but given the pressures to get the GroupWise migration done, we're not waiting. This may result in some calls to the mobile while we're on holiday. Hopefully not; the two Help Desk staff are just back from their GroupWise administration class last week, one of them so burgeoning with enthusiasm that it's a contest to see who will clout him first.

Unfortunately, my on-again, off-again RSI is making a reappearance, quite badly in both hands, in fact. It never really went away the last time, actually; just became a lot milder. Diving into programming the timesheet app probably didn't do it any good. Yet another reason to look forward to holiday; there will probably be somewhat fewer opportunities for typing and mousing.

Oh, and speaking of hands, I tried my hand at JavaScript for the first time today. Does that make me a web developer now? (Hmm, which tangentially reminds me, I actually should update my CV, and change the work site so it doesn't say I'm about to start job-hunting any more...)

Stripe is proving an interesting addition to the household. Having, as he does, six little legs, it should perhaps not be surprising that he keeps turning up in places where nobody will confess to having put him. This afternoon he was waiting for me, just inside the door, which is strange because Mike said that when he got home, Stripe was lurking under his monitor. Gets around, Stripe does.

Created at 21:16

Friday, 27 July

How do we describe a madness so complete and universal in our species as not to be a madness at all, but a norm? 'As mad as the maddest thing you can think of whipped up into an insane pottiness, psychotically marinated in maniacal unreason and folded into a bubbling bedlam of wild lunacy before being heated under an unbalanced flame of raving derangement. Drain, leave to stand, then section under the Mental Health Act.'

--Stephen Fry, Paperweight

We're on holiday! This should be fun--we have done exactly no planning. Well, that's not true in the most strict sense; we do have an intended general direction (north, to Scotland). Moreover, we know we're stopping at Helen's for the first couple of nights. But beyond that, it's all up for grabs. We will probably decide what to do next while we're at Helen's. Presumably we'll decide what to do after that while we're wherever we go after Helen's, and so on until we run out of holiday.

Planning is always a rather futile exercise for us anyway; we're constitutionally incapable of sticking to the plan. I blame maps, really. If we could get from Point A to Point B without having to navigate, we'd probably be all right; but once we start scrutinising the map, it's all over. We'll notice something interesting-looking that isn't far out of the way, or a slower-but-more-scenic way to go than the motorway, or a town with a funny name, and so much for the plan.

So our plan, such as it is, is simply to go with the flow of whatever looks interesting next.

Back in two weeks, then, at which time we'll be able to give a full report about such things as haggis and kilts and deep-fried Mars bars. (We're bringing a lot of our technology with us, so there is even the faintest shadow of a hint of a possibility that we might do a diary entry. No promises, of course, but you never know, so it might be worth checking once or twice while we're gone.)

Created at 23:02

Tuesday, 31 July

What I Did on My Holidays
Parte the Firste

In Which Our Heroes Visit a Quarantined Part of the Country, Are Serenaded by a Wild Bagpiper, Learn That There Is Such a Thing as Nigerian Tea, and Watch With Horror as Innocent Passersby Are Plucked From the Streets As If by an Invisible Hand of Limitless Power!

Holiday is shaping up nicely so far...Here's a brief summary of what we've been up to.

Saturday (28 July)

We got off to a really early start (for us); we were on the road before noon. We had to; we were scheduled to have lunch at Mike's mother's house. This turned out to be a chance to ply me with birthday presents from Mike's mother and Arnie. There was chocolate, for one thing, and a very nice set of slate bookends from the Lakes. These will come in handy, as we have no shortage of books, but bookshelf space and bookends are always at a premium. The chocolate has already come in handy; very little of it has survived to the present moment. I thought it would be most appropriate if we managed to finish it all before my birthday even got here, but we haven't quite made it.

From there it was just a quick drive north to Helen's house, where we were planning to stay for two nights. This was a fun drive for me, as it exactly recapitulated our route from when I first visited England in May last year, and I hadn't been that way since. As we drove into Cumbria, I wondered: Is it my imagination, or are the hills emptier than they were last time? Have the sheep flocks been visibly diminished? Of course I don't really know; I don't remember that clearly what they looked like the last time. But they would almost have to be, wouldn't they? So many sheep and cows have been slaughtered.

Arrival at Helen's was rather grim--the gate has a sign warning that the area is closed due to foot and mouth, and there is a bucket of disinfectant just inside the gate for people who must go in and out. Where last year there were Ben-and-Jerry's-esque herds of black and white cows, and big fluffy sheep, now there are silent hills. I don't think those of us outside the hard-hit areas have appreciated just how much anger and bitterness there is here. There are even conspiracy theories cropping up, to the effect that the outbreak was purposely started by the government for reasons having to do with integration with Europe.

Sunday (29 July)

Helen and Kevin both had Sunday off, so we thought we'd do some touristy Lake District things. Not surprisingly, the day was heavily overcast, with occasional spitting rain, but nothing heavy enough to be really inconvenient. We thought we'd go to Coniston, but we stopped in Ambleside for lunch and ended up going to look at a local waterfall and wandering around town and the shops, by which time it was getting late so we just headed back.

On the way we stopped to see if Castlerigg Stone Circle was accessible, since I've been here nearly a year and still hadn't managed to see a stone circle yet, but it's in a sheep field, and therefore was closed.

Back at Helen's, we booked a B&B for four nights in Edinburgh, on the grounds that the weather for the next few days looked quite unsettled. In a city there's lots more indoorsy stuff to do. Also Edinburgh apparently has this enormous annual festival that lasts three weeks, taking up most of August. We wanted to get in and out before all of that started.

Monday (30 July)

We woke up to shockingly good weather for the Lakes--there was blue sky visible! So we decided to take the scenic route. We took a loop on really minor B and single-track unnumbered roads that went through Buttermere and Honister Pass, and we weren't disappointed.

Buttermere (94 KB). This is Buttermere, a small lake (and town) in the middle of a cluster of mountains. We walked around it for a little bit, along with only a few other tourists. Strangely, there were sheep quite nearby, and even running free in the road, despite the very visible presence of disinfectant tubs.

Then we went up over Honister Pass, which most startlingly turned out to have a slate quarry at the top of it! The pass itself wasn't bad; not nearly the kind of twisty, steep road that Hardknott Pass was. And of course the weather was better, which helps.

Having completed our scenic detour, we pointed ourselves northward. Again there was the sense of depleted populations on the hills, and we even saw a hand-painted sign that summed up the mood in Cumbria quite well: Blair fiddles while Cumbria burns!

We didn't spend long on the motorway; instead we took a smaller A road that went more directly toward Edinburgh, so we could enjoy the scenery along the way although it had turned cloudier and rained sometimes. (Convenient for us, that it waited to rain until we were just driving between two points anyway.)

Edinburgh is a much bigger city than I'd realised. We had some adventures while trying to find our B&B, having to do with Edinburgh's novel and entertaining system for naming major roads--as we learned later, major roads have a main name but also separate names for individual subsections along the way. We thought our B&B was on a side road off a particular main road, because its road name wasn't the same, but it turned out to be right on the main road after all.

It was now my birthday eve, but we were tired and didn't want to stay up terribly late, so we declared it to be midnight just a little bit early so I could open presents! Lots of good stuff--a CD from Cath, a Terry Pratchett book I've never heard of from Mike, along with a potentially very strange SF book about a world where gravity operates parallel to the ground surface rather than perpendicular to it; also another Eddie Izzard video, which we'll have to wait till we get home to see, as B&Bs don't tend to have in-room VCRs; and some Thornton's chocolate, wheee!

Tuesday (31 July)

Happy birthday to me!

We woke up to excellent weather; there was hardly a cloud in the sky, so we thought it'd be a good day to climb Arthur's Seat. (Edinburgh is a strange city. It has an extinct volcano in it. Some time ago someone with a bit of foresight made a park out of it, so there is a vast park containing a rather large hill just to the southeast of the center of Edinburgh.) As it turned out, we climbed a separate subsection of the hill called Salisbury Crags; whatever the name, it had an excellent view over Edinburgh.

I should probably warn you that I have become very attached to the panorama feature of my camera. Probably a real photographer could do a better job of it than I do, but whenever I take normal pictures, I feel like they don't have a hope of capturing what it looked like to me; a panoramic does a much better job, and if viewed properly, can actually make you feel like you were standing there. So as I post pictures, there may be a disproportionate percentage of panoramics among them. Starting right now, actually.

The Royal Mile (431 KB). The heart of Edinburgh is the Royal Mile, running from Edinburgh Castle to Holyroodhouse Palace. Edinburgh Castle is perched at the top of yet another volcanic core, so it looms over the rest of the city quite impressively. When the glaciers came through, they couldn't budge the tough volcanic rock, so they had to go around and over it. Consequently the land right behind the core slopes gently down until it meets the surrounding ground level again, right where Holyroodhouse Palace is. The street connecting these two is called the Royal Mile. In this panorama, you can see Edinburgh Castle at the far left and Holyroodhouse Palace at the far right. The construction cranes are building the new Scottish Parliament. The water in the background is the Firth of Forth. This panoramic has some stitching and focussing issues, but I included it anyway because I wanted an overview of Edinburgh. Interestingly colourful place, isn't it?

Wild Bagpiper (29 KB). So there we were, madly snapping pictures like there was no tomorrow, when suddenly I hear the strains of a bagpipe being played nearby! Behind us were the Crags themselves, and lo and behold, standing atop the cliff was a bagpiper, playing away. I thought I'd die of happiness. I'd been hoping to encounter some bagpipers in the wild, and here one was already, on our very first morning in Edinburgh, serenading us in the morning sunshine! I wanted to get a picture before he ran away, but this was straight into the sunshine, so it's come out as a silhouette, which upon reflection is fine anyway.

Anyway. Once I'd recovered from swooning, we made our way back down in search of tea, starting at the lower end of the Royal Mile (skipping Holyroodhouse for the time being) and working our way up. Eventually we settled on a place that I can only describe as a tea emporium; their menu had at least eight pages of nothing but different varieties of tea that we'd never heard of. There was no such thing on it as an entry for "normal tea"; the closest I could find was "breakfast blend". Did you know that there is such a thing as Nigerian tea? How about South African? How about several varieties from each? Well, anyway, they had them all, along with a selection of utterly sinful concoctions, from which we chose a couple that involved raspberries. Oooh.

On up the Royal Mile we sauntered, taking in the architecture and visual delights as we went along, while tripping over things and bumping into lamp-posts. After lunch we went to this crazy Camera Obscura, basically a giant camera on a tower that somebody set up in the 1800s. It doesn't take a picture onto film; it just projects it into a white bowl. They've turned it into quite a funny show (probably had to, what with camera technology not being quite the crowd-shocker it doubtless was in the 1800s). At one point the showman pointed the camera at the people in the street directly below the tower; then he took his "magic card", chose a person, and lifted them up off the street! Of course what he was doing was putting this white card between the camera and the bowl, so that the image was projected onto his card, but it really looked like he was picking someone up, shaking them around, and then dropping them back on the street. The small children howled with laughter; so did we. He picked up people, cars, whatever; shook them around and slapped them back down. Then he folded his magic card and set it across an intersection; when the light turned green, it looked like the traffic drove over his card like a bridge. It was all very well done.

At this point our feet were really getting tired, so we bagged the city for the rest of the day and chose a destination that involved driving rather than walking. We headed out to look at the infamous Forth Rail Bridge.

Forth Rail Bridge (115 KB). The bridge turned out to be quite picturesque, especially as we were approaching Magic Hour (which is near-interminable here when the days are long; it lasts a solid hour anyway). South Queensferry, the town at one end of the bridge, is also quite picturesque, so we were basically forced to meander around snapping pictures of the bridge and the town, stopping only to have an excellent curry before resuming. It was a hard day but someone had to do it.

Tonight we also did our first camera dump. The amount of technology we've brought with us is truly terrifying. We've brought the camera connection cable, and I have the camera software installed on the laptop, so the idea is that we plug in the camera, copy all the pictures off the card(s), and then we can empty the cards and keep taking pictures. We also brought blank CDs so we can make a backup copy as we go along. This is all turning out to be a bit less optional than we'd thought. We each have 64MB cards in our cameras, plus some other smaller cards, yet here we are on day what, four? and the cards are already nearing full. This could get scary if we keep on at this pace.

Tomorrow, unsettled weather is forecast, so we are going to start out at the museum. There are two right next to each other, one (the Royal Museum of Scotland) in a venerable old Victorian building, the other (the National Museum of Scotland) in a brand-new vintage 1992 modern building, yet they share a wall and are connected. Our interest in the museums is peripheral: One of them reputedly has an Andy Goldsworthy, and we'd quite like to see one. In the afternoon we plan to go to a mall: we have some prosaic shopping needs that we never get around to when we're at home, so if it's still raining by the time we're done at the museum, it seems like a good thing to do.

Like I said: Happy birthday to me!

Created at 23:14

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