the hernandez adventure continues...

installing windows 7 on a lenovo T510 without recovery disks

2011-07-19T18:17:00.000Z

It took me long enough to figure out this out, and the search results were thin enough, that I think a blog post is worthwhile. I certainly would have liked to have had something like this.

Scenario

Lenovo T510
Lost the Lenovo recovery disks
Needed to install Windows 7 64 bit from scratch

After a fruitless attempt to get Windows 7 and Debian Squeeze to cohabitate, I had simply given up and installed Debian Squeeze onto the box, blowing away Windows. Getting the trackpoint mouse to work reasonably well is another article entirely. For various reasons, I needed to install Visual Studio to take a look at it's integration to Microsoft's new Azure platform (pretty neat, by the way) and so I had to get back to Win 7 64. I lost the Lenovo recovery disks in our recent move, and so picked up a full copy of Windows 7 64 at best buy, and got down to installing.

Problem

As many of you may have found, Windows 7 weirdly doesn't recognize the T510's networking hardware. So, after installing Win 7, you will need to install the Lenovo drivers from their helpful website here. Of course, without the internet, this can be a challenge. As I found out, even with the internet this is a challenge, because after downloading the Intel PRO/1000 Lan Adapter ethernet driver via my other computer, putting it on a USB stick, transferring it to the laptop and installing it, I got an error stating that I was missing the "Intel Networking" driver. While pretty much sucks, who's bright idea was it to create an ethernet driver that needs another driver to run? Especially one that doesn't seem to be available for download anywhere? Whatever. At this point, I was pretty well stuck, and just started randomly downloading things in the hope that I could get it to work.

Among the things that didn't work were:

running any other exe's in the PRO/1000 Lan Adapter install directory
manually adding any .inf file via the My Computer >> Properties >> Device Manager
getting windows to detect the ethernet device on it's own (btw Debian does this no problem)
finding the elusive "Intel Networking" driver
installing Lenovo's Thinkvantage Access Connections software

Solution

As it turns out, the winning combo was to get the following:

Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG/ 4965AGN
Thinkvatage System Update

...which at the time I did this, were the following two files:

8aw212ww.exe
systemupdate40-2011-02-18.exe

...both of which are available at the driver website listed above. The first driver is the wireless WiFi driver, and for whatever reason, this has all the neccesary bits to get you connected to the internet. Yes, the WiFi sets up easier than the Ethernet. The second file is the automatic update installer, which just figures out what you don't have, what's current, and gives you the option of downloading whatever you like, including the ethernet driver. From there, you are back up and running.

Hopefully this is of use to someone else who won't want to go through the hassle I did.

installing windows 7 on a lenovo T510 without recovery disks

2011-07-18T21:41:00.001Z

It took me long enough to figure out this out, and the search results were thin enough, that I think a blog post is worthwhile. I certainly would have liked to have had something like this.

Scenario

Lenovo T510
Lost the Lenovo recovery disks
Needed to install Windows 7 64 bit from scratch

Problem

Among the things that didn't work were:

running any other exe's in the PRO/1000 Lan Adapter install directory
manually adding any .inf file via the My Computer >> Properties >> Device Manager
getting windows to detect the ethernet device on it's own (btw Debian does this no problem)
finding the elusive "Intel Networking" driver
installing Lenovo's Thinkvantage Access Connections software

Solution

As it turns out, the winning combo was to get the following:

Intel Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG/ 4965AGN
Thinkvatage System Update

...which at the time I did this, were the following two files:

8aw212ww.exe
systemupdate40-2011-02-18.exe

Hopefully this is of use to someone else who won't want to go through the hassle I did.

IDEs and boost::asio

2011-05-11T03:23:00.001Z

In Computer Science school, you spend a lot of time writing little programs that express some new concept, and are easy to code up in a text editor like VIM. This is fine with me as it suits my tastes. I like the 70s retro computer style. However, one thing this computer science school hasn’t done much of is give us bigger projects with lots of files to manage, until now. I just spent the last two hours getting my project all broken up into .cpp and .hpp files, and loading them into the IDE I’m using, which is Visual Studio 2010. I think it’s a pretty cool tool, though I can imagine a few Linux fanboys who will be de-friending me about now. Sorry Noah. People I know that are working on big real world code projects always say that beyond a certain size of project, it’s just better to use an IDE, and I suppose today I found that threshold for me.

The other barrier that I passed today was getting boost::asio to work on Windows 7. It worked effortlessly on my Debian EC2 server, but getting it rolling on my laptop was a real pain, all kinds of harsh lessons about boost and linkers had to be learned before I got it working. But now it works. I will add that I think the asio guys have totally lost their minds and gone over the C++0x wall, operating in an increasingly erratic manner. Functions? Forget it, now we only use functors. Loops? A thing of the past, it’s recursion or nothing. One nice thing about dealing with boost a lot is that no one is going to knock off style points if you start ripping them off. These dudes are 100% by the book, though my eyes tend to cross when reading stuff like boost::asio::ip::tcp::resolver::query query and boost::asio::ip::tcp::acceptor::reuse_address(true).

Four weeks to go.

And, scene.

crocodiles again

2011-03-31T17:07:00.001Z

Even in binary trees, Crocodiles are near at hand and expect to be a part of the fun.

on the value of an MBA to your professional network

2011-03-16T15:52:00.000Z

It’s been a while since I’ve written about MBA subjects, partly because that was all 5 years ago, and partly because getting a master’s degree in Computer Science takes up a lot of one’s time and energy. Recently, my friend Madeleine posted an image of her Linkedin network visualized as a graph. This was built automatically using the inmaps feature of Linkedin Labs, which is pretty nifty and is very pretty as well. This tool integrates easily with other social networking tools, so in a few clicks, you have a map and you’ve tweeted, posted, and whatever-ed it to all your friends. Here’s mine…

There’s a lot of interesting things to be seen in a visual representation of a people network. Some points that I noticed in mine are:

my closest friends from Seattle, affectionately known as “The Dummies” are fairly well separated from the rest of the network (just below me in purple).
the people that I know who are the most successful professionally generally (but not always) have the most connections.
despite working at Microsoft, Keane, Adobe, Saltmine and Washington Mutual in Seattle, the individual networks of these companies are nearly indistinguishable from one another, adding credence to the “it’s a small world” adage often applied to the Seattle tech industry.
while tightly connected to the overall Seattle network, my old company Saltmine seems to have split into two factions, which makes sense if you ever worked there.
my wife is the big purple dot slightly below and to the left of me, isn’t hers a cute one!
the Oxford MBA staff are more closely related to my professional contacts than the MBAs are, this makes sense as it’s their job to help us get jobs.
working overseas for just a few years expanded the network quite a bit, the Barclays network (above me in green) is a significant portion of the overall set.

Most significantly, I can see that the network I built up in 1 year of Oxford MBA (lower left in orange) is nearly the same size as the network that I built up in 15 years of working in Seattle (middle right in blue). This graph doesn’t show geographic distribution, but I’m sure the MBA network would be off the charts in this regard.

Did this network expansion add value professionally?

This is hard to say.

Pro: In the abstract, assuming there is professional value in knowing lots of professionals in diverse locations, my MBA abroad clearly added value.

Pro: My personal experience tells me that I have never gotten any job via headhunters, newspaper ads, monster postings, or any venue OTHER than my personal and professional networks.

Con: It’s also reasonable to assume that the majority of connections in a network are not particularly useful, and those that are useful will vary in their utility.

Con: Further, given that people I have worked with are on the right side of the graph and people I have studied with are on the left, this graph may be interpreted to show that knowing a lot of MBAs hasn’t gotten me any jobs!

Be Honest with Yourself: Having invested significant time and money in building this network, it’s hard to avoid confirmation bias.

In summary: Combining my experience with the intuitions implied by this graph, I’m going to say: yes, this network expansion probably added value professionally. Since it was a ton of fun building up, I’m also going to say it definitely added value personally.

So, what the hell, get an overseas MBA already!

Cafe Laguardia

2010-11-21T17:25:00.001Z

Cuban food is very special to me. Several branches of my father’s family emigrated from Cuba in the late 19th century, and possibly more significantly, lived in Cuban communities in Key West and Tampa for several generations after coming to the USA. Thus, my grandmother’s cooking included significant components of Cuban cuisine, along with classic Spanish and American dishes. All of her Cuban dishes were simple, savory, hearty arrangements of common ingredients, things that I imagine being within the means of my impoverished ancestors’ budgets. Arroz con pollo (yellow rice with chicken), picadillo (basically a Cuban sloppy joe), plantanos (fried sweet plantain bananas), ropa vieja (shredded flank steak), frijoles negros (a kind of black bean stew), and bollitos (black eyed pea fritters) are all good examples of the simple, tasty meals that I was treated to when I visited grandma’s house. Note that none of these are lo-carb, lo-calorie, lo-sodium, or lo-anything else! Also, because of the flavorings, you don’t need expensive cuts of meat or farm fresh vegetables to be able to pull these off. For the uninitiated, Cuban food may be described as similar to many other Caribbean cuisines with a strong nod to Spain. In any event, I remember grandma as a great cook, and when I think about Cuban food from her kitchen, the memory is of delicious food.

My mother, a 100% New England Yankee of English, Irish and Scottish descent, did a good job of reproducing these dishes in our Seattle home during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. I can’t imagine they were as interesting for her as they were for my father or us kids, but as in all things, mom’s a good sport and put her best efforts in. Mom is also a great cook, and I remember these dishes as being delicious as well.

On occasional trips to Key West to visit Father Evelio Hernandez (my great uncle) and other relatives, I have had the good fortune to eat at local family restaurants that preserve the traditions of this lovely cuisine. One of the best must be El Siboney, which is an unpretentious little cafe in a quiet Key West neighborhood where feral chickens walk the streets. If you’re there, try the Masas de Puerco Fritas. The last time that Reba and I were in Key West (Cayo Hueso in Spanish) we ate there twice in 4 days! Wikipedia says that the Siboney were the pre-Columbian indigenous inhabitants of the Greater Antilles in the Caribbean Sea.

So, Cuban cooking evokes a variety of nostalgic responses in me: vacations past, mom’s cooking, grandma’s cooking, and connections to my family history. When it’s done poorly, it makes me a bit sad, but I think, “what the hell, it’s hard to find this stuff and I’ll take what I can get”. When it’s done well, it brings tears to my eyes because it reminds me of people and places I have known, all of whom have taken the time to do an excellent job at preserving something that happens to be important to me. Grandma could have taken us to McDonald’s every day and we would have been fine with that. Mom could have made American style food only, and we would never have known any differently. But they didn’t and so I have a taste for something that’s rare and special.

And now, on to Cafe Laguardia. Reba took me here for my birthday, I will be 41 on Tuesday but will be in an algorithms test that evening, so we thought it would be better to go out last night. Always the good researcher, she found a well reviewed restaurant run by Cubans and located nearby in Bucktown. We arrived at 7 to a full house with lots of people waiting. Despite the madhouse around him, Carlos Laguardia was warm and serene, which is quite professional, but is also to some degree quite comical. I think Saturday Night Live could do a skit on the theme of an unflappable owner in the midst of a chaotic restaurant. Reba and I waited in the bar, chatting about the usual stuff that parents do when they are away from the kid for the evening and a few drinks in, i.e. the kid. 1.5 hours later I was getting a bit annoyed at the wait, but was finally informed that our table was ready, whereupon Carlos’ mom led us silently to our table.

Sitting down, we ordered sweet plantains and a picadillo empanada for appetizers, Reba had a chorasco steak, and I had the pernil de cerdo asado. Both came with black beans and rice. This food was simply outstanding, and took me right back to El Siboney and the various Hernandez family kitchens of my memory. Without question Cafe Laguardia served us the best Cuban food I’ve had since visiting El Siboney in Key West, and the best meal I’ve had in Chicago, a town with a lot of cuisine options. I’m not a very good food writer, but using my limited culinary vocabulary I would describe these dishes as authentic, tender, flavorful, hot, hearty, clearly made to order, and evocative of the kitchens I remember so fondly. I can hardly hold the popularity of a restaurant against it’s owners, and the food was fantastic, so I’ll admit that it was worth the wait.

The only area of improvement I would stress is the lack of good sipping rum. Of course it would be entirely apropos to have a wide selection of Havana Club rums available at the bar, but then due to the embargo, it would also be illegal. There are many excellent sipping rums from other Caribbean locales, all of which would nicely top off a night at Laguardia. Unfortunately, the only dark rum at the bar was the ubiquitous, mediocre Jamaican Meyer’s, which I ordered anyway. That said, my dad’s idea of a good dark rum was Meyer’s as well, so maybe these guys are onto something I’m missing.

I relayed a much abbreviated version of the above to Carlos Laguardia, and he told us that a number of people have mentioned El Siboney to him, smiled sadly at the mention of Havana Club, thanked us, and gave us both hugs! Nice fellow. Great restaurant.

data structures

2010-11-19T17:05:00.000Z

Today I had a little fun with java data structures and timing of adds vs lookups for Hashtable, ArrayList and LinkedList.

I intialized each structure with 10^6 random strings of length 6.

Inserts:

Hashtable: 2061 ms
ArrayList: 706 ms
LinkedList: 867 ms

Lookups:

Hashtable: 0 ms!
ArrayList: 21 ms
LinkedList: 29 ms

These data basically make sense: hashtables take a while to load, but are super fast looking up because you're not looking through anything to get the element you want, as the hash tells you exactly where it is. The other two take less time to load and more time to look up. The weird bit here is that ArrayLists are supposed to insert faster than LinkLists (OK) and look up slower, but this last didn't hold true. ArrayLists were just faster all around. I think this has to do with where I was inserting in the list... beginning, middle, or end makes a difference here.

If I get time, I suppose that I should set this up to run a bunch of tests on inserting to different parts of the structures, and then get an average performace over many runs. The machine is the standard box in our lab: Phenom II X4 945 quad processor with 4 GM RAM running Debian lenny.

beard story

2010-08-22T12:36:00.001Z

victory against spam!

2010-08-12T16:48:00.002Z

When you work in the IT field, you tend to get an f= fair amount of IT job spam. When you've ever once lived in London, you get f! (factorial) IT job spam because the London headhunting world lives and breaths on casting a wide net early and often. Technology has only accelerated this trend, and some headhunters are little more than spammers.

For a while now, I've been getting emails from Jonathan. At one point some of these were promising sounding technology leadership roles, and I even wrote him back a few times. At some point early this year, the jobs he was emailing about started getting less relevant to me... located in remote corners of the UK (yuck), salaries 1/2 to 1/3 my current salary (do I look that desperate on paper?), and roles that I really wasn't qualified for (senior C# developer???). At another point this year, I MOVED TO THE USA to do a 1 year Master's degree, which really made these jobs less relevant me.

Mail #1 - January

Dear Ean,

Happy new Year!

We are a specialist Software Engineering recruitment company covering job opportunities across the UK.

As our .net specialist I want to get in touch to understand whether you are interested in job opportunities currently? If you are looking or interested in hearing about potential local jobs to yourself, then please let me know your current situation?

Furthermore, if you have an updated CV, please send this to me for consideration against current positions and to update your profile with us.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Kind Regards,

Jonathan

My reply to Mail #1...

Hi Jonathan,

I'm always interested in hearing about good opportunities. My CV is
here: http://cv.eanh.net

Let me know if you'd like to speak further.

Ean

...note that he didn't call me back.

Mail # 2 - January

Dear Ean,

I have a senior opportunity available that I would like to make you aware of. If you are interested in this position and would like to find out more about this opportunity then please let me know?

Location: Windsor, Berkshire

Salary: dependent on experience £££ flexible £££

Technical Director, Digital Agency, Berkshire

This is an opening for a fast growing, leading, digital company who boast excellent blue-chip clients!

This position has come about as part of their growth strategy... (bla bla bla etc)...If you are interested in this position then please let me know?I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Kind regards,
Jonathan

My reply to Mail # 2...

Sounds interesting! Let's talk soon.

My cv is here: http://cv.eanh.net/ and there is a link to pdf and doc
versions at the bottom of the page.

thanks

Ean

...note that he didn't call me back this time either.

Mail # 3 - February

Dear Ean,
I have a contract opportunity that I would like to make you aware of. If you are interested in this position and would like to apply then please let me know?
Location: Surrey
Type: Contract

This is an excellent opportunity for a recognised software solutions company... (bla bla bla etc)

If you are interested in finding out more about this position then please let me know?

Speak to you soon.
Kind Regards,

Jonathan

My reply to Mail #3...

Jonathan,

Please remove me from your list.

Thank you,

Ean

Mail # 8ish - July

(I deleted a bunch between 4 and 8)

Dear Ean,
I would like to make you aware of an exciting job opportunity that I have available. If you are interested in this position then please apply for immediate consideration:

Location: Guildford, Surrey.

Mid-Level experienced Developer - ASP.net (2.0/3.5), C#, Web Application developer, AJAX, MVC, Guildford. An opportunity for a Technology consultancy and Solutions company... (bla bla bla etc) If you are interested in this opening then please let me know?

Kind Regards,

Jonathan

My Reply to Mail #8...

can you please remove me from this list?

my salary range is 3 times this and I don't even live in the UK anymore.

e

Mail #9 - July

Dear Ean,

I have a position to make you aware of that I feel you may be interested in. If you feel this opening is of interest then please let me know for immediate consideration?

Location: Basingstoke, Hants

C#, ASP.net Developer/Web application developer, Basingstoke

This is an opportunity for a large company and household name based in the Thames Valley and M3 corridor... (bla bla bla etc)If you are interested in this position then please let me know? I look forward to speaking with you soon.

Kind Regards,
Jonathan

My Reply to Mail #9...

I just ignored this one.

Mail #10 - July

Dear Ean,

I would like to make you aware of a job opportunity I currently have available that I would like to make you aware of. The position details are below, if you are interested in this job opening then please let me know?

Location: London, Camden

Application Development Manager/Technical Project Manager ASP.net 3.5 C#

This is an opening for an award winning organisation looking to expand their technical services team by bringing on an Application Development Manager/Technical PM to help with the ongoing growth of the comanies services. ...(blabla bla etc)

If you are interested in this position then please let me know?

I look forward to speaking to you soon.

Kind Regards,

Jonathan

My reply to Mail #10...

Jonathan,

This is the third time I've written you requesting removal from your list.

* I no longer live in the UK

* I am not interested in any job less than (what I make now)

* I am full time studying a degree this year

PLEASE will you remove me?

Ean

Mail #11 - same day as Mail #10!

Dear Ean,

Location: London, Camden

Senior C# ASP.Net (3.5) Developer, OOP, agile Digital solutions, London
This is an opportunity for a digital solutions company based in london and looking to (bla bla bla etc) If you are interested in this position then please let me know?

Kind regards,
Jonathan

My reply to Mail #11...

(ccing Jonathan's boss who I found on Linkedin)

Hi Jonathan,

Since you not only continue to send me unsolicited email, but actually sent me another yesterday one just after I asked you to stop for the THIRD time, I can only conclude that you are either (a) not a real person, but just a robot spam program, or (b) persisting in this just to annoy me.

Therefore, I have reported you to the following:

* spamcop
* google spam
* the UK Information Commisioner's Office

Apparently you are liable to (a) a 5k GBP fine and (b) have your ISP
shut off your email access.

Have a great day!

Ean

Jonathan's reply to my reply to mail #11 - phone call 5 minutes later

Apologies were made, claims were made of already sent mails to the effect that I was now off the list, etc.

Vindication!

what on earth is Ean up to?

2010-07-13T06:05:00.001Z

Actually I’ve been doing lots of interesting things lately. Read on!

Living Space

Firstly, Reba and I made the big move to Chicago. Changing cities is nowhere near as traumatic the 3rd time around, and there’s a number of things about this city that make it particularly easy to deal with. Oxford was a shock because it was really the first time that Reba or I had lived away from family and friends, and was an entire new country etc. The peculiarities of Oxford and MBA life simply added “and awe” to the shock. Then London was next, and again it was a first for us: we’d never lived in a big city, especially not a big, old, cosmopolitan city like London. Subways, winding streets with Maseratis roaring down them, various Gucci clad 3rd world prince-lings at the coffee shop, and next to zero personal space were all new to us as well. Chicago is different, big and cosmopolitan, but we’ve done all that at least once now, plus it’s a comfortable 104% USA, and very convenient to live in.

We live in a high rise apartment building (46 floors) that was built quite recently, so everything works. There is a separate washer (works) and dryer (works) in our apartment, new stove (works), garbage chute down the hall (works), new shower (works), A/C (works), new oven (works) and fridge with the little lever that you push and water or ice comes out (works). There are 4 elevators (work[s]) and a 24 hour doorman (works). There is a laundry in the building (haven’t tried it yet) and people to receive packages during the day if you’re not home (this works too). Nearby are Whole Foods and other groceries, but Peapod (Ocado for Yanks) brings all the basics we need. Internet is free (works) and the view of all the other skyscrapers is pretty cool (it’ll work). So, I must admit that it is refreshing to be back among the conveniences of American living. Chicago gets a zero for old world charm and quaint pubs, but then you can’t have everything. Our stuff arrives from London this week, and I’m really looking forward to having more than two chairs, one table, a bed and a crib for furniture. For those in the know: the big red couch made the cut and will be joining us soon.

The pizza is really good, and the city is gagging with steakhouses. For Kaysa’s benefit I will add that these are packed with beef from giant grain fed super steroid monster cows, and once you get past the fact of it all, the steaks are fantastic. Also, people eat a lot ribs in Chicago. Today I ate at Bibs N Ribs, an oak/hickory based bbq joint that’s been open in Hyde Park since 1966. There are benefits to a daily journey into the (tamer) regions of south Chicago.

So, Chicago is thus far a decent space, and our space within it (works) for us.

Beard

I have an enormous beard now, and my head hair (what’s left of it after MPB) is getting shaggy. Reba and I are both sick of it, and Isa won’t kiss me anymore, so as soon as our stuff shows up, with the electric shaver, it all goes. Back to Baldy McBalderson. It’s about time, one of the other students in my program commented that I look more like a PhD student than a Master’s degree student. Enough said. Don’t say it, Natasha.

School

School is going well. For inquiries as to WHY I am in school again, see the FAQ. I am still in the “immersion phase” of the program, which is ostensibly the vehicle by which we non CS degree holding students will gain a reasonable grasp of CS math and programming necessary for graduate level study. The math so far consists of:

propositional logic and equivalences
predicates and quantifiers
inference
proofs: direct, contradiction, contraposition, cases, and induction
sets and set operations
functions
sequences and summations

There is a lot more to go, and with 5 hours of class each week unit mid September and a gnarly assignment due each week, it’s keeping me busy. For me, the math part is quite difficult, but it’s always the hard stuff that I value the most later on. The programming bit is so far all C on Debian Linux. This is a real hoot for me, since I’ve done a lot of programming before and already get the basics, and also because this environment is kind of a walk down nostalgia lane. For whatever reason, the academic environment du jour is Linux, and not just a Linux based Windows rip off GUI with open office and a mouse and whatever, but a hardcore, text based 1982 looking Unix style experience. Working on these machines reminds me of writing my first Perl web applications back in the mid 90’s on the Eskimo North ISP. There’s the Alpine mail reader, the (still text based) update to Pine which I used for years when I first got email, VI the text editor from 1976 that people are still improving on, all manner of funny little commands and switches, and all on a screen with no graphics, just text. All the programming tools are text based as well, and kind of remind me of writing basic programs for my dad’s H8 and Z89 computers when I was a kid. Of course these systems are infinitely more powerful then those old PC systems, but they still have the same vibe.

The coding is all in C, which is super primitive compared to Java and .Net, etc., even to VB and Perl really, but there’s a real elegance and simplicity to it that I appreciate. The C reference books all seem to have been written in 1978 or so, and there’s something quite appealing about the retro tone of this part of the experience as well. Honestly, it all takes me back to when I was a kid and my Dad and I used to play around with programming, setting up small systems, etc. Of course this make me a bit sad too, given that dad’s not around to chat about all these impressions and experiences. I suppose the lighter side of that is that he can’t make fun of me for finally doing a technical degree at 40 when I could have done a CS degree back in 1989 when he offered to pay for it. In any case, I am digging the programming part, and when I’m done with my math assignments for the week, I feel pretty good about that end of the course as well. At this point, I’d say that I’m putting in 50-60 hours a week and taking things easy, it’s not a death march like the MBA was. At least not yet!

A New Belfry

The Ryerson Physical Laboratory is the home of the the MSCS program at U Chicago. The MS students have their own special lab, which I like to call a belfry, in fond remembrance of the top floor silent reading room at SBS. We have lots of neat computers, 30 foot high ceilings, and an enormous white board to figure stuff out on. There are a couple of adjoining rooms for sneaking away to in search of complete silence, though the belfry is generally deserted anyway. There is an elevator that opens into the lab, but only if you have the MS key. For whatever reason, I feel particularly relaxed and able to study when I’m sequestered in some cool, quiet, high up spot, with no distractions, lots to study, and the occasional coffee break. Stacks of books improve this experience even further, if the dean is reading this: hint hint! In the drawing below, you can see the RPL, and the top floor of the middle tower is our lab. I look out of those pointy top windows from where I sit. The little turret on the right is the observatory, which I still need to get up to at some point.

talk about ivory towers!

Isa!

Isa has started walking. It’s total drunken sailor walking, but it’s walking nonetheless. She’s also trying to talk, but this is pretty poor if I’m honest. The words we have at this point are: doggy, kitty, dada, hi, wow, and uh-oh. They come out more like dodgyieeeee, kitchgeeeee, tata, hiiEYEii, wow and uh-oh, but it all seems like progress. She’s also scrunching up her face and making weird straining poses a lot. Reba says that it’s part of some phase or another, what do I know? In any event, it’s all pretty cute and I most definitely have the best baby of all.

The Next Move

2010-03-13T07:59:00.001Z

It’s official, we’re moving to Chicago in June.

It’s funny how this blog has changed since I started it. At the beginning, it was a little story living off by itself and I was trying to get my friends and family to read it. These days, it’s integrated into Facebook where I have hundreds of connections including people from Seattle and London, my family, long lost school mates, professional colleagues, and pals around the world. As soon as I say anything here, everybody will get a little update and the word will be out. In this way, the blog has to some degree become the Hernandez family newspaper. Because of this I couldn’t really talk about our coming move until proper communications had been made at work, as I didn’t want to embarrass my boss who was waiting a bit to make the announcement. Now that this is out of the way, I can write about it.

Why Chicago?

The choice to move to an even colder place than London may mystify those who’ve heard Reba and I gripe about how “next time we’re moving somewhere warm”. That plan is still on the table, just not in the short term. The immediate plan is that I am going to get another degree: a Master’s of Science in Computer Science. As it turns out, the University of Chicago is the perfect choice as it has a 1 year MSCS program for people with non CS undergraduate degrees (like me), and is highly ranked among world universities.

Why Another Degree?

I felt that I would be better placed to get management roles in technology if I had a technology degree to complement my management degree, and that I would be a more competent technology manager if I understood the fundamentals of the science more deeply. And, As Dan points out, I have also developed a dangerous love of learning.

Is This Really Necessary?

As I found out when I told people I was going to do an MBA, there are a variety of views on this subject, ranging from “why on earth would you subject yourself to that”, to “a degree won’t help you, your career is all about your professional experience”, to “that sounds really cool, I wish I could go do that”. There have also been plenty of people who simply wished me the best of luck and shook my hand. Ultimately, I suppose another degree isn’t strictly necessary, but is instead something I want to do and think will help me professionally. As I found out with MBAs, there are generally two opinions about MBAs among managers (a) people who don’t have them think you don’t need them, and (b) people who do have them think you do need them. I figure that in a short life, the best policy is to do the things you want to do and avoid regrets (thanks Gibby). So, I will go.

The Plan

Right now, we are procrastinating the plan, which seems to have mostly involved practicing saying “DA BEARS” and reading about Discrete Mathematics. Broadly, we’re going to try for some last trips to Europe with my mom in May, a couple of weeks in Seattle in June, and then make the move to Chicago.

Longer Term

Chicago is almost certainly a 1 year deal. Barclays is allowing me to keep my job, and while June 2011 is a long way off, we may well end up back in London. Since the details of what I do for living are rather dull as well as the private business of my employer, I will leave any speculation on my future role at Barclays at that. In many ways, Leaving London is just as hard as leaving Seattle was. We have a lovely group of friends here in London and have settled into a comfy lifestyle that involves lots of European holidays, London black tie events, and some pretty decent big city living. Just like when we left Seattle, some of the people who are closest to us here weren’t too happy to hear about our departure. I take this as a tremendous compliment, even though it’s a bit uncomfortable at times. I hope we are making the right decision, but I suppose that if I wasn’t just a bit nervous, it wouldn’t be a new adventure.

The Hernandez saga continues!

a quiet christmas

2009-12-27T00:21:00.001Z

Last year Reba was out of town while the predictable psychological/existential crises kept me company, the year before we were in Seattle and on our way to Taiwan, and the year before that it was a wild time with all our Seattle folks while we were on break from Oxford. This year was different. Isa is just 7 months, so travelling would be a big hassle, especially the 9.5 hour trip to Seattle. The snowstorms over the eastern seaboard seemed to ratify our choice as fundamentally sensible. Also, the prospect of a quiet cozy one with the nuclear family sort of reached out to the both of us. So for a change, we stayed home and observed the peculiar ritual of a Hernandez Christmas.

La Nochebuena

One of the many little habits my family inherited from it’s Cuban side is the traditional Christmas eve dinner known as La Nochebuena. The Cubans inherited it from the Spaniards, and where they got it from is unknown to me. In our family, this is a meal which consists of the clearly traditional Lechón (suckling pig), the potentially traditional Cuban style black beans and rice, and the clearly adlibbed elements of Rioja wine, pecan pie, apple pie and pumpkin pie. For us there is no Christmas day meal, and certainly no turkey.

Clearly

Cubans, like all good people of Spanish descent, love their pigs. That is to say they love to eat their pigs. Trips to the old country abound with stories of trucks stacked high with pigs in crates, the Museo de Jamon, “vegetarian” salads with ham laid daintily across the top, etc. A bit more rustic than their continental cousins, the Cuban center their Christmas meal around a whole roasted pig. Thus, I have many fond memories of a whole roasted pig showing up to my family’s house on Christmas eve: apple in the mouth, grapes in the eyes, feet and tail still intact, etc. I’m not entirely sure if Spaniards do this on their Nochebuena or not. I bet not. In any case, the roasted pig is to the Cuban as apple pie is to the Yankee: classic.

Potentially

Cubans, and Caribbean people in general eat a lot of black beans. Predictably, the Cuban version starts with frying green peppers, onions and garlic in olive oil before adding the main ingredient, in this case black beans. This warm-up serves for just about any Cuban dish you can imagine, and was the rock upon which my Grandmother’s kitchen resided. To be sure, black beans are as Cuban as big beards and cigars, but whether or not this dish is common amongst Cuban (or Spanish) families at Christmas, I do not know. However, in my family this was always the required Nochebuena side dish, served with white rice. My father had a story to go with this about symbolism, Christians, and Moors, but I’m frankly skeptical.

Adlib

My dad loved Rioja wine, and who can blame him? It is without question the single most consistently delicious red wine on the planet. We always had this stuff coming out of our ears for any important Hernandez family meal, and Nochebuena was no exception. Quintessentially American, my mom made apple and pumpkin pies for the meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Quintessentially southern, my dad insisted on pecan pie as well. Frankly, I think my mom was more than reasonable about the whole affair, since she’s Irish, English and Scottish descent and always seemed patiently out of place amongst all this pseudo-Spanish culture. In any case, the wine and pies were simply our family’s particular spin added to the traditional dinner.

How Did We Do This Year?

I think we did pretty well. As demonstrated below, we had the clearly and potential* well covered, though we did fall short on the adlib by picking up a couple of bottles of Bordeaux at the local Nicolas instead of finding some Rioja. Realizing this mistake too late, Reba purchased a bottle of Cava to balance things out, but that’s really backwards if you think about it. I also had fun making my own apple sauce, really not that hard to do, but quite satisfying in a hands-on sort of way.

before dinner: the spread

after dinner: pies and pajamas

*Segue: Spitalfields and the Potential

The Spitalfields market is an old London market that has lots of butchers. Trying to keep up with tradition, I emailed one of the butchers to reserve a Lechón. The owner wrote me back several times as I posed various questions, but oddly would only reply at 1AM. Maybe meat markets are like fish markets from a schedule perspective? After several mails back and forth about cost, size and origin of the pig, etc., I placed my order, only to receive the following at 1:52AM on 22 December:

-----------------------------------------------------------

From: Tom Absalom <TomAbsalom@absalomandtribe.co.uk>
To: Hernandez, Ean
Sent: Tue Dec 22 01:52:10 2009
Subject: RE: Suckling pig for Christmas

Hi Ean.
We don't have a suckling pig small enough to fit your oven. If it is
acceptable for you I can cut the suckling pig in half for you to make it fit
your oven.

If you come to my shop between 2am and 8am tomorrow, December 23rd, I will
hold the smallest suckling pig I can find for you. You will need to pay cash
for it when you collect the meat.

Please let me know if this is OK. I look forward to hearing from you.
Tom

-----------------------------------------------------------

Having no intention of making it downtown to Spitalfields before 8AM on my day off, I was somewhat relieved to avoid dealing with a cut in half pig. Would I have taken it on the tube with me? In a cab?

In the end, the meal was a success even without a whole (or half) pig. We got a very nice pork roast from the local butcher shop, which is excellent and did not disappoint. Finally, I tried to honor my and my brothers’ tradition of drinking a bunch of cognac after dinner. It’s really not the same without you guys.

And Now, What You’ve All Been Waiting For…

Obscure family traditions are great and all, but what everybody really wants to see are pictures of the baby on Christmas morning, an event that we keep 100% American.

Merry Christmas, dear friends and family around the globe. Much love to you all from myself, Reba, and baby Isa!

It Happened

2009-12-20T17:49:00.001Z

Every parent has a story about a kid who was puking and sh!tting at the same time. Mine did this today, in VOLUME. Out the nose, down the front, all over the carpet, etc., the full deal. Yuck. I don’t know what she ate, but at the very least I am impressed with the capacity this kid can deliver “at peak”. I guess the only way to take this to the next level of gross out parenting experience is to somehow end up being puked, etc. on? I am going to try to avoid that.

what a little angel?

Zip Code, Post Code

2009-12-17T22:14:00.001Z

Following is an excerpt from my email on Zip Codes to the National Marrow Donor Program following my unsatisfactory experience with their donor details update web form.

Dear National Marrow Donor Program,

One annoying element of being an American living abroad is the local perception that all Americans view the world outside of the continental US as irrelevant. Unfortunately, this stereotype is often perpetuated by the actions of Americans back home. Sometimes this is done in large ways, for example by taking a unilateral decision to invade another country. This really bums out the locals, FYI. However, it can also be done in smaller ways, for example by providing web forms that allow for foreign countries while requiring a "zip code" and rejecting non numerical values placed in said form. As it turns out, much of the world refers to this as a "postal code", making use of letters as well as numbers. Yes it's a novel concept, I know.

I am a willing marrow donor, and a US citizen. However, I live in London and do not have a numerical zip code, instead I have an alphanumeric postal code. So, for your benefit I crammed my unacceptable postal code into the city field along with “London”. No biggie, but just a bit annoying.

Admittedly this is a small thing, but sometimes it's the small things that count! Please update your web form.

Thank you

Ean Hernandez

Los Young Fresh Fellows

2009-11-25T22:26:00.000Z

(posted a few weeks later)

Way back in the day, I met Kurt Bloch and and Scott McCaughey. Kurt engineered records for my old band Sicko, and Scott distributed records from my record label, Top Drawer Records, as he was working for Pop Llama Products at the time, another Seattle label that was much much better than mine. Both of these guys played in Seattle bands that also played with Sicko, most notably the Fastbacks (Kurt) and the Young Fresh Fellows (Kurt and Scott). Like many Seattle bands at the time, the YFF were strangely successful in Spain. Other Northwest bands has this same experience, the Model Rockets, Bum, the Fastbacks, and even Sicko all did well there. I’ve heard lots of theories as to why, but who really knows. It’s not like we did well in France, Germany or England. Just Spain. Whatever.

In any case the YFF are indisputably a legendary Seattle band and have been a big part of Seattle music since they started in 1981. Everybody back in Seattle knows this, but a lot of people over here in the UK would probably think that grunge and Nirvana and Alice in Chains or whatever are what Seattle music is all about, and I suppose it’s true to a degree, but way before any of those bands were playing, the YFF were playing all over Seattle, and really setting the tone for what many of us think of as the real Seattle music… punk and garage infused pop. The way I see it, they were part of the chain that linked bands like the Sonics to bands like the Model Rockets, or Flop, or The Presidents of the USA and even to little tiny unimportant bands like mine. So, these guys are a part of Seattle history and a part of my history, and they’re special to me.

28 years later, they still make records and even do the occasional tour, and I was fortunate enough to spend the last few days following them around when they toured Spain. The tour was set up by Francisco from Munster records, which is a label based in Madrid. Munster was usually the driving force behind Seattle bands’ tours to Spain, and would typically release import versions of their US releases. Francisco is a really nice guy who has pretty much dedicated his life to music and records, and while most of us have gone on to have normal jobs and live the straight life, he’s stuck by the rock and roll and carved himself a little niche. I have to say that I’m impressed by anybody who can keep a record label going in the 21st century, especially an independent one. The tour actually went all over Spain, but I only came down for the last 3 dates: Valencia, Murcia, and Madrid.

Night 1: Valencia Solo

On Wednesday, I stayed home from work in the morning, just calling into a few conference calls, so I could spend more time with Reba and Isa before I left. By noon I was rushing around trying to find all of my stuff for the trip, and trying to figure out the best way to get to Gatwick airport in time to fly out. Kissing the girls goodbye, I headed off to the tube with my WSU Cougars hat, hoodie, backpack, and some new songs to listen to that had just come in from my Rough Trade Records subscription. I like to travel as light as possible, it makes me feel good to know I can get on without a ton of crap to lug around. This got me into trouble on my trip to Germany with Juergen, as I didn’t have the correct Euro going out clothes, and the guys had to sneak me into clubs. Of course when you’re going to see the YFF, everybody dresses in jeans and t-shirts, and it’s very casual. So, I knew I could just get by with minimal stuff. I caught the tube to Victoria station, and then the train to Gatwick, got hassled by security for not having my toothpaste in a separate plastic bag, and made it to the plane with plenty of time. I think that I get picked on a lot more when I travel without Reba. Maybe this is because they think a single guy is more likely to be a drug smuggler or a hijacker or terrorist or whatever. The funny thing is that I am soooo boring, that there is really nothing to find out about me, and the cops can search every square inch of my life with a microscope and all they will find out is that I am a comic book geek who buys too much shitty music and works in IT at a bank. Drinking beer and talking about politics is about as wild as I get. There really is nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen.

I spent the first night in Valencia at a hotel across the street from the new Museo de Sciencias, pictured below. The crazy thing isn’t so much that these buildings look like outerspace whale skeleton spaceships that have stopped for a quick bath on earth, but that they are in a place that was as run down as Valencia was 15 years ago.

The city has really done a complete 180 since I was here in the mid 90s. It’s had all sorts of new construction, old stuff has been torn down, and it’s been heavily modernized, which is probably a good thing in certain Spanish cities. I love the old fashioned bits of Spain, but honestly some of it can be pretty run down. The hotel was very nice, and after a walk in the neighborhood, I called Reba for some travel advice. Whenever I go on a trip by myself, I have no idea where to go, and never really plan anything. So, I call Reba, she gets on her computer, and then tells me where the cool spots to go are. In this case, she found an old restaurant down on the waterfront which Ernest Hemingway wrote about in one of his books, and so there I went. The food was good, the beer was cold, and I had several Aguardientes after. I went back to the hotel, crashed out, and woke up late the next day.

Night 2: Valencia Con Los Dudes

I had a fairly chill day by myself, took a couple of conference calls from work, and went down to the old part of Valencia to walk around in the afternoon. After a good deal of sitting in the main square (which Reba and I had visited back in the day) and then walking around town looking for a meaty restaurant, I found Jamon Jamon, where I had a nice stack of morcilla and entrecote with some very cold Spanish beers. Late that afternoon, I met Francisco, Cristophe, and Lisa. Francisco is the aforementioned Spanish record label boss, Cristophe is a big Scott McCaughey fan, and Lisa is actually the owner/operator of Frontier Records, which is the label that put out Suicidal Tendencies back in the early 80s. She got extra cool points from me for that: my friend Tom and I used to dance around his basement doing air guitar to that band when we were 14. Thanks for the rock Lisa! After meeting up, we went to have dinner with the Fellows, which was oddly at a pizza joint. Apparently the band had been eating Spanish food nonstop since arriving a week prior and were ready for a change of pace. I was down for some tapas, but when you’re travelling in a group you have to be flexible. At the restaurant I found a little slice of my past having pizza and beer: Kurt, Scott, Tad, and Jim. I hadn’t seen Kurt in several years, and Scott in longer than that. It had been even longer for Jim. In fact, I didn’t recognize Tad, probably because I hadn’t seen him in 8 years, although to be fair he is doing miles better than me in the preservation department. I was a bit embarrassed about that. The show was in a small club across the street with only about 100 people in it. This gave me the opportunity to stand right up front, and this led to my favorite YFF Spain tour 2009 moment. By way of explanation, my ex-ex-ex-ex girlfriend Christy had a semi rare CD with a white label and a black photocopy of Fonzie on it. It had a single (as I remember) song: “do the the Fonzie”, which is a sarcastic song about the hero of the 1970’s TV show “Happy Days”. In the early 1990’s, the YFF were playing just about every show one could imagine: street fairs, outdoor concerts, bars, all ages clubs, bar mitzvahs, you name it. During this time, my friends and I would go to see the YFF probably twice a month (4 times a month in the summer) and while enjoying their sets, would make a point of loudly demanding to hear “do the Fonzie”. This never ever met with any success. Fast forward almost 20 years, and I am standing in a dive club in Valencia listening to the Fellows, standing up front, and feeling quite cool because they all remembered me. At a lull in the show, Scott asked if the audience had any requests, and I instinctively yelled out, “ do the Fonzie”! To my surprise, Scott said something like “really? that one? (shrug) ok… whatever” and they played it!!! I screamed with delight. Now if I can just go sky diving and see Chichen Itza, my life will be complete. This night ended with beers and wine and bullshitting with the opening band back in the hotel.

The next day, the band left early, and the Francisco, Lisa, Christophe, Ean crew headed for some classic Paella Valenciano. Francisco had set up a reservation with an out of the way place that seemed pretty much locals only. This food kicked ASS. We drove up to Murcia that afternoon.

Night 3: Murcia

This seemed like a cool town, very Spanish and not very exposed to the outside world. I have two distinct memories of this night:

1. Francisco kept remarking on how all the Murcians were tall, weird looking, and had huge heads. To be honest, they looked like Spanish people to me, but what do I know?

2. After dinner with the band and everyone else, I felt ill, and left the table early to head back to my hotel room. I actually puked on the street on the way home! I spent the next two hours prior to the show puking in my hotel room, and the next 6 hours at the show puking in the scuzzy rock club bathroom… EVERY 20 MINUTES. This sucked. I watched a bit of the Fellows’ show, and split.

The next day I felt fine. Food poisoning?

Night 4: Madrid

What memories this town holds for me. I’ve been here a probably a dozen times, lived here with a Spanish family when I was 14, played here in my band in my mid 20’s, and have made it to the bullfights at Las Ventas 4 years out of the last 5. I really love this place. The real trip was that Francisco put me in the same hotel (I’m almost positive) that Sicko stayed in back in 1996. The place was way cleaned up, and had non communal bathrooms, but I swear it was the same joint, just off the Puerto del Sol. After a nap, I went over to the Fellows’ hotel and had a few pregame beers with the various rock and roll tour folks. My buddy Angel was planning on meeting me near the show, and when he called to say he was waiting for me at one of the nearby cafes, I split the group and went to find him. The Puerto del Sol is a sort of central square in Madrid that has a number of pedestrian only streets spreading out away from it. One of these was where the YFF were staying, and this same street was LOADED with hookers. As the night went on, more and more sketchy looking chicks were hanging out staring down any guy that walked down the street. At one point I was on my phone, calling Angel and leaving him a voicemail when a hooker came up to me, grabbed me and said something about “oye guapo”. I was mid voice mail recording and she startled me, so I yelled “no me joda”! Which is sort of like don’t fuck with me, and she got the message. Just after that I saw Angel sitting at a cafe table with some buddies, and the night really began. A ton of Angel’s pals showed up and after a nonstop round of greetings, we all decided to head to the show, which was held at a place predictably called, “el sol”. This happens to be the same club that my band played at in 1996, so it was all the more special to me. The Fellows delivered the rock, I did the pogo, beers were drunk, and by the time I got back to the hotel, it was quite late. A really good night to cap off a really good vacation.

The Last Day

The next day I was awoken by a phone call from the the front desk of the hotel telling me that I had 15 minutes to leave. A quick shower and pack-up later, I was out the door and on my way to meet Angel and his brother Enrique. I spent the afternoon with Angel and his wife Marta and their two girls Claudia and Ines, and Enrique and his son Enrique junior. Enrique Jr, also called El Quique Tucho, is a spunky little guy and called me a “rat man of the street” or something like that. He got in trouble with dad, and I laughed my ass off. We all went to the park to let the kids play, then to a restaurant for lunch where we talked to some old Spanish gents, and then to Enrique’s where we had coffee and cognacs. Enrique has a really good vintage book collection, as well as a very cool collection of old jazz and blues music. I made a point of snagging some of his mp3s.

What a great trip! Seattle rock and roll (which I miss), Seattle people and my Madrid people (whom I love) and a few days in Espana. One could not ask for more.

Der Vaterland

2009-08-31T23:28:00.001Z

Why live overseas? In the midst of day to day life, It’s easy to forget just why I chose to leave all my safety, savings, cars, yard, personal space, friends and family behind and try out a new country. This weekend I had a great reminder of one of the key benefits: experiencing new cultures. My pal Juergen, who I wrote about way back at the beginning of the MBA, is from Germany, and was kind enough to take me on a brief tour of his home this past weekend. Specifically, he is from Mömbris, a small town in the Aschaffenburg district in the Regierungsbezirk of Lower Franconia in Bavaria, Germany, or put more concretely, he is from the the place where oompah bands, big beers, sausage, lederhosen, and most other stuff that we foreigners think of as “German” come from. This suits me quite well.

Autobahn

Juergen lives in London, but had been working in Freiburg all week, and I flew into Frankfurt, where we met. We got a spiffy little BMW hatchback, and zipped off to Dusseldorf to visit Daniel, another MBA. The Autobahn is pretty famous: everybody knows that this is the freeway with no speed limit. People go either normal freeway speed on the right side, scary fast on the left side, or fighter jet speed so the scary fast people have pull over to the right and get out of the way. The fighter jet thing was kind of hard to believe. We would be doing a jaw grinding 90, and these fighter jet dudes would bear down on us and just blow past. Just watching them made me feel sort of dizzy.

Dusseldorf

We got the Daniel’s house in the mid evening. His apartment is HUGE by London standards… room for a big screen TV, a big deck, dining room table, the works. It’s in this old factory that now has been converted to housing, and so is kind of rustic in a hip sort of way. The best thing about Daniel’s place is that there is a raised sleeping pallet which can be lifted up by an electric winch, revealing: oh yeah, you know it… a hot tub! Total Austin Powers action, really funny. I’m sure Daniel has put this to good use. That night we all went out with Daniel’s buddy Marco, who is doing a PhD at the local university. The night was spent in classic MBA style: drinking way too much at clubs with loud music, chatting to random people, and watching my buddies get shot down by girl after girl. I was (once again) sorely underdressed. I only brought running shoes and t-shirts, not the dress shirts and shoes that most euro clubs require. This was dumb of me, I should have remembered, but the guys managed to squeak me in to the clubs one way or another anyway. We came home at 5:30 AM. That makes me tired again just writing it. After breakfast we split for Erlangen, where Juergen’s fraternity is.

Juergen, Daniel, Marco

Germans wear nice shoes, Americans wear shitty ones…

Erlangen

This is the town where Juergen’s fraternity is located. It’s where the Friedrich Alexander University is located, although for complex reasons, he actually studied at another University, but became a member of a fraternity at this one. Fraternities in Germany are in some ways similar to those in the states (dudes in big old house, lots of beer, new members have to do all the shitty work, etc.) but in at least one way, they are TOTALLY different, and that way would be the sword fighting. By sword fighting, I mean actual dudes with armor, fighting with actual swords, actually cutting the shit out of each other and getting big gnarly scars… and here is the important bit: big gnarly scars on their unprotected faces and heads. Does this sound more interesting than the phi delta gamma beta whatevah guys at your school? I bet it does. The basic run down on the sword fighting is this: the fraternities date back to the end of the 18th century, when people actually did wear swords, got into duels, etc. To join a fraternity, you had to fight someone from another fraternity, and if you got a scar on your face, it was a sign of character, toughness, etc. This tradition continues today, and is apparently unchanged from the 1850s. The duelers wear chain mail shirts, heavy leather gloves, neck armor, and these armored goggles with a metal nose plate. This keeps you from getting cut in the chest, neck, hands, eyes or nose. Then, they stand across from one another with both feet facing forward and one had behind the back, and swing the swords at one another’s heads. A round of fighting consists of four swings of each sword, with the swords held above the head. Then, the duelers are stopped. Then, there’s a break of a few seconds and they start again. This goes for up to 30 rounds, or until someone is cut really badly and the match is stopped. You can end up in a fight one of two ways: (1) you do one as part of a organized bout so as to be accepted into the fraternity, or (2) you get someone angry enough at you that they take their business card, rip it, and hand it to you, which means that you are challenged to a duel. Apparently these frat boys never get into fist fights, but if they get really pissed off at someone, they will hold a duel. If you are a crappy dueler and you get challenged, a senior guy in your house can do the fight for you. In either case, people are going to get slashed up, and it’s a pretty serious deal. I got to see the practice room with all the practice targets, helmets, swords and etc. Juergen even dressed me up in the gear for shits and giggles.

no caption could really do this one justice

One of the chief pastimes of all students is drinking beer, and these guys are no exception. I made sure to help as much as I could in this regard.

I think this stuff was called pils… sort of lagery

These guys predictably live in a big old 19th century house with tall ceilings, a bunch of formal rooms, and lots of dark wood. There are little pictures of every member ever on the wall, but for the guys who were in before photography, there are these little silhouettes. There’s some kind of a thing about wearing these little captains hats and tricolored sashes, but I forget exactly what that’s all about. The dudes smoke constantly and from what I can tell pretty much drink constantly as well. One of the rooms is a bar, and this is where I was first exposed to the singing traditions of the house. They have these little leather bound books with metal studs on the covers that have all sorts of Germanic student drinking songs in them. The senior guy in the room kept yelling “silencium” which I guess means silence, and then would tell everyone to open their books and sing. I managed to catch one of these on video with my phone.

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUm5RNkN630)

priceless

Nuremberg is Nürnberg

The next morning we got up and went to a beer garden, where I drank a big beer, and ate a huge pork knuckle with a giant potato dumpling. In the interest of not torturing Juergen in the car on the way home, I skipped the sauerkraut. After lunch, we went to Nürnberg, which people in the US tend to call Nuremburg, this is where the Reichsparteitagsgelände, or Nazi Party Rally Grounds was. There’s a very famous war movie of a statue of a giant German eagle holding a swastika being blown up, and that was at the Reichsparteitagsgelände. This is also where the big Nazi rallies were held, and where the big famous book burnings were, etc. Today, most of the grounds have been turned into parks, so I doubt those old Nazis would even recognize it today. This is also where the top Nazis were prosecuted by the victors after the war. This is a grim museum, but I was glad to get a chance to see it, as it’s an important historical site. Juergen gave me a lot of extra details on artifacts and photographs in the museum, so it was a very instructive visit. After, we wandered around the old town center, which was pretty cool.

Mömbris

On the way back on Monday, we stopped for the second time at Juergen’s grandparents’ place, which is out in the hilly countryside of Bavaria. This area is just gorgeous with lots of trees and little fields and farms, sheep, orchards and vineyards, it’s quite idyllic. Grandpa actually fought in the war, just at the end. Apparently he was a 14 year old anti aircraft gunner in the last days of the war. After the allies overran his emplacement, he rode a bike with flat tires some 200 miles home. Grandma and Grandpa were very kind to me, and fed me lots of tasty Bavarian lunch: sausages, cold cuts, terrine, home made cakes, etc. All very good stuff, right up my alley.

Juergen and his grandparents

country lane outside their house

some things are the same everywhere you go

On Germany

I found Germany to be a pleasant, leafy place with nice little towns, great food, and an admirable dedication to beer drinking. They also really dig the pork products, and I can’t argue with that at all. I definitely need to go back!

the scorps

2009-08-28T08:38:00.001Z

Juergen is taking me on a tour of the fatherland today. I woke up at 6AM with Can’t Live Without You by The Scorpions running on a 6 second loop in my mind. Now it’s 9:30 and Big City Nights is running on a 2 second loop. I’m screwed.

Athenaeum Club

2009-08-25T22:19:00.001Z

Shelby is back in town, and so we went to dinner at the club. Originally this was supposed to be at the Oxford and Cambridge club, but when we got there, it was closed for the summer break. On the door was a list of “reciprocal” clubs, which are basically clubs that let you use the facilities if you are a member of the Oxford and Cambridge club. There is a long list of clubs around the world that are reciprocal to the O and C, but during the summer break, apparently there are a bunch of local London clubs that are temporarily reciprocal. This is cool, because you don’t normally get to go to these, and many are pretty interesting and historically significant. So, tonight we picked another Pall Mall area club from the list: the Athenaeum. This turned out to be a good, if totally random call. The building is really neat, done in Neoclassical and dates to 1824. It’s right around the corner from the The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, and actually pretty close to the O and C too. It’s a bit nicer inside than our club, if also a bit smaller, with lots of classical statues everywhere. Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Franz Liszt, Winston Churchill, Arthur Conan Doyle, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling, WB Yeats, and Richard Wagner were all members here. Apparently the queen mother liked to have get togethers here back before she died. This is totally NOT the sort of place they let recently emigrated Americans into, unlike the O and C which is pretty much for graduates with a pulse. You’ve got to be a hot shot Londoner or a serious arts player to get in here, so it was cool to get the opportunity. We got a look at their library, which is super cool, if quite a bit smaller than ours. It has the two story ladder and catwalk deal that you see in movies, and so it has floor to ceiling books, a really cool effect.

library – someday I’ll have one of these!

The porter who showed us around the club picked out early on that we were from O and C, and kept making a big deal about how much more exclusive this club was than ours while he was proudly showing us around, which was super funny. Having people condescend to you for being lower status than they are is the TOTAL English experience, and it’s even more authentic/hilarious coming from a waiter with a goofy accent. Funny funny place, London. The dining room was typical of London clubs: big room with polished wood tables, candles, waiters everywhere, big pictures of severe looking old dudes on the wall, etc. Although, this place actually has an outdoor patio for summer dining, which is really good since these places all want you to wear a jacket and tie while you eat. I had dover sole, and Shelby had calves liver, which I thought was pretty burly of her. She told me all about her ill fated move to Dallas (lasted only two weeks) and some drama with a dude she’s been seeing. I feel a bit bad that her big move didn’t work out, but I’m mostly glad that she’s back, it’s nice having the Shelbs around. After dinner we went up to the lounge and had a few drinks.

lounge – we sat waaaay down at the far end

Shelby found a book all about London clubs and proceeded to read the stories out loud in a really crappy fake pretentious English accent. I kept shushing her and laughing while scarfing down a tasty 1970’s vintage Calvados. Afterward, we walked our middle classes asses back to the tube station and went our separate ways home.

grandma comes to town

2009-08-03T23:38:00.001Z

My mother came to visit recently and got to see her grand-daughter for the first time. We took several little trips over 2 weeks, and had a blast. Grandmas like new babies, and this one seemed to still be pretty excited even though this is her 7th.

train to polperro

Mom got here on a Friday afternoon, so I took the train out to Heathrow to meet her. I came directly from work, so I was still in my suit and tie. She thought this looked pretty funny and told me that I looked like a real dad. Great. We went back to the apartment and she got to meet Isa, which of course was a lot of fun for everyone. We stayed the night at the apartment and got up really early the next day to catch a train to Cornwall. Actually, the train went to Plymouth which is is Cornwall, and also happens to be the place from which the Pilgrims departed England for North America. These people were religious nuts who were being kicked out of England. Of course they thrived in North America and their crazy ideas have since defined the moral tone of our country. There’s something else for which we Americans can be resentful of our erstwhile English overlords: couldn’t the king just have just burned them at the stake or something? Oh well, too late now. Plymouth itself is a big run down, but does have a neat old town and harbor. This was the baby’s first long train ride, 3.5 hours, and she did fine, sleeping most of the way.

early early early at Paddington station

luggage…

baby on a train!

From Plymouth we rented a car, and drove out to our rental house near Looe. Looe is an old fishing village that has sort of become a crappy English holiday town: lots of dudes with shaved heads and tank tops with bad tattoos and bulldogs out walking with their rough looking wives who are smoking and pushing strollers while eating chips. The place is supposed to be quaint, but it’s really just kind of shitty. I was bummed out by Looe to be honest. The area just outside of town is quite bucolic and nice however, and Reba had found us a really cool house in this area, way up on a cliff overlooking the ocean. The view from the cliff was lovely and in some ways, reminded us of Santorini. We had planned lots of little day trips, but as it turns out, vacations with babies are quite different from those without babies. Getting going anywhere is a fairly big production, and needs to be timed carefully to avoid meltdowns. So, we ended up staying in the house quite a bit, which was fine with me, because I could lay on the couch reading, looking out over the bay, drink an ice cold Stella and chill with the baby all at the same time, which is pretty much Ean heaven.

the good life!

I got a lot of reading in over the trip. I banged through a few economists, a biography about Sonic Youth and an analysis of the letter writing relationship between James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, which was pretty great. Jefferson was kind of a nut, and seemed to believe that people should rise up and violently overthrow their governments every few years. That aside, there were a lot of great ideas moving between these two guys, with interesting ideological conversations played out against a backdrop of a pretty crazy period in history. This is a nice companion to the Portable John Adams, another book I’ve recently read. Good shit, Maynard. I also got a chance to write some songs, and worked out a way to play guitar and rock Isa’s car seat at the same time with my foot. It definitely put her to sleep a few times, which reminds me of a few Birdbath shows from back in the day.

captive audience

Driving around the area, we came across a neat little town that our cabbie in Plymouth had recommended to us: Polperro. This place was way more my speed than Looe, it had a medieval waterfront stuck down in a deep valley, beautiful sea views, a bar with microbrews, and a really great fish restaurant, Nelson’s. In my experience, this is a rare thing in the UK, because to most people here, “fish” = deep fried cod with chips and mushy peas. Not that I don’t like a bit of fish and chips now and again, but there really is a lot more to seafood than that. So, finding a place that did Cornish fish stew, fresh scallops, Atlantic lobster, and had a premier cru Chablis really turned my crank!

lunch in Polperro

Polperro Harbor at low tide

check out the angles on that window

river tour with mom

The trip back to London was nice, and after a week of chilling with books, beer, baby and guitar, I was feeling pretty relaxed. St John’s Wood is a bit on the crazy side recently, because Lord’s Cricket Ground is a few blocks away, and the English are playing the Australians for “the ashes”, which is a complicated rivalry thing that I don’t really understand but also don’t really care enough about to figure out. Anyway, the neighborhood is loaded with guys wearing crimson and gold ties in support of their team (whichever it is) and the neighborhood pubs which are usually empty and peaceful are basically overflowing with loud drunk sports people (in ties).

A few months back, Kaysa set up an outing for Alan, our friend from SBS who was going to get married soon. Al is not the typical guy, so the typical stag party with strippers and shots and whatever didn’t really seem to suit him. So, Kaysa came up with a swell day that included a boat tour of the Thames in London, a kite festival, a micro brewpub, and dinner at some kind of weird German restaurant with accordions and lederhosen all over the place. I found out on this outing that not only are Germans as weird as I initially suspected, but also that a boat tour of the Thames with a stop in Greenwich is a really great day out. So, I took my mom down to the pier at Westminster, and got us on a tour. There’s a lot to see from the river down there… the tower of London, Parliament, the London eye, the golden hind, the tower bridge, the place where they used to chain pirates us to be drowned by the incoming tide, etc. etc. My mom really enjoyed all of this, and snapped lots of pictures. We made it down to Greenwich by late afternoon and stopped at the totally awesome Meantime Brewing brewpub, the Greenwich Union. Micro-brewpubs are kind of rare here, so a visit to this place is a real treat for someone from the pacific northwest. After a late lunch, we walked up to the royal observatory which is on the top of a hill in a huge park, and you can stand exactly on zero degree longitude.

mom at zero

(not) visiting the queen

My club arranged a special after hours guided tour of Buckingham Palace, and the event happened while mom was in town. To be entirely honest, this is the exact same tour that any tourist can get as long as he buys a ticket and turns off his cell phone, but I think my mom enjoyed telling her friends that she might bump into the queen anyway. The Palace is kind of what you’d expect: big, fancy, lots of art and gold stuff, has a throne room, etc. It seemed pretty well maintained to me, but according to the economist, the place is falling apart. It was fun anyway, and I think my mom got a big kick out of seeing the collection of royal dresses that are on display there, so it was worth it. We finished the tour with a glass of champagne on the back patio and then it was off to the club for dinner. Total London stuff… a bit silly, but lots of fun. We didn’t see the queen though.

la Coruña

I really wanted to take my mom to Spain on this trip as well. Our normal M.O. for trips over here is to go to 2 separate places NOT in London, for 1 week each. This keeps things relaxed without too much running around but also gets me to somewhere a bit different from here. This time, with the Palace tour, it was going to be hard to squeeze in a second place without it being London, and since I have all the London I could ever want and we only had a few days left of vacation, I tried to find somewhere that is close by to visit. A friend of mine at work is from a town called La Coruña which is on the north coast of Spain in a region called Galicia. It’s only a 1.5 hour flight from Heathrow, and is near a town that my mom really likes, Santiago De Compostela. So, I booked some tickets to Coruña and some reservations at their nice hotel, the Finisterre. Arriving was a bit weird, as there had just been an ETA terrorist bombing that day in a nearby town (Burgos), so the immigration guys had a field day with my passport. The problem with my passport is that with all the travelling I’ve done in the past few years, and the greedy passport page habits of the UK visa people and the Chinese government, I’m all out of space, and it’s pretty difficult to tell where I’ve been because of all the stamps stamped on top of each other. So, I had to fill out some explanations of where I was staying, how long I would be there for, etc. and have some conversations that stretched the limits of my high school Spanish. Eventually we got through, but it took maybe 20 minutes to convince them that I really was a tourist. Funny! Once we got settled at the hotel, things were just fine… a quick walk put us at the Plaza of Maria Pita, which is the typical Spanish grand plaza with restaurants and people out for walks, etc. We found a nice little seafood tapas place, and dug into some great Spanish dinner. The Spanish pace of evening is something I really enjoy: strolling around, finding a place to eat, wine, tapas, more strolling, the dinner process takes hours and hours, but isn’t tedious, just relaxing. Plus the food is AWESOME. The local Orujo is a joy as well, the perfect after dinner drink. There aren’t a lot of “sights” to see in Coruña, so we spent a lot of our time in this way, which is perfect for me, and seemed to go over well for mom too.

dinner Coruña style

We did take one day trip to Santiago de Compostela, which is an ancient pilgrimage town which has drawn people from all over Europe for centuries. The big cathedral there is quite beautiful, and features a giant incense burner that is swung across the gathered pilgrims, apparently the original idea was to deodorize the stinky bastards after their long unwashed trip across the continent. The cathedral also has a neat column where people repeated placing their hands over the centuries has worn a hand shaped indentation into the rock. The first two times I was here, in 1987 and 1996, you could walk up to the column and put your hand into the grooves, which was pretty neat because of all the people before you who had also done this. Unfortunately for us, but perhaps fortunately for the column, it is now roped off and you can only look at it. This is probably for the best, I bet there are more tourists visiting that city in one 21st century summer than in 20 years of the 15th century, and this really neat relic could be at risk of falling apart if it’s not conserved properly.

handy…

We also visited the Santiago hotel where my mom and dad stayed when they first went to Spain in 1983, the Parador. This is across the square from the cathedral. I think that was cool for her. It was certainly cool for me because I ate some killer Jamon Iberico.

mom standing on the cathedral steps with hotel Parador in the background

mom and the cathedral

looking out over the bay at breakfast

The last thing we did in Coruña was visit the old roman lighthouse at Finisterre (Latin Finis and Terre?), which has been standing since the year 2. It’s had a LOT of changes since then, such as an entirely new roof structure and external walls added in the 18th century, but it’s still there, and makes a pretty good background for mom. I walked up the stairs inside, and it was a a weird combination of claustrophobic because of the tight winding staircases, and agoraphobic because of the high tower with no railing. Cool view though.

lighthouse!

All in all it was a pretty good trip. Now, I’m back at work in my suit.

Spinal Tap!

2009-06-30T21:56:00.003Z

We saw Spinal Tap tonight. If you haven't heard of them, just read this and then come back to the blog. They weren't exactly great, but considering they're only doing 2 shows on this tour, and the fact that they're a joke band anyway, it probably doesn't matter. They had Greg Bissonette on drums, which was cool since the last time I saw him play was in 1987 when he was drumming for the David Lee Roth Band.

On the positive side, it felt like I'd ticked another box on the list of things I need to do in life regardless of just how amazing the actual experience is... like climbing the Acropolis, seeing Bruce Springstein play "Born to Run", or doing Tequila shots at Cabo Wabo. I'm still working my way up to that last one. They were also funny, which is pretty much required from a band like Tap.

On the negative side, they're not really very good, their non-hits are seriously NON, and oddly, they're not loud! For the band that gave us the concept of an amp that "goes to 11", and stood on stage in front of 4 full Marshall stacks with two extra heads, they were pretty quiet. I saw Dinosaur Jr a few months back and with 3 Marshall stacks their guitarist nearly melted my eardrums.

I suppose it's hard to be super excited about a faux rock band when just last week I saw THE real rock band, ACDC, who still pretty much kick total ass after 36 years. We left a bit early, as they broke into some jam session with some local UK rock star sitting in on keyboards and we didn't know/care who he was. We wanted to beat the crowd to the tube anyway. All in all, a fun night, and I have new black t-shirt!

Movie Review: Anvil

2009-06-18T23:15:00.001Z

Tonight I watched some Spinal Tap comedy clips that had been recorded for the release of Tap’s new album. It was basically the Spinal Tap guys doing a bunch of improvised conversations as their Tap characters… stuff we’ve all seen before. This was boring enough that I quit watching after a few minutes, and made dinner for Reba and I. This was some cut up chicken breast I marinated with soy sauce, garlic, salt, sugar, and rice wine vinegar. Typical Ean stuff… whatever is lying around. This was pretty tasty over rice, and we had that while we watched a movie. The movie choices tonight were The Wrestler or Anvil. The Wrestler is some moving drama about a loser wrestler guy and apparently it somehow parallels Mickey Rourke’s life and is even more poignant for this reason. Or whatever. The other option was Anvil, which is a documentary about a seminal Canadian metal band which was famous for a few years in the early 80’s, never made any money, and instead of breaking up, just kept on going until the present day. It was a toss up between drama or what I thought would be comedy ala Spinal Tap, and I chose what i thought would be comedy. Ok, it was pretty funny, and pretty sad at times, but mostly, and surprisingly, it was touching and inspiring.

Anvil

Anvil basically follows the band as they do their super low end day jobs, practice, write songs, try to get a good producer, go on a low budget euro tour, etc., but the twist is that these guys are 50. They’re actually looking pretty good for 50, for what that’s worth. These guys have been best friends since 1973, and have stuck together in a band since 1981, but never run out of hope that they’re someday going to be rock stars. Both are totally loveable morons who bring a sort of wide eyed glass half full middle aged spin to a type of speed metal retard persona I thought I’d seen the last of in rural 1987 Washington. Anybody who’s ever been in a band on tour will recognize the missed trains, empty clubs, ripped off gig money, weird euro rock scene, boxes of self pressed CDs, supportive girlfriends, etc., and that much of this is fun for the recognition factor alone. However, what really makes the movie are the two main band members, Robb (drums) and Lips (guitar/singer), particularly the latter. At a euro metal concert that Anvil get added to, he freaks out over reuniting with B level rock stars he’d shared stages with 30 years prior, and it seems from his hyperactive gee-whiz response that in the meantime they have become idols as well as representatives of his own memories of rock stardom. I’ll say it: this had me a bit teary. Other points in the film were moving as well: the umpteenth fight/breakup/makeup between Rob and Lips during a studio session, as well as a final triumphaly packed show in Japan. All the way through, these guys are so darn earnest and nice I just couldn’t help but root for them. So what if they’re really not that good, so what if they’re 50 year old losers still trying to “make it” as metal stars in the 21st century, so what if their jobs consist of delivering school lunches in the snow, SO WHAT!? I hope they get signed and sell a zillion albums. These guys deserve it.

Now I want to play in a band again.

mBabyTracker back online

2009-06-04T23:12:00.001Z

Phew!

I finished mBabyTracker, my mobile and online baby tracking tool, version 0.5 just in time to get back to work. Of course, the day I went back to work the month changed from may to june and my lousy testing reared it’s ugly head: it totally blew up! The chart bars were all over the place and totally sucking… click the picture below to see just how lame.

mbabytracker mbooboo

This was really bumming me out! I couldn’t show all my work buddies the stupid geeky thing I spent my pat leave doing. :( And of course, since I’m back to work now, I don’t have nearly as much time to play with computer programs at night. mBabyTracker had to sit for several days showing the lame message:

“mBabyTracker is undergoing planned maintenance... ;)”

Eureka!

So today I figured it out. It was just a problem with the way I was setting up the xml for the time categories (1:00, 2:00, etc,) at the top of the page. Now that I fixed it, the whole world can see how nicely my little darling poops and eats, assuming Reba remembers to track the data. Speaking of the little darling…

mBabyTracker (mmm-bĕhbĕh-trakuh)

2009-05-30T15:10:00.001Z

What is it?

There is a lot of downtime when you are on paternity leave. So, I took the opportunity to learn a bit about mobile software development. I started with wanting to write for the iphone, but quickly found out that I needed an iphone and a mac to do it correctly. So I settled for the blackberry, since Reba and I both have one.

What I came up with is: mBabyTracker. Predictably, this is a silly mobile and internet application that tracks things for our newborn baby Isabel. Specifically, it tracks her awake time, sleeping, pooping and eating.

Here's how it works:

1. baby does something, in this case: poop.

2. Reba opens mBabyTracker on her blackberry, clicks “baby poops” and then “submit”.

3. mBabyTracker sends the information up to my server at www.mBabyTracker.com where it is stored in a database.

4. At any time she wants, she can go to www.mBabyTracker.com and view a historical chart that shows when Isa was awake, asleep, eating or pooping.

5. Notice the new little brown star!

How did I build it?

For the blackberry development I used the RIM Blackberry JDE and handset simulators, and Java. For the web server it’s good old Vbscript and T-SQL hosted by Gearhost, a nice cheap little hosting service I use. The reports are displayed in a cool flash based charting tool called Fusion Widgets. The whole thing was free, except for the hosting cost $20/month I was paying anyway, and the one time Blackberry cert registration, which was also $20.

Is this important?

NO! There are lots of baby tracking websites out there: www.trixietracker.com is a good one for example. I just thought it would be fun to learn how to write stuff for the blackberry and Reba was having a hard time remembering how the baby’s sleeping pattern has been.

isa in motion

2009-05-17T13:29:00.001Z

Of course I’m now taking lots of stupid pictures and videos of baby.

stupid video #1 of 10,000,000,000,000

at the edge of something

2009-05-14T23:15:00.001Z

Part 1 – 10:00 AM

Yesterday Reba had contractions all day long, lasting around a minute, of mild intensity and spaced anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes apart. This morning she woke me up at 5:30 AM with contractions around a minute and 20 seconds, with a lot more intensity and spaced 2 to 4 minutes apart. She’d been on the phone to the midwives at the UCL birthing center and they said if the spacing was 3 minutes for over 30 minutes, it would be on. I spent about an hour timing her after that, we hit the numbers, and now…

it’s on like donkey kong.

We’ve been at the hospital for 3 hours now, and she’s gotten a shot of diamorphine which is a sedative and pain reliever that is common here. This has taken the edge off of the contractions: she was literally writhing in pain and moaning an hour ago, now she’s doing all the breathing stuff and even dozing a little. I’ve sent my coworkers the paternity leave note, I’ve texted our uk pals, I’ve called Reba’s mom and sis, and I’ve sent the facebook status as well. The whole planet knows that we’ve snuck into our hidey hole and we’ll be emerging with a brand new baby Isa shortly.

It’s funny, I’m really not all that nervous. It seems like Reba and the midwives know what they’re doing. Even Isa has her head pointed in the right direction and is working to script. On top of that, this process is very routine and Reba is a healthy girl… so, I’m relatively chill. I think I’m going to go find some hospital food now.

Part 2 – 11:00 AM

Now the contractions are steady at 3 minutes, and she seems like she’s really in a lot of pain. She’s showing her toughness, I’m pretty impressed (although the morphine shot helped). I’m also impressed with the midwives here, these ladies are highly trained nurses that just do births. They know what’s up and how to work with difficult pregnant ladies. Ours is Angela and she brings a super chill vibe to the room. Apparently the way she says “breath in through your nose and out through your mouth slowly” is different than when I say it, because Reba actually does it when she says to! The English have a couple of labor pain options that I’d never heard of before I came here. For example, they give something called “gas and air” which is what we think of as laughing gas or nitrous. I should have just brought some whipping cream in a can.

Part 3 – 12:00 noon

We are very close now. The pain is super intense, but she is within an hour or 2 at most of delivery. She’s not very chatty and has her eyebrows so smashed together that they almost go vertical at times. My job is the hand holder and breathing drill sergeant. My hand is more like a stress ball than a husband’s gently grasped mitt… she is squeezing the blood out of it!

this face looks silly, but she was in some SERIOUS pain and so was my hand

Part 4 – 1:00 PM

(ex post facto)

There was a lot of screaming, fluids, narrowly averted last minute changes of plan, and it was at this point that my breathing strategy was shown to crumble on the battlefield. I saw things I shouldn’t have, and I won’t repeat them here.

Part 5 – 1:50 PM

We have a baby. She is Isabel Josephine Hernandez and she has black hair with blue eyes. She is loud and an energetic eater. True to Hernandez form! Reba is good. The baby is good, and apparently weights 3.4 kg and measures 52 cm. I don’t know what that means, but apparently she’s on the large end of things. Now the only thing left is to figure out if she’s going to Oxford or Harvard.

Isabel(le) Josephine Hernandez in the flesh!

Finally we have a bass player who can’t quit

I took this with my phone, I think it’s my favorite

big city living

2009-05-13T23:10:00.001Z

Lately, I’ve been trying to lose weight. It seems like I gave myself a break from dieting and exercise to do my GMAT preparation, and then let it slide for my application papers, and then let it slide because I got into Oxford, and then let it slide because I was chilling at the end of my tenure at wamu (ok that was for 6 months, I know) and then of course because I was having my summer off before school and then during school and then when we were travelling the world and then when I was trying to get a job in London and then when I had just started a job in London, and now 1 year after that I’m 100% out of shape and thinking it’s time to get it back together again. So, I’m eating light and not drinking during the week, and also even thinking about joining a gym. So I had NO plans of having any wine tonight.

(Cut to Monday morning this week)

I was pissed off and yelling at people Monday morning on the 9:30 AM standup conference call because things aren’t moving along and my project is behind schedule. I guess a 9:30 is better than Tom Bolger’s daily 8:30 back at wamu, but still, this current one is a daily bummer. (a note on 8:30 meetings: while it is supremely useful to get your team together to talk through what issues are on the table each morning, assign new issues, close out old ones, remove blockers, humiliate people who didn’t get their work done, etc., the REAL reason for having an 8:30 is a demonstration of dominance. Basically, it’s saying: “I can make you show up to an early morning grilling every day of the week and you have to come. I have power over you, and I’m now punishing you for xyz.” ) In this way, the week has progressed in a uniform fashion: most of Monday was futile and hostile, while Tuesday was born, lived and died in much the same vein. At 7pm tonight I was applying the last of my flagging will to resolving a did-it-work or didn’t-it-work question which you would think ought to be pretty straightforward but isn’t. Despite my shitty attitude today, it really wouldn’t be fair to my employer or colleagues to go into any more detail than this.

I left the office demoralized and frankly a bit angry. Thoughts of “I’ve had it with this”, “ENOUGH” and similar writhed in my mind, growing incrementally less poisonous with each meter I put between myself and Canary Wharf.

I got on the tube and broke out my copy of Foreign Policy magazine, which is a sort of less serious version of Foreign Affairs, but still cool. A gaggle of Spaniards were sitting on the chairs, checking their tube maps repetitively, chatting, and assuming that no one else on the train knew what “de puta madre” meant. I love listening to the Spanish language being spoken, it’s fun for me to test how much I can pick up when the Iberian is conversational and fast.

10 minutes into the ride, a seat came open at the end of the car, so I went to the end of the seats and sat down. I brushed against a sitting fellow passenger on my way. This is typical since the trains are cramped and bounce around a lot when they are moving. As I sat down, the guy to the left of me turned and made a nasty comment about me sitting on his coat. I apologized and turned back to the FP. This is where the ensuing 20 minutes became fuzzy and I have a hard time remembering exact details.

I BELIEVE the guy wouldn’t let it go, and began a barrage of verbal abuse ending in “I’ll mash up your glasses”. I remember his face very well: brown, balding, and thin with the type of hearing aides that poke little plastic tubes out of your ears. He was wearing little rectangular glasses that were rounded on the edges. I think the thin metal frames were brownish too. His left eye was closed, and didn’t stick out as far as a closed eye should. It seemed sort of deflated and there was pus coming out from where the lids joined. I think he was a bit disheveled in his dress as well, but that’s hard to picture now.

He turned away from me and back to a very attractive 20s-ish woman who he was grossly hitting on despite the fact that he was obviously much older than she, and way not in her league. He was holding 2 cell phones in one hand and gesturing to her while he told her something about how she should call him. The woman was just smiling and shaking her head no.

Rejected, eyeguy turned back to me, even angrier. He shouted that I was a “prat”, which is a stupid English term for “jerk” or “asshole” or whatever.

I nearly never ever get into confrontations with anybody. I just avoid trouble, it’s something I can usually sense and steer wide from. I suppose that my angry day led me to ignore my surroundings, ultimately letting me sit next to a psycho without noticing it. However, when these rare situations do crop up, my heart races and my mind goes cloudy. Thus, I can hardly remember the details of what happened next.

Eyeguy continued on with his verbal abuse, but stepped things up by reaching for the handrail to the right of me and holding it so that his arm was in front of my face. Then, as the train stopped he stood up and faced me. I remember thinking that I wasn’t going to let this guy take a swing at me while I was sitting down, so I stood up and he stepped back a little. At this point I was just staring at him intently. He started shouting about something that was in his pocket and demanding that I touch his pocket.

In a raised voice I said, “I’m not touching your fucking pocket”. I was really starting to get worked up at this point. He kept demanding I touch his pocket, and then took out this little wooden box. Holding the box up and shaking it at me (kind of like those guys with the bibles downtown) he shouted that there was something very important in the box, I just stared. He then put the box back in his pocket and started grabbing my jacket. In retrospect I guess he was either working himself up to something or else testing how far he could push me. I remember shouting something about not touching me (ignored), and then grabbing his hand off of my jacket and holding it away from me at the wrist. At this point the door to the train was open, and for whatever reason I rushed him, slamming his body up against the wall. This should have been easy as he was smaller than me, but it was oddly easier than I would have thought: he crumpled up against the wall with me pinning him. I think this guy was even more frail than he looked. I vaguely remember shouting at him to get off the train.

At this point, my head was so fuzzy and I was so agitated I don’t think I could have answered “what’s 2+3” correctly.

Immediately a woman standing near us put her body between mine and the eyeguy, asking me to “please sit down” and the guy to please get off the train. I let him go, and went back to my seat as he let out another barrage of abuse, closing with “if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you”. To really end his day on a low note, the tube doors then closed on his chest, pinning him once more. These doors only look like they would crush you, what really happens is they close fast at first and then slow down, totally stopping if the encounter any resistance. They don’t give much though, so he was trapped. The doors then opened again, he stepped out, and the people around me on the train all started saying how there was clearly something wrong with him, it wasn’t my fault, I did the right thing, etc.

Walking out of the tube station, one of the women who was sitting near me took a few minutes to talk to me about the incident and was really very warm and supportive as we walked along. I think she could tell that I was really upset about the whole thing. I asked her if I had hit him, because it was hard to remember details, but she said no I didn’t, and repeated that I had acted very well, etc. It’s funny how I saw such a crappy awful side of Londoners and such a wonderful, kind side of Londoners all in the space of just a few minutes.

This whole scenario really upset me. I don’t like conflict of any kind, and typically get a belly full during my work day. Physical conflict with random strangers just turns me off completely, and I’d go through a lot to avoid it. Then in the one case where I do decide I’ve had just about enough today and stand my ground, it turns out the guy is some physically and mentally sick loser, and I just ended up feeling like crap for possibly hurting him. I guess you have to deal with this kind of thing living in a big city and riding the subway all the time. In fairness, I have taken the tube at least twice a day for the last year, so if this only happens once in 500 or 600 rides, it’s probably not something I have to worry about running into again.

So, even though it was the middle of the week, I had a nice big glass of red wine when I got home.

catch up: flamenco festival in Jerez

2009-05-10T13:59:00.001Z

This trip actually happened in March, but I haven’t taken the time to write about it yet. Here goes…

Reba has always been interested in dance, and spent a lot of her youth studying ballet. So, it wasn’t surprising when after a trip to Spain a few years back, she saw some people practicing flamenco in a park and became quite interested. When we got back to Seattle, she joined a flamenco class and started giving performances with the class, listening to the music at home, seeing various flamenco groups when they came through Seattle etc. Some of the girls in her class go to a yearly flamenco festival in Jerez, Spain, which is really the heart of flamenco country. This Festival de Jerez last a couple of weeks, and consists of performances by top dancers and musicians at night and classes taught by these same performers during the day. Conveniently, the old part of Jerez is cute with little windy streets and not too many people, and it’s the home of Sherry (Jerez is the Spanish word for Sherry) and this requires lots of sampling.

For the past two years, Reba has of course been a lot closer to Jerez and going to the festival has been just a matter of quick 2 hour flight from London. This year, she brought me, Kaysa, Ginny, and Brandon who was officially renamed el Brandito for the duration of the trip.

Meat

The first night was great. We got into town, settled into our respective joints, and met in town for dinner. We went to Maison Asador, which is basically a meaty meat restaurant in the middle of a meaty meat town. Seafood is much less common in Jerez restaurants than in other parts of Spain, and this place takes this MO very seriously. The jamon iberico is the best thing ever, this is a dry cured ham like Prosciutto or Serrano, but it comes from pigs that live in Oak groves and only eat acorns. It’s very expensive outside of Spain, but still: eat this if you can!

Reba and Ginny, me and el Brandito, on our first night out.

Market Day

The next day, we went down to the old market to get olives, cheese, iberico, etc. Even though there are supermarkets in town, this place is really popular with the locals. Folks are hanging around socializing, eating, shopping, arguing, haggling, etc. It seems like a very inefficient way to shop, but still a great way to spend an afternoon.

there actually is SOME seafood in Jerez after all…

Churros

After the market, we went to the central square and bought churros from the stand there. These are basically like long skinny donuts, and are pretty much all any Spaniard consumes for breakfast aside from coffee and cigarettes.

is that David Lee Roth buying churros with my wife?

Lazy People Drinking in Cafes

A LOT of our time was spend sitting in squares drinking and eating. This is really a marvelous way to pass the time, I can’t recommend it highly enough. Unlike the Belgians, Germans, English and Americans, the Spanish have really failed to develop a beer culture which produces a wide variety of beers. However, they have achieved one spectacular success in the art of serving beer that may well have catapulted them past the aforementioned competitors. This success is called the caña. A caña is a small chilled glass, maybe 1/2 a pint, of very very cold light lager. This is delicious and refreshing to the utmost. Unlike the less chilled lagers of the English, the caña doesn’t get lukeware 1/2 through your pint and thus suggests again the superiority of Spanish culture over all others.

cañas

Flamenco Girls

What makes a girl decide to dive headfirst into a tiny arts subculture based in a foreign country 1/2 way around the globe? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that everybody finds something in life, and these girls found this. Maybe there is some deep hereditary subconscious sociological connection with this music and certain long lost daughters of Spain. Maybe flamenco is just the coolest thing going. Maybe these girls are just arty. Whatever the case may be, there is a certain type that saves up her money, takes time off work, and travels to a dusty little southwestern Spanish town for the privilege of paying to take dance lessons in a room with no air conditioning from severe people who don’t speak your language. These are the flamenco girls, and this time they were Carmen, Rachel and Dani (and Reba).

Carmen, Rachel, Reba, Dani in their ay yi yi am going out tonight in Jerez suits!

Flamenco Performances

Ostensibly, the point of this trip is to see a bit of top flight flamenco. We got to see Rocio Molina’s dance company perform the Teatro Villamarta, and the world famous guitarist Tomatito in the Tio Pepe Sherry bodega (storehose), which had a very cool vibe. There were a lot more performances that Reba and the flamenco girls went to including Mercedes Ruiz, Belen Maya, Antonio Marquez, Pete Habichulea and etc., but I try to limit myself so I don’t get burned out and thus I skipped a bunch. The guitarist in Rocio Molina’s company played a Cuban steel string guitar that has a double string in the middle. I was really inspired by this guy, his style was just oozing passion. I’ve seen a lot of guitarists, and a lot of flamenco guitarists and normally I don’t get too worked up. This time was something special however.

after the show, do what the Spanish people do

The Bullring

Bullfighting is big in Spain, and Jerez, like many other Spanish towns, has a bullring. Lots of people hate the fact that bullfighting is still going on, think it’s cruel, barbaric, and whatever. If this is you, I DON’T CARE so don’t waste your time typing me a rant. I and many people from around the world like corrida, and if you don’t, then DON’T GO. With that out of the way, I figured it was worthwhile to check out the ring in Jerez, even though the season wasn’t started yet. Having seen most of my bullfights in Madrid at the fancy Las Ventas, I was a bit suprised to find the Jerez Plaza de Toros to be so dilapidated. To get there we had to walk a ways out of the old town, and the part of Jerez we walked through was pretty damn dilapidated as well. In Madrid, the ring is surrounded by tapas bars and little streets and a night out after the fights can be quite an elegant affair. Not so here! Oh well.

plaza de toros, Jerez

on the side of the ring there are pictures of famous toros going back over a hundred years

I just love this one of Kaysa

and this one was too cute to pass up!

my baby shower

2009-05-06T22:11:00.001Z

In almost everywhere in the world, baby showers are given by women for women who are about to have their first baby. In almost everywhere I go in the world, my friends/coworkers think it’s fun to make fun of me via semi-emasculating attempts at humor. Given this, my boss and the admin from our group bought a bunch of baby stuff for me, including diapers, baby shampoo, wipes, towels, and of course some sill baby shower crap like a baby balloon and a pink “daddy to be” sash.

Victory setting up before I got to the room

Victory giving me my basket of baby stuff

this one shows a bit more of my coworkers, from left to right there is me, Bola (African but I don’t know exactly where from), Chris (Greek south African), Torsten (German), Victory (south African), and Robin (English).

I just liked this one.

The people I work with also put together a little book with notes of encouragement and advice around being a dad, and also newspaper clippings of current events so I would remember what was going on when I became a dad. At the end of the day, I let the baby balloon go in canary wharf and watched it float up and over a skyscraper. There was no way I was taking that thing on the tube, and it kind of felt good watch it go.

baby baby baby

2009-05-03T22:41:00.001Z

In the next 3 weeks I will have a baby girl. Right now nothing is really happening on this front, but a new baby is going to be inevitable at this point and then I will know whatever it is that all the parents keep insinuating. Apparently it’s supposed to be a real pain but great anyway? Whatever the result, I’m tired of waiting around for it, I want my little girl now! Reba is pretty uncomfortable and doesn’t like to walk too far or fast… I suppose know how she feels!

Last night we had a bbq at Ginny and Kaysa’s place, which was lots of fun. Al and I decided we needed rum and went to the store to buy some Havana Club 7, which we drank entirely. After that point it would have made sense to just go home, but we thought that purchasing a seconding bottle (Sailor Jerry) would be the right thing to do. Following some intensive Sailor Jerry work, bad Pixies solo dancing in the living room, and a stumbly walk across the park, I was relegated to the guest bedroom based on a prior history of snoring. Today we laid low, and Reba made beautiful lovely fluffy delicious pancakes based on a pedantic adherence to the instructions on the side of the Bisquick box, something that no one in this country seems to be able to do.

Tomorrow is a bank holiday, which means the whole country is off at the pub enjoying the sunshine and the lager. Since I actually work for a bank, I’m double definitely taking the day off.

february in london

2009-02-26T23:51:00.001Z

It is cold and wet and dark here! Our next destination needs to be somewhere WARM. News: I got really sick for a few days but am now mostly better, Reba is bigger every day and the baby never stop wriggling around inside her, work is going pretty OK, our bass player dumped us for another band, I helped Eban put together his resume, Tasha and Keith are coming to visit, we got to see Parts and Labor, and our adopted countrymen showed a bit of class.

sick

Pretty much what you'd expect. Not interesting unless you are an epidemiologist.

wriggling

There is a small baby inside of my wife. In 2.5 months it will be outside the wife but still inside the apartment, and I will get to see what she looks like in the flesh. The baby is always moving and kicking, I really can't see how Reba sleeps. The other day I was laying with my face on Reba's stomach and I was talking to the baby when a tiny little foot kicked the wall of Reba's stomach right where my face was. My own baby isn't even born yet and she kicked me in the face! I suspect this is only the beginning.

dumped at age 39

Well, I can hardly blame the guy. Apparently this other band has "label" interest and they are a hell of a lot better looking than us. Plus, I think the "pregnant drummer" thing might have scared him off a bit. :) I happen to know for a fact that pregnant ladies rock the drums just as hard as non pregnant ones, even if they do have to go to the bathroom more than normal. But I can see how that would just seem weird to a typical rock musician. Oh well, maybe we'll find another bass player after the baby is born.

Eban's resume

My little brother is stepping out into the cold hard light of a recession, but he does have some darn good network operations manager chops and a brand new resume edited by yours truly. You should hire him.

Keisha

Tash and Keith are coming to visit and this will be very cool. We will go to tea and the club and sightseeing and drink a lot and bring the stupid. We are even going to have a drinks night for them to meet some of our London friends.

P&L

What a darn great band: super crazy distorted effects pedal bass, even more crazy distorted effects pedal keyboard, neat fender twin reverb spacey effects guitar, and one severely kickass drummer. The songs were pretty and also really fast but something slow too. Sort of like a pop version of the Cripples I guess. The best part: I saw the keyboard after they knocked everything over at the end, it's a total cheap-ass fred meyer model with tiny little keys and one was broken off. I love that kind of thing. I wrote the band after the show and told them that I think there is now hope for rock music. I also need to buy more effects pedals.

just a bit

David Cameron is the head of the conservative "Tory" party in the UK, sometimes called the "opposition leader". Gordon Brown is the head of the liberal "Labour" party, which is in the majority in the house of commons (like the US congress) just now, so Mr Brown is also the Prime Minister. The job of the Prime Minister is to run the country just like Tony Blair used to, and just like a US president does. The job of the opposition leader is to try and show the country that the Prime Minister is an idiot and failing at his job at every turn so people will vote the opposition leader's party into power and make him the PM. Pointedly disregarding the sniping of the opposition leader is the PM's second job. You see this constant stream of negativity in the newspapers on the radio and on TV, but nowhere is it as clear as in the "prime minister's questions" session that takes place every week. In this event, the whole house of commons assembles, and folks get to ask the PM questions. A more accurate way of describing this would be to say that folks get together and try to catch him saying something stupid, embarrass him for doing things wrong over the past week, and generally try to make him look bad. Sometimes they try to get him to agree to stuff they want done. The PM's job in all this is to dodge the questions and look good. The opposition leader's job in all this is do take the first and nastiest swipes of the day at the PM, who in turn swipes right back. It's great political theater, it can get pretty nasty, and it goes down every week, except for this week.

That is because this week, David Cameron's 6 year old son died.

This week, David Cameron wasn't there for PM's questions because he was mourning his son, and the PM himself showed up only to say some very touching and supportive words on behalf of Mr Cameron, who he continually referred to as "David" and not with the formal and often sneering "right honorable gentleman". It was all the more moving because the PM himself had lost a newborn daughter only a few years ago. I thought that this was one of those brief, beautiful moments where British culture and humanism shines right through all the crap and backbiting of day to day British life. These guys are usually at one another's throats, but not today. Everybody in the house just dropped the rhetoric and BS and reached out with support and warmth to a colleague, starting with the boss.

Every once in a while these English step right up to the plate and impress the hell out of me.

snowy london

2009-02-03T22:33:00.001Z

It snowed in London yesterday, so everybody got to stay home. People in London are just as bad when it snows as people in Seattle are: total freakout. No one went to work, and everyone piled into the grocery stores to buy food. We went out to breakfast and caught a few snaps along the way...

front door of our apt

our mews (alley) all snowed in

st john's wood high street and some cute pregnant lady

settled into the sjw

2009-02-02T00:09:00.001Z

We're moved in. After assembling about 900 pounds of flat pack, trying to convince esl movers that they can park in our alley (more on this later) and fixing the flat for two weeks, we are mostly into a livable home.

the flat pack

The flat pack comes into the picture for several reasons:

we have absolutely zero storage in this place... no closets, no cabinets, no bookcases, nothing.
you don't have to go shopping to find it, just to ikea.com.
it's cheap and shows up in a couple weeks.

Simple! So now we have the worlds most matchingest lakvic (or whatever) bedroom set. It is nice to not be living out of a pile of clothes on the floor however.

the alley

We live in an alley. The english call this a "mews", and in fact ours has a name: Cochrane Mews, but to any red blooded American, this is an alley. Of course our mews has a mews association, and they have already told me how I'm putting my garbage out wrong. I guess that a couple of centuries ago, people kept horses in mews, but now that's all gone, and the old storage spaces and stables and whatever associated with those times are filling up with quirky little flats. Our is one of these. Really, it's pretty cool for several reasons:

We're 2 blocks from the tube stop that goes straight to Canary Wharf, this is very convenient for me.
This mews house is a recent conversion from office space, so it's all NEW, and everything works, even the water and heat.
We're right in the middle of St John's Wood high street shops, so everything will be close at hand for Reba when the baby shows up.

A slightly less favorable aspect of our mews is when we try to get anything delivered here. The mews itself is probably 8 feet wide, so trucks have a hard time getting in, and then there's the getting out which is even worse. This is why I had to argue with the esl movers, but they worked it out in the end.

fixing the flat

Renting just isn't the same here as it is back home. Basically, tenants have zero rights, and landlords have all sorts of power over you. Plus, landlords don't really have to keep their places up, except in the most basic way. So for example, if you move into a brand new flat assuming that the brand new washer and brand new dryer and brand new stove all are hooked up and work, you may be wrong. You may also find that the landlord not only expects your to pay your rent promptly, but doesn't really feel that the unfinished nature of the flat is his responsibility. This gets into the whole English "nothing to do with me, mate" culture. Imagine this: you have a brand new stove on which one of the burners doesn't work. The landlord's PA feels she isn't responsible for fixing it, the builders are. The builders feel that it's actually the architects fault, because he bought the stove in the first place. The architect feels it's the manufacturer's fault... and etc. but YOU'RE still paying rent. I can only imagine that builders, architect, manufacturer and PA are all getting paid. I looked into the UK landlord-tenant law, which seems to basically indicate that if the hot water heater and electrical supply are working, then the landlord has met his responsibility. It actually explicitly says that it's not the landlord's responsibility to make sure that any of the things in the flat that USE the water and electricity work! Really, fixing all of these things is simple and easy, but expecting the locals to do it out of any sense of responsibility to their clients/renters is way over the line. So, I spent a couple days getting everything fixed, and now we've got a fairly good working order flat.

the snow

I guess it's snowing a lot outside. Too bad London tube riders don't get snow days!

update

2009-01-05T20:44:00.001Z

Things are looking up at casa Hernandez east. Reba is back, things are moving along with the new apartment, and we even have a jam session with a bass player. The big news, however, is that we now know a great deal more about the next addition to the family: in a little more than 4 months, we are going to be the parents of a baby girl! We went to the 2nd ultrasound today... what an incredible machine this thing is. The technician operating this device could not only see the baby and determine the sex, he measured things like the size of heart chambers, width of arteries, length of bones, formation of the palette, even the size of the tiny arteries connecting to her kidneys! He played us the heartbeat, snapped a 3D picture of her face, and even gave us a paper print of our unborn baby to take home as a souvenir. The kid doesn't even know that there's an outside world yet, but the outside world knows all about her, having looked in to checked out how well her kidneys are functioning, and assessed the quality of her lungs. I've seen what her little brain looks like on the inside, and know that a myriad of onscreen measurements indicate she is well within all the 2 standard deviations of healthy children. We looked into her little stomach long before the first drop of milk, and counted each finger and toe. What's left to check when this little girl is born? Hair color, I suppose.

I was thinking of asking if we could check out her bench press and SAT scores while we were in there, but that just seemed like we might be leaving nothing at all to mystery.

Seriously, I'm so very very happy that my little girl will likely be healthy and I can't wait to meet her.

Isa Hernandez, clay baby

christmas eve in canary wharf

2008-12-24T12:00:00.003Z

I stopped in to work today for a quick meeting with Ashish, and to catch up on email. I recently synced my ipod (becoming more laborious as time goes by and I get more music) and was listening to billy no mates on the tube, bless those guys for still doing it right. I switched to J-church as I walked up out of the tube station into a nearly silent canary wharf. This took me right back to that day I spent walking around cambridge...

"I walked around in a self imposed headphones isolation but with the whole gang and felt really weirdly close to them."

I went straight through "one mississippi" that day, and on to "69 love songs". I'd been really relating to Jchurch that year, because it took me back home a bit when walking in the foreign streets. So on that day, the glowy feeling of the beer, twilight, colleges, the disconnected connection with my fellow students and music mixed in with the melancholy of knowing that it would all be over soon. White noise filtered in from the edges of vision and hearing, and I felt something really beautiful. 10 months later Lance died on a table having his blood cleaned. I found out 3 months after that.

Stepping up into the silent wharf, listening to one mississippi and feeling a bit alone, I suddenly felt really sad. Tears are no good at work, even on christmas eve, so I turned poor Lance off, wiped my eyes and walked through the front doors.

I'm really, really sorry, Lance.

my first Hanukah

2008-12-21T23:57:00.001Z

I went up to oxford yesterday to visit with my friends Sasha and Orly. Sasha was the 2nd MBA that I met way back in September of 2006. He and Orly have two boys, Nir (4) and Dan (1). Sasha works for a small investment bank that focuses mainly on Russia and eastern Europe. He's also Belarusian and speaks Hebrew, Russian and English. They invited me to come up to have dinner, get drunk on vodka and stay over the night. Russian style vodka drinking consists mainly of downing ice cold vodka shots in a single gulp. It's great fun, and went along very nicely with the lamb Sasha cooked. The boys were already asleep by the time I got there, and Orly went to bed after dinner, but Sasha and I stayed up late drinking plain vodka, chili pepper vodka, Irish whiskey, and even some red wine. More accurately, you could say that Sasha and I stayed up late drinking ALL THE plain vodka, ALL THE chili pepper vodka, ALL THE Irish whiskey, and even ALL THE red wine.

Sasha was predictably a bit rough the next morning, but I was totally hung over! He suggested drinking a beer, "hair of the the dog" style... and while this seemed to sort him out, it just made me more sick. So, I slept it off at their house while they took the boys to the park. I was only feeling something like 30% human again by dinner time, so they had me stay for dinner as well, and Sasha made Moroccan style couscous, which is really good stuff, though I obviously couldn't eat too much of it. Then, they lit the Menorah candle because this is the first day of Hanukah. This was also my first Hanukah, so it was very interesting to watch. They dimmed the lights, lit one candle, and then used it to light another one, while singing a song in Hebrew. Just as the the song finished up, Sasha said, "Ok Orly, now bring in the Christian babies' blood..." and we all cracked up laughing. We finished up the process with some home made doughnuts, and presents for the boys: Dreidels of course. I rode the train back down late today, and capped the night off with chicken soup and the unbelievably horrible "National Treasure 2".

my wife rules

2008-12-20T10:50:00.001Z

the mighty teisco del ray

My wife bought me a teisco del ray guitar for Christmas. She's going back to Seattle for the holidays but for various reasons I am staying here. So, she gave me the guitar before she left, hoping that it would keep me busy. It probably will! These things are really cool old Japanese "surf" guitars modeled after the more famous US surf guitars like mosrites, and have a special appeal for sarcastic guitar collectors like me. What a wonderful wife, that's the 2nd guitar she's bought for me! I'm a very lucky guy.

Oxcam Revisited

2008-12-19T00:08:00.001Z

Now I am a member of the Oxford and Cambridge club. For the price of an Oxford MBA, a new members' night spent chit chatting and wrangling for two signatures, and 90 quid/month, I am now a member. Is this a good thing? Would they let in anybody with an oxcam degree and a pulse? I don't want to consider these points. I stopped by the night before last and had a glass of port while I read a weird old book on the Celts of England sitting in a red leather chair by the fire in the library. It was peaceful in there, and I daydreamed that a few old members were looking at me, saying, "well at least this yank is interested in weird old books, even if he is just an MBA... what the hell, let's give him a chance". This club isn't posh like the RAC, and it isn't political like some others, and it certainly isn't hip, it's simply a place where old geeks like to geek on old books in silence with their drink by the fire. Or at least that's the way that I like to think of it. I've come to accept that Oxford people are going to always be intimidating to me, and that's fine, I'm happy being the little fish.

Why do I like these old books? They reflect back to me in waves with the aggregate glow of every eye that ever looked down into them. I like this, it makes the fire seem very simple.

Various

2008-12-13T15:59:00.001Z

I feel like blogging today, but have nothing super interesting to write about. Since that's never stopped me before...

Cold

I have a cold. I hate having a cold. I hate if for two reasons: 1) it sucks. 2) Because I had pneumonia several years ago, and ever since, every little cold I get turns into a chest cold. A chest cold that hopes and dreams of growing up into pneumonia. My guess is this is how I will die someday: I'll be old, I'll get my usual winter cold/chest-cold/wannabe-pneumonia and the pneumonia will finally get it's wish, taking out yet another old guy.

Polish Maid

Nothing in London is cheap, except for house cleaners. I have a house cleaner from a maid service, and for £7 per hour, she cleans, does washing, irons, sews, etc. I have no idea if she's a legal immigrant or not, though she did bring a very shitty photocopy of of her passport once. She's probably 19, and doesn't speak English too well. She's polite, but a skittish. I was home sick on Friday (normal cleaning day) taking all these calls from work, and I think she was kind of freaked out by me being in the house when she was there. I think that maybe she's afraid that I'm going to try to get her to sleep with me or something, she has that sort of wary-eye look that says a girl thinks "this foreign pig is a molester and he'll try to get me if I turn my back to him, then I'll be stuck with half-pig half-polish baby on this Gold forsaken island in the sea... must remain vigilant!" Maybe that's an exaggeration, but in any case I try to just leave her alone which I think makes her like 3% more comfortable.

Christmas Plans

Reba is going to Seattle for Christmas and I am not. There are several reasons for this:

1) she works in a research institution where everybody would flake out over the Christmas week anyway, so the administrators just say "what the f---" and let everybody go. I don't work in this kind of a company, so I don't have the week off.

2) I used all my vacation up already this year, with trips to Spain, Greece, the Yorkshire Dales, Scotland, Seattle, Los Angeles, Bruges, etc.

3) I wanted to make a point to my wife that maybe it's not really necessary to travel to Seattle 4 times a year.

4) Holiday travel is a nightmare.

5) Reba wants to visit Seattle one last time before the baby comes, it might be a while before she can travel again.

6) I'm going to be a father in a few months, and this will be my last chance to have some extended Ean time for a while.

7) Reba and I have often taken separate vacations, after 11 years it's sort of a nice break, and we're always eager to see one another at the end.

Despite the nice long list above, I'm regretting the decision. I want to see my family and friends, have baby brother lunch, go to dim sum with my mom, do the Nochebuena, have a mango chutney shochu eggnogg (or whatever it is they're serving) at Tiger Tail, hang out at the Javabean, see the nieces and nephews, etc. I'm always afraid that there may be a shorter time frame for seeing my mom than previously assumed. There's nothing specific behind this last bit, it's just a fear I have. Also, I have found that if Reba is gone for 2 to 3 nights, I enjoy my personal time, spend time with friends, and have the pleasant experience of finding things just where I put them last. However, I have also noticed that if she's gone for any longer than 4 nights, I inevitably find myself huddled in the eye of some sort of psychological/existential crisis which I am ill equipped to handle on my own.

On the positive side, I will have a lot of time to do the extended Ean fantastic: read weird books and magazines at cafes, buy comic books, find new hardcore bands at All Ages Records, shop for the perfect reverb pedal, admire guitars I don't need, take naps on our giant DFS (think English JC Penny) couch and watch movies that would lead my wife to suspect that I'm an idiot. I will also be going back to Oxford for a quiet Christmas eve with my good pal Andy, who is just about to finish his thesis for his DPhil (that's Oxford for PhD). This is a big deal, because the thesis is really a book of about 100,000 words and he has to get it done by the end of January or the whole thing is canceled. I guess he's got a couple of chapters left. Stressy! Plus, Ginny and Kaysa are going to be around, so they'll probably adopt me for a bit out of sheer pity.

Baby

I'm going to be a father. Leaving aside the recent dramatic and sudden death of my own father, my present absence from my family's home, financial crises and scarcity of jobs in the finance sector, it's still a complex and scary proposition. Put those ingredients back in, and a guy could get really worked up about this. I am, however, determined to NOT be a freaked out first time parent, and thus am committing to being cool about this whole thing. It's a bit early to tell how it will all work out, but I can say that my wife is cute with a little belly, we've found a nice new neighborhood to live in and push a stroller around, and the names are set: Ernest Robert Hernandez (boy) and Isabel(le) Josephine Hernandez (girl). Ernest comes from lots of things Reba and I hold dear: my family often names boys with an E (brothers Ethan and Eban, father Ernest, grandfather Ernesto, great uncle Evelio, great grandfather Efigenio, etc.), memorial to my dad and granddad, Shackleton, Hemingway, and reba's great uncle Ern. Robert is Reba's dad's name, and this just seems fair given the boy's first name. The genesis of the Isabel(le) name is a bit more vague, we both like it and it's Spanish enough to fit with Hernandez, and English enough to be genuine. By genuine I mean that I feel a bit disingenuous giving my child a strongly Spanish first name when the kid would be less that 1/4 Spanish... a pale blonde haired blue eyed 6th generation American boy named Juan Hernandez is a bit ridiculous, and certainly not named with any sense of accuracy regarding his genealogy. So, Isabel(le) works because it's not a purely Spanish name, but still sounds good with Hernandez. This last bit can be difficult... Beth Hernandez? Jane Hernandez? Sally Hernandez? To me, these names sound great with English last names, but with Hernandez it's just awkward. So, finding the right English first name to go with the Spanish last name is tricky. The (le) part is included here because I sort of like the look of the French spelling a bit better than the Spanish version, but Reba feels the opposite way and we haven't come to an agreement yet. The name will sound the same anyway. My secret agenda is to employ the Barclays bank principle through which simply writing something enough times makes it true.

that's not beer!

At Shelby's urging, I have updated my resume from the current 2 page version to a new 1 page version with a separate list of key achievements. The idea is that by having a more succinct resume it will look more professional and more effectively convey my fundamental fabulousness by not losing the reader's attention halfway through the 2nd page. If a potential employer is really interested, they will request the key achievements list. Economical writing is something you work on a lot in business school, and I managed to reduce 18 years of education, jobs, personal achievements, training, methodologies and memberships to 1 A4 sheet of paper. One nice thing about living in the UK is that you get an extra .67 of an inch per resume page over the standard US 8.5x11.

Moving

We are moving to St John's wood. If you live London, that might be a bit funny, if not you're probably wondering what/where that is. Right now, we live in the edgy, punky, wild night out part of the city called Camden Town. This neighborhood is accessed by the Northern Line subway, and is popular with young waify edgy looking people, as well as throngs of tourists that come from all over the UK and Europe to shop for bongs, tie dyed wall hangings, 27 buckle high heeled S&M boots, etc. If you were shooting a low budget version of the Matrix, you could buy all your wardrobe here. We are abandoning this gem for St John's wood, which is only about a 20 minute's walk from our current house, but is really a world away.

Why this is funny:

1) it's on the Jubilee Line subway, which means that it's a straight shot to Canary Wharf,where bankers (like me) work.

2) The neighborhood is very popular with American expatriates, again because of the ease of commuting to the financial center where they all work.

3) St John's is also full of young, fashionably dressed mothers pushing expensive "prams" while their banker husbands work in Canary Wharf.

4) Finally, the neighborhood is quiet and cute.

...which means that there are 4 reasons that our friends here are thinking "oh yeah, now that Ean and Reba are having a baby they're getting conservative and moving to St John's Wood... hahahahha!" I suppose this is like living in Capitol Hill and the moving to Kirkland as soon as you decide to have kids. I can't deny it!

A is the old apt, B is the new one

Ok, that's more than enough for today, next time: Practice Spaces, Charles Darwin, Books, Magazines, and Dim Sum.

Bruxelles

2008-12-11T02:11:00.001Z

This past weekend, Reba and I went down to Brussels (Bruxelles in some languages) to visit Shelby, my pal from business school. We hadn't been on a weekend trip for quite a while, so it felt good to top up on travel. I always feel like I'm wasting my time over here to some extent by not traveling at every chance. Europe is so close to our little island home, and though it's easy to just chill at the apartment and go out to dinner in the neighborhood on the weekends, I won't have this proximity forever.

Brussels is in Belgium, which seems to be a sort of German-ish France. Apparently there is a big cultural/geographical divide between the French speaking Belgians and the Flemish (a kind of Dutch, which makes it a kind of German) speaking Belgians, with all the tension, rivalry and distrust that naturally builds up between two groups of white people living a country the size of Massachusetts. Actually that doesn't make any sense to me, but if you figure (a) one half of this country is Germanic, and there's plenty to pick on Germans about if you're looking for a fight and happen to have had grandparents in northern Europe during the last century, and (b) the other half of the country is French. Let's face it, other than my French teacher back in Seattle and a few francophilic femmes from said French class, nobody likes the French. I'm not saying that it's right, just that it's true. So, maybe this big divide in a tennis court sized state isn't such a shock after all. Whatever. After a while you realize that when you live over here, it's a lot better use of your time to not worry about why these 14 white people in one tiny corner of Europe hate those 23 other white people in the next tiny corner, even though they're probably all 3rd cousins anyway.

Shelby lives in London and works for BT, but she's been assigned to some project in BT's Brussels office, so they're putting her up in a fabulous apartment while she's there. It was really good to see her, she's been away for a while now and I likes my Shelby time. She's moving back to London in a few weeks. Good! She organized a pretty cool tour for us: visit to a Christmas market, nice dinner out, seeing all the wacky Belgian Christmas pageantry (more on this later) and best of all: a trip to Delirium. Delirium is a bar just off the main square in Brussels where they have 2004 different beers for sale, mostly Belgians. While the actual space is a shithole, the beer makes up for it and I was in that most lofty of heavens, beer heaven. I drank a lot of Belgian weird beer (more on this later), and was very happy about it. Shelby and Reba were very good sports and sat with me and watched me go through the various delicious options. Thanks girls!

Belgian Christmas Pageantry

Adding to the long list of Euro stuff I don't get, there are apparently 2 key non-Jesus Christmas figures in the Belgian Christmas tradition. There is a Belgian Santa Claus who is roughly analogous to the Santa Claus we all know and love back in the states. Belgian Santa does his thing on December 25th just like everywhere else, but he's also in a sort of medieval parade on December 6th where he rides around Brussels in a horse drawn cart followed by guys on striped stilts, but what the hell, it's cool, I like stilts. What's not cool is dude #2. This is "black peter" or something like that. This dude is Santa's helper or slave or something, and his face is supposed to be all black from chimney soot. So, of course this means that there has to be a white dude in blackface walking behind Santa in the parade. Oh yeah, and instead of giving presents, this guys beats up bad little kids and takes them back to Spain. I am not making this up.

We had a lovely, culturally enriching trip to the continent this weekend, and I even got to use my French. Au-bon.

Belgian Weirdbeer

I like weird beer. Ok, scratch that, I like beer. Even an ice cold lager is all good with me, but in colder months, complicated weird beer makes me very happy. Seattle is famous/notorious for this stuff, and I quaffed my share of the weird before I left. LoFiBri and I used to do the occasional weridbeer outing, and thinking back on those trips makes me happy and thirsty. The Belgians however, take this art-form to a whole new level. There are thousands of little breweries in this little country, all with their particular take on what a tasty little weirdbeer is. I guess the best way to put it is: the Belgians are as diverse and serious about making beer as the French are about making wine, so get out there and drink some. A Belgian focused recommendation I gave to my Austin pal Gabe just yesterday follows:

"good solid belgian beers that I like are chimay and duvel, nothing too wild but reliable. NOT for consumption on hot summer days tho, way too thick. for something a bit more interesting try westmalle. for something super kickass and weird try the Abbaye des Rocs by Brasserie de l'Abbaye des Rocs. This shit is the bizomb dizzle. I also drank one called "satan red", which is just a good idea generally. I think you can get all of these (except maybe that last) at any good hipster grocery. definitely at any beer store."

Special to Carl: we're pouring one out for Tiki this week, though I suspect he would have preferred some dropped bbq instead. Take care my brother, you're in our hearts and in our thoughts.

The House of Lords

2008-11-19T19:18:00.001Z

It turns out that one of the alumni from my college (somewhere in the 50s) is a lord, and also a member of the house of lords, which is sort of like the US house of representatives in that it's the half of parliament (congress) that doesn't matter too much, but the lords is more prestigious with less power. This particular lord decided to host a dinner at the houses of parliament for the Merton alumni association, and so on Friday night, Reba and I went and had dinner with a lot of mertonians and a few lords, ladies, sirs and at least one dame.

We showed up late and missed the tour, but made it in time to hang out on the lords' deck overlooking the river Thames. Predictably, right next door is the house of commons' (like our senate) deck, and they were having some kind of an event as well. Security was pretty tight, so we got scanned a lot, and had to wear badges, etc. The dinner was a pretty typical Oxford event: lots of wine while you mingle with OSPs (over smart people) that you don't know, followed by a 3 course meal with lots more wine and more conversation with OSPs you don't know (they sat Reba and I apart from one another), followed by a couple of speeches. And then more drinks. Rinse, repeat, and you have British society.

Are you wondering what lords, ladies, sirs and dames are like? I only know a few, but in general they seem to be nice old people who are super super old school British: dry humor, cufflinks, odd accents, and the whole deal. They never seem mention their titles, but are usually announced before speeches or during thank you's, etc. with the title. They also seem to have no problem wearing nametags that include the titles. So, perhaps for this reason, they also seem to me to have a certain smugness to their demeanor... they know they are lords and higher class than you, you know they are lords and higher class than you, everybody else in the room knows that they are lords and higher class than you, and all parties know that you are NOT a lord, but the lords aren't going to say anything because that wouldn't be classy, would it? They are pointedly nonchalant about the whole thing, which in a way makes it all that much more obvious. As far as English oddities go, the whole title thing has got to be one of the strangest.

The main speaker was pretty interesting, he'd spent time all over the world, wrote a bunch of famous stuff, had received all sorts of accolades for doing brave stuff, and was pushing his cause a bit, which is basically reviewing old prison sentences and trying to get innocent people free. Also speaking was Jessica Rawson, the warden of Merton, and also a dame. I think that's funny, because where I'm from, "dame" is what tough guys in campy old gangster movies called women back before they started calling them "chicks", but here it's some sort of honorific title. What she did to deserve it, I don't know, but I'm sure it was academic. Basically the warden is the head of the college, sort of the ruler of it, and I don't think she really reports to anyone. This warden is pretty popular with the alums, but to be honest, a lot of the students didn't like her when I was there. She and I always got along fine even though she never tried to learn my name and just called me "one of her MBAs", but the feedback I heard from the people who lived in college (I lived in my own apartment) generally ranged from fearful to just negative. In any case, she announced that she's leaving after 15 years, and the fellows of the college are looking for a replacement. I'm sure that's caused a bunch of chatter in the MCR.

Reba was tired after the speeches, so we split early, though we did chat with a few folks on the way out. Kaysa wanted to meet up for drinks in Shoreditch, but I wanted to play Spore because my empire, the Wangcopter Empire, is doing pretty well and I wanted to invade some alien solar systems with the new mega-laser I bought.

What do you read?

2008-11-08T18:09:00.001Z

I was reading an article on MSNBC about Sarah Palin today that pointed out how Katie Couric had a minor comeback off the back of her Sarah Palin interview in which the candidate couldn't name the newspapers she reads. The implication was that she actually didn't read newspapers. I thought about this a while and thought to myself: man, that's pretty lame. I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, and I'm not even running for public office... how does she expect to learn about what's going on in the world? So, since I'm getting back to blogging, I thought I'd list off my current crop of regular reading.

The funny part is that I almost never read actual newspapers! They're messy and get my hands inky and unless I've got a leisurely solitary breakfast lined up, I just don't take the time to buy a physical paper.

Regular Reading

2008-11-08T18:05:00.002Z

In addition to various books, I read a lot of periodicals in a sometimes futile attempt to keep up with the pace of business, technology and politics.

Magazines

Here is where I get my more deeply considered opinions about the world. I subscribe to these in print form and read them at home or on the tube on the way to work. I give links to their web sites anyway.

Foreign Affairs - Well argued academic style papers from high end bureaucrats and academics. Political orientations are all over the map, but still credible. These guys are great at polished analysis, but not as good at giving suggestions for the future. Still, I love love love this mag.
The Economist - Founded in 1843, this is a great balance of news, politics, economics and business. Written anonymously for some odd reason.
Harvard Business Review - Gold standard for general business subjects. Organizational design, leadership, IT, strategy, marketing etc.
Sloan Management Review - MIT's attempt at having it's own Harvard Business Review. Lots of good stuff that the HBR doesn't get to, and a bit more of a techie focus.
Guitarist - Because at the back of it all, I'm still a guitar geek and I love reading about all the latest models.

Journals

I like reading academic journals, I got a taste for it in business school and now I'm hooked. I've found that the difficult part about reading specific journals is that much of the time you're flipping through stuff that you don't care about. Plus, subscribing to individual journals only gets you data once in a while. This is where searchable aggregators are handy.

The Association for Computing Machinery - Lots and lots of papers by academics around the world. Much of it concerns technology that I'm not interested in, but there's more than enough that's pertinent or interesting to me. Some of the journals I follow more closely include:
- ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing Systems (JETC)
- Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH)
- ACM Transactions on Architecture and Code Optimization (TACO)
- ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
- ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM)
- ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - Similar to the ACM, just different articles. The most shockingly confusing and poorly designed web site in computing history, but that's fairly predictable give academic focused web sites in general. In here, the journals I like are:
- IT Professional
- Digital Information Management
- Internet Computing
- IEEE Software
- IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
The National Bureau of Economic Research - If you want to read really detailed papers about finance or economics subjects ranging from the relationship between sub prime mortgage structures and the current financial crisis, to the effects of migration on 16th century European economies, this is your Disneyland. I love this stuff.
Oxford Economic Papers - More economics, if a bit esoteric. I probably read this one because it comes out of my school more than anything else.
Oxford Review of Economic Policy - Ditto.

Technology Blogs

I read a ton of stuff via Google reader, which is a very nice RSS aggregator. Some of this stuff is questionably accurate or researched, and at times is little more than opinion. At the same time, a lot of cutting edge thinking is going on in these forums, so I like to follow it. The web sites for some of these blogs are listed below.

Online Newspapers
This is where I get my day to day updates or take brain cool-down breaks at work.

MSNBC - Meat and potatoes, basic reporting. This is where I go for the quick "what's up" in the world or if I want 10 minutes of light reading.
The Financial Times - I go here for business and economics stuff, again if I'm looking for a quick update. This is the UK gold standard business newspaper. I particularly enjoy their economist's forum.
The Wall Street Journal - The US version of the FT. My father in law once commented that the best thing about the WSJ was the editorials, and I must admit somewhat guiltily that I don't use the journal for much else. I love to see how the well informed part of the right wing think, and these editorials are a good source for that.
Le Monde - The big French national newspaper. If I'm going to France anytime soon and trying to brush up on my French, I'll read this for a few days. I also read this to try and understand what it is that French people actually think. I've had limited success here.
El Pais - This is the Spanish version of Le Monde for my purposes, but probably also for a lot of other people as well. Spanish politics has never really interested me enough to follow it closely, but I do like being able to talk to my Spanish friends about it.
The Seattle Times - Not much global substance, but this paper keeps me up on the minor goings on back home.

Want to read what I read? Check out the Ean news rollup.

So... what's new with Ean and Reba these days?

2008-11-04T12:53:00.001Z

oh shit.

Slayer!

2008-11-02T13:24:00.001Z

Just like the Jesus and Mary Chain, we saw Slayer this week. Unlike the Jesus and Mary Chain, they ruled. That is to say, they did not suck, which is exactly what the Jesus and Mary Chain did (suck). Slayer are on of the big four thrash metal bands, and from my point of view is really the only one with any credibility at this point. Based on Reba's initial feedback, Metallica may be able to redeem itself with their new record, but I'm reserving judgement, especially after that last terrible album they did.

The show was just what one would hope: a knucklehead festival. Where these people come from, I have no idea, but somehow Slayer brings out the dumbest, trashiest, most ADD riff raff wherever they go in the world. How was I to know that the frizzy long combed out hair, dirty little moustache, and jeans jacket look adopted by suburban American white trash everywhere in the 1980s (but maybe a bit more in the south, Julie?) was alive and well at the London Hammersmith Apollo? There were skinheads, crazed-eye brawlers, slutty dumb looking "goth" chicks, bikers, and my favorite: headbangers. What's a headbanger? As you might suspect, there is an over analytical wikipedia article that prattles on about the subject, but in the simplest sense, it is someone with long hair that is banging their head back and forth, to and fro, (or even in a figure 8 configuration, ala Tom Araya, bassist and lead singer for Slayer) with the effect of their long hair flipping all over the place. You used to see lots of people doing this in the 80s, but it's a bit rare now. Except at slayer concerts. I remember watching a bunch of these guys from afar at the show, and then getting a waft of hair conditioner smell. Turning around, I discovered that I had my very own headbanger! I gave the little guy enough room to do his thing, and returned to watching the band. In my view, this miscreant suffers all forms of indignity, job discrimination, female repulsion, rejection at posh restaurants, parental disapproval, etc., just so he can have his moment of glory at the Friday night metal show. Who am I to rob him of this? Hell, if I could grow any hair on my head, I might be inclined to grow it long myself!

Also out in force were the old people. That is to say, people like me. Reba and I found a relaxed corner of the club in which many people our age and older were stood slightly apart from one another, enjoying minor-level rock outs of their own. Reba calls this the "nerdsection". These people had naturally bald heads (i.e. non skinhead), polo shirts, glasses, paunches, and the rest. The mayhem in the slam-pit at center stage was not anything I wanted to sample.

As for slayer, they too are old, fat, and even one of them, Kerry King, is bald. For Mr. King this must have been a real crisis. Against all odds, he became an internationally famous, grammy-winning rock star, and then lost his hair! He has compensated by tattooing his head and growing a slender but absurdly long beard, which he headbangs in a fashion by shaking his head back and forth in a very aggressive "no" configuration. Frankly, he looks for all the world like a World of Warcraft dwarf, stout, tattooed, bald, goofy beard, and wearing some crazy medieval S/M-ish clothing. All he needs to do is trade in his axe (metal-speak for guitar) for a real one, and he'll be off to storm the gates of Mordor or whatever.

But the music! At the end of the day, you can make all the fun in the world of Slayer's fans, their hair, and their anachronistic subculture, ad nauseam, but they still kick ass! Their music is as fast, brutal, and emotive as ever. They are tight and precise live, and have all the anger on stage that comes across so effectively in their studio albums. Their songs are frankly scary, and a couple on numbers from 1986's "Reign in Blood" (voted "heaviest album of all time" by Kerrang! magazine) stand the hairs up on the back of my neck. These boys did not disappoint.

dwarven warrior or rock star?

The Jesus and Mary Chain Suck (Live)

2008-10-28T20:51:00.001Z

One of my favorite bands ever is The Jesus and Mary Chain. Their style, lyrics, innovative primitiveness, and energy made we want to play music all over again after the first 15 years. We went to see them last night at a club one tube stop from our neighborhood. It was great to see a band that I've idolized for so long. It was also great to see them with Reba, because she and I used to listen to "Automatic" a lot when we were first dating.

However, they sucked live. Even though a second year guitarist could probably play their unbelievably simple guitar parts, their lead guitarist William Reid was obviously too stoned to remember or execute his own parts that he wrote and has been playing for 20 years. Maybe it would have been easier if he wasn't wearing sunglasses in a dark club, or if there wasn't such a powerful smoke machine onstage, or if he did something radical like actually practice the guitar parts he wrote. Who knows, but he managed to miss guitar lines, play the wrong chords, and prematurely stop songs... all while trying to play material with a complexity level akin to Kum-bye-ya. I suppose in a way it's ok since they are one of those sloppy arty noise lo fi pop type of acts, the kind that are fun to watch fall apart on stage.

We left early anyway.

Voted

2008-10-25T15:17:00.001Z

The whole world is hanging on the the US electorate's next move. People here will act like the fact that they know about McCain, Palin, Obama, Biden, Powell's endorsement, "I can see Russia from my house" and all the rest is because they are so well educated in world politics, but it's BS. The truth is, the next US president will have a tremendous effect on the rest of the globe, and everyone everywhere knows it. They also all have an opinion. Not always a well researched opinion, but then again sometimes it's better than what I hear from my fellow Americans. This president is going to have a major hand in the next steps toward global financial stability, set the stage for Russian, Chinese and European world postures, and decide the outcome of two very long wars. This president will have the tax base and industrial power of the world's largest single GDP at his fingertips. This president will have the world's most powerful expeditionary force at his disposal. This president will say something at the next state of the union address, and the whole world will shiver, bristle, or relax depending on what it is. This isn't true of Sarkozy, Medvedev, Jintao, Brown, Merkel, Aso, Rudd, Abdulla Aziz, Ahmadinejad (or Khamenei), etc. These leaders are all varying degrees of important with varying degrees of influence, but the real deal is: the transfer of American power evokes a level of global interest to which other countries (except perhaps Russia?) only engender a distant second. This much is evident from the media, colleagues, friends, cab drivers, floor to ceiling tube advertisements (seriously) and a million other indicators I run into over here. I don't know, but I bet that there's a lot more people in the world who wish they could cast a vote in the US election than would ever want to visit the US, let alone become citizens.

The part of the US that I come from has a host of other names up for election on a long list of very unimportant positions... Washington state governor, King county council members, judges, assesors, etc. No one in the world outside the tiny and insignificant corner of forest I hail from gives 2 shits about these people, or whether or not Seattlites get mass transit, build highways at the expense of their eastern agricultural neighbors, let sick people suicide legally, improve firefighting, etc. Frankly, I don't care too much about this stuff either. So, American elections in the broad sense are just as unimportant as those taking place anywhere else in the world: if you don't live right there, it really doesn't effect you and you're more worried about whether it's going to rain today on the way down to the pub.

But, there is one set of names on my ballot that really does have a ton of impact on everyone back home, all the ex-pats out here in the UK, the English themselves, the folks that fly in and out of London every day from all over the world, and everybody else: Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin. Ralph Nader doesn't mean shit because he'll never get elected, and neither do the SWP or the Greens. They are just silly distractions which serve more to remind Americans of the inclusiveness of their political process than anything else.

So, it was my great pleasure to vote with my wife today, in several ways.

1) Knowing that I had agonized over and considered deeply issues of policy, character, judgement and stance.

2) Knowing I was taking advantage of a right that many of my forebears struggled and even died to reserve.

3) Knowing I am so privileged as to have the power to cast my judgement on men who will affect the entire world.

This last is clearer to me than ever now that I'm surrounded by intelligent, concerned, informed people who wish they could have a say in this decision, not out of any leisurely obsession with the politics of some random foreign power, but simply because it will touch their lives in the 4 years to come.

serious work to be done

ok, so we're not SO serious :)

The Oxford And Cambridge Club

2008-10-10T23:00:00.000Z

From the late 18th century to the early 20th century, Gentlemen's Clubs were a big deal in London. Apparently they are on the rise again, but I think in general they are way down from where they were. Imagine lots of ritzy dudes puffing pipes and reading the paper while sitting around in red leather chairs planning their next circumnavigation or whatever. This is totally classic London stuff. Of course Oxford, jointly with Cambridge, have one of these clubs, but it's not just men anymore. You can only join if you went to Oxford or Cambridge, but if you did you're basically in as long as you can pay the hefty membership fee. I haven't joined yet. Juergen however, is a member and took me, Brandon, and some dudes from their work (Macquarie) for an evening.

the club

The evening was a trip. When we got there Juergen told us we had to keep our jackets on (jacket and tie required at all times) and our cell phones off. Ok, whatever, it's England and it's Oxfordy so somebody is telling you what to wear again, no big surprise. Then, we went in to have some pre dinner drinks at the bar. The bar is a huge room about 5 times the size of my apartment which was totally empty except for the bartender and two old guys reading books (at separate tables) and nursing drinks. We ordered beers and sat down, adding about infinity % more conversation to the room.

After we finished our drinks, we went into the dining room for our 7:00 dinner reservation. This room is pretty fancy, with lots of giant gilt portraits of severe looking guys staring down, tables of varying size, nice place settings, long white candles burning, and whatever else to make a pretty classy environment. Coming in was a bit strange though, because the only other people in this room four times the size of the bar were just three people in their 80s, each eating alone at a single table. One lady looked up, squinted and stared at us as we walked past. I actually wanted to stop and talk to her, but it seemed like the wrong thing to do. WEIRDSVILLE. We sat down and started going over the menus. The food was very typical Brit, but the kind you find in nicer places. The waiters wouldn't take our orders though... we had to write them down on a form. MORE WEIRDSVILLE. After the waiter took the form away, they came back and asked us what we were having, so they could change out to the right cutlery! WECLOME TO DOWNTOWN WEIRDSVILLE, CORNER OF WEIRD AND S'VILLE. We just complied, as any good Oxonian would do: strange dining rituals are hammered into you at Oxford. The dinner itself and the wine were all good, if unadventurous. By the end of dinner, the room was filling up a bit more, maybe there were 40 people in there with us. Ok, not soooo totally weird. Splitting from the dining room, Juergen gave us the tour. The main lobby has a total "gone with the wind" staircase, this thing is wider than my living room. At the top, there is the library.

cool!

can you see the "silence" sign?

Honestly, this is the coolest part of the whole club: this place is stuffed with something like 30,000 books, lots of which are very old. I love love love old books. There are floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed into every corner of this part of the club, and they even have those rolling ladders you see in movies with scenes in places like this. The red leather chairs, newspapers, woodwork, etc. are all there, this place is totally London Clubby. Of course, there was no one actually in the place other than us... not exactly WEIRDSVILLE, but still a bit odd. We hung around in here for a while, going through the various rooms and flipping through old books, I think I could really enjoy some quiet afternoons doing that.

Next, we went downstairs into the basement to play snooker. More on this in a moment, but first a bit about the route to the basement. Underneath the big stairs, there are little stairs, which seem to go down into a warren of little passages and rooms. Along the way is a hallway of locked red doors, one of which has a red light next to it. I have no idea what any of these are for, but would like to imagine something very sketchy. They're probably storage closets though. Off of one hallway, there was a small little room with another old guy watching TV by himself. RETURN TO WEIRDSVILLE? Having made it to the snooker room (which is also full of books), we settled down to figure out how to play. If Brandon hadn't been so devoted to figuring it out from the rules on the wall, we would have all lost interest pretty quickly. In short, this game is like pool, with a bigger table, smaller balls, longer sticks, different amounts of points for different balls, and a whole bunch of balls you have to hit first before hitting the points balls. Also, those little balls totally don't behave like regular pool balls, so as you can imagine, the game took for freaking ever. At one point, we all got quadruple Jamesons, which are basically the same as nice liberal Hattie's Hat single pours, and sipped away at those for hours. By the time we finished our 2?, 3? hour game, it was midnight and the club was closing.

Leaving, I was trying to figure out if I would shell out the membership fee to join... it would be pretty cool to be in a club, but it seemed pretty darn quiet, but then again I'd like that in some ways, and I would get a kick out of chilling with all those books. Plus, it would be a cool place to take out of town guests, etc. It would be tons better if more people I know from the MBA actually went there, but most of the MBAs I talk to aren't too impressed. Plus there's the issue of having to wear a frigging tie and jacket to anther part of my life, as if work wasn't bad enough in that respect.

Hmmm. I'm going to have to think about this.

The Cup Runs Over

2008-10-05T10:58:00.001Z

I haven't written in the blog for quite some time now. And the truth is, lots of interesting stuff has been happening.

girls girls girls

At first, I wanted to make a clean break with blogging about school for future mba students, thought I might be being a bit narcissistic in writing endlessly about myself, and also felt that a lot of what I am experiencing is the private business of my employer... so why keep blogging at all? My mom wanted me to print up a book of the mba year blog stuff like you can with lulu.com, and I figured that with this, I could end the whole thing nicely with a final entry showing how I got a job in London, a new apartment, and everything worked out in the end after all.

Still, I'm experiencing a ton of stuff over here that makes me think "wow that was pretty cool" and to tell the truth, tends to fade right out of my mind! Memories are sort of hazy for me like that... there's lots of people, places, experiences, funny stories etc. that I don't remember at all from the sicko band touring days, and now I feel like I'm letting these experiences slip away again. Stuff I've done since the last post in October but can't remember too many details about includes:

staying at the Hotel Wellington in Madrid for a weekend, dressing up in a suit every day and walking down to the bull fights to meet Angel
catching the train from Euston Station (1 tube stop away) to the Gare du Nord in the 10th Arrondissement of Paris to visit Kent, and spend the weekend playing with weird guitar effects and throwing stuff off the balcony
taking mom to the Yorkshire Dales (and eating Wensleydale Cheese!) and Santorini
seeing original lineups of Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine, and trying to figure out which was louder
traveling to Knutsford and living in a rural hotel room one night a week every week all year (double Jameson with lots of ice to the room, please)
and last night, seeing Dragonforce, the video game music obsessed English power metal band with Reba

operation ground and pound by Dragonforce

...and these are just the ones I remember. These are even a bit hazy! So obviously I need to get back down to it.

We've been busy(ish) with the radio show, check out the latest episode here: Episode 24, I think we're going to have guest DJ Sallywebb in the next couple of weeks.

love,

all systems go!

2008-02-17T17:32:00.003Z

Things are finally shaping up over here. We have a London flat, internet, a jam session set up with a new bass player, a working copy of protools, and JOBS.

London Flat

the new digs

We moved in to our new place last week. It's better than our last place: more old fashioned, more room, and still has a swell view. Achieving this in London is no small feat. I'm still learning the history, but the oral version I got from our landlord was that a canal used to run through here, and in 1810 a famous London architect name Nash decided to design a fancy housing development based on some European lakefront villa theme (I can't remember the name of the country he was using for his inspiration). The result was an series of white, two story Georgian houses (mansions, I think) lining the canal. Years later, when railroads became big, the canals fell into disuse, and some were filled in, including this one. This left a pretty cool set of big back yards for the houses, and the neighbors planed trees and gardens, and built low brick walls between yards. Then, later still, a German incendiary bomb blew up houses 18 and 20, and the wrecked sites were left undeveloped for a number of years. Finally, in the late 1950s, a small apartment complex was built on the site of the old houses, and was named "Nash House". About 60 years later, we moved in. :) The upshot is that we have a stunning view of all these old mansions through a screen of trees planted in our big communal garden, RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF LONDON. This level of private green space is apparently pretty much unheard of in London, and we were really lucky to get in on it. Of course, it's horribly expensive, especially when you think of the US dollar conversion.

front door

entry way

pretty pretty

ean's office

1950's bathroom...

no dishwasher :(

Internet

I've written about this before, but it's so nice to be able to do email, blogging, the radio show, research, look up train times, find shows and restaurants, check out new bands, etc. etc. with a reasonable connection. I moved from BT to Virgin Media Broadband cable, and paid extra for the 20mbps connection. To be honest, I've never even seen it close to 20mbps, and it's been down several times already, but it's MILES better than BT, and I don't have to have an onshore bank account to pay the bill, like I did with BT. So, I can close that account I opened JUST so I could pay BT for their shitty service. Ok ok, and the ability to play World of Warcraft whenever I want is pretty cool too. :)

Jam Session

I placed an ad for a bass player on a local classified ads site called gumtree.com. A guy name James contacted us, and invited us to see his current band play a show. So, Kent and I went to see them, and they were pretty cool but are also breaking up. Thus, their bass player is looking for a new gig. We're going to check into an hourly rental practice space this week, and give it a whirl. I've even sent him some new songs ideas I put down using protools, which I've finally got limping along again. We'll see how it goes, but with any luck, Tales From The Birdbath will ride again soon and get some local shows. So, don't be surprised if I send you an email asking you to come to some crappy Wednesday night show in East London soon!

Protools Is Working

I hate Protools. For the uninitiated, this is computer based mixing software that allows me to record songs in my own home, using a fairly simple device called an Mbox. I can program drums, get different guitar amp sounds, run all sorts of effects, and do multi-track recording, all on my laptop. So now if want to demo a song, I don't need to hire a studio and an engineer, or even show the drummer how the song goes. Sounds pretty good, eh? Well, that's where the good part ends and the crappy part starts. For all sorts of lame reasons, Protools is very finicky about the setup of the computer that it runs on, and is an endless pain in the ass, especially if you use the PC version instead of th Mac version, like I do. For example, before I finished school, I wrote a song for the Birdbath called "Fear and Loathing in the OX1" which was all about going to MBA school at Oxford. I was able to record it, programming the drums, playing guitar and bass and singing, and then have Gabe come in to do some guitar parts. It actually song pretty OK as well. Unfortunately, Protools need more "system resources" to run... this is a bit nebulous, but could be that I didn't have enough RAM, a fast enough CPU, or had too many other things running. Being rushed, I didn't try to upgrade my computer, and decided to use a program called msconfig to turn off services and start up programs that may have been using resources that Protools wanted. I basically had to turn everything (even networking!) off to finish the session. After I completed the session, I turned all the services, etc. back on so I could use my computer normally. BAD MOVE. The ensuing software collisions totally destroyed my laptop, and I spent a painful 24 hours moving all of my files from the laptop and onto my backup drive, and then rebuilding the whole thing from scratch. This sucked. I decided that before I would use Protools again, I would find a better way to do it, maybe by getting a computer purely for using Protools. Reba pointed out that we had an old desktop back home in storage, and since I had to go to Seattle shortly anyway, I figured I'd give it a go. BAD MOVE. After digging the computer out of our totally overpacked Seattle storage space and shipping it back home, I finally got around to trying to get it to work this week. Protools wouldn't even run a single song with that machine, it was so slow. So, I decided to upgrade it, and bought 3 gigabytes of RAM from my local Maplin store (these guys rule) to upgrade it. This was after lots of research on the internet about RAM types, the particulars of this machine, etc. I put the 3 gigabytes into the machine, and the damn thing ran even slower! I then noticed that the CPU was pegged at 92% when protools wasn't even doing anything. After finding a support line for Abit, the manufacturers of my computer's motherboard, I called to see what kind of an upgrade I could do for the board. Bzzt, no dice: my board is too old (2004) and already has the fastest chip it can handle. So, back to the Maplin store to return the RAM, and begin plan B: upgrade the RAM in my laptop. I bought another Gigabyte of RAM for the laptop, and now I have the maximum of 2 Gb. I got the system home, and HOLY CRAP it works! Protools is still picky, and I don't seem to be able to do very complicated session with it, but for just getting down song ideas, it's working at present. I'm glad I dug out that old computer, flew it around the world, spent hours upgrading it's software to 2008 standards, spend more hours and £££ upgrading it's RAM, all to find that a £60 memory upgrade to my laptop was all I needed. If anybody's still reading at this point, thanks.

Jobs

My in-laws are really going to be most interested in this one, so I saved it for last.

Reba got a job. She is going to work as a Research Technician in the Endocrinology lab at Imperial College. This is some wacky science stuff that has to do with bone growth, and as usual, I don't understand what the hell it is.

I got a job. Everyone else, including me, thought that this was starting to look grim. I answered hundreds of online ads, had my CV (resume) posted on 10 separate job boards, worked with at least 30 recruiters, interviewed on the phone and in person to about 10 firms, and in the end got two offers that I would seriously consider.

The first offer was from the consulting firm Accenture, and was the result of some digging that an SBS pal of mine at Accenture did to find UK Accenture recruiters' addresses, which I then spammed with my little letter of introduction and CV. I then interviewed for an "architect" job that was pretty clearly not a good fit for me. But, on what seemed like a general appreciation for my character, the phone interviewer forwarded my CV on to some folks in Accenture's project delivery wing. This was really much more my speed, and after waiting 2.5 months, I had another phone interview, this time with the project delivery department. That went well, and then I got an actual face to face interview at their downtown London office a month later (February 11th). That was weird, and I didn't feel like I did too well... they dropped a "case interview" on me with no warning. In MBA-land, case interviews are often a major component of the interview process, and a well handled case can certainly make or break you in the interviewer's eyes. There are entire books written about the process of succeeding at these, and I had briefly begun reading up on these before Christmas for a PWC 2nd round interview that was canceled at the last minute (not too cool, PWC). People seriously freak out about these, and spend huge amounts of time preparing for them. Of course, I ended up getting a surprise one dropped on me in the Accenture interview, but I gave it my best shot. I had what I thought were lots of good ideas for the case, but had read in my prior preparations that you're supposed to ask questions about the case, so I got a list of 20 juicy ones, and started asking them when the interviewer told me that in this case, he had no more information about the case than I did, so he couldn't answer any questions. After panicking a bit, I finished the case, and apparently did well enough that they offered me a job a few days later. It would have been in the Content Management team in their project delivery group, and I would have managed a team of 20-30 consultants delivering big Sharepoint (and other) implementations at large institutions. The work would have been pretty cool, to be honest. The reasons I'm not taking the offer are simply: when compared to the competing offer, Accenture offered less money and more travel. Of course, they also offered more training and more variety, but the first two items are apparently more important to me. The money one should be obvious: I spent a lot of money to get here, and London costs a lot to live in, so this is a real issue. I just can't allow myself to come home from the UK in however many years with LESS money than when I left. Regarding the travel issue, I don't mind traveling for work, and in fact I enjoy it, especially if there's somewhere interesting to travel to, like Europe! But, firms like Accenture require that you travel every week, meaning it's highly likely that you will live in a hotel and only see your family on the weekends. I guess I'm too much of a big softie, I just can't stand being away from Reba for that much time. :) So, while I was really flattered to receive an offer from a famous company like Accenture, I decided to turn them down.

The second offer was from Barclay's bank, who have their big office down in Canary Wharf. I found this lead pretty easily: a lot of people from Washington Mutual (my old company) went to Barclay's a few year back when Deanna Oppenheimer moved from Wamu to Barclay's. I had been talking to a guy I used to work for at Wamu since early last summer, and had done something like 8.5 hours of interviews (Barclay's are legendary for lots of interviews) since June, continuing right up to late last month. Finally, the offer came last Wednesday, and after considering it for 2 days, I ended up accepting when I happened to get a call back from the HR department while waiting for my RAM return to be processed at Maplin. So, now I just have to wait on some background checks and the final Visa documents to show up at our house before I can go to work. In terms of decision criteria, this offer was simply better than Accenture's in terms of pay and in terms of less travel.

In the end, the only job search strategy that paid off was networking. In the Accenture case, it was networking with an SBS pal who helped me find the right names to spam at Accenture. I don't think however, the path I used to get the Accenture offer is reliable or recommendable... this involved a lot of chance and goodwill from people I didn't even know. In the Barclay's case, it was networking with people who already knew and trusted me, as well as had recommendations from mutual contacts (thanks Pete). Obviously, this is how most people get jobs, and since I'm in a new country it's very lucky that I had those good contacts at Barclay's. While job boards and recruiters generated a few interviews and even a few close calls, they simply did not deliver on job offers, and ate up HUGE amounts of my time. MBA mill programs did absolutely jack, and I can't say I would recommend them to anyone.

That's all for now!

back online

2008-02-13T16:59:00.001Z

We moved from Oxford to Camden, and despite a week of lead time, BT still needed another week to send someone out to set up their shitty connection. Then, it didn't work. For the geeks: I was getting ping timeouts around 30%, and an average ping time of 80ms. There were plenty up to 800ms and 1000ms as well. The following picture should give you an idea...

bt = sucks

...and this shitty level of quality went right out the window after 5pm at night, when you simply couldn't get on at all! So, I did a little snooping around and found out the following:

* all UK broadband carriers (except one) share BT's infrastructure

* my neighbor uses Talk Talk, and it's even WORSE than my BT connection

* there was a cable box in my office from something called "London Cable"

* London Cable bought out a company called Camden Cable which had laid fiber in Camden in the 1980s.

* London Cable in turn was bought by Virgin Broadband, who thus actually have an infrastructure alternative to BT's.

So, I switched to Virgin, the only non-BT broadband carrier I could find (or probably that even exists) and now I have "up to" 20 megabits per second download and ~700 kilobits per second upload. The "up to" seems pretty theoretical, since I seem to get anywhere from 8 to 17. But who cares?! I've got lots of bandwidth and so far, only a .05% loss rate. Now, I will resume my normal internet focused activities: the blog will get updated, photos added, songs posted, etc. This will also help me find better local shows so I can play new music on the radio show, AND I will actually be able to broadcast from the flat instead of having to haul my gear over to Kaysa's.

More to come soon!

Birdbath Radio lives!

2008-01-28T01:00:00.001Z

We did our first episode of Birdbath Radio tonight. What a total kick in the pants! We played 10 songs, had 15 listeners from all over the world, got instant messages and emails, gave shoutouts to our pals, and acted like total dorks on the radio. The podcast is available here: itpc://www.eanh.net/birdbathradio.xml ...all you have to do is click the link and it should open itunes and subscribe you to the podcast (let me know if it doesn't). It's a bit big, so it will take a while to download if you have a crappy internet connection like mine (fix it Shelby!!!). We really hope that people keep listening in, because it sure is a lot of fun for us. The next episode will be broadcast from Camden Town London on Sunday February 2nd at 10 PM GMT (2 PM Seattle, 4 PM Austin, 5 PM NYC, 10 PM London, 9 AM Monday Melbourne, 6 AM Monday Taipei and Shanghai), but of course it will be available via podcast if you miss the live broadcast.

Birdbath Radio

2008-01-25T18:46:00.001Z

Reba and I are starting an internet radio station.

Yes, this is probably because we still don't have jobs and are bored, but never mind that now... :)

We're calling it Birdbath Radio, and it's going to be broadcast over the internet every Sunday Night from 10-11 PM GMT, starting this Sunday night.

This is 2 pm Seattle time, 4 PM Austin time, 10 PM London time, 9 AM Monday Melbourn time, and 6 AM Monday Taipei time (sorry Frank).

The links to listen to it are on my website www.eanh.net, but you can also get it directly from here:

windows media: http://eanh.net/birdbathradio.asx

real audio: http://eanh.net/birdbathradio.rm

itunes: http://ct5.fast-serv.com:9426/listen.pls

podcast: itpc://www.eanh.net/birdbathradio.xml

The format will be Reba and I playing whatever music we like, talking about whatever goofy subjects, and we'll have guests from time to time as well. I'm going to try to get Sasha to guest DJ a show in Russian, Mikhel a show in Estonian, Niall one in Italian, and Sally to do one in "English". They don't know this yet of course! You should be able to listen to the live broadcast via windows media player, read audio player, or itunes. You can also listen to it via podcast if you miss the live broadcast. The station is up and broadcasting now, running our ad for the upcoming show on repeat for now. We figure this will be a fun way to stay in touch with all our friends around the globe while goofing around with music, which as most of you know, is our favorite pastime.

See you Sunday night!

ps: Special request to techies: If you listen to the show, or even the spot that's playing now, please send me a mail if any of the links don't work or if it sounds bad or whatever. We're doing this on the super cheap (spent a total of 98 pence on the whole project up to now) so there's a good chance that I'll need to work out a few bugs.

Home Again

2008-01-08T10:31:00.001Z

Finally we are done with our big tour, and are back home safe in Oxford. Over the course of 6 weeks, we actually went all the way around the world! Athens to Rome to Oxford to all over France to Oxford to Florida to Seattle to Taiwan to Hong Kong to Shanghai to Oxford!

New Blog Entries

Here are the latest, as it turns out blogspot.com is blocked by the Chinese government, so I couldn't update for a while. Here is the Asia portion of our trip:

New Photo Albums

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/eanhernandez

New Things to Remember When You Travel

All these lessons were learned the Hernandez way, aka the HARD way.

1. Never ever, ever ever ever, NEVER get on a plane to a foreign country without a pocketful of the destination country's currency. You have no idea if there will be ATMs, if they will be turned on, or if they will connect to your bank's network. :(

2. Pack light, and find out the weight restrictions on each airline you travel on. Otherwise, you will end up paying lots of money for each extra kilogram you bring. :(

3. Research visa requirements. Airlines won't tell you if you need a visa to enter China (for example) but the Chinese will be happy to charge you lots of money to get you a rush order visa. :(

4. Shuttle busses are BS. In almost every case, two people sharing a cab to the hotel is cheaper and way more direct than taking a shuttle bus. :(

Get the London and Job Show On the Road

And now, we have to get jobs and move to London. Our time of screwing off and sleeping in and not dealing with anything but lunch is over! It was fun, but now it's back to reality. What a year this has been. :)

Shanghai

2008-01-07T10:18:00.000Z

Stuff is different in China. HK is technically China, but really not at all. It's very different, much more western, and the Chinese government pretty much lets HK run under it's own system. We got our first taste of the less western China when we tried to get on a place at HK airport for Shanghai. It turns out that you have to have a visa to enter the country, and we didn't know this, so we had to go to the China travel agency in the HK terminal, and leave our passports for about 6 hours while they ran checks and printed a form to stick in our passports. This cost about 300 bucks, and we had to change our flights. So, we checked in our baggage, spent the afternoon walking around HK, and came back to the airport at night. The flight to Shanghai was pretty empty, and when we got off the plane, the security dudes were wearing those green and red army uniforms with the fuzzy Russian hats. We had to fill out a bunch more forms to enter, and had to sign something that said we didn't have fever, chills, rash or psychosis (really). Then, we caught a very long cab into town from a dude whose English consisted of "ok ok". As soon as he started the cab, a little video monitor in the headrest in front of me turned on and started running ads with cheesy techno music on repeat. WEIRD. The city itself is HUGE and very spread out, and seems to be perpetually shrouded in fog/smog. It was late at night, and deserted, so the scene was pretty spacey. When we got to the hotel, it was pretty empty too, but all done up in gold paint and gold colored marble... super fancy and gaudy. It was if the hotel was screaming, "THE PEOPLE HERE ARE RICH! MONEY MONEY MONEY!". We went up to our room, ordered up some beers, and went to sleep thinking "what an odd place this is".

The next day we got up late and called Ashton (another SBS MBA) to see if he wanted to hook up for lunch or whatever, but he was pretty groggy when I called, and he said he'd call back later. So, Reba and I hit the streets. What a difference between night and day in Shanghai! The streets were literally packed with people. Apparently it's about the size of New York, but it seems a lot more crowded. We walked around People's Park, went to the ancient art museum and then went to a restaurant in a mall down the street. It's sort of hard to describe how packed in and confusing and high energy everything is, there are restaurants and shops crammed into every little nook, and there are barkers on the street with microphones trying to get people to go in to their shops. To get to the restaurant, we had to go through a candy store that was literally swarming with people.

swarms!

Next we had a really tasty lunch consisting of hot pots and wacky iced tea drinks made from tea and taro milk. V Good.

the one on the left tasted like butter popcorn jellybellies

deep fried frog legs: tastes like chicken

After lunch we walked around a bit, but were just overwhelmed and went back to the hotel room. We got a call from Ashton later and met him for drinks. I now have to apologies for the fact that all of the remaining pictures up here are of food. Somehow Ashton managed to get out of being in any pictures, and we were just so blown away by the awesome food that we didn't really care about the site seeing stuff as much. Ling will understand!

Dinner With Ashton

Ashton went to SBS with me, and is living in Shanghai working for a retail bank now. He is really digging his time in China, and knows all the good spots in town. First, he took up to this Casbah style cocktail joint in the middle of people's park... this sort of gets at the heart of Shanghai for me. This is an old colonial building, built in a 1930's faux-middle eastern style for (ostensibly) Europeans to chill out and drinks swanky cocktails, but it's right in the middle of the communist's "People's Park", and instead of being all liberated for the people and being used as some ministry of culture or something, it's full of a cosmopolitan mix of wealthy people enjoying the night out! Contradictions and complications. Ashton took us to a restaurant called South Beauty, which is a high end joint in some old French colonial style mansion. Ashton is into hot and spicy, and damn was this stuff spicy! But it was GOOOOOOOD too! The best part was that the whole meal cost 800 Yuans, which is $90 USD, including a tasty Malbec and cocktails. Behold:

nice tame roast duck, not spicy

ground shrimp in mild chilies... a bit spicy

beef wrapped in thin noodles and cooked with enough chili to kill a horse! SPICY!

extreme closeup, yes that's all chili!

chinese desert, plus a little playdough doggie

After dinner, Reba went home and Ashton and I went out. We went down to an area called "The Bund" which is in part the old 1930's art deco building part of town, and also the swanky area for going out on the town. It's sort of amazing how MBAs can find the same sorts of clubs all around the world: swanky exclusive vibe, loud techno, all sorts of goofy cocktails, snobby looking chicks, and lots of dudes hitting on the chicks. I swear I've been in this club in London! :) Anyway, Ashton and I got some drinks and went out on the lanai, which had a weird nautical theme, probably because of it's view out over the Pudong river. Poooo Dong. I love that. The view was incredible, I didn't bring my camera, but here's a pretty close one:

developING world?

Apparently this area was all farms 15 years ago. Now it's covered in huge skyscrapers, one of which is not pictured here, because it's being built. I think that it's going to be another world record in height. The thing this picture doesn't really show is just how huge the city is, these kinds skyscrapers are repeated for miles around, marching off into the smog. Plus, it doesn't show the hundreds of of barges, container ships and ferries moving up and down the river 24/7. It was good to chill, catch up and talk about MBA stuff: economics, culture, business, and how hot the local chicks are. :) We got bored of this bar after a while and split for another similar bar downstairs, where we found a quiet-ish room to chat more and drink whiskey. One great thing about hanging with Americans: these people dig their whiskey. On the way out, we ran into a bunch of ex-pats who wanted us to come drinking with them, but we were too tired, and split anyway. Coming out of the building, I got into a totally weird developing world situation. Of course, I love this stuff. :)

3rd World Wackiness

There are beggars everywhere in Shanghai, and lots of them are really f-ed up looking, missing arms, burned faces, twisted feet, whatever. They also recruit their kids, some only 3 or 4 years old, to help in the begging. That really bums me out, and it seems to really piss Ashton off. I don't blame him. Anyway, on the way out to front door, some old Chinese woman with a three year old in one arm and a cup with some coins in it comes up to me and starts shaking the cup at me shouting "moneymoney, moneymoney"! Ashton just said "ignore her, dude", and I started for the cab. By the way, there are LOTS of cabs available everywhere all the time, this is very convenient, unlike in London. Next, as we move past the beggar, a (I think) Filipino prostitute comes up to us saying "you want massage in your room?" Shanghai can veer rather quickly from the 1st world to the 3rd world, and in this case, the volume of 3rd world creepiness pouring into our 1st world evening caught me off guard, and I was sort of speechless. I had my back to the cab, facing Ashton, with the beggar standing on his left shaking the cup going "moneymoney!" and the prostitute on his right going "I give you good massage!" and Ashton in the middle looking annoyed. It's times like these I wish I had a digital camera strapped to my head. We got in the cab quickly, and sped off to the my hotel.

More Food

Ashton recommended another restaurant called Tan Wai Lou at the Bund 18 building, which I think is in the same building that we had the clubby/prostitute/moneymoney experience in the night before. This place is so damn good, I seriously demand that all my foody friends go there. Really high end Cantonese style, with a bit of that modern Frenchy cooking school action. At the very least, Carl and Tim should send Stacie here!

After lunch, we went down to the river and walked around. Shanghai is not for the faint of heart, but it has a lot to offer. As with any foreign locale, it's best to go with a local, because there's just way too much to figure out on your own. So, thanks for that Ashton! Even if you don't know a local, I still recommend Shanghai, it kicks butt!

Shanghai Reebs

Hongkers

2008-01-04T10:09:00.000Z

Hong Kong, aka Hongkers, RULES. This city is just so cool on so many levels. First, it's got this great modern, super high density building style. I've never seen so many really tall really skinny skyscrapers. Something like 7 million people are crammed into this tiny area, and it seems that they're forced to build up instead of out. Super modern buildings with crazy designs, really good subways, immaculately clean streets, no smoking in any public space (not even in parks!) and what clearly must be a lot of money all come together to make a sort of Asian Manhattan. Second, there is a seedy, older, sort of trashy element reminiscent of sketchier Chinatown areas in the US. These areas have all sorts of little shops, dimsum joints, street markets, endless signage, packed streets with zooming trucks, etc. Cool! There is a weird third level to Hong Kong, which is the expat/ex-British Empire vibe. This is subtly visible across the city in the form of English street names, old European style buildings, restaurants and bars catering to westerners, and also by the high "whitey on the street" count: probably 5 to 10% of the people I saw on the street were white foreigners. These factors all blend in to make for a really interesting and diverse city, and I have to say, I'd seriously consider living here at some point!

digging some more harbor out?

crazy building style

Dim Sum, Hell Yeah

On the recommendation of our pal Ling Sung in Oxford, we went to Maxim's for dim sum. This food is pretty popular back in Seattle, so we're familiar with the experience and the dishes, but it was extra cool to do this in Hong Kong, watching boats come in and out of the totally packed harbor.

shrimpy porky whateverballs

Peak Train

One major feature of the HK landscape are the hills. The city is ringed in by very steep jungle covered stone hills, which the locals have diligently built up upon. In the 19th century, British colonials build a railway to go up these hills to some hotel they had build on top of one peak. I guess this was a pretty famous spot, and in world war two, when the Japanese invaded, the Brits put up a heroic style last stand there. The train still runs, and the only way to describe it is as a rollercoaster crossed with a tram. It climbs some 400 meters in about 10 minutes, and the view is pretty breathtaking. Of course, the HKers built a shopping mall at the top. :)

the ride up

view from the top

Mong Kok :)

Our neighborhood in HK was in a part of Kowloon called "Mong Kok". Naturally we had lots of fun with this name. Enough said.

Markets

Like lots of old cities, HK has various small neighborhoods given over to small shops selling one particular good. We checked out the bird market, flower market, and the fish markets. The bird market consists of lots of little stalls filled with all manner of tropical birds, including parrots, minah birds, cockatoos, cockateels, love birds, finches, budgies, and a bunch I don't know the names of. Wild sparrows are swooping in from everywhere to steal birdseed, I'm sure this place is a haven for avian flu. The guidebooks even suggest that you don't touch the birds. Some of the cages are very crowded, and the birds get crap and whatever all over each other, so the vendors wash them down, and then dry them out with heat lamps.

bird market

The flower market is about what you'd expect, a whole street of people selling different bright flower bunches.

flower market

We didn't get a good photo of the more interesting parts of the live fish market, but there are a ton of little shops with brightly colored fresh and salt water tropical fish. Little turtles, anemones, crazily colored shrimps, and even octopi are available as well. There must be some very hard core aquarium keepers in HK.

(live) fish market

The other fish market (dead) is for the kind of fish that people eat, but these fish make it to the market alive. The vendors keep big aerated saltwater tanks filled with still living fish. They then hack them open right in front of customers. It seems that it's desirable to buy 1/2 a fish that's been cut so that the still inflated bladders inside are showing. I watched a guy in one of these stands split a live two foot fish in two with a cleaver. Kinda gross.

(dead) fish market... apparently fishheads are hot here

Bespoke Tailors

We also went to a bespoke tailor's called "Jantzen" at Kaysa's recommendation. I got fitted for suits and shirts by a supergay asian dude with a bleached combover, a moustache, a burbury scarf, and an outfit that remedied me of long underwear crossed with a jogging suit. They measured me one day, and had the fittings read for the next. I could have had the suits the following day, but we were leaving and I preferred to have them shipped to Oxford anyway. For about $1500 USD, I got two custom suits, and five custom shirts. Being the drab dresser that I am, I chose black and dark green 3-button flat fronts with working buttonholes on the sleeves, though I did get some pretty groovy linings, again at Kaysa's recommendation. I got 4 plain white spread collar french cuff shirts, and 1 black one (friday night, all right!) as well. If I bought these all off the rack at Brooks Brothers, it would have cost about the same, maybe a little more. If I got these same suits and shirts hand made in London, I'd probably have to take out a mortgage or something. The jury is still out on the quality of the final product, I should know for sure in a few days.

Engrish

One of the great pleasures of far eastern travel is Engrish. This is where the locals have printed signs in the local language, and in (attempted) English for tourists, business travelers, etc. Apparently English really is the de-facto 2nd language to the world, which makes things nice for me since it's my defacto only language. Check out www.engrish.com for examples, here's our favorite one from this trip.

Langham Place Hotel

The hotel we stayed at was the Langham Place, which is a 5 star joint (for $200 USD/night!) attached to a super modern shopping mall. Gucci, Prada, Chanel, YSL, Rolex, Hennessey, Cristal, etc. are all very big brand names over here, and the locals clearly buy it up. Ashton says that this is typical in China, where people wear brands like badges to indicate status, even to a greater degree than in the US. The hotel itself was really great: kickass rooms, service, food, etc. We even got massages at their 42nd floor spa. That was a trip: getting a really brutal Chinese style rubdown with a view normally reserved for airliners and spy satellites. Chilling out on a couch in the "relaxation" room, drinking jasmine tea, and sporting my cozy robe after the massage, I sat and stared out at the buildings, billboards, cars, and trains below, all lit up like blade runner christmas, thinking: this city RULES.

Next stop: Shanghai!

Taiwan part 2

2008-01-03T09:57:00.000Z

After the wedding, Frank and June took about 30 of us on a bus tour of Taiwan. This is really the best way to travel, because there's lots of different people to hang out with, the confusing transportation in a different country issue is handled, and because you're with locals, you get to see stuff that you would never see if you just got off the plane and walked around. For me, the best part of this was trying all the different food (shut up Frank and Josh) because June and Bi knew all the best places and best dishes.

Night Market

After seeing a bunch of the countryside, we settled into a swanky Taipei hotel, and headed off to the night market. These things are pretty similar everywhere I've been: some ancient part of town with tiny little streets with lots of little shops selling all manner of goods, a ton of street vendors selling tasty/weird food, and LOTS of people. The Taipei night market is basically the standard deal, except there's more people. Basically, the whole night was a rock concert style pack-in with what seemed like all the Taiwanese people in the world. Frank, true to form, was concerned that we would get lost and wanted us to all stay together and communicate via walkie talkies. This was very kind, but we all snuck off ASAP, packed in, and had a blast. Sorry Frank! :)

night market Cory

night market Jill

night market Timmay!

night market E

One of the difficult things about documenting my various travels over here is trying to describe the food. There's a huge variety of flavors and combinations of flavors that I've never tasted before, and just don't have words to describe. That is, other than GOOD, or WEIRD, or GROSS, or KICKASS. I don't even know the names of this stuff, so pictures will have to suffice.

these are called whateverahoozis

these are squids on a stick, called somethingorotheraka

hotdog?

New Years

The last night we went to the Taipei 101 building, which is currently the tallest building in the world. This night was new year's eve, so the streets were packed beyond packed with people waiting to see the fireworks. Jill, Cory, Reba and I snuck in some Famous Grouse in coke bottles, and got nice and buzzy while we waited.

when dumbass meets dumbass and it's love

I'm a hit with the ladies, as usual

fireworks at the tallest building in the world

more fireworks

Aftermath

After the fireworks were over, we and 25 billion of our closest friends all tried to get on the subway. Put simply: this sucked. We queued up for hours just trying to get close to the subway entrance, all the time having to pee worse and worse.

packed in like (Taiwanese) sausage

As we stood in line longer and longer, I went from uncomfortable to twitchy. I started to sweat. All I could think about was peeing and how bad my bladder hurt. As more time went by, I went from twitchy to frantic. Finally, I grabbed Reba, told Wang Fu we were going to split and booked for the nearest darkened alley. As I pushed away into the crowds, Frank (Wang Fu) gave me a sort of disappointed/resigned look and shook his head. I'm sure he thought that our bodies were going to turn up in the river 2 days later. :) A funny thing about Taiwan is the contrast between the developed and undeveloped. Literally 2 blocks from the tallest building in the world is a two story, run down abandoned building filled with garbage. The shrubs in the front walk of this building had overgrown and provided a good deal of cover. Reba and I went in and let loose! As we left, some little kid was on his way in there as well. We smiled at his frowning father as we left, and took off for the cab stand.

Cab Stand, Yeah Right

So there wasn't a cab stand, but instead there were a billion people crowding the streets looking for a cab, looking for friends, looking for love, or looking for the Taiwanese equivalent of a kebab. We walked around in the crowds for a while trying to flag down cabs, but they were few and full. Finally, we came to a freeway offramp from which cabs literally seemed to be pouring. Kickass! Hundreds of people were lining the road waving down cabs, but there was no orderly queue. I'm sure that my English friend are gasping in shock as they read this, but it's true! Chaos at the offramp ensued, and we watched helplessly as cabs were grabbed with no indication of procedure. Taking my cue from my neighbors' bad behavior, I finally just jumped in front of everyone else and grabbed open a door. I stuffed Reba and myself in and gave the little hotel card (printed in Chinese) to the driver. This was a scary moment for two reasons. 1) the driver kept flipping the card over and over like he was looking for something he could read on it. I figured he had no idea where this hotel was, and we were going to have to get back out with the rest of the crowd and try for another cab. 2) I only had 1000 New Taiwanese Dollars, and had no idea if this was enough to get me back to the hotel. I immediately began prepping myself for the "this is all I have and this is all you're going to get" conversation. Stress stress stress!!!! In the end, the driver found our hotel and the ride only cost 300 NTDs. Phew! PLUS, we beat everyone else back to the hotel by an hour. Disaster averted, and adventure gained, not bad for a night out in a strange town!

The next morning, the bus took us all to the airport early, and we caught our flight to Hong Kong, aka Hongkers.

Taiwan Wedding

2008-01-02T10:14:00.000Z

My buddy Frank got married to his wife June several years ago in the US, and I think also did it in some other country as well. However, June is from Taiwan, and so they had to do it there too. We went to Taiwan to witness the big event this past weekend. Frank, June, and June's sister Bi set up a really fancy western/Taiwanese/musicpeople hybrid wedding at a spa resort in the Taiwanese countryside. Following the event was a bus tour of Taiwan, or perhaps more accurately, a restaurant tour of Taiwan with a few touristic stops thrown in between. :)

Day one was essentially travel overload followed by total physical collapse. We left my mom's house in Seattle at 7AM, caught a 2.5 hour flight to LA, transferred to a 14 hour flight to Taipei, were met at the airport by Frank (thanks Frank!) and then caught a 2 hour bus ride to the resort. I went upstairs and passed out cold. Door to door, I think the trip ended up being about 26 hours. Reminds me of that tour drive from Deer Lodge MT to Des Moines IA. It was our tremendous luck that Frank met us at the airport with a charter bus... otherwise we would never have made it.

Day two was the wedding ceremony, but we had all day to hike around and explore before the event, so we did just that, and ran into this cool hilltop shrine.

inside shrine

outside shrine

Also, Reba and Jill found a petting zoo, where there was a very friendly pig. This is a bit creepy actually.

friendly piggy

That night was the wedding. Eclectic is probably an understatement. June and Bi are very Taiwanese, but they are also very international and happen to be recording and performing artists, so there were a lot of different elements to the evening. Here's a brief overview in pictures:

The scene was gorgeous, on a lanai overlooking a jungly valley, the guy speaking is a Christian preacher

There was a quartet playing stuff like Pachabel Cannon, etc., but they were dressed as pink princesses

there was a very animated MC cracking jokes and quoting Eminen songs throughout the ceremony (she is my new girlfriend but doesn't know it yet)

The MC and some of June's friends did a dance routine that included ripping off their bridesmaid's dresses

there was a huge cake that they cut with a sword, and at 3.5 feet, the cake is taller than Frank or June

we ate all manner of special Taiwanese wedding food, this one is shark fin soup!

...and of course, our band, Tales From The Birdbath played. Actually, us playing at weddings is starting to become a fairly standard deal, even though we never write new songs, never play live shows, and never do any recording. In any event, it was really really nice of Frank and June to have us play, even though we are probably the lousiest band in the world. Apparently June's mom has given Frank a new Taiwanese name: Wang Fu Ran. I think this means "jerk who married a princess" or something like this. I'm into it whatever it means, as I really dig having a buddy who is a bald Italian guy from St. Louis named Wang Fu.

jeffy :)

Stay tuned for the next installment: days 3 and 4!

Hernandez Christmas

2007-12-26T07:07:00.000Z

Christmas eve at the Hernandez house is never quiet, and this year did not disappoint. The tradition is to have a "lechon" (young pig) whole along with black beans, rice, rioja wine, and lots of screaming kids. In recent years, the lechones we've been able to get have been poor, so my mom got a 22 pound (that's almost 2 stone, brits!) fresh ham. Other than this minor change, the tradition continued with a vengeance. The grandchildren are 1, 5, 5, 6, and 7, and LOUD.

baby Kosmo... the youngest Hernandez for another 5 months

(l-r) Cora, Sam, Phoebe, and Aika at the kids' table

Of course, things were a bit uncomfortable with my dad being gone... for starters, who now sits at the head of the table? People kept trying to get me or Ethan or anybody to do it, but honestly it would have just been weird. So, Ethan and I sat on the corners and left the head space empty. The meal was great, and after, we all went into the living room to hand out presents. My mother, true to her neatly buttoned New England upbringing, had always wanted to have a nice orderly gift giving process, but my father always threw presents across the room at the kids one after another. Now that she's running the show, she tried a new approach, which didn't exactly pan out. It seems that a wild screaming pack of kids is still wild and screaming no matter how nicely you hand presents out. Oh well.

Granny doing her best to keep things orderly

After presents, the grown ups went back to the dining room for pie and cognac, another little tradition of ours. Each year, my two brothers Ethan and Eban and I all give the other two a bottle of cognac or scotch. This way, we have 6 bottles to sample and dig into while the kids run around screaming. Nice! Reba and I had brought a couple of bottles from Paris, what a pain in the ass that was. Now that you can't carry liquids on planes, this means checking bottles of booze every time you fly, and wondering which have broken each time you get to baggage claim. Plus, you get to pay overweight fees as well each time you fly: extra nice. Whatever. It was worth it in the end, as both bottles were quite tasty.

mmmmmm: tradition

Another little tradition we have is buying the kids the most obnoxious gift possible, in an attempt to annoy their parents. I kept this one alive by buying the kids a box of assorted musical instruments... tambourines, wood blocks, kazoos, etc. A highlight of the evening came as a result of Ethan's efforts in this regard: he bought all the children air powered, circular clip nerf-dart guns. Once the kids got tired of them, the adults took over, and a pretty good shootout ensued. Eban and I went commando and got Ethan with a pincer attack.

nerf attack!

The whole gang seemed to enjoy themselves, and as always, I got a huge kick out of being around the kids. Christmas is never going to be the same without Dad around, but I think that we proved that we can still have a great holiday. Merry Christmas everyone!

Ethan and Christa

Eban and Aika

Me and Kyoko

Sam and Cora wrestling... Sam got his butt kicked

home for the holidays

2007-12-14T00:50:00.001Z

We're back in Seattle now, staying with Tasha and Keith in Ballard. It's the usual whirlwind of social calls, drinks, breakfasts, etc. My old friend Carl has opened a bar with my other old friend Tim, right here in Ballard. My other old friend, Stacy, is the head chef. It's called Tiger Tail, and it's pretty classy. They're going for sort of a Asian Hipster New Ballard Old Punkers Foody Weird Drinks vibe, and I think it works pretty well. Of course, since all my Seattle friends hang out there all the time, and it's owned and operated by people I like to hang out with, it's a bit of a shoo-in for me.

Tash and I at the bar... those light fixtures are rumored to have come from Sambos

Cookie, Amy, Dan, me and Tash

Carl, working. I think even he's shocked.

big fish!

2007-12-09T17:32:00.000Z

After Reba left for Austin, I caught a hefty Redfish while out with Tony. Mom cooked him up for breakfast, and for dinner the next day! It was an awesome end to a fishing trip, I've never caught a Redfish that big before.

However, I am covered in huge swollen bug bites that are driving me crazy. This is the one thing that I really hate about Cedar Key.

sting ray attack!

2007-12-03T04:38:00.001Z

Besides the beautiful views, warm weather and chilled out lifestyles, the big attraction to cedar key is fishing. Without going into all the different game fish and areas to hunt them, lets just say that this place is angler's heaven. Yesterday we were out in fan boat fishing for Redfish, and today we were in a flat bottomed jet boat fishing for Spotted Sea Trout. Both expeditions were memorable and worth recounting.

Redfish

(Sciaenops ocellatus)

Redfish (also Red Drum) are the top inshore game fish in this area. Inshore means close to the shore in the very shallow tidal waters of the Suwanee estuary, which is made up of oyster bars, small grassy keys and endless miles of tiny waterways winding through muddy tide flats. A great way to catch Redfish is to find a tidal pond that has been temporarily isolated from the ocean by receding tides. The trouble in getting to these is that most boats can't get to these areas when the tide is out, and believe me: walking is not an option. Enter the airboat. Airboats are flat bottomed boats with an airplane engine (seriously) mounted on stilts on the back, driving a large airplane propeller. The prop never gets near the water, so the boat can run in extremely shallow water with no worry of striking bottom. Zipping along in an airboat in one or two inches of water is very common, and very useful in swampy areas. In fact, they can actually run across mud if the mud is wet enough, and we did quite a bit of this yesterday. My dad had a really cool airboat that he kept down here for fishing expeditions, and after he died, we sold it to a local guy named Jeff. Jeff and his pal Donny took Ethan, Reba and I out to get Redfish in my dad's old airboat, and applied the tidal pond strategy outlined above.

Donny and Jeff and the airboat

After 15 minutes of navigating various waterways and mudflats, we settled into a spot which was to later deliver my most productive day of fishing ever. However, before we started casting, Jeff pulled out a small boombox and played Sweet Home Alabama for us, per his and Donny's tradition. The irony of this is not lost on either Jeff or Donny, they're both from Florida, love "redneck" sports like hunting and fishing, and think it's funny as hell to play the whole thing up by turning on the Skinnard. Of course, during the week they both work for an insurance company in Gainesville, but on the weekends they head out to Cedar key and adopt a slightly more down-home lifestyle. I tried to imagine how my Oxford pals would react to this scenario: fishing from an airboat in the middle of a swamp, drinking Coors and playing Skinnard... this would be weird even to my Seattle friends! In any case, we all had a laugh and got down to fishing, and what great fishing it was! We found a spot that was so good that we hooked fish on nearly every cast, which is simply unheard of. By way of illustration, Brandon: this would be like if you went to a cheesy meat market bar in London and instead of the usual scenario, girls were fighting with each other all night long to see who got to go home with you. We got lots of little Redfish, and quite a few keepers (18"+) as well. Reba got the biggest: 21 inches. That's a lot of Redfish, friends. We probably hooked and released 50+ fish that day, and we went through all 110 bait shrimp that we brought. I've never experienced this kind of thing before, normally I spend all day getting 4 or 5 bites. Anyway, it was just awesome, and we all had a super great time. After, we all went back to Jeff's picturesque gulf side home, and watched the sunset while we barbecued and cooked Redfish. A simply awesome, unmatchable Southern USA experience.

Reba's big Redfish

riding in the airboat

Spotted Sea Trout

(Cynoscion Nebulosus)

Today, Reba and I went after Spotted Sea Trout with Tony, and old fishing buddy of my dad's. The trout are also a top local game fish, but they tend to be a littler further out from shore, still amongst the oyster bars and small keys, but out away from the mudflats and swamps. They also like the shrimp lures that we uses when pursuing Redfish. Down here, being slightly farther out, but still technically "inshore" always deliver breathtaking views. The huge blue gulf frames in the offshore keys, the shore is forested and wild looking, there's an outstanding variety of gorgeous sea birds, and you even occasionally run across porpoises hunting. On hot days (every day here) it feels so very good to step out of the boat onto an oyster bar and fish knee deep in the cool water.

inshore

Reba fishing an inshore oyster bar

Of course, ice cold lager always helps too. :) Tony is another weekend denizen of Cedar Key, he runs a lawn mowing business in Gainesville during the week, but comes out to his little island house to fish on the weekends, something he's been doing for over 30 years. He and my dad spent many many hours fishing here, and it was cool to spend some QT with Tony. Tony has a more typical flat bottomed "sled" style boat... made for running in shallows, but with a regular engine that sticks down in the water. He happens to use a "jet" engine, which looks just like a regular outboard motor, but uses a high speed water pump to move the boat instead of a propeller. This lets him run the boat in 4 or 5 inches of water or more, so this is perfect for going after trout. We caught plenty of trout, and threw lots back, even though we had enough for several dinners at the end of the day. However, the constancy of hooked fish was nowhere near where it was yesterday, even though this is probably one of the top 20 fishing days I've have. The real excitement came at the end of the day however.

Most of the fish that you can catch in these shallow waters are harmless to people, but there are 3 that can be problematic. In no particular order:

#1 - Black Tip Shark.

The grown up versions of these can get pretty big, but I've only ever caught little 2 to 3 footers inshore fishing in Cedar Key. They're really only dangerous in the same way any shark is when you pull it into your boat: they're frigging teeth with fins, and with their high speed reflexive chomping, they can take your finger right off if you put it in the wrong place.

#2 - Catfish.

These fish have spines in their fins, which are covered in a slime that can cause a painful infection if they pierce your skin. I have heard rumors of lost limbs, but have no confirmed stories.

#3 - Stingrays.

These are like any other ray, but right above their tail, they have a very sharp spike (called a spine), almost like a rigid second tail. When agitated, they wave it around and often stick it straight up. The spine itself is like a long spear point with sharp teeth pointing back away from the tip.

tip of a stingray spine

The rays also store a venom in their spine, and it is released when the spine stabs into something. Even more sinister, the teeth tend to break off inside whatever the spine pierces, and the spine itself is quite brittle and snaps off readily. The venom can cause humans to experience nausea, fatigue, headaches, fever and chills, but most often simply causes excruciating pain. Fishermen, guides, and commercial clammers all talk about how much this venom hurts, apparently it's quite shocking in it's intensity.

So guess what happened today? :)

I was standing on an oyster bar, fishing in a promising looking bit of deep water, and hooked a stingray. This is a very common happening here, and every Cedar Key fisherman has his way of dealing with extracting a hook from a wriggling ray's mouth without getting stung. Since I am a giant weenie, I err on the side of hyper caution. Here is what I do to avoid stingray issues:

* land the stingray on the dock, beach, whatever

* give it time to settle down a bit

* flip it on it's back (the mouth is on the bottom side, so the hook is always there)

* lay something wide and inanimate on the ray to keep it very still, I usually use a wide flat oar

* use pliers to very cautiously remove the hook from it's mouth

* use the oar to flip the little bastard back into the water

Alternatively, if I'm feeling like this recipe isn't going to work, I just cut the line and let the ray swim away with my lure stuck in him. I understand that hooks generally work their way out if they don't rust apart in the saltwater first, but even if my hooks kills the thing I don't care, they are nasty little beasties. Besides, the sharks will appreciate the extra chow anyway.

In any event, I landed the ray on the beach, and was beginning my meticulous procedure of hook extraction when Tony hopped out of the boat to de-hook the ray. As the guide, it is technically his responsibility to do this, so I didn't say anything. Unfortunately, Tony tried to hold the ray's spine and tail still by stomping down on it it with his rubber boot. BAD IDEA, TONY. The ray flipped his spine up at just the right moment, and Tony impaled his foot on it. He started yelling, "oh shit, he got me", etc., and then holding his rubber booted foot up, told me to "pull it out". I couldn't see the spine, so we decided to take his boot off to get a better look. This was apparently very painful, and after struggling for a few moments, we got it off. There, sticking out of the soft flesh between Tony's third and fourth toes, was 1 inch of stingray spine. Again, Tony shouted "pull it out! pull it out!" I grabbed the pliers we use for removing hooks from fish, and paused just before grabbing the spine. For a moment, I thought of those movies where some knight or cowboy or whatever gets shot with an arrow, and shouts "pull it out pull it out" to his buddy...(exciting!) then I took a breath, grabbed the spine, and pulled. Along with a good deal of blood, it came right out, but I could see where a few of the teeth had ripped out in Tony's foot. The whole thing was probably 2 inches. You could tell that he was in serious pain, and Reba and I quickly moved to call it a day. Tony, brave old salt that he is, actually wanted to fish more, because we'd really only been out for half of a proper charter at that point. Reba and I simply argued more strenuously, and Tony gave in. It was interesting and weird to watch him go through the various stages of pain as the stingray venom kicked in... whistling softly to himself, then exhaling and inhaling deeply, for a while standing and then sitting and then standing, then wincing, and finally obtaining a reserved, stoic sort of look. I have to say: Tony took it like a man.

Being unaware of the specific implications of stingray envenomation, I was worried that he might be in some greater danger. So I kept a close eye on him as we jetted back to the boat launch... but aside from the stages of pain noted above, he seemed to be fine. When asked about numbness, chills, light headedness, etc., he seemed fairly certain that he was simply in pain, nothing more. Upon reaching the ramp, Reba zipped home in the rental car to check the internet for details on stingray venom, and I stayed with Tony to help him trailer the boat, clean up, etc. During the ride home, phone calls to Reba and to a commercial clammer wise in the ways of stingray stings indicated that aside from infection and tetanus risks (typical with any puncture), pain was the only thing Tony had to worry about. Also, both sources located a method to slow the pain: soak the wound in near-scalding water for 60-90 minutes. Apparently this breaks down the venom, slowing down the increase of pain, but no not eradicating it.

In the end, we got our guide home, he soaked his foot, drank a sixer of lager, and seemed to feel marginally better. I'm going to check in on him tomorrow. Adventure on the high seas!

Tony and a Spanish Mackerel

cedar key

2007-11-27T23:38:00.001Z

What a great place this is. My parents bought a house here back in 2000 when it was a bug infested disaster. They spent a couple of years renovating and decorating, and now it's a super cool gulf of mexico vacation pad. The whole house is built up on stilts to avoid hurricane damage, as is common here... its a bit Swiss Family Robinson, it takes two flights of steps to get up to the front door! There's a screened-in deck that wraps around the whole house, a dock and a bunch of property right on the Suwanee estuary. It's just gorgeous, it's in the 70s in late November, there's ibis, pelicans and egrets everywhere, the fishing is great, and my parents spent a lot of time here. I have some great memories of this place. My dad had dreams of taking the grandkids here for fishing vacations when they got a little older, etc. etc. And of course, now that my dad is gone we have to get rid of it. :( So, Reba and I are here this week, and Ethan and my mom will come down next week, and we're going to clean the place out. It's lovely being here again, but it's certainly bittersweet knowing that we won't be back. Ah well, at least we'll get in some great fishing.

on our way home...

2007-11-26T13:23:00.000Z

Just now I'm sitting at Heathrow waiting for a delayed flight (big surprise), reading Nikki Sixx's new biography, "The Heroin Diaries". That dude was a total mess, he makes Slash look pretty well balanced! In my defense, I've also just finished Lolita by Nabakov, so I feel I've earned some more cheap gross out rock and roll reading. :) Now, I'm off to my folks' place in Florida to relax for a couple of weeks and help my mom clean out the place before she sells it. After that it's Seattle for a few weeks and then Frank's wedding in Taiwan.

What a year this has been.

CONNECTED!

2007-11-22T16:11:00.001Z

BT have finally pulled their collective head of their collective ass and given me back my internet connectivity. It's been out since October 4. Today is November 22. It turns out that it was a fault in their exchange. Life is smoother now!

Paris

2007-11-18T16:08:00.000Z

We had to fly out of Paris to go back to London for my mom's return flight and our return bus ride back up to Oxford. So, we stayed a few days to take in the sights. Mom and I went to the Louvre, and saw a lot of the basics that I missed the last time I was there (took a few days to visit Paris after my Oxford entrance interview). We saw the Winged Victory, the Venus De Milo, the Mona Lisa, and of course, a ton of other stuff. My favorite is Le Radeau de la Méduse, which besides being a cool creepy painting, is also the cover of a Pouges album.

Le Radeau de la Méduse by Théodore Géricault

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by The Pouges

We had dinner with Kent and Marie at a great traditional restaurant called Le Petit Zinc, which is in St Germain, near the Louvre and our swell hotel, the Louvre St Anne. I've been to Paris a bunch of times now, and I have to say that I am totally over the activity of monument visiting. Another element of Paris (and France in general) which I am totally over is the striking. We managed to be there during a general strike, which included, but was not limited to the subway, trains, gas company, and university. Apparently the recently elected government wants to change the retirement age for government workers to 60, UP FROM 50. Only in France! It's funny: the French people want reform (they voted for a reform government), the government leadership want reform (they're instituting the reforms), but the government workers (drivers, professors, gas workers, etc.) don't want it, and because they are in a position of power they are able to make everyone miserable. I feel the unions are really abusing their power. I also think that if the unions push the majority of French who are either their bosses (government leadership) or sponsors (taxpayers) hard enough, the majority will simply vote to crush/eject/nullify the unions. It can't go on for ever.

Saint Saturnin les Apt

2007-11-13T14:52:00.000Z

Saint Saturnin is a small town in Luberon, which is a part of Provence between Aix and Avignon. Unless you spend a lot of time in southern France, I suppose those names shouldn't mean much, and really this is just one of a million quaint little southern Frenchy towns. It's pretty deserted because it's so late in the season, and if the layout of the house we're staying in is any indication, it's a summer type of place. Most of the restaurants and shops are closed, but we found one to have lunch in that served kickass food. Reba's on a food photography kick (thanks, Ling) so enjoy the photos.

cheese plate... there are few finer things in life

salad!

Later on we hiked up the hill to the local ruined Chateau, which appears to have had a monastery added at some point. The hill also had some old windmills, which was really cool too. I looked inside one, and all the old wooden gears are still in there, totally awesome.

view of the church at St Saturnin

mom and the windmill

Slash (Slash with Anthony Bozza)

2007-11-12T14:52:00.000Z

This book is the autobiography of Slash, lead guitarist of Guns N' Roses. The subtitle of the book is "It Seems Excessive But That Doesn't Mean It Didn't Happen", pretty accurate but really funny. While trudging through the remains of Dawkin's epic atheist rant, this was a welcome diversion. I saw this book at a Heathrow magazine store while mom and Reba and I were waiting for our flight to Paris, and decided to buy it as a "present" for Reba, of course she laughed once and refused to read it, which suited me just fine. I got started in Honfleur managed to charge through 458 pages in about 3 days. :)

Slash is clearly fairly bright, utterly uneducated, and a massive junkie. His writing isn't as "then dig THIS man, I was all like trying bang this hot chica-rella, and then this totally crazy dude busts in and: YOWZA!" as the David Lee Roth book, and it's not as gratuitously detailed as the Motley Crue biography (if I have received honest reports from my friends), but otherwise, it's about what you might think.

I feel that I should justify why I read a book like this:

1. It was just fun to read about rock stars screwing groupies, taking drugs, trashing hotel rooms, being losers, etc., especially as a change from all the HBR and SMR I've been choking down lately.

2. I naturally have an interest in rock bands and their screwed up dynamics, having spent most of my life playing in them.

3. I wanted to know the answers to a couple of basic questions: why did GNR break up, what was Axl really like, were those guys really as hardcore as they seemed to be, were those guys really as big of junkies as they seemed to be, what is Slash's real name, and what was Slash's reaction to the song lyrics where Axl famously attracted nationwide disapproval for singing a line about "police and niggers" (Slash is half black).

The answers to the above questions are, in order: because Axl is an ego-maniacal dick, an ego-maniacal dick, yes totally, yes totally, Saul Hudson, and we'll never know because it didn't come up in the book.

Of note are Slash's extensive drug and alcohol problems. A daily heroin user on and off (currently off) for years, at the height of his alcohol abuse he was drinking one half gallon of vodka per day plus shots and beer at nightclubs. The vodka started as soon as he got up, at one point he was leaving a glass of it next to his bed so he didn't have to have the shakes on the way to the kitchen in the morning. Eeesh. He also died once, ala Tommy Lee, and currently has a pacemaker at the ripe old age of 42. Weirdly, he was a competitive BMX rider as a kid, and predictably, he came from weirdo hippie artist parents who split up early and got high a lot. Finally, Slash managed to date both Savannah and Traci Lords, see page 207 for details on his experience with venereal warts.

All in all, a fun read!

Mont Saint Michel

2007-11-10T14:51:00.000Z

The Mont Saint Michel is a tidal island in the middle of the mouth of the Couesnon river, a huge estuary on the west coast of Normandy. More specifically, the Mont is a huge granite rock in the middle of a huge expanse of wet sand surrounded by salt marshes. Historically, when the tide was in, the Mont was pretty much an island, though connected to the mainland by a causeway. In recent years the estuary has silted up, and today it's more like a island in a sea of wet sand with little rivers of saltwater running everywhere. There's been a monastery on this island since the 700s, and a small town built up around it. At some point in the middle ages, a defensive wall and towers were built around the town and monastery, and now there's a fairly whimsical looking little fortress town in the middle of the bay, complete with a pointy spire and everything.

on the causeway out to the Mont

mom and me on the causeway

reba liked this one

We got here in the afternoon, checked into our hotel, and headed up to the Abbey, which is pretty breathtaking, not to mention damn windy. Those monks must have frozen their silent asses off up there. Everything on the mont is a hike up a lot of stairs, so we were a bit sweaty by the time we reached the top. The place is pretty grim, though its not clear if this is due to the monks' austerity or a by product of it's final pre-touristic role as a prison.

view of the salt marshes and mud flats from the abbey

That night, we ate at the Mere Poulard, a restaurant started in the late 19th century, and specializing in serving huge omelets. The place is famous for having had a lot of famous visitors... all sorts of royalty, movie stars, authors, French celebs I've never heard of, etc. There are autographed pictures of all these folks cramming the walls. My favorites are Omar Bradly and Ernest Hemingway. Apparently Hemingway hung out there a bunch while he was a war correspondent in the summer of 1944. The last time I ate there, in 2002, the food was just OK. I noticed that in 2003, They retained a top line French chef, who has reputedly overhauled their menu in an effort to bring the caliber of the food up to match the restaurant's fame. The meal was fine, better than before, but not as good as the last night we ate in Honfleur, and not as good as the place we ate at two days later in St Saturnine les Apt. Whatever, it's a cozy little joint out in the middle of the bay, and it's a cool place to take your wife and mom for dinner on a tour of France. Plus, I love to think of all those officers and generals cramming this place along with Hemingway back in 1944, it's must have been pretty cool back then.

dinner at the Mere Poulard

The next day we had to get to Paris and then down to Avignon and out to St Saturnine, so we left by 6AM. Brutal!

Honfleur

2007-11-06T14:51:00.000Z

Normandy

Normandy is the north western part of France. There are lots of deciduous forests, the climate is cool and wet like the Pacific Northwest, and the historical style of building includes the half timbered houses that are typically associated with tudor England. This is the place that Vikings (Normans) took over from the local French in the 900s and settled for a couple of hundred years before invading England in 1066 during what is called The Norman Conquest. Back home, the only people who have heard of this are probably history nuts, but it's a big deal for the English and the French, and considered to be a major turning point for the local history. Imagine it for a minute... the FRENCH invading somebody else. And it's England. I think that the English are still burned up about it! I really dig Normandy, partly for the great cool wet climate that is so familiar to me, but also because of the green little villages and farms everywhere. The food is damn good too. We took the bus down to Heathrow on Sunday after graduation, and stayed the night to catch a morning flight to Paris. After landing, we took a cab to Gare San Lazar to get the train to Lisiuex, a town in Normandy. From there, we caught a tram to Deaville, a cute little coastal town where we rented a car and drove to Honfleur, our final destination. Honfleur is another tiny norman coastal town, with an 18th century era port in the center of things. Basically, the port is a football field sized rectangle done in stone, with a narrow channel out to the Seine estuary and the sea. The port is surrounded on three sides by beautiful 17th, 18th and 19th century buildings in a sort of hodge podge layout that is so quaint you'd think Walt Disney designed it.

port in Honfleur

An interesting fact about Honfler is that it's right across the Seine from Le Havre, a massively built up city and port complex with dozens of cargo cranes, huge smokestacks shooting flames out the top, and one of the biggest suspension bridges in Europe. BUT, the clever people of the quaint medieval port across the water have managed to strategically place trees and parks such that Le Havre is basically hidden from view. Pretty smart, because that shit really would detract from the charm of poor little Honfleur.

Omaha

My mom has always wanted to see Omaha beach, so we drove out there one day. There's not too much there, just a really big flat beach, a few monuments, and an old pontoon from the artificial harbor the allies build to take supplies ashore during the war. If you look hard, there are a few hidden and crumbling German bunkers dotting the hillside. It's kind of a cold lonely place, but it was good for a walk on the beach.

mom and I on Omaha

Nearby is the Pointe du Hoc, which is much better preserved in terms of military stuff. This is where the US 2nd Ranger Batallion had to scale a cliff while German soldiers shot down at them. The Rangers were late landing, because of a navigational error, and so the Germans knew that an invasion was on by the time the Rangers got there. Their mission was supposed to be a sneak attack, and they got hammered for this error. There's a whole big story about this battle, but out of 225 Rangers who landed on the beach, only 90 were left at the end of the day. This place had a whole complex of gun emplacements and bunkers, and could shoot down on both Omaha and Utah beaches, and prior to the landing the allies bombed the crap out of it. The area has been under the care of the American Battle Monuments Commission since the war, and they've left all the bunkers, gun emplacements and bomb craters intact. It's exactly what you'd think a world war two cratered battlefield wasteland would look like, though I imagine that it's quite a bit greener today.

view of Omaha from Pointe du Hoc

old German bunker

this one got hit by the bombing

old German gun emplacement

US Military Graveyard

Near the town of Colleville sur Mer, there is an American military graveyard and monument where about 9000 soldiers are buried. It's a really big place, 9000 is a lot of dead guys. It's damn somber and Reba and I have been here before... it always chokes her up to visit. The rows and rows of headstones, combined with the heavy quotes about sacrifice, liberation, and freedom, etc. are pretty moving. For me, this type of language is totally insincere and unbelievable political BS when I hear it used in the context of the current Iraq fiasco, but for me, in the context of world war two, it's really moving. I admit that this may ultimately be illogical on my part. The three of us have spent a good deal of time talking about how over time, people remember only the grandeur of military leaders and forget the horrible things they have done. Caesar, William, Ferdinand and Isabella, Henry VIII, Wellington, Napoleon, etc. are looked upon today as heroes or great leaders, or at least as important and fascinating figures of their time worthy of study and a degree of admiration. However, more recent military conquerors such as Hitler and Stalin are viewed as evil mass murderers. "Mass murderer" is usually not what first comes to mind when Caesar, William or Napoleon are invoked, yet all three were just that. Following on that reasoning, is it possible to view the military exploits of the 2nd Battalion Rangers in Normandy as the bloody execution of cold US political and financial calculus? Or conversely, should we view the green zone of Baghdad as a bastion of hope and freedom for the oppressed peoples of Iraq? Looking over all this in the context of today leaves me with a bunch of questions, if I'm being intellectually honest.

endless rows of crosses, sort of reminds me of a slayer album cover I know

taking it all in

Bayeux

Bayeux is another neat little Norman town, with a great spooky old cathedral and most famously, the 230 foot, 11th century propaganda piece known as the Bayeux Tapestry. Sometime shortly after the 1066 invasion of England, unknown embroiderers put together a 3 foot tall, 191 foot long "tapestry" documenting William's invasion of England and victory over Harold Hadrada. This was a very important event in European history, maybe I can tempt Andy into expanding on this a bit via comments. Andy?? :) Bayeux is the current home of the tapestry, and has been for most of it's long history. Looking at it, a couple of things come to my mind. 1. Damn, that is a long tapestry. 2. The workmanship is really all over the place. Some of it is simply beautify and really conveys movement, energy, and passion. Other parts are totally shitty "doodle" quality work that I could probably have knocked out. 3. The view into life at the time is awesome. They show all sorts of stuff about boat building, medieval dining, battle formations, hunting pastimes, etc. etc. Really cool. 4. There must have been a lot of decapitations and amputations during that battle for them to take the time to sew so many of them into the tapestry. Creepy. 5. There's a lot of naked dudes with really big dicks in there. I really don't get that part.

mom and me at the Bayeux cathedral

At the end of each day, we would come back to Honfleur and our cozy little house. Sometimes we would go out to eat, which was great because traditional Norman food is AWESOME. Lots of seafood, cream sauces, and stuff made from apples... cider, calvados, pommeau, tartes, sauces, etc. etc. Other times, we'd just get a bunch of stuff at the market and have a hearty little Norman snack fest at home.

cider, pate, Camembert, baguette, sausages, olives, and wine... the perfect dinner