September 26, 2002  

a fistful of euros 26 september 2002

Fun things I learned on holiday:

• International travel is a good excuse to drink at 10:45am.
  Well, what else are you going to do for an hour sitting around in Stansted Airport?
• Bilbao airport rocks out. Basically it looks like a cross between a bad '80s haircut, and ambitious seagull, and the jubilee line. In a good way, mind.
• Santillana del Mar (first night) was once described by J P Sartre as the most beautiful village in Spain. Well, it's a step above an endorsement from Posh Spice, innit?
• Northern Spain has a lot of hills. Cambridge doesn't. Having got up into cycling condition in Cambridge is really useful if you're going to be biking around somewhere very flat. As it was, the going was a bit harder than we'd thought. On the first day of cycling, the last 7k or so was along a road along the beach... which kept going up and down the seaside hills. The next day, we walked along the (perfectly flat) beach that we'd been able to occasionally glance while biking up and down the hills and panting out "sod this for a game of soldiers". Mind you, some of the views were incredible. The Pechon highland road stands out for particularly lovely vistas across the entrance to an estuary (lot of estuaries around, actually). Climbing low point was definitely reached on the day we tried to do a solid 5k of climbing with the promise of a great view. We ended up pushing the bikes for the last half of the ride, and the hill was in low cloud - the view was like being inside a ping-pong ball. Nice ride otherwise, though.
• Spanish cows wear bells. On the aforementioned low cloud encounter, all you could hear as you sweated up the precipitous track was the clonk-clonk of (invisible) grazing cows. They were strangely powerful, these ... cows in the mist.
• Gaudi was a mad bugger. We stopped off and looked at the Caprichio de Gaudi in Comillas, a house which he'd designed. Mad bugger.
• The menu del dia (menu of the day) in most restaurants is enough to floor you for an hour or two. Three (or four) course lunch, including wine, for around E8-12 each. And the food was usually damn good quality stuff, too.
• Cycling immediately after eating a 3-course lunch is not recommended.
• I am happy to report that the habit of topless sunbathing is alive and well on the continent.
• Wild boar are alive and well in Northern Spain. Or rather, in the case of the one we saw, are recently dead, gutted, and strapped to the back of a 4WD.
• Alpine Pinguicula grow in the hills. They rock.
• Spanish waitresses are very persuasive. One evening, we walk 6km from our hotel to the seaside town of Llanes. Nice little seaside town, lovely old city walls, impressive waves, nice beaches. About 8pm it starts to get dark and starts raining. We retire to a pavement cafe, dine alfresco (but under cover), and then set about finding a taxi to return home. It's the middle of the night and bucketing rain, so we'd really rather not walk home. We go and stand by the taxi rank. Ten minutes later, we notice that the cafe next to the taxi rank has a phone. We go in and head towards the phone, and a very helpful waitress offers to ring the taxi for us. She dials and waits. No answer. She tries again. No answer. Over the course of the next half hour, she progresses to ringing every other taxi company within 30 miles, then calling local taxi drivers on their mobiles and trying to get them to come out. No luck at all. We're still standing around in this cafe, staring gloomily at the pouring rain, looking scruffy and putting the other customers off. Finally, she rings someone else and gets into a protracted argument with them, from which we can catch phrases like "...and they don't speak any Spanish!" delivered at increasing volume. Finally, the person at the other end of the phone seems to give in. Looking triumphant, she gives us directions back to the centre of town, where our ride will be waiting for us. We duly walk back into the centre of town... and hear a cheerful "¡Hola!". From the local cops, who the waitress has talked into giving us a ride home.
• The back seat of Spanish police cars is very sparse. Not even any cushions - mind you, I suppose the less that can be vandalised or vomited on, the better.
• The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao is amazing. An incredible building, and some rather nice works in the collection as well. The collection was a little sparse - three floors, one of which was closed while we were there, and the other two only took us 2 1/2 hours of chin-stroking introspection. Some absolutely cool works, though. If you get the chance, see it. Particular favorites: the cascade of poetry, the welded iron spidery-thing, and Jeff Koon's Puppy. The building was fascinating. Depending on the angle you viewed it from, it looked like an impressionistic ship, a pile of titanium whipped cream, a stormcloud... you could read things into it all day.
• The steps outside the Guggenheim make an ideal site for silly bike tricks. There's a set of shallow steps (about 3" high per step, about 100 steps) leading up from the river to the front entrance of the building. As we came out of the exhibitions, these two kids on trials bikes and serious shinguards biked tothe top of the steps, popped wheelies on the spot, and proceeded to bounce down the steps, landing once on each step and then bouncing down onto the next. One of them made it the entire way down to the bottom without anything other than his rear wheel touching the ground. Impressive.
• Little lizards bask at the side of the road (concrete holds heat well). They freak out when you come past on a bike. Around lunchtime, you get a sort of bow wave effect, as they all run into the bushes just before you pass 'em.
• Northern Spain is extremely honest. We kept locking our bikes to largish objects and going for wanders, leaving the panniers unlocked and easily removable (and full of useful objects like fleeces). No-one ever touched 'em. And I'm reasonably sure that we didn't get suckered like the naive tourists we were, although that's much harder to tell.

In summary: Spain rocks, go there today. Iberocycle are highly recommended.

And in the no-surprises-there category, I didn't win 'Best British Blog'. There go the world domination plans, then.

Will Self on the Countryside Alliance. Nice.

We were welcomed back to the sunny UK with a scenic earthquake. 4.6 on the Richter scale, epicenter under Dudley (which should confirm some of Maire and Rodger's suspicions). I grew up in NZ and Japan. In Cambridge, the shock was felt as a mild thud and a bit of a shake - the sort of thing that I used to wake up halfway through, think "Oh, it's just an earthquake" and go back to sleep. And then we found out that this was probably the largest earthquake ever recorded in the UK. Tch. Lightweights.

September 25, 2002  

bright eyed and 24 september 2002

Just a brief note to the effect that I've just watched a rather large tree burn down outside the office. No idea what started the fire, but it was with great relish that I got to call the fire department. And it's at moments like this - when the car park slowly fills with firefighters looking bored (the fire was out in five minutes) - that I realise that most of my female coworkers have a thing about firemen. The comments would fair make your ear hair singe.

September 12, 2002  

hip-hop snorkels 11 september 2002

Why headphones can be dodgy in an office: what I thought was a perfectly normal, slightly exasperated enunciation of "fucksake" at a particularly annoying (and repeated) mistake in one of our products was apparantly only slightly short of a scream. Maybe I need to turn the volume down. Maybe people need to stop making simple mistakes that make me swear.

I've been really getting obsessive about Escape Velocity: Nova recently. Mmm. MacOS clones of Elite with lots of missions and storyline. Nice. The original Escape Velocity is probably responsible for about a fortnight (in total) of missed work during my MA thesis, EV:Override made for many a happy hour a year or two back, and EV:Nova is a great expansion on what has come before. Shareware I paid for on day 2, basically.

OK, don't people check for these things first? On September 5th, President Bush announced that September 11th is Patriot Day, to commemorate all those who died last year. Fair enough, and you can see why he did it. But, y'know - didn't he notice the confusion with the existing American holiday of Patriot's Day, first celebrated in 1894 to commemorate the battle of Lexington and Concord. Tch. That's just sloppy fact-checking.

I've just watched two of my coworkers attempt to fix a broken laptop by carrying it around, saying loudly "Hello Mr IT Person, can I show you my laptop?" and then try to turn it on. This approach was based on the fact that it worked whenever they took it down to IT, and didn't when it was on their desk. Unfortunately, the laptop didn't fall for their cunning ruse.

No, I'm not kidding - that did happen. I should point out that both the people involved have young children, though.

We're in the unusual position (for us) of having an excess of bookshelf sspace at the moment. This came about via a friend of ours (Fiona), who has a couple of friends who are busily selling off most of their stuff due to divorce. Some negotiations later, we now own (among other things) another four bookshelves. For the first time in two years, we actually have enough shelf space for all our books. And some to spare. It's great. Why, I may even get around to alphabetising the CDs again.

Off to Spain tomorrow. Updates unlikely to happen, but you never know.

September 06, 2002  

we are but men 5 august 2002

Hrm. Realised that some of the cycling comments here are getting a little self-congratulatory. I think I need to increase my number of comedy dismounts in order to counteract the fun factor.

No comedy dismounts on our Wednesday night pub run last night. The organiser had picked the destination by the simple heuristic of grabbing an OS map, finding a village that looked about the right distance away, then checking the Yellow Pages to find a pub in said village. This algorithm may need some work. When we got there (about 7 miles from Cambridge, so a nice quick run),, the pub was... interesting. The Queen's Head, in Newton - just nestled between Little Shelford and Foxton. It was actually quite a lovely little local village pub - while I was waiting to buy a pint, the local vicar popped in to pick up a package that someone had dropped off for him - but it was certainly fairly rustic. Rustic enough that there was only one menu, which was handwritten on laminated card. Rustic enough that the notice over the bar still claimed to serve spirits in measures of 1/6 gill. Rustic enough that it didn't actually have any beer pumps; rather, tapped barrels sat behind the bar. This wasn't the faux-worn-in thing that a lot of chain pubs do, this was a pub with a handwritten list on the wall of all the landlords between 1729 and, er, now. So: real, genuine rural local pub.

The rustic ambience of the pub contrasted strongly with the actual character of the village. BMWs, Audis, and at least one Porsche. I think that Newton, small little farming village though it is, is basically smack in the middle of Cambridge's equivalent of the stockbroker belt. The rustic, ancient and fairly scruffy pub contained a fair number of blokes in suits with very small mobiles, as well as the traditional horn-handed sons of the soil.

Still, they pulled a good pint. Unfortunately, the meal choice was rather limited. We were all fairly hungry when we got there, and were slightly dismayed to discover that there wasn't actually any hot food. The bar menu consisted of a list of things that the bar staff could cut slices off (ham, cheese, salmon, etc) and serve cold with bread. I had some rather nice stilton, but I'd have rather had something hot. Still, it was a lovely evening for it. Beautiful clear sky, slightly chilly, but otherwise bang on.

And speaking of bangs... On the way to the pub, we biked down Trumpington Road (long, straight) during the evening rush hour. Halfway down, we passed an inappropriately souped-up car (old red Ford XR, muffler on it the size of a tin can, huge stereo, young driver with aggressive countenance). Nothing too unusual so far. Shortly after passing it, we hear a loud bang. Like, shotgun fire loud. Another. And another. And then we get passed by this red shitbucket, and as it goes past it lets off another bang, complete with flaming spark coming out of the exhaust pipe. It disappeared off into the distance, banging and flaming as it went. The best bet (from Martyn, who knows a fair bit about such things) is that the guy's engine was seriously badly tuned and some petrol was getting into gubbins that it shouldn't. Bit dramatic though.

Fun things to find out about your coworkers - one of the people in our office used to do synchronised swimming. Apparantly she was even offered a place in the East German swimming squad, but turned it down as she wasn't up for the drugs. Too right - you don't appreciate drugs when you're young, take 'em when you're old and need all the help you can get.

September 05, 2002  

i see a ship in the harbour 4 september 2002

Work still nosebleed, and descending into a morass of terror and blame. Hence, lack of updates due to stress.

That said, my stress-related cessation of blogging activity is approximately equal to my standard laziness-related delays, so I suppose it's all transparent to the end reader. Hey ho.

Ever since the rise of Elvis Presley, outraged moral guardians have tried to stop teenagers listening to pop music. Where they failed, telecommunications has succeeded. These days, says Loraine, "teenagers spend all their money buying phonecards for their mobiles so they can text their mates".

Alexis Petridis in The Guardian [source]

U NVR CT A RBT + U 8NT N0 FRND F MNE.

I see that the French investigation into allegations of doping by USPS team members has come to nothing. I'd have thought that it was fairly well-known at this point in time that the USPS team is either very, very good at hiding their dope, or clean. Either way, I don't think they were ever going to get anything out of this investigation.

Been listening to Kid Koala's album Carpal Tunnel Syndrome today. The CD's been skipping like a bugger, with intermittant bursts of static. This is surprisingly hard to notice.

So we're off to Spain for a cycling holiday in a week or so. So far, so good. We've got the tickets, we've got accomodation and rental bikes booked, and we've bought travel insurance. The travel insurance was interesting. You can get standard vanilla insurance, which covers you for basically wandering around, taking photos of things, or playing golf. Or bowls. And if you want to do anything more strenuous - like, say, cycling gently between vineyards - you have to get it specifically added to the policy, otherwise you won't be covered for medical attention in the case of an accident. So we had to get additional cycling cover. And even then, we're not 100% covered - should we happen to be seized with an urge to compete in a race, or to hop on a BMX and give it some crazy stylees, our insurance will laugh in our face. I suppose the exceptions are understandable, but I still think it's funny.

One of my friends has an irrational aversion to the verb "to be" in conjunction with the verb "to need". They'll say "This needs done", or "That needs changed", "That salmon in the fridge needs eaten", etc. It's not just a verbal tic - I've seen them use this in writing. For some reason, this really bothers me. Which in itself annoys me, because I normally find this sort of linguistic phenomenon fascinating and quaint. Still, I guess I need chill out.

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