You spend too much time online when…

you wake up in the morning and you are looking for an email message that came in overnight but you’re unable to find it, because you dreamed you got it. It never existed. But you’re not 100% sure.

What a Croc!

I am really, really enamoured of my new shoes. And slightly embarassed to admit the are Crocs. One of my very good friends lives near Boulder where they are made. She absolutely hates the things. I was mortified to confess to her when I got my first pair, but I had the excuse that they were a gift so I was not to be blamed. I did tell her how ridiculously comfortable they were, and what perfect beach shoes they were. But now I’ve done the indefensible thing of buying not one, but two new pairs of Crocs. But again, in my defense they are really cute and low profile, they don’t actually scream “plastic shoes!” and although I got these to wear around the house (note the matching pajama pants, and no Brits I simply cannot say pajama trousers, not only do you lose the alliteration but it sounds dumb–what on earth would you call them?) I’m now contemplating a black pair for work. Again, in my defense, I have arthritis in my feet after a childhood spent ballet dancing (badly! I was never the most graceful or coordinated kid!) so comfortable shoes are a necessity. So watch out England, I am entirely likely to soon be walking your streets in cheap plastic shoes! How very American of me!!!

Books meme

This morning, after reading about the new Kindle (which is sort of a US only product at the moment) I decided to download an eBook reader for the iPhone/iPod touch, and to download some classics from the Gutenburg Project which are thus freely available. I currently have waaaaay too many books in my British flat; they are threatening to take over the room, so it seemed a good idea.

I then remembered the “100 Books” meme and decided this was a good way to try and pick some things to download; I’m posting this more as a note to myself than anything else, however I’d also love suggestions of other classics that are not on this list but that are highly recommended by someone who reads this blog. I also note that there are several versions of this list floating around and I don’t know which one this is. Today I downloaded “Ethan Frome,” and “Portrait of a Lady” which are two classics I’ve never gotten around to but which are not on this list.

Meme Instructions:

1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.

Note, spelling errors on the list are not mine; I copied it off another blog and tried to correct the obvious ones but I probably did not catch them all!

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x+
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte *
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (never plan to read–sorry!)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
6. The Bible x (well, large chunks of it)
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare x (again, a large chunk of it)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x+++ (still my fave of all time)
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck x
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy x++
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34. Emma – Jane Austen x+
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen x+
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden x+
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell x
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x+
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x+
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x+
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Aleandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x+
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker x
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x+
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson x
75. Ulysses – James Joyce x
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x (large chunks of it)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery x
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x+
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I’ve bought both Bronte books for my e-reader and should get started on them shortly. I have another bout of back-to-back European travel coming up (Eindhoven then Scotland then Switzerland again) so I plan to make good use of all that spare time. But seriously, all other recommendations welcome. Some of my own favorite classics are not on this list, like Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth, anything by Solzhenitsyn (yes I love Russian Literature, it’s true) and the Master and Margarita by Bulgakov (still one of the best books I’ve ever read, and re-read, etc.)

click…click…click

Ever get caught in a click-loop on the internet? Like when you suddenly realize you spent more than an hour on Wikipedia and are nowhere near the page you started from, and can barely recall how you got there? I had one of those today, but it involves another expat blog and the story of how I got there is going to cause me enough mortification to last through the Equinox and beyond.

For many weeks and months now, I have read every single wedding announcement in the New York Times. They are published on Sundays and when I wake up on Sunday, this is one of the things I do over coffee. This is, of course, the mortifying confession part. I have no idea why I do this. It started one random week when I was reading the actual news on the NYTimes.com and they had a wedding featured on the site as one of the links from the main page. I read the story and then realized, interesting, they have the wedding announcements here. So I read more of them. Then it became a sociological experiment. I encourage anyone who wants to take the piss to actually try this–read them for a few weeks and split the couples into lawyers, doctors and other. It’s quite an interesting experiment. Regardless, now you know my guilty secret and I can go on with my story.

I have never, ever found something in a NYT bridal announcement that led to further investigation until today. It was this announcement: link, may or may not work since NYT is picky about registration and things, but was the wedding notice for Lisa Charo and Alex Bain. People I do not know from Adam and Eve. And the notice had an interesting note about the company owned by the groom which I then googled. I found nothing about the company, but the website of the groom. And from there, the website of the couple’s cat.

Yes, I know. But I love cats. I read icanhascheezburger regularly and send links to friends. And have one of these silly cat images on my desktop at work. So from there, a link to Levys in London, because they have a cat that is apparently ‘friends’ with the cat of the wedding couple.

So now I was on a site of an American couple in London, and I proceeded to read everything on the site, including plenty of amusing stuff that resonated with me as an expat. So I found this site in a strange and crazy way, but was back in familiar territory with something that made me feel less crazy. I am always happy to find sites of American expats commenting on the things that make Britain different.

So what have I learned? One, I spend too much time online in random click-loops, although it’s hard to complain when they have promising results. Two, I waste too much time when I could be working, which is what I did the rest of the day (except for a trip to the gym). Three, I have an irrational affection for the personification of cats. Four, I have a clearly unhealthy interest in the wedding announcements on the NY Times, especially since I have only been to NYC twice ever. Five, I wonder if I should just break down and buy a television since that is a far more sensible way to waste time than this!

Genius

Anyone who knows me will have seen my conversion from a normal human to a Mac Person a few years ago; it was when I was at MIT for a few weeks in 2005 with my Sony Vaio that I discovered exactly how bad my windows machine was doing in terms of combatting intrusion hacks. I bought a Mac laptop when the Vaio started having more premature electrical problems (that machine was adorable but a headache from start to finish–shortest time I’ve had a laptop in my life, although a bad Dell was a close second) and now I run a fully Mac life–computers sync’ed with iPods and the mysterious “cloud” — except the phone. I still have a Blackberry although I love my iPod touch. Regardless, I knew that when I started with the Mac stuff I was unusual, this was the age of the iPod and I got the new laptop as a convert long before I got an iPod. But now I’ve had four, two of which are in the rotation these days. I love having the option to get instant gratification by legally downloading a CD that sounds interesting. And I’m on my second laptop and contemplating a new machine in the office. But today was one of those days where even after years of Mac-ness, I was stunned into silence. My favorite new game: pick the song that matches your mood, and click the new iTunes “genius” playlist button. I could spend hours examining the reasons why the Genius picks songs–it’s not genre, clearly, as in any one genius playlist it’s pretty random. The same artist can show up with a song on several different and seemingy unrelated lists. It’s like hours of entertainment for the geek insomniac set (me). The strange thing is that somehow it works–the mood I’ve been going for has so far been captured every single time. I’m dumbfounded. I used to listen to the same song over and over when in a particular mood, and did not realize that I had several more where that came from! But now I must run, I’m desperate to see what Genius thinks of the Dresden Dolls…

Yes I lectured at MIT in my pajamas, so?

I’ve returned from that upstart new Cambridge in Massachusetts where I spent the last few days of my trip floating around for meetings at such cool places as MIT and Harvard.  I was asked if I could give a seminar at MIT on short notice, so of course I agreed.  However, I woke up Wednesday morning and realized I was out of clothes appropriate for giving a seminar at MIT.

There is a bit of back-story here, of course.  In 2004, when I was about to leave for my first ever trip to Europe (England and Portugal, and yes it’s odd that I then moved here less than 2 years later in 2006…) I bought a new suitcase at Target (of course!) from the Eddie Bauer line (of course!).  It was a beauty, two separate compartments, plenty of room for 2 weeks worth of clothes.  This has been my only suitcase for all the years since; I have a rolling tote and a non-rolling tote, but until this latest trip I had no other suitcase.  However, I had started noticing that it was a bit big for certain applications.  It was slightly (less than 1 kg) over when we went on my music trip a few weeks ago, and I was lucky that Ryanair did not call me on it.  And that was really frustrating because it wasn’t even full!  When I went back to the US in June it was also not full (although of course the weight restrictions were more liberal) and so I had started thinking of acquiring a second, smaller, rolling suitcase.  Which I did, the day before I left for Boston.  It now became a point of pride that I had to pack everything I needed for this trip into the new case, which I figured would be no problem given that the conference was casual and summer clothes are just plain smaller.  Since I’d be going to three different cities on the east coast, and sharing the car to Maine with three others with luggage, this seemed like a great idea at the time…

It probably should have been okay.  The issue seems to be my ability to count how many days the trip was actually lasting.  I knew it was a full week at the conference, then 3 days in Cambridge, so ten days, right?  Uh, no, there were two extra days in there, it was actually 12 days.  Now I got lucky in one respect, as I always always pack extra underthings and socks, knowing full well that especially in summer showering more than once daily can be nice.  However, I appear to have not sufficiently over-packed to make a 10 day suitcase work for a 12 day trip WHEN so many of the days were “professional” and not planned too far in advance (like the MIT lecture, which came up with 48 hours notice such that there were already few clean things left that late in the trip).

So back to yesterday morning, picking up just as I’ve noticed that the majority of the t-shirts I had with me were in the “dirty” laundry bag.   I was sitting in my summer pajamas, plaid capri pants with a brown t-shirt, when I pulled out of the remaining “clean” clothes pile… my pajama top.  Also a brown t-shirt, but one that I would not wear out of the house.  For one thing, it’s a sleeveless muscle-shirt, not a real t-shirt.  In addition, it has some strange little mini-pockets that clearly do not hold anything but are whimsically placed.  In my jet-lagged haze at the beginning of the trip, I must have grabbed the wrong brown t-shirt (the one suitable for day-wear) and worn it to bed, not noticing that it was the wrong one.  Frantically I started digging through the rest of the clothes only to discover that this was it–the only item that I had left that was clean and could potentially be layered with something to form a suitable outfit for the MIT lecture was the silly pajama muscle shirt.   When life gives you lemons, dress in layers.  And play wild with the color combinations.  All week I had worn the light khaki pants with a light khaki cardigan when needed, and a white cardigan with white capris.  The white partially-buttoned  light cardigan over the top of the PJ shirt hid the sleeves and the pockets, but I really needed the khaki slacks and not the white capris.  So mix and match I did, the shoes were not ideal, but then again, what was ideal at this point.  After 12 days on the road and three cities, I was ready to come home!

Epilogue: The lecture was really fun, the questions were hard but good, and the one person to whom I confided about the pajama shirt claims he never would have guessed.  Of course, it was a “he” not a “she” and I’m not asking whether any “shes” saw me and thought I looked a bit odd for the circumstances.  I flew home over night last night and am now about to crash again, had a two hour nap this afternoon and then dragged myself into work to check for disasters.  A long day of meetings tomorrow and then it will be FRIDAY NIGHT and a FULL WEEKEND AT HOME hoorah.  I need it.  There is a hell of a lot of laundry to do!

Ode to facebook

OK, I admit it, I live in a foreign country, about 4000 miles from where I started life.  This is, as I have realized, not a very normal situation, since most of the people I know are in Minnesota.  Where we were born.  Or at least went to high school.  But there has been an apparent explosion lately in people from my high school being on facebook.  I *LOVE* this.  I may be alone in a hotel room near Boston (at the moment) and flying back to England where I live (tomorrow) but I have a fast-growing number of “friends” from high school in my virtual world.  The latest explosion seems to have been at least partially related to our 15 year graduation reunion coming up; I can’t attend from my position in the UK but it’s fun to know about it.  But as far as I can tell the facebook explosion is not just due to this, as many of the new “friends” I have are people in the year above or below me in school.  I checked for people I knew from high school maybe 6 months ago, and there were about 30 people per year graduated, and now I see about 90.  It’s great and I hope it continues!  My high school graduating class was 640 so there is a long way to go.

Lileks on Sedation and Dentistry

Need a good laugh?  I just about fell out of my chair with this one-Lileks on being sedated for dental work.  His apparent urgent need to communicate with the internet while sedated was really just brilliant, and led to all sorts of amusing non-words which he interprets for the rest of us.  Enjoy!

A UK computing mystery unravelled

I have long joked that I have no “normal” English friends, that the English friends that I have are all not actually English or are otherwise somehow sympathetic to my plight having been expats themselves, or married to foreigners, etc. I had dinner and a few drinks at the pub recently with one of my semi-English friends, and he managed to clear up a little mystery that had long bugged me. As an engineer, I continue to be sort of surprised that there is not much UK-based engineering expertise compared with the US. In the states, for example, we have Apple, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Seagate, Motorola, etc. etc. etc. In computing the UK has … ???? If I’m missing something, please do let me know, but I can’t actually think of any. However, my friend did tell me about the BBC Micro, the computer that swept this country in the early eighties, when I was at home in the states with my Commodore 64 or at school with an Apple II. There’s a nice history/overview here (“From education to obscurity”) but which begs the question of why the thing ended up in obscurity, why there was no Apple-like revival of Acorn. The BBC is kinder, giving the machine’s creators credit for essentially all of modern mobile telephony, although if it was really that much of a clear impact, wouldn’t the guy have gotten a KBE instead of a CBE?

So we now have the UK computer market partially unravelled, and we have some, but not all, of the answers concerning the lack of engineering companies here, especially in the high-tech commodities market. It’s not that there was never anything here in the UK in this area, it just didn’t survive into the modern era. Is it because the BBC was involved, and thus there was not a free market for the machine independent of governmental intervention? Is it because there was no competition? Because the attempt at export to the US market was, like so many of the attempts with Brit-pop, a total bust? Was it due to the claimed “high” prices?
What else could be the case? Inquiring minds want to know.

The UK and the iPod tax

In one of those “it never would have occurred to me” moments, I have just heard that it is illegal in the UK to “rip” a copy of a CD you own onto your own iPod (a practice which is legal in the US).  This information comes courtesy of the discussion taking place right now over the music industry’s desire to levy an “iPod tax” to make up for this.  I particularly liked the comment posted by EastFinchleyite which started

By the same logic, if I buy a CD and then play it in my living room, and there are other people present, I (or they?) should pay a levy for listening to copyrighted music that they haven’t bought.

I agree completely.  As noted, it never would have occurred to me that it mattered which device you used to play music that you had paid for.  Some days I really do think that living in Europe borders on the ridiculous and that going home to the US seems like a really good idea.