Thingomy.co.uk

lots going on doesn’t quite cover it, I’ll give a real update next week, I’m in Denver, I’ve finished with the train, and have a day and a half left here, then I fly to Texas again.

In the mean time, who wants a post card?

If you do, send me an email with your address and I shall do my best.

Really cool day.

Went to the aquarium — reall nice, lots of medeocre pictures, the glass was messing up the whole optics thing, so tey are only ok. was 2 feet from an otter, 2 inches from a large octipus (head was jug sized, 2-3 foot legs), the aparentl have indevidual control over every sucker, in the same way that we have over fngers, which is uinmaginable, they could tpe on a real japaese typewriter without moving any fingers.

Had a wander about the Seattle farmers market — it’s an odd character, has lots of hisory, almost got shut own a few decade ago, but got restored and now doen’t actually have an farmers, but just about everything else under the sun, i got lost several times.

I then went for a look at the train station as I will be pressed ofr time tommorrow (will explain in a later post.

I found a really photogenic spot on the waterfront and took a 360 panoramic, then came back after sunset ot the same spot and did the same thing again, I should be able to do some really cool stuff merging the 2.

I catch a train at 0945 tomorrow for sacremento.

I have not been jumped on by any mechanised fridges, or had any helicoptors droped on me yet. I did however take a couple of pics that looked like arcos (sorry, private joke).

Contrary to some of the comments I’ve been recieving, I niether going to the moon, vancoover nor san fran. although I would very much like ot go to the later 2.

Sadly there was only time for 4 locations, that had to include Seattle, Denver, Sacrmento and somwhere between Sacr and Dever. A detour to san fran would also have involved finding the train station at 5am.

Unfortunatly I screwed up on dates, to cut a long story short I could have taken an extra 3 days without loss, but it’s too late now, it will still be fun.

For those of you that sugested the moon, it may have escaped your attention that I’m actually taking a train from Seattle to Denver (via the pacific northwest, and the colerado river) this involves 3 days and 2 nights on a train.

Currently in a nice enough hostel in Seattle, they have free internet, but really old computers. (One of which seems to be running LindowsOS, with no red on the monitor)

The flight today was uneventful, but 4 hours on a sucky plain with the dehumidifier set to full wasn’t pleasent. Wife sitting next to me was a complete muppet, at one stage she looked out the window and proclaimed that she thought the plane had stopped moving, as the conversation progressed it became apparent that she truly believed we had actually stopped in mid air.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Seattle to begin an 8 day voyage.

Now I must sleep.

I have misoverestemated how much there is to do in this ere town, and so am planning an excursion up north.

Plan D (after throwing out A, B and C) is to:

fly to Seattle WA,
train down to Portland OR, for a 3 hour stop,
train to Sacramento, CA, 15 hour trip, 3 hour stop,
train to Denver, CO, 33 hour trip,
fly back to texas.

I can take a 24 hour stop and several locations, but unfortunatly the salt lake city stop that looks quite nice is at 0415 am, anywhere else pretty much would work

I’m reliably informed that this will give me some of the best scenery in America. including the north west, the upper reaches of the Colerado river and large chunks of Utah.

See a map of available stops here: map

Any sigestions from yall? or alternate routes that would work?

BTW, I trying out some new options with comments, specifically relating to email updates. if it all goes feet up, please email me.

First non travel realted post in ages…

I have come to the conclusion after much deliberation that every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

I hear many people say that this isn’t exactly the most original statment I’ve ever made, but I’m not talking about physics, I’m talking about social interaction.

The idea is that anything that makes a person (call him Adam) feel better than somone else (say Bob), will conversely make Bob feel worse than Adam.

This can be observed in union politics (if you don’t know exactly what I’m speaking about don’t bother) where a group of people feel good about themselves because they are part of the group, the oursiders on the other hand feel like exactly that, outsiders. This has been refered to as cleek culture. This of course happens virtually everywhere, but the most prominent example I’ve seen is in the union, where it is effectivly tearing appart the whole building.

This can also be seen when people educate others, by teaching a new skill or fact to someone, Bob once again feels inferior to Adam, because Adam looks more knowlagable than Bob, if handled incorrectly (or milked by Adam) this can develope into Bob being dependent on Adam for a stream of information, or bob being socially in debt to Adam for this social favour.

I believe that people can often be blind to the fact that they are are inadvertantly milking situations Either because of overwhelming arrogence, insecurities, straigt up force of habit, or social ignorance, and one of the above will affect most people.

I believe that all of these things can be handled correctly, so as not to hurt people, but may be very dificult in some cases, this may be where direct paralels with physics concepts fall down.

Taking pleasure from somone else’s apparent inferiority should imediatly ring alarms however.

I am not going to disown myself from this effect, I first noticed the concept when taking pleasure from superiority. It could also be said that this post is actually an attept to be superior than the people reading it, it certainly is not conciusly so, but subconciusly, nobody knows.

I finally had a chance to get out and about and take photos.

This consited of a walk down to the local river, and some of the surounding landscape, I will let other people discuss details of the plant stuff that’s going on here, I got about as far as “oooh, pretty colours”.

Some of the more notable encounters were a squirel that I ended up about 6 feet from, a world class collection of water lillies and some really cool butterflies and other bugs.

Below are some of the shots I took, the photographers among you will notice that most of them seem to be taken at a rather long folcal length, and there are many macro shots in there, that would be owing to the purcase of my new favourate lens, the Minolta 100mm f2.8 Macro RS D — more on this later.

Can I make a special request that people feed back on how this post looks from where you are viewing it from, as I’m testing out some new ways of doing things in this post.

There are more (about 50 more) and larger copies of these here (7 images follow)

What’s with degrees Farenhieght — it sucks, i keep getting temparatures quoted to me in F, and it means nothing to me at all, at home they at least usually give both, but not here. I bought a 20FlOz bottle of sprite yesterday — what the hell? This country is officially metric, but noone cares. If they converted to metric properly, or at least to the level that the UK has, they would get on so much better.

On the topic of degrees Fahrenheit, the heat — you know when you walk past the back of a bus and get hit in the face with hot air — well, that’s what it felt like when I left the airport, and that was about 2130, well after sunset, for the record it was 28C. I’m getting the hang of it, and will likely get to like it before I leave. last year there were 117 days that went over 40C, If I’d have come during the summer, I’d have melted, literally.

Everyone uses cars, and there is no public transport here at all, I haven’t even seen a taxi since I got here, there aren’t even any decent sidewalks on most of the roads. Everyone drives everywhere, there is a walmart a few hundred meters away at the other side of the bypass, and there is no way to get there without a car, it’s not just difficult to get there by foot, but there is no safe/legal way to do it. In some ways I can see why, it’s not exactly pleasant walking outside in the sun, especially with frozen food, and distances are much greater over here because land is so cheap so there is much less in walking distance.

Gratuitous overuse of stop signs — seriously dude there are intersections over here with hundreds of meters of visibility in every direction, nothing unusual about them at all, with a stop sign at it. As far as I can tell, the standard of driving over here is so low that they have to stop people running into each other by telling them to stop at every junction. And what’s with the driving on the wrong side of the road thing?

I was expecting the people over here to be arrogant and unpleasant, but if you exclude a few bad drivers, everyone I have encountered has been really layed back and friendly, if anything more so than Edinburgh.

I had more fun yesterday (technically the day before yesterday, due to the time it took to write this) than I’ve had in a long time.

The trip down to London was completely eventless.

The trip from London to Dallas was quite cool, also eventless. It was a British Airways Boeing 777 which is a really cool plain that i’ve been wanting to have a go in for a while because it’s really efficient, and generally nice. they have seat back tv’s, with about 12 channels of films and a map to show you where you are now and where you’ve been, along with a load of other info like ground speed, outside temp, etc.

Customs was a pain in the butt. The forms that they give you to fill out on the plane before you get there contained the question “are you taking any food into the country or have you been on and pastures/farmland?” now I live on what is technically a farm, so I had to tick yes. once i spend 20 minutes queuing I finally got to the front, and found a reasonably pleasant woman who looked at the stuff, and took fingerprints and photos etc, then asked me to follow her. She wandered off to a waiting room where I effectively watched paint dry for about 40 minutes while they processed the other 6 people in the room. I can only assume that this was because I’d forgotten to brush my beard… so anyway when they call me forward, it was a really pig ugly woman with a mustache, she asks to see my ticket and ask a few random questions about where I’m going and how long I’ll be there for, then eventually (after spending 10 mins looking for a pen) let me continue.

I collected my bag and then found another layer of customs — I was directed down a long corodor into a large hall full of xray machines. After waiting 15 minutes to get to the front of the queue past a sign that said “Agriculture” I informed the bloke that I was likely here because I lived on a farm, after a brief conversation I was directed round the back to have my shoes dunked is some yellow gunk.

Some background info here — when booking the last leg to San Angelo I had the choice of a 2 hour or a 6 hour transfer. I chose to take the risk of a 2 hour transfer knowing that there was a chance that I would have find a hotel and buy another flight the next day.

I left there after looking at my watch, and to my dismay I was told that my bag wouldn’t have time to get to the plane, and that more than likelly niether would I. They checked my bag in for the next plane and put me on sandby for it, and told me try to get the first one anyway. so I legged it across the airport and missed it by 5 minutes. I did finally make that one with no further cost, and had nearly 4 hours to wander around the airport.

I have to say that Dallas airport was utterly amazing — it has a 10 stop monorail and 5 terminals. below is a greatly outdated map, but you get the idea:

View Larger Map

So anyway that’s all for now folks — later.

Quick update for now — long trip and it didn’t all go entirely to plan, but it’s all good.

More later.