05-01-08

It’s not easy moving from place to place each day. Each destination involves 1 hr+ of planning and endless treks hauling ~60+ lbs of weight per person. True to my academic roots, however, I’ve managed to get two of the more tedious daily tasks - doing laundry and packing - into a process in optimizing overall storage efficiency (herein referred as “OSE”) and cycle time. This morning, I managed to pack in twelve minutes. I found my stop watch to be particularly useful via the Polar RS400 that Kathleen got me. Unfortunately, I only use 3 of the 500 functions on this wrist-wrapped supercomputer but it still gets the job done. More importantly, I feel good about fulfilling my duty of perpetuating Asian gadget stereotypes throughout Western Europe. But I digress. The key to packing is compartmentalizing items that are not in use using space saver or packing cubes and limiting your inventory of choice to only basic clothes. In this case, non-cotton and fast drying where possible.

Which brings me to our next exercise in daily tedium: laundry. The process I’ve used is to use hot water to dissolve detergent, then cool it down - thus creating a super saturation situation where I can get the most soap + bubble yield for the smaller European sinks. Then, I insert clothes and proceed to squish and squash exactly 58 times (each squish + squash counting one time). From there, I run the sink such that the bubbles are “skimmed” by the overflow and then take a shower. By the time I am out (there is hardly water rationing in the UK), the clothes are rinsed where I then squeeze the water out. For each piece of clothing, I then wick it 8 times on each side prior to hanging. This way, as I am still wet from my shower, I don’t mind so much getting mist all over the place. I do think there is room here for automation in the most time consuming task: superior bubble creation and water movement. I find appropriate a fish tank power head with airline tubing to inject bubbles would be an excellent means to accomplish this (as well as create re-marketing scenarios to sell this product). You could move 200 gph with that and its not larger than your standard AC/DC converter. In fact, I’m going to buy one once we get back to London and let you know how it goes. Obviously, there’s not much to think about between 58 squish / squashes.

Laundry and packing aside, we hit the road again. This time by train from Cardiff to Fishguard. The ride was quite a beautiful one - that is when my eyes required resting from GTA Liberty City. Again taken through the English countryside we were surprised this time to see some very nice estuary and ocean views. There are some dramatic land formations here where sand almost seems suspended in the water, creating small islands that form to the flow of current from freshwater streams meeting with sea water. Kathleen in usual fashion slept the whole way (a natural talent indeed) that is, after startin' the morning wit me Irish breakfast (Alchy):

Just kidding, it's actually bottled water but it's true that the Irish drink a lot. There was this guy, whom I wouldn’t call exactly a gentlemen, consume five pints of Heinekens (five pints = 1 tray in samurai speak) on a two hour journey. What made things worse was that he had a billowing voice, which pierced even the Shure in-ear headphones; a grimy, unkept and obnoxious fellow; although he did travel with a little Scottie dog, which seemed out of place and I couldn’t help but to listen in on some sad stories his family had gone through. Nice guy. Just really really drunk - probably all the time. That said, he probably wasn’t all too bad by US standards, although quite a few smudgeons more rude than your uber polite English fellow. Even at that, I’ve felt a general cultural pressure to be more polite, I.e. using ’bloody’ versus [insert four letter word here].

I suppose bloody is appropriate given the economic constraints have pretty much bludgeoned its populace to a pulp. Have I said this already? Things here are so bloody expensive it is ridiculous (probably have, but sans the English whit and charm I‘ve clearly developed). Due to these macro economic factors, for the first time, I actually took advantage of a situation that benefited me financially but wasn’t necessarily the honorable one. Just a few minutes ago, I went to the café to get some 9 Sterling fish and chips (about 18 USD). Just mushy peas, ‘chips’ plus one small slab of Atlantic Cod. The guy behind the counter served me the food, but got distracted and walked into the back (if I were to guess, probably to get more Heinekens for the Irish fellow or ‘lad‘ I suppose; that, or he observed I was timing him via Polar RS400 and crumbled under the pressure). I waited for what felt to be 30 seconds and took off, cleverly meandering my way through tables and pillars as to fade into the darkness with my serendipitously new found fried prize. Hey- it’s not my fault if the incentive structures and hiring practices of the Stena Fairy system didn’t guard against spoilage and negligent fish ‘n chips peddling.

As with the Fish and Chips, everything in Europe is a lot smaller. People tend to be crammed in tight spots and this is no exception in restaurants. Part of my ’immersion’ into Manhattan last year was being able to carry a comfortable conversation over dinner while two unfamiliar couples sat inches away from me. Unfortunately, while this transition has occurred for most New Yorkers and thus creating “white noise“ to drown out the annoying bond trader explaining the latest derivatives strategy to the Chanel toting chick sitting across from him, it still hasn’t taken place in England. When Kathleen and I were confronted with this same scenario, there were gaps, where one couple would talk to each other for 3-5 minutes, while the other two were silent. Once the speaking couple fell silent, the next couple would begin their conversation, usually on a topic as the last one but NEVER did the three couples talk to each other. It was lyrical chairs to say the least and I guess that makes me the lyrical gansta… murduruh!!!

There’s not many pictures in this post since I can’t get an Internet connection here and my portable HD is in my rolley, which is stored away. One thing I’m really disappointed in is Picasa / Blogger integration. For the past two months I have been absolutely blown away by Google products. I was impressed w/ their enterprise email and GoogleDocs free services, Blackberry/Outlook PIM integration and Picasa. Picasa seemed to ‘guess’ which function I wanted to perform based on several events as well as a clever “Feeling Lucky” picture fixing filter. Things work, are well integrated and fast & light. However, I was quite annoyed that I couldn’t import photos directly from Picasa into Blogger. Instead, I have to import pictures from the camera, then I had to create a separate folder to shrink pictures to size and then upload via HTML form and sift through the file system to pick out the photo, each photo being named DSC10929399 and so on. You could do a preview in window, but it is still really inconvenient. There is a way to “Blog This” on Picasa but you’re limited to two photos. I was really hoping to batch process the upload, which Picasa does, but work on a ‘virtual local disk.‘ Plus the “WYSIWYG” editor is pretty shoddy. WTF GOOG? Build, don’t buy! Needless to say, I haven’t been feeling very lucky with Google products as of recent.

To the left is one of the views on the ferry boat to Ireland. Most travellers go by air, but given my propensity to avoid frights, we chose to go by land and sea.

In anycase, the buzz from my warm Boddington Bitter has just about worn off. Write and post more later.

Here are also some pictures from Bath, which I didn't have a chance to Blog about. Bath, UK btw is one of my more favorite cities in Europe visited thus far. It has a downtown that is easily accessible and 'traditionally European' yet is surrounded by the English countryside. Of course, the primary tourist attraction are the ruins of the Roman baths. In order to get there from Salzburry, we took one of the longest suspension bridges in the world.