If you haven't read Predictably Irrational, read whichever one you can get from your local library (or bookstore) first.

And then read the other one.

I was in the middle of trying again to make it through the first few chapters of Piracy (spoiler: I gave up), and figured some fiction was a great way to cheat on a book that made the Sahara seem positively damp.

And the end wasn't - but still managed to wrap up enough of the story that I wasn't left frustrated or unsatisfied.

I find myself quite looking forward to it's successors.

I ended up as the on-call two weeks ago, and spent a week living with (and playing with) the Nexus One.

And all I can say is "wow."

And not in a good way...

Battery life was mediocre at best, even with everything other than 3g turned off, the smoothness of touch interactions on this "current gen" device wasn't nearly as smooth as the first generation iPhone, and the user interface was, shall we say, clearly built by developers.

The home screen, like the iphone, pages side-to-side, but once you hit the "all apps" button, it scrolls up and down - and the only indication of that is that the top row of icons is slightly distorted, as if wrapping onto the top face of a cube. (I'm told this is unique to the Nexus One version of Android - which sorta opens the door to pointing out that "Android" as a consumer brand is going to be defined by it's crappiest implementation, but that's a different story.)

There were several places in the interface when a text entry box would appear, complete with what looked like focus (outlined in the select color, with blinking cursor) but after waiting for a moment, you'd realize you had to tap in the box to make the on-screen keyboard appear.

The oh-so-discoverable notification bar that you were supposed to intuit could be dragged down from the top screen edge. How 'bout responding to tap? An icon appears, I tap it, nothing happens. I assume it's just a notification, and not actionable. In fact, I needed to tap-drag it.

And I won't even start on the TouchDown interface, or how it just stopped syncing mail without explanation, and required a "full reset" to get going again. Ugh.

As a developer I like the relative openness of the platform, but as a consumer device, well, I wouldn't use one, and I certainly wouldn't recommend one for Dawnise.

The whole thing felt not-quite baked.

Everyone keeps saying the next version will be better - and I suspect by the next time I'm the on-call, I'll have a chance to evaluate that.

But for now. Blech.

Then came the wonderful several minutes where all the various apps on the system with auto-update behaviors realized they hadn't checked in with mother ship for several weeks and proceeded to fork bomb the machine.

Once I had the machine patched, and rebooted from said patching (elapsed time - 15 minutes) I closed the lid, putting it to sleep, and reopened it.

And waited.

Not long, in the grand scheme of things, but longer than I should have.

Some of the delay was hardware, some of it was software, and most of it could be solved by a MacBook or MacBook Pro - which wakes from sleep nearly instantly and reliably (accomplished by tightly integrating the hardware and software).

But the cheapest MacBook is twice the price of an iPad. So it seemed prudent to check out the iPad first.

It's like an iphone - only bigger - and with bigger comes some added expectations - only some of which it lived up to.

The first thing we noticed is that the lack of user-profiles meant it's really a single-user device. There's no way to have both our email on the device without trivially giving each-other access. There's no way to select the set of visible apps (or the order in which they're presented) based on who's using the device.

This makes the cost comparison harder - as I suspect we'd quickly probably want his-and-hers, whereas we'd be happy with a single MacBook and fast user switching. But the clamshell design significantly increases the friction involved in using a device.

To be sure, the time scales we're talking about are tiny - but human perception and habit are funny things, and often can't be rationalized away.

The second failing Dawnise quickly noticed was that the iPad can't print.

She used Safari to find a recipe she wanted to make and - being conscious of the fact that the device is expensive and fragile, not to mention borrowed - she sensibly wanted to print a copy to put on the counter while cooking, rather than endanger the iPad proper.

So she hit the print link on the page she was browsing and wandered into the office to wait for the hard copy. When nothing materialized in a moment or two - and neither printer was warming up - she innocently asked "how do I print?"

Turns out the answer is, you don't. (yet?).

This despite the fact that our Macs (running much of the same OS software stack the iPad is) both saw one of our printers "automagically" thanks to Bonjour.

Aside from that - the device does everything an iphone does, except make calls. And it does it with the polish and ease of use people have come to expect from Apple consumer products.

Perhaps the key takeaway from the experience is that it's not (just) a better netbook, or the first "good" tablet computer - it's not even the first "good" MID. One could argue that it's more of a "better television" - it's a device to consume on, not to create on - but really, I think any of those comparisons mostly miss the point.

The iPad is the computing device that most people want - and with a few software (multiple "profiles" - so a family can share it) and hardware (camera, at least front-facing for video chat) tweaks - it very well could be the only computing device most people need.

The missing link, to me, is that Apple doesn't seem to really "get" the network.

That setting up an iPad requires a Mac or PC with iTunes is a failure of blink-tag proportions. The iPad is so nearly the cloud computing device - there should be no need for anything other than the device in the box and access to the 'net.

But then, given the sad and sorry state of "mobile me" ($100 a year for services Google offers me free?) it's hardly surprising it is the way it is.

Sure it doesn't have (much) local storage - but it shouldn't need it. You've got a Time Capsule, right? Well, once you're not backing up a Mac, what are you going to use all that space for? As a local cache of data from the cloud, of course.

Yes, it's a walled garden - but as much as the software engineer in me hates that, and has no interest in writing software to such a platform - it's hard to argue against the net result. In many real and meaningful ways, Apple is making computing easier and more effective for people.

So I expect we'll end up with one, eventually - though a 72 hour test drive failed to instill me with a feeling of "must have." It felt close, but if I'm going to pay the Apple tax on a bit of hardware, it's gotta get a little bit closer.

I mostly agree with the Amazon aggregate of 3.5 stars - it had some great ideas and some interesting characters and locales, but just never really grabbed me.

Far from the worst SF I've read, but not something I'd read again, or seek out sequels to.

It arrived the other day, and weighing in at only a hundred and eighty pages, it was a pretty quick read.

While I completely agree with the cover quote, from Douglas Hofstadter that "Our society would be unimaginably different if the average person truly understood the ideas in this marvelous and important little book" I can't say that the existence of the book had any real chance to change society, given it's tendency toward innumeracy.

If you've taken probability and statistics, or discrete mathematics, you've almost certainly been exposed to the ideas in the book. And you've almost equally certainly failed - as most of us do - to correctly apply those lessons to day-to-day life.

Worth reading, but difficult to proselytize.

We checked into our penultimate hotel a bit late, and wandered around with some small sense of glee that it was an easy thing to find dinner after 9pm.

The plan for the next morning was to explore Westminster Abbey, which we hadn't managed to do on our arrival owing to it being opened for worship on the Sunday and not for tours. I mean I know it's a church and all, but surely they could allow us to look around while they pray, right?

We took the verger tour, which was quite good (Dawnise even got to be "queen for the moment" after being the only one in the group to answer a question correctly), and then wandered around the building. The sheer number of notables either buried there or with memorials there is hard to grasp. We were both touched by the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, especially the idea that even the monarchs procession, when entering the Abbey, walks around that particular memorial.

We rounded out the day with an expedition to Harrods, before our planned meeting with our friend Courtney for dinner that night. It was worth the trek, despite Harrods being something of a disappointment (especially as compared to Fortnum & Mason, and suddenly it was time to catch the Tube to South Kensington to meet Courtney.

We hadn't really taken the Tube much in the city, and I was surprised to see how much a Zone 1 trip cost when purchased by paper ticket (£4). A bit of math determined it was more cost-effective to pick up an Oyster Card for the next couple days.

It turned out there was derailment on the Piccadilly line that morning, so what should have been a couple-stop trip turned into a bit of an adventure, and we managed to only arrive 10 or so minutes late.

We walked to a nice Tuscan restaurant recommended by Robin and had a good meal and conversation, though in retrospect Dawnise and I must have chatted too much, as I feel like I hardly know anything about how life's been for Courtney and know precious little about Robin.

After dinner, we caught the tube back, and Dawnise and I made plans for the next morning.

In the morning we packed up, checked out, and tubed under the Thames to our last hotel, planning to drop our bags and wander 'till we could check in later that night.

To our pleasant surprise, they checked us in directly, and we were able to take our bags to our (unexpectedly large and super-swank) room.

We spent a few minutes in the room, and decided to walk toward our next destination. We needed to see a lady about some crumbs, so we made our way to St. Paul's Cathedral.

We toured the Cathedral and climbed the thousand-plus steps to the top of the dome to be treated with some spectacular views of London around us.

In the afternoon, on the advice of Courtney, I dragged Dawnise to the Bravissimo store in Oxford Circus, and made myself scarce for a couple hours while she looked around and had a fitting. I wandered the neighborhood, popped into a pub for a pint, and got back just as the store was closing so Dawnise could show me her spoils of war. (Is that what they're calling them now days...)

In what was a first for Dawnise, she bought the little dress in the window, and it actually fit, and as I sit here, typing this, the memory of the smile on her face is bringing one to mine.

Friday we had set aside to finish a visit that I had to skip on my last trip to the UK some 16 years ago. The last time I was in London - for only 48 hours - I didn't have time to actually go into The Tower, so I satisfied myself with walking around it, and buying a souvenir of a place I hadn't really visited in the gift shop.

This time, we were definitely goin' in.

We got a light breakfast at EAT, and got tickets to The Tower. We discovered we only had a short time to kill before the first Beefeater Tour, so we curtailed our wandering and were at the appointed spot at the appointed time.

The tour was fabulous - all owing to the guide, who was exactly the right person to show us (and probably fifty other folks) around. We saw the crown jewels (as the guide put it - "each one gifted to England by a grateful nation... at gunpoint"), the newly opened exhibit of royal arms and armor, and generally drank it all in.

Of all the castles we'd seen on the trip, Cardiff Castle and The Tower are probably the ones I'd be least likely to go back to. It's not that they were bad, in any way, just that the others felt more "real" and less "touristy."

We spent most of the day there, and when we were done we wandered off to find dinner, which turned into something of an adventure. We waved off our first destination, and ended up wandering into yet another pub in a train station (The Liverpool Street Station, perhaps? My memory fails me at the moment). The food was the best pub food we'd had on the trip, but that still wasn't saying that much, I'm afraid.

We got back to the hotel a bit late, did most of our packing, and turned in, a bit sad to know that we'd be leaving the next morning.

The Voyage Home

Due to planned engineering on the Piccadilly line, and a delay in our flight, we ended up tubing to Paddington station and catching the Heathrow express to the airport. We got checked in, checked our bags, and boarded the long-haul flight home.

Our connection in Chicago was tight, due to the delay in leaving London, but we made it without too much stress, and the flight back to Seattle was uneventful and on-time. We caught a cab home from the airport, dropped our stuff, and made an effort at staying up 'till a normal time to minimize jet-lag (which only sorta worked).

Coda

Looking back on it, and discussing it, the only thing either of us would change was that we needed more time. We had an awesome trip, and after spending a week in London, I think I'd jump at the chance to live there for a while.

I'd like to head back, see Ireland - which we decided to skip entirely on this trip - and Scotland (which we barely nicked the southern edge of), as well as spending a bit more time in Wales, which we saw mostly through the bug-spattered windscreen.

Traveling, as it always has in the past, made both of us think a lot about where we live, the choices "our country" makes, and how it's perceived by the world. It was especially interesting to be in the UK during what turned out to be a very unusual election, as it provided interesting contrast to how things work here in the States.

We got asked lots of questions - some of them disturbing ("do you actually have separation of church and state? 'cause your politicians are always invoking god..."), some embarrassing ("why are you still debating if you should provide health care for your citizens?") and some confounding ("what does this health care bill you've passed actually do?"), had a couple animated discussions, and tried to learn and teach, in even measure.

I also had the thought, several times, while absorbing some bit of British history, that had the colonies had their disagreement about representation while England was ruled by someone other than George (the mad one), the world we live in today might be very, very different.

If you've read this far, and you're looking for some sort of neat and tidy conclusion to the whole thing, the best I can offer is this.

Travel if you can, while you can, to wherever you haven't been. And when you do, go off the beaten path a bit - don't get carted 'round by a tour company, showing you what all the other tourists have seen.

See that stuff, sure, but also hang out in local coffee shops, stay in little B&Bs, talk to people, listen to people, and let that help inform how you view the world you live in.

I'm not sure where we're going next... Paris? Madrid? Dublin?

But we're going.

And hopefully we're going soon.

After consulting our map, we decided on Caerphilly Castle, another castle smack-in-the-middle of a city. Seriously, you'd think they could find better places for these things. Haven't they seen the movies? Castles are supposed to be out in the middle of no-where. Not surrounded by thriving towns.

In an effort to find a more suitable castle, we detoured to Beeston Castle, off a tiny road past a town, up on a craggy hill. Almost exactly what a castle is supposed to look like.

We made it to our B&B in time for the proprietress to send us back out, rushing to a hotel "just up the road" that would be the last place we'd be able to find dinner. that late at night (creeping up on 9pm).

We hadn't realized just how close we were to Scotland until we saw the "Scotland Welcomes You" sign on our way to dinner. We had another encounter with mediocre pub food, and went back to England to sleep.

Hadrians Wall - Romani ite domum

The next morning, after a full English breakfast, we set out for Carlisle Castle and explored it before heading to Birdoswald, a fort near the western end of Hadrian's Wall and Lanercost Priory.

Birdoswald was a great example of many of the things we saw, and places we explored. At a glance it was easy to miss the significance of the place, or the thing you were seeing. It wasn't until you thought about it for a moment - really let the thing get into your head...

Awesome really is the right word. Like so many things we saw on the trip, the remains of the wall, built to keep the "barbarians" out of the Roman empire in the first century AD, were awesome.

Edinburgh

We had set out that morning with the intent of heading to Glasgow that night, but at the last minute we decided to turn east and make Edinburgh our next destination. We found a hotel, punched in it's postcode, and crossed the border into Scotland once more.

We arrived at the hotel, checked in, and made the mistake of taking the car into town on a Friday night. After circling for what seemed like forever looking for parking, we finally found a spot to ditch the car while we found dinner. We wandered the town, though most things were closed or closing, and sketched out the next day.

Saturday was spent exploring the Edinburgh downtown; the market, Edinburgh Castle (another castle in the middle of a city - sheesh), the Royal Mile... We concluded the day with another another mostly disappointing meal in a pub (but good beer, always good beer) and made it back to the hotel and slipped off to sleep.

The morning would see us turning to the South, on an indirect route back to London.

South to Buckinham

Not wanting to repeat the driving marathon from Cardiff to Carlisle, we left Edinburgh in the morning, managed to end up in a small farmers market on the drive down through Scotland, where we procured various tarts and pies for breakfast, and made it to Lancaster Castle by mid-day.

We didn't initially realize that the castle is a working prison, so the sign at the front gate saying that the visitor center would re-open in a few months almost got us back in the car, but we decided to walk the perimeter at least, which led us to the entrance we were looking for.

Unfortunately, while the tour was excellent and the site both beautiful and fascinating, the use of the building as a working prison and court precluded photography inside.

We made it to our hotel fairly early, given our history, but town was still shut down. We decided to eat in the hotel for the first time on the trip based on the menu, and we weren't disappointed. The food was great, and the company turned out to be as well.

We ended up sitting at a table next to two guys who had ridden in on their motorcycles and were headed to a track day in the morning. They'd each had several pints (and a few more in the pub before dinner) and were quite pleasant to chat with. I learned a bit about what it takes to get a motorcycle endorsement in the UK (hint - it's significantly more expensive and exhaustive than in the states).

Bletchley

The next morning we made the short drive to Bletchley Park, which I expected to take a couple hours. I was keen to see the Enigma, and a reconstructed Bombe and Collossus, as well as see how the Brits memorialized Turing. I didn't think Dawnise would find the place particularly interesting.

My interest was largely, but not completely, professional. Computing, in a very real sense, was born at Bletchley - and that story has only really been told in the last 30 years. The cryptography is also interesting to me. And I wanted to go walk that ground, to get a sense of the place, where desperate times drove so many people to do extraordinary things.

As it turned out, it was a good thing we only planned to make Dover that night - about 3 hours away. We managed to get out of Bletchly in time to find a guest house in Dover on the drive, and Dawnise even managed to find us a launderette. We stopped at a market, bought some laundry soap, and washed everything that needed washing. The dryers gave you about 5 minutes of heat for .20p, so after running out of correct change, we dragged damp clothes back to the B&B, turning the whole room into a drying line.

The couple that owned the guest house made a couple recommendations of local spots to eat - and we took the one he characterized as "more of a restaurant." So of course it was another mediocre pub meal. Edible, but hardly notable.

The White Cliffs of Dover

Another full English Breakfast got us off to a good (meaty) start in the morning, we said farewell to our hosts and headed to Dover Castle.

Neither Dawnise nor I had really set out to make the trip about World War II, but when looking across the Channel towards the beaches of France, and realizing Hitler had guns that could shell the spot you're standing makes it hard not to think about.

Our timing also conspired against us a bit - there was a big VE Day parade (which we just missed seeing) while we were in Edinburgh, so the war, and it's end, was just sort of in the air.

Dover Castle played a significant role during the war, and we felt we couldn't be there and not see the the then-secret Tunnels in the cliffs, another tour which prohibited photography.

Driving In London

We left Dover in the mid afternoon, and told the GPS to take us to our last planned stop before returning the car - Abney Park Cemetery. We ended up arriving during peak traffic and waving off after finding no good place to ditch the car in what turned out to be a very busy London suburb.

Having told the GPS to avoid toll roads, we instructed it to take us to Heathrow, which it did, skirting the charge zone the whole way (we hope).

As we dropped off the car we took stock - over 1400 miles, three-ish tanks of petrol (at £1.20/litre), and only one wrong-way-on-a-one way. I had learned a lot (and quickly) about driving in the UK, and come to some interesting realizations.

Drivers in the UK seemed generally to be far more competent and capable than drivers in the US. To my surprise, my initial disdain for traffic cameras melted away over a few days - the speed limits seemed sensible, drivers understood how to stay left unless passing overtaking. Some choose to speed, but I just couldn't really find a reason that getting "caught on camera" was somehow less valid than being "caught on radar" by an officer. (More on the surveillance culture later.)

We saw previous few "smart cars" or hybrids. The average car was small, compared to those in America, and got much better fuel economy (as an example, our rental was averaging 45mpg, with a reasonable mix of city urban and highway extra-urban driving - a manual would have gotten even better mileage).

After dropping off the car, we caught their shuttle back to the terminal, and back to the Tube into central London for the last leg of the trip...

To Be Continued...

A couple of months back I realized that the only way we were going to actually go on the trip to the UK we'd been talking about on and off for a while was if I took unilateral action. So I checked our shared calendar, asked Dawnise if she believed it to be up-to-date, and got on the phone to Alaska Airlines.

My intent was to use some of our stock-pile of miles to get one of us to and from the UK, and after a few minutes on the phone with a very helpful customer service agent I had traded about 80 thousand miles, and a couple hundred dollars in tax and fees, for two round trip coach seats on American Airlines from Seattle to Heathrow on the 20th of April, returning the 5th of May.

As the date got closer, we started planning - booking hotels for the first and last few nights in London, and reserving a car for days in between. We bought two Great British Heritage Passes, deciding that since we were going where the history comes from, we should see some of it while we were there.

We looked at our luggage situation and decided (Dawnise really championed this one, and she was totally right) to buy some travel packs, which we managed to snag during REI's annual sale.

As the date of departure approached, we were growing increasingly excited.

And then, a bit more than a week before we were scheduled to leave, this volcano erupted in Iceland...

Antici....

So we waited, and we watched, and we wondered if we'd be able to get on a plane. And if we'd be able to get home. And if we'd be able to cancel the non-refundable hotel reservations we'd made.

And the night before we were to leave, we were still wondering, until I called Alaska and rescheduled our trip.

I should take a moment to say that through this chaos, the folks at Alaska Air were awesome - and in nearly perfect contrast to the folks at American, who were abrasive, combative, and generally unpleasant. Similarly, the folks at Priceline ensured my continued patronage by their handling of the event when they, without argument of any kind, undid our non-refundable hotel reservations, asking only for the particulars of our canceled flight.

So, fast-forward a couple weeks. The volcano had quiesced, and we boarded our flight for an on-time departure.

London

We arrived in London, collected our one bag each, cleared customs, and headed for the tube. 40 minutes later, we were checking in to our hotel a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus. We dropped our bags, freshened up, and starting what would turn out to be a nearly non-stop schedule for the next two weeks.

We spent Saturday and Sunday exploring the center of London. All the stuff Dawnise had seen pictures of, she got to see in person. We walked - and we walked - from Westminster to Knightsbridge, with no particular plan, and no constraints on our schedule.

We had some amazing food (Indian, of course) and some disappointing pub fair (nearly all of it), and I had some of the best beers I've had since the last time I was in the UK, over fifteen years ago. About the only black mark on the first two days was when Dawnise took a bad step outside the houses of parliament and banged up her knee.

Saturday and Sunday passed far too quickly, and by the time Monday morning came, and we were checking out of the hotel, we had already decided to add a couple more days in London on the tail-end of the trip. We tubed back to Heathrow, to the Hertz compound, and after an hour or so delay (apparently Hertz is unclear on what it means to issue a "reservation" - they thought it meant they could give me any car they happened to have on hand, as opposed to the automatic I had reserved) we got setup with possibly the smallest Mercedes-Benz ever made.

Driving

After a few minutes orienting myself (ahem, psyching myself out to drive on the wrong side of the road), we punched the postcode for our first destination into the GPS SatNav and started team-driving. As we made the first left out of the rental lot, nav announced "drive point one miles, then enter round-a-bout." Clearly, the UK wasn't going to go easy on the foreign driver.

Our basic plan was to head south west, then up into Wales, then up to Scotland, then back down the eastern side of England, returning to London in eight days. We had the Heritage Pass map and site book, the GPS, and my phone.

The first stop, we decided, would be Stonehenge. As we're driving down A303, we started wondering how we'd find it when we got there. Not yet realizing exactly how much location information is encoded in a UK "postcode," we figured (like a zipcode) it would get us into the neighborhood. We figured, being a popular destination, there surely be signs pointing the way.

As we're chatting about this, and concentrating on not crossing the center line, we came over a rise to see Stonehenge, right there, along the A-road, on our right. Well, we said, I guess we found it.

Oh crap.

It's on our right.

That means I was about to make an unprotected right turn across on-coming traffic.

For those of you who've not driven on the left, I don't think I can possibly explain exactly how wrong that maneuver feels. Every instinct you have is screaming that you're about to die - that you've done something horribly wrong to be turning such that oncoming traffic is barreling down at you.

And then you're across the traffic, and everything's fine, but your heart will take a few minutes to realize that and stop trying to escape your chest.

Stonehenge

And then we were at Stonehenge. And it was blustery...

and cold...

and amazing.

We walked around, we stared, we took pictures, and when it really started getting wet, we escaped into the gift shop where I bought a hat embroidered with the logo of the English Heritage Society (we would totally be members if we lived there), and Dawnise bought a Stonehenge jute shopping bag, which seemed like a practical and space efficient souvenir.

From Stonehenge, we set our sights, and our GPS, on Bath. Specifically, on The Roman Baths at Bath, and we started driving, not realizing that the ruins were literally in the center of the city, and that the GPS was going to lead us into it's one-way system at nearly peak commute time.

Bath

We narrowly (seriously, the roads were barely wider than the tiny car) escaped into a residential area and started scouting for a place to stay. We found a guest house run by an elderly dutch lady with a room available, it wasn't fancy, but it was a bed, and access to a shared bath, within walking distance of town.

We parked the car, and walked back into Bath. The ruins by this time were closed, so we wandered the town a bit and found an acceptable if not inspiring dinner at a local eatery. Walking back to the room we decided to walk back to the ruins for opening in the morning, and that we'd come check out the Abby as well.

The next morning the Abby opened before the Baths so took in the building and ended up on a private (we were the only two early risers) tour of the building, including climbing the several hundred steps to the top of the clock tower for some great views, and fascinating history.

Everything about the baths was awe-inspiring - and by late afternoon it became clear that our rough plan of "leave just after lunch" wasn't going to work. We decided to have what turned out to be a positively wonderful tea in The Pump Room before heading back to the car and striking out for Wales.

The drive to Cardiff was beautiful, and with each outing driving was becoming less white-knuckle-inducing. I had started realizing how different driving is in the UK compared to everywhere I've driven in the US. More on that later.

Cardiff

We arrived in Cardiff and checked into the hotel I had booked for us before leaving Bath. On the advice of the hotel staff we walked down the block to a local Indian eatery and had a solid meal, with a very interesting (not bad, just not what we were expecting) interpretation of Paneer Masalla and a couple pints of Brains (just me, Dawnise didn't suddenly learn to love beer when she landed in the UK).

The next morning we were up and out, to wander the city, and see what there was to see. We saw Cardiff Castle, which was sort of an odd place. I still can't quite put my finger on why, but both Dawnise and I were sorta put off by it. It was as if some part of my brain couldn't reconcile the idea of a real castle existing smack in the middle of a modern city and decided that it must have been constructed as a tourist attraction.

We walked to the Dr. Who exhibit and the Torchwood Hub Millennium Center. The exibit was as cheesy as the source material, and good fun, though sadly lacking in good swag in the gift shop. Dawnise really wanted to come home with a set of Dr. Who bedsheets, or something, but most of the merchandise featured the bad guys, specifically the Daleks.

Earlier in the day, we had decided to do the "touristy" thing and book ourselves for the Welsh Banquet at the castle that evening. We got back to the hotel in time to freshen up and head to the (closed) castle gates at the appointed time.

We weren't sure what to expect, and it ended up being a good time. Good food, good entertainment, and moments that probably indelibly linked Gosford Park (on of our favorite shared films) to our time in Wales.

The next morning we got up, got a light breakfast, and wandered the CBD a bit before retrieving the car and heading north through Wales...

To Be Continued...

I expressed interest in the (2009) demo unit - and the fellow I was dealing with explained that he couldn't sell it yet, as it had only 1900 of the required 2500 miles before it was salable per BMW.

He then offered to let me take the bike home over the weekend, put 600 miles on it, bring it back on Tuesday and buy it.

Had I not been headed to Maui that Monday...

I bought the bike on Wednesday. The deal was painless - a bit over 10% off the sticker for it being a demo bike, full factory warranty, extended by 6 months from the date it went into demo service (so I net with a 3.25 year warranty), the 600 mile oil change and 2500 mile service have already been performed. They replaced a scratched valve cover and the scuffed hard bags without my asking.

The bad news is that it's already back at the shop.

I rode it to work from the dealer on Wed, parked it in the garage. When I got to the bike to head home, it cranked and started, but wouldn't stay running at idle - I had to keep the throttle open all the way home or it would stall out. When I got home last night (having driven to work) I tried starting it and it cranked but wouldn't catch.

So now I get to see how Ride West's follow up service is - I sent the sales guy a note last night asking how best to get it back to them for diagnosis and repair - they sent a trailer today and I'm hoping, but not confident, that I can get the bike back before they close on Saturday.

Not exactly an auspicious beginning.

Oh, and BMW accessories are insane. They want nearly $1000 for the large top box, and like $300 for a tank bag. Givi has a top box that looks attractive for "only" $300-ish, and Marsee has a tankbag - with their BMW-specific fuel filler mount - that I might give a go.

Aside from that, the only other customization I plan is an after-market screen (of which there are several to choose from), as the stock screen is almost adequate for me, but doesn't provide enough protection for the passenger.

I'd normally be going on about how awesome the bike is, but having to send it back this quickly does put a bit of a damper on the purchase...

[UPDATE] 7-Apr-2010: they diagnosed the problem as a faulty injector, and I picked up the bike, and the hard-bags I'd been waiting on, this morning. Rode to work, rode home, so far, so good. Cruise control on a motorcycle is weird. Heated grips and seats, on the other hand, are pure awesome.

Why, in the name of all things right, did my high school insist on teaching macro economics (which is, generally speaking, utter bullshit) rather than micro economics? Seriously, if I had realized there was a whole discipline focused on the study of how people respond to incentives, I might not be writing software for a living.

Or, given the relative incentive structures in play, perhaps I would...

Anyway, the book is definitely worth a read. And if you haven't read it's predecessor, give that a whirl, too.

I ended up only getting about 2/3 through The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science before having to return it to the library. I wanted very much to love this book, but when compared to works like Longitude, or Stiff it just didn't quite hold up to expectations. As a series of semi-connected essays, those I read were interesting, but I never really "got" or connected with Holmes' thesis.

Most recently, I returned The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart and haven't put it back on my hold/buy list. The first few chapters weren't particularly engaging, but that could have been more about other stuff going on rather than the merits of the work, so I may give this one another shot.

This afternoon, Junior left us after a rocky couple of months. His diabetes, which had been under control without insulin for a couple years, suddenly returned, along with a smorgasbord of other symptoms.

This afternoon, I walked into the bathroom to find him in the midst of a violent seizure - and he never came back.

He was with us for 15 years, and ingratiated himself with even the most stalwart anti-cat people. We have lots of record of his time here - as Dawnise has pretty much always thought of cameras as existing solely to capture images of the cats.

He will be missed, and the world has within it a bit less cute.

Looking out the window, I'm sure the sky looks just a bit more silvery-grey than normal...

Four out of five stars. Definitely worth reading - and definitely not suitable for a Disney/kids movie.

Ignore the "reboot" bit of the description - I like Brom's characterization in the epilogue much better. He explains the inspiration for the story by giving some choice passages from Barrie's original, and that's way more creepy than "a reboot."