The Ocean

We had a bit of a seaside weekend. On Saturday we went to Monterey, which is about an hour and a quarter's drive away down the Pacific coast. We thought it would be nice to do some shopping and have something to eat at Cannery Row (made famous by John Steinbeck's 1945 novel of the same name... apparently). Cannery Row is in the middle of being redeveloped, so it turned out to be a bit of a mix of old industrial buildings, new boutique style shops and construction work. Although a lot of the shops were selling pleasingly cheap but tasteful souvenirs (I believe the official term is 'tat'). Feeling both hungry and adventurous, we had a look around all the places to eat - and there were quite a lot of nice looking seafood places - but succumbing to safety in the familiar, and a new-found fondnest for Forrest Gump, we ended up at the Monterey's branch of what appears to be a chain of Bubba Gump restaurants. Not so much film trivia this time, but an excellent view over the ocean, good food (shrimp, obviously) and fun for Lucy. We watched the movie on Saturday night. I think we've got it out of our system now. After lunch we went to the excellent Monterey Bay Aquarium. There was a 45 minute queue to get in, but the handy (but expensive) trick of buying an annual membership got us immediately into the members side door, and lets us get in for free all year, complete with two transferrable guest passes (which actually turns out to be quite a bargain, given the price of the regular tickets, and the likelyhood of us going again several times). It's a large aquarium with some fantastic tanks. They filmed the aquarium scenes for the movie "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" here in 1986, with some special effects to make the rock pools outside the back of the aquarium look like an enclosure large enough to house a couple of whales. Lucy loved it all, and joyfully pointed out all the big fish... and there were some very big fish. The highlight for me was a Sun Fish - Fascinating. On Sunday we went to Half Moon Bay which is only about 40 minutes away on the Pacific coast up the Peninsula. It's quite small with an old-town feel to the town center, and it was nice to walk around and stop for a coffee and a cake. Afterwards we went to the beach, where the waves were just spectacular. This was the first time Lucy had been on a beach, too. She was a little wary of the sea at first, but she quickly started to get excited by the big breakers. This is somewhere we're definitely going to go more often.

Grrrowl...

Becky got out a box of face-paints and a face-painting instruction book today. Getting this picture sent to me on my mobile phone when I was in the middle of an extended and frustrating technical discussion at work really made my day. Marvelous.

At The Source

Yesterday I went to the WebGuild 2006 Conference. This involved me dipping my feet in the water of Industry Conferences - it was a relatively inexpensive one-day conference about the current state and future direction of the World Wide Web. I enjoyed it immensely, despite one or two of the presentations being a bit dull. It really struck me what I was involved in while I was sat amongst about 200 Silicon Valley web professionals listening to Marissa Mayer talk about the history and design philosophy behind the Google homepage. Not some wannabe Internet company, but Google! She has been personally involved in setting the standard for web searching for most of the planet for the last 7 years. This was followed by a panel discussion which included a founder member of OddPost, who now power the excellent new AJAX-based Yahoo mail client (currently in Beta). You simply don't get these people anywhere else. I appreciate that for many of the people reading this, I just said "blah blah blah Google! blah blah blah blah"... but it's seriously inspiring to be continuously coming across people and companies that I'd only previously read about. Next week there is a free seminar at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View celebrating 30 years of Public Key Cryptography (calm down now). This is all very well and good, but two of the speakers are Dr. Whitfield Diffie and Dr. Martin Hellman! (I can see you're getting over-excited... take a few deep relaxing breaths before continuing...). These are the guys who discovered (invented?) one of the most fundamental algorithms in modern cryptrographic communication protocols - it's the stuff that keeps your credit card details safe over the Internet. (we'll gloss over the fact that it was actually developed at GCHQ in the UK... Hollywood will probably soon produce a movie that sets the record straight). OK, so this is deeply nerdy stuff. But it's the kind of nerdy stuff that I keep tripping over. It's fantastic.

Plastic Fantastic

I finally got my California Drivers License. It's surprising how much difference this makes to how I feel. I now feel like I have a legitimacy here that I didn't feel before. I'm no longer carrying around anything from Britain - credit cards, ATM card, ID... It's very odd. I think this is the last piece of bureaucratic "plugging in" to be done here. It's a bit of a milestone.

8/7c WTF?

Maybe I'm mathematically challenged, but I can't make head or tail of the timezone information given in US TV schedules. The one we see the most involves times like 8/7c, pronounced "Eight, Seven Central", which I think means that a TV show is on at 8pm unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case it will be on at 7pm. This is definitely weird, because North America (let's exclude Alaska for now) has four timezones: Pacific (PST) = GMT-8 Mountain (MST) = GMT-7 Central (CST) = GMT-6 Eastern (EST) = GMT-5 ...and they all have their equivalent 'Daylight Savings Time' versions, one hour ahead of those with a 'D' in the acronym rather than an 'S'. So a timing of 8/7c would make sense to be advertised in the Eastern timezone, because 8pm Eastern is the same as 7pm Central. This would surely mean that a programme was being shown at the same physical time - which happened to be 8pm Eastern and 7pm Central. So why do we get these same times specified in California where we're on Pacific time? When they say 8/7c, do they mean that the whole country gets the TV show at 8pm local time unless you're in the Central timezone, in which case they show it at 7pm local time? This is just bizarre. It would be like the UK having TV times of 8/7(Rutland) where you'd see an episode of The Bill at 8pm unless you live in Thorpe By Water, in which case you'd see it at 7pm. This is probably a boon to people in the Alabama, though, because they get everything an hour before the rest of the country. Maybe they need the extra time to digest the content - perhaps it's a social service. And living in California, why do I care what time they'll be seeing the show in the Central timezone? Just to add confusion, there's also "E/P", which appears to mean "Eastern/Pacific", which I can only assume means it's shown at the same time (local time) throughout the country. Fox has examples of this in their 2006/2007 schedule, along with the more understandable "7:30pm ET/4:30pm PT" which clearly means that something is being shown at the same physical time across the whole country (live sports events, for instance). Be thankful if you live in a country with only one timezone (you know who you are).

Best Foot Forward

On Saturday we joined the Walk For Hope in San Francisco, which is a 5km walk to raise funds for Breast Cancer as part of the National Breast Cancer Awareness Month (also in the UK). Becky's mom and brother had joined us, and it was to be an early start, so we drove to the The Embarcadero Center for 8am. There were various tents and stalls set up for people who wanted to register on the day, and to pick up t-shirts... and all the sponsors were there. The atmosphere was excellent.We persuaded a passing stranger to take our photo, for which we unwittingly stood in height order. The walk took us down the waterfront to AT&T Park, around the stadium and back again - it was great to see that part of San Francisco by foot, which is something we might not otherwise have done. Lucy was happy to watch the world go by (although you wouldn't believe it from the photo above). There was a fantastic atmosphere back at the Embarcadero Center as everyone was arriving from finishing the walk. After a 5km walk, we all felt like we'd earnt a beer and something deep-fried, so we went to Pier 39 for an early lunch - because there are lots of family-friendly mid-priced restaurants there (OK, so they're probably not the best restaurants in San Francisco, but we're still enjoying hanging around the touristy areas, and Lucy loves the Carousel). We ended up at Bubba Gump - which is a restaurant chain that somehow managed to get the rights to have a Forrest Gump theme. I've never been in a restaurant where an incredibly enthusiastic waitress asks film trivia questions while taking my order. It sounds slightly tacky (and probably was), but it was a lot of fun. And they had Anchor Steam on tap, and the food was actually very good. And there was a Tom Hanks look-alike in full Forrest Gump atire sat on a bench outside the restaurant as we left. You can't make this stuff up. It was a day of contrasts.

Make The Grade

We had our driving tests on Friday. As it happens, our next door neighbor is a driving instructor, and he very kindly offered to take us both out for a quick refresher on Wednesday - it was really useful, because Becky and I both picked up a few good pointers on things to look out for. The visit to the DMV office to take the tests involved more waiting than driving, and it was 2½ hours before we'd both taken our 10 minute tests. We both passed. Becky came away with a completely clean slate, but I managed to get three minor marks against me (you're allowed 15 minor marks before you fail)... which I put down to nerves and trying too hard not to mess up (for instance, one of my minor marks was for driving 5mph below the speed limit on El Camino Real... go figure). A second explanation could be that Becky is simply a better driver than I am. The third theory is that Becky got a lenient examiner, and I got a more pernickety examiner. I favor the third theory. In fact, our neighbor just came round to talk about how things went, and he confirmed that the examiner I had was the most stringent examiner at that DMV office. I'm not bothered. No, really.

Hammered

If you're at all interested in DIY (even from a wanabe amateur-but-useless standpoint like me), then you have to watch Hammered, with John and Jimmy DiResta (doesn't look like it's actually on UK TV yet, though). My all-time favourite DIY TV Show (and consequently, DIY personality) was the New Yankee Workshop with Norm Abram (on Discovery Real Time in the UK) - who can build anything, effortlessly, with a workshop bigger than our house, containing tools that a DIY enthusiast could only dream of. Hammered is the same thing, only with less conservative projects (that is, more fun), and an East-Coast humour and attitude that's laugh-out-loud funny. The two hosts are brothers: Jimmy DiResta is a ludicrously talented craftsman, and John DiResta is a professional stand-up comedian. Whoever thought it would be a good idea to put these two together on TV was a genius.

Left Hand, Right Hand

We spent this weekend up at Tahoe. It's something we want to be doing more regularly, but we haven't quite got into a weekly/monthly routine yet (too much change and disruption on a week-by-week basis so far to be able to get into a routine). But at least we managed to get up there this weekend, and we had a really nice visit with Becky's immediate family. Becky's mom is being incredibly generous by letting us borrow her car during the winter months. It's a two-wheel drive car, and is consequently unsuitable for driving around Tahoe when it is freezing/snowing (you really need a genuine 4x4), so usually sits out the winter in the comfort of Becky's mom's garage. The snows could come any day now, so we came back in a mini-convoy of the Montero (built and bought to cope with a Tahoe winter) and Becky's mom's VW Beetle (built to be stylish - and successfully so). I was the happy driver who got to drive the Beetle back to the Bay Area - a 4 hour drive, which is a nice long time to get to know and love the car. On the trip, we made a stop at Davis where we saw a man being restrained by police from 4 separate patrol cars in the car park outside the Burger King where we stopped. According to a passer-by that Becky spoke to, he was a homeless man who was on drugs. It was sobering to see my burger-buying safety being ensured by this man's face coming into contact with the tarmac. So anyway... Driving a manual (stick shift) car after a couple of months with an automatic was a complete revelation. For the first time since we've been here, I actually felt like I was fully in control of the car. It was great. I'm convinced now that if we buy another car (when Spring comes and the snow melts, and the Beetle can once again grace the roads of South Lake Tahoe), it has to be manual. I know that this will make it more difficult to sell on, but it'll be worth it. The only problem, really, is that I was changing gear with the wrong hand. My left hand constantly wanted a piece of the gear-changing action. It's odd that it's so easy to drive on the opposite side of the road, but more difficult to be changing gear with my right hand. It'll learn, though... and it's a small price to pay.

Tickover

It occurred to me that it's been a while since I wrote a blog entry. The superficial reason for this is that nothing 'blogworthy' has really happened. That's not strictly true, though... what has actually happened is that we're beginning to settle into a comfortable routine where fewer things are in any way exceptional. A lot of small stuff has happened, though, which all forms part of the comforting humdrum of everyday life. My subscription to TV Guide has finally kicked in, and so when I've finished writing this I'm going to read through the current issue and highlight things I think we might be interested in watching next week, and set them up to record on the DVR - this is what I used to do with the TV Magazine back in the UK to set up Sky+. The licence plates for our car finally arrived (it had Illinois plates when we bought it, and had to be registered in California). Now we've got all the official documentation for the car, and we're just waiting for our appointments for the driving tests (coming up on 13th October) before we're fully signed-up with the DMV. We managed to successfully apply for another credit card, so now we have one each (spreads the administrative load in keeping track of them). That particular application was a bit hairy for a while, though - Citibank Mastercard U.S. want a banking reference before they'll set up an account, which is fair enough. For some reason Citibank UK charge £20 for the privilege of sending a banking reference, even if it is to somewhere else in the Citibank organisation. But I swallowed this because I wanted something that they had. To complete the picture of a joined-up institution, Citibank Mastercard U.S. then refused to take the Citibank UK reference, saying that it had insufficient information, and the information was in the wrong form (not converted to U.S. Dollars, for example). My sense of humor remained intact, and I was actually quite impressed by this level of ineptitude. Anyway, the application all got sorted out quite quickly when I e-mailed my Citibank relocation consultant (they have people employed to deal with trouble-makers like me) and compared Citibank to HSBC - whose card I'd been happily using for the previous two weeks. The cards arrived a few days later by overnight courier. That's more like it. I've set up the computers that we need (using 'need' in one of its looser senses), and also taken the opportunity to buy some more kit on various lame excuses. I was happily surprised to find that the only thing that wasn't already compatible with the 110v power here was one of the PC power supplies. That was fixed easily enough with a quick trip to Fry's (as so much in life is). Unfortunately, the hard drive in one of the computers died catastrophically a short while after I turned it on (weakened by sea-sickness, presumably). The main down side of this is that I've lost the save-game from 'Half-Life' that I'd been working on for the last few months. My feeble progress through an outdated (but good) game is now history, and it's time for me to drag my game-playing into the 21st Century and start playing the (now 3-year old) Half Life 2. We've also splashed out on some technology that will hopefully pay off in the long term, and bought a cordless Skype handset (the LinkSys CIT200, for those interested), so we can use Skype without having to be surgically connected to a PC. You'd be surprised how much more we used Skype now that it feels like using a normal phone. As well as the savings on international calls, Skype calls to U.S. landlines are free until the end of the year, so hopefully that $100 will pay for itself quite quickly. The continuing unpacking of our boxes is suffering from the 80-20 rule. The remaining 20% of unpacking is progressing at the expected slow rate. To prevent us coming to a complete halt and living amongst a handful of boxes and small piles of random belongings for the rest of our stay here, the rule is that every day must contain a small but distinct amount of 'unpacking'. The study/office now has more than 50% of the carpet visible. This is definite progress. I also managed to unpack a lot of the garage boxes in a hunt for the 12v air-pump that I wanted to use to inflate my bike tires. As fate would have it, it turned up at the bottom fo the last box that I looked in. And why are the sizes for screw-in light-bulb fittings different over here? We have a standing lamp that we rather like, and we want to simply put 110v bulbs in it (nothing complex about the electrics - this should just work). But bulbs here come in two fitting sizes: too large, and too small. Luckily, ebay came up trumps with some adapters which turn the 'too small' bulbs to 'just right'. Good old ebay. We're beginning to get tuned in to the prices of everyday things. Petrol is strange in the amount that it varies from place to place. In the UK we were used to a few pence per litre variation, but here there can be up to 50¢/gallon difference between two gas stations on the same street. Well worth shopping around. Bread is very expensive, too. Between $4 and $5 for a small loaf of half-decent bread. Odd, that. So not much to say, really.