Fall-Line

We stayed up most of the night before leaving for the airport on Friday morning in an attempt to get ourselves adjusted to GMT before even leaving Seattle. It’s unclear if it helped the cause, made things worse, or somewhere in between. What is clear is that our trip started off on a negative note.

After arriving at the airport nearly three hours before our domestic flight to San Francisco, we encountered our first setback while trying to check in. It seems that when I bought the tickets I had used our full names for the travel documents. This of course would be correct except for the fact that Mrs. fall-line’s passport is still under he maiden name, and consequently did not match the name on the tickets. This is why you don’t by plane tickets at 11pm online in haste without fully thinking things through, I remind myself now. Of course this problem was my fault at the core, but United really fell all over-themselves to handle it in the worst possible fashion.

Nearly and hour went by and we were still watching a very unhappy and unfriendly lady in United Airlines customer service half fix our problem, and half throw a tantrum about fixing our problem, we got what we needed and headed to the plane. I really thought we were going to have to give this lady a juice box and a blankie to get her to help us before we missed the flight. We made it with 5 minutes to spare. (-3 to United.. this is a trend that will continue)

Once onboard, the travel from Seattle to London via San Francisco was fairly uneventful, thankfully. We even received some nice service from the flight crew of the SFO -> LHR leg. (+1 to United)

We arrived in London at a few minutes to 7 in the morning on Sunday, the city was quiet and peaceful. After weighing our options for travel from Heathrow to the city, we hopped on a coach which took us to within a couple of miles of the hotel for only £4 ($9) each. This hour long ride gave us a good opportunity to sit back and observe the city in a way I haven’t seen it before. 15 hours after leaving Seattle, we were exhausted from our traveling but excited to be on the ground in the UK.

Upon locating the hotel and dropping our luggage for the day, we headed out to see the city with the little time we had. We walked along the Thames, saw the sights and visited a few of the cities hot-spots during the daylight hours. I was particularly impressed by Westminster Abbey after experiencing the great multitude of British and world history quite literally interred within.
For the rest of the day and evening, we tried to keep ourselves awake by walking…and walking… and (as Mrs. fall-line will remind me with a scowl)… walking some more. Our shoes and our dress were not appropriate for a 4 mile night time walk through London (in March), but in retrospect I’m glad to have had the experiences we did that evening. London is incredibly expensive (especially with the weak dollar we have at the moment), the people aren’t terribly friendly, and it’s noisy and dirty. Pretty much what you would expect from a global population center. We were eager to get on the plane the next day to Edinburgh.

London on Sunday, March 18th 2007.

More photos:
http://flickr.com/photos/fall-line/sets/72157600032138777/

Tags: London, Scotland, Travel

After an unfortunate overnight delay in Chicago on the way home from London, we are home and rested after the trip. Scotland was amazing. We enjoyed every minute of our journey around countryside and all of the experiences we had.

In the coming days I will be making individual posts creating an ‘ex post facto’ daily travel journal.

Meanwhile, photos are here:
http://flickr.com/photos/fall-line/sets/72157600032138777/

Most of these photos have been placed on a map as well:
http://flickr.com/photos/fall-line/sets/72157600032138777/map/

Tags: Scotland, Travel

After one week of successfully ignoring the internet, we’re making contact from the east coast of the Isle of Skye, Scotland.

It’s been beautiful here, when the weather has permited. Even when it hasn’t the snow and rain haven’t been too much trouble. We’re off to Loch Ness this afternoon before making our way back south to Edinburgh.

Many photos and details to come upon our return.

Tags: Scotland, Travel

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing around with Google Earth while planning possible options for our upcoming road-trip around Scotland. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s important for me that we leave our options open for spontaneity, but there’s nothing wrong with a basic plan… right?

We’ll have 5 days to cover a lot of ground. Each region and town that we encounter will provide a nearly infinite number of opportunities for side trips and exploration. In most cases, we’ll have time to partake in these options as time permits.. There are a few points of interest that I absolutely must see however, so there will be a few long stretches of driving to be had.

A few Highlights:

• London to Edinburgh on Easyjet (cheaper and faster than the train)
• Arrive in style with a 4 star B&B just south of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh
• Hit the road and head northwest through the mountains before veering east to Speyside
• Distillery visits in Speyside: Aberlour, Balvinie, etc as time permits
• Mad dash to Skye via Inverness & Loch Ness.
• Talisker Distillery on Skye.. the place that started it all for me.
• Oban Distillery and a visit to the MacIntyre family homeland nearby in the highlands
• Heaps of hidden Highland treasures to be explored.. staying in small town B&Bs

Here’s the proposed route.. hopefully it’ll change as we go along.

Tags: distillery, Google Earth, Scotland

This morning while making final arrangements for travel within the UK next month, I was having trouble visualizing exactly how long it was going to take us to get from point A to point B, and which days we would spend in which areas of Scotland. Without thinking I grabbed a pen to jot down some notes and help me get a better picture.

Within a minute or two I realized that I had created a full on Gantt chart, complete with dependencies and time categorization… Sure, I now have a much clearer picture of when to book the car. More importantly, I realized just how much I need this vacation.

At least I was careful not to over schedule the road trip portion of our travels. Once we get loose in the highlands, we’ll drive and stop when and where we damn well please.

• The old man in me who relies on the money I am currently investing in my 401k shook his fist at those damn kids on wall street today… ouch!

• The young kid in me who still likes video games is frustrated at how difficult it is to find accessories in stock for his Nintendo Wii.

• The present day me is trying not to let the old man me, or the kid me get me down. I’m looking forward to Scotland in three weeks!

Have you noticed? People are beginning to pay attention.

After decades of finger pointing, opposing scientific conclusions and flat out denial, if seems now as though the general populace of the nation is starting to come to it’s senses and realize we’ve got a problem on our hands. In the past few weeks I’ve been an enthusiastic witness to series of events and media portrayals which exemplify this trend.

You may have seen that I wrote about one such story back in early February. Richard Branson with the endorsement of Al Gore announced the Virgin Earth Challenge, sponsoring a $25 million dollar prize for researchers who could create a process to effectively remove large amounts of CO2 from our atmosphere.

Since then news of the wave of public awareness has been pouring in.

The documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” which features Al Gore’s campaign to raise awareness of global warming won an oscar for best documentary. Winning this award not promises to increase the market exposure of the film itself, it presented an opportunity for those involved to snag a few moments of time in front of an estimated 35 million US television viewers, and countless millions more worldwide. Gore, along with oscar winning songwriter (for her original song in the same movie) Melissa Ethridge and the film’s creator Davis Guggenheim brought the topic of global warming to the forefront and urged those watching to educate themselves and take action.

Yesterday brought an even more significant leap forward in this fight as 5 governors of Western Sates announced an agreement to develop a target to lower greenhouse gasses and create a program aimed at helping industry reach these goals. The specifics are unclear on what these goals will be, or exactly how significant the motivation will be to comply for businesses. While this coalition of states doesn’t equate to national representation, it is significant. It has been said that if the 5 states of Washington, Oregon, California, New Mexico, and Arizona where to be considered an autonomous nation state, the emission of greenhouse gasses from that state would rank among the top 10 worldwide. Here’s to hoping that the regulations they implement at least measure up to those of the Kyoto Protocol… but, I’m not holding my breath.

Today the big news is of the proposed buy out of the Texas power giant TXU by a group of private investment firms. On the surface it’s a big dollar business deal which stands to make a few people a lot of money right? The real story from an environmental perspective here however is that this buyout comes with some strict environmental requirements. Specifically, TXU is to scrap plans for 8 of it’s proposed 11 coal fired power plants which where to be built in Texas, in favor of alternative energy sources. Should this come to fruition, we’re talking about a reduction of 56 million tons of carbon release into the atmosphere every year. This deal is a long way from being set in stone, but the fact that these environmental regulations are even factoring into the negotiations of what would be the largest private equity buyout of a publicly owned corporation in US history, is significant.

More than any one of these stories is the sum of the movement which they represent. After years of frustration, it finally feels like things are beginning to change. Only time will tell…

Tags: Al Gore, Climate Change, Global Warming

A good friend of mine sent me an instant message the other day. To paraphrase, he said ‘you have a Wii? I have two…‘
SOLD! I said, without hesitation, and proceeded to write a check.

Since their initial release, I’ve been telling myself that when the Wii becomes more readily available at retail price, I’d buy one. I’m not a huge gamer (in fact, I realize now this is the first game system I’ve ever purchased new), but I’ve been keen on this new little system and shift in gaming mentality that it brings with it. Now one was quite literally laid at my feet, while others are still clambering to purchase them for above retail price elsewhere. I couldn’t pass it up.

I brought home the box with the game system, one controller set (remote & nunchuck) and two games (three if you include the bundled Wii Sports.) After about 10 minutes of setting it up and configuring it, I was in business. By ‘in business’ I don’t mean that I was actually in and playing a game right away - though I easily could have been. I found myself plenty entertained by just navigating around the menus, creating Miis, and generally playing with the various features of the system. Of course, at it’s heart it’s a video game system. After a 10 or 15 minutes of mucking around I reached for my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess settled in to give the new toy a good test run.

More than any other game, it was the new incarnation of Zelda that most interested me when I first heard that Nintendo was to release a “next-gen” console. The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES was still is my favorite video game of all time. As I write this, I’ve only logged maybe 2-3 hours of game play on a game which Nintendo claims will take up to 70 hours to complete. I’ve seen enough of this game, and the others to come up with a couple of initial conclusions about Zelda and the system however. Here they are in an only a somewhat particular order:

Pros:

• The Zelda game lives up to it’s pedigree. The story, and general look and feel are completely engrossing. I don’t typically like playing story line adventure type games, but Zelda feels like reading a really good book. Each puzzle that you solve and area you unlock feels like a new chapter in a novel you just can’t put down.

• The interactivity created by the motion sensing controllers is excellent. After decades of video game consoles developing on one basic path (faster games, more graphics, more buttons on an a basically universal controller design) it’s incredibly refreshing to be controlling a game in a way that is not only more fun, but usually more intuitive. I can only guess as to the potential for future growth in gaming here..

• It’s friendly. That is to say, it’s easy to like the Wii. It’s small, cute, quiet and relatively inexpensive. It’s also (as mentioned above) very pleasant to interact with in or out of a game environment.

• The extendibility created by features like the Internet and virtual console ‘channels’ keeps you busy even when not playing a game. It’s great to be able to (legally) download and play some of my classic favorites on this system.

Cons:

• Everybody knows that the Wii isn’t about ‘next-gen’ graphics and I’m OK with that. Still, there are bits in some of the games that look pretty horrible compared to what I’m used to in this day and age. To a large extent, this is caused by the fact that I’m using the included composite video cable to connect to my widescreen HD LCD TV. I’ll be upgrading to the component cables for sure, but the fact remains that the Wii brings up the rear in the graphics quality race among it’s next-gen competitors.

• The interactivity created by the motion sensing controllers isn’t fully leveraged by game makers. The Wii sports title really exists to show off the capabilities of these new controllers, and it utilizes them brilliantly. Zelda on the other hand uses the technology but I feel that it doesn’t live up to it’s potential in this regard. That being said, it’s still 10 times better (in my humble opinion) than the control of the Zelda games on N64 and Gamecube. I feel like there is a very high ceiling for game companies to work with in this department.. and so far this gives me more to look forward to in the future, than be exited about at the moment.

• It’s extendibility is limited and monetized. I love that I can download Super Mario Brothers from the original NES and play it on my Wii. I don’t like that I have to pay extra to do so. Maybe it’s wrong for me to feel that after spending $425 on a system and games, I should be entitled to download a game they offer from 20 years ago for free - but I do. I also worry (thought I haven’t done any research) about the fact that the Internet channel (basically and Opera browser for the Wii) is only available as a “Trial Version”. Will we have to pay for this feature in the future?

• The Wii only comes with one controller set. To be fair, most game systems only come with one controller. But the Wii is all about interactivity and encouraging people to be social, and think about video games differently. I would like to be able to play a game of Wii Sports tennis with my Wife without buying another $60 controller.

That makes 4 pros and 4 cons, with the majority of the words being written on the side of the cons. Don’t let that stat fool you though, the benefits of the pros far outweigh the detriments of the cons. I experienced very little if any buyers remorse after purchasing this thing (which is saying something for me) and would happily do so again.

One thing is for certain, really looking forward to trying some of the next wave of games which are truly built from the ground up to support the Wii and it’s innovative control system. I’m a sucker for sports games, so I’m especially interested to see how that genre adapts to the new possibilities.

The bottom line? I’m very happy with this toy. Could I be more impressed? Yes. But hey, I’m hard to please.

Tags: Nintendo Wii, Video Games, Wii, Zelda

Inspired by Chris…

I like that harmony created Conor Oberst and Jim James when they sing “The whole world’s waking up”.

Brilliant backup vocals from James.

iTunes Song Link

Tags: Bright Eyes, Music

Base jumpers and budding equipment designers are scrambling to create what amounts to a human flying squirrel rig. The wearer will be able to huck off a typical base jumping cliff, but rather than pulling a chute after a period of free-fall, they will be able to spread their wings, and glide gracefully to a landing.. or so they hope.

Notice the guy testing this particular design is still wearing a traditional parachute during testing. One of the advantages of such a design is that it can easily be stored in a small backpack during the approach, and whatever climb is necessary to reach the launch point. This benefit is undoubtedly negated however by the large cases required to cary the wearers balls in..

[link]

Tags: base jumping, extreme sports