Big Skies
To someone used to the green hills of Scotland, the Texan landscape can seem pretty flat and monotonous. But if there's one way in which the state does trump my homeland it's in the quality of its skies, particularly at dusk. As we drove towards downtown Austin this evening, the skyline was backlit by pale yellow/green clouds, occasionally split by great stabs of lightning. Texas doesn't mess around when it comes to weather.
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Hotel San Jose
On Sunday R started feeling poorly again, but insisted that I go to the reception and represent Sid's Glasgow friends. I was glad that I did. Partly because it was a lot of fun, partly because the food was awesome, and partly because other than the best man and his wife none of Sid's other friends from the UK were able to make it. He's a fairly taciturn individual but I think he was glad to see someone from home other than his family. Moving to New Jersey from Glasgow is going to be a huge adjustment for him, and I hope he does well. He'll will very much be missed both as a friend and a colleague - though he will still be working for the company, so we'll keep in touch via MSN and email, and he'll probably be back in the UK a couple of times a year.
I did feel bad leaving R hurting in the hotel, so left early and went back. Here's a quick travel tip that certainly applies to hotels in New Jersey and probably elsewhere in the US. If you go down to the front desk and ask them to order you a taxi, chances are they've made a deal with a "private car" service and will order one of those instead, costing you (as we discovered to our expense) an arm and a leg. Better to find a local cab company yourself and order your own.
Anyway, it was just as well that I didn't stay too late, as we had to get up early in the morning and fly to Texas. R felt poorly on the plane, but ever since landing on home turf she's been much better. We've had a couple of days of family time, and today we drove down to Austin for some welcome relief from having to run around like headless chickens, as per most of this trip so far. Last Xmas we spent a couple of days at the San Jose hotel, and loved it so much that when we decided we needed a relaxing treat after all our latest drama we chose to book another stay here. Right now it's warm and muggy, and I'm sitting on the porch outside our room taking advantage of the free wi-fi and listening to peals of thunder in the distance, drinking red wine, and feeling pretty good.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Karmic Payback
So, after yesterday being amazing, today has, thus far, been shite. Due to directional mishaps and unreliable cab drivers we have missed the actual wedding that we came all this way to attend, and are going to have to just go to the reception this evening.
I am less than happy.
A Good Day
My life is pretty boring for the most part. A dreary cycle of work and tv and drizzle. But every so often you have a moment which makes you go "wow - is this really my life?", and I had one of those today, while in a yellow cab being driven at frightening speeds through downtown New York. My actual thoughts were something along the lines of "Fuck me! I'm in a fucking cab in New York! Fuck!"
The day got off to a shakey start, as I mentioned. We did manage to drag ourselves into the city, but R was still feeling bad. We got on the uptown tour bus, and stayed on it for most of the loop around one side of Central Park, around Harlem, and down the other side, getting off near the Whitney Museum to meet R's friends Kaylene and Dan (plus their three-month-old son Easton.) R started to feel better after a wander around the psychedelia exhibit and an awesome bloody mary in the cafe, and afterwards we went for a wee walk round Central Park, before getting a cab to the East Village to meet up with Joe. We went for sushi, then he took us for a walk arond his neighbourhood as the sun was going down. We went to see Hitchcock's Rope at a local cinema. It's a great film anyway, but the audience were really into it, laughing at the innuendo and gasping theatrically at the tense bits, which made the experience even more fun. We could have stayed out longer, but it's been a long day and we have to get up in the morning to go to Sid's wedding.
I realise I'm dashing this off quickly before bed, and it's rather dry and sparse on detail, but I just wanted to get down some little sense of what was an awesome day before I forget about it. I just wish we had more time in New York. Two days was never going to be enough at the best of times, and with our currently reduced capacity it's even less so. There are a million more things we'd like to do, but we'll just have to come back another time. It's truely an amazing, exciting city.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Something about mice laying things.
So we were up early as planned, but R is feeling poorly so we're going to just take the day as it comes. If we manage to get some quality tourism done then grand, but if not... well, the situation is not ideal and we both came prepared to spend time convalescing instead of running around town. We'll just have to come back at some time in the future when we're both in better shape, physically and emotionally.
We spent most of our time in the city yesterday on a tour bus built in Glasgow (yay!) and owned and operating by gay-hating Brian Souter's Stagecoach group (boo!). It's one of those tours where you can get off at any stop along the way, and get on the next bus to come around when you're done. Though we weren't able to get off and explore as much as we liked, we had several different tour guides, the best being a quite funny and intensely Brooklyn-proud Gilbert Gottfried soundalike, and worst a dude who sounded just like Cat Face. ("This was the home of Washington Irvine, author of the book Rip Van Winkley.")
Anyway, we've arranged to meet some friends of R's for lunch at noon, which gives us plenty of time to get ourselves together, though will require some navigating in the big city. Yesterday was swelteringly hot, and although it's quite cool and cloudy this morning, the forcast is for even greater heat later today. Yikes. If we survive, we're pencilled in to have dinner with my mate Joe this evening, who has invited us to crash at his East Village apartment tonight. That would be cool but I think returning to home base will have to be the plan.
NYC
Sweltering in Secaucus, a New Jersey suburb whose only saving grace is that it's a 20 minute bus ride from downtown Manhattan. We got in on Wednesday after an uneventful flight to find the state cool and cloudy. The taxi ride to the hotel would have yielded a good view of the New York skyline from the New Jersey turnpike, but with all the low cloud all we got was an unpleasant distopian landscape of smokestacks and powerlines, which nonetheless made me smile, the pleasing sense of unfamiliarity reminding me that I was on holiday. For the rest of the day we stayed in the hotel and surrounding environs, trying to stay awake until a reasonable time, and straying no further than the mall on the other side of the highway. When we got there it looked closed, but we tried a door and found another creepy future scene, or perhaps one from Dawn of the Dead. All the shops, bar about four, were shuttered and empty, as though a plague had swept through the place overnight. The few that were open all had defiant "We are not closing down! We are here to stay!" signs outside. Creepiest of all, though, was the huge white head that grinned at as from behind one set of anonymous shutters.
Today we were up at the crack of dawn, still not quite on local time, and got the bus into New York. Stepping onto the street in downtown New York for the first time, you experience a degree of sensory overload that makes it hard not to just panic and stand slack-jawed. It takes a while to get used to the people, the noise, the traffic, and long skyscraper canyons. We paid through the nose for tour bus tickets, and we spent most of the day being stereotypical New York tourists. It's an amazing, exhilarating place, but man, it's hard work.
I could write a lot more, but I'm flagging. Tomorrow we're planning on getting up early and getting the very first bus into the city. Today some of the tourist attractions were just too busy to deal with - the Empire State Building had a queue stretching around the block - and we're hoping that we'll beat that by getting there first thing.
Labels: new york, photos, travel
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postThursday, August 16, 2007
Creep
As a software developer by trade, if there's one thing I've learned to hate and fear it's "scope creep." This is when the requirements for a piece of software become inflated after the project has begun. Sometimes this is down to the customer's requirements suddenly changing, or some bigwig either in the client's organisation or your own coming up with a "brilliant" idea for a feature that just has to go in. The problem is that these people are rarely developers themselves, and are unlikely to realise that what seems like a simple feature on paper can be a massive headache to implement, and will inevitably result in either a delayed product or some severely pissed-off developers who have to work all hours to put the changes in place. A good development manager is one who is able to say "no" when asked to cram in features that will put unnecessary extra strain on the project team.
Why, then, am I suffering from scope creep on a personal project that really has only one client calling the shots - myself?
I had hoped to have a first of Poster, my desktop blogging app, out weeks ago, but despite being a sad bastard and spending a lot of my free time working on it, it's still not quite ready for public consumption. I am fairly pleased with it so far, though. It seems pretty stable, and, I think, easy to use (though that's hard to judge given I'm so close to it), and I always said that I'd try to keep to a "release early/release often" model, and not try to create an app which is all things to all men straight away, but I can't keep from adding things to my "to do" list. It's been capable of making, browsing and deleting blog posts for months now. It's just making it "nice" that's taking the time.
The end is, however, in sight. I've had a meeting with myself and told me in no uncertain terms that no new features are going to be added to the first version. So hopefully there will be something for you to download and be disappointed by fairly soon.
Labels: development, poster
link | 2 comment(s) | links to this postSunday, August 12, 2007
Supersonic
A few weeks back we attended the Supersonic festival in Birmingham. The roundup article is now up on diskant.
Labels: music
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postEggs
There's something about a big cooked breakfast on a Sunday morning - unhealthy though it may be - that leaves you with a feeling of gentle wellbeing for the rest of the day. When I cook breakfast it more often than not follows the same basic, vaguely-Mexican-ish template, today being no exception. Onions, potatoes (introduced, lazily, in the form of frozen hash browns and broken up with the spatula when soft), eggs and cheese all scrambled together and dumped on a tortilla with lashings of hot sauce on top. Fattening, filling, and ready in about ten minutes.
I have, not unrelatedly, been flipping through a book of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's foody articles for various newspapers and magazines. I find him a bit on the smug side on telly, but his writing is both interesting and witty, while displaying the same passion for food as is obvious from his tv appearances. My expanding belly makes obvious the fact that I like to stuff my face on a regular basis, but I wouldn't describe myself as a "foody" as such, but his articles make enjoyable reading, covering everything from basic recipes to the morality of eating meat, while entertainingly crusading against pushers of crap food.
Labels: food
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postFriday, August 10, 2007
Sweeties
This has been the week from hell, and both R and I are feeling a bit glum. I shall spare you the details, but pleasingly each of us ordered a present for the other without them knowing, and this morning they both arrived at about the same time. I got a big box of Lush bath stuff for R, and in return received a great big box of retro sweeties, including Dib-Dabs, Refreshers, Gobstoppers, Wham Bars, and Sherbet Fountains. The latter completely obliterating a false memory I had of sucking sherbert through the licorice "straw" in the top, since it is completely solid and intended for dipping.
Expect me to run around like an idiot then collapse in a diabetic coma before the weekend is out. link | 0 comment(s) | links to this post
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Wet
Another miserable, dreich day in this long cold non-summer, so we decided to make peace with the H2O and head down to the local leisure centre to go swimming. Unfortunately, everybody else in Glasgow had the same idea. Little kids dive-bombed the shallow-end, big kids dive-bombed the deep end, and a gang of pasty neds colonized the hot-tub. Not even the a strategically deposited Mars bar could guarantee enough room to actually swim, Glaswegian children being made of stronger stuff. We bobbed about for a bit, spotting little gaps of calm and grabbing them when we could, but in the end we just gave up and headed home.
Scotland isn't renowned for its hot summers, but this is ridiculous. We've barely had a handful of nice days in three months. Fortunately, we're due to visit the land of crippling, punishing heat soon enough. We cannot wait.
Labels: diary
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postLoft
The house in which I grew up was a bungalow, but it did have a small loft. Although not big enough for a grown man to stand up in, my dad installed flooring and lights, and began construction of a model railway which became the most sustained creative project I can remember him ever embarking on, even constructing a false "sky" with painted clouds to cover the bare beams of the roof. That it was intended for his me was a fairly tissue-thin excuse. I was much too young to appreciate it when he started work on it, though I did get a lot of pleasure from it over the years, and it became one of the few activities we could enjoy together. But what sticks in my memory, and has bubbled up tonight, is not so much the train set itself, large and exceptionally detailed as it was, but the ambience of the loft.
Access to it was by a rickety wooden stepladder, and for much of the time during which I had any interest in model trains, I was too small, or at least too timid to climb it myself, requiring my dad's to carry me up, or, later on, at least to lift me through the hole in the ceiling once I had reached the top. Unaccompanied access to the loft was, therefore, impossible, even if I had been allowed. This was fine by me. I think I would have been too scared to go up there alone anyway. There was something very unnerving about that cramped secret room above the house. The sounds of the plumbing that ran from the water tank, the lack of windows and the odd way that sounds from downstairs or outdoors were muffled by the roof or the insulation beneath the flooring, plus the dusty relics in that dark half that was given over to storage, gave it an almost mystical air. Going up to the loft was like stepping out of the real world for a while. Slipping off the stage and behind the scenes where old props lay discarded, having served their use for now and waiting for the next performance. Though I had only been a baby a few years previously, because that time was unremembered, it felt like ancient history, but here that time still existed, contemporaneously with our own, like a ghost.
A few years ago I went round to my parents' house when they were away on holiday, got out the stepladder - a more modern aluminium one rather than the wooden deathtrap that I was rightly scared to climb as a child - and went up there. The model railway was still there. I plugged it in, tried to get some trains going, but dust or corrosion of their contacts made them sluggish and unreliable, though I dare say that some care and attention could restore them to full working order again. Most of the same junk, including that old pram, was still there, as well as the black bin-bag full of decorations and its unique and permanent smell of ancient Christmasses. It still gave me a little shiver.
Recently my parents had a bit of a clear out. Most of the contents of the loft have gone to the tip now, but I reckon the trains are still there, under their blue painted sky gone dark.
Labels: memories
link | 0 comment(s) | links to this postWednesday, August 01, 2007
Finally I have 40 cakes! But it cost me 40 friends!
Three panel genius at 200 Bad Comics.
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