The Bonelake Perspective

New Commuting Strategy

2011-10-08T14:55:00.001-07:00

I can see the campus from my house, its about a 20 minute walk, all downhill for the first half of the trek, then slightly uphill the rest of the way to the Olin building. I've always thought that biking to work would be the way to go, but I hate getting home all sweaty and gross. The problem is the uphill trek. From the River to My House is about a 300 foot climb over the course of just under a mile, a 6% grade for those who care to know. But trust me, its steep. It takes a lot of work to get up to my house, even on my road bike.
But, awhile back I was reading about some of the new electric assist bikes, and I thought hey, I haven't bought a new bike in a long time. So, I started doing a bit more research and decided that one of the Trek Ride+ bikes would be great. I ended up with the Trek FX+. Sadly, my local bike shop can't sell the Ride+ bikes, so I had to go to La Crosse to find this one. The good news is that this is a good time of the year to get a new bike! 30% off was the sale today.

I took it for a ride around LaCross and up the only little hill I could find, the Cass Ave Bridge, not much of a hill, but I knew I was on to something when I felt like I was riding on the flats with the wind at my back, when I was actually going up a little hill. After riding it around downtown a little longer I went back to the shop, smitten. The only decision was which panniers to get so I can haul groceries and my stuff to school.
Jane hasn't ridden it yet, but I have the feeling I know what she'll want for Mothers day. This would be the perfect option for our cycling marriage. I could ride my road bike and she could ride the electric assist. I think I see some longer bike rides together in our future :-)
The other great thing is that no gas is required. Its all battery operated, and as I coast down the hill the battery is recharged. I'lll be able to easily cruise my way to school, and then on the way home I can engage the electric drive at the bottom of the hill, and get the assistance I need to climb up to my house. I won't arrive home sweaty, and I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that I got a few extra minutes of exercise, and didn't use any gas! The only downside is that I'll be only inches away from the Whippy Dip as I ride home, but as long as I can get by there I'll be fine.

Pizza Oven

2011-09-20T08:31:00.001-07:00

I love it when a good plan comes together. Last summer we decided to finally take the plunge and build a pizza oven at the lake. After looking at the options to site the oven, and thinking about a fireplace/oven combination, we finally decided to combine the pizza oven project with our desire to replace the aging and increasingly ugly outdoor bar area.
In late June I contacted a few different stone masons to start to get an idea of cost and availability. I was immediately impressed with David Marek www.layersofstone.com and his ideas on the project. I checked some references and decided that my initial impression was correct, that David would be a good guy to work with. Here's his original sketch of our project.

David was able to start tearing out the old bar, and working on the replacement the last week of July. He just finished the project last week, in time for us to enjoy some Pizza with our friends this last weekend. The result was beyond my expectations. Here's a photo of the final outcome that you can compare with the plan:

For more shots of the project you can check out my Flickr Photo Set
Last saturday was the inaugural pizza baking. It took about two hours to get the oven fully up to temperature, but the wait was well worth it. We used this crust recipe and pre-baked the crusts on both sides for just a few seconds. The crusts came out very light and crunchy. I'm looking forward to trying out lots of different crust recipes, but this was definitely a winner.

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist - Interactive Edition

2011-09-06T05:12:00.001-07:00

Its fun to see my sabbatical project getting loose the wild. It is always a bit scary to work on something creative and new and then let other people play with it and respond to it. Such is the case with the new eBook I worked on during my sabbatical. Unlike other eBooks that you may be aware of, this book -- in the words of Emeril -- "kicks it up a notch". Using some cool open source javascript code that I've had to modify and bend a bit for my own use this book allows the reader to try their hand at Python right in the book. Examples are fully runnable in two different ways. Each section has an accompanying video. My co-author, David Ranum and I are using this book in class this Fall and its fun to see how the students interact with the book. We've had none of the usual Fall frustration at getting Python installed on students machines. You can have a look at the book here. Note, you'll need a good modern browser, and a gmail account. We've had the best success with Chrome and Safari. Firefox 6 works but seems a little flakey at times.

Yesterday Phil Wagner posted a nice little writeup about our project on his BrokenAirplane blog.

As I told Phil, this book is really a triumph of open source. Here are the open source components we've used and modified for this project:

The text in the book is based on the original How to Think Like a Computer Scientist by Jeff Elkner, et. al. You can find the non-interactive version here
The Python Interpreter is By Scott Graham and you can find out information about it at Skulpt.org. This was a really key piece and although I've spent a ton of time creating a turtle graphics module for it, the book wouldn't have gotten off the ground without it. In the book the pieces we refer to as activecode all make use of sculpt, along with the really nice javascript editor Codemirror.
What we call codelens in the book is based on work by Philip Guo. I really like this part because students can step through the code a line at a time both forward and backward.
Finally, the glue that holds the whole thing together is the excellent Sphinx publishing system. This really turned out to be the key as Sphinx lets you create new directives to use in writing. I was able to add directives to sphinx to make it really easy to include the interactive features without getting in the way of the writing.

I really think this Interactive Edition has huge possibilities for the future, I can see incorporating many other interesting kinds of visualizations, and video collections. My future todo list is already very large, and I'm anxious to hear ideas from others as they use the book.

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide Sixth Edition pdf download ebook - davidflanagan.com

2011-04-26T08:41:00.000-07:00

JavaScript: The Definitive Guide Sixth Edition pdf download ebook - davidflanagan.com

Flannigan is a good author, I find his books to be well written and very useful. As an author myself, its sad to see. I know that the first time I saw a student reading my textbook book for free on Google it almost floored me.

I don't write textbooks to make a lot of money, so its not like google is depriving me of a huge income, but there is that kick-in-the-gut feeling that someone has completely devalued your creation when you see it out there for free. Its like, come on, I worked hard on this book for two years, putting all of my best thinking and ideas into it and you can't even bring yourself to pay the $45 for it?

So, if you need a book on Javascript or jQuery, do yourself a favor and buy this guys books.

Joshua Tree National Park

2011-03-24T19:36:00.001-07:00

I think I said that the plan for today was to head to the Palm Springs tram, and do a little hiking at the top of the tram then enjoy a nice lunch in downtown Palm Springs. But two minutes before we walked out of the house we changed our minds and decided to go to Joshua Tree National Park. Since we both have boys named Joshua, and they are staying together while we are out here in California, it made sense for us to check out this national park. We are glad we did.

The south entrance to Joshua Tree is only about 25 miles away from Indio, so its a short drive to get to the park. But, once you are there you find out how huge the park is. We drove another 23 miles through desert scrub before we got to some of the really interesting parts. The Joshua Tree National Park is a mixture of climates, it is part Colorado Desert, and part Mojave Desert, microclimates abound.

Our first big stop was at the Cholla cactus garden, its weird how these pictures almost look like they are underwater photos of coral!

In the national park there are these small mountain ranges that pop up out of nowhere that look like someone just drove in a huge dump truck and left a pile of rubble behind. In fact these are all granite, and formed from volcanic activity.

Because of all the different climates that are part of the park, the whole southern half of the park doesn't even have any Joshua Trees! You have to wait until you get to a little higher elevation which is in the north and west part of the park. Here's Jim and Karen standing under a very picturesque Joshua Tree.

The Joshua Tree gets its name from the mormon's who saw it and thought that it reminded them of the prophet Joshua stretching his arms heavenward. In fact the "tree" is part of the Yucca family. It has extremely sharp points on the end of the leaves which the loggerhead shrike (a bird) uses to kill its prey!

Our last stop in the park was a great little hike in hidden canyon. Here you can get a sense of how these little mountains were created out of blocks of granite. Its amazing to see the Joshua Trees along with the scrub oak, and Juniper trees just growing out of the rocks.

On the way home, we drove through the wind farm in the San Gorgonio pass. This is a great site for a wind farm as the wind blows here all the time. There are more than 4000 turbines here that generate enough power for the entire Coachella valley! There are turbines here of all ages, some very old and very small, some with two blades, for working in higher winds, and some very new and large turbines. Poor Jim, we discovered too late that you can get tickets for a tour of the wind farm!

Iguazu Falls Postscript

2011-03-24T19:02:00.001-07:00

Wow, We were just here and just on this very same boat ride. I wrote about it here: http://blog.bonelakesoftware.com/2011/02/hiking-in-iguazu-national-park.html. Now today I find out that two American tourists have died doing that same excursion.

Apparently the boat hit some rocks and flipped over. With the power of the falls and that river its amazing that only two people died. http://www.smh.com.au/travel/tourists-killed-as-raft-flips-under-iguazu-falls-20110322-1c4f9.html?from=smh_sb Its worth following the link to the article as it has an awesome picture of a rescue working being lowered from a helicopter that gives you a sense of the scale of these falls.

Spring Break Biking in Indio

2011-03-24T09:43:00.001-07:00

Its Thursday morning, and the earthquake drill is over. Not that the drill took up any of our valuable time, all we had to do was put out a white towel to indicate that we were all OK. The block captain surveys the block and then checks in with anyone that is not flying the white flag. Walking around the block its as if the entire community of Heritage Palms has surrendered.

Its been a fun week, here in california with our friends Jim and Karen. We rented bikes for the week from Big Wheel bikes and we've been on several rides. Yesterday was a favorite, we rode from our house here to La Quinta (http://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/30256922/) Its nice and flat, and through plenty of busy roads, but the bike lanes here are nice and wide and all of the drivers are courteous towards cyclists. The greatest thing is that there are mountains everywhere you look.

Tuesday we drove over the mountains to Temecula. We had a beautiful view looking back into the Coachella Valley.

But a little while later we encountered some snow. Yes, we came out here to get away from the snow only to drive into some in the mountains. Its not nearly as bad as it is back home where the Twin Cities is getting hit with about a foot, and Kaia is getting even more than that in Moorhead. Here's Jim, Karen, and Jane having a snowball fight.

Although we had a fun day in Temecula we didn't really find any wine to fall in love with. The best I tasted was the Viognier at Callaway. We had some great pizza at the Temecula Pizza Company. Half gorgonzola and pear, half turkey and cranberry with white sauce. We also had a small pepperoni and sausage, just for the sake of scientific comparison.

Today the plan is to go up the tram in Palm Springs and do some hiking in the mountains, then grab some lunch in downtown Palm springs. From there who knows what the day will bring, we only have another 36 hours before we head back to the snow and cold, so we've got to make the most of it.

Adding a module to Skulpt

2011-03-19T15:05:00.001-07:00

Now that I'm back from traveling in South America I've started on a project to add a turtle graphics module to skulpt. Skulpt is a javascript implementation of Python written by Scott Graham, and is available on skulpt.googlecode.com. Its a very nice project because it allows you to embed a Python interpreter right in your web page. I've written about how to do this in a previous post.
The skulpt interpreter works like a charm, but it does not yet have any of the Python standard library modules implemented. Scott has been working with wrapping some of Googles closure libraries, and has a webgl module too. But none of your regular Python friends are available, things like math, random, turtle, etc need to be implemented. For the most part these things are already available in javascript so the work is in creating the module and then wrapping the underlying Javascript inside the standard Python API.
Where to start? There's not a lot of documentation provided for skulpt, so I'm hoping this post will be enough to help others get going a bit quicker. Scott was very helpful in responding to all my emails so this is not a criticism of him, rather I'm hoping this will save him the effort the next time someone wants to extend skulpt. So, here's the deal. skulpt relies on two javascript files the first is skulpt.js and builtin.js A very minimal installation only uses skulpt.js, whereas if you want to use any modules they are in builtin.js. Looking around the distribution you will not immediately find skulpt.js because you need to build it. You get a sculpt.js file by using the m script that comes with the distribution. running m --help will give you the full list of commands, but the two that you probably most care about are m dist and m docbi The dist command builds both skulpt.js and builtin.js docbi builds builtin.js and puts a new copy of it in the doc/static directory.
Lets begin with a quick tour of the source tree:

src - contains the implementation of the Python interpreter
src/lib - has the module implementations of webgl and goog. This is where turtle will live and any other modules I implement along the way.
doc - This directory contains a google app engine application and is what you see on skulpt.org There are a couple of important files to check out in here. One of them is doc/static/env/editor.js This is the code that ties together the interactive editor on the home page with the skulpt interpreter and the codemirror editor. If you know how to build a google app engine app then this directory makes sense. One thing about the home page is that it is not set up to use any of the modules. The modules are used in the more advanced ide, which you can find in doc/ide/static. I'm going to tell you how to add modules to the simpler editor later in this article.
test - this directory contains a bunch of files for testing the implementation in a batch mode. These tests are run whenever you run m dist, or m test.
dist - This directory gets created and populated when you run the m dist command. It contains the built and compressed versions of skulpt.js and builtin.js

To illustrate how to make use of modules, here's an extended version of my earlier hello world style example.

<html>
<head>
<script src="skulpt.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="builtin.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

</head>

<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
function outf(text) {
   var mypre = document.getElementById("output");
   mypre.innerHTML = mypre.innerHTML + text;
}

function builtinRead(x)
{
    if (Sk.builtinFiles === undefined || Sk.builtinFiles["files"][x] === undefined)
        throw "File not found: '" + x + "'";
    return Sk.builtinFiles["files"][x];
}

function runit() {
   var prog = document.getElementById("yourcode").value;
   var mypre = document.getElementById("output");
   mypre.innerHTML = '';
   Sk.configure({output:outf,
           read: builtinRead
              });
   try {
      Sk.importMainWithBody("<stdin>",false,prog);
   } catch (e) {
      alert(e);
   }
}
</script>
<h3>Try This</h3>
<form>
<textarea edit_id="eta_5" id="yourcode">
print "Hello World"
</textarea>
<button onclick="runit()" type="button">Run</button>
</form>

<pre id="output"></pre>

</body>
</html>

There are some important differences between this version, and the version and the non-module version. First off, the call to Sk.configure contains another key value pair which sets up a specialized read function. This is the function that is responsible for returning your module out of the large array of files that are contained in the builtin.js file. You will see that all of the modules are contained in this one file, stored in a big JSON structure. The extra key value pair is:
read: builtinRead
The read function is just for loading modules and is called when you do an import statement of some kind. In this case the function accesses the variable builtinFiles which is created from the builtin.js file. The other difference, of course, is that you have to include builtin.js in your html file. Note that builtin.js must be included after skulpt.js
Now as far as the module itself goes, the easiest thing to do is to start your module in the src/lib directory. This way it will automatically get built and included in builtin.js. If you don't put it there then you are going to have to modify the m script, specifically the docbi function in the m script to include your module. Suppose that you want to have a module called bnm.test Here's what you have to do. First, you need to make a bnm directory under lib. In this directory you will need to have either __init__.py or __init__.js or bnm.js to stand in for the bnm module. There doesn't need to be anything in the file as long as it exists. This is just like CPython by the way. Then to make a test module you can either make a test directory and put all your javascript code in __init__.js or you can simply create a test.js file in the bnm directory. Lets look at the test module.

var $builtinmodule = function(name)
{
    var mod = {};
    var myfact = function(n) {
 if(n < 1) {
     return 1;
 } else {
     return n * myfact(n-1);
 }
    }
    mod.fact = new Sk.builtin.func(function(a) {
 return myfact(a);
    });


    mod.Stack = Sk.misceval.buildClass(mod, function($gbl, $loc) {
 $loc.__init__ = new Sk.builtin.func(function(self) {
     self.stack = [];
 });
 
 $loc.push = new Sk.builtin.func(function(self,x) {
     self.stack.push(x);
 });
 $loc.pop = new Sk.builtin.func(function(self) {
     return self.stack.pop();
 });
    },
    'Stack', []);


    return mod;
}

All modules start out with the $var builtinmodule = statement.
This test module exposes a single method to the outside world, called fact, There are a couple of key functions for building up a module. The Sk.builtin.func call for adding functions to your module, and the Sk.misceval.buildClass method. This test module defines a simple factorial function called fact, and a class called stack. Here's a simple Python program that exercises the module:

import bnm.test

print 'starting'

print bnm.test.fact(10)

x = bnm.test.Stack()

x.push(1)

x.push(2)

print x.pop()

print 'done'

Its not obvious, but the buildClass method takes four parameters: globals, func, name, bases
It seems that you always pass the mod object itself as the globals parameter, the func parameter is a function that represents the class object, the Name is the external name of the class, and bases presumably would be if the class is inheriting from another class.
The Sk.builtin.func method creates a function. For module creation we typically only have to worry about the one parameter, func, which is the javascript implementation of our Python function. The method can also take a globals object and two closure objects. Look at the comments in function.js if you want more explanation of how the builtin.func method works.
Well, I think this should be enough to get you going. Its worth repeating, if you made it this far, don't forget to call m docbi or m dist after you make changes in your module, its easy to get into the mode of thinking that the new javascript is automatically loaded. But builtin.js is not automatically rebuilt!
I'll consider this post a work in progress, please leave a comment if something is unclear or you would like something explained in more detail.

Cruise Wrapup Part II

2011-03-15T10:44:00.001-07:00

I've been back in Decorah for less than 24 hours, its been a little more than 48 hours since we got off the cruise ship in Valparaiso. It was great to get a good nights sleep last night after having an overnight flight from Santiago to Dallas. Boy do I wish I could sleep on airplanes.

The Celebrity debarkation process was about as painless as you could make it. We woke up, showered and dressed, got some coffee at the Cova Cafe, checked our email one last time, and then walked off the ship. Like Buenos Aires, the port in Valparaiso is not really designed for cruise ships, so we got off the ship and then took a bus through the containers to the actual terminal. We found our luggage right away and realized that this process was so efficient we still had about 45 minutes to wait before our guide, Mac, from La Bicicleta Verde It was a little odd this morning because Chile was supposed to go off daylight savings time at the same time the US was supposed to go on daylight savings. So, in one day we would go from being 3 hours ahead of home to just one hour. Strangely the government of chile decided at the last minute not to go off daylight savings time, so some people were really off. Mac showed up just after 9:00, and we got our tour underway. We started by exploring the hills of Valparaiso. Its an old shipping town, started when Nitrates were a big natural commodity that was shipped out of here. Before the Canal, and before artificial nitrates had been invented. So there are many beautiful old shipping houses owned by the british that have been converted into small hotels. Here you can see one last view of our ship from the hills:

We continued on past the first Lutheran Church in Valparaiso, and then had to avoid a pack of street dogs. All chilean cities are full of street animals that are well feed and mostly well behaved. The problem this morning was there was one female in heat and four males that were trying to get her attention. Things got a little violent, so we headed off in the opposite direction hoping to lose the pack.

Mac told us that the day before this whole area of the city had been without power. Now as you can see from this picture Valparaiso has a very modern system of electrical distribution:

We were told that whenever there is a power loss, rather than trying to untangle the mass of wires and fix the problem, they simply find an area of the city that has power and then run a new wire to the blacked out area from there.

After the hill tour we headed down the coastline to visit some of the beautiful coastal towns, suchas Vina del Mar. This would be an awesome place to come back and visit on a land tour. The beaches are spectacular, and there are some really awesome restaurants looking right out over the water. Mac got us number one at the most popular restaurant along this stretch. People literally line up outside this restaurant waiting for a table. Something that is unheard of in Chile. We started off with a couple of apetizers: Machas ala parmesan (razor clams smothered in a parmesan cream sauce.) The only way to sum up this dish is: To Die For! We also had Camerones pil pil (little shrimp scampi). Then for the main course we had freshly prepared fish. They have about 7 different kinds of fish on the menu, each one with several different preparations. I had Albacora (swordfish) grilled, and Jane had the Corvina (chilean sea bass) also grilled. We had a side of Arroz and thought we were in heaven. What a great last meal of the trip. Oh, lest I forget , I also had my first Pisco Sour. Pisco Sour is a great chilean drink made of a distilled wine (kind of like brandy) served with lime juice and simple syrup. Just one please!

After our delicious lunch we headed out to wine country. The Casablanca valley is between Valparaiso and Santiago. We stopped at the Emiliana Organic Vineyards, for a wine tasting and a walk around the vineyards. We had a great wine steward, named Joshua, who served us samples of their premium Emiliana Adobe line. This is sold in the United States under the Emiliana Natura label because of a trademark dispute with the Adobe software company. Please lawyers find something more productive to do with your time. The highlight was their Gewurtztraminer, its not nearly as sweet as the German Gewurtztraminers and was very refreshing. In addition to being organic they also practice Biodynamics (you'll have to look it up). This sounds like a lot of hokum to me, but you can't argue with the results.

Finally, what trip would be complete without some cute animals. The vineyard also raises Alpacas, which we learned are part of the Camel family.

With the vineyard tour over, our last stop was the Santiago airport. We had lots of time to kill, since we got there about 5pm and our flight wasn't supposed to leave until 10:05. Of course at 5:00 the American Airlines counters were not even open yet. Then at 6:00 when they opened it was a mad house. hundreds of tired cruisers all anxious to get home, and all accustomed to being pampered for two weeks were now forced to stand in extremely long lines like so many commoners. It was not pretty. An interesting thing about flying out of Santiago is that all the outgoing flights leave in the evening, this is partly because you want to time your flight to get in to the states at a decent hour of the morning. Say 6:00 AM or so. But all the incoming flights get in to Santiago at 7 or 8 in the morning anyway, so why not have an outbound flight at 10AM? By Chilean law, all outbound flights must have a complete mechanical inspection within 12 hours of their flight by a Chilean mechanical team. The reason for this law dates back to 1972 when the Uruguayan rugby team crashed in the Andes and resorted to cannibalism to stay alive. The Chilean legislature wanted to ensure that nothing like this would ever happen again so they passed this inspection law. The result is that the flights that leave in the evening are never delayed for mechanical reasons, because they've had all day to inspect and fix everything. Nice, makes you feel safe.

Well, that brings us as far as our last flights, which were pretty uneventful. A bit of turbulence somewhere between Santiago and Dallas is about the only thing worth mentioning. This was an awesome trip. Thanks again to all the great new friends we made on board the ship for making it a fun time!

Cruise Wrapup Part I

2011-03-15T09:09:00.001-07:00

Its the last day aboard ship, and it has been a day of mixed emotions. We are excited to get back to our friends and family in Decorah, yet we have had so much fun on this cruise, and we have actually met some great people as well. Some of these people get to stay on the ship for the next leg of the cruise and as we think about our long day tomorrow and our overnight flight we are a bit jealous that we don't get to go through the Panama canal, and then fly home from Fort Lauderdale. I'm amazed that I could even consider staying onboard for another two weeks, but we've learned that its really all about pacing (note to self, next time do not buy the unlimited drinks package.)

The cruise critic message boards really provide a great service. Not only can you find good reviews and recommendations of the non-ship excursions, but we've met a lot of fun people, and have been able to enjoy excursions with people that we met online prior to the cruise. So to Carol and Mike, and Carol and Ralph, and Scott and Gai, and Kristine and Craig (our aussie friends)... Thanks!! To Jonathan and Nancy and Jo, we look forward to the final Martini rankings, Aloha! And to Shila and Yogi, Kim and Rico, Rachel and Howie, thanks again for the fun dinners! Hopefully we'll cross paths with some of you again on a future cruise.

So, where have we been? Here's the super-fast summary of our travels:

Decorah to MSP with Jenkins, Thanks for the ride guys!

MSP to Dallas

Dallas to EZE (Buenos Aires) cross town transfer to Jorge Newberry and then on to Iguazu

Two fantastic days at Iguazu falls. If you are looking at this cruise or planning a trip to South America, do not skip Iguazu. The views are fantastic.

Iguazu back to BA and on to the ship!

BA to Montevideo, Uruguay

Montevideo to Punta del Este

Punta del Este to Puerto Madryn -- Desert like climate but great penguins and sea lions.

Puerto Madryn to Cape Horn and the Ushuaia (Ushuaia gets my vote for favorite city of the trip) Its the southernmost city of the world, and the hiking and views on our hike in Tierra del Fuego national park were just phenomenal!

Ushuaia to Punta Arenas... OK, but not that spectacular. If you haven't seen penguins by now, you should definitely do the trip here to see the penguins.

Punta Arenas to Puerto Montt. The port area is not spectacular, but once you get out into the country or to one of the other smaller neighboring cities its great. Beautiful scenery.... second favorite city. Of course the zip line ride really made this stop worthwhile.

Puerto Montt to Valparaiso to Santiago

Santiago to Dallas

Dallas to MSP

Ride home with Sandy Larsen! Wow gone 16 days and no parking charges at the airport!

Other stuff:

While on board, we used up 435 minutes of internet time.

We drank 2 bottles of wine :-) or more...

Jane won $700 at the craps table

We really enjoyed many of the shows onboard the Celebrity Infinity! We had become pretty much jaded about cruise line entertainment, but the quality here was really high. I missed having a magic show, but the music was mostly really great, except for the aging former Argentine star, who just doesn't realize its time to hang it up. When you are on a cruise ship and you have to start your show with a video about how great you used to be, that is not a good sign! Travis, from Nebraska, you rock. The a cappella group top shelf was great too. It was hard to listen to this recently graduated group of young guys without thinking about Kaia's future as a musical performer.

No summary would be complete without some room pictures, so here are a few pics of our Celebrity Suite. This suite will be redone when the ship is Solticized in November, but we thought it was perfect for this cruise. Not only was the room spectacular, but our Butler, Teguh, was the most Amazing person. No job was too big or too small, he really made our cruise seamless. From sneaking into the room before I was awake every morning so that my coffee was hot and fresh on the table, to organizing a part for 20 in our room one night. He was the best!

Jane says I can type and read at the airport tomorrow, so I think its time to get dressed for dinner one last time!

Tsunami Warning!

2011-03-11T13:46:00.001-08:00

This is weird, but I woke up this morning wondering about the question: "what are the ships procedures in case of a Tsunami?" Would we head for the open sea and ride out the giant fast moving swell there, or would we seek safe haven in a harbor of some kind. Then, when Jane checked her email and the news she told me about the 8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan, and the Tsunami warning issued for the entire Pacific Ocean. I didn't really give it much thought, because after all we are a LONG way away from Japan. However, when we were in the tour bus this morning, our guide told us that they were evacuating Easter Island and some of the other Chilean Islands. OK, maybe this is more serious than we thought. Now I was thinking what kind of damage could be done to the harbor in Valparaiso? Will the tsunami have an impact on our trip home? When we returned from touring we noticed that they were essentially evacuating the harbor, all of the ships we already towed out or in the process of being moved out of the harbor to more open water. Score one for the open water solution.

As far as we know, this is not going to have a big impact on our trip. Out at sea, the tsunami is nothing but a big swell that we would ride up and over like any other large swell. Its only when it gets toward land that it becomes the giant wall of water you see on the news. The captain is going about business as usual and we are on our way out of the harbor at Puerto Montt as I write this. We have about 650 nautical miles from here to Valparaiso, and tomorrow we will spend a relaxing last day at sea. If we were the tsunami, we would be able to get there in just a little over an hour! According to news reports the wave traveled from japan toward Hawaii and the west coast of the US at over 500 mph. The pictures of Japan on the news are just unbelievable, but again it appears that distance will sufficiently weaken the tsunami to the point where we will not be affected at all.

So, lets turn our attention to our fabulous day here in Puerto Montt! We got to check off a bucket list item today. What could that be you ask? Zip Lining! The highlight of todays tour was going to the top of a volcano, and then riding a series of zip lines to the bottom. When we arrived on the pier this morning it was quite overcast and the owner of the tour company warned us that with the rain from last night and the wind today we might be out of luck. But we took off in our little bus and headed for Lago Llanguihue, this is a huge vacation lake that sits below the volcanoes. And when we arrived at the base of the ski lift on the volcano it appeared that we might in fact be out of luck. Here's a view of what the side of the volcano/ski area looked like:

We were clearly in and above the cloud line, and it was really eerie to see the wisps of clouds, that looked like steam rising from the dark sides of the volcano. Our guide told us that we would not be allowed to go because of the wind. So, we just hung out for a while looking at the clouds and suddenly we noticed that the sky towards the top was starting to clear. Suddenly the chair lift even started running. Our guide came out and said OK team lets head down and we'll go into Puerto Vargassafsf for some shopping and a nice lunch. Wait! a couple of the women (including jane) said. Can't we at least ride up the chair lift? Of course I'm thinking you guys are mad, why would we want to ride higher up into the clouds to just see more clouds. So our guide told us to wait and she would check. Miraculously, now the 'experts' were out checking the zip lines to see if they were safe. The verdict came back that it was safe, so a few of us decided to follow the original plan and go for it.

When we reached the top of the ski lift we were treated to the following view:

Clearly you can see the clouds had dissipated and we had a fantastic view of the top of the volcano, and its glacier. It took us a few minutes, as the guy working at the top of the lift did not speak any english, but we eventually located our zip lining guides. They got us into our harnesses and led us to the top of the launching pad for our very brief (10 seconds?) safety briefing.

Him: hold

Me: Si

Him: break

Me: Si

Him: No touch the cable, only here and the break

Me: Si

And off you go!

Here's Jane and our friend Scott before we got our helmets. Those harnesses are certainly stylish.

And now here's Jane on her first run of the day. Yes kids thats your mother hanging by a thread from a long thin piece of cable.. Don't worry she's having the time of her life.

And now here's one of me coming in for a landing after our longest ride. The span of this ride was 600 meters! The total ride time was about 38 seconds which means our average speed was 15.78 meters/second or about 35 mph.

In all, we got to go on four different runs, each was great and very exhilarating. We had an adrenaline rush for a good hour after we were all done, talking excitedly in the bus all the way back down the volcano. A great day and a lot of fun. Can't wait to try it again sometime!

On the High Seas

2011-03-10T06:09:00.001-08:00

We are sitting here having our morning coffee and hot chocolate watching the waves crash and roll. We left the Straits of Magellan sometime in the middle of the night and entered the Pacific Ocean, where we have high winds and, as the captain says, "Big Waves." I took some video looking out our window, but I'm not sure you can get the real sense of how much we are rocking and rolling. I'll post the video when we have a faster internet connection. Meanwhile I just walked down the stairs to the Cova Cafe to get some of their great little croissants for breakfast, and I noticed that the crew has strategically placed barf bags along the stairwells and in other places. According to the captain, who just updated us, we are experiencing winds at 50-60 knots with gusts of 70 knots. In addition the waves are 15-20 feet high.

I just got back from the workout room. walking up the stairs was quite an adventure. At times I felt like I was floating up two to three stairs at a time, and at other times, I felt like I was carrying an elephant on my back as I was trying to go up a single stair. Bootcamp was postponed this morning due to the high seas. I decided to go ahead on run on the elliptical, which was kind of fun with all the dipping and plunging the ship was doing.

We will be at sea today, and tomorrow, although later today and all of tomorrow we will be cruising through the Chilean Fjords. The Fjords will be much calmer than the open ocean. I'm not sure whether or not to even attempt to go to bootcamp workout in these high waves.

Yesterday we were in Punta Arenas. It was our first stop in Chile. We did not do any kind of excursion or tour. We just took the tender to shore and walked around the town a bit. There was a nice park square with trees, and a statue of Magellan, and handicrafts. Apparently you are supposed to kiss the toe of Magellan and you will come back again, but with the crew having you sanitize your hands every five minutes, I can't imagine why anyone would want to kiss the toe of a statue and share the germs of a hundred other travelers that way!

While we were in town we found an internet cafe, where for the price of a cup of coffee we could get all the free internet we wanted. It was nice to have some high speed internet for a change.

We just got back from a tour of the bridge. It was very interesting and one of the officers confirmed that the wind was very strong this morning. He said the maximum gust was 99 knots. Thats about 113 mph for you non-nautical types. So what do you do when you have a twelve story floating building and the wind is blowing against one side of the building at 113 mph? Several things, it turns out. The ship has stabilizers that can be deployed to counteract the forces of the wind. These protrude out of the ship under the water at an angle like long wings that are under the water. In addition there is water ballast that can be pumped from one side of the ship to the other to counteract the wind and the seas. So when you consider that we had a strong current, 15 foot waves, and strong winds gusting to over 100 mph its amazing how little rocking and rolling the ship actually did.

Here are a couple of photos I snapped while we were on the bridge:

Since we are back we are also getting ready to host a little party in our room for some of the people we've met on board. The party will start here, and then we'll also visit some of the rooms and suites that others have. This is a great way to see what kind of room you might like to have the next time you come on board. Here's a shot that I took on the balcony of our friends Jonathan and Nancy.

Cape Horn

2011-03-08T04:56:00.001-08:00

Well, here we are, sitting in our room looking out the windows at Cape horn. Amazing! One of the naturalists on board gave a lecture today, and talked about the size of the ships that were used by explorers like Cook, Magellan, and Drake. They are not much larger than our lifeboats! This really puts a new perspective on things. The Drake passage is to our South and is about 300km wide its all that stands between us and Antarctica. The thing about the Drake passage is that the winds and waves and weather get really horrible, primarily because there is NO LAND down here to get in the way of the wind and waves, so they just whip around the world getting faster and bigger.

We were very lucky today and got a day when the seas were relatively calm, and the skies were quite clear. Here you can see Jane and I on the east side of the island. In the background you can kind of make out the weather station. There is also the Chilean flag, and the Albatross Monument. This is a monument to all the sailors who have died trying to navigate around Cape Horn.

The weather around the cape is very unpredictable. In the span of less than an hour it went from the rather nice, as seen in the picture above to the somewhat sinister as seen below:

Again, I think to myself, here we are on this enormous cruise ship, you'd have to be insane to do this on the size ship that the early explorers used.

Just to catch you up a bit. We've been at sea the last two days. Its very relaxing except that I caught a nasty cold and have been mostly just laying around and taking hits off my inhaler. Between the bouts of chills, I've gone to a few of the excellent lectures they do on board the ship. Two retired college profs who get to sail around the world with celebrity giving lectures on the science and nature of the area we are visiting. Not a bad retirement gig if you ask me.

Meanwhile, Jane has been a demon in the casino. She's been rolling the dice at the craps table and is way ahead of our meagre $200 gambling allowance. Now you might be thinking that there is still plenty of time to lose it all. The thing is our strategy is to squirrel away the winnings and then go back to the table with the original amount again the next night. I know some people would say double down, you don't have anything to lose (except the original $80 that we planned on losing anyway) But our Norwegian Lutheran heritage just doesn't roll that way.

Ushuaia

2011-03-08T04:54:00.001-08:00

Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world. It is in the Patagonia region, and the Tierra Del Fuego province of Argentina. Thats a lot of geographical trivia for you in one statement. Another fun fact about Ushuaia is that the Pan American Highway comes to an end here. You can see Jane and I standing by the sign marking the southern end of the highway. It doesn't look like much of a highway at this point since it is gravel, but nevertheless you could get on this road and start riding and 17,848 km later you would find yourself in Alaska. Now that would be a bike ride.

Although Ushuaia is the southernmost city in the world we are not as far south as you might imagine our latitude is only as far south as Washington DC is north, so there are no issues with permafrost or any of the other problems that plague the far north cities. Interestingly though, there are glaciers very near the city, and we cruised by them and hiked near them today. Ushuaia is located on the Beagle channel. This is the channel that the famous ship carrying Charles Darwin discovered.

Our day in Ushuaia was full of hiking with people we've met from Cruise Critic. There were 11 of us that had joined in a private tour with Christine and Craig from Australia. Our driver and guide, Edgar, was very pleasant, and knowledgeable. He stayed awake the entire trip! He hiked with us and pointed out interesting plants and things along the way. Our main hiking was in the Tierra del Fuego National Park. Here are a couple of photos to give you an idea of how pretty it was. Jane and I are going to try to find an Internet Cafe in Punta Arenas so hopefully with some speedier connectivity I can get some larger versions uploaded to Flickr.

One of the interesting things I discovered on the hike was how similar this area is compared to northern minnesota. Its striking how the effects of the glaciers leave exactly the same marks even though we are in completely different parts of the world. In some places you would think you were on the shores of lake superior instead of standing next to the Beagle Channel.

After hiking in the national park all morning, we got in the van and drove to the ski area above the city. Here we were able to take a ski lift up the mountain to another hiking area. If we had more time we could have continued to hike up the mountain to the glacier. Sadly, the hike was too long and we didn't want to miss the ship! While we were doing a short hike at the top of the lift we were lucky enough to see an Albatross soaring in the sky. These birds are huge, with wingspans of up to 3.5 meters! Sadly it was too far away to get a decent picture.

Here's a shot of the view on the way down the ski lift.

And here you can see our ship on the pier with the city in the foreground.

So far I would say that Ushuaia is my favorite city of the cruise.

My Name is Ferdinand and I'll be Your Waiter

2011-03-05T03:19:00.001-08:00

We have great table mates this cruise! Kim and Rico from Houston, Shyla and Yogi from Ohio, and Rachel and Howard from New Jersey. We look forward to sharing stories of our day with them each night at the late seating. This is worth remarking on because we have seldom had good luck with our dinner companions. From the guy from Hutchinson who kept asking me "you gonna eat that?" to Marge (not sure thats her real name) from Jersey (definitely sure she was from Jersey) who complained every night. Here's a sample of one conversation:
Marge: They never have any good soup on this cruise!
Brad: What kind of soup do you like?
Marge: Cream of Mushroom
Brad: Well, we had that last night
Marge (exasperated): But I didn't order it last night!
This sort of luck has continued for us cruise after cruise, until this one. Except for the cruises we have taken with our great friends Brian and Holly! Anyway since it is just the two of us on this trip, we are grateful for the companionship. Now lest you think this post is going to be about dinner and our waiter, I'm going to shift gears and tell you about our day. We were in Puerto Madryn, but the excursion we had planned was a trip to the Valdez Peninsula. This was an excursion that we booked outside the ship through Forastero Tours.
We were among the first 20 people off the ship this morning, wanting to get ahead of all the big tour busses that were heading the same place we were. We met our guide and driver on the pier and hopped in their car. Our guide introduced himself -- I'm not going to tell you his name, because I'm convinced he will be an excellent tour guide someday and I don't want what I'm about to relate to you to harm him in any way -- and proceeded to tell us that this was his first time leading a tour, and that he was still studying for his certification as a guide. He also hoped his english was good -- it was passable. The next thing he should have said was, "so you're in luck, your tour today will be half price!" But that isn't what he said. In fact he didn't say all that much, period. He did tell us that there are four main economic industries in Puerto Madryn, The Aluminum factory is number one, something, something, and then tourism.
Now, its a long drive from the port to our destination on Peninsula Valdez, about 169km in fact. The other interesting factoid about this part of the world is that the ecology around Peurto Madryn is steppe or steppe-like? A large unforrested region of grassland. This was a combination of small shrubs and sand. In other words there is really nothing interesting to see on this drive, except for the occasional Guarananca or Piche -- but I'm getting ahead of myself. Well, not really, there were two destinations for todays trip. First, the San Lorenzo Penguin Colony, and second Punta Norte Sea Lion and Elephant Seal colonies. Oh yeah, the last 76km to the Punta Norte are on gravel road.
So after riding most of the way in silence, we are approaching the Penguin colony and our guide says. "In a few moments we will be at the penguin colony, here is a penguin" At which point he pulls out a picture of a penguin. He continues: "Penguins are black and white, with a white band up here (pointing to the white band on their head) and a black band here (pointing to the black band). I think both Jane and I were struggling to keep a straight face at this point, but one of us managed to say "interesting." Of course what he didn't know is that this was "interesting" in the Iowa/Minnesota sense of the word. Here concludes the fascinating section of the commentary on penguins. To summarize: They are black and white and have two bands.
Let me add a bit more detail that I learned on my own, and from the lecture given by the naturalist on board the Infinity... The penguins that we were about to see are called Magellanic Penguins, named for Magellan who sailed these parts back in the late 1500's. Maybe now you are getting a sense for the title of this post? Ferdinand? Ferdinand? anyone? anyone? Yes, Ferdinand Magellan! I'm so clever.
I know I'm sounding a little snarky about the tour today, but it really turned out just fine. because we were just the two of us on our own tour, we got to the Penguin colony well ahead of the masses, in fact we had the place all to ourselves, and that made it worth it right there. Would I have liked some more insightful commentary? Sure. But the kid was sincere and earnest so its hard to be too upset with him. If I'm upset with anything its with Forastero tours for sending us a rookie.
Anyway, without further ado, here are some penguin pics for you! yes, we were up close and personal with the penguins.

This little guy was not happy. I think he was hungry and Mom was not coming through.

After the Penguins we continued further up the road to Punta Norte where we saw both Sea Lions and Elephant Seals. Punta Norte is the only place in the world where you can see the Elephant seals. At other times of the year, and at high tide, you also stand a chance of seeing an Orca coming into try and catch a baby Sea Lion, but no such luck today. Anyway, here's a shot of the beach, you can see the Sea Lions down below. the Elephant seals are way on the far right end of the coast here and we could see them with the binoculars, but not so well with the camera lens.

After watching the Sea Lions we found a nice place to sit and enjoy some sandwiches for lunch. While we were eating lunch the friendly neighborhood Armadillo (piche en espanol) came around hoping we would share with him, or her Im not sure how you tell with Armadillos.

The last and final episode with our young guide happened on the way back to the ship. We had to take the exact same route back to the ship that we followed to get to Punta Norte, but lets just say the ride seemed shorter for some people than for others. Yep, he actually fell asleep on the ride back! I think the driver was ready to reach across, open the door and push him out.
Its funny how all of our excursions involve both a driver and a guide. In each case we are led to believe that the driver does not speak english. In this case I'm pretty sure the driver was much more experienced than the actual guide, as he seemed to know many of the other guides at Punta Norte. Furthermore I think he understood and probably spoke english just fine. He also did an excellent job of scanning the countryside and the road ahead for interesting animals. We could tell that he was the one who would spot them and then tell our guide what was coming up. His job today was to give junior some feedback on his first outing. I'm pretty sure he got an earful!
The day ended on a very positive note. Jane got on a roll at the craps table and ended the night over $400 ahead. She made a lot of other people at the table very happy too.

Biking Punta Del Este

2011-03-03T03:46:00.001-08:00

The city of Punta Del Este has about 10,000 regular inhabitants, even though when you look at the picture of it you could easily imagine that it hosts ten times that number. This is because Punta Del Este is a huge vacation getaway for much of South America. All of the apartments in the high rise buildings are vacation homes. Punta Del Este itself is mostly situated on a big peninsula with beaches on both sides. The beaches on the west side are at the Platta river, the same one that starts in Brazil and flows through the Tigre Eelta north of Buenos Aires. The beaches on the east are on the Atlantic ocean, and you can see the fresh and salt water mix together off the tip of the peninsula.

We didn't have anything in particular planed for our day in Punta del Este, so we just took the tender ashore with the idea that we would walk around and check things out. However when we got off the ship and started our walk through town, there it was, Bike Tours! One lone woman holding a bike tour sign, of course we had to check it out. Her name was Alice and she said she could take us on a two hour tour of the city, tell us about the history and highlights of the area, and of course we would do it all on bike. Yay! The price was very reasonable too, so here's my digital shout-out to Bike Tours Uruguay Its a great way to see the town, and Alice even has other longer tours that will take you north into some of the other outlying areas.

After we got our bikes, helmets, and water our first stop was the most famous work of art in Punta del Este. The "hand in the sand" This was a sculpture that won a big art contest sponsored by the city back in the mid 1980's. It is literally a giant stone hand coming out of the sand on the beach. Here's Jane and I in front of the middle finger.

We continued our tour down the atlantic side enjoying the sites and sounds of the beaches. The picture at the top is taken looking north back up the beach. When you get to the point of the peninsula there is an observation deck to go out on, where you can enjoy the view looking back up the river as well as out to sea. On the atlantic side there is an island where many hundreds of sea lions live, that is another tour for another day... Some of our dinner table mates took that tour and said it was fun but pretty smelly when you get in amongst all of the sea lions.

When we got to the point our guide pointed out the island, and a small marker right off the point, and then another landmark off the the west. According to the guide there is a large but rather narrow triangle described by these three points.

Within this triangle is one of the places on earth that has amazing energy. Oops, now I'm thinking what kind of strange new age mumbo jumbo guide did we get ourselves mixed up with. But stay with me for a minute. This triangle also encompasses the Punta del Este lighthouse, seen below.

Now, right next to the lighthouse is a little park area with a compass rose made out of stone. You can see Jane standing on the compass rose facing south.

Here's the remarkable thing. When you stand on the center of the compass rose and begin to speak you experience something really amazing. Its like your voice echos inside your head in a really strong resonant way. When our guide told us about this I was extremely skeptical. I could just hear her telling me, "What you couldn't feel it? Its so strong I can't believe you didn't experience the power...." But when I stood there and started talking it was amazing. I'm not sure what causes it, but I did do some googling and apparently there are some strong magnetic forces that converge in the Punta del Este area that have been scientifically investigated. When I get home I'm going to have to do some more research to see if I can figure out what might cause this internal acoustic effect. (unless of course Mike has it figured out for me first) If you have any theories of your own, please leave them in the comments!

We continued to bike around the peninsula, and up the river side. We stopped at the fish market to see some sea lions, getting a late lunch, and from there we also had a great view of our ship as seen through many of the ships in the marina.

Sea Lions at the fish market

For a day where we had absolutely nothing planned this turned out to be a great adventure. Seeing a city by bike is great, it gives you a good perspective and allows you to see the sites from outside, rather than being stuck inside a car or van.

Today we are at sea the whole day, on our way to Puerto Madryn. There are lots of activities scheduled, and lots of time for reading and relaxing today. We are looking forward to a nice quiet day -- After we go to our first boot camp workout! The ship is also hosting a get together for all of the people on the Cruise Critic message boards, so that will also be a chance to meet some people in person that we have only communicated with electronically. So, goodbye for now, I'll give you an update in a couple of days when we are through Puerto Madryn.

Montevideo, Uruguay

2011-03-02T12:46:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting here watching the sun come up over the city of Punta del Este. The water is perfectly calm except for the waves created by some of the tender ships taking the earliest of early passengers over to the pier. There are plenty of clouds in the sky today, but there is still the occasional blue patch. We are close enough to shore that we can see the beaches spread out in all directions.
We don't have anything planned for today except to tender ashore and walk around for a bit.
Yesterday we were in Montevideo, we had arranged a tour with Marta along with a group of people from the cruise critic message boards. It was a driving/walking tour of the city, along with a stop at the Bouza Winery just outside the city. The winery is only about 10 years old, which is about the average age for wineries in Uruguay. Since it is getting toward the end of summer here they were just starting the harvest, so we got to see some of the equipment they were using for squashing and processing the grapes. There were also a lot of very ripe grapes on the vine.
Here is the aging room where they age some of their wines. Some of the barrels are made of french oak, and some of american oak. The winery is pretty scientific about how they keep track of which batch of wine comes from which section of the vineyard. They also keep 20 bottles from every harvest for every different kind of wine they make.

After the tour, of course we had to do a tasting. We had a white blend, along with a rose, a merlot, and a red blend. We asked to try their Chardonnay and their Malbec, unfortunately they only had the chardonnay left for tasting; it was good but I actually liked the white blend we tried originally better.
After the tasting, we were all tired... Big surprise right! But we had a little more touring left to do. We climbed montevideo's only large hill where we were treated to a great view of the harbor and our ship. Its right in the middle of the photo below.

Overall it was a nice tour. Last night was the first formal night on the ship, and it was fun to get out the old tuxedo again and enjoy some good food and a nice show, iBroadway. Jane and I can both check frog legs off the list of foods we have tried. Guess what? They taste like chicken.

Buenos Aires

2011-03-01T02:03:00.001-08:00

It was a beautiful two days in Buenos Aires. Lets start with moving in to our room on the ship. Other than the taxi driver overcharging us dumb Americans for the ride from the airport to the Puerta de Crucera everything about the checkin process went very well. Our room is great, we have this curved wall of windows that makes you feel like you are just suspended out over the water. Our sitting area is really a great place to just hang out and watch the sea go by. The luggage all arrived intact, and we were even able to smuggle a few bottles of wine we picked up at the airport onto the ship.

We had two nice surprises on checkin: First, our room is close enough to the Internet Cafe that we actually get a wireless signal in the room, and because we are in a suite we get 180 minutes of free wireless. That may not last the whole trip but its a good start. The second surprise was that we had a complimentary meal at the SS United States for our first night on the ship. This is the only specialty restaurant on board, and it is definitely a good one.

It was hard to choose from the menu there were so many good options. I had Diver Scallops wellington with truffle emulsion, Lobster Bisque, Surf & Turf (more lobster tail for the surf part) and of course chocolate souffle for desert. Jane had similar except she had a pear and goat cheese tart instead of the diver scallops, and a salad instead of the bisque. We washed it all down with a nice bottle of Far Niente Chardonnay.

When we were leaving the restaurant the cruise director happened to be outside the door taping a segment for the next days onboard news and information channel. We waited until we though it was safe for us to sneak by him inconspicuously, but that was not to be. He spotted us and pulled us over for a quick on camera interview about our dining experience. So, now we are famous for a few days.

Our second day in BA was even better than the first. The main activity for the day was a delta river cruise. Just north of Buenos Aires is a huge river delta, formed by the Plata river as it finishes its journey from the mountains of brazil and empties into the Atlantic Ocean. We met our tour guides out front of the cruise terminal and they drove us through the city, pointing out interesting sites along the way. Actually our driver and the owner of the company, Gaston, didn't say too much since he did not speak English, but our guide and interpreter did a great job.

We arrived at the Marina and got on board the boat. It was a beautiful new 30 foot cabin cruiser, perfect for river cruising. We took off up one of the main channels and just cruised along enjoying the sun and warm weather. We laughed a bit at the fact that there are actually billboards along the side of the channel. This gives you an idea of the amount of water traffic that uses this part of the river. In fact the delta is home to a lot of people who commute by boat, and is the equivalent of going up to the lake for many other BA residents. Everything in the delta uses water for transportation. Everything from grocery delivery to garbage pickup is done by water.

Need some groceries? You just put a bag over the end of a pole on your dock and the grocery boat will stop for you. On garbage day you just hang your bags of garbage out on the end of the dock and the garbage boat takes them away.

After cruising through some residential areas we anchored in a very peaceful side channel to have some lunch... A nice local cerveza and some meat and cheese. It was good, and light, which was perfect since we were still plenty full from our meal the night before. Note to mike and Sarah, We signed up for six sessions of boot camp while we are on board, and although the first session was during our tour, we did work out before hand!

After the tour we got dropped off in downtown Buenos Aires where we walked through the busy city streets, and looked at the shops and bought a souvenir for Josh. Josh: check out the Buenos Aires football clubs.

Of course we had the obligatory lifeboat drill, but then we enjoyed our sail away from Beuenos Aires in our room:

At dinner we went to our regular table in the main dining room, its located right next to the windows on the very back of the ship next to the captains table. There was a little mixup at first with 10 of us thinking we belonged at this table for 8. The waiter got that sorted out by moving this english couple to their proper table. It seems that they were seated at our table the night before when 6 of us were eating at other places. We really seem to have a nice table: One couple from Houston TX, another from Ohio, she is the dean of a small college, and another couple from New Jersey. We had very good conversation, and it looks like it will be fun to get together and compare notes with them each night.

Hiking in the Iguazu National Park

2011-02-27T13:04:00.001-08:00

Have you ever had an experience where afterwards you said, "it took my breath away!"? Today was one of those experiences for me. I was awake, with the sun, at about 6:30 this morning; 3AM back in Decorah, but we were so tired from the previous two days that we were in bed before 10, and slept soundly through the night. After having some coffee and breakfast in the hotel, Jane and I took off on the "Inferior Falls" hike. The inferior falls trail is the lower trail that takes you down to the base of the falls and the river. We were literally the only ones on the trail, and it seemed that around each turn there was a view of the falls more beautiful than the last. I posted a bunch of photos to my flickr account, its a lot of waterfall pictures, but you just can't capture the beauty of it all with a camera. I've been experimenting with the exposure bracketing feature of my camera, and so some of these are three images combined into one using the HDR editor on Aperture.

As we neared the bottom of the trail we spotted a pair Toucans up in the tree, along with several other interesting birds. You can see the Toucan in the picture below. At this point we were also able to buy our tickets for the boat trip under the falls.... But first there was a walkway that went right up to the falls.

I am the person in the mist in the picture below. This was one of those wild kingdom kind of moments.. In your best Marlin Perkins voice you can say: "While Jane stays safely dry at the beginning of the platform Brad will tame the raging river and get drenched." And this was the experience that literally took my breath away. You just can't believe the force of the falls until you get right up to it like I did. The wind that is created by the crashing of the water is like being in a thunder storm, and before I even realized what was going on, I was completely soaked from head to toe. Between the force of the wind, and the perceived force of the water my breath just went right out of my lungs.

As I think about my own experience standing at the end of the platform, I have to wonder about the people that built this thing! Who in their right mind would go to work each morning, to build something where you were thinking that if you slipped, (and I'm sure that during construction it was plenty slippery) you would get smashed against the rocks below you by water with thousands of pounds of force.

There is lots of wildlife in the park, we saw many species of birds, and a little hamster size rodent. Others in our group saw a snake eating a frog -- sorry I missed that one. But the most prevalent creature were these little things that we though were ringtail lemurs, but the locals had a different name for them. Here's one of them begging lunch off another tourist. Their snouts are quite long, and we were told that they are a member of the anteater family.

After our experience on the platform, our next goal was the boat ride. On this ride you get some great views of the falls from the river, and assuming you have a waterproof camera, some good pictures. Then after you have seen the beauty of the falls the captain of the boat plays a game called "lets see how close to the falls we can get without going under." In the picture below you can see the boat ahead of us headed into the falls. I'll admit that when I was standing on dry land and watching this I was thinking to myself, "who in their right mind would get into a boat and do that?" But, when we were actually in the boat it seemed perfectly safe, and the boat was very stable.

Jane had the Flip video camera inside a waterproof bag when we got on the boat but mostly the video is a wall of white, and sound. Here's a little bit of video from when we are near the falls, but not yet in the roiling water:

We were really glad we did the boat ride, as we got to see the even larger Brazilian falls that you can't see from the hiking trails in Argentina.

After hiking back up to the hotel, we picked up my camera and got a new battery for the waterproof camera and set out for the train ride to El Diablo, this is another cool little hike where you go out to the top of the very large falls, and stand and watch the water spill over. The water levels are quite high this year which makes everything even more spectacular. Here's a couple of shots from the top of the falls. Again, there are more without me in them on flickr.

After all of this hiking in the Jungle heat and humidity, we were quite tired and hot, so we headed back to the pool at the hotel to relax and rest up for a while. Our final stop of the day was back in the city of Puerto Iguazu where we had a dinner reservation at Aqva restaurant.

We booked a round trip cab ride (200 pesos) at the front desk, which turned out to be a great deal. We had a very personable cab driver named Ronny, who took us for a little site seeing and shopping before dropping us off at the restaurant. After dropping us off he waited for us to eat and then took us back to the hotel. Before dinner we had a beautiful view of the river from the city, where you can see Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay at the three corners of where the river splits.

The restaurant is decorated in Pacific Northwest style, and the food is a great blend of Argentinian and Italian cuisine. We had a fantastic meal of Argentine steak and a lovely bottle of Malbec. My steak came with a leak tart which was surprisingly delicious, and Jane had potatoes that were stuffed with cheese and ham. The service was top notch, and we had the opportunity to chat with the owner, Jorge Antonio, who was very nice.... We topped off our dinner with a tiny bit of Limoncello. The Limoncello was quite possibly the best we have ever tasted, so we asked the owner if he made it himself or imported it from Italy. He said he made it himself and promised to share his top secret recipe with us if we sent him an email. Just when we thought we were ready to leave the owner brought us a complimentary glass of Argentinian champagne to keep us happy for the ride back to the hotel. If you get to Iguazu you should definitely check out Aqva.

South American Beginnings

2011-02-26T03:15:00.001-08:00

And so it begins. Another travel adventure. This one just Jane and I. The itinerary is a South American Cruise from Buenos Aires, Argentina around Cape Horn and up to Valparaiso, Chile; with many stops along the way. Here's a summary of Days one and two.

We left Decorah with our friends John and Llew at 8:00AM to drive to the airport, we have several plans for getting back from the airport -- the nice thing is that we didn't need to park our car at $20 per day for 16 days. While we are away Josh and our God daughter Liz are in charge of the house. Decorah friends take note of that last sentence! We are flying American all day, and of course the first face I see when we get to the American Counter is the infamous Cat -- see my first post from JTerm travels. Luckily we got our luggage checked in just fine without her. When we got to the gate we checked with the gate agent to see if we could change our seats on the Dallas to Buenos Aires portion of the flight. I really wanted to find a seat with a power port. Nine hours in the air could require a recharge of the iPad. She was so nice that she moved us to a bulkhead/exit row seat -- nine hours of legroom!!

The rest of the air travel was uneventful, and we arrived in BA right on time. Jane and I both managed at couple of hours of napping during the night, but nothing particularly restful. BA is 3 hours ahead of central time so jet lag is not going to be a big factor. Once off the plane we had to go through immigration and passport control. We have to pay $140 each to visit Argentina, this is listed as reciprocity for the Visas that we make the Argentinians pay.

The plan was to get through immigration as quickly as possible and get on our car to the other airport (Jorge Newberry) where we are taking a flight to Iguazu for two days before the cruise. We had reserved the 3:05 flight but were really hoping to get to the airport in time for the 11:35 flight. We knew it would be tight but were hoping to avoid spending valuable hours in the airport. Here's where the plan started to fray... After paying our reciprocity fee we got shunted out of the line for people from the US into the line for Argentinians and other visitors. This line ended up being much longer and slower. As the minutes ticked away we resigned ourselves to an afternoon in the airport. We did meet two very nice women who were traveling alone, one was going to antarctica as part of an academic expedition and the other was celebrating her birthday by going horseback riding.

We ended up sharing our car with Denise -- the horseback rider -- The drive from BA International to Jorge Newberry is supposed to take anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours depending on who you read and what time of day, our drive was a harrowing 45 minutes. Drivers here make up their own lanes and rules as they go along. We got to the airport just after 11:00 which we were sure was too late for the 11:35 flight. But luck was with us and the flight was delayed by an hour, so we were able to change to the earlier flight -- with no change fee!

We cleared security and found our way to gate 3 where we met up with several people from the cruise critic message board, I'll just call them the CC people until I get to know them better. Jane has been conversing online with some of these people for almost a year, and it was fun to meet up with some fellow americans to pass the time.

We arrived at the Iguazu airport, and the plane parked at one of the two gates. We waited forever for Jane's bag, and then got a cab to the Sheraton, which is located in the Iguazu National Park. To summarize, we left Decorah at 8:00AM on the 24th and we arrived in Iguazu at 3:00 on the 25th. A long days of travel! Just as we left the airport it started to rain, hard! But, by the time we got checked in to our room and started to think about what to do with the rest of the day the rain stopped again.

Iguazu is amazing! The falls here are huge, you just can't believe the volume of water that pours over these things every second. For those of you as old as me who are into movies at all, these falls are the sight of the movie The Mission. Here's one picture to whet your appetite.

I took this one on what is called the upper falls hike. Its probably the driest hike we are going to take. Next up is the lower falls hike which I will do in my swimsuit, and a boat ride that goes right up to the falls.

To finish off the story of our first day, we met up with the CC group again to have a drink in the hotel bar and dinner together. I think this is going to be very nice to know a few people going into the cruise. The dinner was pretty good. Jane had seafood risotto and I had a nice Argentine steak. The funniest thing was that Jane got dripped on through a leak in the roof when the rain started up again.

Python in your Browser... in javascript!

2011-02-14T13:02:00.001-08:00

I've recently been looking for ways to run Python in a browser. There are lots of reasons why I think this is a cool idea. For example, creating some simple tutorials, Making some online quizzes and tests, getting Python to run on my iPad...

It looks like there are two projects that are actively working on solving this problem. The first is called skulpt (see the demo on skulpt.org.) This project actually reimplements the core of Python in Javascript by hand. They are working on some modules, but right now it is basically the core Python language.

The other project uses Emscripten to compile the CPython C source code to javascript! Yep you read that right. You can see here that the core of Python 2.7 is running. You can import sys, but thats about it. Nevertheless both of these are really useful for beginning Python exercises.

The problem with both of these is that right now there is no user level documentation. Skulpt is particularly difficult as you can't even look at the demo page to see how its done. You need to go digging through some additional source files from the distribution to figure out how to make it work for yourself. The source code of the syntensity page is pretty easy to follow. So here's a hello world program using skulpt.

<script src="skulpt.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>


<script type="text/javascript">
function outf(text) {
   var mypre = document.getElementById("output");
   mypre.innerHTML = mypre.innerHTML + text;
}

function runit() {
   var prog = document.getElementById("yourcode").value;
   var mypre = document.getElementById("output");
   mypre.innerHTML = '';
   Sk.configure({output:outf});
   try {
      eval(Sk.importMainWithBody("<stdin>",false,prog));
   } catch (e) {
      alert(e);
   }
}
</script>
<h3>Try This</h3>
<form>
<textarea edit_id="eta_5" id="yourcode">
print "Hello World"
</textarea>
<button onclick="runit()" type="button">Run</button>
</form>

<pre id="output"></pre>

Its a bit on the verbose side, and it could certainly be improved so that less code would have to be replicated if you wanted to put multiple input/output areas on a single page, but as a learning example I think it works OK. The try/catch block around the Sk.importMainWithBody function call will capture Python runtime errors and throw them. This is a nice way to inform your users of syntax errors in any code they are trying out.

I'm certainly no expert in either implementation, I just offer this post as an example and a time saver for anyone else trying to get going with either implementation.

Second Edition of Data Structures Book is Out!

2011-01-28T15:23:00.001-08:00

Now that I'm back from my JTerm travels, I'm happy to let you know that the second edition of Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures using Python is available. (www.fbeedle.com) David and I have worked hard on this new edition for about a year now, and we are really excited about it. We think it is a great step forward from the first edition, and I'm really looking forward to teaching out of it next year.

Here's whats new:

All code is now written using Python 3.2
Chapter 1 now introduces Python sets, and exception processing.
Eliminated third party graphics package. All graphics are done using the built-in turtle module
Focus on algorithm analysis in a newly written chapter 2. In addition this chapter includes the analysis of Key Python data structures used throughout the book
New section on linked list implementation in Chapter 3
Moved Dynamic Programming to the end of chapter 4
Introduction of C style arrays and array management in Chapter 8
More focus on graphical recursive algorithms, including recursive tree drawing, and a recursive maze search program.
All source code for data structures has been organized into a single Python package to make it easy to incorporate into homework assignments.
Source for complete examples from each chapter are included so you do not need to piece together code from each listing
A new improved version of binary search trees in chapter 6.
New secion on balanced binary trees (AVL trees) added to chapter 6.

The main site for resources for this book is at http://www.pythonworks.org

In the meantime, here's the cover for the second edition

The Long Road Home

2011-01-26T12:47:00.001-08:00

4:00 PM Laguardia Airport

I have never wanted to be home so badly in all my life. The group of 16 is sitting here in the American Eagle concourse of Laguardia. We are at the airport very early for several reasons. Number one, they are remodeling the lobby of the Seafarers and it sounded like the entire building was going to fall down. Number two, the "seafarers" watching TV on the Mezzanine were on their second bottle of alcohol (gin for breakfast and whiskey for lunch) and were starting to creep everyone out. Number three we though that this mornings snow might have traffic all backed up and we didn't want to be fretting our way through security, but as it turned out we got over here in no time at all. Number five, we feared that there would be long lines at checkin and security due to flight changes and cancellations, which also proved to be a non-issue. So, here we sit, two hours before boarding, the flight is on time so far...

The morning started out early, I was wide awake at 4AM, my mind on the trip home today. We had to be out the door at 7AM to catch our train to Stamford Connecticut, where we visited NBC. We had two great speakers today John Fritsche, and Bucky Gunt (Google him, he's won a ton of Emmys). Unfortunately as we were on the train to Stamford some lovely white flakes of snow began to come out of the sky. Sadly in New York even a few white flakes raise havoc with the schedules at Laguardia, Newark, and JFK. On top of that tomorrow there is a winter storm watch out for our area.

Backing up to this morning again. We got to the Union Square station where we were going to take any of the uptown bound trains to grand central station. We told everyone, if the cars are crowded meet up on the platform The cars were indeed crowded but after our london experience you would not believe how proficient our students have become at jamming themselves onto a subway. So we all made it onto the train. But not 30 seconds after we got off both Craig and I came up one student short. I knew that student was on the train because I saw him and talked to him on the way to grand central. But just like that he was gone! Where did he go? Did he fail to "mind the gap?" Was he abducted by a band of roving gypsies? Did a crazed herd of subway rats drag him away? We had to move to the platform to catch our train to Stamford and unfortunately this student did not have his cell phone along. So one stayed behind until the last possible minute to see if he returned, and the rest of us went on to catch our Stamford train. Sadly, we had lost him. Well, I knew that other than missing the NBC presentations he would be fine. He could always go back to the hotel and meet us there later.

As we were standing in the snow in Stamford he finally called. He was at a pay-phone and was safe and sound. He had gone up the stairs following someone in a coat that looked suspiciously like Craig's. After following not-craig for a while he finally realized that he was following the wrong guy. By then he didn't know how to get back to us and we were probably gone by then anyway. We are all hopeful that this will be the final mass transit mishap of the trip! -- A short update craig just surmised that our inbound plane is 20 minutes ahead of schedule. So, the good news is that we have an inbound plane, it is in the air, and it is ahead of schedule. Yea!!

5:30 Well, scratch that... Our plane is actually now going to arrive about 16 minutes late. It took off late from Charlotte, so is behind schedule.

9:23 CST: Finally off the plane, after landing only about a minute late we were informed by the captain that an AA 737 landed just 10 seconds ahead of us. Unfortunately they only have one ground crew so we wait on the tarmac unable to pull into our gate. Finally we pull into the gate but we wait another 10 minutes before someone finally moves the jet bridge into place. I'm pretty sure that was Cat having her final revenge on me for publicly calling her out in an earlier post.

But, all is well that ends well. Even though we waited a long time (25 minutes) to get off the plane, our luggage was waiting for us at baggage claim, so there was no additional wait there. By 10PM Craig and I were in my car, yes my car, freedom, no reliance on public transportation, no waiting for cranky gate agents, we could just get in my car and drive the last 2:20 minutes to get home to Decorah. We arrived just after midnight. Sweet. It was a great trip, but there's no place like home.

Things I Miss the Most after 21 days on the Road

2011-01-25T14:36:00.003-08:00

My Family -- This has been a great trip,and I think everyone has been getting along very nicely. Its fun to watch a mixed group of students come together and form new friendships over the course of a couple of weeks. At least one trip romance has blossomed. But, I miss my wife, and I have missed way too many basketball games. I keep watching the video of Josh's first varsity game over and over.
My House -- We have had some pretty nice accommodations along the way, and a few sketchy ones as well. Sadly, the last two days here in New York are the worst of the trip. A couple of the students just told me that they slept with their winter coats on last night because their room was so cold! My room was warm, and the sheets were clean but the whole place is pretty worn and grimy looking. And, there is just one kind of gross shower for each half of our floor. But the quiet!! The week in London at the "Royal National" was not very royal but again the sheets and rooms were clean and I had my own nice clean bathroom. By far the best of the trip was the hostel in Interlaken. But I am so looking forward to getting home to my own bed and my own shower, and my own hot water and tea...
Cooking for myself -- Its been fun enjoying the local cuisines along the way. Germany: Schnitzel and Wurst and the beer at the Hofbrau house. Switzerland: Interlaken more good german food but Lausanne was not so interesting. Torino: We had an awesome little meal at a neighborhood restaurant in Torino and some other good pasta options as well. The challenge was finding restaurants that could accommodate all of us. Most of them were pretty small so to fit the entire group we ended up using some cafeteria style places where everyone could work their way through. London: Good Indian, Chinese, and of course the fish and chips at the pubs was really good. But, I'm ready to cook some of my favorites and just eat a little less!
My Routine -- I'm such a creature of habit. I miss getting up in the morning and doing Kettlebells, I miss getting up and just going up to my office to quietly read the news and have a cup of tea. On the road I have to shower and get dressed before I can go find someplace to sit, and read, and even then it is not quiet, its someplace like starbucks or some local coffee joint that is bustling with activity. I end up not reading and people watching.
Playing 500 -- Another great part of the rhythm of my life at home is gathering on the weekends to play cards with friends. Around the table we catch up, discuss Decorah and National politics, parenting, and whatever. Some nights are really intense, and some nights can be downright depressing if the cards are bad. But nobody really remembers who won or lost a week later.
Decorah -- Three weeks of being in big cities really reminds me of all the things I appreciate about our community. I love going into a restaurant and knowing the staff, and knowing that while I eat my lunch I'm going to see people I know and have the chance to catch up with them. I miss having my coffee at Java Johns were again I know the staff, and all of the interesting people that come in each morning. I miss the smallness and familiarity.

30 Rock

2011-01-25T14:36:00.001-08:00

So today Craig and I had an afternoon to do some site seeing. Despite the cold cold temperatures here in new york we decided to start with some Dim Sum. So, we headed to Chinatown. I took out the trusty Urbanspoon app on my phone and we were soon headed to Ping's. Good Dim Sum at a great price. Great shrimp and pork dumplings, Great potstickers and fried spring rolls. The beef short ribs were OK, but not my favorite. We finished up with some fried bacon wrapped shrimp. A great way to close out the meal. We were stuffed and only a few bucks poorer.

After lunch we headed up to 30 rock to do the studio tour and visit Top of Rock. The studio tour was fun. We saw Dr. Oz's studio (who??) and the Jimmy Fallon set, also home to Johnny Carson's show when he was in New York. Finally we saw the SNL set. Lots of great memorabilia and great memories in looking at that set. Unfortunately there is a no picture policy on the tour so nothing to share there.

What I can share is this video clip. Partway through the tour, our guides asked for a couple of volunteers to 'do some reading' Craig and I both volunteered, and it turned out they were going to show us how a mini news broadcast goes together. So, Craig is the anchorman, and I am the weather guy. Its not as easy as it looks standing in front of the green screen, reading the teleprompter, and moving pointing at something nonexistent behind you.

Sadly Flickr uses flash to do these embedded videos, Here's a link to the mov non flash file I uploaded... http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonelake/5402162164/

After the tour we went up to the Top of Rock experience. This is a great view of the city on a nice mostly clear day. Here's a few photos for you to enjoy the view from up there as well. We had hoped to close out the afternoon with a happy hour cocktail at the Rainbow Room, but it was closed.

Jet lag recovery mode

2011-01-24T04:42:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting in Starbucks off Union Square, its 6:30 here in Manhattan and I'm wide awake. I made it until about 9:30 last night but then fell soundly asleep until 2:30AM, 8:30AM London time of course. The relative quiet of my room at Seafarers International house was awesome.

The flight home was a Godsend as well. I went up to the desk to ask if I could change from a center to an aisle seat. The lady said no problem, she moved me to row 31 and said that it was likely nobody else would be beside me. So yes, I had a whole row to myself for the flight home. As it turned out we all could have had our own rows as the back third of the plane was pretty much empty.

Following all instructions we arrived at Heathrow three hours in advance of our flight, the Picadilly line was much more crowded that we expected it to be for 7:30 on a sunday morning. But when we got to heathrow, there was no waiting at the continental desk to check in for our flight, and there was virtually no waiting in the security line either. So, we had plenty of time to sit around the gate area and wait for our flight. I think we all spent more time waiting to get through passport control at Newark than we did in the security line at Heathrow.

We just missed the 3:15 train to New York Penn Station, so we ended up having to wait there for the 4:04. Every other hour of the day has an xx:28 train to Penn station except for 3pm. Once we got into the city we had to get subway passes for everyone. Unlike London, it is impossible in New York to use a credit card to by 26 unlimited passes. So, we had to trudge to the Herald Square station and have everyone line up to use their own cards to get their subway passes for the two days here in New York.

Finally, about 4 hours after landing we made it to Seafarers. It is midnight London time, but everyone was excited to eat some american food, and catch the end of the Packers, Bears game. More american football was to come with the Steelers and the Jets. Craig and I went to watch the end of the Packers game at TGI Fridays, and then headed out to Pete's Tavern. It was great to have an American hamburger, with blue cheese! I loved the fish and chips at all of the london pubs, but it was really nice to be back home. Although we are still a 3 hour flight from Minneapolis I feel like we are close enough to home to reach out and touch it.

Today we have a group meeting at 9, then a speaker from NBC Olympics at 10. Everyone is on their own for the day after our speaker, until we have our final group dinner tonight. Tomorrow will be a busy day as we have a meeting in Connecticut, and then by mid afternoon the group will begin to disperse for the various flights back home.

Premier League

2011-01-22T12:02:00.001-08:00

I can't think of a better way to end a trip to London that with a Premier League Football match. We were very fortunate to get group tickets to the Fulham versus Stoke City match this afternoon. Fulham plays in a venue known as Craven Cottage. Its a smaller, more intimate stadium, but we ended up with great seats. We were in about the 24th row behind and to the keepers left of the goal. A high hard kick over the crossbar would land right in my lap.

Fulham won the game handily 2 nil with Clint Dempsey scoring both goals for Fulham. We thought, briefly, about a USA USA chant for Dempsey, but decided that might not be appreciated by all of the other football fans around us, so we just cheered loudly.

Going to an English Premier League match is a fun experience. We sat in the neutral zone of the stadium so we were not right in with the Fulham or the Stokes City fans. So our section was a bit quieter than all the others. We were the closest to the Stokes City visitors section and it was really a riot to listen to them sing, and chant, and carry on throughout the game. They only quieted down about midway through the second half when it became very clear that there was no way they were going to win the game.

There were a couple of Dads right behind me that had brought their two young boys to the game, so it was interesting to listen to them explain football to the boys, who already knew as much about the game as many of us. It was a great experience and one that I will remember fondly for a long time.

The last few days are really a blur. We have had more great meetings and class discussions, and finally some time to explore the city on our own. Quite honestly I'm 'museumed out' at the moment. I've been to The British Museum, The London Transportation Museum, the Tate Modern, The London Docklands, The Imperial War Museum, and the British Library. All were interesting in their own way, but you get museum, and information overload at some point.

A couple of the highlights for me were the Transportation Museum, seeing the development of the London Underground, beginning in the 1830s and moving forward is a pretty interesting study in engineering, and city planning. The development of tunneling technologies, and the escalator were really interesting.

Another highlight was seeing a letter from Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage at the British Library. The library has labelled this letter as the first computer program, as she is explaining how to program the difference engine to solve a mathematical problem that had never been solved by hand before. Also at the Library was Handel's original score for the Messiah! You could see his notes as well as the names of the soloists that were performing the different parts. They also have one of four copies of the Magna Carta on display. This is a document written in 1215 or so, and is widely considered to be a model for our own constitution.

Last night we had our final group dinner in London, and the Imperial China restaurant. We had our own room, with a Karaoke machine and a special menu. Tons of food, and great fun was had singing karaoke by all. Here you can see Paul, Joe, and Carl treating us to a country song. We also had Rap, Glen Campbell, and even a couple of Disco numbers. It is really strange to think that all of these students know the lyrics to every Backstreet boys song ever written.

Tomorrow is an early morning as we have to be on the Tube going to heathrow by 7:30. We leave London at around 11:15am and arrive in New York at about 3:00pm. We've all enjoyed our time in Europe, but we are also ready to be back in the states again. I know that even after a proper football game this afternoon, a number of the students are hoping to make it

We Will Rock You

2011-01-20T00:50:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was another great day in London. We started out at 8:00 with our daily discussion of the assigned reading. 24 of the 26 members of the class were a little unhappy about the 8:00 starting time, but the other two (Craig and I) wanted to get them up and out of bed so they would have the middle part of the day for seeing the sites of London. This would really be the first extended time they would have since we arrived for doing some touring on their own.

We met up again at 4:00 at a place called the View Tube. This is an educational facility that overlooks the Olympic stadium and Village area. We met with an architect who is the project manager for the Olympic Village. It was an absolutely fascinating meeting. How do you design a village to house 10,000 athletes that will be turned into market housing as well as affordable housing once the games are over? Furthermore how do you build all of this to the latest green standards? How do you design a new city neighborhood, with safety and security as primary design constraints? How do you move millions of people in and out of this neighborhood on a daily basis? These are just some of the design goals for the Olympic Village and park area. Here are a couple of pictures of the stadium and the aquatic center in construction:

The apartments that house the athletes during the games are all built without kitchens and other 'extra' rooms to provide extra bedroom space. After the games the kitchens are added before they go on sale. We also learned that all of these apartments are designed and built so that they do not need heating during the winter! This is amazing to me, but we were further told that they didn't think they could sell them without heat, so in floor heating is added throughout. The water for the in-floor heat comes from a central facility, so should it ever be needed it is extremely efficient!

This project really is amazing, the amount of social and civic engineering that has gone into the design of the village really boggles my mind. Not only that but consider that much of this was designed, and even some construction was started before the economic crash in 2008. The crash led to a full time out to re-evaluate and re-finance much of the operation. Its just amazing that they are going to pull this off.

After our meeting at the View Tube, we all scattered for dinner on our own and then met up again at the Dominion Theater for We Will Rock You. This is a musical where the plot and characters are loosely based around the Bohemian Rhapsody . Lots of great Queen songs that we all wanted to sing along with. Craig and I had our dinner at the Tottenham Pub, and I decided that I really needed to try a meat pie during my stay in London, so I had a chicken and mushroom pie for supper. I was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.

Wimbledon

2011-01-19T05:44:00.001-08:00

After the rain and dreary weather of the past many days it was delightful to get up this morning and head outside to see the sun. The early part of the morning is free, so my plan was to go pick up our tickets to We Will Rock You, but the box office did not open until noon. It was a productive walk anyway as I found a free WiFi connection that was 10 times faster than the Royal National and that allowed me to finish downloading the London2Go app for my iTouch. Its a nice app that works off line and has all of the london highlights, plus tube information, and a map. All of this works great even without WiFi so its very handy to have in your pocket when you are walking around or on the train.

At 10:30 we gathered for a trip down to Wimbledon. First on the agenda for the day was a walking tour of the stadium. It was fantastic. Everything you would expect from Wimbledon. Of course at this time of year the place is pretty quiet except for the workers who are already at work preparing the stadium for the Championship at the end of June. Much of this enormous complex is only used for a couple of weeks during the year. There are courts that the members are allowed to use, but not the competition courts.

Our guide told us the story of how the week after the tournament, the process begins to prepare the courts for the next year.

Dig up the current turf.
Put weed killer on the remaining bits of grass.
Remove the top six inches of dirt to get rid of the weed killer and any remaining grass or (gasp) weeds.
Replace with fresh dirt.
Seed with rye grass
The grass is then watered, mowed, and generally allowed to grow naturally until about April. Mostly naturally anyway, we saw that the had little heat lamps that moved slowly back and forth over the grass during the course of a week. You can see the lamps in the picture below. In April the grounds keepers begin mowing the grass shorter and shorter. By competition time the grass is down to just 6 millimeters in length. The cutting must be done very gradually or the grass will go into shock, and you know thats not good.

Finally, testing begins. A person comes in and literally counts the blades of grass per square meter to make sure the turf is the right density, and that the tennis ball will bounce to the correct height. when dropped from a test machine.

We also got to go in the press room, and sit in the chairs where the players come every day to give their interviews. It was fun to sit in the same chair as Nadal, Federer, and MacEnroe.

We were allowed to sit in the stands on court 1 as well as Centre Court, so we got a good idea of how intimate the Wimbledon stadiums are and what it would be like to actually attend a match. After the stadium tour we had a marketing presentation and learned a little about the way they market the stadium and the museum during the other 50 weeks of the year. All in all it was an impressive experience.

Training for the Olympics

2011-01-18T00:49:00.001-08:00

The first stop on our tour of London was a walking tour around the Olympic venues. To get there was easy. Take the Picadilly line from Russel Square up to Kings Cross St. Pancras and transfer to the Hammersmith and City line which would take us East directly to Bromley by Bow where we would meet our guide. Nothing could be easier right? Except that when we got to Kings Cross, the train to Bromley by Bow was pretty full. But we jammed ourselves on like true Londoners. At the last second I noticed that some of our students had not jammed themselves on the train and a voice in the back of my head said 'jump off.' I ignored the little voice because we had given them clear instructions that if they didn't make it on this train just jump on the next on and we would meet up on the platform at our destination.

When we arrived at Bromley by Bow, we did a quick count and realized we had a little more than half of our group. When the next train pulled in we looked for the rest of the group, but not a single student got off the train. Soon another train pulled in and I noticed that this was a district line train so I didn't expect any students to get off. Well, train after train came into the station but they were all district line trains. That voice in the back of my head told me 'somethings not right' so I went up to the ticket office to inquire when the next Hammersmith and City train was expected. "Service is suspended." he told me.

"Till when?" I asked.

"indefinitely." I was told.

Crap! Why didn't I listen to that voice that told me to jump off the train? Time to regroup. Craig and I decided that he would take the students that were here on the tour and I would wait at the station. We knew that within the group there was the intelligence to figure out a way to get down to the district line and out here eventually. I would meet them and call craig and we would figure out how to catch up.

So, Craig and the guide and the group took off in the rain on the tour and I hung out in the station. Pretty soon I noticed that there were not any district line trains coming in any more. So, back to the information desk. Yep, District line service is also suspended due to signaling problems at Bow Road station. Well, that does it, I had already waited around the station for 40 minutes so there was no way they were going to make it now and even if they did the tour would be finishing up. So I hopped on the next train heading back in. As I passed each station, I scanned the faces on the platform on the other side. If I saw the group I could hop off and catch up with them. But they were no where to be seen.

It took me about an hour to get back to Russell square and our hotel and when I walked in a group of the cheerfully greeted me in the lobby. "We tried to catch up with you but all the lines were suspended." They had their own odyssey of planes and busses and walking in the rain that you can read about on the class blog. (olympicsjterm11.blogspot.com). They had tried their best using all of their ingenuity to catch up with us, but it just was not to be. They were all safe, and sound and much the better for having to learn how to navigate the London Tube system on their own.

Now, if you have been following this blog you may be wondering how on earth I came to be allowed to lead students abroad. Torn ligaments, separated shoulders, leaving students behind on busses and trains. Is there any defense for all that? Nope, these are ingenious Luther students, in every case they knew where they had to be and how to get there. In my mind this is part of the experience of learning how to navigate your way around a foreign country. We're having a blast and we'll make sure we get everyone home in one piece.

Today we are off to Wimbledon, and looking forward to our meetings and tour there. But, if I do hear that voice telling me to jump off the train to stay with the group, I think I'll listen to it today.

The Ryanair Experience

2011-01-16T23:54:00.001-08:00

I'm writing this from 35,000 feet, in the exit row of a Ryanair 737-800. Its almost noon and we are on our way to London! We started this morning early with a bus ride to the airport. We had been expecting a very easy, small airport experience. We had been told that the Torino airport is quite nice and easy to get around. However when we entered the terminal at 9:00 for our 10:25 flight the first thing we noticed was that the security line looked like it might take until 3:00 this afternoon to get through. This set of a general sort of fear among the entire group.

We had been warned well in advance about all the extra fees that Ryanair charges, so everyone was very careful to make sure their bags were under the 20 kg limit. The ticketing agent was very friendly and even let a couple of the bags that were slightly over the limit slide through. After checking bags it was all the way to the back of the line, which stretched all the way across the terminal. Luckily the line moved along much more quickly that we were used to so we got through security in about 45 minutes. After security we had to go through passport control. and then get in line. There are no assigned seats on Ryanair so this is where things get downright pushy. Everyone was trying to crowd the front of the line. When they finally announced that our flight was going to be delayed due to the heavy fog. The delay did not deter anyone from camping out at the front of the line, which is really funny because when we finally got through the boarding line we did not get on the plane! Instead we had to walk down a bunch of stairs and board a bus, where we waited for another 20 minutes! Finally the busses closed their doors and were ready to take off. We almost had a mutiny on our bus when it appeared as though the second bus, with those slackers who were at the back of the line was going to leave for the plane before all of us who had been near the front! Horrors!

When the busses arrived at the plane, ours stopped near the front door, but the other bus went around to the back. It looked like those sluggards were going to catch a break after all. Luckily for me craig was lucky enough to be right be the door at the back. He headed straight on and to the middle of the plane to reserve an exit row so that Aaron could stretch out his legs. As it turned out Aaron could not sit in the exit row because of his crutches, so here I am.

We took off in heavy fog, but it only took a few seconds to get above it all where we were treated to beautiful views of the mountains surrounding Torino. The captain says the weather in London is clear and sunny so we are all excited to get to see the sun, and to spend some time in an English speaking country!

Siteseeing in Torino

2011-01-16T23:53:00.001-08:00

Today was a tourist day, we started with a tour of the Egypt Museum, and then split up to wander the city. Craig and I visited the church where the shroud of Turin is kept, had lunch at a Mongolian BBQ restaurant, visited the Powerstation exhibit at the modern art museum, walked around the Fiat test track and enjoyed the sites of the mountains, and walked by the Olympic stadium. Here are some photos that tell the story.

The Olympic Arch

Egypt Museum

Views from the test track

Olympic Stadium

Day 1 in Torino

2011-01-16T23:51:00.001-08:00

A few years ago, I finished a round of Golf at Oneota Country Club and came up to the patio area. A bunch of guys I knew were sitting around a table with some other men I did not know. It turned out that the strangers were visiting Decorah on a Rotary International exchange program from Torino Italy. One of the men I met that night was Stefano. Little did I know that he would play and integral role in the course on the olympic games I'm teaching right now.

When craig proposed the course, and we talked about Torino, we both thought of Stefano. I contacted him via email, and he immediately responded that he would be happy to help. Stefano organized a very nice morning for us. He stopped at our hotel to walk with us to the Foundacion Alberto Collonetti, where some of his friends were gathered. The friends had all been involved in the Olympics in some way as volunteers, and they told told us a bit about what they had done, and what the Olympics had meant to Torino. Although some of the venues have very quickly decayed and are going unused, everyone agreed that the Olympics had a big economic and cultural impact on the city. Before the olympics Torino was probably only known as the home of the shroud, and was not really a tourist destination, but since the olympics Torino has become a tourist destination for people from throughout the world. In addition the olympics had a big impact on the character of the people, according to many that we spoke with, prior to the olympics people in Torino were not very welcoming of strangers, but since then the city has learned to be more friendly and open. We saw this to some degree, but in general we found it was difficult to find someone that could speak english. This was such a different experience than I have had traveling in other cities in Italy. After the presentations were over they answered the students questions for quite a while. We were happy to use some of our honoraria money to make a small donation to the Foundacion.

Stefano and his friend Fabrizio helped us the rest of the day by accompanying us to the Olympic Village, to lunch, and even to our second meeting of the day with Delatre. For lunch we walked through the abandoned village and over to a rehabilitated Fiat factory. The factory has been turned into a mall, and office building. Across the street from the end of the mall is a place called Eataly, which is a very nice high end grocery store (more on this later) that also has a cafeteria. We bought Stefano and Fabrizio lunch, and it was nice to have Stefano translate the menu for us. We had a very nice glass of Prosecco naturale, not the champagne version but the still version. Craig and I each had a plate of pasta with meat sauce (veal) while the others had pasta and mussels.

A couple of bus rides later and we were at Delatre. This is a technology company that does a lot of web work for NBC, the BBC, and CTV. Their big thing is tying together the video stream with all the meta data about the players and the scores. For broadcasters they basically provide everything you would need to know to do color commentary on a game. They license some cool technology that tracks each football player on the pitch, as well as the ball and the referees. The software can detect when one player passes to another, and provides real time statistics. You can access this on the website, like nbcolympics.com, or they have a special product just for broadcasters to use. It was a very interesting presentation, especially for the 3 computer scientists in the group.

After the presentation they allowed craig to stay behind to print out our boarding passes. I took the rest of the group down the road to the grocery store. The original idea was to wait for craig, but we soon gave up on that and began walking back to the hotel on our own.

We knew that to get back to the hotel we just had to walk east until we found Corso Re Umberto. At that point we would go north to our hotel. I knew it was a long way, so once we reached Re Umberto I said I would run across the road and see if the bus went all the way up to our hotel. Unfortunately as I was asking the bus driver this question, he just started driving away. I tried to wave to the confused looking students on the other side of the road, who were staring at the place the bus used to be as if I had somehow vanished into thin air. I did manage to make eye contact with one or two so they knew I was on the bus and they soon followed. Meanwhile back at the hotel we waited and waited for craig. Finally I decided not to wait any longer and just go ahead with our group discussion. When craig finally returned we had our first glimpse of what flying Ryanair was going to be like. To print out our online boarding passes he had to enter, name, birthday, passport number, expiration date, flight information for every member of our group before he could print out the passes! Of course this took forever, especially since on the first try he entered all of the information only to be told that the session had time out. This meant he had to enter it all over again, but in smaller batches.

After the group discussion we walked down the block to ottoe tre quarte (8 3/4) where we had a glass of wine and some Calzone. After dinner we were both exhausted so we just went back to the hotel to get some sleep. Lest you think I was in bed by 7, you should know that supper time in this part of italy doesn't start until 8:00pm.

My Name is Brad, I'll be your Sommelier This Evening

2011-01-15T13:44:00.001-08:00

Sometimes a Swiss Army Knife can make you the most popular guy in your hotel corridor! Some of the students have discovered that when you are in italy, and close to France, wine is much cheaper than beer. What do you do if you are not a wine drinker? Choose an inexpensive wine at random from a store and bring it back to the hotel. Step 2, after realizing that wine bottles have these things called corks, and corks require a special tool to remove them from your bottle, you wander around the corridor wondering how you are going to find a cork screw. This is where I came in.

"Do you know where we can find a corkscrew?" I was asked. Being a leader makes me the font of all knowledge of course, so I must know. "Well..." I said, "I have a corkscrew on my swiss army knife." "Great! can you open this for me?" Why not, I thought... Somehow the idea of me opening a bottle of wine for a student wasn't anywhere on my list of duties as a faculty member, and I'm not sure its one that the administration would want to cultivate, but here we are in Italy, I might as well be helpful. So, I cut the foil and pop one cork. Its as if the sound of that cork sliding out of the bottle was like some kind of whistle. The next thing I know I'm surrounded by students holding bottles of wine. One or two of them decided it would be a great idea to take a picture of me opening wine bottles. I think the picture below really captures the moment. You can see Craig laughing in the background as if to say, "ha ha, there goes Brad's career."

Thus began our first night in Torino. It was another long train trip from Lausanne to Torino, made a bit more exciting by the fact that just after we crossed the border into Italy the train got behind schedule. What had been a 40 minute layover in Milano Centrale turned into a 10 minute dash from one train to the next.

Once we got to Torino, we had lunch, our first at McDonalds since the trip began, because we knew we were too early to check into our hotel. I had a McBacon and fries. It tasted quite good. The Hotel Artua Solferino is a nice old European hotel. Each room is very different. My room is up the stairs at the end of the hall, and has the smallest bathroom in Italy. Right over my shower is a skylight that leaks cold air like crazy. This morning as I tried to take a shower, I could not get hot water and so the combination of the cool breeze and the luke warm shower water (with approximately zero pressure) was pretty pathetic.

After orienting the students to the area, we turned them loose to see what they could find for dinner. Craig and I waited a while and then took off for the city centro. We walked around and investigated a lot of restaurants. We looked for some that might be able to accommodate our entire group, and some that looked like they might be nice for us. We ended up finding a great little neighborhood restaurante. Not a tourist place at all, and not pretentious. They had a three course chefs menu that looked great. I had awesome risotto, a green salad, and delicious veal arrosto. The meal came with 3 dl of wine which was perfecto.

With dinner done, we made our way back to the hotel. Its amazing how tired I get each day, worrying about the 24 welfare of 24 students traveling in a foreign country where none of us really speak the language well is very tiring. This seems to be especially true here in Torino. Although we have heard that the city has made great strides in welcoming tourists, we find that there are not all that many people that really speak English. Despite that , it is a good beginning to Torino.

Craig's Death March to the Invisible Tower

2011-01-12T12:06:00.001-08:00

Its that depressing, cloudy, cool kind of weather here in Lausanne. Low clouds and mist that block any hope you have of seeing across the lake, much less Mont Blanc. The result is that the city does not seem warm or friendly. When we walked by the lake area on our way to the tourist museum it was deserted and quiet. Of course this is their off season but it was still strange, and it makes me wish I was home where even when things are cloudy and bleak you have the warmth of loved one's around you.

The visit to the Olympic museum was good. They have some cool interactive exhibits where you can test your reflexes, train at altitude, and have a look at all of the new technologies that athletes and their coaches are using. My favorite was the basketball tracker. A camera on each corner of the court records the movements of players, a computer is then able to use that information to triangulate the exact position of each player on the court at all times. Coaches are now using this to do a statistical analysis of how players are likely to respond to different offensive or defensive strategies. Very cool.

When we finished our tour, the mist had lifted a bit so we could actually see the mountains peeking up over the low clouds. I think that is Mont Blanc on the right of the picture below. It may be a little hard to tell, but there is actually a layer of low clouds right at the top of the flag poles in the picture.

After the museum tour, everyone was on their own for lunch. Craig and I checked out the Manora, which is a nice, reasonably priced buffet near St. Francis. After lunch I walked around a bit, and bought a new converter to replace the one I left in the outlet in Interlaken. We had a hike planned to a tower on the highest point in town for 3:00 in the afternoon.

Unfortunately it was raining a bit at 3, and the clouds had returned but we decided to give it a try anyway. After a very long walk up hill we found this spot.

which wasn't a tower, but there was a flag pole we could climb. As you can see there is not much scenery behind the students as we were up into the clouds. and it was hard to see the lake much less any of the mountains from where we were. Nonetheless Craig was determined to find the tower that we set off for, and so while the rest of us were fooling around and looking at the small plastic bag with the odd botanical stencil on it he was trying to find the tower. And, after another half mile of walking up hill here it was:

You could not even see the top of the tower when you were standing right in front of it. However, we had come this far and were determined to reach the peak. So we climbed the 151 stairs to the top of the tower. And we were barely treated to a view of each other.

You can see we were definitely in the clouds!

The walk back to the hostel was all downhill and definitely an easier walk. We found a nice french bistro to stop for a happy hour drink, and enjoyed the rest. After we got back to the Hostel and caught up with the rest of the students, Craig and I found a very nice Asian restaurant (Asian Garden) for our supper. Back to the room and to bed.

Its a great group of students and its fun to see them come together as they get to know each other better. They rely less on us and more on each other with each passing day of the trip, and thats a good thing.

Sardines on a Train

2011-01-10T05:19:00.001-08:00

We just boarded the train from Bern to Laussane, we are on the upper floor of our coach, and packed in like sardines. There is not nearly enough room for luggage storage so our suitcases are on our laps, and in the aisles and generally anywhere we can find room. Its a bit crazy and all of our traveling companions that were already aboard the train must really wonder about this group of Americans. Thankfully we only have an hour on this leg of the journey and then we are in Lausanne.

Just before we left the hostel this morning we had another casualty. Josh was zipping up his suitcase in the lobby and it exploded, just like in the movies. The zipper is shot. So, the helpful woman at the front desk provided us with some packing tape! Jeff and I held the suitcase while josh wrapped it about 8 times around with the packing tape. This will get him from Interlaken to Lausanne, although I did pick up one sock that fell out along the way. Luckily I saw Josh washing clothes last night so I was pretty sure it was a clean one.

Meanwhile, here's an update on skiing etc. I turned in my snowboard for a pair of skis and boots. As a result, yesterday was extremely enjoyable. I skied with Craig, Nick, Jessica, and Camille. Mostly the red runs all day long. Even though I haven't been on skis for a few years it came back right away. The views were spectacular, although the runs were still pretty icy in many places. I felt much more confident on the skis than I did on the snowboard and so was able to enjoy the day much more. We took the train all the way to Kleine Scheidegg which is the highest point the train goes that serves the ski villages and lifts. We were able to get several runs in on each of the three lifts that start in the Kleine Scheidegg area. We skiid the Lauberhorn run which goes all the way down to Grindelwald, then took the small trams back to Mannlichen and worked our way over lift by lift to get back to Kleine Scheidegg. We were very hungry by this time so we had lunch and then skied down to Grindelwald train station and declared victory. Much fun, and no injuries in the group!

Later, back at the Hostel, as I was coming up to check my email Matt asked me "Where is the hospital?" Oh good God I thought to myself. Yes, we have another injury. It turned out that Nody separated his shoulder. At least this one is not a going-home kind of injury and won't really slow him down. The only thing will be that someone will have to carry his backpack.

So, now we need a luggage porter for Aaron, and a backpack carrier for Eric. We are very thankful that the skiing portion of the trip is over. Just now one of the students said, hey lets try ski jumping when we're in Lausanne! I think its time to nix that idea before it catches on!

How Lindsey Vonn spoiled my day in Interlaken

2011-01-10T05:18:00.001-08:00

The morning started out like any other morning, up at 7:00, a light breakfast, then hop on the bus to the ski slopes. OK, maybe not like every other morning, but a pretty desirable thing to aspire to anyway.

To get to the ski slopes from Interlaken requires a bus ride, to Winderwil, followed by a train ride to Lauterbrunn, followed by a different train ride to Wengen, followed by a trip up the Mannlichen Gondola. Unfortunately after all that trouble the quality of the snow was pretty bad. The weather here in Interlaken the past couple of days has been unseasonably warm, so the snow is really icy in the morning, turning to slush by mid-day. Most of the students that followed me out the door of our Hostel (Backpackers Villa Sonnenhof) were beginners. By the end of the day they were calling themselves the Blue Crew because they were only taking the blue runs. Note to U.S. skiiers, in the Alps blue is easy, red is intermediate, while black is for experts. Somehow I got separated from the group right away and ended up doing the first run by myself. It turned out that they had all skiied a ways ahead of mebut had stopped to contemplate their options in terms of which run to take. Even after that contemplation they ended up taking a red run, which was not what they wanted to do. It was during this first run that Aaron took a spill, and tore the ACL, and MCL ligaments in his knee.

Even though I waited at the bottom and top of the lift hoping to find the group again I was unsuccessful for several runs. Maybe an hours worth of skiing. Finally I did see the group coming off the blue run and the first thing I heard was "have you seen Aaron?"

No I said, why?

He fell and hurt himself on the run. He told us to go on to the bottom but now we're too scared to ski back down to him.

So, I took my board down the run and found him sitting all by himself by the side of a snow making machine. Only one person had stopped to see if he needed help, and due to the language barrier apparently determined he was fine. Meanwhile, I had talked to a couple of ski instructors and managed to locate a ski patrol on a snowmobile. He joined us on the slope and made the assessment that Aaron was going to need to go to Wengen for some X-Rays. As we were waiting we decided that we needed a better cover story than falling during the first run of the day. Hence the Lindsey Vonn reference. Our story is that she was on the slopes practicing for the world cup race next week and decided to flirt with Aaron, this distracted him momentarily and caused him to crash. Sadly she did not stop to help or he would probably feel just fine.

After wrapping Aaron up like a Papoose on the sled behind the snowmobile the patrol took off for the Gondola, and I was supposed to ski down and take the lift back up and meet them there. By the time I arrived the Gondola had already taken Aaron down, so I had to wait for the next one. Down in Wengen Aaron got a ride in a taxi to the doctor's office and was awaiting an X-ray by the time I arrived. It only took about an hour and a half at the doctors office to get the X-Ray with the preliminary diagnosis of a torn crucial ligament. They scheduled a followup appointment the next day so the other doctor could read the X-ray and weigh in. They outfitted Aaron with a pair of crutches that included flip down spikes for the bottom to aid in navigating through the snow, and we were off. Aaron with one ski boot on and his crutches, me carrying the other ski boot, his poles, helmet, skiis, and my own board, it was kind of a sad sight to see us slowly trudging through the narrow streets of Wengen back to the Bahnhoff. Remember all the train and bus stops it took to get to Wengen? Well we had to do the whole process in reverse loading and offloading skis, boards, etc. at each change.

Aaron and I made it back to the Hostel, where we began the process of calling our travel insurance company, Luther Study Abroad folks, and Aaron's parents. As I write this we are in "insurance-limbo" waiting to hear from our company whether they will cover an MRI in Laussane. The MRI is critical because it appears that in addition to the torn ligaments there is also a small bone chip. If the chip is too large or in the wrong place then He'll have to go home and get ready for surgery.

Day 2, or is it 3?

2011-01-07T08:23:00.003-08:00

I can't believe that I actually slept until 8:00AM. After waking up at 3 AM I was afraid I was done for, but I dropped back to sleep and slept hard until 8. After a quick breakfast at the Hostel it was time for some Munich touring on our own. A few of us were going to go to the Deutches Museum, but most of the group was headed to Dachau. I really enjoyed the museum, I went straight to the Math, Computer Science, and Astronomy exhibit, where I discovered that they had an actual Enigma machine, in the cryptography area.

There were many other great exhibits, the aeronautical area had a cross section of an Airbus A320 and several other interesting aircraft, there was a really amazing mining exhibit as well. The nautical area was equally amazing with replicas of ships both large and small. You could easily spend a whole day at the museum, but my mind was pretty overloaded by 11:30. The plan was to head back to the Viktalien Markt for a street lunch of sausage and bread, unfortunately everything was closed, it turns out that Epiphany is a national holiday in Germany, so we really had to work to find a street vendor that was open. I had to try the Currywurst, which was a sausage in a sweet sauce with curry powder sprinkled over the top. It was a delicious German meets Indian fusion street food kind of thing.

With lunch behind us we met up with the rest of the group to head back to the airport to meet with Sebastian, a marketing guy, from Lufthansa. He gave us a great presentation on Lufthansa and their support of the Munich 2018 bid. The Lufthansa folks had very generously provided us all with Munich 2018 stocking hats and scarves. After the meeting we took a group photo with everyone wearing their new gifts.

After the Lufthansa meeting we returned to the Hostel for some group discussion and to get ready for our dinner at the Hofbrauhaus! We were not in the main hall, but were upstairs in their groupdining area. I had a fantastic dinner of veal ragout with Spaetzel, and a good size dark beer.

Dinner was pretty calm until a huge group of Canadiens came it. It was a group of ninth grade hockey players and their parents. Things really started to heat up when the parents started singing Canadian drinking songs and chugging their beers. This brought on a resounding L-U, L-U, L-U-T-H, T-H, T-H, T-H-E-R from the Luther crowd and soon we were all friends.

Back at my room, sleep was hard to come by in this second night. I mostly drifted in and out of sleep until my alarm went off at 6AM, we needed to be out of the hostel and headed for the train station by 6:45. As I write this I am on the train to Mannheim and then Interlaken.

Heads a Bobbing

2011-01-07T08:23:00.001-08:00

As I write this, I've been up for approximately 36 hours. My alarm went off yesterday at 3:30AM Minnesota time and it is now 9:45, the next day, in Munich Germany. Its been a good day, and we've covered a lot of miles, but I am definitely ready for some sleep. I'm determined to make it until 10pm our time.

Its been a long day, and a number of titles for this blog entry have crossed my mind. "Hurry up and wait" was the first title that occurred to me as we arrived at the airport at 5:00AM. The lines to check our bags with American Airlines and get through security were as long as any as I've seen at the Minneapolis airport. We finally made it through security with just enough time to run down the concourse. As I arrived at the gate I warned the agent that there were several students in our group that were still behind me. Cat's rather terse response was "well they have four minutes until I close the door." Cat was well on her way to becoming my favorite person. Four minutes came and went, and soon all the students were on board. However the door remained open, and Cat continued to chat with the captain. After a standard maddeningly long airport style delay the captain finally came on the intercom and told us that there was an indicator light on that was bad enough to keep us on the ground. He had tried everything except on "last ditch effort" to clear the problem. The captain continued to describe the vehicle that was going to carry us some 30,000 feet in the air over thousands of miles as "a machine somewhere between a video game and a personal computer" So, what do you do when your PC is acting up? Reboot. Yes, the captain was going to reboot the airplane in hopes that the problem would magically go away. The air went off, and the lights went out, and after a few minutes of darkness everything game back to life. Unfortunately for us the indicator was still on. So the captain announced we would have to get off the plane so that maintenance could come on board and try to fix the problem. One of our students forgot his jacket on board the plane so after we were all off he went back aboard to retrieve the jacket. As he was coming back on board the captain was heard to say "I don't know what the hell is wrong with this plane."

Meanwhile, Craig and I tried to explain to Cat, the friendly agent, that it was very important for us to get to Laguardia in fairly good time as we had to make a transfer to Newark to make our flight to Munich. Her helpful response was "why didn't you just fly to Newark in the first place?" In the end she did say that if the flight was cancelled she could rebook us on a flight through Chicago directly into Newark. So, I collected bag tags from everyone in case they needed to retrieve our luggage and transfer it to the plane that would be right next door. The board was showing a 7:30 departure time for our flight, but when 7:15 came around there was no sign of Cat or any update on status. Finally she came out and announced that we all must board immediately. Of course one of the students had just left to use the restroom and this caused poor Cat no end of frustration. Why would they leave the gate area!? she inquired rather crossly.

In the end all were on board and the flight made it to Laguardia in plenty of time. All the luggage made it as well and so we collected the luggage and made our way to the ground transportation. We boarded a bus that was supposed to take us directly to Penn station in Midtown where we were going to take a New Jersey rail train to the Newark airport. However when we got to Grand Central we were told that we needed to transfer to one of the small vans. Unfortunately all 16 of our group would not fit in one van. After some work a second van came and we got aboard, with a couple of students needing to sit on the floor! Our driver insisted that we needed to be dropped off on the far side of penn station by the Amtrack lounge even though I repeatedly told him that we needed New Jersey rail. Once again everything turned out fine and we made our way to Newark, found the group checkin desk and then dispersed for some much needed food. At this point it was about 2:30PM EST and we had not had anything to eat yet.

The group met back at the gate area for our flight to Munich where we had our first group discussion on the first reading assignment right there. The students had all done their readings and so the discussion was good. Boarding for our flight to Munich went smoothly until I discovered that I had a middle middle seat. Bummer, except that there was an open aisle with an open window right across the way. I moved into the seat, hoping that nobody would kick me out, and luck was with me. After a glass of wine and a short movie I was actually able to get in a short nap.

On we go... landing, baggage claim, and our trek to the airport train station in Munich all went off without a hitch. At this point it was 7:30AM Munich time, or just after midnight CST the group was starting to show some signs of getting tired.

Our train ride was about 40 minutes to get to the Hackerbruke station and then it was about a 4 block walk to our Hostel where we were not able to check in yet, but could at least store our luggage before we went out for a long walk around the city. Craig was an excellent tour guide for our walking tour around Karlsplatz and Marienplatz. Lunch was a rather expensive stop at the Ratskeller. I had Weinerschnitzl and fries for 22 euro. After lunch we took the train to the Olympic Park, where we had a 2:00 tour scheduled, so at this point we are all coming up on the mark where we have been awake for 24 hours. Our tour guide had us watch a short video on the Olympic park and that is when the head bobbing seriously started. People were dropping like flies, myself included. Even after the video as we were standing, yes standing, and looking at a model of the park I found that my chin was suddenly on my chest! Once we got out and started walking around the park people began to catch a second wind, and the enthusiasm of Ruth, our guide, began to catch on. Its amazing how much use the Munich Olympic park gets, it is really a model of how to sustainably host the olympics. Nearly every building is in use today for something, including the famous stadium which up until this year was still used for Bayern Munich soccer club. They have since moved to the new Allianz stadium, but the stadium continues to be used for concerts and other large events. We were able to go right now on the field and enjoy the view of the stadium and imagine that we were walking where famous olympians and football stars had also walked.

After the tour was over, we went up to the top of the Olympic tower where we were treated to a fantastic view of the city, and the Alps in the distance. With the tour over, people started to get tired again as we took the train back to our Hostel where we were able to check in to our rooms and then get ready to go to dinner. We kept pushing to keep people awake until a reasonably late hour. Craig, Aaron, and I went back to Marienplatz to the Andechs Am Dom a brewery where the beer is (or was) brewed by Monks. I had a delicious dinner of roast pork and huge dumplings. I'm pretty sure these are very similar the dumplings that I tried to make for Cenek, our Czech foreign exchange student a couple of years ago. Its nice to finally see and taste how they are supposed to turn out. Most of the group went to the Augustiner pub across the road from the hostel, so we stopped there on our way back to the Hostel to join them for another beer before turning in for the night. This brings me up to date. The trip is off to a good start but I need sleep badly.

Guest Week: Bill Amend (FoxTrot)

2010-11-24T05:58:00.001-08:00

via xkcd.com

Getting unicode right in Python - Nick's Blog

2010-11-16T08:19:00.001-08:00

Getting unicode right in Python

Posted by Nick Johnson | Filed under python, text, unicode, rant

Yup, I'm back from holidays! Apologies to everyone for the delayed return - it's taking me a long while to catch up on everything that built up while I was away.

Proper text processing - specifically, correct handling of unicode - is one of those things that consistently confounds even experienced developers. This isn't because it's difficult, but rather, I believe, because most developers carry around a few key misconceptions about what text (in the context of software) is and how it's represented. A search on StackOverflow for UnicodeDecodeError demonstrates just how prevalent these misconceptions are. These misconceptions date back to the days before unicode - longer than many developers have been in the industry, including myself - but they're still nothing if not widespread. This is in part because a number of well known and popular languages continue to, at worst, perpetuate the misunderstandings, and at best are insufficiently good at helping developers get it right.

We can divide languages into four categories along the axis of unicode support:

Languages that were written before unicode was defined, or widespread. C and C++ fall into this category. Languages in this category tend to have unicode support that's spotty, not built into the language, or difficult to use correctly, making the path of least resistance the wrong one, more often than not.

Languages that should know better. These languages were written after unicode was already widespread, but managed to get things horribly wrong. They have all the weaknesses of category 1, without the excuse of age. Prime amongst these, in my experience, is PHP, though there are doubtless many more languages that do just as badly.

Languages that get it basically right, but have a few critical flaws. Languages in this category are 'modern' and understand unicode, but fail to make the path of least resistance for developers the correct one, which results in some serious shortfalls in unicode support for things implemented in these languages. Python 2.X, to my dismay, falls into this category - more about which, later.

Languages that Get It Right. They support unicode, and they make it easy to do the right thing, and hard to do the wrong thing. Java and the .NET platform both fall into this category.

So what's the deal with unicode, and how are we getting it wrong? Joel's post, the absolute minimum every software developer absolutely, positively must know about unicode is an excellent place to start for this, but for the sake of brevity and those who are naturally impatient, I'll summarize.

Characters and bytes

The essential fact that you must understand in order to handle text properly is the abstract concept of a character. A character is a representation of a single symbol in a piece of text - a platonic ideal, of sorts. Crucially, a character is not a byte. Let me repeat for emphasis: A character is not, not, not a byte. Furthermore, there's no single way of representing a given character as one or more bytes - as I said, a character is the platonic ideal of the smallest unit of text.

Unicode, then, is a way of defining a set of characters that everyone can agree on. It consists of a huge database of characters, and each one is associated with a unique number, called a code point. Thus, the english letter capital A has the codepoint U+0041. The euro symbol has codepoint U+20A0, and so forth. A text string is simply a series of these codepoints, representing the character for each element in the string.

Of course, sooner or later, you need a way to store and transmit your platonic unicode strings. It helps if you choose a method that other people can understand, so that you can send text to them, and they to you, in a mutually comprehensible fashion. This is where character encodings come in.

A character encoding defines a mapping between our platonic characters and some way of representing them as bytes. The mapping doesn't have to be complete - it may have no way to represent certain characters - and it doesn't need to use the same amount of space for each character - some characters may be encoded as a single byte, while others may require several.

Because there are many ways of representing the same character as bytes, this means that if you have a series of bytes, but do not know their encoding - even if you know the data is textual - the data is meaningless. You can guess, but you'd be doing just that, guessing. In short, bytes are not text. If you forget everything else in this article, remember that. In order to read and write text, you must first know the encoding you are using, whether from of convention, out of band information, or any other mechanism.

How Python handles unicode

This is where Python's unicode support comes in. In Python's type heirarchy, there are three distinct string types: 'unicode', which represents unicode strings (text strings), 'str', which represents byte strings (binary data), and 'basestring', which acts as a parent class for both of the other string types. This is where, in my opinion, Python makes its misstep in handling unicode which pushes it into category 3, instead of category 4, by my definition above.

As I've just spent several paragraphs belabouring, bytes and characters are fundamentally different entities, only interconvertible with the help of a character encoding. Python, unfortunately, does its best to help you forget this, with two separate missteps:

The first is of debatable significance: treating sequences of bytes as strings. It's arguable whether or not this is a good thing; Java and .NET support the proposition that it's not, while other languages make good arguments in the other direction. In any case, it's certainly true that certain operations you might want to preform on text strings - regular expression matching, string replacement, and so forth - don't entirely make sense on sequences of bytes. Python, though, treats bytes as just a different type of string, and allows the same set of operations on both.

The second misstep is the more significant one: Python's attempt at transparently converting between byte strings and character strings. In a variety of circumstances, Python will attempt to convert a byte string to a unicode string or vice-versa, when the situation warrants - for example, when attempting to concatenate a byte string and a unicode string together. Since, as we've previously detailed, conversion between the two types is meaningless without an encoding, Python relies on a 'default encoding', specified by sys.setdefaultencoding(). On most platforms, this defaults to ASCII, and it's almost certainly wrong for any given conversion. Other places this encoding is used include calls to str() or unicode() without specifying an encoding yourself, and functions that expect one type of string but are passed the other.

One solution to some of your unicode woes, then, would be to call sys.setdefaultencoding(), setting the default encoding to whatever you ought to be using. This only masks the root problem, though, which is your failure to handle text correctly in the first place. It may also be impractical, since many apps, particularly webapps, may have to deal with multiple different text encodings in different places.

The correct solution is to fix your code so that you handle text correctly. Here's the cliff's notes on what you should be doing:

All text strings, everywhere should be of type unicode, not str. If you're handling text, and your variable is a str, it's a bug!

To decode a byte string as text, use var.decode(encoding) (eg, var.decode('utf-8'), with the correct encoding. To encode a text string as bytes, use var.encode(encoding).

Never ever use str() on a unicode string, or unicode() on a byte string without a second argument specifying the encoding.

Whenever you read data from outside your app, expect it to be bytes - eg, of type str - and call .decode() on it to interpret it as text. Likewise, always call .encode() on text you want to send to the outside world.

If a string literal in your code is intended to represent text, it should always be prefixed with 'u'. In fact, you probably never want to define a raw string literal in your code at all. For what it's worth, though, I'm terrible at this one, as I'm sure pretty much everyone else is, too.

Python 3, by the way, fixes things, and gets unicode and string handling right, putting it solidly into category 4. See this section of the What's new page for details.

Hopefully this made sense, and if you had any doubts about what exactly unicode is and how to handle it, they're now cleared up. Next time you get a UnicodeEncodeError or UnicodeDecodeError in your app, then, you'll know exactly what's gone wrong, and how to fix it!

21 July, 2010
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via blog.notdot.net

Good article on the issues you encounter when working with strings and unicode in Python.

Steve Sack - November 11, 2010

2010-11-12T06:02:00.001-08:00

via November 11, 2010 Comics

In Praise of the Two Fat Ladies

2010-11-06T06:46:00.001-07:00

via The Amateur Gourmet

Mr. Game Show was a Hanukkah gift that my parents bought me one year in the 1980s. It looked like a regular board game (small ... Read More >>

Strange Brew - November 1, 2010

2010-11-01T06:21:00.001-07:00

via November 1, 2010 Comics

Dear Apple

2010-09-17T06:38:00.001-07:00

Dear Apple,

You lost a sale today. I know its just one less iPhone you are going to sell, and in the grand scheme of things does not amount to anything. I suppose its not really your fault, and as a loyal Apple customer its much easier for me to blame AT&T than you. Still, it makes me sad to have to tell you this. I waited as long as I could for AT&T to expand their network in my direction. I've hung on every Verizon rumor for two years. Finally after enduring a year of carrying my iPod touch in the same pocket as the mind numbingly horrible Motorola Crush I bought an HTC Desire yesterday. Android!! I never thought I would see the day.

Here's whats even worse, I like it! It has some great apps Gmail, Calendar, and many apps that I already love on my iPod Touch and iPad: Dropbox, Evernote, 1Password, Kindle, Facebook, Twitter, Weather, Stocks, and a 5, yes 5, megapixel camera! I already love the gps, so the location aware apps work, I love the WiFi and the Bluetooth.

I'm going to miss OmniFocus, but I carry around my Ipad almost everywhere I go so I don't think I'll miss it that much.

So Apple, I'll remain a loyal customer, at least for now. I'm going to continue to develop my app for the iPad, I still love my iMac and my MacBook Pro. But if US Cellular comes out with a decent family data plan in the next month or so you may lose two more sales as the rest of my family follows me into the smartphone world.

eBook Man is Cleaning out the Library

2010-08-19T13:10:00.001-07:00

So today I sat in my office and looked over at my library of books, probably about 700 books all together. The top half of the library contains my cookbook collection and lots of other non-fiction books. The bottom half is largely science fiction, some paperbacks that I've had for 30 years, The Lord of the Rings trilogy for example. There were also several large stacks of books on the floor because the shelves are full. Jane is wanting me to do something to get the books off the floor. Even though she doesn't spend that much time in my office so I don't know why it bothers her, but she's right the piles have been accumulating and its time to do something.

Suddenly it hit me, I could let all of the paperbacks go. I've been saving them for years because they are my favorites and maybe I'll read them again, or maybe I just like to look at the shelves and see my old favorites sitting there. I'm not sure what the precise reason is, whatever it is I'm over it. I just realized that if I did want to read them again, I would no longer want to do it by holding a real book in my hand. I realized that just like all of my old '80s music that I had on cassette tape these are relics of my past, and if I did want to read them again I would be happier to download them to my iPad and read them in the kindle app or iBooks. But, fat chance that the iBooks store would have any of these old favorites. I prefer the iPad over the dedicated Kindle because it saves me one device. Plus until now the kindle required cell coverage that I don't have.

So, here, for posterity, and maybe to remind me in the future if I come back and read this post instead of staring at bookshelves, is a random walk through the lower half of my library. If you have suggestions for what I can do with the paperbacks let me know. If you read this list and have suggestions for other authors you think I would like, definitely let me know.

Rober Sawyer, every book ever written by him except for the current WWW series which I bought in electronic form from the beginning. Factoring Humanity, Calculating God, the Hominid Series, great ideas
Isaac Asimov, The robot books, and the entire foundation series. These books took me through college.
Stephen R. Donaldson, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. Covenant is still one frustrating guy whenever I think about these books. Although I notice that there are some new additions to the series that are out in eBook form...
Dan Simmons, the Hyperion, Endymion series. The Shrike was one scary monster.
David Brin, Despite the absolutely dismal movie the Postman is still a favorite in how it forshadowed the web. I also have some Brin on the upper half of the library, The Transparent Society is an excellent book to get you thinking about privacy in the digital age.
Orson Scott Card, the Enders Game series... I loved all of these books, and I even like some of the more recent ones where he goes back and fills in some missing pieces from the perspective of other characters.
Connie Willis, The Doomesday Book is awesome as are many of her other stories although none have captivated me as much as that one.
Frank Herbert, The Dune series of course.
Robert Heinlien, Stranger in a Strange Land and others.
Mary Doria Russel, The Sparrow. This is one of my all time favorite books, in fact I even made my Paideia students read it last year. I'm sure they thought I was off the deep end for making them read Science Fiction in a serious class like Paideia but Oh well.
Robert Russo, not science fiction but a great writer. I like all of his books, but teaching at a small college, I get tears in my eyes from laughing so hard when I read Straight Man.
And speaking of non-science fiction books, Jon Hassler, this guy captures small town midwest living so well. From Staggerford to Rookery Blues they are amazing. I miss him, and I miss Connie Helgen who recommended him to me. After our trip to Ireland this summer I've been longing to go back and read a Green Journey again, but I just checked and its not available in the Kindle store. Horrors!
James Halperin, The Truth Machine, and I just read an article this morning about a group out in california that is using MRI as a new lie detector. Anyway, read this book.
Roger Zelazny, the whole Amber Series, kind of a disfunctional family but the whole series is fun to read.
John Grisham, hmmm why did I save all of these??
Carl Sagan, Contact. I read this way before the Jodi Foster movie. That was just a bonus for a young geek who loved her in the after school specials.
J. R. R. Tolkien, a boxed set of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I don't think I can part with these. I still remember reading these late at night with a flashlight under my blanket. I've still never been able to make it through the Silmarillion though.
Douglass Adams, such a loss, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. I swear I can open up any of these books to a random page and start reading and I'll be laughing in no time.
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I've never had the energy to make it through the Quicksilver books, but I have Anathem on my iPad so we'll see.
Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai, the Chantry Guild, The Final Encyclopedia
Larry Niven, the Ringword Books, and other books with Jerry Pournelle (a Mote in God's Eye) I still remember looking forward to reading Pournelle's Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine every month
Robert Charles Wilson, Spin, Darwinia, The Chronoliths, and others.
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep, a Deepness in the Sky
Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea books.
Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave series that retells the legend of King Arthur.

I also discovered a rather interesting section on the shelves devoted to historical fiction, but I'll leave that for another time. I just wanted to mention it in case you've concluded that I'm hopelessly one dimensional.

I would also say that I've discovered that computer science reference books work very well as ebooks. I've been teaching myself to program my iPad and I have several good references in electronic form. Its nice to have them open on my big screen, and its easy to find examples when you can search.

Google App Engine Service Login

2010-08-16T12:56:00.001-07:00

So I'm working on an app during my sabbatical that has an iPad component and an online Google App Engine component. The Google App Engine part is half web based and half web service based. Of course this means that the local client part has to be able to authenticate itself to the Google App Engine before it can communicate and do useful stuff. Finding good reliable examples of how to do this is surprisingly hard. For the Objective C code I'm working on I found a nice set of classes that do the trick for you here: On Github For Python I found some example code on stackoverflow. However it was not really in a reusable form.

The basic outline of what you have to do is as follows:

1. Login to https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin This will give you an auth token.
2. Use the token you gained in step 1 to login to your Google App engine application or service. When you have successfully logged in to your service google will set an ACSID cookie for you to use when you make subsequent requests to your service. This prevents you from having to login each time you make a web service request.

I've taken some ideas from both places mentioned above and have created a Python class for logging in and accessing app engine services from Python. To use this module you just need to import it and create a GoogleAppEngineLogin object. Once the object is created you can use the open method on the object to access further services. The open method is just a convenience wrapper around urllib2.urlopen but it also makes sure that your cookie has not expired before it makes a request. If you have comments or suggestions for how to improve the code please let me know via email or leave a comment.

The code is reproduced below, but you can also just download the file from git clone git@gist.github.com:36b1c45ed39298178907.git


import getpass
import urllib
import urllib2
import cookielib


class GoogleAppEngineLogin(object):
    """
   Logging in to an App Engine Account (when you use google users) is
   a two step process: First you must login to Google generally.  This
   gets you an auth token.  The auth token is used as part of a
   request to login to your app/service During the login process for
   your app/service the server sets a cookie with the name of ACSID,
   it is this cookie and its value that serves as the authentication
   token for your own service/app.  So, for future requests you need
   to give the server the cookie as part of your request.  Handling
   cookies can be a bit tricky if you haven't had some experience with
   it but luckily Python's cookielib module makes it all pretty
   automatic.

    This class takes care of the whole login process for you, and then
    gives you a simple helper to access the URLs for your service.
    The helper function makes sure the cookie is still valid and
    passes on the request along with the cookie.  Technically you
    would not even need to use the helper function, you could use
    urllib2 directly to access your service but this seems a bit
    neater to me.

    Some of this code was inspired by and lifted from an example on
    stackoverflow.com, but that was all in-line code my contribution
    is to add some error handling and encapsulate the whole thing
    inside a class to make it easier to include in my/your own
    programs.  Here's a link to the original thread on stackoverflow
    http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101742/how-do-you-access-an-authenticated-google-app-engine-service-from-a-non-web-pyt

    """
    
    def __init__(self, user_email, user_pw, uri, source):
        """
        Create a Google App Engine Object.
        Arguments:
        - `user_email`:  your google username
        - `user_pw`: your google password
        - `uri`:  The url of your google app engine service
        - `source`: The unique name of your google app engine service
        """
        self._user_email = user_email
        self._user_pw = user_pw
        self._uri = uri
        self._source = source
        self._authtoken = None
        self._auth_cookie = None
        
        if not self.google_client_login():
            raise RuntimeError("Could not login to Google")
        
        if not self.app_engine_login():
            raise RuntimeError("Could not login to your application")

        
    def google_client_login(self):
        #
        # get an AuthToken from Google accounts
        #
        auth_uri = 'https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
        authreq_data = urllib.urlencode({ "Email":   self._user_email,
                                          "Passwd":  self._user_pw,
                                          "service": "ah",
                                          "source":  self._source,
                                          "accountType": "HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE" })
        auth_req = urllib2.Request(auth_uri, data=authreq_data)
        try:
            auth_resp = urllib2.urlopen(auth_req)
            auth_resp_body = auth_resp.read()
        except:
            return False
        # auth response includes several fields - we're interested in 
        #  the bit after Auth= 
        auth_resp_dict = dict(x.split("=")
                              for x in auth_resp_body.split("\n") if x)
        try:
            self._authtoken = auth_resp_dict["Auth"]
        except:
            return False

        return True

    def app_engine_login(self):
        #
        #  Get a cookie
        #  we use a cookie to authenticate with Google App Engine
        #  by registering a cookie handler here, this will automatically store the 
        #  cookie returned when we use urllib2 to open
        #  http://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin
        self._cookiejar = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
        opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(self._cookiejar))
        urllib2.install_opener(opener)


        serv_args = {}
        serv_args['continue'] = self._uri
        serv_args['auth']     = self._authtoken

        full_serv_uri = "%s/_ah/login?%s" % (self._uri,urllib.urlencode(serv_args))

        serv_req = urllib2.Request(full_serv_uri)
        serv_resp = urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
        serv_resp_body = serv_resp.read()


        for i, c in enumerate(self._cookiejar):
            if c.name == 'ACSID':
                self._auth_cookie = c
                return True

        return False

    def open(self,url,data=None):
        """
        url should be a properly encoded url ready to go.  data is
        optional and should be used to provide parameters to pass
        along with the URL when you want to use POST instead of GET.
        If you provide data it must be properly encoded just as if you
        were calling urlopen directly yourself.
        """
        if self._auth_cookie.is_expired():
            if not self.google_client_login() or not self.app_engine_login():
                raise RuntimeError("Cannot get proper authorization for this request")
            
        serv_req = urllib2.Request(url,data)
        return urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
        

if __name__ == "__main__":
    user = raw_input("User: ")
    pw = getpass.getpass("Password: ")
    service_url = "http://myapp.appspot.com"
    service_name = "myapp"
    gae = GoogleAppEngineLogin(user,pw,service_url,service_name)
    h = gae.open("http://myapp.appspot.com/my/service")
    print h.read()

Polk County Biking

2010-07-21T14:59:00.001-07:00

Here's a quiz for you... What do deer, old cars, a saw mill, and black bears all have in common? These are all things I regularly see on my rides around polk county. The countryside by our cabin is some of the best riding around, every road is paved and very lightly travelled. I can ride around any number of lakes and have all kinds of flexibility to make a route that is anywhere from 12 to 50 miles long. Bone Lake, Half Moon, Pipe, Balsam, Little Blake, Butternut, these are a few of the lakes that I loop in and through on a regular basis.

So, the other night I took my camera for a ride and focused more on the picture taking that the riding. Here's my favorite shot from the night and you can find the rest of them here:

Incidentally, this picture illustrates where the bear comes in to the picture. This little pond is at the bottom of a little hill and around a nice little corner. One morning a came coasting down the hill and around the corner to see a black bear, he would have been right in the bottom right corner of the picture. I don't know which of us was more surprised! The bear took off one way and I took off as fast as I could up the hill and past the pond. We've never seen each other again.

27 Inches of Bliss

2010-07-06T08:56:00.001-07:00

Why I'm writing this on a 27 in iMac

I'm almost lost as I stare at the screen to write this post. 27 inches is a lot of screen real estate to work with, but boy do I love this new iMac! It is fast, fast, fast. I never thought of my Macbook Pro as being a slow machine but this is crazy fast in comparison. Typesetting my textbook project used to take minutes on the MBP, now it takes just a few seconds. Why all this speed? Maybe it is due to the 8 GB of memory and the 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7 processor.

The more interesting question is why am I replacing my MBP with an iMac? The answer, in a word, is iPad. After trying out my iPad for a few days back in April I was convinced that I would no longer need a notebook, and that my money would be better spent on a desktop. After traveling in Europe for 28 days with the iPad as my only computer I am convinced I was right. The iPad is the best computer ever for traveling.

On the Plane

Flying with an iPad is great. We had a seven hour flight and I had loaded several movies and a bunch of TV show episodes onto my iPad, I've never had a more enjoyable long flight. I can't sleep on planes, so it was great to be able to watch two movies and a few episodes of Merlin on the flight over. My Bose noise canceling headphones make the experience even better as they do such a great job of blocking out the jet noise.

When I wasn't watching a video I was reading. I had several books loaded on both iBooks and Kindle apps. I really wish there was more selection in the iBooks store, as I'm finding they rarely have the book I want, so the kindle app gets used more frequently.

Finally, if I wasn't watching or reading I had several games loaded to keep me entertained. I like Scrabble, Strategery, and Fieldrunners the best, although I did play a few games of chess against tChess Lite.

On the Ground

While on the ground I found several apps to be incredibly useful. WeatherBug is awesome for checking the weather forecast while away, its easy to add new cities and the coverage in the UK, Ireland, and Scandinavia is excellent.

For keeping up with the daily technology news I really like Early Edition. It is beautiful in that it takes away all the hassle of marking things as read or whatever, every day you just get a nice newspaper like layout of the new articles that have come in since yesterday. I love how this keeps me from getting overwhelmed with stuff when I get a few days behind. If someone comes out with an Early Edition like reader for the mac I'm almost sure that would replace my longtime favorite, NetNewsWire, on my desktop.

Every day I also used the Photo app, it was so easy to transfer pictures from my Canon 7D to the iPad. After the transfer I could delete the really bad pictures right away, and it was great to be able to look at the photos I had taken on the iPad size screen rather than the little screen on the camera. I really wish apple would make it possible to rate and organize pictures on the iPad that would make it even better. Now that I'm home, I still have to go through the process of picking the best of the 1000 pictures I took and organizing them into an album. If you could do that on the iPad then I could pick the best of each day as I go along. I also bought PhotoForge for the iPad because there were a couple of times that I wanted to upload a photo to Facebook, and its impossible to edit the photos on Facebook using Safari on the iPad. PhotoForge is great and very easy to use.

The other app that got a lot of use was Evernote. prior to leaving my wife had prepared notes for each day of the trip, along with pdf maps and other info about each destination. Although she had saved them as notes in our shared Dropbox account I found it to be much easier to drag them all into Evernote rather than the hassle of marking each document as a favorite in Dropbox so I could have offline access. I really wish Dropbox would improve the iPad and iPhone clients to make it easier to keep things available offline.

Finally, I wrote a blog entry almost every day of the trip using BlogPress. I purchased an Apple Bluetooth keyboard for writing purposes and I really love it for writing longer blog entries. For Facebook and email the onscreen keyboard is fine, but for longer writing the keyboard was awesome, and it proved to be very durable and easy to carry along in my daypack. BlogPress itself worked like a champ. It was a breeze to choose pictures from the Photo app to drop into the blog, and it also worked very well offline. A lot of times I would write the blog entry when I wasn't in wi-fi range and then just post it when I found some free wi-fi. I also like how BlogPress makes it easy to make a Facebook posting every time I publish a blog entry. That was a great way for friends and family to know there was something new to read.

Incidentally I did not find myself wishing for a 3G iPad at all. I was always able to find some kind of wi-fi no matter where we were. Every hotel we stayed in had wi-fi available, not always free, but I would say in 90% of the hotels it was free. If it wasn't free in the hotel it was not too hard to find a pub or restaurant nearby that did have it available, for the price of a coffee or drink.

A beautiful last day

2010-07-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Well, today is our last official day of vacation. Tomorrow is a day of travel back to Dublin and then we wake up and head to the airport to see Kaia off to France and the rest of us to Chicago.

After our rain soaked day yesterday we were thrilled to wake up to see the sun and big puffy white clouds today. What a difference the sun makes! Our departure this morning was slightly delayed as we were still drying shoes and clothing from yesterday, and (I suspect) because most of the group was in Roundstone partying at the pub until late last night. The Miller family stayed and had dinner at the castle last night as we are all showing the wear of nearly four weeks on the road.

I can't imagine what the maid must have though when she came into our room this morning. I had been sitting on the floor drying 3 pairs of shoes with the blow drier; the shoes I've worn every day for the last 3 weeks, Josh's tennis shoes, and Jane's walking shoes. The smell was indescribable.

When we did take off we headed out toward Roundstone, a beautiful little seaside village which is becoming very popular among the well to do here in Ireland. When you come into town you go right past the house of the guy who wrote the original River Dance. From Roundstone we made our way along the coast toward Ballyconeely where we had our first 'table stop' of the day. Padraic was busy setting out a table with fruit and granola bars and juice for us.

We only had a little further to go to get to Clifden, so we decided to do the Sky Drive loop before lunch rather than after. That turned out to be a great decision as the weather cooperated perfectly and we were treated to magnificent views of the sea. Based on the color of the sea you would think that you were in the Caribbean not Ireland! As you might guess the Sky drive was a bit of a climb but it takes you right out to a point where you can see ocean in three different directions. Here's the Miller family at our stop on the point.

Of course by this time our guides had already schemed to set up another table stop. They had gone to the store in Clifden and bought some more Bulmers cider, this was the new berry flavor that Padraic had not had before so he was even more excited than usual for us to give it a try. We toasted a great trip and all of our new found friends.

The ride back into Clifden was mostly downhill, but by this time we really were ready for some food. We ate at E.J. Kings pub, Jane and I had the chicken curry, Kaia had ravioli, and Josh had a club sandwich. I think Padraic was a little disappointed that we had strayed from traditional irish fare but by this time our palate's were ready for something a little more spicy. We all had to laugh at Josh during lunch because we were talking about the weather and how lucky we were that it wasn't raining like it was yesterday. I said yes, it only rains in Ireland on days that contain a 'y.' Jane and Kaia laughed and the conversation moved on. Suddenly, from out of the blue, Josh says, "wait every day has a 'y' in it." We still love him.

By the time we finished lunch it was almost 3:00 and it was time to head back to the Castle. The Miller family took off a little ahead of the pack, and then Josh and I separated from Jane and Kaia, we made it back in record time. It was our flattest ride yet. The interesting thing about riding through the bog is how similar it looks to the prairies of Southern Minnesota, except where the glaciers flattened all the granite in Minnesota there were no glaciers here so the granite still stands in small hills and big chunks of rock sticking up out of the landscape.

Josh and I were so fast that I missed the last table stop. A little bit of Jameson Irish Whiskey to toast our final ride. Not being a whiskey fan, that did not hurt my feelings except that Padraic insisted on pouring me a glass in the parking lot of the Castle when he caught up to us.

Tonight we have our final group meal in the main dining room here at the castle. Based on the look I had at the menu last night it will be a feast. This has really been a great way to finish up our vacation. The people in our group have been a lot of fun, and DuVine really lives up to their motto, Bike, Eat, Drink, Sleep. In the photo above we have in the front row, Dan, Craig, Kaia, Laurie, and Joanna. In the back row we have Patty (Dan's wife) Bobby and Brian, Brad and Jane, Josh, and James (Joanna's fiance)

Not in the picture are our two amazing guides for the week Padraic and Kirk. These guys are amazing and made for a really fun week. Its easy to forget that every time we were having fun and sitting around enjoying ourselves they were tending to every minute detail to make sure that our trip was a success.

Location:Ballynahinch Castle

Now I know why Ireland is so Green

2010-07-01T00:26:00.000-07:00

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... This morning the sky was mostly cloudy, and there was almost no wind. So I went along with Dan, Brian, James, and Joanna to do the mast ride. This was an optional 8 mile ride for the before breakfast crowd. The main feature of this ride was an 840 (Padraic said 250, but the GPS showed the lie) foot climb. Most of that 840 feet was in the last 3/4 of a mile. For those of you from Decorah just imagine the First Lutheran hill extended to 3/4 of a mile.

The view from the mast was fantastic, we could see the ocean and a couple of beautiful lakes. The hill was so steep, and the roads were just a little bit damp, that I actually had to walk my bike the last 100 yards, because I could not get enough traction when I was sitting on the bike and pedaling! The ride down was almost as exciting, in fact it seemed quite a bit more dangerous than the ride up as it was difficult to keep your speed down without skidding all over the place.

After finishing that ride I was very ready for my breakfast back at Rosleague Manor. I had a ham and cheese omelet with some of the best croissants ever. To wash down the omelet I had a glass of grapefruit juice and a cup of black coffee. The manor employs a great French chef, and they have an exchange program to bring over young people from france to learn Irish service customs.

After breakfast there was another optional ride. From Rosleague we rode to Letterfrack, then out on the Connemara loop, past Molly the pirate queen's castle, and then on to Renvyle, Tulley, Tulley Cross, and then back to Letterfrack by a different road. Once again we had fantastic views, we saw a small vertical wind turbine, and learned about Grace O'Malley the pirate queen. Back in the 1500's she was a very powerful woman who enjoyed plundering the english royal ships that were in turn plundering all of Ireland. She and queen Elizabeth met to try and resolve the issue but as long as Elizabeth was unwilling to stop plundering Ireland, Grace O'Malley was unwilling to stop sinking and plundering their ships. Apparently they ended up agreeing to disagree, but I'm sure it was an exciting meeting.

We met up with the rest of the group in Letterfrack for lunch at Currachs. Although three courses were offered as part of lunch most of us could not imagine eating more than one course and maybe a bit of dessert. Many of us had the Irish pizza and it was quite good. A nice change from the last couple of days. I also had a chocolate chip cookie for desert which was excellent but a bad choice as the chocolate muffin was clearly superior. Kaia had snicker bar pie which would have been a close second or third I'm sure. Jane and Josh had apple pie and ice cream.

Here's where the story of the day takes a turn for the worse. Just as we were finishing up, the weather forecast for the day came true. Rain after noon. We rode to the Kylmore Abbey in a torrential rain. At one point we came out from behind a wind break and I was nearly stopped in my tracks by the strength of the wind. My little water resistant biking wind breaker was doing nothing to stop this rain and I was wet and chilled by the time we got to the Abbey. The Abbey was pretty impressive in the oppressive weather, and I'm sure it would have been brilliant in good weather.

After the Abbey I seriously considered buying a new waterproof winter coat, but instead I borrowed one of Padriac's extra rain jackets. We had 17 additional miles to get to Ballynahinch (pronounced like bal-in-the-hinch if you say it really fast) Castle. After a half a mile we were all soaked through completely, my shoes were completely soaked, my pants were soaked, all of my layers were soaked. And the headwind was horrific. After a while we realized that there was no possible way we could get any wetter, so we might just as well accept our fate and enjoy the ride. Once again, I'm sure that in reasonable weather it would have been beautiful. As it was I was still nice.

Now we are at the castle, showered, dried, and warm. Our clothes have been sent off to be dried, and the porter will collect our shoes to leave them in the boiler room to dry over night. All is well, as DuVine takes good care of us. Our only remaining decision for the day is whether to stay here at the castle and eat at the pub or to go into town and try one of the restaurants there.

Location:Ballynahinch castle

An even better day in Connemara

2010-06-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

We woke up this morning in Ashford Castle to a clear blue sky. After a breakfast, we were left our luggage outside our door and loaded our backpacks into the van. We were on our way for 40 miles of cycling at 9:00 this morning. We only rode about a half a mile before we made our first stop at the Ashford Abbey. This is a very well preserved Abbey. We learned that the most well preserved churches are from the church of Ireland, since in times past there were many interesting rules applied to the catholics. For example if you were catholic you could only build your church out of wood. If you were catholic you could not pass down your family land to one member of the family it had to be divided equally among all of the family members. So for a large catholic family it did not take many generations before the land was subdivided into sections so small that they were useless for farming. While we were at the Abbey reading gravestones, I did discover a typo on one from the 1800's the stone read that the couple buried was survived by "there" daughter.

Biking with DuVine is a bit different from the way I bike at home. When I bike at home I just ride and I keep riding until I'm done. With DuVine we ride, then we stop for snacks. These snacks always involve an important local beverage. We've tried some delicious Irish Stouts, a Smithwicks Ale, along with a some wonderful Bulmers Cider. Anyway, as I was saying, the weather today was fantastic, no wind, and some great sun. Here's a picture of Loch Fuehy (lake phooey) You could really see the reflection of the hills in the water it was so still.

Our first snack stop today was at the edge of Irelands only Fjord. Does anyone know what it takes for a body of water to be a fjord? Mike keep your hand down, anyone else? No, well to be a fjord, you must be fed by the Ocean, and must be formed by a glacier. For our stop we had some Bulmers pear cider (I hope someone in Decorah can get this) and some fruit. After a little rest we continued up the road to our lunch stop. We had a specially designed menu just for us. I had some seafood chowder, a crab sandwich (right fresh from the fjord) and some Creme Brule for desert. Below you can see a picture of the fjord.

We had one pretty good climb today, just before our lunch break. Jane had a little problem with her chain at the bottom of the climb and ended up talking with one of the local farmers for quite some time before she got a ride in the van to our lunch stop.

Another fun feature of riding in Ireland is that occasionally some sheep will be right on the road. Here you can see Jane herding a small flock out of our way.

After our lunch we continued along the fjord until we turned onto the coast. We stopped to check out the peat bogs, and have a little afternoon snack of some Harps Lager and nuts. Once again the views were just amazing. Now we are at Roseleague Manor. There were a lot of rolling hills today so we are just chilling, catching up and email and blogging until our next meal. when DuVine says their motto is "Bike, Eat, Drink, Sleep" they really are not kidding. We've had fantastic food everywhere so far, and I feel like every calorie I bike off, I immediately consume at the next snack stop.

Connemara and Castles

2010-06-29T00:00:00.000-07:00

We are staying in a castle! Ashford castle to be precise. It's about an hour outside of Galway and it's absolutely beautiful. We arrived yesterday afternoon with our DuVine Adventures guides Kirk and Padraic. Yesterday was mostly about checking to the room, getting our bikes fit, and getting to know our fellow cyclists. There are a total of 12 of us on the trip and everyone is really nice. There are no other young adults on the trip but so far everyone has been very welcoming of Josh and Kaia.

This morning we woke up to what the irish call a soft rain, we might call it a mist but I like the irish term better. It really is so soft that you forget about the precipitation until you are totally soaked by it. We had a nice breakfast here at the castle and then Josh and I went golfing at the nine hole course, and Jane went along with some of our fellow cyclists to a falconry class. It was amazing, they got to wear the leather glove, and the falcon would take off and land from their arm. Meanwhile Josh and I were sharing a set of clubs and getting soaked while playing some golf in Ireland. The course was not too hard, and on the par three I almost got a legitimate hole in one, see my previous post on St. Andrews!

At noon we took off on our first true ride of the tour. We cycled up the road a bit to stop for lunch in a small pub. The only problem was that the soft rain had not abated, and according to our head waiter at the castle, "If its still raining at 11, its probably going to keep raining all day." It really was a soft rain and although we were all quite wet at our lunch stop we dried out rather quickly as well. Our destination for the afternoon was Joyce Country Sheepdogs. Here we Met Joe Joyce who is a sheep farmer and breeder of working dogs. If you have seen Marley and Me, you have seen Joe's sheep and one of his dogs (not Marley -- Its the scene where the sheep are blocking the road)

Joe showed us how the dogs herd the sheep and how they respond to his verbal or whistled commands. He lives in a beautiful stone house, and his sheep roam the mountains across the lake from his home. When he needs to bring the sheep in for something, which happens five times a year, he brings his dogs across the lake and he commands them using his whistle from a boat where he has a better view. These dogs are amazing, they WANT to work so hard for him they go crazy when its not their turn to herd the sheep. I should say it rained on us the last couple of miles to Joe's house so we were all like drowned rats when we got their. Thankfully while we were there the rain let up and the sun started to break through.

The ride back was even more beautiful than the ride out, thanks in large part to the lack of rain. Its amazing how green and beautiful the Irish countryside is. The mountains go directly down to the lake shore and the lakes themselves are incredibly beautiful. Tonight we had our second amazing dinner at the castle, this dinner was much less formal than last night's sport coat and tie affair, but my seafood chowder was to die for, the fish and chips were good, and then the desert, a white chocolate rhubarb tart was amazing.

Tomorrow we have about 40 miles to bike to our next destination and another delicious dinner, I'm already looking forward to it, and I hope we will have sun all day tomorrow.

World Cup Disappointment in Galway

2010-06-27T02:39:00.000-07:00

The other night on our pub crawl, Eugene told us a story about the Irish people and how they would conquer the world. He started with the excuse that Ireland has been invaded by just about everyone else on the planet, and how Ireland has a hopeless military; but went on to describe their master plan. According to Eugene when you go into a bar in Ireland you are likely to be ignored for a while, but if you stick around eventually someone will come up and start talking to you. This is not because they are especially friendly, but because the are especially nosey. "Within 15 minutes they will have your name, your parents names, your grandparents names, and your home address." This information is useful he says because sometime in the future, when you least expect it "this person will show up on your door with a sleeping bag in hand." They'll find a quite place to settle down and sometime later fifteen of them will emerge! And this is how Ireland will conquer the world. We all laughed.

Last night at Fagan's pub we experienced part one of this scenario. We were watching the USA versus Ghana match having a nice time, enjoying a pint and some appetizers, and being cheerfully ignored by all the locals. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around awkwardly to find a red-haired man in a gold and green striped jersey wishing the USA good luck. He wanted to know if we were on holiday here in Ireland? If we were football fans? How long we were staying? What we were doing in Galway? What was our surname? Where were we from? (city and state) As this very friendly irishman took a break of his inquisition to get another pint, Josh leaned over to me and said "Dad he's going to show up on our door with his sleeping bag!" I just about fell on the floor laughing!

Partway through the second half the whole scenario repeated itself with two different guys. It was all great fun, especially when Donovan tied up the score on his PK and the whole pub was cheering. Sadly that all came to an end early on in the overtime period when our world cup hopes for USA were dashed. Now we are left to wonder who to cheer for and whether our enthusiasm for watching world cup will wane after this defeat. We have watched a lot of football on this trip, its been a fun constant for us in a sea of daily change. Its forced us to sit down and relax at 4:00 or 8:30 most days rather than continuing to tour and walk. Its revived my taste for a good pint of beer.

Location:Galway, Ireland

A Day in Dublin

2010-06-26T06:51:00.000-07:00

This morning we are on the train from Dublin to Galway. We woke up to a bright blue sky in Dublin, packed up our belongings, and left our little apartment for the tram to the train station. Although the apartment itself was a bit sketchy it was in a great neighborhood and we had wonderful restaurants up and down the block.

Last night we had a wonderful Thai meal at Koh. We shared three appetizers and three main course dishes. For the appetizers we had mixed satays, vietnamese beef balls, and ceviche. All were delicious. For the main course we shared green curry with chicken, cashew chicken, and panang curry with beef. I think we each had our own favorite it was all so good.

Yesterday was definitely a full day of touristing in Dublin. We started off our day on the hop-on-hop-off tour bus. Our first hop-off was at the Guinness storehouse. This is a building that Guinness has turned into a monument to all things Guinness. The building is designed so that your tour takes you around and around and on a spiral upward around the worlds largest Guinness pint glass. We learned about how Guinness is brewed, about the history of Guinness, and how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. At the Gravity bar at the very top of the pint glass we were in an all glass circular room with great views of Dublin, there we could trade our ticket for..... A pint of Guinness! Here's Josh and I in front of the waterfall...good pure water is key to making Guinness. Mr Guiness signed a 9000 year lease for the land on which the brewery sits in part because of it's access to the pure water flowing in from the Dublin Mountains.

After the Guinness tour we hopped back on the bus and headed for the Gaol. By this time we were very hungry and so we decided to find a bit of lunch. There was not much to choose from in the area around the Gaol but Dolce Vita caught our attention almost right away. We had some very nice pizzas and Kaia had a steaming hot bowl of Spaghetti Carbonara.

The Kilmainham Gaol is a famous site in Dublin as it is the place where 14 of the 16 leaders of the Easter rebellion were executed. It is a very old gaol and the history goes back well before the time of the potato famine in Ireland. It was during the famine that the overcrowding at the gaol was at its worst. The gaol has been featured in several movies including Michael Connelly, and the original version of The Italian Job.

By the time we had finished our guided tour of the gaol our feet were tired so we hopped back on the bus and rode it all the way around to where we had started. Along the way we saw lots of other sites of Dublin. The hop-on-hop-off busses are all double decker busses with open tops so we sat up top and enjoyed the scenery.

We returned to our apartment for a little break and decided to head out to find a pub with internet access. We chose the Church bar, which is a bar/restaurant that has emerged from the remodeled Saint Mary's church in Dublin. This is the first bar I've been in that has its own pipe organ! The pipe organ, built in the 18th century was used by G. F. Handel. In addition there are several famous people who are buried in the church/pub, and there have been some important weddings including Alfred Guinness. How appropriate to have a pint of Guinness in the place where he was married.

After happy hour and then dinner at Koh we were all ready to just kick back and watch the world cup match in our apartment while we finished up washing all of our clothes. The match between Chile and Spain was a yawner, as chile seemed to be willing to place their hopes on Switzerland playing to a draw. Its been very interesting traveling to all of the different companies during the world cup competition. We have seen lots of different kinds of coverage and commentators. Last night on Irish TV there were four very old guys who spent forever dissecting the match and making the case that Spain was really going to have to pick up their game if they had any hope of progressing during the elimination round.

Today is a pretty light day. We'll get in to Galway just after noon, and we don't have much planned other than some light walking around and scoping out somewhere to watch USA play tonight. Josh and I are both wearing our USA jerseys today. Good Luck team USA.

Location:On the train from Dublin to Galway

The Roller Derby Queen in Dublin

2010-06-25T01:05:00.000-07:00

Well last night a bit of Dublin had a taste of some Jim Croce music. I'm not sure where it came from but we were enjoying the musical pub crawl that started in Tower Square. Our two guides for the night were Eugene, who played the Irish banjo, and Steve who was a guitar player. After a couple of pubs and a lot of good Irish Jigs and Reels, and some history of Irish music and instruments were were walking between pubs and I started up a conversation with Steve. Steve also plays a Taylor guitar and it is the same model I have at home. That was the kiss of death. "What is your name?" asks Eugene. Brad, I say. "Now we've got you" says Eugene, at this next stop you'll have to play a little for us. Uh, I don't think thats a very good idea I said. We talk a little more about what kind of music I like to play and where we are visiting in Ireland and where we have already been. Steve mentions that he is a fan of Prairie Home Companion and how some of the things that Keillor talks about on the show remind him of Ireland and I'm thinking I'm safe and the whole sing for us thing was simply a fun idle threat.

After we get to the next pub and the duo works through a couple more songs Eugene starts in on a long story about how its an Irish tradition to join in on a session and it doesn't matter how good you are or if you even just sing one verse or whatever, its all in good fun. The next thing I know Steve is handing me the Taylor and a pick I'm I'm thinking what the heck am I going to play!? Roller Derby Queen is Jane's suggestion and I think I can probably remember the chords and the words, so I start to strum a little bit to see if I can recall the right chords and pretty soon I'm singing. I make it through a couple of versus without too many mistakes and finish up to the applause of the rest of the pub crawlers. Thankfully they all had had a few pints of Guinness by now so they were not an overly discriminating audience. Anyway, it was great fun.

So now that its the next morning and I'm thinking about it, I realize that I really have quite an international performance background. I've played in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. I've played with a group of Tahitians sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the South Seas. And now I've played on an Irish pub crawl in Dublin. It makes me wonder where I could go if I practiced some more!

After the pub crawl was over, we found a little Italian place that was still serving pasta at 10:30 at night and finished off our first day in Dublin. The day had started out very early, in Stockholm with a train ride to the Arlanda airport. We flew SAS from Stockholm to Dublin and then took a bus from the airport to the city center of Dublin. Here in Dublin we are staying in one of the StayDublin.com apartments. Its a bit sketchy and in need of paint and a good cleaning but the apartment has two bedrooms a living room a kitchen with one of those funky european washer/dryer units. If anyone can tell me out to operate one of those things properly please send me an email. We cannot get the dryer to work for anything.

After unloading our stuff at the apartment we started to explore the area a little. We found a restaurant called Boojum, right by our apartment that is operated by a man from Philadelphia. If you are looking for your fix of Chipotle right here in the heart of Dublin then Boojum is for you. It was a nice lunch, and I think Josh was really happy with the food. We took a tour of Trinity College and saw the Book of Kells. This is an amazingly old illuminated version of the four gospels that has been preserved by the Trinity library, its a really interesting exhibit, and we had a great guide who is a student at Trinity and works for Ark.com, Ark sells clothing and the idea is that every time you wear an article of Ark clothing you perform An Act of Random Kindness. Thats where the Ark name comes from. The library at Trinity was also extremely interesting to me for two reasons. First it is the largest single room library in Europe. Its just beautiful to see books and bookshelves stretched out for a city block. But the second reason is interesting to my twisted computer science mind because of how the books are organized in the library. The books are sorted by SIZE! In order to find a book in this library you must know the exact dimensions of the book to get you to the proper shelf!

After the tour of Trinity we just walked around and enjoyed the street performers and the shops of Dublin. Josh wanted to go to the Leprechaun museum but he was out voted 3 to 1. So we went back to the apartment to rest our feet and find an internet cafe to catch up on email and Facebook before the pub crawl. Today we are doing a hop-on-hop-off tour of the city and plan to take the tour of the Guiness Brewery and the Dublin Gaol.

Location:Dublin, Ireland

Ship Building Lessons in Stockholm

2010-06-23T12:11:00.000-07:00

Today we heard the name Gustavus Adophus quite a lot. With apologies to my friends in St. Peter I must say he didn't know much about ship building. In all truth it really wasn't his fault from a technical point of view, but he did pay the bill. I am talking about the Vasa of course. It is the largest ship to be recovered and salvaged and conserved in a museum. This is definitely a must see sight if you go to Stockholm. The Vasa was built in 1628 and was the largest ship in the Swedish fleet. Unfortunately she sunk on her maiden voyage out of the harbor! The reason she sank was because there was not enough ballast in the ship to counterbalance the forces on the sails in the heavy breeze. This seems like an incredibly dumb mistake for a ship builder to make, but there you have it.

The ship lay submerged for 333 years until an amazing recovery operation in the 1960's brought the ship to the surface. The Vasa is amazingly well preserved due to the water conditions in the Baltic. The museum is just as interesting for the story of how the ship was raised to the surface and preserved as it was to learn about the building of the ship in 1628.

The Vasa Museum was our first stop today in Stockholm. Our day started early as we had to debark from the vision of the seas by 7:40. The sailing in to Stockholm was once again beautiful and very reminiscent of Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota. We are all very lonely for our cabin at the sight of water, boats, rave trampolines and all the pine trees. The rest of the morning we wandered around stockholm enjoying the shops and the old town. We did a little shopping. I got an official USA soccer jersey to wear for the game today.

After walking around all morning we returned to our hotel to check in and rest up a bit. We are staying in the Rica Hotel on Gamla Stan in a wonderful part of stockholm. The streets around here are narrow and cobbled and there are restaurants and bars and little shops everywhere. We hunted around a little bit to decide where to have a late afternoon dinner and watch the USA versus Algeria match. We found O'Leary's, a boston themed restaurant owned by a swede who spent time in Boston. They had the England match on upstairs and the USA match on down. The American fans were many and much louder than the brits. In a funny small world moment I recognized one of the other fans in the restaurant as the same person we had watched football with when we were in Balestrand! They were originally from Minnesota but had moved to Boston.

To catch up on our activities, yesterday we were in Tallin Estonia, and the day before was a day at sea. Tallin was a really nice city, it has the oldest medieval walled city in Europe. The city reminded us a little of Italy and of some of the walled cities we had visited in Tuscany. The city is an interesting mix of scandinavian and Russian influences.

Jane had a walking tour of the city that we got on the internet and we followed that plan around the city for several hours. After that we returned to the ship for our last night on board.

We are having a great time, but we are all very tired today. We just didn't have a lot of energy for many touring activities. And the USA victory took a lot of energy as well. Early to bed tonight, but up again early tomorrow morning for our flight to Dublin.

Location:Stockholm, Sweden

Read all about it, Biking with Mike is Great

2010-06-21T04:44:00.000-07:00

After days and days of using our feet to get around european cities it was time for a change, and what better city to try two wheeled touring in than Copenhagen. Copenhagen has more bikes than anywhere else in the world. They make the people of Portland look like a bunch of slackers. There are literally bikes everywhere. At the train stations there are bike racks two stories high, there are bike racks everywhere and people riding their bikes everywhere.

Jane found Biking with Mike on the internet, he is a lifelong resident of Copenhagen who left his job as a director at a large company to do what he loves -- bike and tell people about his city. There is no fancy signup procedure as each days tours are first come first served. If the weather is horrible there won't be a tour.

We left the ship at 9:30 and headed straight for Mike's bike shop. We knew the tour was not until 10:30 but we wanted to make sure we got a spot on the tour. We arrived by taxi 5 minutes later, but the shop did not even open until 10:00. So we walked around the area a little bit and decided to get a coffee at the cafe up the block from Mike's. One minor problem was that we hadn't taken the time to find a cash machine and get some Danish Kroners. After preparing our coffee we discovered that the credit card reader in the coffee shop was not working properly, and so we were unable to pay. In Decorah, this would not really be a problem, go find some money and pay me later. Who would have guessed that we would find the same attitude in a big city? This appears to be the Danish way. The proprietor of the coffee shop was perfectly happy to have us go on our bike tour, get some cash, and pay him later in the day.

Shortly after 10 Mike arrived. Bright green stocking hat, bright green shoes, a yellow and black livestrong vest and fashionable glasses. His bike matched his cycling outfit. Mike took us on a tour for a little over 3 hours. We saw the palace, the castle, the parliament buildings, the house where Hans Christian Anderson was born, the new opera house, a couple of parks, and a little lawless place called Christiana. We would bike for a while and then stop and mike would give us a short lecture on what were were looking at, Danish politics, Danish culture, local gossip, you name it and MIke knew about it. He is an excellent story teller. As we were riding there was no talking, the idea is to absorb the local feeling of the place as you are riding rather than chatting. It worked. It was fun, we saw a lot of the city.

Christiana was the most interesting stop on the tour. We had coffee in the moonshine cafe. It is the safest coffee house in Copenhagen. Why? The sign on the door tells the story. More than 6000 police inspections since 2004. Christiana is the counter culture area of Copenhagen, Mike discouraged us from taking any pictures in the area because you never know when you might accidentally capture a deal going down, and they don't like that.

We learned one word of Danish that really sums up our Copenhagen experience. The word is Hygglite, it is difficult to describe exactly what it means, cozy is one possible translation while fantastic is another. Internet people might translate it as "A Good Thing." Its a word they use in Denmark to describe when something is just right and good. Our bike tour of Copenhagen with mike was definitely Hygglite.

At the conclusion of our tour we paid mike and headed, on foot, back through the park on the way to the ship. When we emerged from the park, there was Mike on his bike. Hello he said, I wonder if you might have a few minute to talk to a reporter from the paper Politik? Its the largest Danish paper and they are doing a story about touring copenhagen on bike. It seems that the reporter for the paper was planning to go on Mike's afternoon tour, but because of the oncoming rain Mike had cancelled the afternoon tour. So, we agreed to spend a few minutes talking to the reporter and then we got our picture taken by one of the photographers from the paper. So, if you speak Danish you can read about the Miller family and our bike fun in the city of Copenhagen!

Location:Copenhagen, Denmark

Bon Voyage Oslo

2010-06-21T00:12:00.000-07:00

As I write this we are just pulling in to Copenhagen Denmark aboard the Vision of the Seas. We are waiting for breakfast to be served, and looking at the awesome offshore wind turbines:

Last night was our first night aboard ship and it was really great to get in and to be able to unpack for a few days. We have a wonderful family suite on board, and that is nice because it gives us all a little of our own space for a few days. We did have a really great hotel in Oslo. The Thon Oslo Panorama, if you are looking for a hotel in Oslo at a reasonable price you would do very well here. The room that we rented was one of their studio apartments, so it had a washer/dryer and a small kitchen. It had a separate bedroom, and a living area with a pull out couch. If you need a couple days to wash clothes and rest up this is a great option.

Our Oslo activities were pretty low key. We took the ferry over to Bygdol to visit a few of the many museums. We visited a Stave church, and the viking ship museum. For me the highlight was the Kon-Tiki museum, which is dedicated to Thor Hyerdal. Hyerdal is the explorer and adventurer that made two primitive craft to travel across the Atlantic and the Pacific. The purpose was to show that it would have been possible for early residents of Africa to make it to south america, or for early inhabitants of South America to make it to the south seas. The originals of both the Kon-Tiki and the Ra-II are on display at the museum

After a day of touring we found the Scotsman Pub, which had two very large projection screens, and an assortment of fans ready to cheer for the USA. Sadly the USA put itself in a hole the first half, and although we did come back and win the game 3-2 the idiot ref disallowed the final goal and we had to settle for a 2-2 tie. Again it was great fun to be in a foreign pub with everyone cheering for USA.

After the game we walked around the downtown area, took a tram out to a huge sculpture park, and finally found some tex-mex (or as some here in Norway say mex-tex) restaurant for some comfort food.

Last night we sailed away and enjoyed a glass of champagne on our balcony

We were once again amazed by the beauty of Norway. All of the little islands with houses on them are really striking as you cruise by. It reminds you a lot of Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota only with more water than land.

I am amazed that our bodies seem to have adjusted to this latitude and the lack of darkness. I don't think that we have been to bed before midnight in well over a week, and yet we keep getting up in the morning ready to go. Last night was no exception. We had a great dinner with a family from Florida, explored the ship, tried out the casino and enjoyed some piano music. We watched Denmark play its world cup match with some fans from Sweden. The Swedes were cheering for Cameroon as they are not happy with Denmark for knocking them out of the World Cup competition.

Location:Oslo, Norway

The Nœrøyfjorden

2010-06-18T11:57:00.000-07:00

This morning we got to sleep in, have a relaxing breakfast, catch up on some email and reading, and then we started our long day's journey. As I'm writing this its 10:45 and we are still an hour out of Oslo. Of course it is also still full daylight outside, and we are hopeful that it will still be light for our short walk to the hotel when we arrive.

The first leg of our trip today started with the same Sognefjorden ferry that we arrived in Balestrand on yesterday. Only this time we rode it for only 45 minutes. When made a mid-fjord transfer to another ferry, this one was actually a passenger and car ferry, which took us down the "Narrow Fjord" This is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is the narrowest fjord with boat traffic on it. It is spectacular! We stopped counting waterfalls because there were simply too many. The steepness of the cliffs coming down to the water was just beautiful. We passed three tiny villages that have no roads leading to them, the only way in or out is by boat. The natural scenic beauty of this part of the world really is stunning. Along the way in the fjord I had a quick glimpse of two porpoises as well!

Our final destination for this ferry was Gudvangen, this is a tiny little town on the other side of two very long tunnels from Fløm. There is not much here except for some souvenir shops, a small restaurant, and the ferry landing. We had about an hour and half to wait for our bus to Fløm. The bus stop was literally a wide spot in the highway from Bergen, but our bus was right on time to take us to Fløm. Right outside of town was the first tunnel, it was 11.4 kilometers long. We had a short break and then another 5 kilometer tunnel. After this tunnel we were in Fløm, and the railway station.

The final legs of the journey are by train, we started off on the Fløm railway. Which goes up into the mountains 20km, at about a 55 degree slope! It is the steepest non-cogwheel railway anywhere. Again the scenery and waterfalls were marvelous. We spent the entire trip looking out the windows of the train and snapping pictures as fast as we could. We were not quite sure about this train trip when we first boarded as a hoard of toga clad norwegians got onto the same train car as us. They were quite loud and all carrying a can of the local brew. They were on the train for less than 1 km before they all got off the train, in the middle of nowhere. For all we know they are still wandering around the hills near Fløm celebrating some strange holiday we don't know about.

The final stop of the Fløm railway is at Myrdral which basically consists of a train station up in the mountains. When we got off the train it was actually snowing! We had a short wait for the Bergen to Oslo train to come along and we jumped on. We have been riding in Coach 2, which looks to be the student car on the train. It seems that many students from Bergen must be returned home to Oslo for the summer.

Tonight we will check into the Thon hotel in Oslo, and I suspect we will all sleep in again tomorrow morning.

Location:Norway

Beautiful Balestrand

2010-06-17T01:00:00.000-07:00

After the late night heavy metal concert in Bergen, we were all very ready for some peace and quiet. We found it in Balestrand Norway. To get to Balestrand we took the early morning Ferry out of Bergen, and came up through the Fjords to get here. The Beauty of the Fjords is beyond describing in words, so here are a few pictures. First, leaving Bergen on the Ferry:

From Bergen, we travelled North, between the coast, and all the little islands that protect the coast from the North sea. After about two hours we turned inland into Sognefjord, The longest and deepest fjord in Norway. From here on, it was just one beautiful sight after another. Here's a typical picture from the back of the ferry:

All along the fjords you see these nice houses either up on the hillside, or tucked down near the water. Sometimes there is a boathouse right over the water as in the picture above. Notice how still the water is, and the contrast of the green of the trees on the shore with this stunning blue water is just great.

When we arrived in Balestrand we were met by our host, one member of the family that owns and runs the Balestrand Hotel, which is in my mind the nicest and friendliest place we have stayed yet. The rooms have an amazing view out over the fjord, as you can see from this shot out off the deck of our hotel room. If you go to Balestrand, you should definitely stay here, and don't be afraid to upgrade to the fjord view, it is worth it.

The rooms here, have no TV in them, but who needs a TV when you have a view like this? We did go downstairs to the lobby area where they have a breakfast room, a reading room, with computer, and a TV area. We enjoyed watching some football with a very international crowd. Its interesting hearing the perspectives of the other people on the games, and of course its different to watch the football match when the announcers are speaking in Norwegian. The truth is its kind of a welcome relief from the English announcers. All they do is talk about England this and England that... I suppose the American announcers are the same way, and they probably talk way too much. The truth is you don't need an announcer telling you much when you watch football.

Balestrand is not a very large town, we were able to walk everywhere from our hotel, and see just about everything. There is a small aquarium that shows you some of the sea life living in the fjords, a couple of small lunch places and one other hotel called the Kviknes. Hotel Kviknes is the largest wooden structure in Scandanavia. We ended up having supper there last night and it was quite good. I had a wonderful veal, Jane had risotto, Kaia pasta, and josh had a triple decker club sandwich. While were were seated we struck up a conversation with an older british couple and had a very nice chat. It is interesting to hear the English perspective on what is going on with the BP oil spill in the gulf of mexico. It is clear that although the british people have been supportive of Obama in the past many are taking his anger at BP somewhat personally. Of course football is alway another good topic to take up with the Brits, luckily this couple were very sportsmanlike about our competition.

This morning we were able to sleep in and have a nice breakfast in the hotel. At noon we board the ferry again, and head for Oslo. Today is a travel Odyssey, we'll be on two ferries, a bus, and two trains to take us to Oslo. We won't get in until after 11:00 tonight, but of course it will still be broad daylight so we aren't particularly worried. I'll leave you with one more image of the fjords and beautiful Balestrand.

Location:Balestrand, Norway

Heavy Metal in Bergen

2010-06-15T12:10:00.001-07:00

Last night after we ate our dinner at the Ship Inn we came out to this sight.

The tide had gone out and left all of the boats stranded on the sand.

This morning we flew from Aberdeen Scotland to Bergen Norway, the landing was absolutely spectacular. I've never seen so many small islands in my life. Plus, the sky was perfectly blue for the first time in many days, and so the whole scene was amazing. Getting through customs and the rest of the airport went just as smoothly as you would expect from a scandinavian country.

We immediately found our SAS Airbus to take us downtown to our hotel. We are at the Hotel Thon, it is on the end of Byrggen Street, right across the road from the harbor. Its a very nice location, except that it is next to a huge city park. What is wrong with that you may ask. Well, it turns out that we picked the wrong night to stay at the Thon hotel next to the park, as tonight is the night of the Rammstein concert. Who are Rammstein you may ask? After a little internet searching I quickly learned that Rammstein are a German industrial metal band.

We are actually on the opposite side of the hotel from the concert but at the moment it is making no difference. We are trying to watch the world cup, but the sound from the concert is so loud it is drowning out the Brazilian national anthem. I would much prefer the sounds of those dumb world cup horns to the sound of a german industrial metal band. We can only hope that the concert will wrap up at a respectable time. Josh just found a view of the concert and said it looks like a bunch of black ants (yes all the concert goers are dressed in black T-shirts) streaming toward a rotting apple.

OK, enough grousing, Bergen really is a nice city. We started our tour of Bergen by meeting one of Kaia's facebook friends named Thomas at our hotel. Thomas had visited Decorah with a group of Norwegian students a couple of years ago, and volunteered to get us oriented to the city when he saw Kaia's Facebook status. He showed us around the area including the wharf and the fish market and the central park of Bergen.

Jane and Kaia spent some time shopping around the city for a sweater for Kaia. They were successful, and so Kaia can proudly celebrate her heritage at concord, and at Christmas time.

We took the Funicular up high above the city this afternoon and the view is amazing. We took Thomas' recommendation for a restaurant for supper tonight and went to Egon's. It is a Norwegian chain restaurant and the food was OK. I think we have officially reached the point of vacation where choosing a place to eat for supper and dinner in a new strange city has become somewhat of a chore. We miss the home cooking.

Tomorrow morning we have another fairly early morning, as we must be on board our ferry boat at 8 AM for the trip to Balestrand, of course early morning takes on a whole new connotation at this time of the year at this latitude. We are now far enough north that there is only a couple hours of darkness at this time of the year. Darkness is only from midnight until a little after 2 AM. The Ferry trip tomorrow promises to be a beautiful trip through the fjords, we are all looking forward to it very much.

For now we are resting and watching Brazil and the People's Republic of Korea play some football.

Location:Bergen, Norway

St. Andrews Hole in One!

2010-06-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Can you possibly imagine a better way to top off a trip to St. Andrews than with a hole in one? Well thats what I did!! Josh and I were playing this morning, and it was on the 16th hole. I hit my drive perfectly straight, just a little left of the pin, right where I had aimed it. It rolled, broke to the right and dropped straight into the cup. Here's where the story gets really weird, two holes later, Josh also got a hole in one. Thats right, on number 18 at St. Andrews. He hit his drive past the hole, up the hill, and it rolled straight back down into the cup. A truly amazing shot. You may be wondering which course we were on. Well unfortunately it was not the old course. It was a course called the Himalayas and it is the official putting green of the old course. They have 18 holes laid out, and you can rent a putter and balls. No, silly clowns mouths or windmills allowed, this is just a very challenging, and highly rolling putting green. In fact we had to wait until 11:00 this morning to tee off because they have a ladies putting league that plays before that. It is complete with its own clubhouse and everything. Here I am in my fashionable St. Andrews argyle sweater, getting ready to tee it up!

We arrived in St. Andrews yesterday afternoon, after visiting Castle Edinburgh in the morning. The castle was very interesting, and we again learned some interesting Scottish history. We stayed in the hotel Rusacks' which looks right out over the 18th Fairway on the old course. We could sit in our room and look out at both number 1 and 18 fairways. They have already done a lot of work getting ready for the Open. This is the last week that the public can play on the course until afterwards. So there are lots of grandstands under construction. The great thing is that the course is closed on sunday so the public can walk the course. So we did.

We've talked a lot these last few days about walking where other famous people have walked. We've walked the same rooms and stairways as Mary Queen of Scots, King Henry the VIII, Oliver Cromwell, and many others. Now we can add to our list Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklas, Old Tom Murray, and even Tiger. The room that we stayed in at Rusacks is the same room used by Arnold Palmer, and other golfers. In addition Mick Jagger also stayed in our room. I don't know that Mick cares about golf but he was on the list. I'm sure they will be adding the Miller family to the list any day now.

Back to walking the course, it was really fun to walk along and remember seeing some of our golfing hero's and where they hit great shots and where they got in trouble. We found lots of deep bunkers to take our picture in too. Here is one of me on the Swilcan Bridge:

This blog entry would not be complete without a little culinary update. Last night we ate at Nahm-Jim a Thai restaurant right in the heart of St. Andrews. We had some delicious curry, and Josh claims he had the best Pad-Thai of his life there. Very good stuff. After dinner the tide had gone way out, so Josh and I hiked out on the beach, we got a great look back at St. Andrews. You can see the Golf museum lit up on the far right, and some of the temporary construction they have stared for the open, also on the far right.

After a very light lunch in St. Andrews today, we finally gave in to Josh's urge to have a Subway Sandwich, we drove to Stonehaven. Stonehaven is a small town outside Aberdeen, its probably about the same size as Decorah, but its right on the North Sea. Our Bed and Breakfast overlooks the town harbor and is really beautiful. We took an Awesome hike out to Donnotter castle. This castle is all in ruins but it is such a great setting, its was really amazing. This is the site where they filmed Mel Gibson's version of Hamlet. This picture gives you a sense for how isolated the castle is.

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Location:St. Andrews, Scotland

A Draw in Edinburg

2010-06-13T01:53:00.001-07:00

One week after watching our Decorah Vikings take third in the state soccer tournament we were back watching futbol again. This time we were in Edinburgh Scotland watching USA play England. Now before you get too worried about us cheering for our side on the home turf of our opponent let me just clarify that when England is playing the Scottish will cheer very loudly for the other team! As soon as we arrived in Edinburgh Josh. Changed into his USA jersey, and as we were waking around Edinburgh he got lots of comments from the locals. "nice top there son"

So it came to pass that we found ourselves in a hotel bar with lots of support for USA. On one side was a group of about 20 younger scottish men, and on the other were some additional tourists like ourselves. We had hoped to experience the game in a pub, but unfortunately they do not allow minors after 8pm. It was great fun to watch the game here, but I must say that I have grown used to the expert commentary of my friend Jim, who is leading a group of Luther alumni on a trip through Germany at the moment. I am sure Jim found a good place to watch the game there with some German support. You see all kinds of people when you watch the game in a hotel bar. At one point an Asian man came in, and stared at the screen for a couple of minutes before asking "what half is it?". One of our scottish compatriots replied, well I don't know where you're from mate but when the clock says forty two minutes here you're in the first half. It sounds even funnier when you hear it with the accent. Needless to say that particular fan did not stick around to watch much of the game.

When the Americans scored (yes it was an error on the English keeper) the whole bar erupted in cheers and then a chant of USA USA started up. The bar manager looked like he couldn't decide what to do. He clearly wanted to calm everyone down and was obviously worried that a riot was going to break out in his bar. But he had no idea how what the right strategy was. In the end order was restored by some humor. After the cheers erupted and the chant had started one of the scottish fans came running back into the room to see what all of the commotion was about. As he had been in the toilet, he made a great show of zipping up his zipper which put everyone to laughing, including the manager. Although I was disappointed to settle for the draw, I think it is a good result for the American side.

Earlier in the day we did spend some time walking around Edinburgh, we walked the Royal Mile, and checked out Holyrood House. We have now seen all the royal residences except for Balmoral. The big story of Holyrood is that this is where Mary Queen of Scots spent a lot of time, and it is also where her young son was killed right before her eyes by her husband. Nice guy, who wanted the throne bad enough to kill his stepson. Here is a picture of the Abbey.

Our hotel here is great, we are right in the middle of a bustling area, and have a awesome view of Edinburgh castle out our hotel window. Here is a night shot I took after the world cup game was over.

Today we are going to visit the castle, then pick up our rental car and head for St. Andrews, birthplace of golf!

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Location:Edinburgh, Scotland

Random Rants on a Train

2010-06-12T02:54:00.000-07:00

I am writing this on the train from London to Edinburgh where they have just announced the breakfast options. I don't get the concept of "English breakfast." I would like to meet the chef who came up with the idea of serving baked beans and eggs together! My guess is that if I did meet him I would learn that he was also the inventor of the "Pudding Menu." At every hotel the included breakfast consists of eggs, bacon, and baked beans. I don't like baked beans under the best of conditions, and certainly not first thing in the morning. I guess it must be one of those things you need to grow up with in order to appreciate. In the meantime I will just stick to having tea.

Anyway, now that I have addressed the breakfast issue I will praise the train system. This is really a the way to travel. We have four seats facing each other in coach, tons of legroom, a table in between us, great scenery, free wifi, and a very quiet ride. No long hassles of getting to the station 90 minutes ahead of time, and no long security lines. Just walk to the platform, get on your train, stow your luggage and take a seat. As we reevaluate travel the US I really wonder what it would take to get this kind of convenience. I, for one would travel this way whenever possible.

I also want to say how much I love traveling with my iPad! This thing is great. It's small, light, the battery life is awesome, I have a bunch of books to read on it, a couple of movies to watch, the current season of Merlin, and games to entertain me when I am tired of all of the above. Other than if I really needed to write a program I can not imagine why I would ever need to travel with a laptop. In fact I think this is really the start of something new. I don't see myself needing a laptop. My setup would be a nice big desktop machine for programming and writing in LaTeX, and my iPad for the times I am not at my desk.

Finally, as long as I'm rambling on about products and travel I have to say that I love my ScotteVest. (www.scottevest.com). Its a vest designed for travel, that includes zip pockets for just about everything. I can carry camera lenses, glasses, iPod, phone, and all kinds of things. I think it has 20 pockets in total, so there is a pocket for just about everything. It keeps me warm at the temperatures we are traveling in at the moment, and with all the zippers and inner pockets I feel pretty secure.

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Oxford, Windsor and London

2010-06-11T09:21:00.001-07:00

Since I already posted about today's adventures I guess this is a catchup posting about yesterday. We started our day with a quick trip in to Oxford. We drove around the University area, and found the varsity shop so we could get the requisite sweatshirts. We also found a Starbucks for a quick breakfast.

From Oxford we headed to Windsor Castle. Nothing can prepare you for the first view of Windsor from the distance. It is the most imposing, amazing castle you have ever seen. Josh and I said that if we were an invading army and saw that castle from a distance we would simply turn our horses around and ride home. "Run away, Run away..." in your best Monty Python voice. It just looks like every castle you have ever imagined. Here's josh standing below one of the towers.

The tour of the inside of the castle included the living quarters, as well as St. Georges Chapel. St. Georges is where the Queen knights the new Knights. The living quarters were, of course, amazing, and large, but the scale on the inside just did not compare to the outside view.

After Windsor we returned our car to Hertz and then we were supposed to meet a car we had pre-arranged with Simply Airports. After waiting 15 minutes we called. Yes, the driver is there, in a blue Chrysler, he is looking for you. Can he call you on this cell phone number? Of course, but no call. Another 15 minutes and we determined that although the driver had not been able to call us on our european cell phone, he was at the wrong Hertz. He was at the airport counter not at their drop off location near the airport. He'll be right there. Oh wait, where is it? How does he get there? How does he get here? Dude, follow the signs to rental car return and come on in to Hertz. 15 minutes later still no sign of the driver. Time for "Plan B" We hop on the Hertz shuttle to head back to the airport and take the train to downtown. As we leave Hertz we see a Blue Chrysler mini-van making a u-turn and heading back down the road the wrong way. Really? Was this guy actually waiting for us to come out the Hertz exit rather than driving in? I guess we'll never know. But in the meantime, I would not recommend booking a car with Simply Airports.

By the time we got to our hotel, we were all tired, hungry, and a little bit grumpy, but we decided to press on. We walked back up to Victoria Station, Then to BUCKingham Palace, through the park, on to Trafalger Square, and finally to Parliament. The parliament building is also massive and old. Mike if you are reading here's some Timber frame porn for you:

This hall was probably two football fields long! Look at all of that English Oak! We were also able to see the house of commons in session. We saw several ministers arguing about poverty in great britain, along with several people in traditional wigs.

We completed our day by finishing our circle tour, walking back toward Victoria Station. We decided to have dinner at L'Arco Italian restaurant, right around the corner from the theater where Billy Elliot is playing. It was a small family run establishment, and the food was really good. I had a tomato based Risotto and some Veal Marsala. Jane had the Risotto too, Kaia had some delicious pesto gnocchi, and josh pizza marguerita of course.

Adventure in the White Tower

2010-06-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

Today's travel adventure involved the Tower of London. No, we were not arrested and tortured by the English royalty. We were on a tour of the tower of london. We had just finished the guided tour with one of the Yoman Warders (cool title eh?) and we decided to go in and check out the Armoury. (yep I'm converting to british spelling) Just after we got in the door an alarm started to go off, and a woman steward came hurrying buy and told us that we had to evacuate the tower. We were never able to to find out why we had to evacuate but Jane overheard a couple of them talking about a fire alarm. The tower of London is also the site where Henry VIII beheaded several of his wives, including Anne Boleyn.

We started our day by taking the tube to St. Paul's Cathedral. After walking around the sanctuary we resumed our european stair climbing tradition. We first walked 257 stairs to the whispering gallery. This is a cool balcony where you can face the wall and whisper. The person standing directly opposite you across the circle, over 100 feet away, can hear you perfectly clearly. I'd like to explain the physics of this but I'm told that my readership will decline if I include any equations. I guess all three of you are safe and will remain loyal readers. After the whispering gallery we continued another 266 stairs up to the gold gallery. From here we had a very good, but slightly foggy view of all of London.

Next we walked across the Millennium bridge and toured Shakespeare's Globe theater. This is a slightly modernized version of the original, but still true to the spirit of performing plays in daylight where the actors and audience are face to face. It would have been really fun to try to watch a show there, but Macbeth is being performed at the moment and it seemed a bit dark, and long given our schedule for the day.

Now we are chilling at our hotel, the Luna Simone, watching Mexico and South Africa play futbol. South Africa just scored and are up one nil. Very exciting for the South African side. We have been researching whether or not we dare show the american colors during the game tomorrow. Research has indicated that the scottish people will cheer for ANY opponent of England, so we feel pretty comfortable about watching the game in a pub in Ediburgh tomorrow. Maybe some nice scottish people will buy us a pint if we win! (darn, Mexico just scored)

Kaia is waiting patiently for her phone call from her Concordia advisor to do her registration! Then we'll grab a quick dinner and head out to see Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theater. We had three shows that we wanted to see while we were in London and this one won out since we walked right by the box office last night. We also wanted to see Stomp, and We Will Rock You. Yes, a Queen musical, featuring Bohemian Rhapsody and of course We Will Rock You.

Location:London, England

Bath to Oxford

2010-06-10T13:37:00.001-07:00

Do you remember Sir John Gielgud from the movie Arthur? Jeeves maybe? Imagine the most proper british gentleman you can, and you will have our guide for the tour of Blenheim Palace we had today. This guy was much shorter than Sir Gielgud but he was a pretty good guide. He told us about fine china and tapestries the architects of the Palace along with many of the priceless artifacts that have been collected by the Spencer Churchill family over the years. As we finished each room of the palace our guide would say very politely, well if there are no questions I think that just covers it.

After our tour with Jeeves, we decided to see the Untold Story of Blenheim. This is part Disney animatronics and part history lesson. All in all it did not work for us. The animated dummies they had playing the parts of members of the royal households were all placed in front of 'mirrors' which were really computer screens, so although we looked at the dummy's back we saw a real person's face projected on the screen as if it was a reflection. These characters tried to tell us the back story behind how the Palace was constructed. One can only take so much royal sex scandal before it gets old.

Blenheim Palace is the home of the family of the Duke of Marlborough, although once a year they have to send a flag to BUCKingham, yes you must say that with a British accent with all of the emphasis on the BUCK and you will have it just about right. The purpose of the flags is to avoid paying what must be an incredible amount of rent. As long as the flag is delivered on time the family gets another year rent free.

Blenheim was actually our second castle of the day today. We started the morning by visiting Sudeley castle in the Cotswolds. This is one of the castles where Henry VIII and his wives hung out. Much of the castle is in ruins now, but it really is interesting, especially after watching several episodes of The Tudors on HBO. Other highlights of Sudeley were the Gardens and the Peacocks that were running around and in captivity in the Pheasantry. Yes, how many of you have been to a Pheasantry??

Lunch today was at Noel Arms in Chipping Camden. Jane had a Ploughman's lunch, Josh had ice cream, and Kaia and I tried a burger. It was a nice English pub and we had to try some of the local brews, also quite good.

We stayed in Woodstock at The Bear, It is a hotel in a building that was built in the late 1600's! The rooms are everywhere with no two alike. While Kaia went for a run I had a real english G&T although I really did not appreciate the use of the slice of cucumber in place of the lime. Dinner was at a small family run italian restaurant (Branca) across the street from the hotel. I had a great bolognese, Jane had Arrabiata, and Josh and Kaia had Pizza. All in all this was a great birthday!

Location:Woodstock, England

A Clean Sweep of Bath

2010-06-08T14:55:00.001-07:00

Yesterday we flew from Chicago to London. We tried a day flight instead of an overnight flight and it worked very well. We left Chicago at 9:05AM and arrived at Heathrow at 10:30PM. The flight was very easy an non-eventful, it worked perfect for someone who cannot fall asleep on an airplane. We got into Heathrow and did the customs thing and by the time we got to our hotel it was after midnight. To our bodies it was still early evening but by 1:30 we all had lights out and were working on sleep.

We did sleep in until 8:45 this morning. From there we took off for Bath by way of Stonehenge. For those of you who don't know, Stonehenge is a big circle of rocks. Merlin the magician moved them down from Ireland sometime in the distant past. This was well before King Uther died, because he is apparently buried in Stonehenge. Here's Kaia and Josh at Stonehenge.

At lunchtime we at at a local establishment called Jacqueline's Bistro. Jane and Kaia had fresh baked baguettes with goat cheese, Josh had a ham and cheese omelet with salad and I had fish and chips.

From there we moved on to our final destination for today, Bath. When you arrive in downtown Bath you are "in a twisty turny maze" Its hard to know where you are, and the gps was equally unenlightened at several points. When we finally did find the parking lot where we were supposed to leave our car, it was closed for re-surfacing! So we had to go back to find a different lot that we had passed along the way.

After parking the car it was a very short walk to our Bed & Breakfast at Three Abbey Green. We have a beautiful two room suite, so we have to room to spread out tonight. Josh and Kaia both have their own beds and Kaia gets a separate bedroom. Breakfast is included as part of the deal in the morning. Here's a nice view of the courtyard and our place for the night. The entrance is to the left of the giant tree in this photo:

We went out to view the sites of Bath, its a great downtown area once you are on foot. We visited the Roman Baths - from whence Bath got its name - and looked at the Abbey. Went shopping to replace the shorts that I left hanging on the back of the bathroom door at the Super 8 in Chicago. On the recommendation of our hotelier we went to the Eye of India for some great Indian food for dinner. We had Tikki Takka Tak, (I'm not making that up) Garlic Chili Masala, and Chicken Khorma, along with rice and nan. Here's Kaia and Jane at the Baths.

The highlight of the day was definitely the after dinner show, called Bazaar Bath. Its a comedy/magic show that roams around downtown. The host entertains by poking fun of the people on the tour and doing tricks. As advertised, you do not learn anything about the history or culture of Bath, but it is a lot of laughs and I highly recommend this show if you come to Bath.

Unfortunately our string of injuries continues as Jane seems to have slipped a disc as we were walking around for the show tonight. Hopefully ibuprofen and heat will have her back as good as new in the morning.

Location:Bath, England

Off to a Fast Start

2010-06-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the Super 8 in Elk Grove IL, our plane leaves at 9:05 tomorrow morning. This is a new experiment for us, as usually flights to europe are overnight flights. This one will put us in London at 10:45 PM. We are hopeful that this will alleviate the jet lag on the first day. Time will tell.

Not much else to report today except that I put a big gash in the top of my head before we even left the house today. I was out scooping poop in the back yard so Josh could mow before we left. As I was walking up the yard focusing on scanning the ground ahead of me I ran smack into a low hanging branch of the Oak tree. I immediately put my hand to my head and it came away full of blood. Head wounds really do bleed a lot. After determining I would not need stitches Jane put some neosporin on the cut and that was that. My scalp itches and my head still hurts a bit. I think cutting off that limb will be a high priority project when we get back home.

We drove to chicago by way of Madison and stopped to have supper with Holly and Madeline at the Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant. I had the caribbean jerk sauce which I thought was quite good. Not anywhere near as spicy as my burrito from Panchero's yesterday. If you guys at Panchero's down in Ankeney are reading this, I would just say you do not need to use a whole scoop of your hottest sauce in your burrito, particularly since you have become so stingy with your sour cream. This is the first thing in my life that I have not been able to eat because it was too spicy. I might also just add that this extreme amount of heat was not just my own tender palate, but was confirmed by He-man Joel Martin, who reportedly lives off Panchero's at law school. He had thoughtfully offered to finish my burrito for me, but was similarly stymied by the extreme heat. All of this just serves to remind me that I am looking forward to some good Indian food once we get to England.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Testing

2010-05-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

In preparation for the big upcoming trip to Europe I wanted to try out a couple of blogging apps for my iPad. I will be on the road for almost a month without my laptop.

Since I am writing this from home here is a picture of the sunset from a couple days ago.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Silicon Valley 2010 - Summary

2010-03-01T07:20:00.001-08:00

Here is a great summary put together by the students after we returned. I think it does a wonderful job of capturing the lessons learned on the trip.

Silicon Valley Final Presentation

A new year in Silicon Valley

2010-01-13T17:45:00.001-08:00

The second 'Understanding Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley' started this week. Yesterday was our first full day of meetings.

We started out with Steve Larson at Callspark. Then had lunch at Suriya Thai with Alison Johnston from Aardvark, beers with Matt Van Horn at Digg, and a great experience at sfnewtech.

Here's the gang at Lunch. It was fun, everyone was trying new stuff that was a little out of the comfort zone for a bunch of midwesterners.

The words of the day are "stalking" and "audacious." This seemed to be a theme from many people in terms of both job hiring and job seeking.

I'll update this initial post to include the blogs the students are writing:

Drew Baumann

Megan Hallberg

Kiflu Arega

Bryan Uhlenhake

Jeni Arbuckle

Kaitlin Showalter

Aaron Gauthier

Adam Pyzdrowski

Jacob Otte

Dinner at the Chefs Table

2010-01-01T13:48:00.000-08:00

After spending a ton of money in town, what could be better than a great meal on the ship. One of the activities that Jane had researched before the cruise is called the Chef's table. This is a really exclusive experience that they only do once a cruise for a very limited number of people. In our case there were ten of us lucky passengers that called toget our name on the list as soon as we got on the ship. Of the ten all of us were experienced multi-cruise passengers. A couple of Florida cruises 3 times a year. Another couple from Ohio had cruised many times with their family. They were a bit older than us as their kids were out of college by now. The two other couples were both gay men. Ha, no stereotypes here that a foodie event should have four gay men in attendance! One couple was from LA and the other from New York.

We all met at the International cafe for a short pre-dinner briefing. We met the Executive Chef who was our tour guide for the galley and the rest of the evening. The chef directs a staff of around 250 spread throughout seven galleys on the ship. We began our tour of the galley that served our dining room by putting on our white FDA inspector lab coats. As the tour was happening during dinner service we had to wash our hands wear the lab coats.

The chef was really friendly and very willing to answer any of our questions. We told him how much we liked the parmesan crust under the fettucine alfredo and he launched into a very detailed explanation of how they made the crusts each day. I got the whole thing on video with our little video toy.

At the end of the galley tour we gathered in an out of the way corner and had hors-de-ouveres and champagne. We started out with a sashimi tuna with wasabi sauce, served on a little scoop made of a fennel root. This was followed by: a delicious pate, vegetarian quiche, Escargot, and caviar served on a little potato pancake. Yes I ate everything including the caviar which was really very good served on the potato pancake with a little sour cream. As he introduced each appetizer we got a summary of how it was prepared. It was really interesting. None of the appetizers or anything in our meal is available anywhere else on the ship. It is a meal that is totally unique to the Chefs Table dinner.

After the appetizers we made our way through the dining room to a special table. As we walked through the dining room everyone applauded the chef and many applauded us as well having no idea that we were just on a special tour!

While we were in the kitchen we were promised a lobster risotto and some "special surprises" We began with another little appetizer and some Pouilly Fume. The latest appetizer was beef carpacio on foccacia. The carpacio was layered with alternating layers of parmesan cheese and arugula. It was good but too much considering everything else we knew was coming. Next was the Lobster Risotto. This was probably the best Risotto I've ever had in a restaurant. (except maybe that one exceptional night at LaRanna where I had the Asiago cheese risotto with cauliflower)

By now of course our pallets were in real need of cleansing. So the maitre de brought out a round of lemon sorbet. Of course sorbet alone would not work as well as sorbet with Grey Goose vodka poured over the top.

With clean pallets we finally moved to the main course. Potatos gratin with lobster, veal, and tornados of beef. Plus some veggies thrown in for good measure. I can only describe this course as a cruise size portion. Each person had their own platter full of meat, potatos and veggies. Everything was just great. At this point we switched to a Wolf-Blass Shiraz to accompany the main course.

After the main course was done we moved on to the cheese course. Roquefort balls and a bridge of parmesan cheese. This was not my favorite course as the roquefort was really strong, and the parmesan bridge was 'more 'structural than edilble' in the words of one of our dinner companions.

The next course was the true dessert course, presented by the ships pastry chef. He had constructed a really nice Amaretto desert plate for us which was really a sculpture on a plate. Desert was served with a delicious desert wine.

Next we had our espresso or capucino served with some home made chocolates.

The grand finale was nice glass of limoncello.

After the meal was over the maitre de and photographer showed up. Each couple got their picture taken with the chef and staff, and each 'lady' recieved a cookbook. Notably the gay couples did not receive any cookbooks! This was rectified after one of the guys took the maitre de aside and explained that it probably wasn't fair for them to be excluded from the cookbook. Since they paid the same as us and probably cooked just as much as the rest of us. One of the guys was a professor at Loyala Marymount in LA and he and I talked a little college shop during the dinner.

When one of the other guys found out I was leading a J-term trip to Silicon Valley during January he volunteered to connect me with a friend of his that works at Pixar! Wow that would be an awesome dinner result if we are able to get a tour at Pixar.

Airboat Ride in the Everglades

2009-12-27T13:45:00.000-08:00

This morning started out like any other morning. The alarm went off at 6:15 so that we could get up and get on our way to the everglades. We left the Embassy Suites and walked down 17th Avenue toward the intercostal waterway where we were picking up our rental car. On the way we split our forces with half of us going to Einstein's Bagel Shop and half to Starbucks for Tea, Chai Latte and Cocoa.

We beat the traffic heading out of town easily on our way to the Sawgrass recreation park. It is part of the Everglades national park. We had an appointment with Captain Randy and his airboat at 8:00. Our instructions were to meet him 1/2 mile past mile marker 38 on highway 27. We got there early, the sun was still pretty low in the sky and finished our breakfast in the small parking lot. A few minutes later a pickup truck pulling an airboat with seating for nine pulled into the lot. We watched as the captain fired up the 500 horsepower Corvette engine hooked up to a four blade airline propellor. After the short checkout period he backed the boat and trailor into the water and brought the boat around to the ground.

We greeted Captain Randy, who showed us onto the boat and gave us a short intro to our safety equipment, which consisted of headphones to protect our eardrums from the sound of the engine and airplane prop. He invited one of us to join him in the topmost pair of seats as the co-pilot. We took off, and after a short lesson in steering the airboat, push forward for right and pull back for left, he turned the steering over to me. Driving an airboat takes a lot more anticipation than driving a ski boat. When you want to turn a corner on one of the trails in the everglades you need to start doing so a few seconds in advance. Luckily if you cut the corner to sharp, or too late you really don't run into any problems. You make the trail a little wider as you mow down the Sawgrass and cattail, but there seems to be enough of both to go around.

Taking the early morning trip was a great idea as the angle of the sun was just beautiful, and we saw hundreds of birds as we cruised through the trails. We saw hawks, and herons, and vultures and birds of all different colors and varieties. In addition to the birds we were always on the lookout for gators.

Captain Randy seems to have come from a long line of Everglades boat captains that have been involved with all kinds of dubious activities. Pappy was an alligator poacher, and Randy and his brother kept small alligators as pets when they were younger. As Captain Randy fed one of the gators along the way hotdogs and marshmallows he informed us that feeding the gators was strictly against the law. That didn't stop him, and we got some great pictures of Randy feeding his Mi Amoure Catalyna.

Shortly after our gator feeding experience, we reached the farthest point on our tour. By this point we were all pretty comfortable with the boat and so I was sitting in the bow taking pictures and the rest of the family was comfortably spread around. Randy headed the boat down a narrow trail and suddenly I noticed that we were boating in mud instead of water. As the mud got thicker and drier the boat went slower and slower until we finally came to a halt. Stuck in the mud!

After trying to gun the giant engine on our airboat for many minutes Randy finally admitted that we were stuck and going to need some help getting out. At this point we learned a couple of things about Randy's friend Lyle. First, Lyle had an extremely long message on his business phone, and his cell phone. Second we learned that Randy had helped Lyle out of a similar situation just a couple of days ago. After failing to reach Lyle by phone we resorted to the old fashioned VHF radio. "Laxahatchie, Laxahatcie, Laxahatchie, Lyle this is Randy are you there, over...." With those words our 3-hour tour became a rescue mission.

Our airboat was partway down a trail that had been drained of water. We were about 150 feet onto the mud and it looked like the mud continued for another 300 before it rounded a bend. The trick was to turn the airboat around and pull it out the short way. Unfortunately in the Everglades walking on mud is not so easy. When Randy got out of the boat to try and use a rope to turn us around he sunk up nearly to his waist. To get back to the edge of the water required him to crawl on hands and knees to distribute his weight.

The four of us stayed in the boat feeling somewhat amused at our situation. Clearly we were not in any sort of life threatening emergency but for Randy this was clearly a pain in the butt and probably somewhat of an embarrasment. We were not dressed to jump in the mud and help him, although Kaia seemed very willing to do so. Josh was protecting his new green and white Nikes that Grandpa Miller bought him for Christmas but other than that I think he would have helped too. I had on a brand new pair of Tommy Bahama shorts that I was definitely not interested in getting covered in Everglades mud.

The rescuue mission was long and tedious as Lyle's big boat could not turn around at the end of our trail. This required the help of a third airboat driven by a kind stranger. The third boat acted as a tug boat getting Lyle in the proper position and ferrying the rope into Randy when necessary.

The procedure that Randy and Lyle determined for getting us out involved tieing a line to the bow of the boat and then pulling with Lyle's larger airboat. To a physicist this seemed like a dumb idea as the angles involved were all wrong, but neither Randy or Lyle were physicists so this was not an issue. After breaking Randy's bowline there was some thought that the way to resolve the issue would be to bring a couple of pieces of plywood so that the tourists would be able to walk out of the trail but going from plank to plank and moving the planks as we made progress.

Walking the tourists out was not an acceptable plan to Captain Randy. It was clear that Lyle's larger rope needed to be connected directly to the bow of our airboat and then threaded through the side of the boat about halfway back. Randy decided that he would get to the side with a second rope and pull to try and provide the needed force vector to get the boat to turn to the side. After several long pulls we finally had the boat turned at a ninty degree angle to our original course. (This only took about three hours to get us to this position).

We repositioned the rope to the bow of Randy's ship and he got in his captains chair. At this point the plan was to have one last pull by Lyle with Randy ready to "Give her Hell" as soon as we were headed in roughly the right direction. With this plan in mind and one last pull we were finally free!

Once free of the mud we followed Lyle back to his docking area where hugs were exchanged and many thumbs up were given to our kind helpers. By this time Captain Randy had completely missed his 11:30 trip and was wanting to make sure we got back to the landing in time to meet his 2:30. So we took off for home base at high speed. After a while he slowed down so that Jane or Josh could drive. Josh wanted to have nothing to do with driving as by this time he was convinced that he would do something even worse than get us stuck in the mud. So Jane took her turn and did a great job of driving the boat.

Just before we got back to the landing we made one last stop with captain Randy to make sure that we had our stories straight. Clearly he was a little nervous that his muddy appearance might be offputting to his next group. Particularly if we were unhappy and complaining about the trip. He really had no reason to worry, all of us thought the trip was a great adventure.

After our exciting airboat trip we planned to stop at the Sawgrass Mill, an enormous shopping center. It took us almost a half hour of driving around to find the Ron Jon outlet store. Even after we found it it took forever to get in because the parking lot was so busy and full. The plan was for us to stop there to get Kaia a swimming suit. Since I had discovered that my old suit was too big for me I decided to get one too. Josh also found himself a nice suit and a football for using in the water.

The next big surprise of the night came when we walked over to Pazzo's for an italian dinner. We walked in the door and talked to the hostess who told us to wait just a minute as she checked the tables. As we stood waiting for a minute a familiar figure came across the bar headed toward us. Sasan Mokhtari and his family were in the restaurant! they were in town for the soccer tournament. It was really fun to reconnect with Sasan after several years. We had a great talk with Sasan and Mary and their kids Tara, Eva, and Daniel. Tara is a first year at MIT and Eva and Daniel have transferred to Breck. It took Sasan only about 3 minutes to ask me if I would be interested in doing some consulting for him!

We had a great meal, although Josh was feeling a little sick and didn't eat very much.

BeautifulSoup, Bonktown and Growl

2009-07-23T12:46:00.001-07:00

Here's a little script that combines two of my favorite pass times. Python programming and cycling. bonktown.com is a great site that has steep discounts on road cycling gear. They only sell one item at a time and they typically sell that item until it is gone. I've gotten some great deals on clothing and other stuff on that site. Bonktown helps you know whats currently for sale in a number of ways, including a nice dashboard widget that pops up a notifier when something new comes on sale. The problem is that over time I've started to ignore the growl notifiers for bonktown, because I'm not interested in lots of the stuff they sell.

So, I wrote this python script that allows me to look for the stuff I am interested in buying. It works by having a file of regular expressions that I use to search the item descriptions when something goes on sale at bonktown. If the item matches something I'm looking for then I get a Growl notification. If not then I don't hear about it.

Here's the code:


#!/usr/bin/env python2.6

import re
import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import Growl

name = "MyBonk"   # was BonkMe
notifications = ["search_hit"]
notifier = Growl.GrowlNotifier(name,notifications)
notifier.register()

# Read file of search Terms
myTerms = open("/Users/bmiller/lib/bonk_items.txt").readlines()


# Get the latest page
bt = urllib.urlopen("http://www.bonktown.com")

doc = BeautifulSoup(bt.read())

itemlist = doc.findAll(id=re.compile("item_title"))
price = doc.findAll(id=re.compile("price"))
desc = doc.findAll(id=re.compile("item_description"))

for term in myTerms:
    for i in range(len(itemlist)):
        if itemlist[i] and re.search(term[:-1],itemlist[i].contents[0],re.IGNORECASE):
            notifier.notify("search_hit",
                            itemlist[i].contents[0],
                            desc[i].contents[7].contents[0],
                            sticky=False)

This script makes use of several modules:

Growl

BeautifulSoup

urllib

I would have liked to use one of the standard library html/xml parsers, but I could not find one that was as convenient or easy to use as BeautifulSoup. If you can tell me how to parse messy html with one of the standard library xml modules please let me know.

Aquamacs 2.0 elisp fun

2009-07-03T09:05:00.001-07:00

While waiting for the white smoke to emerge on Textmate 2.0, I decidedto revisit an old friend. It turns out the emacsen have been busysince I've been using TextMate. Aquamacs 2.0 is a great Cocoa port ofEmacs 23. Not sure whether I should call it a port since emacsofficially supports the OS X operating system.The first thing I did was check out some of the old modes I used touse. AucTeX, GNUs are both packaged with emacs now. The SQL mode that comes withis great and "just works" with mysql and postgresql. There is goodsupport for Python and of course HTML. Two minor gliches in thoseareas that I wish I could fix:

I cannot get MMM (multi-major-mode) to work properly. I wouldreally like to have both HTML and Javascript colorized properly whenI'm working on my Django projects. If anyone has any advice ongetting MMM to work right in emacs 23 I would really appreciate apointer.
Completion in iPython does not work right. Instead of completingin the ipython shell it just indents more.

In addition to some old friends I discovered a bunch of new modes thatare really nice. JDE for Java development, Muse for creating lecturenotes in a personal wiki style. In addition Muse lets you publish amarkup style format really easily in lots of differnt output formats.I've been a big fan of using Pandoc with TextMate over the last fewyears, but Muse is every bit as nice.One thing lacking in Muse was the ability to quickly bold or ital ortt some part of the text I'm working on. So I decided to dust off mylisp coding ability and cook up my own. The result is shown below. Ithink it is a nice example of a lot of what you need to do in writingbasic lisp extensions for any text processing mode. I'd be happy toget comments on how to improve this.The idea of these simple commands is that pressing cmd-b should boldthe word the cursor is currently on, or the region (if there is one)or simply insert **|** when the cursor is not on a word. It alsotook some research to figure out how to bind a function to the commandkey. (side note: I've finally gotten comfortable with using the optionkey for meta in emacs.)


(defun muse-bold-word ()
  (interactive)
  (muse-wrap-with-string "**" 2)
)

(defun muse-ital-word ()
  (interactive)
  (muse-wrap-with-string "*" 1)
)

(defun muse-tt-word () 
  (interactive)
  (muse-wrap-with-string "=" 1)
)

(defun muse-wrap-with-string (str len)
  (if mark-active
      (progn
 (kill-region (point) (mark))
 (let ((myword (car kill-ring)))
   (insert (concat str myword str) )))
    (let ((myStr (thing-at-point 'word)))
      (if myStr
   (let ((myBounds (bounds-of-thing-at-point 'word)))
     (kill-region (car myBounds) (cdr myBounds))
     (insert (concat str myStr str)))
 (progn
   (insert (concat str str))
   (goto-char (- (point) len)) ) ) ))
)

(define-key muse-mode-map `[(,osxkeys-command-key b)] 'muse-bold-word)
(define-key muse-mode-map `[(,osxkeys-command-key i)] 'muse-ital-word)
(define-key muse-mode-map `[(,osxkeys-command-key k)] 'muse-tt-word)

Test

2009-06-30T08:49:00.001-07:00

This is a test of gblogger.

3 Days of R&R in Sedona

2009-06-06T12:04:00.001-07:00

After all of our hiking and rafting adventure we are ending the trip with 3 days of rest and relaxation in Sedona. Our major activities here are a Pink Jeep tour, Golfing, and a massage for the women in the family. Otherwise we are doing lots of pool time and have even played a hand or two of 500. Sedona is known for its red rock and beautiful scenery, along with crystal shops and the Ye Olde UFO Shoppe.

We did the Broken Arrow tour with Pink Jeep, which was fun. I think we would have appreciated it even more if we had not already done all the hiking through Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon. Nevertheless it was a good excursion. While we were out there the kids decided to do some rock climbing. Don't let the pictures fool you this was dangerous stuff:

This morning Josh and I played a round of golf at the Sedona Country Club which is part of the Hilton complex. It was a very nice course and Josh and I both played well. It was a great morning to go as there was nobody in front of us and we were able to play at our own pace and move around the course pretty quickly.

Josh got a new shirt and hat out of the deal as the club had a dress code and Josh did not have any clean shirts that would get him on the tee. I played so well that I had to buy a new shirt to commemorate the occasion. It was 25% off for fathers day so happy fathers day to me.

Jane and Kaia both had facials and hot stone massages. I can't go into any more detail about that. :-) But they were both glowing and relaxed when they got back.

Tonight we are going to go out for some barbeque and then come back to the room and get packed for the final leg of our journey. Its been a great trip!

Grand Canyon - River to Rim

2009-06-04T11:55:00.001-07:00

The call for "Hooaaahhht Coffeeeeee" went out at 4:30AM. It was already twilight in the East and it was time to pack up camp and get on the rafts for the final 3/4 mile of our journey. We had all come a long way on this trip. From the first night where everyone managed to find a place to sleep in private, this last night looked like a refugee camp. We didn't have much room and everyone slept right next to everyone else. Here you can see everyone's gear and a corner of what we at first called the "Miller plot" and then renamed to Miller Estate.

Here you can see the bridge that connects the Kaibab trail from the North to the South wall. We went a little further downstream to Phantom Ranch and crossed our own bridge.

The facts of the Phantom Ranch trail are as follows: Its a 10 mile hike from the river to the rim. It is a 1 mile vertical difference from the river to the rim. Now the mathematically inclined will say that is only a 10% grade. Not a problem... It was a challenge. They tell you to have two one liter water bottles and to fill them full at the bottom. there is a halfway stop called Indian Gardens with a water station and a 3 mile (from the top) stop with a water station and a 1.5 mile stop with a water station. We filled our water at every stop. You do drink a LOT of water on this hike. You are also advised to rest for 30 minutes at each stop if you are having difficulty.

We left the river at 7AM and were to Indian Gardens by 10:30. This is going well we thought. Unfortunately when you get to Indian Gardens you have only gone 1/4 of the vertical distance. We finally arrived at the rim at 3:30. We made a lot of extra stops on the last half of the hike. Jane did not drink enough water during the first half and was struggling a bit during the second part of the hike.

In fact with half a mile remaining she was completely pooped. We asked one of our fellow hikers to send Josh back to carry Jane's pack the last half mile. Josh wins the good sport award for the day.

Now you might wonder is the hike worth it for all that work? Yes, absolutely you get to see the Canyon in a way that you just can't imagine by looking down from the rim. Here you can see some of the trail we came up. But not all the way to the river that is hidden in the distance.

Pictures don't do justice to the amazing beauty of this corner of the world. We are all really glad we did this trip. As I'm writing this from the comfort of the Sedona Hilton, I'm inspired by the message on my plastic Gin and Tonic glass which says that "Travel is not about getting from point A to B, Travel should renew your zest for life." This trip has certainly done that.

Down the Colorado into the Canyon

2009-06-02T07:22:00.001-07:00

For three days we had a great raft trip with Wilderness River Adventures. The trip was amazing! For three days we saw the Grand Canyon in a way that few are lucky enough to see, from the bottom up. As we rafted along we literally saw the history of the world from today to 2 billion years ago. The beauty of this place is just awe inspiring.

We began our trip at Lee's Ferry, just south of Page Arizona and ended up at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. We shared the trip with another small group (Rocky, Joe, and Denise) and one large group from Lafayette College.

The Lafeyette group really made the trip for us. The group of Geology students was led by Dr. Larry Malinconico (Dr. M) and Dr. Dave Sunderlin. In my slightly biased opinion I thought that Luther students were the friendliest students anywhere. The group from Lafeyette taught me that there are other colleges with really great students. Not only did we learn a lot from lurking in the back of the impromptu lectures but we had a great time getting to know them all.

Here are a couple of examples of how beautiful the canyon is. Here we are in calm water:

Here was one of our short day hikes. You can see our rafts to the right.

Of course no rafting trip would be complete without the opportunity to get wet, which we are about to do here:

And no trip report from me would be complete without a review of the food. In a word, awesome. Here are the two swampers (Kari and Everett) preparing our last dinner. Spaghetti and meatballs, or Alfredo Sauce. We had Salmon and rice one night, grilled New York Strips and Baby Red Potatoes another night. It was all "good eats".

The leaders of the trip were Richard and Matt. Two excellent raft drivers. Not sure what the proper term is for the captain of a giant rubber raft. But they got us safely through some really "fun" rapids. At one point the Miller family did experience a collective flashback to being stranded in the Everglades when our raft got hung up on Whale Rock. This was right in the middle of the biggest rapids of the trip and we were just starting to wonder how we were going to get rescued when the raft freed itself and we were on our way.

The sleeping accomodations were better than expected by my standards. For three nights we just slept on our mats under the stars. No tents, just sleeping bags, tarps and mats. It was great. Since Arizona does not observe daylight savings time, it was dark by 8:30PM and light by 5:00 AM. So it was an early to bed early to rise kind of trip. One night I woke up at midnight and got out the camera. This picture doesn't really do justice to the beauty of the night sky in Arizona but it gives you some idea of what we saw from our sleeping bags:

The last day of our trip we got up at 4:30AM and went about half a mile downstream to Phantom Ranch. From there we hiked 10 miles linearly and 1 mile vertically to get out of the Grand Canyon. I'll cover that experience in another post.

Bryce Canyon Sunrise -- Antelope Canyon

2009-05-29T06:53:00.001-07:00

It was an early morning today. The alarm went off at 5:30 and we were out of the hotel by 5:43. We made a short drive up to Bryce Point in twilight. The temperature was only 37 degrees but it did not seem too cold. We waited a few minutes for the sun to come up over the distant horizon. When it did we were rewarded with some amazing colors in the canyon:

After sunrise we had breakfast at the hotel and then headed south toward Page. We had a slot canyon tour booked for 10:30 Arizona time so we thought we had plenty of time. Unfortunately we ran into an accident that closed highway 89. We had a nice chat with an over-the-road truck driver as we waited for the ambulance and fire crew to clear the road.

We still made it in time for our Antelope Canyon tour. This was an amazing photographic experience. I took way to many pictures but I'm going to have a hard time picking out 10 favorites from the 200 I took. Here's one as a sample.

After checking out the view of the Colorado River we relaxed at the hotel around the pool. We just got back from our orientation meeting tonight. We got our waterproof bags to pack all our luggage in. We are all looking forward to the raft trip starting at 8:15 tomorrow morning. This will be my last entry until we hike out of the Grand Canyon four days from now.

Bryce -- Navajo / Queens Garden

2009-05-27T19:28:00.001-07:00

According to National Park Service literature, the combination of the Navajo loop and the Queens Garden loop is called the best 3 mile hike in the world. I'd say they must be right. The first thing that is just totally amazing is when you first peer over the rim of Bryce Canyon and see the vast expanse of hoodoos and the brilliant red colors.

After eating a lunch on the rim of the canyon at Inspiration Point we headed down the rim trail to Sunset Point where the Navajo loop begins. It seems like every step you take gives you a new perspective and another amazing view.

In the middle top of this photo you can see Inspiration Point, our starting location for the day:

Here is another view of Inspiration point from the bottom of the canyon.

And here are Kaia and Josh:

Dinner tonight was at the Bryce Canyon Pines Restaurant and Diner. A great family restaurant a few miles from our motel.
Incidentally our hotel is the Bryce Canyon Grand Hotel. Its part of the Ruby's General Store empire here at the north entrance to Bryce Canyon national park. The hotel just opened last week and is very nice.

Angel's Landing

2009-05-27T07:00:00.001-07:00

Our first day of hiking in Zion National Park was great! Here is our goal for the day:

From the bus stop known as "The Grotto" we hiked 2 miles and 1,800 feet up to the top of Angel's Landing. The hike to the saddle point in the middle of the picture was a fairly easy hike on nice wide switchbacks. The rest of the hike was more exciting. The park service has helpfully installed chain handrails to help you climb over any rough spots or to help pull yourself up the steep bits.

Here's a picture of the Miller's at the saddle point:

Here you can see an example of what the last part of Angel's landing hike looks like:

Here's a picture of Kaia and I at the top

Phoenix to Springdale

2009-05-25T22:10:00.001-07:00

Long day of traveling today. Left Minneapolis at 9:05 this morning and just got into our room in Springdale UT at 11:00 Mountain time, or midnight back home. Actually we checked in a while ago but went straight to the Bit and Spur to have some dinner since our last meal was at Schlotzky's in Phoenix.

The GPS said it would be a 7 hour drive. it turned out to be longer than that because we took a side trip to the Desert View overlook in the Grand Canyon. Here is a view from the Desert View of the Colorado River. We'll be rafting down that river and into the canyon in just a few days. We will be able to see the watchtower from the river on our way into the canyon!

It was still quite a drive from the Grand Canyon to Springdale UT. Along the way we crossed the colorado river just south of where we will get on the raft.

We drove through Zion National Park in the dark. We are all looking forward to a great day of hiking in Zion tomorrow.

MIT uses Python instead of Scheme for intro CS

2009-05-11T05:11:00.001-07:00

I've seen several interesting blog posts related to MIT switching from Scheme to Python for their intro course. This is really interesting to me since SICP is one of my favorite CS books of all time. Nevertheless I'm glad to see leading institutions change to my favorite language.

Paraphrase of Gerald Sussman's remarks

Dan Weinreb's blog

VPython version 5

2009-04-18T05:59:00.001-07:00

The other day I discovered that the folks working on VPython have been very busy over the last couple of years. I had given up on VPython because the Mac distribution was so difficult to use. It required the X windows server and one point and lots of other extra junk at other times. But now things are easy! There is a great installer package and it just works.

For those of you who have not heard of VPython before it is a 3D graphics module called visual built on top of Python and OpenGL. You can do a lot of nice 3D graphics very simply with VPython. Its great for education in math and physics and introductory computer science.

So as an experiment I built a turtle graphics module on top of VPython. I use turtle graphics a lot in teaching but the TKinter turtles all suffer from some event loop problems when you use them with IDLE. VPython does not suffer from this problem plus gives you a lot of other cool benefits. One of the benefits is that the window resizes automatically for you based on the units you use in your application. Want to draw a picture at the atomic level of detail? No problem, want to draw planets circling each other? Again no problem.

Here's a screen capture of a fractal tree created in 3-D using my new turtle.

Here's the VPython turtle code:


def tree(t,trunkLength):
    if trunkLength < 5:
        return
    else:
        turnDz = random.randint(20,40)
        turnDx = random.randint(20,40)
        trunkShort = random.randint(10,20)
        t.width(trunkLength/10.0)
        if trunkLength < 25:
            t.color(color.green)
        else:
            t.color((174/255.0,145/255.0,0))
        t.forward(trunkLength)
        # right trunk
        t.right(turnDz,ZAXIS)
        tree(t,trunkLength-trunkShort)
        # left trunk
        t.left(2*turnDz,ZAXIS)
        tree(t,trunkLength-trunkShort)
        # front trunk
        t.right(turnDz,ZAXIS)
        t.right(turnDx,XAXIS)
        tree(t,trunkLength-trunkShort)
        # back trunk
        t.left(2*turnDx,XAXIS)
        tree(t,trunkLength-trunkShort)
        # restore
        t.right(turnDx,XAXIS)
        t.backward(trunkLength)

If you want to check out the turtle module and play with it, you are welcome to do so: hg clone http://bitbucket.org/bnmnetp/vturtle Or send me mail.

Book Plug

2009-02-01T11:17:00.001-08:00

Here’s a little plug for our book from our Colleague Mark Guzdial at Georgia Tech. This was written last September right after the book was published but I didn’t find out about it until this morning. Thanks Mark!

In addition, David and I have started a new blog to post corrections and updates to Python Programming in Context Over here If you are already using the book please check it out.

Remember The Milk

2009-01-30T05:12:00.001-08:00

In the past year, I've been a passionate supporter of three task management apps. OmniFocus, Things, and Remember The Milk (RTM). I've switched back and forth between them trying to decide which one works best for me. I think I'm finally ready to commit to RTM as my long term solution and here's why.

All three apps have an iPhone component and a desktop component. Although the primary RTM interface on the desktop is through the browser there are plenty of Widgets and other desktop friendly ways to access RTM on the desktop. What I really like about RTM for the desktop is its openness. In terms of the ability to dump stuff into RTM its cloud computing model really works.

With both OmniFocus and Things I have to be on the same subnet as my laptop in order for the wifi syncing between my Ipod Touch and the desktop to work. Unfortunately outside of my house this is rarely the case. With RTM I can be anywhere. That means I'm free to roam anywhere in the world with my iPod Touch and I know that when I dump a task or note into RTM it will be there on my desktop or the web interface when I come back to it. If I forget my iPod Touch (a very unlikely event) I can still dump tasks into RTM from any browser.

The second thing I really like about RTM is its openness. As you can see from my posts below I have developed my own desktop interface to RTM using the Python bindings and LaunchBar. The three things that I want to do most often, with as little fuss as possible are:

Add a task

Mark a task as complete

display tasks

With my LaunchBar integration I don't ever have to take my fingers off the keyboard to do any of those tasks.

When I'm using my iPod Touch, I think that the RTM client is the best and most fully featured of the bunch. Since RTM has been around as a service for longer than either Things or OmniFocus they have had more time to work on polishing their iApp. It already supports tagging and searching. Things that are coming in the other apps but are already here for RTM on the iPod today.

Because RTM has an open API there are lots of other nice interfaces for you to use that make it easy to dump tasks and notes into your inbox. Do you Twitter? Send a direct message to your RTM inbox. Do you Text? Send using the Twitter RTM gateway you can text directly to your inbox. Email? yes. You can even email a whole list of stuff to RTM as a way to quickly import a long list of tasks or packing items you have copied from somewhere else. Jott, yes. The possibilities are endless and expanding all the time.

Python + Growl + Remember The Milk = LaunchBar Task Management

2009-01-27T15:14:00.001-08:00

Intro

Once I could add tasks to my RTM account through LaunchBar I wanted a way to quickly pull up a view of what tasks were due today through LaunchBar. The Growl library provides a nice way of doing this.

The overview is as follows: Activate LaunchBar and type due. This due is installed as a search shortcut and you can search for today, tomorrow, or all (abbreviations are also easy). The search shortcut runs the python script that searches your tasks on Remember the Milk. For each task it finds it puts up a sticky Growl notification so you get a nice list of tasks on your screen. You could easily customize the script to put all the tasks in a single notification but I like them separate.

Since the Growl module registers this script as an application you can also use the Growl Preference Pane to customize the look and feel or even the location of your notifications. You can also customize whether you want the notifications to be sticky or not.

The Code

Here is the code for doing all of this. It makes use of the filter parameter on getList.


#!/usr/bin/env python

from rtm import *
import sys
import Growl

def sendNotify(ts):
    if type(ts.task) == list:
        for j in range(len(ts.task)):
            notifier.notify("today","Task Due: "+ts.task[j].due[:10],ts.name,sticky=True)
    else:
        notifier.notify("today","Task Due: "+ts.task.due[:10],ts.name,sticky=True)

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
    command = sys.argv[1]
else:
    command = "today"

apiKey = "get your own"
secret = "this too"
token = "You will create this"

name = "RTMDue"
notifications = ["today","tomorrow"]
notifier = Growl.GrowlNotifier(name,notifications)
notifier.register()

if command[:3] == "tod" or command == '':
    cutoff = 'today'
elif command[:3] == "tom":
    cutoff = 'tomorrow'
else:
    cutoff = None 

rtm = createRTM(apiKey, secret, token)

if cutoff:
    filterString = 'status:incomplete and (due:%s or dueBefore:%s)'%(cutoff,cutoff)
else:
    filterString = 'status:incomplete'

theTasks = rtm.tasks.getList(filter=filterString)

if type(theTasks.tasks.list) == list:
    for i in range(len(theTasks.tasks.list)):
        if type(theTasks.tasks.list[i].taskseries) == list:
            for j in range(len(theTasks.tasks.list[i].taskseries)):
                ts = theTasks.tasks.list[i].taskseries[j]
                sendNotify(ts)
        else:
            ts = theTasks.tasks.list[i].taskseries
            sendNotify(ts)
else:
    if type(theTasks.tasks.list.taskseries) == list:
        for i in range(len(theTasks.tasks.list.taskseries)):
            ts = theTasks.tasks.list.taskseries[i]
            sendNotify(ts)
    else:
        ts = theTasks.tasks.list.taskseries
        sendNotify(ts)

Next Steps

It would be great if I can figure out a way to have the Growl notification box call a script to mark the task as done. Feel free to leave comments or suggestions or improvements in the comments.

A Mid-Winter Cycling Treat

2009-01-21T10:53:00.001-08:00

Although the weather back home may have been below zero, in Northern california he sun was out and it was 68 degrees. Perfect weather for a bikeride. So after talking to the nice folks at the Palo Alto Bike Shop Wes and I rented a couple of nice demo road bikes from Calmar bikes in Santa Clara. Calmar is right by our hotel and the staff there was super friendly and helpful in getting us set up for a ride. Incidentally Calmar has no relation to Calmar IA. I road a nice Spanish BH RoadROM and Wes road a hot pink Trek Pilot 5.2. Even though the bike was pink we felt pretty good passing all the californians on the way up Old La Honda Road.

Rather than head out from the hotel on the busy city streets I decided to take Novian's advice and head into the foothills west of Palo Alto. You can see the ride we took on the map below. This is from a cool website called mapmyride.com that I will use in the future for keeping track of my rides.

&amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/ride/united-states/ca/-palo-alto/752308357021"&amp;gt;01/18/2009 Skyline Drive with Wes Gregg&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;br/&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href="http://www.mapmyride.com/find-ride/united-states/ca/-palo-alto"&amp;gt;Find more Bike Rides in Palo Alto, California&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;

The ride was just beautiful even though we had to climb 2500 feet to get to the view. On the way up we road through some big redwood trees.

Once you get on Skyline drive you can see the ocean on one side and the Valley on the other. Here's me, I look more tired in the picture than I actually felt! Really, Honest!

The rest of the ride is a long coast down Page Mill Road and then some flat riding past the Stanford Dish and the Stanford Golf course. It would have been fun to stop and play 18 holes but I didn't have my clubs with me.

Creating a Group Twitter Repository

2009-01-10T06:00:00.001-08:00

For the trip to Silicon Valley I wanted to have everyone be able to twitter about the experience using their own twitter account, but I also want to have a central place for everyone following the trip as a whole to see all of our tweets. How to do that? Python and the Twitter API to the rescue. You can see the results of this by checking out @lutherlive on twitter


import twitter

USER = "Your group account"
PASS = "your group password"
TAG = "tag contained in each message"

api = twitter.Api(username=USER,password=PASS)

# figure out when my last post was
statuses = api.GetUserTimeline(user=USER)
last_post = statuses[0].GetCreatedAt()

# Get the timelines for all friends since my last_post
tl = api.GetFriendsTimeline(user=USER,since=last_post)
for post in tl:
    # since my posts may show up in friends timelines avoid reposting loop
    if post.user.screen_name != USER and TAG in post.text:
        api.PostUpdate(post.user.screen_name + ": " + post.text)

This little script logs in using the twitter account you create for the group. Importantly, this account must follow all of the group members that you want to be able to re-tweet. When one of the group members wants a tweet to show up on the group account they must use the TAG, in our case @lutherlive, somewhere in their post.

After logging in, the script grabs the timeline for all of the members of the group. This timeline is restricted to the posts since the last a post was made by the group user. This is important to do otherwise you would end up with duplicate re-tweets every time the script is run.

Next the script simply loops over all of the posts and checks for the tag. If the tag is in the post the post is updated along with the screen name of the original group member that made the post.

I put the script into a cron-job on the computer science server at Luther to run every 15 minutes, so while the @lutherlive user isn't a real time reflection of its group members tweets, its pretty darn close.

Adding Tasks to your RTM account with Python

2009-01-08T09:02:00.001-08:00

The documentation included with the Python RTM API is a bit sparse, so here is a really simple example of a script that allows you to add tasks to your Remember the Milk inbox from the command line. I actually integrated this script with LaunchBar for an even nicer experience.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from rtm import *
import sys
apiKey = "get your own"
secret = "this too"
token = "you'll create this with apiKey and secret"

newTask = " ".join(sys.argv[1:])
rtm = createRTM(apiKey, secret, token)
tl = rtm.timelines.create()
rsp = rtm.tasks.add(timeline=tl.timeline,name=newTask,parse=1)

There now that is really very easy.

To Add this to LaunchBar create a new search template. Name it something simple like TD and add this to the details section:

x-launchbar:execute?path=/Your/path/here/addinbox.py&arguments="*"

Cool! Now I can bring up LaunchBar, type TD to bring up my search template. Hit the spacebar to get a text entry box and then type in my todo item. Hit return and the above script is run to instantly add your new task to your inbox. You'll notice that the call to rtm.tasks.add has a parameter parse=1 This parameter tells RTM to parse due date information out of the string you give it.

Of course you could build on the above script to create your own little syntax to specify the list you wanted to add the task to, or for adding tags etc. But this is really simple to get started.