Back to the Future

Meanwhile, I have started watching Entourage lately. I was amused by an episode from the second season that aired in July 2005. The main character is convinced to do a foreign commercial when everyone tells him that he doesn't have to worry about it hurting his career, because no one in the US will ever come across it. Which was, of course, a relatively reasonable thing to say in mid-2005. But it must have seemed so dated only a year later, and now comes across as totally retro today.

Start Me Up

So ever since reading an article on charging batteries in remote devices wirelessly a few months ago, I've been very hung up on how cool an idea this "wireless energy transfer" is. Apparently, at the moment, only relatively small amounts of energy can be moved over relatively small distances. But it looks like there are companies working on improving this. So, I'm picturing a future where all floors in buildings are made out of material that shoots energy at all the devices in the building. The floors would get their power from clean, natural, renewable energy sources. Meanwhile, all devices would come with environmentally-friendly batteries that would last a lifetime (which might not be that long with all this radiation shooting up at us...).

Think about how nice it would be to never have to plug anything in, or have to arrange everything in your room around where the plugs are. Some people who constantly feel the need to keep their cellphones off when not in use would no longer have an excuse for that, because they would be constantly charging/charged. And, of course, all our devices could be as pretty as the iPhone because we'd never have to dissect them to get at the battery.

Sounds pretty good.

Snow!

So there was a little bit of snow on the ground this morning! Then, when we were waking up, it was actively snowing. That lasted for 10 minutes before it turned to freezing rain and washed everything away, but it was fun for a little bit anyway.

The view from my window (Blogger seems to be sickly and unable to upload this picture in the correct orientation ... sorry!):

Where do I live?

So I have some pictures of my house in Cambridge I took when I moved in but never got around to posting. Here we go!

So, I live in Malting House on little Malting Lane, marked in pink. The Law Faculty building is marked in blue, and the main entrance to Darwin is marked in purple:


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Here's the front of the house:



And, from this angle, you can see my window. I'm on the top floor on the right-hand side, the second window from the front (so I have a slightly sloping ceiling):



Here is a bit of the Darwin grounds:



This is the "Mathematical Bridge":



The (untrue) urban legend with that is that Newton built the bridge without bolts, but simply balanced all the wood on top of each other appropriately to build a bridge. Then, the students took it apart centuries later to figure out how he had done it ... and couldn't put it back together again. So now it does have bolts to put keep it in place. Of course, that story is totally untrue and it has always had bolts, but whatever.

Here is the front of the dramatic King's College:



Here is the market in the center of town, which is actually open every day but Sundays:



I got both my sunflower and my "flowering cactus" there, but we'll get to those in a little bit.

Here are some of the cows in one of the fields:



Here are some pictures of the big interior quad of King's:





And here is the River Cam and the Mathematical Bridge from another angle, showing some of Queen's College that is right up against the river:



Here's the River Cam from a different bridge/angle:



Here's Clare College, where Nick's brother, Chris, went:



And here's the "back" of Clare College:



All the colleges along the main section of the river have "backs" on the far side of the river, which seem to often just be grounds. So you live on the close side of the river to town, but then you can cross to more college grounds on the far side of the river.

And then, here are some pictures of my room, back in the Malting House:









So, this was my sunflower:



But the sunflower has gone on to a better place. So, recently, I went back to the Cambridge market in search of another, less fussy plant. So, this time, I got a plant that was labeled as a "flowering cactus" but that the consensus seems to be is a Christmas Cactus. Here is a photo:



So, the final question is, how do I make sure that this one doesn't go the way of the sunflower? Any suggestions? Like, how often should I be watering it?

Sexist SIBL

So one of the big bouldering comp series in the UK is the Southern Indoor Bouldering League. They're having their second round, of six, this weekend. I have been less into bouldering lately, and so been doing less comps, but I looked it up out of curiousity, ande headed on over to the rules.

Now, first of all, a prize to anyone who can figure out what is going on in the rules. There seem to be rounds, normalized scoring, equal points on problems no matter how hard they are, and all sorts of bizarre things going on that wouldn't make sense if you took them at face value. Even includes sentences like this:

Junior & Open are open to anyone under 16 on the day of the first event. The open has no age restrictions.

So who knows what to make of that.

The one thing that I did pick up out of the rules was this:

The top 5 scores from the male open event will be entered into the famous SIBL head to head to battle out for glory.

For heaven's sake. So no finals for girls. Who decided that?

I suppose, to be completely honest, I do not see nearly as many strong girl climbers in England as I do in the US, even though there are surprisingly many strong boys considering what the climbing in England has to offer (different rant, different rant...). For example, three and a half years ago, at the BUSA bouldering comp, I came in about 10th for the girls, out of around 70 girls. Eddie-from-Oxford came in about 10th for the boys, out of not-that-many-more boys, maybe around 100. But here's the thing. Eddie is one of the best climbers in Ireland. He's put up hard FAs. He's repeated hard E-graded things that haven't seen many ascents. At the time, I climbed about V2 (probably still do).

In an American comp where someone like Eddie came in 10th for the boys, there would be very strong girls coming in 10th for the girls. Not me, sadly. (The winning bouldering girls would all be about 4'11" ... different rant, different rant.) England just doesn't have that many strong female climbers, and I don't know why. It takes someone like Lisa Rands to come over and show them how it's done.

What I do know, though, is that it is unacceptable for major, real bouldering comps in England to not have a finals for the girls. Maybe if they were treated more equally we'd see more girls climbing harder to get a chance to be in finals. No wonder Claire Murphy left for America.

Good Obama Website

As the search for Obama's CTO continues, a new website has been launched where you can vote on what the "top priorities" for the mystery CTO should be. Check it out!


And here is how I voted:

Europe Adventures

So it looks like I have two trips lined up now. The first we already have plane tickets for. After term ends here, Nick and I are flying on Saturday, December 6, to Venice, and spending a few days there and a few days in Rome (possibly with Pisa in between), before flying back from Rome on Saturday, December 13. My flight back to the US for Christmas isn't until Monday, December 15.

The second adventure is a climbing trip to El Chorro in January. This is going to just be a long weekend, and is less fully formed than the first trip. We'll fly out to the Malaga airport on the morning of Friday, January 16 (we'd do a Thursday night flight but there aren't any late flights out there), and we'll fly back to England on the afternoon of Monday, January 19. Probably renting a car, and probably staying at the refugio in El Chorro. This coincides with when Hampshire is going to be there, so I should hopefully be able to climb some with Zebby. If the weather really sucks while we are there, we will bail out of climbing and go visit the Alhambra in Grenada instead.

Also, I'm not really looking forward to the El Chorro approach:

Westway Adventures

So today, Nick and I went into London for our first visit to the Westway climbing gym. We decided to take the train because we figured it would be about the same as driving both time- and price-wise. The trip in was relatively uneventful -- train from Orpington to Charing Cross, and from there one more switch on the underground to get to Westway.

Westway itself took a little while to get "registered" at. There were a lot of lines. Eventually we did our supposedly "very difficult" belay test which basically consisted of putting on a harness, tying in, and showing on a piece of rope hanging from a bar how we belayed and lowered. Nothing that "difficult" about it, but English gyms typically don't have any sort of practical belay test at all, so I guess this was hard for England.

Eventually we actually got into the gym at like 3:45 or 4. On the way in, we bumped into other Cambridge kids who were there earlier in the day on their way out, and said hi. Then we headed into the actual climbing room. We climbed, routes only, until just after 6:30. The routes/gym was about as expected. There were actually slightly more stations than MetroRock -- 103, to be exact. However, they were generally closer together than MR's, and there were far more of them that were sort of reserved for beginners like ropes 1 and 2 at MR, so the amount of space for challenging climbing routes was less than MR.

As is standard for English gyms, most of the more challenging routes were supposed to be led, and it was rare to find TR stations with climbs harder than about French 6a or so. So Nick and I spent the afternoon leading a lot of 6's, and TRing a few as well. I think the hardest lead I did was only about 6b+. I also put the rope up on a wall with a 7a, and TR'd the 7a clean first try (although it was probably at least a little soft). But so the good news is that I'm not completely terrible ... yet.

Westway sets by hold color, and has the standard problem where, from above, the holds all look gray. This is compounded by the poor lighting typical in gyms. So there were definitely routes where this caused a problem, but it was manageable. In general, the routes were soft, too. But it wasn't completely terrible, just what was expected (similer to, say, Carabiner's).

On the way back, we did a detour on the underground that let us walk up Oxford Street, which had some big Christmas lights up already on the big department stores (House of Fraser, Debenham's, John Lewis, etc.). It was supposed to have more lights up over the street, too, but those weren't lit up. We also saw the end of the lit-up section of Regent Street, but didn't actually walk down it because it was raining. We've decided we'll go back and walk up and down the street sometime else before Christmas when it's not raining and when more is lit up.

Then we went back to Charing Cross and took the train back to Orpington (with my new Young Person's Railcard all of my travels cost only L4.80, which really isn't bad). By then I was starving, but we had a pizza and garlic bread for dinner and are now watching TV. I'm taking the train back up to Cambridge tomorrow morning and then doing real work for the rest of the day. Those are my Nika-updates!

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I just discovered this. My new favorite thing on the "internet."

Remember, Remember...

Today is officially the Fifth of November, but I had my first real Bonfire Night last Saturday at Jen-from-Oxford's parents' house. A lot of Jen's family and friends were there, but so were, from OUMC, Will, Andy, Jo, and Tim, plus me and Nick.

It took us over two and half hours to get down to Southampton from Cambridge in the pouring rain. (We had seen the new James Bond in the morning in Cambridge first -- it came out in England two weeks before it did in the U.S.) I was unconvinced that fireworks and bonfire would actually be happening in all the wetness, but I decided to wait and see. I didn't have a raincoat (Nick's fault) but instead just had a warm down coat.

Now the deal with Guy Fawkes Night in England is that they're celebrating the fact that he failed to blow up Parliament centuries ago by, apparently, successfully blowing things up? That seems to be the gist of it, anyways. So while it is officially celebrated on November 5th, there seems to be a several-week-long period of all sorts of fire- and explosion-related injuries all across England.

When we got to Jen's parents' house, it was still definitely raining, so we milled around inside with everyone. Jen mentioned that she spent an afternoon looking at my Facebook photos where every time she finished an album another one showed up. Eventually, though, the rain slowed and we headed outside to light the bonfire. Nick gave me his warm waterproof to put on over my down jacket and got by with just a scruffy old not-very-waterproof coat. The bonfire had been kept dry all week by having a tarp placed over it, and Jen's parents had set up other various tarps around the garden for us to stand under out of the rain, so that all went according to plan. Jen's parents even had a Guy Fawkes effigy to burn atop the bonfire in proper style.



The bonfire actually was extremely warm -- but seemed to be getting a little close to the fence behind it (which ended up slightly blackened by the end of the night). Apparently this was an improvement over last year, though, when a section of the fence burned down.

As Jen's parents made dinner, Nick began setting off some of the many, many fireworks that we had for the night. Apparently, Jen's father had specifically requested Nick for this year because he has done "such a good job" of "responsibly" setting off fireworks in past years. According to Nick. There appears to be a low bar there, though -- according to lore, in past years, Sven-from-OUMC once accidentally shot a firework directly at the side of Jen's parents' house, and another Jen-relative once stuck a rocket in the ground that was supposed to shoot up, meaning that it got stuck, went off at ground level, and made everyone dive for cover as it went off like a bomb.

So Nick began setting off fireworks. Most of them were relatively low-key. There were small ones that went off at ground level (on purpose) that shot off colored sparks in a relatively contained manner. There were ones that popped way up into the air but didn't do much once up there. There were also ones that could be hammered to the fence that went off while spinning around in a circle (which again seems like it should be pretty dangerous). I started off by holding a sparkler, which seemed like plenty for me.









Eventually, with about half the fireworks gone, the bonfire died down and we went in for dinner, which was a buffet style thing with chili and cheesy jackets, which Nick ate a lot of.



After dinner, it was time to head outside for more fireworks. Nick taught me to set off a few of the ground-level ones in the little flower pot, which went well for me -- now the initial sparklers seemed a lot less scary. Meanwhile, Nick learned a tough lesson of his own at the time. We were keeping the fireworks in a greenhouse right next to the flowerpart staging area. In all the fireworks instructions, they specifically said to bury these fireworks before they went off, but Nick decided that that was not that important a suggestion -- kind of like the one to not drink alcohol while setting them off.

So anyways, one of the fireworks that we had was some sort of "seven shot" thing. It shot up little balls way into the sky, and did it one at a time with a second or two in between each one as it burned down. This one got to about shot number four when it started wobbling. It wobbled more and more drastically with shot five, and then, after shot six, it tipped over entirely and aimed straight at the greenhouse. Nick, Andy, Will, and Tim all quickly ran away -- as it fired its last shot directly into the greenhouse.

Somehow it didn't manage to set off any of the gazillion other fireworks in the greenhouse, and didn't even manage to make an exit hole (that we could find, anyway). However, there was definitely a broken pane of glass from the entrance hole. At that point, Nick learned to bury the fireworks better.

Eventually we moved on to some of the bigger fireworks. There were "rockets" that got placed into tubes, and lit, and then the rockets themselves shot up to the sky while the tubes stayed on the ground (this was the type that had exploded years before when a relative had stuck the rocket directly into the ground sans tube, and it hadn't been able to escape).

Finally, we got to some of the big boxes, of which we had a couple. These actually shot real, big bang fireworks up into the sky. By this point, I was used to lighting them and actually lit one of the big bang fireworks myself. Below are pictures of the firework that I, personally, set off.





The still-smoking aftermath:



So that was all pretty exciting and fun! Besides Nick breaking the greenhouse, I managed to have the muddiest shoes of everyone and got mud all over the kitchen -- which then got onto Jen's socks. I'm not sure how they got so muddy. Picture of them 24 hours after the fact:



So that was our adventure! Additionally, we may be going to another fireworks party this upcoming Saturday -- so who knows what sort of carnage that one will result in.

Wonkavision, American Style

Just got back from watching some election coverage in the Darwin TV room with a good mix of Americans and, well, not-Americans. For most of the time, we were watching CNN, with occasional forays into the BBC coverage during the commercials. And they were extremely different. The BBC essentially had five old British guys sitting around a plain wood desk with old-school, barely-existant graphics and no props.

Meanwhile, on CNN, there were red-white-and-blue graphics and flags, both real and virutal, crowding the screen. The commentators' laptops were covered with CNN logos. They had a set of touch screens to rival those in the new James Bond (which, by the way, I saw on Saturday). And, I am not even kidding you, they had a reporter that they hologrammed in to the studio from Chicago.

Other Nika-updates: Nick survived America and came back to England on Friday. Also, as of Monday, he was no longer homeless -- bonus. Meanwhile, I went to a proper Bonfire Night on Saturday -- stay tuned for a full post on that sometime soon.