That's Me!

In the bottom right-hand corner of page 37 of this week's edition of Varsity (Cambridge student newspaper), it says:

That's me!

In other news, I'm going to the Peak District tomorrow -- stay tuned for news about that.

Following Up

A few weeks ago, I mentioned the copyright dispute over Bikram Yoga. This controversy actually was brought up in my International IP class yesterday. So, it turns out, that it did go to court briefly, when Open Source Yoga Unity (yes, that's what it's actually called) sued Bikram Choudhury, seeking a declaratory judgment that they were not infringing (2005 WL 756558). There was apparently a denial of summary judgment for the plaintiffs, where the trial court judge ruled that if, at trial, they found that the poses were arranged in a "sufficiently unique manner," they would be protected under copyright law. The court said that there was:

a dispute of fact on the issue of whether sufficient creativity exists in the Bikram yoga routine so that copyright protection attaches, and thus summary judgment on both copyright validity and copyright invalidity must be denied.

But this was never decided. Instead, at this point, the parties chose to make an out of court settlement, so there was no final answer. Apparently, though, at the time people were starting to worry that football plays could be copyrighted, because they're clearly as choreographed as Bikram Yoga is. But nothing seems to have ever come of that.

Meanwhile, on the Facebook front, it has announced that it is introducing both a Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (to replace the existing TOS) as well as "Facebook Principles." I skimmed them both. The Principles seem pretty vague/mission statement-esque, but I guess that's to be expected. I didn't really read all of the Statement, but I looked at Section 2, which deals with sharing of content and information. It's interesting that FB is trying to adapt to user concerns, but I'm not sure how 2.2 and 2.3 work with each other in a legal sense. If the IP license you grant to FB ends when you terminate your account, as claimed in 2.3, then 2.2 definitely goes beyond this. And 2.2 kind of sticks in, at the end of the sentence, that "content shared with others may remain until they delete it." Which gives FB lots of latitude, because really, anything you put on FB is "content shared with others" -- that's what FB is! So if it suited FB's fancy, couldn't it say any photos, status updates, etc., that you uploaded were "content shared with others," and thus wouldn't have to be deleted upon termination of your account? I think the broad language of 2.2 kind of completely overrules 2.3.

Thoughts?

Crouch Starts

Mile End has developed a new quirk to supplement its already generous repertoire of whackiness. Now, many of the boulder problems there are marked as requiring "crouch starts." Interesting. No idea what those are.

In other news, we all got printed notices of the "winter vomiting disease" stuck under our doors today. It includes two numbered lists. One, "help prevent transfer of sickness," has points numbered 4, 5, and 6. The other, "if you feel unwell," has points numbered 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. Nevermind the fact that there are two 6s; I'm more concerned about where numbers 1-3 have gone. Those probably have the secret tips about how to really not get the plague.

Cambridge has the Plague

Yesterday, we got an email from Darwin giving us "Viral Infection Information." Apparently, there is "winter vomiting and fever" going around at an unnamed college (Corpus). The email described "forceful projectile vomiting" as one of the symptoms.

But now, there are all kinds of rumors. I've heard that eighty students at Corpus have had it, and now there's one at Darwin too, and he gave it to a cleaner in his house. And now there's a maintenance man at the Malting House who seems terrified to touch anything, and keeps asking us if we have it. Oh, and the rumor is that it's airborne. So if you breathe, you'll get it.

Stay tuned.

Varsity Champion!

I went with CUMC to our "varsity" competition against Oxford today. The thing was, though, that Warwick University has quite a decent climbing wall. So we used that, rather than trying to work something out at Oxford or Cambridge, but that meant that we had to negotiate with Warwick. Which meant that we had to let them compete with us.

So, we all had three routes we had to try, and five boulder problems.

For the girls, I flashed the first two routes (the second of which was the same as men's #1). So did at least two other girls -- one from Oxford and one from Warwick. On the third route (which was the same as men's #2) I got to the ninth clip -- and they scored you based on the number of clips you made. We got one try each, so I got a score of 90. So did the Warwick girl (the Oxford girl only got about 60 or 70, I think). So, going into the bouldering half, I was tied with the Warwick girl.

On the five boulder problems, everyone got three attempts. You got 50 points if you sent on first try, 30 on second, and 20 on third. So, I flashed them all. The fifth one was a tricky traverse (that was the same as men's #2). Which was good -- it meant that I got a perfect 250, for a total score of 500 (the two routes I flashed were worth 80 each). Meanwhile, I didn't actually see the Warwick girl on the boulder problems, but she apparently only got halfway along the traverse for half-points, and didn't finish it within the allotted three tries. So, I won! I got 500, Warwick-girl got second with 475, and the Oxford girl got about 440. Meanwhile, for boys, Ben-from-Colorado won. So, I got a pink Red Chili chalk bag that Nick is inherting, as well as a pair of Red Chili shoes that I need to actually choose a model of, and order. Which involves getting email addresses from people and stuff. So that may be a bit of a hassle, especially because I don't particularly like Red Chilis. But I'll do it. Although, if anyone is dying for a pair of Red Chilis, maybe we can work out a little deal...

However, even though Ben and I won, to add up the team scores they took the top 2 girls and top 4 boys from each team. And Ben and I apparently didn't make up for the rest of the Cambridge team compared to Warwick. So Oxford got ~1900 team points, Cambridge got ~2100 points, and Warwick got ~2600 points. So Warwick won the overall competition, but for the official "varsity" OUMC-CUMC match, Cambridge won. Go us!

Of course, at the end, I was belaying Nick on something (since he had been very patient with me all day), and using the GriGri ... which is just bad news in England. Once again I got lectured on GriGri use by a person at the gym. This one did want me to use the new technique, and attempted to demonstrate it to me on the rope I had been using ... and struggled to pull rope through (it was a fatty). But he pretended he wasn't struggling. ARGH. And then I watched him belay someone else later on with a GriGri. He was effectively using the new method, which was good, but it was a skinny rope, so I wasn't too impressed. And then when the person fell off, they certainly crashed back into the wall ... because Mr. Bear Rock had committed Eugene's sin #2 -- he didn't jump. And he was on the large side. So there.

But despite the GriGri issues, it was still a good day. I may just use Nick's Jaws from now on.

Lesson Learned

So, the shower in our bathroom here in the Malting House is one of those ones that is a hybrid shower-bathtub. Not uncommon. But, until two days ago, the issue was that it had one of those kind of half-door things on it that are popular in England. They go up to like a normal height that a shower curtain rung would be at, but they start at the outside edge of the tub closest to where the showerhead is, and only go about halfway along. So if you can get water to travel in a weird trajectory, it can go around the little half-door and onto the floor.

Now, apparently I'm kind of splashy, because the floor always ends up wet after I take a shower. Sometimes just a little puddle, sometimes a pond. (It happens to other people sometimes, too, but I seem to be a particular culprit.)

Anyway, it seems that Darwin seems to have finally gotten sick of the wet floor, because it has finally installed a normal shower curtain. It took them two full days to do it, crawling up into the attic above, bringing in multiple ladders, ec. But they did it, and now we have a normal shower curtain and the stupid door is gone.

But I'm pretty sure the moral of the story is that if you have bad (splashing) habits and don't fix them, the rest of the world around you will change to accomodate them. Cool!

Also, a few other Nika-updates:
1. Nick's car is broken. Apparently his "engine management unit" is managing the engine by not letting it run. It's getting taken to the garage tomorrow. So this probably means no outdoor weekend climbing for us this weekend (which probably wasn't happening anyway). At least it did this before our (tentative) road trip to Spain and France over spring break.
2. OUMC-CUMC Varsity Climbing Competition is on Saturday. Stay tuned for updates on that one ... I'm sure I'll have many thoughts and opinions.

Nerd News Again

Some interesting stuff going on in the news lately:

Facebook changed its TOS, and everyone is freaking out.

The NYT sums it up thusly:

This month, when Facebook updated its terms, it deleted a provision that said users could remove their content at any time, at which time the license would expire. Further, it added new language that said Facebook would retain users’ content and licenses after an account was terminated.

But the real reason that Facebook did this doesn't appear to be all that nefarious. They updated their TOS to reflect the fact that comments a user makes on other's profiles, pictures, etc. may remain there even after they delete their account. (Sidenote: If you wanted to, while you still had the account, couldn't you manually delete the comments yourself? I'm not sure about this, and I realize that this could be quite labor-intensive if you wanted to wipe everything, but it's a possibility.)

Of course, the TOS change allows FB to do a lot more with our information, but will they? The thing is, people get very wound up about the privacy policies of the Googles and Facebooks of the world, but even with the expansive rights they give themselves in their contracts, these companies are somewhat reticent to do anything too bad just because they know that everyone is watching. Especially when they're on the record as saying "We certainly did not — and did not intend — to create any new right or interest for Facebook in users’ data by issuing the new terms." (Grammatically incorrect placement of dashes noted -- I wonder whether that is FB's fault or NYT's?) I think we should probably be more worried about privacy policies and TOS's of little tiny websites, and maybe ultimately figure out what constitutes unconscionable terms across the board. Because the little tiny websites are going to be way worse.

EFF wants to add a couple classes to the list of exceptions from the DMCA's general prohibition on circumventing technological protection measures (TPMs -- or "TMPs" if you're a blogger for the NYT) that protect copyrighted works.

The details of EFF's campaign are available here, and there is an NYT blogpost about it (and Apple's response) available here. At the moment, there are six exemption classes to the DMCA, and the two new ones that EFF is proposing involve liberating cellphones, as Zeb might say, and bypassing the TPMs on DVDs to use clips from them in non-infringing ways. At the moment, Apple is worried about the first one.

The author of the NYT blogpost takes issue with the fact that this will be decided by the Library of Congress (which is in charge of aspects of copyright law) because "the copyrighted software is really a small part of a cellphone and not really part of the fundamental issue." (The idea is that the fundamental issue is the more generic locking down of the phone.) But the author doesn't really expand on this point. I think, though, that this just illustrates the fundamental problem with the DMCA -- it really doesn't have much to do with copyright law. TPMs and other access controls are digital locks -- they're not intellectual property themselves. So yes, it's obviously silly to go down this avenue and try to get the Library of Congress to unlock iPhones -- but if you're going to work within the confines of the DMCA as it currently exists, that's what you have to do.

The comments on the blogpost were fun to read. Lots of them wanted us to just "buy another phone" if we didn't like Apple's EULA for the iPhone. Of course, the market for phones isn't unlimited, and there is tons of regulation of consumer devices in other spheres (if China is producing poison children's toys, should we just go buy other toys and not worry about it?), but whatever. A lot of comments seemed to get distracted by, and focus on, the headline (go to jail for jailbreaking!), even though this wasn't really what the article was about, nor is it particularly a concern in real life. One person (comment #8) thought that EFF should drop this fight and instead focus on developing a cellphone their parents could use (Jitterbug?). And comment #2 made a good point that was already made much better in the recent Mapple Simpsons episode. (No link; I'm sure if you've read this far you can find it on your own.)

The 1990s are over, and Apple is so the worst monopolist now. Compare the release of Windows Mobile 6.5, and its general openness.

Finally, the Pirate Bay trial began yesterday, and by today "half" the charges had been dropped.

My biggest concern with this is that there is a criminal trial being held alongside the civil one -- do the big media companies really need to eat up Sweden's resources with a criminal trial? Aren't they better suited to simply pursue a civil trial?

Of course, if TPB goes down, I'm sure there are many other torrent search engines/aggregators that are going to replace it. This is really just an ineffective way to pursue the problem. And, of course, if Swedish law prevents sites like TPB, there will always be somewhere else they can hide. Basically, if you want to run a site like TPB, you need some remote country somewhere with few laws and lots of internet bandwidth. The problem is, these two requirements don't overlap all that well. But the internet is spreading faster than TRIPS is, and I'm sure there will be potential Sweden-replacements. So this really is not a good solution for media conglomerates in the long run.

So that's todays news!

Bullseye

Because the LL.M. degree means so little in America, there are very few American students on the program here. Out of the ~125 students getting the LL.M. degree here, there are only six Americans -- and four of us are on the HLS study abroad program (the other two want to go into academia and are using this as a stepping stone). The vast majority of "American" accents we hear are Canadian, and they entirely outnumber us. So do the Irish. And the Australians. And the Germans.

Meanwhile, though, American law is very important, and because there is such a heavy focus on comparative law in the LL.M. classes, we often end up hearing overviews of U.S. law. Which are often highly over-simplified, and sometimes a bit incorrect. Or, worse, we are called on to explain the U.S. law ourselves. Luckily, in all my classes I've got at least one other American with me, so we look at each other and then usually just go with "it varies from state to state."

But we do feel very conspicuous.

The English are Addicted to Windshield Wiper Fluid

Seriously. They seem to have a practically constant stream of it cleaning their "windscreens." I feel like even in a rainstorm they would periodically do it. I used to think it was just Nick, but I've realized that everyone else does it too.

Meanwhile, the Mile End "director" critiqued my GriGri belaying tonight. I was belaying the way that, like, 90% of the people who use GriGris do -- right hand, palm up, holding the cam down when feeding out rope quickly with pinky and a little aid from ring and middle fingers, etc. Normal. So the director came over and said in a little dipomatic way that he'd like to give me a suggestion, so I said fine, and I figured it would be that new way that Petzl advocates here. (The video also illustrates what I do -- the "classic technique." Don't worry, I don't do the death skull-and-crossbones method at the end of the video.) I particularly figured that this new method would be the suggestion, because there is also a poster on the Mile End wall advocating it.

Now, sidenote right here: the new technique is probably superior on little dental floss ropes. But on old fat clunky ones, it makes too sharp an angle with the GriGri when it comes time to feed out rope quickly. You get too much drag, and you can't feed out rope fast enough. So, since I seem to always be belaying old ropes that are >10mm, I still use the old method. With, say, a 9.6, I'd be much more tempted to try and get better at the new way.

So, anyways, I was waiting for an explanation of the new way, with reference to the poster, but it never came. Instead, Mr. Director seemed to want me to not manually disengage the cam at all. As in, just feed out rope slowly. Don't disengage with pinky, don't disengage with thumb, don't disengage. (You can see this in the video at the "giving slack as the climber progresses" stage.) Clipping quickly never came up. I got the impression that Mr. Director had never actually lead-belayed with a GriGri. So, I just said "okay, thank you" and used Nick's ATC (well, Jaws) until Mr. Director left the room.

Stupid Mile End.

Peak District and North Wales

Despite driving a lot of miles this weekend (almost 600, according to Nick), we really didn't do any climbing. Oh well. On Saturday, we got up at 6:15 to take off for climbing at 7:00. Except it turned out getting organized took longer than expected and we weren't out the door until 7:30. From there, though, we drove up to the Peak District, getting there around 10. The drive was quick and I got to see the crooked spire on the church in Chesterfield, which I like.



Once we got to the parking lot, though, we realized that even though it was sunny, it was going to be cold because of the wind. We were at the Burbage South boulders, which I have been to before on several occasions, particularly because they're quick to dry. Except that the reason they're so quick to dry is because of the wind. So we hung around the parking lot for a while sorting stuff out, and then trudged through the snow to the boulders.



I had a starving attack during the walk-in, though (by this point it was like 11), so I had to have a little lunch at the boulders before I did anything else.



After this, we finally started to investigate the bouldering. The problem was, we needed to find boulder problems that weren't in the shade, weren't covered in snow, and weren't wet. It seemed like the wind had covered quite a bit of the low stuff with snow, which meant that sit-starts weren't really going to happen on a lot of the stuff. Meanwhile, because the upper faces of the boulders are so low-angle, they often ended up with snow stuck on top of them -- especially when it came time to top out. So Nick found a 6a he wanted to try (it looked okay but not great) -- but it was in the shade. He tried it anyways, barely got off the ground (hopped a few times), and then decided he was the coldest he had ever been in his life because he did a shade problem. After seeing that performance I opted not to try it myself.





From there, Nick and I continued on to the one boulder that seemed to have a sunny, non-snow-covered face. There were a couple V0s on it I ran up quickly. Nick was still too cold to climb them.





At this point, Nick and I decided that our best option would be to go for a short afternoon hike instead. We drove about twenty minutes to a nearby area that Nick really likes for hiking, and that has a lot of mountain biking that he has done as well.











We also saw a section of exposed rock where there was apparently a big landslide a while back in England that wiped out a whole section of a major road.



We also took some photos to turn into a panorama because I had heard that Windows Live Photo Gallery had a good photo-stitching tool. That turned out to be true! Click on it to enlarge.



We continued on, starting downhill-ish (we were doing a loop). We saw some green bins near the side of a road we walked by that Nick said were used to store the "grit" used for the roads during the snowstorms. I totally thought we should steal them, and sell them back at high prices, because apparently England has run out of grit to use on its roads due to all the snow in the last week. But they were big. Instead I took some photos to make a second panorama (didn't crop this one).



From there, we continued on down, and eventually got to the car around 4. Then, though, we had an oopsie that ended in an ouchie. See, what happened was, Nick was going to change his shoes, and for some reason decided to sit in the passenger's seat and not the driver's seat to do it. The rear door on the passenger's side was open, too. I told Nick not to sit on my iPod that was on my seat. He used his left hand to straighten himself out just as I was shutting the rear door on the passenger's side. Except that the door didn't shut. Because his finger was in it.

So OUCH. His finger immediately started gushing blood, but the good news was that it was still attached and not broken or really damaged (other than a big chunk of skin missing) at all. The only thing really to do was to put a bandaid ("plaster") on it. And we actually did have bandaids. So it kept hurting a lot, but didn't really do much other than gush blood (and it didn't even gush the bandaid off, so it couldn't have been that much blood). The fingernail is still attached, but the chunk of skin missing is right below the fingernail, so I guess it's possible the fingernail will fall off. But it still looked pretty attached to me.

Other than our incident, though, we actually had a very good day and a lot of fun on our hike. It was kind of an adventure and we got nice views. I was a good temperature for most of the hike except right at the top, because it got really windy there again. So at that point we headed out for the 2.5 hour drive to the hut in North Wales with me feeling guilty about Nick's finger.

The hut itself was fun. CUMC and OUMC were there, ultimately in about equal numbers. Nick and I found places to squeeze in to sleep, and I took a shower while dumping a lot of water on the floor -- the showerheads actually aim entirely outside of the shower stalls and onto the floor, making things challenging. Other than that, the shower was quite good.

For dinner, Steve-from-OUMC was cooking a big chili-type thing for 20 people, and Nick and I made numbers 19 and 20. Apparently Steve was finding the cooking challenging because there were limited burners on the stove and a lot of Cambridge had each brought their own individual meals rather than doing joint cooking, meaning that they were all fighting for burners. Steve said he lit a burner (which was apparently a struggle to light), turned around, picked up a pot, turned back around to put it on the burner, and found that it was already occupied by someone's frying pan and bacon. But he eventually managed to cook for us, which was good.

After dinner, they started all their hut games, with Steve running the show and Rob-from-OUMC and Sesh-from-OUMC doing sidekick duties. Because most of the games were OUMC-created (Steve-created?), OUMC was winning most of them. However, apparently sock-wrestling (hang in harnesses attached to overhead beams by slings and try to get the other person's socks off before they get yours off) was imported to OUMC from CUMC, so they were much more successful at the sock-wrestling.

I eventually went to bed at like 2:30am. Nick had a goal to be up later than all the Cambridge kids, but apparently met his match in Fred-from-CUMC. So they continued with their mutually assured destruction until 3:30, apparently, when they both jointly gave up and went to bed. We were up at about 7:45 the next morning, and packed up rather quickly. Nick and I left the hut as it was starting to clear out around 9:30 -- OUMC was taking charge of making sure it was clean, and had decided it would be easiest just to get people out of the hut and gone so that they could clean rather than trying to get these people to help clean themselves. So that was fine with Nick and I.

We drove to Llanberis to try to do some bouldering, but just as we drove past the turnoff for Pete's Eats, which Nick pointed out to me, it started to half-rain, half-snow. Great. The boulders there weren't particularly sheltered, either. We drove up the pass and back down again, debating what to do. I took a picture of Cenotaph Corner, the obvious corner in this cliff:



Eventually we decided that, because there is often better weather on the coast, we would drive over to some bouldering there and make an attempt at that. The drive took about an hour, and about halfway along it did start to clear up and the sun started to sort of shine through some of the clouds. Unfortunately, that was the best we got. By the time we had actually arrived at Porth Ysgo, it was precipitating again.

We eventually psyched ourself up to do the (very muddy) approach to the boulders. It should have taken like 10 minutes, but in the rain and the muck it took about half an hour. It was challenging to get down to the boulders themselves, which were on a beach right near the sea, since we were walking on grass well above it and had to sort of scramble down a slopey, muddy, 30-degree angle grassy hill to get down to the boulders themselves. And they were soaked. Both from rain and from sea spray. And, because it is a rocky beach, they all have death-landings from all the giant rolly rocks all over the place underneath them. So that was a total no-go.

On the walk back to the car, we saw a little hole near the side of the path, and we couldn't figure out what it was. It kind of looked manmade. It was a little cave that turned into a tunnel that went far back into a section of rock. Nick and I didn't go down it (we could have fit scrunched down), but we shined our headlamps in and had a good look around. Interesting! It may have been related to some old, very abandoned stone structure we saw closer to the beach that had a giant winch in it. Very curious. Meanwhile I had gotten stroppy by this point because my white snowpants had gotten covered in mud and sheep poop up to the knees. So we continued back to the car and had a snack there.

We were in a completely abandoned area so Nick decided to let me drive the car again. Basically all I had to do was pull out, go like 10 feet downhill to another intersection (completely abandoned road, not a single car went past it), turn left, and then try to go uphill as far as I could. When I got to the left-hand turn, though, I turned way too sharply (steering wheel on the wrong side) and sort of drove the left-hand side of his car into a ditch a little. But it was fine, I just kept going. Then it came time to shift into second, though, and that's where the problems started. The car jumped a little bit and then stalled. Now I was facing uphill and had to start the car. I tried, and it almost worked. The car jumped forward like three times and really wanted to go ... but then stalled again. At this point, Nick took over the driving.

We sort of gave up at this point, since it was precipitating with rain everywhere and we didn't want to hike or boulder. So we started the drive back to Cambridge. The GPS sent us a weird way that completely bypassed the town of Betwys-y-Coed, where we were thinking of getting a pub lunch. Instead we had to do a narrow mountain road through an increasing blizzard (apparently, GPS doesn't do elevation contours and can't tell the difference between a mountain road and a pass through a notch). In the next town, we found a pub though and got a late (3pm-ish) lunch there instead.

From there, we had about three and a half hours left to drive to get to Cambridge, according to the GPS. About two hours into that drive, though, we started hitting heavy snow, and the highway didn't seem to be too gritted (I knew we should have taken that salt from the Peak District!). Plus it was after dark by this point. So the driving slowed down a lot for that. Eventually we passed the snowstorm and the driving speeded up again, but the slow-down had added an extra half-hour onto our drive.

We eventually made it back to Cambridge and ate dinner at my house while I put my snowpants in the washing machine. Apparently, though, Darwin closes early on Sunday nights, and I couldn't get back to the washing machines where my pants were to put them in the dryer. So they had to sit in a wet ball overnight. This morning, though, I retrieved them and put them in the dryer and they actually came out just fine. So that was good.

After dinner, Nick had to make another hour-and-a-half drive back to Orpington, but he was home by about 11:30, so that was good. So those were our weekend adventure/boondoggles.

Boondoggle v.2.0

Okay, so Nick and I have come up with a slightly improved weekend plan now that we no longer have anyone riding in our car. We have increased the driving but also increased the likelihood of at-least-a-little-climbing, so the overall boondoggle quotient is probably about the same.

We are now staying in Cambridge tonight and leaving for the weekend at 7am tomorrow morning (probably meaning a 6am wakeup call to get everything organized). From there, we are driving up to the Peak District for bouldering during the day. The general reports I'm hearing are that, although it will be cold (mid-30s F), there is supposed to be sun. I mean, it will be weak, but it will be there. So bouldering.

Once it gets dark (4? 4:30?) or we get cold, we will gather ourselves up and get in the car and drive from there to North Wales -- a 2.5-ish hour drive. Should be arriving at the hut by 6:30 or 7. So there will be plenty of time for joint OUMC/CUMC festivities on Saturday night.

On Sunday, we will spend the day up in North Wales doing probably-not-a-lot. Bouldering? Routes if we were really lucky? Hiking/"scrambling"/walking? All potential possibilities. Then, we're driving back to Cambridge on Sunday night -- and poor Nick will have to continue from there down to Kent. Stay tuned for further updates as they come in.

Ultimate Boondoggle

In case you haven't yet gathered, there is lots of weather-drama going on in the UK. After the biggest snowstorm in southern England in eighteen years on Monday (whatever), the weather has stayed chilly all week, and there is more snow falling today. Airports and other public transportation are all still pretty inoperative. The problem is, this weekend is supposed to be the big "varsity meet" in North Wales with OUMC and CUMC.

Now, CUMC and OUMC are having very different responses to the weather. Oxford still seems to be planning on coming in full force -- they have a "minibus" (large van) full of people, and they all seem to be fully intent on coming despite the fact that conditions for the weekend seem to be the sort that are going to be bad for everything. Sort of a stick-their-head-in-the-sand approach. One of them who lives in Wales is claiming that at the moment the sun is shining brightly in both the towns and the mountains right now -- I'm a little skeptical.

Meanwhile Cambridge is doing the run-around-with-their-heads-cut-off approach. Rather than doing a rented "minibus," the plan was to go up in private cars. Except all the sudden, no one wants to go. They are completely panicked about the weather, both for driving and climbing, and have all decided that they can't be bothered to go on what probably is going to be a boondoggle. Which I would understand -- except that they signed up in the first place. It was clear to me from Day 1 that going to N. Wales in February was going to be a boondoggle -- but I signed up with that plan in mind. Maybe if there were more kebab shops in Llanberis they would still go.

Nick and I are probably still going (with an empty car, to wander around through snow/rain at ground level because I don't have crampons, axes, etc....). I still think it will be fun to go up to the hut and have big fires and adventures, even if they end up being at sea level. But I suspect that the "varsity" meet will be missing half of varsity. (Another factor is that the OUMC trip is officially controlled by the "Sports Fed" at Oxford, so if they decide the weather is too bad they could pull the plug on the whole thing on Oxford's side ... and then we would be missing both halves of varsity.)

Stay tuned for updates...

Siberian Storm

So, England thinks it's having a storm of the century. It's been snowing continuously in southern England since we left Westway last night, but only about 2-3 inches are actually sticking on the ground in Cambridge. That hasn't stopped the drama, though. Clare-from-Ireland is claiming that the weather is coming over directly from Siberia, Nick's work is cancelled for the day, Heathrow is cancelling flights left and right (and apparently one plane slid off the runway), and Mark-from-India is claiming that he stuck his umbrella into the snow here in Cambridge and it was nine inches deep.