England Again

Moving On from England

2009-09-11T03:41:00.001+01:00

Well, now that I’ve finally finished my spring break stories (and now that it’s September, I’ve been back in the U.S. for over two months, and I’m back at HLS for my final semester …) I’m finally ready to finish up this blog.

I graduated from Cambridge back in June:

And, prior to graduating, I had lots of end-of-term adventures that are well-document in photographs.

But, the good-or-bad news, depending on how you look at it, is that I really like having a blog to put all my stories up on – and so, I’m starting a new, more permanent, less-England-based one! From now on, you will find me and my thoughts at nikathinks.blogspot.com. Enjoy!

Spring Break Photos

2009-09-11T02:57:00.001+01:00

And, now that I’ve finished my spring break stories, I’ve also put the photos up on Facebook. Part 1, which I’ve linked before, is here, and Part 2, which is new, is now here.

Last Day of Spring Break

2009-09-11T02:07:00.001+01:00

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

So this was the last day of our spring break road trip (and also the last trip I’ll blog about on my England blog!). When we woke up in the morning, we had to begin by retrieving the car from outside the campground gates. Then, we began completely unpacking the car so that when we packed it back up again, everything would fit for our drive back to England later in the day.

When we cleared out the side of the car that Neal was in charge of searching during the great wallet search, though, we came across a black wallet that wasn’t ours. And was his. So at least we had found it – although about 24 hours too late. So I was in charge of phoning and texting Neal while Nick kept packing the car.

After we had everything packed up, we did some bouldering for just a few hours before we started the long drive back. We climbed at J.A. Martin, doing problems on the Blue Circuit there. We were pretty tired, so we (or at least I) still found them pretty hard.

My thighs were actually really sore, and I didn’t figure out why until I fell off a problem and they hurt. Then I realized that they were tired from catching me falling off of lots of problems (especially La Marie Rose) the day before. So it turns out that falling off is a really good thigh workout.

Eventually, we ate lunch at the boulder field, and then I made Nick drive me back to the campground we had stayed at during the first portion of the trip so that I could sneak in and wash my hands.

After that, we did the long drive back to England, which was pretty uneventful. When we got close to Dunkerque, the city the ferry departed from, we managed to pick up radio from the Netherlands, which was exciting. Even after we got back to England after the ferry ride, we were still getting French radio for a little while.

And then I was back in Cambridge for my final semester!

Boondoggling in France

2009-08-25T23:18:00.001+01:00

Monday, April 20, 2009

Although it had been chilly outside overnight, when Nick, Neal, and I got up in the morning on Monday, it was already starting to warm up. We had leftover croissants for breakfast and then geared up for a trip to the grocery store, which, despite being a hypermarket, was part of an even larger mall. The mall also had a store called Decathlon that sold cheap outdoor stuff, which we we planned to go to to get Neal a temporary replacement tent/sleeping bag to use while he waited to get back the ones the airline had lost.

We got to the mall at about 8:45, but apparently all the big shops, including Carrefour and Decathlon, didn’t open until 9, so we milled around for a little bit. Neal wanted to go get coffee, but thought he had accidentally left his wallet in the car, so Nick loaned him some money. Meanwhile we watched people with shopping carts line up outside the Carrefour, getting ready to charge right at 9.

So, at 9, we joined the crowds and got our final food supplies for our last two days. We then brought them out to the car before going to Decathlon so that Neal could do a full wallet search. He figured it had fallen out of one of his pockets. No luck, though.

After searching for a while we figured we would check back at the campsite and hope it was there, and meanwhile Mr. Moneybags Nick would be in charge of loaning money so that we could get things moving. So we went to Decathlon, picked up some cheap gear, and headed back to the campground. By this point things were actually getting pretty sunny and hot.

A thorough campground search, and a check with the campground office, revealed no wallet. We also did a more thorough inspection around the seats of the car – nothing. We knew that Neal had had the wallet as late last night as when we bought the pizza. Neal was still psyched to climb though, so he figured that he would climb for a few hours and then go into Paris in the evening and deal with cancelling cards and stuff there.

So, we ate lunch and headed out to Bas Cuvier. It was almost too hot, but it was still fun. We tried mostly Red Circuit problems. At one point, Neal tried to talk French to someone, but after a minute or two, the other guy said “let’s try English” – the other guy turned out to be from Colorado. So that was funny. Poor Neal.

One 6A that I had never been on before, that I was close on, was called Le Trou du Simon. It had a terrifying topout that I worked out all the beta for but couldn’t bring myself to do. Nick did it, using my beta. After a while, we wandered over to La Marie Rose, which I wasn’t expecting to be difficult even though it was a 6A – I had done it multiple times in the past without too much trouble. Nick re-flashed it (the way Daddy does), but I fell off on the first try, and next thing I knew there were about 5 or 6 other people who all came over to work it/slime it up. And then I continued to fall off 5 or 6 more times, never successfully doing the hot and slimy topout (although I consistently did the normal crux move over and over). So that was pretty frustrating.

At one point, Nick got on photo duty at least.

Neal tried it a few times, but he didn’t send either – he had already spent a little while flying off of L’Hélicoptère so was a little tired.

By this point, we were all getting kind of tired and ready to head into Paris. Nick and I had vague plans to meet up with little sister Sage, who was studying there, and Neal had to get his wallet issues taken care of. But first, we had to rescue Nick. See, the issue is that the real crux of La Marie Rose is actually the descent. When you get to the top of the boulder, you can either downclimb a 5A slab problem around the corner from La Marie Rose, which I suspect may actually be the easiest route but I’ve never actually tried because no one else thinks that’s the easiest way, or else you can take one of two normal descents involving another boulder. The first of the two descents involves chimneying down an increasingly slick passageway between the La Marie Rose boulder and the one next to it. I’ve done that once in the past, but it was desperate. The second of these two normal descents involves making a flying leap from the La Marie Rose boulder to the one next to it that you would otherwise chimney against. (Well, it’s not really a flying leap – it’s even scarier. Rather than going foot first, you basically stick your hands out in front of you and lean forward so that you fall into a diagonal plank/pushup position against the other boulder – then you step your feet across to meet your hands.) Even after your flying leap, you’re not home free – you still have a tricky downclimb from that boulder that I insist on a crashpad for.

The issue was that Nick had climbed up the 5A slab with his camera to take La Marie Rose photos. When he got to the top of the boulder, he took off his shoes. Eventually, he decided he wanted to take photos from the other boulder, and so did the flying leap with his camera (which looked precarious). He had left his shoes behind. And now he was stuck on top of the other boulder without his shoes (which would be necessary to do the downclimb) and unable to reverse the flying leap back to the La Marie Rose boulder.

I was tempted to leave him up there, but instead I had to go up the 5A slab to rescue the shoes, which I wasn’t too pleased about, because it meant that I would have to now do one of the descents.

So, eventually after much coaxing I did the fall-into-the-pushup position “flying leap” across the chimney and made it across to the other boulder and eventually did the downclimb from there, too, after Nick did it first (now with his shoes) and brought me a crashpad.

So, from there, we headed back to the campsite to drop off our climbing gear, pack up Neal’s stuff, and head to the Melun train station to take the train into Paris. We also had to take all the stuff from our car, which was staying in the parking garage at the train station, and put it into the tent, because Nick was worried about theft. Then we headed out.

It took a little while to get going at the parking garage because Neal was trying to negotiate with the credit card companies over the phone, but eventually we made it onto the train and headed into Paris. Neal headed off to spend the night there and deal with all his problems, and we arranged for Nick to meet up with him in London after he got replacement cards and before he went back to America for him to pay Nick back (Neal was actually in London for a week or two visiting his sister, and this Fontainebleau trip was just a side trip).

After we got into Paris and said goodbye to Neal, the next step was finding Sage, who was about half an hour late, in the giant Gare de Lyon. This involved multiple phone calls between my English cell phone and her French one that were costing us both a million dollars. Eventually we were both insisting we were at track K, but neither of us could see each other. Nick was about to have a heart attack based on the price of our phone usage, and said to me, “tell her to wave her hand in the air,” which I did – it turned out that she was actually on the platform, somehow, rather than at the obvious end of it, which Nick figured out. So we found her.

For a little while, we walked around Paris and kept our eye out for good restaurants. Sage told me about some French-Asian fusion restaurant that I wanted to go to, but it wasn’t on her map so we ended up at a different place. Before we got there, though, we took some various photos.

At dinner, I was dying of thirst, so Sage was in charge of ordering lots and lots of water for our table. That was good. The restaurant had another potato pizza on the menu, which I was still in the mood for, but apparently they were out of some ingredient so I ended up getting chicken instead. Tant pis.

At dinner, Nick realized that one issue we would have is that we would be getting back to the campground after 10pm, which was going to be a problem because the gates closed at 10. We would be able to park the car just outside with no issues, but the tent was full with tons of stuff that would need to go in the car while we slept (we couldn’t just put it outside the tent; things got really dewy at night). We would need to drag all this stuff across the field and out to the car, and possibly would need to lift it over the gate if there wasn’t a human-sized gate next to the car gate that was open. The crux was going to be my large, 50+ lb suitcase (don’t forget that we were on a two-week trip involving a large variety of activities and climates) – lifting that over the car gate would be tough.

Oh well. No matter what, we would be getting back to the campground after 10, so we spent a little bit more time looking around and taking pictures. Nick was particularly interested in seeing the outside of the Louvre at night, so we headed over there for a little bit.

After that, we all got on the Metro and said goodbye to Sage. Nick and I had an uneventful train ride back to Melun.

When we got to Melun just after midnight, though, the events started back up again. The parking garage where we had left the car was totally locked up (with the car inside it), even though there were no signs anywhere indicating operating hours. The campground, with all our stuff, was over ten miles away. We looked around, and saw that the car entrance door would open – if you had a valid ticket from the garage already to stick in it. (That would indicate that you had your car parked in there and were getting it out.) But earlier in the night I had told Nick, “I’m going to leave the ticket in the car while we go into Paris” and Nick had said “that’s fine.” So the ticket was locked up in the garage. We waited to see if any of the few people still coming out of the train station were headed towards the garage so that we could tailgate in, but none of them seemed to.

So, we took a better look at the garage. The “windows” (open parts of the concrete) on the first floor (“ground floor” if you’re European) were blocked by chain link fencing, so you couldn’t get in through them. However, the windows on the upper floors weren’t, so if we could find a way to the upper windows we could hop in through those, walk down to the bottom floor where the car was parked, and drive out (clearly, that would work after-hours since the entrance door was set up to open after hours with a ticket).

While most of the upper floor windows were not at all accessible, it looked possible to climb up to a slight roof that was right above the car entrance and exit doors, which gave easy access to upper floor windows. Nick was on duty, and did a good job hopping up there – he said it wasn’t too hard, but was a little scary with just the road underneath him because the hardest part was about 10-15 feet up. As soon as he was established on the roof, it was easy – now he was at an upper level with no chain link blocking the windows, and just hopped right in, walked down them ramp, and opened up the car and got the ticket out.

At that point, even though it wasn’t necessary, he passed the ticket through the chain link out to me, and I was able to stick it into the slot that opened the car entrance door, so I went in and met him inside. There were definitely no signs anywhere either (1) telling you to take your ticket with you or (2) indicating that the garage would close at any point, so that made us mad.

Anyway, at that point we were able to use our ticket from the inside to pay and open the exit gate to drive back to the outside, and back the the campground. That whole adventure probably took an extra 45 minutes.

At the campground, even though the car gate was closed like we thought, there was at least an open human gate next to it, which was good news for getting all our gear back to the car – it meant that we could roll my giant suitcase through it rather than needing to lift it over the car gate. So that was good. I finally took a shower after that and we went to sleep for our last night in France; we had only one more half-day left there!

Fontainebleau, Again

2009-08-25T03:42:00.001+01:00

Sunday, April 19, 2009

When we got up in the morning at the new campground in Fontainebleau, it had stopped raining (although things were still rather damp). We managed to find a bakery that was still open to pick up breakfast at, and then Nick wandered around our campground and eventually found some of the OUMC people we had intended to meet up with – although not all of them. Apparently some of the group were stuck in England (including one girl who was actually French) because French workers were striking and blockading the ports so ferries from England couldn’t get in.

So we hung out with them for a little while, but not very long – they actually had to leave that morning and were packing up their (quite buggy) campsite before Nick went over and distracted them. We ate breakfast there, and Nick also cooked a giant pot of hot chocolate. We had a surplus of yucky UHT milk and the only thing to do with it was to make hot chocolate out of it. The milk had come from a party we had camped next to in Siurana that had a surplus of a bunch of supplies that they didn’t want anymore and gave to us (we also had a giant bag of potatoes, a lot of dishwashing soap, and 3-4 more rolls of toilet paper we picked up from them).

Eventually, Nick couldn’t distract the rest of them with hot chocolate any more, and they took off. Things still weren’t very dry, so Nick went on a sudden let’s-clean-the-car rampage – the back was getting very messy. So I mostly observed while he rounded up the escaped potatoes and got them all back into their bag. He also took inventory of our toilet paper – that had sort of gotten out of control, too. See, back when we were in Fontainebleau the first time around, the campground we were at didn’t provide you with toilet paper in the bathrooms, and we assumed this would be the case for the rest of the trip. So, on the Saturday, knowing that Easter Sunday and Monday were coming up, we wanted to pick up a 6-pack of toilet paper. But the store didn’t have 6-packs. So we ended up with a 12-pack of toilet paper. But then we stayed in a hotel Sunday night – and when we got to the Siurana campsite on the Monday night it turned out that one did have toilet paper. Then we got another 4 rolls of toilet paper from the group camping next to us. Our next stop was the hotel on the next Friday night, and then the Fontainebleau campsite we were at now – which also had toilet paper. So now we had a collection of about 16 rolls of toilet paper rolling around in the back of the car, which Nick was sorting out. He also dedicated a “bags’ bag” for the empty bags floating around. I mostly observed this and ate more of the gummy worms I had got in Andorra.

Finally, we decided that things had dried up enough to make an attempt to go climbing, and headed over to Apremont, where Nick wanted to try his project. Some of the holds turned out to be wet, but we still had fun on some of the problems around it, and took some photos.

After that, it was our lunch time. Meanwhile, we had made plans to meet up with Neal-from-HMC sometime in the afternoon, which was complicated since none of us had cellphones that were particularly reliable in France. We were using his sister, based in England, as a liason. However, we somehow did manage to meet up with him at the Melun train station after lunch. Neal was a little stressed out, because one of his bags was lost on his flight from New York to London, and was now tent-less, but he was still up for heading to the boulders.

Meanwhile, things had started to dry, and by the time we had Neal, the sun had come way out. The three of us then headed over to Cul de Chien for some late afternoon bouldering. I did a couple 5Cs, but nothing harder than that; Nick and Neal both did similarly.

Eventually, we tired Nick out, and Neal was trying to save his fingers for future projects, so we headed into town, intending to pick up a pizza to take back to the campsite for dinner.

Well, that turned into an epic – the pizza shop, which Nick had ordered from in the past, was very slow. After interpreting the menu (kind of), we picked a pizza with potatoes for a topping – I love those! But one of the other toppings on the pizza we didn’t want, so we ordered it without those. Then we waited … for a long time. Eventually, after checking in several times, it turned out that the pizza lady had accidentally made a pizza with the topping we didn’t want. We’d already been waiting like 45 minutes by this point, and would have happily taken it anyway – but she said she’d already thrown it out and was making a new one. Ugh. I think she was sensing a mutiny and gave us a free bottle of Coke – but I don’t even like Coke. It pleased Nick and Neal, though.

Eventually we got back to the campground and ate our pizza – finally. After that, we headed to bed, which was a bit tricky. Nick’s tent only fits two people (barely), so Neal was stuck sleeping in the back of Nick’s car, which is a station wagon (or, in British, an “estate”). Luckily, after Nick’s cleaning rampage, the back was a little cleaner, so we were able to arrange stuff so that Neal had a flat area to sleep. It was probably still rather chilly for him though.

So, those were our adventures on our next-to-last full day of our spring break road trip.

Another Day of Driving

2009-08-20T23:30:00.001+01:00

Saturday, April 18, 2009

So, like April 12, this was a big driving day as we headed all the way from Andorra to Fontainebleau. At least this time, we had the radio.

When we left Andorra in the morning after breakfast at the hotel, Nick was trying to lobby to spend an extra day there for skiing, because the rainstorm yesterday in the southern half of Andorra had dumped a lot of snow on the mountains in the northern half of Andorra. I’m not a big skier, though, and I wanted to make sure the roads were going to be clear after we went through the mountain pass and started to descend on the north side of the mountains. So, instead, I just took a few pictures on the drive out.

After that, Nick and I drove and drove and drove. At one point we saw a Moulin Rouge.

Eventually, about two hours before dark, we finally arrived at a rainy campsite in Fontainebleau that we hadn’t been to before. We were hoping that we might find some OUMC friends there, but we didn’t have any way of communicating with them (it turned out that some of them had been stopped by some sort of ferry/port strike and hadn’t even made it to France, anyway). So we set up the tent in the rain, and cooked dinner under a little tarped-over cooking area they had. I was pretty grumpy about all the rain. But at least it had showers (it seems like almost all pay-for campgrounds I’ve been to in Western Europe have showers, which is nice, even if the showers themselves are often kind of yucky – these ones had lots of spiders).

So that was a pretty boring day, complete with rain at night (which convinced Nick that we definitely should have stayed in Andorra to ski). But that was our day.

Return to Andorra

2009-08-19T20:31:00.001+01:00

So, as I promised, I will continue to tell the stories about my last few days of my France and Spain trip back in April. You will recall that I left off with my adventures on Thursday, April 16, 2009. Moving on to:

Friday, April 17, 2009

Today, when Nick and I woke up, it was still pretty overcast. It cleared up as we packed up our stuff and checked out. We weren’t sure whether we should do a token final climb before we left Siurana, but we were actually pretty ready to go and anxious to get back to Andorra early enough to have some more time to look around. So we headed out along the carsickness-inducing roads.

The first hour of driving out of Siurana was by far the worst, in terms of feeling like I was going to puke, so Nick and I stopped several times. First we stopped to take a photo of some of the scenery.

Eventually, the roads started to straighten out, but I still felt pretty bad so we stopped in the center of a town to look around. One of the guys who was sitting in the center plaza came up to talk to us. He was intrigued because I was wearing shorts and he thought it was so cold. (It actually was probably only about 60F but I was determined to wear my shorts anyways.) So he had to come see where we were from. He was more interested in Nick’s story because I guess he had spent some time working in England. Meanwhile I took some photos of the chapel and the plaza.

After that, we finally got the radio working again. Nick’s housemate had come through and texted us the radio code we needed to get it working again (and Nick promptly wrote it on the back of the removable radio piece so that he would never be without it again). It took us a while to actually successfully enter it because I had made a few incorrect guesses based on what I remembered, which apparently was a bad idea because for every incorrect guess, the amount of time before you can enter your next guess increases. So I was worried we would need to have like a week of no entering – but we eventually were able to successfully enter what we needed to. Nick was thrilled to have the radio back (because when we hadn’t had it, I had just put on my iPod headphones and sung out loud what I was hearing).

Then I took a nap, because I still felt kind of carsick. When I woke up, we were probably only about an hour from Andorra, and I felt much better. We were driving through the flooded region that I had noticed on the way down to Siurana, too.

Soon after that, though, we were at the Andorra border, which we passed through quickly.

By this point, it was 2 or 3pm, and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so we went to a giant sells-everything store right after we crossed the border top pick up food to make lunch with. Because of Andorra’s history as a tax-haven, even though it was similar to a Carrefour hypermarket in style, there was a heavy emphasis there on alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, and jewelry. Nick made a bee-line for the alcohol; I focused on the chocolate. Eventually, besides some normal food supplies for breakfasts and lunches for the next few days, we ended up getting whisky for Nick and orange-infused Absolut vodka for me (it was like a large bottle for less than 10 euros – which is apparently extremely cheap). We also got some chocolate and some candy, including a giant package of gummy worms. Pretty good.

By the time we left the grocery store, it had actually started pouring rain. We drove to the hotel (we were staying at the same hotel we had stayed at on the way down through Andorra; we figured that was our best bet because it was cheap and we knew where it was – on the way down, the GPS had gone haywire, and we didn’t want to drive all around Andorra trying to find a new hotel), checked in, and went up to our room.

We waited a little while for the rain to drop off, and ate (a very late) lunch. Then we drove into Andorra la Vella to walk around and find a good place for dinner. We wandered around for a little while to see our restaurant options (it had started to clear up by this point), and eventually picked a tapas place (since I had been whining that I wanted tapas). Plus, because we had had a late lunch, we weren’t starved (Nick is generally skeptical of tapas because he’s worried he won’t get enough food). It turned out to be really good – we sort of guessed at interpreting the menu, but did a good job and picked some really good stuff. So that was good.

We went back to the hotel after dinner and opened some of the booze from the hypermarket. Nick had whisky, and I made an interesting mixed drink out of the orange-infused vodka and cranberry juice. It sounds weird, but it tasted just like Smarties (the American ones, not the English ones). It also tasted really good with the gummy worms.

So that was our trek back up to Andorra! Stay tuned for more – there’s still four more days of this trip to blog…

Finishing Up

2009-08-11T19:13:00.001+01:00

Well! I guess this is one of those “sorry-I-haven’t-posted-in-a-while” posts. I want to finish up my old spring break stories, because they were good ones, and then finish up my England blog (since, after all, I’m now back from England). I spent July working, and I’m back in school for my final semester at the start of September. So stay tuned for the next couple days!

Graduated and Engaged!

2009-06-27T17:25:00.003+01:00

So, the epilogue to the punting and fireworks expedition was that Nick and I got engaged afterwards! We're probably getting married in about a year or so, in the US. Stay tuned for deets!

Additionally, I graduated today! Got rained on, and got fed fish, and held onto the praelector's fingers -- adventures.

Eventually I will post photos of the engagement ring, and all sorts of graduation photos, and finish the spring break stories -- but that all has to wait until next week after I fly back to the US and get my computer set up again. I get back on Monday afternoon. Stay tuned!

Punting and Fireworks

2009-06-17T11:13:00.009+01:00

Every year, during "May Week," most of the Cambridge colleges hold their college balls, and two of the most dramatic ones are held at Trinity and St. John's. Trinity's was on Monday, St. John's's (how do I punctuate that?) was last night. A big part of those two are the fireworks displays they both have, so last night, me, some other people from my house and Darwin, and Nick all joined the crowds that punted along the river to get a good view of St. John's's fireworks, which go off above the river.

We headed out around 9:15, when it was still light out.

Next, we punted along the river and past Queens' College, which was also having its ball that night and was already lit up.

We also punted past the remains of Trinity's ball from the night before.

Once we got to the good watching-spot (near Trinity), it got extremely crowded.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get great night shots from the rocking punt, but I took a picture of the St. John's lights, anyways.

We had about an hour to wait before the fireworks actually started at quarter of 11.

Eventually they got going, although my camera seems to no longer recognize it's "fireworks mode," which is kind of a bummer -- so the photos ended up kind of blurry.

After the fireworks, there was a mass exodus downriver.

On the way back, we punted past Queens' again and saw a bit more of their ball, which apparently had a Hollywood theme.

From there, we headed back to Darwin and disembarked. Good adventures! And that's the end of the story, for now.

XS

2009-06-17T10:21:00.002+01:00

Good news -- on Sunday, Nick and I were in the Peak District with great weather, for once. Not too hot, but for the most part not too cold, either. We went to Burbages South and North, which weren't too overrun with people. And the highlight was that I led my first English E-grade -- Long Tall Sally. I probably should have done this a while ago, but neither Nick nor I are big headpointers (Adair by the Sea and The Spring (at the Gunks) notwithstanding). So it was a good flash and went reasonably well -- no major drama. It was actually a lot easier than a lot of the HVS fist-width (and wider) cracks that Nick has been dragging me up lately.

Sage in England

2009-06-17T09:48:00.008+01:00

So, since finishing exams (grades come out tomorrow or Friday -- there will be tears), things have actually gotten a lot busier. Sage was here visiting for four days last week, so we had some good adventures. The first two nights we stayed in Orpington because it was, theoretically, easier to access both Oxford and London from Orpington. But only theoretically, because there was a tube strike going on. That made things more interesting, because it cut down how much time we had in Oxford and meant that when we were in London we had to walk everywhere (I counted it up on Google Maps afterwards and we walked at least ten miles in total on the London day). But I still dragged her around very quickly to all the main sites. She also had a day and a half in Cambridge, which was more relaxed.

Between the two of us we have more than a thousand photos of the week, but I assume that she'll eventually put some of the highlights up on FB. In the meantime, my favorite thing was the installation exhibit at the Tate Modern that was new since the last time I was there in February. Called Bodyspacemotionthings, it was a re-creation of a 1971 exhibit that was shut down after four days because of lawsuit potential. The new version is less fun, because a few parts of it you can't play on in the same way, and because there are guards who make sure that you don't do anything too dangerous, but it still had some fun stuff to play on, including a low tight-rope, a balance beam, and wooden slabs. So Sage and I spent some time there.

Unfortunately, the exhibit seems to have ended on Sunday (which is when I believe it was scheduled to end), so I guess no one else will see it -- but it was good.

Done. D.U.N. Done.

2009-06-05T12:55:00.003+01:00

I had my last exam, Civil Liberties, this morning. Now I'm done, woo-hoo! Except all the other stuff I need to do. It's hard to get a sense of how the exams went, but rumor is that we get grades (or a single aggregate grade, I guess -- we don't get the breakdown until later) on June 18. Publicly displayed. I predict tears. Especially from me.

Last night I was talking to one of the other girls in my house and she said something about "I'm just worried that the exam won't reflect the amount of work I've put in!" I answered something along the lines of, "Yes, I too am concerned about the extent to which the exams will reflect the amount of work we did."

Weekend Wrap-Up

2009-06-01T15:32:00.010+01:00

I had a good and interesting weekend. After lighting the grill tray on fire on Friday night, I had a relatively calm Saturday while Nick went mountain biking with Adrian in the morning. I did my weekend studying then, and then, when they got back around 3 in the afternoon, we all went on a punting adventure. Adrian went to Cambridge for two years back when he was an undergrad, but apparently never punted. So we let him do it for a bit after we navigated through some of the crowds (lots of people were cranky about the river being so crowded). He did fine, happily zig-zagging back and forth.

At one point I told Nick to take a photo of me and his response was "I can't from here, you wouldn't fit. I'd need to switch to a wide-angle lens to fit you in." Ouch.

We had dinner at the Thai food restaurant across the street from my house, and went to bed early because we had to get up early to go to the Peak District the next day.

When we woke up, my bathroom door said this:

I opened the door trepidatiously.

Luckily, whatever infestation there had been the night before (I had heard some squawking from the hallway outside the bathroom the night before) seemed to have died out. There were a bunch of carcasses on the windowsill and the sink, and in the shower, but there didn't seem to be anything alive. Phew.

So we got ready to go up to the Peak District, and met up with the three other CUMCers who were going to ride in our car with us. The ride up was uneventful (all four of us besides Nick slept the whole way), and then we did some good climbing when we got up there.

Nick did some good leading, and I followed more-or-less competently (although at one point I had to hang to attack a nut). I also led a VS and an HS without too much drama -- and then failed to lead an HS. Barely got off the ground on that one -- true jamming required.

Fiona-from-OUMC showed up to climb with us in the afternoon, since she lives near the Peak District now, and I put her on photo duty. I also made a panorama and took pictures of the many sheep and lambs around.

We had dinner at a nearby pub, and drove back late to Cambridge. The backs of my legs were wicked sunburned (they still hurt) -- but don't tell Krissy.

Oh, and speaking of burned, it turns out the grass we used as a fire extinguisher on Friday night didn't survive quite as well as we initially thought. The shape of the grill tray seems to be traced into our lawn, now.

Next exam: International Intellectual Property, tomorrow afternoon. Stay tuned!

Burning Down the House

2009-05-29T23:38:00.006+01:00

So Nick and I had a little mishap cooking dinner tonight. The first thing to know in the description of our incident is what our kitchen setup is like. A common stove set-up in England consists of a small oven below a small "grill" -- which seems to be a little chamber with heat coils across the top of it. This is what we've got in our kitchen. Now, our stove is a bit quirky, because the oven takes a hugely long time to pre-heat. It takes it about 30-45 minutes to get up to about 250F, and never really gets any hotter than that. The grill seems to get up to normal temperature, though.

Prior to this term, the way we cooked things in the grill (which is how we had to cook things if we didn't want them to take at least an hour, since we also don't have a microwave) involved a baking tray. Now, the grill has two little ridges on each side that could theoretically hold a baking tray up close to the heating coils at the top so that you could cook them. But we didn't have an appropriately sized baking tray. Our tray was too wide to fit if you held it one way, and too narrow to sit on the ridges if you held it the other. So you had to slide it in kitty-corner with two opposite corners supporting all the weight. Occasionally it would come crashing down. I can draw diagrams if necessary for this point.

But over the Easter vacation, we got a real grill tray. The features of the grill tray are as follows. There's a physical tray, similar to the baking tray but maybe slightly deeper. Then there is a wire frill frame that sits on top of it that you actually put food on. There is a handle attached to the tray (although the handle gets hot when you're actually using it and you still need potholders). There is a layer of tinfoil between the tray and the wire platform that sits on top of it that people typically keep reusing until it gets really gross (your food touches the wire platform, not the tinfoil). And best of all, the physical tray is the right size, so you can just plop it down on the ridges inside the grill rather than fight to balance it.

So, tonight, Nick and I made fajitas for dinner, and needed to heat up the tortilla wraps. Because the food was almost ready and the oven was off, we decided to put them in the bottom of the grill (not on the tray, just on a plate sitting on the bottom of the grill) to warm them up. We plunk them in and wait. A few minutes later, Nick checks on them. The top ones are warm; the bottom ones are cold. (I think this is a function of having the heating coils at the top of the grill.) So Nick takes the stack, flips it over, sticks it back in the bottom of the grill, waits a few more minutes, and opens it back up.

And the grill is full of fire! The grill tray is in the grill -- and it's clearly on fire. (I don't exactly have any photos of this.) The kitchen has a door to the outside, so Nick put on a potholder, grabbed the grill tray by the handle, yanked it out of the grill, went out the door and down the half-flight of steps to the yard, and flipped it over on the grass to smother the flames. It worked! Apparently we didn't even kill the grass (although by the time Nick went back outside to retrieve the tray it was dark, so I'm not convinced he could really see how lively the grass was).

It seems that what had happened was Nick hadn't realized the grill tray was sitting on the ridges in the grill when he warmed up the fajitas (I didn't realize it mattered). Now, there are two ridges on the side, both of which are up pretty close to the heating coils, and when we cook things on the grill, we all slot the tray between the two ridges (so that it's sitting on the bottom one). If you put the tray on top of the top ridge to cook, I think your food would probably be actually touching the coils unless it was really flat. But if you're just sticking the tray back in the oven after cooking on it, you probably just plop it in any old way. And we typically leave the grill tray in the grill even when we're not using it because there's no place else in the kitchen for it -- and plus, normally you use it when you use the grill.

So it appears that some fat or something from somebody's meal had dripped down onto the tinfoil, which was an inch closer to the electric coils than normal -- which made it catch fire. Exciting!

After dinner, Nick and I took the tray back in and replaced the tinfoil. Good as new! The fajitas were good, and the wraps ended up being warmed just right.

Siuirana Climbing

2009-05-26T20:03:00.005+01:00

At the moment I'm cranky because no one is driving to Mile End tomorrow, so I probably won't be able to go, but this post is about...

Thursday, April 16, 2009

Today when we got up it was finally clear, and the rain had stopped, although there were intermittent clouds. Nick and I ate breakfast relatively quickly and headed back to Grau dels Masets. We were disappointed to see that a climb we had identified two days ago as looking good, but hadn't yet done, was absolutely dripping. It was a 6b that shared anchors with a 7 (easy 5.12 range) that we wanted to toprope -- but both were sopping, so that was a no go.

We warmed up on some other stuff at the eastern part of Grau dels Masets, and did a pretty tricky 6b (one of the ones that Nick didn't quite onsight despite being pretty close, and then I flashed by using his beta and prehung draws -- strop strop). Then we heaed over to the western part of the crag to do some of the longer, more exposed stuff. The hand-drawn topo in the guidebook was confusing at first when we thought we found the world's softest 6b (turned out to be 5+), but then we figured it out and did a whole bunch of 6s there, almost all lead, pretty much all in the 5.10 range.

We ate lunch at one point while we waited for a route to free up. Both us and another party wanted to both do two routes that shared the same set of anchors. We wanted to lead one and TR the other; the other party wanted to lead both. So we were stepping on each other's heads and crossing ropes and all that stuff. So at one point they were doing something while we ate lunch and watched it get progressively cloudier.

However, it hadn't totally started raining or anything, so once we got the chance we attempted to TR the 6c+ that came down from the anchors we had already clipped. We knew that the start was going to be hard based on the other party, but Nick and I simply never figured it out, and the other party was gone by this point. Eventually we both pulled past it and both cleanly TRd the rest of the climb, which was in the 6c/6c+ range. The bouldery start to me felt way harder, since neither Nick nor I could find any way of doing it that was even close. I would have lead the rest if I had figured out a way to do the start, since the rest was totally my style. I kind of suspected that something had broken at the start at some point, though.

There were a few drops of rain after that, but it eventually passed and became sunny again, and Nick and I did a few more easy 6s before heading back to the campground. That night, we ate dinner at the campsite restaurant again (we were pretty much out of food, and there were also a few more sporadic rain showers at this point) and headed to bed early again. This was our most productive sport climbing day of the trip, and was generally really pretty good -- it was too bad we didn't have more days like this! We didn't take any pictures this day, though.

2 Down, 2 to Go

2009-05-26T19:58:00.002+01:00

I finished my second exam this afternoon. Yesterday I had Family Law, which went okay, although I don't think it was particularly a strong suit for me. Today I had Intellectual Property, which I thought I did well on -- but everyone thinks they did well on that. And although they claim not to grade on a curve, that's silly -- just because there's not an entirely strict, inflexible curve doesn't mean that there isn't a curve; there's no other way to grade a qualitative subject. So we'll just have to see.

Next week I have International Intellectual Property on Tuesday and Civil Liberties on Friday. Stay tuned...

Speaking of Locusts...

2009-05-22T19:20:00.003+01:00

Last night there was a giant bug that was flying up against my window trying to get in. I tried to get a photo of him, and of my thumb (for size comparison purposes), but they didn't come out great. He's at least an inch long, with like two inches of wingspan when they're out!

It's weird because England is mostly bug-free (and wildlife-free generally). But occasionally you apparently get mutant bugs and midge swarms.

Oh, and my Christmas cactus seems confused about what season it is -- it has a definite bud.

And when is the locust testing?

2009-05-22T19:18:00.004+01:00

Darwin seems to have chosen exam period as the perfect time to do all sorts of intrusive maintenance in Malting House. Today was fire alarm testing, and a week from Monday is "asbestos testing" where they apparently need access to all our rooms.

My first exam is on Monday (three days). Stay tuned!

Vintage Baseball

2009-05-20T09:57:00.004+01:00

A few weeks ago, Williams and Amherst reinacted the first ever intercollegiate baseball game (which they also played). It was held at Williams in traditional clothes, according to traditional rules. The only difference was that this time, Williams won! Article here; photos here.

Rome Revisited

2009-05-20T09:48:00.005+01:00

Over the weekend, Nick and I saw the new Angels & Demons movie, which was fun because it was shot all over Rome and Nick and I kept seeing all the places we had been to when we visited back in December. Besides just St. Peter's Square and St. Peter's Basilica, we saw the Sistine Chapel (presumably they used a set piece for that), the Pantheon, Castel Sant'Angelo, Piazza del Popolo, Piazza Navona and the Fountain of the Four Rivers, and a lot of aerial shots of Rome and Vatican City. Fun!

Not-So-Sunny Siurana

2009-05-19T19:13:00.008+01:00

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Overnight, we start to hear really strong winds around 2am. Really strong. I'm convinced the tent is going to blow away with us in it, and keep telling Nick. Nick keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually I do -- but then the rains start. And it is pouring for what seems like hours. Nick still keeps telling me to go back to sleep. Eventually the rain dies down too.

But in the morning when we get up, everything is still quite damp (including Nick's pillow, which is really mine, because we were using both of mine for this trip). However, the sun is starting to make an appearance, and we decide that we'll wait a few hours for things to dry out.

Meanwhile, the "azure sky" group above us is packing up, and is trying to offload some of the random stuff they've acquired, so we take it. We get a lot of milk (which I'm really excited about until I see that it's UHT), a large thing of dishwashing soap, a huge bag of potatoes, onions (which I tell Nick not to put near any other food so the other food doesn't smell oniony), three or four unstarted rolls of toilet paper, and a few other random things.

At this point, our toilet paper roll count is quite high -- around 15 or 16. Here's how that happened: we had initially bought a 4-pack, because the bathrooms in the Fontainebleau campsite don't have their own toilet paper, and then decided to supplement with a 6-pack from Carrefour that we got on Saturday so that we would have enough to carry us through for a while. Except that Carrefour didn't have 6-packs -- so instead we got a 12-pack. But then there was toilet paper at the hotel in Andorra, and toilet paper in the Siurana campsite bathrooms (which had to be thrown in trash cans rather than flushed because the septic system couldn't handle it). So our toilet paper stock just kept increasing with the additional supplies from the Brits.

So after breakfast (muffins and bread from the campground's café/restaurant -- we didn't have much food left and it was way more convenient to get things from there then to drive for an hour on windy roads to get to a food store), things were still looking damp and we decided that we would walk into the tiny village of Siurana proper, which we hadn't been to yet (the campground is about half a mile from the village itself). There, we could see if there were any viable food stores (there weren't, really, other than restaurants) and just take a look at the little mountain village. And hopefully the rock would dry in the meantime.

We could just see the refugio on a clifftop on the walk into town, and we could also see some of the crags we had driven by on the way in, as well as the wiggly road we came in on (no wonder I felt carsick!).

The town center was old, and was also entirely pedestrianized -- had we stayed at the nice hotel there, we would have had to carry all our luggage in by about half a mile (we saw some people walking out with luggage).

We walked over to the mountaintop that had a church and a monument on it.

Finally, we walked over to the cliffs that were near this part of town. The good news was that they were pretty much dry (they'd had direct sun on them for a few hours at this point), but the bad news was that there was another impending rain cloud in the distance.

Nevertheless, we decided to head back to the campground, hope the rain would hold off, and attempt to go climbing. So we headed back, taking another picture of the wiggle-road along the way.

So then we decided to attempt to head back to the area we were at yesterday, despite intermittent sprinkles and a few thunder growls. We were hungry for lunch, and decided we would take it with us. So this time we used the car to drive to the parking for the crag, and decided to eat lunch before doing the 15-minute hike to the crag from the parking while the weather decided whether or not to really rain.

Well, right when we were finishing lunch, it did start to really rain. And rain and rain and rain.

We headed back to the campground's restaurant, and spent the whole afternoon there waiting for a break in the rain. It came in and out, but it never stopped long enough for there to be any sort of dry rock available. Nick and I played about a gazillion games of tens and gin rummy, and I composed some blog posts on the netbook. We also discovered that there was a room with two ancient PCs that in theory did usually have internet access that you could use for like a euro/30 mins or something (in theory; in practice they didn't enforce paying), but even those didn't have internet at the moment because the campground had shut off access during the thunderstorms to keep everything from getting fried. There was a movie screen that people were watching climbing movies on, and the Brits at the table next to us were watching a UK film, and one of them seemed to have a personal grudge against one of the climbers in the movie, so it was fun to listen to his rants for a while.

Eventually Nick couldn't take any more card games, but it was clear there wasn't going to be any more dry rock today. I took a shower and then we ate dinner in that same restaurant (which was actually really good). So those were our adventures. We were pretty cranky after the whole long, long afternoon -- but at least it seemed like it had finally rained itself out by nightfall.

I told you that mackeral sky wouldn't be good.

Sunny Siurana

2009-05-15T12:16:00.008+01:00

Back in time to...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

When we woke up in the morning in our campsite in Siurana, the first thing we here is one of the psyched Brits in the campsite next to ours saying "Azure sky! Not a cloud in sight! AZURE sky!". So Nick and I poke our heads out of the tent and see that, as usual, the Brits don't understand exactly what clouds are (I have seen a lot of forecasts in England that are "partly cloudy" with "100% cloud cover" -- what's "partly" about that?). The sky in Siurana isn't so much azure sky as it is mackerel sky. So I tell Nick that rain is coming in a day or two.

But today really is still quite sunny, despite the high clouds. So we start by going into the campsite's café/restaurant/reception and taking a look at the campground's guidebook with all the new routes in it, and copy a few of them down that are applicable to the areas we are going to today. So then we pack up and head to our first choice of crag near where we climbed yesterday. But when we get there, it's pretty intimidating -- it's on the side of a gorge and feels pretty exposed, and a lot of the 6s have pretty high first bolts with not-so-easy starts below them. Nick is feeling particularly unpsyched about this. So we took some photos but then decide that maybe we should see whether the other crag we had picked out as a good starting crag would be a better choice.

So we head over to Grau dels Masets, camì and oest. It takes us a little while to find the walk-in, which is down a dirt road for a bit before a not-entirely-obvious turnoff (we kept trying to turn off too soon), but eventually find the trail and make it down. Once we get there, we know that this crag is more our speed. There are toddlers, doggies, and Brits -- total gumby crag. Perfect. The bolts are closer together, the first bolts are lower, there is lots more shade, and the terrain isn't so steep that you think that if someone blows it before they get to the first bolt you'll both go tumbling to the bottom of the gorge. But there are still pretty views across the gorge.

We did an easy 6 at the eastern half of the crag to warm up and then, due to the gumby factor, moved over to Grau dels Masets (oest) so we could have a bit more space. We did a few good 6s over there, including one that I really liked called Rocky. Everything was in the 5.10 range, but pretty well spread out between .10a and .10d. I flashed everything (pinkpoint!); Nick almost onsighted everything but hung once or twice while grumbling about hanging draws and not having beta. Everything was long, but nothing was too much of a challenge for our 60m rope.

Then, we headed back to the eastern half and did one more 5+ there, but at this point it was actually already quite late in the day (crag-finding and new-route-copying took a lot of time), so then headed back out.

We get back to the campsite and cook dinner (well, Nick cooks while I shower). The weather is still sunny, but I hadn't liked the looks of some of the high clouds during the day. Nick, though, proved by induction that the weather would stay good tomorrow (it was good yesterday, and it was good today).

While we're cooking dinner, it starts to get significantly colder now that the sun is sinking, but it's still not bad.

We look at the guidebook some more to make plans for tomorrow, generally get organized, and head into the tent to play some more cards and go to bed.

© in Clothes

2009-05-15T10:07:00.007+01:00

Every so often, people get stroppy that fashion designers don't have intellectual property protection for their creations in the US. A recent article advocates creating a sui generis "fashion design right" that would protect clothing designers from infringement by "closely and substantially similar" designs. By creating a sui generis right, it gets around the problem of copyright law not protecting "useful articles." Boat hulls and semiconductor chips are also unprotected by copyright law but instead have separate protection similar to copyright.

But I think that this is a bad idea for clothes for a whole bunch of reasons. First of all, I'm not sure how we're going to say that clothes that are "substantially similar" don't infringe, but clothes that are "closely and substantially similar" do. What sort of rules or standards can we apply here? The difference between "inspired by" and "knockoff" isn't always going to be nearly as clear as the article suggests, possibly to the point where it's impossible to tell what infringes, and the sui generis right just turns into copyright. Which brings me to my second point: there's a reason for the exclusion of useful articles from copyright protection. There's only so much an article of clothing can do, and if we start overprotecting things where form is tied up too closely with function, everything suddenly starts to become monopolized. Third, there is no discussion of how long the fashion design right might last. Both semiconductor chips and boat hulls are protected for a maximum of ten years. Does designer clothing really need to be protected for any longer than, say, six months? After a few months, the dilution problem presented by knockoffs goes way down because the designer clothes are now out of fashion, anyway. And once you get to such short periods of time, things become less administerable. (Aside: There are proposals I've read to give reporters, like, 24 hours of IP protection over facts they report on to prevent other reporters and bloggers from piggybacking on them. Interesting, but problematic -- but that's another story.)

Fourth, the fashion industry in the US isn't exactly withering away. Jason Wu is now, like, really famous. Is there a real need to give exclusive rights to an industry that is doing fine without them? Fifth, originality is going to be a problem because even designer clothes are closely derived from what came before. Will the fashion design right have a softer originality standard than copyright? Sixth, trademark law already gives the fashion industry some protection (which is addressed in the penultimate paragraph of the article). While the protection offered by TM law is obviously incomplete, that doesn't mean that we automatically need to give a greater monopoly.

And, seventh, I <3 F21.

Andorra and Siurana

2009-05-11T18:59:00.011+01:00

I typed this back while in Siurana...

It isn't raining in Siurana at the moment, but after thunder and hailstorms throughout the day, everything is drenched. We've played about a million card games this afternoon. But this post is about...

Monday, April 13, 2009

We woke up relatively early in the hotel, but it wasn't quite as early as we thought at the time, because I forgot that my phone was on English rather than Andorran time. Nevertheless, we were checked out of the hotel by about 10:45 Andorra time, having already eaten breakfast (leftover croissants and pain au chocolats from Fontainebleau). At one point during breakfast, Nick and I were talking about internet privacy, and how the second your Facebook status switches to "engaged," Facebook starts giving you a million wedding-based ads. Nick said, "Never send me an email with the word "engagement" in it -- Gmail already thinks I'm trying to get into Harvard for law school!" Which makes Nick very stroppy.

So then we drove into Andorra la Vella to take a look around Andorra's capital city before we continued on down south to Siurana. It was nice in some ways, but in some ways it kind of reminded us of one big duty-free shop. There were also a surprising number of Pilates studios.

From there, we headed back to our car to do the approximately three-and-a-half hour drive to Siurana. Finding our car was a bit cruxy because there were about five identical-looking parking garages right next to each other, but we got it eventually. So off we went!

Most of the drive to Siurana was uneventful, although we came across some interesting-looking cloud formations.

We also went past a completely flooded plain that I failed to take a picture of. It stretched on for quite a while (the highway was well above it). That was interesting.

Just when I started to get worried that we weren't going to a real climbing area because we were still in a completely flat, rockless area with only like 30 miles left to drive, we suddenly started to go around sharp curves and began to see some real cliffs. I had to tell Nick to slow himself down when he claimed that he was "taking the racing line."

Finally, we got to an extremely curvy section of road. I felt so carsick. And I wasn't sure whether the car was going to make it, either. I also got worried that the campground wasn't even going to exist because the terrain was so suddenly steep. We eventually finally pulled into the campsite and checked in, and then drove around to find a little spot for our tent. There were a lot of little tiers (not too dramatic) and we got a spot on one of them, and set up. I was in charge of the tent poles.

I also was in charge of picking up the guidebook, which was interesting. The campground sold it, but the lady explained to me that the guidebook was about 8 years old and a lot of new routes had been put up since then, so the campground owned a copy with the new routes penciled in that we could borrow and copy when we had time. So that was relatively useful. We didn't copy any routes today but decided we would tomorrow.

After eating a late (like 4pm lunch), we went off to do a token climb for the day at Ca L'Isabel, which was a very short walk from the campsite. The climb itself wasn't too bad (a 6a with a low crux), but the setting was very exposed since it was basically on a cliff that was high above the valley floor. After that, we gathered our stuff up, looked around at the other nearby crags briefly, and headed back to the campsite to cook dinner.

The good news was that the camping stoves were working significantly better than they had been in Fontainebleau -- Nick claimed that all the curves on the drive had shaken them up so that they now worked well.

I also managed to take a shower, which was reasonably warm, and not a push-button.

After dinner, we went to bed fairly early, especially since, although it was warm in the sun during the day, the air itself was cold and getting rapidly colder after sunset. Nick was a little worried about what we would climb for the rest of our time in Siurana, since a lot of the areas had more 7s and 8s than 6s, but we picked a few likely crags to visit tomorrow, and went to sleep.

Rap-Pitoning?!

2009-05-08T10:16:00.005+01:00

I just learned something new. Apparently, it is not unheard of for new, hard sea-cliff routes in the UK (typically way up on remote Scottish islands) to have pitons hammered into them on rappel by the first ascensionist before they do the FA. For heaven's sake. If you're rappelling to put the pitons in, can't you just use bolts?

I recently rewatched Hard Grit, and a lot of things struck me as kind of ridiculous. I mean, it was really just people with crashpads and pillows and mattresses and thermarests, doing toprope rehearsals, making GIANT tickmarks, preplacing tons of gear and taping it into place, climbing with four ropes and five belayers who were prepared to jump off rocks in six different directions. And then it turned out that maybe those routes weren't as hard as everyone thought, anyways. That's "trad"?

If I was going to make a parody of Committed, I'd call it "Contrived."

Spring Break and Snow Chains

2009-05-06T11:00:00.006+01:00

It is still sprinkling in Siurana as I type this. But this post is about...

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Today was the big driving day of this part of our trip. We were driving 522 miles from Fontainebleau, France to Sant Julià de Lòria, Andorra. The drive was forecast to take about 8 and a half hours, and ended up being over ten, door-to-door (including lunch and gas stops).

When we woke up in Fontainebleau, it was sprinkling, but it stopped while we packed up the tent, ate breakfast, and checked out of the campground. Luckily, the fussy baby from the night before had packed up and gone to a gîte yesterday, so we slept better. As we were packing up, we ran into Goldie-from-Cambridge, who had apparently been there since Thursday, and was staying at our campsite. He was there with a few other Cambridge people, apparently, but Nick and I later tried to find their tent and failed. So we continued packing up, and checked out. We were on the road at 10:18, French-time.

So we drove and drove and drove, mostly along the expensive péages that take us to southern France. We were still radio-less, so I napped for a while, and then, while stuck in traffic, brought out the netbook and started drafting blog posts. It rained for quite a bit of the afternoon, so when we stopped to make lunch around 2:30 in the afternoon, we had to do it under the roof outside of the bathroom at a rest stop. That took about half an hour (we cooked hamburgers on the camping stove!), and then we were back in the car.

We still didn't have the radio working, so I spent a few hours reading car license plates out loud in French to practice my French numbers. When that finally got boring, I just put on my iPod (with my headphones in) and sung songs out loud to Nick when I could remember the words. That killed another few hours. Finally, we got to the base of the Pyrenees.

This is when we started to get nervous. Nick and I had decided that we probably didn't need chains on the car at this time of year, but we could see snow on top of some of the higher mountains, and we could also see several cars coming down with snow on their roofs. Uh oh. It had clearly been snowing in the Pyrenees while it had been raining in the rest of France. So even though the road was currently clear, we were worried about what it might turn into. But we started up anyway.

As we gained in altitude, we started seeing more and more snow on the side of the road, but the road itself was clear, and there was no black ice (and it was slightly above freezing). So we kept heading up, even as the precipitation started to get murkier and we ended up in fog and/or a cloud.

There were some real hairpin turns, and eventually we got to the Andorra border, where a cold-looking immigration officer just waved us through. Then we got to the tunnel that takes us through to the main part of Andorra. The tunnel was several miles long, but the good news was that when we emerged on the other side, the weather was significantly better because we were now officially on the south side of the Pyrenees. The temperature was back above freezing (it had dipped below), and there was less fog, cloud, and snow. We had made it!

We still had to find our hotel (Hotel Husa Imperial), though, which was way closer to the Spanish border of Andorra than the French one. Problematically, the GPS started to go really haywire, apparently because of reflections from the high mountains around us. It was convinced we were on different roads than we were, that we weren't on any roads at all, and that we were driving at over 250mph (it dinged at us when we did that). So the GPS was not helping us find the hotel. Meanwhile, the map that we had downloaded from the internet of where the hotel was turned out to be really wrong. Instead of being up a steep road out of town, it was right in the center of Sant Julià de Lòria, and we had driven right past it. Oops.

So finally, around 8:30pm, we found our hotel, checked in, and parked the car (for an extra 12 euros for the night). The hotel was pretty dead (it was Easter, after all), but we had a nice big room.

We eventually got ourselves psyched up to go walk around and look for dinner.

We found one other open place besides the hotel restaurant, so we went there. It was a small bar that served tapas and pizza -- we went for pizza, since we really couldn't understand what any of the tapas, besides the patates, were. So that was good.

From there we headed back to the hotel, took quite decent showers, and went to bed.

Weekend Punting

2009-05-05T11:07:00.006+01:00

So I went punting twice this weekend, which was a "bank holiday" weekend in England. On Saturday, it was sunny, and the river was extremely crowded, so I only punted up at the far end of the river to avoid too many collisions. On Monday, it was colder and cloudier, and so I did a bit more punting, and am definitely getting better at it. We also took a lot more toys punting on Monday, like cameras and a GPS. I was able to go at a steady 1mph, but Nick could go up to 2mph, and even got the GPS to jump up to 3 at one point.

When we left for punting on Monday, the punt shed seemed to be out of oars, which are really only necessary if you can't steer (both Nick and I can), if you need to push off of obstacles (only really a problem if you can't steer, plus I had brought an umbrella in case of rain that could double as a pokey-stick), and if you drop a punt pole, which seemed unlikely. But I convinced Nick to throw a broken plastic kayak paddle that was in the punt shed into the boat, just in case.

It turned out to be a good decision, because at one point I overestimated the depth of the river while simultaneously underestimating how close we were to a bridge while simulaneously overestimating the height of the bridge when I lowered the punt pole. As we moved forward, the pole got stuck between the ground and the bridge, so I was smart and let go, and we continued sailing on without the punt pole. So Nick half-paddled us back to it with the broken kayak paddle, and meanwhile another boat had gotten it down and torpedoed it back in our direction (they float). So we got it back without too much trouble. But now I've learned to just float slowly under bridges. You can see the punt pole stuck under the bridge in the background here:

Plenty more photos are up on Facebook here.

Arctic Offwidthing

2009-05-04T09:47:00.004+01:00

Not to get completely out of order, because there are still like ten days of the France and Spain trip I haven't blogged yet, but yesterday (real time) Nick and I went to Stanage in the Peak District. The day was supposed to be a sunny May day, so even though I took a fleece coat and a rainjacket, I wore capri pants. Mistake!

The second we got out of the car, despite the fact that it was sunny, and it was May, I felt like I was in a hurricane. It was so windy. And it wasn't a warm wind, either. Nick said it would be less windy near the crag, and that was probably true -- but it was just that the hurricane had dropped a category. So I spent most of the day trying to find little holes to dig myself into to stop myself from developing hypothermia. (Nika: "How do I know if hypothermia, Nick?" Nick: "You stop fussing and become very quiet. I'm not too worried yet.") Also, it clouded over for long periods, and even sprinkled raindrops not once, not twice, but three times during the day. Never enough to give me an excuse to go back to the car, though.

Meanwhile, Nick was having great fun doing lots of classic cracks that I was really struggling with, because they were extremely wide. He was able to do a lot of jamming in them, but my feet really were too narrow to jam at all, and I had to do laybacks rather than any sort of hand jams (and I do know how to hand jam, just not fist jam). So I was skidding all over the place trying to follow these slimy, slopey laybacks that he had jammed up on lead. Which wasn't making me any happier.

The "classic" one of these we did was Goliath's Groove, where I had all my problems at once. The crack at the bottom was too big for me to fit in, so I was half-laybacking, half-stemming. Meanwhile, Nick was at the top of the climb in the hurricane and couldn't hear me saying "up rope, keep it tight." This felt like the longest climb in the Peak District, so there was actual rope stretch, too. So when my fingers slipped off of the layback slopers and I fell off I whacked my elbow hard into the rock and burst into tears before I shivered my way up the rest of the stupid climb. So I didn't particularly like that one.

The other classics we did that were actually good were The Right Unconquerable, which I had actually seconded back in the fall (Nick had never led it before, and was nervous about it, but did a great job -- although he took the less-direct finish that was less well protected but didn't have a scary mantle because it was sprinkling when he got there) and Tower Face, which I actually really liked and didn't involve any real crack climbing. I felt like if I wasn't shivering so much Tower Face would be a good one for me to lead, too -- but I was too cold.

The Right Unconquerable would have been tricky for me to lead -- there was a lot more power involved because you had to layback a gigantic flake for a lot of it. But I was proud of myself on the Right Unconquerable because we had run into a CUMC team that was on it before us, and the second couldn't get two nuts out, so I was put on nut-retrieval duty, and I did it! Including the nut that had somehow turned upside down by the time I got to it. I was also perky on that climb because by the time I was doing it the sun had finally come out, for good, and the wind had finally died down.

Eventually we finished up around 7pm -- right when the wind finally started to die down. We had a pub dinner nearby (I had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding!) and then drove back. I warned Nick that I was going to crank the heat, and did, and then when I fell asleep in the car he tried to turn it down but I woke up immediately when I heard him turn the dial and made him turn it back up.

Today is a "bank holiday" in England, so Nick doesn't have to work. He's on mountainbiking adventures at the moment, but we're going punting again this afternoon. But it's still really chilly today -- like 45 Fahrenheit and overcast. But I am going to take a lot of warm clothes punting.

Final Fontainebleau Day

2009-05-01T17:30:00.007+01:00

I am writing this sitting in the campground's cafeteria in Siurana while it continues to pour outside. But this post is about ...

Saturday, April 11, 2009

I didn't get a ton of sleep this night because there was a very fussy baby in a nearby tent, so that was sort of my alarm clock in the morning. The good news was that it hadn't rained again at all overnight, so the showers yesterday afternoon wouldn't impact the rock today.

Nick and I started with another trip to Carrefour to pick up some more food that we would need for the next few days, since tomorrow was Easter and the day after that was "Easter Monday," when a lot of shops would apparently still be closed.

However, this didn't take us too long, and it wasn't long before we were headed up to Rocher Fin. We tried a few red circuit problems here, some of which felt easier than others. We did a good number of 5s, but no 6s. There were also a lot of topouts that I beach-whaled.

We worked on a 6A traverse on a boulder called "The Cube," and even though I did well on it, I didn't get it.

Eventually, though, the weather got significantly cloudier and I got boreder, so Nick and I headed back to the campground, where we picked up the netbook, drove into town, turned off the car lights and everything else, and booked ourselves a hotel in Andorra for tomorrow night (about 40 pounds for a nice hotel, pretty good). It started raining some, but then it was back to the campground for dinner, and by the time we were actually at the campground, it had stopped again.

I headed off to take a shower in the upper shower block, which had hot water again. It took forever because I had to push the shower button every 8 seconds, but I figured that dinner would be done by the time I came out of the shower. Unfortunately, I found a frustrated Nick back at the campsite.

It turned out that neither of his two camping stoves were starting, and his fingers were very dirty from dismantling them. After continuing with that for a while, he eventually let me go up and order a pizza from the guy who comes to the at campground every Saturday to sell pizza out of his pizza van (kind of neat). So I bought a pizza and meanwhile Nick got one stove cooking and made a few (small) hamburgers to supplement (although the stove then fizzed out again later). By the time we were done eating, though, it was totally dark after that boondoggle.

So that was our last day in Fontainebleau on that leg of the trip. It started to sprinkle again as we were finishing cleaning up and stuff before going into the tent, so it was probably good that we were finished there for now.

Fontainebleau Post I Forgot to Title

2009-04-29T11:39:00.013+01:00

New country, new traffic jam. I'm typing this as we're stuck on the road between Andorra and Barcelona. Nevertheless, this post is about...

Friday, April 10, 2009

Today we didn't have any shopping to do in the morning, but we did need to try and find internet access to figure out weather in Siurana and Fontainebleau for the next week, and decide whether we should bother driving south. So, we headed to the nearby town of Barbizon, a cool artists' town, to see whether there were any networks we could access. We found an open one that seemed to cover at least part of the town, and signed on.

The weather was up in the air, so we emailed Daddy asking for advice. We also looked at hotel options for Andorra to see whether there would be anywhere to stay. After that, we headed back to the campground to gather up our climbing gear.

Today, we climbed at Rocher du Potala, trying red and blue circuit problems. We didn't do anything particularly hard, and it was a new area for both Nick and me. We saw several lizards, as well as a few little rooms built under boulders (complete with fireplaces). Nick and I didn't really know what was going on with those.

Meanwhile, I was really tired for a lot of the day.

Eventually, it started to sprinkle some, and I got increasingly nervous about downpours, so I started encouraging Nick to head back in the general direction of the car. So we decided to try a few red circuit problems at Rocher Guichot, since that was right next to where our car was parked.

We tried a 6A that Nick said he had done before, problem 6 on the red circuit, but couldn't figure it out.

After only a couple tries, though, I saw the obvious heel hook, so I sent. Then Nick did too. It was really actually a quite easy problem for 6A, probably because it was more about power than technique, so the French find it hard.

I then did the climb several more times so that I could get photo and video documentary.

I was also quite pleased to hear a cuckoo bird in the forest -- at first I thought it was an actual cuckoo clock.

Not long after that, though, it started to rain for real, and Nick and I dashed to the car. We went quickly back to the campground, and then decided to head back into Barbizon to make a final decisions about when, and if, to leave Fontainebleau.

We ended up deciding that we would leave for Andorra on Sunday morning, giving us one more climbing day in Fontainebleau, and then tried to head back to the campground to cook dinner. Trouble!

We had stopped the car, but left the netbook charging and battery running, because Nick claimed he had a strong car battery that could handle that. It could, but Nick didn't count on having accidentally left the car lights on, as well. (I'm still not sure why they were on; it wasn't close to dark yet.) Problematically, we were parked on the side of a residential street in this rural/suburban town miles from the campground, and I didn't know how to get a jump-start in French. Plus, Nick said that we needed a big car to jump off of, because his car is a diesel that has a slightly bigger battery than petrols of the same size -- and his car is a station wagon, so it isn't tiny to start with.

The good news was that Nick has some crazy AAA-type coverage called Green Flag that is good all throughout Europe. So he called in and spoke to an English person, who then called up a random French garage they were partnered with. So, in about 45 minutes, a big tow-truck with a French driver showed up.

It took a second or two to indicate that we really just needed a jump-start, but when the French guy tried to start the car he saw what was going on. Meanwhile, I was trying to wave Nick's jumper cables around to get the point across, which both Nick and the French driver thought was funny.

He got the car started quickly, and told us to let it run for a bit before actually starting to drive. But then the tricky part started. He was trying to copy down all our information for forms, and apparently he wanted some registration papers for the car. But the problem is that, in England, you are never supposed to drive with those papers in the car, and in France you are only supposed to drive with those papers in the car. Of course. So Nick hadn't thought of this, and his papers were still in England. He eventually communicated this to the French guy, who pretty much gave up at this point rather than try to continue to get the papers from us, so he let us go. Finally we headed back to the campsite.

The good news was that the rain had stopped ages ago by this point, so cooking dinner would be easy. The bad news was that the drained battery had reset Nick's radio, which has an anti-theft device built in where, if it has been disconnected, you can't use the radio (or the CD player) until you enter a code into it -- which Nick didn't have in his car. Which meant we had no radio, at least until we could get one of Nick's housemates to find it and text it to us (which wouldn't happen for a while). We couldn't even hook the iPod up to the netbook to play it because I hadn't brought the appropriate cable. So this was bad news with all the driving we had coming up.

Cooking dinner was easy, though, even thought it was fairly late by this point. Then I experimented with the low showers that had been recommended to me the night before.

The low showers were just booths that opened up to the outside, rather than to the inside of a building (unlike the high showers). They each had their own light that needed to be pushed again about every 60 seconds. Likewise, the showers also had to be pushed about every 58 seconds (I spent a good amount of time racing them). So I had to keep the headlamp on the whole time in the shower for the various button-pressing I had to do. The shower was reasonably warm, which was good, but the water-pressure was pretty low -- instead of coming out of the showerhead in the straight line along which it was angled, it sort of drooped straight out, down to the floor. But the showerhead was fairly high up, so at least it built up a little pressure.

So that was our Friday! The campsite was getting increasingly crowded by this point since more and more people were showing up for Easter weekend, and there were people like practically camping right on top of us at this point (Daddy would have had a hissy), but we were doing okay.

Who is HAL?

2009-04-28T17:45:00.002+01:00

A few interesting news stories. First, IBM is building a robot to compete on Jeopardy. Pretty neat, because the Jeopardy questions are pretty tricky to comprehend. As the article pointed out,

The real difficulty, Dr. Nyberg said, is not searching a database but getting the computer to understand what it should be searching for.

The system must be able to deal with analogies, puns, double entendres and relationships like size and location, all at lightning speed.

Which brings me to my second news story. Wolfram|Alpha is launching soon, and there's a little review/explanation of it here. (Apparently there is also a "sneak preview" at HLS today -- wish I could go.) Like the IBM Jeopardy computer, Wolfram|Alpha is supposed to answer your questions with a bit more context than the standard Google keyword search. It also apparently is better at presentation than just presenting you with a list of links. As the article explains,

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its "search" results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

I'm not sure how generally useful it will be, but I think it's a good idea and a step in the right direction -- we really need more than the keyword-search functionality that is basically all most search providers offer.

One thing that I'm kind of interested in how often Alpha's database, which apparently comes from "a vast repository of curated data from public and licensed sources," is updated (and how automated the updating is). The article didn't really address this. If there were 93 internet users in the Vatican City back in 2006, and that's the most recently available data, that doesn't really tell us anymore useful information about the current state of things than Google would. And it seems like if the updating isn't automated, keeping the search engine going would be a pretty big task. But it will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Adventures in Sunny Fontainebleau

2009-04-28T09:58:00.014+01:00

Thursday, April 9, 2009

I didn't sleep that well this night because Nick was getting over a cold and kept snotting, plus there were some really loud birds making lots of sounds in the morning (Nick said they were crows). Plus I was probably still kind of jetlagged.

In the morning, Nick and I needed to go to the Carrefour, a big "hypermarché," to get food and a deck of cards, since we hadn't remembered to bring one. That ended up taking quite a while. We also picked up camping chairs. At the Carrefour checkout, Nick told me to explain to the cashier that we had an old Carrrefour "bag for life" (a heavy-duty plastic bag that costs like ten cents originally and that you can exchange for a new one for free when it gets worn out) that we wanted to trade for a new one. So the cashier looked like he understood what we were trying to do with the bags until I started talking. Then he looked confused. But he eventually got it after I kept blabbering for a while. That sort of thing happens to me in English, too, so I wasn't too concerned.

We finally ate breakfast (at lunchtime) and headed off to the boulders. We climbed at the 91.1 area, mostly trying red circuit problems. I tried out my new Red Chili shoes, which were okay, but not fantastic or anything. They turned my feet yellow. But they will tide me over until the Speedsters come out in America. I did a few 5Cs at 91.1 (including some high ones), but no 6As. Nick did manage one high 6A, which was good. Nick also found a lot of lizards, which made him happy.

We both tried Flipper, a well-known 6A that Nick has done before, but neither of us sent. It had huge tickmarks today.

The weather was warm and sunny all afternoon, which was nice. I even borrowed Nick's sunglasses for a problem because I claimed I couldn't do it because I couldn't see anything because the sun was blinding me (but I still couldn't do it with the sunglasses).

By late afternoon, we were pretty tired and headed back to the campsite. I took a shower to de-yellowify my feet while Nick started dinner, and although it was only about 6pm, the shower was cold again. It was fairly hot outside by this point, and the building the showers were in was warm, so it wasn't too bad, but I wasn't thrilled. Meanwhile, though, while Nick and I were eating dinner, the English guy camping next to us (who had the same tent as Nick -- only newer) came over to talk to us, and he told us that the showers in the lower block were still hot. I hadn't tried these lower showers because they're not as nice, the water pressure is lower, and they're not open during the off season (so I thought they might be closed), but Nick decided to try those out later. It turned out that he had a warm (but low-pressure) shower, so I decided that I would go for those the next night.

By the way, during dinner, Nick and I found a really weird strawberry (well, I thought it was really weird, anyways). I guess it's to be expected now that the EU has deregulated fruit shape (although it appears that the ugly-fruit-shape-ban isn't going to be lifted until July 1 -- so does this mean that this strawberry is being counted as non-ugly?).

We played cards for a little while before going to bed. The cards were "Format Français," which turned out to mean that Kings were Rs (Rois), Queens were Ds (Dames), Jacks were Vs (not sure what that one stood for), and Aces were 1s. Which was fun.

So that turned out to be the best weather day of the first Fontainebleau segment of our trip, and I felt like I climbed well, even though I didn't really climb hard.

Europe Trip -- Day 1 of Many

2009-04-27T19:38:00.004+01:00

At the moment I'm typing this, we are driving (in a traffic jam) from Fontainebleau to Andorra on Easter Sunday. But I'll blog about my days on my France and Spain trip in order (plus, who knows when this will get posted).

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Today, we woke up at 8am (after I was packing until about 1am) to get ready to go. Everything was stacked up in our house, but we had to get it out to the car. It was sunny while we were packing, so that was all fine.

We left Cambridge around 9:30am, and headed straight to Dover. We were booked on the 2pm ferry, and were hoping to make it onto the earlier 12pm ferry instead. However, when we arrived around 11:30, there was a long line at the French immigration in Dover (for once they were actually checking passports) and we figured we would never make it. I got a stamp in my passport from the French, which made Nick huffy (he doesn't think it's fair that I get so many stamps). However, when we gave the ferry people our ticket at about 11:50, they still put us on the 12pm ferry. Success!

So although the ferry definitely left England on the late side, we were at least on the earlier one. The ride itself was uneventful and I slept during some of it. It was kind of bumpy for the first part of the ride, but got smoother as we got closer to France.

The next three or so hours of driving in France along highways were pretty uneventful. It did start raining quite a bit at one point, but it eventually cleared up before we got to Paris. There were also a few road repairs going on, and in France, they close down whole sections of highways rather than only a few lanes., and redirect traffic onto the whole other side of the highway with a makeshift barrier between you and oncoming cars. Which is a little weird, but you do get a Frogger road sign to show you what is going on (it's animated!).

When we got to the Périphérique, though, things slowed down a lot. We spent about an hour sitting in traffic all around Paris. We didn't get to Fontainebleau until just after 8pm, which made us nervous about getting dinner and camping. We attempted to go to a supermarket, but it was closed when we got there, so instead we found a small open épicerie in the town of Milly-la-Forêt. Well, I think it was supposed to close at 8, but the guy in there let us in anyways.

Next, we had to get camping. We went back to the La Musardière campsite that we had stayed at before. Apparently, the main office closed at 7:30, but I made Nick knock on the door until a cranky guy got up from his nap and let us pay (which is necessary to get the card that opens the gate). So we made it to the campsite and ate dinner. We also set up the tent, and I was helpful with assembling the tent poles (my favorite job).

The only issue was that the showers were cold. There were a lot of people speaking French and German who were also fussing about the showers. So I was really pretty quick in the shower before we went to bed.

So that was our Wednesday. Stay tuned for more!

I'm Back!

2009-04-22T11:46:00.000+01:00

Nick and I arrived at Cambridge late last night after our France and Spain trip. The trip was mostly good but I didn't climb particularly hard. But I had a good time. There will be many updates to come. Some are already drafted and just need photos added, and uploading, but others aren't yet written. I'll get to them all soon though. Today's priority, though, is going to be catching up on email -- I have about 500 or so messages of varying importance. So stay tuned...

The Plan, Redux

2009-04-07T15:40:00.003+01:00

At the moment, the weather forecast for next week in Barcelona is Not Good. We are not driving all the way to Siurana to get rained on, so I suppose there is a possibility that Nick and I will end up spending way more time in Fontainebleau than planned if the forecast doesn't improve. Which will probably make me really grouchy.

I survived my plane flight back to the UK, but I sneezed a lot, so the rest of the plane was probably ready to kill me.

We leave tomorrow at 10am local time -- and there is a lot of packing to be done between now and then.

The Plan

2009-04-06T20:41:00.001+01:00

I’m flying back to England (in four hours!) for my final term, but before that starts, Nick and I are taking the car and driving to France and Spain for a 13-day road trip. Here’s the general outline:

We drive out from Cambridge in the morning of Wednesday, April 8, and we arrive at Fontainebleau that night. We will then stay in Fontainebleau until the 11 or the 12, depending on the weather (Saturday or Sunday). We will probably also visit Sage in Paris on the afternoon/night of the 9 or 10 (Thursday or Friday), depending on the weather. On whichever day we choose to leave, we’ll probably boulder briefly in the morning, and then drive to Andorra, where we’ll spend the night.

The next day (the 12 or the 13), we’ll look around Andorra in the morning before continuing on to Siurana (about an hour or two outside of Barcelona). We’ll stay in Siurana until either the 17 or the 18 (and hopefully visit Barcelona briefly while we’re there). On whichever day we leave, we’ll try to climb briefly in the morning before heading back north, and probably back to Andorra.

Again we’ll have a night in Andorra, and a morning, and then continue driving north to Fontainebleau on the 18 or the 19, probably arriving in the evening of whichever day, at which point we’ll try to meet up with a few OUMCers who will be there then.

Then, on the morning of the 21, we’ll be able to climb in Fontainebleau, but from there we’ll need to take the car and drive to catch an evening ferry out of Calais. From there, we’ll drive back to Cambridge, and will be arriving there late at night on the 21.

Email access will probably be pretty sporadic, depending on what sort of internet situation the campgrounds have. If no one hears from me, don’t worry – but if I can get email access I will probably use it.

I’ll also be checking my phone sporadically – my English number (when calling from the US) is 011.44.7546.580017. But that’s expensive.

Wikileaks in England

2009-03-31T04:21:00.001+01:00

A recent article does a good job explaining and analyzing (sorry, analysing) a court decision in England forcing the Guardian to take down documents that exposed Barclays’s (is that the right possessive form?) tax evasion techniques. The Guardian was also not allowed to link to Wikileaks, which still had the documents posted.

By the way, my Barclays bank account is run out of the Isle of Man because I’m an “international student.” Which is annoying – the fact that Barclays only had one processing center for thousands and thousands of international students meant that it took almost three months for my full bank account in the UK to be set up.

Getting back to the main point, this has shades of the Bank Julius Baer case from about a year ago, where a US District Court in CA tried to force Wikileaks’s domain registrar to “lock” the domain name. After about a week, the judge turned around and lifted his injunction. He admitted he was wrong in his preliminary decision, and also admitted that his attempt to shut down the site really only garnered a lot of publicity.

One more side note: If I was an IP law professor at Cambridge writing an exam right now that needed a breach of confidence question on it, I would totally write one involving something like the Guardian situation. Maybe throw in something about what happens when a commentator on an article in a different UK newspaper mentions that the documents can be found on Wikileaks (when the article presumably can’t say it itself). Just saying…

Willey's Slide Report

2009-03-27T14:08:00.004Z

On Wednesday, I went up to New Hampshire to do the Willey's Slide ice climb with Daddy. We left Westborough around 9, so by the time we were ready to start walking in it must have been around 1. On the way up, the car went over 250,000 miles. Once we actually got to the parking lot, it was pretty muddy (since it was a warm day -- the high must have been near 50), which made packing the gear difficult. It also took a while to figure out exactly which gear we would use.

We had about four harnesses with us, and only two had adjustable leg loops (which we wanted). One was normal, one was a Mammut "sitzgurt" harness from the early 90s that had an interesting buckle system. I thought I was a harness expert, but I couldn't figure it out. Subsequent online research shows that it was probably a "click buckle", but I couldn't make it feel very secure, and I also couldn't make it stay tight (even that picture doesn't really explain exactly how it should work). Daddy said that when he used the harness it would just spontaneously fall off. So I ended up just using a nonadjustable leg loop harness that kind of squeezed, but wasn't too bad.

Daddy also had to adjust my crampons to fit back on my boots.

Once we figured all that out, we started hiking in. My pack felt REALLY heavy (but Daddy had all the gear and the rope). We did it without crampons, and there were sections that were kind of icy/tricky, but it wasn't too bad. We made it to the railroad tracks about 2/3rds of the way up, and took photos ... and I made a panorama photo:

Then we made it up to the base, and started getting ready. There was one other party one the right hand side of the climb, but we were going up the more central/left hand section, so that wasn't really a problem. The first pitch, which was still in the sun, was pretty snowy and went pretty quickly, but the ice was also super slushy and so a little insecure. Daddy said there was really hard ice a few inches below the slushy stuff, but my tools never got down that far.

The second pitch was more of the same, but was a bit more icy and less snowy than the first pitch. The slush made Daddy, who was leading, nervous, and he put in three ice screws (which are a challenge fore me to get out).

By the time we started the third pitch, though, the sun had gone behind the ridge, and we were in the shade (it still wasn't that cold at the belays, though). The ice got a lot harder and more brittle, and Daddy led the crux "bulge" pitch -- but I don't think it was as tricky for him as the second pitch. I followed it without too many issues.

The fourth and final pitch was a full rope length, but not too bad. I did get some ice sort of kicked down on me by both Daddy and the other party, who were slightly ahead of us and moving to their left (the whole thing narrows at the top so we were converging), but nothing too major. I finished that one too, but on the easier sections where I was standing upright, I kept running out of breath. (In the end, I ended up crawling up quite a lot of the climb.)

So that was the end of the climb itself! We ate some M&Ms and I took pictures of the climb, and tried to do another panorama (it didn't come out that wide):

Then it was time for the actual descent, which was the hard part. The descent was a trail in the woods that ran parallel to the climb, and was pretty much at the same angle as the climb ... but you go down it unroped. It was pretty snowy, with only a few icy sections, but it was still very tough for me. So I ended up downclimbing a lot of it. Like, facing in. It took a while. But we still made it down to the packs marginally faster than we made it up. From there, the rest of the descent route (that we had already hiked up on the way in) wasn't too bad -- much less steep, and still easier, even though I was wearing a pack for this part. I strayed from the trail a few times because it was so packed down, and I was tired, which wasn't very LNT of me.

Then we went to North Conway for Daddy to pick up some stuff for his crampons he had ordered at IME. On his way out of the store, multiple old people started yelling at him -- two people he knew (Henry Barber and Alan, a guide) had seen him, and both were trying to say hi at the same time. So Daddy was befuddled.

Then we had dinner at some "brew pub" that Daddy likes to go to. I really liked my dinner: It was chicken, with some sort of teriyaki sauce, and bacon, and mango-pineapple salsa on a bulky roll. It was really good. Especially the mango-pineapple salsa. The waitress that brought us our food was a different one than who took our order, and tried to guess which one of us had which meal, and tried to give me the dainty little wrap that Daddy ordered. Wrong!

Then we had to drive to Westborough. Daddy got a phone message from Harry asking if he wanted to go to MR tonight (Harry didn't know Daddy was in NH), and Daddy did mention that we could get to MR in time for the last hour, but that wasn't happening. So we drove all the way back to Westborough.

So the day was good, I guess, but it was too much work carrying stuff up, and getting myself up the climb, and then getting myself down the climb.

English Judges

2009-03-26T04:49:00.001Z

First of all, I’m not posting this at a bizarrely early/late hour of the morning. I’m back in the US, and the blog is still on England time (to keep things relatively simple).

Second, on the way to the airport, Nick and I were listening to some BBC radio station in the car, and the DJ mentioned a recent court decision in the UK that found a cyclist in an accident was contributorily negligent for not wearing a helmet. Or, actually, that cyclist was not negligent, but the court said that it would be possible for there to be contributory negligence in that situation. I don’t want to get into the merits of that decision, but instead point out that the DJ then interviewed a fairly high-profile UK judge from the Court of Appeals to get his take on things: The Right Honourable Lord Justice Jacob (I want to be a judge in England to get a name like that).

I just thought it was really interesting that this relatively high-profile judge made random radio appearances to talk about recently decided cases, and no one made a big deal about it (although this wasn’t one he decided or anything). In the US, the high-profile judges definitely like to try and remain super cloistered, and people do make big deals when they agree to be interviewed. So that was an interesting thing I learned about England!

Oh, and going back to an earlier post, here is Abbey Road on Street View:

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A Recap

2009-03-26T04:17:00.003Z

Krissy, summarizing my blog so far:

what were you complaining about????? everything. cold, hungry, tired, plane seats, rental cars, mud, dirty pants, luggage, carry-on luggage, nick's finger getting in the way of the door, parsnips.

While I’m mentioning her, here’s a picture of Krissy and baby Mario from Sunday:

Oh, and I did Willey's Slide today … but that will be its own separate post later.

IP Enclosure

2009-03-23T15:22:00.001Z

There was a good book review in the Boston Globe yesterday about a few recent books that have come out that address the increasingly heavy protections that IP law provides. The article itself is good, and the books it mentions look interesting too.

Hmm, maybe I’d buy the books if I had a Kindle…

What are your theories?

2009-03-20T23:45:00.001Z

So what do we think that this Conficker Worm is going to do? Theories? Apparently, it’s set to activate on April 1st. Exciting!

Meanwhile, this is actually just the sort of thing that Jonathan Zittrain has been fussing about for years.

At the moment, though, the worst thing a virus could possibly do to me would be to mess up my music. After spending days going down this path trying to get Windows, Windows Media Player, and iTunes to agree on how many songs I had, where they were, and whether they would play, I finally seem to have got it more-or-less lined up today. Now WMP and iTunes are in agreement. Windows used to be in agreement, too, but new searches are giving the wrong number of files – but I think they’re just cached from earlier. I hope. But this is my big accomplishment of spring break so far.

One More Thing

2009-03-19T18:07:00.001Z

It pains me to write this, but if you’re having trouble viewing the Street View shots in the last post, try them in Firefox instead – that seems to be working better. On the other hand, though, IE8 was released, like, two hours ago – I haven’t installed that yet, but maybe it will work better.

StreetView in England

2009-03-19T17:57:00.003Z

It looks like Google Street View finally came out in England! It took a while, because things had to be worked out with the “Information Commissioner’s Office,” which required blurring of faces and license plates (which Google software appears to be doing automatically). Blurring wasn’t initially done in the US (although it is now). I find it interesting that the UK, capital of CCTV, was one of the stroppiest countries about Street View.

Some images!:

Cambridge

Malting House:

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Darwin:

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Cambridge Market:

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World's Most Crowded Grocery Store (Sainsbury's in Cambridge):

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Oxford

WEPO Compound:

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Exeter:

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Magdalen (where we stayed for the OUMC Ball on Saturday):

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University Parks:

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Iffley and the four minute mile track:

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London

Nick's Flat in Orpington (above "Andrew Reeves"):

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Mile End (as close as you can get; blue building through the trees):

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Westway Entrance:

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Westway's climbing wall is in the puffy white marshmellow tent in the middle of the roundabout (with a fake outdoor woodie visible outside):

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Highly exciting! I'm sure if you're interested you can poke around and find all sorts of famous stuff in there yourself.

Following Up on Nerd News

2009-03-18T15:49:00.001Z

So, the first thing to know is that I’m trying typing this in a new program (Windows Live Writer), so if this looks weird that’s why.

The second thing to know is that I’m back from England for three weeks. I’m mostly around Westborough/Boston, but may be doing some ice climbing in NH and/or rock climbing at the Red River Gorge while I’m here.

Finally, I’ve seen some articles recently that relate to previous posts. This NYT article mentions wireless power. According to the article, wireless power is already here! Except with kind of a huge caveat. Devices with coils can be charged from pads with coils which are plugged into the wall. The problem is, it appears that each device, at the moment, needs its own pad. So instead of having a bunch of devices plugged in all over the place, you just have a bunch of pads plugged in all over the place (possibly with devices sitting on them that will be easy to knock over). So at the moment I think we need to do some more work before wireless power starts to have a point.

Additionally, Eugene sent me this article in response to this. The most interesting thing, I think, is going to be what happens if new gTLDs are introduced. It may solve problems when, say, multiple users have legitimate claims to the same domain name (i.e., who should get aa.com? American Airlines? Automobile Association (English thing)? Alcoholics Anonymous?), but may also lead to more cybersquatting issues and also more YouTube/Utube problems (for that story, see this JOLT article that I worked on last year).

P.S.: For anyone who asks themselves “what sort of nitwit would possibly try to spell YouTube as Utube?” like we all did when we were working on the article, Nick is exhibit A. He does that all the time. Or at least he used to, before I started making fun of him for it.

Catch-22

2009-03-12T10:34:00.002Z

First of all, I'm reading Catch-22.

Second, at Mile End last night, Nick and I were doing two boulder problems and trying to figure out when the volumes were on and when they weren't. On one boulder problem, it was kind of obvious from context that one of the volumes wasn't on, and on another in the same spot, it was obvious from context that the same volume was. But both routes had the same set of "instructions" that were hopelessly vague about what to do with the volumes.

So Nick said, "I decide about volumes based on the character of the problem. If using the volume is in the character of the problem, I use it. I said, "What if the character of the problem is 'bad'?"

Nick's response was that, well, if the character of the problem is "bad," and using the volume would make it better, well then, I guess you can't use the volume.

Visiting Southern Sandstone

2009-03-07T20:47:00.008Z

This afternoon, Nick and I, and three of our friends, went climbing at Bowles, a sandstone rock outcrop near his house in Kent.

On the way, we stopped at Harrison's Rocks, but that was all still completely soaking wet, so after walking in and back out, we drove on to Bowles.

Bowles was interesting. The crags are at the side of a paved road that leads to a general activity center, which also has indoor swimming pools (which you can see into from the crag), ski slopes, etc. The rock is a super-soft sandstone (and sandstone is a very soft rock generally), and has been climbed on, historically, a lot -- so there are very deep rope grooves at the tops of a lot of the climbs. You can only toprope there, because any trad gear that was fallen on would definitely just break the rock around it. And you're not supposed to lower or even hang around very much to avoid making things any worse (instead, you have to top out and walk off). The rock is very sandy, too (apparently this is particularly pronounced in winter), so you get kind of a gritty feeling that somewhat decreases friction on slopers. But, at the same time, the rock itself, sans sand, is very grippy. It's like Fontainebleau rock -- without the polish from the pof. In fact, this made it clear to me exactly how bad pof is for the rock, because you could see how nice unpoffed sandstone is to climb on.

So, by the time we got to Bowles for the afternoon, we had time to climb about five routes. My favorite, by far, was an English 5a called Pig's Nose. It was a really nice arete climb with a small roof at the top. Great holds. The only issue came when it was time to top out -- that was a little tricky/beached whale-y.

We left around 5:15. There was probably still enough light to have climbed for half an hour or 45 more minutes, but it was getting cold quickly. On the way back, we passed an inn with the following sign, punctuated and emphasized in the following way:

"VILLAGE INN and food" with rooms

I was unclear on what, exactly, the quotes, capital letters, and italics were all trying to imply. But I enjoyed the sign anyways.

In other news, I'm on the waitlist for HLS housing next year. This is going to be so bad.

Printing Privileges

2009-03-04T18:44:00.003Z

At Williams, we got free printing. At Oxford, we got free printing at the Williams house and pay-for printing at Exeter ... but we were given 20 pounds of print credit/term, so you had essentially free printing unless you abused it. At Harvard, we got pay-for printing ... but again we were given $50 of print credit/semester, so once again we got free printing. Not so at Cambridge. At both Darwin and the Law Faculty, there is pay-for printing, and there is no credit. I haven't had to print much yet, but because we can't use computers on our exams, I am going to need to do a major printing session at the end of the year in order to get everything I need.

Now, if this meant that everyone was highly respectful with their use of paper and printouts at Cambridge, I would find this acceptable. The thing is, though, the law faculty has committed the worst. paper. abuse. EVER! They appear to have sent out a survey soliciting feedback on the LL.M. program to all the LL.M.s. There are ~125 of us. They put all these surveys into envelopes with our name specifically on them, and sent them out to us. Now, what they wanted us to do was to fill out one page of information generally, and an additional page for each of the four classes we were taking, out of the 39 classes total. Rather than sending us each a total of 5 pages, though they sent us each a total of 40. Single-sided. They sent us pages for all 39 of the classes, rather than just the 4 we were taking. Thereby wasting ~4375 pieces of paper. And nevermind the fact that they could have easily sent this out online, cut down a lot of administration costs, probably gotten a higher rate of response, and saved another 625 sheets. As well as 250 envelopes.

And they can't give us free printing because we'd abuse our printing privileges?

Quirky England...

2009-03-03T15:53:00.004Z

...and Scotland.

Yesterday I went to a slideshow that a couple people from CUMC put on. One guy talked about his experience climbing the Nose last summer. Most of it was predictable but I did learn one thing I didn't know -- apparently some people take duct tape up the climb and tape over sharp edges that might damage ropes. Sounds like Changing Corners is practically covered in "gaffa" tape. That was news to me!

But the other guy talked about his experiences climbing in the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, and the most interesting thing he spoke about, which kind of sums up the whole of climbing in the UK, was "Fuselage Gully." See, apparently, an army training plane crashed into this gully in the 1950s, and because it is so remote, they never got the fuselage out. Instead, when you do the climb, you just climb through the plane remains, Lost-style. Very British.

The other England quirk I came across was the "Listening Ears" in Kent which tried to "listen" for approaching planes before radar was invented. I suspect that future societies will find those way more confusing than Stonehenge.

Twittering as Nika

2009-03-01T22:58:00.002Z

I don't have a Twitter account yet, and I'm not imminently about to set one up, but I've been noting how many people are Twittering with their real name, or at least pretty obvious iterations of it. And I recently read this, which notes how more and more people are starting to use their real names to communicate online. And so that started me thinking about situations where someone "steals" someone else's name -- particularly where the stolen name is not completely generic (like "Nick Brown") and is either pretty uncommon, or else totally unique.

If someone steals someone else's name to use for, say, a blog authorship name or a twitter account, there are three obvious things they might do.

First, they might actually use the account to pretend that they really are the person whose name they are using. For example, a girl at Nick's work shares her name with a radio DJ and opened a Twitter account last week. Meanwhile, many people have assumed she is impersonating the DJ and have sent her messages telling her not to. So, if she had actually stolen the name and purposely impersonated the DJ, that would fit into my first situation, and it would be pretty easy to stop this through legal means.

Second, they might use the account to parody or mock or just-pretend-they-are-someone-while-making-it-obvious-they're-not. Like the (now defunct) Real Steve Jobs. This is a little bit murky in some situations, but can often be at least colorable fair use. Again, there is a legal solution/legal precedent.

Third, though, they might use the account to simply sit on the name until someone comes along willing to pay for it. So, my question/wonder for this post is, does this violate cybersquatting laws? It's not actually a domain name -- and in a world of search engines, it is far, far more important than a domain name. If someone is sitting on the Twitter account with my unique name when I go to sign up, do I have any legal recourse against them? Because now that people are moving away from anonymity online, I feel like this might become a much bigger problem. With blogs from mainstream blogging services, with Twitter, etc. Thoughts?

Latest Peak District Adventures

2009-03-01T21:57:00.008Z

On Saturday, Nick and I went to the Peak District with two other Cambridge students, Paul and Eddie. We were psyched, because the weather was forecast to be good, and it was looking pretty clear when we were driving out of Cambridge at 8, and even clearer by 8:30 or 9. Plus, it was forecast to have less than 40% "cloud cover" in the Peak District during the day. And 0.0mm of rain. And a "UV Index" of 4. (I asked Nick how high the UV Index went up to, and he claimed that it went up to 11. But I've never seen it above about 5 or 6, I don't think.)

When we got to Curbar, though, it was actively raining. It was very light, but enough to soak everything. So we milled for a bit, and then decided to go for a walk. It was pretty good. We walked somewhere between 4 and 6 miles, and I hardly got wet at all, because the rain was so light. The trails were kind of tricky despite being not particularly steep because they were extremely muddy. This was exacerbated by the fact that they were mountain bike trails (which is how Nick knew them). We saw a few people on mountain bikes, and Paul and Eddie had fun quizzing Nick about mountain biking generally.

By about 1, though, the rain seemed to have permanently stopped, and so we started looking at some of the rocks around us to see if they were going to dry. By about 2, it was clear that the rocks were drying. So from there, we hiked back in the general direction of the car, and got to the car by 2:30. By 3, we were back at Curbar, and we were climbing by 3:30. On the way back to the car, though, now that things were clearing, I took the opportunity to use my newfound ability to make panoramic photos to get a few more.

Once we got to the crag, the first climb we did was a Joe Brown HVS 5b called Baron's Wall. It was good, with a crux right off the ground. Nick took a couple tries to do the starting moves, but then went up relatively quickly (with just a little bit of squawking at the topout). So I was glad he was able to go right up that without a warmup. I did one false start, too, and then followed him up.

Then, we did a VS 4c called Wall Climb. This was an okay route, but wet. When I got squawky following Nick up it, Nick said "yeah, it didn't look wet from the ground." I said "This didn't look wet?!?!" and he said "I guess I didn't look very hard." I did it but I was glad I didn't lead it because of the wetness.

Then, the boondoggling started. We decided that I would try to lead Calver Wall, a VS 4b in the guidebook. It was easy climbing up to a ledge, and then no more than about 10 feet of a "perfect hand jam crack" to the top that was the business. So I went up to the ledge, put in lots of gear, and started up the crack. I thought that it wouldn't be too bad because there were also horizontals near it, so I thought it would kind of be like a Gunks-style crack. But the horizontals were slopier than the ones in the Gunks, and after I got up just a little bit, I got nervous and climbed back down to the ledge (which was kind of tricky). At that point, after lots of hemming and hawing, I decided to downclimb all the way down and have Nick lead it instead. (Don't forget I had hiked like six miles that morning!!)

So Nick led it fine. He said my gear was more-or-less good (or at least the cams were -- when he was taking up rope at the top the nuts popped out almost immediately with no help, so it wasn't a problem that I didn't have the nut tool). But he agreed that the crack actually was quite hard. He got to the same spot in it that I did, and then actually downclimbed back to the ledge because the next piece he wanted was placed at the ledge. But he agreed that the downclimb was quite tricky, and he did look sketechy on that.

I followed it fine, but I still think it was kind of hard for a VS 4b in the Peak District, and Nick agreed. So that made me feel a little bit better. At that point, our good pace was pretty much stopped, and the sun was getting a lot closer to sunset, so we headed back to the car.

Then on the way back, we stopped at a grocery store so that I could wash my hands before dinner (because I was going to mutiny if I couldn't). Meanwhile, Nick, Paul, and Eddie investigated the store, and decided that the prices for everything were much cheaper than they were back in Cambridge and Orpington. So they started buying all kinds of six-packs of Pepsi and four-packs of chocolate-covered donuts which were then dipped into chocolate sprinkles. And then Nick found the beer -- they had some kind of good beer on sale for L1/bottle (and they were large bottles). So Nick and Paul both wanted to get a 12-pack set of these, because you could buy one sort of wrapped in plastic (although you could also just buy them individually, I think). So to get at the actual 12-pack packages, all three of them had to dismantle the beer display and then reassemble it (since the wrapped packages were several layers down).

Then we ate dinner at a "chippy" -- a fish & chips shop. I got a chicken thing and "chips," and it was good, but pretty greasy. And too big; I couldn't finish it. Even though I gave Nick my tomatoes.

So that was good, and it was extra good that we did get at least a few routes in.

Today we went to Nick's parents' house for lunch, because "Auntie Bernice" was visiting. She was nice. We had roast chicken, which was good. There were issues, though, when I was serving myself vegetables because Nick's mom had put the "roast potatoes" in the same serving bowl as the parsnips, and even though they were kind of separated in the bowl, I unknowingly took a parsnip. Nick then warned me that I had a parsnip, and I went "eww." Everyone else thought it was funny that Nick warned me, but he explained that he didn't want me to make a horrible face when I went to bite it. So Auntie Bernice volunteered to take my accidental parsnip. So that was good; I took a second roast potato instead.

Then Nick and I got into the sewing I needed to do. I managed to sew a button onto my coat and a pompom onto my boot without much trouble at all -- they stuck. Meanwhile, though, the pair of pants that I had warn to the Peak District on Saturday had a growing hole in the butt (I first noticed it at Mile End). So Nick's mom and dad brought out a whole assortment of iron-on patches, and eventually found one that was big enough and managed to stick. So she attached that, and then took out the sewing machine to reinforce some seams and to make sure the patch stayed on. It came out very nice and neat (even though the pants themselves were still muddy from Friday's walk). So that was pretty good.

Nick and I made belated "Pancake Day" pancakes back in Cambridge tonight. Well, actually, Nick was fully in charge of that. But that was good too. So those were my weekend adventures.

That's Me!

2009-02-27T22:20:00.005Z

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

2009-02-26T22:08:00.002Z

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

2009-02-26T10:31:00.002Z

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

2009-02-25T12:18:00.003Z

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!

2009-02-21T23:47:00.003Z

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

2009-02-19T23:36:00.002Z

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

2009-02-17T16:13:00.011Z

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

2009-02-17T16:00:00.002Z

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

2009-02-12T01:24:00.003Z

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

2009-02-09T11:26:00.028Z

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

2009-02-06T15:06:00.003Z

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

2009-02-06T11:41:00.002Z

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

2009-02-02T15:59:00.005Z

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.

© in Yoga?

2009-01-30T18:56:00.009Z

I was researching Bikram yoga, because there is a class offered by CUYS on Saturday mornings that I'm considering going to at some point. (Sidenote, amusingly, CUYS's website says this:

This class will be conducted "in the style of" a Bikram class, although the heating may not quite reach the prescribed 40.5°C favoured by Bikram, due to architectural constraints.

complete with the unnecessary quotation marks. I was highly suspicious prior to reading the website that they'd be able to successfully get a Cambridge room to the appropriate temperature, and that just confirmed my suspicions.)

Anyways, my research revealed that Mr. Bikram is quite a controversial guy. He believes in "competitive yoga," as well as completely commercialized yoga, raising some people's hackles (although that train has already left the station). But what really is interesting is how aggressively he's attempting to assert his claimed intellectual property rights in Bikram yoga.

The first thing that he seems to have done is trademarked the use of his name in relation to this style of hot yoga. So unless you are licensed by him, you're not supposed to go around calling your hot yoga class "Bikram" (sorry, CUYS). This doesn't seem to be a major problem, I don't think (although I've already forgotten what we talked about in relation to TMing names during one of my IP classes in the fall). But the bigger problem is that he has also attempted to assert copyright in the series of poses ("asanas") that make up a Bikram yoga class. So if you run a class called "hot yoga" and use those asanas in that order, he's going to say you're infringing.

Now, as far as I can tell, he has settled out of court with a few studios, and never actually brought his copyright claim to trial (although this is only based on a couple Google links -- tell me if you know otherwise). But I think that this is still a problem (chilling effects and all that).

I'm not sure if he's trying to assert copyright in the poses individually or in the series of poses together. One website I saw did indicate the first, but that seems ridiculous -- you can't copyright a pose, even if it is part of protectable choreography -- it would be like copyrighting a word out of a book. Silly. So I'm assuming that he's attempting to assert copyright only in the series of poses, meaning that if you used the same poses in a different order, you probably wouldn't be infringing.

So I figure that he's probably trying to claim that the series of poses are a choreographed composition and therefore copyrightable. But I can see some pretty clear distinctions between a choreographed dance and a sequence of asanas. The dance is ultimately a performance, the yoga practice is not (well, I may put on a performance doing yoga, but that's different). Plus, if you start to protect what is essentially a sports training exercise as intellectual property, you are starting to go down a pretty slippery slope -- can I become a basketball coach, come up with a training regimen for my team, and prevent other teams from using it through the use of copyright? (Hmm, maybe I could try to protect it as a trade secret, though ... that could be interesting.) Anyways, using copyright to protect yoga messes up all the incentives. Of course, it depends on exactly what theory you think it is that copyright is based on, but even the ones that might suggest protecting yoga do so tenuously at best.

We actually talked about the possibility of patenting sports moves in my patent class last year (I'm surprised Bikram hasn't gone down that avenue, too), which again we ultimately decided was a bad idea, because none of the justifications for patent law really applied to the development of sports moves (we specifically discussed this in the context of the Fosbury Flop, and whether Dick Fosbury could/should have patented that move).

Ultimately, though, I think Bikram has a TM claim, but nothing more, and is just being silly. But how interesting!

How my garden grows

2009-01-30T18:20:00.004Z

For Christmas, Nick's mom got me, well, a lot of stuff. Including an amaryllis plant. So it came as a bulb, and the story was that it would take 8-12 weeks to flower once you started watering it.

So, while I was away on vacation, Nick's mom started the watering process for me so that it would bloom in late February. The problem is that she seems to do a much better job at caring for plants than me. When I picked it up from her a week and a half ago, the shoot was fully grown (and it was a bit challenging to transport back to Cambridge in the car, since apparently it is also a bit fragile).

Since then, it bloomed incredibly quickly. One of the two shoots it developed has fully bloomed and is actually going downhill a bit now, and the other shoot is very close to being fully bloomed as well. (After the flowers die and fall off, you can save the plant and try to keep it alive for future years, which is tricky, or else just let the whole thing die.) Here are some pictures of it from various points last week.

International Climbing Celebrity

2009-01-29T21:08:00.007Z

Last night, one of the five CUMC climbing cars going to an indoor gym went to the newly opened Harlow climbing gym rather than the standard Mile End. I was in that car, which was good -- I was happy to check out the new wall and excited that it was all routes (as opposed to the more bouldering-based Mile End). I knew that I would have to pay a one-time "registration fee" of five pounds that all the walls in England seemingly have (I still don't know why), but I wanted to see it, plus it was a little closer to Cambridge than Mile End.

Pros
Harlow did have some good things going for it. The taller walls were reportedly about 40 feet high (they did feel like at least 35), and they had some good angles. They didn't have much in the way of severe overhangs, but they also didn't use up all their available space with highly-featured slabs (although they did have a few of those). Most of the taller walls, in fact, were unfeatured plywood -- which I strongly prefer to the messy overfeatured walls that are so common in England. There was both a lot of leading and a lot of toproping, unlike a lot of other gyms in England where most lines are only one or the other. There were probably about 40 stations in total, but I bet that at least 10 of them are never going to have anything harder than 5.7 on them -- they're sort of the equivalent of station 1 at MetroRock, except that they take up about a quarter of the total stations. But that's still superior to Mile End's ~15 stations for routes.

It's closer to Cambridge than Mile End, and stays open later (10pm as opposed to 9:30). There is no nearby kebab shop that we have to spend time faffing at outside in the cold after climbing, either (although there is an indoor cafe that three of the five of us went up to to get snacks at -- my belayer wanted to go with the other three to get snacks, but didn't quite dare ask to go, so I didn't let him -- so I didn't have to be involved in the snacking). So because it's closer to Cambridge and stays open later, we get about 2.5 hours of climbing rather than the ~1.5 we get at Mile End. Finally, crucially, it is much, much, much less crowded than Mile End -- there were probably only about 25 people in there in total (at Mile End, the tiny section of routes often ends up with 25 people in it alone, with probably at least 100 more in the various bouldering sections on Wednesday nights).

Cons
There are a lot of these. The biggest problem was with the routesetting. The gym sets by hold color, which is as okay as it can hope to be at the moment because (a) the holds are still new and easily distinguishable and (b) there is equal variety among holds of the same color as there is between holds of different colors (but I'll move on to holds separately in a minute). So the hold-color system itself isn't the biggest problem. The problem is that rumor has it, the gym only has one route setter so far. Which I believe, based on the routes. So the majority of stations only had one route on them, although there were a few with two. (On stations with two routes, they give a grade to the route you can do by using both colors, which always annoys me -- that's just un-thought-out rainbowing and shouldn't be counted as a route on its own.) This route setter has some interesting quirks. His easier routes are terrible. Literally right-left-right-left the whole way up the wall. A ladder. And his routes in the 5.10 range were sort of BK-style routes -- the holds started to get further and further apart. However, in the 5.11 range, the routes suddenly started to get surprisingly better, so I started to suspect that the route setter was more lazy than just bad (although sometimes he was definitely bad, too).

The problem, though, is that the route setter seems to be applying an artificial curve to grading his routes (just like HLS!). The routes are all a lot more similar in difficulty than the grades would suggest. The 4's and 5's (the grades were done in French) were somewhat more challenging than they should have been, but the 6's and 7's were soft. There were a few token "hard" 7's and an 8a, but the apex of the bell curve was probably barely 6a and then dropped off steeply. I suspect, though, that the setter probably doesn't climb much harder than 5.11, and I suspect that the hard 7's and 8a would be choss piles. The grades weren't extremely consistent among themselves, but they also weren't unacceptably way off from themselves (although, like I said, the hard 6's and easy 7's were soft and squishy).

Another issue is that I'm not sure that the setter has anyone check his routes after setting them (including himself). There were at least two routes that I did that were all very consistent with a sudden ridiculous crux that is way out of character. In one of them, a little foothold would have made an obvious difference, and I'm not sure whether the setter actually ran that route and realized his problem. The other one was a 7a. I had already onsighted two "7a's" (which were really only about .11a and .11b, respectively), and I was happily making my way up this third 7a, which seemed consistent with the first two. The problem was, though, I suddenly got two the final two holds before the top jug, and there was a GIANT move. Like, you could either do an all-out dyno or do some arete work that was completely out of character with the rest of the route (and it's not even clear whether or not the arete is on) (I eventually did do the move using the arete). What's the deal? I'm not sure that the setter ever really ran the route. Or maybe they did but got bored before doing the final move. The distance of the final move isn't obvious from the ground because perspective makes it look smaller than it is. So even though the setter is generally good at setting things that are in the "real 5.11" range, the setter's laziness messes things up for himself.

The next issue was holds. All the holds are made by the same company -- Top30. It appears that Top30 made the short featured walls, as well. The holds were all quite basic small shapes. There was nothing interesting at all. I think oftentimes when gyms set by hold color they're limited to only buying from a few companies so that they don't have, say, yellows that don't quite match other yellows. But, as you can see from the photos here, these holds are particularly dull. No giant green teeth, that's for sure.

The other problems were more surmountable, but still bear mentioning. One is that there is still no heat, and apparently there may not be any installed for a while. I was aware of this possibility going in, so brought a hat and several fleece coats, but they need to get on top of this (although it's not unmanageable -- England doesn't get that cold). It's also sort of set in a weird position apart from a general sports center -- lockers/changing rooms/bathroom are in one area and the wall is up one set of stairs, down another set of stairs, and actually in a separate building from the main one where the changing rooms are. (I'm actually pretty sure that it would be extremely easy to walk right into the climbing wall without paying if you knew where you were going.) They also only have about 10 parking spaces on site (oh England), and if those are full you have to park about a five minute walk away. (I stepped in a puddle in my flippies on the walk back to the car.) As hinted at, they use too much of their real estate on featured slabs (and, yes, the wheelchair rappel station...), but they do have a high proportion of tall, simple plywood compared to other English walls. Also, there is no bouldering at all -- I wouldn't mind a little bit. If I owned it I would rip out the featured slabs and replace that section with a bouldering cave.

So those are the cons.

My absolute favorite part, though, was when a girl came over to me and said

Sorry, but do you climb at MetroRock?

Umm, YES.

It turns out that she had been at Harvard as a post-doc for two years doing astrophysics, but had since returned to England and was now at Cambridge University as of a few months ago (she hadn't heard of CUMC). She said she was there with her husband and they had been debating whether or not I was the same as the person at MetroRock. So she and her husband apparently go down to the Castle in London quite frequently, so I can communicate with her if I'm interested in getting rides there.

But yeah, what can I say? I'm noticeable.

Photos up on Facebook

2009-01-29T16:20:00.002Z

El Chorro Pictures. The first set are ones I took, the second and third were taken by Nick. A lot of them I've already posted in my El Chorro stories.

...And England, Again

2009-01-28T13:12:00.005Z

Monday, January 19, 2009

On the final day of our El Chorro trip, Nick and I got up around 9, but had to pack up everything and check out. We finished the last of the cereal (but not the last of the UHT milk...I think that got donated to the free bin). Unfortunately, the sun wasn't really making an appearance while we were packing and it became clear that it would probably be cloudy for most of the day.

We stashed our stuff at Almona, but by this point it was around 11 and the Hampshire team had left for the day (as expected). We also had to do a final run to the food shop in town to grab lunch food for the day, and then headed up to an area very close to where we had climbed on the first afternoon at the far left end of the Frontales, Sector Castrojo. I took some pictures of the valley while Nick read the guidebook.

We did a quick 4 or 5 to start (we weren't sure which route we were on), and then Nick led a very very long 6a. Thirty-five meters, according to the guidebook, and I think it may have even been longer because he went to one set of anchors that was a few meters higher than a different anchor. So to get him down was a bit of a challenge with our 60 meter rope (I was aware that the route was going to be pretty long, but was surprised by the fact that the middle mark was at about the third bolt when he got to the anchors). I got us both to about the same height -- the very top of a more-or-less low-angle slab about 15-20 feet off the ground, and we were able to both detach from the rope and come down from there.

I was going to lead it, but there had been intermittent raindrops the whole time Nick was on it and they looked a bit more steady, so we decided it would be best for me to toprope so we didn't lose gear if it started to really rain. So we did that, but by the time I was at the anchors it had actually stopped raining. Coming down on toprope wasn't quite as bad as getting Nick down since the anchors were slightly off to the side, but we still ended up pretty high up on the low angle slab.

So we ate lunch, and then Nick started up another 6a+ that had anchors that were about 30-40 feet higher than the anchors on the nextdoor route, a 6c+. Right as we were pulling the rope, we felt a few more sprinkles, so I started to lead it quickly. This time, though, there were fewer sprinkles than there had been on the earlier 6a, and they stopped by the time I got to the top. While lowering, I kicked over to the anchors for the 6c+ and put a directional on them to toprope through, but didn't bother cleaning the 6a+ because that would involve a lot of fancy ropework. So instead we just clogged up 2 routes (or three, if you want to be pedantic -- the 6a+ shared a first bolt with the climb on the other side of it). Which wouldn't have been a problem when we arrived, since the crag was empty then, but we felt a little guilty because since then, multiple other parties had shown up, including the Hampshire "OPRA team," led by Guy. (Zeb, Max, Luke, and Earl were still at Makinodromo.)

Anyway, Nick did the 6c+ cleanly on TR after a quick false-start at the bottom crux, and I flashed it clean on TR.

After cleaning all our gear off the three routes, it was about 2 in the afternoon, and Nick and I had to head down at 2:30. Guy had just led a good 7a+ that Nick and I wanted to TR, but in the meantime two of the other Hampshire kids had gotten on it. Nick and I stuck around until about 2:20, but it was clear that there was no way we'd have a chance to get on it the way things were going, so we headed out.

We went back up to Almona, and collected our gear and packed it into plane-appropriate luggage. We then drove off, but stopped on the way out to take a few more pictures of El Chorro.

Then Nick and I headed back to the car rental place in Málaga, about an hour away. We had to find a gas station, since we were supposed to return the car full, and then headed into the rental place. I was expecting them to squawk like crazy because the car was really dirty, inside and out (especially from where I kept putting my feet on the dashboard), and the mud-spray around the wheels kind of indicated that we had off-roaded it (as much as the little tin box could be off-roaded). But they seemed to say it was fine, and we headed onto the shuttle and into the airport.

At the airport, we checked in without too many hassles. (I wore all my coats to make sure that our luggage all fit everywhere it was supposed to.) The bag weighed 20.0kg's, but got a "heavy" tag to warn the baggage handlers it was 20. But we had no problems. I had to put my carry-on into one of the crates to prove that it fit, but it fit fine.

Then Nick and I headed into the waiting area, and had to wait around forever to get a gate. Eventually we decided to head to the gate area anyways to try to figure out which gate ours would be. We finally saw an EasyJet plane make an appearance at a gate that was going to be ours, but at that point it was already only ten minutes until our scheduled take-off time. We followed it to its gate (which had still not been officially announced yet), and pretty much everyone else did, too. Because there are no assigned seats on EasyJet, everyone stampedes to get to the gate first.

As we start the (slow) boarding process, it becomes clear that while they are not enforcing a "one piece of hand luggage" rule that they have, they're very strictly enforcing that the "one piece" (the largest piece) fits into a crate. So before I get up to the front of the line I put all my coats back on so that my luggage will fit. The problem is, though, that I forgot that Nick had put his little "travel folder," which was fat because it had our guidebook in it, in the front of my suitcase, making it bulge. I assumed that the suitcase would fit, since it had fit at check-in, but I forgot that then the folder wasn't in it. So it didn't fit, and they were saying that they would have to check it (other people were all having this problem, which was really slowing down boarding).

But what they did was just put a tag on the bag, told me to walk down the ramp to the plane, and have people take it there to put it in checked luggage. But the ramp was long, with twists, and no one was watching -- so I just took the tag right off the bag and carried it onto the plane with me. HAH.

I was right towards the end of the line at this point, but Nick had saved us seats. I was mad at him becuase his folder had caused me hassles, so he had the job of fitting the suitcase into the already-completely-full overhead bins, but he somehow managed it and kept it from being checked. Excellent.

The plane took off about an hour late after all the hold-ups at boarding, but it turns out that the flight isn't nearly as long as advertised, so we ended up landing at Gatwick at about the time we were supposed to. We then had to take the Gatwick "Express" into London (the train is "express" in that it doesn't stop, but actually takes as long as the trains that do stop because it moves very slowly), take the Underground across to King's Cross, and get the train to Baldock, where Nick's car was. Except that there was "rail works" going on on the tracks near Baldock, so the train ended a few stops early and we had to take the buses provided to Baldock. Then we had to walk from the Baldock train station to Nick's parents' house (at least 15 minutes). Of course, even though it was 11:30 by this point, they'd cooked us a three course meal. So we ate that quickly and then re-packed the car with the El Chorro stuff, the stuff that we abandoned there on Thursday when we realized it wouldn't fit on the plane, and stuff that had lived there over Christmas like my mirror (that needed fixing), my bike (that wasn't supposed to be kept outside in the cold during the break), and my plants (Nick's mom was in charge of taking care of them.

Then we had to drive back to Cambridge, which took about an hour, and we arrived about 1:15 am. We had to unload all my stuff from the car, and then poor Nick had to drive all the way back to Orpington so that he could get to work in the morning. But even though we both got back very late on the Monday night, we both had a good adventure trip.

Poca

2009-01-27T15:32:00.009Z

Sunday, January 18, 2009

On the second full day of our El Chorro trip, Nick and I again got going relatively late in the day. We were planning on attempting to find the Hampshire kids, who were going to climb at Poema de Roca (or, as Earl called it sometimes, Poca), a cave section with hard and not-so-hard routes in the middle of the Frontales. However, when our alarm clock went off at 8:30, it looked distinctly cloudier than it had the day before, so once again Nick and I hit snooze for half an hour and got up at 9.

We had another breakfast of cereal and UHT milk (ew ew ew) and packed up some of our stuff. The rest was already in disarray in the car from yesterday's Camino/via ferrata adventure. By this point, though, the clouds seemed to have mostly cleared and it was getting distinctly sunny.

We got to Almona by about 10:15, but Zeb had warned me that the Hampshire crew was probably leaving around 10. So we continued up the road to the same spot that we had parked at the day before, and passed the Hampshire crew (walking) along the way. This time, though, rather than park there we opened up the gate and drove through it so that we could park further up along the dirt road closer to the cliffs.

Once we were parked, we had to sort out all our gear, and by the time we were ready the Hampshire crew had again caught up to us. At this point, we took a different approach than we had the day before (when we went to the Arab Steps) to get to Poca.

Once we got to the cave, we started out by warming up on a 5+ and a 6b (which actually ended up being my hardest lead of the trip). Then we had lunch and headed over to a 6b+. First Nick tried to lead it, but got scared on a runout between the fifth and sixth bolts. Then I tried to lead it, and got scared before I even got there. Then Nick tried to lead it again, got all the way up to the last bolt, and finally decided he was too pumped to finish it. Too bad; it would have been good for him to get. He did a good job on it, though. I eventually toproped it.

Meanwhile Zeb worked on Swimming Through a Shark Attack, eventually sending.

It was mid-afternoon by that point, so Nick and I headed over to the nearby Solarium where we did a couple of pocket-y easy 6's. Nothing too exciting, but they were good. At that point, Nick had decided he was exhausted, and we headed back to Poca to see how things were going.

At this point it was starting to get a little dim and cold (there was a lot more shade), but Zeb was doing a final run up the route Poema de Roca, a super-popular 7a. Meanwhile I tried a nearby 7a on toprope, but didn't make it to the anchors.

At that point, the Hampshire crew went back to Almona and Nick and I went back to Finca for dinner, where we cooked a mini-omelet with our remaining two eggs, and also cooked some pasta and some pasta-with-sauce.

Then we headed back to Almona. We had discussed possibly picking up Zeb, taking him to Finca, and getting him to help us finish the wine discreetly. However, that clearly was not going to be a possibility, because when we got to Almona, it turned out that in the last few hands of their game of hearts, Earl had overtaken Zeb and Luke had hit 500, the stopping point. Zeb lost in the end. And he was curled up in bed in the fetal position.

Nick and I hung out at Almona for a little while discussing plans for the next day. Nick and I were going to head to the far left end of the Frontales for climbing in the morning (we had to fly out in the afternoon), while the Hampshire team was going to head out to the long-approach Makinodromo. Nick and I were going to store our stuff at Almona for the day after checking out of Finca, but we probably weren't going to see the Hampshire team themselves (there was a hidden key).

So that was that! We headed back to Finca for bed before our final day and flight back to England.

Sunny and Scary

2009-01-26T14:02:00.024Z

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Nick and I woke up relatively late on the first full day of our El Chorro trip, and weren't really out of bed until 9:30 (sunrise was only an hour earlier, though). 9:30 in El Chorro, by the way, is 8:30 GMT and 3:30 EST (which I was on about 3-4 days prior to this), so I didn't feel that guilty. Excitingly, it got sunnier and sunnier between 8:30 and 9:30 (we kept hitting snooze), so that when we woke up it was clear that we would have good weather.

We ate breakfast (cereal with UHT milk, yum yum) at Finca, and then went down to Almona to figure out our plans for the day. It was a rest day for the Hampshire team, but Zeb and Luke were going to hike up to the crag with us so that Luke could do an hour of meditating and Zeb could stare at his project for an hour. First, though, Nick and I had to head to the tiny "supermarket" in town to get more lunch food and groceries.

Once we drove the 2-3 minutes into town, we realized that Nick's wallet was back up at Finca. We drive five minutes back up to Finca, pick up the wallet, and then drive five more minutes back into town. We find the shop, get groceries (lots of pointing -- my Spanish doesn't go much beyond "ocho"), and head back up to Almona where we stash our extra food for the day and pick up Zeb and Luke.

From there, we head uphill to the Escalera Arabe area. This area has a fairly long approach, particularly because there is a gate blocking the dirt road that takes us closer to the crag, so we park outside of the gate (although we then observe other people simply opening the gate, driving through, and closing it again -- it's not locked). On the walk, Nick notices the sparkly wasteband of Zeb's pants and comments, "They're not boy pants, are they." We then have to walk for at least half an hour up to near the crag, at which point it takes us a while to figure out which sector we're at.

We eventually figure out that we're near Sector Sergio, so Nick and I do two long, easy 6's and eat lunch (Zeb and Luke head out of sight over to their route-studying/meditation area). From there, Nick and I decide to head up to the Sector Arabesque because there is a 6a that shares anchors with a 7a face climb that Nick and I want to top rope. So we hike up the centuries-old "Arab Steps" to get over to that sector.

Nick starts up the 6a, but at the last bolt gets nervous. He claims that there is a solid 20-foot runout from there to the anchors, and the climbing isn't particularly easy. So he comes down, and I start loading myself up with bail biners and slings to go up and investigate bailing possibilities and texas rope trick possibilities. I'm only at the second bolt, though, when Zeb makes a return (Luke went back to the house rather than repeat part of the approach back up to where we were). So I immediately get Zeb to agree to fix it and lower off straight from the second bolt.

Zeb does fine leading it, although he did take his time moving past the sixth bolt to the anchor. He also helpfully puts a directional in so that we can easily try the next-door 7a as well.

Then Zeb belays me while I toprope the 7a, ultimately onsighting it (it's a nice face climb). Then Nick topropes the 7a (a couple hangs but he does it pretty well), while I belay and Zeb takes pictures of his shoes.

After this, we decide to head down because there are a couple hours of daylight left and Nick is dying to do the Caminito del Rey (which I have discussed earlier here). The Camino is an elevated pathway through the gorge that was built in the early twentieth century to allow dam workers easy access to areas they needed to get to. When the dam was opened in the 1920s, the King used the walkway to get to it during the grand opening, giving it its name. Since then, the walkway has fallen into some serious disrepair, but it is still used by climbers to access some of the climbing areas at El Chorro. It's protectable by via ferrata. By this point, Zeb and some of the Hampshire crew had already walked the Camino during one of their rest days, and more of the Hampshire crew had already done it earlier in this same afternoon. Nick and I figured that this was our once chance to walk it with Zebby as our "guide" (since today was a rest day for him), so we headed back to Almona to get our gear sorted out for that.

We are finally parked and walking in to the Camino by about 5:30 (with sunset at 6:30). We've packed our headlamps. Even the approach is a little tricky -- we have to walk up a hill to the railroad tracks, and then scramble down a slope with a little bit of scree before we can get onto the via ferrata.

We meet up with Earl and a Hampshire team on our approach (they're just coming off the Camino). Just getting onto the Camino is actually the crux of the whole thing. See, the section of the Camino that intersects with the railway tracks and was the originally-designed approach has been purposely destroyed to prevent people from accessing the Camino too easily. Instead, one must approach from below the Camino on a series of iron bars drilled into the side of the cliff and then ascend up third-class terrain to get to the Camino itself. Meanwhile, on the descent, one can either come back across the iron bars or can head straight to the modern end of the Camino (which traverses across the same section as the bars, just much higher up) and rappel back down to where you would start the bars. So Earl's team was rapping down when we came across them, and Zeb convinced Earl to leave the rope for us to use on our return so that we wouldn't have to come back across the bars at the end.

We also figured that, from that point, it would probably take at least an hour for us to travel the entire Camino, meaning that if we went the whole way we'd be returning in the dark, and no one was looking forward to trying to get me back in the dark. So we decided that we would just go to the bridge that was about a third of the way along the whole thing. Getting there contained the most "exciting" parts of the journey as well as the best views; the rest of the walkway was more mellow. That way, we wouldn't need to break out our headlamps for getting back.

So, Nick, Zeb, and I started off. We began with the hardest part -- crossing the iron rungs. Meanwhile, we clipped in to a variety of pieces of metal sticking out from the rock at waist-height, some of which looked sturdier than others. Zeb started out behind me, with Nick in front.

At this point, though, Zeb was already impatient and so switched to going in the front, while I had Nick behind me. At this point, we had to do the third-class scramble up to the Camino itself.

This scramble was a little challenging because it wasn't all protected, although a lot of it was. The rungs were far apart, meaning that even with our extra-long slings we could only barely be clipped into two at once, and had to shuffle back and forth a bit. There were some parts where our sling simply wouldn't reach the next rung, and we had to unclip entirely from one to get to the next one. But it wasn't too bad, and we eventually made it up onto the Camino itself.

Once on the Camino, it turned into a more standard via ferrata with wires on the side to clip into while we walked along.

Before long, though, we came to the first section (of two) where the cement had completely fallen away. Here, we had to walk along the outer iron rung of the Camino. There were a couple different techniques for doing this, but I chose to face into the cliff and shuffle my feet along sideways while leaning forward (across the gap where the cement should have been) onto the rock itself (and, when the rock was too far away to lean against, only onto the via ferrata wire).

From there, it wasn't long until we could see the "bridge," which was actually simply built over an existing pipe that connected the two sides of the gorge.

However, before we could get to it, there was another section we had to cross similar to the last, but longer. This time, the wall itself was too far forward to lean against, so I had to lean only on the wobbly wire, making it more challenging than the last crossing.

From there, we could see where we had come from, as well as where the path went.

Once we had gotten across, there was a wide, semi-natural platform where we unclipped and were able to take a few photos.

At that point, Zeb reported that the path got a lot less interesting, and that it was almost time to turn back. Before that, though, he showed us a tunnel into the rock off to the side that he said had once been used to pump water through. We got out our headlamps and headed through that to an opening in it. Then Zeb went back around to the outside so that we could get pictures of him on an exposed section of the Camino from the opening.

After that, Nick and I walk out through the tunnel to find Zeb. We don't see him immediately, so Nick heads along the section of the Camino where he was, while I head back towards the bridge in the other direction in case he got an early start back. Next thing I know, Zeb is behind me. Turns out that he had gotten behind me by returning into the tunnel directly from the exposed section of the Camino he had been posing on. You can walk directly from there into the tunnel on a walkway connecting the main Camino to the tunnel, but there is no via ferrata for this part. I'm glad I didn't see that.

We collect Nick (who seems a bit worried that he hasn't found Zebby yet) and start heading back along the way we came.

Across the bridge:

Along the second gap:

On an easy section of the Camino:

And along the first gap:

From there, though, we entered new territory. We had come up from the right here (coming up under the metal bar), but now, instead of going back that way, we continued on straight to the very end of the Camino:

As mentioned earlier, this path doesn't lead straight to the railroad bridge anymore, but instead comes to an abrupt end that you rap down from. Earl's rope was still there, so that's where we headed.

Our team had access to one GriGri and one tube-style device, so we figured the best plan was for Zeb to lower me with the GriGri, counterweight-rap off me, and then for Nick to rap himself down with his own tube-style device (in theory Zeb could have lowered Nick too, but Nick weighs, um, more than me, and it was a skinny rope).

So we made it! We still had to scramble up the hill to get back up to the main dirt road, but that was fine. We took a few scenery shots of the sunset and the gorge on our way out.

At that point, we headed back to Almona, picked up our food, and then back to Finca to cook our dinner (at Almona they were cooking something very onion-y -- which was true of all their meals). I discovered that the one picture decorating our room was actually of the bridge in the gorge (Nick was surprised I hadn't noticed that already).

Dinner was an omelet with 4 of our 8 eggs (plus bacon and cheese), except that two eggs sort of "escaped" in the process, meaning that after making four eggs into an omelet, we only had two left over for the following night. So after dinner we checked out the free box, which had some good pasta and pasta-with-sauce that we took for ourselves to use the following night. There was also beer in the free bin, but we didn't take that because we already had an abundance of wine and we couldn't donate anything to the Hampshire crew (no alcohol allowed).

After dinner, we headed back to Almona again to use their internet and watch the hearts game. Earl was quickly closing the gap between him and Zeb (Zeb was in the lead), but Zeb was still pretty confident. Then we headed back to Finca for the night. Good adventures for the day, but not quite enough climbing and a little too much time on the scary parts of the Camino!

Chicago in London

2009-01-26T13:30:00.004Z

On Friday, Nick and I went to go see the play Chicago at Cambridge Theatre in London's West End (it was his Christmas present to me). We had dinner at Fire & Stone, a fancy-ish London pizza place first (there was a good deal on getting dinner and the play tickets). I got a good pizza with little potato and bacon bits on it, and a smoothie (excellent!).

The play itself was good. As predicted, the actors were British but spoke with American accents. The main characters' accents were more-or-less good, although they occasionally seemed to change which part of the U.S. they were from. They did very Sarah Palin-ish a's, which is kind of midwestern and very distinct from the English a. Well, most of the time they did. Occasionally they threw in an English a just to keep things interesting.

However, the bit characters with only a few lines of speaking each had accents that were a mess. They ended up being just very weird-sounding British accents. I get the sense that the accent coach didn't really spend time with these characters. That was okay, though -- I got a kick out of it.

Also, this weekend, I got a cold, went to Westway, read a funny article online (Nick lives quite near Pratts Bottom, unsurprisingly), and learned that protesters are staging a sit-in in our law building (I haven't even gone over to the building since Thursday, so this is news to me). Exciting!

Travelling to Spain

2009-01-21T13:53:00.004Z

The first in a series of four posts about my trip to El Chorro last weekend. This one doesn't have photos because it was more-or-less a travel day.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Nick and I woke up at 4:30am, GMT, to start our adventures. This was after being awake until midnight the night before. Which was kind of my fault. When we were booking plane tickets, we had to commit to how many bags we would be bringing or else be charged a lot to check an extra one at the airport. Because we got carry-ons, Nick and I had committed to one checked bag because I thought it was ridiculous that we would need to check more than 20kgs of stuff for four days. Well, when we combined our checked items into one suitcase and weighed it the night before, it weighed 30kgs. Oops. And we had already packed quite lightly.

So we spent several hours the night before unpacking and repacking and figuring out how many clothes we could wear at once on the plane to get the suitcase down to what ultimately turned out to be 20.5kgs (I think we could have fit at least an extra .5 kg in their before they started squawking...). We got rid of one of Nick's pairs of climbing shoes, 8 quickdraws (bringing our total down to 12 from 20), my helmet (which really made Nick's mom fuss ... I had to take it out when she wasn't looking), a pair of my flipflops, both our towels, and some other stuff. So that chewed up a lot of time and sent us to bed quite late.

There were two buses that went to Luton airport, where we were departing from, from Baldock. One left before 4 in the morning, and Nick's mom was trying to get us to take that one to make sure we had plenty of time. Nick convinced her, though, that we'd be fine taking the one that left at 5:38 and arrived at the airport at 6:15, since check-in closed at 6:40. So we took that one, and while we were slightly late getting to the airport, we still checked in long before 6:40.

Then we wandered around the terminal for a bit before Nick decided he had to go the bathroom before getting on the plane. This turned into an issue. The thing is, we were flying with EasyJet which does not assign seats on planes and instead puts you in a first-come, first-served position of getting seats. This means that everyone goes completely crazy to get on the plane first. So Nick was in the bathroom when the screens announced which gate we were supposed to go to. We missed the rush to get on, meaning that we were just about the last people on the plane. We managed to get aisle seats next to each other near the back, but I was not too pleased; I like the window seats.

The plane ride was pretty uneventful other than my occasional fusses about my seat. When we got to Malaga, the whole plane filed past a single immigration agent. Because just about everyone else on the plane had a UK passport, they could just wave it at the agent without it even being opened to the picture page, and he would let them go through. With mine, though, he had to take it, open it, stamp it (right in the middle of a page, taking up four boxes at once), and send me through while backing up everyone else behind me in the meanwhile.

We easily got our luggage, but finding our car was more troubling. There was a sign for airport rent-a-car companies, but our company that we had pre-booked with wasn't listed. I made Nick go up to the desk of one of the existing companies to see if he could find out where ours was. The woman directed us upstairs in a way that sort of indicated that everyone always asked this. So then at the airport exit there was a guy from our company with a list of people who rented from them directing us towards a shuttle to get to ours. We manage to find the shuttle and get on.

The shuttle takes us past a whole bunch of other rental agencies that are near-but-not-in the airport until we finally get to ours, the last one along the line (probably why it was the cheapest). We get our tiny two-door car after waiting around for a while. It has really tiny wheels so I feel like I'm sitting on the ground. It's no extra cost to put me on as an extra driver, so we do so even though I can't drive a manual. (In retrospect, it may have actually been more useful to get Zeb's driver's license ahead of time and put him on it, because then we would have been able to get back and forth between our houses in El Chorro more easily.) Then we take off towards Alora, which is the last major town near El Chorro that should have a moderate-sized grocery store.

The GPS directs us towards what it is calling the town center of Alora, and we arrive there after about 45 minutes of driving with periodic fussing from Nick about how much he dislikes the car ("no performance!"). When we get there, the streets are extremely steep and narrow, and we don't see obvious grocery store signs. We drive down streets/sidewalks (they looked like sidewalks but seemed to have cars going down them) and eventually saw a small shop. We had to park a few blocks away, though, and then walk up some very steep hills to get back to it and get food.

There was no fresh milk at all, so we had to get some UHT milk for our morning cereal. GROSS. Nick also grabbed two bottles of wine, figuring that it was a bit more than needed but he could donate leftovers to the Hampshire kids. We also went to a fresh fruit store where we were getting eight apples. We pointed and I said "ocho," which made Nick's jaw drop -- he had no idea that I knew so much Spanish, apparently.

From there, we got back in the car and drove towards El Chorro. On the way, though, we passed what was really the main part of Alora which really did have signs to large supermarkets. Oh well. We got to the train station in the center of El Chorro at about 1:50. Zeb was supposed to show up at 2, but we had no idea whether that was actually happening punctually or not. I saw which direction it was to walk towards La Almona Chica (where Zeb was staying) and Finca la Campana (where we were staying), so I instructed Nick to stay with the car at the town center while I hiked uphill in the general direction of the houses to see if Zeb was up there. On the way up, I passed a herd of goats and a man with a donkey, but no Zeb. Right when I see their houses, though, *honk honk* behind me. Nick's got Zeb in the car.

So we head into Almona and eat lunch and chit chat with Zeb. Zeb mentions that one of their only rules on the trip is no alcohol -- which Nick is shocked by. It also means that Nick is responsible for drinking all the wine he got by himself. Oh well. Nick and I then attempt to drive up to Finca and check in, but reception appears to only be open 7pm-9pm. So we head back to Almona and stash all our stuff there in the house that Zeb shares with Earl, Luke, Max, and Mike. Then we head out to the climbing.

We climbed near the left end (Los Albercones) of the Frontales, one of the largest buttresses with climbing in El Chorro. The weather is pretty chilly and overcast, and there are a few intermittent raindrops. We start off with the Hampshire kids, but eventually they hike further up the hill to a different sector while Nick and I stick around down low to get more climbing in. We do 4 climbs (both leading them all) that are all easy 6's (easy-to-mid 5.10's). At that point, it's getting darker and colder, and we are getting ready to pack up and drive off. Right then, Zeb and Max make an appearance to see if they can get a ride back to Almona. So we all head out.

Nick and I collect our things at Almona and then drive up to Finca to check in at about 6:55. The main office still doesn't seem to be particularly open but we're directed up to the bunkhouse where we do a sort of disorganized check in. It seems decent, though -- we have a (tiny) room off to the side of the bunkhouse and access to a large rec-room/dining room and a kitchen. So we unpack, eat dinner, and then head down to Almona to hang out with the Hampshire kids and use their computers and internet for a while. Zeb, Earl, Luke, and Max are engrossed in a rather aggressive game of hearts that Zeb is currently winning ... and has quite a 'tude about. I make general plans to stop by their place the next morning to further discuss where the tiny shop in town is and what we should climb, since tomorrow is a scheduled rest day for Hampshire.

After that, Nick and I go back to Finca and head to bed on the early side because it's already late and we've been up for a while. Our first day was more-or-less successful, and we made it to El Chorro successfully.

Very Educational

2009-01-21T11:02:00.003Z

So HLS requires that we continue to do some sort of work related to our studies during our long breaks at Cambridge. Umm. But I did just learn that Venice had the world's first recognizable patent system as of 1474. So I guess that justifies the Italy trip!

Back Again

2009-01-20T18:11:00.002Z

So I'm back from my Spain adventures. The trip was good with no major calamities to report. Over the next few days (weeks?) I will post full trip reports. That's dependent on collecting photos from Nick's camera, though.

Spain Adventures

2009-01-15T16:55:00.002Z

I leave for El Chorro (very) early tomorrow morning. Hopefully it all goes smoothly! Unfortunately, in the last ~24 hours, the forecast for Málaga has gotten decidedly worse with rain predicted for Friday afternoon and Saturday. Hopefully it's not too bad, though. I'm off!