What?

03:44 pm - Cultural Indicators

I went to the states over Thanksgiving. It was great. Thanks to all the people I got to see and apologies to all those I did not. I had what might be best described as a nourishing time. Which is just what I needed.

When travelling back and forth between two cultures, even two as tightly connected as the UK and US, its easy to notice differences in the cultures.

I've mentioned before the sort of aggressive nature of women here. I've been noticing that again around Newbury where the evening crowd is more young professional than student as it was in Oxford.

But what I've been noticing most lately is vomitus. In front of benches, behind lamp posts, in the gutters. Puking appears to be a fairly public affair around here. "Oi, let's go out and get lashed til we puke in the streets!"

Wheeee!

Thankfully I've managed to avoid witnessing the act. The aftermath is hard to miss. Was this stuff going on in Bloomington and I just didn't see it or is this a cultural difference? Mind you, I'm talking about puking on the high street. To be an accurate comparison Bloomington-wise, there'd need to be vomitus laying casually along Kirkwood and seated comfotably around the courthouse square, etc.

?

Current Mood: embarrassed

10:02 pm - Guitar Solo Personality Testing

Earlier today I braved a drive to Oxford to do some shopping. Some Christmas, some furniture for the new place. It went surprising well despite the extraordinary traffic.

It was helped by the fact that I had some nice tunes. Of late I'm in the habit of semi-randomly selecting a tune in iTunes that I like, making a genius playlist, chopping to the size of audio CD and burning.

So with that in mind I was cruising around with some music and I wondered to myself, "self, do you suppose your guitar and otherwise musically oriented friends can do personality trait analysis based on guitar solo preferences?" This while listening to a live version of Comfortably Numb off Delicate Sound of Thunder. That's a favorite. So is Paradise City. Or at least that's what I thought of when I was thinking of this. Which is not something I think about much.

So my guitar and otherwise musically oriented friends, what does this tell you about me?

Need more data? Um. Dunno. See above about not thinking about this much.

Maybe somebody else can provide their data and then J or S or somebody can interpret?

Current Mood: curious

11:46 pm - Midwest Bound

I shall be back in the US from November 24th through December 9th. First half of that in the Cincinnati area, second in the Bloomington area, with maybe some Kentucky excursions. Are you going to be in those areas?

Current Mood: listless

01:16 pm - This American Life Ripping My Heart Out

On the train into London this morning I listened to part of episode 359: Life After Deathof This American Life. Act One: Guilty As Not Charged is described like this:

Everyone told Darin Strauss that there would have been no way to avoid hitting the bicyclist who swerved into the path of his car. When the girl died, the police said Darin wasn't at fault. Darin tells the story of what it's like to live with being the accidental cause of someone's death.

Current Mood: sad

11:11 pm - Vote

It's an indication of the mood of the world that this year, for the first time in my entire life of being unable to vote in US elections, I really want to be able to vote. Shit is afoot. Would be nice to be a part of that.

So if any of you who can vote tomorrow were thinking you wouldn't bother, please go out and do your voting a personal favor to me. I'd be most grateful.

Thanks.

08:02 pm - Newbury First Impressions

One of the first things I noticed this evening, was how remarkably white Newbury is. And English too.

This is my first night in my new flat, in Newbury. After unloading the car into an empty but otherwise nice place, I went out for a stroll and some food. Everybody is white. Everybody speaks with a proper English accent. Not proper like tea and watercress sandwiches, but broad, loud, some would say authentic, voices

In Oxford, not surprisingly for one of the great universities of the world, you're just as likely to hear Chinese, French, Russian, Polish, something you've never heard before. I think I'll miss that.

I'm somewhat surprised to discover that Newbury feels a bit more walkable and explorable to me than Oxford did. I think this is more likely my bias than it is any particular indication of Newbury or Oxford. Oxford is a tourist destination and knows it, feels like it and caters to it. Newbury is an old town (the building housing my new flat is on the site of a mill recorded in the Domesday Book, thus its name: Town Mills) with a an important commercial history. This doesn't get tooted about on signs, but walking around you get a sense of it. In an entirely different way, this is another sort of authenticity.

More to come.

Current Mood: pensive

07:30 pm - English Living: Driving Licence

Every now and again I give a bit of tale to whoever might be listening on the other end of my chat session. Tale of some injustice or weirdness of living in England. Some have suggested I should be writing these down somewhere. So, in honor of the fact that it has now been a year (holy jesus) since I moved over here and because my tumblelog is about something other than this, I'll see what I can get started here.

Today I passed my UK driving licence practical exam. This is the part where you do some actual driving. Earlier I did the theory and hazard perception portions of the test. The whole thing felt like quite an ordeal, but evidently I got off easy.

Those of us who learned to drive in the US will remember being 16 or whatever and getting shoved into a car with a terrified parent and setting out on the road. A short time later you go to a testing place, write some things down you learned in a book, get in the car drive around the block and as long as you don't run into anything, it's time to go home a newly certified driver.

Some of us (I was one) may have lived in a state where there was compulsory drivers' education: watch a bunch of really gory movies, then spend some time becoming friends in the back of a car with some people you never otherwise would have talked to in school, laughing when the guy up front fucks up a little or commiserating when they fuck up a lot.

It's not quite like that here. Officials recommend 40 hours of in car training with a professional driving instructor. There is only a 42% pass rate. You can have major and minor faults. Major fault and you're done. I think you can have 15 minor faults. I got eight.

The theory test and hazard perception stuff is not too much of a big deal. You sign up on online and they tell you where the nearest testing center is. You spend some time studying books or online resources. The questions are very detailed but with multiple choice answers; however, unlike my recollection of the US tests of similar ilk it isn't one obvious answer and several laughable answers.

The other half of the theory test experience is the hazard perception test. You watch some videos and click on the screen when something in the video is going to make you slow down or change direction. This is much trickier than it sounds. I don't know if it is a UI thing or what, but damn. But I passed both, so...

You have to get a thing called a provisional licence. This is like a learners permit in the state. It says you can drive with an adult, during the day. I was already driving on my US license so this part didn't matter much to me, but for the parts where I was getting instruction and doing the test, it was that licence I was using.

Once you have the licence, you can seek out a driving instructor. There are five million of these guys. Especially in Oxford. I asked the examiner today how many people they run a day. He didn't tell me but he did say that on a busy day they run eight examiners concurrently. Each test is about 45 minutes long.

My first instructor was a guy I found online. He responded to my email. I could write an entire book on the email and retail experience in the UK. If you want to make contact with someone in a business here, call them. Email just doesn't seem to work out. But this guy, he did respond to my email so I thought, right on, I'll go to him.

Before our first meeting I did some asking around and some learning. As it happens, Ben (my son) is in the process of taking lessons as well, so he, amongst others, was able to give me the skinny on how things work.

It's all about the details. There is a wrong and right way to hold the wheel. There is a time and place for the handbrake. You should turn the wheel _this_ much. Shift now. Oh, did I tell you that you can only drive a manual transmission car if you test for a full licence? If you test in an automatic car, then you can only drive automatic cars. When you take the test you get faults for being in the wrong gear, for revving too high or too low, for not using the handbrake, for hesitating, for not using the mirrors as much or when you should.

So filled with all this alarming knowledge I meet up with my dude. He's in a little black Hyundai. No problem there. The problem is that in this car the turn signal is on the right. In my car and every other car I've ever driven it's on the left. So for our first day I kept heading around corners with the wipers on.

This guy was pretty keen on starting me from scratch. I never got comfortable. The next day I fell sick anyway, so I gave up on that guy.

The next guy was more my style. We did 3 lessons of two hours each. His initial assessment was much the same as mine: I can get around without killing people but I have habits that are not in line with the details mentioned above and I don't know much about the maneuvers that done during the test.

Those are things that test your ability to go backwards mostly: reversing behind a car (like parallel parking), 3 point turn in the road, reversing around a corner, reversing into a parking bay. There are ways these are to be done, details thereof. Such as when and where you make your observations. And don't forget that handbrake!

And then there's the show me tell me part of the test. At the start of the test you have to answer two safety questions about the car. Such as the how to check the tyre pressure or the oil. Or how to turn the rear foglights on. Or how to confirm the power steering is working. Where's the horn?

Miagra.

But is done. I'm now able to legally drive in the UK. Today was the day I took my test, today was the last day my US license could officially be used here (although as far as I know no one is checking).

Don't forget to use your handbrake.

08:07 pm - Tumbling With Tumblr.

I've started a geeky tumblelog over on tumblr.com, mostly talking about web-related stuff: http://cdent.tumblr.com/

09:31 pm - climBing

Over the weekend ben and I went climbing at a place called Portland. It's known as something of a southern sport climbing mecca. The area is a limestome lump of an island jutting out into the English Channel near Weymouth, my birthplace.

Looks like this:



The rest of the set, from Ben, should give you some sense of the place. The nearness of the sea, the height of the slope and cliffs gives an enhanced sense of exposure that makes what ought to be a really easy mantel utterly terrifying.

Ben and I had an alpine start: I got to Brightwalton a bit past ten (a bit late) and we dawdled over coffee, tea, admiring Bryony's new haircut. General laziness. We hit the road for the 2-3 hour drive. Saw a lot of traffic. Got hungry. Started climbing around 3 or so, got in three routes before the sun went away and the wind came up.

And I had a blast. It was awesome across all sorts of dimensions.

I've signed up this evening to get some individual instruction on multi-pitch double-rope English-style traditional climbing down on the north coast of Cornwall in a couple of weeks.

Current Mood: pleased

05:15 am - geeking

To distract myself from miscellaneous stresses I spent a few hours this evening working on my little project, called simper. It started out as a way to learn python and write a sort of wiki, blog, cms kind of thing that I would eventually use, while also playing with some ideas about document linking and associating.

Well, I'm learning some python, but it's in a bit of a vacuum so my python is pretty trashy. And rather than having a simple little thing with which I can blog, I now have an interesting thing to blog about but no blog software to blog it on. So I'm here.

If you are curious about such things, the big changeset from tonight has a rather long commit message that might contextualize.

My right eye is starting to flake out, so I'm done for the night.