Trip to the UK and Ireland

We went to the UK and Ireland with my parents this September. We started and ended in London and took in Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England. It was a good trip and we saw a lot of the countries. We also had excellent weather: We had a couple foggy days and got rained on once. But that is great for the UK in September.

We took a tour instead of traveling on our own. I’ll have another post about that. There is also a full gallery of the pictures that I took and a map of our travel path.

Our tour started in London. London was probably my favorite city because it has an impressive density of attractions and sites and is easy to get around. You can see Westminster Abbey, Westminster palace, Big Ben and the London Eye from one spot.

 

If you walk for five minutes you pass 10 Downing street, the Horse Guards, several war memorials and arrive at Trafalgar square. The National Gallery is right there, and you are another five minutes from Buckingham Palace and the Royal Society or the British museum. Plus, there are lots of old buildings and historical markers.

Our tour included a driving tour of the city and the tour guide could barley keep up describing the sites that we passed on the bus. On this tour we got to see some of the more famous modern buildings, the Tower of London, and the Tower bridge.

The museums have some impressive artifacts. We especially liked the Rosetta stone and the clock display in the British museum and both Leonardo da Vince’s notebook and Mozart’s ‘Summary of works’ in the British Library. The British Museum as a huge collection of artifacts from other countries. It is really amazing the amount of stuff they took and haven’t given back.

 

The single site that I was most eager to see was Stonehenge, and I was not disappointed. In fact it was a bit cooler than I anticipated. They have made changes to the site within the past year to move the parking away from the site and make it more peaceful. Between that and the large radius ring that people are allowed into, you could get away from the crowds and noise and enjoy the site.

 

At Bath we saw the reconstructed Roman baths. The neatest thing here were the “curses”. If you were robbed or wronged by someone (especially if you didn’t know who did it), you could write your complaint on a lead sheet and throw it into the water to ask the gods to punish them.

In Cardiff, we took a tour of Cardiff castle. We ended up touring the portion that were renovated in the early 1800s by the local coal baron. The baron (John Stewart) had good taste, the decorations were lavish and everything was still in good shape. Some highlights were the children’s room with fairy tales painted on the walls, the smoking room with game tables, and the dining room where the table was setup to allow live grape vines to be brought in so that diners could have fresh grapes off the vine for dessert.

 

We spent a few days in Ireland before we arrived in Dublin, mostly looking at scenery. We had a nice history tour in Waterford, drove around the Ring of Kerry, took a cruise on the Beara peninsula, and kissed the Blarney stone. The highlight of this period was visiting a demonstration farm where they showed life for an Irish farmer before the potato famine. We got to see peat, their poitin still, and the houses. We ate a traditional meal of lamb stew and brown bread and tried Poitín.

 

In Dublin we saw the Guinness brewery with the tour (very overcrowded) and happened into an Octoberfest. We saw Trinity college with the Book of Kels and the long room that was used for some library scenes in Harry Potter. We went to Kilmainham Gaol and the Little Museum of Dublin where we learned a bunch of Ireland’s history. There was a great quote at the prison: “If the prison does not underbid the slum in human misery, the slum will empty and the prison will fill.” We did a couple of geo-caches and I went to a “Musical Pub Crawl” which was a mix of music and Irish musical history lesson.

Back in England we went to Liverpool. The tour took us to a bunch of Beatles stuff, but there were also a lot of cool buildings. The best was the modern (1970s) Gothic style Anglican cathedral made of red sandstone.

It took a full day of travel to get up to Edinburgh in Scotland. On the way we took a nice boat ride on Windermere lake. In Edinburgh was toured the castle, walked up Scott Monument for views of the city, and toured the Royal Yacht Britannia. The Yacht was used by the Queen for vacations and had a cool room of gifts the Queen received on her travels. It was also interesting to see the vast differences in the bedrooms of the Queen, officers and crewmen.

In Edinburgh we had our most interesting meal of the trip at “Amber” by the castle. They had an extensive (350) Scottish whiskey selection and we both tried one. We learned that the smokey Scottish whiskey gets the smokey flavor from using peat to heat the mash. We also tried Haggis; it could be mistaken for ground beef or mild ground lamb. For dessert we had a whiskey whipped cream with raspberry.

On the way back south to London we stopped at York and saw a chunk of Hadrian’s wall. The part that we saw was small, but it was still neat to see something nearly 2000 years old. At York we toured the old town and saw the impressive cathedral. The next day we stopped at Stratford-upon-Avon to see Shakespeare’s birthplace and Warwick castle. At the castle we saw them fire the world’s largest trebuchet. The last stop before London was in Oxford. We saw the deposit library on campus, the Bodleian, and toured one of the colleges (Brasnose).

 

Back in London we took in the London Eye, Tate Modern, the Victoria and Albert museum and the Natural History museum. The Tate has a lot of art that we liked and the Natural History museum is housed in an impressive building with a cool main hall. We also walked around Hyde park and checked out Harrod’s department store.

 

On our last day in London we went out to the Greenwich Observatory where the prime meridian is located. We toured the museum there and saw the telescopes used to make transit observations. We stood with one foot in each hemisphere and found the spot about 100 meters away where GPS registers zero. They are off because GPS uses an oblate earth model, so the only place where the GPS meridian and the original meridian line up are at the equator and poles.

We traveled back to the Tower of London on a Thames river boat and walked around the tower. They are doing a WW I commemoration right now where the Tower moat is filled with one red poppy for each service member who died in the war.

Conclave of Gamers

We attended the Conclave of Gamers convention in Denver this past weekend. We brought our touch table and were joined by our friend Doug from TouchTableGames.com who brought his newly built touch table. We ran all the games on both tables and had a lot of fun. We got to play all of our games including Power Grid, Fire Platoon and several rounds of Hansa Teutonica.

While this convention was considerably smaller than PAX or GenCon, it was also a lot more relaxed and the attendees were willing to spend more time at our tables. We got to meet with a couple local game developers who may be interested in having Dark Infinity write a touch table version of their games.

Conclave of Gamers

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The convention was held at a hotel just a few miles from our house, so we were able to take both tables over in our car. Setup and tear down was very quick. Overall it was a great convention and we are looking forward to doing it again next year.

Contracting Job at Mercury

In February I was contacted by Mercury, a company that I worked for five years ago, about helping them with a project. The contract would last three months and offered good pay. They caught me at a good time and I agreed to take the job, starting right after we got back from PAX East.

Beyond saying that it was not a government contract and involved writing a distributed message processing system in Java, I don’t really have anything interesting to say about the job itself. It was better than many jobs that I have had (except for the commute).

I was surprised by how easily I switched back into the work routine. It made me notice some of the things that are “hard” about being retired. Not that I am complaining about being retired – it is truly a luxury. Continue reading “Contracting Job at Mercury”

Violin Recital 3

Last night I had my third violin recital. We hosted the recital at our house, and Bill and I played the sonata in F for violin and piano by Mozart. We had both practiced the song for many hours, but we were still nervous when it was our turn to play. The recital went well enough, but I wish I could play in front of people as well as I do alone.

It was also fun to see all the students again and to see their progress since the last recital.

Continue reading “Violin Recital 3”

Take back the data – Part 5

I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. Part 1 listed all the cloud services that I use. Part 2 described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. Part 3 covered the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail. Part 4 covered SSL, setting up my own email server, and the backup system.

This conversion has been an interesting experience: I have learned a lot of details about web servers and Linux that I only knew in abstract; I knew that there was a lot of good opensource software out there, but this project has really brought home how much is out there and how good some of it is; I have been reminded how desktop applications can be so much better than web applications, and of how polished and easy to use modern web applications are.

I love having a local website that is reachable from the internet. My DSL upload rate is pretty slow, so the difference between dropping some files on a local network drive and uploading them is huge. I am looking forward to moving my main website to my local web server. (We will have to improve our upload speeds to support chadweisshar.com and wsims.com)

I am enjoying having ownership of all of my data, but I am also feeling the burden of being responsible for keeping the data safe and the server running.

In the rest of this post, I will describe how I am using the web server and OwnCloud installation to replace all my remaining cloud services.

Continue reading “Take back the data – Part 5”

Take back the data – Part 4

I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. Part 1 listed all the cloud services that I use. Part 2 described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. Part 3 covered the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail.

In this post I’ll describe securing my web server with SSL, setting up my own email server, and the backup system.

Continue reading “Take back the data – Part 4”

Take back the data – part 3

I have decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. In Take back the data – Part 1, I listed all the services that I use. In Take back the data – Part 2, I described how I plan to replace my cloud services with my own web server. In this post I’ll describe the process of setting up the web server hardware and software in more detail.

Continue reading “Take back the data – part 3”

Trip to New York

We took a trip to New York City to visit my brother and his new baby. We had a great time seeing them and touring the city. They have a nice apartment in Astoria and they were kind enough to let us stay with them for the week.

In addition to meeting my new niece, we also took the opportunity to get legally married. Colorado has separate-but-equal civil unions, but with DOMA struck down, we needed to get married in a state where it is truly legal for the federal government to treat us as married.

We also wanted to go to New York to visit a haunted house called Blackout. Unlike most haunted houses, at Blackout you go through the experience alone, the actors can touch you, you have to sign a waiver, and there is even a safe word. They call themselves a “haunted experience” and I wasn’t really as scared as I was disturbed.

I’ve posted pictures of our sight-seeing here: Gallery.

Continue reading “Trip to New York”

Take back the data – Part 2

I’ve decided to stop using cloud services and move all my data back to my own computers. In Take back the data – Part 1, I listed all the services that I use. The next step is to figure out how to replace them and move my data back. To replace the services that the cloud provides, I need to:

  1. Store my data locally
  2. Backup my data (ideally an offsite backup)
  3. Provide remote access to my data

The first part is easy. The second two are much harder because of how home internet service works.

Internet providers use dynamic IP addresses. Each customer gets a new address every few days/weeks. This is like having a phone but getting a new phone number every week. You could make phone calls to other people, but couldn’t really receive phone calls back because no one knows your number. With dynamic IP addresses, you can talk to other computers, but you have to start the conversation. The consequence of this arrangement is that you can’t really run a website from your home computer.

Broadband companies will sell you a static IP (like a permanent phone number) for a small monthly fee, but since very few people have a static IP addresses, software companies haven’t been motivated to make it easy to setup a home website. So, for most people, if you want to share photos or start a blog, you have to involve a third party like wordpress.com or facebook.

This is really too bad. The promise of the internet was that anyone could publish content that could be seen by anyone else. Now we have a few large companies that are in the business of publishing other people’s content and making money off it. Just like record companies and book publishers before them, many internet companies (Facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, etc) make money by publishing the content created by other people.

But it didn’t need to be that way. There was really no reason that we couldn’t each have our own IP address and our own personal website. Windows could have made it easy to publish your own content to your own site. Finding and connecting to other people could have been as easy as looking up or sharing a phone number. But that isn’t how things turned out, and now it is quite a bit of hassle to setup your own website. I’ll have another post with a lot more detail about hardware and software setup, but here is the quick summary:

  1. Buy a static IP. We have DSL from CenturyLink and they charge $5 per month to have a static IP.
  2. Register your domain name and point it to that IP address. That costs about $10/year.
  3. Setup a machine as the web-server. This machine should be left on all the time. Most any computer will do for a personal website.
  4. Install apache or some other web server software on the machine.
  5. Keep the OS and web server software up to date, do regular backups, make sure the machine stays on and working.

Once you have a website, it is possible to replicate most of the services that are provided by the cloud. I am going to use software called OwnCloud. OwnCloud is a webapp (a program that runs on a web server) that provides a way to store files, contacts, pictures, music and calendars on your website and share them with just the people you want to share them with. Since OwnCloud is running on my own web server, no third party has access to my data.

Continue reading “Take back the data – Part 2”

Take back the data – Part 1

The recent closures of Google Reader and Catch have reminded me of the quote: “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Free services aren’t really free, we are just paying for them with our data instead of our money. If the “free” service can’t find a way to make money with our data, they turn into a pay service or disappear.

I was fortunate that both Google Reader and Catch allowed me to download my feeds and notes before they closed. I just had to spend the time to find replacements and transfer my data. Between these two closures and the revelations that world’s spy agencies are working really hard to monitor and record my data, I have decided that I would like to take back ownership of my data. Continue reading “Take back the data – Part 1”