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Robin Hood Way: Introduction

2010-08-22T20:24:16Z

Though if this blog were your guide you might conclude it's the only thing I do, I really have been walking a lot lately. When the weather co-operates, I'm often up at sick o'clock on a Sunday to trample the docile footways of Erewash, when every non-crazy person in the neighbourhood is quite rightly fast asleep. And when life permits, I like to catch a bus into the Peak District or head to the Lakes for moderate exertions followed in the evenings by fish and chips or a piping plate of pub grub. But over the last few months I've been wondering: what's a more ambitious challenge than these spontaneous three or four-hour walks? What achievement can I unlock — at low cost and without needing time off work?

How about my local 105-mile long distance footpath?

My new project: the Robin Hood Way.

The path starts at the gatehouse of Nottingham Castle and runs to the village of Edwinstowe in north Nottinghamshire. Since this is a journey of less than 20 miles by road, directness was not one of the goals of the creators of this route. Along its meandering course it takes in many of Nottinghamshire's green spaces and historic points of interest, such as Wollaton Park, the town of Southwell, Clumber Park and Sherwood Forest.

Of course I'm not walking this in one go. Instead I've devised a plan of attack involving splitting the route into legs that — crucially — all start and end at points accessible via public transport from Nottingham. On paper, this looks like a long distance footpath that's particularly suited to walking in stages with the aid of local buses. In practice? I'll find out.

The local OS Explorer maps feature the Robin Hood Way, and these will be my guide. There's a book called The Robin Hood Walks which serves as the official guide to the route, but it's apparently well overdue for an update; a revised edition is being published 'soon', but until then I'm making do without it. There will no doubt be places where I get lost, or where the 'official' route is not easy to find, but I'm not averse to taking the occasional detour. I'm approaching this walk as an opportunity to walk in interesting places, not to be fussy about seeing every yard of a path; I'm not going to intentionally deviate, but if I find I came to the right spot by the wrong path, I probably won't backtrack.

I'll be carrying a GPS and camera, and I'll make a blog post — including my GPS tracklog — for each leg, starting with leg 1 (Nottingham Castle-Trowell) which will go up sometime this week. Photos will, if I can figure out a workflow, be georeferenced and posted to Flickr. Though I'm doing this more as a personal diary than anything else, I'm going to try to make the posts as informative as possible for people who might want to try this project themselves.

Next post will be the first leg's writeup, then I promise to write something not about walking. Honestly, I'm still a big, desk-bound, lotro-playing, apple-fanboying geek. I don't know what's happened to me — must be all this fresh air and sunlight.

Weekend Walk, 16th May 2010: Two Golf Courses

2010-05-16T12:05:59Z

Sundays are for stomping across golf fairways without paying any attention to the risks.

Click here for the map

Distance: 5.36 miles
Time: 1h 38m
Weather: cloudy with sunny bits

A short circular walk today, starting from Sandiacre, past the church and over Stony Clouds, then under the M1 and across Erewash Golf Club before wandering through Stanton-by-Dale, uphill across fields to No Man's Lane, then back to the start via Maywood Golf Club, The Nook, and Stanton Road.

Notes:

Just a quick stroll around the neighbourhood.
If planners get their way a lot of this countryside will be cut up with a new major road. See greensqueeze.org.uk for details.

We
2010-05-13T19:11:58Z

Adobe have stepped up their war of words with Apple over Flash with a large ad-buy and an open letter from the big guns: the company's co-founders Chuck Geschke and John Warnock.

There's been so much written on this that a recap would fill several entries, and I'm not going to do that, but I should declare where I stand. I use Apple products and enjoy them. I use Adobe products and enjoy them. Some Apple products are better than others. Some Adobe products are better than others. And I think both companies have the right to build their products any way they like, on whatever platforms they like, incorporating whatever technology they like, and if anyone doesn't like that, they don't have to buy them.

I should also clarify that I've interpreted the content and tone of this latest campaign as being primarily about Flash support in the browser, rather than about Section 3.3.1 and compiling to iPhone binaries. The material is ambiguous enough to go either way, but because Adobe seem to have publicly drawn a line under the other issue, and don't mention anything about it here, or refute any of the arguments that have been made against it, it's my educated guess that they're now talking specifically about the Web. So that's what I'll do here too, or I'll be here all night.

Here's the ad:

"What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it, and what you experience on the Web."

Whoa there, guys! Bring that rhetoric back here.

Let's go point by point, starting with the last where their case is strongest.

"taking away your freedom to choose... what you experience on the Web."

Funny, I thought people were choosing what they experienced on the Web. (With the freedom they don't have.) It's not as though it's a well-guarded secret that the iPhone and iPad don't display Flash. (And they're hardly unique devices in that regard.) Jobs' unmistakeable lingering on a zoomed blue lego brick during the first iPad demonstration is a guarantee that some people see this not as a deficiency but as a selling point.

But maybe Adobe scores half a point here. Maybe there's an expectation among consumers that of all the many third party plugins that exist, Flash is uniquely privileged to ship as standard on devices. (I don't think it's realistic to insist that mobile browsers support the same installable plugin architecture as desktop browsers — they're right to strip that out — so it would need to ship.)

But I think the only solid cause for complaint about a browser's format support is if it doesn't have a decent implementation of web standards. If the CSS is buggy and layout is broken, then you've been given a lemon of a browser, and that's unacceptable. But if you want third party plugin support, you can't take it for granted. You're going to have to look for it. In two senses of the word, Flash isn't a standard. It's a closed, proprietary implementation. (In the letter, Warnock and Geschke state that 'anyone can make their own Flash player', but I'll let other people tackle that claim.) And it's also an extra — it's not part of the core functionality of the browser.

"your freedom to choose what you create"

What? What have creators' rights got to do with this? Nobody's stopping anybody from creating anything. I genuinely don't understand why this statement is even here or know what to make of it.

"your freedom to choose... how you create it"

And people can choose to create stuff in whatever form they like.

But they have to weigh up the pros and cons. Like some people not being able to see it as intended. This is why so many people are still designing for IE6. Certain choices exclude certain users. Nothing about this problem is new!

I could create something today in VRML if I wanted. It would be stupid, but I'm free to do it. So why is this statement phrased in terms of freedom when the issue is actually that it changes the terms of the equation? It makes Flash less of a viable proposition for web developers trying to reach the largest possible audience.

That's not diminished freedom. That's just change. The Web is a moving target. A few years ago, I thought SVG was the future of web graphics. The Adobe SVG viewer plugin hasn't been updated since 2005. I'm not annoyed, because on the Web, technologies fall out of favour, or just never make it. That's how it works. Ask RealNetworks.

Okay, maybe in a couple of years it's going to start to suck for designers whose only experience is in designing Flash sites. But whose fault is that? Believing that there's a guarantee that your marketable skill is going to be worth a damn tomorrow when your workshop is the Internet is a quixotic activity, to say the least. The Web doesn't owe you a living. Making money off it today doesn't mean it respects your business model.

Adobe are bitchy about this because it undermines a part of their business, and unlike most gradual changes in the landscape of the Web, they have an obvious target to blame. That's fine, they have the right to be pissy. But I do wish they wouldn't make out that there's a threat to anybody's 'freedom' here except their 'freedom' to push their software on everyone.

I've no doubt that Geschke and Warnock truly see Flash as the best hope for a new era of cross platform rich internet applications, or something. I don't think they're being purposefully disingenuous. But this latest salvo has an unpleasant undertone of entitlement, and they're out of touch with many people's experience of their product. Yes, there are people who love Flash. There are also a hell of a lot of people who can barely tolerate it.

We don't need to bury Flash, as it clearly still has its uses. It'll continue to drive brilliant web games for years, no doubt. But the things that it is uniquely good at will be slowly eroded by technologies like HTML5, which are friendlier, more compatible and far more weblike. If, as a result of maturing technologies, unnecessary use of Flash diminishes, how is this not a win for the web? More importantly, if Adobe can't figure out how to make it a win for them, what kind of person do they have steering the ship? Isn't this a gigantic opportunity?

I think Adobe needs to do at least some, and ideally all, of the following things:

Prove they can do a good job of a mobile implementation of Flash. From the game they talk, you'd assume their credentials on this are solid. But although they've been arguing with Apple over this for 2+ years, no mobile platform has a full Flash implementation. The one they're working on for Android 2.2 may finally be the fulfilment of this.

Stop the pissing match. Apple has every right to do what they did. If Adobe doesn't like it, then hurt them in the marketplace, not with classless and misleading attacks. It gains nothing.

Prepare for a shrinking market for Flash. The writing is on the wall in letters fifty feet high. Screaming at the tide isn't productive. Retool Flash (the creation tool) into something which also outputs rich, optimised HTML5.

Yield control of the Flash specification to a multivendor standards body on which Adobe sits in a non-privileged role. Open source the Flash player, contributing the source code to projects like Firefox and WebKit. Usher in an era of competitive innovation in Flash runtimes similar to that recently seen in JavaScript interpreters. Rebuild the reputation of Flash. Keep making money from best-in-class commercial authoring tools.

Weekend Walk, 9th May 2010

2010-05-09T16:51:09Z

Sundays are for walking until your feet hurt. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Click here for the map

Distance: 11.4 miles
Time: 3h 30m
Weather: sunny throughout with only light cloud

A walk from Sawley, down country lanes and across fields and meadows to Great Wilne and the pleasant village of Shardlow. Along the banks of the river to Trent Lock, then back to Sandiacre along the towpath of the Erewash Canal.

Notes:

Today's walk was intended to be short. Didn't turn out that way.
The challenge of the day was traversing this field of inquisitive bullocks:

Fortunately, I know kung fu.
The village of Shardlow was an important canal port during the Industrial Revolution, and much of this heritage survives today.
Long Horse Bridge, joining the paths along the Trent & Mersey Canal and the river, has been gone for a few years with no sign of a replacement, ruling out a possible shortcut.
Tons of activity at the marinas today.

It's not just me, right? If it were just the name I'd write it off as a coincidence, but the font as well?
The Erewash canal towpath is being progressively resurfaced in no apparent logical order.

Coot hatchlings!

As is probably obvious, I took the little camera out with me, so there's a gallery here with a georeferenced map view here.

A visual status report

2010-05-08T17:02:09Z

I'm not a big fan of blogging about life things. In my latest attempt to get back into a habit of updating this site, it's not a direction I want to go in. Bottom line: my life isn't very interesting compared to most. I'm an introvert who lives alone. Not exactly rich subject matter.

However. Since it's been a long time since the last substantive update, and some things have changed in my life, and I may — may — have a couple of readers who don't know this stuff, I think — just this once — it's worth putting all the personal stuff into one post. I'll try to keep the words to a minimum.

Status Report, 32nd year since birth

Since last summer I've been living in a two bedroom flat in this building:

which has a history a lot longer than mine:

I took this photo through my living room window:

It's a pretty awesome place. I found it by accident when I miskeyed the parameters to a Rightmove search. I was viewing it three hours later, and I signed the contract the next day. I think that may be the luckiest thing that's ever happened to me.

I still work full time doing things like this:

some days in the office and some days at home, but my commute to work, instead of an hour twenty of this:

is now (come rain or shine) thirty minutes of this:

I'm still with the same employer, though we've moved to new locations twice. The original premises, where I worked for three years, now look like this (thanks to Asda):

Living alone I'm learning a lot about cooking:

and I try to walk as much as I can:

but I do sit on my backside a lot too and play games:

and do crosswords, and watch movies, and surf the web.

I'm on here:

where I try to post stuff like this:

and I'm on here:

where I try to post stuff like this:

and, as I mentioned, I plan to post more on here again:

but if you look for me on here:

you'll be unsuccessful.

So, yeah. Life's pretty good, all in all. I'm not sure why I thought you would want to know all this, but there it is; now let us not speak of this again.

Weekend Walk, 3rd May 2010

2010-05-03T09:25:28Z

Okay, let's try something different. (And yes, I'm aware that after a year of no posts, any content is 'different'.)

I like walks. Here's one I did this morning.

Click here for the map

Distance: 9.4 miles
Time: 2h 39m
Weather: started clear and sunny, but clouded over with cold wind picking up

A circular walk from Sandiacre, starting down the canal to Sandiacre Lock, then southwest and west along the line of the former Derby canal past Breaston and Draycott. Heading northwest across fields, leaving the canal behind, almost to the village of Ockbrook but then doubling back east for a circuitous farmland route to Risley via Hopwell Hall. Back to Sandiacre along the road.

Notes:

Derby Canal was closed in the 1960s and along most of the section I walked, there's little obvious indication it was ever there.
Rabbits everywhere between Draycott Fields Farm and Ockbrook.
Hopwell Hall is a huge private residence that used to be (and maybe still is) owned by the co-founder of Coldseal.
Risley Coppice (private, but skirted by the footpath) was covered in a dense carpet of bluebells, apparently from edge to edge. One of the best displays I've seen.
There are at least two geocaches on (or very close to) this route, but I saved them for another day.

Found in a secondhand bookshop in an alternate universe

2009-06-18T20:00:42Z

Gone

2009-01-20T20:15:29Z

Hope

2009-01-20T06:38:38Z

I watch reality TV, and so should you

2009-01-18T20:56:13Z

After I wrote about reality TV that doesn't suck a couple of weeks ago, The Poisoned Sponge correctly identified the subject of the next post. For this, he wins a 48 hour extension to his normal lifespan, which has been automatically credited.

The Amazing Race is a reality gameshow that truly, honestly, doesn't suck. Though it'd been running for 12 seasons when I discovered it late last year, I'd never seen it and only peripherally heard of it, because when it airs in the UK at all, it's buried in the schedules at early hours and on channels I don't pay much attention to. And if you've missed it too, you should get right on the task of watching this excellent show. (Oops! How did that link get in there?)

The premise is simple -- a race around the world for $1m -- but the exact formula is cleverly constructed to make for very compelling television.

First and foremost, the race is between a set of two-person teams, and each team has an existing relationship. This makes for a huge amount of diversity in the contestants -- divorcees, a parent and child, gay partners, work colleagues, best friends, grandparents... all competing against each other. Much of the draw of the series is about how these teams react under pressure, with some working closely and with no interpersonal tension, and others bickering and falling apart through the race. A surprising amount of the show's drama comes not from the artificial hurdles of the race itself but from human relationships becoming dysfunctional under pressure.

Not that the hurdles are bad. Teams encounter various staged challenges between race checkpoints, to be completed by one or both team members before they can receive the next clue. These challenges range from the time consuming, like rounding up sheep or rigging a sailboat, to the phobia-inducing, like hang-gliding or bungee jumping. Some of these challenges are breathtaking, others are funny, and others fill time, but they're not presented in a stagey enough way to detract from the human angle, and in those cases where the contestant is required to face his or her fears, they can really contribute to the narrative the show builds.

The teams follow clues between elimination points, and as well as the planes that take them from country to country and continent to continent, transportation is a mixture of self-drive vehicles provided by the producers, and public transport. It's important to emphasise how much freedom the teams have in many of the legs of the race -- they hop in random cabs, create their own travel itineraries, and often take considerably different routes to their destinations, each team with their own camera guy in constant tow. Though things like the challenges obviously need to be planned in advance, many sections of the show are not set up at all, and it's quite common for a team to make a navigational mistake and get themselves and their (mute) cameraman lost or into some unfortunate trouble. When I was a kid I loved shows like Treasure Hunt and Interceptor, but those were carefully staged, with everything happening to a plan which was not permitted to vary much, even if the contestants or Anneka Rice weren't privy to the details beforehand. Not so in The Amazing Race: teams have a degree of freedom which, while not total (teams may be told they can only fly on certain airlines, for instance) is unlike anything else on TV.

If you dislike fast-paced editing, you're going to have a problem with this show. The average shot length must be about 5 seconds. But (with the disclaimer that I like fast-paced editing) it's very deftly done and not gratuitous. The point of view switches between teams constantly, but somehow, it's still easy to get a feel for the personalties of the players. But as well as speed and tension, the editing is done with a great deal of wit and humour. Source footage which surely amounted to many tens of hours per episode is condensed into tight, satisfying narrative, and ironic cuts abound. I think it's probably the best edited show on television. Each episode must take an age.

There's a lot of Amazing Race out there (13 seasons of the original American version, and three seasons AXN produced for syndication across Asia which are just as good, and much more diverse in contestant nationalities) but I recommend you start at the very beginning (this is the very beginning). The first season of the US show mastered the form from the get-go: diverse locations and challenges, teams you end up loving, teams you end up hating, great strategic play and epic game-ending blunders, teams bonding and teams disintegrating, tension, pathos, schadenfreude, and an ending which could not have been more of a dramatic and satisfying twist had it been scripted.

Reality TV that doesn't suck

2009-01-04T22:06:21Z

For many years I lived with the misconception that all reality competition shows were completely unwatchable. Not a particularly crippling mistake to make, as these things go, but still a little embarrassing. The truth, I've come to discover, is a little more complex.

You see, where I had thought there was only one, there are actually two mostly distinct classes of reality gameshow.

The first type of reality gameshow is at least partially determined by public vote. This being the case, the progression of the show needs to closely follow the real time unfolding of the events in the contest. These shows usually go out live or aired with a short delay, though they also feature segments on tape that have been edited together before broadcast. The turnaround of the whole show, however, is necessarily rapid, so the videotaped footage is hastily assembled in an edit suite sometimes mere hours before the show is broadcast. Examples of these shows are Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity..., The X Factor, etc.

Reality shows of this class should never be watched on any grounds, up to and including winning one. They are typically hastily-produced exercises in profit-making involving premium rate phone lines and, at any rate, the public vote renders them simple popularity contests rather than competitions based on strategy, skill, or even play. They have as much merit as the viewing public has taste.

The second type of reality gameshow is filmed in its entirety months before broadcast (sometimes on videotape, sometimes on film), and the competition's outcome is dictated by the contestants and the standard of their play strategy rather than by pandering to public opinion. The extended turnaround between filming and broadcast affords the opportunity for the producers to spend much more time in the editing room, creating coherent narratives, through-lines, emotional beats and amusingly ironic edits from hundreds of hours of source footage in post-production, creating a 'heightened reality' which plays out much more dramatically. (All reality shows manipulate events through editing, of course; I'm just saying some shows do it well.)

Though you may assume the second class of reality show is an evolution of the first, the mother of the reality TV show boom -- Survivor -- is shot months in advance, skilfully and cleverly edited, and the outcome is decided entirely by the contestants. So the first and now most common reality show type is actually a regression from the original -- a way producers invented to get the same kind of buzz of a successful show like Survivor for a much lower budget, in a way that produces additional income, and with the publicity benefit of being able to plant ostensibly legitimate stories about the show in the media as the competition unfolds on TV screens in near-realtime.

I'll have to complete this train of thought in another entry, where I'll tell you about the best reality gameshow (it's not Survivor), and try to make you feel bad about not watching it.

The DroboPlex

2008-12-25T11:23:51Z

When I'm Xmas shopping for others I confess that I usually can't resist treating myself to some nice gadget as well, to give me something to play with over the holidays.¹ Last year it was an Xbox 360, the year before that it was a digital SLR camera. This year, I bought myself a Drobo.

Drobo is an external storage device that connects to a PC or Mac by USB or Firewire. Inside it, there are slots for up to 4 drives -- standard, commodity SATA drives that are really cheap these days, even in crazy sizes like 1TB. Inserting a drive into one of these slots is about as easy and quick a process as inserting a 3.5" disk (remember those?) into a floppy drive.

The Drobo does its thing with two to four of these drive slots filled, and appears to the machine it's plugged into as a single drive. It always ensures that data is stored redundantly across the drives, so that any single drive failure will result in no loss of data.

So far, so RAID, but it gets better. Unlike a RAID, Drobo will use free space intelligently across drives even if they differ in size. And unlike most RAIDs, every disk swap operation can be done on the fly. This means if I have a Drobo with two drives inside, and I start running out of space, I can buy another drive and just... slot it in. Without turning anything off. Without losing access to data. It's completely transparent, except the lights on the front will flash for a bit to indicate that it's reorganising my data across the third drive. And then, if I look at my computer, my external drive will magically have more space on it.

If all four slots are full and I still run out of space, I just pull a small drive out of the enclosure (again, while it's running, and regardless of what it's doing) and replace it with a larger one. Again, it'll do the blinky light rebuild thing, and I'll have free space again. The same procedure if a drive fails.

Andy Ihnatko, tech journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times, explains this as the Drobo using cartoon physics. I think it's a confirmation of Clarke's law that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'. Check out the 4.5-minute demo video to see how impressive this thing is.

This is an incredibly practical and consumer-friendly device. It doesn't need drivers and there's almost no technical knowledge required to use one -- it's got to be the easiest and friendliest approach to ensuring data redundancy I've ever seen. They are expensive, but I think it's worth it for the peace of mind alone.

Cool though this device is, though, it's functionally just a big external hard drive. But I've been playing with something else to get the best possible use out of my newly acquired storage space.

Plex is a Mac OS X port of the popular and highly polished XBMC Media Center software originally developed to run on modded Xboxes (but which now also runs on PCs). At its root, it's just an interface for audio and video playing, but it runs rings around both Windows Media Center and Apple's Front Row, both in terms of features and presentation.

Out of the box, Plex supports the Apple remote that comes with all Macs, so after setting up a single movie directory, it's already a very practical remote-controlled media centre. But the feature set and level of polish distinguish it from its commercial competition.

Unlike Front Row, it throws any format you care to throw at it without hesitating -- .vob, .wmv, .mkv, even .flv, so no pain-in-the-arse transcoding is required. It'll play from a local drive, from optical media, or stream over SMB shares.

The interface is straightforward, easily navigable, and beautifully designed. It integrates with things like the IMDB and thetvdb.com to fetch metadata for films and TV shows and integrate beautiful poster and menu art into the interface with minimal user intervention.

It really is a lovely piece of software. And it's free. Non-Mac users can get the original XBMC software instead -- which shares the interface and most of the features -- from xbmc.org.

This is all really just prologue to saying that as a holiday project I've been ripping my DVD collection to the Drobo to fill out a Plex-based media centre. At the moment, the media centre is my computer, but at some point in the future I'd like to have a dedicated box attached to a TV that would do all of this. Unfortunately the old Mac Mini I have sitting around isn't suitable for this, as it's a G4, and Plex appears to support Intel only. I already have a softmodded Xbox which is pretty good for this, but it doesn't have the CPU power to decode HD content in realtime.

I can't think of better tools to build and back a media centre machine than Plex and Drobo and I recommend them both very highly.

¹ That probably sounds like shameless consumerism, but I don't make a regular habit of it, rarely make frivolous purchases, and technology is pretty much my one and only indulgence. That's not to say that I don't feel guilty about spending money on things, as this illogically-defensive-in-retrospect footnote probably proves. You know, let's just pretend I didn't say anything.

The worst thing about San Francisco

2008-11-16T08:26:27Z

Yes, I owe you some longer blog posts. No, this is not one of them, but I need to get it out of my head. I warn you that this entry contains aesthetically offensive imagery and is not for the design-sensitive.

Muni is the public transport agency for the city of San Francisco, one of the most visually appealing and photogenic cities on the planet.

Muni's logo, as branded on most city buses, trolley buses, and trains, and which you consequently see about every five minutes in the city, is this:

Aaagh, my eyes!

So, if you go to San Francisco, be warned: it's a city that covers random surfaces with the design equivalent of goatse.

Some people should not be let near canyons

2008-11-08T20:35:20Z

Picture the scene: near the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I am walking along the road back to our lodge about 20 minutes after watching a beautiful sunset. Two girls in their twenties are walking the other way. It is — this is important — almost dark. As we're passing, one of the girls asks me a question.

Girl, in strong Southern accent: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: (speechless for several seconds) ...What?
Girl, with identical intonation: Did we miss the sunset?
Me: Err... yes, the sun set about fifteen, twenty minutes ago.
Girl, loudly: Darn!
Me: ...Sorry.

I don't know which is more disappointing: that I couldn't think of a spontaneously funny response (like “yes, but if you go west really quickly, you can probably still catch it”, which came to me ten minutes later in true Treppenwitz style), or that this person will probably breed.

Technorati Tags: funny, holiday, stories

New experiences

2008-11-03T22:54:37Z

In America, I:

Upgraded to First Class on a Virgin America flight and, for probably the only time, was in the first group of people on and off the plane.
Ate Japanese food in the Sierra Nevada.
With the rest of the audience, played like a kid with several kilometers of paper in the Blue Man Group show at the Venetian.
Got up at 3am to get a bus to get a plane to get a coach. Ugh.
Flew on a DHC-6 Twin Otter over the Grand Canyon as the sun rose over it.
Stayed in a huge black glass pyramid with a balcony outside the door that looked out onto the world's largest atrium.
Picked up John Hodgman's new book, three days ahead of the publication date.
Shook the hand of Penn Jillette.
Ate antelope.
Climbed Sentinel Dome and experienced one of the most awesome, panoramic views I've ever seen.
Drank my first pumpkin milkshake, which is only available at one place I know about, and then only seasonally. With extreme irritation, I discovered that it was by far the nicest milkshake I have ever tasted.
Flew back over the Atlantic at the time the British clocks were put back, saving 12.5% of the jet lag. Unplanned, but quite a good idea in retrospect.

Photos are going up at roughly the rate of one a day on Flickr, and further reflections on the holiday to follow here.

Next: ten reasons why you should fly Virgin America at absolutely any opportunity.