Life Outside PLT1

USA Trip Photos

Alright.

It’s finally done, resized from 10Mpix and filtered through a python script to generate the html, here are the long awaited photos from my recent trip to the USA (minus a few, 266
seemed a bit many).

Thank-you to whoever fixed up the layout problems.

View from Auckland Airport Terminal

GOODYEAR BLIMP! (it was anchored next to the freeway)

Shots of the place we were staying in Newport Beach

View from our friends’ place in Virginia (~20kms outside of Charlottesville) and a zoom shot of the white building visible in the distance (Apparently it’s a winery).

View from the Richmond Visitor Center car park

Bust of Thomas Jefferson

Monticello (Thomas Jefferson’s House) and views of and from Monticello

Thomas Jefferson’s Grave

Civil War Museum (Confederate Flag and Sea Mine)

Squirrels! (Outside the State Capitol Building in Richmond).

Random shot of Downtown Richmond.

US Marshals entrance to the Richmond Supreme Court

Old Canals near the Richmond waterfront.

Staged Indian settlement at Jamestown.

Rebuilt old Jamestown Fort.

Traditionally constructed (unfinished) Native American Canoe

Jamestown harbor.

Colonial Williamsburg (outdoor living history museum).

Civil War Cemetery.

Sculpture outside National Civil War Museum (Closed for the Winter, but we turned up anyway, that’s how awesome it wasn’t).

View From Hoboken Light rail station across to NY (Morning, taken around 9am local time).

Times Square (The Recruiting Office right in the middle of it and some of the weirder Bilboards around it).

Offices of the Wall Street Journal.

Random Fountain.

Central Park (view onto the south end).

Japanese Katana in Museum.

Field Armour of Henry VIII.

“Hoboken” (view from light rail train)

New York Stock Exchange entrance and adjacent building.

Some Statue.

Deus Ex Section (Battery Park, Castle Clinton, Night View of NY).

Capitol Building.

View from capitol building towards Lincoln Memorial.

White House.

Lincoln Memorial.

No Idea.

View towards Lincoln Memorial from stairs in previous picture.

Korean War Memorial.

Smithsonian Natural History Museum.

Lincoln Memorial in the evening.

View from top of Lincoln Memorial.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Various Photos in and around Death Valley.

Hoover Dam.

There, done, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW MULDER?

Welcome to Washington DC: It smells of jet fuel here

(Scroll down for tldr, pictures to follow when I feel like it)

Ok, so it’s probably not the most accurate description of the capital city, but given that I’m passing through here with roughly 12 hours of sleep for the past 96 hours, it’s the most cogent description I am likely to provide.

The trip over was marked by conversation with the cute girl from the windy city sitting next to me (I neglected to get pics, my apologies) and Air NZ’s new in-flight entertainment system. While I was impressed with the content (Numerous recent release movies, a collection of TV series episodes and many albums worth of music), I wasn’t impressed with the controller/remote. Sluggish and unresponsive (button presses would go unrecognised, control lag ranged from nothing to 5 seconds or more and the prevalence of sub-menus made navigation and selection a somewhat arduous task if the controller decided to play-up (read: All the time).

Fast forward several movies (Stardust, The Simpsons), an hour playing Shining Force 2 and watching the CSI episodes encoded on my PSP and I was in Las Angeles. Collecting bags and incorrectly filling out both of the necessary arrival forms proved no real obstacle to my ultimate objective: Finding my parents so I could resume leaching food and other essential resources (Internet, Jokes about receding hair lines, transport, etc) off them. Five seconds after stepping out of the Terminal I get ambushed by a well dressed African American attempting to garner donations for “The Homeless”. Being a long-time pessimist about the trustworthiness of people who loiter around terminals soliciting tourists, I told him the truth, “I don’t have any American money”, this obviously wasn’t good enough “We accept foreign currency too”, I was ready for this, “I dumped my foreign cash before I came here because I knew I wouldn’t be able to spend it”. I walked away victorious, but feeling a little bit down about the whole thing, ’cause hey, y’know, “The Homeless”.

Having duly txted my parents “Outside now” and received a coherent response (at least something that counted as coherent from Mum using predictive txting) “Fiue+Mins”… Twenty minutes later they roll up in the rental car, they’d been “at burger king” (this is odd given Dad’s avowed dislike of fast food chains). What follows next can only be described as a two hour drive along the freeway to Marriott Newport Beach (We saw the Goodyear Blimp ^_^).

Upon reaching the Marriott (which we scored via a Timeshare exchange), I realise that I should’ve gone to LA with my family a week ago. Free internet, 3 TV’s (with many many channels), ocean views, multiple bathrooms, full kitchen. I could’ve done what I did at home for the past 6 days (Watching TV, playing WoW, randomly baking biscuits, inciting bizarre two-way exchanges of insanity over MSN), I’d been foiled once again by relying on my keen sense of lethargy rather than objective planning (does anyone even do that anymore? I’m beginning to suspect that no one ever has or will).

A short time afterwards, I am comfortably perched in the couch watching CNN when my parents announce their intention to head to a nearby shopping mall (they somehow managed to talk $150 worth of shopping vouchers out of the resort, I decided not to ask exactly how they did this).

The next day was entirely comprised of: Not sleeping (had to get up at 5:30 to catch our connecting flight to Washington DC), waiting for delayed flights (snowstorm in Chicago) and giving up on driving to our friends’ place in Charlottesville due to the fact that it was already 11pm and we still hadn’t managed to pick up our rental car. Crashing out at Best Western in Leesburg (and taking full advantage of the complimentary breakfast buffet) I managed slightly under 6 hours of sleep (2am-8am).

The next morning was spent driving and now we’re in Charlottesville. My internal clock is completely shot, I keep asking what time it is because I honestly don’t know if I can trust the time given to me by my cellphone/iPod/Laptop because they’re all had their times changed repeatedly to try and keep up with time-zones. After much comparison I now believe that it is 20:46 on Sunday the 2nd of December. This may all be part of a vast and Byzantine conspiracy to make me kill the president (or steal his waffles, or something), my brain is too addled to be able to tell.

tldr - I’m in the USA, I’m tired, Washington smells like jet fuel. Now in Charlottesville, still tired.

Untitled Post

It’s times like these, drunk at 4am and unable to sleep due to the fact that I’ve just downed 2 cans of red bull, that I like to sit back and ponder the framework of things that are. I’m sitting in the dark, pounding on a keyboard like some Shakespearean monkey (of Hamlet fame), the soft glow of the screen providing just enough ambient light for me to type by. I consider the nature of society and how human failings are (at least in theory) compensated by being part of a greater whole. The question I now pose is; given an infinite number of humans (provided we don’t wipe ourselves out, re: nuclear/chemical/biological warfare, or nature wiping us out re:SARS, Superbugs, influenza), ultimately, is the direction that our society is headed in pre-determined by the nature of our communal existence, or is human group behaviour sufficiently random that our future cannot be predicted. This brings us to the classic Sci-Fi of Asimov in the Foundation series, where it is imagined that human behaviour in large enough groups is, while not completely deterministic, predictable to a large enough degree (and error is not compounded by recursive calculation in a manner that would reduce the the reliable timeframe to a useless length) that humanity can be steered around rough patches and (hopefully) avoid tearing ourselves apart.

The trouble with predicting the motions of large groups (assuming that soceity is predictable in a manner similar to the one outlined above) is that it falls down in the face of individuals that exist are more than a mere dimple on a population chart. People who live in society, but do not behave the same way as the rest of it, propagating ripples throughout our neatly arrayed functions and variables.

The trouble is, that given the question “Can’t we all just get along?” the answer is so often a resounding “No” when queried against the prevailing nature of the society the question is posed to (vis a vi, the middle east conflict).

Are we all horrible, selfish people who can’t see far enough past the end of our own limited existences to see the bigger picture? Has our society shaped us in a way that our children and our children’s children are not going to amount to anything more than we have? That they’ll continue the same petty grievances against groups of people they don’t know?

What do you want from life?

What do you want the next generation to get from life?

If you’re looking for some kind of clever argument, some final point that I’m building towards, I assure you I don’t have one. I’m just some drunk lunatic with a keyboard and a propensity to embarrass myself when I think too hard.

Ignorance and complacency will be the death of us.

(Also, your giraffe is on fire)

Sober Addendum: I’m not sure exactly wtf I was thinking, regardless here it is, make what you will of it.

From Dunedin

I’m not dead, I have food and I have internet.View from the side verranda.

My room as it currently stands (and, more notably evidence of my cooking skills).

PLT1 Thinks that Windows Vista Sucks

Here’s why

Most Notable Quote (referencing the Vista protected content paths designed to prevent copying of Hi-Def protected multi-media):

Note D: If I do ever want to play back premium content, I’ll wait a few years
and then buy a $50 Chinese-made set-top player to do it, not a $1000 Windows
PC. It’s somewhat bizarre that I have to go to Communist China in order to
find vendors who actually understand the consumer’s needs.

The author raises many good points, Vista is NOT a significant improvement over Windows XP in terms of functionality, the user interface has been improved, but not so far that you couldn’t obtain the same under XP using freeware additions (ala Google Desktop). Vista is about losing control of your system, where Microsoft and large media companies decide what you can and cannot do with your hardware.

I’m not upgrading now and I may not ever end up doing so.

As an aside:

You Fail! (at life)

It’s childish, but oh so appropriate. I move that we petition Wizards to add this to 10th.

…

Windows doesn’t surprise me anymore, even when it does this kind of thing.

Oh, and I found the official North Korean English news site:
The news, but not as you know it

The $20 Computer Project Update:

The keyboard port doesn’t work, even after prying the cover apart I couldn’t find any reason for them not to work. So I borrowed Sean’s USB keyboard (which lacked Page Up, Page Down and numpad + and -, preventing me from changing any BIOS settings) and after all that, Ubuntu doesn’t want to install.

The install file md5’s check out ok, the process always crashes at debootstrap regardless. The Gnoppix Live CD boots ok, so I’m hoping it isn’t defective hardware.

And here’s a pic of what the (still non-functioning) PS2 ports look like after application of tin snips, pliers and a flat head screwdriver.

OMGWTFBBQ pizza!

Yes, I have pizza.

Besides that I also have 2×512Mb sticks of OCZ Gold VX ram (note the two gold objects alongside the CPU).

This means (among other things) that I now own gold plated ram.

What the hell?

It’s official, we are all incapable of walking alongside heavy traffic without police supervision

My bus broke down.

No, it wasn’t my fault. Just after Otahuhu the driver pulled over and stopped (some weird alarm thing went off, very annoying sound). We then proceeded to wait while 5 buses (including several expresses) passed us. Several of the other buses stopped and offered to take us the rest of the way into town. Apparently Stagecoach (or OSH, or the LTSA) have a policy that disallows bus passengers walking 10 metres in a straight line and boarding another bus parked directly in front of the broken bus when said changeover must occur on a motorway. We had to wait 20 minutes for the cops (actually just one cop) and a replacement bus. Overall it was an interesting experience (being tied down due to bureaucratic pragmatism), although I’m not sure exactly what the police escort added to the occaision, when we did get to switch buses he just stood in one place and stared at the Tow truck, not even warning us about the dangers of placing ourselves in front of motorway traffic, which I had assumed was his job under such circumstances. Why else would they have made us spend 20 minutes watching express buses pass us while waiting for the police?