Category: Family

Today I took delivery of an Otterbox iPad Defender case, and I bought a new iPad (64GB, Wifi + 3G). (But not from Amazon.) I’m busy restoring the backed-up data from my old 32GB iPad onto the new one, and at the same time I’m resetting the old one to virgin status.
All of this is in aid of a cunning plan, with a fiendish side benefit. The main plan is to transform my original iPad into an Augmentative Communications Solution for my lovely grandson Tommy, who has autism and other developmental disabilities. Custom ACS devices cost up to $7K, but a number of parents and teachers are having great success using an iPad application called Proloquo2Go. Of course Tommy can get a little wild, hence the ruggedized case from Otterbox. I’m going to spend the next couple of days setting things up, and then ship the system off to Massachusetts.
The fiendish side benefit involves my trip to England in December on the occasion of my mother’s 95th birthday. I’ll be staying at her house, which has no high-speed Internet access. The idea of spending a whole week “off the net” was too horrible to contemplate. (Don’t bother to try to convince me otherwise!) However it turns out that all 3G-enabled iPads are identical, and all are unlocked. So when I get to the UK, I’m going to buy a pay-as-you-go iPad SIM from Three (or similar), and I’ll be back in business. In fact I may use Skype on my iPad instead of a conventional mobile phone. (Anyone care to comment on how usable this is, and how much of my data plan it will consume?)
More anon….

It’s been quite a week. Last Monday we flew to the UK, intending to visit my mother, Lorna Arnold, in Oxford and attend the ceremony at which she was to receive an honorary doctorate. It soon became apparent that she wasn’t going to be well enough to leave hospital for the occasion, so on Saturday I attended the ceremony on her behalf and accepted her D.Litt. scroll from the Vice Chancellor of Reading University.
After the event, there was a lunch with a couple of dozen distinguished guests – academics, scientists, MoD, and writers. Obviously they had expected to hear a speech from my mother, so on Thursday I had taken my camcorder to the hospital and recorded a short message from my mother to her friends. At the lunch, I simply held up my laptop and played back the video clip. Then I made a few remarks of my own. I hadn’t prepared anything, and I can’t really remember what I said, but it seemed to be well received. After lunch, we headed back to the hospital in Abingdon to give the scroll (and photos and DVD of the event) to my mother.
Yesterday we left Oxford and headed over to Cambridge. We hadn’t got any firm plans – the previous week had been so ad hoc that planning had been the last thing on our minds. On a whim, we decided to overshoot Cambridge and go on to Ely, where we spent a happy couple of hours exploring the Cathedral. The experience was enhanced by the fact that the choirboys were rehearsing for a concert.
So now we’re in Cambridge, at the Best Western Gonville. It’s a great hotel, unlike any other Best Western I’ve stayed at. Today I have meetings in Cambridge, and then tomorrow we’ll catch up with some family members en route to Ipswich.

I’m in Brookline, Massachusetts for a week, and yesterday we went up to Lynn to see my daughter, her husband, and the two grandchildren. Normally at the end of December Lynn would be deep in snow, but yesterday the temperature reached 64F, and when we arrived the kids were playing in the yard. I took lots of pictures (posted here) as well as some nice video clips.

In the evening, Merry and I went for a walk by the Leverett Pond. I had brought my camera, but the light was failing and there seemed to be nothing much worth capturing. And then Merry saw a flash of white in the reeds: a heron. I tried full optical zoom (10x) on my Panasonic Lumix, but it was still rather small. I had always been told that electronic zoom wasn’t worth using, but I decided to try the “E-Zoom” feature to get up to 15.9x. I was impressed with how well the image stabilization worked at that level. You can see the results starting here. In the final shot the heron is actually taking off, which it was hard to capture with a 1/15 sec. exposure!

Kate, Hannah and I went to see The Quantum of Solace at the Cinerama this evening. After the success of Casino Royale, I had great hopes for it. Sadly, no. Muddled plot, unmemorable characters (except for Bond and M), and a ridiculous reliance on special effects. The film does set some kind of record for the variety of chases: a car chase, a running-across-the-rooftops chase, a boat chase, and a plane chase. Each raises the improbability level a notch: picking a random beat-up old boat in a harbour and finding that it had a supercharged engine that could outperform the bad guys, then renting a decrepit old DC-3 in the Bolivian desert and performing low-level aerobatics in narrow canyons that would be the envy of Top Gun – and without the wings coming off. That was just silly. On the plus side, the computer user interface in use at MI6 takes the design from Minority Report and raises the bar a couple of notches.

After two productive days at our Edinburgh office, I drove south today. The trip planner had projected a driving time of six and a half hours to reach Oxford, and that was alost exactly right: my rest/fuel stops added up to an hour and a half, and the elapsed time was eight hours. I kept wishing that I’d had a driving companion to wield the camera: sunrise approaching Moffat, the bands of cloud draped across the Lake District, the army of ghostly windmills marching across the fells, the quizzical sheep gazing at my from the back of a Land Rover… But that was about it for scenery: from Lancaster onwards it was grey with occasional drizzle.
Afte spending a pleasant afternoon with my mother and brother, I went out to dinner with Lorna and my sister-in-law. Then I headed off for the short (one hour) drive to my next hotel in Slough. The first bit was easy: round the Oxford ring road, and an 80mph dash along the M40 to Beaconsfield. Here I turned south towards Slough. I don’t think I’ve actually been down that road since I was learning to drive 40 years ago, and it was just as twisty, hilly, and off-camber as I remembered it. My instructions were to drive through to the A4, turn right, then left…
I missed the left. Drove on, looking for elusive street signs. Finally I took an arbitrary left, intending to work back to the point at which I’d joined the A4. Uh-huh… this is England, not the USA. No grid patterns. The commutative law doesn’t hold here. I plunged on, clearly lost, but using the bright moon to keep heading in roughly the right direction. I knew I should stop and call the hotel, but I wanted to be able to tell them where I was, in terms of a recognizable landmark. I kept driving.
Finally I saw a large roundabout ahead, and just the other side of it a big hotel (but not the one I was looking for). I pulled over, called the my hotel, explained my predicament, and told them where I was. It turned out that I was only twenty yards from the hotel entrance! If I’d stopped a couple of feet further forward, I’d have been able to see their sign.
So all’s well that ends well? Not quite: the hotel is completely sold out tonight, and the only available room was a smoking room. ((My coment to the receptionist: “Congratulations on the booming business climate. Enjoy it while it lasts.” Lots of gallows humour around these days.)) I’ll put up with it tonight, and shift tomorrow.
Oh yes, and WiFi access is £12 for 24 hours. Daylight robbery.

I’m packed and ready to fly back home to Seattle. It’s been a busy few days here in the Boston area. I spent a lot of time with Thomas and Victoria (Tommy and Torri, to me), both of whom were in fine form.

Tommy trying on my hat:

Me, with my grand-daughter Victoria, earlier this morning:

I had forgotten how tiring it can be to drive. Back home in Seattle, it’s so rare for me to get behind the wheel of a car that each spell of driving (courtesy FlexCar) is over before I’ve had a chance to register any stress or discomfort. But on this visit to Massachusetts, I’ve been driving all the time ((Often at what I would refer to as an “ungodly hour” were it not for the fact that all hours are equally devoid of deities!)). My shoulders are remembering that odd posture where you keep your arms raised for hours at a time… it’s weird.
Anyway, all of this is in a very good cause: helping my daughter to recover from Tori’s birth four weeks ago, while getting Tommy to his day care, doctors’ appointments, and so forth. So here are two iPhone pics of Tommy and Tori from the last couple of days. As you can see, Tommy is prepared for next Sunday’s big game…

I just got back from a weekend trip down to California. On Saturday morning, I flew down to Oakland; Celeste picked me up in my old DARWIN (which now has a boring California registration), and invited me to drive it one more time. So we headed south on I-880, and I finally got the opportunity to drive one of my “fun” cars ((among which I count my Mazda Miata, Mercury Cougar, and Subaru Legacy GT)) over Highway 17 to Santa Cruz. Sadly the traffic was too heavy to really explore the potential for accelerating a 250 HP AWD car into one of the climbing turns that make Highway 17 so much fun. But never mind.
We met up with Chris and Merry at Bookshop Santa Cruz. In spite of the threat from bigger bookshops, this remains the cultural centre of Santa Cruz, and it’s still fun to browse after all these years (ever since Chris was an undergraduate ar UCSC). We then meandered down to Aptos for lunch with members of our extended family, in a lovely home with a statue of a killer rabbit in the yard. (See photo.) We then followed Route 1 south to Carmel, and drove to Merry’s parents’ place, where we stayed overnight.
Today we headed down into Carmel. This is car week in Carmel, and gorgeous cars were everywhere. This is the kind of situation where they roll out the red carpet for cars rather than mere human beings. Even when we walked down to the beach, the cars followed us. (See photo gallery.)
Then after lunch, we (Chris, Celeste and I) headed back up to Oakland. I’d brought along Stop The Clocks, the “greatest hits” double CD from Oasis (the one I’d got from Tescos in Abingdon for £5), and we cranked up the volume and sang along to “Wonderwall”, “Morning Glory” and “Champagne Supernova”. (Of course Oasis were at their peak when Chris was living in Cambridge, England.)
I reached Oakland airport in time to catch the earlier Alaska flight to Seattle, so I got myself added to the stand-by list – but to no avail. That flight was full, and so was mine at 8:00pm. There seem to be a lot of people moving around the country right now…
And now I’m home in Seattle, all set for another week in the real world. I expect there are a bunch of EPFL games on my DVR; I’ll try to avoid reading any sports news from England. No spoilers, please!