Heads-up: I'm heading across the pond

I’m heading over to the UK for a week, starting this Wednesday. I’ll be flying from SEA to LHR via ORD, getting in around 6am on Thursday. From Thursday through Saturday I’m going to be staying in Oxford, visiting my mother and brother (and hanging out in the city). Then on Sunday I’ll take a train in to Paddington, tube to King’s Cross, and a GNER train to Edinburgh. Amazingly, this is only my second visit to Scotland. (The first was a day trip in about 1975, when I was a post-grad student at Newcastle-on-Tyne.) On Monday and Tuesday I’ll be at Amazon.com‘s Edinburgh Development Centre for a variety of meetings. (Long-time readers will know that I’ve always been interested in the challenges posed by distributed development.) And I’ll fly home on Wednesday: BMI from EDI to LHR, then United LHR-ORD-SEA.
Now I just have to work out the crazy (and constantly changing) rules for carry-on bags on flights to and from the UK….
(It would be great to pop down to see some of my old mates from SunUK, but I don’t think the schedule will allow it. Plus I’m going carless on this one; I’ll be taking the bus from Heathrow to Oxford. Maybe next time.)

The wettest month on record

From The Seattle Times

Puget Sound-area residents spent much of Wednesday bracing for another anticipated snowstorm…. But the predicted snow was interrupted off and on with rain and November became Seattle’s wettest month on record. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport reported a monthly total of 15.37 inches late Wednesday, breaking the previous record of 15.33 inches….
At 10 p.m. Wednesday, snow was still falling in many parts of the city. Queen Anne Avenue, the major thoroughfare on Queen Anne Hill, was closed because of snow and police officers were chaining up the tires on their cruisers…. But by [Thursday morning] rain [will be] starting to wash away the snow that had accumulated since Sunday.

Seattle articulated hybrid bus
I must say that this is the first time I’ve seen snow chains on the rear wheels of bendy buses. Quite impressive. I wonder what happens to the bending mechanism if one of those buses starts to skid…..

Massachusetts drivers may be notoriously bad, but at least they can drive in snow

Back in the north-east, a couple of inches of light snow would barely make the front page of the local section of the Globe. But here in Seattle….

Drivers inching their way through the evening commute cursed the snow that returned to the Puget Sound region this afternoon, shutting down at least one highway and essentially turning others into parking lots for several hours.

Police couldn’t keep up with cars careening across freeways, chain-reaction fender benders and motorists abandoning their vehicles on suburban roads. For the first time in at least a decade, Highway 9, a major thoroughfare in Snohomish County, was shut down much of the night because it became “a complete sheet of ice,” said Trooper Keith Leary.

Hmmm. Don’t they have sanding trucks around here?

UPDATE: Well, I was probably unfair to Seattlites. It looks as if things turned to freezing rain, which is no fun in any location. And with these steep hills…. Apparently some people who went to last night’s football game found themselves unable to get home. The office is really quiet this morning, and there’s been a steady stream of “WFH” (working from home) emails coming through.

Test your tonedeafness

Tim Bray alerted me to a fascinating on-line test of pitch perception, called Test your musical skills in 6 minutes!

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

To my amazement, I scored 94.4%.

Optimism in its purest form

I just checked in (online) for my flights back to Seattle on Sunday. I’m due to depart Boston at 6:00am and land at IAD (Washington Dulles) at 7:49am; allow a few extra minutes to taxi to the gate. Meanwhile my flight from IAD to SEA is supposed to start boarding at 7:50am, and to push back at 8:20am.

Oh yes: the BOS-IAD flight has an 87% on-time record.

Wish me luck….