Made it to BRU with a minimal amount of fuss.

Well, it was minimal if you don’t count the 24 hour layover in Chicago due to my inbound flight from DEN getting delayed for malarky, making me miss the single flight to BRU that United fly per day, but allowed me to hook up with my friends Mr. and Mrs. Team G and their newborn who does not talk at all and their 3 year old who talks enough to cover their entire neighborhood. Eating any pizza not from Colorado and waging wanton destruction upon landscaping with a Sawz-all is certainly a formula for fun.

The next day’s outbound flight was delayed, in fact, by Eyjafllallalllabjorkbjorksporkjallajokull, but not too badly. So I consider that a success.

Google Maps walking directions beta isn’t afraid to send you down hiking paths.

Speaking of trekking, the Hotel Dolce here in La Hulpe has the world’s longest driveway.

Maybe I’m getting older and surlier, but trying to learn Flemish didn’t even cross my mind. I just want everyone to speak English. There, I said it.

By the way, all this talk of terrifying ash, oil spills, and the like reminds me of Don Delillo’s White Noise. If you haven’t read it, you really need to.

I should have drank more at home to prep.

This is gonna be a good conference.

It’s Wednesday and changes are afoot. Things are coming up milhouse. Not really ready to reveal anything yet, so instead, let me distract you with pictures of cats.

Rawr!

Photographic spring cleaning.

I’ve been sitting on quite a few photos from various trips, etc. that I never got around to posting because it was just too painful to process them with an ancient Mac mini G4 with a mere 1GB of RAM.

Old Lijiang city in China was one of the best days of our tour because it truly felt like wandering around an ancient pocket of antiquity.

A delightful practice is still carried over from days of yore: using the stream flowing through the city as a natural refrigerator.

[As always, photos are clickable for larger resolutions.]

This is what I feel like after this particular week of employment. On the other hand, if my facial hair looks that amazing some day, sign me up. I may have to stop shaving for the rest of my life beginning… now.

The WSJ quotes Bernanke as saying:

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke referred to mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as a “platypus,” saying they were “neither fish nor fowl.” He suggested strongly that the companies should be privatized during his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee.

Yes, I too, agree that platypus Friday is becoming quite a stretch.

[As always photo is clickable for large resolution.]

If only he were puking Sour Patch Kids.

Torre Agbar and La Sagrada Familia

This lizard is everywhere. Personally, I found it a little underwhelming. Love the argyle though!

This is probably what I look like all the time. Except I’m, you know, Asian, so I’ve got that sweet stereotype going for me, which is nice.

Sorry Joey, I stole your caption.

All in all, a pleasurable day wandering around Park Guell.

Math turns me on too.

We spent a half day wandering around la Sagrada Familia, designed by Gaudi.

One of the cooler cathedrals I’ve ever been to, and it’s not even completed yet. I loved how much Gaudi borrowed from nature in his designs, from plant morphology to placing fruits on top of the spires to the various animal gargoyles.

Maybe I’ll go back in 2026 when it’s supposed to be completed.

Slicing a sliver of delicioso.

Traditional Spanish breakfast: a full cup of chocolate with churros. No, I also don’t know why the entire country hasn’t died of diabetes yet.

Absolutely delightful.

Beep!

Back for a few days and I’m already missing eating tapas for every meal.

To properly picture the Cortes Ingles, start with Macy’s, but then stack a Best Buy on top, then a Crate & Barrel on top of that, a Home Depot design center on top of that, and put the entire stack onto a Whole Foods. There are probably other stores in there too; I only visited 6 out of 9 levels in the one I went to.

The photo that didn’t make the cut had a woman holding about 100 Sponge Bob balloons.

A great order by YT.

Don’t ask, don’t tell. It made sense at the time. Perhaps it was all the delicious paella.

I’m back in NJ now, returning to CO tomorrow.

The trip back wasn’t terribly hard, but we had our share of airport incidents. In MAD, a huge group of Italians started screaming at the gate agent near us. You might be asking yourself, “how can you tell if Italians are angry or if they’re just talking?” A good rule of thumb is to count the number of vaffanculos being screamed per minute. Anything over 136 is likely to indicate anger.

In OPO, we got to experience the new TSA security theatre firsthand. They had to delay our flight by 1.5 hours in order to perform a second security check at the gate, wanding every single passenger and inspecting every single carryon. A lot of people can fit onto an Airbus A330.

It’s the second time I’ve been unimpressed with Portuguese airport logistics. During our EU entry, after processing through customs, trying to re-enter the secure area to connect was an absolute joke. Somehow, in LIS, they decided that it would be a good idea for all the connecting passengers to get their bags, go up an escalator to a landing, and go through a single security gate. Except that the landing was approximately 15′ x 15′, so there was nowhere to really form a line once more than say, 20 passengers and their bags were there. As you might guess, things go south quickly when the contents of an entire Airbus are trying to fit on that landing. People and their bags were getting spit off the escalator and hitting an immobile wall of human flesh, stuck behind the incredibly slow single security gate. Of course the people below the landing couldn’t see the cluster above them, so they’d blithely get on the escalator, expecting (like normal people do) that there’d be somewhere to form a queue, not realizing that upon nearing the top, they were about to become part of soul-sucking blob.

So anyway, flying got even worse when we were away and I’m seriously thinking about curtailing my travel in the future because of the buffoons at the TSA. At least I didn’t have to suffer the indignities of being fingerprinted in two phases (first all four fingers, then separate thumb phase) and having a mug shot taken, as our US customs did to every single non-citizen during our re-entry today. I don’t know why anyone would want to visit the US under those conditions. I’d certainly avoid countries with that requirement.

I bet al Qaeda have evolved their business model. When they were in stealth startup mode, taking out a single Sikorsky with a Stinger missile felt pretty good. Then they IPO’ed, experienced some salad days with 9/11 and Madrid, really getting some efficiencies of scale and putting the “mass” back into WMD. But now, like any mature organization, the accountants are running the business, and they’re milking the cash cow for all it’s worth, putting out crappy releases (Richard Reid, the latest idiot Abdulmutallab ) that no true mujahideen would ever associate with (“back in my day, we made IEDs out of liquid hot magma!”), but still somehow sucking billions of dollars from their consumer base.

[In case the analogy isn't clear, I'm referring to the immense costs of our pathetically wasteful security theatre.]

Somewhere, some al Qaeda dickhead with an HP 12C is laughing his ass off at us, all the way to the hawaladar.

Not my favourite shot; the b&w treatment was a crutch to try and distract you from the poor lighting and unfocused composition. Left it uncropped on purpose to demonstrate how not to fill a frame. Also, I need some adult diapers to handle all that blowout.

Actually, neither of these were taken with the 10-22. But I wanted to do Barcelona architecture… oh well.

I like the depth of this photo, but it’s otherwise pretty boring.

Deliberate distortion effects. Again, not my best composition, but was just trying to get a feel for what the new lens can do.

Shooting with the 10-22 is as challenging as advertised. It’s been quite tricky to compose with and coaxing art out of it isn’t quite the walk in the park that I’d originally imagined. Part of the problem is that I’m trying to treat it as a more limited version of my main workhorse lens (17-55 F/2.8) which has a bigger range and is almost twice as fast. Of course, trying to use the 10-22 in this manner is missing the point completely.

I need to think wider.

In the meantime, expect a bunch more lousy “my first SLR” photos. Sorry for the future eye-stabbings.

Why haven’t rent-a-bikes caught on in the US yet?

38 and 39 are what people look and feel like after trying to keep up with Grace on a full day of tourism. She draws energy from the space-time continuum itself and gets stronger with every sight she sees. I never thought keeping up with a 60-year old 4’10″ woman could be so difficult.