Back home

Snow covered Sandias as seen from our balcony

I am back in Albuquerque for the holidays. Although the weather for the first two days here was not any better than Dublin's, it is beginning to improve. Today (actually last week when I wrote it) was sunny (and cold).

One thing Dublin doesn't have is New Mexican food; i.e. red and green chili. The other day I had lunch with Lee Ann at Garcia's: green chili burrito; smothered! (I'll start exercising again soon ;-)

Last Night in Doblin

Tonight is the last night for me in Doblin; for this year. (It's Doblin with a big open O as in "door".) I have to go pack for my trip to Albuquerque where I will spend the next four weeks. Before I do that, I thought I'd send you a quick greeting.
I went out with Kostas the Greek ;-) for dinner at the Winding Stair. It used to be a used-book store next to the Liffey occupying several floors of a building not far from Trinity and the theater schools. Now the bookstore part is only on the ground floor but still has a unique charm; this is not a Barnes'n Noble!
Above it is now a nice restaurant that serves "modern Irish food". We climbed the stairs and walked into a room packed full of people with a great view of the Ha'penny bridge. After we admited that we had no reservations, we were told that they were full.
Disappointed, we started the descend down the narrow (and winding ;-) stairs when a waiter came running after us. He said he had a table and took us back up, and then up again. On the floor above was a room full of empty tables all set and we got to have one right next to the window from where I took the picture above. Some of the lights are reflections of lights inside.
The food, wild Irish game venison for me, and Smoked Silverhill duck breast
for Kostas, was excellent. Probably the best restaurant meal I've had in Dublin so far. The knowledgable waitress recommended a bottle of Hecula Castano from Spain. It is made from Monastrell grapes which I have never even heard of. Nice earthy and heavy. It was great!
While waiting (briefly! ;-) for the 38A, I took this picture on O'Connel street.

Shoe Laces

A while back I came across this video on How to Tie your Shoes



The speaker demonstrates two ways of tying your shoes: One were they stay tied, and the way most people use, where they don't.
Trying it out, I realized I already was tying my laces in the improved fashion he suggests. Since I learned how to tie my shoes in Europe, I'm beginning to wonder whether this is a cultural thing. Maybe American children are taught the "wrong" way to tie their shoes, and Europeans know better.
So here is a request to put this on a more scientific foundation: Watch the video, determine which knot you are using and report back with the result and on which continent you learned to tie your shoes.
Maybe it is a plot to trip Americans, or it just depends on whom your parents learned from.

Xmas Lights in Dublin

Dublin's name in Gaelic

A couple of weeks ago Dublin started to put up Christmas lights. The ones on Grafton street were turned on by Michel Buble, while those on Henry street came alive a week earlier by Irish Rugby star Gordon D’Arcy. Tonight, the mayor of Dublin, Andrew Montague, will switch on the lights on O’Connell street. I had dinner with Kostas and went early to take some pictures. You can see more of them on my Picasa album.

Above is OConnell street which should be decorated even more today. I was going to add another complaint about the Dublin buses to this blog entry because I stood around for 20 minutes yesterday waiting for the bus I had looked up to go into town. According to my research the 37 bus was either 15 minutes late or 20 minutes early. Unfortunately, this turns out to be a minor mistake on my part. The bus that goes by my apartment is the 38, not the 37. And the 38 was right on time.
But, they do move around the bus stations! I had to walk to the next one last night going home because the old one wasn't there anymore. I sort of new that because I had this problem once before. Back then there was a sign there telling people where they had hidden the new stop. Last night that sign was long gone since they expected their ridership to have learned the new route by now; except I couldn't remember where it was from last time. Must be old age or the extra beer I had at the pub.

I liked the lights on Henry street better than those on Grafton. Both are popular pedestrian areas for shopping: one South and one North of the Liffey.

I took the above picture on my way to Grafton street because I wanted to show the Ha'penny bridge with the Christmas decoration above it. The pircture didn't turn out the way I had hoped since I had to rush. I set up my tripod in front of a parked car that shielded me from traffic, but just as I was about ready to shoot, the car drove away and left me unprotected in the middle of a busy street.

Grafton street was very busy and setting up a tripod in this mass of people wasn't that easy. I went back after dinner, when there were fewer people, to take some pictures of the Brown Thomas window displays. Like many fancy department stores, they put up elaborate pieces of art on some holidays.

The Nespresso store is in a corner on the top floor of Brown Thomas. That means I have to make my way through the perfume clouds and diamond necklace displays on the ground floor, pass the occasional fashion show on the floor above, where my jeans and the holes in my shirt sleeves don't quite live up to the elegance of the shoppers and models there, to the top floor where they have a nice kitchen department with cool gadgets and utensils that are unaffordable. (We're talking $40 cheese graters! I bought a designer one for $6 at Target last time I was in Albuquerque ;-)
The Nespresso store people are always nice and impeccably dressed. By the time I get there, the heat in the store has usually turned me into a sweaty blob with hair sticking out in all directions. The perfume girls downstairs usually look away or down, while the security guards always seem to debate whether to let me proceed or throw me out.
When I pay for my coffee, the Nespresso people used to ask me whether I had a Brown Thomas card. When I answered No, they would give me this knowing look: what in the world, other than coffee, would I buy in this store? Lately, they don't even ask anymore whether I had that frequent shopper card ;-)

This is were Kostas and I had dinner.

Banking

One of the first things I did when arriving in Ireland was to open a bank account. Direct deposit is the only way to be paid here. As with most things, it is not hugely different from the US, but there are some Irish/European quirks to it. To open a bank account you need a PPS number -- the equivalent to an SS number in the States. After applying in person at a branch of Bank of Ireland (BoI), I was told that it would take three to five business days to activate my account. A credit card would take six months or so, since I had not credit history here.
Two weeks after I applied, I called to inquire about the status of my account. The lady on the phone said the account will go live in a couple of days. (This was in my early days here when nothing would happen unless I called twice. It seems better now, but that may be because I already have signed up for all the services I need.) It took another week to get the ATM PIN in the mail and then another four days to get the ATM card (with embedded micro controller!)
In my contract with IBM it said they would pay me about 1,400 Euro out of my relocation expenses up front, within seven days, to ease settling in and cover the period until the first pay check. Of course that seven day period did not start until I was able to supply them with an activated bank account. So this "immediate" assistance wasn't that immediate at all and I spent a lot of money paying for things through my American credit cards.
As soon as I had an account, I signed up for online banking. The web page said I would receive the PIN in three to five business days, which took two weeks. In case you are keeping track, you know now that the number of quoted days for something to happen here needs to be multiplied by about four to arrive at a more accurate estimate of when it will actually be done.
The PIN didn't work online, so I called and was informed that that PIN is for telephone banking, but she could set me up with online banking. Use the Internet to sign up for phone banking and use the phone to sign up for online banking...
I always felt SLFCU provided the services I need and did so reliably and with low overhead. (Despite that, McConkey called it a toy bank ;-) I was one of SLFCU's early guinea pigs of their online banking. The first version, used with a dial-up modem, was pretty basic, but it worked and didn't require a user's manual. The one BoI provides works too, but it is quirky and looks and feels like it had been designed by the bank's president's eight year old nephew.

Click on the images to see a larger version.

This is the login screen. The advertisement promises a new look, but it hasn't happened yet. Maybe the nephew took an HTML 5 class?
After you click on login, you have to enter your user ID, which is an eight-digit number, then it will ask you randomly for either your birthday or the last four digit of your contact phone number. After that, it wants three of the six digits of your PIN.

It randomly changes which three digits it asks for. I guess that is to prevent shoulder surfers from stealing your PIN. The phone company and some other places here have a similar scheme.
Now you are in and can click through to your account to see activity and balances; eight lines at a time. There is a timeout of five minutes idle time. After that it logs you out without warning. If you click on the logout button it takes you to a new screen where you have to confirm that you really want to log out!

There is a way to see more than eight transactions at a time, but it involves clicking a bunch of things and requesting a date range. The picture below is an example.

Look at the description for each transaction. It's complete gibberish. For many of them I have to guess by the amount listed. Two of the credits listed with the helpful description of "-------", were expense reimbursements from IBM. Of course, IBM gives me the sum of what they have transferred, so I have to go look at my expense reports to figure out what I got paid for. One of the "-----" I may have known at one time what it was for, but I don't anymore. The statement certainly doesn't help. For that matter, I don't know what I paid the 60 Euro to UBLE37715 for. The M2309CH was something I paid 14 Swiss Franks for and got charged a 0.46 Euro exchange fee. Whatever it was, it seems I bought two of them, but the second one did not trigger that MRO CHRG fee.
I should mention that the above examples of descriptions as the final ones. For the first day or two after a transaction appears online, it sometimes is even more cryptic. I guess it gets updated and "enhanced" after the transaction has completed.
You can register your cell phone with the bank, which again takes several days. But, once you have it, you can add people and institutions you want to send money to online. They send an activation code to your cell phone, and you can start using the payee immediately.
I can't wait for the redesigned web page coming soon ;-)

My America Trip

I just came back from spending three weeks in the USA, or as they call it there, America. (Never mind the portions south and north of the border ;-) I had a good time and met with tons of people, including some of you!
The Supercomputing conference was, as always, very packed. I had planed to attend a lot of the technical talks, but missed most of them. Instead I talked to people and learned a bunch of things. That's not so different than previous years. What was different was that I was moving in two different spheres: The people I had always hung out with and the, mostly, new people of, and associated with, IBM. Of course, the spheres overlap quite a bit, but it seemed it took even more time this year to meet everybody I wanted to talk to.
That is one of the reasons I switched jobs: to meet and work with new people and get exposed to slightly different ideas and view points.
Now I have to go read all the papers I missed.
Someone in Albuquerque organized, and someone accused me of bringing it along, not so great weather. Then Seattle did its best to be rainy and cold to help me appreciate the weather in Dublin. When I arrived here today, it was actually pretty warm, and no rain ;-)
So, no pictures from this trip, except the one below. Kurt and I were looking for a place to have lunch and I saw the sign advertising the place were we then ate. I'm still trying to figure out the connection between the sign and the display behind the glass. Maybe they are trying to make up for the deficiency of their bread...

Artificial Intelligence

Hello from New York. I've been visiting IBM's Watson research lab for a couple of days this week. I got to meet a bunch of very interesting people working here on the next-generation of supercomputers. This is also the birthplace of Watson, the machine, that a while back won a Jeopardy game on TV.
I started thinking about that as I was listening to the rental car navigation system giving me instructions on how to get here. Some of the ones I've used in the past would scold you if you veered off course and tell you that you had made a mistake and that it now had to recalculate the route; just because of you. This one was a little bit more polite, it would simply recalculate a new route and start giving you directions on how to get back on track.
Driving along, taking instructions, and dutifully execution them, I felt a little bit silly. I was driving this computer to wherever she was telling me to go. If all I'm doing is what she tells me, then why isn't she driving the car, and I can sit in the back and read a book or enjoy the view. I'm sure we are not that far away from that being as common as navigation systems are now.
Artificial intelligence always fascinated me. At the same time I was also always skeptical at how far it actually might go. I still think that we wont have a robot in my life time that is smart enough to tie its shoe laces, but these things have come along further than what I would have thought possible ten years ago.
Watson for example impresses me with its speech recognition capability. Being able to ask Jeopardy questions is important too, but in the end it is just a matter of storage and a search algorithm. More a matter of brute force than intelligence. Listening or reading words and sentences, and making "sense" out of them seems to me much more difficult.
Language is such an ambiguous thing were a lot of context is needed to understand the meaning of a given phrase. In grad school I took an AI class and studied natural language disambiguation a little bit. It's amazing how much knowledge and common sense is required to understand even quite simple sentences.
Of course, no computer actually understands anything, so methods to make good guesses are needed to prompt the correct action from a string of words. An interesting area of study, maybe a little bit scary, and definitely annoying when these machines tell you what to do, and you actually do it and follow their orders because you don't want to get lost in traffic.

Mulhuddart happenings

I have been really busy with work and travel. Sometimes I get into these phases where I work on one thing day and night because it is very interesting and I want to know how it will turn out. For the last few weeks I have been in this mode; hence no traveling and taking pictures and nothing happening worth mentioning in the blog. Sorry.
There have been weekends where I stay home on Friday and Monday to get work done, and for four days in a row I get up, eat, write code, try to make sense of results, go to bed at two or three, and repeat. No clue whether it's cold or warm outside. I enjoy doing that once in a while and really dig into a problem. I'm learning a bunch of stuff; or at least it feels like it ;-)
But then once in a while that mode of operation needs to be broken. For the last two weekends I promised myself that I would go out and do something, but then I didn't. (I haven't exercised in weeks!) This weekend I will go into town. I have to; I'm running out of Nespresso capsules. Can't work without fuel!

The other day I diverged from my shortest route to work and back, and detoured through "downtown" Mulhuddart to return yet another letter to the previous renters of this apartment. This one looked important: Something from the health department addressed to the parents of the girl who must have lived here. Probably a reminder to have her come in to be vacinated or something.
Across from the post office I noticed a new store had opened that promised international food. Anything international and different from the three chain store brands we have here can only be good. And within walking distance no less!
The couple who opened the store is from Albania and they do have interesting looking things on the shelves. Most of them I have no clue what they are. When they say international, they mean it. The other stores have international food too, but it is all made by Nestle, Kraft, or Dr. Oetker and the labels are still in English. Not in this store. I bought some items that seemed safe and that I would have a chance to actually eat or prepare, like the two items in the picture above, but I need to investigate this some more. It's not just Eastern European either. Lots of Asian stuff as well with the same trend: on many of them not a single word in English or roman alphabet letters.

Busy

Sunset on Santorini.

Hello everyone, sorry for not posting in the last few weeks. I have been really busy with work and travel. Even though I got to swing through Switzerland on my way to and from Santorini, and even had time for a small hike there, I spent most of my day and night time working on an IPDPS paper. Unfortunately I was too slow to get enough data and explain it appropriately to make the deadline. But we made good progress and have a good paper soon.

Hiking in the Twannbachschlucht in Switzerland.

EuroMPI in Santorini was fun and interesting; the first time attending since I switched jobs. The conference is usually set in some nice European town in September. Fall is a nice time of year because most of the tourists have left, but it is still nice and comfortably warm. It just seems that at many of them I end up spending a lot of time in my hotel working on a paper for the October deadlines.

Conference dinner was in Oia.

I did make a point to be out at sunset every day to get some pictures within walking distance of the hotel. According to Ken Rockwell's advice (a photographer's pages I sometimes read), sunset and sunrise are the only times you need to be out anyway, since that is the only time of day when the light is perfect. I usually can't make sunrises, since I'm in bed. But sunset in Santorini is easy: do that first, then have dinner at 9 with the early dinner crowd.

View from the table at the conference dinner.

I stayed in a cheap hotel that I had booked through the conference registration page. It was fine, but clearly not oriented towards the business traveler. I think they expect people to go out and do things in Santorini, instead of sitting in their room working. The WiFi was free, but didn't really reach my room. My laptop could see the signal, but never log in. So I spent time downstairs in the breakfast area where the base station was. Unfortunately that was accros from the reception desk where the daughter of the owners spent a lot of her time watching TV on her laptop. This was a small hotel with the family of three running most of the operation. I would go back there for vacation, but probably not business.

Evening in Thira, where the conference center was.

I got some good pictures even with the short time I allocated for it. You can see all of them here, but that is easy on Santorini. Aim your camera anywhere and shoot. It's bound to be interesting and capturing.

At a fancier hotel than mine.

People of Santorini make a point to show off their island.

Flowers and Sunshine

A while back Lee Ann sent me the plastic flower above. When enough light shines on its little solar panel, it flaps its petals and shakes its head left and right. When I brought it to work my Irish coworkers asked whether my wife didn't know where I was. Patrick took pity on the droopy flower and offered to place it at the window beside his and John's desks. (Mine was further in and got less light.) The little flower was much happier there and joyously moved its petals up and down.
Not that the sun was out that much, so I became suspicious. I accused Patrick of having fertilized it, or hoked it up to the power grid. I even lifted it up to make sure there where no concealed wires. But I guess there was enough light and friendly thoughts after all ;-)
Now I moved to the new building where I'm next to a large window myself. Patrick and John on their way to the cafeteria have come by and waved at it through the window.
The new building is a smart and environmentally conscious building, but it needs some more training. The toilets flush with rain water collected on the roof, but the lights turn off after fifteen minutes; whether you are done or not.
There are automatic shades that should help regulate the inside temperature depending on the cloud level and elevation of the sun. Over our desks are motion and infrared sensors that regulate light levels.
If you move very little, haunched over your keyboard, the infrared sensor is supposed to sense your presence and leave the light on, even if the motion sensor thinks there is nobody there. That doesn't quite work yet and I have to wave my hands at the ceiling once in a while for the light to come back on.
A person falling asleep at their desk might therefore cause the lights to go out. I have been accused of letting that little flower flap its petals and tricking the motion sensor into thinking someone is moving around, while I am fast asleep at my desk.
As you can see, (sun)light is an important topic here in Ireland and even a plastic flower gets a lot of attention and sparks conversations.

Dublin City Triathlon

I did the Dublin City Triathlon this morning. After having trained so much for the Ironman in July, it felt like a waste not to use that for something else.  After vacation in Switzerland and London, and then not doing anything for another two weeks, I was in no shape to do anything long. But an Olympic-distance triathlon sounded about right.
 About 375 people participated in the event (almost 500 had signed up!?). (There were another 350 people signed up for the shorter sprint-distance event.) We swam 1,500 meters (just under a mile) in the River Liffey, rode bikes in Phoenix park for 40 km (just under 25 miles), and then ran a 10 km (~6 miles) in the park.  At the end we got a nice shirt, free ice cream, and a burger.
 I have only done one race of that distance before: The Elephant Man Triathlon in September 2008.  That was the first race with my then new bike that I still use. The run was the problem though.  I had an Achilles tendon inflammation that was still bothering me at that race and had prevented proper run training. It took me 3:20:51 to finish. For today's race, my goal was to beat the three-hour mark. And I did; by 37 seconds.
I'm happy about that. Here is the comparison:

	2008		2011
Swim 1.5 km	0:31:29		0:31:52
Transition 1	0:03:03		0:04:41
Bike 40 km	1:38:27		1:23:38
Transition 2	0:01:49		0:02:49
Run 10 km	1:06:05		0:56:25
Total	3:20:51		2:59:23

 Of course, it is difficult to compare races like that, even if the distances are the same. The terrain is different, and the conditions, such as weather and altitude, are never the same. But, shaving 20 minutes off my time three years ago does indicate that I have made some progress.
 It's still discouraging though: Almost all the guys in my age group were faster overall.
 I used to chalk this up to them having been athletes all their lives, and me only recently started and 90% of the time that I'm not asleep, I'm sitting at a desk staring at a computer screen. (I have plenty of endurance for that ;-)
Now I'm beginning to rethink this attitude. I always thought of myself as an intermediate swimmer, with about half of the people in the pool swimming a little slower than me, and the other half, or a little more than that, swimming faster. Since I've come to Ireland this does not seem to be true anymore. People here are generally more fit and bike faster than me, walk faster, and also swim faster.
  And it's not only the slender ones that make me look like a snail. There is a group of guys at the National Aquatic Centre where I train, that sometimes swim in the lane next to me. They do 100 m in less than 1:20 on short intervals. On a good day I can do one of those, if that is all I do that day, and I train for it. The scary part is these guys are portly. I wonder what would happen, if they ever cut back on beer...
 The sun took its time to come out this morning. I'm guessing it was below 50 when the race started. That river is cold. Wetsuits were mandatory. I have a sleeveless one because I don't like the restrictive feeling I have in a full suit; this way I can move my arms more freely.  But this morning I was wishing for a full suit. As soon as I jumped in, my feet went numb and I didn't regain any sensation until well into the run. When they came back alive, they tried to tell my brain in a few seconds what had happened to them in the last couple of hours.  And since my brain didn't do anything about it, they kept sending the same signal over and over.
  We went out in waves of about 60 people. In theory that was to make it less chaotic than the 2000-people mass start at a full Ironman. It seemed it was just as bad. Early on I got kicked in the face and my upper lip is still swollen. I was able to draft a few times, but I also seemed to zigzag a lot, despite the organizers having put a floating line in the middle of the river for us to follow upstream, and then downstream on the other side.  It took me about to the halfway point before I found a rhythm and could pass a few people.
 The bike ride was rolling hills in the park. There are a couple of grades to go up, but noting serious. Going up, the wind was blowing into our faces, but it was not horrendous.  The most difficult part was pacing and counting the loops. It was up to us to do five of them and exit the park to get back to the transition area. At the pre-race briefing they said that every year they have a few people who do four or six laps. Once past the park exit, you are not allowed to backtrack to correct your mistake.
 The first part of the run was hard. First I couldn't feel my feet, and then later when I could, they hurt. I stopped at one point to check that my socks had not crumpled up in my shoe and were pinching my toes. Everything was fine; I was just getting weird signals from my feet.
 The last third was good. I still had energy, my feet were back to their normal pain level during running, and I was able to speed up a little. I even passed some people, although they might have been in a later wave, or doing the sprint distance. Most of the course was on grass or going through woods. I'm not really used to that and twice twisted my ankle on the uneven terrain.
 I'm happy with how this race went. I wish I was faster, but given what i can do, I think this one went well and the pacing worked out.
  So, now Mike can leave a comment about how this race report is much longer than the one I wrote for the four-times-as-long Ironman ;-) Maybe report lengths are supposed to be inversely proportional to the race distance.

Stationary Engines and Pumps

The Blanchardstown shopping center is a small mall not far from where I live. In the first week I was here, I went there a few times to buy things I didn't bring in my suitcases and also to see what Irish stores sell. Eason is an Irish bookstore chain that has a store in Blanchardstown. That's where I found Stantionary Engine Magazine!
This is not a fancy bookstore that specializes in esoteric literature and carries hard-to-find magazines and out-of-print books. It's a typical mall bookstore with bestseller books, a shelf for local authors, candy, travel guides. and the usual stuff you find in these stores. But, they do carry Stationary Engine Magazine ;-)
The grocery store down the hall sells many of the same magazines and newspapers, but not Stationary Engine Magazine. So, Eason is one level up from them. They also sell several photography magazines like American bookstores do and some model railroad and tour bus magazines that I have never seen before. The tour bus magazines are full of pictures of what the next bus looks like that some city has ordered and how many horse powers it has, or descriptions and pictures of luxury tour buses. There are also magazines that do the same thing for tractors and other farm equipment.
I guess it is a little different from Barnes and Noble or Borders. But a Stationary Engine Magazine? Who reads that?
Well, maybe not that many people. Last month when I went to their web site, it was advertising the latest issue, but today the link (above) is dead. Maybe the issue I bought is one of the last ones.
In the introduction it talks about securing those engines. Theft of "sight-feed oilers and magnetos" doesn't seem all that common yet, but some of these engines have appreciated in value over the years and criminal incidents are on the raise! There are letters to the editor, pictures of engines and parts that people are seeking help with to identify, a bunch of ads, and several articles on restoring engines, an events calendar, and a market place.
I'll be checking the link to their web site and the bookstore for new issues. It would be kind of sad if something like that went under.

Art

One of the nice things about London is that many things are free. For example, we visited the British Museum and the Tate Modern without having to pay. Some special exhibits require a fee, but there is so much to see without paying, that we didn't have enough time event for that.
Another nice thing is that that some of these places let you take photographs. It would be even nicer if you were allowed to bring a tripod, but I was happy to take photos at all. I put my pictures for the British Museum and the Tate Modern up on Picasa.

Museum curators select pieces that are interesting and worthwhile to look at and display them for us to admire. Usually when taking pictures, you have to think what would make a good picture. At a museum that's already taken care of: Everything in there is worthwhile photographing! Then the question becomes what not to photograph. While it is tempting, there is no point in creating another museum catalog.

A replica of the Rosetta stone. They have the original too, but you are not allowed to touch that one.

 Taking pictures reduces to finding objects that are not constantly mobbed by people in your line of sight, things that have enough light on them to not turn out blurry, and items that make interesting subjects (more than all the others) for some reason. Time is also a factor, since our feet hurt after these marathon museum sessions: These places are big.

Now I had to narrow down my selection even further to show you here and on Picasa what I think are worthwhile pictures. For some that got cut out, even for some I included, I wish I could go back and retake from a different angle, or a slightly different camera setting. Although modern image processing software makes the latter almost unnecessary. At least in a controled environment like a museum. Outside is a different story. There might always be better sunlight or cloud formations to go back to a place and improve on the pictures taken last time.

The British Museum with a Utah sky.

I don't usually care too much for modern art, but I thought it would be interesting anyway to go see the Tate Modern. Most of the things in there are junk, but some things are neat and the museum itself offers plenty of opportunity to take pictures.

I know everybody has a different opinion of what art is, and mine is not particularly relevant. I like thinks that are pretty, somehow clever, difficult to make, inventive, cause an emotion (other then blah), or somehow strike me as worthwhile. A piece of art for me is something that has more than one of these qualities.

 I consider most of the things I uploaded into my Tate album to be art. Not everything, though. Feel free to give us your opinion.

Some photography is art too. Which then begs the question, if you take a photo of a piece of art, is the photo art too?

Not sure whether the mirror was part of the piece behind it or not. Is a photo of a mirror showing a piece of art, art? ;-)

How quaint! A photo of a photo from a photographer's collection at the Tate.

A Goodwill Gesture

Remember when Airtricity, my electric company, turned the power off to my apartment? And then two months later they had a solicitor send me a threatening letter to pay the 147 Euros the previous renter owed them. I was very mad.
People advised me to ignore any letter that were addressed to occupier or some such, and did not have my name on it. That doesn't work, though, because they had two accounts pointing to the same apartment: One was mine, and the other was the delinquent one. If nobody responded to their mail, they would turn the power off again: no more blog writing for me!
So, I sent them, and their solicitor, an email followed by a registered postal letter in which I demanded (by return post) a letter of appology, a confirmation that my account was in good standing, stop of all mail to this address that was not intended for me, and 150 Euros in credit to my account for all this harassment and all the hours I lost dealing with them. I said that if they didn't do that, I would hire a solicitor of my own and it would cost them more, if I added that cost to the hours of work I had lost.
I came up with the 150 based on the 147 they wanted me to pay and my (under) estimate of what it would cost to send registered mail. I threw that in to make it more serious. What I really wanted, was for them to straighten out their records and leave me alone.
Nothing happens in Ireland by return post. But, while we were on vacation, I got an email response apologizing for the mixup and a promise of a 150 Euros credit.
Today I got the latest bill, and it shows 150 Euros credit as a good will gesture. This has never happened to me before! Maybe I should go back to school and learn to be a lawyer ;-)

Signs

In the previous post I listed two of the themes I was pursuing with my picture taking during our vacation. Another theme was signs. I was looking for interesting, nice looking, and colorful signs. The criteria for inclusion in this gallery were lower than the glass and mirror one. Some of these are simple vacation snapshots. The two below are good examples:

They are not exactly master pieces. The left one I took because it seemed such an important place. Is this where they make physics? Do they govern it from here? Who are they? This was just a building along a street we walked. It didn't seem to be associated with any kind of higher institution like a university or maybe the Queen's palace. Can I go there to complain, if I feel gravity is too high?

Others, like the one above, were place we have been or shopped at. Most, however, stood out for one reason or another. They were particularly artistic, or seemed to have hung in place for centuries and were there to announce the location of a business still in operation.

And then there were some that just seemed whimsical. As usual, you can look at all the pictures in this series in my picasa album.

Do you want more or fewer humps?

Bikes, Glass, and Mirrors

I have started processing the pictures from the Switzerland and London portion of our vacation. Processing means mostly straightening some crooked shots, removing dirt and smudges, and selecting those pictures that are worthwhile displaying. I took almost 1,200 during our two-week vacation with the hope that at least 10% are salvageable.
My goal over the last few years has been to increase the percentage of keepers: Spend a little bit more time thinking when taking the picture and save a lot of time weeding through boring pictures and trying to correct those that almost turned out. Today I uploaded 14 and 28. Let me know whether they are worthwhile looking at.
When I was looking for subjects I tried to gather shots for a few themes. The pictures I uploaded today fall into the category of Bicycles and Glass and Mirrors.

A lot of people ride bicycles in Switzerland, but in London it was almost difficult to take a picture without having a bike in the frame. It was obvious that that should be one of my themes, but I didn't realize that until later, so that collection is relatively small. With the rain helping along, some of these could actually be in both albums:

The other thing that was obvious in London was that glass and mirror effects were everywhere. This provided lots of opportunities to catch colors, reflections, and play with focus to create interesting pictures.
What make some of these pictures interesting is that you can look at them for a while and still discover new elements. The one at the top of this post is an example. After looking at it for a while and changing what you are focusing at, you start seeing new things. I think I can see a man in that picture.
Here are a couple more that have multiple levels and it takes a while to figure out what belongs where.

You can view the remaining pictures of these two collections here and here. Now I have to work on the other pictures and hope to find another 78 good ones to reach my 10% goal. I'll let you know when I upload the next batch.