Travel: Washington DC, USA -- Let it Snow!

Tonight I went to watch "Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire" with a friend and when we got out of the movie theatre, the air was thick with snow, which had also covered everything with a lovely thin layer of white.

On the way back to my hotel driving through the snow I listened to the radio show 'Continuous Christmas, 101.9', which was appropriately playing the carol 'Let it Snow' (I'm not sure if that is the title, but it is something that is sung a lot). It felt all very Christmassy, although it is not yet even Thanksgiving (Nov 24).

As for Harry Potter, well I really enjoyed it. I might write some more about this movie later. Tomorrow I head back home!

Random: Caffeine Free Coke and Backwards Light Switches

See the switch below. The switch is off when pointing down. Is this just a special case or is this another difference between American and Australian standards?

I also found a funny-looking diet coke in the fridge and it is caffeine-free Diet Coke. Surely this is coke with all the bad stuff taken out? Then again, it does still have phosphoric acid, potassium benzoate (to protect taste) [what does that mean anyway?], natural flavours and citric acid.

Sport: Australia makes the World Cup!

According to a reliable source, Australia has just made the World Cup (soccer) for the first time in more than 30 years! We beat the 5th-placed South American team (Uruguay) in a penalty shootout when the games were tied after 1-0 wins from both teams at home.

Its a shame I wasn't there to watch the game...

Detroit: Weather

The weather in Detroit isn't so good today. Strong winds and lots of rain. Not looking good for tomorrow either...

Travel: Detroit, Michigan, USA

I've been in Fairlane which is about 10 miles from downtown Detroit for a couple of days now. Today I went for a stroll around and as you might expect from a place which claims to be 'The Motor City', it is pretty difficult to get around here without a car. I went for a walk for about an hour and found only the occasional footpath to wander along. There are trains, but they only run every few hours or so around here.

I decided to follow the saying 'when in Rome, do as the Romans do' and after a little hesitation caused by a small fear of big freeways and major traffic around the city centre, I headed into the city. In a car, getting around Detroit like much of America is very easy. Road signage is very high quality and generally the roads were in pretty good condition, especially the freeways.

I found a parking spot offering $5/day and thought it was pretty good, given that in Sydney you could easily be paying $5/hour. Surprisingly, this was quite a common price, and on-street parking was only 25c for 20 minutes, cheaper than in Canberra. Things are weighted heavily in the favour of drivers, although there is a petition for free parking for city workers, so some drivers feel that even $5 is too much to pay.

My first stop was Greektown, which was a reasonably busy area of town, possibly because of the Casino:

After that I went for a wander around town and I got the feeling that the place was pretty deserted. I asked someone on the street and he said that it was the start of hunting season tomorrow, which might explain why there were a few less people than usual, but really 'Detroit is pretty dead'. I tend to agree with this, with streets looking something like the following (at about 3:


I decided to check this out a bit more on the net and I found out that Detroit is actually one of the few cities whose population drops during the day (more workers leave the city to do their job than come in to work). There was also mention of about 10000 people/year leaving Detroit and of course there were people with very negative views of Detroit.

Detroit has been heavily influenced by Ford, with a Henry Ford Medical Centre, Henry Ford Museum, many Ford buildings etc. The sign below spells it out:

IT: RSS/News Aggregators

At home I use Akregator to keep track of my RSS/News feeds as discussed previously. This is great but at the moment I'm travelling and with a Windows computer so I couldn't run it even if I could have copied my subscriptions.

So I started looking at online readers. Google Reader looks pretty good, as does Bloglines, but Netvibes really caught my eye. Here's a picture:


I'm dragging the Gmail component to a new spot in the picture. It is basically your own personal portal with news feeds, price watches, weather, search, etc. etc. This is similar to the personalised Google search page, but I think it looks a little cleaner.

Even though this is probably going to be good enough for what I need to do, what I'd really prefer is some way to run a non-web client (Sage?), but to be able to synch settings. This would also be very handy for Firefox extensions. For example, I set my home PC up with certain Firefox extensions (ForecastFox, FoxClocks, perhaps Sage) and then I could start another PC and ask it to synch the extensions and their settings from a web address.

At the moment I have to manually set up each new PC with the same extensions and then the settings before I'm ready to go.

Thoughts: "Meditate Now"

I saw the sign "Meditate Now" the other day while driving and I thought that was a collision between two completely opposing ideas. The first is to meditate, which is to seek inner peace through some form of relaxation. It typically involves thinking "intently and at length, as for spiritual purposes".

This is colliding with the idea of having to do it NOW. It is similar to the principle of "hurry up and wait", which is evident in peak houring driving. People rush to be first off the line at the traffic lights, only to stop more quickly at the next set of lights.

I am not sure I'd try to meditate at a place which is rushing to get you into it. Would they then expect you to start at a given time and bam, after an alloted time of 30 minutes exactly, you're out of there? I'd be more likely to attend a session at a place that had a slogan like "Meditate when you're ready", although I haven't ever tried group meditation.