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ebook man is cleaning out the library
So today I sat in my office and looked over at my library of books, probably about 700 books all together. The top half of the library contains my cookbook collection and lots of other non-fiction books. The bottom half is largely science fiction, some paperbacks that I’ve had for 30 years, The Lord of the Rings trilogy for example. There were also several large stacks of books on the floor because the shelves are full. Jane is wanting me to do something to get the books off the floor. Even though she doesn’t spend that much time in my office so I don’t know why it bothers her, but she’s right the piles have been accumulating and its time to do something.
Suddenly it hit me, I could let all of the paperbacks go. I’ve been saving them for years because they are my favorites and maybe I’ll read them again, or maybe I just like to look at the shelves and see my old favorites sitting there. I’m not sure what the precise reason is, whatever it is I’m over it. I just realized that if I did want to read them again, I would no longer want to do it by holding a real book in my hand. I realized that just like all of my old ’80s music that I had on cassette tape these are relics of my past, and if I did want to read them again I would be happier to download them to my iPad and read them in the kindle app or iBooks. But, fat chance that the iBooks store would have any of these old favorites. I prefer the iPad over the dedicated Kindle because it saves me one device. Plus until now the kindle required cell coverage that I don’t have.
So, here, for posterity, and maybe to remind me in the future if I come back and read this post instead of staring at bookshelves, is a random walk through the lower half of my library. If you have suggestions for what I can do with the paperbacks let me know. If you read this list and have suggestions for other authors you think I would like, definitely let me know.
- Rober Sawyer, every book ever written by him except for the current WWW series which I bought in electronic form from the beginning. Factoring Humanity, Calculating God, the Hominid Series, great ideas
- Isaac Asimov, The robot books, and the entire foundation series. These books took me through college.
- Stephen R. Donaldson, the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. Covenant is still one frustrating guy whenever I think about these books. Although I notice that there are some new additions to the series that are out in eBook form…
- Dan Simmons, the Hyperion, Endymion series. The Shrike was one scary monster.
- David Brin, Despite the absolutely dismal movie the Postman is still a favorite in how it forshadowed the web. I also have some Brin on the upper half of the library, The Transparent Society is an excellent book to get you thinking about privacy in the digital age.
- Orson Scott Card, the Enders Game series… I loved all of these books, and I even like some of the more recent ones where he goes back and fills in some missing pieces from the perspective of other characters.
- Connie Willis, The Doomesday Book is awesome as are many of her other stories although none have captivated me as much as that one.
- Frank Herbert, The Dune series of course.
- Robert Heinlien, Stranger in a Strange Land and others.
- Mary Doria Russel, The Sparrow. This is one of my all time favorite books, in fact I even made my Paideia students read it last year. I’m sure they thought I was off the deep end for making them read Science Fiction in a serious class like Paideia but Oh well.
- Robert Russo, not science fiction but a great writer. I like all of his books, but teaching at a small college, I get tears in my eyes from laughing so hard when I read Straight Man.
- And speaking of non-science fiction books, Jon Hassler, this guy captures small town midwest living so well. From Staggerford to Rookery Blues they are amazing. I miss him, and I miss Connie Helgen who recommended him to me. After our trip to Ireland this summer I’ve been longing to go back and read a Green Journey again, but I just checked and its not available in the Kindle store. Horrors!
- James Halperin, The Truth Machine, and I just read an article this morning about a group out in california that is using MRI as a new lie detector. Anyway, read this book.
- Roger Zelazny, the whole Amber Series, kind of a disfunctional family but the whole series is fun to read.
- John Grisham, hmmm why did I save all of these??
- Carl Sagan, Contact. I read this way before the Jodi Foster movie. That was just a bonus for a young geek who loved her in the after school specials.
- J. R. R. Tolkien, a boxed set of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. I don’t think I can part with these. I still remember reading these late at night with a flashlight under my blanket. I’ve still never been able to make it through the Silmarillion though.
- Douglass Adams, such a loss, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series. I swear I can open up any of these books to a random page and start reading and I’ll be laughing in no time.
- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. I’ve never had the energy to make it through the Quicksilver books, but I have Anathem on my iPad so we’ll see.
- Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai, the Chantry Guild, The Final Encyclopedia
- Larry Niven, the Ringword Books, and other books with Jerry Pournelle (a Mote in God’s Eye) I still remember looking forward to reading Pournelle’s Chaos Manor column in Byte magazine every month
- Robert Charles Wilson, Spin, Darwinia, The Chronoliths, and others.
- Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep, a Deepness in the Sky
- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea books.
- Mary Stewart, The Crystal Cave series that retells the legend of King Arthur.
I also discovered a rather interesting section on the shelves devoted to historical fiction, but I’ll leave that for another time. I just wanted to mention it in case you’ve concluded that I’m hopelessly one dimensional.
I would also say that I’ve discovered that computer science reference books work very well as ebooks. I’ve been teaching myself to program my iPad and I have several good references in electronic form. Its nice to have them open on my big screen, and its easy to find examples when you can search.
google app engine service login
So I’m working on an app during my sabbatical that has an iPad component and an online Google App Engine component. The Google App Engine part is half web based and half web service based. Of course this means that the local client part has to be able to authenticate itself to the Google App Engine before it can communicate and do useful stuff. Finding good reliable examples of how to do this is surprisingly hard. For the Objective C code I’m working on I found a nice set of classes that do the trick for you here: On Github For Python I found some example code on stackoverflow. However it was not really in a reusable form.
The basic outline of what you have to do is as follows:
1. Login to https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin This will give you an auth token.
2. Use the token you gained in step 1 to login to your Google App engine application or service. When you have successfully logged in to your service google will set an ACSID cookie for you to use when you make subsequent requests to your service. This prevents you from having to login each time you make a web service request.
I’ve taken some ideas from both places mentioned above and have created a Python class for logging in and accessing app engine services from Python. To use this module you just need to import it and create a GoogleAppEngineLogin object. Once the object is created you can use the open method on the object to access further services. The open method is just a convenience wrapper around urllib2.urlopen but it also makes sure that your cookie has not expired before it makes a request. If you have comments or suggestions for how to improve the code please let me know via email or leave a comment.
The code is reproduced below, but you can also just download the file from git clone git@gist.github.com:36b1c45ed39298178907.git
import getpass
import urllib
import urllib2
import cookielib
class GoogleAppEngineLogin(object):
“""
Logging in to an App Engine Account (when you use google users) is
a two step process: First you must login to Google generally. This
gets you an auth token. The auth token is used as part of a
request to login to your app/service During the login process for
your app/service the server sets a cookie with the name of ACSID,
it is this cookie and its value that serves as the authentication
token for your own service/app. So, for future requests you need
to give the server the cookie as part of your request. Handling
cookies can be a bit tricky if you haven’t had some experience with
it but luckily Python’s cookielib module makes it all pretty
automatic.
This class takes care of the whole login process for you, and then
gives you a simple helper to access the URLs for your service.
The helper function makes sure the cookie is still valid and
passes on the request along with the cookie. Technically you
would not even need to use the helper function, you could use
urllib2 directly to access your service but this seems a bit
neater to me.
Some of this code was inspired by and lifted from an example on
stackoverflow.com, but that was all in-line code my contribution
is to add some error handling and encapsulate the whole thing
inside a class to make it easier to include in my/your own
programs. Here’s a link to the original thread on stackoverflow
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/101742/how-do-you-access-an-authenticated-google-app-engine-service-from-a-non-web-pyt
“""
def init(self, user_email, user_pw, uri, source):
“""
Create a Google App Engine Object.
Arguments:
-user_email: your google username
-user_pw: your google password
-uri: The url of your google app engine service
-source: The unique name of your google app engine service
“""
self._user_email = user_email
self._user_pw = user_pw
self._uri = uri
self._source = source
self._authtoken = None
self._auth_cookie = None
if not self.google_client_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Could not login to Google”)
if not self.app_engine_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Could not login to your application”)
def google_client_login(self):
#
# get an AuthToken from Google accounts
#
auth_uri = ‘https://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin'
authreq_data = urllib.urlencode({ “Email”: self._user_email,
“Passwd”: self._user_pw,
“service”: “ah”,
“source”: self._source,
“accountType”: “HOSTED_OR_GOOGLE” })
auth_req = urllib2.Request(auth_uri, data=authreq_data)
try:
auth_resp = urllib2.urlopen(auth_req)
auth_resp_body = auth_resp.read()
except:
return False
# auth response includes several fields - we’re interested in
# the bit after Auth=
auth_resp_dict = dict(x.split("=")
for x in auth_resp_body.split("\n”) if x)
try:
self._authtoken = auth_resp_dict[“Auth”]
except:
return False
return True
def app_engine_login(self):
#
# Get a cookie
# we use a cookie to authenticate with Google App Engine
# by registering a cookie handler here, this will automatically store the
# cookie returned when we use urllib2 to open
# http://www.google.com/accounts/ClientLogin
self._cookiejar = cookielib.LWPCookieJar()
opener = urllib2.build_opener(urllib2.HTTPCookieProcessor(self._cookiejar))
urllib2.install_opener(opener)
serv_args = {}
serv_args[‘continue’] = self._uri
serv_args[‘auth’] = self._authtoken
full_serv_uri = “%s/_ah/login?%s” % (self._uri,urllib.urlencode(serv_args))
serv_req = urllib2.Request(full_serv_uri)
serv_resp = urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
serv_resp_body = serv_resp.read()
for i, c in enumerate(self._cookiejar):
if c.name == ‘ACSID’:
self._auth_cookie = c
return True
return False
def open(self,url,data=None):
“""
url should be a properly encoded url ready to go. data is
optional and should be used to provide parameters to pass
along with the URL when you want to use POST instead of GET.
If you provide data it must be properly encoded just as if you
were calling urlopen directly yourself.
“""
if self._auth_cookie.is_expired():
if not self.google_client_login() or not self.app_engine_login():
raise RuntimeError(“Cannot get proper authorization for this request”)
serv_req = urllib2.Request(url,data)
return urllib2.urlopen(serv_req)
if name == “main":
user = raw_input(“User: “)
pw = getpass.getpass(“Password: “)
service_url = “http://myapp.appspot.com”
service_name = “myapp”
gae = GoogleAppEngineLogin(user,pw,service_url,service_name)
h = gae.open(“http://myapp.appspot.com/my/service")
print h.read()
polk county biking
Here’s a quiz for you… What do deer, old cars, a saw mill, and black bears all have in common? These are all things I regularly see on my rides around polk county. The countryside by our cabin is some of the best riding around, every road is paved and very lightly travelled. I can ride around any number of lakes and have all kinds of flexibility to make a route that is anywhere from 12 to 50 miles long. Bone Lake, Half Moon, Pipe, Balsam, Little Blake, Butternut, these are a few of the lakes that I loop in and through on a regular basis.
So, the other night I took my camera for a ride and focused more on the picture taking that the riding. Here’s my favorite shot from the night and you can find the rest of them here:
Incidentally, this picture illustrates where the bear comes in to the picture. This little pond is at the bottom of a little hill and around a nice little corner. One morning a came coasting down the hill and around the corner to see a black bear, he would have been right in the bottom right corner of the picture. I don’t know which of us was more surprised! The bear took off one way and I took off as fast as I could up the hill and past the pond. We’ve never seen each other again.
a beautiful last day
Well, today is our last official day of vacation. Tomorrow is a day of travel back to Dublin and then we wake up and head to the airport to see Kaia off to France and the rest of us to Chicago.
After our rain soaked day yesterday we were thrilled to wake up to see the sun and big puffy white clouds today. What a difference the sun makes! Our departure this morning was slightly delayed as we were still drying shoes and clothing from yesterday, and (I suspect) because most of the group was in Roundstone partying at the pub until late last night. The Miller family stayed and had dinner at the castle last night as we are all showing the wear of nearly four weeks on the road.
I can’t imagine what the maid must have though when she came into our room this morning. I had been sitting on the floor drying 3 pairs of shoes with the blow drier; the shoes I’ve worn every day for the last 3 weeks, Josh’s tennis shoes, and Jane’s walking shoes. The smell was indescribable.
When we did take off we headed out toward Roundstone, a beautiful little seaside village which is becoming very popular among the well to do here in Ireland. When you come into town you go right past the house of the guy who wrote the original River Dance. From Roundstone we made our way along the coast toward Ballyconeely where we had our first ‘table stop’ of the day. Padraic was busy setting out a table with fruit and granola bars and juice for us.
We only had a little further to go to get to Clifden, so we decided to do the Sky Drive loop before lunch rather than after. That turned out to be a great decision as the weather cooperated perfectly and we were treated to magnificent views of the sea. Based on the color of the sea you would think that you were in the Caribbean not Ireland! As you might guess the Sky drive was a bit of a climb but it takes you right out to a point where you can see ocean in three different directions. Here’s the Miller family at our stop on the point.
Of course by this time our guides had already schemed to set up another table stop. They had gone to the store in Clifden and bought some more Bulmers cider, this was the new berry flavor that Padraic had not had before so he was even more excited than usual for us to give it a try. We toasted a great trip and all of our new found friends.
The ride back into Clifden was mostly downhill, but by this time we really were ready for some food. We ate at E.J. Kings pub, Jane and I had the chicken curry, Kaia had ravioli, and Josh had a club sandwich. I think Padraic was a little disappointed that we had strayed from traditional irish fare but by this time our palate’s were ready for something a little more spicy. We all had to laugh at Josh during lunch because we were talking about the weather and how lucky we were that it wasn’t raining like it was yesterday. I said yes, it only rains in Ireland on days that contain a ‘y.’ Jane and Kaia laughed and the conversation moved on. Suddenly, from out of the blue, Josh says, “wait every day has a ‘y’ in it.” We still love him.
By the time we finished lunch it was almost 3:00 and it was time to head back to the Castle. The Miller family took off a little ahead of the pack, and then Josh and I separated from Jane and Kaia, we made it back in record time. It was our flattest ride yet. The interesting thing about riding through the bog is how similar it looks to the prairies of Southern Minnesota, except where the glaciers flattened all the granite in Minnesota there were no glaciers here so the granite still stands in small hills and big chunks of rock sticking up out of the landscape.
Josh and I were so fast that I missed the last table stop. A little bit of Jameson Irish Whiskey to toast our final ride. Not being a whiskey fan, that did not hurt my feelings except that Padraic insisted on pouring me a glass in the parking lot of the Castle when he caught up to us.
Tonight we have our final group meal in the main dining room here at the castle. Based on the look I had at the menu last night it will be a feast. This has really been a great way to finish up our vacation. The people in our group have been a lot of fun, and DuVine really lives up to their motto, Bike, Eat, Drink, Sleep. In the photo above we have in the front row, Dan, Craig, Kaia, Laurie, and Joanna. In the back row we have Patty (Dan’s wife) Bobby and Brian, Brad and Jane, Josh, and James (Joanna’s fiance)
Not in the picture are our two amazing guides for the week Padraic and Kirk. These guys are amazing and made for a really fun week. Its easy to forget that every time we were having fun and sitting around enjoying ourselves they were tending to every minute detail to make sure that our trip was a success.
Location:Ballynahinch Castle
connemara and castles
We are staying in a castle! Ashford castle to be precise. It’s about an hour outside of Galway and it’s absolutely beautiful. We arrived yesterday afternoon with our DuVine Adventures guides Kirk and Padraic. Yesterday was mostly about checking to the room, getting our bikes fit, and getting to know our fellow cyclists. There are a total of 12 of us on the trip and everyone is really nice. There are no other young adults on the trip but so far everyone has been very welcoming of Josh and Kaia.
This morning we woke up to what the irish call a soft rain, we might call it a mist but I like the irish term better. It really is so soft that you forget about the precipitation until you are totally soaked by it. We had a nice breakfast here at the castle and then Josh and I went golfing at the nine hole course, and Jane went along with some of our fellow cyclists to a falconry class. It was amazing, they got to wear the leather glove, and the falcon would take off and land from their arm. Meanwhile Josh and I were sharing a set of clubs and getting soaked while playing some golf in Ireland. The course was not too hard, and on the par three I almost got a legitimate hole in one, see my previous post on St. Andrews!
At noon we took off on our first true ride of the tour. We cycled up the road a bit to stop for lunch in a small pub. The only problem was that the soft rain had not abated, and according to our head waiter at the castle, “If its still raining at 11, its probably going to keep raining all day.” It really was a soft rain and although we were all quite wet at our lunch stop we dried out rather quickly as well. Our destination for the afternoon was Joyce Country Sheepdogs. Here we Met Joe Joyce who is a sheep farmer and breeder of working dogs. If you have seen Marley and Me, you have seen Joe’s sheep and one of his dogs (not Marley – Its the scene where the sheep are blocking the road)
Joe showed us how the dogs herd the sheep and how they respond to his verbal or whistled commands. He lives in a beautiful stone house, and his sheep roam the mountains across the lake from his home. When he needs to bring the sheep in for something, which happens five times a year, he brings his dogs across the lake and he commands them using his whistle from a boat where he has a better view. These dogs are amazing, they WANT to work so hard for him they go crazy when its not their turn to herd the sheep. I should say it rained on us the last couple of miles to Joe’s house so we were all like drowned rats when we got their. Thankfully while we were there the rain let up and the sun started to break through.
The ride back was even more beautiful than the ride out, thanks in large part to the lack of rain. Its amazing how green and beautiful the Irish countryside is. The mountains go directly down to the lake shore and the lakes themselves are incredibly beautiful. Tonight we had our second amazing dinner at the castle, this dinner was much less formal than last night’s sport coat and tie affair, but my seafood chowder was to die for, the fish and chips were good, and then the desert, a white chocolate rhubarb tart was amazing.
Tomorrow we have about 40 miles to bike to our next destination and another delicious dinner, I’m already looking forward to it, and I hope we will have sun all day tomorrow.
world cup disappointment in galway
The other night on our pub crawl, Eugene told us a story about the Irish people and how they would conquer the world. He started with the excuse that Ireland has been invaded by just about everyone else on the planet, and how Ireland has a hopeless military; but went on to describe their master plan. According to Eugene when you go into a bar in Ireland you are likely to be ignored for a while, but if you stick around eventually someone will come up and start talking to you. This is not because they are especially friendly, but because the are especially nosey. “Within 15 minutes they will have your name, your parents names, your grandparents names, and your home address.” This information is useful he says because sometime in the future, when you least expect it “this person will show up on your door with a sleeping bag in hand.” They’ll find a quite place to settle down and sometime later fifteen of them will emerge! And this is how Ireland will conquer the world. We all laughed.
Last night at Fagan’s pub we experienced part one of this scenario. We were watching the USA versus Ghana match having a nice time, enjoying a pint and some appetizers, and being cheerfully ignored by all the locals. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around awkwardly to find a red-haired man in a gold and green striped jersey wishing the USA good luck. He wanted to know if we were on holiday here in Ireland? If we were football fans? How long we were staying? What we were doing in Galway? What was our surname? Where were we from? (city and state) As this very friendly irishman took a break of his inquisition to get another pint, Josh leaned over to me and said “Dad he’s going to show up on our door with his sleeping bag!” I just about fell on the floor laughing!
Partway through the second half the whole scenario repeated itself with two different guys. It was all great fun, especially when Donovan tied up the score on his PK and the whole pub was cheering. Sadly that all came to an end early on in the overtime period when our world cup hopes for USA were dashed. Now we are left to wonder who to cheer for and whether our enthusiasm for watching world cup will wane after this defeat. We have watched a lot of football on this trip, its been a fun constant for us in a sea of daily change. Its forced us to sit down and relax at 4:00 or 8:30 most days rather than continuing to tour and walk. Its revived my taste for a good pint of beer.
Location:Galway, Ireland
a day in dublin
This morning we are on the train from Dublin to Galway. We woke up to a bright blue sky in Dublin, packed up our belongings, and left our little apartment for the tram to the train station. Although the apartment itself was a bit sketchy it was in a great neighborhood and we had wonderful restaurants up and down the block.
Last night we had a wonderful Thai meal at Koh. We shared three appetizers and three main course dishes. For the appetizers we had mixed satays, vietnamese beef balls, and ceviche. All were delicious. For the main course we shared green curry with chicken, cashew chicken, and panang curry with beef. I think we each had our own favorite it was all so good.
Yesterday was definitely a full day of touristing in Dublin. We started off our day on the hop-on-hop-off tour bus. Our first hop-off was at the Guinness storehouse. This is a building that Guinness has turned into a monument to all things Guinness. The building is designed so that your tour takes you around and around and on a spiral upward around the worlds largest Guinness pint glass. We learned about how Guinness is brewed, about the history of Guinness, and how to pour the perfect pint of Guinness. At the Gravity bar at the very top of the pint glass we were in an all glass circular room with great views of Dublin, there we could trade our ticket for….. A pint of Guinness! Here’s Josh and I in front of the waterfall…good pure water is key to making Guinness. Mr Guiness signed a 9000 year lease for the land on which the brewery sits in part because of it’s access to the pure water flowing in from the Dublin Mountains.
After the Guinness tour we hopped back on the bus and headed for the Gaol. By this time we were very hungry and so we decided to find a bit of lunch. There was not much to choose from in the area around the Gaol but Dolce Vita caught our attention almost right away. We had some very nice pizzas and Kaia had a steaming hot bowl of Spaghetti Carbonara.
The Kilmainham Gaol is a famous site in Dublin as it is the place where 14 of the 16 leaders of the Easter rebellion were executed. It is a very old gaol and the history goes back well before the time of the potato famine in Ireland. It was during the famine that the overcrowding at the gaol was at its worst. The gaol has been featured in several movies including Michael Connelly, and the original version of The Italian Job.
By the time we had finished our guided tour of the gaol our feet were tired so we hopped back on the bus and rode it all the way around to where we had started. Along the way we saw lots of other sites of Dublin. The hop-on-hop-off busses are all double decker busses with open tops so we sat up top and enjoyed the scenery.
We returned to our apartment for a little break and decided to head out to find a pub with internet access. We chose the Church bar, which is a bar/restaurant that has emerged from the remodeled Saint Mary’s church in Dublin. This is the first bar I’ve been in that has its own pipe organ! The pipe organ, built in the 18th century was used by G. F. Handel. In addition there are several famous people who are buried in the church/pub, and there have been some important weddings including Alfred Guinness. How appropriate to have a pint of Guinness in the place where he was married.
After happy hour and then dinner at Koh we were all ready to just kick back and watch the world cup match in our apartment while we finished up washing all of our clothes. The match between Chile and Spain was a yawner, as chile seemed to be willing to place their hopes on Switzerland playing to a draw. Its been very interesting traveling to all of the different companies during the world cup competition. We have seen lots of different kinds of coverage and commentators. Last night on Irish TV there were four very old guys who spent forever dissecting the match and making the case that Spain was really going to have to pick up their game if they had any hope of progressing during the elimination round.
Today is a pretty light day. We’ll get in to Galway just after noon, and we don’t have much planned other than some light walking around and scoping out somewhere to watch USA play tonight. Josh and I are both wearing our USA jerseys today. Good Luck team USA.
Location:On the train from Dublin to Galway
the roller derby queen in dublin
Well last night a bit of Dublin had a taste of some Jim Croce music. I’m not sure where it came from but we were enjoying the musical pub crawl that started in Tower Square. Our two guides for the night were Eugene, who played the Irish banjo, and Steve who was a guitar player. After a couple of pubs and a lot of good Irish Jigs and Reels, and some history of Irish music and instruments were were walking between pubs and I started up a conversation with Steve. Steve also plays a Taylor guitar and it is the same model I have at home. That was the kiss of death. “What is your name?” asks Eugene. Brad, I say. “Now we’ve got you” says Eugene, at this next stop you’ll have to play a little for us. Uh, I don’t think thats a very good idea I said. We talk a little more about what kind of music I like to play and where we are visiting in Ireland and where we have already been. Steve mentions that he is a fan of Prairie Home Companion and how some of the things that Keillor talks about on the show remind him of Ireland and I’m thinking I’m safe and the whole sing for us thing was simply a fun idle threat.
After we get to the next pub and the duo works through a couple more songs Eugene starts in on a long story about how its an Irish tradition to join in on a session and it doesn’t matter how good you are or if you even just sing one verse or whatever, its all in good fun. The next thing I know Steve is handing me the Taylor and a pick I’m I’m thinking what the heck am I going to play!? Roller Derby Queen is Jane’s suggestion and I think I can probably remember the chords and the words, so I start to strum a little bit to see if I can recall the right chords and pretty soon I’m singing. I make it through a couple of versus without too many mistakes and finish up to the applause of the rest of the pub crawlers. Thankfully they all had had a few pints of Guinness by now so they were not an overly discriminating audience. Anyway, it was great fun.
So now that its the next morning and I’m thinking about it, I realize that I really have quite an international performance background. I’ve played in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa. I’ve played with a group of Tahitians sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the South Seas. And now I’ve played on an Irish pub crawl in Dublin. It makes me wonder where I could go if I practiced some more!
After the pub crawl was over, we found a little Italian place that was still serving pasta at 10:30 at night and finished off our first day in Dublin. The day had started out very early, in Stockholm with a train ride to the Arlanda airport. We flew SAS from Stockholm to Dublin and then took a bus from the airport to the city center of Dublin. Here in Dublin we are staying in one of the StayDublin.com apartments. Its a bit sketchy and in need of paint and a good cleaning but the apartment has two bedrooms a living room a kitchen with one of those funky european washer/dryer units. If anyone can tell me out to operate one of those things properly please send me an email. We cannot get the dryer to work for anything.
After unloading our stuff at the apartment we started to explore the area a little. We found a restaurant called Boojum, right by our apartment that is operated by a man from Philadelphia. If you are looking for your fix of Chipotle right here in the heart of Dublin then Boojum is for you. It was a nice lunch, and I think Josh was really happy with the food. We took a tour of Trinity College and saw the Book of Kells. This is an amazingly old illuminated version of the four gospels that has been preserved by the Trinity library, its a really interesting exhibit, and we had a great guide who is a student at Trinity and works for Ark.com, Ark sells clothing and the idea is that every time you wear an article of Ark clothing you perform An Act of Random Kindness. Thats where the Ark name comes from. The library at Trinity was also extremely interesting to me for two reasons. First it is the largest single room library in Europe. Its just beautiful to see books and bookshelves stretched out for a city block. But the second reason is interesting to my twisted computer science mind because of how the books are organized in the library. The books are sorted by SIZE! In order to find a book in this library you must know the exact dimensions of the book to get you to the proper shelf!
After the tour of Trinity we just walked around and enjoyed the street performers and the shops of Dublin. Josh wanted to go to the Leprechaun museum but he was out voted 3 to 1. So we went back to the apartment to rest our feet and find an internet cafe to catch up on email and Facebook before the pub crawl. Today we are doing a hop-on-hop-off tour of the city and plan to take the tour of the Guiness Brewery and the Dublin Gaol.
Location:Dublin, Ireland
ship building lessons in stockholm
Today we heard the name Gustavus Adophus quite a lot. With apologies to my friends in St. Peter I must say he didn’t know much about ship building. In all truth it really wasn’t his fault from a technical point of view, but he did pay the bill. I am talking about the Vasa of course. It is the largest ship to be recovered and salvaged and conserved in a museum. This is definitely a must see sight if you go to Stockholm. The Vasa was built in 1628 and was the largest ship in the Swedish fleet. Unfortunately she sunk on her maiden voyage out of the harbor! The reason she sank was because there was not enough ballast in the ship to counterbalance the forces on the sails in the heavy breeze. This seems like an incredibly dumb mistake for a ship builder to make, but there you have it.
The ship lay submerged for 333 years until an amazing recovery operation in the 1960’s brought the ship to the surface. The Vasa is amazingly well preserved due to the water conditions in the Baltic. The museum is just as interesting for the story of how the ship was raised to the surface and preserved as it was to learn about the building of the ship in 1628.
The Vasa Museum was our first stop today in Stockholm. Our day started early as we had to debark from the vision of the seas by 7:40. The sailing in to Stockholm was once again beautiful and very reminiscent of Wisconsin and Northern Minnesota. We are all very lonely for our cabin at the sight of water, boats, rave trampolines and all the pine trees. The rest of the morning we wandered around stockholm enjoying the shops and the old town. We did a little shopping. I got an official USA soccer jersey to wear for the game today.
After walking around all morning we returned to our hotel to check in and rest up a bit. We are staying in the Rica Hotel on Gamla Stan in a wonderful part of stockholm. The streets around here are narrow and cobbled and there are restaurants and bars and little shops everywhere. We hunted around a little bit to decide where to have a late afternoon dinner and watch the USA versus Algeria match. We found O’Leary’s, a boston themed restaurant owned by a swede who spent time in Boston. They had the England match on upstairs and the USA match on down. The American fans were many and much louder than the brits. In a funny small world moment I recognized one of the other fans in the restaurant as the same person we had watched football with when we were in Balestrand! They were originally from Minnesota but had moved to Boston.
To catch up on our activities, yesterday we were in Tallin Estonia, and the day before was a day at sea. Tallin was a really nice city, it has the oldest medieval walled city in Europe. The city reminded us a little of Italy and of some of the walled cities we had visited in Tuscany. The city is an interesting mix of scandinavian and Russian influences.
Jane had a walking tour of the city that we got on the internet and we followed that plan around the city for several hours. After that we returned to the ship for our last night on board.
We are having a great time, but we are all very tired today. We just didn’t have a lot of energy for many touring activities. And the USA victory took a lot of energy as well. Early to bed tonight, but up again early tomorrow morning for our flight to Dublin.
Location:Stockholm, Sweden
read all about it, biking with mike is great
After days and days of using our feet to get around european cities it was time for a change, and what better city to try two wheeled touring in than Copenhagen. Copenhagen has more bikes than anywhere else in the world. They make the people of Portland look like a bunch of slackers. There are literally bikes everywhere. At the train stations there are bike racks two stories high, there are bike racks everywhere and people riding their bikes everywhere.
Jane found Biking with Mike on the internet, he is a lifelong resident of Copenhagen who left his job as a director at a large company to do what he loves – bike and tell people about his city. There is no fancy signup procedure as each days tours are first come first served. If the weather is horrible there won’t be a tour.
We left the ship at 9:30 and headed straight for Mike’s bike shop. We knew the tour was not until 10:30 but we wanted to make sure we got a spot on the tour. We arrived by taxi 5 minutes later, but the shop did not even open until 10:00. So we walked around the area a little bit and decided to get a coffee at the cafe up the block from Mike’s. One minor problem was that we hadn’t taken the time to find a cash machine and get some Danish Kroners. After preparing our coffee we discovered that the credit card reader in the coffee shop was not working properly, and so we were unable to pay. In Decorah, this would not really be a problem, go find some money and pay me later. Who would have guessed that we would find the same attitude in a big city? This appears to be the Danish way. The proprietor of the coffee shop was perfectly happy to have us go on our bike tour, get some cash, and pay him later in the day.
Shortly after 10 Mike arrived. Bright green stocking hat, bright green shoes, a yellow and black livestrong vest and fashionable glasses. His bike matched his cycling outfit. Mike took us on a tour for a little over 3 hours. We saw the palace, the castle, the parliament buildings, the house where Hans Christian Anderson was born, the new opera house, a couple of parks, and a little lawless place called Christiana. We would bike for a while and then stop and mike would give us a short lecture on what were were looking at, Danish politics, Danish culture, local gossip, you name it and MIke knew about it. He is an excellent story teller. As we were riding there was no talking, the idea is to absorb the local feeling of the place as you are riding rather than chatting. It worked. It was fun, we saw a lot of the city.
Christiana was the most interesting stop on the tour. We had coffee in the moonshine cafe. It is the safest coffee house in Copenhagen. Why? The sign on the door tells the story. More than 6000 police inspections since 2004. Christiana is the counter culture area of Copenhagen, Mike discouraged us from taking any pictures in the area because you never know when you might accidentally capture a deal going down, and they don’t like that.
We learned one word of Danish that really sums up our Copenhagen experience. The word is Hygglite, it is difficult to describe exactly what it means, cozy is one possible translation while fantastic is another. Internet people might translate it as “A Good Thing.” Its a word they use in Denmark to describe when something is just right and good. Our bike tour of Copenhagen with mike was definitely Hygglite.
At the conclusion of our tour we paid mike and headed, on foot, back through the park on the way to the ship. When we emerged from the park, there was Mike on his bike. Hello he said, I wonder if you might have a few minute to talk to a reporter from the paper Politik? Its the largest Danish paper and they are doing a story about touring copenhagen on bike. It seems that the reporter for the paper was planning to go on Mike’s afternoon tour, but because of the oncoming rain Mike had cancelled the afternoon tour. So, we agreed to spend a few minutes talking to the reporter and then we got our picture taken by one of the photographers from the paper. So, if you speak Danish you can read about the Miller family and our bike fun in the city of Copenhagen!
Location:Copenhagen, Denmark
