Ants on the Melon
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We arrived in Amsterdam Sunday evening around 4pm, and immediately had to wait for an hour at the travel center to reserve our overnight coachette to Copenhagen for the following day. At 5:05 we learned from the door of the tourist information center that they close at 5:00 on Sundays, which made finding a hotel a little more interesting. Someone at the bus station pointed us in the direction of an area of town with lots of hotels, so we took a trolley there and walked around until we found a hotel with a room available. We ended up staying at the Omega Hotel, which was a nice little bed and breakfast type place that even had free wifi (but still no A/C).

Monday morning we went out for breakfast, checked out of the hotel, took our luggage to the train station and rented bikes for the day. Our first stop was the Rijks Museum (Rembrandt), followed by the Van Gogh Museum which had several pieces that I recognized, including Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom.” After eating a late lunch and picking up some groceries for the upcoming overnight trip, we headed back to the train station to drop off our bikes and wait for the train. My pictures from Amsterdam are here.

We took the train from Amsterdam to Duisburg, and then caught the overnight train to Copenhagen from there. When we exited the train station in Copenhagen on Tuesday morning I realized that I did not have my camera, which was in my pocket when I boarded the train. I ran back down to the platform but the train was already gone. Eventually I found an elderly woman who told me the train was about 10 minutes away being cleaned. She made some calls, located my camera, and told me to come back in 30 minutes to pick up my camera. Yay for nice people!

During all of this running around in the airport I had noticed several flyers for the “International Rotary Convention.” While waiting for my camera to show up, Jason and I walked to the local tourist information center to find out where we could get a hotel. “None. Nothing in the City. No rooms available. Sorry.” Uhm… so we decided that maybe the tourist center only dealt with large hotels, so we walked around to find a smaller one that might have vacancies. That’s when we learned that 18,000 Rotarians were in town for the convention, and one hotel told us that there are only 10,000 beds in the city. We got a second opinion to be sure, and heard the same answer. Armed with Eurail passes, we ran back to the train station just in time to hop on a train to Stockholm (which apparently we needed reservations for, but again, yay for nice people!). Since we have first class tickets for the Eurail our seats are really nice, and there is even wireless and power on the train!

Instead of going from Copenhagen->Oslo->Stockholm, we are going to see Stockholm->Oslo->Copenhagen so we will be back after the 14th, when the Rotary convention is over.

The weather has been absolutely perfect so far, even for the 5 days I was in London.

We arrived in Brussels around 4 pm on Saturday afternoon. As soon as we exited the train station Jason managed to pull an Americanism with a local shop owner while asking for directions. It was at that point I decided to handle public relations for the rest of the trip.

Finally we figured out what was going on and took a cab to the local information center. A lady there hooked us up with a hotel and said that they were running a “deal” until later that evening. Sure enough, she got us a price that was lower than even the hotel was advertising. More on this later.

After checking in and dropping off our bags in the room we headed out into the bustling town area to find dinner. The city was alive with people, and we walked around for a while before stopping at a little restaurant named Les Chapeliers near La Grand Place. Of course, I had to get a Kriek since I really enjoyed the one Dirk introduced them to me last fall. After filling up on meat and potatoes we stopped at a little corner dessert shop for Belgium and Liege waffles. Sweet!

Now that we had full bellies we started walking around the rest of the city. We saw La Grand Palace, as well as several really interesting little streets full of restaurants with tables out side, and after walking around for 3 hours we eventually saw the Manneken Pis, the famous statue of the little boy peeing. It was beginning to get late (but not dark) by this point, so we headed up to the top of the city to the capital. We got there just in time to see the sun set over Brussels, which was pretty cool, although a bit strange to see at 10pm.

By this point we were exhausted so we started back to the hotel. Along the way we met some interesting (drunk) dudes who were singing Billy Joel’s “Uptown Girl” for the whole city to hear.

Since the sun had just gone down, it was still pretty warm and when we got to the hotel room we were both still sweating. After a few minutes we noticed that the room was really hot, so we started looking for the air conditioner switch. We found a few knobs, but they ddn’t seem to do anything. I called the front desk to find out if there was a trick we didn’t know, but instead she said “Air conditioning? There is no air conditioning at this hotel.” Ok, we were on the 6th (and 7th) floor but fortunately there was a huge window in the room that we were able to open. This allowed the room to cool down a little, and so around 11:30 we were able ready for sleep. It was at this time that the Turkish Karoake Bar across the street started things up. This went on until at least 3am (which is when I finally passed out from exhaustion), and the entire time it was very loud, and well, I’ve never heard anything quite like it. There is a lot of high pitched yelling, as if the person is going through some excruciating pain. At 3am. The absurdity of the situation just made us laugh uncontrollably, possibly because we were simply delirious by that point. I don’t think it is something either of us will forget anytime soon.

The next morning we woke up, had a really good breakfast at the hotel, and caught a taxi back to the train station. Two Eurail passes later we were headed to Amsterdam for the next stop in our trip. I’ve written this on the train to Amsterdam, and we have an overnight train scheduled from Amsterdam to Copenhagen, so I’ll write the next update at that point. I’ve posted all my pictures from Brussels.

Today is my last full day in London, as Jason and I are leaving in the morning to begin traveling. I have had a blast here, and the UK Rackers have been just great. Wednesday night they took us out to Tas Pidi, a Turkish restaurant in the south bank area of London. Afterwards we crossed the Millennium Bridge over to St Paul’s Cathedral and then headed back via the tube.

Last night we all went to “Tequila Thursday” at the Hole in the Wall with the group from the office. No tequila for me, but it was a great time and I met lots more people. The Hole in the Wall is a really cool little pub with an outdoor area with picnic tables and green grass. The food there was excellent as well.

I’ve also had a lot of fun teaching DNS to the Rackers here. We had 4 technical sessions, and 3 non-technical sessions. I was wondering what I could teach about DNS that wasn’t technical, but as it turns out there was a lot that the sales people and account managers wanted to know. Of course the technial sessions were fun and I got to talk about DNS people who were actually interested in hearing about it. That doesn’t happen very often. Also, I uploaded a few pictures of their new (very cool) Stockley Park office.

Tomorrow morning we are leaving for Brussels. From there we plan to head to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, Prague, Munich, Paris and finally back to London to catch our flights. If there is time we may also swing by Zurich between Munich and Paris. These are ambitious plans for two weeks, but we are going to give it our best.

I arrived in London yesterday morning, after a 9 hour flight from Houston. I managed to get the only window seat on the plane without a window, but not a big deal.

When I was walking to my hotel in the city I noticed the picture to the right. Click on it to see the full irony.

Today I taught two classes on DNS to several Rackers here in the UK. The Rackspace UK office is amazing, I would love to work in an environment like this. Now I know why Rackspace UK was ranked 6th best place to work in the UK.

Tonight some of the Racker’s here are going out to dinner with Jason and me to a Turkish restaurant. I’m trying to remember to take pictures, but I’ve never been very good at that. I’ll be uploading pictures into my Europe 2006 gallery whenever possible.

Cheers!

Today I was reading the Signal vs. Noise blog and I following a link to BMW’s page on Wikipedia. I was skimming through the section on Rolls-Royce when I noticed that it mentioned the Crewe Factory. Oddly enough, I knew that Rolls-Royce had a plant in Crewe.

My dad has an auto body shop in Burkeville, Virginia, which is about 5 miles from Crewe, Virginia. When I was younger I remember that an executive from Rolls-Royce visited Crewe, Virginia because it was named after the city where the Rolls-Royce factory was (or something like that). While this guy was in the area, he had been told about my dad’s shop and came up to pay my dad a visit and see the shop. So when I saw the link to Crewe from the BMW page, I had to check it out.

To my horror, the first thing I noticed at the top of the Crewe, England page was a link to Crewe, Virginia. At the top of the Crewe, Virginia page there was a link to Nottoway County, which referenced pages about Burkeville, Virginia and Blackstone, Virginia, my hometown. According to Wikipedia, “As of the 2000 census, the town had a total population of 3,675.”

The Internet is a crazy place!

Google just released local maps for several European countries. Check out the Arc de Triomphe and The Eiffel Tower in Paris, St Marks Basilica in Venezia, and the Cathedral in Florence

Maps are available for France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Check out the announcement on the Google Blog. This is so cool!

It’s hard to remember what the web was like before Google came along.

I spent the weekend with some friends in Virginia at Wintergreen Resort.

The event was great because almost all of us had something to celebrate. Rebecca is (finally) graduating from Pharmacy school, it was Pete’s birthday, I finished paying of my college loans, and Scott was celebrating the fact that Rebecca is (finally) graduating. Sarah and Elissa helped to get the party started. Its not very often that this group of friends gets together, since we all live in different parts of the country, but when we do it is a lot of fun. Unfortunately I was never able to meet up with Tate and his entourage while we were all up there (sorry Tate!), but I’ve already told them that next year we have to plan a trip out west.

I’ve been skiing and snowboarding at Wintergreen since the fourth grade, and it always seemed like such a fun place. But after spending several days snowboarding in Colorado my perspective on east coast slopes is a little different now. The snow is so slippery and icy, the slopes are short and crowded, the lift lines are long, the lifts are slow, and the people are dangerously novice at best. People also appear to have attitude problems there as well, but that seems more like a general east coast issue.

But, then again, there are a lot of mountain men up that way and you tend to see some interesting sights, like the guy in the picture to the left. Notice the camoflague hunting overalls doubling as skiing attire, and the awesome “pizza” stance.

It was a very quick trip, but we had a great time.

Recently I spent some time out in Colorado, here’s what happened.

Snowboarding at Beaver Creek

After landing at the Eagle/Vail airport I met up with some mutual friends and caught a shuttle to our place at Beaver Creek Resort. When I arrived at the house I didn’t know any of the other 7 people there, but they were Chris’s friends and everyone was very friendly. We had dinner and played some games until everyone was ready for sleep around 10. Chris arrived later that night.

The next day we hit the slopes. It had been about 3 years since I had last used my snowboard, so it took me an hour or two to get back in the swing of things. Soon I was back on the advanced blues and hitting the black daimonds. I started skiing when I was in the 4th grade, and switched over to snowboarding around the 11th grade in high school, but almost all of my experience is from the mountains on the east coast, especially at Wintergreen Resort. In college Tate and I used to go up there several times a week in the winter, good times. When I lived in New Orleans I flew out to Winter Park, Colorado to hang out with my cousin and snowboard for a few days. I remember thinking then how much more intense the slopes are in the Rockies, and Beaver Creek is no different. (check out the trail maps)

We snowboarded for 4 solid days and after each day everyone was completely exhausted. Usually everyone passed out by 10pm, but one night we took the opportunity to head over to Vail and check out the scene. By the end of the 4 days my calves were a jelly-like substance and there was no way I could think of spending any more time on the slopes. The only thing that kept me going was the excellent food that Katie, Jason and the group prepared each night, although I am quite sensitive to peppers now. We headed out Friday morning, and I caught my flight to Denver to continue the rest of my trip.

Hanging Out in Boulder and Denver

Ken picked me up from the Denver airport around 4pm on Friday and we headed over to his friend Scott’s place to hang out. While we were in Denver with Scott and Jenny we went to dinner at Tommy’s Thai. When we walked in we noticed that everyone was wearing jackets, gloves and stocking caps. It was very cold inside, but the food was worth it. I ordered medium hot Pad Thai and an order of vegetable gyoza, and every bite was excellent. I’m not a huge fan of Asian food, but I could eat at Tommy’s any day. After playing several games of pool and being reprimanded by a middle-aged woman in an “N’Sync” shirt, Ken and I headed up to Boulder where he lives.

The next morning we woke up early and got off to an extremely good start by having breakfast at Lucile’s. Breakfast is my favorite meal and I think its pretty hard to get a top of the line breakfast. There are many great lunch and dinner spots, but few places specialize on breakfast. Lucile’s breakfast was one of the best I have ever had. There were 3 or 4 things on the menu that I really wanted to order, but I finally settled on the New Orleans french toast. It came with eggs, sausage, fresh fruit, and was hands down one of the best breakfast meals I have ever had.

After breakfast Ken showed me around the Pearl Street Mall in downtown Boulder. There were all kinds of interesting shops and stores, and I picked up a few CDs from Bart’s CD Cellar. After a few hours of this we headed up to the foothills and walked around for a while. By this time we were ready for a late lunch so we headed back down to the city and stopped by Foolish Craig’s for a byte to eat. Once again the meal was incredible. I ordered their chicken salad sandwich and a Raspberry Frambozen and all was at peace. We walked around for a while longer then headed back for a break.

My friend James Taurman recently moved to Fort Collins, CO which is about 45 minutes north of Boulder, so I called him up when I got to town to see if he had plans. James drove down to Boulder to meet up with Ken and me at the Red Fish Brewhouse for dinner. We all ordered one of their Pilsners and I thought it was quite tasty. (I originally order their “Badonkadonk Brown,” but was disappointed to hear that they were sold out.) The meal was pretty good, although my previous three meals were a hard act to follow. James’ suggested that we head down to Denver to see Robert Randolph and the Family Band at the Fillmore Auditorium. Danny told me that Robert Randolph put on an excellent show at last year’s ACL Fest, so it sounded like a good plan to me.

Robert Randolph at the Fillmore in Denver

When we arrived at the Fillmore Auditorium there was a large gathering of people around the ticket window, but we were still able to get tickets. I thought the Fillmore was actually a really cool venue, with the blacklight-fueled purple chandeliers and the sunken center area. We were only there for about 5 minutes when a man on the center of the stage started making some incredible electric sounds. It sounded like a guitar, but the man did not appear to be playing a guitar. Then I finally realized that it was Robert Randolph and he was making these sounds on a pedal steel guitar, an instrument almost exclusively used in country music. But here he was playing it in funk/soul/blues music. Insane!

The show lasted about 2.5 hours, with about the last 30 minutes of that being a 4 song encore. These guys can really jam, as several of their songs lasted 10-15 minutes each. They are also great showmen. At one point in the show Robert started pulling people from the crowd and giving them an electric guitar (a PRS, btw) for them to play leads on. Two different white guys jumped up onto the stage, but their skills weren’t quite on the same level as the rest of the bands. Around that time the band also had about 25-30 girls from the audience come on stage and dance with them. But of all the stage tricks they had, the most amazing was when they started swapping instruments. At first Robert went back to play drums, while the drummer came down to play the pedal steel. Then Robert went to bass and the bass player got behind the drums. Then there was more swapping with the keyboard player until they all finally swapped back into place. The crazy thing was that each one of them did a fantastic job on each instrument, they are all extremely talented.

Without question this was the most high-energy concert I have ever seen, and I see a fair amount of music shows. Whenever he wanted to Robert would make the pedal steel screen and the entire room would be just buzzing with energy. This lasted throughout the entire show too, I have no idea how the band members can sustain it without any break other than the 3 minute gap between the show and the encore. In addition to their own original music they covered a few older songs including Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean”, Bobby McFaren’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition.” All in all, it was an excellent show and I would highly recommend checking out this band.

Wrapping it up…

Sunday morning Ken, James and I had a really good breakfast over at the Buff Restaurant in Boulder. Afterwards Ken and I bid farewell to James and then headed towards the Denver airport, where I had the only negative experience of the whole trip.

I arrived at the airport at about 12:45pm (an hour and fifteen minutes ahead of my flight), waited in line at the United Airlines counter for 30 minutes, and when I finally made it to the front I was told that I could not check my luggage and snowboard since the flight was scheduled to leave in less than 45 minutes. It was actually around 42 minutes before the scheduled departure time, and she told me that she didn’t care that I had waited in line for 30 minutes, only to miss the checkin deadline by 3 minutes. I had checked-in online the night before, I only needed my baggage to make the flight. I told her that the baggage could come on a later flight if necessary, but she wasn’t interested in making a deal. She put me on standby for the next flight to San Antonio, which was at 7:30 and told me there was almost certainly no way I would make it, as the flight was already overbooked. Thanks, lady. After talking with several other people for the next hour and a half I finally ended up in front of a man with a brain and the will to get things done. He immediately told me to ignore what everyone else had told me, and that he would put get me a seat on the 7:30 flight, which is exactly what he did. I asked if there was anyway that I could tip him, but he said no and quickly asked to help the next person. Rock on, dude.

I’ll probably avoid United Airlines from now on, just as I have done with Northwest for the past year. Sometimes the lower price just isn’t worth it.

Overall, I had an excellent trip and it was great to see a few old friends and make some new ones. Oh, and Boulder has topped San Francisco in my list of most awesome cities. I didn’t think that would be possible, but The People’s Republic of Boulder is one extremely cool place.

2005 was the year that I decided to give the whole blogging thing a try, and so I thought it would be a good idea to put together this list so that I will be able to remember some of the things that I did over the course of the year.

The Places I Visited in 2005

• Atlanta (4 trips)
• Baltimore/DC
• Boston/Cambridge
• Las Vegas (3 trips)
• Los Angeles
• New Orleans (for Jazz Fest, before Katrina)
• New York
• Reno
• San Francisco
• Virginia (3 trips)

Along with lots of trips to Austin and a couple visits to Houston, I did a reasonable amount of traveling this year.

Musicians I Saw in 2005

• The Hot Club of Cowtown (2x)
• Two Tons of Steel (many times)
• Widespread Panic (Jazz Fest)
• Dave Matthews Band (Jazz Fest)
• Trey Anastasio (Jazz Fest)
• Randy Newman (Jazz Fest)
• The Derailers (2x)
• Eleven Hundred Springs (3x)
• The Gourds (3x)
• Mingo Fishtrap
• Neko Case (blogged)
• Drew Kennedy (blogged)
• Matt Powell (blogged)
• Hank Williams III (blogged)
• JB Beverly and the Wayward Drifters (blogged)
• The Greencards (blogged)
• Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez (blogged)
• Slaid Cleaves (blogged)
• Susan Gibson
• The High Flyers (blogged)
• Mickey and the Motorcars
• Guy Forsyth
• Jason Boland and the Stragglers (blogged)
• Dale Watson (blogged)
• Terry Allen (blogged)
• Robert Earl Keen (ACL Festival)
• Lyle Lovett (ACL Festival)
• Grupo Fantasma (ACL Festival)
• John Prine (ACL Festival)
• Wayne Hancock (ACL Festival)
• Lucinda Williams (ACL Festival)
• Big Sandy and His Fly Rite Boys
• The California Guitar Trio (blogged)
• Asleep at the Wheel (2x)

This year The Hot Club of Cowtown broke up, which was a major bummer. But Elana has a few things going on, and Whit and Jake are performing with some others as Whit Smith’s Hot Jazz Caravan. At Jazz Fest and ACL Fest I saw a lot of other little bands, but I can’t remember the names.

The Books I Read in 2005

• Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Being There by Jerry Kosinski
• Radical Leap by Steve Farber
• “1984” by George Orwell
• The Fuckup by Arthur Nersesian
• Entanglement by Amir Aczel

As usual, my interests over the past year are reflected in the books I read. I almost always cycle through 4 topics: physics, economics, sociology and literature. In 2006 I want to finally finish reading Gödel, Escher, Bach.

Random Stuff in 2005

• Participated in Cornyation during San Antonio’s Fiesta (blogged here and here)
• Met up with some friends in New Orleans for Jazz Fest
• Switched to a new job within Rackspace
• Enjoyed many Wednesday Night Dinners
• Attended DefCon (blogged here, here, here and here)
• Worked on the SafeList project
• Saw some great music at the Austin City Limits Music Festival
• Attended Paul Graham‘s Startup School
• Saw two Cirque Du Soleil shows – Varekai and Mystere
• Almost finished paying off my hefty college loan
• Sold the Ford F-150 and bought another white Nissan
• And, for what its worth (not much), got an RHCE

Overall, it was a pretty good year. Made some new friends, spent time with old friends and had a lot of fun.

Happy New Year!

A few weeks ago I discovered that Terry Allen would be performing his “Dugout III: Warboy” for three nights in Los Angeles. I’ve been trying to see Terry Allen for a while, and since he does not perform very often I thought it might be a good idea to check this out. I knew that Chris was out in L.A., and I figured he might want to go as well. A few IM’s later I had tickets to the show and my flights booked.

Chris picked me up from LAX last Friday afternoon, and apparently he can now read minds because as soon as I hopped in his jeep he asked if I was hungry for In-n-Out Burger. I had just spent 3 hours on a plane, mostly thinking about eating at In-n-Out Burger, so yea, perfect. Mmmm so good!

That evening we went to the “rooftop bar” at The Standard hotel. This is an open air bar on the top of a high-rise hotel in downtown L.A. There is a pool up there, and these big red pods shaped like giant Hershey’s kisses with waterbeds in them. It was a pretty cool place to hang out, and there were some sweet views from up there.

Later that night we met up with Chris’s friend, the Dread Pirate, and headed over to Cozy’s to see Big Sandy and His Fly-Rite Boys. These guys were a lot of fun and put on a pretty good show. Also, it was interesting to see the SoCal rock-a-billy crowd, it must be pretty rough being stuck in 1952.

Saturday afternoon we went down to Hollywood Boulevard. While walking down the sidewalk we passed by Richard Pryor’s star, who had died earlier that day. There were people there with cameras taking pictures of the star with flowers on it.

Saturday night was the event I had been waiting for: Terry Allen’s “Dugout III: Warboy.” After a sushi dinner at R23, Chris and I headed over to the REDCAT theater to catch the show. Honestly, I had no idea what to expect. I knew that it was some sort of theatrical performance that included Terry’s wife, Jo Harvey Allen, as well as Lloyd Maines and Richard Bowden, but beyond that I wasn’t sure. As it turned out, the show consisted of Jo Harvey telling a story based on Terry’s parent’s lives, while the three musicians performed the soundtrack of original music. This might not sound that interesting, but let me assure you, it was incredible. Not only was the story extremely fascinating, but the music was pure Terry Allen and was excellent.

Afterwards we headed out to Tommy’s Burgers for a late night snack. Before eating at Tommy’s I thought that Chester’s made the world’s messiest chili-cheeseburger, but now I know I was wrong. Tommy’s burgers are served from a stand on the side of the road, and you do not even have the option of ordering a burger without chili — like the bun and the meat patty, its part of the experience. About 15 napkins later I realized that I had been defeated, so I called it quits.

The trip was quick but it was a lot of fun. Thanks again to Chris for letting me crash there and showing me around the city.