And, to end that story...

Further to my last post, it is now a down deal. Helen starts at UMBD in September.

Houston, we have a solution to the two-bodied problem.

Her Brilliant Career

Meet Helen Burgess, super star! Slayer of search committees!

We used to say that he (the computer geek) was more employable than her (the english prof).

No longer! We moved to West Virginia so I could catch a rare beast- an SE job. Then Helen went looking for jobs- sent out 10 resumes, got 6 preliminary interviews, 3 offers for on-site interviews, then got a job offer on her first on-site visit.

Let's review. 10:6:3:1. That's almost the golden ratio. Certainly, they are exciting numbers here in Chez Burgess-Menzies.

And all this at a time when there is much published lamentation about the lack of jobs in English: "many desperate, hollow-eyed job-seekers- a sea of unemployed misery gives me something one might call sympathetic nausea - many of whom are bound for adjunct hell- they just keep coming -- like Steinbeck's Oakies puttering into California in their jalopies " (from chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/01/2007011901c/careers.html)

Far away in the snowy mountains

I rarely feel that Morgantown is an isolated mountain town.

Until the snow comes.

Then I get a sense of slopes and altitude and being high and away from the rest of the world.

The photo you weren't meant to see.

Helen was horrified when I set up this shot.

"It looks like something on CNN", she said, "you know the one - in the back there's a guy in a hood about to behead you".

Me, I thought I was being an ewok.

Just goes to show how the differences in our head spaces!

One the last day of Christmas

(Everybody sing now...)

On the last day of XMAS,
my students came to see,
what kind of house contained me

We meet since, before the whole academic whirlwind began again, I wanted the clan to meet and greet and eat. Most of the grad students came. Some folks showed that I haven't seen for years (Greta and Nana) Even Dan Baker shook off his jet lag and made an appearance (after this picture was taken). Very nice.

Before their arrival, I was a mite worried that my start of semester soiree would be a somewhat staid affair- that the Australian-at-a-party might be too raucous for the gentle graduate students.

It was a simple problem to solve- just add wine. Bottles and bottles and bottles of wine.

Just think- billions of years of evolution to produce the brain cells that we wiped out in a single evening.

Andromeda Strain

When I was 12, the pinnacle of hi-tech Sci Fi was Crichton's "The Andromeda Strain". And this was the key to it all- the arming device of the nuclear bomb that was meant to blow our heroes away if the alien bug got out.

One of the technical consultants on that film was Bill Koselka. Then, he worked at JPL and did things like shot lasers at butcher's meat to show the art department what a laser burn would look like.

Anyway, these days Bill works at IV&V and he's been bragging for months about his role in the film. I didn't believe it- I wanted proof. So, to secure his place in history, Bill obliged. "The arming device for a fictional nuclear weapon good enough for you?" he asked.

Chincoteague, Dec'06

Just before new years, we went down to the ocean, to Chincoteague.

Surprisingly warm weather. Surprisingly long drive there and back (Google map directions under-estimated by 2 hours in each direction).

Very few people there, cheap hotels, great seafood, relaxed little town.

Couldn't ask for a nicer place.

Barbie and Helen at XMAS time

Oh, little town of Morgantown,
How still we seem to lie
But through deep and endless tubes
The internet(s) flows by

And in thy eyes, pages shineth
The neverending sight
The hopes and fears of hackers here
That it compiles, tonight.

The church of beer.

Like any Australia, Ron Davenport worships his beer. So it was no surprise he found a pub in a church for us in Pittsburgh.

Data Mining Seminar, 2006

I ask my data mining students to "do something amazing with data mining". And the stuff they get up to:

• Building predictors for football games
  
• Learning music preferences
  
• Studying student record data to find patterns in who stays, who quits at WVU.
  
• And a ton of other cool stuff.
  

Amazing stuff.

One thing that was very nice to see was the professional way they presented their projects. Most exciting to watch and, as an educator, most gratifying.

Halloween, 2006

I'll work it out one day- why America is so obsessed by the dead. And why they organize their catharsis so rigorously- we were attached by ghouls and goblins for 59 minutes, from 6:00pm to 6:59pm. And all the ghosts and goblins were taken home by their mommies and daddies.

prolog(rules), ok.

I've tried to fight it but there's no denying. Prolog rules.

It has been weird doing some Prolong-ing after all that recent LISP hacking. Somehow, all those old American arguments against logic programming rang louder in my ears as I sketched yet another pattern match. "Why give over procedural control to a resolution theorem prover?" and "Why add those extra layers of computation to your code?".

I have no real answer except this: I am v. productive in Prolog. In the last 3 days I've nearly recreated in Prolog about 2 months of procedural hacking that I did round XMAS 2004.

Revenge of attack of the kliller S-expressions

Please ignore my last post.

It turns out that, under Mac, Fink Commander has a preference "use unstable packages".

After clicking that, and doing a Selfupdate, then all the missing packages appeared including scsh, scheme48, clisp, etc etc. Cygwin also has clisp so that is where my current search has ended.

[1]> (mapcar #'(lambda (x) (print x))
                '(that took far too long))

THAT 
TOOK 
FAR 
TOO 
LONG 
(THAT TOO FAR TOO LONG)
[2]> 

Attack of the killer S-expressions

In this era of open source, you'd think it would be a simple matter to compile a 45 year old language that has been used and update extensively during its entire life.

WRONG!

I was after a Lisp dialect that ran on Windows (Cygwin), Mac (Intel) and *nix. PLT Scheme looked good for a while- slipped onto all the platforms, no worries. But Scheme suffers from lack-of-standards and there was some note somewhere about PLT about to lose its NSF funding (read "insert dead-end language here"). Also, all the benchmarks I could find showed dull old Common Lisp whipping the pants off Scheme implementations.

So, onto Lisp. GCL had no Intel-Darwin version and while SBCL came highly recommended, it get dying on compilation. Offically, Fink has clisp but I could never get my local version to find that packagte. Then I tried DarwinPorts but that barphed cause Fink had got there first and added in headers that DarwinPorts saw as "not a registerred (Darwin) port". So that was that.

Currently, I'm trying ECL. It uses gcc and compiled cleanly on the Mac (after telling its configure to use my own directory structure for $prefix. Right now, I'm trying a Cygwin compile. Cross fingers.

This is day five of poking around web sites, looking at this, trying that. Not that I worked on it full time but this is much more work than I'd anticipated.

(print 'goodGrief)

(UPDATE: ECL compiled fine under cygwin, but now it won't recognize any command line arguments- it just quits after loading. grrr)

(UPDATE on the UPDATE: Cygwin's clisp compiles just fine so it looks like it'll be ecl on the mac and clisp on PCs. Which has its upside- I'll be less likely to use uncommon Common Lisp constructs if I have to satisfy two interpreters.)

Not visiting places in New York

Here's just one of the many places Helen and I didn't visit in New York. The lines at the Empire State Building were so long, that we didn't go in.

We were in town because Helen had to give a talk at SLSA in New York. I'd never been there before so we fly off to New Your for a weekend.

Before we left, a West Virginia asked "what's in New York"? And the answer had to be "Well, New York is in New York".

When I got here, I was really surprised. My expectation was crowded sidewalks that you had to fight to get through. Crime, rampant in the streets, and "u lookin' at me?", everywhere. I thought I'd be fumbling down the streets, clutching my chained bag, avoding eye contact, trying to get out of everyone's way, and getting brused and kicked a little by the passing aggression. Every so often, I thought, I would flop into a coffee shop to sit quivering with all the other country mice, scared to go back out.

Instead, I found a tame herd of (somewhat crowded) apes who give each other space on the not-so-crowded sitewalks. There were trees everywhere where red and gold leaves were still changing on the branches or dancing on the side walk in little eddies. It was a really really wam Autumn weekend (60 degrees in mid-November: who'd a thunk?). My bag never got stolen, I wasn't mugged, and no one knifed me.

As to the night life, I'd like to say it was a wild weekend of partying till dawn in Soho. However, honesty requires me to report that we were tipsy by 9pm, then back to the world's smallest hotel room to sleep by 10.

After not going to the Empire State Building, we didn't go to the Statue of Liberty (again, line too long). Then we didn't go the Guggenheim (too much construction work).

We did get to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, the fates conspired against us.

See, after West Virgina, New York was amazing+++. After a day of wondering around, slack-jawed, like Mr and Mrs Gunderson from Minnesota, we were soooo tired. So, we were like zombies walking round one of the greatest collections of Art in the Western (?entire) World - had to drag ourselves from room to room.

So, all in all, we drank a little too much, walked a million miles, road cabs driven by maniacs/ subways packed like sardines, and ate ate ate such wonderful food. We'll like to come back but the hotel prices are scary. When we checked in, the clerk at the hotel blinked twice at our rate ($187/night for a little box with two single beds and a bathroom shared with someone down the hall). Who'd we kill for this one, he asked?

Subversion! Rocks!

I've been using subversion now for a few months and, quite seriously, I think it rocks.

I work at four locations (NASA, WVU, a workstation at home, and a laptop when on travel) and on three operating systems (Windows/Cygwin, OS/X, various Linux dialects). After some fussing with make files, I can know log in into any of the above, update, run a make file, and hey presto my local environment is up to date.

There are two cool side effects of the above.

• Holy multiple redundancies Batman: I get back-ups on my stuff on multiple machines AND my central repositories.
  
• I play well with others: If people want to run my code, its a few minutes set up and then they get my environment running on their machine. Better yet, by giving them access to the repository, we can all work together on the same project.

But there are some traps to avoid. Don't just jump up and rush home at the end of the day. Depart elegantly. Allow, say, ten minutes to shut down and commit your changes (subversion somethings needs a little babying to get everything squared away).

Also, the operating system does not know about subversion. Its so tempting to grab an icon in the visual environments and move some directories around. Don't do it. Every file/directory manipulation should be done using subversions. For example, don't "mv a b" but "svn mv a b".

Oh, and incrementally add little things every day- bulk huge updates are a real problem. So don't do what I did- try to import 4GB into the repository. Instead, having an "old" space and a "new" space inside the repository. If you start working on some "old" stuff, first move that directory/file into the repository and then "svn add" it. (By the way, its a little humbling how little of "old" ends up in "new").

But the main tip is to get a Dreamhost account and plant your repositories there. No set up headaches- repositories running in minutes. Files accessible via the web. And Dreamhost gives you lottsa disk space, for nearly $0. And you can set up any number of repositories there. I run three:

1. http://www.unbox.org/wisp/: a space I share write access with my collaborators and the world can read it.
2. http://now.unbox.org/all/: the world can read it but only I can write it.
3. mine: no one but me can read/write it

That's all easy to manage. Just make a directory called "work" and install the repositories as sub-directories of work. A short script can then:

• update with
  cd $HOME/work; for i in *; do (cd $i; svn update);done
• commit with
  cd $HOME/work; for i in *; do (cd $i; svn commit);done

And the second script needs $SVN_EDITOR set to your favorite editor.

Lost: 1 family

After 4 days in California of being a voyeur on family life at Chez Richardson, I went to D.C. for two days to a standard American soul-less hotel.

What a horrid contrast:

• Before: intense sunshine light noise enthusiasm
  
• After: disdained overcast hermetically- sealed sedated bored
  

When I left the hotel, they gave me a bill.

When I left California, they gave me a poem.

While he was here we ate, drank, talked and laughed.
Now, he has gone.
The glasses go unemptied, the uneaten food begins to spoil.
His legacy: a key, a cable, some money.
And a bundle of cheese sticks.
I hope that when I go, I will leave cheese sticks too.

I think I like poems better than bills.

Boehm singing "Ode to Fortran"

(As sung by Barry Boehm at a private party in his honor at CSEET'06):

Fortran, Fortran, going so fast;
Fortran, Fortran, going so fast;
I don't know what loop I'm on;
Won't you tell me where I've gone?

Got a job, about a year ago;
Invert a matrix, row by row;
This, I said, will be a breeze:
Fortran will handle this with ease.

Coded it up, took it up to compile;
When it returned, I lost my smile;
I will never learn to spell,
"EQUIVALLENCE" with just one "L"

Finally got my octal deck;
Loaded it up without a tape check;
Suddelnly some red lights glowed;
It went into the trapping mode.

It ran right through my storage block;
Shorted out the on-line clock;
Spun the tape right off their reel,
And stripped the printer's gear wheels.

Now I'm doomed, forever to pore;
Over my assembly code and dump of core;
Trying to find where my Fortran code;
Took off into the trapping mode.

I love Ishtar

(For years, the only web site that praised Ishtar was something I wrote back last century. That site is now long gone, but for history's sake, I show some of it below. For more information, see the very thorough Ishtar movie web page or the WIKIPEDIA entry).

Ishtar is the world's most under-rated movie.

Two terrible lounge singers get booked to play the Ishtar Hilton. Somehow they become pawns in an international power play between the CIA, the Emir of Ishtar, and the rebels trying to overthrow his regime.

This movie contains the most gawd-awful songs ever written. You have to be very very good to write stuff that is so very very bad:

Telling the truth can be dangerous business
Honest and popular don't go hand in hand
If you admit that you can play the accordion
No one will hire you in a rock and roll band

CHORUS (everybody now)
But we can SING our hearts out, (all night)
And if we're lucky then no neighbours complain
Nobody knows how the beginning part starts out,
But being human we can live with the pain

Because life is the way we audition for God
And we pray that we all get the job

Crying out loud gets you pointed and laughed out
Be like a baby, only babies should cry
Somebody tell me how that rumour got started
Something I know only god knows why

But we can SING our hearts out

The movie is usually hated by critics but it has many die hard fans. For example:

Martin Nohe (Woodbridge, VA):

A truly under-rated film.

I have never understood the seemingly universal disapproval of this fine film. Is it "Reds"?...No. Is it "Rain Man"?...No. Was it intended to be?...Of course not.

Ishtar is a comedy of the first measure. Start with two struggling musicians trying to make it big, who find themselves trapped in a circle of espionage and intrigue in a far away land. Include some of the funniest text ever written for the big screen. Add two of the greatest actors of our day, Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, (both of whom are playing characters that could not be farther from the traditional roles that these actors have played, which was, I'm sure, a challenge in and of itself) and throw in a blind camel for good measure, and you have the recipe for a cinema classic. If this film had managed to avoid the negative press that it received early on, it would have gone done in history as one of the great comedies of the 1980's. Now, everyone wants to be on the "I hate Ishtar" bandwagon. It is truly unfortunate that this film has not received the credit that it deserves.

"Ishtar" is not the most under-rated film ever, but it may be close.

Bob Helbig (Patton, PA):

To: timm@cse.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Ishtar
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 12:53:22 +1100 (EST)

Dear Tim,

I wholeheartedly agree with you! I love this movie! I just can't get enough of it. I wish more people could enjoy it as we do. It's really great to find someone else who feels the same.

Tim, do you know who could sell me the soundtrack?

Wouldn't it be great to have an Ishtar Convention? The entire cast could be invited, memorabilia could be displayed and sold, people could speak, and we could have a screening. Who knows, Dustin and Warren might just show up for a laugh!

Anyway, enough. If you do, indeed, have an Ishtar fan-club, I want to join.

Scott Johnson (Kent, Oh):

To: timm@cse.unsw.edu.au
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 1997 18:45:10 EST
Subject: Ishtar

I like this movie also. I think that people miss the point of this movie. They don't understand how funny bad songs really can be. It is not comic genius but it is not as bad as some portray it.

And, of course, there's me !!:

I was flying back from Bali with the worse case of Bali belly I've ever heard off. As I tried not to think about toilets, the film started: ISHTAR!! The rest of the plane went to sleep and I was left alone watching this legendarily bad film.

I was captivated. Amused. Tickled. And I didn't have to break once for a rest stop.

When it was over, dawn was breaking over the wing and I was uplifted to a new sense of calm and solid poos. I was so content. Ishtar had taken me away from the mundane and the runny to a new plane (:-)) of existence. And such god-awful songs. Truly, you must be very good to write stuff so awful.

Geek Fest '06

So yesterday Palo Alto had a festival of the arts. Hundreds of stalls, street muscians, food from around the world.

Of course, I didn't go. Instead, I spent the day geeking out with at Julian Richardson's swanky surburban pad, complete with jacuzzi.

Me and Julian hacked PowerPoint all the day and all the night. There were breaks (for the jacuzzi, for a wonderful Vietnamese dinner, for a run for groceries store) but we where PPing first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Don't tell anyone, but I really liked it.

To the bat plane!

Wired reports that Shunkworks has a new trick for silencing the sonic boom. This would enable a national American supersonic plane market (Concorde was banned in US skies due to the volume of the boom).

Their prototypes look wicked cool. I've started saving.

Terrorism and dieting

Today, I nearly made it into the national newspapers by shutting down airports all over the country. I blame the South Beach Diet.

See I'm absent minded at the best of times (e.g. I'm 46 and I just realized I forgot to have children). But right now I am into "phase one" of the South Beach Diet and this carbohydrate cold-turkey (;-)) thing is doing sssttrrrannnnggggeeee things to my mind. Moments of sublime calm (or is that starvation - I can never tell). And extreme forgetfulness. For example:

Example 1: Part of the diet is to arm yourself with tiny snacky treats. Like string cheese. Which, I have to say, looks exactly like tubes of plastic explosive. So I saunter up to airport security with four tubes of this stuff hanging out of my breast pocket. While watching my bags go into the scanner, I realize I am carrying (what looks like) detonators, pull it out of my pocket, and stare at it dumbly. The security guard says "what's that?" and I proceed to pass the "detonators" to her with some lame story about "cheese". She backs off and tells me to dumb stuff into the trash bins "over there"; i.e. far away from the security check point.

Example 2: When I arrived at the airport, I got my boarding pass, and forgot to check my bags. At the security scanner, just after the cheese incident, I dumped my huge black bag onto the conveyor belt and thinks "hmmm... what is wrong with this picture? .... D'oh!". So, in front of a security guard, I start pulling the bag off the conveyor belt while telling the guard, "whoops, forgot to check this one". Which, to the security guard would have looked like this:

• there is a strange, confused man going through my checkpoint.
• the cheese incident has jolted him back to reality
• he's just remembered that his other explosives are in the bag on the conveyor belt
• so he's just invented some bogus reason to pull the thing off the scanner

Of course, she stopped me. Happily, all she made me do was to scan all my bags, walk through the metal detector, then turn around and walk out back to the airline check-in. But, at this time of heightened airport security, you might have expected that I got taken away, stripped, probed, etc etc etc. That Pittsburgh gets shut down for a morning while they search from my accomplices. Which, in turn, costs the American economy hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue which I have to pay back toiling night and day, locked and chained in the basement of an accountancy building with anti-aging drugs keeping me alive for the centuries required for the task.

Example 3: Once past security, I buy some coffee and some bottled water and sit round waiting for the plane. Ho hum, dum de dum de dum, twiddling my fingers, sipping my coffee, time to go,walk on the plane, seal the hatch, wait on the tarmac. Hot in the plane, reach for the bottled water. Stewardess sees the container of fluid. "What's that!" she demands. "Er... water," I say, pointing to the label. "What's it doing on my plane?" she demands. "Um..." I offer.

She debated calling the SWAT team to disarm this terrorist from his chemical weapon. Then she looked me over and realized what a duffus I was. The water got dumped in a rubbish bin (in defiance of 1000 anti--terrorist regulations).

Example 4: when I landed I took the buss to the car hire place and, on arrival, remembered that I'd forgotten to collect my checked luggage. So I had to ride the bus back to the terminal, grab the bag-of-terror, then ride back to the car hire place. Made be half an hour late for dinner with my hosts in San. Fran.

So, there you have it. Proof positive Dieting causes incompetent terrorism. And loss of luggage.

The answer? MacDonalds for all! The BigMac can save the world.

His Noodly Appendage (sighted)

A rare public appearance of the Flying Spaghettii Monster.

The Air Force released some tissue thin set of lies about this just being the dump or something out of a plane. Typical.

His Noodly Appendage

All is clear to me now. My doubts answered, my fears relieved. I have accepted the Flying Spaghetti Monster as my personal saviour.

Soon I will assume my pirate garb and teach the true alternative to evolution and intelligent design.

"Blasphemy!" I hear you cry. "No one insults evolution and gets away with it!".

I understand your pain and fear since until all too recently, I too shared. Please believe me when I say that I hold love in my heart for you.

Know too that I am here for you and my most fevernt hope is that one day soon, you will now the peace and love of his His Noodly Appendage.

May the sauce be with you.

Papers, papers, papers

There's a bit of cult of effortlessness in academia: "and I've got a paper on that coming out next month in the international journal of bright and shiny things". According to that cult I should not boast.

But what the hell. Here's what in the works:

• Two short papers in IEEE Software (July'06) and IEEE Computer (Oct'06);
• Two papers [1, 2] recently accepted, pending minor revisions, to IEEE TSE;
• And there's one long article in the works that stands a fighting chance of appearing in IEEE Computer (Jan'06).

Paradoxically, this could all be a problem for my tenure track stuff. I'm still in year one of a N-year tenure track process. How can I possibly top all the above in years two, three, four,...?

Hills and Oceans

So we went driving for a week and instead of traveling thousands of miles to Prince Edwards Island and Montreal, we decided to see what was to see in our own backyard. We found:

• the world's greatest Barbie collection
• a strangely absent atomic fallout shelter;
• the strangest marine museum;
• rockets
• giant radio telescopes;
• beautiful mountain swimming holes;
• an incredible rich-bastards mountain retreat;
• a beautiful road across the clouds;
• a gorgeous ocean beach;
• the greatest marine wetland;
• a sea-side town so daggy that I could almost call it Australian
  
• and took a sublime sunset harbor cruise.

All in all this was one of the nicest trips Helen and me ever ever ever took.

And, or course, there's lottsa photos.

Best place in USA

.

"This will be difficult to photo blog", I thought, as the camera disappeared bubble bubble bubble into the deep dark green waters next to the dock.

Reverting now to manual mode.....

We spent the day driving round Chincoteague day dreaming of buying a place down here. Yes, some places cost $100,000,000,000 but there are daggy little shacks at around $100K.

Then it was back to the best bits of yesterday: beach, marshland, ice cream shop, docks, etc etc etc. Finally we hit the pool and played fish for a while before going on a sunset cruise (which is where I lost the camera).

Since there is no camera to contradict me, I can assert that the cruise was indescribably beautiful. The sky was blue, the temperature warm (not hot). Gentle swell below, birds flying formation above, sunshine sparkling on the water all around. Either side of the setting sun where sun dogs (rainbows) iridescence in the clouds. We saw

• a bald eagle flying high overhead
• pelicans playing with ground effects as they swooped low over the water
  
• marshes with yellow sheens stretching to the horizon
• rare birds nesting on low sand islands

I could go on (and on and on and on) about it but suffice to say that in the entire Unites States, this is the best-est we've ever seen.

Chincoteague Island, Virginia

Chincoteague Island, Virginia
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Chincoteague Island is perfect. No ubermen anywhere. Daggy. Its a real town- real fishing boats. Fresh fish. Great great great fresh fish.

This whole trip has been blessed by good luck- like getting fireworks right outside our room at Virginia Beach. Here, the "curse" continued:

• Normally, Chincoteague is packed with summer tourists but gas prices kept them away this year.
• This island is famous for plagues of incests but it was unusually dry this summer so we didn't get bit once.
• Without booking, we scored a sweet room overlooking the harbor.

So we rolled (walked) into town and had to wait for the resteraunt we wanted. They suggested a little waterfront bar round the corner where the bartender poured me a double gin and tonic. Standard stuff followed, plus great seafood along the way.

Assateague Welands, Virginia

Assateague Welands, Virginia
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

These wetlands have a wildlife loop that everyone takes at three miles an hour. Every car bristtles with cameras, like some CIA training exercise on how not to do covert surveillance.

The air there smelt wonderful- so clean and crisp. You kind of drive along, stop, point, and go "wow! look at the cranes" or "check out the deer/ wild ponies" or "hey, I never new marsh came in all those colors".

Half way round, we took our coffee and sat on a bum-numbing wooden bench. There, we stared at fleets of refuelling fowl. It was sublime.

After a (long) while it started raining again, just a little, and we said things like "hmm... really need to leave sooner or later.... heh, look at that drake over there... is that a starling?.... check out that little one....".

Assateague Beach, Virginia

Assateague Beach, Virginia
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Screw Virgina Beach. Here's a shallow sandy grade, no high rises, warm water. Sweeeeet.

NASA Wallops

NASA Wallops
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Home on the (rocket) range.

Wallops is a small facility that tests sub-orbital sounding rockets. It used to have a much larger role. Over the years, some 14,000 rockets have taken off from here (only 15 of which were orbital). Before they launched humans from Cape Canaveral, monkeys were launched from here to prove that mammals could survive launch and space conditions.

I heard tell that the state of Virginia wants to expand the Wallops center- seems its a good place to do polar orbit launches. And that was heard at a party so it must be true.

Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel

Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Big, isn't it?

This thing is miles and miles long- has two underwater tunnels

Virginia Marine Science Museum

Aquarium, Virginia Marine Science Museum
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

This museum is designed for rainy days at Virginia Beach. 100,000 diversions for kids. Lots of little things to poke and prod (hey, I liked petting the horseshoe crab).

Sadly, not much for adults. I've never seen so few fish spread over such a large area. A few large tanks and turtles and a few small sharks but for a museum with so much space, there was so little on show. We walked over acres of manicured marsh lands and there was nothing to see.

There's so few live exhibits in this museum- they're exhausted for performing for the audience. All over, there were blank spaces were the exhibits were a.w.o.l. For example, there was this one otter that was so tired of performing that he just lay comatosed on a rock. He waved at us before rolling over and falling back to sleep. "Call my agent," I think he said, "I'm touring again in the Spring."

Clearly, these folks went insane thinking of how to fill up this HUGE space with stuff to entertain the kids:

• There was one exhibit where a mock grandfather sat in a mock garage making mock duck decoys (which are used for hunting- so this should be in an avian preserve because....?).
• But the best, by far, was the the solid waste kangaroo. Go figure.

Helen conqueors Virginia Beach

Helen conqueors Virginia Beach
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

its 23:37 and a completely perfect evening at Virginia Beach is drawing to a close.

We arrived, a little tired and worn about 7pm. We said hello to the ocean, then had a gentle walk at dusk up and down the boardwalk.

This was followed by yummy sea food and much fireworks- which were set off exactly opposite our room. Afterwards, we watched from our balcony as a full moon rose over the ocean.

We walked along the warm sands, happy++ not to be roasting in the mountains any more. Then we strolled the streets- clowns and bands and such on every corner. Whole families wondering around at 11pm at night. Little girls, aged 3, never been up so late.

(Postscript: next morning we awoke to brilliant sunshine and the sounds of the ocean lapping on the sandy shore and dolphins swimming out beyond the breakers. Damn fine.)

American industrial might

Chesapeake Bay
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

If you ever want to get a sense of America's industrial might, take a drive across Chesapeake Bay and look at the HUGE shipyards that line its shores.

Warning: squirrels on sugar

Squirrel, UVA
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

This little fellow rejected our beans but snapped up a coconut marroon.

This was irresponsible of us. Imagine the results- a squirrel with a sugar rush beating up pedistrians, demanding "coconut! give me coconut!"

U. of V. Charolettesville.

Big building, UVA
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

This place is old- not Al-Azhar University old (founded 969 A.D.) or Unviersity of Bologna old (1088) or Harvard old (1636) but still has the right to be called old (1819).

The University boasts (?hides) numerous secret socities sich as the Seven Society (founded circa 1905). Members are only revealed after their death, when a wreath of black magnolias in the shape of a "7" is placed at the gravesite.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Blue Ridge Parkway
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

One of the great Aussie myths is that the Blue Mountains that ring Sydney owe their color to gum oil from the trees.

WRONG! Check it out- blue mountains, sans gums, Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia, Not Australia.

The country round the parkway is savage++. How this thing ever got built through such a landscape is a great mystery.

While the land around the parkway is quite wild, the road itself is quite genteel. The road surface is perfect- flat, no cracks, no patches of different color. The grass either side is immaculate lawn, mowed to around 6 feet either side of the road.

And this goes on for mile after mile after mile after...

Lost: one atomic bunker

So the PLAN was to travel to White Sulphur Springs and check out the Senate's former super-secret atomic bunker.

(FYI: the secret got blown years ago by the Washington Post and now there's tours there, twice a week. Now, like many other Cold War relics, the space is available for "special purpose theme parties".)

But the best laid plan of best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. We couldn't find the thing after driving through town, twice. Me, I'd have a huge flashing neon sign hanging from dirigibles "secret bunker! here!". But this is West Virginia and we don't like showing off.

So the bunker's secrets remain safe. We went to the Greenbrier resort instead.

Scarry ass mountains, Virginia

Scarry ass mountains, Virginia
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

If you want to get a sense of West Virginia's isolation, take a drive across I68 in Maryland or I64 from South WV into Virginia.

Big big big scarry mountains.

Almost paradise, West Virginia

Almost paradise, West Virginia
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

The Greenbrier Resort looks like a standard rich-bastard resort (a three night package costs a mere $2900).

But they take pains to give it a local flavor- like astro turf on all the outdoor steps.

Chilling at the Greenbrier

Swimming, Greenbrier style.
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

So here's a common method to extract $$$ from rich bastards.

1) travel to some remote mountain location;

2) find a smelly hole leaking water and sulphur

3) truck in the rich who are (a) fit enough to make the journey, and (b) scared enough to pay $$$ for the honor of bathing in the smelly sulphur.

The results can be seen everywhere: the Banff Center in the Rockies and the Greenbrier Resort in South East West Virginia (where a three night package costs a mere $2900).

Greinbrier summer white house

The summer white house at the Greinbrier
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Q: Its summer. Its hot. Its 1850. Where do you go to get away from it all?

A: Why, the summer white house in the hills of West Virginia at the Greenbrier resort, of course

Best Barbie collection?

Something to remember me by
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

(Seen at Annies Home Cooking Pizzeria, White Sulphur Springs, WV)

The woman in the portrat died in the car crash in 2004. Her friends and family erected this shrine in her honor- it display her amazing Barbie collection.

Includes Star Trek Barbie, X-files Barbie, and (of course) Secret Agent Bond Barbie.

This shrine is a mile down the road from the Greenbrier Resort- one the most expensive resorts in North America. Talk about going from the sublime (barbies) to the ridiculous (Greenbrier).

Me, in infra-red

Me, in infra-red
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

The Green Bank Telescope

The Robert Byrd
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

The old jokes are the best jokes.

Q: what is the state flower of West Viriginia?

A: The satellite dish

So in WV, of course there's the biggest steerable radio telescope in the world.

The telescope was built to replace an older one that collapsed in 1988. The story goes it collapsed one night while the single scientist on duty was in the toilet. Apparently it was his first night on duty.

The Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope measures 100 by 110 meters. This puppy is NOT falling down, unlike its predecessor. This thing has struts connecting the struts that connect to the struts. Its sensitivity is measured in janskies (equal to one-hundredth of one-trillionth of a trillionth of a watt per square meter per hertz). Its thousands of panels, each with their own motors, that struggle to keep the parabolic shape despite wind, gravity, thermal...

The telescope operates in normal model; safe mode (shut down for routine maintenance); and snow mode (when it has to melt off the snow fall).

Inside Cathedral State Park

Inside Cathedral State Park
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Oldest forests in West Virginia. Here, trees are up to 500 years old while, in the rest of the state, it all got chopped down and had to regrow.

Finally, a place to swim

Swimming, Audra State Park
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

When I first got to WV I remember calling someone up asking "where is the tire on the tree over the swimming hole?". There was no answer. Seems all the streams round here were polluted with mine tailings- toxic metals and the like.

8 years later, I can report that we've found two swimming holes. There's Bull Run, near Morgantown but that gets a little crowded. And, as we found out today, there's Audra State Park.

We got there after a day in the car. It was delightful. We spent a happy hour here, blowing bubbles, duck diving, paddling, paddling, paddling.

I'll be back.

Downtown anywhere, WV

Downtown anywhere, the WV way
Originally uploaded by timmenzies.

Actually, this is Philippi but with these red brick buildings and lack of decoration, it could be anyone of a dozen towns in ths state.