Still No Power

Greetings from the College Park Hampton Inn, our home away from home, at least for tonight. It's got all the modern conveniences -- air conditioning, hot water, Internet access...that our house lacks at the moment. According to PEPCO's map, outages in PG County are down to 1,697. Unfortunately, we're one of them. There's a tree on the power line down the street and no sign of PEPCO, so the prospects seemed dim for a restoration tonight.

Here are some pictures I took yesterday.



The first one shows our broken tree after the tree guy had done some initial work. We're hoping it'll survive, but we're not sure.




The second one shows the damage done to our fence, either by the initial treefall or the subsequent tree work.



The next two show that the damage isn't too extensive...one post has to be put back into position, the top bar has to be popped back in, and we're most of the way there.




The final picture shows our next-door neighbors' front yard. I suspect this tree will cause further problems restoring power after the one a couple door down is taken care of.

Powerless

We had quite a storm yesterday afternoon. In terms of sheer tree destruction, it beat Isabel. There, we had to go to the end of the block to see a downed tree. This time, we had only to go into our back yard. That was the second biggest tree on our lot. If I remember correctly, that's a 4-foot fence, which would make that tree around 50 feet tall -- snapped in half by the wind.


We weren't the only ones with tree trouble. Our next-door neighbor had an oak fall across the alley behind our house. Glad we don't park back there! The scene was reported up and down the block. Both of our next-door neighbors had huge branches come down in their front yard. (By huge, I mean tree-sized.)

Fortunately, the destruction seemed to be fairly localized. The green area in the map is the area with the most customers out of power -- our ZIP code and an adjacent one. I'm hoping that means we're at the top of the priority list -- unlike Isabel, where the whole metro area needed help. (You can check PEPCO for an updated map -- in the time since I uploaded the copy here, a third ZIP code has gone green.)

I stuck around St. Petersburg...

My last big excitement of my trip to St. Pete was my visit to the Hermitage museum. It was an organized tour, which had its plusses and minuses. Plus: I wasn't afraid of getting mugged. Minus: I didn't get to choose what we got to see. We spent about an hour on the Winter Palace (cool), an hour on the treasures of the czars (yawn, and they didn't let us take pictures), and an hour on pre-18th century art (cool, although I was more interested in the rooms of Matisses and Picassos that they reportedly have).

The very distinct Russian Baroque style was similar to that of Peterhof.

---

They had a number of paintings by Rembrandt.

---

They also have two of the approximately 18 existing Da Vinci paintings.



The room containing them was very popular.

---

Here's a sculpture by Michaelangelo.

---

And of course, here's the final entry in my "Big Head Trilogy".

Go Update

It's been a while since I did my last update of my online go ranking. At the time, I was 22 kyu. Since then, I've been enjoying playing face-to-face go more and on-line go less. I had almost entirely stopped playing on-line until I discovered I could now play against a computer program. That works well, because I can play as little or as much as I'd like in a sitting.

After many ups and downs (including hitting 19 kyu a couple of times), I am back at 21 kyu. That's as a result of losing a close loss last night to the computer program. I'm sure I'll bounce back.

In the real world, I finally won my first match at a Richmond go tournament in June. Amusingly enough, it was against the same opponent who delivered my first loss this spring. Since I was now 19 kyu and he was 15, I got a 3-stone handicap, compared to our earlier even game. (According to the way the tournaments I've been in before work, it would have been a 19-15=4 stone handicap, but this used a computer program that was a little different.) With about 5 stones left to play, my opponent resigned. I guess he figured I wasn't going to make any stupid mistakes that would let him back into the game.

My second game was a 3-handicap game against a 14 kyu player. (If you win, the computer keeps making your matches harder until you lose.) I made plenty of stupid mistakes in that one. In the end, I made more than my opponent, and he won by 25.

My third game was a 6-stone handicap against a 12 kyu player. After the pairings were announced, my opponent from the previous match came up to me and said, "I know this guy. You can beat him. Just don't make any stupid mistakes." So I played very conservatively...I noticed the other guy was, too. Whenever I made the slightest
aggressive move, he went to defend. So with both of us playing conservatively, and me with a 6-stone handicap, I won easily. We started counting, but quit when we realized I was ahead by more than 50 points.

My last game was an 8-stone game against a 10 kyu. The game went back and forth. First he killed a bunch of my stones, then I killed some of his (not supposed to happen against a 10 kyu!), then he invaded some of my territory that I had defended poorly. When we counted it up, we were dead even. We counted again to make sure. In a tournament, ties go to the higher ranked player (he had, after all, given me 8 stones handicap), so he won by half a point.

That was particularly harsh, since 3 victories would have won me two books. Still, one of the games I had lost was a particulary hard one, so when the dust settled my ranking went from 19.3 kyu to 19.0. So I can still enter the next tournament as a 19 kyu. I'm hoping to study up and go 3-1 or 4-0. After all, winners there not only get a prize, they also get a trophy!

Updated Map

Well, now that I've been to Russia and India, my map of countries visited looks all the more impressive.


The Europe map looks pretty good, too.




In terms of new countries, I'm hoping to go to China in December, and I may go to Spain and Malaysia for conferences next year. There's always the possiblity of finding a nice spot in the sun for vacation, but Caribbean islands don't show too well on the map. :-)

Maps courtesy of World 66.

Peterhof

More pictures from Russia!

The conference excursion was to Peterhof, the summer palace of the Russian czars. Although hanging around the hotel most of the week got old, the excursions were really memorable.
On the way there, we passed the palace where next month's G8 summit will be held.
We got to Peterhof a little bit early, so we visited this nearby church. According to our guide, the Church of Sts. Peter and Paul was built as part of a contest to build a memorial to the assassinated Czar Alexander II. It came in second to the Church of Spilled Blood.

The palace was incredibly opulent. The style is "Russian Baroque" which apparently differs from other baroque styles due to the white background.
Even though the palace is supposedly "closed" one day a month for cleaning, you can get in that day as part of a tour group.
You can see the picture of Catherine the Great above her throne.
One room was filled with pictures of court ladies, all by the same artist. It was an effect I had never seen before.

The front of the palace looked out onto the Gulf of Bothnia. Peter planned it so that people would usually arrive by sea. (Usually by issuing the command "F Bothnia->St. Pete.") (That's joke goes out to all you Diplomacy fans.)
We finish with the second of the "big head" pictures.

That's Me in the Corner

Well, I've finally been reunited with my luggage. In there was a CD of photos that the organizer provided at the end of the conference. I thought that was a really cool gesture. I also thought I'd show that Russia wasn't all fun in games by highlighting pictures of me attending the conference. Little did I know I was this conference's Zelig.

I was sitting in the upper right of the conference Monday morning, as you can see from the closeup.


The rest of the pictures show me at the rump session studiously taking notes. (Please ignore the empty beer glasses.)

St. Petersburg Boat Trip

I just got back from Russia. Wow, when they say 4 star hotel in Russia, they don't mean the same as in America...or Poland, for that matter. But perhaps I deduct too many stars for the persistent smell of tobacco smoke. I did manage to take three interesting excursions in between conference talks, and I'll post pictures of them one at a time.

The first such trip saw me exchange cigarette fumes for gasoline fumes as we took to the waters of St. Petersburg.

On the bus ride to the boat, our guide talked a lot about real estate. The apartment building on the left is one of the crappy 1990s style buildings -- but not, the guide, assured us, as crappy as the ones built under Krushchev. She returned to the point of how bad those are. In fact, there was a lot of complaining in her narrative. On one hand, that seemed like an odd note on which to start the tour. On the other hand, it seems like Russians have a history to justify a lot of complaining. The apartment building on the right is being built now and is much nicer (but too expensive, of course).

Here is a typical view of the waterways of St. Petersburg. They may look like canals because of the man-made embankments, but they are actually rivers -- the embankments were public works projects of the tsars. I have a lot of pictures of backs of buildings where Pushkin lived or some tsar set up a home for orphaned girls or something, but they all sort of run together.

This is the Peter and Paul Fortress. It was the first set of buildings built in St. Petersburg, and Dostoevsky was once imprisoned there.

This is my big head in front of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Since I didn't feel like asking anyone to take my picture, this will be the first in a series of "big head" pictures.

This is a bridge allegedly built by the same people who built the Eiffel Tower.

My mother the singer

"This is the nicest group of women. As much as I love SaddleBrooke - and I do love it - it was nice to meet women from all over Tucson," Grantham said.

Here's an article about my mother and her singing group (but, from my perspective, mostly about my mother).

Perfect Record

Well, I played in another go tournament today. My record is still unblemished by a victory.

My first game was against one of my opponents from my previous tournament. Since I had regressed to a 17 kyu ranking, and she had advance to 15 kyu, I got a two-stone handicap. It didn't help -- the same result. She cordoned off a massive amount of territory, I tried a desperate invasion, it failed, and I resigned. She ended the tournament undefeated, so I guess I shouldn't feel too bad.

My second game was against a 15-kyu kid. I played more respectably and lost by 32 or 34 stones (I can't remember). I feel like I was a few mistakes away from winning that game.

My third game was something else entirely. I played against a kid who entered at 35 kyu. That meant I had to give him an 18 stone handicap. I didn't even know what that looks like. (The most I had played with online was 10, and the most I had played in the tournament was 2...my previous two games.) After some consultation, we came up with the following diagram:


The more observant among you may notice that there are only 17 stones in the diagram. They couldn't figure out where to put the 18th stone. So they decided black could go first (normally reserved for white) as the 18th stone. Now, even if you don't know how to play go, if you recognize that the object of the game is to use stones to surround territory, you realize that black starts with a lot of territory almost surrounded. If I played an 18 stone handicap game against a 2 dan, I'm fairly confident I could pull that off.

But I almost did win despite the handicap. I made one mistake late in the game that allowed my opponent to win by around 30 stones.

The fourth game was much like the third, but this time I had to give my opponent only 15 stones handicap. Once again, I lost by 30 stones. This opponent also finished the tournament undefeated.

So I stand at 0-8 in competitive go. Despite all this (or perhaps because I'm hungry for a win), I am itching to play again. I'll drop to 19 or 20 kyu after this tournament, and I'll have an even better chance -- right?

I've been selling Christina on the idea of spending a weekend in Richmond next month for the Virginia Open. Winning (or losing) is not guaranteed, but a report here either way is.

Border Issues

I thought I had weighed in on this subject before, but Google can't find a mention of it, so I must be mistaken.

I read in a USA Today article that the Senate has pushed back the date by which Americans need passports when returning from Canada and Mexico. I don't have an opinion on the technical details of the timing of this requirement, but overall I'm in favor of this requirement.

I don't necessarily think that this requirement will increase our border security. Conceptually, however, I think it's good for people to use their passports when traveling out of the country.

First of all, it's easier. After I traveled to a conference in graduate school and my non-passport-carrying fellow graduate students (one in particular) got chastised by Canadian immigration, everyone swore they'd have a passport next time they crossed the border.

Secondly, it makes people think about the fact that they're leaving the US. Maybe I'm being naive, but I think having to carry a passport into Tijuana might make a few people think about the fact that they're entering a sovereign nation with a rich history which wasn't just set up to provide them with cheap booze for a night on the town.

Finally, I hope that Americans who get passports for travel in North America will feel, "Hey, now that I've paid for this thing, I might as well use it." I love America, and I love Americans, but some of you guys need to get out more. Especially now that international travel is not that much more expensive than domestic, people can get out and see the world. And they should -- travel has given me a wider perspective on the world, and I think others could benefit from a more cosmopolitan experience.

Millennium Bridge

My trip to England was mostly work, but I did have part of Friday free and in London. London! I like London, so this was cool. I finally got to do something I wanted to do in my 2000 trip there. The Millennium Bridge was built for the millennium (duh) and opened in 2000. It was quickly closed, as resonance from pedestrian footsteps caused the bridge to sway wildly. Well, they finally "fixed" it (there was nothing unsafe about the original design -- it sounded kind of fun) in 2002.

It turns out this is the easiest way to get from Paddington to the Tate Modern and the Globe. I just take the Underground's Circle Line to Blackfriars and then walk across the Thames.

It has quite nice views. To the north is St. Paul's Cathedral...




To the south, the Tate Modern...



To the west, the Tower Bridge...

Bristol Marriott Royal

Greetings from the Bristol Marriott Royal. I have the option -- do I pay 15 pounds/day (roughly $28) for Internet access through the hotel? Or do I use the free wireless network provided by a nearby independent cinema? Hmmn...

I have a very nice room. This is a quaint old hotel that has been remodeled recently.



They decided to keep the plumbing as is, which means separate hot and cold taps (I never understood the attraction of that). Also, if I'm running cold water in the bath, I can't run it in the sink. And if I'm doing either of the preceding two things, the toilet tank doesn't refill. Quirky, but reasonable.




Right now I'm waiting for room service. I used to feel like I should leave my room and have more interaction with local culture. But I've had plenty of interaction with UK culture over the years, and I'm going to have plenty this week. Plus, it was raining (trust me -- it started after I took the picture.)



I took the train out here, which was cool. I hadn't taken a UK train in over 10 years -- except for the Heathrow Express, which I also took today. I almost duplicated a feat from years back, when I started to nod off as we pulled into Bristol. Fortunately, unlike years ago when visiting my parents, I did not manage to sleep through my stop. A short taxi ride later, I was here and napping in my room. That's another thing I used to feel like I should avoid...but I've learned that I'm talented enough at sleeping that a nap won't keep me up all night.

Well, the room service is here, so I'm going to go enjoy my chicken caesar salad...