Terri and I just got back from an amazing trip to Europe. We spend 17 days there and enjoyed every minute of it. I’d like to put together a more complete narrative of the trip, but here are some photos from Ireland and another set from Italy-Switzerland-Brussels-Amsterdam to look at while I put together something that helps to better describe what we did there.
Terri and I are planning a trip to Europe this summer. We were in Europe in 2003 for a tour of Scotland and Ireland which was wonderful. This time we’ll be spending a week in Ireland, visiting with my relatives and then will travel to Italy to visit with our friend Silvio and his family. Silvio visited with us last October. We’ve been to Italy several times before and we have always enjoyed our visits. We love the scenery, the food, the people, and just about everything about Italy. This time, we plan to see some of it on a motorcycle. We’ve rented small motorbikes before in Italy and traveled in Tuscany between Florence and Sienna and Pisa, and there’s just no better way to experience the countryside than on a motorcycle. This time Silvio will be arranging a more capable bike, a Honda VFR shown below, and we hope to take a trip up in through the Swiss Alps.
Silvio has proposed several routes for motorcycle trips so that we can make our decision based on where the weather is best. I’ve used Google Earth to view them in 3D and each of them look to be quite spectacular. The routes are shown below.
After Italy, we’ll be flying to Brussels, Belgium, and then taking a train to Amsterdam before returning home. I’ll make sure to take a lot of pictures.
When I was a kid, I loved science fiction. I recall watching episodes of Lost in Space and Star Trek with such a sense of awe that I couldn’t wait for the future. At the time, the U.S. space program was on track to put a man on the moon in a few short years. How much longer would it be before everything envisioned in these sci-fi shows became reality? I also vividly recalled watching the H.G. Wells inspired classic film, Time Machine, when it first aired on TV in the early 60’s. One of the scenes from that movie that was burned into my memory over the years was that books were no longer needed. No one studied anything. If one needed to know an answer, he just spun a ring and asked it a question. The rings would answer any question in a human voice. Although the user interface is quite different, this reminds me of the Internet today.
I saw Star Wars when it came out, but never became fanatical about the series. I realized after seeing the reactions of others that my enthusiasm for sci-fi was beginning to wane although I couldn’t quite identify the reason. I’ve tried to read some sci-fi books recently and found it hard to get through them, even though they are considered classics in the sci-fi enthusiast community (William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash in particular). I think that after spending 20+ years in engineering, the luster had worn off of sci-fi because the stories depend an audience that is either completely ignorant of science or has an infinite capacity to suspend its disbelief in implausible scientific reasoning. When I was younger I’m sure I fit both descriptions. Now that I am older, I see sci-fi from a different perspective, and if a scientific priciple is asserted that is completely at odds with reality, then it causes a kind of cognitive dissonance that spoils the story for me.
This realization came to me after watching The Matrix, a film that seems to be at the top of the lists of many sci-fi fans as the best film in the history of the earth. My sense of reasoning was completely assaulted when I became aware that the premise behind the film was that human beings were being used by some nefarious forces as a source of energy, sort of like batteries. My head was about to explode when I tried to comprehend how abolutely ignorant one must be to make such an assertion. Human beings consume energy at approximately 100 calories every hour they are simply resting. Humans cannot be used to power anything without putting in at least three to four times the energy they are producing. And it’s really hard to extract energy from humans. You’d be much better off with a generator. Built on top of this shaky premise was an orgy of special effects, none of which made any scientific sense. An example of gratuitous special effects was the scene where, when shooting automatic weapons at an unseen opponent, it was necessary to simultaneously perform cartwheels. It was a feast for the eyes, but pablum for the brain. I know that my assessment of The Matrix will not be approved of by those who think of the movie as a science fiction masterpiece, but I suppose if you are completely ignorant of science or have an infinite capacity to suspend your disbelief in faulty reasoning, you may think the movie set a new high water mark.
It makes me a little sad to come to the realization that I’ve outgrown science fiction. But I suppose it would be sadder if I had a closet full of costumes to wear to sci-fi gatherings. 🙂
I read recently that a blog is often like a soliloquy.
so·lil·o·quy n., 1.a. A dramatic or literary form of discourse in which a character reveals his or her thoughts when alone or unaware of the presence of other characters. b. A specific speech or piece of writing in this form of discourse. 2. The act of speaking to oneself.
That fits the description of this blog :-). I’m essentially talking to myself, and sometimes I go back into the archives and see what I was thinking about at some point in time. I have virtually no subscribers on Bloglines or Newsgator and no links on Technorati, yet my RSS feed for this blog is one of my most frequently accessed files according to my web access logs. It’s hard to explain. I can generally find the topic I’ve blogged about on Google just a few days after I’ve made the entry, so I guess search engines like RSS feeds, and people who read this blog are finding it through searching on topics.
Today I checked out the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a website founded by Brewster Kahle to archive the whole Internet. I was stunned to find my very first attempt to create web pages unmercifully stored in the archive for the rest of the world to see (from AOL, no less!).
The Internet has always struck me as an ephemeral medium, with stories that age off systems, websites that go away completely, broken links, and people who come and go. The fact that someone is trying to take periodic snapshots of it and store it away for posterity is absolutely mind boggling to me. I’d heard about this service many times, but never thought to go out and see if any of my stuff was on it. I figured, quite incorrectly as it turns out, that only important websites would be archived but I found that there were even a few of my @home pages tucked away in its archive. I found blog posts from many years ago sitting out there by people whose blogs never even had archives. I knew from previous experience with Usenet that it’s generally not a good idea to post anything on the Internet that you didn’t want to haunt you for the rest of you life, but I didn’t think that what I put on my own website would fall into that category. After all, I’m the webmaster of my domain and I can make things disappear. But not with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine! It can store every embarrassing thing you’ve ever written and serve it out to anyone with enough curiosity to sift through its data banks.
It doesn’t appear to be complete, but there’s enough information on there to be used to piece together what a site looked like as many as 10 years ago. It’s hard to imagine what it would cost to host and maintain a server farm that is basically trying to back up the entire web. According to Wikipedia, it takes on petabyte of storage and is growing at about 20 terabytes per month!
So go ahead, write what you want on the Internet, but know that there is a veritable Akashic Record being stored of it somewhere…and it’s beyond your control to erase any of it.
