A visit to California for work provided a chance to meet one of my cousins, and join a bunch of rocket scientist at an airshow in the Mojave desert. And the US tried to elect a new president.

OK, it’s been a bit longer than I anticipated, but hey, I have a job to do as well!

And now that Issue #2 has been produced I guess I really should start on creating the website together, and uploading the pics. For the more excitable among you, it’s nothing that you’d be embarassed to show your mothers (no photography allowed inside that club in Toronto), but they say a picture is worth a thousand words (especially if painted by Picasso) and I’d rather not spend half an hour describing something when a snapshot will do just as well.

And why the name change? Since I now have a full-sized desk all to myself, it’s no longer quite true. If the iHateMyCube.com site ever goes back online, you’ll see just what I mean. Yes we (temporarily) had a webcam in the techie corner of the office to make a point. It worked. HR came to visit within two hours promising to sort things out if it was turned off. Ahh, the power of the Internet. From a UK perspective, certain American work practices seem a little odd. Others we could definitely learn from, like free cokes, bagels & croissants on Fridays, and beer n’ pizza at other times.

The Election

Q: How many Americans does it take to count an election?

A: I’ll tell you in a couple of weeks!

Boom - boom!

The Luggage

It arrived! And with only three minor breakages! Not bad I suppose, although I was a bit annoyed they decapitated a Terracotta Warrior from my China holiday of a few years ago. Not a real one (they’re a bit too big to put in a suitcase, and that would also upset the Chinese), but a replica. OK, so it cost about the same as a beer if you exclude the air-fare, but that’s not the point.

And after all of the messing around with customs forms and stuff, it turns out I didn’t have to pay duty after all. And there’s all that unused relocation allowance sitting there doing nothing.

International Banking

Somethings don’t seem to change. NatWest responded remarkably quickly to my enquiries as to why they managed to completely corrupt all the information about me. I almost started to regret the rather incendiary language I used. That was untill I read their response. They want to charge me £10 before they send any information for me to correct for them! I haven’t replied yet, as I have a few things to rearrange first, but they’d better be wearing fireproof gloves and shades when they open the reply.

By contrast, it took 5 days to get Internet banking set up with Citibank, and that is solely down sending an initial pin number through the post, and it worked first time. Unfortunately they have to tell the IRS about the account since it is partly in US$, despite being based in London. I can’t work that one out, especially as I cannot pay into the account in the US. I guess that’s why accountants and lawyers who specialise in this sort of thing can earn such big fees.

How to tell if you’re an American #1

You decide that the relationship with your partner is over. How do you break the news you are leaving?

(a) Leave a tearful note on the table and slip quietly away
(b) Calmly discuss the reasons with your partner for your decision
(c) Attack them with a chair in front of a rabble of cheering pumped-up inbreds on national television.

Credit

I’ve discovered the big catch to using UK credit cards here. Actually, it could be a NatWest thing (them again!), but the exchange rate is abysmal!

If you’re going on holiday somewhere it’s probably OK to take a 30% difference between market and card rates, but when you’re living off the thing, it works out very expensive. It will be cheaper to buy a card at that rate. Unfortunately it’s difficult to hire a car without one.

The other interesting thing is a US company is offering me a UK credit card (thanks to the erratic wonders of international mail redirection). I wonder if they’ll do a US card with the same limit? What am I thinking???

American Banks

While we’re on the subject, here’s something else to have a laugh at. If you buy anything with a cheque (or check in the local dialect) it is quite a long drawn out process. Typically you’ll have to have a photo ID like the new UK driving licence (and yes, I have been asked what state it’s from!) or a passport, and frequently you have to have pre-arranged "checking privilages" beforehand. Apparently this is all about preventing fraud and the retailer having confidence that you have the money in the account.

Now many years ago we came up with the concept of the cheque guarantee card. If you give that to the shop, they know they’ll get the money from the bank. I explained the concept here and it was like explaining quantum physics to caveman. They couldn’t believe in such a concept, or that it could actually work.

Oh, and if you’re feeling mean, hand over a Canadian $20 bill when doing your local shopping. I’ve done that a couple of times in the local Starmarket (a local variation of M+W / Tesco Metro / Mace / Mr Gees etc). Each time the checkout girl (sorry, VP Payment Processing) stared blankly at the paper. I could almost see the thought processes drifting across her face like icebergs in the ocean. "It says $20. But it’s not a twenty. Why has it got a picture of some woman on it instead of that old president?" OK, it’s not nice. I didn’t mean to - honest!

How to tell if you’re an American #2

You and your mates decide to have a game of football in the park. What do you need to take?
(a) A ball
(b) A ball and 2 coats
(c) A ball, 50 crash helmets, 4 tons of body armour, 20 cheerleaders, a marching sousaphone band with a grand piano on a trolley, and a team of orthopaedic surgeons specialising in spinal injuries.

Think of it as democracy in action…

OK - apologies to Larry Niven there, but I guess the big story here right now is about how a bunch of OAPs managed to bring the election of the "leader of the free world" to a grinding halt.

I must admit I watched some of the election coverage, but it just wasn’t the same as the Beeb covering Election Night. And it wasn’t just because only the BBC has Peter Snow with his swing-o-meter.

Firstly they have this Electoral College system, and although it may be 200 years out of date, it turns out there is a good practical reason for this. Apart from something to take the mickey out of them for. (nothing new there!)

Way back then, it wasn’t possible to organise a one-man-one-vote electoral system for the entire country. Or even a one-man-(-who-is-white-aged-over-21-and-owns-a-house-)-one-vote system. So instead each state would send Electors who would gather to vote on the next President based on local ballots. Each State has a number of votes in the Electoral College roughly equal to the number of Senators and Representatives the State has. Since every State has 2 Senators (in the Senate belive it or not - similar role to our House of Lords or whatever it’s going to be called), and a number of Representatives (in the Congress - similar to the House of Commons) proportional to their population, each State has between 3 and 54 Electors.

The practical upshot is a candidate cannot ignore small or sparsely populated States as they could decide the outcome. If it weren’t for this, the inhabitants of about a dozen cities would effectively choose the next for President. Which may seem strange, but then California alone is the worlds sixth largest economy - just to give you an idea of how many people there are.

The actual means that each State uses to decide on how it’s votes in the Electoral College will be cast is pretty much up to themselves to decide. The fact that 48 out of 50 decide to cast all their votes to the single candidate who wins in that State is up to them, and this is seen as fundamental to the federal principles of the US Government as a whole, and therefore it’s A Good Thing.

The other interesting feature of this, in half of the States the Electors don’t have any legal requirement to vote for the candidate that wins their state. And this has happened a couple of times in the past. So in theory, once this Florida thing is resolved it still ain’t over.

And what is this fuss in Florida? To vote, all you have to do is punch out a hole in a piece of card next to the candidate you want to vote for. The confusion was caused by the holes being in the middle of the page, and a nice big arrow pointed from each candidate to their hole. (Should I rephrase that?). And this was too confusing. Anyone got a Canadian $20 handy?

Cal-ee-forn-eye-ay

I was aware that America is a big country, in the geographical sense. Just as most people are aware that Australia is south of Watford or the Mediterranean is somewhere around Spain or France. But it’s not until you spend eight hours on a coast-to-coast flight that you realise just how big it is. I can fly to London in slightly less time than that (although it may take two days to do the couple of miles to Logan airport thanks to the traffic congestion of the Big Dig).

I had to fly out to San Francisco to have a look at two pieces of software. If you look really closely at the disks you can see the bits and bytes - honest! Work stuff aside, it wasn’t much of a trip because all we did was work stuff. I mean, 8 hours in a single meeting is a bit much. They even bought lunch into the room so we didn’t have to stop. I’m surprised they didn’t have astronaut fittings under the seats.

On the upside, since I had flown all that way for work, it would have been a shame to fly back on a Friday night, especially when I have a cousin down in Pasadena. Even if I didn’t manage to get in touch until a couple of hours before leaving Boston (moral - always take enough underwear for an extra day or two).

So the plan was to see a movie on the Friday, go to an airshow on Saturday and fly home on Sunday. So I turn up and LA is cloudy which is not a problem, I’m quite used to that. And after a quick drive past of the nicer bits of downtown LA (you really wouldn’t want to go into the nastier bits - unless you were in an armoured car, or preferably a tank with two Apache gunships as escorts), that were visible in the smog I ended up having a guided tour of CalTech.

Now, students are generally weird. American students more so. But this was definitely on the next level of weirdness (but perhaps not quite as weird as Berkley). If you’ve seen Beverly Hills Cop you’ve seen some of CalTech already. They shot the gun club scenes there. But that’s not weird. It’s when you wander into some of the student halls. One of them is painted red and orange, with flickering orange lights in the ceilings and various hallowe’en symbols painted on the walls. Apparently it’s known as Hell. Downstairs looks as though George Lucas had been to stay, with pictures of planets and various Sci-Fi ships. Connecting the two is Hyperspace, that looks like an air conditioning duct (with fitted carpet) that runs from a kitchen cupboard down to a small store room (and unlike the movies, there’s no lights in there). But then the place is full of people having a damn good go at inventing the warp drive.

The airshow was pretty good. It was at Edwards, which is a couple of hours east in the Mojave Desert. Now, I’ve been living in Boston and had planned to visit San Francisco. Neither of which is famous for having desert conditions. Shades or a hat would have been useful. As it turned out, I was very glad to have jeans and a jumper as it was cold!

The show started with a fly by from Chuck Yeager in an F-15 at Mach 1 (at high altitude) making him the fastest OAP on the planet. OK, so John Glen did go up in the shuttle not that long ago, but he was in orbit so it doesn’t count. All the usual suspects were there, F14, F16, FA18, F117, B1, B2 (didn’t fly), C17, A10 and so on, some of which did (simulated?) bomb runs on the range next to the airbase. I think the best display was by a Pitts Special. Not the fastest or meanest plane, but certainly the most aerobatic. They also had a NASA U2 and Blackbird on static display, which they claim as the only civilian owned spy planes. I suppose that NASA is technically a civilian organisation, despite all the spook stuff they do.

Hollywood

Haven’t seen much on the movie front of late. The Exorcist is on release again but for all the fuss it wasn’t as bad as people make out. You’ve probably seen half of it already in other films. I’ve also seen Red Planet which is another of the current crop of Mars movies. Not bad, with some interesting touches but pretty average Sci-Fi fare. Charlies Angels provided an evening of suspense belief. Heavily influenced by The Matrix but it did have three good things going for it. I’ll let you work out what they were.

On the TV front, the new season of the Simpsons is showing. I won’t spoil anything since you know where I live. Unfortunately we won’t have cable for a few more weeks yet so there’s no news on Stargate. And the video has a burned out PSU thanks to a mains spike. The surge protector and everything else survived intact. And there’s not that many places to get PAL & NTSC videos. If you’re really interested I can forward the spoilers from Showtime’s website since it’s not available to non-US internet users.

Oh, and don’t even ask about multi-region DVD players. That too is an alien concept.

And finally…

How to tell if you’re an American #3

You are driving along a country road when you accidentally run over a rabbit. What do you do?

(a) Stop and see how badly injured it is, taking it to a vet if it is still alive
(b) Carry on driving, but hope it is still alive, or if not, that it died quickly
(c) Strap it across the bonnet of your car and drive home a-hollering and a-whooping and throwing empty Budweiser cans out of the window.

I found another Indian restaurant that seemed promising, but only just. If you ordered a curry in the UK, would you expect to be asked how hot you’d like it? To me, if you want a mild curry you go for a korma. If you want a hot one, jalfrezi or vindaloo. Here, the approach is to serve them all as mild, and then add chili. Which complete destroys the balance of the flavours if a few seconds after taking a mouthful of a nice piquant lamb dopiaza, all you can taste is the raw heat of chili. But on the plus side, that essential companion to a good curry is readily available. Every place I’ve been to so far has served that famous Indian creation: Kingfisher lager. Brewed under licence in the UK!

Oh, and for all you winter sports fans, the season has now started. Snowboarding for four days during Thanksgiving. And I’m probably going to the mountains this weekend as well. Yippee! [Actually is was last weekend. Yes, this is even later than planned. But more on that next time!]