Mum Visiting

My Mum arrived from Australia today.

She arrived via the Amtrak train from San Francisco, with Qantas taking care of the Sydney-San Francisco leg thanks to the miles I used to get her a business class ticket (I think she liked that a little better than flying at the back of the plane).


These long distance Amtrak trains are a black hole for taxes; but if my taxes are going to be wasted, they may as well be wasted on my Mum!

Beaver

We were out for a walk this afternoon passing by Casey's Pond when some movement in the water caught our attention.

Anyone speak Swedish?

If you do, I'd like to ask the Nobel Committee the following question:

What the f... were you guys thinking?

That's my reaction to Obama winning the Nobel Peace Price.

I voted for the guy, and whilst I've been bitterly disappointed with his economic policies, I generally think that on foreign policy he's on the right track. But if this were a 400 metres race, he wouldn't even be through the first turn.

Things are better in Iraq but it's still only the sort of peaceful where people die every day in political violence.

Afghanistan is going the other way. It's one hell of a mess on the way to being a disaster of biblical proportions.

North Korea and Iran are still making nuclear weapons. Burma is still run by a repressive military regime. People are still being persecuted and dying in Darfur.

Obama's approach on all these issues is measured and considered and patient (unlike his predecessor who showed all the patience and consideration of a teenage boy), but it will be quite some time before he's achieved anything lasting and substantial.

Update 10:30 am Mountain Time: Ok, it seems need to translate "What the f... were you guys thinking?" into Norwegian. It seems that the Peace Prize is awarded in Norway, unlike the rest of the Nobel prizes which are awarded in Sweden.

Thank you Comcast

Those are words I never thought I'd speak. Comcast have been my cable TV provider since 2002 and my high speed internet provider since 2004 and in that time have managed on many, many occasions to annoy the hell out of me.

But last night they redeemed themselves. I was able to watch the Australian Football League ("Aussie Rules") Grand Final live on ESPN360.com which I only discovered earlier this week is available free to Comcast subscribers.

I have a computer connected to my big screen TV that I used to watch it, so apart from the occasional jitter it was as good as watching it on TV back in Australia (apart from being the middle of Friday night instead of Saturday afternoon, but hey you can't have everything).

To obtain this level of performance ESPN must mirror the feed from Australia to the US and then serve it to end users from here, because I've tried streaming football video from Australia before and it's been unwatchable (bandwidth across the Pacific is lousy).

So once again for the record, just in case there is any confusion; Thank you Comcast.

First snow for '09

It's 66 days until opening day for the 2009-10 ski season and we had our first snow last night. Only a light dusting but it still counts (there was still snow on the rooftops when I got up at 6.30 am). There's probably more at the top of the mountain but right now you can't see that for the clouds.

Terrible jet lag

We arrived back in Steamboat on Wednesday after four weeks in Australia. For some reason we're suffering from jet lag far worse than we ever had before; awake until 3 or 4 am and then sleeping until 10 or 11 am.

It normally takes at least a week to adjust to a time change this big (eight hours in the northern summer), but by now we should at least be sleeping a bit better, yet last night was still a shocker. Hope it improves soon - I've got a trip to San Diego on Tuesday, with a 9.30 am meeting on Wednesday morning!

The best hot chocolate. Ever.

Last year I wrote about discovering the perfect cappuccino.

Today I had the best hot chocolate I've ever tasted. Not best by a little bit, but the best by a long way. If this was a ten, the best I'd had before was a five.

Where was this? In Canberra, Australia at a place called Koko Black.