I’m thinking I should take up blogging, again. Some things seem too precious not to share.

Case in point: Yesterday, I saw a man in a coonskin cap. I wanted to laugh, but this guy wound up being the scariest-looking dude I’ve ever seen on the streets of Cambridge.

He was tough enough without the hat. For starters, he was real weathered-looking. Like a big mean sailor. Something about him conveyed (and quickly) that this gentleman had already “been there, done that” when it came to speedy resolution of conlicts. Pub fight, street fight, prison fight — check. Fists, beer bottles, butterfly knives — our man was clearly familiar with all the above.

And, as I have mentioned before, he was lumbering around Cambridge, England wearing a coonskin cap. Now, that’s a disconcerting choice of headgear on anyone, but here the effect was downright chilling.

I mean, where does one even procure such a thing? What haberdashery still stocks this item? The souvenier shop in Frontierland, for one, but that’s back in Anaheim, and I’m convinced this man had not been. He wasn’t the Magic Kingdom type, in so many words. Plus, his wasn’t a costume-shop racoon hat, it was gen-u-ine mammal. I think.

This was not a fashion statement. Nor an anachronistic affectation. This coonskip cap was, quite simply, one of Nature’s Little Warning Signs; a distinct cue for other members of the species (human and raccoon, in this case) to keep walking ahead, eyes fixed forward, never looking back.

Or laughing, either.

It’s stating the obvious, I know, but for the record, this blog is officially on hiatus.

We’re still in Cambridge, though student life seems eons away. (I’ve joined the commuting masses, instead, and am now part of the Google team in London.)

Life is good, though. For all three of us.

Bye!

After 8 long days in the hospital, my wife Azure and our newborn daughter have finally come home. Despite some shaky moments, they are both fine and healthy and beautiful, and I am the happiest dad on the planet.

A few incoming MBA students have asked for advice on moving to the UK. About year ago, I asked the very same question to Frank Leahy, who then wrote a helpful blog entry (two, actually) about Moving to England — What Do I Bring and Getting Stuff There.

Herewith a few more details that I can add — these being oddball points, mostly tailored to Cambridge MBA students:

Cell phones: For starters, they call ‘em “mobile phones” here, and yeah, you’ll need one if you hope to socialize much.

You need a GSM phone, however — if you’re a T-Mobile or Cingular customer in the States, you’re probably in luck. However, your phone is still likely to be ‘locked’ to that provider; you still need to unlock it to join another carrier. There’s an easy way to test this — if you’re a T-Mobile customer in the States, stroll into a Cingular phone store (or vice-versa), then ask whether their pre-paid-minutes plans will work on your current phone. Store reps should be able to swap out your SIM card and try one of theirs. If it works, your existing phone is already unlocked and ready for the UK.

Unlocking phones is a tricksy business. It’s not-really-allowed, but if you live in a big city, there’s probably some local shop that’ll do it for fifteen bucks. Try asking around at 3rd-party places (the storefronts advertising calling plans from multiple carriers) especially if they serve a lot of overseas-immigrant customers. A couple years ago, I owned a Sony T68i that I’d used while in Italy; I needed it unlocked so I could join Cingular pre-paid in California. The first shop I walked into (outside Monterey Park) was happy to unlock the phone — as a cash-only transaction.

You might also try your luck and wait until you arrive in Cambridge. There’s a stall in the market square advertising phone unlocks while-u-wait.

Of course, the whole point of bringing an unlocked phone to England is to join a ‘pay-as-you-go’ phone plan, and thereby avoid spending a single pence on new equipment. You can live quite cheaply on pay-as-you-go — you’re charged only for the calls you dial, not the ones you receive. And there’s never any end-of-the-month billing surprises. Azure and I probably averaged under 10 pounds a month with our pay-as-you-go mobiles, but we didn’t gab much.

I recently became a pay-monthly customer, though, since I wanted a brand-new camera phone. As in the U.S., you’ll get a very nice ‘free’ phone here if you sign up for a 12-month plan, usually £30 and up. Nice thing is, pay-monthly phones are generally provided unlocked (but be sure to ask) so you can use them after graduation, wherever you may live. One prerequisite may be having a UK bank account set up, however.

Sticklers for detail will note that I’ve missed two other options. First, you can buy cheap locked phones (£29-£99) tied to a provider’s pay-as-you-go plan; if you choose a cruder phone, and don’t talk much, you’ll still recoup the savings (vs. a monthly contract) before the year is up. Avoid the ‘3’ network if you head this route, though — any minutes you buy will expire every month. Dumb.

The other option is to buy an unlocked tri-band or quad-band GSM phone, new or used, back in the US. (There’s little point to buying a phone over here; the prices generally match the cost of buying a 12-month contract with the phone included.) Some phone makers, like Handspring, sell unlocked phones directly to customers. Some stores may, too.

Unlocked phones are also for sale on eBay, though there’s also a lot of fraud in that space — be especially wary of overseas sellers with low feedback numbers. Sellers whose only picture of their phone is lifted from the Nokia website are also a bad sign…

Business Suit: Maybe most MBA’s own one of these, already; I was lucky enough not to. You’ll need a suit for client-based group projects, formal halls, the class picture, etc. I brought an inexpensive no-name grey suit from a discounter, which was a good call. That suit spent a lot of time getting wet in the rain, picking up road dirt from cycling, and getting spilled on at formal halls and college bars. Save the nice suit for after graduation.

Tuxedos: These are called ‘dinner suits’, hereabouts. Absurd, I know, but getting educated in Cambridge means you’re likely to need/want one. There’s a black-tie Christmas party at the Judge, and the more traditional colleges like Magdalene throw a number of black-tie-preferred events (holiday banquets, etc.) as well. (Demanding people to wear a tux is, like, no big deal here.) Toss in a May Ball or two, and you’ll belatedly realize that buying is better than renting at £35-£50 a pop. Like most everything else, buying a tux at home is much cheaper than buying in the UK.

Vaccinations: You’ll soon get a note from Cambridge telling you to get a mumps vaccination. The disease may sound as medieval as most of the buildings around here (and is unheard of in the US), but it’s a virus that’s very much alive and kicking in English universities.You don’t want to get this one, especially if you’re male.

You’ll need to register with the NHS on arrival, and can sort out with them how to get your ‘jabs’, but it’s probably a lot less of a hassle to get this done Stateside.

Bicycle and accessories: This is a cycling town. Thanks to the barricades and ‘short-cuts’ placed throughout the whole of Cambridge, two wheels are generally faster than four, and bikes are how everybody gets around, rain or shine. A cheap used bike costs £40 or less, but add-ons like decent halogen lights, helmets, etc. easily add up to that same amount. If you already have this stuff at home, toss it in your suitcase.

Council Tax, etc: The fine print on your rental contact (should you choose to live in private accomodation instead of college housing) is likely to mention Council Tax. This will come in at about 10% of your yearly rent — a nasty surprise, if you weren’t expecting it. Good thing is, you can probably avoid this charge altogether if your entry clearance visa says ‘no recourse to public funds’. You won’t be able to go on the dole, but your tax burden is made much easier.

If there’s a TV in your house, though, you’ll also be liable for a yearly TV license, which runs about £100 / $200. Again, this is unlikely to be included in your rent, so remember to ask — I hear they are remarkably efficient about following up with non-payers.

And that’s it. Well, except for an umbrella and rain jacket. Which are… useful.

LEDs replacing cigarette lighters? That’s what wound up spinning through my brain as I watched the Kaiser Chiefs play at the Queens’ College May Ball.

Not as firestarters, mind. I’m talkin’ cigarette lighters as rock-ballad accoutrements, i.e. glowing objects to be held aloft whenever the band plays a song you like. Because that’s what happened last night, thanks to the whole cameraphone / digital camera scene. Stuck towards the back, I could spot each and every viewfinder that popped up above the crowd — they looked like little glowing blue things, jumping and hopping to the music — until, poof, they’d go down for a few minutes and other consumer electronics would take their place.

You gotta wonder what that looks like from the rockstar’s perspective. They don’t see the screens. Instead, it’s half the crowd stomping and going wild, the other half apparently content to stand still and show you their phones….

Anyhow. Haven’t had time to read that book about the Wisdom of Crowds, but I’ve heard the gist of it, and so last night I made sure to hoist my own Sony K750i in the air, and waved it like I just didn’t care. Coincidentally, I bought the thing only yesterday, primarily because it’s the first 2-megapixel camera phone on the market. The pictures it takes of a Cambridge May Ball look something like this:

No, not great, but then, lighting was low and there wasn’t time to RTFM. But there’s something I love about the constraints, here. I know that visually, it’s like you’re shooting with Kodak Disc film and a pinhole camera. Yet both the form factor and media format are so impulse-friendly that without a cameraphone I doubt these pictures would have been taken. And they capture plenty of the moment, at least for me.

Speaking of which: May Balls, wow. That’s quite a bit of extravagance for a collegiate get-together; it was like an All-American high-school prom mated with the Opening Ceremonies at the Olympics. Yes, the Kaiser Chiefs were the big act, but like a circus, there were other acts in other tents, which ranged from jazz to classical to hip-hop and hippie. Throw in a shiatsu room, a Moon Bounce, a velcro wall, tea tasting, hookahs, Bellinis, burritos, swing boats, fireworks, and a free-alcohol-free-food-free-everything policy that would make even a Las Vegas casino nervous, and you start to get the picture. Definitely the wildest black-tie event I’ve ever been to.

(The Magdalene May Ball is white-tie. I won’t even guess at what goes on, there.)

I wandered home at dawn, which isn’t as late/early as it sounds. The sun goes down at 10:30, now, and is up again within six hours. That, I just love.

Update: Since a fair number of people arrive here looking for more info on the Sony K750i, I’ve added some higher-resolution snaps taken under bright light, which is where the built-in camera really shines.

I’ve knocked the sizes from the native 1600x1200 to 800x600 in Photoshop in most samples, as I think that’s a more realistic example of what you’d mail to friends or post on the web. I’ve noticed that the pictures also tend to look much better that way — there’s a type of pixel noise in the full-size pictures that becomes a lot less noticeable at email-friendly sizes. I also include a ‘tweaked’ version of the picture that’s received minor Photoshop manipulation (i.e., Unsharp Mask, Levels, etc.) to punch things up a bit.

Cath Kidson Bags example: Full Size, 800x600 (natural), 800x600 (enhanced)

Antique Iron: Full Size, 800x600 (natural), 800x600 (enhanced)

I tend to update this page on Saturday mornings. Maybe that’s because it’s the one day I stay seated through my morning cup of coffee, tethered by the teensy hangover which will come knocking anytime I hold up my wine glass for even a single refill.

So be it. Friday nights are good, here.

Last night I was happily back at Magdalene, even though the season of Formal Halls is over. This was a pizza-and-chips affair, instead, with the other Magdalenes who are in the Judge. It’s a small group — there’s four of us MBAs in college this year, a couple of MPhils, and our strategy prof, herself a Fellow at Magdalene.

Nice thing was, the college Master showed up, too. As you might expect from somebody who’s also the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, he’s a very cultured gentleman. (Such that, if genteel cocktail-party talk were an Olympic event, he’d probably lead the field for Britain.) He’s also enormously good-natured, and a super-approachable guy; that’s something I learned after he took a dozen of us MBAs into the Fitz, and gave us a quick lecture on how finance, marketing, and management issues affect the Arts today.

Anyhow. Cambridge is suddenly bursting with festivities, and it’s belatedly sinking in that The End, as I’ve always been warned, is nigh. I feel like I’ve been running this whole academic year, praying I can make it into the home stretch, and just now realized that it’s all already behind me.

It’s fitting, then, that our night sky has been rocked by professional fireworks days in a row — the May Balls are happening (in June, as always) and will be for the whole of next week. (I’m at Queen’s from Monday night to Tuesday morning, meself.) Simultaneously, there’s the May Bumps, a week-long rowing competition which is arguably the heart of Cambridge sport. That’ll be a blog entry unto itself; suffice to say that some students are walking around wreathed with willow branches, most the rest have Pimm’s in hand.

Oh, and the sun is out, gloriously. 84 degrees, no joke.

There’s a correlation between sunny weather and Pimm’s consumption, in these parts. Correlation, yes, and causality, too.

Of course, I’d never heard of Pimm’s before landing in Cambridge. I’d likewise presumed that the locals hadn’t experienced sunny weather — I mean, how else does one explain the Brit tendency to don T-shirts and miniskirts when it’s still freezing out?

Turns out the sun does sometimes shine in the British Isles (every second Saturday in June, 11am to 3pm, weather permitting) and last weekend, Azure, Alanna, and I found ourselves reaching for some sunscreen. And then reaching for the Pimm’s.

Pimm’s, you see, is a gin-based liquer, mixed with lemonade and mint and cucumber and fruit slices. It’s a quintessentially English cocktail, supposedly the standard method of hydration at cricket matches and polo fields, and I shall readily admit:  it’s terribly good stuff.

More elegant than a mint julep, and less labor-intensive than a proper Mojito, Pimm’s No. 1 immediately ranks as one of the best summertime refreshments I’ve had the pleasure to drink. (Especially when the only alternative is warm beer.)

Seriously, though, I believe the weather has turned (mostly), and it’s been a blast. We’ve been cycling/punting/strolling to the outskirts of town, almost daily, then coming home in the evenings to watch the frogs in our neighbor’s garden, or spy on the hedgehog in our own.

Plus, there’s been a swirl of events — this week, the Queen visited the Fitzwilliam Museum, across the street from the Judge, which interrupted a class or two. The same night, Azure and I attended formal hall at Pembroke with two other MBAs; it was in the middle of exams, so it turned out that we four were the only diners, apart from High Table.

That particular dinner will stand as one of the most memorable events from my time at Cambridge: the three long tables of Pembroke’s hall all barren, except for one, with a single candlestick and four plates at the end. All the routine, of course, stayed unbroken; there was still a ringing gong and grace in Latin, the standing, and bowing… whether for four or four hundred, certain things never change, here.

Oh, and yeah, it was ‘Mexican Theme Night’, so then they served us fajitas. Hah!

And school? (School?) Ah, school is still in session, but barely — my classroom time is all but finished, concluding with a case study on Ben & Jerrys’ strategic alliances in Japan. My attention has already turned to the individual project over summer; more on that, later. (There are projects, and then there are, well, other big things…)

We had a slew of great speakers in the last few weeks — Tom Glocer, CEO of Reuters, got my vote for being the best of ‘em. He managed to mention RSS, the ‘blogosphere’, and Gawker in a single sentence, which scored big points in my book. Honorable mention goes to Lois Jacobs, president of Jack Morton, which has got to be the highest-profile company whose name I’d never heard — they quietly produce ‘experiental marketing events’. Sounds cute and fuzzy until you find out they’re the crew which produced the opening ceremony at Athens 2004, the Hong Kong handover in ‘97, and a buncha other ceremonial stuff you’d never think was ‘outsourced’. Suffice to say, Ms. Jacobs’ Powerpoint presentation was slick; by the end, I was bracing myself for a pyrotechnically-enhanced finale.

Or maybe that’s a feature in the next version of MS Office…

So Azure and I saw Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy last week. ‘Twasn’t perfect, but at least I can review it in a fitting fashion, like so:

“Mostly Harmless.”*

…and glean some satisfaction in that. And, I suppose, there’s some reassurance in knowing that this film adaptation won’t be regarded as the definitive Hitchhiker’s. Because in my book, that honor is reserved for the Infocom game. What else?

I’m not sure if it’s a ‘skill’, a ‘knack’, or maybe an ‘art’ (by this point), but I can say that my procrastination abilities have become quite well-honed at B-school.

Case in point: we just wrapped up our MCP project. The MCP is a full-time effort (and then some); there’s no classes in April because of it. While every group scrambled to finish on time, my group’s project was especially back-loaded; lots of analysis couldn’t even get started until last week.

Goes to figure, then, that I’d decide last week was also the perfect time to ‘tag’ my entire iPhoto library with comments and keywords. Doing so is the digital equivalent of rummaging through a shoebox full of old photos and writing helpful notes on the back of each picture, explaining who’s who, etc. It’s exactly the sort of ridiculous undertaking that nobody ever bothers with — unless, of course, there’s other, more important work that needs doing.

But it brings me around to this: one thing you hear, working in the web industry, is that “Metadata Is Expensive”. In other words, “scribbling notes on old photos is time-consuming monkey-work”. And I can say, from recent experience, that that’s true, regardless of whether the photographs are digital or physical. (Metadata, incidentally, is defined as ‘data about data’; on the web, metadata helps classify, describe, or organize web pages.)

You hear this ‘metadata is expensive’ maxim especially in regards to search. Google, for example, gives a cold shoulder to metadata — AFAIK it reads only the regular, visible words on a web page, and ignores any behind-the-scenes attempts to categorize a website. There’s a bunch of valid reasons for this, namely:

    [A] Google patented software techniques which make their current setup pretty awesome     [B] Early web history showed people will cheat and write deceptive metadata to lure an audience.
    [C] The notion that ‘metadata is expensive’ to create. It just isn’t worth the time.

Obviously, there’s a bit of a vicious cycle with that final point: I can now imagine plenty of people crafting nice, careful metadata code for their websites, if they thought Google might actually use it.

The main reason I’m increasingly confident in the above statement comes from my own recent behavior vis-a-vis iPhoto: apart from the procrastination element, I did have some good reason to slather metadata across my entire iPhoto library. The soon-to-be-released Mac OS X Tiger will supposedly allow me to search against it. Given how I value those pictures greatly, it struck me as being worth the effort to organize my photos. However ‘expensive’ it was. (Just a few hours’ work, really.)

But Google isn’t going to start acknowledging metadata, I think, largely because of reason [A], above. They’re on top of the search-engine world right now, and won’t benefit from rocking the boat. As for [B], I think the web today is capable of solutions that weren’t on the radar in the ‘90’s. And regards [C], well, like I said: ‘expensive’ is relative. People will gladly bear the cost of metadata on things that they personally value, and that extends off the desktop onto the web. See Flickr.com.

So. I’m increasingly of the opinion that if Google doesn’t do metadata, somebody else will. In fact, it seems like one of the obvious avenues for second-tier players like Yahoo, MSN, and Jeeves to gain some competitive advantage in the search space.

And I want to see what that strategy looks like, if it happens. Especially if it provides me new opportunities to put off doing real work.

Seems England can’t completely shake off winter, much as I can’t free myself from this particularly nasty cold. It’s brutal, really. Cambridge was grey and drizzly all of last week; meanwhile, I was shuffling across the cobbled streets doubled-over and coughing, like some Dickensian pauper doomed with the consumption.

Well, not quite that bad.

In fairness, there have been intermittent bursts of Spring, about. (And I, in truth, am largely on the mend.) The oft-truant sun swung our way a few weeks ago — staying long enough to push up yellow daffodils and scatter cherry-blossoms all across Cambridge. Our garden hedgehog also returned right about then, and has since proceeded to enjoy his evening ruckus in our shrubs. And now there’s another woodland creature hanging about our place: an impressively plump Toad who crawls into our conservatory, since it’s warm there. After relocating him back to the garden, we’ll spot him from time to time; he sits under the fern, mostly.

That’s mostly it. School’s out — April is the month of our ‘Major Consulting Project’. Half the MBA class flew the coop to places like Singapore, Norway, and Venezuela to work for various multinationals. My team of four hasn’t left town, not much, but our full-time gig is with Apple, which suits me fine.

Now, if somebody would kindly pass the mentholated cough drops…

Unintended consequence of the Cambridge MBA: Bond movies aren’t the same, anymore.

Actually, 007 hasn’t mixed the martinis quite right for some time now. The whole franchise slipped past ‘tired’ to ‘exhausted’ with The World Is Not Enough. But this is beside the point.

No, what happened is this: I hung out with Britian’s previous ‘M’ (James Bond’s boss, remember?) for the better part of an hour, chatting about his old job and present-day geopolitics. The requisite dash of intrigue was provided early on, when our MBA class was told to show up for a guest lecture — but wasn’t told who’d be speaking, for ‘security reasons’.

The former ‘M’ has a name, of course: Sir Richard Dearlove. (And, in reality, apparently the title was ‘C’, not ‘M’.) Sir Richard spoke about leadership and organizational management — from the perspective of somebody who’s managed and led a very unique organization. That said, the core topics he discussed — training, development, managing culture — are pretty standard fare in B-schools; I suppose the trick lies in adjusting those ideas to fit your own corporation, or Secret Intelligence Service, what have you.

Anyhow, the regular guest-speaker rigamarole followed the lecture: mingling, chatting, and a few glasses of hey-not-bad-given-that-it’s-free wine on the 2nd floor of the Judge. And that’s where I wound up having a real conversation with Sir Richard and four or five others; much of it centered on the Middle East. To craft an SAT analogy out of the whole experience, I suppose it was like talking about meditation with the Dalai Lama — the key relationship being that the other guy is operating with some insight that’s very much unavailable to you. Or so you’d imagine.

Of course, if you read the Judge Institute’s press release, it’s also clear that this went down in early February. So I’m getting seriously behind on the blogging…

Oh, and speaking of managing organizational behavior: ever wonder why those useless buttons are on the sleeves of men’s suits? You know, the ones sewn by the cuff, without a buttonhole, even?

This actually cropped up in Strategy, of all classes. Turns out the sartorial invention is credited to Napoleon, who’d observed his lieutenants nastily wipe their snotty noses with their jacket sleeves. Disliking this vulgar habit, Napoleon immediately mandated that sharp copper buttons be sewn along the sleeves of his uniforms — serving as a visible (and tactile) reminder not to rub your jacket across your face.

Must’ve worked.

The week before last was exams — a one-two punch of Corporate Finance and Organizational Behavior. I was swaying on my feet the moment I stumbled out of Cambridge’s Small Exam Hall, but then Az and I went and saw ‘Million Dollar Baby’, which pretty much knocked me out for the whole weekend. (Okay, so the boxing metaphor is corny, but damn if it isn’t apt as hell.)

I’ve barely recovered. Lent term began promptly on Monday morning, which means I’m now fully back in business (school), and once again filling my cranium with executive-class knowledge.

Take, for example, this gem that cropped up during an Operations Management discussion: “The Price Inelasticity of Fruitcake” — i.e., as the price of fruitcake goes up, the demand for fruitcake doesn’t really drop. Interestingly, this atypical behavior occurs because fruitcakes aren’t bought for personal consumption — rather, they’re used solely as gift-items for unfortunate relatives.

Ergo, since the only way a buyer can measure the worth of a fruitcake is by looking at the price tag, bumping up the MSRP actually manages to increase the perceived value of said fruitcake. This, in turn, boosts demand for fruitcake-gift-object, and all in such a way as to offset any drop in demand due to some consumers being priced out of the fruitcake market, etc. etc.

Anyhow. I trust all this explains why I ain’t been blogging much, lately.

On a side note, I’m desperately seeking investors for an exciting, hush-hush arbitrage-ish opportunity. I can promise fantastic returns — all that’s needed is a small sum of cash, up-front, to cover costs of some flour and sugar, and roughly three tons of candied lemon peel…

About a month ago, I finished Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, though I didn’t really put the book to rest for three weeks after. It’s a massive tome; I wasn’t about to re-read it from the start, but the book demanded immediate re-visits, first a page here, then a passage there. And so it stayed atop my nightstand, getting better and better.

It’s a hard book to describe: the 19th-century atmosphere feels as cold as a lake in winter, and a gothic kind of melancholy hangs on every page. The tangled plot grows like a vine, not a flower; the story doesn’t discretely blossom before the reader, so much as it entwines itself around one’s ankles. And then, of course, there’s the magic – this is a book about magic – which feels inarguably historic, resolutely English, and dangerously fey.

Whatever it is, this book is not your run-of-the-mill fantasy.

There’s joy in it, too, but that’s mostly found in Clarke’s language, not the story itself. Her publisher has been aggressively hawking this book as ‘Harry Potter for Adults’, but where J.K. Rowling channels the warm and infectious spirit of Roald Dahl, Clarke delivers a piercing, Victorian wit and humor that’s better compared to Austen or Dickens. And while her book deals with the dire, fantastical and otherworldly, the needling jokes are usually sourced closer to home – like the following, where Stephen Black is unwillingly whisked to a chilling setting by a malevolent fairy king:

The light was watery, dim and imcomparably sad. Vast, grey, gloomy hills rose up all around them and in between the hills there was a wide expanse of black bog. Stephen had never seen a landscape so calculated to reduce the onlooker to utter despair in an instant.

“This is one of your kingdoms, I suppose, sir?” he said.

“My kingdoms?” exclaimed the gentleman in surprise. “Oh, no! This is Scotland!”

And so forth. Anyhow, the book gets a big thumbs-up, from me and Az both. (And we’re not just saying that because the author lives here in Cambridge, too.)

The days are short of late, and the sky unduly enamored with cold, metallic colors. Brushed aluminum, powdered magnesium, gunmetal steel - ah, ‘tis a chic palette, very Euro-styled and all, but frankly I prefer a bit more yellow and blue, up above.

Alas, the only alternative on offer is White: Cambridge’s first winter snow started coming down in clumps three nights ago. Az and I live adjacent to the train tracks, near a railroad yard which houses a grove of halogen floodlights, and the sight of the snow floating past those towering lamps was remarkable. The flakes were larger than silver dollars, and all sopping wet when they hit the ground - I think that by some fluke it had part-ways melted, then weirdly re-amalgamated in the atmosphere. Watching the snow chunks swirling around the orange lights, you’d swear they sky was storming with locusts, or something equally sizeable and threatening.

(For all I know, maybe that’s just what snow looks like, here in England; the only true winters I’ve ever known were high up in California’s Eastern Sierra, where the snow gets delivered in an exceptionally dry, light and micro-sized format. It certainly doesn’t thud onto the ground like this local stuff.)

Anyhow, because of the season, I’m finding that afternoon classes are becoming a touch difficult; it’s heartbreaking to stare out the oversized-porthole windows of the Judge and see evening fall somewhere near 4pm. And since we’re now in the midst of our ECP project (the ECP is a part-time consulting gig with a local tech company, clients vary according to your study group; my own group is working in the industrial inkjet market) there’s often group work or travel after the last class. So like I said, the days are terribly short, but then, they can run awfully long, too. Wicked chronological cocktail, that.

(Incidentally: Does complaining about the snow show that I’m a spoiled, stubborn Californian? Or, rather, does my introductory grumble about the weather imply that I’ve actually embraced a bad British habit? Tough call…)

And speaking of the cold, a more serious cold: I cycle past the Scott Polar Research Institute every day, since it’s around the corner from the Judge. The museum there is small but good; I visited with my parents, and the laughably crude equipment on display makes you realize just how outrageously tough and hardened explorers like Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott must have been. It’s worth a visit.

What’s really chilling, though, are the final handwritten letters from Scott and his company, penned after they’d realized their imminent doom on the ice. I spent some time staring at them, under the glass. There’s an unflinching stoicism there that I found so impressive, so moving, and at the same time, unfathomable and almost alien. After all, I’ve just spent a semester hearing the word ‘risk’ being cautiously applied in the context of Excel spreadsheets, and then to come across a quote like “…we have missed getting through by a narrow margin which was justifiably within the risk of a such a journey”; words plainly written by a man freezing to death… well, it provides perspective. Which is a good thing to have.

I found a note scribbled in the margins of my spiral-bound notebook, “lifetime pizza customer value 10K”. Now, whether I was skeptical, impressed, or just a tad peckish when scratching those words, I no longer remember. But I did just bother to look up the pizza bit on the ‘Net.

Turns out the lifetime revenue stream generated by a loyal pizza customer is actually $8,000. Give or take a slice.

Anyhow, my point is that it’s these things neat, small, and clever which are most easily forgot, if not written down. Thusly follows a quick list of not-blogged events from the last month at B-school, which I’d always intended to jot down, somewhere:

Kings of Convenience + Call & Response, at the Cambridge Corn Exchange. Ooh, what a show – a girl-fronted S.F. Bay Area rock band opening for a Norwegian duo whose crooning gets compared, constantly and aptly, to Mssrs. Simon and Garfunkel; the entire shindig rocking a converted corn warehouse/market facility left over from some bygone era here in England. I did the college-student thing, and bought a concert T-shirt, even.

Hedgehog, in natural habitat. Right, so there’s a hedgehog living in our garden. Frustratingly, I’ve only glimpsed the creature once so far, when I was up late in the conservatory, studying Finance.

The Master’s Lodge. The lushest accommodations in Cambridge are the Masters’ Lodges of various colleges. And since the Master at Magdalene also happens to be director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, his pad hangs plenty of name-brand artwork, to boot. A few times each year, he kindly opens his home to all the grad students; on this particular occasion, we got treated to wine from the cellars along with some medieval motets from the Magdalene choir. ‘Twas all an eminently civilized affair, and, yah, I’m grinning as I say that.

Clare Formal Hall. One of the friendlier traditions at the Cambridge colleges are the formal hall exchanges – play your cards right and you can wine and dine in the great hall of every college. Azure and I hopped over to Clare for a bite on a Friday night (no gown required), and couldn’t help but be amused at being seated opposite a looming portrait of Gen. Cornwallis, a.k.a. the old arch-nemesis of George Washington & Co. Cornwallis looked just like he did in my elementary-school history books, red coat and all. What I wondered about, most of the meal, was what went through Cornwallis’ mind, sitting for that portrait: Did he fathom, then, how many future generations might dine beneath, and still recognize, his picture?

Evensong. Still on the college kick, I attended Evensong at Magdalene’s diminutive chapel the other Sunday. Not as glorious as King’s College, maybe, but what’s remarkable is how little space there is in the church – the choir numbers roughly 15 students, and I’d wager the additional seating hardly holds twice that. So it’s an intimate service, and personal, and really quite lovely.

And now it’s November, already.

The first real lesson from business school isn’t about supply and demand or Net Present Value. Forget Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, even, because it’s with French existentialist philosophy that B-school truly begins. Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion that “Hell is other people” is the inescapable starting point of the curriculum, here.

Other MBAs will recognize, I suspect, that I’m talking of ‘Group Work’, a method of learning and assessment rather unique to B-school. Sure, everybody works in groups, in almost any discipline, but business school takes the practice to a whole new level.

Do I dislike my group? Nope. Dislike my classmates? Uhh, negative. (In fact, I just wrote a fawning little piece about them for Cambridge’s student web diaries, and was being remarkably honest throughout.) But the tortuous fact is that all these initial projects assigned to our five-person ‘study group’ can really be done faster and easier on one’s own. There’s that adage about how one farmer can build a barn in a year, two working together in six months, three in four, and so on - but that heartwarming model doesn’t apply to five students poking and grabbing at a laptop crunching Excel spreadsheets. The law of diminishing returns in action? Recipe for disaster is more like it.

The school admins wickedly love this stuff. They’ll readily confess that they engineer study groups to be as fractured and as contentious as possible - and with 104 students from 33 countries, the Judge Institute operates with a massive advantage over its peers in its ability to assemble volatile mixtures of geopolitical / social / cultural / professional backgrounds. I suppose that, for them, the entire exercise is a thrill not unlike high-school chemistry - mixing and shaking all sorts of stuff, hoping it will go boom.

‘Course there’s no swapping or shuffling of teams allowed - the mantra is always ‘Work with it’. And so you do.

Mostly.

My group has actually been quite the breeze to work with. We’re a surprisingly good crew. There’s rumors, though, talk-in-the-hallway about other groups less fortunate. Some have gone begging and appealing right up to the Director, searching for a mediator. As for myself, I’ve watched other groups out of the corner of my eye, especially during high-pressure, time-constrained assignments, and spotted, here and there, dynamics like Tom and Jerry in a tussle - just a twirling, indecipherable blur of conflict, radiating cartoon stars, smoking squigglies, and technicolor exclamation points. (Almost.)

I’d congratulate myself on avoiding this, but I’m just lucky, so far. Conflict is unavoidable when working under pressure. But I suppose the whole ‘learning to work together’ bit will be equally inevitable, for all of us. Meanwhile, be glad there are no pots, pans, rolling pins or gigantic wooden mallets hanging on the walls of our study area.

That would be a bad scene.

A year and a half ago, I wrote a Webmonkey article asking where metadata might be headed next. What hidden information should we add to web pages to make them more searchable? For example, G.P.S. coordinates (longitude & latitude) would be an obvious boon for smartphone / mobile surfers - imagine standing on any street corner, and searching for all restaurants within walking distance.

The question remains unresolved, but it’s increasingly visible. Notable in the last few weeks were Jeff Bezos’ talk at the Web 2.0 conference, along with this ‘Metadata for the Masses’ essay over at Adaptive Path. And, as anybody with a few thousand digi-cam snapshots knows, the metadata issue applies just as well to individual photos as it does to web pages.

I like the small ideas, though, always have. That’s why I was a fan of super-simple GeoURL; ‘twas a great trend, at least until the site went kaput. Finally, though, I’ve found a replacement: A2B.cc - another location-based search engine which parses a variety of geographical markup, including old GeoURL tags.

On an entirely different note, we just learned our new row house came with a one-way cat door. Kitty-cats can come in, but can’t leave. And that explains why, yesterday, upon arriving home after a long afternoon stroll through Trinity and St. John’s, a heretofore unknown black-and-white tabby was lounging on our sofa. Meow!

Friday marked my first formal hall at Magdalene. It’s a tricky event to describe without dipping into Harry Potter comparisons - I mean, where else do you find long rows of gown-bedecked students, dining by candlelight? Sure, those silver candelabras at Magdalene don’t levitate in mid-air, but there are still enough of them to serve as the only light source in that stretching hall.

I realize, of course, that Harry Potter is a cheap cliché for describing Cambridge. It’s like bringing up Blade Runner when talking about Tokyo - the simile is spot-on, but all too easy, more atmosphere than reality. Nevertheless, I’ve found Harry Potter remains the finest template for describing how the whole University - College relationship functions. For graduates, at least.

For instance: I got strange looks when I first told friends I was studying at the University of Cambridge, and then explained I’d be at Magdalene College. (And the Judge Institute for Management, as well.) How could I attend three schools at once? Now I tell folks it’s like attending Hogwarts School for Magic, but having the Sorting Hat stick you in Gryffindor House on your first day. (Or Slytherin, as some have slandered.) Harry Potter’s school has just four Houses; Cambridge has 30-odd colleges. But you get the gist of how it works.

I never actually requested Magdalene. It’s old (576 years), small (a few hundred students), and home to the likes of C.S. Lewis and proto-blogger Pepys. But I knew its reputation from tour books — the college is still notorious for being the last to admit women, in the 80’s. (That would be the 1980s, not the 1880s.) Sounded suspiciously crusty, a Porterhouse Blue kind of place.

It’s not anymore, not far as I can see. Magdalene these days is like anywhere else in Cambridge - which makes sense, considering that most grads are placed there by chance, like me. If anything, Magdalene’s old stubbornness in clinging to its other customs, like the anachronistic formal hall, is considered charming and special, now.

So what about dinner, you ask? Well, it’s supposed to take a while to get to it, you see. To begin with, there’s the dressing up - black tux or suit and tie, plus a gown on top of that. Post-arrival, sherry might be served (in another hall, mind, not the main one), and then, once you’ve finally meandered into the dining area, there’s a grumbling period of waiting until the High Table (Fellows, professors, etc.) finds their seats. The buildup continues with a large gong being rung (swear, I’m not making this up) to signal the start of the Grace being recited… all in Latin, of course.

And then (only then) you get dinner. First course, white wine, Main course, red wine, Dessert, Savoury trifle, right on to petit fours and port or coffee. Last of all, another Latin benediction. Just like home, non?

Yeah. Having both dined and worked in the U.C. Berkeley cafeterias, I gots to say dinner here is a serious step up. (I’d say the same about the schoolwork, too, and would catalog all that in detail, but that’s not as fun to write about…)

Punting is tougher than it looks. It’s certainly harder than the guides ferrying tourists up and down The Backs make it seem.

Arrive in Cambridge on a warm, sunny weekend (happens every few years, I hear) and you’ll see punting’s gnarlier side: the ‘self-hire’ crowd. Once these all-too-literal boatloads of amateurs take to the water, the whole British notion of a ‘jolly riverboat jaunt’ is replaced by a tourist blood-sport that’s more akin to log-rolling or demolition derby. It’s best to watch from the shores of The Backs, I think - you might wince occasionally, but between the crashing, splashing, and multi-lingual shouting, you’ll at least remain dry.

My own punting skills are no better, likely worse. But last weekend, I managed to elude the rent-a-boat crowd, at least, by punting away from Cambridge, towards Grantchester. (Actually, I rode down, then punted the way back.) It’s a 90-minute push either way - plenty long enough to leave me cold, soaked, and pretty well tired. I lost the pole twice (the river bottom is like clay, in parts), and then got rained upon, to boot. Happy I went, of course, but I’m done punting ‘til summer returns.

I completed another journey this week, and one which took me far longer - sixteen years, if I count correctly: I finished Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, the very week the last installment was published.

Can’t complain about the time - after all, it’s taken King 30 years to write those books, and he’s said this final volume heralds the end of his massive writing career. I can believe that - almost every book he’s written ties, somehow, into the nexus of The Dark Tower, and now that it’s done… where can he go?

So how good was it, at the end? Tough to say - his yarn was obviously good enough for me to read one after the other, and year after year; I’d also agree with the author’s own conclusion that the tale was ‘not entirely successful’. The big concern, of course, was the ending, including the author’s sudden, interjectory warning not to read it. (I’ve read a lot of books, and never have I seen an author pop into the narrative and lecture me against turning the page.)

King was right, of course. I should’ve closed the book. The journey is the reward, etc. - and any ending would have to be more bitter than sweet. This ending, though - man, after thousands of pages, a decade and a half… it just left me crushed. King says endings are heartless, and so this was. Almost.

No spoilers, here. All I can say is that choice facing the reader and Roland were one and the same - dare you enter the Tower, to finally see and know what lies inside? Or would you sit on the doorstep, deep in that field of roses, knowing there that the quest is good and true, and already complete?

I’m entering B-school with one eye open.

See, Mod gave me a Daruma on our last visit to Oakland. It’s a Japanese thing, Daruma, a paper-mache figurine of the monk Bodhidharma. He’s a round, roly-poly guy, the backstory being that Bodhidharma’s arms and legs fell off after he meditated for seven years straight.

Daruma dolls have no eyes - it’s up to you to paint them in, yourself. One eye gets painted when you start working towards a goal, and the other eye can only be painted if and when you complete that goal. Unsurprisingly, it’s mostly a New Year’s thing, though I’ve heard Japanese politicians make a big show of drawing Daruma eyes during political campaigns.

School’s started. Which means our once-blind Daruma now sits winking by the telly, and I vaguely suspect he’s watching more BBC than he should.

(And a year later…)

We just rented ‘Shaun of the Dead’, which proudly bills itself as ‘a romantic comedy, with zombies’. Unlike most movies, it actually delivers on that promise. Az laughed, I found it romantic, and yes, the walking undead get their screen time.

The kid at Blockbuster tried warning us off it, after hearing my American accent. “This is quite good,” he said, then hesitantly added “but very English”. Fair enough. But so then are Wallace and Gromit, Flying Circuses, and The Office - and they export just fine. (In truth, if ‘Warning: Very English!’ labels existed, I’d slap ‘em on Walker’s “Roast-Lamb-and-Mint-Jelly flavour” potato chips, first thing. But I digress…)

Actually, there is one joke in ‘Shaun of The Dead’ that hit me as tragically, tearfully hilarious - largely because it is doomed to go unnoticed by most Americans. It happens like this:

Shaun and Ed, urgently needing weapons for zombie-head-removal, stumble across Shaun’s old record collection, at which point they frantically start tossing discs (Frisbee-style) at the neck of a nearby zombie. However, (and here’s the British comedy for ya) they can’t help but bicker and argue over which LP’s are too precious to be thrown at the zombie onslaught.

Ed [holding up a record]: Stone Roses? Shaun: Noooo! Ed: But it’s ‘Second Coming’. Shaun [pauses]: I liked it!

Thing is, the Stone Roses hardly made a dent in American pop culture, and remain relatively unknown in the U.S. despite having been massive chart-toppers in the UK. The band released only two albums in their ten years, the first being hailed as the album of the decade, and the second (coming) widely trashed as… well, I liked it.

Sure, you’ll still find a few hopeless Roses fans (is there any other kind?) Stateside, and I proudly count myself amongst their number.

For Roses fans like me, it’s been a good week, and not just because they’ve written in-jokes for us into ‘Shaun of the Dead’. On September 13th, former Stone Roses lead singer Ian Brown released his fourth solo album, ‘Solarized’. I was personally excited because it was the first time I could buy one of his albums without an ‘Import’ sticker and 30-dollar price tag on the cover.

And how is it? Not half-bad, in fact.

A few tracks shine: the surprisingly sweet ‘Time is My Everything’ stands out as my initial favorite. (Respectably, ‘Time’ achieves the highly-improbable feat of substituting John Squire’s legendary guitar licks with latin horns, of all things.) ‘Longsight M13’ and ‘Keep What Ya Got’ (w/ Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher) also display the craftsmanship you’d expect for radio singles. Whether this ‘approachable’ sound was a production decision, or the result of Ian Brown recording this album sober (so he claims), I can’t say. But it’s better than the last one.

There’s still a fair shake of the less-listenable, self-indulgent stuff. (Not exactly uncommon with lead singers who’ve ‘gone solo’, now is it?) But c’mon — it’s hard not to spot the warning signs for that, right on the cover - the album artwork/branding consists primarily of Ian’s name written in various fonts, and the highlight of the liner notes is a juvenile photo-collage of you-know-who’s simian face, striking various poses. Anybody who buys this album should expect as much.

At the moment, though, it’s the only CD we own. (We hauled our MP3 and AAC collection with us, but left the good speakers behind.) So, for better or worse, Solarized is getting heavy rotation hereabouts.

I steeled myself for my upcoming capitalist indoctrination (B-school starts next week) by watching ‘Battleship Potemkin’ on Sunday. The movie, in true socialist form, was free for the masses - it played in a drizzly Trafalgar Square, and featured a thumpin’ new soundtrack composed and performed live by the Pet Shop Boys.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t so much a big spectacle, as a good show. I’d expected a double-dose of high camp; that the synthetic techno bombast of Mssrs. Tenant and Lowe would serve only to make Potemkin seem anachronistic and crude by comparison, probably send the whole thing up as a terribly naïve work — technologically, artistically, politically, historically, whatever.

Instead, it was engaging. The music was surprisingly complementary, at times almost natural, and if anything, made the film seem more contemporary, not less. Given, I actually like the music of the Pet Shop Boys (hence my trek from Cambridge to London), so my opinion is undoubtedly suspect to some, but I’d call it a success, and an artistic one at that.

No, it wasn’t perfect: some passages veered too far to the club sound (IMO, the words “Da!” and “Nyet” do not a natural bass line make), some slower strains went on just a bit (like Phillip Glass pumped full of Red Bull). But pacing, I suppose, is something the revisionist soundtrack composer can’t completely control, and one of the more obvious aspects where early cinema shows its age.

Standing in the rain surrounded by umbrellas wasn’t the best screening venue, but it was memorable. The best seats in the house, alas, were on a red double-decker bus snarled in Trafalgar’s traffic - we watched passengers wind their way to the top deck, sitting high and dry, until a traffic cop finally cleared ‘em out.

Just north of the Cam, past Magdalene College, is Kettle’s Yard. From four 17th and 18th century cottages, Jim and Helen Ede built foundations for a single house, and a singular home.

It’s an art museum, now - though I suspect Mr. Ede (himself the curator of the Tate in London, once) would agree that the scale and setting make it something altogether different. Above all, Kettle’s Yard remains simply a home: you need to tug on the doorbell to enter, and once inside, you can grab a seat anywhere, and pull a book from the shelves. And that’s how it went for us, yesterday afternoon.

Of course, art is the big draw: when you’re a networked fellow like Mr. Ede, I suppose it was easy to gather up pieces from ‘artist friends’ like Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzeska, even Miro and Brancusi. However, the personal authenticity of the collection is what impresses the most — knowing that behind every piece was afternoon tea or a handshake, the ties of friendship and patronage.

You can feel how the house was all slowly assembled, truly built — not simply bought at Sotheby’s. In that sense, Kettle’s Yard reminds me of Jim Thompson’s house in Bangkok: like the organic shell of an extraordinary life. That, and then there’s the fun of traipsing through the tiny bedrooms, hallways, and winding staircases, so unlike the squared halls of most museums.

Best of all? At Kettle’s Yard, it’s the arrangement and selection of every piece which matters, not cash value; some of the most important features are pebbles, plates, and lemons (just ask), each item placed properly, and just so.

Oh — and it’s free. Next time it really rains, I’m heading back.

I bought my gown last week. I couldn’t help but grin, trying it on: the long robes are probably one of the more peculiar and quintessential images associated with Oxbridge colleges.

Actually, the first time I glimpsed a formal Cambridge robe was in Berzerkley, of all places; one of my undergrad professors was a Cambridge (and Oxford) don, and at graduation he’d ambled onto the stage wearing colorful garments which looked like a cross between a rodeo clown’s outfit and the Vatican Guard uniform. Amidst all our cookie-cutter rental-quality black robes, and the tattered business-class upgrades worn by most Berkeley profs, his outfit was… brilliant.

Americans generally associate gowns only with graduation; here, it was a more important part of your daily outfit, once upon a time. I needed to purchase mine before school starts (T-minus 2 weeks, ack) because it’s still mandated for nightly dinner at my college.

Thankfully, I won’t need to strut about town always looking like Zorro, or a wayward Renaissance Faire vendor - graduate-level gowns are simple, uniform black affairs - and anyhow, I gather it’s a thing to keep stashed in a locker or backpack right until you walk into Formal Hall. Perfect compromise, in my book.

All it takes is a little Murphy’s law: the day after local papers led with “WETTEST SUMMER IN 50 YEARS”, this place starts feeling like California. In a sunshine-y sense, that is.

We took a most civilized stroll out of town yesterday, and walked alongside the river Cam towards Grantchester. The footpath dips and rises through hyper-pastoral meadows, and it offers exactly the sort of scenery you’d hope for: grazing livestock, starry-eyed punters, and rolling farmland in the distance. It’s quiet, verdant, and all feels (relatively) isolated, especially for a route that starts just twenty minutes’ walk from the city center.

An hour later, we stumbled across Grantchester, and its tea-room of some repute: The Orchard. As the name implies, the outdoor grounds are sprinkled with apple and pear trees; Az and I entered from an adjacent meadow by first squeezing past some cows and then climbing a cattle-fence. I’d hoped to congratulate myself on my little discovery, but turns out this is a place Cambridge students have flocked to for 100 years; The Orchard even offers a glossy brochure listing its famous tea-takers, beginning with Virginia Woolf and ending with John Cleese.

Closer to my own heart, they claim Alan Turing ‘first conceived’ the idea of Artificial Intelligence whilst strolling from Cambridge to The Orchard. I don’t entirely buy it: I’m no genius, but do I spend an inordinate amount of time daydreaming about computers, sci-fi, and othersuch nerdworthy nonsense, and I can say that bits, bytes, and computer cognizance were the last thing on my mind during that pleasant walk. To me, it’s like arguing that Thoreau penned Walden whilst riding the London Underground. Doesn’t jibe, somehow — but, then again, I’m no genius.

The local weather report is lately prefaced by so many apologies, and so thoroughly riddled with qualifiers, that it’s tough to tell just what the day’s weather is actually supposed to be.

“Not nearly as nice as it ought to be,” is how the weatherman sheepishly started his routine Sunday. By the end, he was preaching stridently about how things could really be “much, much worse”. The end result, I found, was one of those days where it’s too brisk for a T-shirt, but you’d sweat when wearing a jacket.

I suppose this can’t all be the meteorologist’s fault; things are uneven, recently. It’s like George Lucas was allowed to direct England’s climate — not original-Star-Wars-George-Lucas, but lame new-trilogy-George-Lucas — so that we see only occasional admirable moments, an hour of warm sunshine glimmering on the Cam, maybe, but it’s mostly grey dross and unremarkable rain showers.

Hey! You know the one restaurant in town that never seems to make it? The name changes, the menu’s shuffled somewhat, and day-glo vinyl banners proclaim Grand Reopenings, Under New Management, and so forth… just for a few months, until everything goes dark, again?

Yep, and so it goes with this oft-mothballed blog. Still the same management, alas, but other items are moving around — us, namely — as we’re translocating to England.

It’s a year move, at least, and we’re allowed just four suitcases. All are empty, at the moment, save for a single frying pan that’s nestled in one. (Experience has taught us that most furnishings can be cheaply IKEA’d across Europe; obtaining well-seasoned, hard-anodized kitchenware is another story.)

Our saucepan might be a nice addition, too, but unlikely. I’m considering wearing one, Johnny-Appleseed-style, right onto the plane. (“What ma’am? Oh, it’s my Calphalon Safety Helmet. They say Chairman Kaga wears one made of gold, you know.”) But then, what if the overhead luggage spot fills? It’s hard enough to sleep in Coach Class, as is… could be uncomfortable.

…quick, then, before they hit the lights, a run-down on Mighty Atom Syndication.

this blog now seems to be officially shuttered for the summer. ‘cause it’s sunny out.

elsewhere, though, there’s this: Metadata, Mark II, an overview of some nifty metadata technologies.

and so it’s a 5am cab ride to Fiumicino, her eyes are closed and dreaming to the taxi dispatcher’s lullaby, calling over and over for cinque cinque and quaranta sei, with promises of prenotazione and passegieri, until you’re suddenly both awake and there already, hurriedly hauling this thrown-together luggage set, a total of just 3 bags, but in sum nearly a year, and almost a home.

the heat, as singer/songwriter Glenn Frey once poignantly observed, is on. day after day now of inhospitably high temperatures, 30s C and 90’s F, but it’s the whallop (that’s like, a big dollop?) of humidity, stickily slathered across the city, that’s making things unbearable.

our squat little pinguino still loyally conditions the air in our apartment, but in a tactful and rather non-confrontational manner (penguin-ish, to a T), steering well clear of the gruff, freon-oozin’ and temperature-stompin’ attitude which is the more vulgar custom of california’s air-con culture. no, mr. pinguino does not seem to cool the air at all, in fact, but instead hums and gurgles in such a way that suggests an air conditioner might be present, and therefore, ostensibly cooling things.

so, neat, it’s like a psycho-somatic or sub-conscious air conditioner. or maybe it’s just busted.

we’re back from a week in Madrid, and still trying to sort out impressions from the place. though this much i can recommend right away: rent yourself a rowboat at Buen Retiro park, since euro-for-euro (or dollar-tentytwo-for-dollar-twentytwo), it’s one of the best buys on the continent.

oh, and i don’t know if it was because i had churros for breakfast, or what, but ‘Guernica’ underwhelmed, while Rothko’s ‘green on maroon’ just socked it to me. how’d that happen?

remember how Pippin wails, “But what ‘bout second breakfast?” at Aragorn in Lord of The Rings? that line’s our new in-joke about italian cappuccino.

okay, so it’s not particularly novel to note how things are smaller in Europe than The States — after all, these divergent cultures respectively regard Smart Cars and Hummer H2s as acceptable, non-comedic commuter vehicles. swap continents, though, and these cars would draw more laughs than a clown ambulance. (it’s probably been that way since classic Cinquecentos and Caddies first rolled onto the streets.)

so the car thing is obvious, but it’s the pervasiveness of this sizing switcheroo that’s harder to convey to folks back home: everything here, from shower stalls to soda cans, seems of skewed scale or diminished heft.

right then. and what was that about italian cappuccino?

Best. Coffee. Ever. and nobody who’s sampled it would ever argue the point.

and yet… coming from a country where the ‘Thirsty-Two Ouncer’ was long ago deprecated to a mere ‘medium’ versus a ‘large’ 64-oz. pail of carbonated beverage, a nation where the words ‘super’ and ‘size’ are not only combined, but also conjugated in an imperative verb form, and where a zillion Starbuckses huck percolated swill in ‘Venti‘-ounce units, i can’t help but have my heart sink, just a bit, every time i’m served my Morning Cup here.

‘cause it’s better coffee, sure, and it’s better milk, no doubt, but it’s just so damn… dainty. hell, i’ve seen Java Jackets boasting double the diameter of the cappuccino china here.

but you can’t order two. it’s bad manners, against the rules, something only silly stranieri would do. (as apparently is ordering cappuccino after 11 or so in the morning.)

hence the little Tolkien joke. our solution, you see, is the hobbit-inspired ‘Second Breakfast’, cunning and conniving, and awfully elegant, too: simply put, we’re two-timing the local cappuccino bars.

we’ll have a cappuccio at the bar closest to home, happily trading the morning ‘buongiornos’ all around, quaffing our coffee, and then stealthily slip around the corner, where we repeat the routine, down to the last drop. topping off the tanks, so to speak.

so is this gluttonous? yeah, probably. but, then again, one doesn’t get to drink Italian coffee every day of their lives. or do they?