Portland, Oregon

I’m slowly finishing off the uploads of photos from the USA trip.

You can find a bunch of pictures of Portland here, which was the only place we really rested in Oregon.  Time was pressing, and we did a nine hour drive one day from Eureka, in the far north of California, to Portland, at the north of Oregon.  It was a long day and I certainly slept well that night, especially after a couple of drinks.

It was a shame not to have stopped more in Oregon and seen the beautiful mountains and forests, and the curious wee towns and villages with amazing and occasionally very kitsch wood carvings.  But needs must, and we sped on to Portland which – in the couple of daylight hours we spent there – we found to be a pleasant surprise.

The city had a gritty, post-industrial riverside, reminiscent perhaps of Newcastle, and a lovely city centre area.  It had the informal, grungy feel I was expecting Seattle to have (but didn’t).

Seattle and various other parts of Washington came next before the homeward journey; but I’m in Edinburgh tomorrow, then Perth and Skye the week after, so perhaps I’ll get the very last ones done over this weekend, I am not sure.

You’ll just have to wait on the edge of your seats to find out…

Uninteresting

I’ve been “tagged”, it seems. by Lynzy and Danny to name six uninteresting things about myself.

Now this is difficult.  When I’ve seen others do this, the facts have been at least moderately interesting, and  to think of facts about myself that are truly, mind-meltingly dull is quite a challenge.

After all, I am quite an interesting person, and I could much more easily name six highly fascinating facts about myself.  Like for instance the fact that my elbow joints are structured in a female rather than male way; or that I can sing “happy birthday” in Luxembourgish; or have shaken hands with Ibrahim Rugova; or used to hate garlic but now love it.

But six uninteresting facts?  A tall order.  Well, here goes:

1. I am right-handed.
2. I have two cultery and utensil drawers in my kitchen.
3. I know what HTML stands for.
4. Currently, I have a pen on my desk balanced on its end.
5. My phone number starts with a 0.
6. I’ve just become immensely bored thinking of a sixth one.

Consider yourself “tagged” if you wish.

Sorting stuff out

I’ve been continuing to get into the swing of my new Mac, and while there are still some frustrations, I am slowly getting to grips with more of what it can do.

iPhoto, for instance, is excellent.   I’ve uploaded some photos from the last few weeks, including some of The Big Jig, which you may remember me blogging about.  The Big Jig was a charity ceilidh by Glasgow band The Jiggers, whose frontman Greg, a friend of mine, asked me to take some photos for the band’s publicity purposes.

Now those who know/tolerate my photographs know that I am rubbish at doing anything with people or action.  Preferably, my subjects should be absolutely still while being snapped, and ideally should have been motionless since the last ice age.  So a ceilidh was a bit of a tall order, and as predicted around 90% of what I took was squint, blurry cack.  A handful, however, were not so bad.

Something else I’ve been sorting out has been the world of music.  My old PC of course died in the arms of the guys at the Apple store when they were transferring files on to my MacBook.  They managed to get most files transferred, including nearly all my photos, but sadly none of my music.

I managed to do some CPR on the PC last night – though before you think that makes me some sort of computer whizz, my equivalent of those big iron things that doctors use after shouting “clear!!” was actually just me pressing the “on” button repeatedly until it grumbled into life.  I managed to save all my music from “A” to “J” before it died again.  Who knows if I can resurrect it once more.

So for the time being, byebye Led Zeppelin, Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Ulrich Schnauss and others.  At least I’ve saved bands like Explosions in the Sky, plus everything I’ve previously bought on the iTunes store.

Of course it’s not really byebye to those bands from “K” onwards – I have pretty much all of them on CD, and can easily burn them all back on to the new Mac.  Though that tedious task will take the best part of a day or so – and I can’t see me having time for that until around Christmas.

Oh, and I still haven’t forgotten about the last batch of USA pictures.  Watch this space.

Funny

Satire continues to be truer than the news this week.  The Daily Mash’s take on the storm-bound runners sums up most of my views on pointless exercises like running.

Meanwhile, I laughed out loud at Newsbleat’s 20th October entry “Right Idea, Wrong Wall”.

Satire really makes the news worth paying attention to these days.

Whirlwind

As I said to a friend the other day, I’m beginning to forget what Inverness looks like at times, with a packed work itinerary of late, and weekends away in Glasgow and Cardiff over the past couple of weeks.

Tonight, I’m back late after Tuesday to Friday in Edinburgh and today in Dundee for work.  I’m shattered, but it’s not all bad because I’ve been catching up with a lot of friends on my travels.

And the coming week is relatively quiet, with only a couple of day trips, although I have two lots of couchsurfers which should be fun.

How are you?

Adjusting to Mac-dom

So, it’s around a week or so since I got my MacBook.  Here are some early thoughts.

It looks very, very pretty indeed.  And in so many ways it is better than my delapidated old Tiny PC: it’s faster, slicker, has a number of very useful wee features (such as the widgets), and the battery life and sound quality are both excellent.

However, it’s getting an awful lot of getting used to.  You can’t right-click with a Mac so have to just find other ways of doing things through an initially complicated plethora of short cuts.  There are so many things I am still struggling to do, or seem to be doing in a slower way than I did on a PC.

And downloading programs seems to be very strange.  Having downloaded Firefox, I have this strange icon on my desktop that seems to be related to a wee window I get when I open Firefox whereupon I need to click on it to get the browser to open.  If that makes sense.

And downloading MSN Messenger is simply beyond me – all I seem to be able to do is download an icon which simply gives me a duplicate of itself when I click on it.

Moreover, when I connected my camera for the first time earlier today, it didn’t just pop up with iPhoto and intuitively talk me through what I wanted to do.

Oh and another example – I’ve been trying to upload new software to my mobile phone which is misbehaving.  But there is only software to do this for a PC.  Not Apple’s problem, admittedly, but it seems strange there is not Mac software for a fairly common brand of phone.  Sadly, I can’t get fully jump into Apple smugdom with an iPhone as my phone is still on contract until June next year.

And annoyingly, because my laptop nearly died at the Apple store, I still have loads of data – including photos and all my music – I need to transfer slowly with a USB stick from the PC to the Mac.  It will be ages before I have the time to do that, and in the meantime you’ll have to be patient for the rest of my USA pictures.

Mac fans say the machines “just work”.  They don’t.  It’s not as simple as that.

They’re still better than PCs, though, and the more I play around with the machine, the more I get to like it.

And it really does look pretty.

US Presidential election

I’d like to put finger to keyboard on something that I’ve been thinking about lately – the forthcoming vote for President of the USA.

It’s a fascinating and important time for the USA and the wider world, and there was significant election fever in the states we visited last month.  Admittedly we visited mostly hardened Democrat country, but it was interesting to note that there were vast numbers of posters for Obama, but none (that we saw) for McCain.

Quite randomly, I picked up an intriguing book while in the USA called What We Do Now.  It’s a collection of essays by left-wing and Democrat thinkers and activists across the USA published just a few weeks after Bush won his second term in 2004.  The book suggests ways in which those who were aghast at Bush’s victory can recover, reorganise and come back stronger.

They were interesting essays, and while the Democrats appear in the ascendency in the forthcoming vote for President, it seems that little of their angry idealism has been realised.  I wonder, for instance, whether Obama is really all that much of a saviour for the American left.

While driving through Seattle, for instance, we caught a bit of the first presidential debate on the radio and I was disappointed and alarmed by one thing Obama said.  He attacked McCain’s belief that Iran was at the heart of the “War on Terror”, saying that in fact the front line was Afghanistan.

Wrong.  Both wrong.

If you look at the decades-old resentment Muslims (and many others) across the world have at US foreign policy, much of it lies in the Israel-Palestine conflict, not Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq or anywhere else.  Key within this anger is the perceived hypocrisy of a country which is keen to bestow (or force?) democracy and self-determination upon Muslim countries like Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan, but not on Palestine.

Obama simply doesn’t get this.

Indeed, he believes that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, seriously undermining the viability and integrity of any future Palestinian state.  Regardless of your views about the Israeli-Palestinian problem, it cannot be denied that it lies at the root of much of the Muslim world’s unrest, and is one of the major reasons why the USA is so hated in many parts of the world.  Whether that hate is justified or not, it is unarguable that it is a significant cause of the “War on Terror” and a continued source of threat to US security is.

To fail to recognise this, and to fail to take seriously the quest for a Palestinian state, Obama will in turn fail to remove one of the major obstacles to security in the USA, never mind the Middle East.

On account of the fact he’s not a Republican, I hope he wins.  But do I think he’s going to save the world?

Far from it.

Smug, but tired

I’m back in Inverness, after a long and fun weekend in Glasgow.

I had a good time catching up with lots of people, the weather was (mostly) good, and most importantly I am the proud owner of a brand new MacBook.

This evening’s tasks have therefore included acclimatising myself to my new baby.  It’s of course very different to a PC in how it does things, how intuitive the commands are and where things can be found.  It’s been a bit confusing and frustrating, to be honest, but on the whole it has been exciting to be away from my crumbling, sluggish PC laptop.

Further fiddling around with the Mac – plus a million and one other things I need to catch up on – will have to wait until later, however.  I have a busy week ahead, where I will mostly be in Aberdeen and Arbroath, and then next weekend I will be in Cardiff.

Time to catch up on sleep…

…oh, but before I go: a joke courtesy of David McCarthy’s sermon at St Silas on Sunday morning:

What’s the capital of Iceland?
- about two pounds fifty.

San Francisco

I’ve just uploaded a couple of photos from Eureka and the Valley of the Giants in northern California.

But before we reached those places, we had a couple of days in the outstanding city of San Francisco, and I’ve put up a veritable barrowload of pictures from there in the last day or two.

After the glitz of Los Angeles, San Francisco came as something of a contrast and a surprise – earthy, a little rugged, and gritty in a way that seemed quite New York-ish.

The downtown area boasted some grand early 20th century and more modern skyscrapers and office blocks, nestled together tightly to create an overwhelming “big city” feel that the lower-rise, more sprawling Los Angeles didn’t seem to manage.

That, and particularly the New York feel, strongly suited black and white shots, I felt, so you’ll find lots of those among my San Francisco photos.

Further out, there was some gorgeous Art Deco architecture, Chinatown, zig-zaggy Lombard Street, the beautiful harbour, and of course the famous Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.

I’d definitely go back.

Not right now, though…

Weekend in Weegieland

Next weekend, I am going down to Glasgow to catch up with lots of people.

On Friday night, I’ll be going to a ceilidh (the Big Jig) featuring top ceilidh band The Jiggers.  There’s a rather amusing advert for it here by the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppets.

I’ll also be visiting the Apple Store, hopefully to buy a Mac.  My PC laptop has been struggling with life lately, and I think it knows I’m thinking of getting rid of it because it’s really slumped in the last few days and has even refused to switch on at times.  Time to convert, for sure.

Glasgow promises to be immensely busy on Saturday – it’s the Scotland v Norway match, and so the Tartan Army will be out in full force.  I’m not going to the match but the crowds will be unmissable and the pubs packed.

I may even make an appearance at St Silas on the Sunday.

I’m not sure which of all that I am most excited about.

Probably buying the Mac, if I was totally honest…