damn third world countries

So I went out to spend some money today. A very successful mission: I came home with a slightly lighter new bicycle than I expected to get for my budget, a printer, some speakers for my computer, and some money left. After the shock of buying textbooks yesterday ($400, and there will be one or two more next week!) this was a relief.

Anyway, I had cycled home, and I was quite hot, so I thought I'd stop at the last shops before home and by an ice cream. There were big signs in the window saying 'no power', and the cashier explained that they didn't want to open any freezers, in the hope that power would be back soon and they wouldn't have to throw any food away. I thought maybe this was just their block or something, but I get home and nothing's working. I have new toys and I can't play with them.

posted @ 6:02 PM -

magnetic poetry

I've been getting a strange sort of junk mail lately. It involves a paragraph of unrelated words, followed by an image (probably some sort of web bug, but I never download the images), followed by another nonsense paragraph. The nonsense is the sort that porn sites put in their HTML to make them appear spuriously in searches (which does work—I've found porn by searching for Arthur Scargill speech before, and I can assure you that thorough examination of the site found no trace of miners or trade unions), but it doesn't make sense in spam, because I would have thought it makes spam filters more likely to reject such messages.

Anyway, at times the nonsense actually conjures up interesting images. Today's started aristotelian boron bottom telescopes, which doesn't bear thinking about too much.

posted @ 10:17 PM -

Power struggles

I take it everybody who has internet access must know about last week's power outage in this part of the world. What you may not know is that it seems almost certain that it started in the Cleveland area, and that the problems are not entirely over yet. One of Ohio's nuclear plants has not yet re-started, and the whoe system is so stretched that there is no spare generating capacity to make up for it, so at peak usage times (mid-afternoon, due to air conditioning) the electric company is having to phone up major consumers and ask them to switch off all non-essential appliances to avoid having to institute rolling blackouts. So far it's worked—they haven't had to shut anything down since the original blackout—but it's pretty embarrassing.

Welcome to Cuyahoga County. We may be part of the richest, most technologically advanced country in the world, but we still have an unreliable power supply, a lake that isn't safe to swim in because the original blackout caused a raw sewage overflow, and a mosquito-borne illness that kills people.

posted @ 5:41 PM -

Arse-elbow differentiation

Well I've only been here a few days, but I've come to the conclusion that staff here are considerably more aware of the difference between their arses and their elbows than in a typical British university. So far I've been kept thoroughly busy (I had an 8:15 start today - I'm actually grateful for jetlag!) by orientation meetings and administrative tasks. While the orientations are a bit repetitive, I'd rather they err on that side than let newcomers feel lost, but much more importantly all the admin so far has been impressively well organised. I don't think I've had to wait more than 10 minutes for any particular desk, and once I had met with my supervisor and chosen classes it only took an hour or so to do a whole list of things that had been waiting on that step. My memory of Sussex registration involves enormous queues and being sent from one desk to another, only to then have to wait weeks for simple essentials like a library card....

posted @ 5:12 PM -

Things Americans do more readily than Brits

• Wait for the lights to tell them it's OK before crossing the road
• Say good morning to strangers
• Say good morning back en masse to speakers, like we used to do in primary school,
• Apologise for sneezing
• Applaud warmly after utterly dull introductory speeches, just because someone has stood up and said something
• Make conversation in the lift, as opposed to developing a temporary fascination with their shoes

Just some observations so far

posted @ 5:01 PM -

Mysteries of the Western Reserve

My street is about a mile long. It has fairly large detached houses, each with at least enough separation from the next to get a car through. Therefore it clearly can't have a huge number of houses. So why is my house number 4 digits?

posted @ 5:24 PM -

Lost in the Supermarket

Yesterday I believe I set personal records both for the longest time and most money ever spent in a supermarket. Partly this was because I've never before had to stock a kitchen from scratch, but it still wouldn't have taken that long if I were doing this in the UK.

It's actually something I was warned about—a former flatmate who had lived in Holland said that one of the more confusing things about living abroad was simply finding things in day-to-day shops—but until now I thought he was exaggerating. In New Zealand I never had this problem, but then I never stayed in one place for long enough to be bothered about making sure I had everything. If all you need is bread, jam, pasta and sauce, it would be pretty challenging to design a supermarket that could thwart such simple desires.

Actually trying to get everything I will need in one trip is quite a different matter. Our local Giant Eagle is fairly big (like a big UK supermarket as opposed to a mammoth Walmart), and impressively widely stocked (they even have a proper wine cellar, and most of the ingredients I was expecting to have to find a specialist Asian shop for, though apparently no fresh ginger, which seems a little odd). However, things just aren't in the same places, and brand names aren't the same, plus everything's labelled in pre-metric units that even Britain abandoned for most things long enough ago that they feel primitive (and I can't remember how many ounces are in a pound), and even the price labelling is confusing in places.

I'm sure it's not actually that supermarkets here are less well organised or labelled (except that grams and litres are clearly easier to use units than the arcane system in use here), but it will take some getting used to. I think in a way it's these mundane things that do most to remind me I'm not at home.

posted @ 5:21 PM -

Settling in

I'm in Cleveland, and so far everything is going pretty smoothly, except for an entirely pointless delay at—surprise, surprise—Immigration. In the general scheme of US Immigration causing me trouble every time I enter this country, this was a particularly absurd incident. Several people with student visas were kept waiting for several hours for the all clear to be given by some understaffed office somewhere in D.C. It's not that any of us had any problems, or that I was even asked any questions at all, just that it took 3 hours for the staff to get through on the phone to OK our visa numbers.

Apart from that, I'm in a nice house, with lots of space, and for the first time I actually have my own study. Contrary to the standard European stereotype of an American suburb, it's a short walk from the campus, a few restaurants, a big supermarket, a bar and some useful public transport.

I have a pretty busy week of introductory meetings and suchlike ahead of me, and then next week term starts in earnest. So far it's taking me a long time to find any given room on campus, but I'm sure that won't take too long to pass. It's years since I've really had a completely new start like this, and I think I have needed it.

posted @ 2:15 PM -