I am … unhindered by talent

photo credit: hradcanska
As we were car-less in the UK last year, we would rent wheels at various times when we needed to move all three of us and lots of stuff over what passes for long distances on the small island. Our last rental, for our last week between Spain and our return back to the U.S., was from Enterprise. When we dropped the car off at the airport their desk was closed, so I just plopped the keys in their little return safe.

Today I got an e-mail with the receipt. As an attachment. In “.MDI” format. Whatever the hell that is.

I was pretty sure we were going to find out that this was a M$ format before I’d even bothered looking, as it’s almost always people that have been sucked irretrievably into the M$ vortex that blithely send out files in annoying proprietary formats without considering the possibility that not everyone has sunk loads o’ dosh and a major organ into M$ software. I was right. It turns out that it’s Microsoft Document Imaging format, which apparently scans physical documents and converts them into TIFFs. But instead of then using the open, nigh on universally supported TIFF, they wrap (I’m guessing) that in their own goofy MDI format so people like me can’t open the documents.

Charmed. I’m sure.

Nothing I tried (and I tried quite a lot of things) would open this MDI file up, so I (nicely) wrote back and asked if he could re-send the file in an open format, like plain text or PDF. A model of restraint, I was. Really.

They promptly sent a second message with a new attachment in “.doc”. Good on the promptly. Less winning on the “.doc”, since that’s clearly not an open format. Happily, however, NeoOffice was able to open it up, sparing me a second round of e-mails with this nice person.

And what, after all this fun, did this remarkable M$ Word document contain?

A single, small image.

The image looks like a scan of a small bit of a spreadsheet. A small bit. No names (theirs or ours), dates, or any other standard “invoice” information. Just 10 lines of text, four of which are labels, four of which are actual entries (the rental amount, VAT, etc.), with the rest being sub-totals and totals.

In other words, a ton of machinery to obfuscate a quite small bit of information.

I just hate it when that happens…

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Several people have asked about “culture shock” upon returning home, and for me at least there really hasn’t been much (I’ll let WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil speak for themselves). One thing that has been really amazing, though, is the peace and quiet here.

The photo above is from a few years ago, but it’s representative of what it’s been like being back. The roads (and sky) are wide and quiet, and peddling my bike down a big empty street seems kind of otherworldly after a year in a much more crowded part of the world:

The other huge difference is the damn mosquitoes. Didn’t really miss them while we were gone, and wasn’t too thrilled to see them again (in vast quantities) upon our return.

Oh, and burritos are much better in Minnesota than in the UK (and much better in Texas than Minnesota). Really. Much better.

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We’re back in Morris, Minnesota, sleeping in our own beds for the first time in 10 months!

We arrived late Tuesday after a long, but generally uneventful trip. (Well, uneventful if we ignore a bit of a rush transferring in Chicago that contributed to WeatherGirl leaving her iPods on the plane there. But still, generally uneventful.) Jess Larson was super generous and drove us and our sixty zillions Tons O’ Crap (TM) back to Morris, and for this we are incredibly grateful.

We were thrilled to find that the house was in wonderful shape, and are very grateful to Rebecca and Joe (our renters) for taking such good care of our home while we were away.

All the major utilities have been restored, including Internet and DirecTV, so the family is unlikely to revolt :-). Sub-Evil has been catching up with his friends as much as he can, but many are out of town so it’s a process that will dribble on for a while. Now we plow into the unpacking of suitcases and boxes (both the ones we left behind 10 months ago and the ones we shipped last week) and the restoration of the flotsam of our lives. (We defrosted and cleaned the chest freezer since it was nearly empty, and today I shoveled all the mature compost out of the composter so we could start filling it up again.)

It was a great year abroad, and it’s nice to be home again.

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Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

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Today we went to the justly famous Mezquita de Córdoba, the mosque/cathedral complex here in Cordoba. The mosque is huge and largely intact, a vast forest of columns and red and white arches that really gives on the sense of being in the woods rather than being in a building. As a sense of the size of the thing, after the Christian reconquest they built a quite large cathedral in the middle of the mosque, and you don’t actually see it right away when entering the the mosque. Even Sub-Evil, who’s quite jaded for a 14 year old, decreed that it was one of the most beautiful spaces he’d been in.

I took hundreds of photos in our 2.5 hours there, most of which attempt (usually with limited success) to capture the vast space and repeating columns and arches. As it’s rather dark, however, motion blur and lack of depth of field are chronic problems, and it’s going to take a while to sift through and pick a few that appear to have worked.

Thus I leave you with a little detail shot instead. The mihrab (prayer niche) is a truly remarkable piece of work, with wonderfully rich tile work and calligraphic decoration. In almost any other building it would be a showstopper; the Mezquita, however, is so large that you could almost miss it amongst all the other visual stimuli.

At one point there was this neat patch of light on a bit of the mihrab, so I took it’s picture. (Several, actually, but I’ll only bore you with one.)

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Last night the three of us climbed up into the Albaycin, which is the site of the original Moorish town, and the historical location of the old Muslim neighborhood in Granada. There are wonderful “postcard” views of the Alhambra from there, but unfortunately it was overcast and the light was all “blah”. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy eventually got bored and headed back down the hill, but I stuck around hoping for the sun to creep below the clouds as it was setting. Happily I was rewarded with this wonderful view for the last 10-20 minutes of sunlight. Absolutely splendid.

The big square tower in the foreground and a bit to the left, along with many of the other buildings and towers in the left and center foreground, are part of the Nasrid (Muslim) palaces, and contain some spectacular rooms and spaces. The church spire in the back center is a Christian church built on the site after the Catholic reconquest. The large, square, decidedly non-Muslim building that dominates the right hand side is the palace of Charles V (the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who captured Granada, eliminating the last Muslim kingdom in Spain), and houses some excellent museums.

And that’s only a quarter to a third of the entire Alhambra complex!

Tomorrow we leave Granada for Cordoba, so more wonderful stuff to see and photograph. Unfortunately the internet at the next hotel looks to be stupidly expensive, so there’s likely to be radio silence for the next week…

Ciao!

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Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

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We had a wonderful week in Toledo, and last night made the journey by train to Granada. J.J. Merelo has kindly invited us to join him and his friends for tapas lunch today, so we’ll get the local skinny right at the start of our time here!

As always, click on the photos to jump to Flickr, where there’s a little more info about them. WeatherGirl is posting lots of useful info on where we’ve been and what we’ve seen, so tracking our combined family stream might be your best bet.

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You should definitely check out the combined family blogstream at ThomasMcPhee.com as both WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy are actually posting words and things that carry information :-). In the meantime I’ll annoy you with some more photos. Again, clicking on a photo will jump to Flickr, where there may be a little info on the image.

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I just had to take four on-line safety courses here at Essex in order to get money from our research grant. I’ll spare you the horrors, although I did twitter on about of some of them as I went as a sanity saving device, and will share a couple:

“Keeping your workstation and office tidy is crucial to short-term and long-term health and wellbeing.” I am doomed.

[The] Irony of spending much of an hour wading through a tedious online lesson on risks of spending too long at the computer is not lost on me.

As if the exams themselves weren’t annoying enough (and trust me, they were), the people that assembled them implicitly assumed that everyone in the world is in Microsoft’s pocket. I eventually became so frustrated that when I’d verified that I’d passed them all, I sent the following along to the folks that put all this together:

While I’m here, I should mention that there were several pieces of media that seemed to assume that one was on a Windows box. Quite a few images (clip art, I assume) didn’t load on either a Linux box or a Mac. Also the PowerPoint in the “Working at height” lesson assumed that you had PowerPoint or some compatible viewer, which isn’t always going to be true.

None of these problems were fatal for me. There didn’t appear to be important content in any of the images that I couldn’t view, and I was able to view the PowerPoint file in another program. Still they were confusing and frustrating (especially at first), and it would presumably be fairly easy (if somewhat tedious) to convert them all to a more standard and open format.

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