For those unfamiliar with MSP, the vast majority of flights use the Lindbergh terminal, and I suspect many people pass through MSP with nary a clue that the Humphrey terminal exists. I think I’ve only flown through HHH once before, on a Sun Country flight to a conference several years ago, and I’d pretty much forgotten what it was like over here.

I knew I’d have a couple of hours to kill at the airport between the arrival of my shuttle from Morris and my departure, and I figured I’d grab some lunch and try to continue revising our GECCO talks. This, however, failed to take into account my departure from the Humphrey terminal instead of Lindbergh. The Lindbergh terminal is a nice airport, with lots of restaurants (some of which are pretty decent) and even a passable book store or two. HHH is a small terminal (10 gates) servicing a ragtag group of low cost and limited traffic airlines.

It’s like a ghost town, but with airplanes.

There was almost no one here when I arrived. Only one of the dozen or so AirTran desks was open, there were no customers in sight, and I was able to just walk right up. Security also only had one queue open, but there were only four or five of us going through at the time, so it was again “Step right up and off you go”. The waiting areas were almost completely empty when I got here, and now (probably 30-40 minutes away from boarding) have a smattering of folks.

All this is most definitely to the good, especially when compared to some of the chaotic and stressful check-ins and security checks we’ve had in some of our recent flights.

The downside is that there are pretty much zip in the way of services or staff. There are a whopping two coffee/sandwich shops in the whole terminal, one on either side of security, and one bar/restaurant. After that we’re down to a magazine rack and a few vending machines. And the coffee shop inside of security didn’t have anyone at the till when I first came through.

Arguably less good, and certainly weird. No one’s going to mistake it for Heathrow or O’Hare, I promise you.

The real bummer, of course, is that there’s no free wifi here (or at the Lindbergh terminal). $4.95 for an hour, or $7.95 for the day.

Wonderful. Almost as wonderful as the fine $3 sandwich that cost me $7 for when the coffee shop finally opened up.

I’m looking forward to not flying for quite a while (perhaps as much as a year!) after I return from this trip. It’s nice being other places, but getting there isn’t always loads of fun, and it tends to suck environmentally.

¹ GECCO = Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, one of the two or three big international “mega” conferences in evolutionary computation. To be honest GECCO is much bigger and more circus-like than would be my preference. I’m much happier at smaller gigs like EuroGP, but that’s during the school year, and at an awkward time, and a lot more expensive to get to, so I’ve attended a lot more GECCOs than EuroGPs :-(.

Hmmm… Applying vaunted American know-how to find new solutions to the problem of energy independence? What an odd, odd thought, especially when McCain supports a tiny, slow band-aid that … well … won’t really help at all.

We were in Fargo a few days ago buying a car. We sold our one and only car when we went abroad, and are currently on borrowed wheels. There was serious discussion of not even getting a car, or perhaps leasing a car for the winter months while going without a petrol powered vehicle in the summer when we can bike around town. In the end, though, we decided to go ahead and buy a shiny blue Honda Fit. (This is the second time we’ve bought the exact same car as my sister a year or two after she bought hers. We’re not very original, I’m afraid. That, and my sister rocks!)

The Honda dealer said that the demand for Civics, hybrids, and Fits has been really high, and they’ve had periods where they haven’t had any Civics to show people, including used ones! (And this is North Dakota, where I suspect trucks have long out-numbered compacts.) Given that most people won’t keep a car for all of the 7 years it will be before we see any of the off-shore oil from McCain’s proposal, Obama’s plan seems to be much more in touch with the mood of the populace.

What I’d really like is for the U.S. people (and government) to realize that there’s real value in basic scientific research, and understand that kind of research is going to have to be an important part of any solution to the current energy and climate problems.

While in Fargo we also bought Sub-Evil a new bike, and will probably buy a new bike for WeatherGirl in the next week or two. This, combined with the fact that mine is getting a substantial tune-up at the moment, means we’ll all be on two spiffy wheels as much as possible, at least when the weather allows.

photo credit: Leucippus

Cory Q of Monkey River Town suckered WeatherGirl and I into forming a fantasy team for the Tour de France. We’ve never done something like this before, and had to do it in a hurry, so I’m guessing that we will not be stellar performers :-). Still, it was a lot of fun sifting through the participants putting our team together, and will make it even more interesting to watch the stages. Now we’ll actually care who comes in 11th in a sprint!

Our team…

• Magnus Backstedt
• Fabian Cancellara
• Sandy Casar
• Sylvain Chavanel
• Juan Antonio Flecha
• Oscar Freire
• José Ivan Gutierrez
• Kim Kirchen
• Oscar Pereiro
• Yaroslav Popovych
• Riccardo Ricco
• Carlos Sastre
• Christian Vandevelde
• Jens Voigt
• Haimar Zubeldia

aller à bicyclette, originally uploaded by Summa for Strings.

The mighty Tour de France started yesterday. We’ve been recording it, but haven’t actually seen any of it yet (unpacking, etc.). Soon, though, there will be many hours of bike racing in our lives!

Thanks to “Summa for Strings” for this amazing photo!

I really like this photo because it’s so wonderfully misleading. Any guesses as to what it is? Hint: It’s right here on good old Terra Firma.

Click on the photo (or follow this link) to learn what it really is…

photo credit: hradcanska

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…

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.

Some of my most common Flickr tags (click on the cloud to see it bigger on Wordle’s site):

The contents of the front page of my blog as of 3 July 2008:

I like how the latter captures our time in Spain quite nicely, and I really like how Wordle can intermingle the ascenders and descenders. Wordle can grind pretty hard on your CPU, but there are lots of neat options to play with and some very fun results to be had. w00t!

Thanks to banned photography inc for the tip.

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.