Sunday

After breakfast this morning we split up. Our days always start with breakfast. We have to get up for breakfast. It's a struggle every morning. It feels like we could sleep until noon otherwise.

Margo went off on her own downtown to walk around. Here are three of the pictures she took.





Me, I don't bother taking pictures like these, because the city is full of beautiful old buildings. You know the Peter Jackson remake of King Kong? When they recreated the New York of the 1930s? It was done with software. The landmark buildings were modeled, but the rest - the "fill" - was auto-generated. They put in certain parameters - some percent Art Deco, some percent Victorian, so many stories, and so forth - and had their software just make it up. That's what Edinburgh feels like, and I'm sure much of the UK. 90% Gothic, 3-5 stories. 10% modern, glass and steel, tastefully integrated. I've got more observations on architecture to write about later.

So while Margo was out doing her thing, Sarah and I went to the nearby commonwealth pool. Sarah put her face in the water a few times; her next step on the path to being a swimmer is to get her head in the water, but this is still a difficulty for her. But she was very friendly, going out of her way to say Hi to smaller kids when she could - I think she's eager to make friends.

We phoned Margo and met her downtown. After a refreshment stop we walked past the National Gallery to Princes Street.



That's a Scotland hat Sarah is wearing. I guess she wanted a baseball-style hat. It has the Scottish flag on the front (a white X over a blue field ... kinda boring when they could be using that red lion on the gold field instead, that we see lots of other places).

I tried to fulfill an errand (figuring out how to unlock my older Nokia phone from the USA so that I could use it with my newer chip) when Margo decided to get a newer phone. She wanted one with Bluetooth so that it could integrate with her PDA. So now she can have the same boring information in 3 places - these two plus her laptop.

Now I'm taking offense at this. After all, I am the engineer in the family. I'm the one who makes a living (well, will make a living) (well, will supplement a living) on the bleeding edge. A software developer must be constantly learning new technologies and tools just to stay relevant. It's a harsh world. Learn AJAX or you're a dinosaur. It's not all tea and crumpets, let me tell you. So anyway, here's my wife, who has the cool factor of a salami sandwich. No, a baloney sandwich, with mayonnaise, on white bread, on a plastic plate. And what does she end up with? A Motorola RAZR flip phone. Which is, for this month anyway, about the coolest phone on the planet. It's like your grandmother buying a Panoz. It's just unfair.

So that was our first outing, taking us through early afternoon. Then we walked down the Royal Mile to Our Dynamic Earth, an earth science museum. Along the way we spied this Porsche Carrera GT, which was ogled by every male passing within 50 meters. In fact, here's one now.



Now when testing our products at Chrome we engineers favored exotics, but I don't recognize this one. Is it unavailable in the States? Do tell, Chromies.

We also passed the Parliament building. This is just one building on sort of a campus of buildings. It's new because, until the mid-90s, the Scottish Parliament was actually in London.



I also had to take a picture of these bike racks because you only see the bike shape if you're looking head-on down a row of them. I thought it was clever.



And then on to Our Dynamic Earth.



We made it through the main exhibit before Sarah got tired. It started with a time-machine presentation of the planet's history, covering the Big Bang, early volcanic activity, early life, more complex life, and finally apes and humans. And not that it was funny, but I was inwardly amused that this scientific narration was delivered with the accent of Groundskeeper Willie.

Then the second part of the exhibit was the future: we were herded into four groups of seats in a planetarium-sized theater where we got to collectively decide the planet's future. Depending on where we sat, we made decisions in the areas of energy, water, pollution, and something else I don't remember. We were asked to decide on issues three times, voting one of two ways by pressing buttons on our chairs. So for energy, our first issue was whether to invest in alternative energy sources, or continue using cheap fossil fuels. Each decision affected the choices available on the next round. We made the first choice (majority rule; in the case of a tie, fastest choices won) and saw a mock news report decades in the future showing the results of our choice. And so on for two more issues: use nuclear power, or force conservation (we chose nuclear); and continue conserving, or allow cheap fossil fuels again (we voted fossil, and saw storm damage increase and shorelines rise).

Afterward, it was time for an early dinner. We found a pub uphill on the Royal Mile that was serving dinners (and could therefore accommodate wee ones). Margo had a Sunday roast and Sarah and I split a fish and chips. We also sampled the local hard cider in addition to another local ale. And then we bused back to our B and B, where I booted the laptop, started my bad writing of the day, and that about brings us up to date.