Musical Formulae

Of all the two years that I've had an interest in DDR, I don't ever recall playing it so badly that I lost all capability of movement in my right foot. That happened yesterday after I'd tried some of the J-pop tracks that were new to me (they were great, incidentally*) down at the Bearcade. The machine there allows four songs instead of three, which caught me out as I made the third one as stressful as I could allow due to habit. I staggered off and pulled up a chair to watch two girls outclass me in every way possible.

"She's our teacher", a nearby Asian commented to me, as if classes in DDR were part of the normal course catalogue at the University of California. He then got up himself and proceeded to do four nine-footers in a row with no ill effects whatsoever. I limped off ready to try something less strenuous, like Tetris or Scrabble or something.

Afterwards I ventured on to Telegraph to attempt to find a T-shirt for my brother's birthday last week, but T-Shirt Orgy seemed to have replaced their selection of clever or retro-styled T-shirts with an array of black ones with "profound statements" on them that were typical of the level of wit and insightfulness of, for instance, Father Jack.

I did get a couple of new albums while I was in town, though. I had been looking in the wrong section of Rasputin before - they have a separate Metal section that I didn't know about, complete with red separator cards with black dripping lettering on them. The over-the-top imagery is strangely parallel to what I mentioned in the article a couple of entries ago... which, come to think of it, I should have got around to submitting to The Sinner by now. Anyway, I found Kamelot's "The Black Halo" and Sonata Arctica's "Reckoning Night" for $30 in total, about half the price I would have paid in Britain.

My music-buying record in America isn't exactly stellar - during the previous three times I've visited I've picked up Kotipelto's ghastly attempt at a solo album, "Coldness", and Kamelot's first two albums when Mark Vanderbilt was still "singing" with them. I haven't had the chance to listen to the two releases that I bought closely yet, but I can already tell that they're far better than those disasters.

Usually it takes a while for an album to grow on me before favourites emerge. I thought that the same would happen with Coldness, but it seems that Kotipelto has serious problems with the basic formula of his songs. A typical format would go something like this:

D.I.Y. General Metal
1. Introduction
2. Long Verse
3. Bridge 1
4. Short Chorus 1
5. Short Verse
6. Bridge 2
7. Short Chorus 2
8. Solo
9. C Section
10. Long Chorus
11. Ending

There are variations, of course, but most non-epic songs (unless they're written by Heavenly) can be fitted in to that basic template. Kotipelto, however, seemed to be using something like this:

D.I.Y. Kotipelto
1. Boring Riff
2. Long Verse
3. Bridge 1
4. Disappointing Chorus
5. Short Verse
6. Bridge 2
7. Grating Chorus
8. Random Notes
9. Bridge 3
10. Repetitive Chorus
11. Repetitive Boring Riff
12. Stop Without Warning

Early Kamelot, however, used something entirely different. Their actual song structures are very varied, but three steps unify them all.

D.I.Y. Kamelot (First Attempt)
1. Begin Promisingly
2. Get Vanderbilt to Start Screaming
3. Give Up

Fortunately, they later refined this down to two steps, which are more evident on the latest album than ever (a continuation of the conversion of Faust to a metal opera)...

D.I.Y. Kamelot (Revised Edition)
1. Be Really Pretentious
2. Become Dream Theater

But as long as they do it well, I'm not complaining. I'll have to listen again to gather how successful they've been.

*Accuracy not guaranteed.

Life in the City

Everything is bigger in America apart from spoons and plugs.

Spoons seem to all be downgraded one size - breakfast is usually eaten with a tiny utensil that I would call a teaspoon, and tablespoons are just breakfast-spoon sized rather than the gigantic things that we use to serve out the recommended daily allowance of neeps and tatties that Scottish people eat. It was suggested to me that British people have bigger mouths to match their spoons, but looking at the competition here, it's highly doubtful.

Plugs are another thing - the sockets don't take up more than about two inches square, unlike the British kind which spread their pins over what seems like half the wall. It's embarrassing seeing my shaver hanging on to one of these sockets through two huge and unwieldy convertors. The size of plugs is certainly one thing that America has right. The advantages are even more apparent when you look at extension cords - with no surge protector, a four-way American splitter can be fitted neatly in to a pocket (you could get about four in if you've got big trousers), but the equivalent in Britain would be difficult to fit on to a reasonably sized snooker table.

I accompanied Whitney to the bus stop on her way to work today, because I was going in to town with the intention of buying some music. Despite going to two large and well-known music stores, it seems that European metal is even less appreciated here than it is on the other side of the Atlantic. In total I found one album from Stratovarius's early days before they tried to become classical, which I should probably have taken the opportunity to buy, but it felt like buying for the sake of it.

While searching for the stores, though, I found the Bearcade again by blindly walking in the wrong direction, so I spent a while there and was narrowly beaten at Tekken 5. The DDR Extreme machine seems to be a Japanese-specific one, because now that I look at it, it certainly has more songs than the American one I played in Dundee, and most of them have titles like [Katakana that I can't read] Extreme. I tried Speed Over Beethoven, a dance version of Beethoven songs by the same people as Hot "We Drink Ritalin" Limit, and failed miserably. I'm out of practice.

After coming out of there I looked around for the bus stop to be taken back. There wasn't one. Further, I noticed that all the parked cars were pointed in the same direction. I was on a one-way street and had no idea where the bus routes went. I decided that the solution was to walk back to Shattuck, another main road, and wait at a bus stop there. Blocks and blocks later, I finally got there and sat down at the bus stop, fishing in my pocket for the transfer card to get me back. It was then that I noticed it had expired ten minutes ago - it was only valid for one and a half hours, and I'm sure that they allowed two hours last year. Having no change and no inclination to get any, I decided just to walk all the way back.

It was about twenty minutes later that I remembered just how far the distance back to the house was, especially as the last half of it is uphill, and because of the heat from the sun, and the fact I had a leather jacket with me. I entertained myself by reading the various things scrawled on the pavement as I walked. "CHRIST", said one. "SAVIOR", said another a block further along. The third one, curiously, read "SECOND OMELETTE". It seems that the writer must have got distracted by hunger in the middle of his cryptic graffiti artistry.

I did eventually make it back thanks to remembering the route with last year along with a fair bit of luck and a reasonable sense of direction (as long as the direction is "forwards"). I think I'll print out a map now, because life needs a map, and if you can't get that, it's at least helpful to have one of your immediate area.

Metal Misconceptions

The style of metal that I listen to seems to be becoming more and more popular, particularly in the growing recognisability of bands such as Sonata Arctica, Nightwish and Dragonforce (which remains one of the only melodic metal bands outside continental Europe, unless you count Metallica who turned to the dark side, or Iron Maiden who just collectively went mad). However, despite its growing popularity as an alternative musical genre, there do remain a lot of prejudices against the genre as a whole. I'm prepared to solely blame Fred Durst for the entire situation as it is now, but the rest of this entry analyses it in a little more depth.

1. Metal is violent.

This was demonstrated in an iPod add-on advert that I saw recently, where the player was set to "Metal" and little skulls and crossbones were flying out of it. That's not metal - that, if anything, must be pirate radio.

I think that the violent image of metal today is due to the nu-metal revolution fuelled by MTV (My hatred of that channel is flimsily based on only one reason - everything they stand for). The commercialised, "angry" image isn't one that is shared by the genre as a whole.

Another genre that I believe has suffered from this anxiety to appeal to disturbed youth is rap, which comes across to me as far more violent than I'm sure it is in reality. As Dylan Moran said in that sketch show I saw the other week (it was possibly called "Monster"), it's all about "I've got cars and bitches/My car runs on bitch juice/I'm going to dig up your mum/And stick her up your dad" and so on. I'm not familiar at all with what you might call the "true rap" behind it all, but I've been assured that it's entirely unlike the commercial image. Very similar to metal, really.

It's been said that all metal sounds angry. I think that the sound of it is more energetic than angry for the most part, and that those two musical emotions are distinct - however, this might be a valid point in that it's all in the ear of the beholder, or something like that.

2. Metal is satanic.

There was a time, admittedly, when having a demonic image in metal was considered trendy - this was around the 80s, when Steve Harris wrote "The Number of the Beast" about a dream that he had had, resulting in Iron Maiden being branded as satanists and their records being burned by some of the more insane religious figures.

This was also at the time when it was popular to listen for backwards messages on to recordings. One of these messages on Iron Maiden's records was alleged to say "I want you to sell your soul to Satan" when played in reverse. However, on closer inspection it emerged that the message was in fact Harris saying something along the lines of "Thanks, I'll see you tomorrow - cheers!" in the commonly accepted forwards direction at the end of a live performance.

They responded to that situation by putting a real backwards message on their next record, "Piece of Mind", to bait the people that wanted them banned. When this message was reversed, listeners were treated to the band's drummer belching in to the microphone and telling them not to "meddle with things you don't understand".

Even though I'm nowhere near as religious as I was a few years ago, the promotion (not the theme) of satanism in songs makes me rather uneasy. Only very few groups do this, though - in fact, I'm certain that the amount of bands that mention God, Heaven, and so on is far greater than those that mention Satan (for example Gamma Ray, who regularly write cryptically Biblical songs, particularly those by Henjo Richter). So there.

There are people, however, that say that it doesn't matter what the lyrical subject of metal is, and that it all has a "Satanic beat". I'm going to have to stop this section here because I find it impossible to come up with an argument against such creative idiocy.

3. Metal all sounds the same.

In fact, metal (and indeed its superclass, rock) is one of the most ludicrously subdivided genres in music, with meaningless names like Melodeath, Doom Metal, Black Metal, Power Metal, Progressive Metal, and so on. The music column on Something Awful had a large but mostly insulting list of these a while ago, detailing that speed metal is the opposite of heavy metal, nu-punk is the opposite of punk and nu-metal is the opposite of music.

I found one explanation that attempted to explain the difference between some subgenres which used the scenario of rescuing a maiden from a dragon to illustrate the point, so I'll see what I can remember.

• Heavy Metal - You ride in on your gigantic Harley Davidson motorbike, sword the dragon and motor off with the maiden.

• Power Metal - Galloping in on your enchanted unicorn, you fire your ethereal crossbow at the dragon then cast a teleport spell to get the maiden and yourself to safety (+5, roll against Luck).

• Progressive Metal - You saunter in to the cave with your guitar and play a 25-minute solo, boring the dragon to death.

• Nu-Metal (ugh) - Dressed entirely in black with cheap spikes from Hot Topic covering most of your arms, legs and face, you hang around in the cave until the dragon becomes uneasy and slinks off.

That's probably enough of that.

4. Metal has no musical merit.

It's easy to consider metal as brainless because of its unfortunate reputation, but conversely it can be one of the most complex musical styles - certainly more so than most popular music, anyway.

Comparisons have been drawn between metal and classical music, which sounds a bit far-fetched at first, but the structure of having instrumental and solo sections is rather similar, and there are many bands such as Stratovarius (and particularly other Finnish bands) which have a definite classical feel to them. One album that is often cited as an example that brings the two genres together is Metallica's S&M album, featuring the entire San Francisco Orchestra along with the normal band members.

I'm not sure how much I actually agree with the claim that metal and classical are so closely related, but they can certainly work well together. Some people seem to be turned off metal because there's too much going on at once rather than that it's too simplistic.

5. Metal is about dungeons and dragons.

An interesting point, this - anyone would think that I'm making up these as I go along. Again, the accuracy of this accusation depends on individual bands rather than being representative of the genre as a whole. The accusation mainly relates to power metal, a strangely named genre as it's one of the happiest forms of metal.

Manowar is very battle-oriented, but I don't know much about them because they were always rather too Warhammer-like for me. The scream at the start of Sign of the Hammer is hilarious, though. Hammerfall is slightly better, writing more melodic songs about killing people. Dragonforce take that approach and exaggerate it a huge amount, with a general sound like (I'm going to use it again) an explosion in a Skittles factory. Kamelot, despite their silly name, have written only one song about King Arthur, one that mentions a dragon in passing, but two entire albums about Faust.

Power metal can be rather fantasy-based, although Piet Sielck of Iron Savior (along with being the producer of just about the entire musical output of Germany for the last twenty years) took a different approach and put the genre in to science fiction, which worked just as well. The story that runs through the collection of albums (featuring Atlantis and giant robots - it would make rather a good anime) was apparently going to be a novel, but he never had time to write it, so he turned it in to a series of albums instead. I suppose that makes it literally a space opera.

There are some lapses, though - for example, on "Worlds Apart", an otherwise completely un-D&D album, DC Cooper of Silent Force suddenly uses the present tense verb "runneth" as if he's some sort of Thy Dungeonman. This hardly makes them inaccessible, though. Come to think of it, they're overdue for a new album if you ask me.

6. Metal listeners are elitists.

Some people seem to automatically think of me as a musical elitist, but I try not to let this be the case. After all, anyone who enjoys listening to the J-pop that I have on my computer alongside all the more valid stuff can't claim to be a musical anything.

Another problem is that to many people who enjoy this style of music, it seems that when something becomes popular in the mainstream, it seems to be less valid by definition. I don't know why this is - possibly because of the typically almost completely inverse proportions between chart success and musical quality. Look at the recent number 1 star, for example.

But with that, I think that as long as you can give reasons for your preferences, other than simply that it's popular at the time, any form of musical taste is as valid as any other.

School's out forever

A couple of days ago I had the displeasure of attending a high school graduation ceremony. The graduate was Whitney's brother Drew, who seemed to hate the whole idea of it more than anyone who was just going to watch. The three-hour event was held in the Greek Theater, a building which ignores thousands of years' worth of masonry expertise and is built as a hard stone bowl in which the audience is slowly broiled by the sunlight.

After the students had all come in wearing the red and yellow gowns that made them look like lost Gospel singers, or possibly a very large fruit salad, the first half of this ceremonious psychological torture was taken up by various performers and speakers talking about very little. Having said that, all the student speakers completely eclipsed the principal of the school, who talked in a droning monotone and paused to take a breath between every three words or so. Someone sang. That was all right. Someone rapped. I didn't listen. The rest of the audience gave up on what was happening on stage fairly quickly, and instead cheered on the students who were batting around smuggled beach balls before the teachers came over to confiscate them and rob the event of any interest it may have once had.

Finally the performances ended, the audience woke from its slumber, and the escapees filed up to the stage while the orchestra started their endless loop of Pomp and Circumstance. About forty thousand names were read out as they walked through a huge stone arch decorated with balloons, received their blank diploma cases (kept empty so that they could drag them back to the school one more time and deny their graduation if they upset the ceremony), then walked off, danced a bit, or in one case, fell over. Meanwhile, I drew things on my programme. By now the members of the orchestra looked ready to pass out one by one, but the list of names ended before it became a solo performance. The final notes played and everyone ran off as fast as possible.

No one enjoys going to the graduations, but I think I have an extra dislike of them because the event held when I left the Academy three years ago (even referring to getting out of school as a "graduation" seems over the top to me) consisted only of about sixty of us going up to an assembled stage - we didn't even use the real one at the other end of the hall - shaking hands with someone or other, and getting our black folders. Shake with the right, take with the left - that obviously took a full week of practice beforehand. Some went up multiple times to get certificates from the Orchestra, Young Enterprise (I got that one even though I wasn't part of it), and so on. No Greek Theater or collapsing orchestra for us, just running laps of an assembly hall.

There was a reasonably good meal afterwards, though.

Listen, world -

"Your" is a word that is used to indicate possession or association. "You're" is a contraction of "You are". The two are not interchangeable. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. I've now seen the word "Your" misused so often that it's beginning to look wrong no matter where it's used.

This post was brought on by seeing yet another misuse on The Sinner - a site for St Andrews students, supposedly the best (or sometimes, richest) in Scotland.

I'm going to go and have a lie down now.

Bits and PCs

To keep me occupied during the times that Whitney's working at the garden centre, I've been fixing some computers at her dad's offices. (I should probably refrain from using the word "job", because I'm not technically allowed to work here yet).

When I come to think about it, it's the first time that I've been helping out with something that remotely relates to computer science - finding the specifications of computers, pulling them apart, putting them back together with bits left over, and using those bits in other computers. So far I've almost assembled three competent machines from a selection of four aging scrapheaps and a gigantic ex-server that's about three feet tall. The average speed of them is just under 1GHz, which isn't exactly up to modern standards, but they're decent for what they're used for.

It also gives me the opportunity to see a bit of how the lawyer's business works - I was taken to the recording office before lunch, where I was temporarily promoted to Attorney to gain entrance to the library. During the half hour that I held this position I was in charge of a stapler which failed to drive staples through paper (which is a fairly vital property as far as staplers are concerned).

The recording process consisted of waiting around until our number came up, as if we were at a delicatessen counter, then going through to an office and waiting for ages more while the woman behind the counter checked through the forms. About halfway through, the most typical Californian convertible driver in the world swaggered in wearing a tank top, shorts and a pair of gigantic sunglasses and started talking at great length and volume with the employees about his cars and motorbikes. This delayed the process even further, because Captain Cyclingshorts was obviously a regular and the woman serving us considered his conversation a higher priority than property transfer papers.

I tried to save the more technical bit of this entry until the end of the entry so that you can just forget about it. Windows 2000 is an awkward thing to use, though. I had actually expected to be able to swap hard drives directly, but this just produces a terrifying blue screen and the message "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE", in all caps and with underscores instead of spaces to make it look more threatening. "Hardware Malfunction", that was a good one as well. Still, it's an adventure to try some more hardware-based things than I normally do, especially as it doesn't really matter if I manage to break them.

Earthquake!

I've apparently experienced my first earthquake, 7.0 on the Richter scale off the coast of Eureka. Absolutely nothing happened, and the tsunami warnings for further up the coast never came to anything. In fact, the first I heard about it was when it was on the news just now. It was a bit anti-climactic, really.

Like this entry.

American television...

...is patently awful. Most of the time, judge shows will be taking up at least some of the airwaves - programmes that take the already suspect process of justice and turn it in to a Weakest Link-style game. Even though I feel my intelligence draining away every time I'm in front of the television, they do have a sort of therapeutic effect, similar to reading the Sun - the feeling that I'm immeasurably superior to anyone involved with it.

There are a few worthwhile things on, though - a couple of nights ago I had the opportunity to watch Iron Chef for the first time. I had heard about it before, but I didn't expect it to be quite so much of a bizarre hybrid of Ready Steady Cook and Mortal Kombat. After the host ceremoniously and inexplicably bites in to a yellow pepper, a challenger chef selects from three grandly-clothed Iron Chefs to battle, and the cooking takes place in a circular arena surrounded by columns and stained-glass windows.

It would be a fairly normal if frantic cookery programme if it wasn't for the Gladiators stylings, but it was very entertaining to watch, especially as the challenger I saw seemed to feel it necessary to dip his hand in to the 500 degree boiling oil every few minutes to test its temperature, with no ill effects apparent whatsoever.

To avoid most of the television, though, we've been watching Miyazaki films. His work is immensely popular here despite being relatively unknown in Britain (with Spirited Away being by far the most recognisable of his films so far there). We were going to try and see the new one, Howl's Moving Castle, but no cinema in Berkeley seems to have it at the moment - so much for being popular. In the meantime we've been renting his older films from the video store down the road. Last night we watched Kiki's Delivery Service. This film features Jiji, who as shown in 's user icon, is a strong contender for the sweetest thing ever.

Memes

A couple of weeks ago, at the top of a long set of results in her journal, mentioned that I hate memes. I can't really defend myself against that comment - for the most part it is true, but it would be hypocritical of me to dismiss them entirely. If you look hard enough you'll be able to find a few meme results in this journal, particularly near the start, but I'd recommend against going back that far because my journal was pretty worthless back then apart from the quote log entries.

Disregarding those for the moment, though, I'd like to talk about LJ memes in this entry. This isn't meant to be a piece against people who do them or an encouragement to stop, because after all, the primary purpose of this site is for wasting time between having to learn things. I suppose I'll be able to see how many people took it personally by the amount my friends list has been reduced by tomorrow.

As I view it, there are three kinds of memes, and the first of these can be subdivided in to two separate types. I have put them in order of descending uselessness.

1a. Result generator (Random)

By far the most pointless of all the memes in existence, this type of meme takes in the answers to a short list of questions such as "What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favourite colour?" and generates a random seed number based on those. (I'm having to guess about the exact operation of them, but this is how I would do it.)

This number is then used to either put a list of your LJ friends' names against a variety of amusing accusations or to return some arbitrarily generated statistics about you such as your social success. If your LJ is solely composed of memes, I don't think it's necessary to take another one to inform you of that.

1b. Result generator (Meaningful)

These are slightly better, though their meaningfulness does depend on the subject of the meme. Quizilla used to be the primary source of these, but that dubious accolade now seems to have passed on to a different site that messes up my friends list whenever someone posts a result.

A set of questions is asked to the user, who ticks through them anxiously trying to crowbar their personality around the answers that they think will give them the result that they want. After they have all been answered, a result is given. The user then presses the Back button and tries again with some changed answers, and the process is repeated until a satisfactory answer is achieved. The code for this result is pasted in to the user's journal, often with a missing tag at the start or end which goes unnoticed for a while before being corrected.

Like I mentioned, the relevance of this type of meme depends on the subject - a recent one was the Revenge of the Sith one, which seemed valid enough even though it doesn't particularly interest me. Further examples, though, are such odd assessments as which London Underground line or type of wafer biscuit is most similar to the user. "Pointless" just isn't the word. Actually, yes it is.

2. Questionnaire

Thirdly, I come to my second point. The Questionnaire type of meme consists of a list of questions, the length of which ranges from colossal to ludicrous, for the user to fill in and share their answers with the world (or as much of it as they feel like).

The success of these memes depends on two different factors. The first of these is the questions themselves - they have to be original enough to warrant asking, and open enough to answer in an entertaining fashion. The trouble is that most of them are neither of these. The vast majority seem to be written by 14 year olds, and are very specific to that age group or the location from which it originated (a particularly irksome and frequent question being "Have you ever been outside the USA?"). An attempt at openness is often apparent in the form of at least one nonsensical question fragment such as "Pencils?", but it's rather difficult to know what to say to things like this. At least one slightly racy question is always provided through electronic sniggers, but everyone will either refuse to answer this or lie about it.

The second factor lies with the answerer of the questions. I'm fortunate enough to have a great collection of people on my friends list who can make even the most turgid of these memes seem entertaining, but they do tend to get repetitive once the fifth set of the same answers is encountered no matter how original the replies. Any further attempts to add to the mixture, including my own, seem to be lost among the others hoping that people will actually read them.

3. Interactive

I think that this type of meme is the most worthwhile of them all - prompting the people on the friends list of the journal to provide opinions or responses to something. No matter what the subject happens to be, whether it is solely ego-boosting, informative or totally pointless, they provoke discussion rather than simply fill up some space in an entry.

Like I said, this wasn't meant to be anything against people who do the memes, or dismissing the first three types of memes themselves - there are some exceptions to the typical scenarios that can have fantastic results, such as the "search for your name on Google pictures" one. But for the most part, I posted this because I am interested in what my LJ friends have to say - not some anonymous Internet quiz writer!

Questions

Strikethrough really isn't funny any more, is it?

Additionally, who is GialloFantastico? And why does (s)he keep spamming me and various other former Sinners with weird links?

Results II - Return of the Results

I was compelled, as I am at every hour of the day, to check my results to see if they'd come up yet just before going to bed. Surprisingly they had, which means that now I feel compelled to write an analytical entry before I can get to sleep. In fact, I glanced at the page and then got Whitney to read the results out to me, because that tactic worked last time.

In a repeat of the situation from last semester, I got my worst grade in the subject that I thought was easiest - a 15.3 for Databases, which is also my lowest Honours mark (so far). I don't remember the exam being particularly brilliant - it included an entire section on PHP, which was glossed over in one lecture using a couple of slides - and I was just glad to get it over with.

Joint second at 16.0 were Logic and the Project. I have no clue how I got that mark for Logic, so I can't say anything about that, and I also don't know how my grade for the project compares to the rest of the people in my group - that all depends on how good I was at creating the illusion that I was working.

The highest mark, as I suspected, was in Operating Systems - a 17.6, which seems a pretty good excuse for wine related carnage. All right, I'll stop now.

It seems that it's rather early in the morning for people in Britain, so if you're in computer science and haven't checked your results yet, good luck. If you're in computer science and know your results, I hope they were decent (or above!) as well. If you're not in computer science, I don't care good luck to you too.

The Journey

I promised an entry, then I didn't bother, but here it is now.

After a ridiculously early morning start, my day of airborne travel began in Aberdeen. Even though I've always been nervous about airport security, I had never been searched at all, but this time my backpack set off the alarm. They pulled the bag to the side and proceeded to take out the contents one by one and search through them.

I was particularly worried that my laptop might have set it off, especially as it was the only significant change that had been made to my bag's contents since the last time I took a plane journey. This concern was made worse by the fact that I thought that I would be questioned about having the most suspicious-looking keyboard in the world (I was cleaning the keyboard and decided to rearrange it to model a Linotype machine in a moment of extreme desperation to avoid revising Databases). They didn't even notice, though. It was put under a large scanner thing, but they seemed happy enough with it. In fact, they couldn't find anything that would possibly have set it off.

After a short plane ride I found myself in Heathrow. Despite the huge size of the airport I was unable to find any shop that interested me apart from the small Virgin Megastore (more like a microstore, actually). The most entertaining thing I found to do was to sit and have a bagel from Bagel Street. I had hoped to find a seat with a socket nearby so that I could use my laptop, but none were immediately obvious.

When the gate number finally came up about four hours later, I went there and handed in my suspiciously blank boarding card. This time my bag got through the scanner without setting anything off despite having had nothing changed about it since the last time. With the airport obviously thinking this was too convenient, I was then selected for a random search which went through roughly the same stages as before.

After that, it emerged that my e-ticket hadn't actually allocated me a seat number, so I had to stand in a group of about five others who were in the same position and wait for everyone else to come through first before we got ours.

I hope someone is still reading this, because this is where the good news starts. Economy class was overbooked somehow, so I was given a Business class ticket instead. As a result, I felt like I was being treated like royalty throughout the eleven hours (at least a full hour of which was spent fiddling with the five individual controls for my seat). I even got to sleep decently because of the amazing amount of legroom - I couldn't touch the back of the seat in front of me with my feet at all. Because of my height, that might mean it was about eighteen inches away.

Even the meals were pretty decent. We were handed out menus that wouldn't have looked out of place in one of the classier St Andrews restaurants, and even though the food was still airline food and therefore muck by definition, at least it was presented well, with tablecloths provided and everything. I thought I'd finished a meal only to be served another course.

There was some turbulence when we neared San Francisco because that's where Rod Smallwood's gravitational pull starts, but otherwise it was a much smoother flight than the last time. Drinking gallons' worth of free orange juice must have helped as well. I wonder what the chances are of the same thing happening on the way back...

I don't need to worry about that yet, though, because I'm here for a month, and after that I get to go back and work at the RGU. My contract for them arrived at home this morning - 37 hours a week of typing things in to computers and playing Yahoo pool when no one's looking. It's going to be a good summer.