Berkeley Incompetence Centre

Extreme warning, team, this topic's draining your life force!

I recall hearing a (quite possibly fictional) story of someone who was annoyed with his bank for refusing him a loan, so he went off and changed his name to "Yorkshire Bank Plc Are Fascist Bastards". It seemed quite an extreme solution, but after dealing with the Berkeley Health Centre I'm beginning to understand how he felt.

Last Monday I went in with a heap of medical papers from my examination in Britain, only needing them to sign a bit of paper saying that I had had all the vaccinations I needed. During the appointment, a blood sample was taken from me (which had been happening so much recently that I didn't question why it was being done) and a tuberculin test was given, even though I'd explained to the nurse about eight times that I had been vaccinated against BCG.

The Wednesday after, I came back to the health centre to have the ghastly bump that had developed on my arm read. Naturally it was a positive, and I thought that it would not be a problem - but instead the doctor told me that I then had to go and get an X-ray just to verify that I hadn't got tuberculosis, and that the test had been unneccessary. That cost us $120, as it happens.

I had the X-ray done immediately, on the understanding that they would receive it and have my form ready in three days.

On Monday, they hadn't received it.

On Wednesday, they still hadn't received it. Then they told me that it wouldn't be ready until Friday anyway, and if not that, next Tuesday. When I'm at the other end of the country.

This morning, they phoned Whitney's father saying that they had received them. I phoned them to verify it, and they couldn't find them at all. However, Malcolm (who is an absolutely terrifying man when he wants to be) had annoyed them enough to drag the civil surgeon in to the clinic, and they said that he would be in later in the morning.

I phoned them at noon. The civil surgeon hadn't been in and they had no idea where he was.

After going to lunch, we finally got a phone call from the health centre. They said that I hadn't filled out one of the forms and couldn't get it signed. So Whitney and I had to drive straight there to get it signed before he left.

I arrived at the health centre as the civil surgeon (who was a hundred years old) was talking with the receptionist about my papers. He clarified the receptionist's story about the form, saying that he couldn't sign my papers because I hadn't had a medical examination in America.

I showed him the letters from our immigration lawyer, and repeatedly explained to him that I only needed the vaccination supplement. He understood absolutely none of it, and Whitney couldn't get hold of the lawyer. Eventually Whitney managed to convince him that we only needed one sheet of paper, and he suddenly seemed to understand perfectly. "But," he asked confusedly, "If you only needed that, why did you have the blood sample and X-rays?"

I'm beginning to understand why Americans kill each other so much.

The stupid are everywhere

You know, I joined the Clickteam forums a while ago in the hope that it would be populated by at least mildly clever people. I don't know if it's just me running out of tolerance over time, but the stupid seem to be everywhere.

I wasn't very impressed with whoever was on the other end of the phone when I phoned up to ask about renting a van from U-Haul, either - we need one for moving furniture around when we get to Boston, but I only have a British driver's licence. I'd like to present a short LJ production of the conversation in one act:

Me: Hello. I wanted to ask if I can rent equipment from you if I have a British driver's licence?
U-Haul Man: Mumblemumble hold on?
*Four minutes pass.*
U-Haul Man: Mumbletymumbletymumble.
Me: What did you say?
U-Haul Man: Can I help you?
Me: ...Pardon?
U-Haul Man: Can I help you?
Me: The question about my British licence?
U-Haul Man: What?
Me: [Giving up slightly] I didn't hear what you said. Could you please repeat it?
U-Haul Man: Can I help you?
Me: No... before that.
U-Haul Man: Is it an international licence?
Me: No, it's a British licence.
U-Haul Man: No, we don't do that.
Me: Right. Sod off and die Thanks anyway.
U-Haul Man: Mumble mumble click.

Despite not being licensed to drive in this country, I have been learning to drive automatic cars for the first time. I used to mercilessly mock those who couldn't cope with manual transmission (particularly if they used the term "stick shift"), but after trying the alternative I'm beginning to realize just how superior the whole system is.

When learning to drive a manual car, you have to concentrate on your clutch control, avoiding stalling, remember which gear you're in and where you want to be next, and balance to avoid rolling where you don't want to go. Automatic cars have two states - stationary and moving. That's all you really need to know. It's like what would happen if Apple made a car.

This means that I've been able to practice driving the family's van, which is what I'd regard as an immensely heavy vehicle (but is probably considered a lightweight runaround in most of this country) with the difficulties associated with driving on the wrong side of the road easily compensated for. Even though the driver's seat is surrounded by buttons and switches that make it look like the cockpit of an X-Wing, all that the driver needs to do is select "Drive" on the lever next to the wheel, disengage the handbrake that is actually a footbrake, and move off while avoiding all the other suicidal drivers who don't know how to use roundabouts. You don't even have to worry about rolling back on hills because the car automatically keeps you steady. It's amazing.

The speed limit laws are still the most confusing thing, though. While in Britain you drive at the speed limit, in California I can only express the expected speed as MIN(65, MAX(Posted speed limit, Speed of surrounding traffic)) - in that it changes depending on how many people are breaking the limit anyway. Enough of this, I'm going to help pack.

Disneyland

I did say that I was going to post about the honeymoon eventually, but I had the problem that I didn't know how to write it without being phenomenally boring. Nevertheless, I'll do my best. At the moment we're watching a judge show on TV, which is like a zoo of the stupid being shouted at by a ghastly Home Economics teacher, so it's something to distract me from that.

The most memorable thing about the flight over was the entire plane singing "Happy birthday" for a six-year-old a couple of rows in front of us - complete with the blinds closed and the overhead lights on to create a candley mood. That took an hour, then there was a further hour in a taxi delivering people to various hotels.

Our hotel was the Hilton Anaheim, and I had never stayed in a hotel quite that upmarket before - a large fountain and pool stood in the middle of the foyer, and there were a couple of floors with balconies looking down on to it. Interestingly, there was no tenth floor on the lift, but I eventually asked them about this and the disappointingly normal answer was that it was the floor that held the telephony system.

The first evening, we went to collect our tickets from Downtown Disney, a shopping centre-like place between the two parks. After an unsuccessful search for an Abu doll for my sister, we went to the Build-A-Bear factory. I couldn't help but feel the place had a Frankenstein-like sinisterness underneath the fluffy exterior. After putting together a rabbit that was made in my image, we were given a printed and signed birth certificate and read a large pledge on the wall that was even worse than our wedding vows. It felt like we'd just had a baby.

The next morning, we went into the Disneyland park for the first time, and I'll make a separate entry about the attractions that we visited. It was pretty much what you would expect from a large park - a lot of children, many hours of standing in queues, and spraying each other with a water bottle to prevent death from heat exhaustion. We went back and forward between the parks, and ended the day by watching the large firework show.

The second day was spent in the California Adventure, a slightly less child-oriented park opposite the main Disney one. We didn't get there until about noon because we stopped for breakfast at the IHOP, which I nearly spelled iHop. It was rather like the worst-named restaurant in the world (The Eating Place), but more American.

That night, we used the hotel's on-demand film service and watched Silent Hill. Unfortunately it was coloured blue, and after calling the front desk we found out they had been installing a new system that day. I convinced them to allow us to watch the film for free, but it wasn't that inspiring. It felt like two independent directors had stuck two halves of a film together - the first wasn't terribly good at filmmaking but wanted to stay faithful to the game, and the second one had got the idea of Silent Hill exactly right but wanted to make a new storyline. I had thought it would be the first good game-to-film conversion, but it was just mediocre. And blue.

On the third day, we had an early pass, which meant we could get into the park for 7am - an hour before the queues formed. We spent this time going on a couple of the more popular rides, then Whitney took me round the children's rides for a couple of hours. By far the most memorable of these was "Small World".

I had thought that it was a normal slow boat ride. When you float into the tunnel you're greeted with a lighthouse bobbing in the water with a flag saying "HELLO THERE", which made me laugh out loud for some reason. Then the song begins. "It's a small world, after all" is played at you when you turn the corner, and keeps repeating over and over. As you go through the ride, various puppets trill the words to you - again, over and over - while dressed up in some outdated or just plain offensive national dress. (Scotland is represented by tartan hills and a man on a tower playing the bagpipes). The song is played on various instruments throughout, culminating in a room with puppets from every country singing it together and spinning around in a perpetual dance of the damned. Once you've finally escaped from it, the same tune is blasted at you through a set of speakers above the ride until you're halfway across the park. And it stays with you for the rest of the day.

That night, as the last thing to do on our honeymoon, we visited the Blue Bayou restaurant, which is situated in the middle of the Pirates of the Caribbean ride - the boats sail around you as you eat. It's extremely expensive, but at least you get to keep the menus - and apparently the crab is amazing.

After that, we looked in the glass shop across the road for a moment. A music box caught my attention, so I picked it up and wound it. It played "It's a small world". And I fell over dead.

Sharks on a Rollercoaster

Or, as you can see here, Points on a Graph.



I don't think the film was quite as silly as it could have been, mostly due to the middle section - it starts off slowly and builds up the atmosphere of silliness for a while, only to hit you with an absolutely traumatic half-hour or so. During this time I stared at the back of the seat in front of me and reminded myself that at least I wasn't watching Braindead.

After that, the daftness of it all returns. Having been urging the on-screen Samuel L Jackson to "Say it!" under my breath for most of the film, I was very pleased that the famous added line got a round of applause that would have done an NPH audience proud when it eventually appeared. Then it hits you with a final scare, and once you think that's over, there's a final final one, just to make sure.

Nevertheless, you have to admire a film that gathered such a huge cult status before it was even released.

Furnitured out

It took a look at my Calendar page to realize just how much I've been neglecting this livejournal recently. The old routine of getting up and spending hours wasting time on the Internet has long gone (but will probably start up again once we're set up in Boston). Meanwhile, I'm still updating the minisite for my latest project, so have a look at that to see what I'm doing. You can even comment on some of the entries if you like. It took me ages to write that feature.

I'm absolutely exhausted just now because we've spent seven hours looking at furniture and household items to order for the flat - this will genuinely be setting up home this time, rather than living somewhere that feels borrowed. The biggest problem (both in literal size and in difficutly getting it) is the bed, because we have to either order an expensive and untested mattress online, or go without a bed for a couple of days while we choose one in Boston.

We're going to see Snakes on a Plane, the most hilariously-titled film in the world, tomorrow for Whitney's birthday the next day. The All Your Base-type following that it's generated on the Internet before even being released is something of great fascination to me.

Yes, I will make a post about Disneyland soon.

Medical form

If the level of competence of the US health service is normally at the level I've experienced over the last couple of days, I really hope I don't get ill any time in the next three or four years.

Wedding photos

Here are some photos for you. Two albums are up at the moment, totalling about 20MB already. I'm expecting to get some more photos from my family soon, but they all seem to have forgotten how to use email at the moment.

Highlights include the complete lack of composure at the blessings, the ceremony photo on the front page, and my dad evidently having drunk a bit too much. (He's the one that's the same colour as David Dickinson.)

I'd really like to know what was going on here. Has anyone got any suggestions?

Married

David Newton and Whitney Leader-Picone were married at 7pm on Sunday August 6th, 2006. That's what the blue marriage certificate we've got says, anyway. And we've just come back from four days honeymooning in Disneyland. Because so much has happened since I last wrote anything here, I'm going to have to make a few separate entries.

The wedding took place in the Brazilian Room in Tilden Park, about ten minutes away from Whitney's home in California. About a hundred people attended - most from Whitney's group of friends and family, but I had my immediate family over as well as neighbours and my family from Germany.

We wrote the ceremony ourselves to combine Jewish, Celtic and Christian traditions. It began with reciting the kiddush in both Hebrew and English, then sipping from a glass of "fruit of the vine" (usually wine, but we used grape juice). Unfortunately Philip, my best man, was a bit overenthusiastic and poured a full glass rather than two mouthfuls, which I had to finish it off myself - and got a round of applause, as everyone thought that I was swallowing wine at a vast rate.

After signing the marriage document (actually a fake ceremonial one, as the real document looks like it was put together on a typewriter in the 1940s), seven friends and family members were called forward to give their blessings. None of us had heard them before, and we completely failed to get through them without bawling our eyes out. With the exception of Philip, that is, who found the whole thing absolutely hilarious. A tissue was passed between the two of us, and had virtually disintegrated by the time the blessings were over.

The most difficult part of the ceremony was the handfasting, where Whitney and I had to exchange rings, then tie our left hands together with only our right hands. We had practised this at home, and managed it much more smoothly than you would expect - prompting more applause from the onlookers. We both forgot the list of vows we had prepared, but improvised an out-of-order set that sounded pretty convincing, and I don't think anyone even noticed. Finally, the glass was stepped on - this had also been practised, because it took me ages to get up the courage to put my foot down on a cheap IKEA wine glass that would instantly shatter, potentially sending shards of glass into feet, into brain, and dead. But the napkin around it held, and prevented any hospital visits.

During the dinner, several members of the family and friends gave speeches. Philip's was probably the best, saying that I shouldn't be let near DDR machines, my brother should be kept away from karaoke machines, and that our marriage would work out fine so long as Whitney wasn't a Mac user. Afterwards, the tables were cleared and we proceeded to teach the Americans how to ceilidh. The ceilidh band (which was surprisingly led by an old Chinese man) came up with a surprise in the form of the Wedding Reel, a dance that had been specifically written for the occasion.

A bouquet and garter toss later (which were caught by the maid of honour and best man, respectively), Whitney and I drove off to spend the night in the immense honeymoon suite in the Rose Garden Inn. Whitney's dad had given us the MGB for the occasion, which I navigated through a cheering crowd of people, round the corner and out of sight just before stalling it disastrously. Three times.

I'm going to put up a photos page on my site as soon as I get them from the wedding photographer and family. And I'll tell everyone what went on at Disneyland later.

Vanity Search

I have achieved something momentous. I am now a GameFAQs Idol, the highest documented member level. Something tells me that I shouldn't really be proud of that.

Something more acceptable is that I've been able to add another award to Treasure Tower, a "Wasz Medal" from a review on Victory Games. The trouble is that only the Eastern Europeans seem to be heavily into Click games, so I can never actually understand any of my reviews. It's also recently been on the Bravo Screenfun coverdisc, which is virtually the pinnacle of achievement in the community as far as I'm concerned, but they've somehow credited me as "H+H Software".

On one of my recent Google vanity searches, I also found out that Before the Moon Falls was mentioned on a Cantonese weblog of some sort. Surprisingly, putting it into Babelfish produced a reasonably understandable result, and said that it was highly recommended. I don't consider it one of my best works (the lyrics were written when I was horrendously tired on a bus between two airports, and I've since forgotten what they were meant to mean) but it's good to see that people are still finding my music, even when it hasn't been released on my site and Modplug is still showing no signs of resurfacing.

Finally, I've begun the minisite for my latest project (which still doesn't have a name, hence the big gap at the top). Along with the normal pages taken straight from the Treasure Tower site, I've written a news/comments feature that will be able to serve as a development log, and hopefully this will encourage people to look at it more often (and encourage me to actually do something to the game). You can also see the gibberish that I type in to the high score table to check that it's working correctly.

Driving Ambition

Berkeley confuses me. Even though I've now been here for a total of about two months in my life, I'm still not entirely sure how it all fits together. I can find my way around on foot as far as the supermarket or video store, but it's the Circle and tunnel at the bottom of Whitney's road that I'm most worried about. Go around from the Circle once and you arrive at the tunnel underneath it. Go around again, following the same route, and you're back at the circle. It's like a giant Möbius strip, but you can't see the curve.

And today, for the first time, I was driving on American roads. I was being taught my Malcolm in his MGB - quite a step up as I hadn't driven any car but a Ford Fiesta before - and he wasn't nearly as terrified as I thought he would be. I, however, was - particularly as I can't help but feel something life-threatening has happened to me at least once every time that I've been driven out of Mariposa Avenue.

I thought that the only difficult thing would be the move to the right hand side of the road, but it really does feel like learning to drive all over again. The gear lever is what I had the most problems with, as there's a total of about two square inches of space for the four gears. And having the handbrake on the right is awkward as well - I kept on pawing at the doorhandle when stopped at traffic lights. Which don't follow the same order as in Britain, incidentally.

After driving round an abandoned car park for a while, I sort of accidentally turned on to a road, and eventually found that the best way to drive without hitting anything was to stay as close to the central line as possible, using it as a reference rather than keeping close to my side of the road as I would in Britain. With the sensitivity of the accelerator, I didn't feel so much as if I was driving as steering a guided missile, veering it continually away from impact and the resulting huge fireball.

After the wide roads and getting used to the continual Stop signs (and I'm still certain that someone is going to plough straight into the side of me at every junction), we headed back on the road to the house. This was the best bit, as all that I needed to do was steer the car and avoid any stray buses or old women. And when we reached the Circle, I was proud to be one of the few drivers on the road that understood it, with roundabouts being landmarks rather than simple road devices in California. It was just like the Haudagain, but backwards.

I think getting the car back in the same shape as it left is quite an achievement. I may even be able to drive it away from our wedding in a week.

PC Reborn

This journal's been jumping about in time even more than Pulp Fiction recently, but there's only one more entry from the past that needs to go up before everything is realigned again. I'm putting them up over a few days so you can ignore them individually rather than having a sixty-screen block of text to scroll through every time you visit your Friends page.

Whitney and I have already performed a spectacular achievement in that we assembled a computer from scratch without breaking any of it. Whitney's dad Malcolm had ordered a cheap computer online, and expected it to come as a complete article rather than have them dump all the bits in his office. The two of us have been in the basement piecing it together, something that I haven't done since working on Nils' machine in the lab last year. The computer is going to be used as my machine until I leave for Boston, and now has my hard drives and graphics card added to it.

Even though I regularly pull my computer apart and reassemble it, this was the first time that I'd touched a motherboard, processor and fan. Putting in a motherboard is easy enough, but it was made slightly fiddly by the way that the back didn't slide out of the case. There were also only five screws and spacers when we were expecting seven, so it still wobbles a bit.

The most difficult part of the whole procedure was putting in the processor and fan, just because I'm terrified I'm going to break everything by even touching them. The instructions said to look for two white dots to match up, and on looking at the chip, we found we had a triangle, a large dot and two smaller ones (all beige). I eventually got the alignment right by counting the pins on each side. The fan is stuck to the processor with a bit of thermal paste, and four gigantic plastic screws that were impossible to turn without bending the motherboard quite worryingly. But it's in.

Once that had been done, everything else was familiar to me. I don't like putting in memory because you need about three pairs of hands to push it in evenly and flip both the switches at the same time, but it's possible. AGP and PCI cards are dead easy, though it seemed the screws that came with the case were the wrong size for the slots on the back. They'll be fine as long as I don't drop it.

It was here that I discovered the CD-ROM drive I'd been provided with was from Malaysia and had a huge 50-pin connector, which I'd never seen anything like. A rummage in the avalanche of components and bags in the home office next door revealed three further drives, one of which eventually worked. After putting in my hard drives, everything was ready, and miraculously, when I turned it on I got the single beep from the BIOS that signalled that everything was working correctly.

The next step was to activate Windows. I know that the activation key is meant to prevent piracy, and I appreciate the steps against it (despite having about 3GB in my Retro and Rom folders now) - however, it's my copy of Windows, and making me have to apply for a new activation key when I change my hardware too much seems pretty criminal. Well, this copy is still installed on my parents' computer as well, but that's not the point. Last time I activated Windows on their machine, it said that it wouldn't let me use the key again the first time, but inexplicably worked once I tried again the next day. I thought that that would happen again, but I didn't have any such luck, so I decided to download a key generator.

Half an hour later, once AVG had finished cleaning the plethora of viruses off my hard drive, I decided that I really was mug enough to phone up Microsoft and ask them to activate it for me. The process involves being prompted to shout a fifty-four-digit number at the automated operator when you could easily just type it in in ten seconds, and when that eventually fails to recognise it, you're put through to an operator. After repeating the number to her and telling her a minor fib about the number of computers I'm using the OS on, I was given a confirmation number and that was the end of it. The worst thing that can happen is that my dad's copy is deactivated when it next connects to the Internet, but I think in that case he can go and buy it for himself.

I have a couple of problems that someone might know about, though. Here's a random sentence in bold so that people don't give up before reading this bit. The first is that Windows seems to have forgotten a couple of my file associations. The problem seems to be limited to video and music files - the icons remain intact, but every time I try to open one it asks me what I want to use to open the file. Even when I select Media Classic and tick the "Always use this program" box, it comes back every time I open anything else.

The second isn't really a problem, but I just want to check - is 50 degrees a normal temperature for a Celeron processor to run at, or is it likely to explode and kill me before I finish typing this entry? Actually, - who I've just noticed no longer exists - has just answered this one, and he says it's fine.

Thirdly, the My Documents folder has gone. It hasn't been removed, it's still in C:/Documents and Settings/Newton/My Documents/ (I apologize, but this keyboard does not have a backslash key) but the link from My Computer has gone, and it's helpfully refusing to let me drag a shortcut into it or anything simple like that.

Well, I'm not dead yet.

Return to the Land of the Free

Well, I survived. Despite Whitney's best efforts at keeping me up (I managed until 9:30), I was exhausted at the end of my 24-hour day. I thought I would sleep better, but woke up at 2am and again at 6am. Now I don't feel very tired, but am in an almost Jack Dee-like state of annoyance and can only shout at inanimate objects and sit here watching Television for the Terminally Stupid.

Yesterday, or two days ago, or something, I had dreams about little things in the hotel room eating me and woke up at six. After repacking my suitcase I got out of the hotel at seven and dragged the whole lot down to Bayswater station before the heat boiled me alive. The Heathrow express, which was jammed in a tunnel for fifteen minutes, eventually got me to the airport.

I was slightly worried about my luggage because I was carrying an X-ray film of my chest in it - I thought it would go through the airport security, they'd see a ribcage and think that I had a body in my bag. (There's also the issue of carrying about fifteen thousand years' worth of copyright theft across the Atlantic on my hard drives, but that didn't come to anything either.) I did ask about upgrading my economy ticket, but on Virgin you even have to pay if you want an exit row.

I've been on a different route virtually every time I've travelled to the USA, and my memories of the airports and what's in them seems to blur. As soon as I got past security, though, I recognised Heathrow as one of the duller waiting areas that I had previously experienced. After burning my mouth on an absolutely volcanic breakfast bagel from Bagel Street, I went into the newsagent and bought the Top Gear magazine, mainly for the free book being given away with it as I needed reading material for the plane. It must have made everyone think I was a detestable boy racer when I carried the magazine through the flight gate, though.

At first glance, the plane didn't look too good - thin seats and not a lot of legroom, but that never bothers me because I'm too short to actually get my knees to touch the chair in front of me anyway. However, Virgin airlines certainly beats all other airlines I've flown with for the value of their in-flight entertainment, which is far more than you'd ever need. Because they're rather proud of it, they're not just screens in the back of the seats - they're IFE consoles. A massive list of films and TV programmes are provided, along with a selection of games that can be played against other passengers. The TV programmes are mostly rubbish - for the "UK Comedy" section there's no sign of true quality like Black Books or Blackadder, the airline instead having opted for Little Britain and the Catherine Tate show - but I did spend a while watching The Simpsons and Scrubs.

I appreciate that the IFEs have to be built cheap, but my HCI student side forces me to mention some points about the controller. For a start, there are several places the Cancel/Quit button could be, and in the middle of the D-pad wouldn't exactly be my first choice. Secondly, many people (quite rightly, I suppose) mentioned that the PS controller's buttons are hopelessly wrongly named - Square, Triangle, Cross and Circle are less quick to remember or say than X, Y, A, B - and because the IFE controller doubles up as a VCR-type control, the buttons would probably be named Square, Triangle, Two Triangles, and Two Triangles But Backwards.

The game hosting architecture is a bit wrong as well - the only way to host a game is to sit and wait at a game's listing screen until someone else happens to turn up, rather than being able to see the number of active players and invite them yourself. It seemed I was the only one on the plane bright enough to play chess (even though I kept losing to the computer), so I tried one of the solo games that was bound to turn up - Sudoku.

I should mention that I'm not particularly into Sudoku - I'm not like , whose burning hatred for the game is almost equivalent to mine for buses, but I just hadn't really tried it before. The only problem I had with it is far too computer-sciencey to be mentioned, but I'll do it anyway - logically it should be solved subtractively by elimination, but all the help files about it recommend that it's solved by adding possibilities instead. By ignoring the advice and working out a system myself, I was able to solve most things fairly easily (if in a time-consuming way) even on the Hyper-Extreme-Death difficulty. I found myself wondering whether it was always possible to solve the games algorithmically. Then I stopped all of that line of thought, because I realized that I had just invented a senior honours project.

Audio channels are also provided in the IFE, though their collection of metal was inevitably non-existent. I wouldn't mind too much, but they had genres of Awful Pop, "Urban", Soul, Classical and all other major shelves that you would expect to find at a Virgin Megastore, so why my genre of choice is underrepresented is a mystery. There are also a couple of specialist and relaxation tracks - I put on one that was supposed to help stop smoking. It sounded like normal lift music to me, but I suppose I didn't feel like having a cigarette at the end of it, so you could say that it works in some way.

Even with all that (and I apologize for going on about it for fully five paragraphs) the flight began to drag a bit after seven hours, but soon we arrived and the last hurdle was to go through Customs and Immigration. I was pleased to see there were hardly any queues, and went right up to a woman at one of the Visitor desks. Unfortunately this woman turned out to be totally useless, and had to keep asking another official over her shoulder what to do with a K-visa. After confirming that I needed US-VISIT done, my passport was stamped and I thought that was the end of it, but I was then directed into an office at the end of the corridor.

Passing under a sign saying "Secondary processing", I emerged in a terrifying pristine white room with a row of chairs and a group of shifty-looking people. I went up to the front and handed my gigantic bundle of forms to the official, who looked decidedly like Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid, then sat down to wait as people were called into the interview rooms or up to the desk. Curiously, I didn't see anyone who went into the interview rooms come out again, but I tried not to think about it. Instead, I watched my distinctive pile of paper being shifted along places in the toastrack-like counter leading towards the computer, all the while thinking that something was disastrously wrong with my visa.

The student in front of me was using a visa that expired six months ago, so I had to watch them trying to sort him out before they eventually got round to me. I had to watch the officials looking at the computer, then at me and back again, shaking their heads and talking amongst themselves - it was clear that none of them had any idea why I was there.

Eventually I was called up to the desk, and was asked if Whitney or I had any children, then the normal questions about how we met all over again. The official seemed happy enough, stamped my passport and visa then stuck my 90-day ticket into it, and I was finally free to leave. I thought that customs would give me a hard time about bringing $1500 worth of wedding rings into the country, but fortunately I was waved straight through to the all but deserted Arrivals area, where Whitney and her mother were still holding their greeting sign up for me. And so ended the scariest experience of my life (apart from the driving test).

So that was the end of the journey, but I still have a vast amount of text written during the period of limbo in London. I'm going to put it up over the next few days and re-date the entries so that they're recorded on the days that I wrote them - they might appear in the Friends pages, they might not. They're all absolutely immense, but I think they're quite good.

Lifting the Visa Curse

(Written on July 17th)

This was the big day - the moment of arrival of the visa. After another 7am start, I left my huge and unwieldy suitcase at the hotel and set off to Jean's again, at the time just before the sun began beating down and frying everybody again. To pass the time, I sat and looked up flights for the day after phoning the courier service again to make sure that it would be delivered that morning and that they hadn't given me a visa to Australia by mistake. They said that it would arrive today, but couldn't be more specific than 9am to 5pm. Incompetents.

It was 11am when the package arrived, while I was trying to solve an insurmountable musical puzzle in the Best of ZZT. I stepped into the hallway expecting a pristine uniformed officer waiting with it, but instead was greeted by a shabby-looking Middle Eastern man who looked like he'd just cycled a marathon. He handed me a far bigger package than I had been expecting and vanished back into the lift.

Naturally I opened it straight away, and phoned Whitney's family to wake everyone up and tell them that I could finally get on my way. The package contained a not-quite-A4-American-size folder that has to be opened by the customs officials (and it's almost as heavy as my laptop) and my passport, now complete with a second dreadful photo on the page headed "VISA".

I booked my flight immediately, going for one on Virgin Atlantic - partly because it was a cheap direct flight, but mostly because they're not Air France.

The real journey starts tomorrow, though, and finding a hotel proved to be a bigger problem. The one that I had been staying in couldn't extend my reservation because they were fully booked, and after looking online and asking at the travel agent, it seemed that so was the whole of London. I had planned to stay in a hotel at the airport itself, but they're all exceptionally expensive - I even found one that charged £3,000 a night, and I think it would have to provide at least a private jacuzzi and a decent-sized harem of furry girls to be worth that. TMI'd! But I went back to the flat to have another look, and finally found a hotel about two streets away from where I'd started that morning.

I had been rather fortunate to find a decent hotel for £50 a night last time, but this one is a bit of a dump to be honest. Cunningly, they took a photo of the hotel across the road rather than their own for the online advert. Not that the impression at the entranceway is bad - it's just that my room's in the basement, and it shows a bit. I couldn't help thinking of the "Get out of the lift" scene from The IT Crowd when the lift doors opened (and you should remember that, because it's one of only about three good bits from the whole series).

To give an impression of what it looks like, the walls in the corridor are made of cross-hatched metal, the door to my room has a heavy industrial-type lock on it, and the ceiling is composed of slowly wilting tiles that wouldn't look out of place in a school conference room. I have an ensuite bathroom and shower (just a spigot with a rusty sprayer attached, really), complete with a bit of crepe paper on the floor helpfully labelled "BATH MAT", as if it was trying to fool anybody.

What it lacks in polish it certainly makes up for in size, though - I thought I was going to get a tiny AMH-style room for my £49 like I had last time, but this one has three beds in two separate rooms. (I'm not going to go into discussion about quite why there are three beds in a twin room.) One's being used to store my suitcase, another for my clothes. And the advantage of being in the basement is that it's nice and cold, even in the sweltering heat that's blanketed over the rest of the city.

So here I am, with a visa and a purpose once again. Actually, the only purpose just now is to waste enough time before it's justifiable to go to bed.

Big Small Update

I have about 3,000 words' worth of LJ entries saved on my laptop, but there's no Internet access in London that allows me to use a USB drive, so they'll have to be put up at some point in the future. To summarize:

1. The visa interview was on Thursday.
   
2. I had to spend the weekend in London because of the courier service's incompetence.
   
3. I now have the visa.
   
4. I've got a flight as well.
   
5. See you in San Francisco.
   

I feel somehow guilty about not closing li tags, but it works anyway.

Top Gear

(Written on the 16th July)

Over the past four years, I seemed to grow out of television almost entirely. I had a set in my room in AMH in my first year of university, and even went as far as paying the £100 licence fee for a fuzzy picture and the right to turn it on. (I explained all this to Whitney's father, and he was absolutely horrified.) But I'm getting distracted - what I meant to say is that even though I now spend less time watching television than brushing my teeth, there is one thing that I'm definitely going to miss in America, and that programme (however surprising it may seem, because I'm not really a car type of person) is Top Gear.

The programme is undoubtedly a British classic, and has a history that dates back to the Seventies. At that stage, it was a fairly normal car review show targeted mainly at motoring enthusiasts. Its long run ended in 2001 because of a ratings decline, and most of the presenters restarted the programme as "Fifth Gear" on Channel 5 as no one at that channel has ever been bothered about poor ratings. However, as soon as it was thought that was the end of it, the BBC was handed a design document for a new series. This document probably read something along the lines of "Men who should know better at their age, doing stupid things in expensive cars and occasionally blowing things up." And that's what's so appealing about it.

The show is fronted by Jeremy Clarkson, who is (and let's be fair to him) an arrogant, self-important git. Like all good megalomaniacs, he is supported by two lackeys, James and Richard - or, as they are usually referred to, "those incompetent co-presenters I have".

Cars are still reviewed on the programme, but the focus has now shifted to the team being given various over-ambitious projects, either working together or against each other. Examples from the current series are converting a people-carrier to a convertible, and building amphibious vehicles. Once the vehicles have been built, a series of tests have to be carried out to determine their success - the convertible people carrier had to be driven at 70mph without falling apart, taken through a safari park, and ultimately, driven through an automatic car wash (which, against all logic and likelihood, caught fire).

A challenge that's undertaken quite often is the three of them being given a budget and having to go out and buy a specific class of car as cheap as possible. James' vehicle usually breaks down on these occasions, but he always manages to remain optimistic about it. James is often hailed as an underused comic genius, and he probably does deliver the best lines out of the three of them, including that and his sheepish assessment when his Triumph Herald/yacht broke down - "The trouble is I can't open the bonnet because I've had to seal it up. I didn't tell the others this because I didn't want them to mock me."

Another regular feature is the henchmen being sent on a journey in public transport while Jeremy races them to the same location by road. James and Richard have never won, even when they piloted a private plane from Italy to London (because James had to land in Belgium, as he didn't have the licence to fly at night). The purpose of these races is mainly to prove the uselessness of public transport, though, and they all share my hate of buses, which is very welcome.

It somehow manages to be much more entertaining than anything on UK TV since... oh, I don't know, Black Books, despite not even intentionally being a comedy. The only trouble is that Richard is frequently teased for being so short, but he's exactly the same height as I am :(.

And the reason I felt inspired to write about all this (quite apart from my lack of things to do just now) is because I've just watched the last one that I'll ever see in Britain - even taking into account any more visa disasters. This time, the team went on a caravanning holiday in Dorset, which included ripping a chunk out of the caravan on the way out of a petrol station, being cautioned by police after causing a roadblock while trying to turn it round, and ultimately, once they had arrived at the caravan park, burning it to the ground while trying to cook chips.

So I'm going to miss the rest of this series, but that's what BitTorrent was invented for, isn't it? Well, that and pirating software.

Bayswater Ain't a Bad Place to Be

(Written on July 15th)

With an entry title that perfect, you might as well not bother reading the rest of this mega-entry, but I'm typing it out on my laptop's pretentious (and entirely self-inflicted) Dvorak keyboard, so you can at least appreciate the effort. Wonder when I'll get fed up of it. (Edited to add: Halfway down the third paragraph.)

I'll start off with brutal honesty - yesterday afternoon, I can comfortably say that I felt the worst I have done in my life. In fact I was going to post an entry saying exactly that, but talked myself out of it because I don't want to highlight the fact that this is, after all, a Livejournal.

I will instead begin the saga with a description of what my life goal is at the moment. My current objective is to obtain my visa and make it somehow to San Francisco, where I will eventually get married. One of the key steps in this process was the visa interview, and I went down to London on Thursday morning for the appointment on Friday.

The seven-hour train ride was actually one of the most comfortable journeys that I've taken - I had a table to myself for the whole trip despite there being reservation slips in the chairs all around me, so obviously I look too dangerous to be sat next to. There was even a socket in which I could use my laptop, and no journey seems too bad when you have about sixty ZZT games to keep you going.

On arrival at King's Cross, I hauled my huge unwieldy suitcase into a taxi and paid the extortionate £15 fare to get to Whitney's great-aunt's flat, where I was staying the night. I then learned that two other relatives were staying over as well, and only one of the two bathrooms was working. I really can't remember what I did to pass the time that evening, but fortunately the sleeping hours in that place are shifted forward a few hours from the rest of the country - I was provided with a camp bed in the living room.

Now, I don't want to seem ungrateful for the place to stay, but even without the accommodation problems, the flat is one of the most uncomfortable places in which to sleep I've ever experienced. For a start, the curtains on the full-wall living room window haven't closed for years, and it's the middle of summer, so there is no darkness apart from in the middle of the night. Added to this, her other great-nephew insisted on staying up in the living room with a light on reading while I was trying to sleep, and his phone kept on making noises. And occasionally, the land-line would go off as well, playing a supremely irritating rendition of "The Entertainer" every time someone phoned. It was, to sum up, absolutely ghastly.

I woke up at seven in the morning, which is surprising considering I didn't get any sleep. The morning routine wasn't as awkward as I had first anticipated, but I still got my suit on and my documents together ready for the appointment two hours before the interview was due to start. I set off on foot across Hyde Park, anxious to not get in the way any further.

(Now, unlike the rest of this entry, this next section could actually come in useful. If you're applying for a visa, this is what happens. It's not very pleasant, but you can read it to scare yourself anyway.)

I arrived at the embassy expecting something similar to the medical appointment - announcement of my arrival to reception, a wait in an upmarket waiting room, then a call to interview. Instead, I walked across the inexplicably-pronounced Grosvenor Square three quarters of an hour early for my appointment to be greeted with the sight of two queues stretching across the side of the building. I walked up to the front to ask which queue to join, and a guard with a gun that would have made Arnold Schwarzenegger proud directed me to the right place.

During a standing wait of over an hour, I was talking to Leann in the queue next to me, who was a teacher applying for the same type of visa as mine. We had time to exchange virtually all our life histories while propped up against the barrier fence, while a bottle-shaped guard with a beard lumbered up and down the queues shouting happily that people could pay him £20 to get in. Once we reached the head of the first queue, everyone with 10:30 appointments were then herded over to the second one, after a check of the visa letter and passport.

People from the second queue were slowly being called forwards to have another check of their documents before being let through to the security check in front of the embassy building. I always take ages at scanners like these because of the vast amount of things that I feel necessary to carry in my pockets at all times, and Leann was beginning to think that something dreadful had happened to me when I eventually got out of the portacabin.

So after a queue to get into a queue, then another queue for a security check, we had finally got into the building. This was another queue, but in a different sense - we each had to take a ticket and sit around waiting for our number and service window to be called, making it disturbingly like a supermarket delicatessen counter. Fortunately, immigrant (and near-immigrant) visas weren't terribly popular that day, and both of us were called within about half an hour.

I had expected the interview room to be slightly more private. Instead, it resembled the kind of thing you'd see at the post office. On arriving at window 13 (good sign or what?), I had to hand over the immense amount of forms that had been prepared for the day. The woman behind the desk made a comment about what a huge amount of paperwork I had, which I found rather insulting because I only had what the embassy had told me to bring with me. There was a moment of panic when she couldn't find one of the forms, but discovered it attached to the bottom of something else. I had to hand in my passport and return to the waiting room for the real interview.

Even though the sheet I had been given said that I could expect to wait several hours for an interview, I was called back almost immediately. This time it was to a different window, where I had to raise my right hand and swear an oath that I would tell the truth (being awkwardly unsure of what to say back, I answered "I do", which seemed vaguely inappropriate) before being asked a variety of questions about my relationship.

How did you first meet? - I had been expecting this one, but the whole story is so long-winded that I'm sure she had given up listening by the time I was finished.
How long have you known each other? - Any kind of mental arithmetic, no matter how simple, becomes an impossible task under pressure of time or interview. I had to count on my fingers.
Do you have plans for a job in Boston? - I stumbled over my words a bit here because I wanted to say that I'd been in contact with a number of companies without actually saying that none of them had replied to me. However, she seemed fine with my situation. She asked me what kind of degree I had, and on my reply of "Computer Science", told me that I would have no problems getting a job whatsoever. This was the effect I was hoping for, as everyone else who I've ever told that has had exactly the same reaction.
How do your parents like her, and when did they first meet? - I had absolutely no idea about when Whitney first met my family, and had to fob her off with saying that they had liked her and were happy with me marrying. I think it could possibly have been Easter 2004, but I'm not certain even now.

All of these are just to check that you do indeed know your fiancee. She said that she was pleased with my answers, and that unless my fingerprints came back showing I was a major criminal, I was assured a visa and could take my pink sheet of paper to the courier service. I did ask about picking up the visa myself, but their stupid system has now made that totally impossible. (My words, not hers.) I was also given back a large envelope containing an X-ray of my chest, which I have put in my suitcase, having absolutely no idea what else to do with it.

I rejoined Leann in yet another queue, this time for the courier service. She was told that her visa would arrive in five working days, which sent my blood pressure sky-rocketing because I had previously been told 24 hours, and had put down Whitney's great-aunt's address on my form. It turned out that my projected time was slightly better, being only 48 hours because they already had my medical results. I was told the visa would arrive on Friday, Saturday or, at worst, Monday. With my receipt, I headed off to find some lunch and phone Whitney with the neither good nor bad news.

It wasn't until I returned to the flat and asked if I could stay another couple of nights that I realised how limbo-like my current state was. I was practically housebound until the visa arrived, but being optimistic, I thought that Friday would be a good time to expect it to arrive as I was just around the corner from the embassy. It turned out that I was wrong.

After another torturous night being driven mad by sunlight and Scott Joplin's best-known work, I woke up at seven again despite meaning to sleep later. It's just totally impossible to get any sort of rest there, because things start happening at seven in the morning.

I went out for a walk in the hope of finding something to do, but it was Kensington, so there were nothing but clothing shops and Marks and Spencers as far as the eye could see. In addition to that, the weather has been incredibly hot for the last few days, and I feel as if I'm slowly melting every time I set foot outside.

Finding a park, I sat down to look at the receipt I'd been given, which told me that Secure Mail Services don't deliver on Saturdays. The woman at the embassy had misinformed me, and committed me to an entire weekend of blankness.

I was also beginning to feel very guilty for staying longer than I'd originally asked, and expressed that feeling to Whitney's great-aunt in the afternoon. She suggested that I could go home for a couple of days, and I phoned my parents with the idea.

When I started out the journey, I thought I could cope with a wait, but I couldn't - I was stuck with nothing happening at all, no companionship or activity other than being stuck inside, having to wait. It was at this point that I was at my all-time low. All journeys back up North seemed impossibly expensive or just plain impossible.

My mother phoned back with a suggestion that I would never have considered if I was in a steady frame of mind - to take the Megabus back up the road that night and rejoin my family, having my visaed passport posted up to me via special delivery on the day that it arrived at the flat. At the time it seemed fantastic, and I was willing even to overcome my bus-hate to book a £25 trip that night. I had weighed the options, and decided that 12 hours of hell was better than an indeterminate number of days of it. Besides, I've now seen hell, and it's a Scott Joplin ringtone.

The lunacy of this plan was eventually pointed out to me when Whitney (who has featured surprisingly little in this story so far) phoned me that night, and I sadly informed her that the visa hadn't come, wouldn't come on Saturday, and that I'd probably be dead by then anyway. But it took a phone call from Whitney's father to eventually convince me that my parents' plan (like many of their plans before that) was insane, and that I couldn't give up and delay it again when I was so close.

So I am now in a very reasonably-priced hotel just off Bayswater road. Even though it would seem my situation has changed very little, I feel much more comfortable here - it's somewhere that I don't feel I'm cluttering up all the time, and somewhere in which I have time to pass, rather than being forced to pass time for the sake of it. Well, it makes sense to me. The advertised "internet connection" is just a second phone line with exorbitant rates, and the shower shoots out water in all directions rather than the commonly accepted downward method, but other than that, things are looking much, much better.

I've already done an immensely shameful thing - I bought the The Sun, Newspaper for Idiots. (I needed something with a TV guide in it, and it was the cheapest one at the garage at the bottom of the road.) The headline is "The Lowest of the Low", which appropriately enough is what I feel like for contributing 55p to their cause.

I phoned the courier service yesterday to see if I could change the delivery address for the visa, but they said that they couldn't change it unless a delivery had already failed. That made virtually no sense to me, but being used to this kind of thing from anyone related to the Embassy, I just asked them if they had any record of my case. Surprisingly, they knew exactly where it was, and it's ready to be delivered on Monday. So that morning, I'm going to drag my suitcase back down to Kensington and sit and wait once again. Then it'll arrive, and I will rush down to the travel agent to get out of this place as soon as possible. And then, the whole visa saga will finally, not a moment too soon, draw to a close.

The Last Day

Right, it's just hit me that this is the last day that I'll be staying in this flat, and that in only a few hours I'm going to throw everything else I can think of into my suitcase, dismantle the computer that's served me well for two and a half years, and begin to transport us both to America in pieces (mentally or physically). I'm off to curl up in a corner.

The game's going quite well, though. MMF2 arrived this morning in the toughest-looking DVD case I've ever seen. It's just as well I don't have a camera any more, or you'd probably get a picture of me hugging the box.

And I'd forgotten about the things I had left over in the fridge. I am now having, for my dinner, one entire cucumber.

Near the end

So far, the visa process has progressed with all the ease and comfort of swallowing a harpsichord. We sent the first forms off in February, and after that, the cycle of worrying for months, filling out forms and sending more information in inch-thick binders literally began to gradually kill me. I'm now on two types of medication (three if you count the bananas), I've stopped keeping the budget spreadsheet because my expenses are now entirely fees after charges after travel tickets, and it looks like it's approaching the end of it all. I have a ticket down to London, a visa interview on the 13th, have arranged to stay at Whitney's aunt's again, and will be able eventually to get a plane ticket to California from there. And then there's just organizing the wedding, citizenship, and the rest of our lives to worry about.

The only thing that I'm finding difficult now is packing. I'm going to have to leave the flat this weekend and stay at my parents' house for a short time before the incredible journey begins, and I can't think of much that I actually want to take with me apart from clothes and the bits of my computer that I can salvage. What's worrying me most are the forms that I musn't forget - the living room is covered in paper. I've reserved one sofa for the vital interview documents, another for the things left over for my medical, and the table for everything else. It was only after digging through one of the piles and sorting all the photocopies of tax returns, legal forms, passport photo pages and evidence of financial support into a large envelope that I began to see the pattern of the cushions emerge again.

It's strange - everyone in Britain who hears of my immigration is excited and says to me that they want to do the same thing. The reaction from Americans is more along the lines of "Why do you want to come here? Americans are idiots." (N.B. This is a direct quote, with eccentric punctuation having been corrected. Actually, he then went on to ask me how much a castle costs, so maybe he's not the best source.)

Right - I'm going to write my packing list here, because I'd have to move the mouse all the way across the screen to get to Notepad2. Clothes, all forms weighing under 1cwt, graphics card, rabbits, shaver, toothbrush, ears, hard drives, $45. I think I can easily fit all those into a suitcase.

Visa appointment

I was immensely surprised to find a letter from the Embassy on my doormat today. I've been given an appointment on the 13th, in just over a week - I may be able to get out of the country yet.

MMV4

Exile isn't really that bad when you have broadband. I ordered the full version of MMF2 this morning (£74, but I think I owe it to Clickteam after mooching off the demo version of 1.5 for so long). During the wait for its arrival, I've found other ways to pass the time until I hear again from the embassy, and one thing that caught my attention was Micro Machines V4. I think it's been just over eight years since an MM game was last released, and I downloaded the demo hoping that Codemasters still had their touch.

The concept of the games is simple - drive miniature cars around normal-sized household environments (kitchens, desktops and the garden being three classics), racing against opponents while attempting to blow them up or shove them off, while they try to shove you off or blow you up. The gameplay is a tribute to the simpler days of games, and I'm surprised that it survived intact without major updates.

Before I actually get in to mentioning the game, a word about the menu. Codemasters were infamous for including "console-style" name entry screens in their 1990s games, and after a decade of experience, it seems they still haven't learned. I could type in my initials in just under a picosecond, so why do I have to traipse around a letter grid to pick it out?

But once that sticking point was passed, I was most impressed with the game itself. Like I said, the game hasn't changed much since the third version, bar a graphical update - both the interface and playfield look clean and simple. There still doesn't seem to be a straight racing mode - instead, races are a series of small runs around the track, with points being added or deducted depending on how far ahead or behind a car gets.

The kitchen level was the first track that I tried, and it comes complete with the old favourite obstacles such as a cooker top going at full blast and a sink (which becomes a lake of death passable only by ferrying across on a sponge if you happen to be a model car), along with a couple of new ones such as the collapsing ironing board. As an added self-referential touch, the radio is playing the menu music from the third game. At first the speed of it took me by surprise and the cars felt like they didn't have any grip at all, but soon I got used to it and was sliding around like a maniac and shouting at the computer players as if it was 1996 all over again.

The idea of weapons has stayed from the third game, but oddly, there didn't seem to be any lasers or Tom and Jerry-style mallets this time - instead, a variety of firework-style explosives feature. It's a strange move, and almost makes the game feel like Supersonic's modern series Mashed, but it's still very satisfying to score a direct hit with a rooftop bomb while driving backwards at full speed.

The demo also comes with two new environments - a chicken farm and a set of rooftops. The only thing that's new apart from the scenery is the way that debris is scattered around some sections of the track - it's pushable, so crashing into them isn't exactly fatal any more. Some obstacles are, however, such as the circular saw on the roof that I unwittingly drove into, only to see my car fall in half. It then hit me with a Demo Timeout. Bah humbug.

I've never really felt inclined to buy many modern games, instead set on hoarding as many retro classics as possible on my hard drive, but this tribute to the old series could change that yet (especially with the inclusion of a track editor - a huge attraction for any game back in the mid-nineties). Even though the list of changes since the original might be as small as the cars themselves, I think that this is what games should be like.