Prague.

At a later date, I am going to post a long entry about our Christmas trip to Prague, in the Czech Republic. For now, a couple quick things of no great importance.


1) Everyone overhere looks like a Pagac or a Dubnanski. (Nicole's ancestors.) We walk around all day saying, "Hey, that guy looks like Uncle Jeff" or "That guy could be Uncle Kevin's overweight twin." Oddly, no one looks like Uncle Mike.¹

2) I have consumed some Becherovka, which is is a yellowish liquor sold here as a digesterif which is made from vodka and infused spices, and tastes vaguely of cinnamon, cloves, and maybe a hint of nutmeg, sort of a boozy gingerbread. I have either had it somewhere before (Oleg/Artur/Viktor can you take credit for this?) or something nearly the same, as it tastes remarkably familiar. We purchased a bottle at a small liquor store, where the proprietor stated that Henry looked almost exactly like me. (He also said Henry needed a brother and a sister. ) Personally, I don’t see the resemblance.



3) Prague has a lot of cool views, especially if you are a kid from Western PA who's idea of old is 150 years.


4) Nicole liked her Christmas gift!

(1) Actually, about half the people here look like Uncle Mike.

A comparison, version 2.

At ~0.5 Months:



At ~4 months.



At ~6 months.

Lots 'o Happenin's

So, I am a bit late with news of the last couple weeks, but as you'll see below, things have stayed quite interesting recently.

First thing: we had to get Nicole a new car. The one she had (pictured below) was luxurious inside (for a non-Cadillac) but now that gas is $0.73 per gallon here in Doha, we had to get her a more reasonable ride.

(That is a 2009 Rolls-Royce Convertible. Click on the photo, and you can see another 2009 Rolls close on the left and on the right in the far back. Note the one on the right is a four door.)

All joking aside, the weekend before last (not 5 days ago, but rather 12 days ago) we attended a car show, where we saw some really amazing things. Perhaps the most amazing: the car show took place at at "The Pearl," a gigantic fake island built off the coast of Qatar, apparently as living space for the discerning multimillionaire. (If you look it up in Google Maps satellite view, you get an idea of what it is, but the satellite image is ~1 year old, so it is unfinished in those photos.) There were a lot of stupendous cars there and a few not so stupendous, as GM¹ had a booth next to Lamborghini, but two things really caught my eye.

The first was a Spyker, pictured above. It is a super expensive (multi $100K) car, basically your high performance dream machine. Now note the gear shift visible through the driver's side window. The whole assembly appears to be aluminum rods with a handle. This one part (and only this) looks like it was designed by a high school metal shop.

Side note: If you want to irritate a high-performance car salesman, ask where the cup holders are.

This is the other thing that caught my eye, the newest Triumph. Look at the size of the radiator across the front. I thought that was a really neat design. Of course, H. Stockton disagreed.



He only likes American steel, specifically the newer Harleys. When I first set him on it, he took a minute to like it, but I think the second picture shows he digs it. So, STOW² what are the plans for Chillicothe 2023?


The photo above is a set of stone steps at the Pearl, right near the car show. The steps are slightly different heights, so I tripped on them. Hard. While holding Henry.

More specifically, I was holding Henry in both arms, kind of perpendicular to me with his head and feet pointing at my shoulders when I tripped and landed on my knees on the concrete steps.

That hurt.

Then I realized that the upper part of my body was falling forward and I couldn't stop myself, so Henry's head was going to be between my shoulder and the steps if I didn't do something. As for what to do, my friend Artur, a former gymnast and current Judo master, asked why I didn't simply roll, which is kind of like asking why I didn't use my heat vision to dissolve the steps; it requires physical abilities I simply don't have. So I did the next best thing: I stopped our fall by sticking out my elbows so that all our weight landed on them.

That really hurt. I couldn't feel my pinkies and ring fingers for 15-20 minutes, but Henry was OK, so it was all good.


The next day (Saturday) we went to the park. As you can see in the two pictures below, Henry had an amazing time.



When we walked back to the car, Nicole noticed an issue with the vehicle, namely that it was gone. We assumed that it had been towed, as the punishments for theft and the like over here are a little harsher than the current American system of "Hey, if we give him enough hugs, maybe he'll stop being a child molester," thus there is effectively no crime. So we walked around the park, and found a cop who didn't speak English, who directed us to a cop that did speak English but who was not responsible for that part of the park and thus sent us to a third cop, who told us to go speak to the "Internal Security Force" guys at a round-about. So, I run across three lanes of traffic, and one of the Internal Security guys speaks English. Basically, where we had parked was sub-optimal for rejoining traffic, and thus the traffic was being slowed by people trying to leave our parking area, thus the Security force simply towed our car to the other side of the park. No note, no ticket, no fee, just "Your car was in the way. We moved it. Just walk around the park til you find it. You're welcome!"

So we got the car back, and it was safe and sound....for 6 hours til I was in a car wreck. A rig pulled up on my left and wrecked into me, caving in the driver's side of the car. This was at 10 PM, and I was driving back with Henry from my office when we got hit. I immediately called Nicole to come get Henry, as these things can take hours and hours, but it turned out I had both sets of keys, so we were stuck together waiting for the cops. Through all of this, Henry was fine; he thought we had just stopped off to chat with some nice Arab gentlemen. Once the cop showed up (maybe 15 minutes), I knew I was hosed, as they both spoke Arabic and I didn't, and we've been told repeatedly that if you have better insurance than the guy you hit, you're at fault. Now, I am not trying to make a joke, but cop was scary in appearance, as he looked like a shaved gorilla in a blue beret, and given everything else, I was concerned. So, all four of us go over the accident and what happened, and I was told I had to be at the police station at 8AM the next day. The cop then told us we were free to go, and then kissed Henry goodbye. Of course, can you blame him?


The next day at 8 AM I go to the police station, which is basically nothing like those in the US. There is a tall wall, and inside the wall there are a bunch of tiny sheds, each of which contains a chain-smoking Arab from the local insurance companies. Basically, you go into the station, get an accident report, and come out and give it to the fellow in the shed. I have a rental, so I didn't have to do this. I went into the building, found a long room with a huge counter behind which were many women in full cover. There I spoke to a lady, and she sold me a new insurance card for my rental car for 100QAR ($27). What does this have to do with me getting the accident report? Absolutely nothing. It was just a miscommunication, as no one in the police station spoke English.

I walked around the station for a while and finally found where I could get an accident report. (Side note: I actually entered one door that put me on the wrong side of the counter with the covered ladies, so I got out of there as quick as I could.) A man in the accident department gave me a form (all in Arabic) with an ink stamp on the form and told me to take it to the kitchen. I thought I misunderstood, and from his directions I ended up in the room full of ladies again. One wrote in pen on my form, and then told me again to go to the kitchen. Turns out, next to the long-counter room there is a snack kitchen which people constantly stream in and out of with small tea glasses. In that room there is a man who sells you four Qatari stamps, valued at 5 QAR per, for 27 QAR ($5). (How that figure is arrived at is beyond western comprehension.) I was only able to figure this out because there was an older gentleman in western dress who was getting a chuckle out of the confused American, and told me what to do to get my stamps. The stamps make the report official, and I gave the report to my car rental place. Turns out, because I was basically waiting to get into the round-about and the other guy hit me, he was assigned the blame.

All things considered, it was better than any time I've dealt with constabulary in the US.

The next Thursday was Thanksgiving. Here is the whole family at the meal at our villa. Nicole had just a couple people in, and as always, the meal was great. Motherhood certainly agrees with Nicole.


On Friday, we went to the University for a big Thanksgiving with the whole University community. Once again, the whole family.


Finally, just a bit of cuteness: This is Henry trying to open his first Christmas present.

I'll talk to you next Friday!

1) Excluding Cadillac, when was the last time you heard something good about a GM car?
2) STOW: Stormtroopers of the Winnebago, a group of friends of mine that travel to biker rallies in a, well, Winnebago.

Something Geeky.

This is not this week's big post, but I just saw something this morning that blew my mind, so I have to share it.¹

Like many kids that grew up to be a computer jockey, I had a Commodore 64, which my father actually won on a business trip. It was awesome. Sure, I played a lot of games, but I also learned what a nested loop was in 5th grade. So, recall the C64.

Now, also recall/realize computer speed is measured in "FLOPS," or floating point operations per second. A floating point is just a number with a decimal part, such as 1.234. An example of a floating point operation would be 4.111 + 2.333 = 6.444. (If this was a long, dull article in a journal, I would put here an explanation of why this isn't a perfect measurement of performance and why measuring FLOPS is done with linear algebra packages, but it ain't, so I won't.) FLOPS are used as a measure of computer speed, with the more FLOPS, the faster the machine. The top supercomputer on earth (this month) has just cracked the petaFLOPS barrier, at 1.105 pFLOPS i.e. 1 million billion floating point operations per second.

There were 30,000,000 C64 computer built, and they ran at 320 FLOPS. If every C64 ever built was suddenly unleashed on a problem, it would take that great machine of brown plastic and frustration 32 hours to equal the computational work done every second by the current state of the art supercomputer.

Pretty cool, eh?


1. The basic idea, supercomputer time in units of every C64 ever built, comes from a /. post this morning.

Sorry it took me a few extra days to post again. The cigar was awesome, and I look both sexy and sophisticated as I smoked it. Sorry, ladies....I'm taken!


I've decided Henry can teach my physical chemistry class. (If you get the joke written on the board, you are a nerd, like Henry's Dad.)


H. Stockton and I had a long conversation this evening about solid food. While he supports it in principle, there are several practical points on which he and I have fundamental disagreements. For example, I favor what is known among eaters as "keeping food in the mouth and swallowing," while H. Stockton prefers the "slow drool method."

Henry went as a black cat for Halloween.


"So, you come here often?"

Story 1: I've found the Middle East to be very family friendly. People from small children to the elderly will walk up and wave at a baby, or hug and kiss a baby, or ask to pick him/her up. Henry, being above average cute, get a lot of this. Anyway, Friday Nicole and I went out for Lebanese at this little place, which had an open kitchen just blocked off from the dining room by a counter. The waiter came, and took our order, and asked if he could pick up Henry, mentioning his son was about Henry's age. He jostled Henry around for a minute, and then carried him over to the kitchen, where he handed Henry across the counter to a group of kitchen cooks. The cooks were all smiling young guys, in there mid-twenties. They swarmed Henry, who positively squealed in delight at all the attention. They kept him for maybe 10 minutes, during which time Henry was in what looked like a white paper shower cap (the Middle East hairnet) and the cooks took turns posing with Henry, getting cell phone pictures. I wish I had a copy of the picture, but Henry is smiling like mad in the photos and looks like the littlest Lebanese cook. Henry was brought back to us, and the waiter brought out a mashed banana for him, which we let him try. A little later, a cook came out to show us the cell phone pictures and asked to take Henry again. He came back maybe a minute later holding Henry, who was in turn holding a strawberry the same size a his fist. Henry was trying his level best to figure out how this whole eating without a spoon thing could work. We didn't let him have it.

A good time was had by all.

Story 2: There are guys over here who work in the mall who use more hair gel than I thought was possible. I'm not talking about spiked hair, either. Even guys with long hair will add enough so that they look like their hair is made of plastic. In fact, it looks like nothing so much Lego people hair. I like to think that they have a bunch of different hair styles on a great plastic block-shaped altar at home, and each night, they decide which one they will snap in place tomorrow.




Finally, a quick note: I've been watching "Sons of Anarchy" on FX. The first episode was only OK, but now that we are 11 episodes in, it is as good as anything on TV. In fact, excluding HBO (?) and Showtime (Dexter), I think it may be the best show on TV.

Guess What?

Cuban cigars are legal here, and sold in grocery stores among other places. Now, I quit smoking cigarettes two years ago, but cigars are a different thing. If I had a cigarette tonight, I'd be back to pack-a-day inside a week, but stogies are something I can pick up and put down. Tonight,
I'm going to have a cocktail and smoke a cigar.

It's nice to be an expat.

(More Tomorrow.)

Photo Contest!

Two of the four photos were uploaded intentionally, the other two were accidents. The first commenter who correctly identifies the two intentionally uploaded photos will be mailed a 10 Qatari Riyal note, and a signed photo of H. Stockton Brothers.

Nicole like Momming!


Some days the lion eats you.....

For the love of God, get your head down!

There are not three cats in this picture.

And now, a few quick/minor points:

1. Henry got another round of vaccinations. He's had no adverse reactions, save that he sleeps like a log the night after he gets them, probably from crying so hard when he gets the shots. Nicole's response to this is the completely rational "if someone stuck me with a needle the length of my arm, I'd cry til I was tired, too." My response has been "well, he's obviously going to die."


2. We had breakfast this morning at Rick's, an American restaurant in Doha. Imagine if a little breakfast place from Main Street in Butler was suddenly festooned in bumper stickers from Army divisions and then dropped into the third world. The food was good. I had steak and eggs (over medium) with hash browns and a biscuit with gravy, which supplied my caloric needs for the day, if I had spent the day running a marathon in a snowsuit.


3. If your not religious, this will take a bit of set up. In the Bible, there is call to all believers to go into the world and convert all people. In other words, a central tenet of Christianity is evangelism.^1,2 In Islam, evangelism is prohibited. If you were ask a Moslem about Islam, they receive credit if they help you, but they are prohibited from making the first move.


4. I got a liquor permit. WHOOO! Bought a case of beer, called "Kingfisher Strong." It is Indian, 8% ABV, comes in 650 ml bottles, and tastes like fortified Rolling Rock. There is NO good beer to be found, so when I reach the US, I shall hoist a mighty flagon of ale.


5. "Mighty flagon of ale?" Play much D&D, Casanova?


6. Christmas plans: I am not coming back to PA for Christmas. Right now, Nicole and I really want Henry to see snow for Christmas v1.0, so we're thinking Prague. We talked about Germany, but we want to do that next year with Nat and Kurt, so Prague looks like the best option. Note that there are no holiday villas in Belarus, despite some fairly extensive searching on my part.

(1) King James Versions, Matthew 28: 18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. 19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: 20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.
(2) New International Version: And J-Dog was all like, "Roll out! I got your back, son!"

CAUGHT!!

I have no idea why, but this picture cracks me up everytime I see it.

A few quick things....

First, as always, a picture of Henry looking cute.


Next, a picture of the three of us.

This was taken at a Luau for the University, to celebrate a recent accreditation victory. The food, as at all events in Qatar, was bountiful, and we had a great time. It was outside by a pool area, which is why I'm sweating like Mike Tyson at a spelling bee.

Check these out!

These are from a company called Sanük, a surfer company. The idea is these are sandals, but more substantial. They are, simply put, the most comfortable pair of shoes I have ever owned, and they look like old man slippers when I wear them. The other issue is that they are surprisingly warm. Long story short, I think I have my new travel shoes, so I can take them off at the airport easily.

Side note: One of my biggest fears is that someone will figure out how to hijack a plane with a pair of pants, and they'll get banned like shoes, lighters, and bottled water. Then we'll all have to sit on the plane wearing government issue disposable paper pants. Given how everything else works in air travel, what do you bet they itch?

Fax machine musing.
I ran across something on the internet yesterday where a boss basically yelled at a worker for having a stack of papers that the boss told the worker to fax. I'd think it was untrue, except this also happened to my friend Mike. He basically had a row with a woman over the phone because the originals weren't coming out of her fax machine.

The thing I find so great about this is that the central idea the people have, namely that paper can be teleported, is so very odd that if you try to make it part of a consistent worldview, it starts to make your brain hurt. First, you have to assume that tele-transportation is possible¹ and that there are two categories of objects: those that can be teleported (like paper) and those that can't (like people, else we'd be in Star Trek land). Take a minute and try to figure out what the rules would be for this, and you'll see where the brain injury starts. The division can't be based on weight, as there are obviously things you'd like to move that weight less than a sheet of paper (like micrograms of drugs into the blood stream), but for which we don't use Super-Teleporter-Fax technology, so obviously that can't be the divider. It can't be based on size, for the same reason. It can't be based on 18th century vitalism² because paper is mostly cellulose but ink is mostly oil.

So effectively you're left with the idea that paper and only paper can be teleported, which makes me smile every time I think of it.


1) Suck it, Werner Heisenberg! (Someone will mention the Popular Mechanics article on quantum transportation. Photons don't have mass. Not the same problem.)
2) The idea that things which come from natural sources, like bone, have a fundamentally different something than things which don't come from organic sources, like a rock. This was disproven by the synthesis of urea, which created a natural product from unnatural sources and heralded the birth of organic chemistry.

A comparison.

At ~0.5 Months:


At ~4 months.

Why, yes it has been six weeks....

...and thus I have to apologize. Qatartistry will be at least weekly from here on, with new posts every Friday at a minimum.

Anyway, as an apology, please accept the following picture of H. Stockton Brothers for the very first time holding his head up while laying on his belly.




Anyway, two quick weird things for you:

• Occasionally the Qatari Gov't station police men at the roundabouts to direct traffic. (Quick side note: Roundabouts are what traffic lights would be if they worked on the honor system. You know, terrible.) These guys will stand on a little jutting area of cement at night with now flashlight but with a reflective yellow vest to protect them from the whims of the crazed drivers of 1000 nations. I do not know what they are getting paid, but it is not enough.


• I went to a Ramadan dinner (iftar) a while back and saw a whole roasted goat served on a huge (4 feet in diameter) plate covered with rice and vegetables. By the time I got to it in the buffet line, it had been completely stripped, so the whole dish looked like nothing so much as a skeleton sitting on top of a huge paella. (More about Ramadan next week.)
  

Oh, one more thing: If you want to find me on Skype, just look under Brothers.

The Painted Word

OK, tonight's installment is going to be a LOT of pictures, as I haven't posted any in a while.


H. Stockton Brothers and Father after a long day of sleeping, crying, and eating.


Due to Lufthansa destroying our stroller by tearing off a wheel, Henry has been travelling around primarily in this car seat, i.e. we've been carrying him. It's quite durable, but everytime I see it I think there should be a little deflated poarachute hanging off the side, as it looks like nothing so much as an ejection seat from an airplane. It is great, however, as it provides a great deal of protection for Henry in a country where concepts of personal space are more malleable than in the US.


Yeah, he's a good looking kid.


This is my Uncle Ron. He's a WWII vet, and served with the 10th Mountain. He asked to hold Henry, as he wanted to talk to him. Here's what he said: "Henry, if you were forty years older and I was forty years younger, we'd get some fast horses, some young girls, some old whiskey, and head to Kentucky."


I don't think I posted this before. This is Henry in the Lufthasa bassinet. I thought the seatbelt was a bit off overkill versus the size of Henry.

(The next three pictures should be viewed together. Use the location of the silver car and tent in the images to see how thay should combine into one image.)



This is the view out the front door of my villa. Immediately out my front door is the tennis court, followed by (panning to the left) a green space with a semi-permanent tent, a pool which includes a deep end as this country has no product liability laws, and the clubhouse for my villa complex. Beautiful, eh?


This is the view out my back window. Sand, rocks, and nothing. They'll pave it, eventually, but for now it is just a desert patch. Note that this is what the green-space would turn into in a few days without constant watering.


Nicole and I ordered pizza last night, from Pizza Hut. (Yeah, I'm living exotically.) Pizza was exactly the same (except it was beef pepperoni), bit for some reason was delived with 30 ketchup packets. I have no idea why. My Brother-in-Law suggested that we go to the Pizza Hut and observe to solve this mystery. But where do you think it should go?

Three unrelated things.

Item 1: If you ever go to a TGI Fridays or some of the other "Fun/Cheesy" restaurants¹ you will see in the US various sauces on the menu made with liquor, like Friday's "Jack Daniel's Honey Barbecue-Flavored Corn Syrup Magic For Meat" or "Jim Beam Spicy Chipolte Chicken Cover-up." In Doha, except for VERY limited situations, there is no liquor, but these menu items are still available. They are now simply slathered with a generically named "Tennessee Sauce." If, however, the sauce can be made with no booze, and booze is always more expensive than no booze, do you really think that the sauce in the US contains the liquor it was named after?

Item 2: The villa I was assigned to came with a computer an Internet access, and it ran slowly (probably a bloated setup), so I put Linux (Ubuntu 8.04.1) on it in place of Windows. I would say that I got about a factor of 5 speed up, and in general had a very positive experience. More impressively, my wife, who never used Linux before was able to interact with it easily and accomplish all of her daily computer tasks. That said, I finally had to revert to Windows today, due to webcam support. I got the cam to work in Skype, but only sporadically, and I spent three evenings messing about with drivers. Plus the exact same cam on my Sister-in-Law's slower/older computer looked like a TV show when using the Logitech-written drivers, whereas on my machine the frame rate was such that you looked like you were trapped in Benny Hill episodes, without the quasi-nude English birds. If webcams worked (since I don't play a lot of computer games) I think I could actually go Window's free for my primary box.

Item 3: I have to go get fingerprinted tomorrow at a gov't office, according to an email I received this afternoon. I have absolutely no idea why, as in what part of my immigration or getting a driver's licence this is part of. I have reached the "Oh, OK, whatever" phase of interacting with bureaucracy.


(1) Quick rule of thumb: It is a "Fun/Cheesy" restaurant if you would not be surprised to see an LP cover attached to the wall. Of course, this definition would thus include the Hard Rock Casino, which doesn't make it wrong.

Part narrative, part trivia, Qatar.

I realize it has been a while since my last post, so let me apologize right off the bat for that. Things have been a bit crazy, what with the the new baby, the new job, and the moving to a foreign country.

As soon as I looked out the plane window at Doha, I noticed immediately that it didn't look like anywhere I'd ever been. By this I mean that all first world cities kind of look the same; for example, Dublin has a storied history and deep character that has shaped world events, but when I sat down to dinner in a restaurant it was like being in Houston, just with better beer and horrible food. Doha looks, well, foreign, at least when you are outside. There is a mall across from our villa, called the Villagio, which would be perfectly at home in Houston. Inside, it looks like the the Galleria (for PA family, Ross Park) but with 2/3 people in Arab dress. However, there are also strip malls here that look like something right out of Indiana Jones, but with Lexus dealerships.

Nicole, Henry, and I have had to go have two different medical exams mandated by the state to get a residency permit, one to determine blood type and one more comprehensive with an HIV and Hepatitis test, chest X-ray, and some other things. Each experience illustrated something about living here that I find really interesting.

The first place we went was this little dingy clinic, which had a line of maybe 40 guys waiting to get blood types done. They were workmen, all dark brown (I am assuming Indian or Pakistani. definitely non-Arab) and all really wiry, like bantamweight (115 lb) prizefighters. As soon as I saw this, I thought that we were skunked because there was no way I was having Henry stand outside in a line for an hour (at minimum). But we didn't have to wait. They took us in a side entrance for families, and it was explained to me that the line was for "Bachelors only." Over the next few days, I'd here this term bachelor used again and again, and it appears to be a inexact translation for some concept that doesn't exist in English. It doesn't mean unmarried man. For example, an unmarried Qataris wouldn't be called bachelors. It appears to refer more to a social standing, or lack thereof. The nearest example I can come to it in the U.S. (if I understand correctly) is the Mexican day-laborers in Houston. They are in the society, they may even have money to spend and are welcome to spend it, but there is a class/race issue that is a wall of some sort from the regular society. Anyway, the clinic took three drops of blood from each of us, determined our blood type, and charged us 45 QR, or $12.40. I'm A+, Nicole is B+, and Henry is O+, which means he is going to get hassled by the Red Cross every 45 days once he is old enough to donate.

The more comprehensive exam also taught me a bit about Qatar. But first, a brief digression: While waiting for the more comprehensive exam, I was sitting next to two Brits also waiting for the exam. They had posh accents, and were wearing nice suits, with watches that cost more than a cheap car. They chatted about business and the like, and in general, were a stereotypical English colonials. Except for one thing: The one gentleman was ethnically Indian. Behold the British Empire! I just thought it was neat.

OK, back to the comprehensive exam. Everyone I traveled with was immediately split into men and women, with Nicole carrying Henry. (This got her to the front of EVERY line, so she was done in a flash.) We (the men) were brought into a room with maybe 25 rows of chairs set up facing the front of the room, each row six chairs across. When I entered the room, I sat in a available chair near the back, although as we were all European in my group and had a Qatari minder with us, we got to jump up a few rows. (Subsequently, the minder was able to let us skip ~2/3 of each line.) Every few minutes, we stood up and sat in the row of chairs in front of the row we were in. Eventually, we got to the front of the seating area, and were assigned a line to stand in to pass over paper work to a bored Qatari clerk who gave us a paper that would let us start the exam. This was all presided over by a short mustached Qatari gent. If anyone tried to skip ahead before he was told he could, or even move diagonally when it was time to move forward from one row to another, he was simply ejected with a wave of a hand from this fellow from the seating area. The place was loaded to the gills with workmen and restaurant staff, notable by their wearing (for example) maroon tuxedos.

The next step was getting blood drawn. The device for doing this looked like a ha-penny nail. As soon as walked in, I asked the phlebotomist if it was clean, and he showed me that they were using disposable needles, then he chuckled at me, and said "Were do think you are?" I though I was in a free clinic in the third world, but I kept my mouth shut. (One of my father's many teachings can be most accurately distilled to "No one ever went to jail for not saying something stupid.")

Then we had chest X-Rays, and you had to take your shirt off. A bone-cancer researcher from Cornell, who was also getting the exam, tried to argue with the staff for several minutes about whether this was necessary if your shirt front had no metal or other X-Ray active materials. As the staff had enough English to say "Stand here," "Grip this," and "No Shirt," he failed. Then we had some basic biometrics (hear rate, blood pressure, etc.) including a height and weight done with your shoes on. If I had known this, I'd have worn HUGE boots, as I've always wanted to be 6'2".

Finally, I got to leave. Total time, including the huge acceleration of skipping most of each line, 2.5 hours. No one here is in a hurry.

One last detail: There were no bathrooms at the clinic, but there was a set of water taps mounted on the wall with a single aluminum cup for sharing. Crazy, eh?

More posting + pictures to follow later. Now that we are a bit more settled in, I'd like to post one goofy fact/observation per day.

OKey-Dokey.

3 Cats, Henry, Nicole, and Ed have arrived in Doha safely. As with any trip, there were some challenges, but we are here, and starting a new phase of our life.

Short Comments/Blurbs/Ed Doesn't Have Enough Time

1) I read in baby books that a child will grow and change in a surprisingly short period, but I had no idea.

2) It is important that fathers and sons find a hobby they can enjoy together.


3) This is my sister, the great Gretchonzo. She and Henry got along swimmingly.

4) This takes a bit of explaining. Here in Houston there are many iced cream shops that sell ice cream with fruis/nuts/cookies/candy stirred in at the shop atop a large, cold marble slab. These stirred in bits are collectively known as "crushins." We frequent a shop which has a very small size of iced cream cup, so small in fact that these crushins can't be added. Hence the sign.
5) A buddy of mine, one of the most talented scientists I know, is leaving the field. He got a job at an Oil Company developing new ways to model thermal properties of oil trapped in sand. He gets LOTS of computers and LOTS of money. Nice job, Kostya.

6) I had to reinstall my old desktop computer. I tried to reinstall Windows XP from an old disc (SP1), and it was a mess. (Specifically, I didn't have drivers for my Ethernet controller, so it would have become a huge pain to download drivers on one machine and install on the desktop.) I said OK, the computer is a paper weight at this point, so I installed Linux (Ubuntu 8.04). It just worked. Out of the box, everything worked, including a NetGear wireless USB connector. (By the way, those sticks are so awful that if someone tries to give it to you, punch them.) I was stunned and impressed. Assuming "Wine" (the Window's emulator) gets better so I could run games, I could really see having no Windows Box in my home. That said, Open Office is still so awful as to be embarrassing.