Category: Uncategorized

Bill Sayle was a professor at Georgia Tech. He passed away earlier this year; I found out via a mention in the national IEEE newsletter (page 17 of this PDF), and then earlier this summer the GT ECE newsletter featured an article about him (page 3 of this PDF).

I have to admit that I did not know him that well, but 15 years ago he had an impact on the direction of my career.

From 1985 to 1990 I attended Georgia Tech in pursuit of a degree in Aerospace Engineering (AE). I exhibited rather lackluster performance in acquiring my degree, basically slouching my way through 5.5 years of studies. The truth is, I found many other things much more interesting, and just didn’t really care that much about AE. It didn’t help that the aerospace industry had tanked in the late 80’s as the end of Cold War paid a peace dividend and the defense industry shriveled. But I can’t just blame the industry for my inability to find AE work; my GPA was definitely crap, mostly weighed down by 3 or so years of serious slacking off. It was only in the last 2 years or so of getting the AE degree that I really started trying, but at that point I had so much weight on my transcript that I could only pull my GPA up to a 2.4 . Georgia Tech is a hard place, and AE one of the hardest degrees, but that’s still rotten.

So I graduated (in Dec 1990) and started working full time. As a temp slave. Seriously, I had an AE degree from Georgia Tech — one of the most difficult degrees from one of the most difficult schools in the country — and I was working as a filing clerk at a government office downtown via a temp agency. I discovered that year how little I needed to survive, because I made $11,000 that year, and that paid for everything, including rent and car insurance. I made the best of the job (eventually developing some procedures and computer tools for them) but kept on looking for “real” work. This went on for a whole year.

Finally in early 1992 I got a job as a field engineer with a company in the Atlanta suburbs that did contract work in the nuclear power industry. They simply accepted anyone with a GT degree and then trained them to do the field work. And off I went to nuclear plants around the country. Some other time I’ll write about my experience working in nuclear power.

In 1994, I had been out of college and in the workforce for 4 years. Knowing that Georgia allowed you to claim in-state status (and the ridiculously cheap tuition rate) after 3 years of non-student residency, I had my eye on returning to Georgia Tech to get another degree. At one point in my life I had fantasized about doing this endlessly, working and going to college and just accumulating degrees, but these days I’ve happily put my academic life behind me. So anyway, at the time I was thinking about going back to Tech. I quit the nuclear job in Dec 1993 and took a month or so off to relax, do all those things I would do “if I just had the time” and think about what I would do next. ( I learned something about myself in those 1-2 months: left without constraints or demands, I don’t get much done.)

I decided to indeed go back to Tech fulltime and get an Electrical Engineering degree, but a Bachelor EE degree, not a Masters EE. I had become interested in EE as a utilitarian degree, one that I could apply at home and in the community, certainly moreso than one can apply an AE degree. So I really wanted to learn the basics of EE, not study some EE niche as a master’s student.

Getting a second bachelor’s degree brings up a bit of institutional bureacracy. Georgia Tech allows you to apply credits earned at any time over the past 10 years to any degree, so I could use all those basic course credits (Calc, Physics, English, etc.) accrued during my AE studies in the 80’s and apply them to an EE degree. I just had to take all the EE courses, about 80 credit hours worth, which it turned out would take about 18 months of fulltime study. I had started at Georgia Tech (and received my first course credit) in 1985. If I was starting this work on the second degree in 1994, and it was going to take me 18 months, and I needed to take a quarter off in the middle somewhere to make some money, I was going to be in a bind. By 1996, the 10-year sliding window was going to start killing my first credits from 1985 and 1986 — basic courses that I certainly did not want to have to take again. I needed an 11-year window.

And so that’s where I was in February 1994. I wanted to A) get accepted back into Georgia Tech to get a second degree, and B) I needed a waiver from them for the 10-year window, just a slight extension. And remember that my first tenure with Georgia Tech was rather unimpressive — I barely got out of there with my AE degree, with a truly awful GPA.

So with all that in mind, I wrote a letter to Bill Sayle, laying out this situation and requesting admission and the waiver. To my delight, I guess he saw my potential and said that A) they’d admit me and B) he’d endorse my waiver request. To be fair, I realize now that older students are safe bets, because they’ve crossed that maturation threshold that is hit-or-miss with regular college-aged students.

I made some contacts in the nuke industry and started coordinating some nuclear contract work (1-2 months at a time) to fit into the school schedule. Over the next two years just two of these contract jobs paid for the study months (rent, food, tuition, etc.) They were very hard work, with 72-hours weeks (the regulated maximum allowed) but with very good pay, enough to pay for my expenses for the rest of the year.

Exactly 2 years later, in March 1996, I finished my EE degree and started working at Scientific Atlanta as an electrical engineer. Unlike my first time through Tech, this time I’d done fantastically well, landing on the Dean’s List every quarter. Considering my poor performance the first time, I’m pretty proud of that. So I like to say that I’ve been on both sides of the academic fence — the smartass slacker in the back of the room who barely survives to get the degree, and the smartass brown-noser in the front of the room who takes furious notes, engages the professor a lot, ruins the curve and gets the honors.

Bill Sayle was a small but critical part of that transformation, and I thank him for it. RIP.

Note: I drafted this post in 2008 but I guess I never finished it and I definitely never published it. In 2025, when Typepad shut down and I moved this blog to a new domain, I discovered this old post sitting here drafted. I am publishing it now as-is (backdated to 2008) to capture my thoughts, even though this particular post was clearly just a brief jumble of notes. I don’t even know what I was thinking 🙂 But maybe someday I’ll come back and figure it out. So, here I go, pushing the publish button …

Singularity

Wired Found

http://www.metafilter.com/73510/Artifacts-from-the-Future

Children of Men “Crimson King” video

http://www.foreignoffice.com/projekts/movies/children_of_men.htm

http://www.foreignoffice.com/

[I mailed the following letter (paper / snail mail) this week to Senator Saxby Chambliss, Senator Johnny Isakson and Representative John Lewis. Please consider doing the same.]

Dear Senator / Representative:

I am writing to you today to express my support for the funding of science and exploration in general, and for three projects specifically. I do not have a personal financial stake in any of these projects, and I do not work in these industries. They simply fire my imagination about what we might accomplish and learn in the future as we continue to research the world around us.

I urge you to support funding for all three of these projects.

1. Arecibo and NSF – Arecibo is the gigantic radio telescope in Puerto Rico that suddenly is facing a drastic funding shortfall. Arecibo is responsible for many, many discoveries about our universe, too many to enumerate here. Further, generally, the National Science Foundation continues to do great things and deserves their funding request.

2. Spares flights to ISS – NASA continues to plan the last flights of the Space Shuttle, with a targeted end to the program in September 2010. The last two flights are “contingency flights”, and while that’s a dull name, those are quite important missions. Without those last two flights, the International Space Station will not have the critical spares needed to ensure operation through 2015 and beyond. These are spares that could easily be the difference between “we’ll have that fixed in a week” and “abandon ship”. Please protect funding for these last two flights.

3. Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to ISS – The AMS is a huge scientific instrument that is already built and ready to launch to ISS. Unfortunately, NASA currently plans to leave it on the ground, forever. With just one more shuttle flight, this last piece of ISS could make it to orbit.

I’m sure your science advisor can tell you more about these projects. Please make sure that he keeps you aware of legislation that affects these, and let your congressional colleagues know how important they are.

In general, funding of projects like these is a fantastic investment in our future, both for purposes of financial return and motivation of the next generation. As a boy I spent countless hours studying the results of the robotic expeditions to the plains of the Mars and the outer solar system, submarine exploration of the bottom of the seas, and manned activities in low earth orbit. I’m sure if we continue to fund these activities that we will be inspiring a whole new generation to pursue science and engineering careers.

This is not a form letter, which I’m sure you get a lot of. I hope you’ll bear these concerns in mind as you go through the last few months of the session.

This is a story about Flat Bridget. Flat Bridget is the flat version of Real Bridget, who read the story of Flat Stanley at school. So Flat Bridget was created, and then Real Bridget decided to send Flat Bridget to visit Uncle Chris and Aunt Sharon in Atlanta.

Uncle Chris was very excited to receive Flat Bridget! He took her to the airport, where they watched the planes coming in to land. They flew right over their heads! It was very loud, and Flat Bridget wanted to cover her ears.

Flat Bridget went with Uncle Chris and Aunt Sharon to visit some friends who had two new kittens. The kittens liked Flat Bridget so much they stood right on top of her! Then Flat Bridget got to meet Flat Legolas from a famous movie about hobbits. She even had a chance to play the drums!

Uncle Chris and Flat Bridget went to the baseball stadium, Turner Field, but there was nobody there. They did get to look through the fence at the giant baseball. Play ball!

Flat Bridget then went to visit Eyedrum, which is a place that Uncle Chris likes to go to. When Uncle Chris wasn’t looking, she climbed up on the silo out front — Flat Bridget, get down from there! Then they went inside, where Flat Bridget looked at strange art and then got up onto the stage and spoke her mind!

Next Flat Bridget went downtown to work with Uncle Chris. She played on the big CNN sign with another little girl who was also visiting, and then she watched some people announcing the news like they were on TV.

Then they went across the street to the park. She wanted to run into the fountains with the other children but Uncle Chris said “Flat Bridget, you are made of paper!” and would not let her go in. Look at the tall skyscrapers! See how some of the windows look different? A very strong storm called a tornado came through downtown Atlanta and broke many windows in the skyscrapers. But nobody was hurt and they are now fixing all of the windows.

Later that night there was going to be a movie in the park, but it was going to be a famous movie about a big shark. Shark movies can be scary so Flat Bridget didn’t want to see it. But in the distance, can you see the building with the “G” on it? That is the Georgia Aquarium, and Uncle Chris is going to take Real Bridget there when she comes to visit Atlanta. Lots of fish and sharks and whales and dolphins and all kinds of water creatures!

Next Uncle Chris took Flat Bridget to another place that he works. It’s a place called a teleport, where they have many big satellite antennas that are pointed at the sky. The antennas are talking quietly to the satellites very high in the sky, much higher even than airplanes.

Flat Bridget came back home with Uncle Chris and Aunt Sharon, where their cats Maggie and Penny were very curious about the new stranger in the house and spent a lot of time sniffing and exploring. After a while we could see that Maggie liked Flat Bridget very much!

Finally, Flat Bridget posed for a picture on the back deck with her aunt and uncle. And it was time for her to go back home to Petaluma and be with Real Bridget again!

[update: fixed some links, added Mars Live link, added details on CNN coverage] The Phoenix lander arrives at Mars’ north pole region on Sunday night. This is an event I’ve been anticipating for over a year, since before the misson launched last August. Since then, the U of AZ team has been doing a fantastic job with outreach, and I’m seeing news of this event pop up all over the place, from the New York Times to Slashdot to CNN. There is a flood of resources available on the net for this landing: * Phoenix Mars Landing Real-Time Simulation — great status display of what is happening when, updated live * NASA’s own Phoenix blog * The Planetary Society’s blog (by astro-hottie Emily Lakdawalla) –normally covering many topics, but for the next week or two wholy focused on Phoenix * Mars Live blog (UK) * Live status via Twitter — very short blog post with the latest bits of status * Live chat on night of Phoenix EDL: #space on irc.freenode.net — this requires IRC software, something most people aren’t familiar with On TV, there will be multiple (!) ways to watch this. CNN will cover it, in fact they are devoting a whole hour to it on Sunday from 7pm to 8pm, when it’ll all be over except for the cryin’. Miles O’Brien, former anchor and space fan, will be hosting the hour live from JPL in Pasadena and will have Steve Freaking Squyres on air with him as commentator. Wow! The Science Channel (one of the Discovery networks) will have coverage, but that channel is hard to find. Finally of course you can go to NASA TV (via cable/satellite TV or online via www.nasa.gov) — their coverage starts at 6:30pm on Sunday. Afterwards, refer to this NASA TV schedule to find out when follow up press conferences will be aired; right now it looks like it will happen every 1-2 days in the afternoon, but check the schedule for that. I’d expect to see first photos come down around 9:30pm. This is a terribly risky event — as one of the mission managers said at the press briefing yesterday, EDL (Entry Descent and Landing) is just about the most complicated thing to pull off in the world of robotics. And there is a long history of Mars eating space probes that we hurl at it. The last time we successfully landed on Mars with retro rockets, Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The only two successful landings since then have been done using an airbag landing system, literally dropping to the surface and bouncing and rolling to a stop. This mission is too big for the airbag solution, so they’re back to the old retro rocket design. Watch the Phoenix landing animations and you’ll agree that it just seems terribly difficult. Frankly I will not be surprised at all if they fail, not due to lack of confidence in their abilities, but because this is just so incredibly hard to do. It would be a crushing disappointment, especially for the people have been working on this for a decade. So you will indeed see the most deliriously happy engineers and scientists ever on Sunday night if they survive the landing. Less than 48 hours and I can’t wait! The rest of this blog post is about my interest in planetary exploration in general. As a kid in the 70’s, I was rather obsessed with the Viking landers, and I can remember paging through the National Geographic reports over and over. My room was postered not with cars or girls (although that came later in college, late bloomer huh?) but with pictures of the planets from the Voyager flybys. And I’ve remained interested through the years, but it’s only the past 2-3 years that I’ve really come back to it. A lot of resources are appearing on the internet, and it’s given me the luxury of being able to practically gorge myself on mission plans, launch and space activities, scientific data and discussions of all of the above. The latter is the best of all — instead of relying on magazines or even net news sites for a sense of progress and community, in the last couple years there have sprung up internet forums where I’ll find hundreds and thousands of guys like me who are poring over every last shred of news about each mission. Nasaspaceflight’s forum is the best for manned spaceflight (i.e. the space shuttle and the International Space Station), and UnmannedSpaceflight’s forum is the best for the robotic probes. Those guys are hardcore and I usually just sit back and watch. The Planetary Society has been involved in this and pushing hard for decades now. They are essentially a lobbying organization, with thousands of members (inluding myself) who all believe that it is our collective human destiny and mandate to explore beyond earth. Emily Lakdawalla’s blog is one of their outreach efforts, and she does a stellar (*rimshot*) job of illuminating the latest news and bringing it into context. Mat Kaplan hosts Planetary Radio, a weekly half-hour show that brings it even further down to Earth (is this mic on?); in Atlanta you can hear that show on WREK 91.1 FM on Sunday mornings at 8am, although I just listen via their archive at www.wrek.org; outside of Atlanta you can just go to their web page and download the mp3. As you get into all this, one of the things that you learn is that manned spaceflight is horribly expensive, as compared to unmanned spaceflight. From the perspective of science and research, it is actually terribly wasteful to send astronauts into space. The shuttle and ISS programs inhale massive amounts of money, and the unmanned probes (Mars Rovers, Cassini, Swift, Hubble, etc etc etc) get by with the comparably little crumbs that are left over in the budget. Further, even the manned spaceflight program lately seems to be heading in the wrong direction. In the year after the Feb 2003 Columbia shuttle accident, the Bush administration put together a new “Vision for Space Exporation” (VSE) that set out a long term plan for the manned space program, involving retiring the aging shuttle fleet and developing new rockets, with the new end goal being to put men on Mars. That is very exciting, and there’s no question that a goal like that really captures the imagination of the public. However, in the VSE, the stepping stone to that goal is to return to the Moon. And that is the rotten part. Returning to the Moon as if it’s a stepping stone to Mars is a fraud on two counts. First, the Moon is old news. We’ve been there, and scientists will tell you that there is NOT any compelling reason to go back. We already know it pretty well, and it’s just not that interesting anymore. Second, the orbital mechanics involved, specifically a concept called “the gravity well”, mean that the Moon can NOT be used as a literal waystation or stopping point on the way to Mars. It’s like saying that in order to get to Everest, you must first reach the peak of Kilimanjaro. Which leads to the better idea: go to an asteroid as a stepping stone to Mars. That IS an interesting destination, and it COULD conceivably be a way station on the way to Mars. Certainly, getting astronauts out to an asteroid and back (millions of miles away, much further than the moon) would be a wonderful intermediate step to demonstrate all the engineering that would then need to be scaled up for the Mars trip (50+ million miles away). With all that in mind, the Planetary Society recently convened a few “Town Hall” meetings around the country. Actually, they started with a VIP-only event at Stanford in February, where lots of space scientist luminaries got together to discuss this problem. Then they took it to the public in the form of public meetings where regular people could voice their opinion. They actually only did it in two other cities: Boston and Atlanta. Why Atlanta, I don’t really know, except that two separate contests that the Planetary Society had recently held were both won by two different Atlanta groups, so perhaps we were just high on their radar.

Held at Georgia Tech on May 7th, they brought in a couple Planetary Society bigwigs and added a few local folks to form a panel that started off the discussion. But then they stuck to their promise and handed the mic out to the people in the room. And moderating all this was … Bill Nye the Science guy.

Now, I’m sure we all have our snickering opinions about the goofball we all saw on his PBS science show. But I have to say this: that guy is whip smart, he knows how to work a room, and he knows how to turn the most inane comment into a constructive point. The Planetary Society has a great asset in that man (he’s their Vice President). The meeting went on for two hours and it was clear that most in the room were strongly in support of the things I’ve talked about above, in particular the idea of going to an asteroid or two prior to the Mars jump, instead of going to the moon. And maybe all this whining by us space nerds has had an effect, because a couple weeks ago NASA announced that they are now considering a manned mission to an asteroid. Eeeeeexcellent. (spoken with the voice and fingers of Montgomery Burns) Now, if we could just get AMS up to ISS before the shuttle retires …

I’ll close this long post with this. Here’s a fantastic article by an astronomer about what it’s like to work a night at the Keck telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii:

http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/03/blue-hawaii.html

http://www.mikebrownsplanets.com/2008/04/bluer-still.html

A couple weeks ago I had a chance to attend one of the “Art Papers Live” lectures. Art Papers hosts presentations by prominent artists a few times a year, and every one of the handful I’ve been to has been fascinating. Mind you, I didn’t go to art school and don’t have any training in the fine arts, so I’m sure the things these guys talk about is old hat for most art scenesters, but it’s all great brain fodder for me.

This time the presentation was by Daniel Canogar, a Spanish artist who works with light and projection, primarily through the use of fiber optics in large (sometimes public) installations. His modest demeanor hid a sharp intellect and he provided fascinating insights into his own processes and art in general.

A while back I was able to go to another Art Papers Live and see Christian Marclay give a talk on his work. I was already familiar with him through my exposure to the music underground. We had one of his records at WREK — it was a vinyl LP that consisted of 4 LP fragments that had been joined together to form one LP, and of course when you played it you’d get this blip-blip-blip channel-changing effect where you were listening to four different recordings interspersed with each other, about half a second of each one at a time.

Anyway, back to the thing with Daniel Canogar, it happened to be held at the Institute for Paper Science and Technology (IPST), an industrial research operation located in the far corner of Georgia Tech campus. They’ve got a little museum off the lobby that showcases the history and technology of papermaking. It’s interesting enough although a bit … dry.

Coincidentally, Dorkbot ATL was holding one of their meetings the same night in the same area of campus, so when Canogar finished I hoofed it over to the Dorkbot meeting. Alas, I got there just minutes after they’d finished. I don’t kow if this is representative across the nation, but the Atlanta chapter of Dorkbot is mostly focused on using electronics in new ways for the purposes of music composition. This is probably the case because the leader and founder of the chapter is a music professor at Tech (yes, they exist). So at these Dorkbot meetings you get less dorky robots and more dorky music electronics. It’s alright, I’m just usually underwhelmed by it.

Walking back through the west campus dorm area to get back to my car at IPST, I was struck how artless Georgia Tech campus is. I mean, I spent five years of my life living in that exact spot (in the west campus dorms) and I didn’t really find it objectionable, but I guess now with my greater exposure to .. the world, it just seems … uglier. Of course, this is what architecture critics are alwasy jumping up and down and screaming about. It all just seems so completely devoid of imagination or human expression.

There was another annual Listening Machines event at Eyedrum; this annual event has Georgia Tech music technology students presenting their creations. Occasionally I get to go see Sonic Generator (yet another Georgia Tech music operation, hmmm); actually, I’ve only seen one so far. I’m giving these short shrift because I’m not sure whether I actually like them. I go, but I’m not sure I really enjoy it. But I go anyway.

A similarly minded event from a couple years ago involved a visiting artist from Australia. Guy Ben-Ary was doing a residence at Georgia Tech and had a one-night installation at Eyedrum. What he did was take a culture of neurons (rat cells, if I remember correctly), maintain them in a culture, and wire them up with fine wires with which to sense and stimulate them. Then those sensed signals were connected to robotic arms that moved according to the signals. With pen in hand, the arms drew patterns on paper. The results were not particularly compelling visually, but it made for a thought-provoking evening. He also did a presentation at Dorkbot which was actually quite fascinating.

Attending events like these often gets me thinking about life in Atlanta in general. It seems to be perpetually balanced between middle-American cheese (Shoney’s, megachurches, discount outlet malls, W stickers, OTP) and “real” urban city life (music subcultures, art cinema, actual pedestrian street life, F stickers, ITP). Most of the time Atlanta is just provincial, lacking in serious art presence, public art, or any kind of street character. But if you try a little bit, you’ll find plenty going on under the plastic sheen.

I will shortly be updating most of the New Zealand posts with some more pictures*. During the trip I took some panorama photos, which are simply series of photos taken from left to right that, when joined together, form a wide panoramic view of the scene.

The problem is the joining, also known as “stitching”. If you just glue them together it looks stupid. So you have to use special software, and this capability has been available in computers for many years now. Usually when you buy a digital camera these days, it comes with a software CD that will help you make the panoramas. And further, many cameras now have a “stitch assist” mode, which helps you align the next shot as you take the left-to-right series of photos, so that when you get to the computer part later it lines up a lot better.

And at the extreme, a few cameras will do the joining of the photos in the camera, producing a panorama within the camera without requiring a computer or software. THAT is cool, but unfortunately that capability is currently exclusive to Kodak cameras, and they are crap, at least compared to Canon cameras. Oh well.

So that put me in the business of having to use stitching software on a computer. I wanted to use my Linux machine for this, but ran into a few dead-ends there. There is a plugin and process for doing it within GIMP, but I don’t have the time or patience for what sounded like a terribly tedious process. There is the hugin package, to which people have given glowing reviews, but it’s not available for the (2-year-old) version of Linux I’ve got. I’ll be overhauling the Linux install later this year and look forward to using hugin then to improve on these panoramas, but for now it’s not an option.

So that dumped me back over to using Windows. Ugh. Fortunately, I found out about autostitch, which is a very simple program produced by a coupla grad students at U of BC. You literally just dump the images into it and do nothing but wait for about a minute, and out comes a gorgeous, perfect, blended panorama. It’s really amazing what them smarty pants college kids can do given Moore’s Law …

This is Wellington!

* Apologies to those of you who subscribe to this blog, as you will get several nuisance alerts about the posts being updated as I go through them, and this might not be the last time, as Sharon and I have more details and narratives to add to the daily posts …

Riiiiiight … So we get to the airport shuttle bus stop in downtown Auckland and wait for the bus. Which is supposed to stop by every 20 minutes, but does not appear until about 45 minutes later. OK, we’re still OK, we’ll just get to the airport 2 hours before flight time, still plenty of time. Then we finally arrive at the airport, and take care of a few necessities (like picking up the stored luggage and returning the rented cell phone) before getting in the checkin line with our luggage … behind a just-arrived busload of Japanese tourists. The line took an hour for us to get through. By the time we got our bags checked in, it was already boarding time, and we hadn’t even cleared security yet! Fortunately, NZ has very little flight security (attention terrorists, here’s your new vacation spot! oh wait, NZ stayed out of the Iraq folly) so we flew through security. Twice — we got rejected by the first passport check because we hadn’t paid the “Oh You Want To Leave That Will Be Twenty Five Dollars Please” exit fee. We did get to the gate with time to spare … specifically, 10 seconds. No kidding, we waited for 10 seconds before they called our row and we went in. Oh, and Chris and his big laptop bag got pulled aside for a random search by security! Yay!

During the long oceanic flight, Chris plowed through Juno (middling thumbs up), Control (middling thumbs up), and American Gangster (thumbs down), and decided that no movie can really be any good on that little screen, especially if it has dialogue that you need to actually hear. Also it was no help that the Ugly American behind us had a jowl-rattling snore that would wake the dead. Sharon rewatched Flight of the Conchords episodes again. That show is crack to her, apparently.

In San Francisco we got our bags, got through customs with blazing speed, rechecked the bags, and got Chris’s tickets corrected (did we mention that United had screwed up Chris’s US tickets?) Then had a little bit of time to sit and do internet work (thank you SFO for your excellent wifi) including the post that precedes this one. Then back on the plane …

In Denver we didn’t have to hassle with our bags since they were now checked through to Atlanta, so were able to finally sit down to some righteously greasy food and do some idle people watching. We sat next to a most surreal family from Brooklyn, ask us about it sometime. With another hour to kill, we then settled in at the gate for more idle reading and internet goofing (including hopefully this post), but discovered that Denver’s wifi is terrible. Instead of making you pay for it, it’s free, BUT it’s ad supported. How they actually insert the advertising uses a technical mechanism that breaks many websites, including that of this blog. And the signal was too weak to be usable anyway. Hooray.

In Atlanta, finally, we had to wait about an hour for our bags, but they showed up and that’s all that mattered at that point. Taxi ride, key in door, home! Hi cats! 2 am. 35 hours awake.

[update: added two panoramas]

Today started with a disappointment … After hauling ourselves to the airport to drop off our luggage so we could spend the day in Auckland free of them, we discovered that we could not take a bus to the nearby Otara Market as planned. The market only happens on Saturday mornings, but the bus from the airport to the Otara suburb … only runs Mon-Fri. Hmmph. Mmmmmkay, that just put us ahead of schedule on the rest of the day.

Which basically consisted of taking a ferry from downtown Auckland to the island of Rangitoto in the bay. Rangitoto formed out of thin air (well, sea water) as a new undersea volcano erupted about 600 years ago and thrust this new island up out of the water. It’s a couple miles around and has the familiar cone at the center, albeit a small one. What’s really amazing about this island is that the lava hasn’t broken down into soil yet, so most of the island is covered in this surreal deep-black fluffy-looking stuff that is actually volcanic rock. In some places a couple inches of soil has formed (starting with lichen on the rocks) and so you do have some plant life. But mostly it’s either bare black fluffy rock moonscape (despite 600 years of weathering) or overgrown with low plants that can eke out a life on the meager soil so far.

So in contrast to our self-guided travels for this entire trip, today we paid for the ferry ride out and went on a guided tour of the island. We piled into this tractor-trailer rig (with mostly retirees and toddlers) and went on a slow and impossibly bumpy ride around the island, with commentary by the tractor driver up front.

We had killer views of Auckland from the top of the volcano, of course. This first one shows the city of Auckland in the distance (not that far actually) in the center of the image, with the bays stretching from horizon to horizon littered with weekend sailboats. City of Sails indeed.

This last panorama shows the view from Rangitoto to the east. The newer volcanic island (600 years old) is right next to an older island (millions of years) that is basically farmland. In the far distance are the barrier islands and the Coromandel peninsula, or so we were told:

The ferry brought us back to the downtown wharf at around 4:15 pm, leaving us time to goof around downtown a little bit more and then take the airport shuttle back to the airport with time there to eat and relax a bit. However, that actually turned into something of a debacle, but that’s for part 2 of our marathon Saturday …

[update: finally found the picture of the lake]

Got breakfast at … the McDonalds in Greymouth, because that is the place that had the wireless internet. Go figure. Several older people hanging out with laptops there, which was weird.

Today was the big drive back east across the island to Christchurch to return the campervan and fly to Auckland. The drive was uneventful, except for when we had to drive through a treacherous gorge that was part of the pass (“Arthur’s Pass”) through the mountains. There had been signs for an hour discouraging people from towing a trailer through the pass. On our way into the mountains we were passed by ambulances and fire engines with sirens blaring. AN HOUR LATER we reached the gorge, where a sedan towing a trailer had hit the guardrail and nearly plunged to their deaths. It was an extremely remote place, just about the worst part of the entire pass, certainly with no cell phone coverage, and we wonder how long the accident wreckage was in place until word reached the emergency services to fire up their engines. As we passed them, finally, we all glowered at the college-aged morons who had created their own misery … The picture above was taken right after we reached the top of the pass, only a minute after getting past the accident site. That’s a permanent snowcap at the top of the mountain.

Then we passed through the very arid region east of the mountain peaks, which provide more starkly beautiful views, including this one of a small lake with whitecapped waves on it because the wind was so strong! Below is a 360-degree panorama, which Chris likes doing if only to watch Sharon roll her eyes. Obviously you can’t make out much in this web version, even if you click below to get the enlarged version … At full resolution they are stunning … we’ll have to get these printed as blowups.

After plowing through Christchurch city traffic (it was a Friday afternoon, after all), we returned the van, went to the airport to check in our bags and walked over to the Antarctic Center which is next to the airport. Christchurch is basically the traffic hub for travel (of scientists) to all points in Antarctica, including all US traffic to McMurdo Station and the South Pole station. So they have a tourism operation set up there at their headquarters with a museum that explains all about life in the Antartic (human, penguin and otherwise). It was OK, but Chris was underwhelmed. Sharon perused the gift shop most of the time.

On the short flight from Christchurch back up to Auckland, we managed to see several South Island sights again from high up, including the Kaikoura peninsula and Marlborough Sounds (through which our ferry had sailed a week ago). Then as we flew over the North Island, we peered through a door window porthole to catch a glimpse of Mount Egmont, which is a volcano with the classic conical shape (click here for pictures of what Mt Egmont looks like, much better than the blurry, distant view that we got)..

Arrived in Auckland, checked into the hotel and relaxed with a real bed and shower!

One last day of sightseeing on Saturday, and then in the evening the long flight back to Atlanta begins!

More funny names: Crippletown, Mount Doris, Cape Foul Wind, Condies Head, The Remarkables, Mount Awful.