This is going to be quick and dirty

Nothing wrong with that at all!

But, given one pound and 17 minutes on the computer for it, I have to type fast and loose and hope I don't spill wine on this stupid 12%£ limey computer. All while watching football and basketball scores in the background. What I have learned that I cannot jam into twitter:

• Virgin Atlantic allows only 6 KG for carry on. Got that? 12 pounds. That's nothing, nothing at all. All my planning in the crapper because of that. Sorry Virgin, you get booked no more. Eat that Branson.
• Cab from the airport is 55£, not 35£ as on the Arran house web site. You are losing points on Trip Advisor. Also losing for not having a main level door to the lounge- you know you should. Great location though, but there are 10 other hotels right here, with connections and probably better washers. Oh, and some personality, as you had promised but does not exist.
• Harrods and Oxford St. Who the hell thinks people aren't out shopping for the holidays!?! We could barely walk with the crowds. They are thick as horse manuer on Grandpa's farm. All other observations are media hype.
• If you don't care what's going on or what you might do next, travelling with children is a dream.
• The Sound of Music was ok, good, but you can get good half price tickets two rows back from where we were on the same day. Now I know. Now you know. :P
• Potted Potter- Fringe festival best thing you can do with an 8 year old who likes fart humor. Really. Absolutely the best thing you can do.
• Duck tour (dukw) - very funny and worth the 55£ for the whole family. Brilliant tour guide and lots of giggles.
• The buses in london are very nice, warm and neat. They take forever. But the tube is horrible and hard to find your way around in and you see nothing but, well, other people. And cabs, they are just as slow but should be your end of night transpo.
• Winter wonderland was ok, but expensive and not worth it except the little pancakes and mulled wine.
• Aran is a wise old soul and Nelson is a hedonistic old soul and they are an absolute delight to travel with.
• I cannot wait to get out of London - three days is plenty, thank you - and head for the hills on the train (spend the extra couple hundred for first class over four days if you are with kids and they are free).
• Somerset is the best place to go ice skating but book a day in advance.
• Don't go to the tower of London. Just don't. Oh, it's a 'must do!'. No it isn't, really. Go to the Tate. Go to a pub. Go shopping.

I bought a Hugo Boss scarf. Never thought I would, but, you know what? it's fantastic. Long and warm and very sporty green. Nelson and I plan to buy tweed jackets in the highlands because we are two dudes on a mission to be sporting it Scottish style. That's it, with 3:42 to go. Go Hokies!

About SDmicros

I completely forgot this nugget, but it is only really interesting to me given a long history working with computers thanks to my Mom (she wanted to know how to read the Library of Congress' new card catalog system in 1980 so I got introduced to a TRS-80 that year).

I have sd micros I bought for $29.95 each that are as big as my index finger nail and hold 8 GB of data. There were some with 16 GB, but who wants to be greedy. Look at your index finger nail. Just the nail. And imagine something a little smaller and black with gold connectors and that's 8GB. That holds up to 7 DVDs. That holds all the albums I care about. That goes in my little phone. That knocked me over, and it takes a lot for little technology to knock me over.

The TRS-80 mom bought had no hard drive (just like my phone!) but it couldn't store anything. Loading programs meant playing a tape recording into it's 16K of memory. 16K is 16 kilobytes. The memory in that machine that took up one very large desk was one 64th of a megabyte. And this was an advanced machine mom bought- you usually couldn't find one with more than 4 kilobytes of memory in it. In 1993 I took out a loan, a very large one for my means, to buy a computer that had a 20 MB hard drive. That's 20 Megabytes, 13 years later, storage. The memory was probably 256K, but I don't really recall. For storage though, and that's what we are talking here, that was one 51st of a Gigabyte. And that came in a slow spinning hard drive that liked to get scratched, lose data and die.

Now, by 1998 we were cooking. Solid state devices were out in the form of Newtons, then clios. 40 MB, no moving parts. Even when they got to 80 MB they were 9" by 5" and still one 12th of a Gigabyte. Mid 2000s, the first ipods? Yes, lots and lots of space, but moving parts whizzing around in there a whole 2" by 2". And now I have 8GB in something smaller than my index finger nail in my phone and oh my music sounds so nice. It plays movies by the way. Free software to rip down and rewrite DVDs and next thing you know you are carying libraries of useless things to the UK in your pocket.

Data for Family Trip to UK

Bumped up...

As you can see from my twitters, we have an outgoing dataload of 54 GB and 1,500 pages analog. Surreal and impressive, in some ways. In some, just interesting. And that's with nothing larger than a cam corder- two blackberry world phones with 8 GB sdmicros (more later), two ipod 3gs with 4GBs and one HD HD cam corder half price with 30GB for almost 10 hrs record time.

More impressive to me is 4 people doing two weeks in winter with only carry on. Two 21" rollers and two 25" rollers along with two courier bags (simple and small). All liquids, of course, diffused and in less than quart sized baggies. All it takes is planning, the willingness to wear some things twice and the knowledge that at least a couple guest houses you are visiting have laundry (that isn't even necessary as anyone who can't find a coin laundry next to a bar in any western city should not be travelling). For winter, one sneaky trick is silk undies- head to tow -for layers in cold and for pajamas.

Each of us has rolled- 7 socks, 7 undies, 2 silks (head to toes), 5 shirts (plus our wear over stuff), 3 pants (you must wear these multiple days dandies), hat, gloves (slimline), cotton sweater or sweatshirt, thicker sweater or winter coat. Extravagences include second pair of shoes (you don't need these, but we have a Christmas dinner to attend, the theater, Christmas eve service, St. Paul's choir, High Tea), a sports jacket (travelsmith) for me, skirt for the ladies, a tie (Nels and I- see above), a travel pillow each (we are not cavepeople!). The kids, being little people, crammed in one 6" by 5" stuffed animal each for rough spots.

One guide book. I felt extravagent not ripping out pages and putting them in a baggy like my mom taught me. You should do that if you are not a really good packer- only take where you will actually be, duh.

Other things in the packalongs: two power cords (1 for ipods, 1 for blackberries), two decks of cards (extravagant! we only need one! A deck of cards is the only game you need for this sort of trip- it is about 1,000 games in one), airborn (medically proven not to work, but nice little logenzes with an excellent placebo effect), directions to everything with reservations all cut right down to size (data duplicated on phones), money and plastic.

Next winter trip, I do away with the winter coats. Have done so for me this one- layers and waterproof windbreaker can do everything a bulky, single winter coat can do. Thick winter coats are a scam and I think I've broken that wide open.

Well, that's it. I'm sure I've forgotten 10 essential items I am going to scream about from the UK. If so, I will tweet them and pray I don't die of frostbite. Wait, it's warmer in London than Virginia? What? Another scam!