Despite the combined efforts of Air Canada, the Canadian authorities, and the US authorities, I seem to have (remarkably) made my connection to Boston. Which means that in just a few short minutes I’ll be taking off for the final leg of my journey home. Which reminds me of something that impressed me at Paris De Gaulle — you didn’t need to take your laptop out of your bag for their x-ray machine, because, I was told in superior terms, their technology is, indeed, superior. I’m not going to disagree with a Frenchman, especially when he’s right.

In fact, the whole experience at De Gaulle was fairly smooth, with the exception of a lack of automated check-in systems. In contrast, Canada send me through a highly confusing (and poorly marked) sequence of Canadian customs (“Why did you come through Montreal instead of flying directly to Boston from Paris?” “Um, because Air Canada was cheaper, I guess.” “Oh. Well. You’ll see why.”), Canadian ticket check, making me go back upstairs to re-check my luggage, not staffing the luggage check counters, giving me a second customs form to fill out (this time for USA), checking my ticket again, checking my passport again, USA customs, USA supplemental screening (which weirded me out completely), USA hand search of my checked bag, actually checking the bag, metal detector and X-ray, supplemental screening for my laptop, supplemental screening for my backpack, and finally sending me to the farthest away terminal in the place. Goodness, I sure do hope my checked bag made it onto this very tiny plane.

Its funny, because Montreal’s airport is pretty much just a very empty, very slow, very awful, but slightly nicer looking version of Paris’s. After all, everyone is still speaking (and everything is written in) French. I want to go home.

After the great London fire of 1666 destroyed 80% of that city, Sir Christopher Wren was given the monumental task of rebuilding. His influence can be seen everywhere, with some of the most beautiful and lasting buildings, including St. Paul’s Cathedral standing as a lasting tribute to his great works. Despite this, one thing Sir Christopher did not achieve was better transportation. Because many building basements survived, legal disputes arose over land ownership and the plan for a grid city with wide avenues was abandoned. The city was rebuilt along the lines of its existing street plan but with modern additions like a sewer system. Thus even today London consists primarily of many small, congested streets and small, congested sidewalks.

Paris, in contrast, was rebuilt under the direction of Napoleon by razing entire city blocks in order to create wide, modern boulevards and thoroughfares, dozens of bridges over the Seine, and massive parkways and sidewalks that, one would think, would serve to make the city a clean and pleasurable place in which to travel. Remarkably, the amount of congestion in Paris is similar to that of London. The main streets are massive, with a dozen lanes, their sidewalks wide enough to let two dozen people march side-by-side. Areas outside monuments and landmarks contain huge amounts of open space. Paris is simultaneously a dense urban center and a comfortable, spread-out, well-designed transportation conduit.

So why are the Paris streets and walkways just as packed as those of London? Why are the bridges just as crowded? I think that people have a remarkable ability to expand to eat up all available space. If two dozen people can walk side-by-side along the sidewalk, then three dozen will try to, jostling and passing and bumping and getting frustrated. Had London more room and the same number of buildings, shops, restaurants, and attractions, more people would come. In California every time a huge new road works project is finished and new freeway lanes come online, they are instantly filled and soon enough we have the same traffic jams. It isn’t going to ever end as long as resources and people are plentiful.

One of the best things about London, Paris, and other dense urban centers that were forward-thinking is that there is plenty of public transportation in the form of trains, subways, and busses. These transportation systems, of course, have the remarkable virtue of becoming *faster* the more they are used. Think about it: the more people you put on a train, the more cars they will add, the more trains they will put in service, the more people will get to their destinations more quickly. Up to a (very high) saturation point, trains and subways and monorails can continue to be expanded in a way that makes them *more* efficient, not less. For busses this is true to a lesser extent. The Paris Metro trains I’ve ridded have all been crowded. Same goes for their commuter rail. Same goes for the London Underground. These services *do* start to reach their saturation point, but the sidewalks and the roads serve as the necessary bottleneck that keeps all the other services functioning at their peak efficiency.

In which I state gross generalizations and simplifications of things I’ve discovered in the UK that differ from things in the US. See also: part the first.
# British TV seems to find it highly amusing that Hugh Laurie (a Brit) plays a grumpy American doctor on _House_. They especially like it when his accent slips.
# Construction crews, many police officers, some cyclists, and people from numerous other professions where it is appropriate wear jackets or vests with bring yellow or white reflective stripes. This “high vis” clothing is required on construction sites and is really darn useful in picking police out of the crowd. It is fairly prevalent here, but virtually unseen in the States.
# Street performers are called “buskers,” and Underground tunnels bear signs stating “no busking” and designating busking areas.
# The phrase “mind the gap” refers to the large gaps between trains and platforms in some tube stations. Newer or renovated stations have a minimal gap, and the announcement is not made at those stations.
# Much of the transportation (busses, trains, etc.) in the UK is privatised. All of the transportation in Glasgow is excellent.
# “TV Licensing: easier to pay, harder to avoid,” is the tagline of a BBC advert campaign. Brits can be fined up to £1000 ($1883) for failure to pay their TV license fee, which currently stand at approximately £130 ($245) per annum.
# Fries are called chips. Chips are called crisps. When you say fries, there is a 50/50 chance they’ll know what you mean. Thanks, American TV!
# Most of the non-fancy restaurants have crappy ketchup. This was explained to me by a native simply by, “we’re cheap.” Luckily, the fancy place we went to had Heinz, which is important when your steak comes with chips!
# Brits refer to GPS navigation systems as “sat nav,” which, in my opinion, is a way cooler name. *Added 5/28:* It occurs to me why this is the case. GPS is a “brand” that refers to a US military satellite system which provides global positioning information. Europe, which does not like the idea of relying on the US military for such a critical service, is constructing an alternative network of satellites called Galileo which will not bear the “GPS” moniker. Thus the naming “sat nav” is more appropriate in addition to sounding cooler.

In which I state gross generalizations and simplifications of things I’ve discovered in the UK that differ from things in the US. See also: part the second.
# Scotland has a major problem with knife crime (guns are very difficult to get ahold of around here) and so are upping the penalties for knife possession. If someone who has been previously convicted of a violent crime is found carrying a blade, the prosecutor will now take the remarkable step of asking the judge not to grant bail prior to trial. And they consider this to be a major enforcement step. And expect it to make a difference.
# In restaurants, they never, ever bring you your check. You have to ask for it. Two Scots who were behind me on the shuttle to Heathrow were complaining about the American behavior on this, to the effect of: “I was terribly insulted when they brought me the check before I asked for it. I asked the waitress if they have a problem with lots of people leaving with not paying, and she said no.” She thought that the reason we bring people checks when the meal is finished is because otherwise they might forget to pay?
# In restaurants, they don’t refill your drinks. They just don’t. Not even water. When I ask for more water, they always seem very confused, and bring me a new glass. Apparently the invention we call a “pitcher” does not exist here. (Edit: Actually, in fancy restaurants they do top up your glasses when you’ve purchased things by the bottle, but the point still stands.)
# In Scotland, and I suspect England as well, Chip and PIN has huge penetration. It is a system utilizing SmartCards(tm) and keypads for entering a PIN before a transaction can be validated. To support this, most restaurants now use portable wireless credit card readers that they bring to your table, use to process your transaction, and immediately give you an accurate receipt (including gratuity). This is awesome.
# London has moved entirely to a type of taxi cab that is advertised as the “most accessible in the world.” It includes a wheelchair ramp and restraints, two jump seats in addition to the regular seats, doors that automatically lock when the vehicle is in motion, bright yellow handles and seat covers for the visually impaired, and an induction loop audio system to communicate with the driver, which is especially useful for people with hearing aids. In order to fit all this sophistication, the vehicles have no boot (trunk), so luggage is placed in the passenger compartment.

More to come…

# Was the last 30 seconds of the season finale pre-planned, or tacked-on after they found out they were getting renewed?
# Will it be resolved within the first episode back, or will it be an ongoing plot thread (along with the requisite casting change)?

The Berkman Center is an awesome place where you get to rub shoulders daily with movers and shakers in the cyberlaw and cyberpolitics fields. Other perks of working here include a nifty @cyber.law.harvard.edu email address, cool lunch talks on cyberlaw topics (with free food!) every Tuesday, and, of course, decent summer pay for a student who needs a short-term job.

So with that said, I’d like to announce that we are looking for three students or recent graduates to fill the following positions, which can either be classified as paid jobs or paid internships, depending on how the mood strikes you. These jobs are flexible — you need to be able to fulfill the minimum requirements, but if you can do more or have additional interests, we can probably expand the scope to take advantage of your extra skills.

|^. *Web Designer*
$11.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for creating new web site designs and site graphics based off a pre-existing style manual and some sample templates. Work will include designing new, visually-appealing sites and graphics for technology conferences, Berkman projects, and other event sites. You would be interfacing with research fellows and Berkman staff, determining their needs, providing sample sketches and diagrams, and creating clean, effective, and appealing web sites that can be implemented in HTML. You should have a good understanding of the abilities and limitations of HTML-based design, but do not need to have any coding experience. |
|^. *Web Developer*
$10.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for creating new web sites based off a pre-existing style manual and templates. You should be extremely comfortable coding well-formed HTML with CSS. Much of the work will involve modifying existing desigs for use as WordPress templates and formatting new content for web display. You should also have experience using MediaWiki (the software that underlies Wikipedia). If you have additional design or development experience (such as web site design, graphic arts, or coding for the web) the scope of the job can be expanded. |
|^. *Content Specialist*
$9.50/hr. | This position includes responsiblity for assisting Berkman staff and project fellows in creating and updating web sites including project and conference sites. This position would include some measure of copy writing and editing, so good writing, spelling, and grammar skills are a must. You should have some experience with basic HTML and have used WordPress or another blogging tool. This position will also be working on wikis as well as our in-house content management system. Some time would also be spent cataloguing, capturing, and posting pre-recorded multimedia content, including conferences, lectures, and the like. |

Start and end dates are flexible but should be around June 1 — Sept 1. Please send all resumes and links to zeno _care-of_ cyber.law.harvard.edu

The folks at ONI are adopting some more prudent security measures, including standardizing on PGP keys. This has encrouaged me t once again renew my PGP interest, and generate a couple new keys corresponding to my current email addresses. If you want to contact me securely with almost no chance of government interception, snag my key from a public key server and verify the fingerprint with the following. Do the same if you just want to verify that the messages I send you are really from me, as I am now auto-signing almost everything I send.

table.
| *Key ID:* | B87DED8B |
| *Email:* | zeno _care-of_ agblog.com |
| *Fingerprint:* | E59D BDFC FE19 BEA0 D34B B520 886E 86A5 B87D ED8B |

table.
| *Key ID:* | 84746329 |
| *Email:* | zeno _care-of_ cyber.law.harvard.edu |
| *Fingerprint:* | BC4C A886 B174 11C9 DEA6 CD9B B983 8E89 8474 6329 |

No idea what this is all about? Read and be edified. If you use Thunderbird, this will get you hooked up.

I have a problem — my computer can’t concentrate.

I’ve found a lot of ways over time to make my Mac work better for me. I run a bunch of little utilities and menu bar widgets and such that give me the information I want when I want it and make it very easy for me to do frequent actions, such as control my music, without having to waste time switching between programs. This goes along with my very strong belief that your computer is not working for you unless you have customized it to work the way you want to. In my ideal future, no one would ever ask to use anyone else’s computer because it would be completely incomprehensible, it would be so adapted to its owner.

Anyway, on Friday I wiped and completely reloaded my computer, hoping that it would solve the strange instability issues I’ve been having. Now I’m keeping even more track than I was before of resource usage, trying to arrive at the ideal combination of the utilities I want and the stability I require, along with keeping my memory and processor usage low. It isn’t an easy thing to achieve.

As you can see from the above, I don’t actually have very many apps running at the moment (the list was truncated to remove some small programs required by the operating system). While Safari, which has several open browser windows, may be justified in taking up 178MB of RAM, Quicksilver, my launcher, which isn’t even being used at the moment, takes up a whopping 109MB! iTunes seems a bit high at 65MB, and Adium, my IM client, seems high as well at 43MB, but 38MB for Synergy? Synergy is a simple app that lets me control my music with key combinations. It should be a small, simple add-on to iTunes, not a 38MB behemoth. Same with Growl, at 33MB, which shows notifications when events happen (like new mail arriving, or new songs coming on). And finally, look at QuietMBP! This is a tiny utility that does one thing — keeps my processor usage at a certain level — to deal with a terrible Apple design flaw that causes the MacBook Pro to emit an ear-splitting whine whenever it goes into processor power save mode. 15MB for the privilege of not having headaches may be a small price to pay, but it is still too high. In contrast, we have the Activity Monitor, from whence that screenshot came, which shows me all sorts of useful process information and graphs, all wile taking up only 10.5MB of RAM. I have to assume some of the other examples are simply sloppy programming if a mature app like Activity Monitor can keep its footprint so low.

Keep in mind that I usually have a lot more things running — four or five more utilities, my Mail program, etc. But even with this very minimal set of utilities, you can see why a Mac runs slowly with less than 1GB of RAM. The one good thing I can say about my current situation is that nothing I’m running right now seems to be the cause of the instability. I’ll keep adding back items, one at a time, so that I can isolate what was causing all the grief.

_A Prairie Home Companion_ will be coming to the Boston area in mid-June. Anyone want to go see it? (Why do I sense a deafening silence approaching…)