C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Fri, 7 Jul 2006 12:30:09 -0400 (CLT)

Just back from Buenos Aires.  Had a good time.  Much food.  Some art.  Big
blister on my heel, though.

Overwhelming impression: dog shit.  All over the damn place.  And dog-shit
teams: people (usually male) walking packs of 8-12 dogs at once.

Stayed in a pretty nice place (although a bit damp - the whole city was
damp).  Prices are still lower than Chile, so printed out the Amazon
wish-list and headed to the CD shops.  Ended up with a slightly wider
variety than I expected: for some reason I had Rammstein on my list, so I
am now proud owner of German Heavy Metal (well, perhaps Dance Metal is the
correct term).  And I finally found a copy of Royksopp's Melody AM (which
I have just been playing, and which is already terribly terribly
familiar).

Currently in the player is Massive Attack's 100th Window; on the queue is
Kid A and the latest from the Gotan Project.

Books - read Power's Galatea 2.2.  Wonderful.  Just been reading some
comments around the net.  No-one has mentioned one thing that stuck me:
the use of autobiography to help suspend disbelief.  Maybe the technical
side doesn't require mush suspension of disbelief for many readers (a
neural net comes to life, is all - maybe that's what most people expect in
a day's work for the average computer scientist).  Anyway, a sweet sweet
book.

Picked up a book at the airport to read on the way home - Alejandro
Dolina's Cronicas del Angel Gris.  Took a while to get past the rather
heavy prologue (written by someone else - I don't know if I was missing
large doses of irony, or if it's a "cultural thing"), but the book itself
seems pretty good - deft, amusing at least.  Hopefully I will continue to
read this (need to improve my spanish).

[later] Oh the irony of it all - the suckiest CD so far (Massive Attack)
is copy protected.

Wine - on arriving home last night I opened a bottle of Bonarda (Norton). 
No idea what to expect - we bought it because we didn't recognise the
variety.  Well, it's watery.  Which might explain why it only seemed to
exist in cheap bootles!  Hmmmm.  Google suggests it's the most common
variety in Argentina, used in blends.  From Italy (Bonarda Piemontese),
light, fruity.  Certainly light.  Sounds more intersting in retrospect -
maybe we should have looked harder for more expensive wine (we just hit a
supermarket and aimed at mid-level; this one was a bit cheaper than that,
but we also picked up a slightly more expensive Malbec).

Andrew