MQP in London

Breaking the silence

2008-12-05T15:05:00.002-05:00

After 2 weeks of not touching my blog... I must apologize for my negligence. Truth is that my MQP has actually started to become a time suck (who would have thought, huh) and when I get home from BofA... I find my self just wanting to eat and not do much of anything else.

But yeah.. that's my excuse. Thanks giving came and went... nothing to spectacular there. Took Friday off and just slept the entire day. The only 'turisty' day was Saturday... and all we did was go to the British Museum. Did you know that most of their collection is stolen? From the Rossetta stone, to the mummies all the way to the japanese artifacts - si it was a bit funny. Now you must be asking you self "so were are the pix of this place"... and the short answer is that I don't have have. The long answer is that since I haven't used my caera since I went to Oxford... I totaly forgot that my batteries were dead.....until I got to the museum and it would not turn on >_< doh!

Since I don't have picture to provide my readers with entertainment, I have compiled a list. I call this list "Things that make me lol".

American hip-hop and gagster rap in British bars
+40-year-old couples in the club
Blue-color British comuters obsession with BlackBerries
Down jackets and scarfs in 50ºF weather
Sky news
90's American movies on late-night British TV

And that's about it... I have exactlly 2 more weeks in the UK and 1 more week of MQP. So I'll have a week to my self and not waking up early - which I'm looking for.

So yeah... my posts are going to be a bit lacking at least for the next week which is when my MQP will be officially over. So until peeps.

Cheers,
Maurice W.

Weekend roundup

2008-11-17T14:45:00.005-05:00

So lets recap what I actually did this weekend:

Friday

Ministry of Sound

Saturday

Walk around the London Bridge area

Sunday

Windsor Castle
Stonehenge
Oxford

In case you read my last post... you may notice that we did not make it to the Tower of London. But more on that later... lets go in order:

Ministry of Sound

Prolly the most awesome club I have been to. 4 separate rooms + a VIP area. Each with a different DJ and each with its own environment - totally independent from the others. Simply amazing.

London Bridge

As I said... we did not make it to the Tower of London,. Why? The placed closed at 4pm... and we were not ready to leave until around 3-ish so it was pointless. So I just went back to bed while the rest of the group went somewhere (no clue where), woke back up at 5pm and decided to randomly walk around London. After walking about about 50min (and a few tube stops later), I found my self in the London Bridge area.
Many people confuse Tower Bridge with London Bridge. Let me clarify this for you: Tower Bridge is the fancy looking bridge, while London Bridge (as seen in the picture above) is a simple plain old bridge. London Bridge, how ever, does have an amazing view of Tower Bridge.

Me, standing on London Bridge with Tower Bridge in the back

Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Oxford
This was part of a tour. Left around 9am, got to Windsor at 10-ish and stayed there for about 2 hours. Then off to Stonehenge for about 50min then Oxford for 1 hours 30 min.
While all 3 places were nice, what I loved the most about the tour was our guide. His name was Fill (or Phill?)(or so he said). Very British, very talkative, very informative.
that's him (in the hat) talking about the first coal-powered train in London and some history about Windsor.

Stonehenge was a bit over rated in my opinion. While it is amazing to see such HUGE stones in such an elaborate formation... at the end of the day they are just a bunch of stones. Also.. they are not AS big as they always look in pictures.
Oxford was the last place we visited. I felt like I could spend all day walking through Windsor Castle... but I would have loved to spend the night in Oxford. It just has a great small-town feeling - very cozy and comfortable. Not to mention that it has 19 college, all which make up Oxford University. So many little streets and such beautiful looking buildings. OH! There was also an open street market in Oxford for the weekend... and the food... good lord the food... it all look SOOO GOOD.

A booth at the open market. Yes... it smelled as amazing as it looks. anyone know where I can find one of these in the US?

This is an entrance to one of the 19 colleges in Oxford. They all look as magnificent as this one.

So that was my weekend in a nutshell. If anyone still wants more pictures, the rest of them can be found over at my Flickr page - so feel free. Most pictures are 8 megapixel, but a few are 5 (not many) so you'll be able to see every little detail if you really want to ;-)

Till next time mates.
Cheers,

Maurice W.

PS: sorry for changing the font style on this post... but Flickr seems to have removed the 'Font Family' option from their WYSISYG editor. Oh well.

The weekend is upon us

2008-11-14T14:00:00.000-05:00

Finally Friday, and what a weekend I have ahead...

Friday:
- Ferry Corsten @ Ministry of Sound
Saturday:
- Recover from the night before
- London Tower and London Bridge
- Triplet house party in Hackney (tentative)
Sunday:
- All-day tour of Stonehenge, Winsor Castle and Oxford
- Some how still have energy to go to work the next day

On the flip side... every time I check the gaming news... I feel nostalgia from being away from consoles in such AWESOME times...
Here is a list of all what I won't be able to play until late December (if I still have money) ;_;

Mirrors Edge
Call of Duty 5: World at War
Little Big Planet
Resistance 2
Guitar Hero: World Tour
PixelJunk Monster trophies patch
High Velocity Bowling trophies patch
Fallout 3
Gears of War 2
Xbox 360 interface upgrade (NXE)
Motor Storm Pacific Rift
Rock Band 2 DLC (new Foo Fighters album)

*sigh*

Oh well... this is first in my short but frequent blog posts... and I'm glad for that 'cause I need to go take a nap before we go to Ministry in about 2 hours. Also... expect some new pix for Monday of my crazy weekend travels.

Peace out homies
- Maurice W.

PS: sorry for no pix this time around... but I'm too hyped about Ministry and I need to sleep. I'll make up for it by the time the weekend is over - I promise ;)

Life on the tube

2008-11-12T06:16:00.009-05:00

First off, many people have commented about the lack of pictures in blog as well as the low-rate I post things. Since I’m a big believer in customer service… I will cater to both of those comments. First off, I’ll try to add pictures when possible (this post is still all text) and second, in place of long infrequent posts I’ll do much shorter much more often posts. Which means that this will (or should be) the last long post (and I mean long…)

It’s been about 2 weeks now and London is yet to loose its magic. Leaving home at 8am on the other hand has gotten quite old quite quickly. Luckily taken the tube (aka: subway) every day provides me with vast insight to the British commuting culture and I have came up with a few rules to follow while commuting in the UK (a survival guide if you may)

1) Entertainment is a must:

Probably the first thing you’ll notice while commuting on the tube is that 80% of the white-collar travellers are reading. Many opt for the free newspapers (which actually reports REAL news, not just phony tabloid junk) but others have real books, magazines and a few seem to use e-books (I’ve seen 2 Sony digital readers in the wild and a few people using iPods). The amazing thing about this is that nothing seems to break their concentration… reading while standing, walking, talking or even gripping the handle bars for dear life – THEY NEVER TAKE THEIR EYES OFF THE PAPER.
About 18% (where I fall in – podcasts make a 40min commute THAT much better) opts for some sort of music player. iPods are super common (no surprise there) but CD players are not as rare as you would expect them to be.
The other 2% is usually playing with their phone – which is always a BlackBerry, Nokia or iPhone. Some commuter must have a serious addiction to brick-breaker at this point.

2) Silence is golden:

Maybe this is just a consequence of everyone having some form of entertainment or maybe the entertainment came about because of this…. But which ever came first… the fact is that nobody… I mean NOBODY says a word in the tube. If you need somebody to move out of your way, simply tap them of the shoulder or nudge them with your elbow. I once said “thank you” to somebody for moving… and they looked at me as if I had gone mad.

3) Each white-collar for them self:

Just the other day…as I waited for the Jubilee line and watched people pack into the tube like canned lemmings, a guy had a little roller back which got stuck in the doors. As the poor guys struggled to get the doors open and his bag in… 2 other fellow commuters helped him. The joint effort did indeed manage the for the automated door open…but as soon as that happened, the 2 guys who were helping simply crammed into the train with total disregard for the person they seemed to be helping. So while it appeared as if they were helping this guy get his bag into the train… their true intentions were just to get the door open so they can squeeze into it as well. As of course, the other 300 people who were queued up for the train had no reaction (or comment) at all.

Of course…. These rules only hold place during rush hours. On the weekends it seems to be a free-for-all. People are a lot friendlier when to commuting to/from work too. Last Saturday night…I actually had a lady join our conversation on the tube, which I found quite refreshing :-)

For those interested in what my commute is like (distance wise), here you can download a PDF version of the tube map…. And below is my commute route marked in red (from Sloane Square to Canary Wharf)

Cheers,
Maurice W.

Dificult takes us a day; imposible, a week

2008-10-31T01:06:00.000-04:00

Hurray! The beast is dead!

And by “the beast” I mean my sucky room and by “dead” I mean that I moved. But yes! After dodging all the naw-sayers and much bureaucracy… Martin (my roommate) and I made it out of our shitty 1st-floor room (room 110) up to the 8th-floor (room 805).

Life on the 8th floor is a blast. Our view has changed from a plain white wall of the building next to us… to an amazing view of Chelsea and the London Eye. But that is just one of many benefits. Here is a table comparing changes (yeah... it's a screenshot from Word):

So it’s pretty obvious why 805 is so much better.

We also secretly kept a key-card for 110...which means we have access to 2 kitchens... so we can go into their kitchen and take dishwasher pellets when we run out.
Thanks to this, I was able to get back in the dreaded 110 and take a few pictures. As I was doing that... my camera died...reminding me that both my battery charger and card reader were in the US. So I went out and spent about £30 on a USB multi-card reader and a battery charter (not THAT bad since the charger came with 2 AA and AAA batteries).

Anyhow... I’ve been wanting to do an in-depth observation of my (not so) wonderful accommodations IES provides to us. So I think I’ll go on a picture-taking-spree tomorrow and blog about that.

Until then!

- Maurice W.

PS: here is an e-mail from work I found pretty funny - lol

On Friday 31 October there may be an anti-capitalist demonstration around Reuters Plaza, Canary Wharf, commencing at around 5.00pm. Participants of this event intend to congregate outside the main entrance to the Jubilee underground, adjacent to Reuters Plaza. It is not known how many people will take part but it is possible it could involve large numbers. Participants may be wearing Halloween-themed fancy dress to conduct 'trick or treat'.

Please note that if this event does take place on a large scale, it may be covered by the national and international media. Due to the potential crowds there will be an enhanced police and security presence on the Estate.

first 48 hours in the future

2008-10-27T06:56:00.001-04:00

Welcome to (+5h into) the future!
I've broken down my first 48h here in 3 sections for easy reading ;-)

The flight
Getting here was not as fun as it could have been due to the +3h delay Virgin Atlantic had. First they claimed the baggage count was "off by one" and they were not willing to leave with out solving that issues. After about 45... they announced that they now ran into a "technical difficulty" which also had to be fixed (does that mean that the missing bag was stuck in the engine?). Long story short... we left JFK around 12:40am in place of 9:35pm.

Amenities on the flight were amazing. There was this 9" screen in front of each seat which had a variety of movies and games to select from. Staying faithful to the geek within, I ended up playing a little over an hour of "In-Flight Tetris". The foo was less than stellar, but the booze were free so that kept me happy :-)

Day 1 (right after the flight)
Once in London (12:30pm GMT +0 time), out of Hethrow and at my temporary residence in Chelsea... I found my self assigned to what is the smallest room I've ever had to live out of (Pictures and additional comments about that will be left for another post...). And to top it off, they can't turn on our ports until Monday or Tuesday - the suggested alternative was to plug into the common rooms.

Mt initial impression of London is that it's a lot like NY. We walked around Chelsea for about 3 hours while popping in and out of shops gathering some essentials. (yes, I'm judging the ENTIRE city based on the 3 streets we walked down - lol). Prices were not as bad as I expected them to be, but I'll get into details about that in another post since this one is already getting long.

While hanging out in the common room with my fellow WPI-ers, we met a Brazilian kid who has been living in London for about 7 years now. As a way to celebrate our first night in the UK we decided to go to a Bar (no, not a Pub but a Bar). And I must say, bars around here are not as rowdy as the ones in the US. It was quite a pleasant experience.

Day 2
First night in London started off with a bang...actually more like a really high-pitch "BEEEEEP". At 11am the fire alarms went off waking both me and my roommate up. We were not alarmed at all, but more annoyed if anything else. The first reaction was "how do we turn this shit off", his answer: "can we just take out the battery?". But we decided that it would be a better idea to leave the building in case there really was a fire.... So standing outside (in the rain) we discovered that somebody burnt food on the 7th floor kitchen and opened the kitchen door which then set off the entire building alarm... thanks a lot DOUCHE BAG!

Now that we were already WIDE awake... my fellow WPI-ers and I decided to go have a English breakfast. Sausage, 2 sunny-side-up eggs, toast, ham, baked beans, hash browns and a glass of OJ - not bad for about £7 if you ask me. With a full belly, it was now time to obtain means of communicating with each here - so to the cellphone store we went. Fortunately all 4 of us have non-US or unlocked phones and SIM cards are free here... so we just needed to add money to any pay-as-you-go plan. Pretty nifty if you ask me :-)

daily meal: check, communication device: check, living essentials: check. Only thing missing was food for the rest of the week. There are food-stores around, one bigger than the other (I can't remember the names so I'll get back to you on that later). Since we had time to kill, we went to both of them. It was really nice to see hard-alcohol and beer being sold in supermarkets :-D I also think I'm going to get into the habit of drinking wine with my dinner, since some of theme were pretty cheap and it will make me look classy.

Conclusion
In summary, my first 48h were not action-packed by any means but it was very relaxing and enjoying. I have, how ever, spent about £60 at this point which is more than I would spend in a normal weekend in the US... but that includes eating out twice, going to a bar, buying a bathmat and other 'room essentials' plus enough food for a week so I don't think it's that bad.

I promise that my future posts will not be anywhere as long as this. It's just that there i always a lot to see during the first 48h. But now I must end this since it is 6:54am and I need to be at my project site by 9am (which includes a 40min tube ride).

Cheers everyone

- Maurice W.