In an ongoing attempt to tick off as many national parks as possible, we've now been to the Petrified Forest. It's basically a desert with a lot of stone logs in it. This doesn't quite cover it though; the fossilized remains are so dense at points that you would believe that they have been placed there, but it's actually natural. Although it was hot (about 36C I think), I seem to have acclimatised now; keeping the air con off in the car helps. This gives you the freedom to walk around at peace, except for the need to consume water and factor 50 sunblock in roughly equal quantities. Ironically, the two best sights, however, were not the fossils: first, newspaper rock which is covered in 1000 year old petroglyphs — there are literally 100's of them; and, second, the sunset. The sky was deep red, with a cloud just above the horizon, light up with a bright halo.

Now, I am in the lobby of the El Tovar Hotel; 20 seconds walk outside the door is the south rim of the Grand Canyon. I don't know what to say about this that is not obvious; it's really big, very colourful and awe inspiring. Walking around it for a day will stay with me for quite a while.

Without wishing to be a party-pooper, I think that Waimea Canyon on Kauai is actually better; it's 1/20th the size but it's also very wet, teeming with life.

Well, okay, so actually we drove. From San Diego, we drove straight to Indio, which is just south of the Joshua Tree National Park. Got there to late to do anything; to be honest, the area (Palm Springs) looks like there is little to do except bask in luxury of expensive hotels. The next day, we drove through the Indio mountains; this is edge of the desert proper and was, in a nutshell hot (38C) and dry.

The Joshua Tree park was $15 to get in with a car; money well spent. It's full of Joshua Trees as you might guess, but also amazing rocks, cactus of all sorts, animals, a hidden valley (which really is hidden, I got quite nervous when the exit was not where I thought, but another 100m on). The sunset was wonderful.

Today, we drove across the Mohave desert, or at least the outskirts of it. The fuel gauge just went shooting down, as the air con fought against the desert heat. We skirted London Bridge (for this is where it ended up) and then caught Route 66 (which isn't called 66 anymore). Oatman clearly lives entirely on tourism; it's complete with Tavern, jail with gallows and, bizarrely, semi-wild ex-pit ponies. It was actually less tacky than you might think, and the journey there was fabulous.

After that, we headed to Flagstaff which is where I am now, in a motel. It's pleasant and cool, being at a little over 2000m in elevation. The motel is on Route 66 again. It's also next to the Himalaya Grill; no idea why they called it Grill; nor Himalaya as it's not basically curry, although with anise and a few other unusual spices. Well, suffice it to say, I am now very stuffed and rather happy.

So, two days in San Diego; it was a busy place. Comic Con was on; I've never seen so many Jedi in one place, although the Boba Fett's made a pretty good showing.

Most of the stuff that I saw in San Diego, I've been to before; the exceptions was Balboa Park — very nice indeed, lots of museums, including a botanics and a cactus gardens — and Coronado — chilled out, lovely and, no doubt, very expensive.

Also spent 3 hours in car hire places. A throughly irritating and unpleasant experience. I was taking back one car and taking out another. The first car had some bumper marks on the rear; apparently this required urgent buffing to return a hire car with 80,000 miles to full service and this would cost $75. Much arguing with the idiot cliche of a hire man ("is this how you do business?"). In the end, paper and water cleaned it up. I guess that I should not have been surprised by a car hire place called "A1 Budget Hire", but it was tiresome.

The second place, this time Dollar Car Hire, decided that we hadn't paid them enough and they should charge $200 extra, for a single way journey. This is after an 2 hour wait in the queue; this one, we are going have to take up with the credit card company.

Ah, well, onwards and upwards; we have moved to Indio which is inland and in the desert. No idea what it's like as it was dark when we arrived except that it's really hot; yeah, well, I guess it's a desert.

Yep, so Portland is definately not so bad. We ended up in the Irish pub last night, which was fine up to the point they started the pixie music. Then we moved to a second pub, which was book-lined and made you go to the bar to get drinks. Much nicer.

I hit the sack just after 11 — I was really tired, and unable to count how many beers with the combination of pitchers and variable glass size.

Now in Portland airport, heading south to the hydrocarbon assault of San Diego.

Okay, so it's possible that I was a bit rude about Portland yesterday. I walked to the meeting today, down the river side past the multiple bridges. It was overcast, warm but not hot. I could have got a bus or streetcar, though; Portland has a good light-rail transit system, but multiple forms of trains, overhead cable cars. There's also good support for bikes as well, with a few bikes going past every few minutes. Maybe, I was just being a bit miserable yesterday.

At the interoperability workshop. It's small but focused. But there's no network! I don't know what to do? I might end up even listening to the talks now.

Flying into Portland, it looks a really beautiful place. It's got a hilly, dynamic, green and water-rich landscape. The city itself, after this, is a bit of a let down to be honest. We're in the Benson Hotel — a local landmark the programme booklet tells me. It's at the edge of the downtown district which is small, yet tall. Small is actually good, as it's not far to get to one of the quieter backstreets where there is plenty of simple, cheap food. Heading North, the areas get slightly seedier (bar, then camping shop, then grocer, the full nude review theatre). After the vibrancy, relaxation and excitement of Toronto, it seems bucolic to say the least.

The Benson Hotel is nice, but somewhat tatty. They got all the frills — doormen outside, chandeliers, idiot guest at the front desk shouting out how badly he's been treated. The guest room, however, shows that while the attention to detail is there, they have forgotten the basics. The glass in the window has integrated The window frames are dirty and are single glassed sash windows, making the room cold; the heating (which you need as a result) has only a "hotter, colder" thermostat so it takes ages to get it right. The furnishings are all grand but have clearly seen their better days.

I think that I have finally understood the difference between US and European cities. In Europe, evolution and economics has given us strangely organised functional parts of town, with roads randomly and chaotically scattered throughout. The US cities have incredible organised roads with the functions scattered randomly; facely buildings, next a brightly lit shop, next to a bar and then a parking lot ($7 all day — land is not expensive here). I guess Americans get as confused by our winding roads as we do by their building chaos.

Maybe I am being a bit negative here; perhaps it's because I am being all sad and pathetic and not knowing anyone.

What a pleasure it is to be back in America. ISMB and Toronto were good, but now I've moved onto higher things and am in Minniapolis for a flight change. I entered the US in Toronto (er...) having cleared immigration there; end up in the secondary examination room (where's the vaseline?) having after first miserable enemy of humanity for an customs officer who didn't want to point out that "index finger" meant the first finger. Well, it was early.

I should mention that the two customs people in the backroom, though, were polite, patient and efficient.

On the plane, I had a moment of panic when the announced the destination as "Twinchitty", somewhere I did not want to be. Turns out Minneapolis is known as "the twin cities".

Stopped in the airport for some noodles and tofu. They were alright but the caramel in the soy fused with the addititives to leave a nasty aftertaste. So I went in search of some fruit; the cloest I could get is some banana cake and a small (read vast) expresso.

America, America, Land of the Free, tra, le da.

Just got my first piece of skype spam...pretty novel.

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Got up yesterday morning (duh, duh, der, duh) to go the conference. On the way down in the lift, realised I'd forgotten my geek badge. So, went back up to my room. Realised, I'd locked myself out. So went back down to reception. Then back up to get my geek badge, then back out. 55 floors of movement. Hmmm.

I'm enjoying ISMB this year. Been flitting between SIGs and don't have to worry about bio-ontologies till tomorrow. Text has been quite fun. BOSC as often has some interesting subjects but with a big variation in the quality of the talks about these subjects. Biopathways had some nice stuff also, but the talks are a bit long and the program keeps going off time. Lucky that Mark Wilkinson's biomoby talk was early at BOSC, as I could pop out of pathways without missing two talks; glad I didn't miss that; exciting, energentic and with very funky slides, as always.

Regular readers of this blog, of which there are none, will no doubt have noticed the long gap since I last posted. I've generally been a fairly frequent poster, but it's been nearly two months since my last. Well, I've been busy. So, what has happened?

Northern Rock Cyclone: So, after a reasonable amount of training, I managed to do the middle distance race which was 62 miles long. If you add in the distance from my house to the start and back, this was 68 miles in one go. Okay, at 12 mph, it's a bit of a trundle, but I felt good about doing it. If I can speed things up a bit, then I might try for the 100 next year.

Brewery Demolition: I saw explosive demolition of the old Brewery. Had a great view from from over the road at St James' Park. On film, buildings always fall down majestically; the brewery wasn't like that. We heard to countdown from the security guy's radio, then there was a flash of deep red light from the bowels of the building. Then it fell down. No majestic collapse, the building just fell to the ground. The dust rose up and swirled around in the brisk wind. Finally, it cleared and there was a pile of rubble. Deeply scary.

InstantSOAP: This was my first independent research project. It was only a year long, but because of a big gap in the middle, it finally finished in a short while ago. I ended up doing a reasonble amount of the documentation for it, and I've started to repurpose it for my neuroinformatics project, Carmen. It's basically an easy way of doing web services; I have it doing R now. It's being trialed out in a user tutorial in a few weeks.

Houses: I've moved houses, and am now living in St Peters Wharf. It's really nice. It nestles in between the river, an industrial estate, a waste recovery centre (that's a tip to you and me), and Walker.

Bio-Ontologies: I'm on my way to Toronto for ISMB and my SIG, bio-ontologies. We've gone against the main conference this year and, yet, registrations are up. I feel good about this.

Anyway, with that lot combined I've been far to busy to write blog posts. Hopefully, they'll get a bit more regularly again.