Howdy folks! Time to let you know about my time here in England, a place where, like Amsterdam, almost everyone speaks my language, although Brit's are often harder to understand than the Dutch. As I said, I arrived in Brighton at 3PM or so on Monday, and I promptly collapsed into bed. I was staying with some friends of ebeth's who I had met a few times when I was in europe last year. I didn't do much Monday night, obviously, besides get up, eat dinner, and go back to sleep. On tuesday, I did a little more. The guy I was staying with, Jamie, builds and races hovercraft (referred to in the trade as "craft"), which is pretty damn cool as far as I'm concerned. I took a look at his craft, so skip the next bit if you don't care about toys for boys.

The frame was fiberclass, and it was about 8 or 10 feet long and 5 or 6 feet wide, so about the size of a small car. It had a big fan in the back, set sort of low in the vehicle so that some of the air could be diverted to go under the skirts. The engine was something like 400cc's, as I remember, and the thing could apparently go like 40 miles an hour. The race courses can be land, water, or a mix of the two, and while they don't have jumps per se, there are spots where you come out of the water, hit higher ground, and jump 6 or 8 feet in the air. It sounded like lots of fun. Jamie is apparently ranked 4th in country right now, although only 2 out of 8 races have been run. To anyone who has driven with him, this isn't at all surprising, the guy acts like he's on a racecourse all the time. It ought to be really scary, but he has such complete control over the car, such obviously perfect reflexes, that it almost isn't. Almost.

Other than that, I went into Brighton for a while. Brighton is a seaside vaguely resort-ish town in the south of britain, about an hour south of London. Its a vacation town, famous as a place to go to bring or meet someone for a weekend romp (the Brighton "Dirty Weekend"). I looked around at cellular stores and talked to people, but couldn't find a solution for my wireless woes. After a while I headed back. I didn't really do much in Brighton, so I won't talk about it anymore. I hung out, saw Con Air, watched the british stripper channel (no joke, british cable has a stripper channel), and rested.

On Wednesday, I went into London for the day, on my way to Cambridge, which is an hour or two north of London. I found a hiking backpack to replace my suitcase which had broken its handle. I also went into London's Council Travel office and got a ticket to Milan for saturday. I am meeting Treasa then, and I had been planning to just take a train, but that was going to take close to 24 hours, plus it would probably cost more than my plane ticket if I didn't use my eurail pass. My eurail pass is for 30 days, and since I expect to be using it until July 25th or so, I would rather not activate it until June 25th or so. So it seemed much better to fly, faster and cheaper.

I also got my cellphone working, which I will go into in detail for all the geeks out there. The problem was this: The data card I got for my computer, the DC23, works with Ericssons 300 series cellular phones, which is what I used to test it out in the states. Unfortunately I had been stupid and rented a 600 series phone. I had some hope that my card would work with the GH688 phone, if only I got the right cable, since the bottom of the 600 series, where the cable from the data card clips on, is different than the 300 series, so I couldn't even hook up my card. I wasn't sure if my card worked with the 600 series and maybe I just needed a new cable. So to fix my setup I either needed a) hopefully just a cable that went from my card to my phone, b) a 300 series phone, used (because they were discontinued), that I could pop my SIM card into and use (the SIM card contains your cellular identity, basically), which would work with my card, or c) a new card that would work with my phone, which according to the Ericsson webpage would be the DC23v4, (I had the DC23, and no idea what the v4 meant).

So I wandered along looking at cell stores. None of them carried used cellphones, and none of them carried the cable I wanted. One of the people seemed pretty knowledgeable, and suggested that i go a few blocks to Tottenham road, where "there are lots of electronics stores" (it later turns out that Tottenham Road is *the* main place to wheel and deal for electronics in Britain). So I did, and the first store there said they sometimes stocked the cable I wanted, so I kept looking, more hopefully now. It looked as though no store was going to carry used phones, i would have to use the classified ads for that, and I wasn't going to be around look enough to do that effectively, so that scratched option b. The next bunch of stores were all identical, none of them carried obscure cables, none of them were willing to take the cable out of the kit which contains the card as well. Finally I found a place that looked hopeful and a little bigger, and went in. They were willing to go the extra mile - the guy was happy to sell me just the cable out of the kit, and to call up the manufacturer to find out how much it would be to replace. He did this out of the room, and quoted me a price of 60 pounds to replace the cable, which I am sure was a baldfaced lie, but it seemed a reasonable price for me to have a working setup.

I wasn't sure the cable would work, since Ericsson's webpage had said my card and phone were not compatible. These people were perfectly willing to let me whip out my setup, plug everything in, and try it out. I did, and it did not work. They brought up an expert from downstairs, and determined that no, my card would not work with my phone. It turns out that the v4 in DC23v4 stands for "4 volts", and the 600 series phones want 4 volts. I don't know what the hell it is that they want to be 4 volts, but whatever it is, its important. So the actual PCMCIA cards were different, and I needed to buy the DC23v4 kit, which cost a horrendous amount, but we tested it out and it worked, so I bought it. Hopefully I can sell it on the net when I get home.

I didn't get to actually download my mail at the store, since my laptop and cellphone were both running out of batteries. Also, the mail server I use with the mobile link is on an IBM server (to which my izzy.com account sends copies of everything I receive), and I had been reading mail on izzy.com, so there were 70+ messages waiting on the server, and I figgered it would take a while to download over the expensive cell link. So I moved on to Cambridge, about which I will now talk.

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