Benj’s blog!

I spent the past weekend in Vermont with Sam (my good friend visiting from England) and Angela (who was there for work). The drive took about 6 hours and was fairly uneventful, passing through NY state and directly into Vermont. So far I’ve noticed that the geography of each of the states are noticeably different. For example PA seems less hilly than NY, which in turn is less hilly than VT. Differences are also apparent in the flora.

We stayed by Lake Morey in the Connecticut river valley. The picture up and left is the view from a 2000ft hill Sam and I canoed to and then climbed and features the aforementioned river. On another adventure, Sam spotted this little thing, which I believe is a salamander, scurrying around. I guess the fauna differs too.

All in all it was a great weekend. And now it’s time to get back to working on my paper.

Unless you count Syracuse, until Tuesday, I had only been to two large US cities — Boston and NYC. With this in mind, and since I hadn’t really had much of a break over summer, I decided to accompany Angela on a short trip to Chicago.

We set of on Monday night, with the intention of flying out of Ithaca Tompkins Regional Airport (ITH) (also a first for me) to Philadelphia (PHL) and onto Chicago (ORD), but the weather had made other plans for us. On arrival at the airport it was clear something was afoot, people were milling around and generally looking miserable and the queues for check-in were short, we were second or third in line.

On stepping forward, we were told that the had just been cancelled due to thunderstorms (it was a beautiful evening in Ithaca). On top of that, tomorrow morning’s flight to Philadelphia was full, so we were kind of stuck. The only flight leaving Ithaca that night was going to NY - La Guardia (LGA), but we were told that by the time we would arrive, there were no flights on to Chicago. Thinking we could make an adventure out of it, we chose to go to LGA and travel to ORD at 6am the following morning.

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I spent this past weekend in NYC and stopped by the Apple Store to see the iPhone for myself. The place was packed with people waiting to have a go, and at one point, an employee made an announcement to try and shift people from playing to making a purchase. When I finally got to play, to be frank, I was underwhelmed:

• The virtual keyboard. The keys are too small and the lack of tactile response was a big problem. Maybe it’s something I could learn to like, but my initial impressions were that it was awkward.
• The screen is too small for browsing. Having the zoom function is nice, and it’s cute that you can render real websites, but again, it’s just a faff. The experience of zooming in to read text is not what I’m used to.
• Browsing was slow. I checked and the device was using the in-store WiFi, but even so, browsing was painful. As I was navigating through pages I frequently saw the checkerboard.

Apple are a clearly an innovative company, constantly pushing the frontiers of technology. However, I fail to believe that iPhone is the revolutionary device they claim. To me it’s just a phone with a few interesting twists (especially visual voicemail, which is a nice idea).

Jon has some different thoughts at his blog.

August 6th 2006, I flew out of England and arrived at JFK.  From JFK I took a flight to Syracuse, where I was greeted by my new landlord.  He had offered to give me a ride to Ithaca, NY, the place I now call home. A few days later, my girlfriend Lala arrived with her life in suitcases.  We spent a few weeks getting to know the area, and then it was time for school year to start.

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I’ll be back in Blighty for a couple of weeks over Christmas. My old mobile phone number should still work. Give me a call or send an email.First semester went pretty well. I’m looking forward to the next one and plan to be a little more organised!