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London Apartment

Woman in a green floral top and jeans holds hands with a young blonde girl in a white shirt outside a grand white building entrance with columns.

Our London trip is a lot different from our Summer of Love West Coast Road Tour. Notably, we aren’t on the road very much for London and with the exception of a short jaunt to Scotland for Tammy and I, we are staying put in London proper.

We rented an apartment for the month and have gotten settled in. We are in the Kensington area at Philbeach Gardens. The apartment is good. We have about 800 square feet and behind the apartment is a very large private courtyard where Mazie can play. I think the nicest thing about the apartment is the dining room with a glass ceiling. I’ve setup my computer in this area with great light.

On the downside we are missing some niceties. Mainly what was advertised as included Internet access is really a 3G HSDPA Modem (Huawei E220). It’s better than nothing, but you have to tip toe around the Internet and wait for long delays. We have a washing machine but no dryer, I guess we just hang our clothes to dry.

We went shopping for some supplies at a nearby Tesco. It took us over an hour to find what we were looking for. It’s great that London is English, but there is no doubt you are in a foreign country. It took us about 10 minutes to find baking soda.

Here are photos for a little virtual tour.

Modern living room with a small CRT television built into white fitted cabinetry beside a doorway leading to a glass conservatory Dark olive sofa with multiple cushions in a wood-floored living room, side table with lamp, doorway to adjacent room, sunset artwork on wall. Young girl in green pajamas standing in a open-plan living room and kitchen with wood floors, white cabinets, and toys scattered on the floor. Light wood dining table with six chairs in a glass-ceiling conservatory, laptop on table, abstract painting on white wall, garden visible through large windows Sunlit conservatory dining room with a wooden table, six chairs, a laptop, water bottle, and phones, surrounded by large windows overlooking a garden. Unmade double bed with white bedding in a bright apartment bedroom, with a colorful polka-dot artwork above, teal lamps on white nightstands, red tulips, and a yellow North Face duffel bag on the Tree-lined residential street in Kensington London with parked cars including a green Mazda MX-5 and white stucco terraced townhouses Tree-lined London street with white stucco Georgian terraced houses, black iron railings, and stone steps leading to columned porticos.
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Living with a 3G Modem

Mail.app activity window showing 18 simultaneous IMAP commands, with progress bars indicating active and idle connection states.

I’ve mentioned that our “included Internet access” at our London Apartment is a 3G USB Modem (Huawei E220 to be precise). It’s been a long, long time since I’ve had to deal with modems. I honestly thought those days were behind me. The service is provided by 3. Short rant, who names a company 3? I’ve made the best of it though. I’ve got the E220 connected to my MacBook Pro and am using OS X Internet Connection Sharing to broadcast my own WiFi network that our iPhones and the MacBook Pro are using to get online. I can happily report that setting up this kind of network is a lot easier than it was in the past. My only issue was from an overly aggressive firewall on my MacBook Pro. After I cleared that it all worked fine.

The connection itself is a bit spotty. If it’s under continuous light load it does okay, as long as it doesn’t get backed up. The pain with this connection is latency. Throughput isn’t actually that bad. I downloaded an 8MB file very quickly. But latency is horrible and can result in big delays. This screen grab is the list of activity from Mail.app. You can see 18 active IMAP commands, 9 of them actually in progress and another 9 just waiting idle for attention.

This is as good as it gets for the next month though. We won’t be watching any of the Olympics streaming over the web here. I’m certainly not buying any marketing that 3G is some panacea of bandwidth.

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Getting to London

The trick with spending a month in London is that you have to get there, and that has to be done on a plane. Mazie had never been on a plane before and we bullishly pushed through with a trans-atlantic flight as her very first one. Tammy has been on many flights, but has a very real fear of flying causing much stress and anxiety. She was an absolute rock star though keeping all of that to herself and not causing any undue stress for Mazie.

We departed at 9:45 p.m. For whatever reason I felt it absolutely necessary to get to the airport at 6:30 p.m. Having never flown with a kid, and knowing we had 5 bags to check, I figured we needed all the time we could get. In reality, we checked all 5 bags in a few minutes at the curb and flew through security without any issues. With over an hour to spare we decided to have desert at Ike’s in the airport. They have a chocolate cake that is a foot tall, rather crazy actually.

The flight itself was fine, but getting Mazie to sleep was not. I had this idea that we would leave at 9:45 p.m. and after the excitement of takeoff ended Mazie would just naturally fall asleep. This was not the case. She didn’t go to bed until 1:30 a.m. central time. We tried everything short of medication and nothing would work. I got furious with the screens in the back of every chair that constantly flashed different messages at us, keeping Mazie enthralled with them.

Anyway, she finally got to sleep and I crashed about the same time. Tammy on the other hand spent most of the night playing Quordy on her iPhone and got maybe 15 minutes of sleep.

After landing we collected all of our luggage, got through customs, and found a cab for the £55 ride into Kensington. I’m trying to not do £ to $ conversions here since it’s just depressing.

Our first day here was spent mostly recovering from jet lag. We were all crazy tired.

Woman in red shirt and khaki shorts holds hands with a young girl dragging a yellow rolling bag outside an airport luggage cart station. Young blonde girl in a dark tank top and khaki shorts pulling a yellow and orange wheeled animal suitcase while holding an adults hand outdoors near luggage carts Young blonde girl in a brown top smiling broadly at the camera while seated at an airport departure gate Woman with a large backpack and tote bag holds hands with a small blonde girl rolling a yellow duck suitcase through an airport terminal.
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Lunch at Leicester Square.

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Winnipeg Folk Festival 2008 Kids

We go to the Winnipeg Folk Festival every year (see music from 2008, but kids only go every other year. This was a kids year, and I got this really cute video of them having some fun.

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C-Lazy-U Horse Run Video

While we were at C-Lazy-U I did an audio capture of the horse run. I also got a chance to capture it with my Canon HDV-30. In a lot of ways, I actually like the audio only one better.

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Mazie and I up and having croissant breakfast this morning. Today we get the apartment situated and visit the market.

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Quordy - Awesome Game

I have been really impressed with the games landing on the iPhone AppStore recently. I’m hopeful that Apple is looking at the top selling applications and taking some notes. It is obvious that gaming is a big opportunity on the iPhone, and I think it should be a bigger one on the Mac desktop as well.

iPhone screenshot of the Quordy word game showing a 4x4 grid of letter tiles spelling R I T E O A R R D E A M B S E T with words and points both at 0 and solo high score of 39

Tammy and I have been addicted to this newest game, Quordy (iTunes Link). Quordy is really similar to an existing game that I’m not going to name, but has letters on dice that you shake up and then make words by connecting letters. You figure it out. I like the game a lot, and Quordy is a great implementation on the iPhone. The touch interface is perfect for the game and its fun to shake the phone to start the board.

The best part of Quordy though is challenging your friends. It’s simple and easy to make your online profile in the game and then you can simply browse your address book and pick friends to play. The play is asynchronous which is key. You can check for challenges from friends, or make challenges and they can play when they have free time. There is a running tally of wins for each friend and you can see what words they guessed that you didn’t.

If you grab the game, send me a challenge!

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  • Hello from London! Getting situated. Barely online via 3G USB modem. (ugh!)
  • Bootstrapped my Mac onto this 3 HSDPA USB modem via my Parallels installation. Got it going, now trying to share it from MacBook Pro.
  • Having a horrible time getting Internet Connection Sharing to work. Wont give a valid DHCP response it seems.
  • Got it working. Had firewall set up really tight and was denying incoming DHCP requests from sharing clients.
  • Infrastructure done: 3G HSDPA modem connected to Leopard, Leopard sharing that to private WiFi network for others. Whee! Sleep soon.
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Boarded plane! Mazie got scared walking onto plane but thinks it’s fun now. Wish us luck!