I forgot to mention that on Sunday afternoon I also headed over to Buckingham Palace while I was waiting for a room to be made available at my hotel. Perhaps 100 yards away from the palace is the Canadian War Memorial.

In my view, the Canadian War Memorial is right beside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as the most potent war memorial I've ever seen. But where the Vietnam Memorial provides an overall impression of solemness, and possibly sadness or regret, the Canadian War Memorial evokes a profound sense of gratitude. It's a water cascade over a granite diamond that has images of maple leaves embedded into it, and the memorial is surrounded by maple trees. In autumn, the leaves from the trees fall onto the memorial and mix with the carvings. It's just stunning.

Image courtesy flickr user OwenBlacker

If you're ever in London, do yourself a favor and pop over to Green Park, right by Buckingham Palace. The palace is rather nice to look at as well.

I have arrived in London, where I'll be working for two weeks. So far, everything is going well.

Immigration was ridiculously fast. I mean, literally, I walked into the room and up to an available desk. The immigration officer did the usual routine of complete non-interest except when I mentioned I worked for Google, to which I got a "Oh, mhmm."

The hotel I'm staying in is really nice. Probably nicer than I deserve. The mirror in the bathroom has a section of fogproof glass. I can see the top of Big Ben's tower and the parliament building from the window.

It's also creepy. The minibar is computer controlled. If you remove anything from its spot, it bills your room. When I arrived, I opened up the minibar hoping that it had space to be used as a fridge (it doesn't). About 15 minutes later, a room service guy arrived with a can of Red Bull and put it in the minibar, and he implied that they had noticed that I had opened the minibar but hadn't taken anything out, so they wanted to restock the can in case I wanted it.

I spent last night wandering about the Square Mile, which is also creepy after dark (5:30) on a weekend. Nothing is open, including museums and things, and you can walk for blocks without seeing anyone. I originally went out to go see The Monument, but it's closed for renovations for 18 months, so I decided to just wander about. Guildhall is really impressive, though, even at night when you can't go inside. In fact, the whole city has this really cool feel from being a mixture of old medieval architecture and beautiful modern stuff. Walking along a long slim overstreet walkway and looking over to see a ruined section of the London Wall is awesome. I unfortunately don't have any pictures, as it was dark and my only photographic device is my phone, but trust me, it's great.

Also, 140 London Wall is perhaps the greatest address ever.

Cars driving on the opposite side of the road are kind of unsettling, too. I didn't realize to what extent I have subconscious feelings about what direction I have to watch out for cars, but when you're walking along the left side of the road and a car whips by from behind you, it's quite surprising.

The London office is quite a lot like New York. My major impression is that it's smaller and has better junk food.

So, it appears that my impression of London so far this time is impressive, yet creepy. More tales as the trip progresses.

As I sit here in my parents' house on the last night before I fly back to New York, gazing into the thick fog that's settled over the neighborhood, I feel compelled to take stock of my life. The last week has been a really great time, and it's going to be tough to leave, though I know I have to. Knowing how hard it is on my mom doesn't help either.

Overall, I feel like my life in New York is pretty good. Looking at it from the outside, it certainly looks awesome: I live in a great place, I work at one of the most desired places to work, and so forth. But for the most part, I feel unfulfilled, and I can't quantify exactly why. Part of it is that work isn't that interesting to me; I work on interesting projects, but the complete disconnect from the customer dampens my enthusiasm dramatically. I don't feel like that's it, though. Hopefully I can find what I need to change to feel better.

In other news, there are some exciting developments on this side of the country.

My parents have a new cat, and she's absolutely adorable. Her name is Gina, and she's quite small, roughly 2/3 the size of what I think of as a normal cat. She's got plenty of spunk, though, as she'll happily climb up onto my (six foot high) bed or chase a wine bottle cork around the house.

There's a new Catholic cathedral going up in Oakland right on Lake Merritt, and it's pretty impressive. It looks to be about eight stories tall, judging by the neighboring buildings, and is faced with glass panels in a elegant curve shape with a angled indent. Andrew Sherman has been keeping a log of its construction with a large helping of pictures.

Speaking of Lake Merritt, they're finally doing planning and construction for the southern end improvements, most notably: redesigning 12th Street and Lakeshore, adding more park space, and removing the horrible tunnels that go under the expressway. The design looks really good, though there are concerns about the number of trees being removed (both there and elsewhere), and I'm not convinced that the new restaurant that's being put where the boathouse used to be will be worth anything. There've previously been restaurants on the Lake and all of them have gone out of business. I wouldn't mind living in a high-rise apartment overlooking the lake someday, though.

Also, SCO was delisted in the last couple days, though not as a result of low share price (which it was already under advisement from NASDAQ about), but due to filing for bankruptcy.

I updated the site a little bit over the past couple weeks. The first change is adding some links to the sidebar, so if you don't remember that I have a map of the IPv4 address space (or whatever), you can remember by looking over there. Also, some bot keeps posting spam comments, so I've switched anonymous comments to requiring approval. If you're logged in, your comments will show up right away, but if you're not then you'll have to wait for me to flip the switch on them.

New York City has had direct current electrical service since 1882, but that ended today with the disconnecting of 10 E. 40th Street, the last DC customer in the city. Plenty of systems still use DC, most notably the subway, but ConEd has gradually moved the responsibility for AC/DC conversion to the customers, allowing ConEd to stop delivering DC power off the grid.

New Haven consists largely of parking lots and medical emergencies.

The God Plays Dice blog that I've been reading recently had an interesting entry on trying to derive the importance of intersections from a map of a city. The core observation is that a good first approximation of importance of an intersection is the number of roads leading into and out of it.

Manhattan has some qualities that make this interesting to ponder. Primarily, the city was allowed to evolve naturally until 1811, when the Commissioner's Plan set forth the layout from 14th Street to the north side of Harlem, and the most important locations in Manhattan (depending on your point of view) are split between the Financial District, which is unplanned, and Midtown, which is planned.

In the planned section, the given approximation works out well. The plan included one major irregularity: Broadway, which cuts across diagonally from about 77th Street to 10th Street. As a result, the grid section includes 6 intersections that have 6 roads leading into and out of them instead of four:

• 72nd and Amsterdam Avenue (10th Avenue in Midtown): a central location on the Upper West Side
• 66th and Columbus Avenue (9th Avenue in Midtown): a corner of Lincoln Center
• 59th and 8th Avenue: Columbus Circle and a corner of Central Park
• 42nd and 7th Avenue: Times Square
• 34th and 6th Avenue: Herald Square and a corner of Macy's
• 23rd and 5th Avenue: Madison Square Park, home (sort of) of the Met Life Tower and Flatiron Building
• 14th and Park Avenue: Union Square

All of these are major intersections, and certainly rank highly among the most important intersections in the City.

Below 14th Street, though, the theory breaks down heavily. The West Village in particular has streets going all different directions and includes many intersections of 6 roads, some of as many as 8. However, none of those intersections are particularly important to the city as a whole (though some have local importance). Partly this is because Greenwich Village is built on land that is unsuitable for large buildings and partly it is because of the history of the area (which was once a literal village for people who didn't want to live in the bustling metropolis that was lower Manhattan).

Perhaps the core of the matter, though, is that the importance of an intersection is proportionate to the importance of the streets that intersect there. Intersections with more streets thus stand a better chance of being important simply because there are more streets that might contribute some importance. In that manner, we could find important intersections by trying to find the important streets. Ideas for what features one might look for to determine that could include unusual streets (such as Broadway), streets which are further apart from similar streets (such as the Avenues), streets that carry two-way traffic (as these tend to be larger than one-way streets), and streets on the edges of major parks.

Isabel also includes a side note about subways and why she feels that Boston has a thorough subway system while Philadelphia doesn't. She compares Manhattan to Philadelphia in that the system is a grid, so there aren't "obvious" places to put subway stops, but that isn't actually true for Manhattan. The Commissioner's Plan designated fifteen Streets (14th, 23rd, 34th, 42nd, etc) to be wider than normal, and many carry two-way traffic nowadays (which is very unusual in Manhattan, even the Avenues are largely one-way). Because they're regularly placed and main thoroughfares, these became the obvious places for subway stops when the system came along. That's why there are 4 separate stops on 125th Street, but no stops on any of 117th-124th or 126th-134th.

The New York Times posted an article about the recent release of our product to hundreds of thousands of additional advertisers. Pretty exciting stuff.

Despite football (soccer) being the national sport of Greenland, they are not a member of FIFA. Why, you ask? Because it's impossible to grow grass in Greenland that meets FIFA's standards.