The fireworks over the castle were incredible:

Followed soon after by a light show:

The next day, we took the train back home. On our way back through King's Cross station, we saw Platform 9 3/4, of Harry Potter fame:

Jan 2nd:

Attempted to return home -- faulty plane and many annoying travails caused the 2nd to slip into...

Jan 3rd:

...in which we got up at 3:30am to catch a 7am flight, and finally got home. Hooray!

Except for the travel bees at the end, it was an awesome trip. I'm very glad to be home though, now :).

Tonight is Hogmanay -- and we're in Edinburgh for it. And it's frickin' cold.

We wandered around today. Edinburgh is an amazing city. The combination of centuries-old architecture and a vibrant city core is enthralling to me in a way that London and Paris haven't been.

I don't have a lot of text for this entry; just three pictures I took today.

Edinburgh Castle, originally uploaded by tiltology.

The view outside of our hotel room tonight.

Dec 28th:

Our afternoon was mostly taken up in the the British Library.

I would have loved to have shown you pictures of the "National Treasures" exhibit, which included jotted down Beatles lyrics, a Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, and Jane Austen's writing desk; or the provocative "Taking Liberties" exhibit, which showed interesting British historical documents and the context in which they led to modern civil rights, but the British Library didn't allow the taking of photographs :(. Suffice it to say that it was all pretty amazing.

I did snap this shot of The King's Library, which formed the original core of the British Library, and is still apparently expected to be held separate under the terms of the original donation. I wish I'd had a fish-eye lens, because it's much much bigger than this.

This is an iconic sight in the London Underground -- mind the gap!

We went to see a burlesque Sunday night -- La Clique. It was very, very gay. A good time was had by all.

Dec 29th:

Our last full day in London. I had trouble sleeping, but we hit the ground running and spent the day seeing the sights. This was really the first non-holiday weekday of our trip, so we got to see the city in more of its natural state.

First off: Trafalgar Square. I will spare you most of my pictures of statues and fountains.

Next up: we took a "Duck Tour." World War II amphibious landing craft/troop carriers have been repurposed into tour vehicles. Half of the tour was on the streets of London, and the other half was on the River Thames. Our tour guide was replete with bad jokes, and it was a cheesily awesome good time.

Passing another "Duck" on the river:

House of Parliament and Big Ben:

After lunch, we headed over to the Tower of London. On our way, we passed this odd church archway on Seething Lane:

This is the entryway to the Tower. While it's not in this picture, I found it interesting that the gatehouse to the tower was where the security folks were doing bag checks and checking tickets.

The actual Tower was somewhat disappointing, because it was jammed full of people, and the exhibits were somewhat lackluster in providing information and context. Still, the architecture was fascinating, at least partially because it covered so many different eras within a very small amount of acreage.

I found "The Line of Kings" to be impressive:

And this elaborate arrangement of guns in the royal armoury:

We passed on waiting in line to see the Crown Jewels, though. This picture shows part of the incredibly long line, and also some of the architectural whiplash:

This picture has three interesting things in it. First, a tower raven (in the left). Second, a really old-ass wall. Third, a representative queue of people waiting to get into one of the many tiny tower exhibits.

Here's a close-up of that same raven from the last picture:

Some more architectural whiplash -- it's the London Gherkin in the background!

And here's Tower Bridge and the oddly shaped London City Hall in one shot:

Finally, Tower Bridge at night:

From the Tower of London, we headed to Newham to catch a panto. However, the guide we used steered us wrong, and this one completely failed to have any of the sly subversive humor we were promised. Instead, it was a pretty straight up kid's show. We left after the intermission and spent a quiet evening in the hotel room.

And this morning we're on a train to Edinburgh! More on that in the next post.

Our hotel is just around the corner from the British Museum, which is quite an impressive edifice. The interior courtyard gave me a uniquely 21st century bit of deja vu, because I'd seen it before -- in Hellgate: London (note: this is the only part of London I've actually placed from this game). I remember quite distinctly battling some evil yet nondescript creature up and down the stairs that encircle the reading room in the center of the courtyard.

Our first stop was the Egyptian exhibit. As we wandered around, we overheard a gentleman translating the hieroglyphs to his companion. He noticed our interest, and began walking us through some of the basic details of the offering formula featured on the piece we were observing:

We also particularly enjoyed this statue of Ishtar as war goddess:

The drinking horns, and the room of Viking stuff they were contained in, got The Immigrant Song irrevocably stuck in our head:

Possibly the most depressing aspect of the museum was the exhibit of Parthenon statues:

The tone was oddly defensive -- "hey, if we hadn't bought these statues off of a dissolute English lord who picked up their pieces out of the rubble of wars and explosions, I mean, heck, they'd be destroyed by now!" Which, while probably true, didn't make it feel any less like we were viewing the corpse of the Parthenon, laid out on the operating table for us to view.

I'm not entirely sure why this exhibit in particular felt worse than the others in this regard. I think it might have been the sad history of the Parthenon -- it was used as an ammo dump in a 17th century war, and a shell lit off the gunpowder stored inside, which did much of the damage to the structure. It might have been the horrible shape most of the statuary was in, compared to the other pieces on display.

For me, though, it was seeing these statues that are meant to loom over us, sitting stacked one next to the other at eye level, battered and beaten. It's not how I pictured the place. In a way, the Carnegie's display of plasters of these ancient statues had more of a sense of the grand scope I expected.

Still, that hall aside, we found the British Museum overwhelming and awe-inspiring. Our feet hurt, but our heads are full. Also, we took high tea in the museum's cafe, and that was both tasty and delicious.

Dec 25th: Almost adjusted to new time zone. Had a delicious Turkey dinner at a local restaurant, which was totally ruined by incredibly rude waitstaff. I did not get my Christmas Pudding :(.

Settled in for evening of BBC, including Blackadder's Christmas Carol, Wallace & Gromit: A Matter of Loaf & Death (new!!!), and an amusing Black Adder documentary. Missed the new Doctor Who Christmas special due to a tragic misreading of the BBC website, so have been watching it fits & starts on the awful BBC iPlayer service, which goes to great lengths to be hostile to my efforts to let the damn thing queue up over my slow Internet connection.

Overall, a very nice, relaxed Christmas, despite minor annoyances.

Dec 26th: We set out!

First we went to the London Eye, which is a bizarrely large millennial ferris wheel situated in downtown London:

We obtained tickets, and saw London from a bird's eye view as part of a 30 minute single rotation around the wheel. Between the lateness of the year and the northernness of London, the light was already fading, but I got some bizarrely Blade Runner-esque vistas:

Next, we took a cab over to the rebuild Globe Theatre, which is pretty freaking awesome:

The original Globe burnt down, so this one was rebuilt in the late 20th century to be as close to the original conditions as possible. We took the tour, which was awesome. Our crusty, feisty guide had all kinds of awesome stories about the place:

We now totally want to come back in the summer when they're actually doing a play.

Finally, we booked it over to the West End, where we had tickets for Avenue Q tonight. Sadly, the Noel Coward Theatre is designed for very small people with very short legs, but we still had a blast actually finally seeing the musical, as opposed to just hearing the soundtrack as much as we can stand.

My cell phone, regrettably, is a crap shoot at the moment. I like to use it, but I seem to be on the edge of 3G service here, and I hate toggling on and off the 3G support.

So. I need a solution where I can use the USB headset plugged into my desktop computer to get and receive phone calls, with good audio quality. It needs to work on a Mac. Optionally, it should allow me to port over my Vonage phone #.

My first thought was Skype, but poking around their site, I couldn't find a way to port an old number. Heck, I couldn't even find Austin in their bewildering drop down list of available area codes, which seem to be a greatest hits of small towns that aren't fully using their number space.

Vonage has something called a "SoftPhone," but my understanding is I have to have a second phone # in addition to the "land line" supported by my Vonage hardware box. This, if I may be so bold, is incredibly stupid.

So, has anyone else tried to solve this problem, and have you found a solution you like?

and then is cast down as we rekindle the Sunwell:

The 3.0 patch definitely made Sunwell a lot more beatable, but Kil'Jaeden was still a pretty hard fight -- it felt very satisfying to beat. I'm feeling a bit of a rush right now. It's also nice we were the first Alliance guild on Spinebreaker to achieve this feat. It was kind of fun knowing the other ally guild that had been ahead of us all this time was racing to do the same alongside us :).

As a side note, I also finally got this cool rare fiery horse from the first boss in Karazhan yesterday:

Virtual life is good.

I also want to point out that Rock Band gets this -- but Guitar Hero does not. RB makes it super easy to use all of your downloaded content ("stuff") with RB2. It also works with pretty much any instrument controller. GH doesn't work with RB controllers -- on purpose -- and the GH: Aerosmith expansion didn't work with any GH3 downloadable content. Also, RB2 very cleverly made it easy to re-create your RB1 characters, although if they'd really been on top of it they would have included character import from RB1. Guitar Hero 4: World Tour wants very hard to win on features alone, and I will admit it's a compelling list of features. But... I already have the RB1 instruments, and the RB1 songs, and a bunch of songs I bought. I don't think the slidey touchpad frets are going to be enough to justify having to buy all new stuff. Did I mention I also hate to move?

These OGPs represent a kind of "stickiness" that keeps you coming back to the game or games supported by those platforms. If given the choice between a game that's out for PS3 or XBox 360, I'll buy the Xbox game even though I own both platforms. Why? I can see my Live buddies if I'm playing the XBox game. You end up investing in your online experience. In Warcraft, I've spent a lot of time developing my library of applications (characters, addons), and I have a lot of interest in maintaining interoperability with others (the social groups I've developed to play games with).

There's even now a Bejeweled that runs inside of Warcraft. The next major upgrade will include in-game calendaring on top of the pre-existing mail system. The todo list -- quests, if you will -- is also getting a major beefing up in the form of new achievements, XBox Live-style. I've long contended that Warcraft is the most interesting online productivity suite out there, if you're willing to accept that killing giant dragons is an interesting group productivity activity.

And why not, really? So much of our 21st century life is based around the production of things that have no physical basis. Yes, the software I develop gets dumped onto a CD or DVD every so often, but that's an artifact of distribution -- and since I don't work on distribution, there's nothing tangible, really, that I craft with my fingers. (And iPhone apps are purely virtual!) What remains interesting is not the physical or virtual mementoes of the process, but the act of doing, and the social constructions that remain from that act. In this, online gaming now resembles blogging, in that the community and the memetic constructions are what remain lasting.

So what's a new game to do in this space? One could liken the release of Warcraft to the release of Windows 95 -- a social gaming space that finally broke through to the masses. (I'd say the same for Live and Steam but really... nothing like them existed before for the markets they address.) Before Warcraft, MMOs existed -- the DOS of DikuMUDs, the Windows 3.1 of Everquest -- but they had not yet shattered that accessibility and usability barrier to really catch on. And since Warcraft, there have been a number of attempts to learn from and inherit the space that Warcraft owns, but none have really been successful. I've tried several of them -- some, like Lord of the Rings Online and the most recent, Warhammer Online, are fairly faithful extend & embrace copies of Warcraft. So why do they not have the same traction?

It's that stickiness. When Age of Conan came out, the die hard neophiles jumped to it -- in the millions. Funcom's stock price rocketed. But then those same players abandoned the game in droves. Why? The social space wasn't as rich. The game itself wasn't as mature and stable. And, frankly, you didn't have your stuff. Why don't people jump from one OS to another purely based on features? The reason I hear most often is, "I'd have to re-buy (or re-acquire) all of my applications." Switching online gaming platforms is getting to the same place -- you want to play the one your friends play. You want to play the one where your stuff is.

I've been messing around some with Warhammer Online (and did the same with Lord of the Rings Online). Both games clearly very carefully learned the UI lessons of Warcraft. Jumping into both games feels very comfortable for an experienced player, and they've clearly taken care to make the experience pleasant for the new player as well. But neither stuck with me because I have great affection for my communities and my little avatars.

What's the solution for these brave new upstarts then? To be honest, I'm surprised nobody's done it yet. It's the same as the solution for, say, a plucky presentation software upstart that's challenging the dominant paradigm. You provide the ability to work with your old stuff, and another compelling new features to make you feel like you're mistreating your old stuff to work with the old app. Blizzard's already put the foot in the door already -- all of your WoW characters can be examined (in XML format, no less!) via the armory.

Mark my words -- some brave asshole will finally put two and two together and make a WoW character importer for their new game. And it'll work terribly. And their will be lawsuits. But then the idea will be out there. And then, eventually, we'll see avatar portability and a persistent, interoperable virtual stuff space. I give it ten years. After all, somebody you know is probably raiding tonight. These virtual spaces are here to stay.

Brutallus Dead, originally uploaded by tiltology.

The big DPS check in the last raid in current Warcraft is... dead. Even if we don't get any further before the next expansion (coming up in the next few months), I feel a real sense of accomplishment to have gotten to this point.

Somehow, in my characters' elaborate backstories, they all end up to be family members. Here, we see Cynnosure, holy warrior, posing with her younger sister Checkers, who has recently embraced the light. These two holy warriors are nothing if not pragmatic -- Cynnosure saw Checkers' time spent studying the shadow as only sensible.

Cynnthia & Felicia have a somewhat more complicated relationship, as they had very different reactions to the death of their parents to the Scourge. Cynnthia chose to confront her anger head on, with a sword. Felicia has adopted the dark magics that brought the undead into existence -- she says, to better combat them. Neither really understands or respects the other's decision, but they still try to make it work.

Cynndethiel Stormwalker had a sister, once. Dechesel was lost in the fighting when the Burning Legion invaded Ashenvale, and was presumed dead.

Imagine, then, Cynne's surprise when the Knights of the Ebon Hold renounced the Scourge - and Dechs was among the undead Death Knights now returning to the Alliance, and renewing old ties.