Obsolete Your Idols

Greetings from WisCon(Sin)

After nearly a week of travel via car, we've arrived at Madison, WI for WisCon 31. I'm very nearly socially saturated so I'm hiding in the hotel room, laboriously transferring phonecam images to my flickr stream. I did want to take this opportunity to leak a coupon code.

Our friend Deb Taber is Editor and Art Director for Apex Digest and they're running a promotion right now. If you use the code WISCON20 when subscribing online, you get 20% off the price. Which is a pretty good deal for a magazine of spooky stories. This will expire at the end of June and evidently by sharing this with people not here, I can expect to have my head explode.

So, I hope it was worth it to get this valuable information out there.

posted at 10:25 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: people i know, travel, wiscon

Show Us Your Third Leg

I attended a SF in SF event tonight, a reading / Q&A with Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow and Terry Bisson.

Cory read a chapter from a novel which will be out next May called Little Brother and Rudy read a story about Alan Turing called The Imitation Game, then they took some questions from the audience and from Terry.

They covered the future of distribution, the dis-aggregation of the functions of a traditional publisher into the sub-functions of investment, distribution, editing, marketing, public relations, and some of their various hot topics and interests. I had an amazing time, especially for something free, but I didn't have a whole lot to say and I was really trying hard to not spend money and succeeded in not buying any of the books I wanted. It would have been a different story if they'd had Rucker's The Hollow Earth on hand.

The title is a reference to an anecdote which Bisson attributed to another writer (possibly Kim Stanley Robinson), that in order to be a successful sf writer, one needs to have a three-legged stool, with one leg in a field of literature or interest, to attract readers in that space or to solidly craft stories set in that space.

I didn't take notes as I should have because I was so eager to rush home to my brand new laptop. Despite UPS dousing the box in water to the point that the original box was falling apart and needed to be encased in an outer box, it seems to be intact. It's running memtest overnight and then I'll perhaps have more to say about it.

posted at 23:17 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: bay area, cory doctorow, rudy rucker, sf

Interview With the Blogless: Devin

I've known Devin literally for years. We probably met in Mt. Vernon, a tiny little town in Iowa. This would have been in the early 1990s. We both moved around over the course of more than a decade until we both ended up in the San Francisco area. He doesn't blog but he's always interesting to talk with so I asked him if he'd let me interview him in the simplest form imaginable. He agreed and here's the result. His responses have only been edited slightly for clarity.

1. Who's the least influential musician or band which you still enjoy listening to and why?

   Probably The Bloodhound Gang. They're sexist, juvenile, rap-rock, so I really ought to kinda hate them, but they're also a lot of fun and funny as hell, so. yeah. I still listen to them and enjoy it.

   I asked him this because Devin has turned me onto a lot of great music I wouldn't otherwise know about, such as Steel Pole Bath Tub, Replicator and Billy Bragg.

2. You study a martial art. What is it? Why do you study a martial art and why this one?

   I'm currently studying Shaolin kung fu at the Wen Wu school in El Cerrito. Originally I started going to a kick boxing studio with a co-worker when I decided I needed to do something exercise like to compensate for my sitting in front of a computer all the time lifestyle. I quit that when our schedules didn't match up. In the beginning I really needed a buddy to get me to go regularly. After that I went to the now defunct Kung Fu USA in El Cerrito with R when she was recovered enough from her car crash to return to the quan she'd been studying at before and needed a ride. When the owner closed the quan, some of my fellow students had moved on, ending up at the Wen Wu school after trying a few other places out. I joined them there. I think I chose martial arts over joining a gym because I get bored easily and gyms seem incredibly boring to me. I'd rather be learning how to do strange things with my body while working out.

   And this is why you do not want to mess with him. If you antagonize him, he will do strange things to your and or his body.

3. What bug or new feature request for an open source software most desperately needs to be dealt with?

   I haven't checked the status of this for a while, but it is the first thing to come to mind: 64-bit Linux support in general, flash specifically. It seems like a little thing, but it's the main thing that drove me back to running i386 based builds on my AMD64 system.

   We spend a lot of time comparing different open source applications, running them, playing with them, breaking them and daydreaming about having the time to develop them. We actually have a dormant project on sourceforge called bbc.

4. What have you been thinking about lately?

   Finals? I dunno. Nothing particularly interesting. Convergence and divergence of improper integrals, sequences and series. Plotting graphs and charts in perl without using GD, which goes back to the 64bit Linux support again. Can't use GD-based anything on this one server because GD + mod_perl = crashing and we think it's 64bit related.

   The reference to finals and the mathy bits here are from the college class he's enrolled in, in his copious free time. I think he may be understanding the interestingness of the thinking here as that sounds like a thorny set of problems. I stole this question from Aaron Swartz.

5. What game do you wish you could spend more time playing?

   All of them? I've been cycling through the games I have recently. Aside from WoW and the new LotR MMO, I've been putting some time in Oblivion, NWN2, and Dawn of War on the PC, and GuitarHero2 on the PS2.

   I asked this because Devin's a multiple platform gamer, as you can see from his response.

OK, that's the end of this brief peek into his life. Thanks to Devin for taking the time to respond!

posted at 16:16 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: california, el cerrito, games, interview, kung fu, people i know

One Liner for Generating Annual Postfix TLS Cert

Put here because I keep having to search the web for it every time I need to do it:

openssl req -new -outform PEM -out smtpd.cert -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout smtpd.key -keyform PEM -days 365 -x509

Then point postfix at the key and cert file from main.cf. You'll need to connect with the clients once to tell them to accept this new updated certificate. One-liner swiped from urbanpuddle.

The Courier imapd-ssl provides a mkimapdcert script to do the Right Thing for that side of things.

posted at 14:55 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: memo to future me, postfix, ssl, tips, tls

Oh, You Mean the Milk of Human Kindness is Literal?

The train back to Madrid took us to the same station we'd departed from days earlier so the strange place was slightly familiar. I managed to get us completely turned around and lost until we went into a hotel lobby and got reoriented and headed for one of the low-budget hotels we were looking to stay in, in the neighborhood with the train station and the museums.

After some confusion with buzzers, door locks and language, we got ourselves a room at the Hostal Cervantes. Where the sink and bath tub had no stopper. On purpose. The shower head was cantankerous, but at least the bed was comfortable. We had a small radiator we could attempt some laundry drying on, so we did a little sink washing and crashed out.

The next day we woke bright and early, left our bags at the hotel, and went museum-delving. We first hit the Prado where we did the clever sneaky thing and went to the unpopular entrance so that we didn't stand in an interminable line and were admitted right quick. Vy gave me a crash course in art history. It's an enormous building with large collections and we spent hours cramming as much of it into our eyes as we could.

A highlight of the museum was the statue of Hermaphrodite. Here's a picture of it from someone else's photo gallery. The thing that really sticks with me, though, is a motif I saw from several artists, in several contexts. That motif is the Virgin Mary lactating. I'm not even kidding a little bit. Several paintings, showing her squeezing her teat to spray milk. She sprays it all over babies in Purgatory, she shoots it right into St. Bernard's mouth, she sprays it out into space and it becomes stars.

Dear Catholic people: WHAT.

Don't believe me? Someone has collected some images of what I saw at thehangedman blog (good blog name, by the way).

We took a sangria break at a pricey little cafe, had some ice cream, and then hit another museum, the Reina Sofia. This place is full of modern art. A lot of the most current stuff seemed either incomprehensible or pointless to me. So opaque as to preclude my understanding the point of it or so simplistic as to not have one. But there was a fun set of video installations where loops of imagery and interactive camera-television pieces gave me something to think about and do. I also saw Guernica in the flesh and some Dali, including some not-very-surreal pieces which I liked for contrast with the portions of his work I am familiar with.

Then we went back to Puerta del Sol, our old stomping grounds from our original pass through Spain, lo those many days before. We did some souvenir shopping, went back to El Corte Ingles and bought some hard candy to take back as co-worker souvenirs. I was looking for something sturdy enough to be squished into a bag, unrestricted enough that there would be no hassle with Customs, and varied enough that most of the people I work with could find something tasty about it. I had given up and we were heading to the checkout line when I spotted the candy aisle.

After our grocery run, we went into the gourmet grocery department and bought cheese and beers. We sat outside on the nearest thing to a bench we could find and enjoyed our repast. Not having an opener, I resorted to the technique of popping the bottle cap on the concrete edge. Worked great for Vy's; mine ended up breaking the neck. I still drank mine, I just did it very carefully. No reason to let possible lacerations stand between me and beer. While we were sitting there snacking, a dishevelled dude with a bigger bottle in a brown paper bag sat down on the other side of me and we all savored the day together.

Then we made a mistake and went to the airport, deciding we'd rather take the 1 Euro Metro than a 40-60 Euro cab at a later hour, and assuming the airport would be functional 24 hours a day. That turned out not to be the case and shortly after we arrived, it started shutting down most things. We found a closed restaurant, a completely vacated restaurant, and a soon to open under construction restaurant. Finally, as we were gnawing our arms off, we found a cafeteria. After 01:00, the place got quiet enough to be peaceful and restful. We grazed on a few snacks from the Cafeteria and waited for it to be late enough in the morning for our airline's counter to be open.

We weren't the only ones in this state, by any means. A line started forming long before the counter opened and we got right into it. We managed to be in the first 20% of the line and enjoyed some schadenfreude as each new person approached, began circling the line to reach the counter which they were sure had nothing to do with this line, stopped, gaped, and slunk back to the end of the line. Our patience was well rewarded as we had a painless check in process, headed to the gate, and found ourselves on the relatively short KLM hop to Amsterdam. The Amsterdam airport was still a dream of clean efficiency, especially appreciated after the lovely but somewhat grime-challenged bathrooms of Spain.

Then we were on a flight home! It exists as a 16 hour smear in my memory but I distinctly remember that the woman to my left was visiting the US for the first time and was adamant that I learn several of her tricks for solving Sudoku. So I did and she was happy and I was pleased and then we were home where we slept for half a day and then spent several more days trying to remember how to do simple things like find food and transport myself to the office.

This concludes my traveblog about Spain. I'm sure I left out many things, important things (like the time I was castigated by a nun). So it goes. I hope you've enjoyed it. We are eager to return to Spain and genuinely appreciate all the hospitality we enjoyed from the people we met and fondly remember the places we went.

posted at 11:31 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: art, art museum, madrid, milk, museum, spain, travel, wtf?

No Spoilers!

My friend Tim has undertaken a project to get the straight poop about Linux by trying it for himself. That's the kind of pragmatic approach one might expect from a skeptic. Me, I prefer to judge Linux by omens revealed to me on vision quests. Mostly it seems that the spirits associate Linux with hunger and falling down steep slopes intro bracken.

The hardest part for me about reading his posts is that I have to resist the urge to try to solve the problems he's encountering. I did resort to commenting and pointing him at some information he might find helpful. I just can't leave well enough alone.

posted at 09:18 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: linux, ubuntu

Web2Expo Presentations Online

The list of Web 2.0 Expo presentations online include five that I witnessed. If you're not very interested in Web 2.0 crud, you still might want to check out the Architecture for Humanity (link to a PDF) which I found impressive, moving and not hype-saturated.

posted at 11:24 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: web2expo

Piecing It Together

As Vy foretold, her story has appeared in Heliotrope. Hooray!

I think it's quite good in a creepy way but I'm biased.

posted at 16:00 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: vy, vylar, writing

Ahead of the Curve

There was a phenomena back when I was in school, where it seemed like the school district would roll out cool programs and resources in my wake. Things like AP programs, decent computers, advanced math curriculum, expanded libraries. Today thanks to a podcast I caught up on from Cory Doctorow's feed, I found out that my nominal home town has rolled out something else cool long after I left it,

KRUU open source radio.

Somehow I doubt anyone I knew when I was there has anything to do with the station. Not their bag, baby.

posted at 15:14 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: open source, radio

Slightly Less Pixellated

Pointless ephemeral post week continues with: I had lunch with Fasteddie from DinoMUSH. Also stoat. Who I also know from DinoMUSH.

Here's a stunning example of why people prefer his photography to mine.

On the plus side I showed him a not-yet-released Playfirst Mobile game and he claimed to be hooked.

posted at 14:13 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: dinomush, people i know

People Whose Opinions I'm Respecting

Here's an interview with Aaron Swartz, who has had some good ideas and done some good work. I'm just pointing at it so that if you have no idea who that is, you can see some of why I'm interested in the things he's working on.

posted at 08:43 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: aaron swartz, creative commons, google, philosophy, thinking, w3c

In the Land of the Dry, the Soggy Man is King

We arrived in Granada, had the blurry experience of dashing out of the bus station which had funky ramp escalators to the nearby median island where we caught a local bus going the right direction.I tried to figure out where to get off but the book was incomplete; luckily there were some English-speakers on the bus who recognized my accent and helpfully told me the stop we wanted, since they wanted it, too.

After our earlier pickpocket experiences we were leery of these helpful new friends and so we sort of skulked along behind them to the Plaza Nueva around which everything tourist orbits in Granada. We found a hotel recommended in the book, and got admitted and were able to secure a room from the amazingly helpful Matilde Ortiz de Landazuri. Sadly, she told us that we had come at a bad time and that she was not well.

The room was big and comfortably sized. The toilet was a complicated technology which looked like it had been created through a series of ad hoc re-factorings. We passed out into sleep and woke the next morning having slept away most of our traveling pains.

To fix this in time, this was March 29th, 2007. I know, because that's when we'd bought Alhambra admission tickets for. When I sat down to schedule them, I thought I was doing it well in advance. In practice, there were two time slots available and neither of them as early as we thought we wanted them. We ended up with a late afternoon slot which wasn't what we thought we wanted.

That was before we actually got to Spain, got ourself on Spanish time, and adapted to the Spanish schedule. So now that time slot was just nearly perfect. It gave us plenty of time to wend our way from the hotel we were staying in (the roomy and charming Hostal Landazuri, which was just as nice as described in the travel guide we were using) down the street to the main plaza around which all of our time was spent.

During this day we ate a really delicious paella. We saw the chapel commissioned and built as the final resting place for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, with their elaborate death mask statues and memorial and, underneath, their actual coffins. Including the one for Prince Michael who could have been king of a united Spain and Portugal because his grandparents were in charge of Spain and his father was king of Portugal. He's sometimes called Miguel de Paz and his mother had the same name as his grandmother, more or less.

Then we caught a bus up the hill to the Alhambra. To the top of a tall hill, with a commanding vantage. Exactly the kind of place one might build a fort. Like this one:

But before we went there, we spent a lot of time in the Generalife Gardens. Which, in a word, are enormous. This image is representative of the experience.

Everything in the garden has been carefully cultivated, arranged, positioned, patterned, placed. It shows a fastidious attention to detail. It's elaborate, ornate, and expressive. I really am ruining it for you with words; you need to see it in person to appreciate it.

Leaving it, we saw something we had not yet seen in Spain. Cats! As hard as it is to believe, we hadn't seen any domestic cats anywhere in Spain and now we saw several feral ones. They were all over Granada once we knew to look for them but the first ones we saw were skulking about the grounds of the Alhambra. This was a big deal for us, to see cats at last.

Then we walked to the fort you saw earlier and walked around it a bit, getting closer in time and space to the main attraction here, the Palacios Nazaries. We stepped into the boring but big palace of Carlos the Fifth.

There is a modern art museum in that palace and we stepped into it, saw a strange video on a screen, stepped back out again. Modern art has that effect on me.

Then it got to be fifteen minutes before our admittance time to the Palacios Nazaries. We walked to it, stopped in across the street to look at some models of the area in different eras, and then we managed to get admitted early to the big palace.

It's vast and amazing. Here's an interior shot.

Here's a shot of what it looks like to look out of the Palacios Nazaries at the rest of Granada.

We spent hours walking and looking and experiencing being inside this ancient enormous archive of history. This was the one fixture we had planned for our visit before coming and it rewarded our attention. So this was great. But eventually our feet hurt and closing time was coming on, so we headed back down to the Plaza Nueva.

The next day we went for a couple walks, one up to the San Nicolas Viewpoint, and back down through the Albayzin neighborhood, another along part of the Paseo de los Tristes, where we saw more cats along a river. We did some souvenir shopping, our first of the trip, as we were starting to anticipate our departure. I spent literally hours looking for a very particular souvenir and here's why.

Once upon a time when Granada was home to Christians, Jews, and Muslims. They all lived there and they, more or less, got along. That's because the Muslims were in charge and they didn't force anyone not a Muslim to convert to their religion. That was novel at the time. They did, however, tax everybody who wasn't a Muslim for being a whatever-else-they-were. That didn't sit too well with the Christians, who are well known for amassing wealth, just like Jesus told them to do.

In any case, during this golden age of relative peace and practical plenty, the leaders of the Jewish community in Granada presented the Muslim king with a gift to put in his palace. It was a fountain with twelve lions facing outward from the basin in the middle. During each hour of the day, a different lion spouted water from its mouth. So it functioned as a show of wealth, because for the Muslim kings, wealth was demonstrated by how much water you could splash around in a dry climate. It functioned as a show of cleverness, because it kept time as a clock. It probably functioned as bragging rights of some sort or another because I doubt just everybody had a piece of interior decoration presented by the leaders of the Jewish community.

So the fountain sat there and ran merrily for some time and then, when the Christian re-conquest of Granada drove the Muslims away, and the fountain was abandoned, the Christian scholars decided they really needed to know how this fountain worked. So they took it apart. They broke it in the process. Not only could they not figure out the functioning, they couldn't even restore it back the way it had been.

So I hunted feverishly for a bottle opener with an image of the Court of Lions fountain on it to give to the person who does QA for the Playfirst website. I thought that story made for a lovely tale of QA and testing. I found tons of other bottle openers and other items with that image on it but I had nearly despaired of ever finding the particular combination when I finally found it.

Then we boarded a slow train to Madrid for our last two nights in Spain.

posted at 23:06 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: gardens, palace, ruins, spain, travel

Span Before Aliasing?

I'm a slow adopter. I spent 12 days thumbing the 40404 sequence into the SMS To: field before I gave it an entry in my contact list and now it's down to four keys to generate a message to Twitter: select, t w ok. I haven't yet given it a unique initial letter but it has the built in uncommon pairing.

So that's my personal time-line between playing with twitter and deciding I'm going to keep using it.

posted at 08:34 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: sms, sns, twitter

No Me Molesta Mezquita!

We got back to Cordoba from the Medinat al-Zahara and since the bus dropped us off in such a convenient location, we decided to check out the Mezquita. Do you know what that is? Neither did I. It's a church. At least, that's what it was before it became a tourist attraction. Before it was a church it was a mosque. Before it was a mosque, it was a church. Before it was a church, it was a temple. Confused? Imagine what it would be like to attend a church with this kind of architecture.

As I understand the story, a long time ago, when the Romans lived where Cordoba is, they had a nice friendly cult of Janus. No, not this friendly cult of Janus, this friendly cult of Janus. Who seems to have been part of a polyamorous relationship involving Jupiter. So, a distinguished fellow and the Romans had a house for him at Cordoba, or so I am told.

But then the Christian tide flooded the area and they built themselves a lovely little Gothic church on top of Janus's temple. Well, lovely in a squat, rude and Gothic sense, one presumes. Then the Christian tide waned, the Islamic tide waxed, and the Gothic church was refurbished and became a mosque. It stayed that way for a while until the tide of Islam waned and the Christian tide re-waxed. They cathedralized the hell out of the mosque but weren't able to excise all of it.

So when you see it today, it's a mix of stark Christian, ebullient Christian, colorful and geometrically entrancing Islamic, and, for some reason, there's a hole in the floor so you can look down at the floor of Janus's old bachelor pad. Overall: fairly fucking awesome.

We walked around and oohed and ahhed for a while. I was particularly struck by the transitional points, where one era of architecture blended into another. Good stuff, and I'm not even an architect.

Then we decided to have a meal and went to a place recommended in, yes, the Rick Steves book on Spain. El Caballaro Rojo, which I think means The Red Dude. It was described as being somewhat pricy but worth it. Oh. My. Yes. It was indescribably delicious. I still had no appetite but I managed to eat a decent amount of the food here, it was so delicious. I also enjoyed the experience of a bathroom stall with a timer controlled light. That's one exciting part about bathrooms in Spain, a lot of them have mechanisms to automatically turn off things which would perhaps simply run here in the US if someone wandered off. The faucet, the lights, the toilet. The other exciting part is the variety of intricate mechanisms to engage flushing. The bathroom back at the Hotel Europe in Madrid had a two part button which you could selectively thumb to select the narrow option or the wide. Several other toilets I met had rods or levers or buttons in unexpected places which were to be manipulated in diverse fashion.

But enough potty humor!

After we let the meal settle, we walked around in Cordoba, past the palaces of the Christian Kings which is a tourist attraction which didn't really attract our tourism. We sauntered back up through the gardens we had rushed through earlier until a combination of hunger and curiosity took Vy into a grocery store. I stayed in the entry area with our bags, since we were forbidden to take them in and we didn't feel like dropping the euros on the pair of coin-operated lockers we'd need to hold our bags.

We weren't allowed to take our bags in, a barrier reserved for tourists, as several locals sauntered past me with enormous open backpacks. I guess only tourists shoplift in Spain. Vy had herself some grocery shopping adventures and then just before she emerged from the checkout line, it started to rain.

We raced across the street and ducked into a cafe, part of the same chain as the cafe where we'd gotten directions for the bus to Medinat alZahra. I had a perfectly pleasant espresso and used the women's bathroom by mistake (SoSuMi, their space age decor completely overshadowed the text which told me who the unisex chamber was meant for) and refilled the plastic water bottles I had carried with me the whole trip to stay hydrated. Spain made me very thirsty, all the time. We got a time estimate from the barrista for the distance, in English, as she was unimpressed with my Spanish. Man, even in Spain, the barristas are over-educated and snide. It's awesome.

When the rain stopped coming down, we ambled back up through the gardens which form a block wide path between the neighborhood where the Mezquita is and where the train station is, a sort of Tourist Boulevard, and got to the bus station with plenty of time to catch our bus. This was a new adventure in Spanish transit and probably the one where the differences and similarities to the American equivalent were most stark for me. I've taken a Greyhound from Iowa City, Iowa to Los Angeles, California, and back again. I did this because I was insane.

I would happily travel the same distance on a Spanish bus. The seating is much more comfortable, the driver is much more insane, the other passengers are much more mellow and much less skeezy, and the Spanish countryside was, for me, a novelty. There was no analogue to, say, Nebraska, on this trip. I did see, as Vy mentions, the extremely startling and creepy sight of two cute little girls skipping around in what I could only interpret as Ku Klux Klan robes but which I now know is just what you wear when you're celebrating Easter in Spain.

Here's a picture of a display of knick-knacks resembling the outfits I saw those girls wearing:

Otherwise it was a pretty relaxing trip, speedy, with no real rest stops. Good thing we were both dehydrated!

Then we got into Granada, the cornerstone of our trip planning. We had succeeded in making a day trip of Cordoba and I had fulfilled a secondary goal of sampling a Spanish long haul bus trip.

posted at 22:16 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: spain, travel

What, They Just Forgot It Was Here?

The train was just as efficient and pleasant as the first AVE we'd taken. We highly recommend and advocate taking the AVE if you are traveling in Spain. We had a funny exchange when we went into the RENFE ticket office at Cordoba and asked for schedule information for our future travels. In my slightly befuddled Spanish, I managed to ask when the AVE went to Granada from Cordoba and the station agent grinned widely and told me "Agosto". That's right, August. We weren't that patient so we decided on a bus instead, eventually.

But first we found the TI office. That's the Tourist Information office and it was the second one in Spain we went into. This one was much smaller, more like a mall boutique sized shop and it was right in the train station. We were so happy to have someone who was patient with my Spanish and understood our English and could answer all of our questions. We got confirmation of the bus station location (right across the street from the train station), directions and reassurance that we still had time to get there for the pick up point for the bus to Medinat al-Zahra, tickets for the bus, and a nice walking map of the touristy parts of the city.

We made our way to the bus station, got a schedule for the bus to Granada, decided that the schedule was something we could live with, bought our tickets, and then doubled back past the train station and through some really charming gardens towards the pick up point for our main reason in being here, getting out to the ruins.

Here's why:

• I love ruins
• Vy was curious about the architecture and context of the time it was built and inhabited
• we are attracted to experiences with narrow time windows of availability; most days, there is one bus which takes you out to the place and after a while comes back

It was a little vexing to find the bus pick up point because there was a sign with an arrow, pointing ... nowhere in particular. The actual pick up point was blocked by a truck from which a guy was unloading a pallet of boxes of brownies and when we loitered near him he became quite suspicious. I'm sure he could see that I was just the sort to steal a pallet of brownies and run away with them. We only found the place to be because we went into a cafe where they had one person who could understand English after I completely failed multiple times to explain what we wanted in Spanish. In retrospect, I think the problem was that the word I learned two decades ago for bus is no longer the word used for that vehicle. Oops.

Just as we were getting antsy that we were in the wrong place, or that the bus had driven past us without noticing us in the shadow of the tower of brownies, the bus pulled up and stopped in the lane beyond the parked truck and we boarded and sat in the empty seats up front. We watched an educational video about where we were going, in Spanish, with English subtitles. I don't retain a lot of what we saw but I do remember that the name of the place was something about Flowers and that it was a fortified city palace for a series of local bigwigs which got its start with some guy who was tagged with the epithet of "the Upstart" because he arrived in the area after fleeing from the murderers who killed his whole family, empty handed, with no favors to call upon, but within a few short years, he became a real power in the area. I guess if he did that today, they'd call him "the Entrepreneur" or maybe "the Disruptive Technologist" or maybe they'd just call him "the Upstart 2.0".

The bus took us out into the country, on progressively more narrow highways until we were down to a single lane which we must share with oncoming traffic by having one party pull off onto the grassy shoulder to allow the other to pass by and then we went up some winding hilly roads and, finally, we are there. Or, rather, here:

If you're wondering why I keep spelling it different ways, it's because I kept seeing it spelled different ways. I think it probably came into Spanish phonetically from Arabic at a time before there was much writing down of such things. The picture above is of the twisty set of walls which describe, define, delineate what might have been the interior parts of the city. Even with a lot of it knocked down and missing it feels very civilized. An order imposed upon the space, ground levelled and space shaped.

But there were parts of the palace which were deliberately left open and here's one of those:

When people talk about Islamic architecture, I guess there are a couple distinct features they have in mind. Arches like this is one of them:

There was a lot more to see here but I didn't trust my camera to capture much of it so I went sparingly on the pictures. I did have an opportunity to take a picture with a fancy camera while we were there. A group of Spanish kids asked us in English if we would take a group picture of them and I managed what I think was a pretty good one. It helps to have the instant feedback of the LCD on the digital cameras.

It was completely worth the trip to Cordoba to see these ruins alone. Luckily, we saw much more!

posted at 20:59 PDT (-0700)     (comments disabled)   permanent link   Technorati tagged as: gardens, ruins, spain, travel