In conclusion, America is a land of contrasts

Florida SUCKS!!!!!

But you can have a fucking great time there!

Richard, Arynn's and my host for the last week, took us to a few awesome nudist places in and around Ft. Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale was probably the worst place I'd ever been, until we drove around Miami. Drivers are idiots, old people are everywhere, young people look either plastic or dangerous, Jeb Bush is governor. It's fucking terrible. But the local florae and faunae are terrific. The plants all look eerily prehistoric, and the rampancy of tiny geckos and weird-ass birds is equally alien. The geckos are too hard to catch, but I'm sure they wouldn't have tasted very good anyway (for some reason I wanted to eat everything that moved).

We got up early each morning, went out to the nudist destination du jour, swam, sunbathed, hiked nature trails, collected shells or fossils when they were around. Arynn and I battled the Atlantic for a few hours on a nude beach in Hallandale until we grew tired, declared victory, and built a schizophrenic little sandcastle. Occasionally young black Jamaicans or old white businessmen would hit on us.

One resort was full of French Canadians, more than I think I've ever seen before. It also had a pond with an island that had once had a monkey house (this is a real thing!) wherein several monkeys lived. Then a storm came, and all the monkeys left save one. Then the monkey house fell down, and the last monkey left. Hmph. Remaining in the pond were tiny and large fish (I was unsuccessful at eating the small fish) and turtles. One was a peculiar softshell turtle. The other was, as Jim (or Jheem, le manageur) informed us, was "just, like, a water turtle, you know?" We tried to feed them bread, but they were almost too stupid.

Richard himself is fascinating. His Asperger's idiosyncrasies weren't at all irritating, especially since he's such a (compulsively) rational guy and was totally cool talking about it. Waay cooler was his profound geekiness. He's been involved in IC design and FS/OS since before the beginning. The copious art on his walls was about half nudes and half NASA photographs of the Earth from space, the Shuttle on Earth, space from Hubble, etc. His computer hardware was not at all bleeding edge (his ThinkPad must be five years old), but his software was, and his cables were meticulously hidden. He related to us the time RMS (yes, Richard Motherfucking Stallman) telephoned him because his computer wouldn't boot! Richard's first question, he admitted, was "Well, what OS are you using?" RMS was hardly amused. Needless to say, we hit it off like a house afire. I caught him in the obvious fallacy of stating a salt-water pool's density as exactly 1g/cm³, and we had a chuckle. While we were lounging poolside, he said to me, "Hey, I just got some e-mail from someone whose name you might recognise" and showed me his inbox on his BlackBerry. It was Linus Torvalds!

I am so totally a fan. Maybe in a couple years his company'll be needing some SQL-proficient physics grad students to crunch a few numbers?

And in case you were worried, it was a problem with GRUB not recognising the new hard drive the OS was on. They physically removed the drive, flipped it over (because for some reason it would fit in two different ways), stuck it back in and it worked fine. Happy ending!

P.S. I am now so deeply tanned I can at last reasonably invite people to kiss my black ass.