Picture update, mostly…

As the title says, this is mostly just a heads up that I’ve finally removed my opposable digit from my rectum and worked on some photos and posted them up on the companion blog over at Pictures of the Long Road to Nowhere

The recent ones posted were all from several day trips with a friend of mine from LA – the same person I’m doing the Two Photos a Day thing with.

Bottles was taken in an old skool candy store in Pasedena while we walked around the Old Town for a few hours one afternoon. We saw the Cheesecake factory where Penny from The Big Bang Theory apparently works. It looks nothing like it’s portrayed on the show. I felt cheated. I did not feel surprised, but they could’ve made it at least slightly close to reality, no?

Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica 3rd Street Prom, Pier Couple and End of Route 66 were all taken on a day trip to Luxembourg. No, wait, that’s not right. Santa Monica, sorry. Easy mistake to make – they’re right next to each other. They were all taken at night, hand-holding my camera with no tripod or rests at all. Given that, I’m pretty impressed with how clearly they came out. I also haven’t played with B&W photography for a while, so they were fun to edit.

It also occurred to me that should someone, for some reason I cannot fathom, want to contact me about this blog at all, they have no real way of doing so save for leaving a comment on a post, which lacks privacy and finesse. On that note, I have created a Contact Me page up at the top should anyone need to. Also, I’m serious about the smoke signals.

Productivity becomes me…

Yeah, not too productive though, I know.

First, I guess a geographical update is necessary. My allowed stay in the US on their visa waiver program ran out sometime around the 21st of December, so I left the country on the 19th. Given the time of year and my impending birthday at the end of January, I decided to fly back to the UK and spend the holidays and said birthday at home with my family. So, that’s where I am.

Don’t worry though – I still have a fair few articles I want to get written up here about various things, and I have a whole load of photos to go through and work on from my time in the US. LRTN and PotLRtN will still be updated while I’m at home. I won’t be staying home forever by any stretch of the imagination – just a little while, and taking that time to plan where to go next!

In other news, I have started a new collaborative work with a good friend of mine I met while in Los Angeles. While staying with her, I was shown a photo book that my friend had printed with a photo from each and every day of 2010. By Jove, what a wonderful idea, and especially interesting, I’d hope, due to my very varied and every-changing locations in the coming months.

So without further ado, I introduce you to Two Photos a Day – a photo blog receiving posts each day, one from me, and one from aforementioned friend in Los Angeles. Do check it out and follow us over there. I’m hoping that our widely different locations and photographic styles will lead to some interesting daily diptychs.

And, that’s all for now. I hope you all had wonderful holidays and a great New Years.

Big fat lies…

I was lying in the half sleep you get just after you’ve woken up when you’d really rather fall back to sleep, but your mind is still functioning on a dream level.

I came up with an idea.

When it first came out, keeping in mind how long ago the first film was, I was fairly frequently mocked by being called Harry Potter. This was because I wore glasses and had dark hair, I can only presume, because that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

But.

I still have dark hair, though it is substantially shorter than Harry’s, I still wear glasses (some of the time) though they’re notably less round than Harry’s, and, well, I have a nice authentic British accent.

By jove, I shall pretend to be related to J.K. Rowling and, in fact, I am who she based the character on! Genius.

I can even back this up with a picture of Hogwarts school I took, which is where she got the inspiration for that and the location to use in the movies.

Taken by my own fair hand

I am going to a party filled with strangers later. Mwa-aha-aha-ha.

Now to research which of JK’s relatives I could be…

This has nothing to do with travel, so if you just want to read about my travelling adventures, move on to the next post. It’s also lengthy. And miserable.

Recommendations, yo…

What? I can be street.

Moving on…

When deciding which post to write today it was quite a toss up, because I have four or five ideas milling around in my head, and I don’t want to write one after the other and post ’em all up at once. So instead of deciding, you get something different.

I recently received an email from my dad about a couple of different things, and at the end was a very sweet sentiment: “I think your blog’s great, very entertaining. You should seek employment as a travel journalist. Seriously!”

Now, bless, I’m entirely sure he’s viewing things through the rose-tinted glasses of family, so I thought I would compile a list of other blogs that’re actually well written and worth reading, or that I just plain enjoy. Some are travel related, others not. Some are a tad NSFW in their nature, but you’ll be okay.

Never-Ending Footsteps – another travel blog by a friend of mine pursuing a very similar journey to me.

Fluent in 3 Months – a highly popular travel-ish blog about a guy trying to learn a lot of languages and travelling while doing so, but it also had some incredibly well written articles  on a variety of worldly things.

Travel, Adventure, and New Experiences – another blog about which the title says it all really.

Journalist on the Run – more travel related fun.

Tattoosloveandlunacy – I have no idea, but I like the way she writes…

Listful Thinking – ditto…

I imagine at this point your attention spans are starting to wane a little with all the reading, so let’s watch something instead.

Seananners’ latest YouTube video – Seananners is a YouTube video maker by profession, and sometimes posts vids of him gaming with commentary over the top. You can pretty much ignore the gameplay and just listen to the point behind what he’s saying:

 

And now I gotta get to packing up my bag again. Moving on from LA for a week or two to go visit my good friend Maya up in San Francisco!

Productive music…

I absolutely have to have music playing whenever I’m doing anything that isn’t either talking to people, or watching a show/movie. It helps me be less distracted and to focus properly.

You should know about an excellent website called Stereomood. Go to the site, click on a heading that represents the kind of mood you’re in, and sit back and relax to an almost endless list of music supplied to fit the feeling.

I have a playlist there that I use when I’m writing posts here. It seems to be pretty effective at keeping me on track without being distracting with lyrics I can sing along to or music catchy enough to make me wanna air drum. I play awesome air drums. Possibly the best you’ve ever heard. Feel free to have a listen.

Really, people? Light switches?

I went out for the day today with one of the people I contacted on Couchsurfing – I’ll write more about that later. When I got back I noticed something rather interesting about my page view stats. They’d spiked massively, about double my normal page views, in the few hours I was out. Lookit (and you’ll also notice the difference tagging has made increasing, too):

See that huge spike on the right hand side? Yeah, that wasn’t there when I left. My tracking whatsamagiggers tell me the hits came from Facebook, and that someone shared the most recent post I published. The one about light switches.

Yep, out of all the things I’ve written about travelling alone through strange countries, spending time visiting historically war-torn cities, the joys and pitfalls of constantly meeting new people (OK, I may not have written that one yet), all the deep and meaningful stuff about myself, and it’s bloody light switches you people like?!

Clearly I’ve been high-balling the level of my readers’ intellect (I jest, don’t worry). No, I just found it amusing that out of everything, it’s a post about light switches in England vs the US that is the most popular by far.

Important cultural differences…

Alright, I admit, the title may be slightly misleading. Unless you classify ice cream and light switches as important, as I do.

So there are many and varied differences between the US and the UK, and for some reason it seems to be something that I’m asked quite frequently by Americans when I’m chatting to them. “So what’re the biggest differences between here and the UK?” they say. And despite how many obvious and huge differences there are, it’s actually rather difficult to name any of them when put on the spot like that.

Well, now I have a specific and immediate answer I can give whenever presented with that question in future. It might not be what most people are expecting, or the most interesting answer, but you can’t fault it for it’s pragmatism.

Light switches in the UK look like this (without all the chrome and fancy black plastic, but the general shape remains the same):

Now, imagine you’ve just made your evening meal, and you’re holding your plate of food in one hand and your drink of choice in the other and you’re about to walk out of the kitchen, but you don’t want to leave the light on. You have no choice but to ineffectually jab at the light switch with the edge of the plate over and over again until you either catch it just right and turn the light off, or spill your lovingly prepared food onto the floor. Was the floor hungry? Possibly. But you didn’t need to feed it just yet. And certainly not with that bolognese you just made (with tagliatelle, philistine).

American light switches have overcome that problem quite nicely. Observe:

You see that? The majesty of the little nubbin sticking out so brazenly into the room like that? Now all you have to do, chow in hand, is wander past and deftly catch the little bugger with the edge of the plate, your finger, hell, flick it with your nose if the fancy takes you.

Light switches, eh? It’s the simple things that make the difference.

Also, ice cream.

There are so. many. more. flavours of ice cream here. It just doesn’t seem fair. The UK market gets maybe, conservatively, 20% of the available flavours that the US has access to. Now, admittedly, it’s cold in England a lot, and so ice cream isn’t going to be such a big thing, but even so. We like our after dinner niceness, dammit, and I resent the fact that we only get thrown a metaphorical bone when it comes to the flavours on offer.

Today, for instance, I purchases some Ben and Jerry’s Cinnamon Buns ice cream, which is not available in the UK as far as I’m aware. Caramel ice cream, (pronounced ka-ra-mel, not car-mel, tch) with cinnamon bun dough and cinnamon streusel swirl. Oh God it’s good.

But then, I hear it’ll be snowing in parts of the UK soon, so maybe ice cream isn’t at the top of their list of priorities…

Publicity…

This is more of an update and FYI than a post with any actual content.

For those of you who pay attention you will have seen I have included a Where on Earth have I been? page at the top of the blog. This is a more detailed list of the countries I’ve visited and most of the places in each country, with handy links to all of them if you want to get a bit more info on any in particular. Please do take a look – it’ll make the effort of writing that list out and creating the links one by one seem worth while.

Secondly, and for those of you interested, I have created a Long Road to Nowhere Twitter account (@LRtNowhere) and Facebook page. This is mostly to make it easier for people to receive updates when I post things here (instead of RSSing the blog, or receiving email updates), as I’ll likely not post much on them at all specifically (though occasionally), but they will receive auto-updates when I post here. Please do follow or like as you see fit.

And probably lastly, you may have noticed that several of my posts have had pictures included recently. This is likely to become an on-going thing. For a start, it makes large walls of text more interesting to look at, but more importantly since I started tagging and categorising all my posts, they appear on the WordPress global tags listings pages, and posts having a picture makes them much more attractive to the eye when browsing said lists. Here’s one coming up now:

In the above picture, taken from the reader stats page of the blog, you can see the difference tagging posts has made to the number of page views. This, and the different methods of increasing readership and publicity is good. I’m not trying to make money or anything like that. It’s more that if I regularly have people reading this who have no idea who I am or what my story is, it’ll encourage me to a) write more often, b) write posts with actual interesting content rather than just my own personal ramblings, and c) write better. We shall see.

Oh, and this is a test to see if the auto-publication to Twitter and Facebook works properly. EDIT: It does.

Busy day…

While I have predominantly spent it sitting, today has been quite a busy day. I have made a fair few changes to the blog here which I shall now highlight for you.

For a start, I have filled out an ‘about this blog’ / info page, entitled What On Earth is This? You’ll find it constantly available at the top of the blog just under the header image, but for your convenience click the link in this paragraph.

I have also added a Quotations page, which contains some inspirational or otherwise thought-provoking quotes. If some of them seem a touch cliché or trite, well, screw you. Write your own damn blog. You will find this page sat all cozy next to the above mentioned What On Earth is This at the top of the blog.

Depending on how you view the site, you may notice some changes and additions to the information on the right hand side of the posts. If you receive updates via email or RSS, I’m not sure if you can see this information or not, so bookmark and visit the actual site from time to time. I have changed the ‘links’ section to have descriptions to the sites they link to, I’ve updated my reading list, and I’ve added a category list as well as a tag cloud (more on that momentarily).

While I’m talking about the links, I have edited and updated all three of the maps that’re listed on the Maps page. I discovered something pretty nifty with that today – if you load up any of the maps, say the Total Trip one, and then click the play button, it’ll take you on a nice animated tour of the whole journey, complete with accompanying (and fitting) music. Try it for all three. It’s fun.

So back to categories and tags. I spent a large portion of the afternoon going through and adding categories and tags to most every post I’ve made. One by one. The categories are somewhat larger over-arching subjects that a post may be about, a theme it’ll fall into, shall we say. The tags are smaller or more specific subjects that may be contained within. On the right hand side of the main blog page you’ll see a category list and a count of how many posts fall into each category (which so far are Travel, Introspection, Miscellany and Photography), and a tag cloud below that (which represents how often each tag appears by the size of the word). You can click on any of the categories or tags to filter and show only posts pertaining to that particular subject. Oh, TIL stands for Things I’ve Learned, by the way. Each individual post will detail which categories and tags are attached to it at the bottom of the post.

I don’t imagine any of this will make any difference to anyone going forward – it was mostly for the sake of proper organisation. That said, it will allow newer readers to easily go back and read posts on certain subjects or places easily without having to scan through every post. For instance, if you want to read all the Things I Have Learned, just click the TIL tag, or all the posts about or relating to Italy (warning, bad language…) then click the Italy tag.

Also updated is the About page over at Pictures of the Long Road to Nowhere, though that’s really a minor addition.

You will find, should you view each post’s page individually (such as via email or RSS feeds), buttons at the bottom of a post allowing you to share said post via Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, WordPress, Google+, reddit, and indeed email itself, should you feel the post entertaining or enlightening enough.

I think those are all the changes I’ve made to the blog so far, though I have a couple of other things in mind as well. Feel free to leave feedback on any of the above should you care enough.