That’s what history really is: masses of people doing ordinary things.

—Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

What other organization, indeed?

“Because what other organization would put out a chart like this.” (Worth seeing.)

The FUD department is connected to the legal department is connected to the Kinect department?

How is this (people finding new things to connect a Kinect to) in any way a law enforcement or product safety issue?

We’re in coastal Patagonia with the hopes of seeing penguins, dolphins, and whales — all of which should be around this time of year. There are two big wildlife reserves here — Peninsula Valdes to the north (known for whales and elephant seals) and Punta Tombo to the south (the world’s largest colonly of Magellanic Penguins). We’ve also been told there are good dolphin-watching opportunities nearby, and we should try to combine this into our trip to the penguin reserve.

Short story for those just interested in the animals: we saw the penguins and dolphins and both were endearing. The dolphins we saw are Commerson’s dolphins, which are tiny, live here year around, and are called “toninas” by the Argentinians; other larger dolphin species (“delfines”) show up in the summer but aren’t here yet. The toninas were easy to spot, and obligingly playful, swimming near our boat, and surfing the bow waves from our and other boats. The penguins in the Punta Tombo colony are Magellanic penguins, about 2 feet tall, fairly lazy, and fairly willing to ignore humans traipsing through their nesting areas. We spent a few hours watching them, sleeping in their nests, standing up and stretching and standing still for 10s of minutes at a time, going through a wake-up grooming ritual that looks a lot like humans brushing their teeth — hey, penguins are easy to anthropomorphize — and occasionally waddling around.

Longer story with advice for anyone who might be trying this trip themselves:

The guidebooks we’re using are both heavily biased towards using Puerto Madryn as a base for visiting these areas, but we decided to stay in Trelew first, for three reasons: it’s closer to the penguin reserve, it’s got the airport we’re flying into, and being less recommended by guidebooks it’ll be less full of guidebook-toting tourists.

So, then, here we are in Trelew trying to figure out how best to visit Punta Tombo, but this turns out to be not incredibly obvious, either from guidebook advice or internet searches (hmm, maybe this is why the guidebooks advise going to Puerto Madryn).

It seems we have 3 basic options: a guided tour package, a taxi hired for the day, or renting a car and going by ourselves. The taxi that picked us up from the airport mentioned they do all-day tours to Punta Tombo for a fixed price of AR$480, so that’s our starting point.

Looking for tours, it seems like most of what’s available starts in Puerto Madryn and not Trelew. Using guidebook advice, we find one company starting in Trelew but they’re not running a tour today. Finally our hotel front desk finds one; it’s AR$180 per person, and visits the penguin reserve, Gaiman for Welsh tea, and the dinosaur museum. So a group tour: nearly the same price, takes us other places we didn’t want to go, doesn’t visit the dolphins, and leaves only about 1 hour with the penguins.

We ruled out renting a car because I didn’t feel like driving all day.

That left us back with the taxi option, and since now we know it doesn’t cost that much more than a package tour (for 2 people — and for 3 or 4 people, it would actually be cheaper), plus lets us go at our own pace, stay with the penguins as long as we want, and work the dolphins into the itinerary too, it’s the clear winner.

Next up: bus to Puerto Madryn, rent a car, and drive into Peninsula Valdes to see the whales and elephant seals.

Apparently by visiting now we’re slipping in just under the window for the legendary Argentinian beef… people are complaining already it’s gone down in quality and up in price just in the last year, but they expect it to keep getting worse. The reason is a combination of the American feedlot system taking over, and bad government subsidy policy which means there’s no money in beef and too much money in soy… Argentina is now actually a net importer of beef now (mostly from Uruguay). And the people I talked to were not happy about that.

Argentine national parks are really expensive for foreigners. Admission tends to be something like $75, per person, per day — unlike in the US where national park admission is usually good for an entire vehicle for a week. (If you aren’t familiar with Argentine currency, here’s a crash course: the unit of currency is the peso, and there are currently about 4 Argentine pesos to the US dollar. The peso symbol is the $, so to avoid confusion, I’ll prefix the $ symbol with the country code, either AR$ for pesos or US$ for US dollars.)

Vanessa and I have visited 3 different national parks so far – Parque Nacional Iguazu, Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego and Parque Nacional de los Glaciares. We visited each park for 2 days, and since there are 2 of us, and all of the admission fees are per person per day, that means we had to buy 4 tickets — conveniently matching the 4-to-1 ratio between pesos and dollars. Thus, admission to Glaciares is AR$75 for a single ticket, but for the two of us to visit on two consecutive days it cost us US$75.

Iguazu was also AR$75 per person per day, or US$75 for our 2-day visit, and Tierra del Fuego was AR$65 per person per day, or US$65 for our 2-day visit.

Further: Argentine national parks have 3 different prices depending on where you’re from — residents of the same province as the park pay the least, other Argentinians pay slightly more, and foreigners pay a lot more. That seems somewhat fair since (a) foreigners don’t pay taxes and (b) they mostly come from more expensive or richer countries.

But, this still stings in comparison to the US: the less visited parks cost something like US$10, and the most popular and expensive (say Yellowstone) something like US$25. However, that gets your whole family in for a week. And there’s an all-access pass good for all national parks for a year (this used to be known as the Golden Eagle pass; now it’s called Access), which is US$80. That’s sounding like a better and better deal compared to Argentina, and as far as I know it’s available to foreigners as well.

(Maybe there’s some all-access pass for Argentine parks that I don’t know about? As it stands, we’ve racked up US$215 in park admission fees in just 2 weeks!)

If you’re entertained by finding patterns in noise, meaning in chaos — even false meanings — and especially if you’re a English-speaking rap-listening Burning Man-attending engineer — perhaps you’ll be as amused by these acronyms and airport codes as I am.

EZE — the Buenos Aires international airport, Ezeiza, practically screams “straight outta Compton”.

BRC — the Bariloche airport, or the Black Rock City airport. (If you do a Google search for “BRC airport”, both pop up in the top 3.)

FTE — the El Calafate airport or, if you’ve worked in Silicon Valley and had to read any resumes or job postings, a full-time engineer.

AC and DC — the equivalent of BC and AD in English, meaning Ante Cristo and Desde Cristo. In English, we use AC and DC to refer to different kinds of electric current, but also the rock band (whose name, judging by their lightning-bolt logo, was inspired by electricity). But since they also have a Genisis-inspired song (Let There Be Rock), who knows — this comes full circle back to the Spanish Biblical meaning for AC/DC.

Really good take on the e-book state of the union

Nate Anderson has a really good description of the current state of the e-book world, as shown by the Kindle 3 — the device, and also the issues surrounding whether to buy/borrow/read books on paper vs electronically.

He points out one subtle issue which I think is really important for the adoption of e-books. Consider downloadable music, which really took off with the introduction of the iPod and its “rip, mix, burn” mentality, showing that you could bootstrap your new pure-electronic library by converting your existing music library, and then go on buying music in either the old physical format (CD) or new downloadable format. With e-books, you have to choose one, and the choices bifurcate; as Anderson writes “it appears that all but the youngest of us are doomed to go through life with two different codexes, physical and electronic.”

I know this matters for me — I like reading on Kindle, but often miss having access to a book I already have on paper somewhere.

iOS 4 on iPhone 3G — lawsuit material?

On the one hand, it’s silly to use class action lawsuits as the tool to address software bugs, but on the other hand, if Apple’s going to publish an update this bad and then actively prevent people from just going back to the other version, what other recourse do upset customers have?

Having seen the issue firsthand — how horribly sluggish an iPhone 3G became after upgrading from iOS 3.1 to 4.0 — I can see how people would get really frustrated. I’m sure Apple just saw this is a bug to fix in the next update (iOS 4.1 is said to fix it, though I haven’t tried it yet), but for people whose daily-use phone was horribly sluggish for a couple months while they waited for that upgrade, it’s hard to excuse Apple for not letting them downgrade back to 3.1 in the meantime.