How I $pend My Time

O dear, I just love puns. You get five points if you can correctly identify how many I put in the title.

This post goes out to all my fellow engineers, who share my love for excel.

Now that I have done a considerable amount of traveling, and my habit of making excel sheets to keep track of data (you know what I mean), I have decided to share my travel graphs.

I’ve kept track of the time that I spend on different forms of transportation: trains, buses, boats, and planes during my trips.

And here are some nice figures showing that data, Enjoy!

*The following data only contains time of travel, it doesn’t include waiting time, which is considerable. For example, my plane was cancelled once and the next one was a 2 hour bus ride and 6 hours in a different airport away.

The bar graphs gives you a nice overview of how much time I've spent in transit.

I put in a pie chart cause really, who doesn't like a pie chart, even though they are stupid because they are qualitative. Is the blue one bigger than the green one? Is the yellow one half the red one? The bar graph knows!

This one is my favorite. It shows how much travelling I have done and when, but also how my travel mode habits have changed. While its not exactly what I wanted, its pretty close.

Peace out!

I left my gloves on a bus in London

­­Ello ello ello there.

I’ve now been to both capitals of the two countries that founded Canada so long ago, and I will say that the English side has won me over. While Paris was awesome, London always kept me laughing, for example:

Since it was a Saturday I went out on a pub crawl for some London partying, some of the bars were douchey and lame, but it gave me that chance to chat up some locals, a nurse and a political adviser to the US military in Iraq, pretty sweet! It finished off at the Ministry of Sound, self described as the best dance club in London, with perfect acoustics and humidity controls, blah blah blah, whatever, the bass was insane!

The sweet sign projected on the wall outside.

After a great night of clubbing, of course there is parliament building to see. Great weather made walking around London rather comfortable, and the late time of year meant pretty much no tourists.

Just incase you forgot they do everything backwards here, a convenient reminder.

And some great flying buttresses at Westminster abbey. Its in such great condition because they charge 15 pounds to get in, unless you go in for worship that is…

Buckingham palace, pretty unimpressive, apparently it wasn't made to be a palace… ya okay… The Stockholm palace is much more impressive.

Some afternoon sun presented with some great lighting for pictures.

The Clock Tower, often wrongly called Big Ben, which is actually an informal nickname of the largest bell inside the tower.

The back side of Parliament.

And to keep up with tradition, some evening pull ups on what must be the worlds largest sundial, on the summit of Tower Hill.

The Tower Bridge, next to the Tower of London, just of Great Tower road, ya I know, very original naming sceme. Really impressive construction techniques for a 120 year old brigdge. It’s a steel suspension truss brigde that opens with an upper walkway for pedestrians, very cool, but I don’t believe it opens any more.

Next stop the British museum, to see some world famous Greek and Roman sculpture, which I seem to have developed quite a liking for. The Greeks were much more skillful than the Romans, and like the current Hollywood, almost all Roman Sculpture are copies of Greek work that doesn’t exist anymore.

And instead of showing you dozens of statues and pieces of buildings, which you can’t really appreciate, I’ll show you the roof! Its really sweet, made for the Queen or whatever.

A return to the Tower of London during the day was next. While its quite pricey to get in, they keep the Crown Jewels here so kinda a big attraction, what with having a 530 carat diamond the size of a golf ball! There’s also the lesser, 300 carat diamond, small by comparison.

Ahh and here is what most of the London tube looks like, escalators and lifts, cause that baby’s deep! The amount of stairs you have to take to get to the tubes is in the range of 200!

I also got lucky and happened upon a tube strike the second day, so it was time for the bus, which was insanely busy, as was the rest of the city since everyone had to walk to work that day.

I hung out with some Aussi’s I met on a tour who were quick to point out my terrible pronunciation of British words, such as ‘Leicester’ is said ‘Lester’, which is stupid.

Until we speak again...