The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Milo’s playground in Fulham is Bishops Park. I took a bunch of photos of it in an effort to create my first Photosynth, which is Microsoft’s latest cool thing. More specifically, Photosynth is a new way to create panoramic photos, but online and in a way that lets you navigate around the set of photos instead of seeing just one big image.

Click on the picture to see mine.

A bunch of co-workers and I spent Thursday evening at the studios for Virgin Radio (recently sold, soon to be renamed) for a night of team building and rock trivia. I did OK despite the fact that I had never heard of some of the English bands that didn’t make it over to the US in the last 30 years. Being the only American helped a little, but not too much. It was a fun night and included a rather strange race at one point…

I’ll post photos once I get them, but there were about 30 of us and they needed 5 volunteers to wear large, full body-sized, foam costumes and race each other around Golden Square in SOHO. I of course jumped at the chance! The choices were a lemon, a red pepper, a banana, a carrot, and a hot dog. I chose the hot dog, but the guy in the red pepper won the race. It was difficult to run in a big costume with no peripheral vision, with the mesh thing over my face rubbing my nose raw, and of course we had all had a bit of wine with no food yet. 

Just another odd experience of living in London.

Yes, the Colosseum in Rome is amazing, St. Peter’s has more marble than anything I’ve ever seen, and all of the various ruins are quite interesting. However, we really felt like we got a feel for Italy after a large Italian meal, with a large Italian family (sort of since they’re mostly a mix of Europeans now living in Italy), in a small hill town near Orte (a different small hill town), and drinking a very good house wine. Although, to be more precise, after this big meal with locals, 5 of us squeezed into a worn out Fiat Panda with the local 22-year old driving with blaring Italian music on the radio going between 70 and 100 kph – often on small roads, with cell phone in hand. It all seemed quite normal for him and the rest of his family, and a bit surreal.

We just got back from a few days in Rome and a few days in Orte with friends Geoff and Silvia. Geoff’s cousin owns a place in Orte that we rented and it is her family that we had dinner with and their Fiat Panda that we borrowed while there – after the above driving lesson. This means that we got the experience of squeezing a car through very narrow roads in various hill towns, driving like crazy Italian drivers (sorry my Italian friends, but I think you know what I mean), and tasting gelato in different locations. It also means that I got to test the waters (at least my foot) of another sea: the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was a great time and we can’t wait to get to other areas of Italy, preferably in the smaller towns and countryside.

I have uploaded a bunch of photos.

We live near Munster Road in Fulham and saw this tonight. Yes, apparently rainbows do end in London, but we never saw a pot of gold.

If you look real close, you can see a plane under the street light – it had just flown through the rainbow.

Yesterday started with a meeting near our place in Fulham at the Chelsea Football Club. There were people from the club, some from Microsoft, and a couple of other technology partners. The most interesting thing about the meeting is that everyone involved except two Americans (one was me) was that they were all avid Chelsea fans. I think it is somewhat of an unspoken rule that you don’t do business with them if you are not an avid fan, or if you aren’t, you send someone in your place that is.

I didn’t get to tour the stadium, but I’d like to. That costs £15 though. However, they have their own television studio, since they have their own cable channel. They are quite proud of this, so I got to see their studio. It isn’t as impressive as the Big Ten Network studios we saw the other week in Chicago, but this is just a football (soccer) club, not a television network.

I’ve given my dad a CD from Eric and made a copy for Anne (sorry Eric) and Alyson just sent me a URL to a good video that you should see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8toUUnAJfgI

You can see and hear more from Eric at http://www.youtube.com/user/ebranner

More about Eric at http://ericbranner.com/

I decided to check out the British International Motor Show today, which unfortunately was way over in East London. With weekend tube closures and summer tourist crowds, it took me almost 2 hours each direction to get there and back. From bus to tubes (Picadilly line to Jubilee line) to light rail (the DLR). I only spent 2 hours at the car show, so my travel time was twice that of my entertainment. Oh well, at least my new Zune is full of good music.

My favourites were electric cars from the NICE Car Company. MSN has a list of their view of the 10 greatest cars at the show. One of the trends I certainly noticed was that most car companies are creating small cars like my 1992 Honda Civic and are focusing on low CO2 emissions. Even Ford and Chevy were at the show with their environmentally friendly cars.

One of the nice things about living in London is access to a variety of champagne, probably because of the close proximity to the Champagne region.

With Anne on Friday, we sampled a new champagne (new to us) and one we had picked up a few months ago when we were in the Champagne region. Pictured here are 3 of our favourites, left to right:

1. Pommery: We had the Blanc de Blanc, also called "Summertime"
2. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin: pictured is the Brut, but we didn’t have any this time – it is our regular standby, which a pretty good one to have as a regular.
3. Louis Cesar Beaufort: We had the Cuvee Hannalice, which is the new one that Anne introduced us to.

If you get the chance to have one of these, I recommend you give it a try.