One of the reasons I am here is due to Craig Gallen. Craig is using OpenNMS, the software application I help maintain, in his doctoral work, and he introduced us to a local company working on digital television distribution. He also agreed to put me up for a few nights. So after landing I made my way by train to his place in Southampton.

The Titanic set sail from Southampton, and it is very close to Stonehenge. When I came here in October of last year, the first thing Craig did is take me out there, and as we toured the English countryside there were a number of times I completely fell asleep. So what I wanted to do first was nap (and it was the main reason I showed up a day early to help me get used to the time change). I slept for about four hours, and as it was an unusually beautiful day, we decided to head for Portsmouth on the coast.

Home to the Royal Navy, Portsmouth as been trying to reinvent itself somewhat as a tourist destination, and part of that was the building of the Spinnaker Tower. For £5 you can take an elevator to the top and look out for miles. We wandered around there for awhile and both of us started to get hungry, so on the way back to Southampton we stopped at a pub called “The Jolly Sailor”, which was right on the water. It was nice – I had my first English beer in months – and a fish pie.

After dinner we met up with Ben, a friend of Craig’s, and Ben’s fiancé, for a movie. It was an art house picture directed by Tommy Lee Jones called The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. I enjoyed the movie but I don’t think I’ll be watching it again. As I grow older, I have come to demand a lot more entertainment from films, and as an art film this one was a little long, and a little depressing. Not as depressing as the trailers for two French films that were previewed before the feature film. While I haven’t decided to lock myself into the Jimmy Carey catalog, I’m thinking some blockbuster like The Da Vinci Code is next on the list.

Note: I must admit that there was a trailer for a film called Brick that looked real promising.

We got back to Craig house around midnight and stayed up talking until 1 or 2 in the morning (I have no watch). It didn’t take me long to fall asleep.