Hobbiton

May. 19th, 2024 03:30 pm
purplecat: Gandalf driving through the Shire (Tolkien)

A view over Hobbiton showing rowing hills with round doors in them.  In the foreground is a market garden with pumpkins.


So, yes, on the Sunday in New Zealand I went to Hobbiton. In fact I took a guided minibus trip that also included some caves with glow-worms in them which, while pretty, didn't quite live up to the hype and wouldn't allow photos.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect at Hobbiton - it is a movie set after all, but actually - as both the guide on the minibus and the one he handed us over to once we got there explained - the set used for Lord of the Rings had been completely removed at the end of filming. However, over the subsequent years the farm started making a lot of money from driving fans up to the empty field where the set had been, so when The Hobbit movies came round they proposed that the film build everything for real and then operate it in an ongoing fashion as a tourist attraction. This is what is there today and it's pretty impressive. You can't go in to most of the hobbit holes, but I gathered they all had an actual room behind the door (mostly used for storage).

To be honest, I have a lot of photos of misc hobbit holes so I've bunged them all into the directory which I use for random Friday pictures, so you can see them as they pop out amid all the castles, fossils and random neolithic stones. Even so, and with some strategic weeding, there are a lot of photos.

You have been warned! )
purplecat: The family on top of Pen Y Fan (General:Walking)
"Bring your outdoorsy clothes we might get lucky with the weather," Matryoshka said in one of her emails before this trip.

I therefore packed my walking boots. I considered packing my walking sticks but wasn't convinced they were worth the trouble of trying to get into the carry on luggage. Once here, we consulted the weather and decided that Tuesday was the best day for a walk. Matryoshka then picked us a 13km (allegedly) walk to the next town, past a Vikinghytten where she promised there would be waffles. I murmured a bit about the lack of walking sticks but she insisted we would take the funicular railway up to the plateau and, once up there, "it's very flat". It was only later it occurred to me that, being nearly 10 years younger than I am, she might not have realised I value my sticks more on the down than on the up.

Anyway we got up onto the plateau where the walking was pleasant and easy albeit with a bit more up than Matryoshka had anticipated.


A square cairn with a pointed stone on the top and a sign.  Beyond it is visible a blue wooden house.
Despite the fact the sign on that cairn reads Vikinghytten, that house is not the Vikinghytten. When we got to the Vikinghytten which was actually off to the left of that cairn, it was resolutely shut and there were no waffles to be seen. Also, the toilets were locked.

However we continued onwards and upwards a bit following a nicely visible line of cairns. Then we took a turn off this path and things became a bit more complicated. It's a long time since I've been on a walk without the combination of solid GPS and an ordnance survey map. I had managed to persuade Matryoshka to load the route to Indre Arna, on her phone and we relied on this quite heavily in what followed as the path repeatedly disappeared leaving us to strike out in roughly the right direction across the bog until we picked it up again.

Then we hit the down which was both muddy and steep and variably pathless, sufficiently so that when we came out on the road and then missed the turning back onto the path we decided to stick with the road which only took us a little out of our way. Shortcuts make long delays, we reassured ourselves, and we were certainly travelling about twice as fast on the road as we had been on the path.


image showing a contour map with two peaks, then sharp down from about 9km to about 11km which subsequently flattens out about.  Over this is a blue line which shown a noisy track but generally downward trend until there is a sharp dip just after 10km after which it rise up higher than the start.
This is the Strava analysis of the walk showing elevation against our pace. The point where we hit the road is fairly obvious.


We ended the walk in a very empty but very clean train station with a very space age toilet but no bar. We waited 30 minutes for a train and 10 minutes later we were back in Bergen, where we went our separate ways, showered and then met up again for burgers and beer. We were both clearly a bit dehydrated when we compared notes this morning, but neither was too stiff though Matryoshka had sore ankles and I have slight numbness in one big toe.


View from the plateau, down to the pine forest and then to the fjord.


Allegedly this was a research meeting and, to be fair, we did plan out a textbook though we got side-tracked today into writing a paper so the textbook plan hasn't even made it as far as an outline document.
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)

View from a high window over a flat city.  Lots of trees and two large blocky buildings.
This is the view from the room where the MetaEthics Workshop was held - the reason I was in Eindhoven in the first place.

Other Pictures under the Cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
While I was in Texas an old friend and his wife took me out for the day including a trip around Texas' Capitol





Piccies Under the Cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
This is the last travel picspam for a while I promise. I was there to deliver a lecture on Verifying Autonomous Ethical Systems to Matryoshka's Machine Ethics class.

Pictures under the cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (academia)
At the start of March I spent 2 Days in Washington at a slightly odd workshop on Incorporating Ethics into Artificial Intelligence. I knew, from following [livejournal.com profile] gregmce on Strava, that there was a nice looking run around the National Mall and so most of the photos below are from that - often early in the morning because Jet-Lag.

Picspam Under the Cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
A final few miscellaneous images of Delft. Including some of medical instruments, just to warn those who may not like such things.

Under the Cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
I've been in Delft for the past two weeks for work reasons but I was able to spend the weekend doing touristy things. I've got quite a few photos, but I need to pack this evening so I'm only posting a handful now. Maybe more later. I also had to take selfies for Corporate Communications, so I may be posting a link to that at some point.

Pictures under the Cut )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
I have written about Schloss Dagstuhl before. I do rather like the place, so seized another opportunity to go when one presented itself. I will not bore you all with the details of Verifying and Testing Multi-Agent Systems. I think the most interesting aspects, for me, were getting a better handle on some of the logics for reasoning about multi-agent systems, and getting a better look at some of the other model-checkers out there. There was also an interesting session on devising good examples for the specification and verification of multi-agent systems and, with luck, there may be some concrete outcomes from that.

However I will talk about the hike. The Hike )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
At the end of march I went to a conference in Tallinn, Estonia. It was actually a really good conference and I came away with lots of thoughts though I'm not really intending to blog about them since they are along the lines of "more efficient ways to generate Büchi Automata" which I suspect won't mean much to my flist. Though there was an interesting and more generally accessible talk about load balancing in the German national grid with a side order on getting more trains onto a single European train track which I may give an overview of at some point (*stares dubiously at list of "things it might be interesting to blog about" which has grow scarily long of late*)

Anyway, I actually think my boss was a little bemused by my sudden enthusiasm for foreign travel when this came up. Our group was approached by one of the attached workshops and asked if anyone would like to give a talk and he rather dubiously passed the question on and asked if anyone was interested in going. Normally I'm not terribly excited at the prospect of spending a week away from home, but I'd seen pictures of Tallinn and it looked terribly pretty.

I was not disappointed. Gratuitously long Picspam under the cut )

Sapporo

Sep. 22nd, 2010 08:54 am
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
I didn't take many photos when I was in Japan. Sapporo is a tourist city, but it's tourism is based around it's winter ski slopes and focused on the internal market. Visually, it felt to me very much like visiting a North American city, just on a slightly more compact scale which actually made walking from place to place practical. But largely there were just a lot of big modern buildings.

For the sake of completeness though, here is the view from my hotel window )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/20660.html.

Sapporo

Sep. 22nd, 2010 08:54 am
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
I didn't take many photos when I was in Japan. Sapporo is a tourist city, but it's tourism is based around it's winter ski slopes and focused on the internal market. Visually, it felt to me very much like visiting a North American city, just on a slightly more compact scale which actually made walking from place to place practical. But largely there were just a lot of big modern buildings.

For the sake of completeness though, here is the view from my hotel window )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (agents)
I vaguely threatened to write up my trip to Schloss Dagstuhl when I posted about visiting Trier. I don't really feel up to an account of even the most interesting talks but I thought a bit of general waffle might not go amiss.

waffle )
purplecat: Hand Drawn picture of a Toy Cat (Default)
I've just been on a trip to a workshop at Schloss Dagstuhl in Germany about which I shall no doubt blog in due course. On Wednesday afternoon, when it was pouring with rain and my head was full of cold we went on a day trip to Trier and had a guided tour of the city. To be honest, in retrospect, I should really have stayed behind and gone to bed but that sort of thing is easy to say in retrospect.

picspam under the cut )

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