@Elwoodicious - lol! too tragically apt. As a green card holder with a British passport, it takes me about 60 seconds to enter any European country, and an average of 45 minutes to re-enter the States (usually including being taken out to a little room at the back for secondary processing, because apparently despite my unique green card number, passport number, driving license number, and social security number, all of which are by this point spread before them, the system is still confused by my having a common second name and it's hard for them to decide which person I am.)
This "Herbie-less Headhunters" album is even more awesomer than I thought it was going to be, btw. You Hippity-Hoppers in particular may wish to take note.
It can happen over here too, though GP. When we flew back from Athens 18 months or so ago it took us about 1 hour to get through British customs at Heathrow. But you're right in one sense - it also probably took us 60 seconds, if that, to get into Greece
@Germanprof, a fun little story. Before my wife and I were married we took a trip to the First Connecticut Lake up in northern most part of New Hampshire. The trip was a couple of years before 9/11 so the passport requirements were more lax.
So one sunny morning we decide to cross the border into Canada and just see the sites (I wanted a soda aux raisins because I'm dumb and thought it sounded funny to my boorish American sensibilities). Now my wife's maiden name is German and fun to pronounce phonetically but beyond that she's never encountered problems with it and the crossing into Canada bore that out, sitting on a lawn chair in front of a tiny wooden shack with no gate to speak of the Canadian guard just waved us on. No questions, just a smile and a wave. The return home however was the polar opposite.
On the US side of the same crossing was a massive and imposing brick and concrete structure with a substantial gate. We approached the gate and over the loudspeaker a voice told us to stop our vehicle and turn it off. We obliged and then sat for what felt like several minuted before a metal box slide out from the building (like the kind used in banks), and the voice returned to tell us to drop our IDs in the box. Again we obliged and the box slide back into the building followed by another wait. This time the voice returned and proceeded to play 20 questions with my wife.
What is your name?
What is your zip code?
What is the name of the high school you attended?
What is the capitol of Connecticut?
Who is the president of the United States.
What kind of last name is this?
Are you a naturalized citizen?
What city were you born in?
Each question was barked and if we responded with a question he only barked the question again. It was very much like encountering The Wizard of Oz.
Eventually, the questions subsided and we sat again for a long while. The voice never intoned again, we never saw the guard, and when then the metal box slid out for us to take our IDs the gate lifted allowing us to tentatively cross back into the US.
That's funny. I can picture it as a Mr Bean skit. Or an interlude in 1984 (or better: Brazil, the Gilliam movie). I could add a few stories. The time I got passed through a series of people to the higher officer in the little room and had him stand looking at various pieces of ID, all of which stated my middle name as Ian, before looking up and asking me "So your middle name isn't Terry?" after which I was free to go. Or the time when the head honcho in the back room, after a half hour wait, stared at his screen and asked me "have you ever lived in Montana?" and when I said "no" let me go. (Apparently the ability to say no in answer to a yes-no question absolves me of being a suspicious person, but multiple pieces of government-issued ID don't adequately identify me. Good to know our borders are secure). Of course the really fun one was early in my time here when, by following what turned out to be mistaken advice from our human resources department, I ended up in Germany without a valid visa to re-enter the US, with the semester due to start 2 days later...that one took a hard day of stressful activity to sort out.
@GP, elwoodicious et al - you are beginning to make me wonder if we will get in when we come over in two years time! We already realise that we will have to limit our trip to three months and we will have to prove that we can support ourselves financially for so long.
The last thing I played yesterday was BS The Promise - see above. I was in another room away from my computer, so I played the CD through my DVD player with high quality 5.1 sound. It reminded me that I keep on intending to improve the sound quality from my computer where most of my music is played. The speakers need replacing, probably I also need a better sound card than the one Dell supplied. But one issue with some of my own CDs on there is that they are lower quality than those I upload now. I originally started putting music on my (then) computer some years ago, using something like Windows Media Player 5 or 6. Memory was quickly becoming a problem. So all those CDs went on at 128kps. When I got my ipod I just transferred the lot on to itunes. When we bought a new computer all went straight on using an external drive. Nowadays everything gets downloaded/uploaded at much higher quality - generally lossless where possible or as high as emusic or others provide. Even on my current computer speakers I can tell the difference. In my car or through headphones it is more noticeable. So today I am beginning the process of re-uploading my own CDs. It is probably going to take months doing a few each day - some I will have to find out of boxes that have been packed away. This is the first, simply because it happened to be out because it had been in my car.
Comments
This "Herbie-less Headhunters" album is even more awesomer than I thought it was going to be, btw. You Hippity-Hoppers in particular may wish to take note.
A whole new layout over there since an hour ago.
So one sunny morning we decide to cross the border into Canada and just see the sites (I wanted a soda aux raisins because I'm dumb and thought it sounded funny to my boorish American sensibilities). Now my wife's maiden name is German and fun to pronounce phonetically but beyond that she's never encountered problems with it and the crossing into Canada bore that out, sitting on a lawn chair in front of a tiny wooden shack with no gate to speak of the Canadian guard just waved us on. No questions, just a smile and a wave. The return home however was the polar opposite.
On the US side of the same crossing was a massive and imposing brick and concrete structure with a substantial gate. We approached the gate and over the loudspeaker a voice told us to stop our vehicle and turn it off. We obliged and then sat for what felt like several minuted before a metal box slide out from the building (like the kind used in banks), and the voice returned to tell us to drop our IDs in the box. Again we obliged and the box slide back into the building followed by another wait. This time the voice returned and proceeded to play 20 questions with my wife.
What is your name?
What is your zip code?
What is the name of the high school you attended?
What is the capitol of Connecticut?
Who is the president of the United States.
What kind of last name is this?
Are you a naturalized citizen?
What city were you born in?
Each question was barked and if we responded with a question he only barked the question again. It was very much like encountering The Wizard of Oz.
Eventually, the questions subsided and we sat again for a long while. The voice never intoned again, we never saw the guard, and when then the metal box slid out for us to take our IDs the gate lifted allowing us to tentatively cross back into the US.
(url=>amz)
Dropping to the command-line now for a quick evening of server diddling.
- Lovely.
(url=>amz)
One of my favorite AmieStreet finds.
Damn, I miss them.
@GP, elwoodicious et al - you are beginning to make me wonder if we will get in when we come over in two years time! We already realise that we will have to limit our trip to three months and we will have to prove that we can support ourselves financially for so long.
The last thing I played yesterday was BS The Promise - see above. I was in another room away from my computer, so I played the CD through my DVD player with high quality 5.1 sound. It reminded me that I keep on intending to improve the sound quality from my computer where most of my music is played. The speakers need replacing, probably I also need a better sound card than the one Dell supplied. But one issue with some of my own CDs on there is that they are lower quality than those I upload now. I originally started putting music on my (then) computer some years ago, using something like Windows Media Player 5 or 6. Memory was quickly becoming a problem. So all those CDs went on at 128kps. When I got my ipod I just transferred the lot on to itunes. When we bought a new computer all went straight on using an external drive. Nowadays everything gets downloaded/uploaded at much higher quality - generally lossless where possible or as high as emusic or others provide. Even on my current computer speakers I can tell the difference. In my car or through headphones it is more noticeable. So today I am beginning the process of re-uploading my own CDs. It is probably going to take months doing a few each day - some I will have to find out of boxes that have been packed away. This is the first, simply because it happened to be out because it had been in my car.
This was a four track free CD given away when BS toured the UK 7 0r 8 years ago.Not sure if it was ever released in the US
That's enough of uploading CDs for today, especially with playing them as well - it takes too much time to do too many!
(url=>amz)
Sparkling Wide Pressure - Bob Moves/Linda Speaks - free at Bandcamp. Thanks brighternow.