This week, I have been mostly eating steak.

Well, sort of.

Work wanted somebody to go and visit $VERY_BIG_COMPANY in Austin, Texas to help with performance tuning. I've done this kind of thing before: of course, the last time conveniently put me in America (actually Austin as well, more or less coincidentally) on 11 September, as I've probably complained about to anyone who'd listen. So, with a certain amount of apprehension about the obviously upcoming war, I left for Texas on Friday morning just over a week ago, getting a taxi at some insane hour of the morning to spend 12 hours or so on a plane. Fun.

Last time round I'd intended to visit friends in Houston, but got scuppered by buildings falling over and flight times going crazy. This time I actually planned for it properly and arranged to stay over with them and do the Houston-Austin trip by car. That plan nearly went awry when the car hire place my company had arranged wouldn't hire to under-25s, and the one I tried next wouldn't take my credit card for some reason I still haven't figured out. Fortunately Joe was a lifesaver and let me use his card as a guarantee, and I then paid by cash on the way back, so it turned out OK in the end.

The weekends on either side of the trip were great, of course: Steph and Joe are fun people (although Joe is one of those scary Texan types who owns lots of guns :-)), and they took me to places like the NASA Johnson Space Center, which is pretty spectacular even though the areas you get to see are a bit limited. I then did the three-and-a-half-hour drive to Austin, more or less managing to figure out how to drive a left-hand-drive automatic without crashing into a tree or something instead of the right-hand-drive manual I'm used to, then checked into the hotel blissfully without incident and fell asleep hoping I'd be able to find where I was supposed to be going the next morning.

It turned out that for some reason I'd been booked into a hotel on the diagonally opposite side of Austin to the office in question. Now, Austin is not Cambridge. You could probably walk across the guts of Cambridge in three-quarters of an hour or so, but in Austin it's more like driving across it in three-quarters of an hour, and that's on freeways at 60 mph: I found that out the hard way last time when I didn't hire a car. That meant I got dropped into American driving at the deep end, weird laws like being able to turn right at red lights and all, but at least I seem to have survived the experience.

I won't go into what I was doing at work, since (a) I very much doubt I'm allowed to and (b) it would probably bore everyone to tears. It was interesting to see what this lot were doing from the inside, though, and the people I was working with were great, taking me out for lunch and showing me round and stuff. I enjoyed it much more than I'd expected to, and I seem to have got the job done to their satisfaction into the bargain.

I did the best to make the most of my evenings rather than just sitting around in the hotel, although there was a fair bit of that too. Monday was St. Patrick's Day, so I made a pilgrimage to an Irish bar on 4th Street that was recommended to me. I have to say it was pretty cheesy, being part of a chain and all that, although they did keep the Bass reasonably well and there were at least some genuine-sounding Irish accents around, perhaps more from customers than staff ... On Wednesday I arranged to meet up with the Debian Emacs maintainer who lives nearby, and spent a very enjoyable evening in a bar with him and his cute girlfriend. :-) The rest of the time I did my best to sample as much good food as I could, hence the subject.

Digressing briefly onto the inevitable subject of politics, one thing that very much surprised me was that the media coverage of the war was very balanced indeed, and frequently quite critical of Bush and company. Virtually all the people I talked to were liberal in contrast to the usually conservative Texas, possibly because Austin is a technology capital and has a higher chance of attracting that sort of person. I'll respect the others on my friends list who've kept their views low-key around here and do the same, but whichever way you lean it was interesting to see that even the popular American media wasn't anywhere near as united as it sometimes seems from across the pond. (Maybe this was already obvious to everyone else?)

Anyway, I got back home early this afternoon, much relieved to be back on familiar ground, to find sphyg, Peter, Kirsten, Jacob, and Benedict leaning towards going to a local pub; I joined them and drank the strongest coffee I could find in order to stay awake. Unfortunately now that it's time to go to sleep I seem to be getting my second wind, but no doubt I'll lose consciousness the moment my head hits the pillow. See you lot whenever I manage to wake up again!