I spent the first few weeks of January in California. Because I was particularly keen, msinvisfem and I caught a train into Los Angeles to go and visit this place:

We paid more than we needed to for the train, as I made the mistake of going to a window for service in the station rather than buying from a machine. Different train company, as we figured out later, and happy to charge us getting on for twice as much without even mentioning that there was a cheaper and more frequent alternative service.

We got off the train in LA Union Station, found our way outside through the impressive waiting room and walked down the road a bit for the Metro Silver Line (a bus service, despite what it may sound like). We both checked the route signage, waited for a bit, and got onto the right bus heading in the wrong direction.

When we reached the end of the route without spotting our destination, it became clear that something had gone wrong, and a helpful cop who managed to keep a straight face throughout directed us to the correct stance to go back again.

By this time, the generous safety margin that we’d allowed for getting there before our timed tickets were due to take effect was looking a bit shaky. In fact it was worse than that, as it turned out. By the time we’d returned to Go, did not collect £200, and headed out in the right direction for a similar period of time, our safety margin was completely blown and we turned up half an hour too late.

’There's a reason that Scotland languishes at only second fattest nation in the world. America can see us the infamous deep fried Mars bar and raise it… quite a bit.

Usually, when I’ve visited the States, I’ve left blogging until after I get home, done a couple of decent posts then run out of steam. In an attempt to manage better coverage this time, I’m blogging offline with Live Writer for posting once I get back. (Now that I’m back – I didn’t succeed as well in that as I hoped, but still have a bit of a head start.)

msinvisfem and I visited the famous Pink's of Hollywood, a hot dog stand of 71 year’s standing patronised (occasionally) by the rich and famous and (more commonly) by hordes of commoners willing to queue for up to an hour to sample the gourmet hot dogs.

msinvisfem's only option was the vegan Patt Morrison Baja Vegan Dog (topped with fresh guacamole, chopped tomatoes and chopped onions) but she declared herself satisfied. I ordered a “Planet Hollywood” dog for myself (Polish sausage, grilled onions, grilled mushrooms, bacon and nacho cheese), and msinvisfem recommended^* a Martha Stewart dog (relish, onions, bacon, chopped tomatoes, sauerkraut and sour cream).

I dug into the Martha Stewart first. The bacon was nice and crispy and the sauerkraut made an interesting contrasting layer between the bacon and the hot dog. The other ingredients, while each making a contribution, were less significant in their impact. On the down side, it was impossible to get a full height bite of the dog in one mouthful, and the wetness of the ingredients led to fairly quick disintegration of the hot dog, and a fair bit of fall-out.

I finished off Martha Stewart, and started in to the Planet Hollywood. My first impression of this was the nacho cheese adhering to my face as I tried to bite into it, and unfortunately it’s only at this point that I recalled I’m not over keen on nacho cheese – it’s a bit slimy and plasticky, and doesn’t even have the greatest taste. The Polish sausage was mildly spicy, but gave the impression of being made of the cheaper bits of meat. It may be true, but generally we want to be able to fool ourselves about this! Even the bacon was less well cooked than in the Martha Stewart, and was a bit on the fatty side. I wasn’t sure when I started out that I’d finish both dogs, but the Planet Hollywood made it easy to give up half way through.

Pink’s is worth a visit, but I would recommend avoiding any dog based on the Polish sausage – try one of the other ones. The Martha Stewart was nice.

* The recommendation was made on general principles, not experience. msinvisfem wishes to further clarify that "'General principles' doesn't mean that I think people should go around eating giant wodges of bacon. Especially as I am vegan."

While in the vicinity of Hollywood, msinvisfemand I went to the recording of an American TV show there - with me under strict instructions from msinvisfemnot to embarrass her by mentioning the host's former stage name...

Craig Ferguson, who some may remember as a stand-up comedian in the late 80s or early 90s, or as Confidence in Red Dwarf, is now rather better known in the States than he was on this side of the pond, after a number of seasons in a successful sitcom, starring roles in a couple of moderately successful movies, and several years of presenting a daily chat show: The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

Not having been to a recording of a UK show, I can't make any comparisons, but they don't half make you work for your free ticket in the States! The warm-up man is dire and filthy, not a good combination, although to be fair to him, he knew it; and he was on the ball with coordinating responses silently once the programme began. In return for your seat, you have to sit and laugh for an hour or so, whether it's funny or not; and under those circumstances it's a pretty fair bet it's not...

After too long listening to the warm-up guy, the show began. The standard pattern of the show is opening monologue, followed "after the break" by studio guests. The opening monologue is a bit weird for the audience because it's delivered straight to camera, and even though we were behind the camera, it was plain it wasn't for our benefit! Craig plainly knows his audience and is now an American citizen, but it's a bit odd hearing a Scottish accent building up to his closing catchphrase,"It's a great day for America". There are some jokes related to the world situation that might get more of a mixed response in the UK.

The guest spots were a bit more interesting, as they were slightly less scripted. I had no clue who the first guest was, but Brooke Shields had a bit more international appeal. She was plugging a stage show.

Actually, the guest that woke me up most was Tyson. Who's Tyson, you say? Haven't a clue, except that he was the guy plucked from the audience to look foolish - one seat away from us. He did a fairly good job of matching up to Craig's banter, after an initial period of looking like a stunned mullet. Of course we wondered whether he was a plant, but on balance I don't think so - he was hesitant and lost enough to start with that I think not. And he seemed to enjoy himself, and might possibly have earned himself repeat appearances (apparently this does sometimes occur to audience members, but I haven't watched any subsequent programmes to find out).

Craig has a decent line of patter, but didn't manage to justify the side-splitting mirth expected of us; still, it must be pretty difficult to keep that up day after day, and if we needed any reminding that it's a skilled job requiring talent, we only had to recall the gulf in capability and charm between him and the warm-up man!

Afterwards we nipped out to the  Farmer's Market a couple of blocks away for something to eat (the show gave us money off vouchers for local eateries, but not for anywhere we wanted to go). It's a permanent fixture, more like some of the well-established markets in our big cities than the local farmer's market in St. Andrews. After a wander around looking at everything, I had fried alligator tail rolled in cornmeal (nice enough but undistinguished) from The Gumbo Pot.

Well, who knew that they weren’t the same? Not me, but once you see them in person they’re not alike at all; apart from both being mahoosive!

Redwoods grow along the northern half of the coast of California; they’re fairly numerous and commercially harvested. They are home to small tree villages of Ewoks, although if I’m completely honest I have to admit I never actually saw any of those. Redwoods are tall and thin, although thin is relative when you grow that tall; they can still be over 20 feet across at the base of the trunk. Compare that with a 10' x 10' room, and you’ll see that if you find the right tree and you’re careful about it, you could fit the room inside the tree.

Sequoias are protected. They’re much less common, and are quite picky about the environment they grow in, preferring a fairly narrow band of altitudes in the mountains – between 5,000 and 7,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada. A couple of thousand feet may sound like a lot, but maybe not when you consider the trees themselves can grow to over 300 feet tall. They don’t grow quite as tall as the redwoods do - there’s about 50 feet in it - but they’re a lot bigger in the more general sense of the word, because they don’t get much thinner as they get taller. For all their size, they look pretty stocky.

msinvisfem's master-plan for the first part of my recent visit to California was to see big trees, since they were the most obvious Californian icon I’d not seen on previous trips. The day after arriving, msinvisfem, her Mum and I set off to travel north. More about other aspects of the trip another time, as I've decided to do themed posts this time rather than a travelogue, but here’s the overview of the route: from Anaheim we went up the Coastal Highway past Monterey (which I visited last time I was in the States) and San Francisco, then the Redwood Highway as far as Patrick's Point. After that we cut inland towards Redding, then south through Sacramento and Fresno, before heading further inland to Sequoia National Park. The final haul was back down to Anaheim, arriving eight days after we'd set out.

The trees are interesting enough in themselves, but there’s a human history to some of them too, particularly the larger sequoias. A fallen sequoia may be big enough to live in, if you don’t need a lot in the way of space. Tharp’s Log (interior below) was inhabited every summer from 1861 to 1890 by Hale Tharp, the first non-Native American to enter Giant Forest. Sequoias are very slow to decay, so trunks that fell over 100 years ago can still be in a good state today. Tharp’s Log was hollowed out by fire.

The age of the living trees is impressive too. They’re not the world’s oldest, but a sequoia cut down in 1893 for the Chicago World’s Fair comes 8th or 9th in the top ten (3200 years old, by ring count), and many are between 2000 and 3000 years old.

And yes, we drove through a tree:

While I was in California recently, I visited Monterey Bay Aquarium. I’m not sure that there’s an awful lot to say about the aquarium itself – you know what an aquarium is, right? – apart from a couple of quite interesting nerdy facts. The money to set up and run the aquarium was largely supplied by David and Lucille Packard, also of Hewlett-Packard-founding fame; and although it’s here that they filmed the aquarium bits for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, there have never been any whales here. The tanks aren’t big enough, for a start, as is obvious when you visit.

I tried taking photos, but as very few of the beasties were willing to cooperate in behaving predictably for the camera – especially the otters – it quickly became obvious that video was the only way I was going to get anything half-decent; so here’s my inaugural YouTube video for your delectation. It’s available in resolutions up to 1080p (full HD).

Camera shake is all my fault, as is jerky zooming. Video quality is not great when the lighting is low, though it improves noticeably when the lighting is good; it's a stills camera that does video, not a dedicated video camera. I'm quite pleased with how it copes. If the video is at all sticky I blame Windows Live Movie Maker. I found it quite nice on the whole for editing my first video, but it is a bit buggy. The most noticeable flaw to you may be some slight stickiness on scene changes; the most noticeable flaw to me is that you’re not seeing all the scenes I wanted you to. When you select a clip from the middle of a longer video, Movie Maker sometimes seems to randomly start playing from the start of the video file, rather than the start of the clip. Needless to say, this is very annoying, but as I wasn’t able to figure out why it was picking particular clips to do this on, I eventually settled for the output you see above, which contains a very low number of unwanted substitutions that don’t affect my vision too badly.

Camera shake in particular is something I might have done better on. I had in my backpack a commercially produced version of The Poor Man’s Steadicam, which I chose not to use. This was mostly due to embarrassment (it’s taken me ages to get used to just using a camera when there are people around), but shhh! That’s just between us. I intend to claim it was really an altruistic move, to avoid clouting small kids around the head with the weight on the end.

I ran a session of Steam Elephants on Saturday – my fledgling campaign using a very slightly modified version of  ffutures' Forgotten Futures rules. I say fledgling, because it's probably still accurate; it's been running for about two and a half years, but infrequently, so we've not racked up a lot of sessions. However, given how long it takes me to start a campaign these days, I’m inclined to think I’ll stick with this one for the foreseeable. It feels fairly comfortable for me, seems to be going down well with the players and it’s got lots of potential. And there are fun figures for me to paint, when I get the time!

This particular session was a not-particularly-steampunky first though; the first game I’ve been involved in where we had a virtual presence.

I set up a spare PC with a web cam on a chair in the living room, and msinvisfemtook part from California. The times worked out fairly well; our regular start time of 3 o’clock was 7 in the morning on the west coast of America so it was early, but not impossible.

I took advantage of someone else’s trial and error in finding the best solution; Scott Hanselman has written a couple of articles about remote working with a more social side to it, and in the absence of a spare $5000 for a Roundtable camera, I went with his Skype video recommendations, which he uses for speaking to the family when on the road, and sharing a virtual office with another remote worker, setting up a dedicated Skype account on the spare, and telling it to auto-answer anyone on its’ friends list with full-screen video. As it’s an old PC and I don’t have the world’s fastest broadband connection, I didn’t try the High Quality Video Hack, although the camera would have supported it.

Picture quality was good enough anyway, and help up fairly well for the nine or ten hours of play. There were some problems with corruption of the picture and freezing, and the sound was not always perfect, sometimes requiring repetition; but on the whole, OK. In the post-mortem, it turned out that some of these issues might have been due to a virus scan starting up in the background on one of the machines, so maybe the problems we did have can also be avoided in future.

From the GM’s point of view, I would say it was a success. It wasn’t hugely different from having a player in the room. There were some practical issues regarding who to send out of the room at some points when secrecy was required (i.e. everyone else might have to move rather than the remote person, because the PC is not easily shifted) but nothing insurmountable. I was kept busier than usual just keeping things going, but that may not have been due to the teleconferencing – we had a good turn-out, which means more people to deal with, which means more work.

From the remote player’s point of view, I think it was more of a qualified success. Although it did allow involvement in play from a distance, the positioning of the camera meant that other players were disembodied voices, so it wasn’t as immersive as actually being there. One thing I got right with the camera was putting it on a long USB extension lead, so that it could be brought over to the table to show the position of figures. I wonder if there’s a better place to put it for general play, though. On top of the monitor is good for other players, because it’s easy for them to face the remote player when talking to them; but positioning the whole assembly naturally as if it were just another player meant the other players usually weren’t within the camera’s field of view. Finding a different location that would show more of the other players to the remote player would be an improvement. I’ll have to see if I can come up with an alternative place to put it.

Our second tourist trip in California was a bit less clichéd than Disneyland: the place where the Mojave Desert and Colorado Desert meet, in Joshua Tree National Park.