EWR, EWR, it's a hell of a concourse. It is. Okay, it's not quite Eno's "Music for Airports," but's pretty good as far as actual airports go.

On the flight I was reading a textbook on abstract algebra. The introductory chapter on groups reminded me that the tiles in the Alhambra -- and, of course, in a lot of other places -- are groups (or, more specifically, dihedral groups of order n). I'll try to post photographs of them soon.

When I got to Newark about two hours ago, I walked around for a while looking for things to take pictures of. Right after a fascinatingly tall and willowly blonde woman declined my request to photograph her, I noticed this advertisement, which reminded me of how I came to go on this trip.

(Click any image to view it in full size [which might be too big for your browser, unless you use a brower that auto-scales images, like FireFox]).





I work with a guy, Tim, from Germany. He was hired only a few months ago. When he started he was only in Westminster for a few weeks, and then he had to go back to Germany, where he was going to work remotely, to get visa issues squared away. That got me thinking that I'd like to do the same, so I asked my manager at work whether I could go to Spain for a month and telecommmute. He said, "If I let you do that, then I have to let everyone do that, is that right?" So no go on the idea of telecommuting from Spain. Undaunted, I looked into a leave of absence, and it turned out that my employer allows people to take a thirty-day leave of absence each year. And, voila, here I am, on my way to Andalusia.

Here in the airport, I spent some time looking for beautiful things through the windows. I turned off auto-focus and started seeing things differently.






And then I fell in love with the arrival/departure status monitors.