Suppose you are in a cafe and of course you have a laptop with you. All of the sudden, a little box pops up and says “Brian Groth is nearby and you have a meeting next week. Click here to see more details.”

Microsoft and I recently got patent number 455041200 that explains how this works. It is titled “Automatic Detection and Notification of Proximity of Persons of Interest”

It took a few years to get through the USPO and I am not able to find it via the USPO web site, but it can be found via Google’s Patent Search site.

Thanks to Shish letting me know that it was finally approved. Good luck on your patent Shish!

Wimbledon is known for tennis, which is like ping pong, but played with dog toys (the yellow ball). Friends from Chicago, Brent and Odele, have been in town to see a few games and apparently even had good seats and only got rained on for about 45 minutes during the 2 days they were there.

We ventured to Portobello road to see the market up there, relying on Cullen, our Montana friend, to be the tour guide. We figured that would make sense.

And of course, there have been a few pubs, busses, tube delays, and dog time.

We spent 3 days & nights in Barcelona, Spain and if I go back I plan to spend most of the time in the beach town of Barceloneta, which is basically the waterfront area of Barcelona. It has a couple of good boardwalks, a nice beach, and a ton of good bars and restaurants.

However, the entire city is interesting with the weird architecture from Antonio Gaudi. It’s an easy city to walk around with a few nice large parks worth seeing. We were there with our friends Nina & Fred with their 2 little boys, which is why we ended up at the parks. It was very warm, so the large trees in the parks provided some much needed shade, which was much nicer than the streets and the beach was too crowded to really enjoy, so the parks were a good choice for the long weekend. I have posted a few photos too.

Travelling during the week without my laptop will be strange, but it is time for a short break. There are a variety of things to see and do, or so we are told, and one of them is this strange looking church called the Sagrada Familia.

I will upload photos when we are back, but might blog a little from my phone while there. It is only a 4 day trip, which is short by European standards, but seems about right for us. We can’t sit still for too long!

Wandsworth Park is South of the river from our place in Putney, but an easy walk through Bishops Park then over the Thames via the train bridge. Milo gets some good of off-leash time when we hit both parks on the same walk.

Click on the picture below to see where the park is on the map. Switch it to “Bird’s eye” view to get the view I have below.

That goes double if you have a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th, which is what paraskevidekatriaphobia is. Yes, the phobia is rooted in history, but I think it’s just a way to explain coincidences in life. Although, this is a good story:

Ships that set sail on a Friday will have bad luck - as in the tale of H.M.S. Friday. Over one hundred years ago, the British government sought to stop once and for all the widespread superstition among sailors that setting sail on Fridays was unlucky. A special ship was commissioned, named "H.M.S. Friday." They laid her keel on a Friday, launched her on a Friday, selected her crew on a Friday and hired a man named Jim Friday to be her captain. To top it off, H.M.S. Friday embarked on her maiden voyage on a Friday, and was never seen or heard from again. Since then, ships are not usually launched on that date.

Yes, the war is never far in London. The other day the District line (the one we take most often) was closed due to an unexploded WWII bomb that was found. It was the biggest one found in the last 30 years.

This meant taking the bus for the day, which is no big deal since I usually take the bus anyway.

Sometimes Milo takes the bus too. This time it was on the way home after our normal Friday night pub experience in Putney. OK, that has nothing to do with the bomb that was found. 

The strange thing about the bomb is that when searching for news articles about it, there seems to be another bomb that closed other train lines too.

Just another odd experience in London!

After having just come back from Seattle, I noticed that it always seems to be daylight in London. This is partially due to the nice sunny weather in London versus the clouds and rain in Seattle, but there is more to it.

This of course just makes me think of Jimmy Buffett’s Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude

I’m not much of a car enthusiast, but I do enjoy the Top Gear show in the UK. I just found this video that has them talking about the Ford GT. (sorry, but the embeded code didn’t work)

I’m not sure if you can see this if you are outside of the US, but it is a great commercial from Saturday Night Live about a taco wrapped in a soft shell, a pizza, a pancake, and more.

The day before we headed to New York, I saw that the Brooklyn Bridge was 125 years old. So on Saturday morning we jumped on the subway (to compare it versus the Tube) and walked over the bridge. As you can see, it was a nice and sunny day Manhattan. Other than walking around Saturday morning and having lunch with our friend Hayley, we didn't have time to do much else before catching a train from Grand Central station so we could get up to Westchester county.

Milo loves to chase them, and Lorie and I are in awe of the size of some of them. The bumble bees in London seem larger than in Seattle. Pictured is one (average size) that was dead in our garden. We had never felt the fuzz of a bumble bee before, but it is nice and soft. Milo probably wants one as his own pet - too bad he tries to eat them though.

We are off to New York, then Seattle. I will try to post about our travelling adventures when I can.  

Unrelated, but if you live in the US and you want to save cash when purchasing stuff online, start by searching for whatever it is you want to buy at http://search.live.com/cashback

A while ago, Christmas I think, my brother Mike sent us a bench via Amazon. Yes, metal legs and wood pieces make for a heavy box. After cutting the grass today with some hand-shears, I put finally took the time to put the bench together. This included repairing a broken metal leg with some packing tape. I should at least get some tape that matches the dark green metal leg or come up with a better solution. It is the front leg on the left if you can see the white spot. Using packing tape to fix a metal leg is a pretty poor excuse for a DIY job.

Milo and the troll gnome watched, but never helped other than a brief moment to "water" the grass.

Cider: I usually drink the Aspall Cyder at our favourite Friday night pub (Spencer Arms) and I just discovered the half-pint. Most beers and ciders in the UK have their own glasses, except half-pint servings are often in a generic glass. Not so for the Aspall Cyder at the Spencer Arms.

Space Junk: Earlier this week, Lorie and I met up with a friend of a friend named Casey who works at Boeing and was in London for work. He does military-related stuff these days, so he couldn't tell us much about his work, but at a previous job at Boeing he designed the emergency exit doors for Boeing 737 planes. His dad used to work at Boeing too and some of his work is still sitting on the moon! Apparently the antennas of the moon rovers are his.    

Milo: This is for Alex's benefit, since he calls this the "dog blog". This picture was taken in the Barnes Common field near what we call the "creepy hospital". We call it that because the hospital is closed, but sometimes lights are on and we once saw a nurse near the back entrance late at night.

I have been a bit slow to post anything recently, because I have been busy building and releasing Messenger TV. If you are in the US though, you don't get to have fun with it. We hope to change that in the future, but for now you can enjoy the screenshots and see the videos that will eventually be available in Messenger TV in the US by going to http://video.msn.com.

Here are a few interesting things to read about it:

1. Announcing Messenger TV for Windows Live Messenger (our pre-press release)
2. Microsoft Switches on Messenger TV (the press release)
3. Messenger TV in the news (the results of the above 2 links)

Meanwhile, Milo has been enjoying the warm weather.

Despite the forecast for rain, the weekend turned out to be warm and sunny. We took Milo on a walk around the Thames from Hammersmith bridge to Putney bridge during low tide, so we were able to walk along the water and let Milo drink from the river. Hopefully the water wasn't too toxic.

We also ended up at a friend's party in Soho, where we were supposed come as Vikings. I figured being all Norwegian (a few generations ago) was good enough. You can see the BT Tower in the background from their deck, which is on the top of the building. It makes for a great place to have a party, especially when it is warm out and all the pubs down on the streets around the building are overflowing with people.    

Thanks to a bank holiday, we had a 3-day weekend. No, I don't really understand bank holidays yet, but who cares - a day off is always a nice thing. This of course meant that Milo got a few more walks, such as through the Fulham cemetery where he sees foxes and squirrels. The photo is a pathway in the cemetery that is full of pink petals off of the trees.

We also found time to visit a pub we hadn't been to called the Nag's Head, pictured below. It is a strange little pub, but with lots of character. We also got to have dinner at the very fashionable The Thomas Cubitt. I basically had pub food (Shepard's pie), but it was good. The restaurant is right across the street from Milo's 24-hour emergency vet, but thankfully we didn't need to visit it this weekend.     

Hello friends and family. I see that you are located in Salt Lake City, London, California, Minnesota, Bellevue, New York, Gig Harbor, and a variety of other locations. Usually the name of the location is related to where your ISP is located, but it is close enough that I can guess who you are, since I do know many of you. (I can't figure out which one is for Longview, WA though).

How does it work? I have a little IP2Map icon at the bottom of the right-hand column of my blog. When anyone visits http://GrothAdventures.Spaces.Live.com that icon is loaded from the IP2Map site and it records the IP address of you, my visitor. It then looks up where all of these IP addresses are located and puts them on a map. Scroll down to the bottom of the right-hand column and click on the IP2Map icon to see the map and list of locations.

I'm sure everyone reading this has wondered "is bowling the same in Belgium as it is in America?" I can now report that yes, it is exactly the same. Same shoes. Same balls (we had coloured ones). Same lanes & pins. Same types of machines to keep score. And of course, most of us were terrible - I was there with about 20 co-workers. The big difference about bowling in Antwerp is seeing stuff written in Dutch, French, and English.