Today I got on a bus to get from the other campus to my flat, and I was shocked by another bus fare raise. When I first came to Sheffield last year, the bus price to go about 2 miles was 80 pence, or about $1.60. Part was through the year it was raised to a pound. Today it was 1 pound 50 pence! It's nearly doubled in one year, which seems ridiculous. The main cause is that several years ago they privatized the bus system, whereas it was city-owned before. However, they didn't bother to create real competition in the buses. 95% of the buses were owned by one company, First. This meant they could basically charge whatever they wanted. Luckily, there is some hope on the horizon. The company that owns the tram, Stagecoach, has recently bought a small bus carrier and started building a fleet of buses. They are offering a weekly joint bus-tram pass at a lower cost than the weekly bus pass from First. Hopefully First will respond with some better prices.

To put it in perspective, in London it costs less (about 1.20) to ride a bus from one end of the city to the other, considerably longer than 2 miles.

I have to think about getting a new passport in the next 6 months because mine is going to expire. It turns out they just started making the new e-passports, which have data chips in them with copies of your image and data to avoid tampering. It's the whole biometric passport thing people have been talking about. All that is ok and everything, but what's really cool is they redesigned the way the passports look so they are much more interesting (and hard to forge I imagine). Check out a little slideshow of what the new passports look like.

I don't know if I'll be able to get the new one though, as they have only started releasing them in the Colorado facility. The State Dept. says they will be making them everywhere by the end of 2006, but I don't know if I should wait that long.

Well, we've made it back from America safely. Back to freezing cold weather. Apparently there was a heat wave while we were in the US, but today I had to wear a sweater and a raincoat to work because of the weather. Hopefully it will improve before we go to visit Victoria's parents at the end of the week.

I have finally recovered from jet lag, and we are both thankful we got into the country right before the terror alert which has made flying in the UK a real pain.

Our only problem on the flight back was a thunderstorm that hovered above RDU for 3.5 hours. This meant we would've missed our Boston-Manchester flight, so the kind ladies at American switched us to the Raleigh-London flight, and we got a British Air flight from London to Manchester. Unfortunately, this meant we got home much later than expected, but it would've been even later if we had ended up stuck in Boston. Amazingly our luggage arrived with us in Manchester. The one positive thing is that the BA flight was economy-plus, and this meant a pre-flight visit to the executive lounge, where we had free breakfast foods and free drinks. It was a very comfortable way to spend the hours before our connecting flight.

Going back to work has left me in a bit of a daze. I got a round of applause from the people who have been covering my job for the last month. Then everyone else promptly went on holiday for the rest of August.

On Saturday I went to Alton Towers with Robin. We went on lots of roller coasters, so it was a great time. There was only one ride we wanted to go on but couldn't: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There was a limitation that only people with kids could go on it until after 3pm. We tried after 3, but there was a huge line, about an hour plus for it. We did manage to go on all the roller coasters though. The fastest start was Rita Queen of Speed with 0-62mph in 2.5 seconds. That's pretty fast. It did a cable launch to start the cars. The only faster launch coaster I have been on is the Hypersonic XLC, which is a compressed air coaster. It did 0-80 in 1.8 seconds. I actually could tell the difference, because in the Hypersonic one it pressed my arms backwards with such force. Rita was perhaps a more interesting coaster though as it kept going for awhile after the launch. Alton Towers is also neat because there is a historic castle in the middle, though it seemed to be in desperate need of renovation.