I am not going to talk about all aspects of my Bermuda trip, but I would like to highlight two pieces of it. To talk about everything would take hours…<p/>

Mopeds are awesome. Tons of people there have them, and they are cool, smooth, strong, fast, powerful and sweet! When you visit, the Thing To Do is rent a moped and drive it all over the island looking for stuff. You can get from one end to the other in an hour on a moped, and it’s really enjoyable to drive the things – the only thing to remember is that you gotta stay on the left side of the road! Anyway, it’s tons of fun, and I recommend it.<p/>

One other thing which I would like to talk about is these people who live here, whose house we visited last night – the Bordens. They are extremely rich and built their own huge house on a cliff in Bermuda – looking south over the Atlantic from Tucker’s Town (on the south coast of Bermuda). This house totally blew me away. It was constructed from shellstone imported from Texas – it’s this stone that is filled with imprints from shells, and it occurs naturally in Texas, I guess. Anyway, this was the place where you would expect to see stylish people dressed in golf shirts and berets, lounging in colorful armchairs, contemplating the problems of the world, working wirelessly with their Powerbooks. Sure enough, there were colorful armchairs (in a huge room with abstract art, brightly colored carpets and densely windowed walls on both sides). There were Powerbooks, there were golf shirts, there was wireless. It was truly a beautiful thing to behold.<p/>

The awesome thing was that the people were really intelligent and insightful, and we talked about really high-brow topics: creationism vs. evolution, neuroscience and machine learning, the past and future of the world. I would have called it pretentious, except there was no pretense – these people really cared about these things – this is what they did all day. Their “driveway” is golf-green-quality grass – it’s maintained about 5mm thick, with fiberglass fibers in the soil to help keep the roots in.<p/>

Anyway, I had a happy birthday on Friday, thank you, and I’m 19 now. Growing up is kinda crazy. But lots of fun.<p/>