• Implementation of an HTML form using the Prodigy 'mailto' CGI script

• Posting of a description of GSM technology

• Completion of the "Conceptual Introduction To Protocols" and the "Conceptual Introduction To Wireless Communications (With A Short History Of Wireless)"

• Implementation of a JavaScript script that creates cookies so a user can bookmark the most recently read Construction History day and jump to the next day upon return to the site

Despite the meeting of the first goal, I felt like I had set a tall order for myself. The presence of my father made the time in England seem like much more of a vacation. In fact, my Dad's arrival being timed nicely between the previous weekend with it's schedule of fattening social events and a four day weekend for Matt had caused all of us to regress into complete vacation mode. Weight Watchers was put on the back burner (the front burner being reserved for cream sauces and English bacon).

The JavaScript was going to be a challenge since I still had to read a bunch of the book before I could even begin to sketch out how it might work. My bookmark was woefully near the front of my JavaScript book despite the book having been carted around for hundreds of miles of car trips the past few days. ("JavaScript is not Java." Fascinating! I'm absorbing this material like a sponge! Like a sponge, just about the most primitive thing listed under the kingdom Animalia. Okay, so JavaScript is another name for Java. Wait. Or are they different? I better go back. Look out the window! A neat looking tree!) On the other hand, I held out hope for some shameless downloading to save me some time. The Protocols piece was also going to be a challenge because, frankly, I still hadn't learned that much about protocols.

So, I had sketched out a near term To Do list, but I could already foresee some optional goals that would likely end up as near term goals upon return to the United States:

• Posting of descriptions for GPRS, 3G, ISDN, and WAP

• Implementation of revision control using WinCVS

• Addition of some JavaScript input verification of email addresses in the 'mailto' form using regular expressions.

Interestingly, the goal "get a job" hadn't made the list. Well, what was I supposed to do? Look for a job while my webform accepted such useless input as "this isn't an email address, loser"? I definitely needed to get on with the RegExp stuff so that such a malicious web form filler-outer would at least have to type "fake_address@you_are_a_loser.poo". One has to set one's priorities.

I had also canned the server-side stuff for a bit, but I hoped that it wouldn't be too long before I could either mess around with IIS or set up a Linux box to use as a server. I had been momentarily torn between playing with server stuff or learning more HTML, like using frames and Cascading Style Sheets, but I decided that I was more interested in the server stuff. For one, it would open up the entire world of server-side development. Who knows, maybe I'd get to the point where I could have user accounts and passwords! Coolio.

All that stuff seemed a long way off over the course of the weekend. On Friday, we had made another trip to Cambridge. Matt, my Dad, and I walked around the colleges while Susan went shopping. She decided she couldn't justify spending £20 on a blouse she liked, so she spent £80 on clothes for Cam instead. Dad, Matt, and I paid to walk around in the King's College chapel where the King's College choir sings, as seen on PBS at Christmas. While there, I studied an interesting display on the construction of the fan vault ceiling. ("So that is what a catenary curve is useful for!" I had thought it was only useful for pretentious pedants like me to say "See that chain hanging between the fence posts? That's a catenary curve. You're an imbecile, and I know all. What's a catenary curve good for? Describing hanging chains, you fool!")

I also got a poster with a time line of English kings on it. So now, if I ever watch "The Lion In Winter" again, I can say, "Peter O'Toole was king until 1189 when Anthony Hopkins took over. But Anthony Hopkins was only king for ten years before that guy from Excalibur took over. That's the guy who signed the Magna Carta." Unlike the display in the Tower of London I had seen the year before, the poster went back before the Norman invasion to the first English king, Egbert. This allowed me to see that Ethelred "The Un ready" was actually Ethelred II. (Apparently someone decided that the name Ethelred was good enough to use twice.) Ethelred The Unready was deposed in 1013 by Svegn "Forkbeard", but he got the throne back a year later. He was king for only two years after that, and I imagine he spent those two years storming around his castle shouting, "Stop calling me 'The Unready'! I'm king again! Now he should be called unready! Damn, 'Forkbeard' sounds so much cooler. Maybe I should grow a distinctive mustache..."

With Weight Watchers discarded for the moment, we were able to make a triumphant return to The Cambridge Cheese Company. "May we have a taste of the Manchego? Hmmm. Yes. We'll take 200g of that." Later, I looked up Manchego in Matt's "Cheese Companion", a book he has in addition to "The Encyclopedia of Cheese".

Manchego is the only cheese in the book with an almost completely unrelated photograph placed in the definition, a photograph of a windmill. Manchego is named after the area from which it comes, La Mancha. Don Quixote was from La Mancha and jousted windmills that he imagined to be giants, hence the windmill in the cheese definition. (I suppose that, even if less apropos, this is more appetizing than a 1000x photograph of the cheese mites that make the pits in the rind of the Mimolette.) All in all, we bought six different cheeses at two shops: Manchego, Mimolette, mature Gouda, a strong Brie, Stilton, and a cheese I'd been getting curious about, Shropshire Blue. Weight Watchers be damned! We set out a cheese plate when we got home, and I ate myself ill.

The next day, we got up at 6am for a road trip to the Peak District of England. We parked in a town called Castleton and hiked around to various nearby sites. We walked up to tour Peveril Castle from which Castleton gets its name. The castle itself was interesting, and the views were great. Across a narrow valley we could see sheep clinging to the steep, green valley wall. In the other direction, we could see the town and part of a bigger valley divided into bright green rectangles by neatly built, mortarless stone walls. This is what is meant when one says 'pastoral'. Also, it turned out that the keep was added to the castle by Peter O'Toole. (He was king until 1189.)

We also walked up to the mouth of Peak Cavern, but balked at paying the fee to get inside. The cave has a website with a great URL: www.devilsarse.com. With such marketing, it's a wonder we didn't pay to go inside! Still, the chasm leading up to cavern entrance was neat to look at in and of itself, and some plaques pointed out some absurdly British sounding vegetation, like "maidenhair spleenwort". Next we walked partway up Winnats Pass before turning back to town.

Winnats Pass was also neat. It had the same steep-sided-valley-with-very-green-grass-and-some-rock-out-croppings look as the other nearby valleys, but a posted signed explained how it had once been a coral reef over 300 million years ago. A walk through the pass showed that this was not some inaccessible bit of geology. Every rock was full of fossils. You could pick up a rock, any rock, and find the fossilized imprint of a scallop or sea lily. I was extremely tempted to put a chunk of stone in my pack, but the sign had asked me not to, so I resisted.

When we got back to town, we went to a shop so Matt could get ice cream. We had passed the shop on the way out of town. To keep us moving along (rather than stopping again right after brunch), Susan promised Matt he could get ice cream on the way back. (Matt provides her some good practice for when Cam gets older.) However, when we got back, we all saw that the sign also mentioned oven fresh scones and clotted cream. MmmMmm! It had only been two and a half hours since a large brunch (that included dessert), but we'd spent most of that time engaged in light exercise. Without a solid dose of clotted cream, our arteries were in danger of loosening up. And we were in England, after all. My Dad had been treated to scones and clotted cream by a friend on a visit years ago and was curious to find a point of comparison to what his friend had indicated were the best scones and clotted cream around.

The idea of ice cream was abandon in favor of a sit down meal of scones and clotted cream. But we wanted something salty, too, so we ordered the cream of mushroom soup. The scones were wonderful, and in addition to clotted cream, they were served with a superb black currant jam. Clotted cream, if you've never tried it, is very much like whipped butter in both flavour (<grin>) and texture. Somehow, though, because it is not called butter, one feels justified in using as much as one can pile on. I felt I had done myself proud (ashamed?), using blobs of clotted cream half the size of the actual scone, but Matthew showed pure mastery of clotted cream consumption. I'm not sure, but I think he may have run out of scones and bald-faced mimed creaming a scone, in actuality putting a giant pile of clotted cream directly on his fingers. One couldn't be sure. The amounts of clotted cream were large enough to obscure anything that was underneath. He could have even had something healthy underneath, like a head of cabbage or a watermelon, but who could have seen? (I could imagine the web server running the Weight Watchers Points Calculator browning out the grid of a major metropolitan area as it endeavored to come up with the numerical equivalent of "Please see a doctor.")