I am almost finished a quick trip to Edinburgh for the W3C TAG F2F and London for a customer meeting. A few pictures are at http://www.pacificspirit.com/photos/2005/Edinburgh/. The TAG part went really well. We spent many hours on the ontology of versioning xml languages, and we might even have rough consensus. We also spent some time on another of my findings, the Abstract Component References. This might have spurred Roy to do some writing on good URI design, specifically why parenthesis are bad in l-r grammars like URIs.
Richard II
With 1 second to spare after flying in from Edinburgh and taking the heathrow express and Hammersmith and Jubilee lines, I sat down at 7:30 in the Old Vic in London to watch Kevin Spacey play Richard II. He was really really good, better than I expected. He knocked out of the park the mournful, unbelieving, desolate parts of RII. He wasn't quite as strong in the "angry" bits, but I don't think you can have it all. He *definitely* has the strongest bio of a actor I've ever seen. Nothing like multiple Academy and Tony awards.
I was really impressed with the production as well. They modernized the play with videos, clubs, text messaging, model shoots, etc. When John of Gaunt got ill, one of Richard's lords got a text message about it. Richard's wife was interupted while in the middle of a photo shoot. Richard was partying in a night club. Henry of Bolingbroke (very well played by Ben Miles) and his men were all dressed in modern British Army black fatigues while Richard's men were all in roughly World War I khakis and hats, which made for a really neat comparison of the old vs new. They used replays of the events on 2 different screens. Tres cool.
Not only was Kevin really good, another film actor had a strong performance. John of Gaunt was played by Julian Glover who was in Troy, Star Wars, Indiana Jones etc. He did the "angry old guy" really well.