Bletchley Park

I was invited to give a talk at a workshop in Milton Keynes, so Mark and I went early since Bletchley Park is in Milton Keynes, more or less.   For computer scientists with fathers in WW2 and a child who likes cryptography, the place has it all. It turned out they have a new visitor's center which had just opened that day with controversy!   Anyway, we were there for like 5 hours and didn't even finish, in fact we just got to the best part about Turing when we were kicked out. Who knew there was a huge museum at the very end of all the buildings...   It is amazing how all the people sworn to secrecy really kept their secrets until very recently.  Now that they can finally talk they are interviewing people while they can.  The nice employee closing up gave us a ride back into town after we started chatting and realized we were fellow nerds, although I violated all my own views about not getting into cars with strangers.  Anyway, we'll have to go back as we didn't quite finish Bletchley, and didn't even get to the computer museum part.

Milton Keynes is a very strange place.  Very modern (people describe it as American) with no there there.  Raymond Blanc does have an Italian gastro-pub kind of restaurant which we checked out.

Mark went to Oxford while I was at the workshop, then I went to Oxford to give a talk and took the interminable 4 hour bus back to Cambridge.  It calls itself an Xpress but it seemed to stop everywhere.