Last weekend Brian and I flew out to Denver to visit family, look at the city and to interview for a possible job. Unfortunately, the interview fell through since they hired someone else for the position, ah well. It would have been a cool job but since I'm not planning on moving out there right away, I doubt I would have gotten it. It would have been nice to interview anyway considering I've only had one interview ever, if you can call it an interview.

A major setback was the fact that Brian was sick as a dog for almost the entire trip. It pretty much sucked for him since he doesn't like to drink when he's feeling so bad and most of our time there was taken up with drinking activities: Coors Brewery tour, Redstone Meadery tour and Octoberfest. Poor guy :(

Otherwise the trip was great fun. I got to catch up with Kim, Ted and my cousin Rick as well as play with DJ who has grown into an 8.5 month old drooling machine! I'm amazed he doesn't dehydrate himself since Denver is so dry. He's a really happy baby (most of the time) and the type that strangers just have to come up and coo at. He's going to be a terror when he learns to crawl sufficiently.

This morning a confused coworker sent me this link. After reading the article, though, I'm not all that surprised. In absence of a gun culture, the UK has a thriving knife culture. Edinburgh isn't as bad as Glasgow but I was definitely told by friends not to walk alone at night in certain parts of the city. Also, the Scots like their drink and they get very rowdy after professional sporting events. I'm guessing most of the violent assaults are either alcohol or football (read soccer for us Americans) related and rarely fatal. For most of the time I was in Scotland, however, I was blissfully unaware and unaffected by this sort of violence. I never made it to a football match and thus never saw football hooligans in action and I usually went out for drinks with friends in the more crowded areas of the city taking a cab home if we stayed out late. This was why I got such a shock when on the night after my last day of work one of my friends, Abby, got headbutted in the middle of a bar by some random female nutcase. The woman was obviously trying to start a fight but Abby was so surprised by the sudden attack that she walked away still trying to figure out what had just happened. The rest of us after realizing what had happened took Abby outside and got her to describe the woman to the bouncers, who were called away in the middle of the description to stop a brawl that had suddenly erupted in the bar. We found out later that the woman had come to the bar with several drunken guys who were also trying to pick fights, with a bit more success. I also found out that what had happened to Abby was called a Glasgow Kiss.

Anyway, thinking of violence in cities made me curious about how Denver stacked up to Washington, DC. What I found was not incredibly surprising.

City, 2002	Crime index, total	Murder	Forcible rape	Robbery	Aggravated assault	Burglary	Larceny- theft	Motor vehicle theft
Washington, DC	7,767.9	45.9	45.9	653.5	850.2	905.1	3,661.4	1,605.9
Denver, Colo.	5,511.1	8.8	55.2	205.0	265.2	1,049.6	2,646.7	1,280.7

I was a little surprised to find that Denver was placed not far below Washington in the list of cities ranked by population size. Denver is ranked 25th with 554,636 by the 2000 census, while DC is ranked 21st with 572,059. And Denver is growing rapidly. The cost of living in Denver is quite a bit lower than DC mostly due to housing costs. According to this, the cost of housing in Denver is 110.6 and in DC it's 201.2, I have no idea what these numbers refer to but that does seem to be a significant difference. Sadly, moving to Denver will not alleviate my traffic woes. According to this Denver ranks above DC in traffic congestion. Coming from DC, I can not believe this is true. I just don't trust the numbers. After driving around the Denver area a couple times during rush hour I didn't see anything that came close to the beltway at rush hour. Yes, the road going south as we went north to the airport on monday looked pretty bad but it was still moving, which is more than I can say for certain parts of 66. Ah well, I guess I'll find out about Denver traffic sooner or later.