kontrawize

X-Ray Bag for Travellers

A funny idea, albeit only in theory rather than in practice. Courtesy of Gizmodo.

A Selection of Photos, London and Dublin

For your weekend viewing pleasure, here are some photos that I took with my (film) SLR and recently had scanned. Click on any photo to go to a page with a link to the full-size image.

Christmas Tree Lights

It's wonderful what you can do when your camera lets you trigger the flash at the end of the exposure, rather than the beginning.

Sunset on Greenland Dock, London

Swans swimming at sunset.

Waterfall at the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin

This is part of a display on the necessity for pure water in the making of beer.

Standards and Celtic Music in Dublin

I spent last week in Dublin at the Guinness Storehouse for the 10th UN/CEFACT Forum. UN/CEFACT develops standards for trade facilitation, i.e. making international trade simpler, easier, and cheaper. Electronic messaging standards are a big part of that.

The UN/CEFACT technology stack is broadly equivalent to ISO 20022 (UNIFI), although ISO 20022 is simpler and focussed on banking and finance, whereas UN/CEFACT's strength is commerce. The two areas of business overlap around payments. That is to say, when a large sum of money is paid from one company to another, it is actually done by sending instructions to the two companies' banks. If that sounds simple, well, it is when everything goes right. However, payments are a complex area because of the things that can go wrong, and managing what to do if something does go wrong.

A set of payments messages for ISO 20022 have recently been published, but the content of those messages has been translated into UN/CEFACT message components (Core Components and Business Information Entities, to use the jargon) so that equivalent messages can be created using the UN/CEFACT process and style. We don't know yet which style of message will become the preferred one for payments, but the outcome could affect the direction that messaging takes in banking and finance in the future, say in the next 5 years (certainly not in the next 6 months or even 1 year).

On a lighter topic, on my last night in Dublin I went on the "Musical Pub Crawl". It's a musical evening led by two professional Celtic musicians (drawn from a pool of those who happen to be in Dublin that evening), and takes place mainly in some private rooms in pubs in Dublin (it is a "crawl", so you have to walk from pub to pub a couple of times). The private rooms are needed because they play acoustic music, just the instruments and voices with no amplifiers and such. The evening I was there, we had Anthony as the guitarist, and Eugene playing the tenor (4-string) banjo (an instrument which was brought from America back to Ireland). Both were brilliant musicians, and they taught us about the different styles of Celtic music and some of the history and culture of Celtic music.

At the end of the evening, they asked the people on the tour to sing, and a request for an Australian meant that I was nominated by my UN/CEFACT colleagues. It guess it wasn't the worst rendition of "Waltzing Matilda" ever; I'm still waiting to see the video that someone took on their phone.

All in all, it was one of the best evenings I've had in ages, so if you find yourself in Dublin sometime, I highly recommend it.

Hand Luggage for Laptop and Camera

In the days before I had a laptop computer, I used to carry my photographic equipment as my hand luggage. After I joined the ranks of laptop owners, I suddenly found that I was no longer able to take my SLR with me on my travels.

However, I recently found the RoadWired Roadster Convertible. It's cabin luggage size, but has dividers for carrying your photographic equipment, and still has space for a laptop and accessories. It was a little difficult to get here in the UK (it took 2 months to arrive), but it's cleverly organised and seems quite well made. I hope to be travelling with it for some years to come.

Après Ski

I spent last week with my family skiing in Pamporovo in Bulgaria. Pamporovo is the southern-most ski resort in mainland Europe, but its snowfall is on a par with the other Bulgarian ski resorts (Bansko & Borovets). I'm not an experienced skier, so I need coaching, and one of the good things about Bulgaria is that the ski instructors are very good but very reasonably priced. An experienced English-speaking private instructor for the day (4 hours) cost us 120 leva, about £42 or US$73, from the Steve ski school.

A lot of people go to Bulgaria to learn to ski on package tours (particularly Brits at the moment). The packages often include ski instruction and a ski kindergarten/school for children. While the travel and accommodation parts of the packages can be worthwhile, I recommend you think hard about whether to pay a bit extra for private instruction and a private ski kindergarten/school for your children. The problem with what the packages provide is overcrowding. In a group of 10-20 people with just one ski instructor, you learn very slowly. You would be lucky to learn more than how to ski the green (easy) pistes. By comparison, the first time I skied, with private coaching for a week, I finished the week having skied green, blue (harder) and red (intermediate) pistes.

The difference is even more profound for the ski kindergartens/schools for your children. We talked to people who were on package tours, and they told us stories of 2 instructors caring for around 20 children, far too many for the instructors to cope with safely. On top of that were inadequate toilet (bathroom) facilities for the children. We were lucky that we found the family-run skielite ski school in Pamporovo, and their ski kindergarten was just ideal. Our 5-year-old learned to be comfortable on skis in a group of 2 children, and one of his coaches was a member of the Bulgarian snowboarding team. You can't ask for much better than that. It wasn't particularly expensive either.

The good news for us was that we had snow! We haven't had much luck with snow in the past, but this time it was good. However, on our last day, the temperature went up to about 15 celcius (about 60 degrees Fahrenheit), so I'm so glad we aren't skiing this week. Anyway, it was a great break, all in all.

Where is the nearest hotel to where I'm going?

I travel a number of times each year to conferences and technical meetings. I don't want to travel far each day (I really just want to walk), so I always want a hotel that is near the venue. However, it has never been so easy to find out where the nearest hotels are. Travel agents really haven't picked up on this one. They can get you a hotel in the same city, but they usually haven't much of a clue about where in the city the hotel is, and certainly not how far it is from your venue. Some of the travel sites like Expedia will show you a map of the hotels in an area, but they don't help you find where your venue is. It can still take a long time to work out where your venue is in a hotel map of an unfamiliar city.

So I was impressed when I had a look at Google Maps today and noticed that you can use it to find hotels. Here is what you do:

1. In the search box, type in the street address of the venue near which you want a hotel, and press Search;


2. If necessary, click on the location (red balloon with a black dot in the middle) to get an Address pop-up bubble;


3. In the bubble, click on Set as start location;


4. Type "hotels near here" in the search box and press Search.
   

Now the map will show you where the nearest hotels are. Cool. It works better for some parts of the world than for others, so it depends where your venue is. I guess there are no guarantees that it shows the best or most affordable hotels. Still, it is far and away the fastest way I know to find a nearby hotel for a venue.

Power games

I see that Tim Bray found some power sockets on an aeroplane. Not the odd kind where they make you pay £100 for a special adaptor, but real bona fide power sockets. I understand Tim's request for all aeroplanes to have these; I believe the problem in older planes is that they aren't equipped/wired/whatever to deliver enough power for a laptop in every seat. In newer planes, like the Airbus Tim was on, I guess this is no longer an issue.

I had a similar experience recently on the Eurostar from London to Brussels. In the carriage I was in (it was a first class carriage, I must confess), there was a normal power socket for every pair of seats. Given the Anglo-European nature of the Eurostar, the sockets alternated between UK sockets and Euro sockets, but that's fine. It certainly made life much easier that I could just plug-in on the train, and save my batteries for later (you never know where your next power point will be. Your next meal can wait for longer).

Power to the people! Or something like that.