Chris Saul's Blog

Monday December 10, 2007

Exciting luggage news

My trusty wheely suitcase has served me well for three years, carrying my underpants across the world, from San Fran to Tashkent, Warsaw to Addis Abbaba and Heathrow to Milton Keynes.

Lately though, it's been frowned at by check-in staff for its size, its wheels have started to seize up and it's begun to look a bit tatty, so I decided it was time for a change.

What did I want in the case that was to replace it? Well, I'm a professional traveller who wants value without sacrificing performance. I needed designers who had applied this philosophy to every piece in their collection, including new business and lifestyle silhouettes designed to enhance both my trips and my trade.

I popped into Jashanmal in Sprawl of the Emirates and got a nice new Victorinox bag for 25% off.

It's pretty cool - super lightweight, easy to wheely along and with a nice suit carrier thing built into it. It also seems to have the same capacity as my old one, but looks smaller - something that will be particularly useful when trying to persuade the check-in staff at Emirates in Vienna that it's going to be carry on luggage. (Emirates staff elsewhere don't seem to mind, but their Viennese colleagues always seem fanatical about the subject).

The only problem is that my laptop bag keeps falling off the top of it. My old bag's handle had two poles, providing a nice platform on which another bag could nestle. This bag has one central pole, causing anything on top to lost its balance. I could strap the laptop bag on lower down, but that won't be so practical.

There is, of course, another answer - buy a new laptop bag! As Mrs Saul wisely pointed out, my current laptop bag has lots of space, which apparently means I just fill it up with rubbish and make it too heavy. I will be rushing down to Jashanmal this weekend to see if I can find a smaller one that matches and is designed to integrate with the case, giving me two 'luggage solutions' - and doubtless yet another 'lifestyle silouhette' to enhance both my trips and my trade.

I'm not usually one for getting excited about spending cash on this kind of thing, but for the first time in my life I feel I can splash out on some cool luggage. No plans to emulate Mr Aaron however, with his huge collection of bags of varying capacity, wheel count and side pocket for every possible trip length and type.

Skoda Power!

Check out Mr Darren Kottler's Skoda Rapid - pics here.

After a few years sitting in the garage he's resurrecting it. Can't wait to see it when I'm over in December.

The Rapid is a rear-engined, slightly speedier version of the Estelle, of which the Saul family owned a bright orange number, much to the amusement of my school friends. 'Did your mum peddle the car to work Chris? Hur hur.'

Some people souped the Rapids up by putting in a more powerful engine, creating the 'cheapest Porsche experience' on the roads, according to Autocar at the time. There was also a UK company that created cabriolet versions, one of which lived near us in Richmond. Check out for some more info.

Riyadh for a couple of nights

In Riyadh for a couple of nights.

A premium hotel, but with all the things that annoy me about rooms that are supposed to be 'business rooms' - you can't open the window, you have to crawl on the floor to plug your laptop in, the glass topped table means an optical mouse won't work and the desk chair is more suited to sitting uncomfortably whilst waiting for a court appearance as opposed to sitting working for a couple of hours.

My driver was from Ethiopia and was playing some really cool sounding Ethiopian pop music - I asked him for the name of the band and he kindly gave me the cassette, despite my protests. I look forward to mp3-ifying when I get back.

I first came to Saudi over 5 years ago and was surprised to see that most of the cars were lumbering American models, compared to Dubai's general preference for Japanese and European cars (Jeeps aside). The Japanese seem to be making in-roads though, but there are still tonnes of Crown Vics, Suburbans and other slightly dented monsters roaming around.

On my first trip I felt rather like a gangster or a diplomat as I was driven around in a huge Cadillac with tinted windows and an Indian driver who liked rap music. The whole effect was quite incongruous - listening to Public Enemy telling me to Fight the Power whilst shoving small Toyotas off the road and driving past hundreds of mosques was rather surreal...

More Airport problems

The Apple Airport wireless network randomly died again twice in quick succession when downloading a large file and trying to stream iTunes to the Airport Express I have. This is really beginning to irritate me.

I wonder if one solution would be to use the Airport Express as the 'main' router and have the Airport Extreme join its network? I'll fiddle with that when back from Saudi on Thursday. If it does solve the issue, great, but quite frankly the Airport Extreme ought to do what it's supposed to...

AirPort Extreme disappointment

I bought an Apple Airport Extreme for the new apartment and so far I'm not particularly impressed.

I bought it for three main reasons -

1. It looks good. Mrs Saul must like the way things look, or they must be hidden in hard to access parts of the living room.

2. You can attach usb disks and use it as a file server.

3. I already have an Apple Airport Express and wanted things to match and work well together when streaming music from iTunes to the stereo over the network, so having two products from the same company would make sense.

Setup was relatively easy. I always use Windows these days, so it wasn't a problem that the client is Windows and Mac only. I'd have been irritated to have had to use Windows a couple of years ago when Linux or Solaris were still my main desktop*.

Disk access seems painfully slow. Following Thin Guy's experiences, I changed the channel I was on after using NetStumbler to see what the networks around me were using. As someone named 'Wolverine' was on the same channel as me, I changed to an unused channel - disk access seems to have improved, but only a little. Frankly it's unusable for anything but iTunes streaming or copying the odd file here and there. The idea was to use it to stream video around, but I can't see that working acceptably.

Using Bittorrent kept causing the router's wireless to stop working. Hunting around via Google I found that people had had the same experience and that switching off 'DHT' (whatever that is) would solve the issue. It seems to have.

Accessing the Sun VPN through my laptop is almost unusable. I have a second ethernet port enabled in the spare room - when using that, access works fine. This could be because I'm downloading a couple of large files on the other connection via the AirPort Extreme, but in theory both of my ports are sharing the same 2Mb link and the wireless network shouldn't be overloaded.

I need to do some testing to see where the bottlenecks lie, particularly with disk access, where slower, older wirleess cards may be the culprit.

That said, things 'just worked' with my old Dlink router, without any fiddling, installing client software, checking on forums and having things stop working randomly. Having one machine use the Sun VPN whilst another downloaded something wasn't an issue. Maybe I'm placing blame unfairly, but I'd have expected Apple to have done a much better job.

Next week I'll have some time to do some testing and may invest in some 'n' wireless cards for my work and home laptop to see if that improves things. If not, I'll have a look at some other NAS devices I can use to do file sharing better - Linksys seem to have a popular one out that might be 'coming in Dubai'.

I think I must be getting old - I used to enjoy putting all this stuff together, but these days I just want it all to work properly, out of the box and get everything from one vendor. I'm tired of fiddling around.

* I do still use Solaris for work stuff, but as my customers use a Windows desktop and as we have to use a Windows desktop at home, I just end up using Windows for 'consumer' stuff.