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Sep
26
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From today; it looks like some liquids are safe to fly again. For me, that was one day too late - I got pulled aside @ SJC because I had a Jamba Juice (Citrus Squeeze, Original). Shoes in one hand I had to go to the back of the queue and quaff it before proceeding. It gave me one of those "ice-cream headaches" you got eating ice-cream when you we're a kid. Travel is so undignified.
Technorati Tags: travel, undignified, war-on-liquid
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Sep
22
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Looks like I got Schwartzed. I guess now I'll have to leave my Laptop at home ! Re-reading my post - it's interesting that my motivations for lugging a laptop were : "catch up with Tivo", "maybe do some work", (and adding a third) make phone calls with Skype*. Maybe that is the PC's salvation - high-end portable entertainment for travelling executives. Anyway, I'll try and blog my experiences.
*also intersting is that I keep a Windows partition on my Ubuntu laptop just so I can make cheap calls with Skype !
Technorati Tags: treo, ubuntu, schwartz, skype
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Aug
25
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I'm not one given to spreading fear and certainly believe that being afraid of terrorism is conceding defeat. But given the speed at which the world's authorities have been mobilized in the war on moisture and given the high profile cases of exploding laptop batteries (even without any nefarious intervention or design) - I'm pretty amazed that there isn't already a war on laptops - but by all reports it is still safe to be on a plane surrounded by laptops and other battery powered devices. Phew. A good book related to people's innability to assess and manage risk is "Against the Gods" by Peter Bernstein (Amazon link); Freakonomics also takes an interesting look at risk assesment.
Technorati Tags: laptop, exploding, war on moisture
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Aug
24
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After a seventy six year run, Pluto has just been relegated to "dwarf planet" status along with other moons, asteroids and KBOs. Come on Pluto - you had a good run while it lasted - now get back to the Kuiper Belt where you belong. The Beeb has the full skinny and the wikipedia is already updated.
Tags: pluto kbo kuiper
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Jul
6
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I'm using Sun's mandatory July shutdown to catch up with various things.
For example, I've just uploaded a selection of pictures from our May / June trip to the UK. We actually took over a thousand pictures so at some point I need to weed out the best couple of hundred and delete the rest.
We didn't really do much sight-seeing in the UK - we we're mostly there to see friends and family, that said we did see a side of England we've not seen for sometime (and our kids have never seen) - that is rural Somerset. We mainly stayed with friends / family but also rented two cottages. The second and the best was Nailey Farm (just outside Bath) which was spacious, very well decked out, had stunning views and a working farm for the kids to explore.
The farm is just across the valley from St Catherines Court (an impressive pad owned by Jane Seymour which you can rent for $24k a week!!).
I guess we were lucky with the weather - the first week was crap (wet, cold and windy) the remaining two or so weeks we're absolutely stunning (by any standards).
My next job is to download and burn our video (2 tapes) onto DVD.
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Jun
6
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I'm about 2 weeks into a 3 week vacation back to the motherland (England) - we've been staying in some fantastic cottages in Wiltshire and Exmoor visiting friends and family. I haven't spent more than a couple of days in the UK in the last 4 years so this trip has been interesting. Some immediate things I have noticed that have changed are :
- Cigarette smoke - Northern California is pretty much cigarette smoke free - you rarely smell it unless you go looking; it sounds like the UK is heading the same way in the future.
- Cars have gotten smaller - nearly every manufacturer has a range of minis - mini-MPVs, mini-hatchback, mini-minis, etc. They all look pretty cool and nicely designed - I'll try and take some pictures. Contrast this to the US where cars seem to continue to get bigger (and less efficient).
- Things are expensive - this isn't just due to the weak dollar - everyone seems to complain about he price of everything. See the picture above - that's a $100 tank of petrol.
- The beer is still way better than the piss served up in the US
I have started posting pictures of our trip to Flickr (as bandwidth allows).
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Nov
13
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On Saturday I drove about an hour and a half South to Pinnacles National Monument (just past Hollister, CA). I must admit, I'd never even heard of Pinnacles until a friend told me about it. It's a pretty amazing landscape and some decent walking though it probably gets way too hot in the summer months.
We we're fortunate to see the recently released California Condors - they put on a great soaring display for us but my camera predictably scared them away so I didn't get any decent pictures.
There was some pretty decent top-roping and bouldering and a decent camp ground nearby so it'd make a great place to introduce the kids to climbing next year.
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Apr
18
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I'm in LA this week attending the Gartner Integration & Web Services Summit; ie. meeting with some of the Gartner analysts (who I have previously only talked to on the phone), attending some of the sessions and on Wednesday participating in the OASIS WS-Security interop event - where a number of vendors will get together and see if their WSS implementations can talk - a good test of the spec. and the impelmentations (fingers crossed). We'll be demonstrating Sun Java System Applciation Server 8.1 PE which supports WS-S - swing by on Wednesday if you're at the conference and say Hi !
This is my first time in LA and I managed to break away from the conference this evening to do some sightseeing - I strolled along Holloywood Boulevard, saw the Chinese Theater etc., and just had to get a picture of this :
Thats cool.
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Mar
30
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I saw this map on Paul Jakma's Weblog and thought I'd create my own - it's pretty amazing how little of the planet I have seen (just 10%); despite having spent way too much time in airport lounges and having lived in 4 different countries (UK, Cyprus, Malta & the US).
Note - the map is by country - Tobago (which you can drive around in a couple of hours) gets the same weighting as the USA - which would take more than a couple of hours to drive around - especially if the 101 is anything to go by 
create your own visited countries map
Update, thanks to Matt for the USA coverge map, here's my USA state coverage - a pretty paltry 25% - still plenty to see
create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.
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Dec
14
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I wonder how long it will be before someone takes the first bungee or BASE jump from this new bridge (maybe it's already been done) - imagine dropping through the clouds into the valley below, again, and again, etc.
Seriously though, that is one magifique bridge - it reminds me of the Roman aqueducts or Victorian viaducts you see throughout Europe (or the UK) - engineering boldly defying the lay of the land.
I'm a lover of nature and big open spaces but I think if designed well such engineering feats can almost enhance the landscape and in this case it probably restores the tranquility in the valley below (ie. no more holiday traffic snaking it's way across the valley).
