Lotusblog

I am two hours or so into my 13 hour flight to Bangkok. So far so good. The in-flight meal of green curry hit the spot. It is now 14:30 London time, or 21:30 Bangkok time. I guess that means that I should really go to bed in a couple of hours. I don’t think I will have any trouble getting to sleep- last night I got home from Glasgow (and the arduous trek from the airport to my office) on the good side of 1am, but ended up being awake until around 4am as I was manning the ‘phones and trying to get my packing done. Upon checkin at Heathrow this morning (from December 1st, the super convenient, life-saving “check-in-at-Paddington-station” service was suspended, so after lugging my cases to the airport on the Heathrow Express) found that I was 3 kilogrammes over my 30kg limit, but the ground staffer very kindly let me get away with it “just this once”. Thank goodness.

That’s about all I can think of writing at the moment. Hopefully Bangkok will be a paradise of unsecured, open wireless networks so that I can get this posted. If not, don’t know what I will I do.

Those of you on GSM networks will still be able to reach on my UK mobile until Wednesday night.

Phew.

What a couple of days.
I am now on the Stansted Express heading from the airport back to London. I just had a couple of days in Glasgow. Got up stupidly early on Friday morning (almost didn’t even wake up) and found my way to the airport. Arrived at Glasgow around 11am, to rain, mist and biting cold. Met Gillian for lunch in The Lighthouse (where I had a meeting later on) and ate a pretty tasty burger made from Italian sausage:

Lunch at Glasgow's "The Lighthouse"

The food wasn’t the only great thing at The Lighthouse. The view from the top was also pretty fine, and quite unbelievably the sun suddenly started shining! And continued to do so for 2 hours!

Sunny Glasgow

And the sun just kept shining

Spent the rest of the afternoon working before meeting up with Andrew and Gillian again later that evening for an after-work drink. Managed to get the Christmas feeling thanks to this:

The Princes Centre Christmas Tree

and this:

And more Christmas decorations

After our sundowner, we all headed back to their place for a wonderfully relaxing and filling dinner of Fajitas. We all crashed pretty much soon after that, woke up this morning and had the best breakfast of 2004 (as chosen by Food Critic magazine). We then got into the car and toured some of the local sites including a pretty amazing automated canal lock.

…I will post the pics later when I have a chance…

I am on a train again- this time heading back to London. Just finished my meetings in Cardiff. Cardiff was a curious place. I would like to get back and check it out a bit more.

I am looking out my window now at a massive sprawling housing estate. The suburbs always upset me for some reason. I don’t know it is about them, but they just seem so oppressive. Actually, they are oppressive. I guess I don’t like being oppressed.

My new phone is going well. I bought a Sony Ericsson T68i a couple of months ago (through eBay) expressly for the purpose of this trip (and all subsequent trips). The main reason I chose it was the design and the Bluetooth support (it was a vanguard phone when it was released a couple of years ago) and so far it has been great. Syncing it with my Mac- and getting all my contacts onto it- was a cinch. And the great thing is that when I go to Thailand, or when I go to Australia, I will be able to use it there too. I haven’t had a chance to test out the GPRS, and to be honest I don’t even know if O2 offers GPRS or not, but it’s nice to know that I can dial up to the net using this phone as a Bluetooth modem on either GSM or GPRS. At the moment that isn’t necessary as some fool called Dan has set up an open wireless network near my office- so I use that to connect to the net. I sort of feel sorry for him- he is running all the Windows services like file and printer sharing. If I were malevolent (or perhaps just if I had more time) I could really have fun there.

On the way to a big meeting

Greetings all.
It is now Wednesday morning, I am a diesel train speeding towards Wales to Cardiff. I have a meeting there and then I then have to be back in London by 17:00 for another meeting. Busy busy busy, but everything is going well so far.

I am going to be here for a few more days- more meetings tomorrow and then on Friday morning I am off to Glasgow. Come back from Glasgow on Saturday night. Then on Sunday I fly to Bangkok, have another meeting there and then 2 days at a beach to unwind.
Then back to the grind in Osaka.

I am now in London. Arrived a couple of hours ago. It’s grey and cold. Just what I expected.

Saw an unbelievable live event last night. It started with a guy who composes music on Game Boys and finished with a cellist who took out an angle grinder and started grinding his cello. It was the re-birth of industrial.

I leave for London tomorrow. Will be away for about 10 days. (notice to thieves: there is a vicious dog in my house, so, err, don’t break in while I am gone. Or you’ll regret it)

Anyway, the pre-trip preparation doesn’t consist of making sure I have 6 pairs each of socks and undies, clean T-shirts etc, this time my pre-trip preparation is more like this:

Have I synced my Bluetooth phone with my address book? Do I have my iBook data mirrored on my Desktop? Is iBlog set to work from my iBook? Is my Clie up to date and ready to go? Do I have all my relevant sim cards, Bluetooth adapters, rechargers, power-cables? Is my London number working properly? Is it diverting calls to voice-mail? Do I have my firewire cable ready in case our office doesn’t have a router and I have to do IP over firewire?

When did all this happen? Travel didn’t used to be like this.

Column 8 is a (sometimes) amusing, usually wry column that appears in the Sydney Morning Herald. I look at it every now and again. Today one of the items was actually pretty moving.

“Some thoughts on turning 89,” submits Col McDonald, of Lindfield, via the nostalgic medium of the typewriter. “Not the best time of life. You don’t look good or feel good and (unless you’re careful) don’t smell good. You spend half the night awake – remembering what you should have done but didn’t, or what you shouldn’t have done but did. Sometimes you cry, ‘Where did I go wrong’ and a reply comes, ‘How much time do we have?’ “

Just read a really fascinating article on Wired. Tony Long writes:

Safety in Numbers
A pod of dolphins circled protectively around four people swimming 300 feet off a New Zealand beach to fend off an attack by a great white shark, according to a report Tuesday by the New Zealand Press Association. The four were swimming when several dolphins began herding them by doing tight circles around them. When one swimmer, Rob Howes, tried to drift away, one of the larger dolphins herded him back. It was then that Howes spotted a 9-foot great white shark swimming toward the pod. “I just recoiled. It was only about 2 meters away from me, the water was crystal clear and it was as clear as the nose on my face,” Howes said. “They had corralled us to protect us.” If the report is accurate — and a spokeswoman for the environmental group Orca Research says the behavior fits these marine mammals — then dolphins are treating us with a lot more respect than we’re treating them these days.

At this site , I just read one of the most amazing and enthralling articles I have ever read. Just to give you a taste, here is a particularly noteworthy section:

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I ended up deleting the text I had copied due to this rather nasty and serious sounding warning:

Unauthorised reproduction will be vigourously pursued to the full extent of the law.

So, just to give you an idea what it was about (but I do encourage to read the article yourself at the site linked above) it discussed the Aum sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway in 1995. What was astounding was that the writer claims that the attack was actually used to discredit and cause the disbanding of the Aum sect- the real perpertrators were a “shadowy foreign entity” and Soka Gakkai, who it turned out were really pulling the strings behind the Aum facade.

And if you’re wondering why I am reading this sort of stuff, well it’s simple. I was listening to A Reminiscent Drive’s “Smokey Mountains” and there is a sample in the song of a British investigative reporter talking about the biological chemical tests that were held secretly in San Francisco in the 1950’s. It turns out (after reading the article above) that the San Franciscans weren’t the only ones being experimented on.