Occasional Observations

Looks like my bag is on the way home ... "Item located, pending confirmation".

My trusty two-night suitcase is once again at the mercy of the airline baggage handlers. It didn't make it to Munich with me last night but KLM says "in 95 percent of all cases, baggage is located on the first day".

The case is a travel veteran and has shown up by taxi or courier on several previous occasions. Its telescopic handle has also been broken and repaired twice by another airline. It's a nice size but the wheels are a tad too close together to walk briskly through an airport - it has a tendency to tilt on to one wheel, then on to its back.

What's inside? Some dirty laundry and an unloved suit that I was thinking about retiring anyway. And some birthday presents for the kids from my sister - at least she will probably still have the receipts.

Labels: rant

Spent the weekend in the UK, driving from Bristol to Plymouth on Saturday, then back up to London on Sunday, dumping the car at Heathrow and heading into town on the train, which cost less than the overnight parking for said car.

Since it was only a few hundred miles with a camera-enforced 70mph I went for the bog-standard Ford Focus; on arrival at the Avis desk at Bristol Airport, was delighted to receive an upgrade, to a Peugeot 307cc. This is an interesting car: a coupe/convertible. Despite the overcast skies, I had to drive it with the lid down, of course ... apart from the 3-mile stretch on the A38 near Exeter where it rained so hard that I had to stop and raise the roof.

Compared with the 280SL, there's very little wind intrusion, thanks to the very steeply raked windscreen. Performance wasn't too bad - mine was a turbo-diesel which managed to accelerate well past the 70mph legal limit while still in fourth gear, so having a six speed 'box was overkill.

Over the weekend visiting relatives we managed four-up although there wasn't much legroom in the back - there wasn't even a seatbelt for a third person in the middle of the back seat.

Before the Heathrow drop-off I filled the tank, which consumed less than 40 liters (a relief since diesel in the UK is now a penny off GBP1 a liter, which is $8 a gallon. That's excellent for 400-or-so miles. I don't think it would qualify for the Alpentour 2008, though.

Labels: Alpentour, petrolhead

The much-hyped BBC iPlayer is now officially into Beta, so despite my disappointment with Joost, I thought it would be nice to be able to tune in and see what I'm missing out on, from time to time.

Problem 1: You have to live in the UK (presumably there's some IP address lookup going on)
Problem 2: You need Windows XP

As I'll be in the UK shortly, I fired up my XP VM to bookmark the sign-up page - then complete the registration from a UK IP address.

Until I read the small print, that is.

Clause 17 states: "When you install the BBC iPlayer Library you will also install peer-to-peer file sharing software from Verisign Inc. This software has a file share (sic) feature that allows other BBC iPlayer users to download BBC content through your personal computer (using part of your upload bandwidth), via a secure link, to their personal computers. ... When you use the BBC iPlayer Library you shall not have the option to 'switch off' the peer-to-peer functionality as this is a core component of the BBC iPlayer Library."

BitTorrent, byte by byte, is going legit.

However, for now, it looks as if µTorrent is more convenient.

Labels: iptv, multimedia, nerd

A few days into messing with virtualized versions of Windows and XP beats Vista hands-down - it'll get even faster when I've finished switching off all those unwanted services. Even had a conversation on Skype the other day with someone who was running it within a VM. I haven't gone that far, yet.

Running Vista within Vista was a mistake. My system(s) slowed to a crawl. It was agonizing. A colleague recently told me that these moments spent waiting for the mouse to respond / something / anything to happen actually have a name: Bill Gates Contemplation Moments.

Somewhere at home I've got a CD with the original release of Windows 95, which I haven't used since early 2001. I'm thinking about installing it as a VM and then loading up my copy of Railroad Tycoon - if I can find a working floppy drive to copy the info on to a USB stick. I think we've got a floppy drive somewhere in a box at home although there isn't one that's actually connected to a working computer.

Labels: nerd, virtualization

Yup, have already plowed through the 750-or-so pages of the final Harry Potter novel. Pretty disappointing in the end but a page-turner, for sure, in getting to the final showdown.

If you haven't read it yet, can keep your eyes and ears shut to the media mayhem and smart-alecs giving away the plot, then my tip is: don't bother with the final chapter. Of course you will, and you'll then wonder why, etc. Just pretend it wasn't written by JK. It probably wasn't, anyway...

Labels: bookworm

I'm probably one in a million today - the seventh and final Harry Potter book has arrived: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. This probably means Me and the Deathly Silence all day as I romp through ... tempting as it is to turn to the last chapter, I'll at least start the book. Will have to keep all radios switched off until I've finished it as some eedjut is going to blab on about the Prestige.

Labels: bookworm

Don't try this at home - unless you have a ton of patience (and a few GB of RAM): I booted Vista within Vista, as a virtual machine. My dual-core machine with 1.5GB of RAM normally has enough to run Vista - allocating half of that to the VM was a mistake.

Meanwhile, XP Pro runs flawlessly as a VM in just 256MB RAM. I think that's a clue as to Vista's processor and memory-intensive demands. MS offers the Vista VM as a free 30-day download but I don't think it'll even stay 30 hours on my machine unless I happen to stumble across a couple of GB of RAM this afternoon.

On a totally different note, the Firefox plugin forecastfox has been keeping me up-to-date on the weather outside, and offers a one-click look at the weather in my favorite locations around the world.

Labels: nerd, tech, virtualization

So far, so good in my first experiments with desktop virtualization. I'm trying the free VMware Player and Microsoft's also free, and more functional, Virtual PC 2007.

With VMware, functionality is more limited with the free player, although there is a good selection of pre-installed open source desktop and server and it didn't take long to discover EasyVMX, a donation-supported free site offering basic VM creator templates. Using this I was able to install Windows XP in VMware Player - as well as by simply creating a new VM in the more functional MS VPC2007.

Despite making some noises, neither company has yet offered any patch to make its VMs compatible with the other.

I also tried Ubuntu desktop Linux with both VMs. The out-of-the-box Ubuntu .iso install with VPC hung on some corrupted graphics, while WinXP installed perfectly; with VMware, the Windows installation doesn't (yet) have any network connectivity but the Ubuntu image I downloaded works perfectly. Perhaps I can also get a ready-installed Ubuntu image for VPC.

Labels: tech, virtualization

Spotted a total of nine police in three vehicles at a well-used speed trap on a main drag into Munich this morning. Plus the two plainclothes sitting in the speed trap car itself - isn't that rather excessive???

Labels: odd

Getting up to the superb Timberline Lodge on Oregon's Mt. Hood was a real highlight from this trip. Gerry and I briefly reprised the Alpentour with a jaunt out from Portland to the lodge, which stands at exactly 6000ft on Oregon?s highest mountain (11,249ft).

The road up to the lodge is completely different to those Italian passes: big, sweeping 70mph bends. Gerry?s chocolate-brown 560SL was barely ticking over on the way up. It was still a chance to feel the difference between the 280SL and the 560SL - the latter is better balanced but with the fairly high, freeway-geared final drive, fairly lazy. Definitely a Sunset Boulevard cruising car more than a Dolomite pass runner.

It would have been fun to hustle the 500E up the road towards the lodge ? except for those pesky speed limits. Next trip to Portland, I'd like to conquer Mt. St. Helens. The lava dome is growing ? still has some way to go before the mountain regains its pointy profile that disappeared in a puff of smoke and a bang in 1982 (Later correction: ahem, actually 1980).

Labels: Alpentour, oldtimer

Labels: rant, travel

Until tonight, my last ride in a Mercedes-Benz 500E was waaaay back when I was too young to appreciate it. It was when I was a news reporter on the UK's Autocar magazine (oh, the irony), and one came in on test in late 1990, when they first hit the streets. The finer details escape me but it was a very short-term test, a couple of days or so ...

Apart from the car being black, expensive as hell, and virtually hand-built by a famous German car company that wasn't actually called M-B, I thought of the 500E as the bastard big brother of our long-term 300E-24. I'd hardly gotten over the "hey, I'm 23 years old and driving this MERC!!!!!!" (me) about the -24, aka "Hnnnh, see you've borrowed your daddy's car you little ***t!" (everyone else) when this honking 5-litre monster arrives on the block.

I didn't appreciate it then ... the LHD thing was so inconsiderate.

Some 15-plus years later, back in an immaculate 500E that still feels tight despite the years, I'm starting to realize what I missed when I was pimping that test car along the Chelsea Embankment all those years ago. In short: I should have been headed out of London - headed for the Welsh mountains.

Labels: oldtimer, petrolhead

"That's the peril of traveling with lots of gadgets!" said a colleague in response to the news that I'd mislaid my E61 mobile at Chicago O'Hare airport yesterday. Here's the back-fill, I was actually at the airport in good time ... in good time for the thunderstorm that swept off the plains and across the Mid-West, also delaying the departure of my plane from its previous destination (St Louis) to Chicago.

Three gate changes and three hours later we were finally ready to board. I'd been camped out on the wi-fi at the original gate, and had placed my phone on my jacket. When I grabbed my jacket the phone must have tumbled to the floor.

I didn't notice until 15 minutes later, on board, when I remembered I hadn't switched it off ... er, what phone would that be??? No phone - and too late to get off and find it. So I borrowed a phone from my friendly seat-mate and activated the E61's emergency lock feature that I'd set up, but never tried. We were about to taxi so there was no time to call the phone and ask the person who answered to hand it over ...

This is a simple and ingenious idea - on receipt of a keyword via SMS from any phone number, the phone automatically locks down, requiring PIN and lock code (they're different) to reactivate. It even goes into offline mode so it can't receive calls. This worked a treat since anyone calling my phone went straight to voicemail.

Called the American Airlines lost property office this morning and got voicemail ... explaining that they only call back for items that have been turned in. Oh no. Left a message anyway, in the vain hope that someone would call back. Ten minutes later (max) the callback came in. The phone was handed over, and by the time I got the call, they'd already made arrangements to hand it back to me when I fly back through Chicago in a few days. Now that's customer service!

So, whoever found the phone and handed it over - thank you. I hope to be able to do the same for you one day.

Labels: mobile, travel

As my dad likes to say: Time to spare, go by air. It seems to be getting worse every time I fly. LHR was almost unbearable: the longest queues I have ever seen there, and the slowest crawl through security. Now having an O'Mare at O'Hare ... with the aircraft for my flight not even here yet.

Labels: rant, travel

For me there is, of course, only one five o'clock in the day, at least under normal circumstances. Today's an exception as I'm at the airport (already), having set a new record for the door-to-door trip to the airport of 40 minutes. Wasn't even racing. There just wasn't any traffic. Oh, the joy of early Sunday mornings...

Labels: petrolhead

Xing - "Sing" or "Crossing" depending on who you believe, is a social networking site big in Germany ... think LinkedIn auf deutsch or in Cantonese, increasingly.

I've used it for around three years and it's quite useful in tracking my contacts - think Plaxo without all those irritating emails.

Although it's not new, the XING plug-in for Outlook is improved, and I used it for the first time to import my contacts. To my delight, they come complete with picture - so now when I open up an email from anyone in my address book whose pic is on their Xing profile, I get their smiling (usually) face. Cute.

Labels: networking, tech

Definitely not new music but it's 20-plus years since I last listened to what the rock journos would call the "seminal" first album by Black Sabbath. I wasn't at all interested in heavy rock in 1970 and wouldn't have cared what I was missing, but looking back now - wow. It was a very good year for vintage rock, with The Sabs' first album, the debut from Led Zep., Blind Faith's eponymous album and the Stones' Let It Bleed all in the charts together. Rock on!

Labels: iPod, rawk

The Trabi Convertible auction has ended - with hajo030176 being the highest of the 38 bidders and picking up the car for a snip at EUR 2138. That's waay more than I was prepared to stump for a 17-year-old Trabant. It was, I must say, one of the best examples of a Trabi Ostermann convertible: one of the very last Trabis which appeared to be in immaculate condition. Maybe a little bit too good for the Alpentour 2008.

Labels: Alpentour, auto, odd, oldtimer, petrolhead