Occasional Observations

How mad is this: in old Europe, the clocks go back this weekend to Daylight Saving Time ... and a week later in the New World.

Welcome to timezone chaos. It's complicated enough scheduling calls with people in multiple timezones, but there's a small window: the much-loved 8am California time/ 5pm Central European time. Except that next week, this becomes the 8am/4pm slot. The week after, we're back to the nine hour time difference.

Now factor in the need to get participants on the line from Beijing, California, Germany and Australia. It's a headache and a middle-of-the-night call for someone, anyway. So let's make it more complicated by trying to remember that the clocks don't change in China - so they're another hour ahead of Europe through the winter.

Thank goodness for the World Time Server.

Labels: rant

There is an airport, not too far from London, which specializes in budget flights to tourist destinations. It sucks for business travel, especially when you?re trying to get through the metal detectors etc, since there always seem to be the people who have never flown before (or even been to a big city?) who don?t realize that getting through the machines means removing your coat, your hat, your belt, the metal items in your pockets, etc.

But I digress. Arriving at said airport, where the lines are long for check-in, is enough to merit the mental ?Abandon hope, all ye who enter here? signs that I always seem to imagine at the entrance to the check-in hall. And let me share a little secret: with a rather well-known and brightly-colored airline, it?s absolutely possible, without fear of recrimination or even funny looks from other passengers (unless they?re within earshot), to pick the shortest line and check-in there. Regardless of your destination and what it says on the board above that check-in desk. So Malaga = Munich = Belfast = anywhere you?re going, as long as you actually have a ticket with that airline, that is.

Aha! You exclaim. Queuing is done only by those who are off the grid. Indeed, I agree ? however when one is travelling with more than a laptop and mobile charger and one night?s essentials, especially on the way back from a trade fair, when one?s bag is likely to be stuffed with Bling / CPS / Chotskys, then a bag is sometimes essential? and no, this airline doesn?t yet do bag-drop only desks.

So today, despite the monster teenagers-sitting-in-circles-on-the-floor-around-their-bags queues, I was in luck ? there was one check-in line that was shorter than the others. And lo and behold, it was even the ?one? for Munich, my destination. Somehow, that didn?t seem right. What really confused me , through, was the lady in front of me. She was going to Dublin, a destination that my airline de jour doesn?t actually serve ? on a different airline.

That, I didn?t get

Labels: odd, travel

Earlier this week I was fortunate enough to get a front-row table in an exclusive London jazz club to hear funk legend Hamish Stuart play a live set. Founding guitarist and lead vocalist of the Average White Band, the 58-year-old rocked in a near three-hour set. Of course he played Pick Up The Pieces - as the finale. On the way to the epic 10-plus minute version, Hamish and his band gave us a funkin' good time with numbers like Person To Person and Get The Love.

For me, it's two out of two for the 606 Club in Fulham. Back in April, Robbie Williams' former collaborator Guy Chambers was part of a superb line-up alongside a couple of Irish brothers who got me hooked on bluegrass.

Already planning the next London trip - and will be checking the 606 line-up before booking my flight.

Labels: music

The no smoking ban has come into force across the UK, meaning that the super-stinky streets of London are now even worse. Those poor smokers huddled on the pavement - it really is sometimes necessary to take a deep breath before entering or exiting a building, to get through the smokescreen without inhaling a lungful of second- or even third-hand smoke.

In London, it doesn't really make much difference - since the diesel stink is pretty overpowering, especially in the medieval streets of the City of London. And even though smoking's been banned on the Tube for around 20 years (I still remember when it was possible to smoke on the trains) the air down there is still pretty hazy.

Oh for the mountain air of Munich!

Labels: rant

Sometimes, people are more famous internationally than at home. Take 1980s heavy rock band Def Leppard, for example, who could fill stadiums in the US but never really made a lasting impression on the charts in the UK, despite being originally from Sheffield, and the unknown-at-home-but-big-in-America Bush.

Colditz Castle in Saxony, Germany, falls into the same category. In Germany it?s almost unheard-of and certainly not on the map for most tourists visiting nearby Dresden and Leipzig. But for Brits it?s up there ? probably in the top 10 places an Englishman would have heard of in Germany.

Why? Because during WW2 the castle was used as a prisoner-of-war camp for Allied officers: not all, but those who had already tried to escape from a PoW camp. A then-abandoned mental hospital, Colditz already offered secure accommodation for 600-plus prisoners as well as further barracks for German soldiers. Tucked away between Leipzig and Dresden, Colditz also had geography on its side, being several hundred KM from the borders of neutral Switzerland, and from the North Sea.

It was only in the 1950s that Colditz? rise to fame began ? with the publication of his first-person escape from the castle by Pat Reid. Further books followed, since 25-plus British, French and Canadian prisoners managed to escape and make a ?home run? to freedom between the years 1941 and 1945. Superstardom arrived with the movies The Colditz Story and later, the TV series. The castle was ?home? to many high-profile prisoners including Douglas Bader and Airey Neave.

Tourists hoping to visit Colditz, however, were disappointed, as the castle was behind the Iron Curtain and therefore largely inaccessible to tourists. It was only after the wall came down that renovations to the castle began, and at the end of 2006, the section that was the former German barracks opened as an International Youth Hostel.

The legend of Colditz is told during a guided tour which lasts approximately an hour and provides a glimpse of the famous tunnel dug by French PoWs, from a 16^th Century wine cellar into the adjoining Chapel ? continuing between the floorboards and the stone floor along the length of the Chapel and to within 10 meters of freedom. Just days before the tunnel was completed, it was discovered, therefore thwarting the escape of up to 200 prisoners.

Visitors hoping to see the home-made glider will however be disappointed. There?s only one photograph ? taken by a US GI in 1945 when the castle was liberated ? and no chance to visit the attic where it was built. The plan was to launch the glider with the help of a bathtub which, when dropped over the sheer castle wall, would provide the momentum to launch the glider into flight for the planned 500-meter flight into a riverside meadow within sight of the castle. Possibly more of a white elephant than a real escape project, the glider was one of many ingenious escape ruses that no doubt kept morale high for the officer PoWs.

They weren?t exactly suffering though ? thanks to the Geneva Convention, the most-severe punishment that could be meted out to prisoners was a stretch of solitary confinement, but still with regular meals and an hour?s fresh air per day. Outside solitary, the prisoners received pay (in the form of a micro-currency valid only for the prison shop), food parcels from the Red Cross, and were probably better-fed than their German guards.

Labels: tourism

Lots of newsprint and pixels have been dedicated to the new Radiohead album over the last week, the brave new "choose how much you pay to download" model. Don't be skeptical, I reckon they'll still make a fair whack on online sales, possibly more, even, than the slice the band could have expected under a traditional record contract with a major label.

I downloaded and listened to it today, with noise-cancelling earphones blotting out background noise (to the point where I was surprised when the plane landed). First reaction is: more of the same. I really love Kid A and Amnesiac, they're my favorite Radiohead albums, while I think OK Computer is only that, OK.

But here's the nerd take on the brave new move by music pioneers Radiohead: wot, only 160kbps? This is exactly half the bitrate I'm looking for.

Paranoid thought arises: Is this because I was cheap and didn't offer to actually pay money for the album? Could it be that the bitrate is proportionate to the amount you pledge? Nope. A check on indexes for various swap sites confirms that the album weighs in at just under 49MB. Download a torrent offering anything more and you're being fooled, baby.

So what now? Wait for the CD, that's what. By January I'll be more familiar with In Rainbows so once Radiohead have sorted out their new record label and managed to actually release a CD version, I'll snap it up, probably for ?12 or less. I'll then be deleting the 160kbps version - so why pay, when I'm simply getting an advance, review version that's only half retail quality?

And this is the thing about downloads. I'm hardly an audiophile but when I first bought the late, unlamented Real Jukebox in 1999, the MP3 standard was 96kbps. Today, ringtones are higher quality. I progressed slowly through 128, 160 and a flirtation with ogg, got totally confused by the EAC format (although I have plenty of disk space for it) and settled on 320kbps mp3, for now at least. I *honestly* can't hear the difference even when playing back an 320-encoded file through my ageing but excellent quality hi-fi separates and speakers.

Time to toss or sell my CDs? NO WAY. They're my shiny licenses to the music and the offline backup. As for the artwork, if I was really interested in that, I'd still buy LPs. It's all about the music, stoopid.

Labels: mp3, music, rant

They're only a couple of days late, which in the grand scheme of things isn't too bad when you've flown all the way to Munich, Germany, from Australia. No joke, yesterday lunchtime I bumped into a bunch of Oz guys all wearing "Australian beer drinking national team" t-shirts - walking away from the Theresienwiese looking rather dejected. Possibly because the Oktoberfest finished on Sunday? Either they were late or hoping to drink one last lunchtime Maß before the long journey home.

Labels: beer, odd

So there I was in the theater, sitting towards the back, stage right, and the house lights were up during the interval - the ideal time to pull out my iPhone and send an SMS message to a friend about what we'd do next.

I pull out the phone and twist it round so that the screen's in landscape mode, and start tapping out my message, when the stranger in the seat next to me asks "Hey, is that an iPhone? They're pretty cool, aren't they!"

And then I woke up.

Actually the dream carried on but I'm not even going to try and explain why someone was driving a car up the aisle (and no, I don't remember the make, model or color).

This is perplexing. I didn't know I wanted an iPhone. I was in the US shortly after they launched, and had a little play. It's of course an instant icon although I didn't like the touch-screen too much. iPhone is launching here in major European markets within the next couple of months, so I'd better try and steer clear of the shops for a while...

Labels: bling, iphone

Sold most of my holding in a large technology company called HP today, and - gasp - despite the US $ currently being worth less on the international money markets than a Guatemalan Quetzal, I made a modest profit.

It did cross my mind to open a US Dollar account - or to blow the proceeds on a '69 Corvette in mint condition, for example, but in the end I opted for conversion into a currency that seems to be doing OK: Chinese Yuan.

Only joking - if only, but not so easy from here. I actually went for Great British Pounds, or Brownies, as they're known these days in some circles. Ironically, you need 1 GBP in London to buy anything that would cost 1 USD in 'most any major US city, but I needed 2 USD and change for every 1 GBP.

And so it goes.

Labels: bling