Geeky Traveller

Because the year isn’t complete without a few silly lists. There will probably be few surprises here. I haven’t seen Brokeback Mountain yet, and that’s on lots of critics’ lists, so that might fit in here somewhere. The same goes for Munich.

 Serenity
Broken Flowers
Shopgirl
Unknown White Male
3-Iron
Lord of War
A History of Violence
Downfall
Capote
Syriana

Walk the Line

Crash

The Family Stone

Sin City 

Wedding Crashers

Murderball

Turtles Can Fly 

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Google has launched yet another beta project–Google Transit. It’s only available for Portland, Oregan at the moment, but it’s a pretty nifty expression of transit routes across the city. It even provides the cost for a trip (and comparative costs for driving), and associated walking on either end of the route. Here’s an example, and here’s the official spiel:

Google Transit Trip Planner enables you to enter the specifics of your trip—where you’re starting, where you’re ending up, what time of day you’d like to leave and/or arrive—then uses all available public transportation schedules and information to plot out the most efficient possible step-by-step itinerary. You can even compare the cost of your trip with the cost of driving the same route!

Apparently Google has plans to roll it out nationwide.

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On the bus back to Calgary, I was chatting with an Irishmen named Hugh Mullen about Ryan Air, the low-cost airline and Irish success story. Hugh told me that Ryan Air CEO Michael O’Leary is floating a plan to enable airplane seatbacks with video gambling terminals. Apparently they may render the already absurdly cheap flights absolutely free.

Within four to five years the success of in-flight gaming and services such as insurance and car hire could make flights free. "Entertainment is where the real money will be made in future." If anyone got round to paying passengers to travel "we will pay them more". He dismissed suggestions that the free ticket moves would further anger environmentalists who want to see a carbon tax on aviation fuel. It was his job to "annoy the fuckers".

Hilariously, Ryan Air would become less an airline and more a mobile casino provider.

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Okay, it’s a little dubious to classify this as a travel gadget, but I can imagine at least one nation for which it’d be essential. Despite the appearance of a nubbed sex toy, it’s a silicone tea spoon for stirring loose tea into your cuppa (thanks, Popgadget)

Women really do love silicone. My new silicone rubber tea spoon filters loose tea as you stir. You twist off the base, fill it with loose tea, pop the base back on and swirl around in boiling water. The velvety rubber has a very high temperature tolerance.

Mind you, that nation is notorious for its conservative travel habits, so they may eschew loose tea–cuppa Earl Grey, if you please?

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When I’m doing multi-million dollar bamboo furniture deals in Tokyo or Yokohama, I’m always a little concerned about who I’m going to meet. If I’m meeting Jashiki Suzuki, am I looking for a man or a woman? Thanks to Escape Blog, I discovered the handy Japanese Name Gender Finder. All my gender confusion problems are solved! Well, not all of them:

I created a chart to find the gender for English names for Japanese people, and many people found it useful. Then I thought some of you might have the same problem for Japanese names as we have for English names, so here is a chart for you.

Now, if only they offered one of these for every nation on the planet.

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Caterina writes this snarky but entirely justified letter to the operators of the luxuriously named (and no doubt outfittted) Hilton London Metropole:

It is the year 2005, nearly 2006, and you do not have internet access in the rooms. In 2005, this is akin to saying to your guests, "Toilets? Of course we have toilets. They are down in the lobby, and you can use them any time you wish. Oh, and they will cost you 5 pounds per use. Cheers!"

I can’t imagine why they haven’t implemented it so that they can rodger each customer to the tune of 47 pounds a day for a trickle of bandwidth.

The comments in Caterina’s entry points to further nickling and diming at the Hilton. In an earlier entry, it’s reported that Hilton guests apparently have to pay to use the hotel gym. Total bogosity.

UPDATE: Via Navarik’s blog, I found this analysis of the hotel wifi landscape.

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I’m going to a wedding in Scotland in the new year, and was kicking around a quick side trip to Iceland. I’m embarassed to say that I lived in Dublin for two years and never got there. While considering lodgings in Reykjavik, I happened upon the awesomely-named Hotel Borg.

As it turns out, it’s pretty pricey–CAN $350/night. And, happily, it doesn’t look like this.

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Jet lag, the wearying curse of travlling geeks everywhere. In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson offers this great description:

Her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

According to new research in the fabulously named The Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (trust me, don’t go there), you can reset your circadian body clock simply and easily:

Both bright light and melatonin have successfully been used in laboratory and field settings to "phase advance" (resetting the circadian clock earlier in time so that all the circadian rhythms of the body occur earlier) thereby helping people adapt to night shift work or to a new time zone following rapid transmeridian jet travel. Melatonin alone has been shown to synchronize the circadian clock of the blind to the 24-hour day.

 Long-haul travellers of the world rejoice!

Technorati Tags: jetlag, endocrine, melatonin, lightbox, travel, nerds, william gibson, pattern recognition

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When travelling, I’ve always felt sheepish about taking photos of other people, especially children. You obviously don’t want to exploit them, or treat them like animals in a zoo. On the other hand, it strikes me as kind of tacky to give them money (though poverty trumps tackiness, so I’d probably give them cash in many developing countries)

Regardless, I recently read (somewhere, maybe in National Geographic’s Traveler magazine) a great tip for photographing the locals while travelling. Bring along a Polaroid camera (even something simple like this iZone 200). Take a photo of your subject with that camera first, and give them the polaroid as a little gift. Then take photos with your own camera. Then you both get a keepsake of your meeting.

Technorati Tags: photography, polaroid, travel tips

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If you look up ‘3-star business hotel’ in the dictionary, you’ll find a photo of the drab but functional Grand Canal Hotel. It’s on the outskirts of downtown Dublin, and the border of ritzy Ballsbridge.

It’s profoundly ordinary.

It has no pool, no gym, a characterless restaurant and friendly, eastern European front desk staff. And of course, they’ve got a pub. In this case, Kitty O’Shea’s (one of seven around the world).

As for geek appeal, it’s average. They’ve got wifi, but only on the 5th floor. This is a fact they don’t advertise, so be sure to request a room there. They use BT Openzone for the wifi. It’s 15 euros a day, which is pretty average for Europe. However, if you’re there for a while, you can get a month for 60 euros. I was there for seven nights, so that’s like 8.5 euros a day–deal!

There’s no wireful access, excepting some dodgy Web access through the TV.  

Technorati Tags: hotel review, grand canal, dublin, ireland, accomodation, btopenzone

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