November 24th, 2005
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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November 16th, 2005
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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November 10th, 2005
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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November 6th, 2005
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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November 3rd, 2005
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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November 1st, 2005
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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