Geeky Traveller

Over at SWT, Jody has pointed to a cool reference library of speech accents from around the globe:

Everyone who speaks a language, speaks it with an accent. A particular accent essentially reflects a person's linguistic background. When people listen to someone speak with a different accent from their own, they notice the difference, and they may even make certain biased social judgments about the speaker.

I couldn't actually find how many total samples (hang on, Wikipedia says they have 496) they had, but they're got an impressive array of languages.

They've got 14 samples from Canada, and none from Newfoundland! I mention this because, while living in Dublin, I blew my Irish friends away by playing them a sample of a Newfie accent (probably from here). They couldn't believe its similarity to certain Irish accents.

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Via The Cellar Image of the Day, I discovered this nifty map that displays countries based on their proportion of world international tourist trips (click for larger version):

From the WorldMapper page about the map:

In 2003 665 million international tourist trips were made. Dividing this by the world population would mean 10.7% holidayed abroad. However some people make multiple trips, so less than a tenth of the global population make tourist trips abroad. Western Europe is the most popular destination for international tourists, the region receives 46% of world tourist trips. At the other extreme 0.1% of world tourist trips are made to Central African territories.

Western Europe is naturally going to look large because the countries are small, the population is wealthy, and it's easy to travel among them. For someone who likes to avoid the tourists, this map shows you where to go. I'm shocked to see how small South America and India appear.

What's that big tumour on the north coast of South America? I don't think it's Brazil. Venezuala, maybe?

WorldMapper has 35 other cool maps, including a number of others concerning tourism. This map showing the estimated population in the year 1 A.D. is pretty fascinating too.

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Via Boing Boing, I visited HotelChatter’s review of the best WiFi-enabled hotels:

Hotels have finally realized that WiFi is a must-have, something that tops the wish list of many potential guests. But the rush to quickly set-up hotel WiFi networks, coupled with the fact that wireless fidelity is still a fairly new technology, means that consistent wireless internet access, pricing, and service, is not a given across hotel brands, small hotel groups or even from the lobby to your room.

Apparently Kimpton hotels (I’ve never stayed in one) are a cut-above everybody else, offering free (free!) WiFi in your room. Sweet. Unfortunately, Kimpton looks to only be a North American chain, and I seem to always be traveling to Europe, the land of the Hotel WiFi Rodgering.

Technorati Tags:
wifi, travel, kimpton, hotel, hotelchatter, boing boing

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Via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools email newsletter (site currently down), I read about the clever Whirl Wind [sic] Cup. It offers a tiny but useful innovation to the travel mug.

I’ll spare you the site’s Engrish and explain. As you can see, there’s a little fan installed in the inside of the cup. You press a button on the handle, and the fan stirs whatever substance you’re currently quaffing–coffee, tea, martini, whatever. Be sure to check out the nifty little Flash video on the site, which has some charming hand modelling.

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Normally when we book flights, we do so through one of a zillion third-party vendors. Though it’s often Expedia.ca, it’s almost as often some random site–Cheep-Flightz.com or whatever. In my experience, when you book through one of these sites, you can’t select your seat.

On this trip to Europe, there was a good seat sale at Air Canada, so we booked directly through them. We could choose our exact seat, so I made use of SeatGuru.com to identify the optimal seats for the trip. The site’s been around forever, but I’ve never had a chance to try it out.

It worked like a frickin’ charm. On both legs (Vancouver-Toronto, Toronto-London) we got the first two seats behind business class (seats F12 and H12, to be exact). The legroom, particularly on the first leg, was big league. It’s a little hard to make out in the photo, but Julie’s stretching out her legs, and her feet don’t touch the bulkhead. She’s no giant at 5’3’’, but for all 6’1’’ of me, it made a huge difference.

This is a fantastic airline hack. We combined it with our usual requested vegetarian meals (they come first, and they’re generally of better quality than the standard ones), and the trip was actually tolerable.

Until, of course, we arrived at The Worst of All Things British, Heathrow Airport. I’ll spare you the tedious details of the fiasco that is the BMI self check in counter.

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For the next ten days, I’ll be at an Irish wedding in Scotland on St. Patrick’s Day (do you think there will be any drinking?). Then I’m scooting down to four nights in Venice, using the insanely cheap package I acquired on Luxury Link.

There will definitely be new photos in my Flickr account, and hopefully some geeky reporting from the road. I’ll be back on March 26. 

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Scott writes to send along this intelligent analysis of the flight attendant call buttons on airplanes:

Both the call button and reading light button are on a panel on the inside armrest of your seat. The two buttons are the same size and same shape and differ only in their icons and positions on the panel…Of course, in the dark, when you are trying to turn on the light, you can’t see the icons on the buttons, and when you feel around for the buttons, the two buttons feel exactly the same.

Add to that the grogginess that comes with 8 or 10 hours in a flying metal tube, and it’s no surprise that people get confused. 

If you dig design, check out the entire site, which is full of examples of lousy design. You might also check out a great book called The Design of Everyday Things.

Technorati Tags: airplane, button, design, travel

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Upgrade: Travel Better points to this USA Today article which discusses the demise of the hotel minibar. Apparently people are tired of paying twenty-seven dollars for four peanuts and a teaspoon of cheap gin.

The Hilton McLean in suburban Washington, D.C., for instance, is in the process of emptying the last of its 458 minibars, which are being rechristened as plain old refrigerators. The reason: lack of demand.

Similarly, New York’s 1,946-room Marriott Marquis has ousted its minibars, which took 20 employees seven hours to service.

"It was a pure business decision," spokeswoman Kathy Duffy says. "When we saw how few people were actually using them and the amount of labor it cost to visit each room every day, it was far higher than the revenue."

Apparently they’re removing a bunch of items and leaving space for guests to store, you know, affordable consumables.

On a related note, the Cheapflights blog discusses the addition of sex toys to certain urban hotel minibars. I perceive an immediate problem: these would be an impulse purchase, but you’d want to wait a while for them to cool down to room temperature. Nothing kills the mood (among other things) faster than a cold French tickler.

Technorati Tags: travel, minibar, hotels, sex toys

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Shel Holtz refers to an evil practice by hotels–double-dipping on the broadband:

Two people check into a hotel room—husband and wife, business colleagues sharing a room, whatever—and each has his or her own laptop. One jacks in, signs up for the $9.95-per-day service, does his work, logs off. Then the second person jacks in and is asked to pay again. Each computer has a different MAC address and the hotel—many of which would charge for each flush of the toilet if they could—takes advantage of that to get double broadband fees for one room.

 Are hotels desperately worried that some geeky and his 5 friends are going to organize an all-night hackathon in their suite?

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Joe regularly writes about his inspired ideas for changing the world. Most recently, he proposed USB movies for travellers.

Loaded by a vending machine that takes credit cards. The vending machine in turn loaded over a broadband connection every few days. The content could injected into the USB key (which could be sold as part of the package) with the content embedded in a player program. The player program is designed to timeout with the timeout being set to around 48 hours. After that you can discard the data and use the key as normal. Next time just reload the same key with a different set of movies/shows.

I like it. Presumably the USB works as a dongle, and you could only watch the movies with the device plugged into your laptop.

As a bonus, Joe recently wrote a longer entry about the problem of landmine clearing.

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