Travel

Just got back from three weeks in Australia visiting family and friends. Countries: 3 (England, Singapore, Australia) Cities: 7 (Singapore, Brisbane, Hamilton Island, Perth, Broome, Kununurra, Darwin) Red rock formations: Too many to mention Best airport: Singapore - free gadget recharging points and Internet access Worst airport: LHR T4 - building site, long queues, surly staff Wildlife: Kangaroos, wallabies, crocodiles, spiders and, err, terrifying budgerigars States: 3 (QLD, WA, NT) Flights: 11 Airlines: 2 (Quantas, JetStar) Miles: 26,341 Music: ‘These wooden ideas’ - Idlewild Newspapers: Zero

This week, I have been working in Bergen, near Norway. Normally, I view my trips to major European cities simply as a means to end and after a while they all tend to blur into one unified major European city. Same hotel room, same office, different people, same problems, same computers, same restaurants with the same cashless transaction mechanism. Bergen, however, is different. The city is just beautiful. I love it. Mountains, water, snow, history. Just stunning. If I didn’t have ties, I think I would seriously considering moving here full-time. ...

Holidays are a time blissfully free of the modern distractions of computers, mobile phones, games consoles, televisions and a time for the family to spend some quality time together and eventually fall out. Inevitably, this leads to varied, interesting, thought provoking discussions. During the Brightside annual vacation in Venice, the following thorny questions were posed: If you immersed yourself in a foreign country, how long would it take for you to become proficient in the language ? If there was a 15 km stretch of beach resort including hundreds of young people, bars and restaurants in England, how many riot police would be required ? If soldier ants are so damn clever, how come they didn’t land on the moon first ? When the bus was forced into that emergency stop, was it the German tourist or the Italian bus driver who screamed ‘BASTARD’ ? What’s the Italian for ‘Cornetto’ ? If mosquitoes could be trained to attack people with the same blood group, would the bites be rendered harmless ?

On Friday I returned from a very enjoyable week in Brussels. Hard work, challenging customer and miscellaneous technical issues. However, unusually, I had the pleasure of the company of a few of colleagues so we were able to have a chat over a meal and share a few excellent beers together. Over the past five years, I have visited so many European airports, that they all tend to blur into one. However, certain key characteristics soon reminded me that I was indeed back in Brussels. ...

Spending a lot of time in airports is an occupational hazard in the glamorous and fast moving world of IT consultancy. Most of us are intimate with the various methods of tuning Oracle databases and Siebel CRM but here are some quick tips about optimizing the airport experience. Most airlines have succeeded in shifting the massive queues from the check-in desks to smaller queues at the self-service kiosks. The most obvious method to avoid this is to check-in online and print out your own boarding pass from the comfort of the office. One word of caution - ensure you have the hardcopy of the boarding pass in your hands before leaving the Web page. If, for any reason, printing is unsuccessful, it is impossible to check-in online a second time to print the page again. It is a little embarrassing to explain to the customer service agent that an unknown pre-sales guy mistakenly took your boarding pass as it was sandwiched between his 89 page RFC. Worse, it also wastes a lot of time. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to attach your own luggage labels thinking this will save time. The baggage label must be coiled in a loop Origami-style and stuck together in a very specific way. Please, I urge you, leave this to the experts at the Fast Bag Drop desk. Look nervously at your shoes and repeatedly wipe your sweaty brow in the queue for security screening. This behaviour guarantees that you will be ‘randomly selected’ by BAA security staff to go through the new full body scanner. Don’t worry when other passengers start giggling as you are asked to raise both arms and stand on one leg to assume a star shape. Revenge will be sweet when you are re-introduced at the head of the queue in front of the X-ray machine, skipping 23 people and saving a vital 17 minutes. In the current climate, passengers are increasingly asked to remove their belts and shoes as part of security checks. Save time by investing in a pair of black, leather slip-ons. No need to waste time struggling to tie up your shoe laces. Consider buying some tighter trousers that don’t need a belt. Always select a seat at the back of the plane. Do not think you will disembark quicker if you are located near the front of the aircraft. You won’t. Everyone else thinks the same way so the most determined, forceful personalities will always be seated in rows 1-18. You also risk being struck by an oversized case (that should have gone into the hold) from the overhead lockers. Worse, your brain will be irradiated by the hordes of business types eagerly turning their mobile phones back on after being incommunicado for a whole 55 minutes. Make a date with Iris. In the UK, you can register to trial the optical recognition system at immigration. Watch your colleagues from Consulting gasp in amazement as you leave them behind in a lengthy queue as you waltz up to the empty Iris desk and quickly make your way out of the terminal. Use a professional, competent taxi company and arrange to be collected at the airport. This may seem blindingly obvious but for reasons that now escape me, for a period, I used a completely incompetent taxi firm who were always late for the rendezvous, didn’t have the right change for the car-park and couldn’t even find my home address. The final straw came when they woke my family, in the middle of the night, by ringing my door bell at 05:45 for a 06:00 pickup. The ever increasing capacity and falling prices of USB memory sticks now make it possible to think the unthinkable. Leave your laptop behind. Copy your mini-technical library onto a memory stick. I have done this on a couple of domestic engagements and it is truly liberating. My dodgy, aching back is also feeling the benefit. You can normally access SupportWeb, MetaLink and collect email from most customer sites. One advantage of being severed from the laptop is that it really focuses the mind on what technical material is truly essential to do your job. Consequently, you incrementally build up relevant content on the stick. It is also perfectly feasible to copy all your email folders onto a memory stick. The only element I have occasionally missed is my own Siebel 7.8/Oracle 10g sandbox environment. Have a good trip. ...

When I went to bed, I closed the curtains. Unfortunately even at full stretch, the curtains only spanned half the width of the window. This was excellent news as I was able to cancel my 07:30 wake-up call as the morning sun streaming into the room at 05:45 was just as effective. The shower worked although it was a little tardy to empty. So slow, I thought I was going to have a minor flood on my hands but fortunately the sill was pretty deep and disaster was narrowly avoided. ...

Arrived in Rotterdam and checked into the Grand Hotel which isn’t quite as grand as the inviting and expensive (but fully booked) Hilton across the road. The kind lady on reception welcomes me to Rotterdam, quickly locates my booking, gives me an electronic key and directs me to room 401. I take the lift to the fourth floor. There is no room 401 - just 403-417. I know because I walked all around the fourth floor with my bags. Twice. ...

I travel quite a lot. I usually stay in decent hotels. I am fairly easy to please. All I really need on my short visits is a clean bed and a shower. However, most of the hotels in Rotterdam (including the one I stayed in last week where I could stroll down to the client offices - my idea of nirvana) are fully booked for reasons that are unclear. I have a feeling that there may be a major tulip festival taking place. Either that or it is because (for reasons outside my control) I am being forced to book at 24 hours notice. ...

Ten hours cooped up on a plane with facile excuses (‘just another 10 minutes’), no food and screaming babies for company. Love the cheerful musical score, the facial expressions and the way the video starts in daylight and ends in complete darkness.