I just spent a happy four hours walking the streets of Dublin, just soaking it up. And “soaking” here is purely metaphorical: although some ominously dark clouds rolled overhead, the morning was dry and mostly sunny. My favourite bit was walking through and around St. Stephen’s Green, a beautiful city park. Dozens of local artists were displaying their paintings on the railings around the park, and I was both impressed and frustrated; there were some stunning pieces for sale.
Having started out at the Guinness brewery, I eventually wound up at the corner of O’Connell and Abbey Streets, getting a little footsore ((I was wearing the sandals that I’d flown over in)) and hungry. I decided to check out the LUAS tram, and rode it the few stops to Smithfield, where I’m staying. It’s an excellent system, and obviously very popular: most trains are full.
And finally, when I returned to my hotel I found that my missing suitcase had just been delivered. So now I can change into some real shoes, and upload the pictures from my digital camera, and recharge my cellphone, and…
Oh yes – and have some lunch. Then this afternoon I’m going to visit the Old Jameson Distillery, just across the street. ((Web site is here, but turn the volume down before you click it; it’s a tacky, noisy Flash thing.)) Apparently visitors are encouraged to indulge in a “practical” assessment of their quality claims! And (weather permitting) I’m planning to eat at the Bull & Castle this evening. It’s a self-described “gastro pub” recommended by Mike McHugh.
UPDATE: The Bull & Castle was a great choice. I had a pint of Guinness (what else?) followed by a superb steak – possibly the best I’ve ever tasted. Highly recommended.
Month: June 2007
Travel woes
As I was walking down the steps from the aging Air Canada 767-200 to the shuttle bus that would take us to the main terminal at Dublin, I was mentally composing a blog entry about the flight. It was going to expand on my thoughts that even though nothing really went wrong, it felt like a mediocre experience. Mediocre food. (Dinner was four different ways to deliver fat; breakfast was four different ways to deliver sugar.) Mediocre seats. Mediocre, 1983-style in-flight entertainment. (The feature film was an art-house flop, and one of the supporting pieces was a random episode of the BBC’s Top Gear from 2003. I enjoy Top Gear, but it’s less interesting when they’re featuring obsolete car models.) No duty-free. (Not that I usually buy stuff on the way out, but it was as if they didn’t care.) And mediocre communications: the flight landed 32 minutes late, but the crew didn’t even mention this fact, let alone apologize…
That was before I realized that Air Canada had lost my bag. When I checked in at SeaTac, I checked my bag all the way through to Dublin. Somewhere (Seattle? Toronto?) they lost it. That kind of thing overshadows mere mediocrity.
If all goes as well as possible from this point, they will put it on the next flight and deliver it to my hotel in Dublin tomorrow (Sunday) morning. If it doesn’t go as well as possible… Well, sufficient unto the day and all that. Meanwhile I just walked up to the nearest Marks & Spencer and picked up some things to tide me over.
I was trying to remember the last time this happened. It might have been that terrible trip that I took in the mid-1990’s, when British Airways managed to lose the same bag twice! (The first time when I was flying from Heathrow to Stockholm, the second when I was flying from Lyon to Heathrow a few days later.)
UPDATE 5:49PM: A few minutes ago, I called Servisair, the company that handles baggage at Dublin for Air Canada, but I just got a recorded message. So on a hunch, I plugged my file reference into the Worldtracer tracking page, and it reported:
Bag 1 Status RECEIVED AT AIRPORT / DELIVERY PROCESS INITIATED
Which airport? Oh, well: this seems like good news, so I’ll try to be patient.
Doin' the Maple Leaf Rag
I’m at the Maple Leaf Lounge at Toronto airport, killing time until my evening flight to Dublin. I’m not flying business class or anything like that, but my United Red Carpet Club card was good enough to get me in. The facilities are w-a-a-y better than any RCC that I’ve been in recently – the booze is free, ((though my consumption so far totals 4 cans of club soda)) there are fresh veggie snacks, and the staff are really attentive.
My reading material for the flight is the Ruby “pick-axe” book. My impression after the first couple of chapters is that the language has lots of convenient features but there’s a certain amount of ad-hockery about how they’re brought together. When I’m learning a language, I like to establish a clear relationship between the concrete and the abstract levels of interpretation, and the concrete syntax of Ruby feels all over the map to me. Nothing that a few sample programs won’t clear up, I’m sure. Meanwhile the pure OO features are sweet…
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence
Vice President Dick Cheney has asserted his office is not a part of the executive branch of the U.S. government, and therefore not bound by a presidential order governing the protection of classified information by government agencies
Excuse my while I mop up the sake that I sputtered all over my keyboard…
UPDATE: There was an excellent question raised in the comment thread:
If Cheney is not under the Executive Branch, can he still claim “executive priviledge” when he doesn’t want to testify before Congress?
Hitchens' interview
Excellent interview with Christopher Hitchens on BBC Radio Five… unusually intelligent questions for a radio show. (14.6MB MP3, 36 min.) Here’s Hitch on the metaphor of the shepherd and his sheep:
… and I have to remember why you people call yourselves a flock. Be like a sheep yourself if you must, but please leave me out of it. I’m not a sheep and I don’t need a shepherd and what shepherds do when they’re not actually messing around with their sheep is they’re keeping them around and alive so they can be fleeced and then killed.
Personally I never understood the appeal of the “Lamb of God” idea, except as a ghastly homage to the gruesome practice of animal sacrifice. Ughh!
Half full or half empty at the W3C?
Tim drew my attention to the Web of Services for Enterprise Computing Workshop Report that was recently published by the W3C. As he put it, “I thought the pungent smells of failure on one side and optimism on the other mixed oddly, but still worth reading.”
Setting the scene:
The discussion at the workshop tended to revolve around two main streams of thought, which are not as well coordinated as they could or should be. One is that existing Web technologies can be adapted for enterprise use. In this stream of discussion it was proposed that additional standardization is not required, but this view did not garner widespread support.
While post-Web businesses such as Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Google, and others have successfully adapted Web technologies for enterprise usage patterns, they appear to have done so using a lot of custom code and minimal off the shelf software or standards-based approaches to integration.
To which I guess the obvious replies are, “Yes”, “They would say that, wouldn’t they” and “Perhaps there are lessons to be learned from this.” And reading the following passage is like getting a rheumatic twinge in an old sports injury:
At the Web Services workshop in 2001, the approach of having a stack of solutions was appealing and we decided to spin up lots of groups to build these specifications. We were to build a foundation of protocols that work within the context of the Web, with the goal of making lots of things talk to lots of other things. In addition, we wanted to create a system to support dynamic composability to meet problems as these arose and to build the corresponding tooling to make all this happen. After six years, we are half way through the spec stack, and interoperability has remained elusive.
Sigh…
So I’m now on Facebook. This should be fun…
Travelling, travelling
I have an interesting trip coming up this week. On Friday I’ll fly from Seattle to Toronto, and thence to Dublin. I’ll be working at Amazon.com‘s Dublin facility from the 25th to the 28th, and on the 29th I’ll fly to Edinburgh. I’ll spend July 2nd and 3rd at the Amazon development centre in South Queensferry (where hopefully the weather will be better than my last visit!). Then on the Fourth of July, I’ll drive down from South Queensferry to Oxford, where I’ll spend a few days visiting my mother. ((Hopefully I’ll get to see Alec – and perhaps Jeff.)) And on the following Sunday I’ll brave the horrors of Heathrow and fly back to Seattle.
I’ll be flying on three different airlines:
- Air Canada for SEA-YYZ-DUB. This will be my first trip on AC, and also the first time in six years since I’ve flown across the Atlantic in something as small as a 767.
- Aer Lingus for DUB-EDI, I have fond memories of EI. My very first flight was LHR-DUB in an Aer Lingus Viscount, back in 1960. (We were going on holiday to a farm in Donegal, and my mother took it into her head to fly to Dublin and drive up to Fanad.) And then on July 9, 1998 I flew DUB-BOS in an EI A330; for some reason I got upgraded, and it was possibly the best transatlantic flying experience I’ve ever had.
- British Airways for LHR-SEA. What can I say? When they’re good, they can be great… but in recent years that’s been the exception rather than the rule. At least it’s a direct flight.
Hitting rock bottom on low expectations…
Arianna Huffington previews the Bush administration’s assessment of the “surge”. She quotes Ryan Crocker, U.S. ambassador to Iraq:
“It’s definitely not by any means a universally negative picture.” Translation: Don’t believe the facts, believe us!
You know the soft bigotry of the Bush administration’s low expectations for Iraq has finally hit bottom when “Hey, we’re doing slightly better than universally negative!” has become the rallying cry.
The phenomenon continues
Indianapolis: Another Grand Prix, another pole position, another victory for Hamilton. Simply amazing. And another “I must be dreaming” story: teenager Sebastian Vettel, standing in for Robert Kubica after his crash last week, brings the BMW Sauber home in 8th place and scores a championship point in his first GP. ((However it seems that Kubica will be fit for the French GP in two weeks time, so this may be Vettel’s only appearance in 2007.))
At the end of last season, people were wringing their hands and worrying about what would happen to F1 after Michael Schumacher’s retirement. The answer seems to be, “the best bloody F1 season in ages!!!”