I’m composing this blog entry from my room in the Maldron Hotel in Smithfield, Dublin. After enduring a variety of bizarre and expensive hotel internet access schemes on this trip, I was pleased to find that Maldron offers “FREE Broadband Connection”.
However I’d happily pay extra for a service that actually works.
I’m not sure exactly what they’ve screwed up, but my guess is that it’s the DNS server portion of the proxy server they’re using. The first time I point Firefox at a new URL, it immediately fails, just as if the DNS server had returned a authoritative “not found”. If I hit “Reload” a few times, the page will eventually load. Or some of it will. On a moderately complex site, like My!Yahoo! or the Guardian newspaper, the first “successful” load will yield a mangled, unstyled page together with dozens (even hundreds) of errors, because every image, CSS, script, or iframe that refers to a different URL will fail to load. If I’m lucky, I can load the complete Guardian front page with no more than ten clicks on “Reload”. And the DNS entries have incredibly short TTLs: by the time I finish typing this piece, I can be pretty sure that the entry for geoffarnold.com will have timed out, and I’ll have to reload a few times. (Memo to self: copy the text of this entry to the clipboard first, just in case WordPress loses the plot.)
Add to this the fact that it’s impossible to use a VPN (I can establish the tunnel, but I never receive any traffic), and that the WiFi in the restaurant is completely non-functional, and you can understand why I won’t be returning to this or any Maldron any time soon. (I stayed here before when it was part of the Comfort Inn chain; I don’t remember it being this bad.) And if any Maldron employee picks up on this, please fix your service.
Heading northwest
More travel today. I’m on a Tarom flight from Iasi to Bucharest at 1pm, then British Airways to Heathrow and Aer Lingus to Dublin. I’ll have to make my way from T5 to T1 at Heathrow, but I have almost 3 hours for the connection and I’m not checking any bags.
When visiting Dublin, I usually rely on the bus service to the city, but I’m getting in at 9:25pm, so I think I’ll just get a cab. Such extravagance….
(Posted from the Amazon office in Iasi, because the Internet access at my hotel failed this morning.)
Dallas, November 1
I’ve just booked my travel to Dallas for Gene’s memorial on November 1st. I note ((With a finely-calibrated sense of irony.)) that the cheap hotel that I’m using (the Staybridge, near the Sun office) offers free wired and wireless Internet. Meanwhile the fancy hotels that I stayed at last week in Edinburgh and Slough charged an arm and a leg for web access, and made me jump through hoops to get it. ((Buy an access card; scratch off the silver patch to reveal a PIN; then use it or lose it.)) Gene would have been appropriately outraged….
Iasi photos
Looks like Gallery Remote glitched on the upload of the pictures that I took of Iasi. I’ve just finished filling in the gaps.
Unmitigated B.S. quote of the day.
Lewis Hamilton dominated today’s Chinese Grand Prix. He led from pole, and steadily extended his lead to about 16 seconds, being careful not to over-stress his tyres. Kimi Raikkonen was in second place, unable to catch Hamilton, and Felipe Massa was third, unable to keep pace with Raikkonen. But since Raikkonen was no longer in contention for the title, he deliberately slowed and allowed Massa to take second place at the finish. Raikkonen explained what he’d done and why, but Massa came up with this nonsense:
“I was strong enough to catch and pass [Raikkonen] and that was the best part of the race for me – but it was not enough.”
Pure B.S. What a wanker Massa is…
Strolling the streets of Iasi on a warm autumn Sunday
Today was my one free day on this trip, and the weather cooperated. After watching the Chinese Grand Prix on television (go Lewis!!), I spent several hours this afternoon strolling through the streets of Iasi. The sun was out, the sky was blue, the traffic was light (and some of the streets were closed off), and it seemed that all of Iasi was out for a walk, or sitting in the parks, or fishing in the (vestigial) river. I’m uploading the photographs even as I type this.
Just for the record, let me sketch out where I went. I’m not going to attempt to get the accents right, so my Romanian colleagues will wince when they see this.
I started at the Ramada Hotel, next door to the Palatul Culturii. After admiring the Casa Dosoftei, I walked up B-dul Stefan cel Ma si Sfant, past the Catedrala Catolica and Catedrala Mitropolitana. I crossed the street, went past the Primaria, and through the park leading to the Teatrul National. From there I zig-zagged my way to the big square called Piata Unirii. I cut up Maxim Gorky to the Piata Independentei, dominated by a huge and very forceful statue. I continued north-east to the Piata Mihai Eminescu, then turned south on Str. Gavril Muzicescu and made my way all the way back to the Palatui Culturii. I followed Str. Palat south around the Centru complex until I reached the river at the Piata Podu Ros. By now I was quite warm, and was starting to obsess about the bottle of sparkling water in my hotel room. So I headed up Str. Sf. Lazar (checking the location of the Amazon office for tomorrow), until I reached Str. Grigere Ureche which leads to the hotel.
More anon.
And speaking of Transylvania….
Here’s an interesting piece about a castle that’s often associated with Vlad the Impaler (DBA Count Dracula!), and how it’s up for sale.
The Thin Guy would probably insist that I highlight the fact that this story was produced by Al Jazeera. So I will. And it’s worth reading the comments at YouTube which suggest that the reporter was misled by the sales pitch, and managed to get the history completely wrong.
Emotion Vs. Reason
In an interesting riff on Emotion Vs. Reason, Michael Batz argues that….
…part of the reason that Obama is winning is not because he is speaking about policy, but because he has won the argument that we SHOULD be talking about policy. He has managed to convince people that in these times its important to vote with our brains, and that he’s the right guy for that vote.
There is some irony here. Obama won the primaries based upon very strong rhetoric and some hopeful idealism that had, at its core, a very emotional pull. His public persona before the convention was the lofty speaker who glossed over specifics, but he has pivoted substantially into the serious let’s-talk-numbers guy. It is pretty remarkable, when you think about it.
Underestimation
A thoughtful observation from James Fallows:
I remember how often, how vehemently, and with what certainty Obama’s detractors during the Democratic primaries said that he could not, possibly, in any way, in any real world, withstand the onslaught of GOP negative campaigning once it geared up against him. That he’s been seriously underestimated twice — by the Hillary Clinton camp, and now by McCain — doesn’t prove his potential in office but is interesting.
Sorting out history
When I was planning to visit Iasi in Romania, I looked at a map, saw that it was in the northern part of the country, and casually assumed that this meant that it was in Transylvania. Well, no. I’ve spent the last hour reading up in Wikipedia on the history of Iasi, Romania, Transylvania, and Moldavia, and I think I have it sorted at a superficial level. And calling someone from Iasi (Jassy) a “Transylvanian” would seem to be a bit like calling someone from Durham a Scot…
Another thing I’m sorting out is geography. I had looked at Google Maps images like this, and had assumed that Iasi was in a mountainous region – part of the Carpathians. Well, no. If I’d zoomed out a bit, like this, I’d have seen that it’s well to the east of the mountains, in what looks like a prime agricultural region.
Speaking of agriculture, can someone explain why all of the fields show this fine-grained irregular striping pattern. The link’s to a Google map zoom-in satellite view of fields just to the east of the Iasi airport, but I saw this pattern all over the country. (Here’s the same kind of thing just outside Bucharest.)