So next week is GeoCommunity '09, the annual conference for the Association of Geographic Information and everyone's getting thoroughly excited at the prospect of putting the word "geo" in front of everything, including georant, geobeer (although only in half measures for some reason), geochat and conference chair Steven Feldman's personal favourite, geolagavulin.
It rained last night in London. This is not news. This is not even an uncommon occurence. Granted, it was heavy rainfall, as evidenced by the windows of the restaurant in Soho last night being drenched every time a car went up Wardour Street and by the tree branch which was floating off down the road outside my house.
None of this explains why our public transport infrastructure seems to come to a sudden shuddering stop everytime the weather (rain, snow, autumn leaves, frost, ice) for which this country is reknown, actually happens. I'm sure the Victorians didn't have this sort of problem when they built the railways and I'm sure they had pumps to get rid of the rain when it collected, inconveniently, in tunnels too.
The end of the week, semi regular, hand selected, carefully edited snapshot of what made it into my Delicious bookmarks this week.
Last weekend I upgraded my MacBook Pro from Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5.8, to Snow Leopard, Mac OS X 10.6. This kind of classes as early adopter behaviour as there's no bug fix release for Snow Leopard out in the wild yet to iron out any kinks or rough edges but I wasn't particularly bothered by this.
I've used OS X since version Cheetah, version 10.0 and have gone through the intervening releases, Puma, Jaguar and Panther. With Tiger I stopped using a desktop machine and took a decision to make my Yahoo! supplied MacBook Pro my sole day-to-day machine, an experiment I didn't regret and which has become the norm for me.
When Leopard arrived I took the early adopter plunge and upgraded and, apart from a few teething troubles, which I can't even recall now, all was well. Then Snow Leopard arrived and I waited a week, not quite early adoption but early enough. I heard no shouts and screams and even my one blocker, the lack of suitable Cisco VPN support for the version required to connect to Yahoo!, was resolved so I made sure my backup was up-to-date and upgraded. The backup gives me more foresight than I really deserve.
At first all was good. The Exchange server my corporate mail is hosted on is Exchange 2007 and at the right service pack level to work with Snow Leopard's rather stringent requirements. Mail took my authentication credentials and set up my Exchange account, iCal did the same and so did Address Book. Granted they took a while to sync up but that was over a VPN connection, over a wifi link, over my home broadband connection so some slack was cut.
This week's trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week's trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.
It's probably an oversimplification of a complex issue but geographic conferences or events can be somewhat polarised towards one of two extremes. On the one hand you have the solid, slightly reassuring and established GIS world whilst on the other we have the upstart, slightly shouty, web-centric neogeography community. These two worlds don't always co-exist particularly well and each can be equally distrustful of the other. Where 2.0 in the US tries valiantly to get these two worlds to talk to one another and to share a stage but it doesn't always work well; the GIS community brandish their desktop GIS system while the neogeo hackers point to their PHP based web mashups.
But this year in Stratford-upon-Avon something brave, intriguing and altogether worthwhile is happening; both communities are being represented at the AGI's GeoCommunity '09 conference, which takes place in a little over two and half weeks time. Yes, there's GIS practitioners and yes, there's neogeo developers but there's also speakers covering all points inbetween; just take a look at the PDF of programme for this year. Even the tag line for the conference, Realising the Value of Place, places emphasis on the meeting of the geo-worlds.
It was inevitable, but once I'd found out that a new version of the Cisco VPN client was available, the one thing that was stopping me from installing Snow Leopard, then a Snow Leopard upgrade was on the cards. So off to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London I went.
Once home, it was time to see what's in the package, to which the answer was not a lot, as it was even more minimalistic that the Leopard box.
And then on through the best part of an hour's worth of installation with a single reboot roughly half way through.
... and yes, I do have more disk space now that there's no PowerPC support and so there's no Universal binaries and yes, though it's totally subjective it does feel a darn sight faster. Now to test Exchange 2007 support ...
Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I'd checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM's online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.
British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I've yet to see it being used and there's no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous
Is it lying in your shed or garage, unloved, a bit rusty and in need of some care and attention? You'd love to get it going again but lost the original maintenance manual?
Maybe this Haynes manual, spotted this morning in Foyles on London's Charing Cross Road, is what you need.
It even covers the Saturn V you have lying around under the bed; you know, the big rocket bit that goes under the lander. Go on, there's really no excuse now.
Here in the UK we're used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it's virtually ingrained into our genes. We're well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don't; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you've paid for, murmuring "well that's a turn up for the books". We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the "American service culture" whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.
