Sometimes you have to get away from it all, get up above the streets to appreciate a city.
While I'm acting under a potentially loose interpretation of Chatham House rules (we'll see about that) at this event, that doesn't stop me admiring the view of The Gherkin, St. Paul's Cathedral and the City skyline from this conference room.
(This post was originally written for theYahoo! Developer Network blogand was published there on October 5th; it's duplicated here for posterity.)You're stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you're there, there's a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue's net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it's called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.
There's a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, "geoballs" and a free wifi point called yahooligans.
Last week I was unfortunate enough to hire a rental car from Avis at Heathrow. The italics are important here as they point to where the problem seems to lie.
I travel quite a lot for work and so it's fair to say I rent a reasonable amount of cars; all of them through Avis who are the company's preferred rental supplier. After getting off a plane, the last thing you really want is to queue to get your car so I'm a member of Avis' Preferred service; this allows me to skip the queues, pick my car up and drive out of the rental garage with a wave of my driving license. It's quick, really quick; you see your name on a board which shows you which bay you need to go to, find the car, fling your suitcase in the boot and off you go.
It typically takes around 3 minutes to get my car; and Avis in the UK makes a selling point of this, proudly proclaiming "Your keys in under 3 minutes or £20".
Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks ...
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.
There's nothing like being at the seaside; the cry of seagulls, the tang of ozone in the air, Blackfriars Bridge, The Gherkin and St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance ...
Blackfriars Bridge? It's easy to forget that the Thames is tidal and if you time it right that there's several stretches of beach at low tide.
Some parts of the shoreline even have sand, though the daily high tide does mean that sandcastles are seldom seen.
This week's trawl through what appeared on the interwebs and made it into my Delicious bookmarks.
Stand with your back to the "looks like it's built out of Lego" St. Gile's development and you'll see New Compton Street.
Follow it for a while, running parallel to Shaftesbury Avenue and it comes to an abrupt end, due to someone building 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, which is also the Yahoo! London office, right across it.
The Bakerloo Line is part suspended today due to engineering work which is due to last over the Bank Holiday weekend, so naturally everyone either piled onto the Waterloo & City Line or onto the Northern Line at Waterloo this morning.
And on the Northern Line, somewhere between Waterloo and Embankment and underneath the Thames it all got a bit cozy as we suffered the inevitable and inexplicable "Tube stops for no apparent reason".
tag: tube, underground, commute, london
With the Yahoo! Geo Technologies sponsored, London #geomob meetup coming up this week, this weekend I took a look at how many companies were actively using location within London. No easy task. After much web searching this weekend I took a trawl through those companies tagged as being in London in CrunchBase, the database of tech companies that TechCrunch operates.
Not strictly scientific but then again this is more about gauging a trend than being strictly empirical.
