Travel

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Green Mountains, blue sky

August 16, 2008 in Blogging, Fun, Life, Travel | Permalink

A perfect day in Vermont. In Middlebury at the moment. At Carol’s Cafe. Perfect coffee. Before that, lunch at Mama’s Cafe. Also outstanding. I have a feeling nothing sucks around here.

Not sure what’s next, but we’re doing that.

[Later…] I don’t know why, but this text disappeared, and the comments under it now appear under the one following it, which now appears to precede it, because I was able to recover the text, and post it again. Not sure what went wrong there, but … whatever. Better just to enjoy life. And sleep. I gotta crash now. Tomorrow: something in New Hampshire.

Shoot

August 16, 2008 in Blogroll, Business, Photography, Travel | 11 comments

Several weeks ago, while we were walking around Mystic Seaport, in the mist of shooting these pictures, I dropped my camera, a Canon 30D — a workhorse that has served ably for more than two years. Afterwards it seemed to work fine mechanically, but it could no longer read light properly. For whatever reason, it overexposed shots by two stops or more. (All the shots I took with it after that were in manual mode using guesswork about light, trial and error.)

So I took it in to a camera repair shop near Boston, and they sent it to Canon. On Friday (yesterday) I got it back. It was an almost entirely new camera. New back, new top, new electronics. I didn’t have time to test it out before hitting the road for the weekend in Vermont and New Hampshire, but I didn’t expect any problems.

I was wrong. The problem wasn’t fixed. It still reads light wrong and overexposes by two or more stops. How could they replace so much of the camera and not fix the one thing that was wrong with it? Amazing.

I suppose I should bring the camera back on Monday and repeat the process, but I really want to have it in California this next week, and on the trip that follows that one. In fact, the first day I’ll be able to pick it up is September 12.

Right now I’m hoping that Samy’s in Santa Barbara (where I bought it) will be able to send it into Canon and expedite a fast turn-around on a fix.

Meanwhile I’m wondering if I should just go ahead and get a soon-to-be-discontinued Canon 5D, which is getting down around $1000 now. It’s a great camera, much better than the 30D. And use the 30D as a second camera. But… I dunno. Probably not, mostly because I’d also have to invest in all those good lenses that will make the 5D sing. Right now I have only one really good lens for the 30D. The other two are cheapies: a Tamron 18-200 (sharp, but not fast, and with fuzziness at the long end and barrel distortion at the wide) and a Canon f1.8 you can still get for just $80 or so.  They do a good job for the money, but they’re not real good lenses.

I’m a pretty good photographer. Not great, but pretty good, on the whole. And I feel like a pretty good musician using an almost good instrument. The 5D is a good instrument. Not the best, but close enough. To get a 5D and the “glass” that would do it justice… say, three primes (fixed length lenses) and a zoom would cost several thousand dollars. That’s out of my range, at least until my get-rich boat comes in.

I’m sure it will. And for that to happen, I need to focus on other work.

Mark-up

August 11, 2008 in Photography, Travel | Permalink

In May of last year I flew from London to Los Angeles and shot a lot of pictures out the window. While still ascending toward the sky over Scotland and beyond I shot a city I later discovered was Manchester.

Since then the photo has acquired 21notes by 3 different people. Go through the 49 shots at that last link and find many more notes from more people than I can count. Amazing. I love that kind of help.

Speaking of which, many shots like this also serve duty in Wikipedia. I just discovered where they live.

The inhospitality business

August 4, 2008 in Business, Travel | 12 comments

When you charge somebody for a service, your charge embodies your costs. That’s just the way business works. You bear the costs of overhead, and you charge enough to make a profits above that overhead. So, if you’re a hotel, your room rates embody the costs of heating, air conditioning, water, electricity, maid service and other necessities. Those are all overhead.

It’s time to look at Internet service the same way. Providing it should be as astandard at hotels as providing water and electric service.

Actually, more and more hotels are starting to realize this. Oddly, they’re mostly low-end hotels. But bravo for them. At least in those cases they seem to have worked out the kinks. I’ve had many fewer problems getting online over free Internet at cheap hotels than I’ve had getting online over paid Internet at expensive hotels. In fact, the costs of running a pay toilet business around Internet service are themselves pretty high, I’d reckon. You’ve got all these labor-intensive value-subtracts to maintain, starting with servers that throw login pages at users, and bump users offline if no activity is detected. These things are Murphy bait.

Of course I’m in the middle of one such mess right now, in San Francisco, where I’m paying $9.95 per day, per device, to not get online. (Luckily I have a Sprint EvDO card. But I’d rather get on a solid Net connection with more upstream speed than the EvDO card can muster.)

There is nothing wrong with a hotel hiring some outside company to make sure guests have working Internet service. But there is something wrong with a hotel offloading the entire service, and then charging guests for it. Can you imagine a hotel charging extra for water or electricity — and then sending you to some outside company to get it running if it isn’t working?

I’ve said it before and keep repeating it until it sinks in: Charging for Internet in hotels is like charging for toilets. Hotels need to get out of the pay toilet business.

What are some companies that help hotels provide free Internet to guests? Let’s have their names and pass them along. I’ll start with my hotel right here. (Where I’m currently waiting for a call from this hotel’s outside company.)

[Later…] So, at least empirically, we’ve found the solution that is also the problem: the hotel’s wi-fi system was only tested with Internet Explorer. We couldn’t get it to work with a Mac laptop or with a Linux one, each running Firefox and the former also running Safari. But when the Mac laptop fired up an ancient copy of Internet Explorer, it worked. How lame is that?

Currently operating at reduced power

August 3, 2008 in Blogging, Travel | 1 comment

Right now I can’t log into this blog. Not through the WordPress browser dashboard, anyway. For some reason, my logged-in state was lost, just like my password to it.

My outliner knows the login and password, though. So I’m able to blog that way, which is how I post generally. But I need to be logged in to make comments as myself, or to post pictures.

Anyway, it’s a weekend, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get stuff staightened until Monday. Meanwhile I’ll be flying and driving a lot, as well as working. So, happy trails.

Cool. Literally.

July 27, 2008 in Fun, Geology, Ideas, Journalism, Life, News, Science, Travel | 1 comment

This shot here (and above) has found a home here as well.

Big Business Idea

July 27, 2008 in Travel, VRM | 1 comment

I like the hotel we’re staying in. The wi-fi signal is strong, fast and free. The bed is firm and the sheets are fine cotton, topped by a soft comforter. The AC works well and isn’t too noisy. I have no complaints except for the lack of a good desk and chair for working on my laptop.

This is standard. Very few hotels have desks with surfaces low enough to allow comfortable work. And few have chairs that aren’t uncomfortable for sitting at a laptop for more than half an hour or so.

My point: I would gladly pay more to stay in a hotel with a good desk and office chair. In fact I think an office-standard desk & chair should be listed among amenities at hotel sites and in services such as Orbitz and Travelocity.

Of course, no industry changes overnight. But it’s never too late to start. Meanwhile, consider this a primitive Personal RFP.

Opening the Book Cliffs

July 26, 2008 in Geology, Ideas, Life, News, Past, Photography, problems, Travel | 7 comments

A few dozen million years ago, in the Eocene — not far back, as geology goes — a large lake covered much of what’s now western Colorado and eastern Utah. A lot of organic muck fell to the bottom, and now that muck is oil. Problem is, it’s locked in shale, and extracting it is no bargain… yet.

If and when it ever gets to be a bargain, look to see some of The West’s prettiest landscape ripped up.

Edge-on, the old lake bed presents itself as the Book Cliffs*, which overlook I-70 for a hundred miles. I took some shots of the region when we drove past them last year. And one of those shots now illustrates this post by Brandon Keim in his Wired blog.

[* My geography and my geology were corrected below in the comments by Ron Schott, a genuine geologist. Brandon Keim wrote about oil shales using my photo. There are oil shales, but not in these Book Cliffs deposits, which are older. The oil shales are in strata above the ones exposed here. Apologies for the errors.]

What we’re presented with here is a set of costs that can only be rationalized in terms that regard the extraction of all the world’s oil as an economic necessity — and nothing else.

I hear arguments for mining oil from places like this and a few memorable lines from the Doors’ “When the music’s over” come to mind:

What have they done to the Earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Ravaged and plundered and ripped her and bit her.
Stuck her with knives in the
Side of the dawn and
Tied her with fences and
Dragged her down.

Great song, by the way. Also the one that foreshadowed the demise of Tony Soprano on the penultimate episode of Tony’s show.

Is there foreshadowing here too?

P2P name dropping

July 24, 2008 in Ideas, Places, Travel | 3 comments

Rohit Bhargava calls it “egommunication”, and defines that as a form of communication where you can share a message or piece of content with someone based on their own consistent habit of checking mentions of themselves and their content online.

It’s an insightful post about how to reach the otherwise unreachable. But I think we move off an important base when we label a form of listening with “ego” or “vanity”. Listening for one’s name is something we all do naturally, all the time. It’s the way our brains are wired, by necessity. Online we have to do it manually, by setting up a feed of searches for our names, along with other subjects that interest us.

This is not to say that ego and vanity play no role in communications of all kinds. Just that listening to hear one’s name dropped, or called, is not by nature an egotistical activity.

Speaking of dropping (or its opposite), that’s Rohit on the left in this photo, with the big camera. I’m there on the right, farther back, also floating in the air of a 727 treating its occupants to zero G-force. I think by this time my own little camera had floated away.

Getting around

July 23, 2008 in Art, Business, Fun, Photography, Travel | Permalink

I shot some Puffins the other day, from an old lobster boat piloted by my cousin George, who is a local on Maine’s Muscongus Bay. We skirted just past the surf surrounding Eastern Egg Rock, from which puffins disappeared in the 1800s after settlers ate all their eggs. The birds have been re-established there with great help from Project Puffin and the Audubon Society. There was a nice story in the Boston Globe yesterday about puffin restoration at the small, rocky island. I was there a few days earlier, and I’ve got the pictures. Fun combo.

Puffins are smallish birds with large colorful bills. Except when they’re laying eggs or fresh from hatching between hard rocks, they spend their whole lives on the open sea. The Globe story mentions one bird that’s 35 years old. That’s a long time on Earth for a sea creature that lives mostly on or above the surface.

Anyway, travel. I do a lot of it, along with plenty of photography. For those and related reasons I am on the board of PlanetEye, a new company that just launched on the Web. Check ’em out. Give’m feedback, too. They have a link for it, and I know they listen.

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