When a Japanese sunset is in Tring

Japanese sunset
Originally uploaded by Today is a good day.

I took this on a walk one evening this week round the wildlife park at Tring Reservoirs not far from where I live. It looked exactly like this - straight out of the camera! The title Japanese Sunset seemed appropriate.
Yesterday I was testing Google Maps ability to handle geoRSS feeds - by taking my Flickr RSS stream - and feeding it to geonames and then to Google (see my tech blog for more in this). See here. It seems that geonames got too hung up on the title and has placed this image near Tokyo. So although computers can be smart - they've still not that intelligent!

Impressions of Ibn Battuta

In-flight magazines seem to be much better these days. In particular I always look forward to reading “Impressions” by BMED (when I go to Azerbaijan). It’s one of the few freebie magazines I routinely take away with me to read afterwards. So I was really pleased to learn that the content is available online.

BMED serves destinations in Africa, Middle East and former USSR – and the articles in the magazine always shed light on interesting stories and hidden “treasures” about geography, history, culture and present-day of these places. One downside is that every time I read it I add something to the now impossibly large list of places I’d like to visit (like the Krak des Chevaliers in Syria).

One really great journey would be to follow in the footsteps of Ibn Battuta - a traveller that I had not heard of, who travelled over 117,000km over 29 years in the Islamic world of the 14th century. The article is here.

Upwind in Gale Force 8

Upwind in Gale Force 8 on Vimeo
Tomorrow I'm going to the wedding of a fellow crew member (Doug Morton) from Team Samsung during the Round Britain and Ireland race in October 2005. I was thinking back to the race itself and some of the video clips I loaded on the internet. I was amazed to see that this one has been watched 1600 times. And it's not even on YouTube!
Later that day, and in the dark, the weather got worse and Doug was twacked by a big wave and washed right to the back of the boat. I guess that his wife to be (Paula) has his safety line to thank for him being here!

This clip is about a minute long but gets much more interesting about 30 seconds in!

Happy Novruz

Happy Novruz
Originally uploaded by Today is a good day.

I travel a lot with work – and I know that to many this sounds “glamorous”. It’s not! More often than not it’s a case of “fly-in, go to hotel, go to office, work late, eat, sleep, repeat process, fly out”.

This week I spent two days in Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan. I’ve visited a few times previously and am fascinated by the changes in the city brought about by the development of oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. I don’t think all the changes good, but overall I hope that the impact is positive.

I’m always struck by how pleasant the people there are. And also by how smart and particularly well educated the people I have the opportunity to work with are (a higher standard than I’m used to in the “west”). And it is always interesting (and important) to me to learn more about different cultures. This week I was struck the preparations for Novrus – the biggest annual holiday in Azerbaijan and many of the surrounding countries such as Iran, Georgia etc.

This trip was so short that I had no time to explore and take photographs – such a pity as the city is such a rich store of images. What views I had were restricted to looking out of a bus or Land cruiser window. There are so many things that I’d like to spend time capturing visually.

• Little old ladies in headscarves out at dawn sweeping doorways and pavements with twig brooms.
• Old soviet trucks with huge leaf springs trundling everywhere
• Ladas competing for road space with BMW police cars
• Groups of dark grey suited men peering into the engines of broken down Ladas!!
• Little shops and stalls selling fruit, motor oil etc at the roadside
• Big satellite dishes betraying dwellings in the most unlikely of places
• Pictures of the president (or the old president – I’m not sure) everywhere
• Pipelines – a legacy from soviet days – crisscrossing the land above ground
• Manic driving (you don’t dare risk crossings – they get ignored)
• Smiling, well dressed and shiny clean kids leaving schools

I hope I get back soon.

(you can see more photos of baku here - I can't say I'm too impressed with any of them though!)

Words of Wisdom

I very much enjoy Euan Semple's blog "the Obvious?". And today he reminded me of a quote I was once very well aware of from Peter Drucker in his My favourite Drucker quote ... posting.

This might go some way to explaining why a lot of older managers struggle with the way younger people - who have grown up with the web - work.

Sign of the times

Sign of the times
Originally uploaded by Today is a good day.

Beware of the natural world!

The comments on this one are telling (click on the picture to go to my Flickr pages)

I took this at the entrance to a Paintballing park at the weekend. No mention of paintballs flying about at 200 miles an hour! But watch out for floppsy bunny and tree roots!!!

Where are all the time travellers?

On a visit to MIT in Boston i picked up a copy of one of the Uni newspapers.  A letter in the paper refered back to a conference organised there in 2005 - a conference for time travellers.  The idea was that if time travel is invented in the future - they could come pop back to this conference and explain how they did it!! 

No one turned up (well - not from the future anyway).

Several possible explainations were put forward - the most obvious being that "time travel is not possibe"!   Sounds reasonable! Another is that it is possible but clearly we wipe ourselves off the face of the planet before we make it happen. Sounds scary!  Yet another reason was all about multiple universes. Hmmm!  The best answer: "in the future they knew about this and thought it sounded terribly dull!"  That one gets my vote!!

More here

My online conversation with a hacker

American icons
Originally uploaded by Today is a good day.

This image made me a target for extreme Islamic hacking! Not me alone, but me as one of many on Flickr who posted images that were seen to be glorifying the USA.

I got a message from a legitimate (but hacked) account inviting me to look at similar shots hosted by Flickr's new download tool. Of course there was no such tool - and the link directed me to a phishing page and a link to download an executable package. Uh oh!!!

So I sent an email to the account that left the message to whinge a bit! I got a reply straight back from the hacker himself- who was still logged onto the hacked account! Quite interesting!! He (she?) was from a group claiming to be the Moroccan Islamic Hackers Front (or something like that) and he seemed to think that because I'd posted a very American image I must be supporting the war in Iraq! Of course the fact that I was fervently against this from the outset was a model that he couldn't get his head around. After a couple more exchanges - during which I expressed that I was a tad pissed off - he said "so what?" and that "they'd" never catch him and that was that!!

Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome

I was checking out the home page of Seth Teller - from the Computer Science and Artifical IntelligtenceLab at MIT, who I met with last week.

At the top of his home page he had this great quote from Samuel Johnson.

A very great man and I do forgive him for his first exchange with Boswell...

Boswell: Mr Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.

Johnson: That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.

Radio Paradise Zoob Tube

A few years ago I "discovered" Internet Radio - a World War 2 radio channel that I used for background music when we had a "murder mystery" dinner with some good friends! Since then I've probably listened more to podcasts.
Then last week a colleague - Bob Waring - pointed me to Radio Paradise. I wish I'd found it sooner. Unlike most other Internet stations the music they play is not limited to any specific genre but instead represents great variety - pop, rock music and everything from jazz to classical to electronicaworld music. Just like my iPod!!!

He also pointed me to Radio Paradise Zoob Tube which streams Flickr photos and YouTube videos according to the characteristics of the track being played. A really interesting and effective experiment!

Give it a try!