When
· Naughties
· · 2004
· · · March
· · · · 26 (4 entries)
Hamburg Sunflower · I got finished a little early Thursday and when I got to the hotel the sun was coasting low with not many clouds about, definitely a photo opp; so I tossed the gear in the room and sallied forth with the camera. Unfortunately, it was about 0°C with a brisk wind, so I sallied right in again before very long, with numbed extremities. But I got three shots that I think worth looking at. I seriously considered splicing them into the narrative I’m going to write about OpenOffice and the future of XML and blogging clients and so on, just to force the pix on the geex, but that would be dishonourable ...
OpenOffice · I spent the day Thursday at StarOffice in Hamburg and came away with some of my ideas about XML & blogging changed. It was a side-trip; other business took me to Brussels and OpenOffice wasn’t that far away and I had an agenda there, which we’ll get to. But this is important stuff, I think. [Updated with a pointer.] [And again with Geof Glass’ OO.o-to-blog gateway.] ...
Travelers’ Advisory · I was checking in at Brussels for the British Airways hop back to Heathrow, then home to Vancouver. Unfortunately they’ve suddenly started enforcing the long-ignored policy that no carry-on shall exceed 6 kg in weight. My ordinary roll-on full of ordinary clothes and so on came in at 14 kg (my briefcase, on the other hand, bulges with electronics and has the specific gravity of lead, but they didn’t weigh that). So, I was going to have to check it. Except for, British Airways is OneWorld and Air Canada is Star Alliance, so they couldn’t check it through to Vancouver, I’d have to recover it at Heathrow. Except for, I had barely two hours at Heathrow and had to change terminals, which just doesn’t leave any slack for doing the luggage dance. This looked serious and, in a soft-voiced, polite way, I made a scene. Three phone calls later, they decided to allow me to carry it on board. Six kg is, frankly, ridiculous. This is yet another step in the ongoing campaign by the air travel industry to make the experience supremely unpleasant. I expect their executives all to end up in jail when the videoconferencing boom hits and it turns out they’ve been accumulating big equity holdings.
Yahoo Update · Not long ago I wrote a really cynical piece about Yahoo’s Paid Search program. Well, I got some people mad at me, and follow-up is in order ...
