Reinhold's Musings

Getting Wintertyres in UK

2011-12-04T19:44:00.001Z

The last two years, winter here in UK had been abnormally "harsh". For several weeks, snow blankets covered large parts of the country, and much of the traffic was at a standstill or only moved slowly. So how will it be this winter? Could this be a part of the general climate change, or were these winters just freak random events, which will be compensated by this years record-warm winter?

The press had made wild predictions about another snowy winter, but they have really no clue - weather cannot be predicted for a longer period than 3 days, and in recent weeks I have even got my doubts about the ability of weather forecasters for this short period. Nobody knows. But this year, I am actually less worried. Why? This year I got winter tyres on my car.

These past winters I just had the same summer tyres on my vehicle for the whole year. And yes, the car did slide all over the place on those un-cleaned side roads with their snow-covered ice. Nobody here in the UK drives with winter tyres: there is usually no necessity to put on winter tyres for those two days of some wet snow drizzle. But the last two winters have shown that winter in UK can also be different. When I lived in Germany, we did have lots of snow in winter, and I always had put on winter tyres because they really provided better traction, cornering, and stopping. Now since recently, it is actually compulsory in Germany to put on winter tyres. These tyres in general really work already better in any condition from below 7 deg C, so this should be fine on many days in the UK winter too.

Since October, there has been some awareness campaign by tyre retailers to convince customers to buy winter tyres. The only problem is: there are almost no winter tyres available anywhere. I did check the major tyrer retailers, and they do have either no winter tyres at all, of maybe one single noname brand of which I never have heard from before. Even doing an online search did show that most tyre dealers did not sell any winter tyres. But then I found one online retailer: www.mytyres.co.uk. They have all possible tyre manufacturers, from cheap tyres at around £ 40 up to £ 90 per tyre. In my opinion, the tyres from Dunlop, Goodyear, Continental, Michelin are the best (as tested by the ADAC). But for myself, I opted for a lower-cost tyre, which including fitting cost £ 60 per tyre: Debica Frigo 2 (made in Poland). Should be good enough for my cheap vehicle. The test results on TyreTest (actually submitted by owners of the tyres) appear to be much more lenient than the ones by the ADAC, but at least the Debica did fare better than some of the other low-cost tyres.

Quite interesting, how the URL of the Tyretest page has the German word "pkw_winterreifen" in it... and the German connection goes even further: Turns out that the company mytyres.co.uk is part of the German company Delticom AG. The tyres, after I ordered them online, would have been sent to my home in Leeds directly from their supply depot in Germany! But instead I chose them to be delivered to one of their recommended fitters here in Leeds. Shipping is for free, and the fitting added about £ 15 per tyre for fitting, so the total price including the fitting came to £ 60 per tyre. Yesterday on Saturday, I did the fitting, and now I am ready for any snow storm here in Leeds! The weather report for Monday already predicts some chance of snow flurries - I am prepared, and I am looking forward to the strongest longest winter ever!

In the former "Sudetenland"

2011-11-06T23:00:00.000Z

Most people with an awareness of European history in the 20th century connect the name "Sudetenland" rightfully with events in 1938, when the Munich Agreement regulated that this area of Czechoslovakia was annexed by Germany. But there is a bit more to know than just this single year of Sudeten history. The name "Sudeten" is quite old and refers to mountains at the Northern border of Bohemia and Moravia. German settlers had been invited in the Middle Ages to settle there. Since around 1918 they are called "Sudeten Germans", although this term no longer was limited to the actual Sudeten Mountains, but to all Germans who lived within the borders of Czechoslovakia, after this country was established in 1918. In the years 1945-1947, most of these Sudeten Germans around 3 Million) were expelled from their homes and fled towards West, where most of them settled then in Germany.

Among those were my maternal grandparents. However, I myself grew up in Western Germany and never felt any close connection to that Sudeten region. The "Sudeten Germans" were in my view mostly old people who spoke a strange dialect, cooked a hearty food (meat with "knedl"), went into the woods to collect mushrooms, and met all once a year at a big meeting to remind politicians of their fate.

After the death of my grandparents I collected some of the old photographs which they had brought with them - they are online here. And now when I had the opportunity of travelling in the Czech Republic, I decided that I would pay this region of my ancestors a visit.

After driving towards northeast away from Terezin (which is also linked to the same fateful period in history), the first thing that appeared were large chemical factories. I passed a large "Glanzstoff" factory. Then the road turned into a very rural region, with marked the beginning of that hilly region with its characteristic small post-glacial mountain peaks. Quite impressive and unusual, very bucolic. My first stop was at the little village of Zichov / Schichhof, which I had identified on those old photographs. When driving into the village centre, I felt as if I drove back in time. The houses looked very much the same as they did in the 1930, with the exception that the small chapel had probably become a victim of communism.

Schichhof Village Square in 1936

Zichov Village Square in 2011

Schichhof Village Square in 1937.

Zichov Village Square in 2011.

Some of the houses were newly renovated, while other buildings showed the traces of time. I sat down in the centre of the village and looked quietly around. Some people were working in their yards, I heard some hammering, probably renovation work. One car came along, stopped near one of the houses, a couple got out. They looked at my with some distrust, not quite knowing what a stranger would do here in this remote place. I got up and walked towards them, putting my most friendly smile on. He did not speak or understand English. I took out my phone and showed him the old photograph of his house, I thought he might like to see it. He looked at it, smiled slightly awkwardly, then went away into the house without further comment. Maybe he thought I want the house back?

I moved on to the next town on my schedule: Bilina / Bilin. The buildings were all still there, slightly modernised, but recognisable.

Bilin, winter 1936.

Bilina, autumn 2011.

It began to get dark, and I drove on, because I wanted to reach the hotel before nightfall. I had booked a room in the nearby town of Teplice, formerly Teplitz, and I found it without any problems. The price per night was very inexpensive: 20 Euro including breakfast. When approaching the hotel, I saw why the price might be a bit lower than usual: right behind began a large industrial complex with two huge chimneys. But now on weekend they were off. The hotel itself is actually quite nice, with a few strange quirks: at the reception during check-in, I had to pay upfront for the night. And I had to book my breakfast in advance, from four choices. Next to the reception sat two young women, chain-smoking. They were still there after I had brought my stuff up into the room and had a one-hour nap - the travelling and the sites today had made me quite tired.

I headed out to find something to eat for dinner. First I drove to another town, Osek / Ossegg, from where I also had a few pictures. But the town was larger than I expected, and in the darkness I was not able to identify anything familiar. There was a kind of restaurant, I peeked through the window, but its neon-lit large room looked empty, there was only the chef and one waiter sitting around bored. An elderly couple walked along, they seemed also to look for a place to eat. They also checked out the place, and I decided that I would go into this restaurant if they would. But also to them this neon-lit room did not appeal to them very much, and they moved on. So I also decided to drive back to Teplice and try there my luck.

Frantisek who also had studied in Teplice, had warned me that some parts of Teplice may not be very safe; and it looked like I was just now driving through one of these parts near the train station. But a few blocks southwest, there was the old town centre, and I parked the car there. Saw a very fancy looking restaurant, and they did have a very good and reasonably priced menu. No goose, but I did order the duck.

Later that evening, I made good use of the free Wifi in the hotel to upload some of the pictures I had taken.

Next day the fog had lifted, and the weather was sunny. After breakfast I went again into the town centre of Teplice to have a look at it in daylight. Then I drove on towards North, up the mountains to the border with Germany. A cold wind was blowing over the lonely hill crest. Strange shops where you could buy wheel caps (who needs to buy wheelcaps in the mountains?). I took a small road through the forest down south and moved again to Osek. Then drove further to Duchcov, Bilina, passing the significant Borek mountain (Borschen), Zichov. Czech drivers seem to know exactly where they want to go, and they want to be there as soon as possible. This is slightly opposite of my approach now, as I am not quite sure where to go, nor am I in a big hurry - so I often turn to the side to let cars pass.

These lonely narrow country roads, of which there are still many, seem to lead directly into the past. I slowly drive along, enjoying the beautiful hilly region of this area.

I am glad that I visited this place. Now I can associate some visuals when there is talk about the "Sudetenland". I may come back again some other time, to explore further, as time was quite limited during this visit.

Here two further links, with very interesting content:

An interview with the two Czech authors Matej Spurny and Ondrej Matejka about their books about the Sudetenland. They are members of the Czech group AntiKomplex.
In Germany there is a research group at the Carl-von-Ossietzki-University Oldenburg which is concerned with research about Bohemistic and Sudetistik.
It is such activities which can bridge divides and can bring people together in mutual understanding.

In Terezin / Theresienstadt

2011-11-06T07:34:00.000Z

I think that the history and significance of Terezin/Theresienstadt is well known to everybody, so I will not present it here. Since my route up north would pass this place, I decided to include it in my travel plans.

The weather on Saturday was determined by a thick foggy cloud cover, which seemed to make everything grey and depressive. This set the proper frame for a visit of this place of sadness. Coincidentally just 4 weeks ago, I had attended a concert with music of composers who were in Terezin, and on Friday evening, I learned that also cellist Frantisek Brikcius is participating in this project to keep this music alive and make it more known to wider audiences.

Terezin is an 18th century military fortress. I had expected to find fences and barbed wires, but the town is actually open, and people live here. This seemed strange to me, and the whole atmosphere is a bit weird: there are shops and restaurants (advertisement for a pizzeria shows up), but most visitors walk solemnly around. The area is quite large to walk by foot, and I was not able to see every corner of the town. But I visited the central museum, which does provide a very good documentation. There is a room with just the names of all 10,000 children. There are also many exhibits with original documents which described everyday life and procedures.

If I had more time, I would have also have visited the auto museum which is located between the small fortress and the parking lot: they seemed to have a nice selection of classic buses. But I think that somehow such a mundane "attraction" feels misplaced here in Terezin.

After about 1 1/2 hours I drove on, towards my actual destination for today, not very far north from Terezin: the area known formerly as "Sudentenland".

In Jihlava

2011-11-05T22:31:00.000Z

When planning what to do during the two days after the EuroPLOT meeting, I immediately considered visiting the town in which Gustav Mahler had spent his youth: Jihlava. I was curious to see the town which has shaped him and to see the same environment that has brought out the creative talent. And so I booked one night in the Gustav Mahler Pension. I also had the choice of staying at the Gustav Mahler Hotel, but I went for the less expensive option. Seems that the good tourism folks there in Jihlava have discovered how to milk the fame of their famous citizen - there is also a Gustav-Mahler-Cafe. Neither of these accommodations has in fact anything to do with the composer - the houses in which he grew up are a few blocks away. The Gustav Mahler House is one of these - he spent there his first 12 years.

After my arrival around 23:00 I went soon to sleep. The Gustav Mahler Pension is in fact quite a nice accommodation: the room is nicely appointed, like a little suite, and the breakfast buffet is very good. 11:00 is checkout time, so I planned to do my walking around the town right after breakfast. Walking through the grey cold autumn morning, the town Jihlava seemed slightly unwelcoming. The sometimes slightly crooked buildings on hilly streets seemed to find their equivalent in Mahler's sometimes slightly crooked harmonies. I could imagine how the small-town mentality felt somewhat limiting.

But then, the exhibition in the Gustav-Mahler-House showed a different aspect: there was a lot of music activity in the town, and also the nature around was inspiring to young Gustav. The exposition in the Mahler house is very interesting: some replicas of equipment that was used in the house when it was his father's liqueur shop. Also there are details about Mahler's bad grades in high school.

I am glad that I got at least a brief impression during this visit from the environment in which Mahler grew up. If I had more time, I would have explored the outside environment, the hills, valleys and forests around Jihlava. But my time schedule was tight - my next stop would be north of Prague. So back in the car, filling it up with petrol, then driving north. Once again driving through the vicinity of Prague, but not touching the center this time. Instead, following just the signs for Teplice and Usti nad Labem.

In Praha / Prague / Prag

2011-11-05T21:38:00.001Z

The EuroPLOT meeting in Hradec Kralove ended around 15:00 on Friday afternoon. We (Georgi, Margrethe, Nicolai) had our luggage already in the car and left 10 minutes later. The ride was smooth, and we followed the directions to Praha Centrum, which guided us into the entrance from South. Traffic was not too bad, and in less than two hours we were right at the center, west of the Carls Bridge, to drop off Georgi, Margrethe, and Nicolai. I continued to drive on, looking for parking, and found it right near the Rudolfinum. We planned to go out for dinner. But then I got a phone call from Margrethe that their hotel had a problem with the water, and they would transfer to a different one. We agreed to meet on a later date. Meanwhile Georgi checked in fine, and would join us for drinks. However, by the time that Margrethe and Nicolai could make it back to the east end of the Carls Bridge, it was already quite late, and we just went into the very first place that offered something to eat. No point that Georgi would rush over the bridge, as we left shortly after we had the Gulash soup, and then walked to the Rudolfinum where the concert started at 19:30. I would have joined them, but I did instead meet with cellist Francisek Brikcius who studied one year in Leeds and knew people there. He gave me a detailed tour through the old town of Prague, and we had a nice chat about music, politics, Leeds, etc. I took
some pictures of the nightly city, which was naturally very impressive in all its architectural glory.

Then it was time for me to continue, and I drove on towards south on the Motorway, listening to the music on the CD which Frantisek gave me. Shortly before 23:00 I arrived at the Gustav Mahler Pension in Jihlava.

EuroPLOT Meeting

2011-11-05T07:04:00.001Z

The EuroPLOT project is about "persuasive learning objects and technologies" (PLOTs), which are to be developed and to be tested in four case studies. The team (6 institutions from 4 European countries) meet every 6 months face-to-face, in addition to several online meetings. This was the third meeting, after one year into the project. Since Janet's retirement earlier this year, I have been asked to lead this project further.

It is indeed a very interesting project, linking several of my interests in teaching and learning technologies, and the partners are highly qualified and specialists in their respective fields. The user case studies range from academic university courses, language learning, industrial learning, to heritage and tourism. At this meeting, one of the goals was to link these user studies tighter to the persuasive design elements, as envisioned in the original project plan. I believe that this was achieved in the past two days. We also got the opportunity to use the two software tools GloMaker and PLOTLearner in the latest versions. Nicolai chose me as a subject to test the German language case, using the Tiger database of German newspaper articles. I am ashamed to admit that I failed the tests miserably! It appears that my knowledge of the German language is only very rudimentary. So it is very good that we now have this new tool, with which I can brush up and improve my command of the German language!

The meeting was very well organised by Jarka from U.Hradec Kralove, and we had good opportunities to sample the delicious Czech cuisine and a couple of Pilsener Urquells.

After the meeting I will stay in the Czech Republic until Sunday, to do some travel in Czechia.

Georgi had a hotel reservation in Prague, and so did Nicolai and Margarethe. So I decided to take them into the (small) rental car into the city, before I would head off to my other destinations.

Travel to the EuroPLOT Meeting, Hradec Kralove

2011-11-03T00:39:00.000Z

After the farewell dinner with our friends from India, I went back home for the weekly evening online chat session with my student group in California. However, in the UK the time has changed from daylight savings time to regular time, whereas it has not yet changed in the US... so when I went online, only a few students were there, as they had been already waiting for one hour... why can the daylight savings time not be changed simultaneously in all countries of this planet?

Then, after midnight, I began packing my stuff for the travel next day, and I was done with everything at 3am.

Wednesday morning was cold, grey, foggy in Leeds. Driving to the airport, then a bit of sun came out. Leeds-Bradford airport was very empty, I got immediately to the check-in counter. Later I meet Georgi from LeedsMet who is also travelling to this meeting: the bi-annual face-to-face meeting of the project EuroPLOT, in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. Departure was on time, and arrival in Prague was 20 minutes ahead of schedule. There was a thick grey cloud cover, no sun came through.

I got a white Fiat Panda. Nice car, but the 1.2i engine seems quite weak.
Instead of driving around Prague on the south side, Georgi and I decide that it might be nice to drive straight through Prague towards the East. And yes, we had a glimpse at the illuminated Hradschin, after crossing the river Vltava (Moldau) near the Karls Bridge, as the evening darkness set in. Around 19:00 arrival in Hradec Kralove.

Nice meal for dinner: Altboehmische Kartoffelsuppe, Lendenschnitte mit Boehmischen Knoedeln. And Pilsener Urquell.

At the after-meal walk, I see the participants from Krems: Peter and Erich, who just arrived. And then we meet Nicolai, Margarethe, Helle, and Tom. A few of us decide to go out for another pint, and we end up in the Na Hrade restaurant. When we enter, a very familiar smell hits us which I had not smelled for quite a while: cigarette smoke. It is apparently (still) legal to smoke in bars and restaurants, and this smell is somewhat reminiscent of past times. The bar itself with its interior decoration at the wall appears also to be so nostalgically out of the past.

And now the mind moves to the EuroPLOT meeting which will take place on Thursday and Friday.

Visit of our Friends from India (Gujarat) in Leeds

2011-11-03T00:16:00.000Z

I have been to India twice: in November 2008 and in January 2011. With members of the organisation "The Rivers Movement", directed by Brian Lewis, we had traveled to Gujarat and visited there the Sardar Patel University and other educational institutions, and we had made many friends there. Now the plan was to bring to the UK four of these friends, to facilitate a mutual cultural exchange.

Our four friends who would visit us were: Asha Makhecha, lecturer at Sardar Patel University in Management and Business, Surendra Gohil, lecturer at Sardar Patel University in IT Education, Juhika Bhanjdeo, artist, and Chhaya Uphadya, teacher and educator. A program for their visit was worked out by the local team here in Yorkshire (Gina Hawkins, Deborah Bullivant, Brian Lewis), taking care of the various interests of our visitors, and thanks to donations and fund raising we were able to collect funding for the flights and accommodation. In August 2011, our four friends from India applied for their travel visas. But then in September, we got the news that despite four identical visa submissions, only Asha had gotten her visa. So suddenly, instead of four visitors, we would only have one coming to the UK. The program was changed, and we booked the flight for Asha. In the meantime, the visa applications were submitted again, with additional documentation and with letters from the sponsoring organisations in the UK. And indeed, one week before the planned travel date, the other three (Chhaya, Juhika, and Surendra) also got the notification that they would get the visa. Fortunately the ticket prices at Emirates Airways had not gone up too far, and we could buy the three remaining tickets. However, a few days before the flight departure, they still had not received their passports with the visas in them... and we all got worried. Juhika finally had to fly to Mumbai to the consulate to pick them up herself, and the group only held the passports in their hands just six hours before their departure from Ahmadabad!

They arrived on Thursday, 20.October, and Gina, Deborah and Brian took good care of them, organising events and meetings. The following Sunday I joined the group, and we had a memorable train ride on the Middleton Railway in Leeds and a visit to the Saltaire Museum. Then last Wednesday, they visited LeedsMet, and on Friday there was the "Pockets exhibition" in Castleford, with Juhika's and others' art works.

Then Tuesday evening was their last day in Yorkshire, and we met for dinner at Barnsley Northern College. Next day they would travel to London to spend the remaining days of their stay.

It has been great to see them again during her stay here in Yorkshire, and I am very privileged to know them and count them among my friends.

Interview with TrendPOV

2011-10-27T00:44:00.000+01:00

A few weeks ago I received an email from Dr. Amy Vanderbilt with an invitation to appear on the TrendPOV show and chat about Augmented Reality (AR). At that time I was not familiar with TrendPOV, and I learned that this is a one hour web streaming show about certain topics for businesses.

This sounded quite interesting, and so I agreed to participate in this. I prepared a CV and sent my picture. Then I decided that it would be good to update my website. Unfortunately, weeks passed by, and I still had not found the time to prepare a new version of my web presence. So on this Monday I finally began to set up a new Google Site for a new portal to my site(s). Not much time to put any content in, so I placed a link to my site at LeedsMet which contains the most relevant Augmented Reality work.

Then I prepared for the recording of the show, which would take place today, Wednesday, 26.October. I had taken the day off because of our friends from India were here on a visit, and I joined them for a few activities during the day. But then in the evening I went back to my office at LeedsMet and set up everything for the Skype session. I was supposed to call in at 6:50pm. There was still some time, so I some other work. Suddenly I noticed that the EDUROAM WIFI started to fail around 5:50pm. The signal dropped from 5 to 1 - what was going on? It looked as if an access point was powering down... So I tried to use another laptop computer which did have the credentials for the wired Ethernet. A pity, because this meant that I would not be able to use the built-in camera of the first laptop computer. When trying to setup the second laptop computer, I was not able to get the internet going. WIFI was out, and the Ethernet connection kept giving problems regarding the proxi server. I am sure that the credentials were correct - that all had worked fine a few months ago. But now it did not... and so I had to resort to the third option: using the office PC with its two monitors. I rarely use that PC, since most of my work is on the laptop(s). But at least there I got a reasonable internet connection. So the picture here with the four monitors does really not reflect technical sophistication, but actually shows the sad state of an emergency solution.

Then another problem: how to affix the camera on top of the monitor, so that I could look right into it and see the screen at the same time? This webcam did not have a suitable base, so I had to stick it with tape onto the top of the screen. It worked ok then, and I was ready for the show to begin.

I dialed in at 6:50pm. Had a video chat with Dr.Amy first. She was very enthusiastic about the Augmented Reality concepts and was really looking forward to this show. Then the show began. On the skype monitor I only saw a logo, but I heard the show then live, the music, and then Dr.Amy speaking. And then we talked about Augmented Reality for a whole hour. I gave my opinion and assessment about the AR technology. Unfortunately I got carried away and forgot to put a plug for the ongoing ISMAR conference in Basel, something that I actually had wanted to do. And when I talked about the LeedsMet project "Our City, Our Music", I forgot to mention the main proponents Ben Dalton and Megan Smith. But otherwise I think I got everything across.

It was a fun experience!

--- Update 3.November 2011: the video is now live online, see here on the TrendPOV site.

At one point during the recording a slight technical problem happened: in my LeedsMet office, the lights are dimming off, once they do not sense any motion in the room for a certain while. And since I did not move that much while speaking into the camera, the sensing switch-off kicked in a few minutes before the first commercial break, and then the lights dimmed away, and it got quite dark. Fortunately I did have another non-dimming lamp on, which kept my face illuminated, and so I just kept talking as if nothing had happened. Then during the next break I did bring the lights back by getting up, and from then on they stayed on fine until the end.

Car Insurance - Get Comprehensive!

2011-10-10T19:48:00.001+01:00

My annual car insurance premium was due recently. Premiums were rising, so despite me not having any claims, I would have to pay more.

As every year, I did a search using the comparison web site GoCompare. In the past years, I did have good experiences with them, and I always found the best price through them. I did also contact some insurances directly which were not among their offerings, but I very often found that those insurances were still more expensive than the cheapest listed in GoCompare, except once when my renewal and staying with the same insurance was the cheapest option.

I again tried GoCompare, because in an experiment two years ago, I concluded that they did offer the best capture of my data, relevant to my situation as a non-UK driver with EU license. The other competitor comparison sites did have some trouble with that. And now I am also too lazy to try those out again - takes a lot of time to enter all the data, and GoCompare already has them stored from my last years of searching.

Of course, if I would base my choice on the commercials which these comparison sites run, then I would definitely take Compare The Meerkat, aeh, I mean Compare the Market - these commercials are really good and not as annoying as the singing tenor or the confused cartoon lady.

When I tried this year to get a car renewal quote for the insurance with the least features (just 3rd party), I got only quotes which were the same or more expensive than what I already had. Disappointing. For fun I selected then "comprehensive" - and the quote was about £ 200 cheaper! This is quite surprising, that an insurance which would provide more cover, would cost less. Has probably to do with the average comprehensive client, who drives maybe more carefully.

The same was confirmed for another renewal - saving £ 150 then. So it appears to be well worth choosing a comprehensive insurance, if you want to save money on the insurance fee.

If you do not like to go through comparison web sites, then you may try directly with SwiftCover - in both cases they were the ones with the lowest premium (naturally, they try to sell additional items on the insurance, but these can be unchecked). They operate mostly web based, so no postal mail is sent - better back up your data and the policy then! But this approach appears to make them quite efficient. Of course I had no opportunity yet to test how they are when a claim should be filed... but I hope that I will not need to do this anytime soon.

A busy day

2011-10-05T00:24:00.002+01:00

I knew it that 45 minutes is just simply too short for a transfer between two flights at Amsterdam Schiphol airport. This is how much time I had between the official landing time and the departure time of my connecting flight.My flight from Leeds had arrived on time, I was the very first one out of the bus, moving quickly into the terminal building. By the time I was in the queue for entering the Schengen zone, only 40 minutes were left until the next flight would continue. And there was this veeeery long queue of visitors from China, which did not seem to move at all, and I had to place myself at the very end of this queue. There was a special line for "short connections", but this was closed between 12:00 and 16:30. Fortunately someone shouted "European Passports", and a new line opened, which I joined and which was very short then. Lucky, but the border control police officers seemed to have their training day today: very young officers looked very long at each passport and asked very detailed questions.

And the day had started so promising: first a few things done in the office, then driving with Gerhard to the Old Broadcasting House to the monthly Open Coffee meeting at 10:00. Then driving back to Headingley again, to give my lecture at 11:00. Before that, ordering the taxi and arranging for car parking. After the lecture, the taxi came in time and brought me to the airport, 1 1/2 hours before departure. Plenty of time, as the Leeds Bradford airport was quite empty around noon. The only inconvenience was that the taxi let me off 200 m before the airport, because otherwise additional £ would have to be paid: there is no more free passenger drop at Leeds Bradford airport. Greedy people! Now taxis stop before the airport, passengers walk along the road, and I saw several groups who waited for a pick-up from friends along the street outside. I can predict what soon there will be: any kind of stopping in the vicinity of 1000 m around the airport will be made illegal. Then it may really be better to fly from Manchester airport.

When boarding in Leeds, I was told that I had to change the seat - it was faulty. Ok, so I got a nice wide legroom space in the emergency exit row - which usually costs extra. Had my window seat, and dozed off a little after munching the savory snack. Arrived on time in Amsterdam.

And now in that Schengen queue, where I was inching slowly forward. Behind me a guy from York who was on my flight and also had to catch another flight. Finally my turn, after the officer carefully checks my boarding pass and the passport, I can go through. Now only the x-ray procedure, then I am clear and have entered Europe. The boards show my flight is already boarding - and the signs indicate a 24 minute walk from here to gate B26! I start running now. The Amsterdam airport is very big. I use the moving walkways wherever possible and walk fast on them; on the regular hallways I just run, pulling my rolling carry-on behind me. Reach the gate - no passengers are there anymore, but I am still in time. Go down the stairs, and am the last one on the bus. After I enter, the doors close and it drives to the tarmac where the next Cityhopper is waiting.

After that little exercise I can relax in the plane on the short flight to Luxembourg. Arrive in time. Weather is warmer than in Leeds, still some remnants of the weekend heat wave. At the hotel, they cannot find my reservation. But it does not matter, because they still have a room.

Then I take a bus towards the town. With me on the bus is another participant of tomorrow's meeting, whom I already knew from a few years ago - nice to see him here already. I get off at the Philharmonie Luxembourg in Kirchberg. Pick up my ticket, have a sandwich snack for dinner, then enjoy a marvelous concert: "Terezín / Theresienstadt". Anne Sofie von Otter sings songs which were composed and played by inmates of the concentration camp Theresienstadt. Very moving.

Back to the hotel, preparing for the weekly online chat with students at California Lutheran University (in California obviously) which is from midnight until 0:45.

Yes, this was quite a busy day. But overall very enjoyable. Tomorrow is the FP7 Call 8 Info Day. Will be again quite busy.

Improvements at Blogger

2011-09-29T17:20:00.001+01:00

For quite a while, Blogger (owned by Google) had not introduced any improvements to its blogging system. But a few months ago, a new interface was offered, and I switched to it. Very positive experience, I can confirm. The interface looks very nice and clean, all relevant items are well accessible - it is real fun to work with this. There are many improvements in details regarding the editing and publishing blog posts, compared to the previous interface.

Here is how the main interface portal looks for my blogs:

With this interface it is quite a pleasure to manage my blog universe.

Autonomous Self-Driving Vehicles - Talk at AGI 2011 by E.D.Dickmanns

2011-09-28T13:15:00.000+01:00

From 1990 - 1996 I worked with Prof. E.D.Dickmanns in Munich at the UniBW on developing a computer vision system for autonomous road vehicles. This was a great experience, and I also got my PhD degree from that work. It was therefore a delight to see a recent presentation given by my "doctor father" (that is how we call our PhD supervisors in Germany) about his work in computer vision based autonomous vehicles. I remember taking part in these technical demonstrations, for example the PROMETHEUS presentation in 1994 near Paris, and the road trip from Munich to Odense (Denmark) with my colleague Markus Maurer (now Professor at Uni Braunschweig). When the autonomous vehicle (a nice Mercedes 500 SEL) went with 180 km/h (110 mph) on the Autobahn near Lueneburg, we were quite a bit tense, hoping that the car would not suddenly decide to swerve to the side...

Here is Prof Dickmanns' talk, given at the recent http://agi-conf.org/2011/:

Powerpoint 2010 - Bad Narration Quality

2011-09-20T14:30:00.002+01:00

For a few weeks I have been using the "record narration" feature in Powerpoint. Never needed this before, because I was always speaking live when giving a presentation. But now with the advent of true online distance teaching, this feature becomes handy.But unfortunately, in Powerpoint 2010, this feature is not really usable. I can record the narration ok, but the sound quality is appalling. It sounds as if recorded with 8 bit, at 11 kHz, and results in absolutely unprofessional recording. In addition, the audio appears not to be compressed, but raw wave, judging from the file size increase which is caused by this. And there is no way of setting the quality, the coded, the bitrate, the compression or any relevant parameter.After searching the web for a solution, this problem is know. Apparently, Powerpoint 2007 did provide means for changing the sound quality through a panel with options. This was taken out in the 2010 version.Is this progress?

Low-Cost Airlines Price-Cheating

2011-08-29T16:33:00.000+01:00

Low-cost airlines are a nice thing: they give us cheap and no-frills travel, compared to traditional airlines. But recently, they are resorting to unfair practices in their pricing, showing false low base prices, then add on additional costs which cannot be avoided. This is plain cheating, and the European Union is already considering action against this and will outlaw this practise, as seen on 13.May in the Telegraph newspaper.

But this practise is still going on, as my recent purchase of a Jet2.com plane ticket shows: base price is £15.96. Then comes a taxes and charges fee of £109.00. Steep. Sure, the other regular airlines also do this, and their price also often is more than 50% tax and "charges". But then there is an additional charge for the baggage of £49.96. Then a £20 fee for checking-in online. So what if I would not check in? I would not be allowed to fly. So why is this fee put separately, instead of being included in the mandatory base price? That base price is pure fiction, is just there in order to look good (low) and to attract customers. And it is illegal, to lie to customers about the price of a product, as blatantly as Jet2.com does this here. There are still more fees: £7.00 for fuel supplement. Why is this not in the "taxes and charges" included? Payment card fee for £7.53. Maybe they want me to pay with cash? And then the final insult: a booking fee of £7.27. This fee is for the convenience of booking the flight. Maybe the next fee would be a luggage drop fee, for allowing to bring your baggage to the flight check-in desk. Or a gate-transfer fee, for the convenience of being brought by bus from the gate to the plane. Or...

Here is the screenshot of the fees from my web booking, in case anyone thinks I made this up:

Refreshing the Design of this Blog

2011-08-12T17:57:00.001+01:00

It has been a while since I have posted on my blog. In the past 6 months I have posted more on Facebook, and also have tried out Google+. This led to a decline of my blog and Twitter activities.

Now I have chosen a new design for this blog. Also properly equipped with all the social networking buttons under each post. The people at Blogger have done a good job in the last year and have added many new features, such as these buttons, and also making new designs. Also there is now a feature in the template which allows to automatically format this blog content for mobile phones - this is very useful.

The app "BlogSpace"

2011-08-12T15:18:00.001+01:00

This is my first post to this blog using a little app on the iPhone called BlogSpace. It gives me an overview of my various blogs on Blogger.com, and let's me post to each one. Seems to work fine so far. One slight negative issue is that the title field is difficult to click on - it is very close to the top, and one can easily hit the cancel button instead, when trying to enter a blog title.

The Movie "BRAZIL" - My Review

2011-03-28T01:30:00.003+01:00

This film came out in 1985. At that time I watched a review of it in one of our German TV culture programs, but I did not pay much attention and did not watch it in the cinema.

I did not see the film until sometime in the 1990s, I think it was on German TV, in a dubbed version. And I was immediately fascinated by this movie’s emotional approach to the very important topic of life in a totalitarian society. Since then I had the opportunity to see the film a few times on the big screen, and everytime I see it I discover new details. The most recent viewing was on Saturday, 26.March, here in Leeds at the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds, and it compelled me to write a review about it which I want to share with you.

You may find info about this film at the IMDB site of BRAZIL, where there is an outline of the plot and many other reviews (I also submitted a short version of this review). So I will not go into details but rather give my own impression and my interpretation of some of its content.

The movie is absolutely hilarious, pointing out with the means of irony, satire, and parody the flaws of totalitarian societies. But these flaws are actually also the flaws of our own society, and this movie reveals this brilliantly. Besides the overall theme of a fictional retro-future all-encompassing dictatorship, the movie has several layers of topics that are very relevant to our current society. I would like to list these topics here:

Work environment

The satire with regards to the aspects of working life is so heartwarming because we all have most likely encountered in our own work life some of the pathetic specimens that are depicted in this movie.

There is the incompetent and cowardly boss Mr Kurtzman, who is unable to take responsibility for anything and delegates everything to his smart subordinate Sam Lowry. He even makes him falsify his own signature, which is one of the items for which Sam will later be held responsible.

There is the false sense of actionism and energetic work ethics in the Ministry of Information Retrieval, when the supervisor runs through the halls, followed by a crowd of subservient subordinates who are requesting decisions which are swiftly given by the superior.

Hilarious are the dire working conditions (dark narrow office) in the Ministry of Information Retrieval which are in much contrast to this energetic positive work attitude.

Very funny is the petty competition of fellow coworkers. For example when the neighbour of Sam Lowry pulls the shared desk towards his own side. Or when he tries to show off with his (non-existent) computer skills.

Then there is the way how office workers find a way around the rules and regulations to make their work life more bearable, in this case by watching a classic movie channel. In our own world this is replaced by web browsing.

Totalitarian Government

"We in the West" live in democracies, but much of the double speak that is shown in the film has slowly penetrated our own political life, by our own corrupted political classes, and we are often not anymore aware of it.

The cruel and impartial attitude of the security forces who make prisoners and put them into these sacks - which evoke the images of hooded prisoners in Abu Ghraib. These security forces are "normal" people, chat about the misery of work such as headache from helmets, but then treat their subjects that they took into custody with uncompassionate harshness, and all is done strictly according to procedures and regulations.

The government’s pursuit of suspected terrorists and the efforts in uncovering the hidden connections between them, which lead to paranoia and to suspicion of connections where there are none. The example is the pursuit of the freelancer Archibald Tuttle, who just wants to work as a heating engineer, because he enjoys it, but who does not want to comply with the tight rules and regulations of that trade. We see currently the same by linking every terrorist act to the omnipresent "Al Quaida" network, even if the links are unproven (the war in Iraq comes to mind ...). Also the phrase "9/11 changed everything" shows how much of this movie has already become reality.

The emptiness of the slogans, expressed in public announcements and also in the posters that are hanging everywhere, shows the paranoia, feeds the public fear of terrorists and justifies the state actions. (I wish there would be somewhere a collection of these posters that are in the movie in the background in so many scenes ...)

The refusal of state authority to admit that an error has been made, is so true also in our current "system". The heartlessness and lack of compassion by the same authority when they realise that an error has been made. The overall long winded process of appeal when such a mistake it tried to be rectified by a citizen. And the labelling of such a citizen then as a potential terrorist.

General society

The obsession with youth and cosmetic surgery, represented by Sam Lowry’s mother’s plastic surgery and her desire to look young. The parody of cosmetic surgery peaks twice: in once instance the person with whom the cosmetic surgery went terribly wrong, dies. In the other instance, in the end Sam’s mother looks like the love interest of the protagonist in an Oedipean twist, although only in the mind of Sam.

The emphasis on cleanliness in the streets, where passers-by are upset when a few papers are dropped on the streets, but where nobody appears to protest against the dirty war against the presumed terrorist thread.

The celebration of Christmas which has lost all its inner spiritual meaning and is hollowed into simple formality of giving thoughtless interchangeable arbitrary thoughtless presents, all done in the same packaging.

The consumer society which has eaten up all that was once in spiritual meaning ("Consumers for Christ") and which encompasses all the life of people. Shopping, expensive goods, and even when a bombing occurs, the show must go on (in the restaurant). But the true essence of enjoyment is lost: food is just a pile of coloured mash and can only be identified by a picture that comes with it.

There are two types of overall attitude which make a totalitarian system function and keep the protagonists alive: one attitude is represented by the silence and under-the-radar-screen-operating main character, Sam Lowry, whose main concern is that he might accidentally get noticed, which he tries to avoid by all means. The other attitude is represented by the ambition and suppression of the conscience by Jack Lint, who is actively supporting the system and is one of its representatives, in executing torture.

This society appears to show a blind faith in technology and in its believe that it works and solves everything – demonstrated to be not the case, as a simple bug can cause a terrible deadly error, and as the technological gadgets appear to malfunction at any opportunity.

The complex technology of climate control for individual housing which is difficult to handle. Overall there are many hoses and wires, in the houses, in the restaurant, during the cleaning process of the administration building. Everything is wired, is connected, and hoses go everywhere.

The annoying dealing with the monopolised services of Central Services. Everybody in our own world and time has had to deal with such non-responsive entities (BT comes to my mind). Free and independent enterprise (as personified by Tuttle) is illegal.

The overabundance of bureaucracy as it stifles all functioning of a society. The overall formalisation of all transactions with receipts and receipts for receipts, the rules and regulations that govern everything. (Reminds me somehow of "health and safety", and of the quality assurance formalisms that have in recent years stifled much of the creativity in UK.) The strict adherence to these rules appear to give even the cruellest government action a coat of legitimacy, because it is all done exactly according to the rules.

The loss of natural environment, as a consequence of providing energy and power and of overpopulation in densely urban cities. There appears to be no park, no trees, no green area. People live in dense highriser blocks without any daylight. Roads outside of the city lead to power plants, through deserted polluted landscapes, which the driver cannot see, because big billboards show advertisement and government slogans, depicting among other things landscape and blue sky, which is no longer in existence in the real world.

The desensitation and cruelisation of children: they grow up in dire housing complexes, mirroring the worst of "council estates", and they play war games with weapons. For Christmas they get guns as presents, and they play out security force and prisoners, with realistically hooding their prisoners as the adult world is doing it. This desensitation is also a reality in our real world, by the proliferation of ego-shooter computer games.

Filmographic

This movie also pays homage to classic movies, as they appear to be the only thing that brings real joy to people, but also that they act as an escapism for the unbearable reality of the present life. Very funny the reference to Eisenstein’s "Battleship Potemkin" in the scene where the security forces walk down the stairs, and a lonely cleaning equipment cart rolls down these stairs (instead of a stroller like in the original). Also at one point there is a parallel in the action of the movie to the film that the office workers are watching ("Casablanca"), when Jonathan Price says to his boss "here is looking at you".

Overall this movie is addressing all the above topics not on a rational level, but on a deeply emotional one. The main protagonist has his dreams, and in a very illogical way these dreams meddle with the reality, as he suddenly sees and meets the woman of his dreams.

This film is an emotional appeal for humanity, to do everything to prevent such a society from becoming a reality. Because once it is established, there is nothing that can bring it down – as the very pessimistic ending of the film implies (evil always wins).

Some of my favorite quotes from this movie:

"My complication got a little complication."
"Do you have a form 27 6-B?"
"This phone call is not being recorded."

Trying to update Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7)

2011-03-08T16:18:00.005Z

A few weeks ago I read that Microsoft is now sending out the first update of the Windows Phone 7. And together with it came the news that a few phones were already "bricked", that is turned into functionless bricks. See also this article Ars Technica.

A few days ago I got the notification on my HTC HD7 phone that an update is available, and that I would need to connect it to the computer and run ZUNE to install the update. This is actually a pre-update, which corrects some bugs in the general update process.

First I had to update ZUNE itself. Then I connected the phone, went into "settings > update". The "searching for update" took quite long... then I got prompted not to disconnect the phone, and then I waited patiently with this screen:

The phone rebooted, then showed a different screen, with a black/white graphic of a mobile connected to a laptop computer. It appears that this symbol indicated I should connect the phone to the computer - which it already was... After a while the phone rebooted again, this time with the regular screen. Then ZUNE showed "Your device wasn't updated". Error code: 801812C1

I googled this error code and found several entries in various forums. One recommended to stop the device recognition process after the first reboot. I was only able to do that by stopping the process "update.exe" through the Windows Task Manager. But that did not help... the error still remained, no update happened.

Another forum advice was to unplug the USB cable for 2 seconds, then plug it back in. Well, the message on the screen says that exactly this must not be done. However, I gave it a try - but it did not help.

There is another "update" announced to be available shortly: The "No-Donuts" update, with copy-and-past. But first I have to manage getting this first update onto the phone...

During my update trials, the phone so far has always booted properly the 2nd time, when it returned to its regular state. I keep trying - maybe I will get lucky, and the phone will finally "brick"; then I will bring it back to the O2 store and swap it for an HTC Desire with Android.

RIP, Jane Russell

2011-02-28T21:39:00.002Z

On 28.February 2011 one of the last great Hollywood icons died: Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell. I knew her films already as a child, and I especially liked the movie "The Paleface" with Bob Hope, where she plays a woman who once in a while hits him on the head with a pan. For me as an 8 year old, this film - especially the hitting on the head - has shaped my image of women for many years.

In 2003 I once had the pleasure to meet her personally, at an afternoon event at the TCM store in Los Angeles, where Robert Osborne hosted an afternoon with her as a special guest. We chatted about movies and classic movie channels. Also about Germany, where some of her ancestors were from. A very friendly woman, and a great actress.

She will be greatly missed by every fan of the Classic Hollywood. Rest in peace, Jane.

Windows Phone 7 - a second look

2011-02-26T13:01:00.004Z

For a few weeks I had now the HTC HD7 with Windows Phone 7, the new mobile OS by Microsoft. In my first brief note about the initial user experience, I noted many shortcomings, both compared with the previous version of Windows Mobile 6.5 and with the current other smartphones competition. So what remains of this negative first impression after a few weeks of use?

The overall resume of these first few weeks using Windows Phone 7 is that the update is urgently needed. This version of Windows Phone fall short on so many expectations. These are often quite little things, but sometimes also major issues. It makes you think if the engineers/developers have ever tested their product in a real life situation. Probably not.

Here are some of these issues:

- After making a phone call, any respectable phone shows the call duration. Not so Windows Phone 7. No display about the length of the call, neither in the call history.
- When a text message is received, many phones show a button to make a call to this number. ~~Not so Windows Phone 7. The only option it to reply. No "call this number", no "store to contacts". This is absolutely inadequate.~~ One clicks onto the sender, then one can make a call or store the number in the address book.
- the phone does only display battery status and signal strength on the start screen when switching on the phone. Afterwards only the clock is displayed in the top right corner. There would be space for a heading info line, but it is just plain empty. Would be very useful to have this info, especially when doing longer online sessions.
- the tap on the display sometimes does not work, especially when it is on a text link with small fonts. One almost needs to use a stylus to click the link then, as it would not react to the pressure of a finger. Has probably a technical reason: because the overall "click strength" is taken from the absolute number of active pixels being pressed; and since a small text has only few active pixels, this number is small. Would be better to have a relative measure. But this is just a speculation...
- the finger sliding is often interpreted as a side swipe instead of a vertical swipe, and then the page changes. This has been reported by many other people in a variety of apps. It could have several reasons: a driver problem of the display, a bug in the gesture API of Windows Phone 7, or an incorrect use of this API for detecting swipe direction by the app developers.
- Why is the battery strength only shown graphically and not as a numeric percentage?
- The Marketplace search returns too many wrong things. When I search for an app by a name, for example "Twitter" in the apps category, a lot of songs and albums also appear with the name "Twitter" in their name... this should be filtered.
- Many apps offered for Windows Phone 7 are inferior to their counterparts on other smart phones. This can have several reasons: Windows Phone 7 is new, so many apps are just in their first version, with updates (hopefully) to come. Or the Windows Phone 7 market is so small (3%?) compared to iPhone or Android, that the developers neglect it and put not much effort in. There are a few notable exceptions though.
- There is no synchronising of data/files with such files on a PC. When connecting the phone by cable to a computer, there is not much that can be done. I was hoping that I could drag some files over, or have some files automatically synced as it was great on the old Windows Mobile OS where Office files (for Excel, Word) could be automatically be stored, edited, and synchronised on both devices. This capability has now been lost and can only be sort of emulated via a much more complicated method through cloud computing. The Zune software synchronises music and video, but that I use almost never.
- No copy-and-paste. This makes it very difficult to edit Excel files, modify entries in the contacts list, etc. I cannot believe why it is so difficult to implement this feature? Also the first iPhone generation did not have this...
- The title headings of pages in apps use a very stylish, elegant, large font, but these titles stretch over several pages, therefore cannot be read fully on one page. This is especially annoying when the app only has one page, because the rest of the heading is just cut off. Here a bit more "function over form" would have been better.

There is something positive to be said about Windows Phone 7: it looks quite nice. The big tiles are more attractive than the icons/buttons of other phones, easier to touch. The also can show live content, although most apps still stick with a static image.

There is good potential: if all these little bugs/annoyances that I mentioned above are being fixed, and if there would be more options for users to create additional pages instead of just having one title page and one app page, then this may actually take off. Installing and updating apps works as smooth as with the iPhone.

So, Microsoft engineers, keep working and please produce an update soon (and without "bricking" it...) !

SCORM in XSTREAM

2011-02-16T10:37:00.006Z

The first semester in this academic year has been concluded in January. My major work had been in the the Mobile Wireless Comms (MWC) MSc module: I have experimented with SCORM-compliant Sharable Content Objects (SCO), integrated in our Learning Management System (LMS) XSTREAM and accessible remotely through a web interface. SCORM enables such SCOs to provide feedback about the learning progress of the student, by having small assignments in the SCO which automatically are being fed back into the LMS. In principle this works fine, but there are a few issues:
- the connection between the SCO and the LMS times out, and then some error messages appear at the user's end. This is quite annoying, and it also may interrupt the data flow: sometimes the results from the SCORM quizzes were not reported back correctly to the LMS.
- new versions of an existing SCO will create a new column in XSTREAM gradebook. This makes the handling of the overall marking quite cumbersome, as all different versions of the SCO grades will have to be considered.
- in principle it is possible to have several questions/quizzes within one SCO. But this proves somewhat more prone to failures in reporting back the quiz results, which leads to missing and wrong grade entries on XSTREAM.

Overall, the concept of having these interactive learning objects in the form of SCOs was quite popular with students: they were engaging very well, and the assignments were designed in such a way that students could try out examples. At the core was here some additional JavaScript code, which allowed these SCOs to give each student a different set of problems to solve: the basic formulas and equations were the same, but the individual numbers and parameters were different for each student. This allowed the student to repeatedly try a particular problem, everytime with a different set of numbers.

The downside of using this SCORM-based approach is that it is very time-consuming for the teacher: the preparation of these SCORM-compatible SCOs takes longer than the traditional lecture/tutorial preparations, and fixing the technical issues regarding the incorrect grade feedback added an additional hassle. As a consequence, I am now preparing a set of "good practise" recommendations on how to best use SCORM in this context of XSTREAM.

Also, I will present this work at the CAL 2011 conference in Manchester, April 13-15.

Windows Phone HTC HD 7 - First Impression

2011-02-05T23:41:00.005Z

Two weeks ago, right after the arrival at Manchester Airport and while waiting in the baggage claim area, my mobile phone stopped working: the touch screen was no longer operable. I noticed one spec on the screen at one location, as if the layers of the touch screen surface have collapsed at that point. While the screen still showed data and the buttons of the phone worked fine, the touch screen no longer responded to any touch.

Fortunately a few days later my contract allowed me to get a free upgrade. Which phone should I get? I am already using an Apple iPhone for project-related work, so I would look for other alternatives. Android looked good, but in order to get the HTC Desire HD I would have to switch to Three, and I would prefer to remain with O2. O2 only offers the lower-end version HTC Desire as an Android phone. Since around 1998 I had quite good experiences with Windows CE devices: first the PDAs, then PDA phones. I liked the backward compatibility and the ability to edit Word and Excel docs on the mobile device, so also my most recent phone had been a Windows Mobile (6.1). Since October the new Windows Mobile Phone 7 devices were out - breaking completely the backward compatibility and actually offering less functionality (I wonder why it is so hard to implement copy/cut-and-paste; Apple had the same initial problem). There is still one phone out there with Windows Mobile 6.5.3, which still offered the old well-proven functions, such as synchronising with Outlook (even without Exchange) and backward compatibility, so I could run some of the software that I still was using (for example CodeWallet was a very nice utility for storing passwords; they are working on an iPhone app). But then I got lured by the latest Windows Phone: the HTC HD7.

The upgrade was free, and so I got my phone on last Friday. And here are some first experiences:

The overall look of the interface is very slick. Nice fonts, although the overall stylishness and coolness sometimes leads to text being shown too large and going beyond the screen.

There appear not many customisable settings, especially in comparison with the iPhone. There is only one main screen with those tiles (which can be arranged and configured), then there is one other screen which sorts all "application" icons in an alphabetical column. I have not yet found out if one can actually define more screens, which I would prefer.

Similar to the Apple Appstore one can also here directly download apps. The selection appears much smaller than for the iPhone; also the prices for many apps are somewhat high; but there are also free apps. These apps appear somewhat of a lesser quality as the ones for the iPhone: for example the Twitter app for Windows Mobile does only support one account, whereas the same app for iPhone supports multiple accounts - although both apps come directly from Twitter. Similarly the Facebook app, which works fine, but seems to have only few configurable options on the Windows Phone side. It also shows less information on Windows Phone, for example you cannot even see which people are behind a "like".

In some other cases there is stylishness over function: for example on the "people" tile, the faces of contacts pop up in a random manner. While this looks interesting, it has no meaning at all, as these face popups appear only to be random. It would have been great if these would be linked to actual activity online, for example when a contact post something on Facebook, or when an email arrives. But the faces fade in and out even when there is no network; when I see those faces and then check for the actual activity of that person, there is no correlation whatsoever to the tile display and the actual activity.

One positive thing: all contacts are now accessible under one tile, providing one access point for contacts from Outlook (Exchange), Facebook, and all other email accounts. This is really useful.

On the other hand, there is no common joint inbox, as it is on the iPhone: instead each email account has its own tile on the main screen.

One big advantage of the old Windows Mobile phones had been the capability of synchronising data and files with a PC, although the synchronisation suffered from terrible programming of ActiveSync, which often resulted in duplicate items and updating of the wrong file. The new Windows Phone has replaced this by using the Zune software. First one has to download a 120 MB big file for the Zune installation, then one has to wait for another 30 minutes until all the updates for this have been downloaded and installed, then Zune is ready. Supposedly the synchronisation of the Windows Phone with the PC would work from there. But I had connected the phone per USB to the computer already before I installed the software, assuming (hoping) that there would be some kind of self-installing driver there, as it is with many USB devices. Unfortunately that was a wrong hope - the device did not install itself, and when I tried then to use Zune for installing the drivers, the phone did not show up there in the "device" settings. That had worked better with the iPhone on the Apple Mac... no surprise about this.

So it appears to be a big problem that I had connected the phone to the PC before I had installed Zune... fortunately I found the solution in a forum, and I was finally able to have the HD7 installed as a "portable device". But then it did still did not show up in Zune... until I realised that I had to click an "ok" somewhere in order to move on. Strange GUI...

Unfortunately this Zune software only synchronises media files, but no other files such as Excel, Word etc. There is some mention on synchronising "One Note" files, but I will have to explore this further.

The camera takes excellent sharp pictures, and the 4.3" display (800x480) is very nice: bright and crisp.

Overall the experience with this phone so far is mixed. I still am looking for a proper way of getting the synchronisation going. On the windowsphone.live.com website, it says I can sync notes from my phone by tapping on "Office>All>Sync". But that does not exist... instead there is mention of a "Sharepoint", which I found out costs something... so it looks pretty bad, and I may not be able to get my car petrol statistics or the list of all my flights (all in Excel files) over to this mobile phone, which really is a pity.

A year ago Microsoft had about 7% market share of smart phones. This has now dropped to 3%... and if they do not soon provide an update to their new Windows Phone OS with all the features one would expect (cut-and-paste, synchronisation of Office files with PC), then soon there will be the well deserved end of their attempts in the mobile market. Windows Phone does have potential - the look-and-feel is good, but it needs more substance.

Final Departure from India

2011-01-21T21:21:00.001Z

A short breakfast in the hotel at 7am, then leaving with the free Shuttle to the nearby airport. Have to show the passport at many occasions before we can board the plane. Everything is on time and runs smooth.

There are rain clouds over Dubai, and there is a little drizzle on the ground. In the terminal I cannot resist going to McDonalds and ordering a juicy burger - the first meat after 13 days. I guess I am not made for vegetarian life...

The connecting flight is on time. The route goes actually over Iraq, and when we are over Baghdad, I just am eating lunch, listening to Gustav Mahler's 9th Symphony through the fabulous Emirates entertainment system. A somehow surreal combination...

I do not feel very well, the throat hurts, and I feel feverish and warm. Take two more Lemsip cups and try to rest.

Arrival in Manchester without problems. Luggage is there, and then our group parts: Gina and Deborah have a taxi waiting, and Brian and myself take a train to Leeds.

13th Day in India - Ahmadabad

2011-01-20T22:54:00.001Z

Breakfast at 6am, the taxi arrives shortly after 7am. Sunil has carefully noted down the directions to our hotel in Ahmadabad - Comfort Inn Sunset, and we arrive safely at the hotel around 8:45. First we head to the Calico Textile Museum, which Brian was keen to see. Very large selection of fabrics, and a tour explaining the complicated manufacturing techniques which requires exclusively hand craft work. The admission procedure is a bit strange: since we do not have a reservation, we have to wait in a queue - only 10 people without reservation are allowed to visit the museum, and this can only be done 10:00am - 11:00am. We have to hand over our mobile phones and cameras to the officer at the entrance. The tour takes until shortly after 12:00. No pictures can be taken, and they have run out of postcards to sell... so the world here will not know much more about this marvelous place.

Following a suggestion by our friends we visit the restaurant Saffron. Have to take 2 rikshahs, as 4 people are not allowed in one. Great food. Then we hire another two rikshahs to drive into the old town. Nobody whom we ask seems to understand the term "Old Town". That was the same time during our last visit 2 years ago; for some reason it appears not to be worth anything to the locals. But to us it is: a wild mix of rikshahs, hidden architectural heritage gems, and colourful bazaar atmosphere. But one thing is quite negative: the pollution. Even in the smallest street there are auro rikshahs and motorcycles competing with streams of pedestrians. Miraculously no collission occurs, but the air is very heavy of exhaust smoke.

At 15:45 we hire another auto rikshah to drive us back to the hotel. This time the rule of no 4 people in a rikshah does not apply... but Deborah has to move into the luggage compartment of the vehicle. At 16:15 we are back in the hotel and take a nap.

I doze off on the bed, but when I awake I am shivering: the AC had been onto max, and it is now freezing cold. The shower is just lukewarm and does not help, so I keep shivering, and I feel my temperature rising. So finally my immune system had given in to all these threats in the air, and I got a throat infection. I am not hungry and decide to skip supper, having an early sleep. Fortunately I have some lemsip with me, which I prepare on the tea cooker.

12th Day in India: Feedback Session and Good-Bye

2011-01-19T23:53:00.000Z

On Wednesday morning we had a feedback session at 10am at the HP Patel Institute where we discussed the project and our stay. The resume was overall very positive, and we decided on a few action for the future.

Afterwards we went with a rikshah to Anand, meeting Chhaya and Mitali for some more gift shopping. We got hungry, and I could not resist trying something extravagant: a cheesburger with fries and Pepsi. The cheeseburger was indeed unusual: instead of cheese inside, the cheese was grated above the burger. The veggie part inside the burger was not a patty, but were actual vegetables: cucumbers, tomatoes, and a kind of green pesto. Very unusual, but quite good.

Then I use the last few hours in which I have access to the USB 3G stick for uploading a few more pictures. Tomorrow we will be in Ahmadabad, where possibly I might have another few hours of internet access.

11th Day in India: A Book in 8 Minutes

2011-01-18T21:35:00.000Z

The workshop was supposed to begin at 11:00. However, only a few students were present at that time; more started to trickle in, as they were commuting and came back from the holidays. It reminded me of my lectures that I gave this semester at LeedsMet each Thursday morning - many students usually also started then to trickle in a bit late. In this area there is definitely some room for improvement on the students' attitude... although I must say that our taxi pick-ups and all the travel arrangements during our stay had been spot-on in time.

When finally the last students come to the lecture lab around 11:20, Brian begins the lecture. The first part is about the students writing in Gujarati language on paper a short paragraph about "My Place is Gujarat", which would be intended to be a textbook for Gujarati children. Each of them has to do this within 8 Minutes, and then they read aloud and translate this paragraph into English.

Then comes my bit: Each of the students should now put down their story/paragraph online, to share it with the world. I show them how to use the page I have set up and how to get pictures from
my Flickr archive, then the start typing. In the end we have collected 23 pages, which automatically were collected on the web page: www.theriversmovement.org.uk/bi8m/ViewBook.php.

In the evening we have invited all our friends to the restaurant "Flavours", and we have a great farewell dinner.

Tenth Day In India: Writing a Web App

2011-01-17T21:07:00.002Z

On Tuesday we will give lectures at the HM Patel Institute, and these need some preparation. Gina and Deborah will give lectures about education, Brian and I will give a workshop on writing a "Book in 8 Minutes", involving collaborative technology. For this I have to write some software, enabling the joint authoring. So on Monday I devote the whole day to this, sitting outside near the entrance of the guest house and hacking away on my computer. The goal is that the students should be able to write a very short story related to the topic "My Place is Gujarat", amended by a photograph from my online collection. We did not want them to use other pictures because of possible copyright issues, therefore we focussed on my collection only. There was now one technical problem to solve: a few years ago, one could directly right-click any picture on Flickr and get the true URL. This has changed: right-click on a picture does not provide means for saving it or getting its true URL; for this one needs to use the Flickr API. So I had a quick look at it - straightforward, one first needs to get an API key, then call a specific function in the FLickr API to get all the info about the picture in an XML response, then parse this to build the actual URL. I did not want to write a parser for XML, so I was looking for something that would make this job easier, and I found phpflickr: this provides the tools for getting info of any Flick picture, just by passing the picture ID to it. Then there is another function for building the URL. So I began writing a little PHP script, using that phpflickr library: to the script the picture ID would be passed, then the image URL for a medium-sized image would be returned. This script in turn would be called from JavaScript on the main page, using AJAX. What the students then had to do when they would want to embed a picture in their page: they would copy the URL of the picture page into a field, click on a button, and the page would receive the unique image URL from where it could be passed on to a web form for storage in a database. All I had to do now was to write a parser to get the image ID from the Flickr image page URL.

This worked fine: the result is here: www.theriversmovement.org.uk/bi8m/. I did some more minor edits later in the night to have this ready for Tuesday.

At 17:00 we went to Asha Makheesha's C Z Patel College of Business, where an official awards ceremony took place. Gina and Deborah had gon there already earlier, Brian and I wanted to join just before the event would begin. I did not know where the college was, and Brian had missed one turn... so we were a bit lost, when suddenly we met a friend from the HM Patel Institute who recognised us. She engaged another motor cycle rider who was around, and then each of us was riding on the back of a motorcycle heading to the nearby College of Business. The floors on the halls were decorated with graphics made out of coloured powder or sand. The main event venue was outside on a roof terasse, under a large fabric tent roof. The honourable dignitaries were sitting on a podium, waiting for their time to speak. Then the official event started, Asha moderating the proceedings. Brian started to cough, probably a consequence of rushing to this event earlier, and also because of the dust and pollution in the streets. He left the proceedings and went back to the guest house for a brief rest. When he came back 2 1/2 hours later he just came in time for the closing of the official events, after all speeches and prize awards to the students.

Since Brian did not feel very well, we decided to not attend the following dinner and instead head back to the guest house, where I could finish my software for the workshop on Tuesday.

Ninth Day in India: back to Vallabh Vidyanagar

2011-01-16T22:54:00.000Z

At 5:30 one of the guest house clerks knocks at the door, brings tea for breakfast. At 6:00am we assemble in the lobby and get into the car, to drive through the morning darkness towards a remote temple site on a hill for watching the sunrise. We are there shortly before 7am, driving up a very steep road (probably 30% slope). as we reach the top, a very surprising site: a wall straight ahead, and behind it we see - boats! We think this is a Fata Morgana, boats on the top of a hill. But there is indeed a small reservoid / lake on which a few boats are floating. As we get out of the car, a cold wind is greeting us. We climb up the wooden covered structure from where we can see the plain below slowly becoming visible through the darkness. I head back into the car for a while to warm up. Then, as the orange disk of the sun appears at the horizon, we all assemble on top of that wooden observation point and take pictures.

Afterwards we are heading back to Vallabh Vidyanagar towards West. Passing through a few lively towns. Small rikshahs and trucks are loaded with people: usually there are at least about 20 people per small vehicle: sitting on the roof, hanging from the back, squeezing themselves inside. On the way we see a road accident that must have happened just recently: a white car is damaged at the front, while a truck is lying in a ditch at the side of the road, the driver's cabin smashed by a tree.

We arrive safely back at the Vallabh Vidyanagar guest house and have a rest. I can upload a few pictures, then we head out again for dinner: at 18:30 Sunil picks us up in his car, and we drive first to Kiran Chauhan and his wife Sarika for a tea, where also members of his family are present. Then we all together move to Sunil's house where his wife Viraj has been busy the whole Sunday to prepare a meal for us: a mix of traditional Indian cuisine with Western and Mexican components. We enjoy the company of the family and friends: Surendra Gohil and Juhika are there, as well as Kiran Chauhan and Sarika.

Back at the guest house around 22:00 we quickly fall asleep after a busy weekend.

Eight Day in India: Champaner

2011-01-15T21:22:00.000Z

We get up at 6am, have breakfast at 6:30, then our taxi arrives at 7am. Dr Piyush Joshi and Dr Falguni Bharateeya accompany us, and all four of us are in the travel group. We head off in the direction of south-east, to the heritage site of Champaner. Before we visit this archaeological site with its mosques and stone carvings, we first drive into a wild rural area and visit a temple that is hidden away. Photography is forbidden there, which irks me a bit - well, then the world will not know about this fabulous temple site with its strange red idol god (which looks a lot like a cartoon character).

We then visit Champaner: a large mosque, where I also meet a group of people from Switzerland (easily recognisable by their unique accent) who are on a family visit in Gujarat. There is another mosque, and there is a large fortress. Within the fortress walls there are people living in a village.

We head up the nearby mountain and visit a site with seven arches, from where we enjoy a great view over the plain down there with the Champaner site. Driving further up we end up in a queue for entering a parking lot. Cars are parked here for going further with a cable car to another temple site. It is quite difficult to enter and exit, and the exiting cars block the entering cars. Finally we get a spot, and then go to the restaurant to have a meal.

Afterwards we have the privilege to see a panther who has recently (4 weeks ago) been captured from the wild. It has killed 4 people, and so they had to put it into a cage. It is not a black panther but a yellow one with black dots. In my opinion this would count as a leopard, but then I have been told that leopards are larger. When we approach the cage, the panther ferociously bites into the metal bars of the window, and she hisses loudly and angrily. The strategy to deal with this panther is to feed her very little so that she gets weaker, and then would not be a danger to people. In my opinion this is completely wrong: a hungry panther is so much more dangerous than a well fed one. There are enough cows running around which are of no use to anyone (because nobody here eats meat anyway), and they could feed this panther with some of those cows to make her really fat and lethargic. Then the panther would also be more happy. But my suggestion seems not to be welcomed...

We drive further, and after a few wrong turns and detours we reach the town of Lunavada, where we visit a friend of Piyush and Falguni who is a doctor. We have a tea, and he prescribes something to Brian against his chest cough. It is getting late already, and the sun has set as we take off for the final travel segment to the guesthouse which is located near a dam.

Very simple accommodations... our ladies share a room: the VIP Suite #3, and Brian and myself share room #7. Both rooms differ slightly in their amenities and their funishing.

We go to sleep early as we will have another early start tomorrow.

Seventh Day in India - Kite Flying Festival

2011-01-14T20:55:00.003Z

On Friday is the kite-flying holiday. The university and all stores are closed, people are at home, on the roof of their houses, and let kites fly. Traditional food is chikki, a sweet desert: nuts bound together by crystallised brown sugar.

Brian is on this day on a tour with Dr Piyush, to visit an ancient well. The rest of us has been invited by Sunil to join him and his family for this event in the morning. He picks us up at 9:30, and first we visit one of his friends for a brief view of the kite flying frenzy in one of the neighborhoods in Vallabh Vidyanagar. Loud music, everybody on the roofs, flying kites. Unfortunately there is very little wind, so it is difficult to get the kites up.
Then Sunil drives us to his home, where it appears to be a bit more relaxed and quiet. We go to the roof of his home, were other members of the family and friends are there to fly kites. We unwrap our kits and also let them fly. Naturally there is tea being served.

Around noon Sunil brings us back to the guest house, he will in the afternoon visit other friends out of town. We have a lunch in one of the restaurants. Then we rest a bit in the guest house, before Dr Jadeja picks us up for a tea at his home. We meet his family and have a nice chat.

Then we walk back to the quest house, where we meet Asha. Then also Brian arrives back from his day trip. We discuss the further plans, then I upload quickly a few pictures. At 6:30 Kiran picks us up for meeting his family for a traditional dinner, with the festive vegetable dish Undhui. Delicious!

A great day, full of meeting people in their homes and enjoying their hospitality.

The Sixth Day in India

2011-01-13T18:47:00.000Z

In the morning I had done my auto-rikshah driving. The university was now mostly empty, students were now at home, preparing for the kite festival on Friday. Only the university staff was here. I went back to the guest house to use the internet for a while, to respond to emails and to upload a few pictures. I get invited by the staff of the engineering library which is also in the guest house, and I visit their rooms and have a tea.

At 15:30 we walk to the university to meet together and to drive to another "organic farm". A 15 minute drive brings us to the home of O.o.t.Patel (One of the Patels) who has a stately house surrounded by organic farmland. Directly around the house there is a very shortly cut lawn, so it feels as if we made a quick jump into England. The owner shows us around on a tour to his garden, where fruit and vegetable are grown according to principles of the antroposoph Rudolf Steiner. We have tea, and later a large papaya fruit.

Afterwards I manage to arrange a meeting with Kiran through Facebook, who then comes at 8pm to the guesthouse where we have a nice chat alltogether, with tea and "chikki", the traditional sweet that is only available during the kite festival time here in Gujarat.

A lifelong dream came true: driving an Auto-Riskshah - and I mean "driving", not being driven

2011-01-13T14:23:00.000Z

Before we went to India, I had toyed with the idea of renting a car in India for a few days and to travel around a bit, independently, just following the road signs, stopping wherever I felt. From my first visit here I knew about the road rules, or more correctly, about the absence of those, so I felt I could do this without a lethal accident. But when searching on the internet for opportunities to rent, I noticed that this would only be possible in Ahmadabad, about 2 hours away from where we are. So I almost gave up that idea. Jokingly I told Brian that I might rent a rikshah instead, just to drive around a bit in Vallabh Vidyanagar. And yesterday, Dr Jadeja told me that it would be possible to rent a rikshah - with an accompanying driver. Great! So on Thursday morning at 9:30 I went to the HM Patel institute where the driver Harish with his rikshah was already waiting. First I got a brief instruction: there are three gears, to he shifted with the left handle. The "neutral" is between gear 1 and 2. The clutch is operated with a lever at the left handle. The right handle turns the throttle. There seems to be no idle, the throttle has to be operated always, during starting, and during idling when standing, otherwise the engine dies. The brake is operated by the right foot. The horn (very important) is operated with a button by the right hand, which then has to be removed briefly from the throttle handle (or you need to have a large hand). The blinker is a switch near the left handle, but no finger can reach it while the hands are on the handle, so one has to remove the left hand from the gear switcher. Very un-ergonomic design, that 1950s Pioggo from Italy. But as we slowly do a test ride around the block, I get the hang of it. Brian sits in the back and enjoys the ride. The test ride immediately develops into the real ride, and we drive out of Vallabh Vidyanagar towards west, on the road to the temple town Vardtal. Traffic is light. The speed indicator is not working, but I have my GPS: it shows almost 40 km/h. The driver keeps telling me "slo, slo"... While driving this rikshah I can now appreciate the difficulty in multitasking which these drivers have to do: in addition to the actual driving task, meaning operating the non-ergonomic machine, one also has to pay attention to the traffic situation, watch vehicles in the back, front, and sides, swirve around potholes and avoid speed bumps, overtake pedestrians, cows, dogs, camels, and tractors, be overtaken by basically everybody else, and avoid any kind of collission with anyone. This is quite a number of tasks, and I hardly manage. Especially because the side mirrors are not well adjusted - I have to move my head very far out of the way to see anything, and they I miss what is ahead of me. So I simply rely on other vehicles sounding their horns, and I also use every opportunity to beep the horn, to warn everybody that I am approaching. The turn signal indicators are of no use, because our accompanying driver has wisely switched on the alarm blinker, indicating that an "incompetent driver" is now operating his machine.

On the way we pass the village "Jobanpura", and I decide to stop and have a brief look.

We go on towards Vadtal, and that town always has a special flair to it, with its temple in the center, its gates, the buzzing crowd around the stalls. I take a few pictures, then we return. We stop at the guest house to pick up Gina and Deborah, to give them a lift as they have to go to their next appointment at a local school. So I am now officially acting as a rikshah chauffeur. But their destination is too far away for me, the two hours rental are soon over. So we drop them at a busy intersection where they take another auto rikshah. A few minutes later they overtake me laughing.

A brief stop at a bank for exchanging some money, then we are driving back to the HM Patel institute.

That was fun!

Fifth Day in India

2011-01-12T21:52:00.001Z

We get up around 5:30 am. For the first time on this trip I find a good use of the Immodium tablets that I had taken with me. Maybe one of the 10 chillies which I ate yesterday was not so good...

We drive to a temple in the hills to watch the sunrise above the Narmada river. Then we continue to a waterfall which is called something like "Dshermanie". I keep hearing "Germany" when our Gujarati friends talak about it in their native language. The dusty dirt road goes in winding curves up into the 7-ridges mountains. When we reach the destination, we visit a tribal family who lives in a wood hut with her children. We brought some sweets with us and hand them out to the children. Walk along the water to the waterfall, crossing the stream a couple of times on rows of stones in the water. A little girl offers Gina a kindly helping hand while walking across the river.

We drive back towards Vallabh Vidyanagar, because Falguni has to be at the institute before 1 pm.

In the afternoon we have a rest, and in the evening, Surendra and Jinny visit us at the guest house, and we drive with an auto-rikshah to the North-East exhibition.

For the upcoming kite festival Brian and I decide to by kites. We go for the largest ones in the store, because they are the easiest to fly. Also bought some strong string which is fortified with a golden glass powder. We have been told that during the kite festival one of the goals is to bring down the kites of others - by trying to cut their wires with your own wire. Supposedly there are every year during the kite festival stories in the newspaper about people fallong down from balconies, or heads of careless motorcyclists being cut off with those wires...

Fourth Day in India

2011-01-11T21:41:00.001Z

Breakfast at 7 am. Then at 8am, Gina and I are being picked up by Piyus Joshi and Falguni in a rented taxi, to be driven to the Narmada Dam. First we head north, to pick up the engineer Pandya who works at the power station of the dam, and with him we will get access to the inside of the station. The whole ride takes several hours, driving partly on the expressway towards south, then leaving it and driving on smaller roads which lead through bustling little towns.

We stop at the heritage site Dabhoi, where we can see two ancient gates with rich ornaments.

Lunch at a rest stop. Delicious fried chillies - I cannot stop eating them!

We arrive at the flat where Pandya lives - that is where we will spend the night. We are not allowed to take many things into the power station, especially cameras are forbidden. I take mine in the pocket, since it is so small. Several control posts control access to the dam area. The vehicle is searched with mirrors, we all have to get out and go through a metal detector. When I go through, it gives an alarm. I begin emptying my pockets, first the paper-based notebook which I always carry with me, then the pen, then the roll of emergency toilet paper which may come handy, and then the guard is already satistfied, and I can go through.

A tunnel leads into the rock downwards. Inside is a huge hall, where 6 generators can create a total power of 1.2 GWatt. They are off now, are only to be switched on when demand raises. The dam's main purpose is not creating power but providing irrigation.

Afterwards we drive back to the engineer's flat, pick up our staff, and drive to a sustainable farm where a family provides for all their needs on their land. They do not use pestizides, have a very economic use of water, and have something very interesting: solar cookers from the German company of Wolfgang Scheffler. A parabol dish similar to a large satellite antenna directs the sunlight onto a single spot where a pot stands - and this pot would be heated by the sun rays. A spring-powered mechanism moves the "antenna" so that the pot is always in the hot spot (focal point) of the mirrors.

Furthermore, the family manufactures soap and healing powders for various illnesses. Everything is made so that it uses the least possible amount of energy and resources.

I discuss with one of the sons the implications of our modern technology. While he advocates a life back to the origins and suggested to limit human curiousity and the quest for "progress" as it has brought much bad consequences (atomic bomb, climate change, destruction of nature and natural resources), I advocated a quest for progress to overcome these difficulties. I would not want to live in a society that is completely without growth, and I would not be satisfied with the simple life alone. Human quest for knowledge has not yet produced a knowledge of everything, as every answer to any question raises new questions. And we need to follow those questions and try to answer them. This is only possible by using significantly more than just the standard resources which a tribal community would consume. But of course we need to watch that everyone gets his/her fair share in the use of these resources, and that they are not exploited too much and destroyed by over-utilisation.

We head back in darkness to Pandya's flat where we go to sleep around 10pm. Will have to get up very early in the morning.

Third Day in India

2011-01-10T20:57:00.002Z

On Monday morning I again woke up around 5am, but I did not feel tired. I used the time to try the USB stick again, and it worked great! I uploaded all pictures I has so far onto Flickr, and responded to emails.

This day would be devoted to music. We wanted to show to the same class as yesterday the music which I had written for the Rivers Movement: "The River Aire", after a poem by David Wilders. The students should then try to find words which were embedded in the music. This was a very interesting experiment, especially becaise these were Indian children, and the music had been written in a Western classical style. The schedule for the day changed a few times, but it was finally set that this lecture/performance would be given from 14:00 - 15:00. In the meantime I prepared a video of this music, with the corresponding words from David's poem shown synchronous to the music.

The internet worked fine, no need to exchange the USB 3G stick.

The lecture in the afternoon at 14:00 started with me switching on my laptop computer, connecting the audio to the speakers, and then playing the wav file with the recording of "The River Aire". 95 Indian English teacher students are the very first people on this planet who hear this music being played. They are being told to write down words and impressions of this music. After 10 minutes it is finished, and they "report" threir impressions. it is amazing how well they were able to capture the spirit of this, not having seen the original poem by David wilders on which this music is based. They mention words like "storm", "calm", "serene", "raging", "animals and plants" (how did they get this one? pretty good!). This shows that music is a cross-cultural language, even if it has some local "dialects". Later we listen to a recording of Indian music about rivers, played with flute and sitar. and yes, you can hear the river there as well, with its waves and flow.

The video of the music is here:

It is to note that this is still an incomplete draft - when I am back from this travel I will add the missing 11 words, and I will revise the instrumentation and composition to make it more consistent.

At 15:00 Surendra and Falguni take Gina, Deborah and me to a tribal village school outside of the town, which is away a 45 minute drive. We see children in their classes, and Gina and Deboray talk with their teachers. I document with camera and video the activities. When the classes end at 17:00, all the children walk out and wave to us. Then we take a walk around the willage. Small mud houses, surrounded by farmland. Women carrying fire wood on their heads, men plastering house walls, and everybody smiles friendly when we walk by. It appears that everybody wants that we take pictures of them - so we do. And it appears that the polite thing to do is then to show them their picture on the camera screen. Thank goodness for digital technology!

Already during my last visit to India two years ago I was wondering why almost everybody there was so keen to have their pictures taken. I came up with a theory: when a picture of them is taken, their image goes onto a journey. They themselves may not have the opportunity to see the rest of the world in the near foreseeable future, but their picture will. Their own eyes will not see the world, but the world will see them on their image - so in a way they do travel and get connected to the rest of humanity, to whoever sees their image. So I keep taking pictures of them, to fulfil their dream of being seen by the world (or whoever has a look at the pictures).

In the evening when we return to the HM Patel Institute, there is a group of young students from Surat, supervised by Ashok. They are also very keen to have their pictures taken.

How I got interviewed by the police

2011-01-09T22:49:00.000Z

On Sunday afternoon I walk alone along the main street in Vallabh Vidyanagar, on the way to the DBS supermarket. Very busy, very dusty. Everyone is staring at me, and I attract significant attention. Not sure if it is just the fact that I am the only Westerner in the whole town who is walking here, or if it is my GPS unit that I am wearing around my neck, or the fact that I take pictures of almost everything I see: cows, buildings, just the road...

And walk by a group of three policemen who are sitting on chairs, chatting with each other. Maybe I looked somehow suspicious to them; after I am already away about 10 meters, one of them shouts after me "Hey, come here". I think I better follow. With a big smile I turn around and walk slowly towards them. One gets up and points me to sit down on the chair. I do this. "Where are you going?" I say that I am going to the supermarket. "What do you have in the bag?" Cake from the bakery around the corner. "Where are you from?" Not sure what to answer, but I say "Germany". At least they cannot release any anti-colonialistic resentments then - the relation to the former colonial power here in India has still a slight tension. They all smile while they ask me these questions, so this questioning feels kind of weird: maybe this is not an official inquiry, but just a chat... ? There is actually a meeting of police here in the town, for a kind of drive around various towns, as I have seen the signs "Vallabh Vidyanagar welcomes police from..." and then a couple of towns listed. So we talk about that. Then I say that I have to go now before the supermarket closes. A friendly good-buy, and I walk off.

On the way back I stay on the other side of the road, just in case.

In the evening we have a tea with the cake which I bought, and we have a laugh while I tell the story to our group.

Second Day in India

2011-01-09T21:42:00.000Z

I slept very well, but for some reason already woke up at 5am. This was quite strange, as I had expected to sleep longer than that, because the time zone difference in India put us there 5 1/2 hours ahead of UK time, which means that 5am is 11:30pm UK time. All those sleepless nights in the past days must have reset my inner clock to a wrong time...

It was very surprising to us that the uni staff was working on a Saturday, and that students were actually attending lectures. But even more surprising was that the same thing happened on Sunday: a full day of lectures was scheduled, and we were given a two hour slot to give presentations. The students are future English teachers. Brian introduced them to the Rivers Movement, Gina talked about her work at Barnsley College, and Deborah about her work in the education sector in Rotherham. My presentation was about teaching with technology: I talked about SCORM and learning objects, showed what you can do with CourseLab, and pointed out how this could be used in the educational context with very little resources.

The USB 3G stick was not functioning well, I had hardly been able to get to any website. So Sunil decided we should go back to the store on Monday and cancel this 3G plan.

I used some free time in the afternoon to do some shopping of water, cake, and some cleaning utensils for the bathroom.

First Day in India

2011-01-08T22:31:00.003Z

After another night with only a few minutes of sleep we had arrived in Ahmadabad around 3:00 am. In the baggage claim we were for a long time looking for our luggage, and we were afraid it might have gone lost in Dubai. But after a while everybody of us had their luggage, and so we headed through the customs control. The flight attendants of our flight to Ahmadabad had not given any of the passengers an immigration form, so there was a rush to get these forms. Quite a chaotic queue formed at the immigration desk, with people getting to the front to bring back these forms to the waiting passengers. In principle the queue was supposed to be meandering in an S shape, separated by barries. But some people decided to shortcut the queue by going straight instead of following the S-shape, by removing the barriers. Some heated "discussions" started then... We finally made it through the immigration, and then went outside, where our driver greeted us. It was 4:30am.

A crew of 3 people had come to pick us up. They had been here since 1:30 am, due to a misunderstanding of the time communication. When loading the luggage into that Toyota van, it became apparent that there would not be enough space for the four of us to squeeze onto that one backbench - so someone would have to go into the luggage compartment. Gina and Deborah volunteered because they were smaller than Brian and myself. So our three drivers rearranged the luggage and put some onto the roof, where it was affixed with a very thin looking piece of string... it was not really our intention to treat the ladies that way, but that is how it turned out to be: their luggage on the roof, and they into the trunk. The car had seatbelts in the rear seat, but when I tried to put it on, there was only one half of the seatbelt - the parts where to stick it in could not be found anywhere. Fortunately everything went well, and almost two hours later we arrived safely at the university guesthouse in Vallabh Vidyanagar. During the ride Brian and myself noted that the road near the airport had been improved significantly - much fewer potholes. We drove around Ahmadabad on a kind of ring road where the early morning traffic began. The temperature was relatively fresh, and we saw many people outside with scarfs around their face. In combination of those scarfs with some automated guns which a few of the guards at the toll stations were wearing, it looked as if that toll booth had been hijacked by a local warlord... in many places a few people stood together in a group around a small fire, to warm themselves.

After arriving at the guest house we moved into our rooms and had a few hours of rest before we headed at noon to the university to meet our hosts Sunil Shah, Dr Jadeja, and Surendra. We received a heartfelt welcome. Turns out that my Twittering (tweeting?) and facebooking had kept everybody here well aware of our travel obstacles, and they had felt very well informed and up to date. Sunil as the ICT expert suggested to me that I should get a Tata Docomo 3G USB stick for a fast mobile internet connection, and so we headed off on his motorcycle. I felt a bit unsafe, but Sunil was driving very cautiously through the Indian road traffic with its 3-wheel motor rikschahs, motorcycles, cars, tractors, pedestrians, cows, and the occasional camel. The question of wearing a helmet never came up... what is a helmet anyway?

Got my USB stick, drove back to the university, but it did not work... some driver problem. Must be because I had other Huawei drivers installed from another earlier device... and the software did not appear to handle this case very gratiously. So we went back again to the Docomo store to get some help. However, the IT guys there were not very well versed in computer installation questions and just were able to offer some generic help. What I needed was an explicit Huawei driver which I could install separately. After a few hours tinkering with the registry and reinstalling the device several times I finally got it to work- and the afternoon was over.

Back at our guesthouse the electicity went off for 1/2 hour, leaving us in complete darkness, except for the bluish glow of my laptop display running on batteries. But a few minutes later the house attendant came with a candle for everyone.

Kiran, Falguni and Mitali who had visited us in Yorkshire in summer 2009 came to the guest house to welcome us, Then we headed to the restaurant "Colour Flavours" where we were treated to an excellent meal by Falguni. As usual, I had something sizzling - I like it when the food makes a noise.

On the way there were many stalls on the road selling kites. Dr Jadeja explained that this is for the upcoming kite festival, and Sunil invited us to experience that festival in his home on Friday.

Back in the guest house I tried the internet stick, but the performance was very spotty. Often no web site could be reached. Only a few times I was able to see my emails, reply, and send out a tweet.

A Day in Dubai

2011-01-07T22:44:00.000Z

We have been told to go to the Transfer Desk after our arrival at Dubai Airport. The queues there are not very long, but are moving very slowly. When it is finally our turn, we are told to go to another desk in the arrivals hall, to the "SPTC" desk (or something like that). In any case there is no desk with that label, so we just go to the customer service desk. Turns out to be the right one. After some waiting in another queue we receive a voucher for a hotel and a one-day visa for visiting Dubai.

Our luggage stays checked-in. Fortunately I had taken in my carry-on a set of stuff so I could survive for 2 days without the suitcase. Waiting outside for the hotel shuttle. A blue-sky morning, with mild air. Reminds me somehow of Southern California. The Shuttle drives to the "Majestic Tower Hotel". This is not THE tower in Dubai, but is located towards West of the city centre. Very classy hotel, 24 stories high, with all amenities. We freshen up in the rooms and then have some breakfast at the buffet. There is a pool on the terrace. And free Wifi! So I can upload my first tweets from the travel.

We take a taxi to the Burj Khalifa, which is the name of THE tower, currently at 828 the tallest building in the world. It is within a kind of park, with an artificial lake in the centre a large in-door shopping mall to the right (they have there a California Pizza Kitchen and a Nordsee restaurant - very international) and another indoor mall with Arabic crafts to the left. Very generous space design, but quite empty and devoid of people. Brian's comment: "this is how I imagine hell". But I like it - it really reminds me of the outrageousness off Southern California, with the everything-is-possible attitude. This space is built for the future, eventually there will be tourists here. Yes, it is a bit commercial with its Gucci and high-class luxury mall shops, but I find it is also forward-looking optimistic. In any case, I like high buildings, and currently it does not get higher than this! Of course I take the opportunity to go up to the tower - the elevator moves at up to 10 m/s. It ends at the 124th floor - there are still about 38 more floors on top of that - a total of 162 floors! This building is just incredible. Most offices and flats are empty - like the Empire State Building during its first decades. This tower is ahead of its time, but I think that it will see a great future.

Since we would stay not even one full day in Dubai, we had not exchanged any money. In the stores foreign money is accepted - but only US$ and Euro. The UK pound is not accepted... this became a problem when I became thirsty and wanted to buy one of these sparkling lemon drinks. But the lady who made the drinks said - "ok, I can give you that for free". Now that was very nice! I found a grocery store in that Arabic mall where I could buy with my credit card a few bottles of sparkling water and freshly-pressed grapefruit juice.

At around 1pm we decided to go back to the hotel and use the rest of the time to get some sleep. It was a pity to waste that beautiful warm sunshine, but we really were quite tired and needed some rest, especially with another long awake-night ahead. I fell asleep like a stone and slept for 4 hours. We then met for a drink in the hotel bar, then had dinner in the restaurant. Excellent food, again a buffet. At 21:00 pm our shuttle left and brought us back to the airport. We went straight to the gate, since we already had the boarding passes. Since this was a rebooking, we did unfortunately not have window seats... so again no GPS flight tracking. We tried to sleep, but the flight was just too short (2 1/2 hours) to squeeze more than a brief nap in between take-off, food, and landing. At 3:00 am we landed in Ahmadabad.

Travel to India

2011-01-07T02:06:00.001Z

Over the Christmas holiday I was quite busy with a variety of things: preparing for the travel to India, fixing loose ends on a variety of work-related things, for example marking students' work, setting up a website for an unrelated project, and working on two music projects. For the "Rivers Movement" I had taken on the challenge to put into music a poem by David Wilders which he had created for this project: "The River Aire - From Source to Castleford". In October he presented this during the workshop series in Castleford, and I had begun to translate this into music. But I had not gotten much beyond the Malham Cove... Now for our travel to India I wanted to complete this, to "perform" it at some events there. But time was running out... I had to complete all the work for the university during the two days 4. and 5. January when I was at work. and could devote no time during the day to the composition. Only in the evenings I could do some, and it progressed very slowly. So I decided to shorten the poem and at least create a music which is in itself complete, with a proper ending rather than the fragment I had before. This was finished at 23:00 on 5.January, the night before the travel. Finally I could then start packing. That was done at 2:00am. Then some final work on that web page for the "Connecting Enterprising Women" organisation - completed at 4:00am. Time for some sleep. Getting up at 6:30, leaving for Leeds train station at 8:00. The Leeds Tourist Office there is closed until 9:00; I had hoped to get some presents for our friends in India, but now I have to wait until the store opens. I find a few things there and stuff them into my suitcase.

The train leaves on time at 9:25. Brian already has been waiting at the platform. I still have to complete two reviews for a conference and one for a journal... I take my laptop out and work on these during the ride to Manchester Airport.

As we enter the check-in hall in Terminal 1 around 11:00, there is a huge line: it is the one for the check-in to Emirates Airways. An Emirates employe distributes a paper, in which the latest problem is explained. Just like when the volcano had erupted... The paper states that the outbound flight to Dubai is delayed by 5 hours. We go to the baggage drop queue which is much shorter than the general check-in queue. But it moves very slowly, about 10 me per hour as I am going to find out. At around 12:30 we finally are at the counter. Since we have a connecting flight from Dubai which we will miss, we have to be rebooked. Not many flights to Ahmadabad, either the same day at 23:05, or next night at 4:25. We are now all being re-booked on the 23:05 flight, and Emirates will provide a hotel accommodation where we can rest during the day. Which means we will now arrive a day later in Ahmadabad, but we will have an opportunity to see Dubai.

One problem comes up when my suitcase is checked-in: 34 kg is definitely over the limit - Emirates has a 30kg limit, which is already quite generous. So I unpack some of the book presents and put them into Brian's light luggage - problem sorted.

We have a lunch at the "Giraffe" at MAN, and I complete the paper reviews. Then I finish some last updates of the CEW website, then I am finally done with all the loose ends. In the meantime I kept the world updated of our status through Twitter and Facebook. Which turned out to be very useful because our friends in India then already knew about our delay, before we gave them a phone call to alert them about our delay.

The flight took off at 19:45. I had never flown in the Airbus A-380 before. Feels very smooth and quiet. Nice are the outside-view cameras. Despite sitting at a window seat, I cannot get a GPS reception. Maybe the window opening is too small, maybe the class is covered with a shield. Maybe the wall insulation is just too thick - I cannot place the GPS receiver close enough to the window. So no flight tracking this time. I watch the movie "The Social Network", then doze a bit. We arrive in the early morning in Dubai, after a second night with very little sleep for me.

Preparations for Travel

2011-01-05T00:19:00.000Z

For quite a while our "The Rivers Movement" project group had planned to go for a second time to India. After our first visit in November 2008 our friends from India had visited us here in Yorkshire in June 2009, and we had planned to return the visit. The "Rivers Movement" project's goal is to create awareness of climate change by means of art and writing. I had joined this group in 2008 based on my interest in geo-centric interfaces, and I contributed to it by doing some of the photography and documentation. Originally the second visit had been planned for November 2009, but then got postponed due to a variety of schedule conflicts. Finally the travel had been booked for April 2010, but then came the volcano - and air travel was at a halt. We had to cancel the travel that time, which was quite a disappointment to everyone. Finally travel was arranged again for the 6.January 2011.

For travelling to India a visa is required, for which the passport needs to be sent to one of the consulates in the UK. I needed my passport for other travel and could only send it at the end of November. The official processing time for it was given as 10 working days, so time should be sufficient. But it was cutting it a bit close. The online application process just had gone through a change, and a new "system" was implemented. The visa application form now includes questions about the applicant's religion and about the military service. At one point I realised I had made a small typo in one of the phone numbers to enter - but there was no provision of going back and changing, once the form had been submitted - had to start filling in another form from scratch. The new online application process seemed to be a bit convoluted, somewhat counterintuitive and with very few explanations, but after about two hours everything was done. The first major problem came a few days later when our team leader, Brian Lewis, had indicated in his form that he is a free-lance writer. He received a phone call that this would be in violation of a "tourist visa". He quickly had to send a fax, stating that he is in fact retired. This was to be done the same day, as he had done his application through an off-line process, which still used "the old forms", and these would expire the same day. Another problem was uncovered by our co-traveller Gina Hawkins, who received a phone call that her photos were not right - they needed to be at least 2" by 2" (5cm x 5 cm) large. This exceeds standard passport picture size, so she had to get quickly larger pictures. I became a bit worried, because I just had sent two standard passport pictures, so I tried to inquire online about the status about a week after I had sent the application. The status inquiry was negative - my passport had not been in the system. This was just after the December-freeze had befallen Britain, with delays in the postal delivery. So I send an email to the online inquiry, with my data. Simply the online reference numbers did not help, only after I had also sent the postal tracking number, it was confirmed that my application had been received. No comment about the photos, so I thought everything is fine. After the christmas holidays I became a bit worried, as I still had not received my visa after more than 3 weeks. and I realised that I had forgotten about those bank holidays which brought all economic life in Britain to a standstill. On 30 December, Deborah Bullivant, our other co-traveller, sent us an email that she had just received a postal mail from the consulate, rejecting her application - because of wrong passport size. She had to travel to Birmingham and hand in her application in person, this time with the right pictures. I got really worried now - had gotten a SMS that there is a courier mail from the consulate. This would probably also contain my visa rejection, and I already prepared for a trip to Birmingham myself. Luckily the post was actually my passport, with the visa in it.

On 4.January Deborah picked up her visa in Birmingham, and now everything was ready for the travel.

WARNING: mylife.com violates privacy

2010-12-16T14:53:00.002Z

This morning I was trying out the site "mylife.com", as I thought this may be an interesting site for collecting many things together, in the same way as many social networking sites do. I used my facebook login to connect this site to facebook. While browsing I noticed an option for premium users (costing a fee) which allows to check who is searching for myself, but I did no action on this.
Later, I noticed on Facebook that this site had sent a status message to my FB account, as if I myself had recommended this option, stating something like "this is co sool". I can definitely affirm that this was not me who posted this. In fact I find two objectionable things in this: first, that a status message is posted automatically, without me knowing it, in my name, posing as myself. Second, the fact that searches (they claim that even Google searches would be included) by anyone could actually be monitored by this site. This is, in my opinion, a clear violation of generally accepted privacy.
Therefore, I decided to delete the account on MyLife, and I want to warn you about that site.

Snow in Leeds

2010-12-01T19:10:00.001Z

The snowfall started on last Friday. I had just arrived from my trip to St.Poelten in Austria, it was shortly after midnight, temperature was just below 0 Celcius. My car on the airport long term parking had been frozen over, so I had to scratch the windows free. Shortly after I had started driving, it began to snow. I came home safely, and in the morning there was a snow cover of maybe 1-2 inches in and around Leeds.

This is very unusual here in UK, to have snowfall that early in winter. In the astronomical calendar it is officially not yet winter ...! Only the Eastern part of the UK seemed to be hit by that snowfall, when looking towards the Yorkshire Dales, the mountains there appeared to be bare without any snow.

The following days and nights there was some further light snow, and since the temperature remained below freezing, the snow kept accumulating. And then today after 10:00 am there came a big snowfall, as I was at work: there were thick snow flakes, and they began to accumulate quickly. When I checked my car, there was a cover of about 4-5 inches on it!

When I returned from lunch, my colleague from the neighboring office asked me if I could give him a lift home. He only lives a 15 min driving distance from our campus, but in the morning it had taken him almost 4 hours to come to work, using buses. A main meeting that had been scheduled for the afternoon was cancelled - many people could not make it because of the snow. And Leeds Met closed down at 3pm. So I drove my colleague to his home; took about 30 minutes. The road was quite full, traffic was moving slowly. Cars started to skid as soon as there was a slight incline.

The Smart car is not really ideal for these snowy conditions: it has rear wheel drive, and its automatic clutch does not give me any control over a soft starting. But I managed anyway, just had to be very careful when accelerating - and avoid using the brake, just rolling out a slow speed instead. The northern Ring Road in Leeds was full of cars in both directions: this road has quite a few hills, and any incline, either downhill or uphill, present a major problem for driving, as cars easily start to skid. I avoided Ring Road by driving through local roads in Adel and Alwoodley.

I had promised another colleague at Leeds Met to give him a ride home too, so I drove back to Leeds Met. Since the Ring Road was full, I had to drive a longer way than I had anticipated, going all the way East to the A61, then driving south to the city centre. This direction was quite empty, but long lines of standing or slowly driving cars were heading out of the town, inching along through the slippery roads. At one point I missed a right turn and had to drive quite a detour because I did not want to drive back into that long line of waiting cars, and in one location I also started to skid and almost hit a fence at the side of the road. But I managed to avoid the collision and slowly moved further on. 35 Minutes later I was back at Leeds Met, picked up my colleague, and drove him too to his home.

In the news today on TV the main topic was the weather and the traffic chaos. Not sure if LeedsMet is open tomorrow. I have teaching of a class scheduled for 9am - and I will try to be there. As a reward for students who will show up to this lecture I will bring some German Lebkuchen and Pfeffernuesse - if I manage to keep away from eating them myself tonight.

Visit at BRP Rotax

2010-11-26T23:59:00.003Z

My flight back from Vienna was later in the evening on Friday - this had been the cheapest available flight, so I had recommended to book this one. This meant that after my visit at FH St.Poelten which I had done in the past 3 days, I now had Friday morning and early afternoon available for other activities, and it fit very well to my schedule that I received an invitation by Johannes Christian to visit the company BRB-Rotax. This company manufactures petrol motors for a variety of vehicles: small airplanes, snowmobiles, fun vehicles. Johannes' work is in the area of teaching and training in the "After Sales" context, which means training for maintenance. He investigates here the use of Augmented Reality for intuitive new training methods.

I got up quite early - the train ride from St. Poelten to Gunskirchen took 1 1/2 hours, I had to change trains in Linz. This day was foggy, and some snow flurries began to fall down.

The company buildings are right next to the train station, so it was easy to find. Then we had a chat about Johannes' work, and he showed me around in the training centre where I had the opportunity to test-sit one of those "fun vehicles". He also gave me a tour of the manufacturing hall - very impressive!

At 12:30 the train left. The ticket machine at the train station did not work properly - when trying to pay with a card, it could not connect to authorize the payment. Since I had too little cash, I entered the train without ticket - although it said in several places that on this train line one could NOT purchase a ticket on the train. Well, I would have to discuss this with the conductor. But there was nobody checking the tickets on this train to Linz... When I got of to change the train, I rushed to the nearest ticket machine - there it worked fine, and my ticket was now 4 Euro cheaper. Well, the OEBB needs to get their act together and fix their ticket vending machines, if they want payment for train rides!

The Railjet is a nice comfortable and fast train. It has three classes: standard economy, first, and premium (which would cost an additional 25 Euro). I chose the cheapest option, good enough for me now. The train leaving at 13:10 from Linz was quite full, so unfortunately I could not get a window seat.

Arrived 14:40 at Wien Westbahnhof. Bought at a bakery a nice dark rye bread to take with me for the next days. Then with the bus to the Airport.

Everything fine there. Vienna Airport has free WIFI, which is nice! I even used it to make a Skype call from the iPhone through Wifi.

In AMS the announcement that the flight to Leeds would be delayed and would take off at 22:15 instead of 20:45. Decided to spend 5000 Miles from my KLM Flying Blue account to get into one of their lounges. Had not done this for a few years now; back in the time when I was travelling more often, the admission to the lounge had been free.

The flight departed then more than 2 hours late, but arrived ok in Leeds. No snow there yet, but the car was covered in frost. When I began driving, the snowfall started, but I made it home fine.

3rd Day in St.Poelten

2010-11-25T23:46:00.002Z

Today on Thursday was now the rest of my ERASMUS teaching at FH St.Poelten: I gave an overview on some "historic aspects of Augmented Reality", talking about my work at RSC on marker and building tracking and explaining some of the issues related to head-worn displays. In the afternoon I gave a lecture on my work in developing SCORM shareable content objects (SCOs). I also met with Prof Dr Alois Frotschnig, the Technology Department Director of FH St.Poelten. And for the fourth day in a row, I came back to the hotel after 22:00.

Three very busy days, but well worth spending. Tomorrow I will travel back to Leeds, but before my flight there is another highlight planned: a visit at a factory which employs Augmented Reality in their employee training.

Second Day in St.Poelten

2010-11-24T23:45:00.002Z

On Wednesday the Forum Medientechnik continues. I meet with the Executive Director of FH St.Poelten, Dr Maria Gabriela Fernandez. Later that day I also meet Dr Alexander Seewald from Seewald Solutions, a really ingenious inventor in a wide variety of areas: computer vision, augmented reality, music recognition. In a Viennese Heurigen Stube, he uses his software on an iPhone to automatically detect the music style of the two musicians who play Viennese music - and it properly recognises a waltz. Brilliant!

Again I return back to the hotel late - 23:40. Will I see St.Poelten also some time during daylight?

First day in St.Poelten

2010-11-23T23:21:00.000Z

Tuesday morning I walked again through downtown St.Ploelten. This time there were actually people there, the stores began to open. Went north through the railway station to the other side of the railway tracks, passing the hospital, then approaching the Fachhochschule (University of Applied Sciences). A simple contemporary building, glass and steel, three stories high. I register for the Forum Medientechnik and join the other participants in the auditorium. There are talks about new media 3.0, about the use of Twitter, and about guidelines for software / web development for mobile phones. All very interesting. I meet Thiemo Kastel, one of the main organisers of this conference, and Hannes Raffaseder, Vice Rector for Research at FH St.Poelten. In the afternoon I join a tour of the media facilities, where a complete studio is available with green-screen technology and tracking, also an AVID system for studio production. Frank Angermann from Metaio who also gives a talk about mobile AR and the Junaio Mobile AR system, joins a student seminar with a group of Thiemo Kastel's students who are working on a mobile AR tour guide for Vienna. There are a few interesting new things about to come regarding the Junaio project... am not allowed to say more!

In the evening is the award ceremony for the Golden Wire 2010 Media Prize in which student project receive awards. More than 18 different projects in 6 categories are shortlisted, and a jury decides the winners. Quite impressive work - animation, short films etc. At 22:30 I return to the hotel, after again a night walk through the empty streets of St.Poelten.

Arrived well in St.Poelten

2010-11-22T23:27:00.003Z

A long day. Why does it seem to be so difficult to travel from Northern England to Eastern Austria? There is not a single direct connection to Vienna from any of the Northern England airports. One would assume that at least Manchester has one, but no... the only connections are from the London airports, Standsted and Luton. But this would have meant a 4 hours hazzle train ride from Leeds. So the only reasonable alternative is to use KLM from Leeds-Bradford airport. Not ideal; the very lowest-cost flights would have left me stranded at the Vienna airport at night, because no further trains leave to St.Poelten. So I had to choose a "reasonable" flight during the daytime, with a 4 hour transit time in Schiphol airport (Amsterdam).

Everything went well in the morning, I decided not to take a taxi and instead drive to the airport, the parking for a week costs as much as the two taxi rides. Takeoff from LBA on time, then walking through the AMS airport. This is in my opinion the best airport in the world: besides having a museum with paintings of Dutch masterpieces there, they now also have a library! The four hours go by fast, as I stroll around, exploring some electronic gadgets (Sony has a digicam with 360 view video capture! And there are quite a few micro pocket projectors available - would be good when giving talks or demonstrations where a projector is not available). Can also do a bit of work. Then I proceed to the gate B15. Flight to Vienna, departure 17:40. I sit there and read a magazine, waiting for the boarding call together with other passengers. The plane at the gate is from Austrian Airlines. I did not know that this KLM-flight would be a code-share flight - there was no mention on my ticket and boarding pass! Well, maybe they have some nice Austrian food during the flight. As the call for boarding comes, they mention the Star-Alliance. That cannot be right - since when is KLM a member of the Star-Alliance? I go to the desk and ask if this is the right flight - no, it is not. The KLM flight to Vienna, at 17:40, is at another gate. How could I be so stupid not looking at the flight number? That never has ever happened to me before! Now I have an opportunity to test my sprint capabilities, as I run to gate B36, fortunately on the same letter track. They are about to close the gate, but I can still go in. Lucky, I made it. Everybody is seated, and they just make the announcement that they are waiting for a few late passengers and are about to unload their luggage...
How can there be two flights at exactly the same time, to exactly the same destination? Well, next time I will be more careful and will check exactly the flight number, to rule out any confusion with code-sharing.

The flight goes well, and we arrive actually on time in Vienna. Now by bus to West-Bahnhof. Takes 45 minutes, through some narrow streets in the "12.Bezirk" of Vienna. The Westbahnhof is a huge construction site - the main hall is basically stripped of everything, not sure if they will actually turn it down. I know that they are rebuilding the Suedbahnhof into a new main station for Vienna (Hauptbahnhof). From the schedule there are only 5 minutes to buy the train ticket now and to get onto the train, but the bus has arrived a few minutes early. So I catch the proper train to St.Poelten, and arrive there at 22:00 local time. 20 min walk from the station through the empty and silent, but well illuminated town centre; my two rolling suitcases make a lot of noise on the rough pavement.

Then finally at the hotel. The travel day is over.

Launch of Safe4

2010-11-17T19:11:00.003Z

On Tuesday evening I was invited to the launch event of the company Safe4 which took place at the Club LS1 in Leeds City Centre. Safe4 is a start-up company which offers a safe online keeping of important documents, primarily targeted for businesses. I saw a demonstration there, and was quite impressed with the ease of the user interface. The online storage of the documents is encrypted and provides good data security.

At the launch Keith Madeley introduced the company and also spoke about the Middleton Railway, which will soon (in 2012) have its 200-year anniversary of the world-wide-first successful use of a steam locomotive in a commercial context (coal transport).

Also attending were the Lord Mayor of Leeds (Councillor James McKenna and Councillor Andrea McKenna), HM Deputy Lieutenant of West Yorkshire (Michael S Fox), and the Venerable Peter Burrows, Archdeacon of Leeds. We had a nice chat about the Berlin Stadtschloss and discussed if it should be rebuilt or not.

Brian Lewis speaks at the opening of the Rivers Movement exhibition in Castleford

2010-09-03T19:21:00.001+01:00

__________________________Sent from my mobile phone - apologies for typosTo view the terms under which this email is distributed, please go to http://disclaimer.leedsmet.ac.uk/email.htm

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In Castleford, exhibition in Bridge Gallery, by the Rivers Movement Group

2010-09-03T18:46:00.001+01:00

Hull

2010-08-12T19:34:00.001+01:00

Last time using the UK mobile phone network, from now on there will be expensive roaming only

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Ferry in Hull

2010-08-12T16:12:00.001+01:00

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LeedsMet staff party

2010-07-22T17:25:00.001+01:00

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At Leeds Met Graduation, Innovation North

2010-07-15T16:03:00.002+01:00

This was at the second ceremony today, at 14:00

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Bengali concert at Leeds Uni

2010-07-13T19:43:00.001+01:00

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At Leeds Uni - before concert

2010-07-13T19:34:00.001+01:00

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Investment Forum by Connect Yorkshire

2010-07-07T21:07:00.007+01:00

On 7. July, Connect Yorkshire organised the Investment Forum, a one-day event at the Aspire in Leeds with the opportunity for investors to meet businesses with good potential for future growth. I was involved in two roles in this event: In one role I have been a mentor in the group of advisers who would give businesses advice on their presentation at this event, where they would seek funding and would show their prospects in the best possible light. In the other role I represented together with Prof Rod King (Carnegie Faculty) our own project "Virtual Runner". Unlike most of the other participants, we did not plan to give a presentation, but we simply presented our poster, next to the "Proof-of-Concept" fund table.

We arrived in the morning around 9am at the venue. Unfortunately, setup time had been between 8-9am, and while I was carrying our poster to the setup location, the first investor guests already had arrived, zipping their coffee and mingling around for networking. At our table I realised that we did not have any stand for hanging of affixing the poster - I must have miscommunicated our requirements... fortunately Danielle came up with a few stripes of Duck tape, and we could affix the poster to the big column next to the table. We setup the Virtual Runner software on Rod's laptop, and were able to give quite a few demonstrations to many people who were interested in seeing it. The two lovely ladies Amanda Robinson and Danielle Ward did a great job in making sure that the exhibition of the posters and the whole organisation of this event went well!

The presentations by those companies who were seeking investment were very interesting. Quite a mix, from simple but innovative solutions to high technologies. Very interesting to observe the different presentations styles. A panel of three experts from the venture community were moderating and were asking questions to the presenters after their talk.

The Aspire building is a very interesting architectural structure from Victorian times. It has been remodelled and modernised inside and is a very nice venue for these kind of events. One remarkable feature which I got to enjoy were - the gents toilets. Never have I encountered anything similar: somewhat indirect lighting, there are candles lit in glass containers, the main pissoirs are long glass bowls along the walls, the water for washing hands flushes from flat and wide fossetts into the basins. After entering these rooms it takes a while before one realises the purpose of all the installations, so unusual is their design!

John Dean talks about KTP

2010-07-01T11:47:00.001+01:00

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Prof Carlton Cooke introduces Prof Sir Deian Hopkin

2010-07-01T09:57:00.001+01:00

At the LeedsMet Research&Enterprise Conference, in Gandhi Hall.

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Game over for England...

2010-06-29T09:11:00.009+01:00

On Sunday I had the choice: to work more on my latest music project, or to watch as history would be re-written at the football (soccer) worldcup game England-Germany. Since the weather was unusually good - temperature up to 27 deg C, blue sunny sky - I decided it might be ok to give Gustav Mahler a rest and instead drive to the East coast, to Filey, and have a dip in the water. On the way everywhere the George-cross England flag. The fans clearly were looking forward to this game. The press in the UK did have its usual headlines full of pun, when it came to talk about the upcoming match: "Herr we come again" and similar. I guess this verbal German-bashing is part of the local folklore here - without it a match against the German team would just be half the fun. Interesting is that this agitated attitude that can be seen in the press is not at all present in anybody I spoke to: all the English people I know had a quite differentiated attitude, being critical about the performance of their team, and admiring the success and strength of the German team.

I was looking forward to this game, especially because I could be happy either way: it really did not matter to me if Germany (my home country) would win, or England (my host country, which pays my wage). I even had both flags, still left over from the last world cup in 2006. Well, deep inside I probably would root for the German team...

Many pubs on the way had signs outside stating "World cup game on big screen", so one could watch inside. Also at the beach in Filey there was one opportunity to see the game - with a window view over the water. The beach was, as expected, relatively empty. But there were still quite a few people who clearly were not interested in football: they were just strolling along the promenade, some of them mumbling something about football being the most boring thing in the world. But this attitude here in the UK is clearly in a minority.

10 minutes before 15:00 I headed to the Coble Bar, which had the sign outside that there would be a TV for viewing the game. I got a Shandy and a Sunday roast (for an incredible 4.95) and sat down. There were several beach goers who starred at the 32" screen. Strange atmosphere: no Hooliganism, but silence, like in a church, as everybody was watching the initial minutes. A unisono "ouww" at the 1:0 for Germany. Another one at the 2:0. One woman said that England will loose 0:6, and that these guys are way overpaid. Then a loud cheer when the 2:1 happened, and another one at the 2:2. That one turned into a disappointment, as it was not awarded, and from then on it went downhill. I must say that not awarding this goal was a stupid decision - it should have been counted after the video replay. Well, I am sure that the rules for this will be changed soon.

The mood in the Coble Bar was somber at the end when the official score was 4:1 for Germany. I would still count the score as 4:2, which is also quite bad for the English team. Germany won deservedly: they had a great team play, with some text-book-like goals. The English team was not working well together, although they did have some good chances and were playing aggressively.

I really feel sorry for the English fans. They are truly committed to their team, and were so looking forward, in a way in self-denial of the overall bad performance in past games. On the way back from Filey there were much fewer flags on houses and cars.

On Monday one of the newspaper headlines had something along the lines "If the defence in WW2 had been like this, we would speak German now". (They just cannot stop here with references about the World War, but that is ok - part of the folklore here.)

Watching THE worldcup game

2010-06-27T16:10:00.001+01:00

In pub at beach in Filey, UK

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World-War 2 Re-Enactment at the Great Central Railway

2010-06-12T21:15:00.009+01:00

World-War 2 was a horrible event. The countries who won it, celebrate their victory in annual events, those who lost it have events commemorating the horrors and crimes which have been committed. Nobody in his right mind would celebrate the war itself, right?

Well, wrong, there is one country which does exactly that, and this is England. A celebration of the war itself may be strange to most people who think that war is a terrible thing and that the only thing to celebrate is that it is over. But in England the mood is somewhat different, for various reasons. A country which had been largely a victim in World-War 2, such as France, Poland or Russia, would never have a re-enactment of these events - the memories are just too horrible, or too embarrassing. Of course, in Germany itself such a re-enactment would be unthinkable. What would one re-enact there? Concentration camps? Air raids? Destruction of whole cities? No, there is absolutely nothing to celebrate. And the USA? Well, most of the country during 1941-1945 operated almost as before, with a few limitations and restrictions, the troops were fighting far away, and life for many people seemed mostly to go on as it did before.

This puts the UK in a very special position: on the one hand the country was subject to severe war action, by air raids and bombings which led to significant destruction and presented a danger to everybody in the country. And on the other hand, because the country did not experience an invasion, it did not suffer the very bad consequences which the occupied countries did. Furthermore, Britain is in the unique position of having been the only country in Europe that successfully resisted the Nazi-German aggression after September 1939, staying true to its commitment to Poland and standing up against dictatorship and for democracy. This fact still fills many people here with pride, as I could notice when observing the general attitude of people and the reporting in the news. The war time in Britain also brought people in the country closer together: everybody made sacrifices; taxes were 50% and up for everybody; holidays were cancelled, people tried to save resources, worked overtime, often in volunteer work. This overall attitude of personal sacrifice for the war effort appeared to have engrained itself into the collective memory, as this overall attitude disappeared after the war. This is what many of the old veterans and contemporaries of the war time talk about in their memories, and so it is very understandable that Britain is very proud of its role in World-War 2.

One should also consider that after WW2, the situation in the UK remained austere for quite some time - in 1955 the country still had food rationed and people were not allowed to take money with them when travelling abroad, whereas in Germany which was the physically and morally defeated country, the "Wirtschaftswunder" (economic miracle) had already brought back prosperity to wide parts of the population. These facts and the economic downturn in the following decades in Britain (loss of coal and steel industry, decline of much of the manufacturing industry) also made these 1940s appear more glamorous than the present times.

Therefore, these 1940s weekends in which the wartime itself is being commemorated and celebrated, started being organised sometime after the war, and they have grown into joyous celebrations of the time back then. People dress up in costumes from the 1940, with original hairdo and makeup, original uniforms, period-correct cars and other vehicles. One of the calendars of 1940s events reveals just how many individual such events are being organised throughout the year! Many of these events are organised around heritage steam trains: these provide the realistic backdrop, with steam engines from that time, and with train stations which have been restored to accurately represent the 1940s.

Since the English are good sports, these events not only show the English history, but also include "the enemy": the re-enactment includes the ficticious assumption that one train station would be located in occupied France. And suddenly, one of the train stations is decorated with the Nazi-Flag and is swarmed with German officers and soldiers, and also the odd SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer walks around, with the Swastica-armband well visible. The actors who play those Nazi officials seem to enjoy their roles and pay meticulous attention to details in the uniform.

When I saw such a re-enactment for the first time a few years ago, I was somehow shocked, after all the pre-conditioning from TV documentaries: turning around a corner in Ingleton and seeing a man in black SS-uniform sipping a cup of tea, discussion with his English-uniformed colleagues. Looked very real and unreal at the same time. Last autumn I visited a 1940 weekend at the North York Moor railway, and there too were those friendly SS men. Well, these are British - I assume the originals were not as friendly.

And this weekend, when my friend Kishor (who is originally from India, but is a US citizen who now lives in Denmark) came for a visit, I decided to go with him to the 1940 weekend of the Great Central Railway. Everything was there: Steam trains, people in original 1940s clothing, impersonators of Churchill and Montgomery, British troops in uniform, military vehicles, also US soldiers, and - the Germans. Two stations were designated as being in German-occupied France: Rothley and North Leicester. Rothley had German beer for sale, North Leicester offered red wine and baguette with Camembert. There was a control post at the North Leicester station, controlled by German soldiers. With the ticket for the day we had been given "ID cards": one side in English, the other side in German, with all the period symbols and icons there... In the train an SS 0fficer checked these ID cards before we arrived in Rothley. There a battle was being played: English soldiers attack a German army unit. Lots of explosions, smoke, gunfire. I suppose the English won.

At Quorn station which was at the centre of all the events, a Spitfire airplane flew by and showed some acrobatic flying.

I still felt strange when seeing those German uniforms: they stand for so much horror, and one might think that one is not supposed to enjoy such a theatrical re-enactment when so much serious history is behind it. However, this historic play does have a positive effect: it makes the history somewhat more alive than just watching a documentary on TV. One can be immersed in the past (to some degree) and get a real experience, and this experience contributes to a more lasting memory than anything else. Of course one must replace in mind those friendly re-enactors with the rough reality... but we know that already from all those documentaries.

So I must say that this celebration of the 1940s in England is a phantastic way of experiencing history, as long as one is taking into account that this in some ways a bit of a glorification which leaves the real negative parts out.

I put the pictures of this event in a set on Flickr. Below are a few selected photos.

Update

2010-06-11T16:48:00.001+01:00

In recent weeks I have taken a break of posting to this blog, and so I will recapture some of the activities since then. First, our planned travel to India was "vulcanised": the morning when our flight was supposed to leave from Manchester, the first flight bans had been introduced in the UK. When we rebooked to the following week, the ban was still in effect, and so we cancelled all our travel arrangements and postponed them - probably for January 2011. I had taken these days off, and so I stayed at home, working on some of my music recordings. In the beginning of May I travelled to Germany to attend the funeral of my grandmother. On the way back the Icelandic volcano again interfered - and it took me a day longer than planned to come back. Since then I have done a few weekend excursion trips, the pictures of which I will post on Flickr soon.

No more Skype on Windows Mobile Phones

2010-05-18T15:07:00.002+01:00

I just wanted to put Skype on my Windows Mobile phone, but I found out that Skype no longer offers Skype for Windows Mobile (since 25.February 2010): they give a quite strange and dissatisfying explanation for this decision. I wonder what was the real reason...

In the meantime, Skype for Windows Mobile is still available for download on other sites - here is the download through CNET.

Lonely chocolate at St.Pankras Station

2010-05-17T01:04:00.001+01:00

Have to wait here until morning, when train to Manchester leaves.

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Franki-Pasti at "Weinstall" in Castell

2010-05-12T18:48:00.002+01:00

Hello,Here's a picture message you've been sent.You can send a message back from your mobile phone. But don't reply to thisemail.Thanks,O2

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Late breakfast at Manchester Airport

2010-05-11T11:13:00.001+01:00

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A Day in the Lake District

2010-04-17T21:36:00.003+01:00

The weather was great - even with that invisible volcano ash cloud in the sky. And so I decided to drive to the Lake District this Saturday. Lake Ullswater has been compared with Lake Lucerne (Vierwaldstaetter See), and when one sees it in reality, one can understand why. The mountains are not as high as the ones in Switzerland, but the overall atmosphere is somehow similar.

Travel to India - With Obstacles

2010-04-15T17:56:00.003+01:00

After the proposal submission which had kept me busy for the past few weeks I finally could relax - and prepare for the next venture: I had one day to get ready for the travel to India, in relation to the "Rivers' Movement" project. We had postponed this travel already twice: an original travel plan back in November did not work out due to schedule conflicts, and a travel in March was not possible because of that proposal work. But now I was ready for the 600 movie channels on Emirates Airlines, and for the scorching summer heat in Gujarat where it is now about 48 deg C.

In the morning of Thursday, Brian Lewis called me, telling me that he heard about a volcanic cloud from Iceland which prevented airplanes from taking off. But we decided anyway to go to Manchester airport and see the situation there. Well, the flight was cancelled. Pretty strange: the airline employees at the help desk were not able to help us, we had to call the central reservation line. And that was broken for a while, a voice message was played "this is a test message" and nothing else. But finally we got through, and were able to rebook our flights for Tuesday, 20.April. Then we had a cup of tea and sat down for a while, before returning back to Leeds.

Submitted a Proposal for Funding

2010-04-13T17:32:00.002+01:00

These past weeks I have been very busy with mainly one activity: to prepare a proposal for funding from the European Commission. As some of you may know, there is the FP-7 programm which provides several billion Euro 2007-2013, for all kinds of activities. It is quite difficult to find out which funding opportunities would be available, although the EU has published all of that on various web sites and portals, one of them here on their CORDIS portal.

What I did in this process:
1. I registered on CORDIS to have a user ID. This allows to post profiles and project ideas.
2. Then I posted a profile of myself, plus another one with a specific idea here on CORDIS. This allows other interested parties to find the project idea. One important thing is that in most EU-funded projects there need to be partners from three different countries represented. This is often difficult for "newcomers" who do not yet have any links or ongoing collaborations. Therefore one can use this partner facilities to find other partners with whom one would want to collaborate in a project.
3. I received a few replies and began "building the consortium". Through other institutions within the UK I advertised my idea, and they in turn won a few other partners across Europe with whom they had collaborated. So the consortium grew, and in the end we had a total of 12 partners, from six different countries.
4. Important in the consortium building is of course that the partners are complementary, in terms of expertise, topics, but also in terms of size and sector. It is good to have academic university partners, SMEs, research institutions, and also a large company it it.
5. Writing the proposal then follows the templates that are available for a specific call. Our idea was suitable for a so-called STREP project, a specific targeted research project. These usually have a total budget between 2-5 Million Euro, often go over 3 years, and have anything between 6 - 15 partners. There is guidances on this on the EU web site for the specific call available.
6. Since I had the original idea, it was up to me to bring it into a form that would engage all partners equally and would ensure that each of them would contribute with their expertise. Not an easy task... at one point I made a phone call to each of them, to discuss for 15-60 minutes the idea and their possible contribution to it.
7. One very important task in such a project is the coordination/management. This is a special activity: to keep contact to the European Commission, to submit the paperwork, to administer the finances. It is important to have someone in the consortium who specialises on that and has done that before. Fortunately we won a partner with that expertise, and that partner took then the role of the proposal coordination. One needs to set up the EPSS for electronic proposal submission and needs to collect the financial data for each partner. This also requires an estimate of the average monthly salary cost, because the whole resourcing will be done in terms of person-months in the proposal.
8. Then everybody prepared their part of the proposal: state-of-the-art, and a few specific bits on their own contribution. The proposal form requires more things to consider, e.g. exploitation, risk management, project management etc.
9. We submitted the first proposal draft Sunday, 2 days before the deadline, just to be on the safe side and have something in. The next few days, however, I kept in contact with the coordinator, via Skype and email, often until late after midnight, to shape the proposal, use proper formulations, and balance the cost of the project properly according to the tasks that we were planning to do.
10. The very final version of our proposal was submitted just 1 minute 36 seconds before the deadline.

And now we just have to wait... the proposal will be evaluated according to the normal procedure, and I hope that our proposal will convince the evaluators to give it high marks in those three categories: Science/technology contribution, management, and impact.

Published a Book

2010-03-30T01:32:00.003+01:00

The volunteer activity in the "Rivers' Movement" project has led to the publishing of this book. It contains photographs of people, events and places, documenting the Rivers' Movement Project and its outcomes from 2008 - 2010. The book is available online at Blurb - see below.

The Rivers Movement by Brian Lewis and Reinhold Behringer | BOOK INFO

Nothing for Ungood

2010-03-30T01:08:00.006+01:00

One of my German PhD students who is working abroad sent me something very interesting: There is an American guy, John Madison, who lived and worked for a while in Germany. And he wrote down his observations in his blog Nothing For Ungood. This term "Nothing For Ungood" is a German expression "Nichts fuer ungut", mostly used in Southern Germany when you want to indicate that you did not really mean an insult with what you just said...

Really brilliant reading! As a German who lived for a while abroad, I can fully appreciate John's observations of some of the quirks that he encountered in Germany. He even published this as a book.

Six Degrees of Separation

2010-03-29T18:58:00.008+01:00

Most people know about this "six degrees of separation" thesis which states that everyone on earth is connected to anyone else by a maximum of six degrees of separation. Microsoft Research has put up a very nice web site with which one can test this: the People EntityCube. One can put in any two names, and from scanning / searching the web, the system is able to show connections between people.

I did this for myself - turns out I am only 3 degrees apart from Osama Bin Laden.

Barbara Colledge introducing Ray Russell

2010-03-26T14:31:00.001Z

At the inaugural lecture of Prof Ray Russell in Gandhi Hall, at Leeds Met

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Prof Ray Russel performing music

2010-03-26T14:26:00.001Z

Playing guitar, at his inaugural lecture in Gandhi Hall, Leeds Met

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In Gandhi Hall at Leeds Met

2010-03-26T14:20:00.001Z

Inaugural lecture of Prof Ray Russell

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System Restore on Windows XP

2010-03-14T10:37:00.004Z

In order to fix the problem with the Google Chrome Browser, I found in several of the Google Discussion Forums about this problem the recommendation to do a "System Restore". This is of course a quite brutal way of fixing a problem; better would be if there was a clear guidance on what settings specifically would need to be changed in order to remove that obnoxious behavior of Google Chrome not to find web sites at the first try.

But I now did a System Restore, beyond the date of when I noticed this behavior occurring more frequently. And - it seems to have cured the problem: Chrome now finds all the site immediately, waits properly until all various sites / images / iframes within a site have been loaded properly, and does not spit out that error message about not finding a site anymore.

The System Restore is supposed to let files and documents untouched, that is any new files since the restore point would still be there. However, when I looked at one of my folders, there were all those new files missing. I did then a search for one particular file which I knew had been in this folder, and in the search the file showed up - in exactly that folder! When I then looked again at this particular folder, it now had all the files in it that appeared to be missing at the first glance. So what must have happened: after the system restore the folder view appeared to have some kind of "image" or "status shot" in memory, a kind of cached version of the folder view as it was at the time of the system restore point to which I had reverted. However, only after again viewing it, the content view was actually updated. So everyone who is making a system restore needs to be aware of this: the views of the folders need to be refreshed, to see the latest true content and not the "imagined" content at the time of the system restore point.

Twitter Widget Update

2010-03-11T08:59:00.002Z

More trouble on the IT front: since recently (I do not know since when, maybe since a few weeks) the Twitter Widget did not work anymore. I had used the widget in my blog(s) and website(s) to automatically show my latest tweets. Recently that block had been simply black. I had attributed this to internet connection problems, but today I realised that this was a systemic failure: Twitter has now a new way of embedding their widget.

So I changed now in a few places this widget and replaced it with the new one.

Trouble with Google Chrome Browser

2010-03-11T07:39:00.004Z

This time of the year seems to be the time where everything appears to go wrong somehow. In recent weeks I have experienced significant trouble with the Google Chrome Browser: when I try to access a page, often the message comes:

This web page is not available.

The web page at null might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

This indicates actually two bugs: the null should show instead the base URL, and overall the page should load because it is available. This message shows up very shortly after I try to access the page, so it seems that some timeout has been set incorrectly. Hitting reload a few times eventually loads the page, but this is very unsettling, especially when making a payment on the web: it happened several times that during the pay process I had to reload the pages - hope I will not get multiple payments. This problem happened since about 2 weeks; I first had attributed it to a slow and faulty connection, but when I dug a bit deeper and searched for this issue on the web, I came across a lot of posts who complained about the same thing in the Chrome browser. The null-issue is described at the Chromium project as a bug that they are aware of - it obviously only appears in the UK-English area. The other bug is harder to fix. I managed to set a new DNSQueryTimeout in the registry - now the problem only appears when accessing a page with https. The Chrome version I use is 4.0.249.89.

When trying Firefox or Internet Explorer, these problems do not occur at all. So I attribute it to something inherent to Chrome.

BT (British Telecom) Is Seriously Losing it...

2010-03-08T17:33:00.002Z

Warning: This post is a rant. It describes my recent experience in trying to get the new BT Infinity service, based on fiberoptic cable. As it turns out, there are a few issues with this ...

A few weeks ago I got a friendly phone call from British Telecom (BT), leaving a voice mail on my answering machine, saying that they now have fiber-optic cable in my neighborhood, and that they offer me an upgrade, as one of the first customers. Well, great idea! So I called them, and yes, this new BT Infinity was indeed available, and they referred me to the web site where I could find out more. I entered the phone number, and yes, the estimate of my speed would be about 20 Mb. So I followed the online instructions, everything quite easy and straight forward, and after a few minutes I got a confirmation email that the equipment would be sent soon and that an engineer appointment has been set up. Great - really good!
So in 1.March I stayed at home in the morning between 8:00-13:00, when the engineer would come and connect everything. I should have gotten suspicious when there was no package being delivered with the promised equipment, but then I thought the engineer might bring it. I checked online, and yes, the order was being tracked ok, and the appointment appeared to set up properly.

When nobody showed up that Monday morning, I called BT. And the nice lady with her strong Scottish accent tells me that there was a problem - the order never had "gotten through". What about the confirmation email? And the online tracking? Nope, somewhere in "the system" the order was not processed, and no actual work order had been issues. Well, since this is such a new service, I could understand some glitches. So we rescheduled for the next week.

This time everything appeared to be scheduled properly: Got a confirmation SMS, also received a very nice custom-printed announcement, on glossy paper, individualised for my address, looking very posh! And the new BT Homehub arrived in the mail too. Great, was looking forward to get upgraded. So on 8.March I again stayed home in the morning, waiting for the engineer who was supposed to come between 8:00 - 13:00 (pretty long time window, but I can understand that sometimes the planning and scheduling cannot be done in smaller windows, due to possible delays and unexpected problems). When at 13:15 still nobody had shown up, I called BT; they tried to ping the engineer, but while I was on hold he actually called on the other phone line - he would be there in 20 minutes. Ok, I am a patient person.

He comes, sets up the equipment. There needs to be a new splitter installed, to separate phone from data lines. The data line goes into a white box which is probably the DSL modem. Then there is still the new BT Homehub, which now simply acts as a hub interface for the ethernet network, the WiFi, and the BT Broadband Talk. Works all fine, but the engineer's measurement only indicate a data rate of about 4-5 Mb. It turns out that the fiber-optic connection is only going up to the last connection box, from where the data signal then is transmitted over the conventional phone cabling.

This speed is of course lower than advertised, but is about 8x more than the line supported before. So I am happy to leave it at this lower speed. The engineer drives away to check something at the exchange or the last connection box, maybe the speed could go up. He thinks that this low speed is due to the distance of my endpoint to the connection box, and he says that probably nothing can be done.

Ok, so far, so good - at least this is a much faster connection than before. And if the story ended here, I would have never posted it, despite the few little kinks in the process.

But wait, this is not the end of the story: after an hour, the engineer comes back, dismantles the whole setup, and puts back on the old previous connection which is at about 500 kB. What? "For legal reason, BT cannot give customers an access to fiberoptic cable at a speed lower than 15 MB". Despite the fact that the line would support 4MB and was working ok without errors on the "fiberoptic connection", I was not allowed to get this speed.

So all the grieving and tolerating of those BT delivery failures - for nothing. Hence the headline of this post - I hope many people read it!

Summary

What BT needs to fix in their rotten internal procedures and policies:

They need to make sure that the BT Infinity service is only offered to people who actually will receive the promised speed. This requires both to revise their telephone marketing and their online phone test tool for checking available speeds.
BT further needs to revise their online booking system for the BT Infinity offer, to ensure that customers' orders actually are being processed.
BT finally needs to revise their current "legal position" which robs the customers of the possibility to increase their broadband speeds by at least a modest amount. The policy of "all or nothing" is not customer-friendly at all.

Having said this, I will concede that all the people I have spoken to at BT appeared friendly and competent - so I have not given them a hard time at all but remained friendly and patient in my interaction with them. I chose not to complain to them by a phone call to their customer service - this would only hit the wrong person, the poor chap whose ears probably fall off from all those customer complaints. Instead I want to bring this disaster to the public, and I hope that it helps to change something at BT - this company simply does not appear to be able to fulfil its vision of providing adequate IT services to Britain.

The Dragon of Wantley

2010-03-07T14:32:00.001Z

In Stocksbridge, at the Venue: just before the performance of yhe opera "the dragon of wantley"__________________________Sent from my mobile phone

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Trouble with "Outlook"

2010-03-05T14:11:00.004Z

In the category of "complaints about software" I can add a post about Microsoft Outlook. In principle it is quite a reliable system; many companies and institutions use it for their email system, together with the MS Exchange server. I also have this service linked to my Windows Mobile phone, so I get always push-email, and since several years I have my complete contacts address book (with more than 2000 entries) on there, with sync between mobile and server. Works quite well, and since ActiveSync 4.5 I also seem not to get any duplicate entries anymore.

But recently there have been some issues, and I am wondering what the reason for those problems is and how they can be solved:
- on my Windows mobile the mail arrives now only once per day, although I have set it to deliver as it arrives on the server. Either the server admins have changed the behavior, or I am doing something wrong.
- the Outlook calendar sometimes just pops up pointless meeting reminders: out of nowhere there suddenly comes an alert that I need to attend a meeting - which took place 4 weeks ago! Somehow this alerter seems to go through my appointments, and once in a while finds one for which I have not acknowledged the reminder. This appears to be completely random. I get reminders of events that took place yesterday, last week, a few weeks ago. No idea why this happens, and how to fix it...

40 Part Chorus Work - on 40 Loudspeakers

2010-03-03T14:17:00.003Z

Yesterday at the Open Coffee event in Leeds a colleague informed me about this very nice sound installation which had been run at the Grand Theatre in Leeds from 4. February. So I went yesterday evening after work. 40 speakers are placed in the Howard Assembly Room in the Grand Theatre, and each of those speakers plays the recording of one solo singer. The work is the 40 part "Spem in Alium" by Thomas Tallis, the installation is by Janet Cardiff. A wonderful experience - 11 minutes long, played the whole afternoon from 2pm to 8pm. Today, 3.March, is the last day that this is being performed there - I can recommend to anyone to go there and have a listen. Btw, the admission for this is free.

Problems with Google Chrome

2010-03-01T11:16:00.003Z

Since Google Chrome came out, I have been using it as my main browser. I like its clean interface which to me is a bit more appealing than FireFox, and its fast loading which beats Microsoft's IE 8. Quite strange that in a recent survey it came out that in the UK the Google Chrome browser only has a share of 5%. But there may be reasons for this, as I too have some issues with this browser which have yet prevented me from making it my default browser: I still have MS IE 8 and Firefox on my computers, just in case something does not appear right. And one thing seems to be the handling of JavaScript.

One example: When I checked on Spiegel Online the Medal Statistics of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, the table appeared to be faulty in Google Chrome: instead of country names there was only "undefined", and the flags were empty rectangles. When looking at the same page in MS IE8, everything was shown correctly. What could be the reason for this? I have no idea... Gears is installed properly, the browser version is 4.0.249.89, up-to-date. Unfortunately the user interface sleekness of Google Chrome has the disadvantage that there are no settings for me to control: I did not find anywhere to "enable Javascript" or something similar...

Another strange thing: I wrote some HTML code for a few web pages with images, and I used the "alt" attribute there, to give an alternative textual description of the image. In all browsers this "alt" attribute is shown when hovering with the mouse over the image, like a tooltip. Not so in Google Chrome: nothing appears. This may be actually closer to the intended web standard use, which recommends to employ the "title" attribute for tooltip-like information... I may have to change my web pages to properly take care of this.

Recent Activities

2010-02-28T00:36:00.003Z

Very busy schedule recently: a Periodic Course Review of our MSc course, marking moderation of students' assignments and exam, the module Subject Exam Committee meeting, a meeting at the Yorkshire Concept Springboard, an evening at the Rivers Movement Exhibition in Barnsley, a workshop about commercialisation and business in Leeds, and a book launch event (also in Barnsley). In addition my main activity is in preparing a major bid for funding of a R&D project, to be submitted in the next few weeks. Is quite a challenge to organise this, to coordinate all the proposal preparation activities with the project partners. But the project - if funded - would be quite interesting: in case we win I will provide updates on it.

The weather in Leeds: some recent snowfall, but the temperature is above freezing, so no snow remains on the ground. Some snowfall could be here on Sunday, but only the top of the hills will get some white dusting.

At Venturefest 2010

2010-02-10T23:55:00.000Z

On Tuesday afternoon I drove to the York Racecourse, to set up our stand for the "Virtual Runner" project at the Venturefest 2010. We had received funding from the Yorkshire Proof-of-Commercial-Concept Fund from 2009-2010 and had now been invited to show our progress at this event, together with other funded projects. The A0 poster which the organisers had prepared for us looked quite good. Met with Rod there, not much to setup. Later I drove to Staples to get 150 handout colour prints which we would give away to visitors of our stand.

On Wednesday early in the morning I picked up Abe and drove to York again. Unfortunately the "Networking Breakfast" was only for the delegates, not for the participants, so we went to the cafeteria and had some breakfast there. Abe had worked throughout the night to do some last fine tuning of the software, and I too had not much sleep: I did a few tweeks of the project website. Added a database so that we could collect email addresses for a potential mailing list.

There was slight frost outside that morning, around zero degree Celcius, but the roads had been clear. However, many people took longer than usual, as there was some traffic on a few of the country roads around York.

We ran the software the whole day - not a single crash. We showed it to many people, got valuable positive feedback. There were many who really wanted to use this system and its envisioned future implementation.

Later in the evening Rod and I were invited to the Awards Dinner, where a few prices were given to projects and entrepreneuring companies. Nice conversations, and interesting people. A very busy but positive day!

During the day there were some snow flurries falling down, but only about 2 cm. The roads were clear again, but traffic drove slower than usual, being cautious just in case.

Abe, Rod, and Tony at the Virtual Runner stand

York Venturefest Awards Dinner

2010-02-10T20:07:00.001Z

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Rod and Abe at the Virtual Runner stand, Venturefest York

2010-02-10T14:18:00.001Z

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Prof Rod King testing the Virtual Runner

2010-02-10T13:06:00.001Z

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Virtual Runner stand at the Venturefest in York

2010-02-10T10:57:00.001Z

At the York racecourse.

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Opening of Exposition in Barnsley

2010-02-05T21:59:00.004Z

On Friday the "River Dearne Project", one project of the "Rivers Movement", opened an exhibition in Barnsley at the Emergence Pod 1. The expo shows paintings by artists and photos by photographers. In addition, a whole month of activities is been organised at this venue:

One of the expo pieces is an installation of Huddersfield University artist Lee Gascoyne: "Stillness". See his blog for details. I collaborated in this installation by writing software for visual tracking: a USB camera is pointed at the entrance to the installation room; when people move through the entrance, the software notices the change in the captured images and controls the replay of a video recording which Lee made of his creation of an art outside artwork. These changes in those camera capture stream influences the video replay (WinAmp) and makes the video "jumpy", going back and forward seemingly random. Only when the audience comes to a rest, that is when nobody enters or leaves the room, the video is played properly. The software which I developed is the same that is powering our Headingley Caedmon Webcam.

In addition, I also exhibit there four of my photographs - see below.

Narmada River in Gujarat, India

Lake near Hadrian's Wall

Malham Cove, Source of the River Aire

Sound of Barra, South Uist, Outer Hebrides

On Tuesday, 23.February, Brian Lewis and other painters will paint for 24 hours paintings, related to their age (he will paint 73 pictures in 24 hours). I have agreed to participate in this as well: I will compose a music piece which is 46 bars long. Still need some inspiration for this (ad)venture... I might actually also be there in the evening, bring my newly built MAESTRO-2 PC (have a look at the story of building that PC) and improvise a bit with all those fabulous Garritan Personal Orchestra instruments.

Visit of Peter in Leeds

2010-02-03T21:43:00.000Z

On Tuesday Peter Baumgartner from Danube University Krems (DUK) paid us a visit here at Leeds Met. On Wednesday evening I took him out for dinner to (one of the) oldest Pubs in the UK: the Bingley Arms in Bardsey (supposedly from 953 AD). On the way it began to snow once again while we were driving slowly up north, through Harewood. The parking area was very slippery: I could not drive up to the pub but parked the car down below. Under the thin snow layer (2cm) there was ice forming... very dangerous for walking! Fortunately there was nothing like this on the roads - the temperature was just around 0 C, and the gritters had sprayed salt. We had a nice dinner in the pub, which has a good selection of food and ales.

Advertisement in Linz

2010-01-15T09:27:00.005Z

PhD student Johannes Christian found this advertisement in the Linz Train Station (in Austria) a few days ago. I wonder which Reinhold is meant there... (yes, I could eat a nice Roesti-Burger!).

Rough translation of the Austrian text: Reinhold, come on and eat!

Car Adventure

2010-01-06T23:20:00.015Z

When owning a car that costs less than £ 1000, one thing is for sure: there will always be some interesting stories to tell. Such a low-cost car is not like those brand-new cars with their never-failing-no-break-down life, but instead provides a lot of material for heroic stories of overcoming challenges. And with such a car, I get to make good use of my AA breakdown cover...

On Saturday I had driven with the Renault Megane Scenic, which I had bought 3 months ago, across the Pennines, on a snowy motorway M62. The front wheel drive worked great, and I travelled in the right-most lane, overtaking the two queues which began to slow down on the left. The rear-screen wiper worked fine, wiping away the wet snow.

Next day, driving again through cold winter weather, the car runs great. But when I try the rear screen wiper, only the cleaning fluid comes out, but the wiper remains motionless. Well, this is now the first thing of all the things that will eventually break at this car, the problems of the Ford Granada which I had from 2005-2007 also started with the rear wiper...

Today I had to run a brief errand, which I wanted to do during the daylight in the late afternoon. When I returned back to Uni for a planned evening session of software work, I got into the evening traffic in Headingley. The cars moved slowly forward. Suddenly I noticed that the windows began to fog, for no apparent reason. I put the ventilator on max, but the fogging continued. I had to wipe the front screen clear. Why was that happening? Did I bring too much snow with my shoes into the car? When I looked out to the front, it seemed to me as if some vapour was coming from the engine department. But it could also be the exhaust of the preceeding car. The temperature appeared to be fine, so I continued, but I decided I would stop at the next petrol station and have a look.

When I stopped the car at the BP petrol station on Otley Road, I noticed clearly that there was some vapour coming from the motor. I opened the bonnet (US-american: hood), and yes, there was some steaming and some water dripping. Damned. Where was the leak? Then I saw the thermostat loosely lying on the engine. I immedialely recognised this part, as 10 years earlier I have had a lot of trouble with that 1971 Plymouth Fury Custom Suburban Station Wagon, which had constantly trouble with the cooling system, and I had done a few thermostat changes on that car myself.

I looked for the place where that loose thermostat could have come from, and I found it: on the side of the engine where the cooling hoses lead into the engine, there was the thermostate case. I could lift the upper part - it had no connection to the lower part. The whole piece had just broken. No wonder, it is only made of plastic! The thermostat case of the Plymouth had been made of full metal.

So what to do now? I got petrol, and also bought two liters of antifreeze coolant. Poured one liter into the reservoir, but while I filled it, the steam came again out. Not good. I decided to drive the short distance up to the University campus and wait there for the AA to pick me up.

The coolant in the engine had probably all gone. But the temperature still had been reasonably in the middle, and even now when I slowly drove out of the station, it was fine. Only when I drove up on Churchwood Ave, the needle began slowly to move up. I made it into the campus, with the temperature needle now being at 45 deg angle instead of the usual horizontal direction. Parked the car at the road between Caedmon and Metceno where AA could easily pick it up. 17:00 now, I had hoped I could get some food for the wait, but the campus food shop closes now at 17:00. I go to my office, call first KwikFit, asking if they repair thermostates. No, they do not, but the guy there recommends Nationwide. I call there, yes, I can drop off the car. Then I call the AA breakdown service. They tell me that I will have to wait about 2 hours. Is fine with me, since I am in my office and can do some work as planned anyway.

18:30
I receive a txt message from AA that in 10 minutes their service vehicle will be there. I slowly pack things and walk down.

18:40
The AA van arrives. I tell the guy the situation, and he concludes that he cannot fix it here but that I need a towing to a repair shop. Since there is a thick flattened snow coverage on the road, he is concerned that he will not be able to pull my car from where it stands now. Instead he drives forward until he reaches the downward sloping road along the Acre. Since my car in principle can still run, he asks me to drive behind his van so that he can setup the towing.

This van has a built-in device for towing; with several motors the towing axle comes out of the rear of the van, and the driver assembles it and sets it up. It takes about 30 minutes to set up the towing. Since my Megane has an automatic transmission, it cannot be towed by a simple towbar, but its frontal axis needs to be lifted for the towing.

19:15
Everything is ready, the Megane is affixed properly to the towing axle, the additional rear lights are affixed, we are ready for driving. Slowly downwards the slippery road along the Acre. Some sliding around the left-hand curve into the exit road, towards St. Chads Drive. The driver does not want to go down directly through St. Chads Drive, because he considers this too steep and too slippery. So instead he wants to turn right to Batcliffe Drive, then down to St. Anne's Rd. When exiting the Uni campus, the roads are not as much cleaned: a thick snow cover has been flattened by cars driving on it, creating a slippery road surface. Exactly at the exit of the campus, a taxi van wants to enter at the same time. It partly blocks the access road, so we cannot immediately make a right turn but have to drive around it. During the turning-right maneuvre, the AA van appears to slip, and slides slowly onto the opposite side of the road while still turning to the right. We make the curve, but are now very much on the left side of the road, with the left wheels digging into the deeper snow at the side. And then we stop - stuck. This was a short ride.

19:20
An AA van with a car behind it now stuck at the snowy road curve. The driver makes several attempts, but mostly the left front wheel just spins freely. He tries to rock the vehicle. letting it roll back, then trying again to speed up towards the front. But it always gets stuck at some icy patch. Finally the van appears to get some grip, and slowly inches forward. We made it. Allright. Now forward uphill on Batcliffe Drive. I tell the driver about my recent experiences with driving on snow, but he appears to be very concentrated on moving forward. As the slope becomes steeper, we are loosing momentum, and finally we stop - again the left front wheel is spinning, while the whole van with its appendix stands still and only slides a bit about. We are now actually blocking the road, having slid onto the right side of the road. Other cars squeeze into the relatively narrow gap on the left between us and the cars parked there. An SUV graciously overtakes us on the right - by driving completely off the road onto the sidewalk and the side lawn. Currently there is no visible difference between the road and the side - all covered by snow. How will we get out of this stuck location?

19:28
The AA driver decides that we have to unload my car, drive up the hill separately, and then tow again downhill St. Anne's Road. Ok, if there is no other choice... he tries a few more times to drive out with the whole assembly, but it does not work. So he reverses the whole procedure for affixing my car.

He drives the van uphill, but the van still does not get a good grip on the surface. He asks me to push the van. What a situation: I am pushing the AA van which I had called for help! But it works: I push on the right back side of the car, always weary of the towing axle which dangerously follows from behind me; the left front wheel still keeps spinning, but it helps to move the van uphill. When on top, the driver decides to move even further forward, until the downward slope begins. This is reasonable, because even on the horizontal road stretch it would be difficult to start towing my car. I walk back to my car, start again the engine. The cold air should be able to cool it sufficiently, even without any liquid coolant! The Megane drives without any problems up the hill, then towards the van.

19:45
Same procedure again as before: affixing the car to the towing equipment.

20:02
Done. We continue down St. Anne's Road. The van slides a bit, but holds the track reasonably well. We even stop properly at the red traffic light. From now on the driving is smooth, as the roads are relatively free of snow.

20:20
Arriving at the Nationwide Repair Centre. There is already another car parked in the back. While the driver releases my car from the towing equipment, another AA van comes along, towing another car - also a drop-off at the repair station. And their driver tells that earlier he had brought the car which is already parked there! Tomorrow this Nationwide Repair Centre will make a very good business.

When I drove the Megane into its parking position, I operated the screen wipers. And surprise, surprise - the rear wiper was working again! That is the nice thing about such an inexpensive car: full of surprises (good ones and bad ones).

I just hope that the thermostat repair is not very expensive.

My car being towed in Headingley

2010-01-06T21:04:00.001Z

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Happy New Year 2010!

2010-01-06T10:45:00.005Z

A bit belated I wish you all a Happy New Year 2010!

Here in Leeds there was a "White Christmas". It had snowed before the holidays, it snowed before New Year, and yesterday a new snow dump brought at least 15 cm snow cover everywhere in and around Leeds.

As usual, road traffic collapses here in the UK when such snow conditions occur. There is usually not much snow here in winter, so when it comes, the road services are overwhelmed. One problem is that here in the UK a lot of salt is used to clear the roads from snow. They do not use snow ploughs but instead spray salt and sand grit. This is only effective when the snow cover is not more than a few cm. But with the current snow amount, I believe it would be better to use ploughs to move the snow to the side, before spraying salt on it. This is also for environmental reasons: salt damages the environment around the road ways. It also leads to increased corrosion of cars.

Driving on the M62 Motorway across the Pennines from Leeds to Manchester on 2.January 2010.

Snowfall at Leeds Met

2009-12-17T15:34:00.002Z

View out of my office window onto Priestley Building and parking lot

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European Commission Evaluators at Dinner

2009-11-25T22:10:00.001Z

in Brussels, restaurant Lo Scoglio

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