Travel to India

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.

Trouble with Google Chrome Browser

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.

Trouble with "Outlook"

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...