It Could Be Worse

Last week I made the annual pilgrimage to Brighton for dConstruct – one of the UK’s leading grass-roots Web conferences. Now in its fourth year, the theme of the conference this time was “Designing the social Web”, a topic increasingly of relevance to what we do at IOP Publishing.

“Social Software” is merely software that gets better the more people use it; it’s not necessarily about creating the next Facebook or MySpace, and many (though not all) sites could benefit from social features. While we, as a company, have dabbled in several of the Social Web’s themes (blogs, commenting, registration, social bookmark links etc.) and have oft-stated aims of engaging with communities of interest in the world of Physics, it’s probably fair to say that our efforts have been piecemeal and not informed by any overall Social Web strategy. I could start going off on one about the need for multi-disciplinary Web teams, but I’ll save that for BathCamp at the weekend…

In previous years, I’ve come away from the dConstruct conference wanting more depth; 45-minute sessions are necessarily biased towards an overview or taster of any given topic. This year, I booked onto Joshua Porter’s workshop “Social Web Design: from Strategy to Interface” in order to get a bit more substance.

I left Bristol on Wednesday afternoon, taking a slightly odd train journey via Bristol Parkway and Reading. Four hours later, I was in Brighton. A taxi ride took me to the hotel (Kemp Townhouse), which was small but perfectly formed; after checking in, I wandered out for food. Knowing that geeks and healthy food were unlikely to be in close proximity over the following days, I chose Sawadee, a Thai restaurant in St. James’ Street where I had a new experience: asking for a table for one. No matter, though; the next two days were bound to give plenty of social interaction so some peace and quiet was welcome, and the food was tasty but relatively healthy: Thai fishcakes followed by pan-fried cod in a sweet-and-sour sauce with rice.

After that, I returned to the hotel to get some rest before the learning-and-networking onslaught to follow.

To be continued…

Oops – it looks like I’ve been having one of my occasional blog hiatuses. My apologies! Since my last post in May, the following exciting things have happened:

• We (i.e. Clive, with occasional help from us & Claudia) started (and pretty much finished) building the conservatory.
• Phoebe had her first birthday.
• After nearly ten accident-free years, we had two minor bumps in the car. First, I pulled into a Cornish field entrance, skidded on gravel and hit a rock. Two weeks later, I hit some metal framework (From a lorry? A tank? A roadsign? Who knows?) on the A36 near Warminster while travelling at 60mph, damaging the suspension arm, floorpan, exhaust and sill. The first bump was knocked out by the garage but the second required an insurance claim, lightening our bank account by £350 (Note to self: negotiate a smaller policy excess next time). Talking of the garage, they managed to completely miss the damage under the car when we took it in for a service, despite the fact that I told them I could see damage to the floorpan and sill. We weren’t best pleased, I can tell you.
• I turned 31. Not in itself notable, but I suppose I’m properly in my thirties now.
• There have been two more Bradford-on-Avon Geek meetups. Photos of the last one are on Flickr.
• Phoebe has started walking; we’re glad we got the stair gates fitted! She can also repeat, parrot fashion, many many words, so Kathy and I have to be careful what we say. She can also say words in a non-parrot capacity, like “milk”, “up”, “down”, “no”, “more”, “please” (Yay! She’s a polite girl!), “bowl” and lots more.
• Kathy has started child-minding, for the child of a co-worker of mine who was in our NCT class. The nice early start means I get into the office by 8am, giving me scope for a lunch break.

So that’s it really (I think!). Work carries on apace: we released another web site back in June; we’re now scratching our heads over the eternal “build vs buy” conundrum vis the way forward. Lead times for new sites need to be reduced, it seems.

After hearing about how great last year’s South by South-west (SXSW) was, I quite fancied going. There’s a whole Brit contingent making the trip this year, which would have been fun to ride the coattails of. As you can infer from the title of this post, though, I’m not going. I don’t personally have the money, I didn’t ask work whether the training budget would stretch, and (to be honest, this is the main reason) I wouldn’t want to be out of the country for a week when Kathy’s six months pregnant.

However, like the Murphy’s, I’m not bitter.

Apple Expo Banner, Paris

Originally uploaded by t1mmyb

We’ve never been to San Fransisco (maybe we will one day), but we did manage to go to Apple Expo Paris back in September.

One of the things that I noticed during our recent tour was that urinals in European toilets are, on the whole, so much more technologically advanced than our own British ones. Mind you, I’ve never had to manually flush urinals in the UK, which happened a few times on the continent. Ours tend to be flushed, en masse, on a timed basis, whereas ones in continental Europe (even the recent EU-joiners like Slovakia) tend to operate using the automatic sensor, per-urinal-flushing method.

So, chalk up yet another thing that we in the UK do worse than our cousins over La Manche. Actually, Kathy & I started a list of things that they do better and things that we do better, and the list was heavily stacked in favour of the continent. I’ll dig the list out soon and post it here.

It had started raining during the night so we packed up the van and parked it next to the laundry room so we could do some washing. It felt wonderful to get clothes clean and pillowcases, everything smelt so fresh and lovely, especially after it had been tumble-dried.

We did a grocery shop while the washing was on: yoghurts, mustard, fleisch salat for Tim, muesli, oranges and nectarines.

We were glad to leave the campsite as it was a bit depressing although hard to put your finger on why. It had stopped raining by the time we arrived in Klosterneuberg, just outside Vienna, about 2:30pm. This campsite felt very friendly and cheerful and we relaxed, played cards, bought some cheap red wine and planned the next day.

16.09.04.

Headed into Vienna about midday on the train and got a 24 hour travelcard each. Started at the main square where we had a look at the cathedral which was a bit dark and grey. Headed for a wurst stand for our daily sausage fix, the weather was beautiful again.

Kathy foolishly agreed to finding the Apple centre, was a bit of a trek across the city but we passed the Opera house and some of the museums, all very grand, beautiful buildings. Wandered through the pedestrian area looking in the shops and then headed for Cafe Central that we had read about in one of our books.

We were glad we did as it was really gorgeous, arched ceilings, pillars, all beautifully decorated and a guy playing the piano while we relaxed with coffee/tea and cake, again (are you all worrying about our waistlines???). Tim had the famous Sacher torte and read a newspaper and we soaked up the atmosphere while smart waiters bustled around.

We had a look around a department store which was like John Lewis and set off to hunt down some Teewurst (one of Kathy’s favourite things). Found it in the basement of a shopping centre in a supermarket called Billa. Looked like the basement floor or Selfdridges in Manchester!

Had originally planned to have dinner in a Heuringer, one of the wine taverns which are part of Viennese culture but they are all out in the suburbs so we chose a restaurant that sounded good where we could go and have Wiener Schnitzel.

It was in a quieter area of town and took a bit of finding but we were so glad we had made the effort as soon as we arrived. It had a lovely atmosphere and when we ordered a beer each two half litre glasses arrived and tasted great. We shared a wonderful fried chicken salad for starter, Kathy had Wiener Schnitzel with potatoes and Tim had fried potato stuffed with mince meat with a sour cream and garlic sauce, it was out of this world gorgeous. Anyone who wants to come to Vienna with us for a weekend can come and see for themselves.

We were too full for dessert so made our way back to the van and rested our happy tummies!

A well deserved sleep saw us getting up at 10:30am and rushing to pack and leave by 11am. It was a fantastically beautiful day, clear blue sky. Shortly after leaving we got a right shock when the roof of the van flew up, Tim had forgotten to close the catches that keep it down! Well it was his job! So we stopped speedily and did them.

The land was very flat and the views were beautiful. Had to queue for over half an hour to get through border control but finally entered the Czech Republic. We then began to encounter the detours, it seems there were road works going on on most of the main roads we wanted and so instead we ended up driving down bumpy rural roads some not much wider than single track. Thus the journey took longer than anticipated and the campsite proved difficult to find – what is it about campsites??

The campsite we were aiming for was closed when we arrived but there was one next door so we went there and chose a lovely spot next to an apple tree. In this area of Prague there are lots of small campsites that have people have set up in their back gardens. It was lovely and quiet, clean loos and a wonderful beer for sale called Gambrinus that cost us approximately 37p each! We had a wonderful dinner of boiled potatoes with butter, ham, leek, bread roll and cold beer, mmmmmmm!

We got up early and prepared for our day trip to Bratislava. We had originally planned to camp there but had read that the campsites were ‘grim’. As it is not far from Vienna we changed our plans and took the train there instead. We got to travel on a double-decker train into Vienna centre!

The journey took about an hour and a quarter, including a fifteen minute stop for border control / passport checks. Tim read up on the city while I wrote postcards. The weather was getting cooler, we were both wearing jeans and the nights were starting to get a bit chilly.

On our arrival in Bratislava we realised we had no currency – they don’t join the Euro for a few years yet – and couldn’t speak the language. We got some Slovak crowns out from the cash machine and wandered around until we found the tram ticket office. Got a tram into the centre and paused to eat the lunch we had brought with us, for a change.

We followed the route in the ‘Rough Guide’, had a look into a church that was closed, wandered down into the old town, past two towers. We stopped into a shop called L’Occitane, the French equivalent of the Body Shop but more expensive! The sales assistant was very enthusiastic and told us all about the products and gave us several free samples. We bought some lavender oil for Kathy’s bites.

We found the two main squares of the city which were wonderfully peaceful and pretty in the sunlight. We then wandered on to the river and saw the bridge support which is reminiscent of the Starship Enterprise, it has a cafe at the top.

We visited the Jewish museum which was small but interesting and not emotionally orchestrated. We got two books as part of the entry fee.

Back in the main squares we went in search of refreshment and sat outside a cafe. We had Golden Magic tea with lemon and shared a piece of apple strudel. We were entertained by a group of young people who were practising juggling and Diablos overseen by a very tall guy in a waistcoat and trousers, looking very Aladdin-like.

We then set off to find the National Gallery which we’d read had an exhibition of design and architecture on the top floor. We got there just after five with under an hour ‘til closing time so rushed to the top floor but all we could find were paintings and statues. We were a bit disappointed but we found some fantastic sculptured heads showing different emotions – one called ‘suppressed laughter’.

We were determined to find the blue church we had read about before we got the train back so we set off. We were ready to give up when we found the right road and the church. It is like something out of a fairytale with beautfiul mosaic glass tiles that look like strings of jewels hanging from it.

Short of time we walked in the direction of the station stopping to take a picture of a map which we then referred to as we made our way. We spent the return train journey reading the books from the Jewish museum.

Buongiorno tutte!

We drove all the way to Lake Maggiore, arriving about 8pm. 300 miles in one day: quite a tiring trek, really.

It was starting to get dark, so we stopped at the first campsite we found. It was right by the lake, but we couldn´t see a lot in the dusk.

In the morning light we found that the site wasn´t that great, and Kathy was suffering with an allergic reaction to mozzie bites, so we left post haste.

We decided to avoid the autostrada (costs money) and headed for Bologna, eventually arriving at 6:30pm. We found the campsite, but needed supplies so went on a wild goose chase to the supermercado: 3Km turned into 17Km!

The campsite was quite crowded but had the best facilities yet: large cubicles and v. clean. Had mozzarella, basil, tomato and olive oil salad for dinner, accompanied by some unexpectedly fizzy red wine.

10.9.04
Bit of a lie-in, showered and planned our day. Got the 1pm bus into Bologna: 1 euro each way! Wandered towards the central square: Piazza Maggiore. Had wonderful pizza at Altero and then looked around the church of San Petronio: 22 side chapels all containing paintings, scupltures etc. It has an astronomical clock; we bought a guide book and some postcards (no photos allowed!).

The general architecture and feel of the place was fantastic: columned porticos everywhere. Bought pasta, dried tomatoes and funghi porcini (mushrooms). We also visited San Stefano´s (Saint Stephen´s) church!

To round off the day, we had a meal at Nino´s, where we both chose the set fish menu. It was absolutely amazing, as was the service. Something, unfortunately, disagreed with Tim´s stomach (mussels?) and he was rather ill later

So on to Venice…

…with the sound of music! No we weren’t in Austria but we were travelling through the Alps.

We left Lyon at 10am and struggled to escape, French signposts are pretty awful.

Looking forward to the Alps we began to see them as hazy outlines against the horizon. Difficult to put into words the beauty and awesomeness of the landscape, we took lots of photos and exhausted the battery in the video camera.

We drove zig-zag up a mountain, astounding views and the road dropped away on one side in a stomach-lurching manner. The thermometer on the van stopped working, which it had done before in England, but the engine fan was working, phew! The van (now nicknamed Freda) did really well considering the gradient, the heat and the tight corners.

The view from the top was amazing.

On the way down the van began to make a squealing noise – can’t say we blame it really – which seemed to be associated with the brakes, bit worrying. We took it easy and stopped a couple of times to let it cool down. When we reached the flat ground at the bottom it stopped.

We left the mountains, sadly, but were now in Italy, Buongiorno!

Decided to press on to the lakes and so took the motorway (Autostrada) which you have to pay for. Got to the booth before joining the motorway and as there was no person had no idea what to do. Sat there panicking for a while until some people at the next booth called to us, in fantastic English, to ‘push the button and take the ticket’.