Blade Runner and London

One good thing about the pandemic lock down is having the time to catch up on my outstanding entertainment list. Listening to the Art of the Score podcast on Vangelis' score to Blade Runner I am remembering my own connection to the movie's music.

Back in July 2009 I was on my first solo overseas trip, to London for a week to attend a workshop. My wife and baby son were at home while I stayed at a pokey London hotel in Earls Court without summer air-conditioning. I existed in an almost time free zone, attending the workshop or exploring London during the day, sleeping when I got back to the hotel, waking in the middle of the night to video chat with B and Alex before returning to bed.

Early in my stay I popped into the Virgin Megastore and purchased a couple of soundtracks: Jack Nitzsche's Starman and the three disc Blade Runner set.

London isn't really a city that you would associate with the imagery of the dark 2019 Los Angeles portrayed in Blade Runner, one of my favourite movies. Yet it worked very well as a soundtrack for this trip.

It's fortunate that I had purchased a DVD burner in Singapore during my stopover, as I was otherwise reliant on my Walkman phone and Samsung MP3 player for music. I hooked the burner, bought for backup purposes, and ripped the music to my very recently purchased and very slim Sony VAIO P laptop and plugged in the also slim TDK flat travel speakers, the VAIO P speakers being tiny and poor.

I love to fall asleep to music, but B doesn't share my tastes, so I took this opportunity to do so. So every night I would drift off to the hypnotic tones of Blade Runner and Starman. And this tiny room, warm with summer heat, would be transformed into an exotically dreamy Middle Eastern locale with Tales of the Future or Damask Rose.

My flight home was via Hong Kong, the city that apparently inspired Blade Runner's canyons of neon. I arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning, exhausted and needing a sleep. The hotel desk at the airport recommended the Novotel CityGate nearby.

The filtered golden brown light of Hong Kong's dusky air recalled the first meeting of Deckard and Rachel at the Tyrell Corporation. Too exhausted to do anything more, I opened my laptop on the table, lay down on the pristine bed, and fell into the most delicious of sleeps to the music of Blade Runner.

Later on, before I almost missed my final flight home, I walked the streets of Mong Kok under those neon lights of Los Angeles 2019.

Arncliffe revisited

It was six years ago, almost to the day, that I visited Arncliffe in Sydney's south and remarked upon the English appearance of a disused kiosk building adjacent to the station. I happened by Arncliffe on Thursday last week and noticed in passing that the building has either been demolished and replaced or rendered to look like a generic McMansion from anywhere in a newer Sydney suburb.

August 2009

August 2015

The next travel computer...

... Is a phone.

I've long been enamoured with small, highly portable computers, back to the days of a programmable Sharp calculator. My last couple of notebooks have been very thin and light, perfect for carrying around in a normal backpack. So far nothing has been able to beat the flexibility of a full PC.

The notebook serves as a tool for copying and uploading photos from the camera, for looking up information and checking into flights, for typing blogs and fixing up issues at work.

However, with these carry-on luggage only cheap flights ever gram and every centimetre counts. And phones are becoming even more capable. My Sony Z2 has the same number of screen pixels as my ultrabook. The same as my full HD television actually. A USB port, a micro SD reader and many other features.

Sure storage is an issue, to be solved either with bigger or more memory cards (back to the old days of travelling with digital cameras) or using online storage as the only backup. Google's Android operating system integrates well with their Google+ photo service, naturally enough.

Chrome also mostly mimics the abilities of the desktop version.

The problem is the keyboard. Typing thousands of words on the small screen is tough. I bought one tiny bluetooth keyboard from Japan, but it's just too small and requires function key presses to get numbers and popular characters. So now I'm trying the Rapoo E6500 mini bluetooth keyboard. That's what I'm typing this on. So far, so good!

Wouldn't mind a mini bluetooth mouse though. Sure I can find one.

The keys are not as nice as my notebooks, all of which I selected partly for their keyboards (the VAIO P being a case in point - magnificent keyboard for such a tiny computer). But good enough to type quite accurately and quickly.

I'm sure that I'll still be taking the ultrabook on many future trips, but I'll give this setup some further testing to see if it suffices for those situations where space is at an absolute premium.

The crazy weather

Yesterday, in the middle of October, the area around Sydney experienced catastrophic bushfire conditions of heat and wind, leading to the destruction of hundreds of home. Last week there was apparently temperatures of 39 degrees in the city.

I didn't know at the time because we were on holiday in Asia. But even in Japan the weather was unseasonably hot (it's always hot in the other countries we visited) and we felt the turbulent effects of Typhoon Fitow on the way up, dodged Typhoon Danas on the way down. A few days after we left Da Nang and Hoi An at least five people in the region died due to Typhoon Nari and Typhoon Wipha was headed for Japan.

I asked my colleagues, some of who are climate and atmospheric scientists, if this was something we had to look forward. One replied that this was the hottest year on record, but they expected stronger typhoons in future, not more frequent.

He also pointed out the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), which currently points to greater typhoon activity in the Pacific.

Good luck to all the emergency workers across the world.

Edit: This article in the Japan Times says that the country is on track for a 30 typhoons this season.

Announcing allrite@

Yesterday I released my latest website, allrite@, my new online travel journal. 

This was my first project written using Django, a python web framework. I haven't had time to do much programming lately, but I found Django's built in functionality, including sophisticated admin screens, to be a real time saver. I'm calling the journal platform Tatami (or maybe t@tami) after the Japanese straw matting that is a feature of their houses and ryokans. Plus it sounds like "ta ta me"!

Development was done on a $250 netbook running Ubuntu. It was such a pleasure using Linux again after being stuck in Windows land for so long.

Getting the system running on the Webfaction host was a bit of a pain. Somehow, through brute force mainly, I got it operational by yesterday morning.

I managed to add features such as an RSS feed, comments, image uploads, WYWSIWYG editor, nice urls and more. Planned features that I ran out of time to add include searching, faceted search using tags such as location and transport options (I had url issues with these), a better wider header image and improved layout and styling.

The reason I couldn't complete everything before initial release was because I was up against a very fixed deadline. My latest trip, a 10th anniversary holiday in Europe, started yesterday and I haven't brought the Linux netbook with me!

IYou can read about it at allrite@...

Trottoir Roulant Rapide

The Trottoir Roulant Rapide was a very fast travelator located between Paris Montparnasse station and the adjacent metro. I remember using this, though I can't remember if it was in 2004 or 2005 and whether we had luggage with us or not. Scary and exciting at the same time. Pity that it has been slowed down or even dismantled now.

Little Li's Pig's Blood Cakes

We are considering visiting Taiwan just so we can eat this popular and fragrantly chewy and soft snack available at the Gongguan Night Market. Or maybe for other reasons instead.

Check out other interesting food, like Frog Hits Milk, in Taiwan Tourism's North Area Street Eats guide.

Arncliffe

Yesterday I travelled to work via England and the Middle East. Or that's what it felt like. I caught the train from Arncliffe. As I walked up towards the station along the eastern side of the railway line I came across a small park. At the end of the park, at the beginning of the footbridge to the station, there was a disused kiosk. The kiosk, footbridge and station buildings themselves looked like they were transplanted from somewhere in England.


When I arrive at the station entrance the scene changes. Schoolgirls in headscarfes and olive skinned schoolboys mill noisily near the steps. The shops lining the road to the west of the tracks are adorned with Arabic script. A clothing store sells Arab fashions for women.

As I wait on the platform for the train, surrounded by people of Middle Eastern, Asian and European descent I watch the Emirates giant A380 aircraft lift slowly into the air. It was flying to New Zealand now, but when it returns the passengers inside will be destined for Dubai or London. Maybe they should just visit Arncliffe instead.

End of the line

Where is that, the old track going?
Where is there, I want to know
Running away, I want to follow
Far away, I want to go

Into the distance, the old track leading
Into the unknown, I will follow
Hidden away, I will seek
Beyond horizons, I will go

Comes the time, the old track ceases
Comes the place, I find the end
Where it goes, I cannot follow
The passing of a dear friend

The Burning Gates

At Derweze (Darvaza), in Turkmenistan, there is a 60m in diameter crater filled with the flames of burning gas since a Soviet drilling rig collapsed into it in the 1950's.

There are some awesome photographs and videos of this doorway to Hell.

Why I want to return to Japan

Cherry blossoms in Springtime. Just one of many reasons to return to Japan!

Flight associated headaches

I have been on a few international flights where I suffered debilitating headaches. One was so bad that I considered quitting international travel altogether. Now it seems that I am not alone.

A paper in Cephalalgia, An Internation Journal of Headache, as it dubs itself, found that over 22% of passengers reported flight associated headaches at least once a month.

The research was based on questionnaires filled out by travellers, the majority of whom flew in economy class. Suggestions for possible causes of these headaches were the constant noise of the engines, the quality, the lower air pressure and oxygen content of the recirculated cabin air.

Another, earlier, study in the New England Journal of Medicine where the changes in cabin pressure was simulated in a hypobaric chamber found that some participants suffered symptoms akin to high-altitude mountain sickness.

Thankfully, at least in my case, I don't get headaches on every flight and it has been possible to enjoy many holidays in distant places. It will be interesting to see what future research uncovers, as well as the impact of quieter cabins, such as on the Airbus A380, and the higher cabin pressures of the Boeing 787.

References

I Potasman, O Rofe & B Weller, Flight-associated headaches—prevalence and characteristics. Cephalagia, 2008; 28:863-867.

Muhm JM, Rock PB, McMullin DL, Jones SP, Lu IL, Eilers KD et al. Effect of aircraft-cabin altitude on passenger discomfort. N Engl J Med 2007; 357:18–27.

Travel Blog Diarrhoea

I copied the text of my China blog and my other travel blog into Word and discovered that I have written about 63,000 words and 133 pages of 12pt text since the start of the China trip last year. And I still have plenty to write even without another trip. There are also 10,253 photos taken by B and I during our trips since that time (even more from earlier trips and others that are travel related).