Surfing the Luminiferous Ether

I was recently on a business trip in Europe on which I was unfortunately stuck using London as one of my main air travel focal points. On the trip, I used three of London’s five main airports (Heathrow, Stansted, and London City); I have now used four of the five airports. The exception is Luton, and my British colleagues tell me that I am not missing anything.

With a weekend day to spare, I decided to use the London Walks guide to occupy my day. Every walking tour I have taken with London Walks has shown me small hidden spots in London, sometimes right under my nose. My Kensington experiences have been negative, confined to the overcrowded and high street dominated by chain stores. As a former British colleague of mine explained once, \"When we talk about having more money than sense, Kensington is one of the first places that springs to mind.\" To attempt to crack the shell of the bland corporate veneer, I decided on the Old Kensington walk.

David, our guide for the walk, is surprisingly, the son of a Wisconsin farmer. When I mentioned that I had attended Grinnell College, he asked if I was still a student. Oh, David, flattery will get you everywhere! (I graduated almost eleven years ago. While I’d like to believe I still look 20, my chosen discipline of engineering really demands that I accept reality.)

The highlights of the walk:

David explained that the people who maintained streetlights or cleaned chimneys (my memory fails me) were also responsible for waking up household residents by using a long pole to knock on their windows. This activity is the origin of the phrase “knocked up,” which apparently in British English has merely the unpleasant connotation of a wake-up call and has nothing to do with the American English connotation.

As we stood on Thackeray Street, David asked us to consider the types of shops (hairdressers and high-end clothiers), and told us to consider the “sheer social muzzle velocity” of the neighborhood, which is distinctly plutocratic. An unimproved 17th or 18th century home sold in the neighborhood recently for ₤1.5 million. Social muzzle velocity is a most excellent phrase that I shall endeavor to use more frequently.

In Kensington Church Walk, we stopped in front of Annie Russell’s hair salon. “How gifted is Annie Russell?” asked David rhetorically, before answering that “she is talented enough to be Elizabeth Taylor’s hairdresser for twelve years.”

Also on Kensington Church Walk, there is a famous low wall, shown in the photos below. The late Princess of Wales lived in the neighborhood, and both William and Harry amused themselves walking on the wall. (During the course of the tour and taking the photographs below, I think a half-dozen children came to walk on the wall.) One resident of the building behind the wall dislikes this practice, and has instigated the planting of unpleasant plants along the wall to discourage children from walking on it. David is opposed to this idea, and partway through the tour, he saw a neighborhood resident and said, “I’ve got the metaphor: barbed wire wall!”

St. Mary Abbots church is a short walk from the tube station. To enter the church from the high street, you walk through a small cloister:

Two of the windows on the St. Mary Abbots chapel are labeled with the “ancient lights” sign seen in the photo below. England has an old law that says owners with unobstructed light can protect the level of light received through a window light by putting up a sign like the one below. New developments cannot block light through the windows. The legal doctrine of the right to illumination has not been adopted in the United States as a general principle, but some narrow exceptions do exist, mainly for solar energy. For example, the California Solar Shade Control Act protects investments in rooftop solar panels by ensuring that they retain unobstructed access to the sun. In England, the legal doctrine goes back to the days when sunlight was precious. Windows which have had continuous access to light for 20 years can advertise the fact with a sign reading “ancient lights,” which then protects the sunlight on the window against future obstructions.

Our tour ended near Kensington Palace. In the days when it was a working palace, the building in the photo below was used as barracks for the royal guards unit. It has now been converted into flats. On a previous tour, one of David’s customers had visited one of the exclusive flats. They are small, with no closets (17th century soldiers didn’t need much storage space). At the time of the report, the flats rented for ₤10,000 per week, which is about $87,000 per month at current exchange rates. For the price, you do get some cachet. As part of the palace grounds, the landlord is the Crown. The building itself is pretty nondescript:

Higher class accomodations in Kensington have period details, like this old-style bell pull to announce yourself at the door, rather than the modern doorbell buttons we are now generally accustomed to:

As the tour group broke up, David jokingly described London Walks as “a social security program for unemployed actors.” It shows. Most of the London Walks guides have impeccable timing, flawless delivery, sly humor, and have big voices that easily carry out to the edges of large groups. Combine this with all the knowledge about the hidden back streets, and London Walks is living proof of Dr. Johnson’s famous maxim that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

In February of this year, I was in Athens for an IEEE ad hoc meeting. I have wanted to visit Athens for well more than a decade, and it was worth the wait. In a way, I’m glad that I made the trip after I bought a good camera and had some time to get used to it because I got much better results than if I were learning the camera on the trip.

Naturally, getting to Athens was not without a hitch, since I was transferring at one of the world’s worst airports, London Heathrow. (It could, however, be worse.) When I checked in, I received boarding passes for all three segments of my trip. After arriving in London, I checked the monitors, and found out that the London-Athens flight had been cancelled. Upon checking with customer service at the airline, I was told that the flight had been cancelled because of a snowstorm that had shut down the Athens airport.

My arrival in Athens was delayed by a day. By the time I arrived, the snow was melting quite rapidly, though I did get a few pictures of this unusual occurrence.

First stop, the Acropolis. Really, is there an alternative? At the foot of the Acropolis, approaching from the south, there was snow by the curb of the street, with the sun shining brightly on the Parthenon above:

Getting closer, you could peek through the gates of the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, where some of the stones were still covered with a thin layer of snow:

When walking around, I felt an unexpectedly dumbstruck trying to read signs. Unlike, say, China or Japan, where I don’t expect to read anything except the Romanization on the street signs, I do know the Greek alphabet well enough to try reading the larger Greek signs most of the time. (I know the Greek alphabet from studying physics, not the language.) On-the-fly transliteration helped only to the extent that the word was close to a form that had been adopted into English directly, or words that were adopted in English through an intermediate language like Latin. It is hard to describe the feeling I got when I started to look for the “Εξοδος” on an exit sign rather than the “exit,” or when I realized the derivation of “agoraphobia” while looking at the open space of the Ancient Agora:

There is also a much smaller agora built by the Romans, also built around a central courtyard:

As I sort through pictures from the trip, I’ll be posting the best ones.

Earlier this month, I was speaking at the JANET(UK) Networkshop 36 conference. Unfortunately, getting there involved the new Heathrow airport, a slight snowstorm, and Terminal 5. After having lived through it, I’m not sure whether the “snowstorm” or Terminal 5 was worse.

When we landed, snow had halted most of the ground activities at Heathrow. Our captain said that it was as bad as he had ever seen the snow, and he noted that Heathrow does not have a lot of snow handling equipment. As a result, nothing was moving and our plane had to sit for a while.

We are not talking about a huge amount of snow. Chris Hessing, the chair of the Open1X Project, was traveling with me. Chris is from Utah. I think he put it best when he said, “If the grass is poking up through the snow, it doesn’t count.” Here’s a view out the airplane window:

It was cold out. Here’s the tail of a Jet Airways plane. On the dark blue tail, you can clearly see the internal frame melting the snow along the structural elements.

Nevertheless, everything had ground to a halt because of the snow. Several hours later, most airlines other than British Airways had recovered. BA blamed the snow, cancelled lots of flights, and blamed the weather. To deal with the crowd of people who needed to be rebooked, BA called in extra service staff. For example, here’s one of the major service desks at Terminal 5, dealing effectively with the wave of cancellations that occurred at 11 am:

I did try to speak to the person at the desk, and he told me that my problem could only be handled landside. BA computers cannot automatically rebook passengers on to the next flight, which meant that huge crowds were going landside to get rebooked, waiting in lines, going back through security, and getting cancelled again. By the end of the day, anecdotal evidence suggested that their lines were best measured in hours, with estimates as high as six hours.

The whole experience was awful. I did finally talk BA into a hotel room for the night after the second cancellation of the day. They had resumed operations the next morning, and I was on an early flight to Glasgow. However, in line for security, I overheard other passengers talking about how the computer system for luggage handling had crashed again.

I wrote more about my experience on FlyerTalk in this thread

To answer the most frequently asked question, my luggage arrived without any problems. Although T5 has been notorious for lost luggage, I did not have any problem. My best guess is that I checked in for my flight in San Francisco with American Airlines, so entering my baggage record into BA’s computers didn’t need to use the T5 luggage system.

On Wednesday, I read that the problems at BA had actually made Heathrow better for other passengers. With fewer BA jets trying to get on to the runways, the other airlines had an easier time getting out on schedule.

The bottom line is that if you want me to go somewhere in Europe, you had better have a plan that doesn’t involve British Airways. I was quite glad to hear that American is expanding code share services with both Iberia and SN Brussels, which should allow me to avoid Heathrow in the future.

January’s IEEE 802.11 working group meeting was held in Taipei. Towards the end of my time in Taipei, I wandered through the grounds of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. In a small area with a statue of Dr. Sun, there was a neat view of Taipei 101, shrouded in the heavy wet fog around the city at the time.

One of my favorite things to do with my camera is just to go wandering. On my January trip to Hong Kong, I stumbled across the Graham Street Market, which is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) in Hong Kong. Out of everything I saw, there were two scenes that particularly struck me.

The first was at a seafood shop. As typical for the Guangdong region, much of what’s on sale is alive and kept in polystyrene water containers. If you look closely at the photo below, you can see the aeration tubes. What really struck me about the photo, though, is the smile on the face of the woman helping a customer.

(As an aside, one of the reasons why I was shooting in black and white is because it doesn’t require me to color balance. Street market vendors use all kinds of lights, each of which has a slightly different color cast. Tungsten lamps are orange, fluorescent lamps have a sickly greenish cast, and the energy-efficient metal halide lamps that light streets the world over spread a yellowish light. Provided there is enough contrast, switching to black-and-white means that I don’t need to deal with the horrid color clash from all the lighting.)

The second scene, which I didn’t capture as well as I would have liked, illustrates the captivity of traffic to pedestrians. Only a small fraction of Hong Kong residents own cars because the government taxes automobiles very heavily and the transit system is possibly the best in the world. The street market is actually a street. As I wandered around, I noticed that trucks were making deliveries, but they sometimes had to move very slowly through single-lane streets that were choked with pedestrian traffic. At one point, I noticed a car moving slowly through the pedestrian crowd. It wasn’t just any car, either. I love the contrast of the immaculately polished white Bentley moving through a crowd of pedestrians.

In January, the IEEE 802.11 working group met in Taipei. The week before, I hosted a meeting for Task Group U in Hong Kong, a city that everybody should visit for its unique blend of traditional Chinese and Western culture.

I’ve been going to Hong Kong for over 15 years, though there was a gap of more than ten years between my first and second visits. In that time, one of the most notable changes is an unfortunate side effect of the rapid economic development in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and the entire Pearl River Delta region. Air pollution has become much more prevalent, to the point where it can often be hard to see across the beautiful harbor.

After the meeting one night, I took one of the Star Ferry’s Harbour Cruises with some of my fellow attendees. As we passed by the Central district, I noticed flashes of light coming from up high on Victoria Peak. At this point, I am so accustomed to the seemingly permanent haze that it took me a while to realize that the flashes were tourist cameras going off on the peak.

As the boat docked, I debated whether to head to the peak at 10 pm, since I was quite tired. My companions provided the needed encouragement, and I’m glad I went. By the time I made it up, many of the buildings had turned off their colorful night lights but it was still the best view I’ve ever had of the harbor:

I later spoke with my colleagues who live in Hong Kong, and they told me that a night so clear almost never happens. I feel very fortunate that I happened to be in the city at the time.

Yesterday morning, I was awakened at 2:08 am by the incoming text message indication sound from my phone. I am traveling in Europe and my local time is +10 hours relative to my home, so it was a perfectly reasonable time to send a message to me in California. As I stumbled across the room, I wondered which of my friends or colleagues I had forgotten to tell about my trip.

The answer was “none of them.” T-Mobile had sent me a text message with the following contents:

Free T-Mobile Msg: Use your T-Mobile HotSpot account at Starbucks for years to come with no additional charges. Learn more at hotspot.t-mobile.com.

As I have often said before, T-Mobile knows where I am. Their roaming database knows that I’m in Europe because I’m attached to the Vodafone Greece network. Therefore, the T-Mobile network is perfectly capable of knowing what time it is where I am. Sending me text messages in the early hours of the morning is just aggressively stupid customer service. At 2 am, I do not care about how long I can use the hotspots at Starbucks, and in fact, coffee is not something I remotely want to consider.

(Early morning disturbances from the phone were the driving force behind the time zone processing feature I developed for my home PBX. Read part 1 and part 2 of the Linux Journal description.)

If anything, this text message is yet another illustration of why I can’t wait to get an OpenMoko phone. The first thing I’ll do is develop a “turn off ringing and text messages within the hours of X pm to Y am” feature, so that I’m not bothered by this ever again.

It’s a long-held article of truth among frequent travelers that avoiding O’Hare in the winter is a good idea. Actually, it’s avoiding O’Hare period, since the summer brings nasty thunderstorms.

I, like a fool, have disregarded The Truth, and I am paying for it as I wait for my plane to arrive on a two-plus hour delay. How bad is it? Well, this snapshot of the American flight status boards should tell you. Yellow indications on the boards indicate delays. Of the six displays in the picture, the left five are for departures. 26 flights are departing on time, out of, oh, lots…

I was in Helsinki for an IEEE ad hoc meeting recently. On my last night in Helsinki, I went out for a walk after night, and took this picture of the statue of Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, the first President of Finland, in front of the Eduskuntatalo (house of the Finnish Parliament).

What I found remarkable about the experience is that the statue is only the width of a driveway across from the front steps of the building. I pulled out my tripod and proceeded to fiddle with my camera to set everything up. Nobody approached me and told me that photography was forbidden, or that mysterious security rules dictated that I move along, even though I was only a few meters from the entrance to the building. The parliament may not have been in session, but I can’t imagine that I’d be allowed to set up my tripod anywhere I wanted to on the U.S. Capitol grounds.

More photos from Helsinki are in the Helsinki gallery here.

Since September, I’ve been traveling a lot and posting has been light. A few days ago, I logged in to the American web site, and I was greeted with a new elite status:

(This month, I also re-gained elite status on United, due to a two-week period where I took four trans-Pacific flights.)

I’ve never been an Executive Platinum before. I’ve had lousy luck on using first-class upgrades most of the year, so I’m curious to see if my new status helps out my low percentage.