Articles
Something is rotten in the airport of Heathrow
Tuesday 1 April 2008
The recent chaos at Heathrow brought about when the new Terminal 5 opened to passengers last Thursday has shot the airport to people’s attention across much of the world. Many people have been saying for years that the world’s most busy international airport is a nightmare to deal with, and hitherto I mostly haven’t agreed. I’ve used the airport frequently enough—several times a year—that I got to know it (Terminals 1 & 4 in particular) fairly well. However, I think that because I was comfortable using those terminals I didn’t realize quite how unfriendly Heathrow is to less-frequent travellers.[[Nevertheless, I freely acknowledged, and frequently complained about, the problems with arriving at Heathrow. All too often when on a long-haul flight landing in
A tale of Swiss bureaucracy
Tuesday 30 October 2007
In case you didn’t know, I am spending this academic year as an ‘étudiant libre’ at the University of Geneva. Since I am studying Modern Languages (French, in particular!), I have to spend the third year of my four-year degree course in a country where the language is spoken. Geneva was recommended to my friend Isobel and me by our Latin tutor.
I am living in a flat in Geneva, going to classes in the university. However, I had to wade through an awful lot of red tape to get here. I’m not going to go into details of the process of applying to the university, which was further complicated by the fact that both Issy and I were initially rejected to come and study here for a year. [[My application (and Issy’s) was originally rejected on the grounds that I
A trip into the Outback to take some photos
Wednesday 24 October 2007
I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror—
The wide brown land for me!—from 'My Country' (1890/1911),
by Dorothea Mackellar (1885–1968)
When it comes to the Outback, Dorothea Mackellar had it right: it's a place of stark contrasts. The tourism phrase 'Red Centre', which has now entered common parlance, doesn't quite do the Central Australian terrain justice—I came expecting a land of endless red rock but instead found greens, greys, browns, and yellows to complement the reds. Then there are all the different shades of red—only to be expected, perhaps—such that some are far more accurately described as 'grey' or 'brown' than
RSS & Mac OS X for beginners, using NetNewsWire Lite
Friday 31 August 2007
So, you read the first part of this series and are now excited about the possibility of subscribing to feeds for sites you like. I now propose to give some step-by-step instructions for how to do that, whether you use Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer on Mac OS X or Windows. This article concentrates on the Mac, specifically how to set up and use my free feed reader of choice, NetNewsWire Lite from Newsgator. Over the coming weeks I will be giving advice on how to do something similar using Web-based services, which you can access from anywhere there's an Internet connection.
The principles of subscribing to a feed
When you want to subscribe to a site, there are three steps you have to take. Keep these in mind and you've won half the battle:
- Find out if the site /
Microsoft and Transparency Redux
Thursday 12 July 2007
It would be remiss of me after writing my earlier article about Microsoft's lack of transparency not to refer to the latest posting on the blog of the Mac Business Unit (the department in Microsoft which writes software for the Mac). You'll remember that I complained (and I wasn't the only one) about the lack of real information being made available, especially about the support for Exchange servers in the forthcoming release of Microsoft Office for the Mac.
The Mac Business Unit has apparently taken notice:
On the serious side, one of the themes I found could be summarized as "more transparency, more data". That is the goal of this blog and we are working towards that. While we can't answer every question in real time, we are listening and we are using that feedback