Bootees

 Crafts, Family  1 Response »
Aug 292006
 

I was a few months preg­nant when Tim asked when I was going to knit some bootees (aka booties) for the baby. I wondered why he had­n’t asked for the first child, he answered that he had­n’t known I could knit back then. Fair enough.

So I got some yarn in time for the trip to Hawaii, think­ing it would be a good chance to get some knit­ting in. I tried two pat­terns, one from a book of my great-aunt’s, and one on the web; I pre­ferred the web pat­tern (they’re the bootees on the right). Once the baby arrived of course, we redis­covered why we had­n’t used the bootees we had with our first child; they don’t stay on the feet! Socks or out­fits with feet built-in are much more prac­tic­al. Although I did dis­cov­er that if you put socks on first, the bootees do stay on longer.

The res­ults of the Hawaii knit­ting are here, show­cased on a table­cloth I got in Hawaii… Baby's jacket and bootees

The jack­et is a seam­less cabled jack­et, knit­ted in Baby Soft by Lana Gatto from a pat­tern that’s no longer avail­able. The only slightly tricky bit was mak­ing the increases work into the cable pat­tern prop­erly, that required a piece of paper and a cer­tain amount of cal­cu­lat­ing. Oth­er than that, a reas­on­ably easy knit and the yarn is lovely and soft. I just hope she spends as much (or more) time wear­ing it as I did knit­ting it!

Hawaii 2006

 Travel  No Responses »
Aug 242006
 

We had a fam­ily trip to Hawaii (the Big Island) in the last week where I could reas­on­ably fly before I got too big. Mind you, I was still big and bulky and quite glad of being able to float along in the water. I took quite a few pho­tos, but these two are the only ones I deemed worthy of pub­lish­ing. They’re from the “saddle road” between the vol­ca­noes on the Big Island. 

I found the con­trast between the new lava, the old lava, and the no-longer-vis­ible lava on this photo to be the inter­est­ing part: View from Saddle Road on Hawaii

and the con­trast of the new lava with the tree, the grass, and the moun­tains was what made this photo interesting: tree on Saddle Road on Hawaii

Liberty Deployments

 Identity and Privacy  No Responses »
Aug 172006
 

It’s good to see ana­lysts writ­ing sen­tences like “the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions are res­on­at­ing with major IT user organ­iz­a­tions” (quoted in an InfoWorld art­icle entitled E‑government Group forms with­in Liberty Alli­ance). It shows that the Liberty spe­cific­a­tions (and not just fed­er­a­tion) are being imple­men­ted and deployed.

Which brings me to the main point of this post­ing — if you know of Liberty deploy­ments that are worthy of pub­lic atten­tion, pro­pose them for the Iden­tity Deploy­ment of the Year awards. Nom­in­a­tions close on Monday, August 21st, and the judges are wait­ing to see what you can nom­in­ate! The win­ners will be announced on stage at Digit­al IDWorld. I’m hop­ing we get to see some deploy­ments that are illus­trat­ive of the wide range of prob­lems that Liberty Alli­ance spe­cific­a­tions solve. Paul of course wants a People Ser­vice imple­ment­a­tion to win; are there any cool ones out there that will sway the oth­er judges as well?

The Wall

 General  2 Responses »
Aug 132006
 

The Wall was put up 45 years ago today, an event that seemed to define the Cold War. I lived in Ber­lin for a few years, start­ing in 1988; to me the concept of a city belong­ing to West Ger­many being in the middle of East Ger­many sur­roun­ded by a sys­tem of walls pur­pose­fully designed to make it easy to shoot people try­ing to cross was pro­foundly unnat­ur­al. For those Ger­mans who’d been born (as I had) since the build­ing of the Wall, it was nat­ur­al, it was what they’d always known. I remem­ber long dis­cus­sions with friends early in 1989, as the Com­mun­ist sys­tems star­ted to wobble and crumble, wheth­er and when East and West Ger­many could become one again. As late as June 1989 it was­n’t at all some­thing that people allowed them­selves to believe in. Most people I talked to seemed to think the Allies (the US, the Soviet Uni­on, Great Bri­tain, and France, the four “win­ning powers”) would­n’t allow Ger­many to ever again be a large, power­ful coun­try. And indeed it took a lot of dis­cus­sion before the four powers would allow the reuni­fic­a­tion of Ger­many, under the Two plus Four Con­tract.

The Wall evokes mixed emo­tions. In the West it was, of course, seen as unam­bigu­ously bad, stop­ping people leav­ing East Ger­many and sep­ar­at­ing fam­il­ies. When I talked to some people from East Ger­many around the time it fell (Novem­ber 9, 1989) they said at the time it was built the Wall was a neces­sity to give their fledging state a chance of sur­viv­al. Too many hard-work­ing people with skills and ambi­tion had left the coun­try and they needed to keep those who were left. Their view was that even­tu­ally East Ger­many would be a socially fair, pros­per­ous coun­try, if only it could have a fair chance. And, from what I’ve heard, in the dec­ade after the Wall was built, life did get bet­ter. Wal­ter Ulbricht, the lead­er of the coun­try at the time, was said to remain in touch with the people, to go to the pub with his mates, and to genu­inely want what was best for his coun­try under the cir­cum­stances. Later on the polit­ic­al lead­ers were more adept at liv­ing the good lives them­selves than they were at pro­cur­ing them for the rest of the pop­u­la­tion, with their vil­las and parties with food and drink unob­tain­able by nor­mal people. I’m not going to go into the eco­nom­ic prob­lems of East Ger­many here, there were lots, but suf­fice to say that by the end of the 1980s East Ger­many was not pros­per­ous. West Ger­mans and for­eign­ers could vis­it East Ber­lin on exchange of 25 Deutschmark for 25 East Ger­man Marks; this was deemed to be an entrance fee by many West­ern­ers and there was quite a debate about wheth­er people should vis­it or wheth­er that money was just prop­ping up the East Ger­man regime. But I digress.

Many people ask why the West Ger­mans did­n’t just tear down the Wall? One reas­on was that the Wall was built com­pletely on East Ger­man ter­rit­ory, suf­fi­ciently back from the leg­al bor­der that nobody could claim it encroached on any part of West Ger­many or West Ber­lin (which leg­ally had a dif­fer­ent status to the rest of West Ger­many). Anoth­er was that even at the time I was in Ber­lin, there was a def­in­ite feel­ing of being occu­pied. I worked at the Hahn-Meit­ner Insti­tut in Wannsee, near the south-west bor­der of West Ber­lin, in the Amer­ic­an zone. It was not uncom­mon to see Amer­ic­an sol­diers in full battle gear with machine guns run­ning around the streets on some exer­cise; they sel­dom bothered to learn any Ger­man and I remem­ber being at a kebab stand watch­ing the Amer­ic­an sol­diers bark orders at the Turk­ish server/cook in Amer­ic­an Eng­lish in such thick accents and so fast that I had dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing them. Then there was the less defin­able feel­ing of guilt, the feel­ing that this sep­ar­a­tion was some part of the pun­ish­ment that Ger­mans had to suf­fer in order to atone (if only in part) for what had happened dur­ing the second World War.

Most people in West Ber­lin learned to live in the pres­ence of the Wall, although many could­n’t and fled to West Ger­many. Many people died (Peter Fechter was the most fam­ous), many fam­il­ies were ripped apart, for a Wall that was gone, along with the sys­tem that cre­ated it, 30 years later. 

A380 Size Implications

 General, Travel  4 Responses »
Aug 122006
 

I’ve been a bit con­cerned about the idea of fly­ing in one of the Air­bus A380 jets (assum­ing they ever actu­ally deliv­er one to an air­line I fly on, that is). I haven’t been con­cerned about the safety of the big plane, but rather the logist­ics and com­fort. Although, with the latest ter­ror­ist scares, I’m begin­ning to won­der about the safety of fly­ing on these big planes.

Although in the­ory a double-deck­er plane has room for a fit­ness centre, spa, and cock­tail lounge, most air­lines will take the oppor­tun­ity to cram as many pas­sen­gers in as they can. How many that is will depend on the air­line, just the same as it does today for oth­er planes. 

So, what does a plane hold­ing 550 people imply? It implies the same prob­lems as with a Boe­ing 747 that holds around 450 people, only more so. Let’s assume the air­lines in gen­er­al keep the same seat pitch, seat widths, and legroom as for the 747 or Air­bus A340, so the com­fort level on board is roughly the same. Then there are two sets of prob­lems I see. One is the logist­ic­al one of cop­ing with get­ting that many people on and off the plane, and the oth­er pre- and post-flight hand­ling. Board­ing time and dis­em­bark­ment time will depend on wheth­er air­ports have the mul­tiple jet­ways to ser­vice the mul­tiple doors; some already do for the 747 but it’s a good ques­tion as to how many air­ports will make the invest­ment early on or wheth­er they’ll wait until there are lots of A380 planes fly­ing to incur the cost. Bag­gage hand­ling and cus­toms and immig­ra­tion form­al­it­ies are already pain points when 747 planes from mul­tiple des­tin­a­tions land close togeth­er; they will likely get worse with the big­ger planes as they’re cost centres for air­ports, not rev­en­ue generators.

And then there’s the secur­ity angle. Will the big­ger planes be big­ger tar­gets for ter­ror­ists? They’re not that much big­ger than a 747, but it seems likely to me that under the “max­im­um bang” the­ory, ter­ror­ists would aim for the largest num­ber of people they can get at once. To min­im­ise this danger, secur­ity checks at the gate are likely, which will fur­ther increase the board­ing time, assum­ing that some amount of cab­in bag­gage con­tain­ing books, knit­ting etc will be allowed on board to try to keep the pas­sen­ger bore­dom level reas­on­able. As an aside, if the pas­sen­gers are not going to be allowed to bring along means of enter­tain­ing them­selves, and the air­lines aren’t going to widely imple­ment indi­vidu­al in-flight video sys­tems, I hope the flight attend­ants are pre­pared to cope with more cases of air rage.

So what’s the answer? Apart from avoid­ing travel com­pletely, that is, which isn’t always pos­sible. Avoid­ing large hubs isn’t pos­sible for many trans-ocean­ic jour­neys, avoid­ing the large planes for these jour­neys also won’t be pos­sible in many cases. It looks like the cost of air travel is just going to increase, in money, time, and irrit­a­tion. The biggest win­ners are prob­ably going to be the phar­ma­ceut­ic­al com­pan­ies that make the rem­ed­ies to help pas­sen­gers sleep, or to calm them down. I can just see it now, flight attend­ants ask­ing “Would you like some melaton­in with your ginger ale to help you sleep?”.

Airline Thoughts

 General, Travel  9 Responses »
Aug 112006
 

In the after­math of the latest round of air travel restric­tions, it seems to me there will be quite a few rami­fic­a­tions for the travel industry, if these restric­tions stay in place for any length of time. Here are some of the ones I see, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

  • Full-ser­vice air­lines will have a fight­ing chance again, as long as they actu­ally provide the amen­it­ies that used to be expec­ted for travel, such as food, drink (even if non-alco­hol­ic), pil­lows, blankets, in-flight video sys­tems, and magazines. 
  • Flights will be full of tetchy bored people whose elec­tron­ic toys were taken away from them curs­ing the noisy bored chil­dren whose toys were taken away from them.
  • Boe­ing’s decision to cre­ate a plane for point-to-point travel rather than hub and spoke looks like the right one. Flights from Heath­row and Gatwick (the big air­ports) were the tar­get points rather than those from smal­ler air­ports; flights from smal­ler air­ports may be used as a way to get mater­i­als onto oth­er flights (if there are no secur­ity checks between land­ing from one flight and get­ting on the next) but are less likely to be tar­gets them­selves. Tak­ing flights from small air­port to small air­port will also avoid the longer secur­ity-check­ing delays at lar­ger airports.
  • Secur­ity screen­ing of bags as you get on the plane is likely to start, to enable people to take some cab­in baggage.
  • Cheap air­lines which have been try­ing to stop people check­ing lug­gage and only take on hand lug­gage are going to have a hard time.
  • Com­pan­ies that sell really good pad­ded bags so you can check your laptop without wor­ries will find a lot of cus­tom­ers. People should also give more thought to secur­ing the data on their laptops when they check them, but most prob­ably won’t both­er. Insur­ance com­pan­ies will have to cope with a lot of claims for lost and dam­aged laptops, iPods, etc.
  • The mid-80s fash­ion for see-through briefcases and purses will be rein­vig­or­ated. I had one of these purses, it was actu­ally quite handy being able to find things quickly in it.
  • Air tax­is will start to become pop­u­lar as people try to avoid the increas­ing unpleas­ant­ness of com­mer­cial air travel.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this all plays out, and wheth­er the vari­ous Air Trans­port author­it­ies man­age to come up with real, effect­ive secur­ity meas­ures that don’t incon­veni­ence the inno­cent too much. I’m just glad I don’t need to travel any­where much in the near future.

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