Don’t Be An IT Consultant

I finally made it, safely, to Bracknell. I had a 4 hour delay from Boston due to a volcano eruption in Iceland. When I finally got to Reykjavik, the mechanics union went on strike. After 9 hours of waiting, they finally let us board. The story I heard is that the parliament stepped in to resolve the situation. I finally made it to Heathrow, where it was a zoo trying to get through immigration. Once I was through immigration, I had a great limo driver who took me to the Hilton St. Anne’s Manor. (I am a Marriott Platinum member, but I decided to try the Hilton Gold status that was conferred upon me. And besides, it is close to our office and a co-worker recommended it.) I learned my lesson though, because they bumped me for someone more important.

They put me in a cab to the other Hilton here, Hilton Bracknell. They gave me a choice of a free room upgrade or wireless, so I picked the wireless. Oh, I ordered in a pepperoni pizza, and they sent over a pepperoni, tuna, ham, olive, green and yellow pepper pizza. The diet coke I ordered turned out to be a regular coke and I’m too tired to complain.

To anyone who is considering a career in IT Consulting, I say forget it. It is better to be an I-banker. Or a hotelier. Or a CPG manager. You’ll have a better commute.

Holga Medium Format

I tried some old black and white medium format film with the Holga camera while in Europe last year. There must have been a slight problem with the loading/unloading, because I’m getting a weird triangle across all my photographs. Here are two examples:

The picture above was taken in Nice at a beach. The beaches there are very rocky and the stones are called “gallets”. It made for a beautiful picture.

I took this in a random town that we stopped in south-central France. We were on the way to Mont Ventoux to see the tour.

Also, I very quickly scanned in the first of the 35mm roll I took. I plan on using GIMP with a bunch of these images and then posting them to Darjix at some point. I think the photograph below might have been from Switzerland, but I need to double-check.

Singapore Car Parks

I am in Singapore this week for business. Because of my limited access to the Internet, I will not be able to blog consistently.

We parked in one of the many car parks in the city today, and I noticed that the parking structure had a sensor above each spot. The sensor allows the car park to know what spots are open. Open spots have green LEDs. In addition, a board announces the number of open spots on each level.

I noticed this when I was in Europe too. It strikes me as odd that I have never seen this type of system in the US. There may be a few in the US that have this system, but it it isn’t that common.