Blog, Travel

Wanderlust

I’ve been reading the magazine Wanderlust for a few years now. It’s a great magazine with interesting stories about places that are often well off the beaten path — my kind of travelling! A couple of months ago I took the unusual step of writing a letter. It came in two parts, a comment about my time in Cuba (in response to someone who said he couldn’t find any night-life) and a second, longer piece about my time in Gdansk, Poland (as a counter-point to their piece on long-weekends for less than ?100).

Of course they published the Cuba story but edited out the rest. I thought the Polish story was the best part so I reprint it here:

The second is a short story from a couple of years ago when I went to Gdansk. Kind of. The friend I was visiting was working in Warsaw and one of her colleagues told her that if we were visiting Gdansk we had to see Sopot which was just a little bit further up the coast. Sopot was their home town and, reportedly, well worth a visit.

Gdansk was lovely, we wandered around, my friend dragging me to many amber jewellery stores and, long story short, we were quite late leaving and heading up the coast. We were expecting a lot and were disappointed. I didn’t miss a word out there. It was the Polish version of Ayia Napa with late-teens running around in an advanced state of inebriation. We weren’t impressed and time was getting on so we didn’t have very much choice other than to stay the night. Unfortunately pretty much everywhere was fully booked.

In the end we got the last room in the worst hotel I’ve stay in for quite some time. It was some distance from town (we were also hungry by this time) and there was a big party going on in a field next door. An all nighter it turned out. Come 6am, tired and miserable, we decide to leave. If breakfast was anything like the shower, we wouldn’t have eaten anything anyway!

Still, it would take more than that to stop me travelling to new places…

Links

Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249

I’ve refrained from commenting about Microsoft’s iPod competitor so far as it’s not much of a challenge to mock it when they decide to make one model dung-coloured.

However this article caught my eye:

AppleInsider | Microsoft says Zune to sell for $249

What the headline doesn’t tell you is that they are planning to make a loss on each unit to make that price-point, just like they do on each XBox games console. I can’t think of many other companies that would make a loss of $388 million in one quarter and consider that to be a good strategy worth replicating for another product.

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Why Top Employees Quit – by Dumb Little Man

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I think, over the years I have left companies for most of the reasons listed in this article. Not that I’m claiming to have always been a “star” employee.

I left my first job mainly for money. My third wins the honour of collecting most of the reasons in the list, but would gain special commendation for management BS (as the article calls it).

It was no surprise that they assumed that more people would leave for money. Most people incorrectly assumed that I left my last job for a pay raise too. The part that rang most true for me was “too challenged”:

“You cannot ask someone to complete 20 tasks and then give them inferior tools and personnel. … The employee will either leave, OR , become so unmotivated that they lose their star status and become a normal employee and thus under perform.”

I certainly felt my productivity drop as my frustration with the available tools increased. (Pet peeves included monitors that were not able to display one of the main screens of their main application and having to use a Citrix server to use Microsoft Office.) Ironically I did not feel particularly challeneged by the work — “death by boredom” — just my ability to get it done efficiently.

Looking from a job-hunters perspective, the difficulty I have is learning from this. How do you discover what a company is going to be like to work for? Ultimately I think it comes down to the old adage: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. You’re never going to find out this stuff at an interview, you just have to know someone already there.

Blog

September Wedding

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Rose and TomaszIt seems like only last week that I was at a friends wedding (in fact it was just over two weeks), but on Tuesday two more friends tied the knot.

I’ve known R since my time in Norway. We met up a few times in Oslo and continued when we both returned to London. She had dreams of travelling, going back to Norway or Paris, or, generally, elsewhere. But she drifted back to her home-town, Bristol. Later, T, a Polish tree surgeon, moved into the flat-share she was living in. She jokes that while I tried internet- and speed-dating, she just stayed at home but had greater success.

They exchanged vows in Camden Town Hall, confusingly located opposite St Pancras station rather than in Camden as one would naively expect. It was a good service, and it was good that so many people made it, including both mothers. T’s didn’t speak much English but seemed to enjoy herself.

Afterwards we retired to a local pub for the reception.

A good day was had by all. R and T are currently in Morocco on their Honeymoon and we all wish them all the best. Congratulations!

Blog, Links

An Inconvenient Truth

I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night, a film about Al Gore’s global warming lecture tour.

It’s very well done. Gore delivers the talks with humour — he introduces himself link this, “I’m Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States” — confidence and passion. (If he’d had this passion in the presidential campaign things could have been very different!) Even for someone that agrees with the message there are some scary statistics. Perhaps even more scary is the lengths that some politicians go to to avoid acknowledging the problem, much less doing something about it.

Quite possibly a case of preaching to the choir, but I still think it’s well worth seeing.

As a counterpoint, you might want to look at these videos from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Talking about CO2, “they call is pollution, we call it life.” Based on the fact that we breath out carbon dioxide they conclude that the volumes found in the air currently are perfectly natural.

These people should be forced to watch “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington