Is this thing on?

To transportinnlegg på fremtidsblogg.

Augustine-kommisjonen til Obama: Ingen måneferd før 2020

Kan høyhastighetstog bli ryggraden i vår megaregion?



Cat free 9/9/9? Great, but what about all the other days?

I have wanted to visit Wrocław for a long time, and as it is situated in the South-Western corner of Poland, it is fairly nearby Prague. Nearby geographically at least, it is quicker to get to Oslo from Prague than to Wrocław. There is only one daily train going directly to Wrocław, but it runs so slowly that IDOS will always find some other sequence of trains to intercept it, saving an hour or so for the trip. There is also a much quicker bus, but it leaves late and arrives in the middle of the night. The cross-border connectivity is poor.

My route was a slightly later sequence of trains, five of them in all, each one smaller than the previous one, until the shuttle train going from the tiny village on the Czech side of the border to the tiny village on the Polish side. It was a 10 minute ride and 15 minutes wait on the other side, more convenient than the 4 minute connection I had just done, but it was also a 20 minutes delay, to the consternation of myself and the other two people on the train (plus the driver) that were about to miss the train to Wrocław too. The connecting train had stayed, so we ran across the tracks not to push our luck, but in the process drew the ire of one of the customs officer whose passport control post we had neatly bypassed. A year from now we wouldn't as the Czech Republic and Poland both should be in Schengen by then. The Polish train arrived in Wrocław as it should, so all in all it was better than my previous crossing. Taking in in the first hotel I could find (hotels near the railway station are often cheap and sleazy, the way I like them), I got my surprise.

I hadn't come to Wrocław for tourism, but because we had just opened a new office there and I wanted to visit. Also Norwegian had opened a Wrocław-Stockholm route, making Wrocław a possible transit point when I had some business in Sweden.

This was my second attempt to get to Wrocław. In December, when I heard of the new office, I bought a Wrocław-Stockholm ticket in addition to the Prague-Oslo ticket I had bought earlier. Unfortunately I got the dates for the two tickets I had mixed up and only realised that while sitting on the slow direct train heading for the border, leaving me to jump off the train and head back for Prague instead so that at least I got one flight. That was one time I missed Outlook. I would never trust its mail client, but as organiser it isn't half-bad. In particular it could hold the few pieces of information I need together: From where and when is the next flight I am supposed to take (where to is less important), where and when is the following flight, preferably also how long will I be away and which countries will I be in, for packing reasons. Without that information I make mistakes like that.

I've found that I am not so unusual, most of the travel details are figured out on the journey (most, however, order hotel rooms in advance, something I've been loth to do as it limits my flexibility, but I have realised the benefits of planning here).

A couple days before leaving I got a mail from Norwegian about a schedule change, my plane went a day earlier. That was a little harsh, on an earlier trip I had gotten a message that the plane left half an hour earlier, fine when you know it, but this would cut my Wrocław stay in half, but that was still OK. But I hadn't read the message thorough enough until the next morning on the hotel, planning my itenerary. The plane didn't just leave early, it left from Krakow, an entirely different city. As Poland goes it was a nearby city, again in geography, the time to get there was the same as getting to Oslo. By the time I had gotten the information on how to get to the airport I had half an hour until the last train that would make it in time left.

Checking the web pages it turned out the Wrocław-Stockholm route had been cancelled, presumably not enough people were using it. Even so I was disappointed that they hadn't gotten seats from one of the two or three other airlines going to Stockholm (as there couldn't be that many people to reschedule). I've never encountered a change of city in any flight, and while they may have the right to do so, it was very poor service. It was also annoying that I didn't discover it until just before the train left (of course it would have been more annoying afterwards), giving me no time to yell and shout. If I had seen this I would have demanded a ticket from Prague, saving me two days on the train with barely any Internet connection.

I guess what I really want would be for the date and place for each leg to be marked up as such, using hCard or similar, so that my calendar was automatically updated. This would also need a reference to the original itinerary so that it is updated, not a new one added.

Prague is uncomfortably hot in July and August, making its inhabitants looking for a way out in those months. I had finished a trip to Silesia in the northeastern part of the country ending up in in the castle at Hradec nad Moravicí.

When it was time to return home I was running late, and looked up which connections I was to take, found a bus would leave at 18:12, which I just should be able to make. There was a map of the village and surroundings I took a photo of and started my forced march towards the bus stop, largely through a forest trail. Sure I could use a map service, a few sort of work with Opera Mini, but the response time and the zooming works a lot better with a picture. 18:10 I got to the bus stop and then I realised I didn't know in which direction the bus was supposed to be going and I had forgotten where the bus was going to. I had done my search on my laptop, not my phone, and there was no chance it could start up from hibernation in two minutes or anything close. All I knew was the departure time, which made for curious conversations with the driver.

— Is this bus supposed to leave at 18:12?
— No, I am running a little late, I'm supposed to leave at 18:05
— Thank you, then I'm not interested

Running across the street to catch the next bus in the opposite direction, I got second in line after a woman and her friend, and overheard her conversation with the driver:

— Is this the 18:12 to Přerov, there's not another bus going there?
— Yes, it is. I'm just a little ahead of schedule
— All right, then. I'll have a ticket

My turn. Having just finished T9ing "Hradec nad Moravici" and "Praha" I still didn't know what stop I was supposed to get off the bus at. Together with the lady and the driver we came to the most likely one. She too was going to Prague, and had looked up the route on the Web. I realised I had turned into an Internet package that was blindly following a route some server had determined traffic from Hradec nad Moravicí to Prague should use. Like that package I knew my final destination, but had no idea how to get there, being dependent on good routers on the way.

Or getting my laptop and phone to respond, so after some minutes I knew that I was on the right bus travelling in the right direction (most travellers to Prague would return in the opposite direction, the one I was coming from), and that I was going off a little earlier at the stop U Žida in Bělotín. That was close to the railway station where a local train would allow me to intercept an international train going to Prague. The 19 minutes interval were ample time to handle the couple minutes bus delay get to the station, realise the ticket sale was closed, return to the motorest U Žida, get a refreshing , go back and cross the rails to the right platform, get berated by the loudspeakers from the unmanned station for not using the designated and safer underpass, and snap a few pictures. On the train I bought a ticket to Prague and was told that the main train was arriving only a few minutes after this train, which the IDOS site told me was correct, but as it was leaving many minutes later there was no rush anyway.

In the competition laptop vs phone it was a draw. Neither really measured up. Both got me to Prague in time, using a route no humans would have figured out, but neither provided me with the information I needed when I needed it. If the IDOS site had been a little more phone friendly the phone would definitely have won, but I still would have to type fairly long texts which the phone is unsuited for. Combined with geographical positioning I could have gone from "here" to "home" instead. The site tells about known delays for trains (only), but apart from actively monitoring that particular train I wouldn't know if the delay would cause me to miss a train nor would I be given a different route from there if it did. Such updates would favour phones.

I left the hotel in for the last time today. Except for my flat in Oslo this was the place I had spent most nights the last few years. I have never lived long-term in a hotel before, but I could get used to it. The reason I left was that I had finally gotten the keys to my own apartment, signed the lease, paid the rent. I miss having a reception so that I didn't have to carry my keys around, the two keys to my door are fine but the key to the entrance door is a huge brass thing that seems more appropriate for ceremonially giving someone the key to the city rather than actually unlocking a door.

Having an apartment on your own adds a sense of freedom, having two is better, but I am really not a home-bound person. Whereever I sleep is where my home is. I use to call a small bag with my laptop, chargers and other work equipment my office, and a slightly larger bag with clothes and toiletries my home. Having your office in one hand, your home in the other, and not really having decided where to go next, that truly adds to your sense of freedom. In that respect I don't have homes, I have forward bases.

Another definition is whereever my subscription to New Scientist goes is my home. In that respect the Opera headquarters has been my home for the longest time, but not anymore. I have now officially moved to The Wineyards (Vinohrady) district in Prague, in the vicinity of Žižkov, Vršovice, and Strašnice. With the huge Prague cemetaries to the north the neighbourhood itself isn't among the liveliest, though I can claim living next to the permanent recidency of Franz Kafka for instance, but the communications are great and it is a short walk to the widest variety of what Prague can offer.

The transition into a remote worker isn't too hard as I haved worked from the beyond before, but there will still be some days before everything is in order. Making it work should be fun.

Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.

The travel time from my flat in Oslo to my base in Prague is 4 hours and 42 minutes including busses, metro, and walking distance plus a maximum of 29 minutes waiting (assuming no delays). The cost is 100€ upwards return fare for the ticket plus another 17€ getting to the airports and back (thanks to the the currency converter to figure that out).

Ten years ago travelling by bus would cost half again as much, and take 24 hours (twice that again, and slower and less convenient, if you travelled by train). Six years before that the Iron Curtain was still in effect, which didn't just separate the "East" from the "West", but the East from the East. A train journey in those days would entail as much standing still and be processed, or just as likely standing still for the purpose of standing still, as it would be actually rolling along at anything but high speed.

As the wireless connectivity of Prague is excellent, city-sponsored WiFi (partially) and unlimited GRPS connectivity to an acceptable price, working here is just as easy as it would be in Oslo, and a bit cheaper. Fifteen years earlier the Internet connectivity from the Charles University in Prague, the entire republic in effect (there was a further line to Liberec in the north), was a shaky 64kbps line to Linz in Austria. Then again at that time the infrastructure was abysmal, and apart from Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and the Nordic countries that had megabit lines between their universities, the situation wasn't much better elsewhere. West Germany for instance was a X.25 morass that didn't "get" the Internet until years later.

A weekend in Glasgow. Scotland is neighbouring Norway and a direct flight from Oslo (though this being Ryan Air the bus ride to their airport takes longer than the plane trip itself).

The physical and cultural closeness makes it easy to forget that they live by different standards than we do. The difference is slight, phones work, they use 230V, they even switched to metric. All is fine until you try to put your round pegs in their square holes.

The phone is fine, but the laptop is getting progressively more needy. All for competing standards in the user interface.

Just another case of being railroaded to places you really wouldn't want to go to. The route Malaga-Cadiz leaves you stranded in the Dos Hermanas junction, though hopefully not for too long. Shuttling Malaga-Sevilla, Sevilla-Cadiz would still make more tourist sense.