Day 2 – Introducing Venice

To get from Venice Mestre to Venice you have to take a 10 minute train ride. Don’t try and buy a ticket from the ticket machine in the station though. This just means that you get to wait in a queue for 20 minutes to get a chance to read a tiny notice on the machine that tells you these tickets are available from a little office with the words “Venice Tickets” written outside on a big sign. Which of course we hadn’t seen. Oh, and get your tickets validated before you get on the train,  or the ride might be more exciting than you really want.

Venice is like nothing on earth. Except Venice. Someone must have said “What if we had canals rather than roads?” and a bunch of other people must have gone along with this. The thing that I loved was the way that people actually live here. Going to work on a boat and treating all the fantastic architecture and stuff around them as part of the furniture.  Some bits are rather annoying though. There is nowhere to sit apart from at cafes. And when you do you are very aware that a clock has started ticking, and at some point a bill will have to be paid. It is expensive, but we managed to eat for reasonable prices.

What you get if you ask for “the fish”.

We didn’t go on a boat. It looked a bit expensive and I don’t believe in spending good money just to be made to feel queasy. 

You could buy silly hats. Although it wasn’t compulsory.  They also had a lot of masks.

Since I, perhaps rather surprisingly, don’t have much need for a mask I didn’t get one.

At the end of the day we staggered onto the train and rumbled back to our tiny room. I’m not sure if I’ve got much more culture, but I did take loads of photographs.

Day 1 – Heading for Venice

..in which our hero has a go at travel journalism for no good reason.

Today marks the first day of my proper holiday. We are heading off to a couple of places we’ve never been to before, Venice and one of the Italian Lakes. We flew out of East Midlands airport this afternoon courtesy of Ryanair. We fly with them because we quite like the colour of the seat backs in the plane (a particularly garish yellow) and because they are by far the cheapest way to travel. There are no other reasons to fly this way. Having said that, and ignoring the scrum to get the seats with legroomthe cabin crew were pleasant and the plane arrived on time.

My travel tip for Ryanair: Have the “double drink and chocolate muffin” deal”. This only costs 10 euros for two of you and almost represents good value.  Oh, and don’t buy the lottery tickets. You are almost as likely to win these as you are to be involved in an air crash. And you shouldn’t tempt fate to go for the double whammy. Imagine how fed up you’d feel fingering your winning scratch card as the plane plummeted towards the earth.

Once we arrived at the airport (which is almost, but not quite, near to Venice) we grabbed a coach to the hotel. Another tip. Make sure you have a 10 euro note (preferably a newish one) to buy a couple of coach tickets. Get them from the machine while you wait for your luggage to turn up.

Staying in Venice is very expensive. So we didn’t. We found a hotel in Venice Mestre (I think Mestre is Italian for suburb). This place is only around 10 minutes or so from Venice proper.  We stayed in Hotel Aaaron.  This is both a hotel and an experiment in capsule living. Our bedroom was exactly that. A room just big enough to hold a bed, a tiny desk and bathroom. But everything was shiny new, the staff were great, the WIFI worked and the breakfasts were lovely. And since you don’t go on holiday to sit in a hotel room, it is perfect. Tomorrow we head for Venice proper.

Windows Phone 7 Goes Gold

Windows Phone 7 has “gone gold”. The term comes from the old, CD-ROM, days when software manufacturers would send a "gold” master CD to the duplication plant. In the case of Windows Phone it means that the phone manufacturers have been given the final version of the product to put into their handsets.

I’ve been using Windows Phone 7 for a while now and I love it. Going back to the iphone turns out to be hard work. Windows Phone is one of those clever interfaces that grows on you. The more you use it the more of these little touches that you notice, like the way that icons rotate when you change the screen orientation. And moving between programs using the back button is really easy. Microsoft have a really big mountain to climb with this new platform. But they have also made something rather special. With a bit of luck the phones themselves should not be long coming as well.

The whole Windows Phone team deserves immense respect for what they have achieved in such a short time. Kudos folks.

Rob Miles is not on Kindle Yet

Who, me?

I got my new Kindle from Amazon today .  Of course, the first thing I did was search for myself in the Kindle store. Imagine my surprise when I found that I’d put three books on there and was charging over seven pounds each for them (that’s more than they are asking for Tony Blair’s memoirs – so they got that bit right). Either I’ve uploaded them and set the price in my sleep, or there is something strange going on here. I’ve asked Amazon to find out what is going on.

As for the Kindle  itself. It is a perfectly formed device that is going to spell the death knell for a lot of paper books. I got a Sony E-Reader some time back and quite liked it, but loading books was  a pain and the display was useless for anything interactive.

The Kindle fixes both these problems. You can even use it to browse to my blog and the pictures look strangely wonderful in grey scale. As a paperback replacement it is fantastic. It is ultra-portable (at the moment I’m using an A5 envelope as a case) and the screen is really easy to read. The integration with Amazon is impressive to the point of scary. I got the one with the built in 3G phone and stuff just arrives as though by magic. It also has WiFi which works fine at home but not on the university campus. This is because the Kindle doesn’t support the WPA2 Enterprise security that we use at Hull.

It is a bit glib to say that the Kindle will do for books what the ipod did for music. But I don’t think that it is far from the truth.

One reason for getting the Kindle was to experiment with page layouts that work best on the small screen. I’ll be putting properly a formatted version of the Yellow Book on the Kindle store soon.

But the ones there are the moment are not from me.

Live Writer Twitter Notify and Oauth

If you use Live Writer to write your blog posts (and you should) you probably use the Twitter Notify plugin to send your follows a tweet when you make a new post.  Today Twitter changed their authentication to use the Oauth protocol (which makes the authentication process much more secure). Unfortunately it also breaks programs that used the old authentication method, including the previous version of Twitter Notify. However, an updated version is now available from here.