ccmoblog

WindowsLive: social aggregator in the cloud

2010-11-18T18:11:00.007+01:00

With easy integration to 40+ social networking services - from Blogger to Facebook, Flickr to Pandora, and LinkedIn to Xing, Microsoft has succeeded in making it easy for busy people to seamlessly post and receive the updates they want in a simple, centralised manner. And now with SkyDrive, I can keep different machines synchronised, while storing 25Gb of photos and documents in the cloud. Kudos! Now I just need a new Windows 7 phone to stay connected while I'm mobile...

Zurich enters winter

2009-11-28T14:56:00.005+01:00

A few photos of Zurich during the transition from fall to winter, which seems to have happened very suddenly this year.

Travel Art

2009-11-19T00:46:00.001+01:00

Some recent mobile photos taken in London, in Zurich, and in between...

India

2009-10-15T16:54:00.016+02:00

In August, Dana and I travelled to India to attend a good friend's wedding.

Here are some highlights

Henna on the bride's hand

The Buddha at Opus on the Creek in Bangalore

Deluge in Delhi (it was monsoon season after all)

Commercial Street in Bangalore

The Agra Fort

The Taj Mahal

Sunrise in Agra

Qutb Minar in Delhi

Departing the New Delhi train station

On the grounds at the Taj Mahal

Having a beer with the groom

Indian white tiger

Street scene of Bangalore's wildlife

Interlaken - Top of Europe

2009-06-16T00:31:00.003+02:00

A recent trip with the kids to the Top of Europe - the Jungfraujoch -

3,454 m (11,333 ft). From the blue-green glacial Aare river running

through Interlaken, it's a series of three cog railways and 2 1/2 hours

of continuous climbing to reach the top of the Jungfrau.

This is

Europe's highest-altitude railway, in service since 1912. From the

summit, one can see the Vosges Mountains in France and the Black Forest

of southern Germany.

At the summit, not only

are there spectacular views of the surrounding mountains, but also,

carved into the glacier, is a fantastic ice palace to explore.

The Aletsch Glacier, at 22 km, is the longest ice

stream in the Alps, and it begins on the Jungfraujoch. Imagine how

small a world it is to have bumped into friends of ours during a change

of trains at one of the stations on the way up!

http://www.jungfraubahn.ch/en/ Highly recommended.

Paris in the spring

2009-06-05T21:00:00.002+02:00

Er, waiter, there's a bug in my soup...

Paris Charles De Gaulle Airport's horrible Terminal 1 - it's like you're in one of George Lucas's early film school projects.

Ahhh, a beacon of reliable consistency: Starbucks.

A few recognizable features of the city of light...

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

ARN to OSL to CDG to LCY

2009-05-04T00:03:00.002+02:00

Stockholm to Oslo to Paris to London

Plane to DLR to the Tube

2009-04-07T00:10:00.006+02:00

Plane to DLR to the Tube, originally uploaded by craigmiller.

Paris

2009-03-19T14:45:00.001+01:00

A beautiful sunny day to be in Paris...

Sent from my Windows Mobile® phone.

Alpen vista

2008-12-09T21:26:00.003+01:00

View of the Alps from my next-to-the-corner office.

Both ends of the chunnel

2008-11-01T23:49:00.000+01:00

London to Paris on the Eurostar

One day in Amsterdam

2008-09-21T14:30:00.000+02:00

Mechanical problems

2008-09-18T13:36:00.000+02:00

A forced plane change today, en route to Amsterdam.

Guess where?

2008-09-06T20:17:00.000+02:00

Where is this place? (Hint: regular viewers would do well in this quiz.. that is if there were any regulars). Two bonus points for correctly selecting the place where I proposed.

St. Andrews, Scotland

2008-07-21T23:50:00.024+02:00

Golf. Invented in St. Andrews.

Golf appeared in 1350 in St Andrews, Fife. It was forbidden by the king thrice during the 1400's, as it was considered to distract young men from their archery and Church, but was re-legalised in 1502. It is a common misperception that it began in the 1600s; as early as 1567, Mary Queen of Scots played golf on the St. Andrews Links. The oldest remaining club here is the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, dating back to 1834, which still accepts only male members, with the exception of once in the year for the Women's Open. http://wiki.answers.com/Q/When_and_where_did_golf_originate

Arrival in Edinburgh, Scotland, however, was far from optimal. My luggage was lost for 28 hours and our journey to the hotel took hours longer than anticipated. T in the Park attracted more than forty thousand music-loving fans to Kinross-shire, which just happened to be along our path to the hotel. As a result, we became ensnared in the traffic pouring out and negotiating a detour cost us more than an hour.

We stayed at the Fairmont in St. Andrews, where, despite our 1:30am arrival, we were greeted very energetically. Fairmont St Andrews is delighted to announce the completion of its major refurbishment programme. Voted in the Condé Nast Traveler readers' poll as 18th in the World's Top 100 Golf Resorts, this £10m renovation further enhances Fairmont St Andrews five star global reputation for leisure, golf, spa and conference facilities.
Set on a 520 acre estate with a unique coastal setting, our 209 bedroom hotel is the perfect location to turn your stay into a treasured memory.

The view in the morning of the North Sea across the green links of one of the Fairmont's two home links courses.

Of eight courses in St. Andrews, I was pleased to learn from my biased group, including the caddies, that the Kingsbarns course is often rated the best course in St. Andrews. The Kingsbarns clubhouse, below.

Players at Kingsbarns can see the water from 16 of the course's 18 holes. See here for a photo perfect view of each hole: http://www.kingsbarns.com/photo-gallery.php

Proof that I was in fact there.

The photo below was taken of the club house on "the old course" in St. Andrews.

Where golf began.

28 hours in Amsterdam

2008-07-18T18:55:00.001+02:00

Coming off last week in UK and US, this week also was solid travel. From the first train ride and airport customs check, I had 7 UK and intra-European flights in 6 days.

Amsterdam had fine weather this week. After a brief welcome drizzle stepping out of Schiphol airport, it cleared up and became respectable summer weather.

We stayed at the trendy Roemer Hotel, where everything is included, and had our 1 1/2 days of meetings at the Vinoly Building (above) in the up and coming World Trade Center business park.

We dined at 15, Jamie Oliver's successful mini-chain of restaurants employing disadvantaged youths, started in London and now open in Amsterdam www.fifteen.net

Ich bin ein Berliner - for a day

2008-07-17T20:41:00.002+02:00

My first time to Berlin consisted of a whirl-wind tour of the sights in Berlin Mitte - the central district, that sits on the former border between Eastern and Western Germany.

I saw Checkpoint Charlie from the Western Berlin side at night, where the face of a young American soldier stands on guard; and the next morning in daylight from the former East German side of the border, where a young Russian soldier's portrait is immortalized. Strange to freely walk across what was a fiercely dangerous border zone from 1961 through 1989, and where many lives were lost in the pursuit of living a free life.

We ate at Gugelhof, where Albright, Clinton and Schroeder ate together, several administrations ago.

The Holocaust memorial was very impressive, with scores of individual concrete pillars of varying heights are arranged in rows and columns. The pathways in between varied in their depth and are designed to take you into the monument, and make the experience a little uncomfortable as you walk among the gravestone-like monuments.

Steeped in history, and deserving of a more leisurely time for exploration, I hope to return to Berlin soon.

Heading home

2008-07-10T01:13:00.002+02:00

What a wet trip - from Zurich to London on to New York and back again - rainy in all locations. There were a few sunny breaks, but they never happened while I was flying.

My first experience with Heathrows' terminal 5, however, was rush, rush, rush, and wait. Before the rushing part, we did have a chance to look around at the recently opened terminal.

Created by Troika, an art and design studio in London, “Cloud” is a digital sculpture housed at the luxury lounges in Heathrow Terminal 5. It’s a smooth-shaped object suspended in the air, covered with 4638 “flip dots” - motorized metal patches that change orientation to produce various patterns.

The sculpture is located in Terminal 5 in the atrium hall which leads to the British Airways First Class Lounges. The brief from British Airways was open and simple: to create a signature piece that will mark the entrance of the First Class Lounges and signify the transition between the busy shopping floor and the calm and serenity of the lounges.

And then we arrived in New York City.

The Chrysler Building looked fantastic (it was sunny then). It's always been my favorite building in Manhattan.

We had a group dinner at Tao Restaurant. Tao provided an authentic Asian atmosphere, but unremarkable food. It makes a better bar than restaurant.

There was a 50-minuted delay into LCY, a 4 1/2 hour delay departing LHR and a 1/2 hour delay out of JFK. I hope it's sunny in Zurich...

Dubai's Burj Al Arab and the Burj Dubai tower

2008-05-08T20:48:00.001+02:00

The Burj Dubai, nearing completion (no one really knows when it will be complete) is going to be somewhere between 800 and 1000 metres tall. The final height is being kept a secret. This spear of a building shoots up to the clouds from out of the desert sand and is truly impressive to see up close. The square kilometer on which it sits is quickly becoming some of the most expensive residential, retail, and commercial real estate in the region. It is indeed a wonder to behold.

The Burj Al Arab (below) - famous for putting 7 star hotels on the map - sits in the water as a sailing ship at dock. It commands the gaze of everyone in the beach resorts, like the Madinat Jumeirah, shown here, and those traveling from the downtown financial centre to the more residential west side of Dubai.

London town

2008-04-04T02:26:00.002+02:00

Piccadilly Circus tube stop, King’s Cross, the DLR, Northern Line, Borehamwood, Regent Street, some emergency cufflinks at Herbie Frogg’s on Jermyn Street, and fluffy clouds viewed from above

Hopping the channel and the Atlantic

2008-03-18T11:49:00.000+01:00

The irony of traveling twice in two months westward across 9 timezones to California is not lost on me. I relocated from California to Europe, and yet I've been back almost as many times to the US as I have been to the UK. Thank goodness I have a classmate working diligently on reducing carbon emissions from air travel.

Scenes from London and San Francisco, down at our local little lakeshore, and the oft recurring inescapable airplane theme.

Britain-bound again

2008-02-14T22:24:00.001+01:00

Keeping my success rate at about 50% on-time arrival, this time the fog at London City Airport caused a four and a half hour delay. No fog up here...

Arriving mid-afternoon, ours was one of the first flights to land. Our cab driver was none too pleased to have been stuck waiting at the airport with not a single arriving passenger for over 4 hours.

The Millennium Dome looked like a space station.

We had a few over-priced pints at the Dorchester Hotel.

Piccadilly Circus is always a fascinating place to people watch.

And the colourful Madarin Oriental another fine place to relax before missing the flight home…

Another trip to the UK. Always a pleasure.

A real barn burner in Nanikon today

2008-02-11T16:59:00.000+01:00

There was a barnhouse fire in our hometown today. The fire started inside a lumber business on the main street in town. The adjacent barnhouse, home to friends of ours, also caught fire. It partially burned and, although thankfully no one was hurt, the entirety of their possessions were to lost to the flames. Upon arriving home from work, I saw this scene. The fire crews were still working to douse the still hot structure, resulting in billowing smoke rising high above the center of town. Plan and discuss with your family your fire escape plans tonight.

A Frankfurt-SFO return flight produces 2,010 kg of CO2

2008-02-01T23:34:00.000+01:00

I took a recent trip from Frankfurt to San Francisco for a Silicon Valley meeting with an up-and-coming .com - Thank goodness I had all this legroom to relax while my 11,359 mile round trip flight added 4,430 lbs CO2 (2,010 kg) to our atmosphere. Ouch...

My personal share, apparently, was about 226 gallons, or 856 liters' worth. According to this decent CO2 calculator from TerraPass Inc., I am able to restore karmic balance and achieve environmental peace of mind by offsetting this carbon contribution with one simple payment of USD$39.60. Not knowing this at the time, I was unencumbered with the burden of this knowledge, and so was perfectly able to enjoy watching the Canadian Rockies pass underneath from 39,000 feet.

My total carbon dioxide footprint due to air travel over the last 12 months is rapidly approaching a not-so-trivial offset of USD$1,000 ... very conveniently, they accept Amex/Visa/Mastercard.

Arrival in San Francisco's newly expanded international airport, we put in at gate G100. The new international terminal is spacious, like 15-minutes-walk-to-get-to-the-exit kind of spacious.

On the westbound journey, even though we departed Frankfurt mid-morning and arrived in SFO at noon, we flew so far north that we skirted darkness much of the way. The eastbound return leg departed late evening SFO time and arrived morning in Munich. Here is the in-flight map at mid-point, showing the scale of a trip that crosses 9 timezones.

A recent trip to London made for some more practice in black & white...

The Canadian High Commission in London

Back to colour, I enjoyed this late afternoon view of the sun-lit alps and rising full moon, from Switzerland's beautiful Flumserberg ski resort.

Carving down the slopes on a snowboard is a very different feeling from driving through central Milano. Despite my keen interest, we unfortunately came nowhere near the Duomo, but I did manage to take a few marginal shots.

One day in New Delhi

2008-01-11T08:39:00.000+01:00

Our Air India flight from Bangalore to New Delhi was very good. Not too late leaving, great in-flight service, and quick and efficient arrival procedure.

The welcome awaiting passengers upon exiting the airport takes a little getting used to. There are hundreds and hundreds of people holding name cards up, ready to whisk arriving passengers through the New Delhi night to their hotel.

We found our man, or rather identified ourselves as matching the names on his sign, and he needled his way through the crowd to take our bags. Then it was up to us to keep up with him, as he filed through the crowd, left the airport, and wound his way through the maze of cars to one for which he apprently held the keys.

The view from the Park hotel

Street scenes taken on the move through Delhi

There are so many sensory experiences in India, and pictures can only begin to share some of what it is like. Here are a few of my favourite shots.

According to the locals, the air pollution has improved greatly since the introduction of natural gas buses. On the buses is hand-painted the tagline, "Powered by clean fuel", attesting to just that. Below is a bus, crammed with public transportation patrons, and jammed in between the bus lane and ours are wedged an auto rickshaw and a motorcycle.

The check-in queues at the New Delhi International Airport were impressive, but we actually were processed pretty quickly. Departure time was 1:55am, which is planned so late in order that the Zurich airport will be open by the time we land. I skipped dinner and breakfast in favour of my attempt at sleeping, which worked pretty effectively.

Back in Zurich, I checked into the Arrival Lounge to freshen up, and headed out to the bus terminals to take me the 8 minutes to the office. Time to put in that full day's work.