I suddenly realised that I expect Amazon (and indeed many other websites) to correct my misspellings in the same way as Google:

Did you mean: lost in translation ?

But it doesn’t.

They should fix this.

The son of one of the world’s most influential and talented economists is obviously a total geek. How wonderful.

Oh, and get this blog comment and response.

Update 16:58: Then, of course, you read this.

Why don’t economists get any respect?

I grumbled to the nice folks at TripIt because I wasn’t eligible for their referral competition, so they sent me a T-shirt instead. So I think it’s only fair that I put in a good word for them:

1. Try it. If you travel a lot it’s invaluable.
2. It’s free.
3. It’s better than Dopplr.
4. Er… that’s it.

I’m kinda undecided on the BAA break-up. The FT thinks it should definitely go ahead. But as a fairly strict libertarian, and therefore keen on economic freedom, I’ve always had a problem with monopoly break-up except in the most extreme of cases (and I’m not sure this qualifies).

Nevertheless, as my job now takes me onto an aeroplane more than I before, I’m curious and so I read the summary from the Competition Commission’s provisional report. I’m not sure I’m any the wiser, but there were some interesting facts and statistics embedded within:

• Gatwick’s proportion of business travellers is a mere 18%, far lower than I would imagine (I know it’s not strong on the transfer front, but normally appears to have many terminating flights to useful places, from what I’ve seen). By comparison, Heathrow’s is 40%.
• From the set of BAA-owned airports, only Heathrow and Aberdeen have above 20% of transferring passengers, with 34% and 21% respectively. Heathrow’s reputation as a hub is clearly deserved.
• BAA’s airports account for 60% of UK air passengers, but 90% in south-east England, and 84% in Scotland. Maybe there could be a local monopoly at work here, at least?

It’s interesting that the Competition Commission makes lots of slights about poor service, lack of responsiveness to the market, high prices, and so on. This seems a bit unfair. I’ve often wondered how one can gauge the degree of monopoly exploitation fairly, partly there’s rarely an accurate enough free-market alternative implementation to compare it to. The theory does dictate that a monopoly might happen, given some of the stats above, but saying that there is one is a much bigger stretch. This does make me think that perhaps a bit more laissez-faire might go a long way in keeping things market fair - although, as I think they hint at, a bit less regulation would help even things out too.

I’m beginning to enjoy transport in London almost as much as Richard. Got to Waterloo this morning to find that once again, the Jubilee line entrance was closed - this happened last Monday too. Not being a fan of taking replacement buses and braving the crowds with two large bags half-way across London, I copped out and got a taxi.

But what’s going on here? And why are TfL incapable of communicating with me when it does?

Until recently, I was having problems with fullscreen video in Windows on my new T61 Thinkpad, which uses an NVidia Quadro NVS 140M display adapter. Video would regularly flicker when fullscreen was enabled in a variety of players, including Windows Media Player and various embedded Flash players, and had to be taken out of fullscreen and put back - sometimes as many as 10 times - before the image was stable.

After doing a bit of hunting around yesterday, and noticing that at least one other person had the same problem, I came to the conclusion that it was power-saving based - my suspicion is that the refresh rate is reduced under some power-saving circumstances.

The following set of steps seems to remove the problem (or, to be more exact, I haven’t seen the problem return since following them):

• Open the NVIDIA control panel (from the Start Menu or the system tray).
• Navigate to Mobile / Change PowerMizer settings.
• Select Not manage my power consumption (Disable PowerMizer).

Hope this helps someone else.

Used to be, I employed a cunning trick I found on the web to create a quick ‘n’ dirty homepage for my browser on my mobile - all the delicious bookmarks I’d tagged with mtag.

Then delicious went and released a new version and this trick broke.

After a bit of fiddling, I’ve found a reasonable alternative. feed.informer will take any RSS feed and turn it into fairly plain HTML. So take your RSS feed, which might look something like this:

http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/andrewferrier/mtag?count=100

(the count increases the maximum number of items in the feed to 100)

Now plug it into feed.informer, and edit the options to make the result look how you want (hint: I modify the template, and set the Per-Item Template to <a href=”%URL%”>%TITLE%</a><br />, leaving the rest of the template blank - this prints one bookmark per line). You’ll also need to sign up and create a feed.informer account whilst you’re doing this (assuming you don’t already have one).

Once done, just view the ‘HTML’ version of the digest you created, and set that as your mobile homepage. Bingo.

Anyone want any free energy efficient lightbulbs? I keep getting spammed with them by British Gas, Southern Electric, et. al., in a desperate attempt to prove their green credentials. Of course, it doesn’t work - I already have all I need and they are now piling up in the cupboard (here’s a hint: maybe that ain’t so green).

The law of unintended consequences is a bitch.

I generally consider myself to be a pretty liberal guy (in the old-fashioned sense). However, 24-hour doughnuts are testing my patience. Lots of London Tesco Express stores now seem to stock delicious Krispy Kremes, and to compound the evil, they do it at all times of day and night, just outside the hotels I tend to stay in. I think they are following me.

They should clearly be banned.

Being as I travel so much these days, I tend to eat out far more often than is good for me (quite literally). London, where I’m currently holed up for a few months, is generally an excellent location for a good selection of good places to eat, although it’s still challenging to find a good (and quick) meal every night. However, my hotel for this week and last (the above average Hilton Kensington) doesn’t exactly seem to be replete with places to dine.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I ventured a bit further up to Notting Hill this evening and found the Black and Blue. A basic but incredibly juicy steak definitely made my evening. Much better than yet another so-so Indian meal (the Bombay Bicycle Club is definitely over-rated). It’s re-affirmed my faith in moderately-budgeted expense accounts.