• Large; decent selection of food.
• Looks like usual upscale Waitrose food quality.
• Pleasant, well-turned out, professional staff (Sainsbury’s Winchester, I’m looking at you here).
• Clean and well-presented store (once again, a glance in Sainsbury’s direction).

Downsides:

• It’s too far out of town. OK, it probably isn’t if you have a car, I admit. I’m in the minority by avoiding one for cost reasons (which might cause one to question why I choose to shop at Waitrose, so it probably works for most of their customers). But, for me, it is a trek. I’ll probably be trying out Waitrose Deliver to see if that might help.
• Poor range at fresh bread counter.

This is pretty excellent customer service. I struggle to see this happening in the UK.

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.

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

• You typically get a better view and a quieter room.
• You sometimes get upgraded to a better class of room, without having to explicitly ask for it – they are often high up.

It has a disadvantage, however.

• Got an SMS this afternoon saying flight to Terminal 5 had been cancelled. A request to call BA at my own expense.
• Rapid call to BA asking for a rebooking on an earlier Malév flight to Gatwick, followed by a semi-run to the hotel.
• Panic rush to airport; in the end, got there too early!
• Checked in; panic over for the moment.

I’ll have ‘fun’ when I get back checking whether I can claim compensation – I think I can. Normally I like flying with BA, but this will make me think twice in future. I’ll certainly be avoiding T5 for a while, if at all possible.

Perhaps Frankfurt is suffering from the Heathrow disease of being just too big for its boots.

TripIt, although it has similar facilities for maintaining a list of travelling contacts, originates from a slightly different and more ambitious idea. Essentially, you email TripIt confirmation emails for hotels, airlines, car rental, etc. – and it parses them and automatically organises them into trips with information-rich itineraries, including weather, maps, city guides, etc. You can print those out, but (more usefully) you can again syndicate them into tools such as Google Calendar via iCal. This way, I end up with details about all my flights, hotels, and so on in my calendar automatically.

TripIt’s not perfect – I’ve found a few bugs – and TripIt doesn’t support every single travel agent (for example, it doesn’t support the one we use within IBM – at least not directly). But the TripIt team are very responsive to feedback – I notified them about a Hertz reservation email this afternoon that wasn’t recognised. They’ve already fixed the bug and the information has appeared in my TripIt account. I’m not sure how they plan to monetise their service (although that’s still not clear with Dopplr either), but I am likely to stay a regular user for the foreseeable future.

(Honourable mention for another useful travel website goes to Kayak, which has the most flexible and useful flight search interface I’ve found).

Dear Ms Ferrier [sic],

Born before 1958! Your age could save you money on your home insurance.

Let’s face it, you are bombarded with messages promising you cheaper insurance… [etc. etc.]

Quite entertaining that they managed to get both my sex and my age (quite significantly) wrong. I don’t think they’ll be getting my business.

The journey was tinged by a strange sadness, too. A middle-aged woman who had been sitting opposite me on the Piccadilly line for a few minutes, to all outward appearances entirely normal, suddenly surreptitiously slipped a can of Strongbow out of her (smart leather) handbag and swigged a gulp, then slipped it back in – all as discreetly as possible. Fortunately for me, I’ve never been close to anyone who’s been affected by alcoholism, but it began to dawn on me how strange an addiction it must be to need a drink in such a place – and from such a person. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for her.

I’ve been in Madrid for just over a week now. My first mistake was to assume that restaurants would be open when I wanted them. Unfortunately, it appears that the local convention dictates that you don’t eat till about 9pm, so most don’t even open till 8.30pm. It took me a few days to give in and toe the line. The places I was forced into when I ignored this convention were not pretty (a cheap and nasty buffet being one of them). Although I’m now resigned to it, the habit of eating so late really disrupts my sleep (please, no comments about siestas. It’s close to freezing here some nights, and most people work 8am-6pm – with lunch at 3pm).

Even once I’d got the time right, both the quality and variety seem to be surprisingly low for such a major city. Yesterday’s meal, in an unassuming but smart Italian restaurant, was looking promising when I ordered the lasagna. It turned out to be less so when I realised it was microwave-heated: and not all the way through. My Spanish being not up to par, I couldn’t be bothered to complain, but skipped dessert without a second thought.

Tonight’s experience was almost worse. Getting fed up with Italian-based food (it’s easy to find when you’re travelling, but you get bored of pizza and pasta), I wandered into a place with a bit more variety. I fancied rice, but not the risottos available, so went for a chicken curry. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got even less – this time it was stone cold. I had a chat with the waitress and then the chef, and in between their broken English and my attempts at half-sentences containing the word ‘caliente’, I got it heated. I think the implication was that it was meant to be that way. Once hot, it was acceptable, but not much more than coronation chicken.

The best meal I’ve had here so far has been in a cheap down-and-out tapas bar with two Spanish colleagues at lunchtime. The second best was a pizza, but was marred by an embarrassing wine-glass-smashing incident. I think I’ve resolved that I must put aside my fear of speaking Spanish, bring with me a phrase book, and try tapas again for dinner. I’m fed up with everything else.

Roll on postal competition.

All this is an unusual combination, to say the least. I’m checking into the Radisson SAS Plaza downtown later tonight, which Chris assures me (from a trip to Oslo earlier this year) is pretty decent, although sadly the team has to move after tonight as it seems that the whole world has checked into Oslo for this week and all the hotels are full. We have to move 50km away, so maybe I’ll be brave and hire a left-hand-drive MANUAL car. God help me.

Now all I have to do is make the week worth it by helping to impress the IBM customer I’ve come to see with our products. I’m nervous, but excited.

Later update: Hotel is OK, team is very friendly and seems very capable. I’m feeling quite positive about this week. I have discovered that we’re only at the customer till Thursday (rather than the Friday I thought), so I’ll have to find something to do on Friday. Maybe locate the local IBM office, or maybe take the day off. We’ll see.

Oh, and it’s 11:30pm and it’s still almost light outside.

For a long time, Winchester’s most obvious and best option for coffee (in my humble opinion) has been the equally sterile and characterless Caffè Nero chain. There are a few other chains and independents around, but they’re all weaker for one reason or another (low ceilings, no air-conditioning, dirty tables, etc.). Starbucks will become its most obvious competitor, located only a few doors down, and will hopefully shake things up. It’s interesting how Caffè Nero’s dominant position has allowed it to get away with some things – the lines are always far too long, and the staff slow and inefficient. I see this as a practical example to observe how change in markets works, that wouldn’t be possible in a larger city with less incumbency and more turnover of residents. It’s going to be curious to see what happens, and I’ll be one of the first in Starbucks’ door.

Advantages:

• Easy-to-use Sony design – the build quality seems pretty good too. Normally I avoid Sony in the same way I avoid Apple – I just don’t understand the fuss (sorry Apple fans). This time, the bargain price swayed it for me.
• Much slimmer and lighter than my Canon.
• Goes all the way up to ISO 1000 (my Canon only does ISO 400). It remains to be seen how much noise there is at this level, but it’s still nice to know it can do it. I shoot in low light a lot, and hate compact-camera flash almost on principle.

Disadvantages:

• Not quite as many features as my Canon. It won’t do aperture-priority, shutter-priority, etc. I can do without these for the time being.
• No gravity sensor. It remains to be seen how annoying this will become, but Picasa makes rotating easy so hopefully it won’t be a big problem.
• Only a 3x optical zoom. Not sure what this translates to in old numbers, but it ain’t much.
• US charger – of course I didn’t expect anything different, but will have to solve this in the UK somehow.
• US-only warranty – didn’t expect anything different either, but just decided to take the risk – that’s an easier decision to make with $240 than the ~$1000 the 400D would have cost.

I’m really not sure what I’ll do when I return to the UK. It probably depends on how many the Canon will cost to fix. I might sell it on Ebay once fixed and part-buy an SLR with the proceeds (I really should have followed Adrian‘s advice originally and bought the 400D in the UK). I don’t really want to keep it; I’m most unimpressed with Canon now, and I get the impression the Sony will probably do everything I want from a compact. We’ll see.

I’m still stuck with the problem of how to take pictures; I’ve looked into hiring a camera, but the only ones seemingly available are high-end SLRs at around $75/day – far more than I want to spend. I may just end up buying a cheap compact so I have some photos to take home.

Unsurprisingly, Canon’s UK website provides much worse service – I can’t even find an email address to check with them whether they’d fix a camera under a US warranty. I still find it amazing that companies think it’s reasonable to leave their customers without an email address to contact. I’ll probably call them on Monday to confirm, but I’m not happy with this level of pre-sales support. I’ll be taking a look at Nikon.

Which unfortunately leaves me without a way of taking pictures whilst I’m here. And that makes me a sad Andy. Anyone see a way out of this?

People with my political opinions often make arguments for the latter based on either practical or moral arguments. Richard and I had a online discussion about this recently. But maybe there’s another, more silly, question that’s missing: which is sexier: business or government? A quick look at the primary US government portal compared to Wal-Mart’s homepage leaves me in no doubt who hired the better web designer, at any rate (and Wal-Mart is hardly an example of glamour). Which corporate body makes you want to interact with them? Anybody who’s spent any time at a UK local council, with their cuppa-and-rich-tea-biscuit image, will know what I mean (that’s an example of non-sexiness, if it’s not clear: not that I have anything against rich tea).

I’m semi-serious, actually – this does matter – it’s an issue of marketing. Clearly a company cannot actually be sexy – only people can be that. But the Virgin family of companies gets pretty close – and not just because of the suggestive naming. It’s an image that has been carefully cultivated by the folk at Virgin. Virgin is a company that you want to like (well, I do, anyway), irrespective of the fact that their trains don’t run on time.

I think the reasoning behind this is simple. Companies have to be sexy – or at least, they have to project an image which is aligned with values their customers want them to have. Sometimes this is sexiness – and Virgin is a prime example of a brand that’s attacked several markets with that technique and won some new custom. Sometimes, to be fair, there’s another image to be conveyed (UPS brown vans and brown uniforms are not alluring; but they do project an image of reliability). Conversely, government has no such motivation to project an image of anything – or at least the vast majority of unelected officials don’t. There’s no requirement to improve, no motivation to act like a marketer, because there’s no competition. Thus, government will always continue to project an image of dull and incompetent, whether that be the case or not. As Seth says, ‘[people] lose their jobs because of boring marketing’ – except in government they don’t, because they rarely lose them at all.

It’s probably not the most pressing problem the world faces right now, but wouldn’t it be nice to stop worrying about global warming for five minutes and think about how to make the institutions we deal with on a daily basis more appealing?