Always add a note to your hotel reservation requesting a high floor if possible. Some hotel chains will let you do this on your frequent traveller profile, for others you may have to request each time. It’s worth it, for two reasons: 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.

Today: 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.

A general grab-bag of tips for using LaTeX, from the days when I still used it a lot: To add nice headers and footers to each page use the fancyhdr package. Use glosstex for most acronym and glossary needs. Use the hyphenat package if you need monospace text (such as that set by the \texttt command) to wrap correctly, with hyphenation marks. The varioref package provides easy-to-use cross referencing with automatic phrases such as ‘on the following page…’ etc.

Should be an interesting travel week coming up - I am going to Budapest on Tuesday. I’m ashamed to say I’ve never been so far east in Europe before. Then on Friday I fly back into Terminal 5, the day after it opens. I wonder how smoothly it will be operating?

Good to see Hampshire County Council are spending my taxes wisely. In the propaganda brochure accompanying their latest letter demanding 800 pounds for rubbish collection and clogged roads, I find this item: These pages have been checked for clarity by Plain Language Commission [sic]. Sometimes I’m ashamed to live in a socialist country.

Normally I find Germany to live up to its reputation for competence and organisation. Today’s trip through the bureaucracy of Frankfurt airport, however, has been marred by duplicate security checks, far too many passport and boarding pass checks, annoying queues, and unclear instructions at the gate - and I haven’t even got on the plane yet! I’m not impressed. Perhaps Frankfurt is suffering from the Heathrow disease of being just too big for its boots.

Note to self and others: never use Picasa to download photos direct from the camera when using RAW+JPEG. It has a nasty habit of downloading the JPEGs, then deleting the RAWs. Ouch. Always use a card reader on the Compact Flash card instead.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using Dopplr and TripIt a lot recently as I’ve been travelling more. Although TripIt is far more featureful, I know more people on Dopplr and so keeping it up-to-date is useful as it increases the chance of serendipitous coincidences. They are competitors, but I like them both. So far it’s been a pain to enter information into Dopplr manually, but they announced today that it can now watch iCal calendars and create trips accordingly.

I went to the Focus on Imaging show at the NEC at the weekend. The show itself was a little disappointing, obviously oriented more around trade sales than the end-consumer, and was marred a little by poor organisation from the NEC resulting in large queues, a car-park merry-go-round, and so on. But nevertheless, there were some interesting stalls - Canon and Nikon having the largest and most impressive, with some substantial Canon L-series lenses on display.

As I’ve starting travelling a lot recently, I’ve been making reasonably heavy use of both Dopplr and the less well-known TripIt. The idea behind Dopplr is simple: tell it which cities you’re travelling to and it will share that information with your other Dopplr contacts, notifying you when you’re in the same place. You can also syndicate your travel plans - I have mine published on Facebook and available as a feed via Google Calendar.