Tag Archives: BlackBerry

Quick AirPower05 mini-review


Posted on 26. Jun, 2005

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The show was quite decent, the air base looks onto a ridge of tall hills (mountains?) so when the planes are flying low they're against hills which is pretty unique and spectacular. AirPower had to be the smoothest airshow I've ever attended. No security check and free entry meant that the hundreds of thousands of people moved in and out of the show in a matter of minutes, rather than the normal queues at pretty much any other airshow. The prime sponsor was Red Bull, which was actually founded by an Austrian. He must be quite the plane nut as he had so many planes sponsored and painted red bull that he literally has his own air force. Amongst his sponsored painted planes he had a beautiful Alphajet, Sea Vixen, several aerobatic planes and war birds, and a DC-6 airliner! Not a bad little collection. AirPower will be the biggest gathering of aerobatic teams this year, and the flying was spectacular. I quite liked the Swiss, Spanish and French teams, along with of course the Red Arrows. This is the first time I'd seen these teams, the French were excellent. The Portuguese dual jet team did some of the closest formation flying I've seen at high speeds. The 16 helicopter troop insertion featuring black hawks, bells and two other types was impressive too. I guess the highlight for me was seeing the Austria Draken's. They had a solo and a 6 ship formation. The Draken's are due to be retired this year, they're a bizarre looking aircraft, I wouldn't say they're good looking but they certainly look big and mean, and sound really loud. Friday was a full 10 hours of flying, too much even for me. Saturday was blistering hot until a massive thunderstorm came through and drenched the field for an hour. Flying resumed, I left at 5pm very wet with the display still going. I couldn't wait any longer to watch the red bull air race. The race course consisted of massive inflated cones for the planes to fly through kind of like a rally race course. It certainly looked impressive and difficult. AirPower05 was well worth the trip and Graz was a great city to stay in too. Good weekend.


Mobile Weblog Post from Graz, Austria


Posted on 24. Jun, 2005

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I flew into Graz, Austria yesterday afternoon for the AirPower05 Air show. The show is actually 90km away in Zeltweg, but it seemed like an interesting base and is easily accessible by train from Graz. Graz is Austria's second biggest city and has a really lively feel to it. There's four big universities, combined they have 50,000 students so its a bit of a party town with lots of bars, pubs, restaurants and clubs. I did some walks around the old town and west of the Mur. There's lots of interesting architecture mixing modern with historical. They have a futuristic bar (Aiola Island) sitting in the middle of the Mur river made of glass and steel and connected by two bridges. They also have a very cool looking convention centre, I can't remember the real name, but its dubbed "the friendly alien" as it looks like bizzare spaceship. Amusingly Graz is the home town of Arnie, well a suburb 6km out of Graz. I'm on the train to Zeltweg now, the show today promises to be fantastic and should be the highlight of this years European airshow season. 230 planes from 20 countries including 8 Aerobatic teams including the French, Swiss, Spanish, Italian and English jet teams. Organisers are expecting 250,000 to 300,000 people and its going to be hot, around 32c. Surprisingly the show itself is completely free. I was chatting to two Germans on the train before who went to last years big show in Payerne, Switzerland which featured all the jet aerobatic teams in a single 40+ aircraft formation flypast, here hoping seeing as though they're all here they might do it again! I've got all my gear, so hopefully I'll get some good videos for my airshow videos section.


Paris Airshow 2005 Mini Review


Posted on 19. Jun, 2005

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Well, I've seen the A380 now, up close and flying! It's certainly big, but doesn't look over bearing. Its nicely proportioned and looks like it should fly, if you know what I mean. The presentation was quite restrained, unsurprisingly as it only flew for the first time several weeks ago or so. Then again, on reflection for an aircraft still in the early stages they did a fair bit including some tight turns close to the ground and a nice slow pass. The display was gear down the whole time and between 120 and 160 kts. Boeing also had their experimental 777-200LR on static display which looked nice and beastly. There were tens of thousands of people there and it was damn hot, I got burnt to a crisp despite layers of sunscreen due to having to queue up for everything for long periods.. buses, trains, entry gates, food etc. Other aircraft on flying display included the latest Rafale and Mirage fighters, and the very impressive Russian Sukoi Su-27 fighter. Also the first time I've seen the Tiger attack helicopter flying of which Australia has ordered approximately 30 I think. The Tiger put on an impressive display freaking out people by rolling upside down a few times. Paris was interesting, but the massive crowds and hours in the beating sun took away from it a bit, the flying display only kicked off at 12:30 and a lot of time was wasted on the boring stuff.. gliders, parachutists and little piston trainers. Still it was worth it to see the A380 and also check out the Museum's two Concorde's. Interestingly many of the French started leaving after the A380 flew, not interested in the fighter jet displays to follow. Anyway, airshow in Austria next weekend, hope its a bit cooler temperature wise.. (Moblogged while sitting in typical Parisian cafe drinking coffee and eating croissants for breakfast).


Mobile Weblog Post 2005-03-03 (64)


Posted on 03. Mar, 2005

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Brrr. Quite cold in London now, and while the capital has had pretty poor snow coverage, the rest of the country has been getting a good dump. I hate the BBC weather reporters, any chance they get they use their favourite word "treacherous" to describe ("hype") the conditions. For a country that gets snow and ice every year, some groups seem unable to deal with it, particularly schools and public transport which are thrown into chaos at the first sign of a few mm of snow. I love the quote I heard the other day about a school deciding to close due to snow, by the time the parents had arrived it had melted. Don't even get me started on the most treacherous of them all, "black ice". The invisible menace that catches speeding motorway drivers unawares.. "what you mean the ice is the same colour as the road and I should slow down?". (Oh dear a post about weather, how dull. Nothing better to do when your blogging on the Central Line, just about to get off at my tube station Bank. Surrounded by about 4 other suits also tapping away on their BlackBerry's).


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-12-01 (61)


Posted on 01. Dec, 2004

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I almost pulled the plug on aussieblogs this week after finding blo.gs no longer publishes a changes.xml feed of updated blogs, and that the weblogs.com changes.xml feed is getting very unreliable. I haven't modified any code on aussieblogs since May and a set of shell scripts on the bot server automatically correct any fatal problems that used to require my intervention eg. hung bots etc. The prospect of having to program new detection routines is very unappealing. Luckily an interface the Technorati team only released in the past month shows real potential. The Technorati Attention API let's you POST a list of weblogs in OPML, and Technorati will return in the same format the list reordered with a lastUpdated attribute added. Its then just a matter of parsing this back into the processing queue at aussieblogs to spider the site, download any meta-data, grab the the last post from the RSS feed, and post the update to the aussieblogs database. I did a quick build last night and this morning with Jakarta Commons HTTPClient, Informa and Xerces that does this but I haven't had time to test it properly yet. While I can easily handle the number of requests that need to be submitted within my 500 query per day Technorati API call limit, I'm not sure that the Attention API is designed to parse input files of over 3000 blogs each time. I could well be wasting my time, but we'll see. If Attention API doesn't work out as a good method of detecting updated blogs, I'll pull the plug on the tracker as I don't wish to return to the old method of visiting each site and performing page size comparisons, there's just too many sites to check for updates. Any Java developers want to contribute?


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-10-17 (55)


Posted on 17. Oct, 2004

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Had a great time in NYC as usual. I love this city. And actually coming here for business and going to work each day on Wall Street was definitely a buzz. Currently sitting in a Boeing 777 parked at the gate at JFK waiting for the final stragglers to board. I'll write a up a trip report just as soon as I've written up one for the Japan trip a few weeks ago. One thing I will mention now is the hotel. I stayed at the Millenium Hilton downtown which is directly opposite WTC ground zero. The large windows in the totally rennovated hotel offered a dominating view of the hole. Not the best thing to wake up to each morning. Plane starting.. Better sign off.


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-08-24 (54)


Posted on 24. Aug, 2004

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Not a great deal going on at the moment. Working on knocking some projects over at the office before heading off to Australia and Japan in September. Japanese lessons are going well, my vocabulary is steadily growing, however putting it altogether into intelligble sentences is a little more challenging. Ticked five outstanding summer movies off my list, only a few more to go now and I will have finally caught up with the new releases.

Loving the BBCi Olympics coverage at the moment, multiscreen digital interactive TV with absolutely no ads is the only way to watch the Olympics. Switch between up to 5 different events, while overlaying schedules, medals tables and news gives the Olympics a much better home spectator experience. Full marks to the BBC. I'm not sure what 7 digital in Australia are offering, but I'd say BBC coverage must be amongst the best available not forgetting of course BBC also have broadband broadcast rights. Its interesting to see the high adoption of interactive digital TV in the UK versus the continued avoidance of it by most Australian households (ah, but there are so many factors influencing this so just ignore that last comment). Possibly the only downside of the UK coverage, we don't have Roy & HG or Bruce.


Reposted Mobile Weblog Post


Posted on 23. Jul, 2004

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Reposted from when we were in the Czech Republic last week: We're in Rakovnik now, a quiet suburban countryish town about an hours drive north-west of Prague. The wedding is tomorrow afternoon so we headed out today for a bit of a poke around and dinner. Without a phrase book Rakovnik is proving quite challenging. Rakovnik is definitely not a tourist stop, so unlike Prague where most hospitality staff spoke a bit of English, out here its Czech, Czech and a bit of Deutsche if you're lucky. Even the most basic anglicky is met with a blank stare. As a result there's already been several amusing fallbacks to sign language to ask for things like an iron (stretch out t-shirt and make ironing motion), ice in a drink (point into glass and shiver), and no whipped cream on a desert (simulate milking a cow and whip up milk and then end request with NO). The most challenging incident was trying to explain that the iron had tripped the circuit breaker in our hotel room and would they mind resetting it. Imagine if you will me trying to explai! n electricity and blown fuse in sign language without knowing any Czech words that could explain the predicament. Luckily I found the fuse box down the corridor, found the tripped breaker for our room and pointed it out to the hotel lady. Sure I could have flicked it myself, but it wasn't really my place to I guess. Amusing anyway, really wish I'd bought a phrase book.

Prague was good, we reached that satisfaction point where you know there's more you could see, but feel like you've down more than enough to move on. So a big tick goes in the Prague column.. Along with a note, next time check out some of the nicer bars and clubs that Prague is supposed to be famous for.. (no not those bars..)


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-07-13 (47)


Posted on 13. Jul, 2004

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We're having a great time in Prague. We're staying in a nice modern loft style apartment in the centre of Prague (Praha 1) in Old Town, which was a lucky find. Prague is a beautiful historic city (where we are anyway), with lots of grand old buildings, narrow streets and nice atmosphere. It's also very young and active with lots of people out wandering late at night between its many bars and clubs including lots of groups of Brit guys on bucks nights. We've still got three nights here till we head to Rikovnik for Pierre-Yves' wedding and another night back in Prague before heading home to London. So plenty of time to see all the good things and soak in a bit of culture. Highly recommend a visit to Prague, definitely one of the most interesting European cities I've been to.


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-06-18 (34)


Posted on 18. Jun, 2004

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Text message: "It's good to be back in London, a week of driving around the Irish countryside was starting to take its toll. We covered 1,100 miles over 6 days and basically saw everything. So there's a big tick in Ireland column now, along with a note:


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-06-11 (33)


Posted on 11. Jun, 2004

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Text message: "The Ireland trip has been good, starting at Dublin we drove south-west to Cork, Kinsale, Bantry, Killarney, Dingle, and now we're heading north-east back to Dublin via Tralee, Galway, Clifden, Westport, Castlebar and Athlone. The scenery has been quite mixed from flat farmland to spectacular mountain ranges and high passes, lakes, cliffs and coastal areas. The weather hasn't been that great though, much of the nice scenery and views has often been hidden by mist or fog. The driving has been fun especially through the mountain passes where you can't see anything below you except fog. Highlights so far have been Healey Pass, Kylemore Abbey and the Cliffs of Moher. Dingle was amusing as its almost entirely Gaelic speaking. Going to a big Peat bog this afternoon, and then hopefully catchup with Martin D for a drink in Dublin before flying back to London. Irish observations: the houses don't have numbers, how anything gets delivered is beyond me.. Finding your booked B&B it's a nightmare on a long road."


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-25 (31)


Posted on 25. May, 2004

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Text message: "Suffering from a major gadget itch at the moment. First up I really want to upgrade my Minolta Dimage 7i to a Nikon D70, looks like I've already left it too late to get a good price on my 7i on eBay though. I would also like to get a Canon IXUS/S500 as my ultra-compact carry everywhere digital camera. And finally I am hanging for the Sony Ericsson K700 to come out so I can finally ditch my old T39m. Unfortunately, buying this stuff in the UK means dropping some serious coin. The UK is pretty much the most expensive place in the world to have a gadget fetish and has seriously impacted my gadget buying habits. I may wait until the next time I Ieave the EU, or alternatively take the import duty gamble game on a reputable eBay merchant from HK or SG. We'll see, no rush I guess. "


RAAF Boeing 737-7ES Wedgetail #2


Posted on 22. May, 2004

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thumb thumb

Better yet, it actually works!

http://www.airliners.net/...


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-15 (30)


Posted on 15. May, 2004

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Text message: "Just on the way back from London Expo. Got to see and meet a few interesting people and ticked another Buffy actress off my list. Highlight was of course meeting and getting a pic taken with Mercedes McNab (Harmony from Buffy & Angel). Also got a pic with Robert Beltran (Chakotay from ST Voyager). Also saw other Star Trek actors including Marina Sirtis (Councilor Troi from TNG); Connor Trinneer (Tucker) and Dominic Keating (Reid) from Enterprise; and Armin Shimerman from Buffy and ST DS9. There were some other interesting people there too including Robert Patrick from T2 and X-Files (now the third actor I've seen from X-Files in the flesh) and Larry Hagman from Jeanie and Dallas! Anyway good fun, but I was on my own this time so all my photos were taken by other people and sucked badly. I've got a few okay shots of some people I'll post soon. Gotta love London for the good mix of scifi actors you get a conferences, heck they even had the chick who played the drop-ship pilot in Aliens.. 'We're in the pipe 5 by 5'."


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-06 (29)


Posted on 06. May, 2004

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Text message: "You've gotta love London. A friend of a friend got knocked over (hit and run) and broke her foot. While she was down on the ground incapacitated someone else took the opportunity to steal her handbag. "


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-05 (28)


Posted on 05. May, 2004

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Text message: "I've made a few tweaks to my Currently database, so it shows more interesting results on the new front page. I really like this section of my site, particularly the Events and Travel views which not only show recent activities, but also includes a little thumbnail image for each where available and a link to related content or external sites. You can also subscribe to RSS version of Currently.

The coolest thing about currently is the ease of making entries, I can now update it via SMS, email, BlackBerry, Outlook and my iPAQ PDA. So when I'm stumbling home from a big night out I can update the evenings venues with a few clicks. Likewise when travelling I can send updates of recent places visited while on the road.

I've also updated my bio complete with a small geeky picture. Okay, no more boring site news, interesting posts will resume when I have something interesting to post ;)"


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-03 (27)


Posted on 03. May, 2004

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Text message: "Only in London would you find umbrella vending machines. For only GBP2 I had to buy one. The umbrellas are surprisingly decent for the price and would probably last several uses. The use of a unique aqua colour would make it easy for the owners of the vending machines to spot customers wandering the streets with their product. Nice idea."


Mobile Weblog Post 2004-05-02 (26)


Posted on 02. May, 2004

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Text message: "Had a terribly boring day at home yesterday, so I thought I may as well do some maintenance on anthonyjhicks.com. I converted the front page into XHTML like the rest site and redesigned it to show summary of recent additions across the site.

My hack at a TrackBack implementation has been broken for months, so signed up for a basic TypePad account and used that to trackback against my site until I had the bug ironed out with my XML-RPC interface. TypePad is very nice by the way. No prizes for guessing my TypePad URL. If I didn't have so much time invested in my own CMS I would probably use MoveableType or outsource completely and use TypePad.

I also added a BlackBerry blogging interface so I can make posts on my BlackBerry (as I am now). Its much better than blogging via SMS as I can write up really long posts.

I'd love to do a complete redesign of the site, but I'm so over doing anything personal web related that I feel this design will probably stay for a few more years yet. Todays efforts along with several bug fixes will probably be the last work I do on my site for a long time. "