Travel Bite #3: Tulum, Mexico

Over the Christmas 2005 / New Year 2006 period, we spent three weeks in Central America. One of the highlights was Tulum,  about 80 miles south of the not-worth-visiting tourist metropolis of Cancun on the Yucatan peninsula.

From the main hostel area in Tulum Pueblo (the village of Tulum) it's only 70 pesos for a short taxi ride to the entrance of Tulum Ruinas, the Mayan walled city (or a long dusty walk which was the option we chose unfortunately!). The site, also known as Zama (City of Dawn) was one of the last outposts of Mayan civilization, being occupied from around 1200AD all the way through to the Spanish colonization in the 16th century which marked the end of this 3,500 year old empire.

As we walked down the dusty track we saw stalls and traders selling colourful ponchos, rugs and sombreros as well as faded postcards and tacky replica Mayan ruins.



I bought a fresh coconut and enjoyed the juice, something I hadn't done since my last trip to Malaysia in 2004. One trader beckoned me over and starting bargaining with me; he literally wanted the shirt off my back - as it was a genuine Premiership Southampton shirt.



He offered me rugs and other colourful weavings. Ultimately I said no, he had nothing I wanted. It was entertaining though - I guess there are some things money can't buy in Mexico!

The ruins themselves were magnificent. Not the towering pyramids we'd seen in Chitchen Itza or Tikal, but low rectangular pillared buildings with a unique style something between Roman and Ancient Egyptian.





They had stepped rooves and looked quite dramatic against the lush green grass of the hilltop. As we wandered among the ruins on paths we saw maybe thirty or forty iguanas, each one a good two or three feet long. They looked like they owned the place, perching on the rocky ruins.



Being a lizard fan, Alex was in her element and managed to snap some amazing photographs, as you can see.

We reached the cliff edge and were treated to picture-postcard views of pure white sands and azure blue waters down at the base of the cliffs. The fort certainly had an imposing location perched a hundred feet up!





We headed down the steps to the beach and indulged in a swim. The sand was soft and the water was warm. It was hard to believe it was early January. We were very glad to have chosen Tulum over Cancun. 

We headed back up through the ruins and then walked down the beach - Tulum Playa - past expensive resorts and restaurants, admiring the beautiful ocean view.



We rounded off the afternoon with a smoothie in a seafront bar and found our way back to the main road and back into the village.

You can see the hi-resolution photos on Flickr here.

You can learn more about Tulum via these links:

• Tulum (Wikipedia)
• Tulum (Wikitravel)
• Tulum Tourist Information

 

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And now for something completely different... a bit of science fiction

This month I have started attending a creative writing course at Thomas More Institute.

The second week's assignment was a 500 word dramatic monologue based on the character we'd developed the week before - in my case, 44-year-old Jack Duffy, who makes a living as a taxi pilot in 2258.

I did post it here but Blogger is playing silly buggers with the formatting, so you can read it on Scribd here. It's also on my posterous. Feedback is always welcome.

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One year without TV - Part One

In just a couple of weeks time, it will have been a year since my wife and I last received any kind of TV broadcast into our home. We don't even own a TV since we moved to Canada.

That's not to say we don't watch TV shows, news and movies, it's just that we've been using different technologies to do it. In this first post I will explore why we did it,  how we made the transition away from broadcast TV, and what technologies we found to be useful. In part two I'll look back at our experiences and assess the pros and cons of not having a TV, and discuss where this might lead, for us and for society as a whole. If you'd prefer a shorter version of this post, you can head on over to my posterous blog.

Watching TV at a time that you choose

So, why did we make the switch? One of the biggest reasons was time pressure. It's an inescapable truth that we are all much busier than we were 20 years ago, in the days when there were fewer TV channels than fingers on your hand. We have gone through a lifestyle revolution where an almost infinite numbers of online and offline activities are available to fill up our time.

When it comes to TV, it's no longer practical to watch a show at the time when it's on, at least not if you want to catch every episode. And who has time to mess around with videotapes? (or these days, DVD recorders)

The solution that presented itself was PVRs (Personal Video Recorders), which allow you to automatically record all episodes of a series by the push of a button, and watch them back in your own time. You can also pause, rewind and fast forward through ads. Being in the UK, Tivo was not an option, but we were still able to get on the PVR bandwagon. We had Sky+ for a couple of years, and then V+, which worked quite well for us. And once you've had a PVR, you'll never want to go back to normal TV (sounds like a line from a commercial, but it's true).

The burdens of PVRs

But we found that having Sky+/V+ presented new problems. This was the first time we'd had digital TV or cable/satellite TV too, and it meant an increase from 5 channels to around 300 channels. This was not a good thing. More channels meant more shows that looked interesting, and more choices about what to watch. More choice is not a good thing. We found that we were accumulating shows we wanted to watch faster than we could watch them, and were having to spend time deciding which shows to delete, or copying recordings off to DVD. What was supposed to bring us more entertainment was becoming a chore.

What's more, at that time it was more or less impossible to have PVR technology without paying an expensively monthly contract (usually higher than a standard non-PVR subscription). Now, you can get PVR boxes that work with Freeview or Freesat - meaning no monthly fee. This would be a slightly better option - but I would anticipate an excess of content still being a problem.

Airdates and TV downloading

The other thing that was happening around the same time was that we were getting into more and more American shows - such as Lost, Heroes, Jericho, 24 and Enterprise. Typically these shows air weeks to months earlier in the USA than in the UK. And in the case of Lost, we found ourselves unable to watch it legally without switching provider when Sky One and Virgin Media fell out over licensing (see right). And there was no legal way to obtain any of these shows when they first came out. So we began to download shows as .avi files from the Internet - typically using torrent sites such as isohunt and the Pirate Bay. This meant we could get the shows we wanted as soon as they came out, while everyone else is still talking about them, and best of all, with no adverts.

Now of course these files are natively viewed on a computer, not a television, which was ok on my widescreen monitor, but not ideal. Computers typically aren't set up with a nearby couch or armchair for viewing. So we started to look at media players - put simply, a box that sits under your TV and lets you watch computer media files from its own hard drive or from your home network.

Media Players

Our first media player was a modded XBox games console (modding is a legal process which involves adding a chip to the console so it can run any software, and installing a new software interface). We used the very impressive XBMC (XBox Media Centre) software, which lets you run XBox games from hard disk, run emulators, stream internet radio, watch movie trailers, and play any music or video files from an internal hard drive or your network. XBMC remains one of the best interfaces out there, with beautifully designed screens, easy to use and highly functional. It pulls in movie & TV thumbnails and info from the internet automatically.

We found it was a very powerful way to watch downloaded episodes on our TV - by simply sharing the torrent download directory over the network, browsing the directory on the XBox, and clicking the file. We now had all the PVR like features (pause, rewind/fast-forward, watch when you like) for our media files.

NAS (Network Attached Storage) and Digital Downsizing

We continued using this system in parallel with our PVR, and accumulated more and more media files of TV shows and movies. We realised we needed to have a single machine to store all our files, accessible over the network, so we began to construct an Ubuntu Linux computer into which we could put lots of hard drives to store our media. This had some limited success, but I don't get on with Linux configuration, and it just became too much work.

Fortunately, I discovered FreeNAS, a Linux-like operating system pre-configured for exactly this purpose, sharing files over a network (known as network attached storage). There are more expensive options available, but FreeNAS can run from a USB key stuck into any old PC you have lying around - and can be easily configured with no command-line stuff from a powerful web interface. It was just the job, and worked beautifully. Soon we were buying 750Gb and 1Tb hard drives (surprisingly cheaply) to store our media files.

By now it was early 2009, and we were making plans to emigrate to Canada. We realised that taking our huge collection of both bought and recorded DVDs and CDs was not an option, and that we could digitize all our music and movies onto the NAS hard drives - and take those hard drives with us to Canada. Mrs Alex did all the hard work, and we soon had eight hard drives full of media to take to Canada.

Soon after getting to Canada, we acquired an old PC cheaply, and installed FreeNAS again, to make a new NAS server, which I affectionately call Tardis, giving us access to all our old files.

A 21st century living room

As we set up home in Canada, we thought hard about how to lay out our living room. We realised that we spend a lot of our time on our laptops, and that having a TV in lounge makes the room very TV centric. My monitor was able to function as a "TV screen" for media playback from the NAS, swivelled round to face the sofa when needed as a TV, and swivelled back to the desk when needed by my Mac. And so we were able to layout our living room without a TV. Looking back, I guess this was the moment we decided not to have broadcast TV any more.

I can't describe how much nicer it is to not have a TV in your lounge. By default, you sit down and do other things - whereas in most lounges when you have a big TV screen in front of you, the room almost invites you to turn it on.

The Popcorn Hour, HD, and Video Projectors

And so we enjoyed this set up for the first six months of our "year without TV"... downloading new shows and watching films from our collection via the NAS and my computer monitor. But by now, some of the shows we watched were also available in high definition, which couldn't really be played back on my 1680x1050 monitor. And I was aware that audio-wise, our system was not ideal (we were just using my computer speakers). We started to wonder about the possibility of setting up a home cinema.

I'd been thinking for some time about getting a better media player. We'd left the XBox in the UK, being too heavy to transport, and using my computer to play shows was a little annoying. The media player market is still in its infancy, but there are many many choices available. There's MythTV (too much Linux configuration for my liking), Windows Media Center (not so great at playing back some video formats, plus, it's by Microsoft), Apple TV (but you can only play shows and movies bought from Apple), and many more. Ultimately the device we settled on is a Popcorn Hour (also known as a Networked Media Tank).

The Popcorn Hour is a tiny box (not much bigger than a hard drive) that plugs into a TV or projector to stream media from your network. It has some of the best support for different video formats - including our digitized VOB files (DVDs) and FLAC files (Audio CDs). What's more it is capable of HD output and optical audio out. I also like it because you're not running a noisy PC, it's quiet and very low power consumption. From a technical point of view it's hard to beat. My lovely wife bought me one for my birthday.

It does have some disadvantages, it's interface is much more primitive than the likes of XBMC, and not very usable for music files. You can install better interfaces, but this involves a lot of work labelling your files in special ways and generating custom menus. Unfortunately the device is not as powerful as a PC, and it shows. But I can live with that, for what it does. Functionality is more important than ease-of-use (much though it pains me as a user-centric designer to say that!)

In August, we moved to a bigger place with 2 living rooms, and setting up a Popcorn Hour-powered became a real possibility. Our friend Eric very kindly lent us an HD-capable projector, and we put up a shelf and drilled a hole through the wall so that we could have our NAS server in the spare room but the Popcorn Hour and projector in our lounge. We painted the walls white to give us a better surface to project onto, and before long it was all systems go. We were even able to hook up our Wii to the projector as well.

This is a great set up, we're now able to watch our movies projected onto the wall, and when you watch HD films you can see every detail. We've been enjoying this set up for the last 6 months - downloading new shows like Dollhouse, Doctor Who and ReGenesis as well as our old favourites like Lost and Heroes.

Watching TV online, proxies and protected content

Beyond downloading, there's another way to watch TV online, that we've dabbled in but not fully explored, and that's watching TV streamed over the Internet. Probably the best example in the world is the BBC's iPlayer, which allows you to watch BBC shows soon after broadcast, streamed over the Internet. Unfortunately, because the BBC is funded by UK licence payers, the service checks what country you are accessing the site from and blocks you if you are not in the UK (as do the UK's other online TV services - 4od, demandfive, ITV Player, MSN Video Player, and Zattoo.)

Similar geo-IP technology is used in the USA to restrict access to Hulu and ABC, and is also used for audio services such as Pandora (US) and Spotify (UK).

As a UK citizen living abroad this is very frustrating. I would be happy to continue to pay my license fee while abroad in exchange for officially supported access to BBC content. Unfortunately the legal and technical systems in place do not allow this.

But fortunately there is a workaround - to use a proxy server. A proxy server is a computer in the country you want to pretend to be in, that relays your connections, fooling sites like iPlayer into believing you are in that country. We've started to use a service called Flote, which for 9.99GBP a month, gives access to US, UK, Canadian and Dutch proxies, enabling access to almost all of the services listed above. Proxies are legal, but something of a loophole at the moment. If you'd like to learn more about proxies, there's a good description in this episode of the excellent CBC Spark podcast.

The proxy service means I can watch UK shows like Doctor Who even while out of the country, but in practice I mostly download the torrent files unless I am away from home. This may be partly because I haven't found a good solution to get Internet streams onto the projector (One option might be a Slingbox, but they're not cheap).

Life without a TV

So this brings me up to the present - you can see how we got here, and hopefully you learnt a thing or two along the way about what options might be available to you. If you're thinking of breaking free of broadcast TV you may also want to take a look at Jeff MacArthur's decabled.com.

In the next post I will tell you about what the experience has been like for us, the pros and cons, and where this might all lead.

Thanks for reading!

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Travel Bite #2: Lake Champlain and a taste of New England

Back in May last year we picked up a Communauto car and did a day trip down into New England. We went down the western side of the massive Lake Champlain through New York State and back up the eastern side through Vermont.

We headed south over the border on Interstate 97 and stopped at a tourist information centre soon after where were able to pick up some useful maps and leaflets. We drove further south and were treated to impressive views of the Adirondack mountains towering overhead, which we plan to visit someday as well as the nearby Lake Placid. We had planned to stop first in Plattsburgh (which incidentally is supposed to be a good location for cheap flights across the USA, as many of the budget airlines don't fly to Canada).

Unfortunately not long after we got over the border the heavens opened, so rather than stop we continued south along the 9 and more minor roads by the edge of the lake (which is technically a very large river).

We saw some beautiful houses on the waterfront. As we have seen in most places in North America, waterfront access is often difficult as it tends to be private land - unlike the UK where rights of way and footpaths exist by most lakes and rivers. One house had a beautiful little summer house on stilts on the water with a hammock looking out onto the lake - it made you wish you lived there!

By now the rain had stopped and we spent some time walking down the streets and to the water's edge in a beautiful little village called Essex, where there seemed to be a very sleepy pace of life and fog engulfed the end of the pier.

Outside of the village we stopped at our first US "historic site", a tiny limestone school house from 1816 (photo on Flickr - see below).

We continued south down long and winding (but nonetheless attractive) roads until soon after Port Henry, were we began to head Northeast, and took the Champlain Bridge across into Vermont.

By now the rain had stopped and the sun came out, treating us to some beautiful views over green fields and of attractive wooden farmhouses with pill shaped grain silos.

We stopped at an interesting art gallery/antiquities store and then continued further north until we reached the city of Burlington, which was surprisingly attractive and felt quite British with ice-cream kiosks, clothes stores and pedestrianised streets. We wandered through a shopping centre and stopped for tea and cake at the excellent Dobra Tea where you can sample teas from every country in the world accompanied by delicious salads, snacks and pastries.

We then began to head home, taking the scenic route across the islands through the agricultural settlements of South Hero, North Hero and Alburgh.

The light was amazing as the afternoon drew to a close, making some wonderful reflections on the water and making the trees and grass seem a lush yellowy green.

We crossed back into Canada on a minor road near Rouses Point, which was pretty much one guy in a booth - a much more pleasant experience than our crossing south on the Interstate (and no queue).

The whole trip was about 4.5 hours driving. It was great to get a taster of the areas around Lake Champlain and we left feeling that there's plenty more for us to explore next time. All in all, a great day out, despite the rain. You can see our route here:

View in a larger map.

You can see higher resolution photos in the full set on Flickr here.

You can find more information about the area via the following links:

• Lake Champlain on Wikipedia
• Champlain Valley on Wikitravel
• Burlington Tourism

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Travel Bite #1: A winter drive through the Eastern Sierra, USA

Welcome to the first of my "travel bites" - short travelogues focussing on a particular place I've been.

In mid-December Mrs. Alex and I took a road trip through a large chunk of southwestern USA. For me the highlight was the spectacular scenery we encountered as we drove down US 395 through the Eastern Sierra, from Lake Tahoe past Mono Lake and onwards south into the Owens Valley and then east towards Death Valley.

Lake Tahoe

We arrived in Lake Tahoe just before sunset, having taken route 50 east from Sacramento.

We found a waterfront park, closed for the season but accessible on foot. We trudged across the snow covered sand to the water's edge and watched the sun go down.

Carson City & Lake Topaz

After dark we drove to Carson City, a sort of Blackpool version of Las Vegas, where we spent the night in a motel that seemed to have been left unchanged since the 80s. The next morning we set out early and headed south, dipping in and out of fog-filled valleys. Snow capped peaks were all around us as we descended below the cloud layer at Lake Topaz.

The lake was half covered in thick ice with ice crystals sparkling in the bright morning sun.

The ice was so thick we even ventured out onto the lake, and felt like we could have walked further still!

Mono Lake & Lee Vining

We continued south, stopping regularly for photos as each corner revealed ever more impressive snow-covered landscapes. The roads were clear and empty despite guidebook warnings of impassable roads. Soon we approached an even vaster misty valley, that of Mono Lake.

Here the overnight fog had allowed ice crystals to gather on every tree branch and flora, creating an incredible winter wonderland.

We wandered around the cemetery, and imagined ourselves in Narnia.

After a brunch stop at the excellent Nicely's diner in Lee Vining, we drove round to the south side of the lake to see the Tufa. The road down to the water's edge was inaccessible, but we got close enough to see the tufa (salty stalagmite-like deposits rising from the lake), and even heard two coyotes howling in the distance. We could just make them out.

Inyo Forest, Mammoth and Owens Valley

Continuing through the Inyo Forest region we neared the Mammoth ski area. This side road and a couple of other scenic loops were inaccessible without snow chains.

But we didn't care as we were seeing plenty of amazing scenery.

We passed through the town of Bishop and were amazed by the view as the landscape opened out into the vast Owens Valley. This was one of those views impressive in its vastness to which a camera just cannot do justice. We had started to lose altitude now, and it was warm enough in the sunshine to build a mini-snowman and have a little snowball fight.

We drove further on as the snows began to disappear and be replaced by grasslands and then desert as we headed east on the 190 towards Death Valley... but that's a story for another travel bite!

All in all we spent probably 5 to 6 hours driving, plus lots of stops, and it was a drive I would recommend to anyone, particularly in this quiet winter period.

Photos, Links, and Map

As well as the photos above, you can view more images with high resolution versions on Flickr:

• 25-photo Eastern Sierra highlights set
• 73-photo detailed set of the Eastern Sierra
• 73-photo set of the whole road trip (of which this was just half of one day!)

You can learn more about the region via the following links:

• Sierra Nevada on Wikipedia
• Eastern Sierra on Wikitravel
• The Sierra Web
• 395.com

You can see our route on this map (you'll need to zoom out a bit):

View Larger Map

I plan to make these travel bites a regular feature, so let me know what you think!

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Amazing stop motion video mashup - thanks to the BBC

via youtube.com

The BBC has just done something revolutionary... they've released all the source footage for an as yet unscreened documentary about the way technology is changing our lives, and are inviting the public to compete and edit/mashup the footage into something unique. Above is an inspiring example of what's possible, by Barry Pilling. Here's another by Cassetteboy.
The idea of allowing your work to be edited and improved by others was first encouraged by the Creative Commons. If you don't already, make sure any photos you share on Flickr are released under Creative Commons, so others can do great things with them (without profiting or taking credit).
Another film in this vein that's well worth a look is RIP: A Remix Manifesto, the story of Girl Talk's rise to fame as a musician who plays no instrument but uses samples of others' music. It too is freely editable and mash-up-able. There's also a growing craze for "fake trailers", the most famous being Shining. It's so much easier these days now that people have a publishing house, editing studio and photo lab on their desktops. Exciting times!

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Google Maps is losing its marbles

I am not sure what is up with Google Maps this week. Usually its public transport directions are very accurate and incredibly useful. But both Mrs Alex and I have experienced some really weird directions from the site this week.

The first image is one Mrs Alex found, suggesting she walk a massive loop to almost back where she started, to catch a bus to a metro station she would have walked past, which is in the wrong direction anyway!

The second image is one I got when I asked for directions to a location near McGill University. Apparently I should hop on the metro to McGill, then walk all the way back home, and walk back to McGill again.

Crazy! I suspect heads will roll at Google when they notice this regression bug :-)

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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My first swim in Canada

I'm a keen swimmer. But that doesn't mean the same thing in North America as it does in the UK, or even to everyone back home, so I better explain - I love to go to the swimming pool, cruise up and down at my own pace and let my mind wander. If I'm feeling particularly indulgant I might even relax in the jacuzzi (spa/hottub) or steam room afterwards. I'm not a competitive swimmer and have no interest in lap times or personal bests. For me, it's a pleasant thing to do that has the happy side effect of giving me some regular exercise.

Which is why it's really sad that I haven't been swimming in Montréal since I moved here 9 months ago. The thing is, in Canada, it's not so easy to just "go swimming". In the UK, the normal way to go swimming is to turn up at a public pool, at pretty much any time you like (save for a few swimming classes or women only sessions when it is not available), pay a few pounds admission, and go swimming.
"Public" pools that aren't publicly accessible

In Canada, it doesn't work like that. Almost every pool (including the numerous "public" pools provided by the city), require memberships fees - usually around $50 (£30) a month, plus a similar joining fee, after which you can have general access at most hours. If you want to keep yourself "unaligned" to any particular pool, then you can come during the pool's "public" hours.. Typically 1-3 hours each day are assigned as open to all (all Montréal residents that is). And during that time it's free to swim. The catch? These "free" hours are not particularly convenient. At the downtown YMCA where we went today, the free hours are 2.30pm-4pm and 8.30pm-10pm. ie no use at all if you want to swim (a) before work, (b) at lunchtime or (c) after work. Canada, your swimming system sucks!

But, unperturbed, Mrs Alex and I turned up for our swim at 8.30pm this evening at the Downtown YMCA (after an interesting lecture at the Goethe Institut commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall). I should add that in North America, YMCAs are not just youth hostels but also community centres and sports facilities, and you can even take adult education classes there.

Compulsory headgear
Our swim was a very different experience from swimming in the UK. First of all, you have to wear a swimcap. Which I've never worn before (well, except for the one I glued a wig to for my Rocky Horror costume a couple of weeks back!). Mrs Alex found us some cheap ones but they were very painful and kept pulling my hair. Not fun. And we had to buy padlocks, you can't just stick a coin in the locker. Which meant remember 7 different numbers - 3 numbers for the lock combination, 3 numbers for the entrance to the changing room, plus my locker number. Great. Just what I need when I'm trying to relax. On the bright side (for the other swimmers) French Canada hasn't adopted the French rule of "Speedo's only" (no swimming shorts).

A disappointing experience

I don't know if the YMCA pools are typical of Canadian public pools but I was definitely underwhelmed by the experience. The changing room had no benches or hooks for getting changed. When we got into the pool area it was rather clinical. The pool was surrounded by breezeblock walls painted in a spartan hospital white. Still, the water was the right temperature (cool but not cold), and was clear and clean. While we swam, three college-age lifeguards in red shirts were playing hoopla with some life-saving poles and rubber doughnuts. Not terribly professional, but harmless enough. After we'd done our lengths we tried the jacuzzi, which was nice enough but a little odd, being open on one side to a medium-sized warmish rectangular pool rather than being self-contained. Heading back out, I noticed more changing room deficiencies as well as the lack of hooks - there were only three showers - unsurprisingly all full due to the constrained opening hours. When I got into the shower the curtain and wooden bench were mouldy. I also noticed that the area by the lockers had carpet! Not useful when you have wet swimming shorts and nowhere to put them.

Overall, it was great to get back in the water. But I'm sad I can't easily establish a routine like I had in the UK where I went for a swim before or after work 2 or 3 times a week. I found it a great way to start the day and I do some of my best creative thinking while swimming. I don't want to pay to join a specific pool (or if I do, I want a significantly higher standard than this!). I had a look for other options on my local borough's site - but nothing quite seems to fit the bill.

My quest for a local, affordable, well-equipped pool continues. I hope it's not another 9 months before I find one.

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Canada, land of empty spaces and vast distances

Canada is overwhelmingly big. The distances and emptiness are awesome in the truest sense of the word. I knew this on some level, but it wasn't until I tried to explore some of it with my family that it began to sink in. Subsequently I did some digging online that gave me an even stronger sense of just how empty it really is. I learnt about many remote places and how hard they are to visit. Eventually I even found an excellent graphic illustrating how most of Canada is uninhabited, which you can find at the bottom of this article.

A week "in Gaspé"
At the start of September, my parents came to visit for a couple of weeks. We decided this was a great opportunity to explore a bit of Canada together, so set aside a week for what would be our biggest trip yet since moving here - exploring the Gaspé peninsula. We got to Quebec City fairly quickly and had a pleasant overnight stay there. In the morning we stopped for a brief look at Montmorency Falls, then crossed back to the peninsula and headed upriver along the Route des Navigateurs.

View Gaspé Trip in a larger map

Our journey took us past plenty of beautiful little villages and farming communities along the way and enjoyed stopping for picnics and photographs. But after a long day's driving, we only got as far as Le Bic, just barely inside the Gaspé region. It dawned on us that with only seven days available, the only way to get around the peninsula would be to drive for long periods every single day - which wouldn't leave us much time for sightseeing. So we adjusted our plans to be less ambitious.

We camped the next night in the gorgeous Le Bic National Park (see left), where we hired bikes and had some lovely walks. The next day, rather than continuing along the north coast, we cut across the peninsula, and stayed the next two nights at the very strange castle-hostel Chateau Bahia. We used this as a base to explore the Restigouche region on the south of the peninsula. Alex and I spent a day kayaking down the crystal clear Matapédia river and we visited more seaside towns, such as Carleton-sur-mer. Then it was time to start heading back towards Montréal, which we did via a lunch stop on the US border at St Leonard in New Brunswick, and an overnight stop in Magog in the Eastern Townships (which were unfortunately rather wet). We arrived back in Montréal on the seventh day, having had a great holiday. We'd driven 1,781 kilometres, or 1,106 miles! For more details on the trip and some photos you can check out Mrs Alex's blog (ask me for the link) - plus I will be putting up photos on Flickr at some point.

Thinking about visiting the wilderness

The trip to Gaspé was a real eye-opener to me. I'm keen to explore Canada, and especially to see some of the more "wild" parts. What I'm beginning to realise is that in a country this big, that's just not so practical. The Gaspé peninsula is relatively "local" for us - yet it needs half a week just to get there and two to three weeks to enjoy it properly. I've spent several evenings browsing the map of Canada on Google Maps, clicking places that look interesting - and every time I look at the logistics of how to get to these places, I am amazed at just how inaccessible much of the Canadian wilderness is. I suppose that's why they call it wilderness!

For example, while doing a bit of Google earth exploring, I discovered Lake Manicougan, a perfect crater lake, apparently not too far from here. Maybe that could be worth a visit? I then read an account from a couple who went kayaking there and realised just how huge and far away it is. It's a mere 1,071 kilometres (666 miles) from Montréal. The last 85km of that is on unfinished roads, and when you get there, there are no facilities. So in theory that would be possible for us, if a little awkward - but like the Gaspé trip, it would take over a week to do it justice. When you have limited vacation days in a year, such epic quests would burn up your leave in no time!

Here's another example. My Lonely Planet 2009 calendar on the "Canada" page shows a picture of a beautiful mountain reflected in a lake. The caption reads "Mount Magog, reflected in Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park" (see right). I couldn't even find this mountain on Google (most of the hits are for another with the same name in Utah). When I did find the page about Mount Assiniboine Provincial Park I read such encouraging words as "No roads penetrate this unspoiled wilderness, with trails providing the only land access" and "Visitors are reminded that the park is a wilderness area, without supplies or equipment of any kind". I don't think I'll be visiting there soon then!

Ever since I saw Canada in an atlas at school, I was impressed by the size of Hudson's Bay. So being in Canada now, I wondered about whether it might be possible to visit Hudson's Bay. I scrolled around the map and noticed the Polar Bear Provincial Park, a nice green area on the south of the bay. On further investigation I found that "it has no visitor facilities, is reachable only by air, and special permission is required before visiting it." Looking back at the map confirmed it - no roads! Hmm, maybe not then!

It occurred to me that the Hudson's Bay Company (which is still trading today and is older than Canada by the way!) was built on harvesting the resources of Hudson's Bay - surely there must be some access to the Bay. This led me to learn about York Factory, which used to be their headquarters, but is more or less abandoned now, and only accessible by water or air anyway.

Through further investigation I found out about the James Bay Road, built to access Hydro Electric facilities built near the Bay in the 1970s. The James Bay Road is pretty much the only road access to Hudson's Bay (James Bay is the southern-most inlet of Hudson's Bay). Surprisingly, it's quite a well built road, but it will take you 27 hours to get all the way along it (from Ottawa), and for 381km there are no services or settlements! Here are a few interesting accounts of people who've travelled the James Bay Road - one, two, three, four. The roadside photo to the right is from another account for which I have unfortunately lost the link.

As you can see, I'm beginning to understand just how vast and undeveloped much of Canada is. I've also learned more about the vast emptiness of Canada from TV series such as the recent Channel 4/National Geographic series Alone in the Wild, where Ed Wardle survives on his own for 50 days in the wilderness of the Yukon. The History Channel/Five series Ice Road Truckers taught me about the ice roads in Canada's northwest territory, which only exist during the winter months as vital supply lines to communities and mining outposts in the far North, that are completely isolated for most of the year.

I could go on, but I won't. I have now realised that the only way to visit some of these places is to invest serious chunks of time - weeks if not months - in other words, not when you have a regular job. And you need a shedload of cash too - not just for transport and accommodation, but for vital equipment for survival! Here is a map showing many of these inaccessible places I've learnt about (click a feature for more info):

View Inaccessible Places in a larger map

So, just how empty is Canada?

As you can see this is something I've been thinking about a lot. But my curious mind then started wondering.. how empty is Canada? I had lots of fun playing with the population density table on Wikipedia, which you can sort in different ways; it turns out Canada has on average 3 people per square kilometre, compared to 31 in the US or 246 in the UK. Of 238 countries in the world, it ranks 231st lowest for population density, beaten only by the likes of Australia, the Sahara and Mongolia.

There's an oft-quoted statistic about how three-quarters of the population of Canada live within 90 miles of the US border. But I wanted to know more - which parts of Canada are uninhabited? Apparently this is quite a difficult question to answer, but eventually I came across a study by Statistics Canada that, in exploring different methods and representations, came up with a rather excellent depiction of "The Population Ecumene of Canada". Ecumene is a word of Greek origin referring to the "inhabited earth". Here is their map:

(click for a larger version or here to see the original in context)

In this map, the green parts are the main inhabited areas, the red spots are small pockets of civilization outside the main parts, and the white and grey parts are completely uninhabited.

I find this absolutely breathtaking. Huge extents of Canada are totally devoid of civilization. Most Canadian provinces have only a handful of settlements and the rest is totally undeveloped. What I find particularly interesting is that unlike Australia or the Sahara, there is still a lot of Canada that could be inhabited - just that it would cost a great deal to develop the necessary infrastructure to support it. A large part of Canada is made up of the Canadian Shield, which is covered by lakes, forests and is high in mineral deposits. Winters are tough but except for the far North, no worse than other inhabited parts of Canada. I think that perhaps the reason these places have not developed, is not anything about the land itself, just a lack of proximity to the existing civilized world, making supplies and trade difficult.

It's strange really. I guess that colonization of uninhabited land and creating new settlements isn't really viable in today's economic climate. I suppose this is what the rest of the world was like before we built our cities and transport networks. And I wonder if some time in the future, greater parts of Canada will become inhabited and enjoyed by ordinary folks, or whether it will always be mostly an unspoilt wilderness that only the intrepid can visit.

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What if we didn't need factories any more?

via reprap.org

That is the thought-provoking possibility suggested by the RepRap project. RepRap is a simple 3D printer that can make plastic objects to any design, on your desk, using an ordinary PC. It can even make a copy of itself. It's entirely open source and freely distributable.

Ryerson University, the University of Western Ontario, Rabble and The Tyee have also started a very interesting multimedia project to explore this technology and the effects it will have on society further, called Maker Culture. You can read a good introduction by Wayne MacPhail here.

I am intrigued to see where this might lead. Developments in computing capability and internet technology have given us recording studios, photo labs, broadcasting studios, video editing suites and printing presses from our desktop - and have completely changed those industries as a result.

What changes can we expect in the world's manufacturing industries if goods no longer needed to be manufactured and distributed, but instead you downloaded a design and printed it yourself at home (much like you download an MP3 or movie and burn a CD or DVD now)?

Certainly this is a technology in its infancy, but full of promise. I can't wait to see how this develops.

Posted via web from Bowyer's Bite-size Blogettes

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Swine flu - From the horse's mouth

Dispelling the myths about H1N1

Swine flu has been all over the news for the last few months, especially in the UK; You could hardly miss it. But as with many things which are analyzed and deconstructed ad nauseum in the media over several months, the reality is somewhat different from the hype.

Having experienced swine flu first hand, and recovered, I feel compelled to set the record straight:

1) Swine flu is just another form of flu

New flu viruses appear every year, and despite its sinister sounding name, swine flu is just another variant. Most variants don’t get to have their own name outside of scientific circles - this one did for two reasons: Firstly, it originated in pigs not in humans; Secondly, it is extremely virulent. That does *not* mean that it is extremely serious - just that it is easily spread from human to human, more so than is normal for flu.

What seems to have happened is that a great deal of stigma has been attached to the name. “It’s not just flu, it’s SWINE flu, it must be AWFUL!”. The reality is that it’s actually quite a lot milder than many other forms of flu. Don’t get sucked into the hype.

2) The symptoms are actually quite mild

For me, the worst it got was one night when I broke out in a fever and was very restless, having multiple nightmares and being unable to sleep. My muscles were aching and I was physically exhausted. I was by no means in a lot of pain though. The remaining five or so days of illness (one day before that night and four days after) were much more like a bad cold - sore throat, sneezing, coughing, headaches and tiredness. At first I thought my tiredness was jet-lag from my flight to the UK, but it lasted too long. I was able to function normally and could quite easily have gone to work if I hadn’t been on holiday. I can’t stress enough how over-hyped swine flu is in terms of what it will be like. I have had far far worse infections - I remember one in particular a couple of years ago when my wife and I were bed bound for a week thanks to a particularly vicious flu. The only deaths that have happened from swine flu have happened to people who already had some other condition that made them more vulnerable - such as an existing illness or immune deficiency.

You may get even fewer symptoms to show than I did; my wife got a bit of a cold and a sniffle for a few days after me, it’s quite possible this is an even milder form of the same infection, that doesn’t seem to be developing into anything more than a light cold.

3) You can easily recover without medication

There has been much talk of anti-virals. But these are not needed in the vast majority of cases. In fact, most health services including NHS Direct in the UK and 811 Info-Santé in Canada, are advising that anyone with flu like symptoms should stay at home and rest, and recover by letting it run its course. Going to the doctors or pharmacy is not advisable because you risk passing the infection to some of the most vulnerable members of society. The medical advice I received said that it is no longer contagious after seven days. This seems about right, as I felt completely normal 8 days after the onset of the flu-like symptoms.

4) Infection can be avoided by taking simple precautions

Many people chose to avoid meeting up with me when they learned I had swine flu; I absolutely don’t have a problem with this because it’s true to say that the risk will be absolute zero if you stay away, but this can never be the case if you do meet up with someone who is ill.

Swine flu, like most viruses, can only be contracted by direct physical contact with the bodily fluids of someone infected. For example, if the infected person sneezes and does not cover their mouth, and some vapours contact your skin or lips. Or if they sneeze and then touch hard surfaces, the virus can survive on that surface for a day or more, and someone else could touch that surface and contract an infection.

So because the means of infection are limited, then provided the infected person catches their whole sneezes into clean tissues, which they throw away quickly, and then sanitize their hands, there is little to no risk of infection. You do not need to wear face masks around swine flu sufferers or avoid them like the plague - just take extra precautions before sharing utensils, phones, pens etc.

I suppose the interesting twist is that you are relying on the infected person to take precautions much more than you are in control of taking precautions yourself - this is why face masks are not recommended or effective.

5) You may never get to find out if your flu is swine flu

One of the interesting side effects of the advice to avoid going to doctors or pharmacies except in extreme cases is that you cannot get an official diagnosis. Instead you have to diagnose yourself (in my case by listening to the very informative recorded information provided by NHS Direct on 0845 46 47). Having listened to a lengthy description of all the symptoms and nodding my head to each, I determined that it was very likely I did have swine flu. But I may never know for sure.

6) Swine flu is not something to panic about

So, in summary, swine flu is not something you should be overly concerned about, any more than you would about a spate of colds going around or a wave of illnesses at work. You can take some sensible precautions to avoid infection, and in most cases you will be fine. If you are unlucky enough to contract swine flu, it’s really not a big deal. You’ll take a few days off work, you’ll feel bad for a while, but you’ll get better.

And most of all, like me, you’ll wonder what all the fuss was about.

And maybe every cloud has a silver lining too, maybe it's good to have been infected now and build an immunity when the virus is weak. As my good friend Ozzy joked: "When swine flu merges with avian flu creating a mega virus that wipes out 95% of the world's population, you'll be fine and ready to create the new world - you'll be able to choose any manor you like and be the king of tinned food supplies!" (à la "Survivors")

A few related links

• "Taking a stab at Swine Flu Hysteria"
  
• "The Great Swine Flu Outbreak of 2009"
  
• World Health Organization Swine Flu advice
  
• Official UK Government Swine Flu site
  
• Official Canadian government advice on Swine Flu
  
• Source of virus image - article at Scientific American
  
  

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TARDIS is alive! :-)

Back before we left the UK, Mrs Alex and I (ok she did most of the work) digitized all our CDs and DVDs not to mention paperwork, recipes and all sorts of other documents to reduce the amount we had to take with us to Canada. Given we've also been living here in Canada without a TV for the last six months, we have accumulated plenty more downloaded movies & TV shows. We brought about 8 hard drives with us to Canada and our FreeNAS install media, and after 2 case upgrades, 2 additional green 1 Terabyte hard drives, 2 new 4 port PCI SATA cards and a beefier PSU, not to mention much consolidation of data from smaller, older IDE drives, I am pleased to announce our behemoth of a fileserver is alive.. Just short of 6 Terabytes of storage for our viewing and data storage pleasure! Hurrah! Now to get my Popcorn Hour media player which Alex bought me for my birthday working.. and then it's HD projector time (which is handy as we have just painted the walls in the lounge of our new apartment white which is just the right colour for projecting onto)...

Posted via email from Bowyer's Bite-size Blogettes

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An example of how society's values are all screwed up

The doorbell rang, a delivery man was there. "Sign here", he said, and handed me a cardboard box. "Thanks," I said, noticing how light it was. I knew I'd recently ordered two new hard drives and a SATA card (to connect them into our server). This was too light to be either.

You can see from the photos below what was inside - a box the size of two shoeboxes, stuffed with brown paper, containing 2 tiny red SATA cables (which could at a pinch fit in a normal paper envelope if you wanted to). I had ordered these from http://newegg.ca/ as part of the order for the SATA card. I was shocked that they would ship these individually and in such a wasteful way. A jiffy bag would have been more appropriate, and why on earth do the cables needed to be shipped separately.

This got me thinking, people talk about how we should have an economical model where we take into account the real environmental cost, not to mention the money cost. I can't think of a better illustration than this. Not only all that waste packaging, but the fact that the delivery man made a separate trip to deliver it.. Wasteful deliveries like this must equate to a lot of fuel, vehicle wear and tear, not to mention packing note printing, labour to package the thing, backroom admin by the supplier and the courier.

It's really sad that somebody decided it's "cheaper" to treat all items the same, send each part of an order in an identical size box, regardless of what it really needs or what is sensible.

I guess common sense doesn't scale.

Here's an image I found online which tells a similar story quite succinctly:

Posted via email from Bowyer's Bite-size Blogettes

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An example of good user-centric design

When were on the way to pick up our friend from Montréal airport on Sunday, we noticed a subtle but very useful design feature on the overhead signs. There are two different airports in the vicinity, and a number of different lane changes are required. Typically when you see signs to an airport (certainly this is true around Heathrow or Gatwick in the UK), it's always the same icon of an aircraft.

What they have done here is angle the aircraft differently on each sign, according to whether you need to stay in the same lane, need to move left or move right. In doing so it serves as a subtle direction arrow. And when I think about it, I can remember at least one occasion being caught out by aircraft signs in the UK where the plane pointed in the opposite direction to that in which I needed to go.

The authority that put up these signs has apparently done some research with drivers into how they actually understand the signs, and have discovered that because the shape of a plane is similar to an arrow, people subconsciously read it as such, so have chosen to make sure the aircraft signs are giving clear signals under both interpretations (as an arrow as well as an aircraft). This is a great example of how you can improve your product by doing additional research into how it actually gets used in the field.

Posted via email from Bowyer's Bite-size Blogettes

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An example of bad usability

When I was in Las Vegas recently, staying in the Luxor, I experienced one of the worst designed pieces of technology that I've seen in a long time. Every day when I returned to the hotel, I had to get the lift back to my floor.

Each of the lifts had the same restriction in effect - you need to insert your room card, and wait for it to register (which sometimes doesn't work first time). Once it has been accepted, a green light will illuminate (if not, you get a red light or yellow light.) I have no idea why there are 3 possible states! Then you have about 4 seconds to press your floor button. If you press it in time, the floor button illuminates and locks in. If you miss your window (or someone else presses an illegal button) then you have to start the whole thing again.

OK, well it's a bit of a faff, but what's the big deal, you may ask. Well it's true that if you are riding the elevator on your own, it's awkward but doable - but as soon as you have more than a couple of people in the room the whole system resorts to chaos. Let's imagine there are 3 people, wanting to go to floors 3, 7 and 11. (It gets even more crazy when the lift has 6 or 7 people and not everyone can reach the buttons!). Anyway, in this example, Mr. 7 happens to be first, puts his card in, and presses the button. The lift starts moving towards floor 7. So now we have a lift that's in motion, but most of the people in the car haven't put their floor in yet. Mr. 3 puts his card in, and after a couple of tries gets it to accept. But we've already passed floor 3. So the button push is rejected. He has to wait until the lift is descending. Which means it's Mr 11's turn. He puts his card in just as we're arriving at floor 7. But before he can push the button, the lift (which now thinks its free) gets summoned to the ground floor. 3 and 11 are now right back to square one, on the ground floor. And so it goes on! It can take several minutes and unnecessary journeys to actually reach your floor, not to mention all sorts of unfamiliar social situations for which there is no established lift etiquette!

This is a great example of how designers can easily fail to consider their users when adding new features. The reading of the room card was clearly added for security - but they completely failed to consider the dynamics of how it would work in practice in a crowded lift.

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