imran*

Category: Travel

  • Westward…

    Spring08
    Wow – flying from Manchester to JFK and onto San Diego with no delays or interrogations? I almost don’t believe it…maybe America’s loosening up in anticipation of a new President, maybe it’s no longer realistic to put Husseins on the Do Not Fly list or perhaps I just got lucky 🙂

    During the next few days I’ll be hopping around California and Washington for…

    • O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology 2008 conference. I’ve been to three prior ETechs between 2004 and 2008 – the first two did nothing less than change my world-view on technology and the third helped me to find the confidence to strike out on my own. 2007 was a bif of an O’Reilly bust for me with the cancellation of ETel, being unable to travel and deliver my talk for Web 2.0 Expo and having to cancel plans for Foo Camp. San Diego holds a lotta good memories for me, so it’s lovely to be back in the City and also a programme that returning ETech to its roots, away from the noise of Web 2.0 and back to the cutting edge of knowledge – this time including personal genomics, hacking UAVs, emerging tech in emerging markets, policy development and data visualisation. Holy crap I think I’m going to pass out from the anticipation!
    • Next up, I’ll be spending the coming weekend with my great friends Aaron and Chrissey in Seattle. hanging out, discussing world changing ideas, shopping for a Time Capsule and maybe – just maybe – a trip to the Evil Campus. If I had more time, I’d love to return to Vancouver or visit Surj and Rael over in Portland.
    • Finally I’ll be back in the Bay Area for Emerging Communications 2008. I’ve been part of the advisory board since late last year and throughly looking forward to meeting many of the people we’ve got scheduled…I’m pretty sure we can keep the ETel movement alive through eComm.

    My usual group isn’t around – but I’m hoping to see some familiar faces this evening… 🙂

  • Pakonaut

    NamiraMy Dad just told me Pakistan’s first astronaut, Namira Salim, would be flying with NASA in 2009. I quipped ‘only if she’s not carrying any liquids, gels, shampoos or lip gloss‘.

    However upon closer examination, the story is sadly not of a Pakistani scientist or engineer reaching the pinnacle of her career, but simply the daughter of a rich industrialist who’s purchased a seat on Virgin Galactic‘s first commercial flights in 2008!

    Referring to passengers booked on Virgin Galactic as astronauts is the same as calling every passenger on Virgin Atlantic a pilot </rolls eyes>

  • Aerial Blogging

    Im_on_my_way_1Blogging at 40’000 feet. Neat. I’m using Boeing’s Connexion wifi service, onboard Lufthansa LH435 from Chicago O’Hare to Munich (that’s a story for a later post, I’ve missed five connections in the last week!). Connexion is soon to be closed, so like John Dunbar, I wanted to see the frontier before it was gone.

    I’ve paid $9.95 for an hour’s connectivity thats responsive enough for me to upload a photo, IM my aunt in Toronto and pick up my email. Apparently I can watch some live TV (CNBC, BBC World) and send eCards too 🙂

  • Way-Dar

    WaydarChris Masters, one of our senior designers at Orange is currently travelling from London to Ulaanbaatar. Chris is travelling with a satellite phone from which he’s periodically texting a particular email address; the mail server parses the email for GPS coordinates and plots them onto a Google map (I think it’s generating KMZs too). His last reported location was central Uzbekistan, at N40° 24.72′ E63° 04.39′, at around 9:46AM today.

    You can follow his progress at his site; unfortunately there’s no RSS feed, geoblogging fans…

    Chris’ project reminds me of Jon‘s Personal Radar, developed at FTRD Boston back in 2003. Jon was using GSM cell data to plot movements of FTRD staff onto Keyhole maps. In fact, he geotagged the first couple years of his daughter’s movements after she was born!

    Coincidentally, a few days ago, Sony announced a GPS companion device, the GPS-CS1, for its digital camera range. Elegantly simple, the GPS-CS1 simply records a stream of GPS coordinates and respective data+time data to its internal memory. Later, this location stream can be used to geotag photos by matching date+time of photos to those of the location stream. Of course, as a Sony product, you can be assured the accompanying software will suck.

    The GPS-CS1 could be employed to generate location streams for any collection of bits or atoms – a consumer homing device? The Waydar 🙂

  • Transit Ghost

    This year I’ve travelled through three continents, seven countries, fourteen cities and ten hotels; between 21st January and 12th April my longest stay in the UK was nineteen days…

    • 11004 miles in January (Manchester-London-SanFrancisco-London-Manchester)
    • 7020 miles in February (Manchester-Dubai-Manchester)
    • 12280 miles in March (Manchester-Chicago-SanDiego-Vancouver-Chicago-Manchester) [1]
    • 9823 miles in April (Manchester-Islamabad-Lahore-Karachi-Lahore-Karachi-London) [2]
    • 1450 miles in May (Manchester-Milan-Manchester) [3]
    • 762 miles in June (LeedsBradford-Paris-LeedsBradford)
    • 574+730 miles in July (LeedsBradford-Amsterdam-LeedsBradford) and (Manchester-Paris-Manchester)
    • 12751 miles in August (Manchester-Chicago-SanFrancisco-Chicago-Munich-Manchester) [4]
    • 662 miles in September (LeedsBradford-Brussels-LeedsBradford)
    • Unfortunately, trips to Boston in October and November were cancelled 🙁
    • 762 miles in December (LeedsBradford-Paris-LeedsBradford)
    • It sorta looks like this…

    That’s…

    • 57818 miles in total.
    • 24.2% of the distance to the Moon.
    • 2.32 times around the Earth.
    • 10.58 tonnes of CO2.
    • A carbon offsetting of £80.35.
    • An average speed of 8.8mph!

    It’s an odd feeling to exist outside the patterns of most lives – governed and guided by airline schedules rather than circadian rhythms, being fed lilliputian food by perma-smiling strangers, collecting the biographies of fellow travellers like baseball cards, sleeping whilst others wake and measuring time in remaining battery life.

    For much of this year, I’ve felt like a ghost – slipping though nations, leaving only electronic traces in the digital bellies of hotels, immigration and ticketing. My personal relationships have been mediated almost entirely through GSM, MSN and timezone calculus…I’ve found myself awake when others around me are sleeping, whether on planes, at my folks or in airport lounges. Sometimes I see other ghosts around me too, usually hunting for ectoplasm ports to charge their ghost charms – iPods, phones and laptops – though looking more Ghostbuster than ghost.

    I worked a depressing night job between school and university, as a security guard at a flatpack furniture factory. I guess that was a beta for Imran 2006. But, far from being a lonely, disconnecting existence, it’s been oddly serene, being uncoupled from other’s realities. I also have a deeper, more profound appreciation for sleep and why Muslims are permitted to skip prayer during our travels.

    —

    [1] This doesn’t include the seaplane ride around Vancouver from CXH.

    [2] The return leg of this trip was particularly gruelling (literally planes, trains & automobiles), with a two-hour 10pm flight from Lahore to Karachi, followed by nine hours in transit at Jinnah, eight hours to Heathrow, one hour in the Underground to King’s Cross, around three hours to Leeds and then Bradford – all accompanied by states of diarrhoea that rotated through solid, liquid and gas at the most inappropriate times. I think I left a brown trail across the planet.

    [3] The return flight from Malpensa was the scariest flight I’ve ever been on, with violent turbulence lasting for the first hour of the flight.

    [4] I missed my O’Hare to Manchester connection, due to bad weather, and stayed over to catch another flight the next day via Munich and it took me 4 hours to get my bags back. The following day, my connection was delayed meaning I’d only have 15 minutes in Munich to change planes for Manchester! After 40 hours of travel – it felt like I was in an episode of Quantum Leap, ‘…hoping each time that my next leap, would be the leap home.’