Month: January 2010

Travel and The IPad – Some preliminary Thoughts


In an impressive presentation Steve Jobs introduced the world to the IPad.

What influence will it have on travel? Some preliminary thoughts:

In the preamble Steve explained that Apple is by now bigger than Nokia, Samsung and Sony profitability wise in mobile devices…It may be assumed that it will be rolled out big 60 or 90 days from now.

  1. My main question is: Will you be able to leave your laptop (or eee netbook) home for an Ipad? If so, it is a must have. You can e-mail, write, calculate and make key note presentations with it, browse the web, watch photos and videos with it and listen to your music library. It will depend on its touch screen typing capabilities, but even if that is substandard Apple has thought about a docking station with type pad.
  2. It seems that by its sheer browsing capability it will enable the travel community to forget about the hassle of adapting their websites to mobile devices with various operating systems.
  3. One aspect is that -as Steve Jobs puts it “standing on the shoulders of Amazone’s entry into reading e-books with its Kindle – It incorporates e-book reading. On the basis of the well known Itunes shop model, Apple has lined up 5 major book publishers to sell books through a new IBook shop. As of yesterday it will be start negotiating with many other book publishers. Hurray, back to downloading the good old travel guides onto your Ipad before you go. When I go on holiday, I usually take a couple of good books with me. Now I can carry those in my IPad, which will spare me a couple of kilos weight in my luggage: Poor Airlines who are just trying to get us used to surcharges for our luggage.
  4. Apparently Apple is also trying making a dent into the augmented reality scene. With a built in GPS and leaning on Google Maps, it will be amazing how fast you will get a bearing and will be able to collect tidbits in an efficient manner about the location where you are.
  5. First I published this photo on my significant other blog because it shows clearly you don’t have to sit at a desk to play/work with your computer properly anymore. I see it as the same sort of liberation the mobile phone brought us. No more desk sitting to await a telephone call. Now you can pute in the park – provided the park has WiFi off course:-)
  6. And you know what? No more need for a paper photo album anymore…you’ll now have a wedding album/slideshow/video on your IPad..and can carry it around the world with you.
  7. Less travel by it’s undoubted future video conferencing capabilities?…no more sitting in studios for those…
  8. No more need for hotels to provide papers to their guests…

Interesting times.

Added:

  • Excellent tool for on the road board games! Via Rembuco
  • Would it influence the way News is spread? See Nieman Lab

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on January 30, 2010 at 12:15 pm

What happened to the vintage Nested Suitcase Design?


Via Cribcandy I came across this vintage nested suitcase installation. Cribcandy found it on Mocoloco and Mocoloco found it at Design*Sponge. It made me wonder what designers do nowady with this perfectly pratical idea. If you travel you can’t have enough suitcases, but at home those darn suitcases take a lot of space…what better than to nest them in storage?

I did a quick image search on Nested Suitcases, but couldn’t find any eye candy design. Did I overlook something or is the idea obsolete and am I only nostalgic?

Wanna Sleep in a Hotel Diaper?

Japanese wave after modeling the latest styles of adult diapers during a show in Tokyo Thursday Sept. 25, 2008. The show was organized to display the latest styles of adult diapers and to raise awareness of some of the issues facing the county’s rapidly aging population. (AP Photo/David Guttenfelder)

I found this photo on Open Salon and thought it fit to use as an illustration of what I find one of the worst hotel amenities: plastic under-sheets.

Whenever I enter a hotel room, the first thing I check is the bed. Does the hotelier in question – like many of his colleagues – believe I’m incontinent and need to wear an adult diaper? If I find plastic under-sheets, I take them away and ask for extra towels to put there.

I hate plastic under sheets! They are soo uncomfortable. And you know what? Al matters hoteliers believe can be solved by them, can be solved by double cotton under-sheets, or maybe more correctly put a mattress pad. Much more comfy!

What do you think?

My main 2010 Project: Revamping our Haagsche Suites Website

SCreenshot-Site-Haagsche-Suites-as-at-January-2009Screen shot of the present Haagsche Suites site

Haagsche-Suites-Screen-Shot-of-the-New-siteScreen shot of the new Haagsche Suites site in development

I’ve only one New Year’s resolution: to bring my main project for 2010, the redesigning of the Haagsche Suites website, to a level where it can work stand alone, as soon as possible.

After last year’s unfortunate computer crashes, server migrations and now the unfortunate hacking of two of my sites –  all costing me too much of my precious time I’m underway again. I’m using the Thesis theme for WordPress which has a couple of wonderful features to change the lay out in a simply way.

Could some in the know please help me with comments either here,

  • or there: about the general idea of turning the whole upside down: changing from a dedicated static site maybe with a separate blog into a dynamic site with an integrated blog. Am I stupid?
  • or there: do you know of better alternatives for automatic machine generated translation?
  • or there: the pros and cons of having dedicated “language” urls, or should I install WordPress MU?

Thank you for your cooperation.

Welcome Back – We were Hacked

Happy Hotelier has been hacked.

They call it a “Deface Hack”. It means that in one way or another the perpetrator got access to my ISP account and replaced the landing page of this blog by the following notice:

Thehacker
0wn3d !

You can imagine I was furious and got more worked up when my service provider didn’t deem it serious enough to answer my calls.

I noticed it at about 23.00 (11.00 pm) last night and concluded it had happened at around 20.00 hr (8.00 pm) last night.

I couldn’t get access to my FTP client on their server, but I noticed I had access to my other blog. Also I had access to my .htaccess file. So I redirected both blogs that were hacked to a post at Chairblog EU:

Hacked-Post-on-Chairblog

At around 10.00 am today I got an e-mail from my ISP that they had solved the matter. They had closed down the FTP access to all my accounts until they had solved the matter.

Due to other business it was only about 01.30 pm today that I was able to reset the redirections.

Luckily the site seems in order again and nothing lost.

Now I’m going to update that post on Chair Blog ….

Also I have rebuild both sitemaps as yesterday’s sitemaps were erroneous

But all in all I’m not satisfied with the isp who claims > 99 % accessibility…..

Last edited by Happy Hotelier on January 5, 2010 at 2:07 pm