Category: Language

Would you consider staying in a notel in stead of a hotel?

Notels-at-Hotel-Haiku
You might consider a notel after visiting a new site on the block: Hotel Haiku, curated by Garri Rayne.

Hotel Haiku has taken up the idea of describing Hotels and, more importantly notels in a real Zen way, with a Haiku:

haiku [ˈhaɪkuː] n. A Japanese lyric verse form having three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, traditionally invoking an aspect of nature or the seasons.

I’m particularly attracted to the term notel, because when I started out as a hotelier and was developing our own unique 3 suites only “hotel” Haagsche Suites, I had for some time the idea of naming it Not a Hotel. Eventually I decided to name it “Haagsche Suites” (i.e. suites of The Hague), because Not A Hotel sounded a bit negative. Never thought of notel.

I congratulate Hotel Haiku with the invention of this term notel. As they describe it:

notel [nəʊˈtɛl] n. An exceptional, often architecturally designed, holiday and vacation rental property that draws inspiration from the design hotel phenomenon.

So notel is beyond Hotel, beyond Hip Hotel, beyond Boutique Hotel, beyond Design Hotel or beyond what hotel have you and at the same time it is below the usual hotel radar. Thank you Hotel Haiku!

First Hotel Haiku (@hotelhaiku) found me via Twitter and I noticed it without paying much attention. Then I found out more about the site via our friends over at Tnooz. I refer to their review of the Hotel Haiku site.

I’m set to explore the phenomenon further and created even a notel category, because I’ve featured some notels here on the blog already.

Update:
As Garri pointed out in his comment the undercast n is essential for the idea behind the term notel , so I have edited all, but couldn’t withstand to add little bit of my own: red 🙂

Dunglish and Offbeat Guides

I posed this question on Twitter:

Invite

Meaning: Does anybody have an invite for the private beta of Offbeat Guides for me?

Then a twitterer, who by the way I suspect to be a native Dutchman or a US citizen with Dutch ancestry, answered “Sure”.

I waited for the things to come, then I DM ed (direct messaged) him that I would be glad to receive one and gave him my e-mail address….Nothing came.

Then another Twitterer who is a native German immediately announced that he also is interested to get an invite. Then I began to understand the possible miscommunication. The first one thought I had invites to offer. As German is nearer to Dutch than English I presume the German understood my question better. So I thought “Maybe this is due to my Denglish”.

Denglish and Dunglish

I looked up “Denglish” on Wikipedia and learned It is not “my Denglish” but “my Dunglish”. According to Wikipedia:

Dunglish is a “portmanteau of Dutch and English, a name for Dutch English. The word is often used pejoratively to refer to the mistakes native Dutch speakers make when speaking English”.

Denglish, sometimes spelled Denglisch, is a “portmanteau of the words Deutsch and Englisch. Used in all German-speaking countries, Denglisch describes an influx of English, or pseudo-English vocabulary into the German language through travel and English’s widespread usage in advertising and business.”

The most famous example of Dunglish is the following quote from ex Dutch Former prime-minister Joop den Uyl who once remarked:

“the Dutch are a nation of undertakers”. The Dutch verb ondernemen is literally the English undertake (as onder is under and nemen is take). The noun ondernemer is thus literally undertaker, however the idiomatic English usage is instead the French loanword entrepreneur. (Dutch uses the completely unrelated word begrafenisondernemer for a funeral director.)

About Offbeat Guides
Its a startup. Its about printing personal travel guides on demand, but the interesting thing is it has been set up by a technorati founder who left technorati. Read more at Tech Crunch and at Joe Buhler’s Site and here is Sifry’s own alert.

Personally I believe this is going back in time. I rather have a personalized MP3 Player or IPhone or other integrated gadget with which I can scrape all the necessary info from a good WiFi access point with map links, directions and so on. That might safe wood and me carrying around too much weight to fly with with all those current surcharges.

I remember one of the Booking.Com founders trying to set up a database with all hotel info in it. Just as a repository for the OTA’s and Destination marketing guys and girls. Just another abandoned project. Reason? No cross platform and no cross industry communication.

The video at Tech crunch reinforces this idea of mine. This is really 20th century stuff and thinking.

Ha, I wonder whether they’ll ever invite me after this rant.

What would you think?

Last update June 5, 2008

Cleaning up Happy Hotelier

Behind the screens I have been cleaning up Happy Hotelier….Well a bit: There remain more things to do.

CSS is great.

It took some time, but I found out where in the CSS Stylesheet I could change a bit ot two so that I don’t have to add manually “[strong] [/strong]” anymore when I simply want a link shown Bold. The consequence is that now I have to delete a lot of those….So be it. Why I bother? Well, when you have to use bifocals for reading like I do, you will be glad to find this to be a Blog in a font and a font size that is easily readable. I hate many of those “Stylish” Blogs that simply do not read. Take those horrible dark backgrounds….

Translations.

The WP plug in that I use is great. It makes it possible that search engines also capture keywords in foreign languages. However, in a strange way the links to the Google translation service work, but those that point to Alta Vista don’t work. So I have , temporarily, disabled the widget until I have figured it out. Also because the translate widget is in the way of XHMTL validation (not that there are not more errors left).

Del.Icio.us.

I am learning how to create simple javascripts to import on the flight bookmarks that I organize in Del.Icio.us. I will be fine tuning this. At least it gives me the means to keep track of the T-List and The L-List and My Del.Icio.us on separate pages. With their tagging button in my Firefox browser it is a lot easier than manually manage the links in the side bar. So I will be trying to change the manual links for scripted ones in the side bar in the near future.

Big Google Brother is watching you.

Despite the fears I have here – recently there is a lot of commotion in Europe over the CIA having full insight in all bank transactions carried out by Swift…Americans are not aware what occupation by a foreign country means… so they dictate the law after 9/11 – I have, for the moment, uploaded my feeds to my Google reader and show some of the interesting posts in a widget (apart little screen or frame) in my side bar. I am definitely interested in another possibility.

My first English interview.

March 1, 2007 Paul Johnson published an interview with me on his A Luxury Travel Blog.
On my wish list:

  • Solve the translation issues
  • Repair the validation errors
  • Find a better solution for the “Happy Hotelier’s RSS Picks” widget
  • Last comments widget
  • Add a couple of Digg and Del.Icio.us alike buttons
  • Related posts widget
  • Style switcher so that readers can choose how to read what I write
  • Most visited posts widget

Translations

Translations
As part of my efforts of manually translating Dutch language posts of the other Blog at Weekendhotel, I stumbled upon and are experimenting with WordPress Translation Plug in’s.

Currently I am experimenting with WordPress Translate version 2.0, developed by Scott Hough.

This Plug in uses the Google translation machine for some languages and the Alta Vista translation machine for some other languages. Not all languages are working yet as the Alta Vista links seem not entirely in order, but Scott seems to be developing a newer version… will be continued

Update: In the meantime I have deleted this plugin as it gave too many conflicts and OOM errors at the server level.

Further Update: At the top of the right column I’ve installed a Google translation plugin. I hope it helps people with another language than English to understand this blog.

Updated January 2017