Tomorrow morning, I’ll be traveling internationally for work once again.

And boy, I certainly do have a love-hate relationship with work travel!

Why work travel rocks:
- Get to know colleagues better.
- Much easier to get collaborative projects moving when in person than over VC or e-mail!
- Frequent flyer miles!
- Experience little fascinating pieces of foreign cultures and learn more about my own in the process.
- Get to see wonderful far-away friends.
- Acquire lots of photos and fun stories to tell

The Galloping Vendors

There had just been again weeks of violent unrest in the world, but I was quite a few countries away, together in a sprawling São Paulo street market with a colleague and our big happy-but-guarded driver.  The three of us were amiably ambling amidst a big, colorful, confusing, and crowded set of not-quite-straight rows on uneven pavement and outdoor shops and inside shops and coconuts with straws and colorful scarves.  And music CDs and sunglasses and an amusing, sometimes perplexing mishmash of electronic items.  Much of this, if not most, of dubious officialness. 

The majority of these items were sitting on wood planks, next to which sat oft squat, loud, tanned, tired yet eager vendors.

By the hour next, some of these sellers looked vaguely uncomfortable, nervous.  The storm clouds were coming, rain was imminent, and there was palpably a rolling sense of unease.

My friend Greg and I just had a fascinating and extensive discussion about the concept of airlines charging their customers by the weight of their bodies + luggage. 

The way we envisioned it, all airlines tickets would be composed of exactly two fees: a seat fee (fixed) and a weight fee (variable).  This is hardly our original idea; I’ve seen similar suggestions pondered on the web before.  But nonetheless, I thought it’d be interesting to reflect upon some implementation ideas as well as pros and cons.

Today’s entry is short and wonderful.  Behold, in the video below, Matt Harding… “dancing” around the world, one city at a time.  At the 54 second mark, watch the video really come alive when he delights countless locales who join in the dancing… and, i guarantee, charms all of you watching, too .

For more information, see www.wherethehellismatt.com.
Also, you really really must see his other videos (linked under his name).

Edited on June 23 to add: Thank you to Bee for pointing out my URL typo! Now fixed

Once again, I was off to Germany… home of good friends, heavy food, wacky long sentences, and Lufthansa, the airline whose plane I was unceremoniously squished into not like a sardine, but wurst.

I had the foot-munching-tray aisle to my right, and a stupendously larger-than-life and dumber-than-devil-fossils young fella to my left.  To his left sat an acquaintance of his, seemingly of equal gelatinousness and dimwittedness. For the purposes of this entry, we’ll call them Slad and Elad, respectively if not respectfully.

*  *  *

Slad had no sense.  No sense of etiquette, culture, space, or time.  No sense at all, really.  And he was happy to share this nonsense with me, loudly… cheerfully interrupting the safety instructions which were actually melodious and fascinating in comparison.

Slad:  HEY!
Me: Hi.
Slad:  THEY’RE TALKING GERMAN!
Me: Yeah.
Slad:  WHY ARE THEY TALKING GERMAN?
Me: It’s Lufthansa, a German airline.
Slad:  [A look even blanker than usual]
Me: ...And we’re going to Germany, so there are Germans on board.

Only the first part had sunk in.  And barely at that.

Slad:  LUFTHANGLE?
Me:  Lufthansa.
Slad:  YEAH!?  BUT THEY’RE STILL TALKING GERMAN!
Me:  [speechless]

About 30 minutes into the flight…

Earlier this month I had the pleasure of taking a river cruise of sorts through Berlin… including both the former East and West parts.

I shot the photos with my new Canon SD700 camera (which I’m generally pleased but not thrilled with) and posted them on various services.

See my Berlin boat tour photos on…
- Flickr [ set | slideshow ] (strong community, many features, good privacy protection)
- Fotki [ set | slideshow not directly linkable ] (handy admin features, nice hierarchical options)
- Picasa Web Albums [ set | slideshow ] (smart pre-caching, great Picasa integration)

You may note a few funky/overly-general tags (e.g., “Places” and “Geography” and such).  This is because I’m having problems debugging a hierarchical-categories-to-IPTC-script.  If that doesn’t mean anything to you, no worries; it’s only a minor annoyance and doesn’t affect the photos themselves .

WARNING:  Mishmash ahead.
Haven’t yet packed, which means this is the perfect time to procrastinate with a blog entry.  Or something like that.

I’m leaving tomorrow morning for a two-week work-related trip.  See details of that trip, plus enjoy some of my phone, camera, T-Mobile, and other musings below.

I invite you to go grab your cell phone / mobile phone / home phone whatever and program the following numbers into it:

- 1-800-555-8355 ("555 TELL" -- TellMe)
- 1-800-373-3411 ("FREE 411" -- Free411)
- 1-888-392-7563 ("EZ ASK ME" -- AskMeNow - Initial signup on site required)
- 46645 ("GOOGL" - Google SMS beta - Google via Text Messaging)

NOTE: One or more of these numbers may be U.S.-only... sorry :|

For details on each service, read on...

My former colleague, Mark Jen, recently wrote about his rather positive experience flying Song Air, the discount wing of Delta Airlines... and this reminded me that I hadn't gotten around to the review I had planned to write last month.

A few weeks ago, I decided to splurge and book a night at a "four star" hotel via Priceline so I could get a good night's rest before taking a long bus ride to Swing Out New Hampshire.

If this Hilton Hotel in Manhattan is four stars, I'd hate to see what a one star place is like.

Okay, so I got at least the 'bare minimums':
- A clean room
- A decent shower
- A relatively comfortable bed

But beyond that... I fail to see why anyone would pay an arm and a leg to enjoy the "four star'ness" of this hotel.