Good customer service

My experience in recent years of customer service when dealing with product defects has been, at best, mediocre. However, credit where it is dues I have just been the beneficiary of excellent service from Salter. I had a problem with some electronic kitchen scales and asked for advice via their website. After a couple of email interactions to establish what was wrong and to provide proof of purchase they simply shipped me a replacement.

Thanks Katharina!

Central Asia - Yazd

I have arrived in Yazd on my latest trip throgh Central Asia. I started the trip in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and Ashgabat pretty much met my expectations. The enormous, elaborate public buildings that have been built with the new found wealth from selling their energy resources are just a little OTT. However, Ashgabat was only meant to be the jumping off point for gaining an Iranian visa and border entry. Gaining the Visa went ok but the cost for UK Ciizens was higher than for any other national, even more than for Americans, at 152EUR plus 35USD for a 'Letter of Invitation'.
With Visas in hand we set of for the Border about 50km south into the mountains. After about 4.5 hours we were through! A long, but fairly painless exercise. From the border we drove South for about an hour and set up camp on the side of a convenient mountain as the sun was setting. Next day we had a long drive to the Southeast of the Caspian Sea, where we camped again. Neither site was particularly good but broke up the journey to Tehran, which we arrived at the following day.
From Tehran to Yazd was another long drive, this is a big country. However, Yazd is great, last night I slept on the roof of our hotel so that I could see the sunrise. I was woken by the Adhan shortly after 04:00 and did get to see the sun rise over the old town at about 05:10. A nice but not spectacular sun rise. I'll try it again tomorrow before we set of for Persepolis.

Another Bob Minor milestone

I have spent much of this year trying to achieve some level of competence at ringing Plain Bob Minor. I achieved a major milestone by completing a Quarter Peal (recorded on Campanophile) in a time of 40 minutes.

It takes six people to ring Bob Minor and I could not have done it without the kind assistance of five people willing to give up their time to help me ring this for the first time. This is the third time this year that I have rung a Quarter Peal, each of which was a first of a kind for me, and I think that the willingness of people to help others progress is one of the aspects of ringing that I appreciate the most.

I now need to decide what to try and learn next. I am hopeful that I will be able to speed up the rate at which I can learn new things so will attempt to tackle three things in parallel. (1) Consolidate Grandsire Doubles, hopefully this should not prove too difficult of take very long. (2) Learn Grandsire Triples, a more challenging goal since it is rung on 8 bells. (3) Learn another Doubles method, I'm leaning towards Stedman Doubles since it widely rung around here.

Visa for Turkmenistan

The complications of arranging my trip along the Western part of the Silk Route are gradually disappearing. The difficulties I suffered in July are behind me and the original routing through Turkmenistan and Iran is possible again.
My application for a Turkmenistan visa is now in the Embassy for processing and I am keeping my fingers crossed that everything proceeds smoothly.
I'm beginning to look forward to arriving in Ashgabat and starting my journey. The weather should be pretty good and much better than what I would have experienced on my original schedule for July, the Lonely Planet reckon that only the insane or deeply unfortunate find themselves in Ashgabat in July and August, when the temperature can push 50°C.

Silk Route saga

In 2007 I travelled through Central Asia along part of the Silk Route but working for a living meant that I could only afford a month's time. I would like to complete the Western end of the journey ending up at Istanbul. There was no single route from Uzbekistan, where I ended my first segment, but was delighted to see that Dragoman were running a trip that runs South of the Caspian Sea through Iran. I was due to depart for the start point this week.

Some weeks ago Turkmenistan stopped issuing "invitation letters", without which you cannot get a visa, due to the swine flu pandemic. There are very few ways to get from Uzbekistan to Iran if you cannot travel through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan being the only other way and that is not viable. While waiting to see if Turkmenistan was going to change its position Dragoman started to look at an alternative route via Kazakhstan and a crossing of the Caspian Sea. Meanwhile, the Iranian presidential election takes place and is followed by protests at the result. The UK Government FCO response is to "advise against all but essential travel to Iran".

Time runs out to make the necessary arrangements to travel on the original date. There are just too few days available to arrange "invitation letters" and obtain visas for Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia. And just to round things off nicely, Russia started Caucasus 2009 a military exercise that includes South Ossetia (Georgia) which was the scene of the 2008 South Ossetia war. When my wife saw this in the newspapers she "questioned my sanity".

I am now planning to take the trip starting in late September, the weather, if nothing else, should be a little cooler.

In the mean time I'm going to Cornwall with my wife to walk a section of the South West Coast Path, "630 miles of superb coastal walking".

A Plain Bob Minor milestone

For the last 6 month's I have been trying to get to grips with a new ringing method, Plain Bob Minor. I thought it would be a relatively straightforward exercise to build on Plain Bob Doubles and to an extent this proved to be the case. However, there proved to be additional, unanticipated, challenges. One extra working bell doesn't sound like much but going from 4 to 5 is a 25% increase. No Tenor to lead off, another challenge. The dodges are all with different bells. Singles as well as bobs.

During the last couple of weeks I have managed a number of touches of Bob Minor but always felt a sense of relief when arriving at the end. On Thursday 9th July I feel that I finally got over the hump, I rang a touch where everything went smoothly and when "that's all" was called I felt a sense of disappointment rather than relief. I was really enjoying myself!

Last day at IBM

After a long stint I have finally got to my last day working for IBM. I thought this would be a peaceful week but there were a couple of things I really wanted to get done before I left.

Most of my work in recent years has been in Standards and until today chaired two Working Groups in the W3C. Today the Candidate Recommendation of SOAP over Java Message Service 1.0 was published. This has taken much longer that I would have hoped but it is nonetheless a milestone and I wish the Working Group success in getting through the last stages and arriving at a Recommendation.

Unfortunately I have not been able to get the XHTML2 Working Group to such a neat point. I had hoped that we could clear up all the XHTML 1.n family specifications before I left but we failed to follow the process correctly and W3C rescinded Four Proposed Edited Recommendations for XHTML Documents. The problems are being addressed and I'm sure that the documents will eventually be published but I am disappointed that we messed up.