Month: August 2010

Asus Tablet

Books, Tech, Thought Provoking

Now this is an interesting device which was reported by laptop mag has reported. The article also mentions a device where a 12 inch table can attach itself to a keyboard to transform itself into a notebook. However, I’m a fan of devices becoming as small as possible but also to be usuable. The iPad (which I saw for the first time yesterday) is too heavy and too big for my liking. That’s what makes the third device to interesting.

As a note-taker, the Eee Tablet could hardly offer more functionality. Its stylus uses Wacom technology to give it an incredibly smooth drawing / hand writing experience. But if writing down notes or drawing diagrams when you’re in a meeting or class is not enough, why not take a picture of the whiteboard? The Eee Tablet has a back facing camera that will take photos of anything and let you annotate it. You can also record sound while you take notes. So just imagine recording a college lecture and then playing it back while you read the notes and look at photos of the whiteboard.

It seems to me to be something business people would take to in droves. The iPad is notoriously unhelpful for productive tasks like writing, there is no camera and as far as I’m aware, there is no microphone. The ASUS tablet has all three. It seems that ASUS has stolen a march on their competitors yet again. Watch them try and catch up.

When to buy an airline ticket

Thought Provoking, Travel

The Guardian reports that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks.

Help is at hand. An economist, Makoto Watanabe, has calculated that the optimum time to buy an airline ticket is eight weeks in advance of flying.

His yet-to-be-published findings also suggests that airline tickets are cheaper when purchased in the afternoons, rather than the mornings, prompting him to speculate that airlines are assuming business travellers will book their tickets at work in the morning on the company account, whereas leisure travellers are more likely to book from home in the afternoon

Hmm, I did a couple of searches yesterday but for me, the theory didn’t hold true. But Sunday wasn’t a normal day so perhaps that is the exception.

Reward offered for information on JP Grealis.

Uncategorized

Achilll man JP Grealis is still missing in the Netherlands. Today in the Irish Times, his family have offered a reward of €10,000 for information of where he is.

The family of James Patrick “JP” Grealis has put up a reward of €10,000 and described it as their last chance of discovering his whereabouts.

The last reported sighting of JP, a carpenter then aged 24, was when he checked out of a BB in the town of Breda on October 23rd, 2008, saying he was going to find work in another town.

The Grealis family, of Tonragee, Achill, hope the involvement of a team of Dutch experts who have recently taken up the case will provide a breakthrough. A retired detective, a criminal psychologist and a well-known crime reporter who take on cold cases or those the police are not treating as crime have started their own inquiry.

They believe his disappearance was suspicious, and that he may have been murdered. “The Grealis family came up against a brick wall, they were sent away again and again as they tried to discover what happened to their son and brother here,” said crime reporter Jolande van der Graaf of De Telegraaf newspaper.

There is also a report in Dutch in the newspaper, De Telegraaf in the Netherlands with a video of his sister making an appeal for help. The video is in a mixture of Dutch and English.

De afgelopen weken zamelden de eilandbewoners 10.000 euro in voor ‘hun’ JP. Vanuit Ierland looft de familie Grealis dit bedrag uit voor informatie die daadwerkelijk leidt tot de terugkomst van James Patrick Grealis of zijn stoffelijke resten

Coincidence

Cinema, Thought Provoking, Travel

I just rewatched “Before Sunset”, the sequel to one of my favourite films “Before Sunrise”. I was struck during the dialogue that Ethan Hawke’s character notes that 6 months after a life-changing event whether it was winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic, a person reverts to the psychological state that they inhabited before the event. Then I read the latest post by Tim Harford this evening.

It’s quite possible that our image of these possible futures is not very good. As the psychologist Dan Gilbert points out, you might think that winning the Lottery would make you happier than being permanently paralysed from the waist down, but the empirical evidence suggests that this is just a failure of imagination: paraplegics are not, in fact, less happy than people who have won the Lottery.

By the way, the film is definitely better the second time around. I wish that I could see Before Sunrise again right now. My favourite part is at the end of the film where they show all of the places in Vienna where the story unfolded the next morning, deserted. I felt that way about Prague for a long time.