Naming is Hard

If you haven’t heard by now, Brighton woke up this morning to quilt of snow. We went down to the beach to marvel:

Climate change is not all bad…

I’m sitting in Heathrow T4 looking out over the airfield with jumbos taking off over my head. I’m off to Toronto with my girlfriend for two days and then on to New York, New York for six. I’ve been told the weather out there is very nice.

My girlfriend has been in Toronto for 6 weeks now (on a medical elective) and from what she’s told me it’s a beautiful city, especially now the autumn colours are out. I’m looking forward to going to Niagra and looking green about going up the CN tower.

It’s not my first visit to New York but it is such a wonderful city that there’s always more to see. As well as all the touristy things, we’re going to see Maroon 5 at Madison Square Garden which I’m hoping will be fantastic–if not the music, then at least the venue.

Tally ho, Blighty! Smoke me a kipper…

At the moment, I’m trying to plan a multi-city break to Toronto and New York with my girlfriend. The flights to and from Toronto are already booked, but I need to sort out a hotel in Toronto, flights to and from New York and a hotel in New York. No big deal, right. Fair enough, but this is complicated by the fact my girlfriend is already in Canada and even Skype isn’t making discussing these things easy.

When I started planning this trip a few days ago, my first thought was that I needed a way to store all the various configurations online so that my girlfriend and I could work out what was best. Assembling the options online would mean we both had them at hand and would help to reduce confusion. Anyway, I set out with the thought that surely trip planning’s quite common in this day and age and there must be a decent Web 2.0 app to help me out. First of all, I tried Yahoo! Trip Planner. Unfortunately, my patience waned after only a few minutes. Trip Planner isn’t a particularly accurate name, since it doesn’t deal with how to get “there”, only where to stay and what to do once you are “there”:

Even though it wouldn’t help me with the flights from Toronto to New York, I gave Trip Planner the benefit of the doubt and tried to compare New York hotels. This was futile as Trip Planner presented me with a list of hotels which I could sort by popularity or name. WTF?! Isn’t Yahoo a search company? I wanted to find hotels which could accommodate my girlfriend and I on specific dates and order them by price and location.

(Btw, I like the look of the price at the four-and-a-half star Plaza)

At this point, I pretty much gave up with Trip Planner. As much as I Googled, however, I could not find the app I was so sure would have existed. (If you’re thinking of building a Web 2.0 app, there’s an opportunity here!) I asked Jane and she couldn’t do any better either.

Enter Backpack

Having tried the domain-specific solution, I re-considered my problem. Although what I was trying to do—plan a multi-city trip—was quite specifc, it was simply an organisation and collaboration problem. There were loads of tools built for collaboration—why not use one? I chose Backpack because it’s a tool I’m familiar with and also because my girlfriend has a Backpack account as well and Backpack allows you to share pages. Looking back now, it’s the obvious solution—just look at the name.

Anyway, I set up a page for my trip and starting adding notes. What I hadn’t realised is that since I last used Backpack (a few months ago), 37signals have beefed up the page components. My planning fell into natural sections: flight to Toronto, hotel in Toronto, flight to New York, hotel in New York, flight from New York, and flight from Toronto. I wanted to keep these distinct but also on the same page. To do this, I used a new Backpack feature: dividers.

Dividers are a great way to organise a page into sections. Each divider can have a title, or you can have a simple line if you’d prefer. I created a divider for each section.

Next I added notes for each small nugget of information (e.g. Air Canada flights on Monday or details of a hotel) and dragged it into the right section. I chose notes so that I could build up the information progressively and re-order items based on how good I felt they were.

Finding Hotels.com

After a while of lurching about on the ‘net looking for New York hotels, I stumbled upon Hotels.com, which is a Hotel search engine with lots of search options and great features. I put in my options and went through the list of hotels, creating a note for each one that was promising. For each hotel, I linked the note to the Hotels.com overview page which gives you the address, a summary, user reviews and price information. It also gives you a total estimated price in GBP which is very handy since New York accommodation taxes are too complex for my tiny brain and dollar prices don’t mean anything to me. The mapping feature gives you an at-a-glance idea of where the hotel is in relation to the sights. All in all, I’d recommend Hotels.com highly for hotel comparisons.

Mapping hotels

While it was good to know where each hotel was individually, this didn’t help when looking at the whole list and trying to trade-off price and location. I wanted to be able to see all the hotels on one map to compare where they were. For this, I turned to Google’s recently released My Maps feature which gives you Google Earth style map annotation right within the browser. I created a map for the New York hotels and a map for the Toronto hotels. Each hotel has a blue pinprick and is labelled with its name.

Best-of-breed versus All-in-one

What this exercise illustrates to me is the trade off of using several best-in-breed applications (Backpack + Hotels.com + Google My Maps) versus one all-in-one monolith (Yahoo! Trip Planner). In this case, the best-of-breed approach worked best for me. For the average consumer, it might be too much to ask to tie in several different information sources manually but for me it worked well. In this case, the all-in-one solution did not offer enough flexibility or functionality to help out, but there are obviously situations where the connectedness of the solution would offer great advantages. To me, there is a third way: tieing best-of-breed applications together using APIs and this is a key feature of Web 2.0. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re looking for opportunities), there doesn’t seem to be a good product in the trip planning space yet to compare.

It’s been a busy few weeks for me—so much so that I hadn’t realised quite how soon dConstruct is. At Madgex, we’re sponsoring the event so there’s been a sudden rush of activity.

Of course, the main thing we’ve done for the conference is the Backnetwork: http://dconstruct07.backnetwork.com/. (If you’re going to dConstruct and haven’t received an activation code yet, please email info@backnetwork.com). New this year to the backnetwork is the ability to auto-detect your xfn relationships from previous backnetworks, which will save repeat-conference-goers lots of time. Also, we’ve added a forum to the site and this seems to have taken off!

On the day we’ll have a stall set up so come and have a chat–we might offer you a job! I’m off to choose the right t-shirt to wear to the pre-party…

BP have launched Target Neutral—a way to offset the damage your car does to Mother Earth. To ‘neutralise your CO₂ emissions’, you enter the make, body shape and fuel type of your car along with your annual mileage and average fuel economy. You’re told just how many tonnes of carbon dioxide your car pumps out into the atmosphere and asked to donate money to environmental projects to offset this damage.

My little Modus pumps out a shocking 3.49 tonnes of CO₂. Since the density of gaseous CO2 is 1.98kg/m³, this is equivalent to 1,762.62626m³ of CO₂—enough to cover 9 tennis courts to a depth of 1m.

Luckily, this 3.49 tonnes of CO₂ can be offset for the paltry sum of £15.05. Rather than pay this amount to target neutral, I’m trying to cut down my car usage. Now I work in central Brighton, I walk to work rather than drive, which makes a huge difference (and I can get into shape too).

aeo07

Yay! I’m going to dConstruct 2007 (barring accidents and work emergencies—don’t even think about it, Mike). The conference promises to be an interesting one with lots of brilliant-looking talks. The focus this year is user experience. UX is a really important topic for any web consultancy, so it’ll be good to learn from people who spend a considerable proportion of their time worrying about it.

I’m especially pleased to be going this year since I really wanted to go last year. Unfortunately, my mum fell seriously ill and I had a pretty sucky summer. Happily, she made a brilliant recovery and this summer promises to be much better (shitty weather aside).

Like all the cool kids, I’m on Pownce (bruceboughton), and—even cooler—I have 12 invites going spare. If you want one, leave a comment and I’ll invite you using the email address you supply.

Comments are moderated so won’t appear on the site immediately but I’ll keep it first-come-first-served.

To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it.

Psychology Today: Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature by Alan S. Miller Ph.D., Satoshi Kanazawa Ph.D.

I’m just back from mountain biking round the forest at Stanmer Park with Steve, Jim and Paul from work, as well as some of Steve’s friends and one of Paul’s friends. We did about an hour-and-a-half, starting at Falmer, riding down through the University, behind my old halls (York House), round the top of Stanmer Park through the forest up to Ditchling Road and finally slalom-style downhill to the entrance of Stanmer Park and back through the uni to Falmer. There was just time for a pit stop at the local pub before it got dark and we had to clean off our bikes. Unfortunately, I was the only one to take a slide through the mud, but I was also the only one to manage to do a 360° spin, albeit unintentionally!

The hills were hard work and I got absolutely caked in mud, but it was definitely worth it. I’m definitely going to go again once I’ve got myself a bike (and a helmet!) and I really recommend it. There’s some brilliant tracks and some hair-raising slalom runs! I think I might have caught the bug…

The weeks of waiting are finally over. Results are in and they’re good—very good. I got my First class Honours as I hoped for and Seb got a First too!

There was a surprise appearance from Guy McCusker—a brilliant lecturer who Sussex recently lost to Bath. Apparently it’s nice and quiet up there!

Anyway, time to chill out and enjoy the culmination of three years’ hard work.