Happy Birthday, Linzi!

My little sister is 26 today! My parents and I bought her a MacBook. I hope she likes it!

The Future Of Web Apps Conference

I took three trains to get to the Future of Wep Apps conference yesterday. It was surprisingly good. I tend to get so tired of Web 2.0 conferences in San Francisco but I really liked this one. Maybe because it was in London. :)

See my coverage of the event for PC Magazine here.

This is a sad story about linquistics…

This story claims that half of the world's languages will be extinct by the end of the century. I'd better start learning Chinese!

Listen to this clip of a man speaking a language called Magati Ke. Why can't Google Language Tool translate this into English?

$150 Per Day For Broadband!?

I am in Dubai right now and my hotel charges 150 Dirhams (AED) for 24 hours of broadband. Although that is not quite as bad as it sounds, approximately $40 USD, it still is annoying considering I am staying at a hotel that has been voted one of the best business hotels in the Middle East. $40 and it isn't even Wi-Fi! It is an RJ 45 cable. Come on people! The hotels I have been staying at in London and Istanbul were not as luxurious as this and they both had free Wi-Fi.

Also, Flickr is blocked in this country. What the heck?

I don't have a good sense of what Dubai is like yet because we arrived at 2 a.m. so I slept until noon. It is hot and the city is full of cranes. I'll go exploring in a bit.

One cool thing about this resort is that it is so prestigious that a representative from the hotel met us at the gate and took us straight to the front of the visa line. That line would have otherwise took us an hour to get through but we got our passports stamped right away, then off to baggage claim, and then shuttled to the hotel in a towncar with cool towels waiting for us. Not too shabby!

T-Minus Four Days

I'm going on vacation on Friday. I'll be in Istanbul and Dubai for vacation but don't stop watching TeXtra. I have great shows lined up for while I'm gone!

Meanwhile, Episode 76 will be coming at you tomorrow!