This small box sat silently, patiently even, in our classroom for the best part of a year. On the few occasions our teacher was brave enough to flip the switch the machine would chirp into life with it’s two-tone beep and would state on capital white letters on a black background that it was BASIC. At this point the teacher would key-in the mythical incantation of CHAIN “” – handily jotted on a nearby note – and feed the beast a cassette tape.

Some time later the machine would announce it’s vague disappointment with the contents of the tape and be put back to sleep. One time, and one time only, I recall a screen full of bright colours masquerading as pirates looking for treasure.

I was 11.

Such a tantalising taste of computing left me hungry for more. I knew precisely two people who owned computers. One possessed a cut-down version of the BBC Micro from my classroom called the Acorn Electron and guarded it like a sacred treasure, the other was a friend and more accommodating so much so that he agreed, with little optimism, we could type my program listing into his computer.

What combination of childish scrawl, lack of understanding of programming concepts or the cobbled-together dialect of BASIC was responsible for his Texas Instruments TI-99 rejecting my program I would never know. However neither that failure nor the subsequent arrival and rapid departure of a ‘programmable’ Philips G7000 Videopac from my home would quench my thirst.

A new school year started and for me that meant a new school and new subjects the most interesting of these was named Information Technology or IT for short. I don’t recall much of these early lessons other than some exposure to word processing, videotext and a simplified geometry-base programming language for drawing shapes called Logo.

This fixed schedule held little interest to me although the machines themselves did and the teacher opened the room of fifteen or so BBC Micro’s equipped with 5.25″ floppy drives to the ever-changing line of misfits queued outside to play games. But unlike my old school a few people here actually knew a little about these machines.

Chuckie Egg and Mr. E were favourites while masochists would fire up Castle Quest, Citadel and Repton 2 despite being impossible to complete and lacking a crucial save-game option. Fewer still braved the open-ended and Elite space trading/combat game which would let you resume your position each day. Right on commander!

Games consisted of a few files passed between easily damaged 5.25″ floppy disks that students had mysteriously acquired. Remembering which file to CHAIN, *EXEC or *LOAD was a task in itself made worse by the ever-changing scene of kids and games. Now I finally had a machine to myself for a brief period each day I set about solving the first real world problem I encountered here and wanted to create something that would automatically boot and let you select a game by pressing a letter or a number.

Scouring magazines, loaning one of the few BBC BASIC programming manuals from the teacher and occasionally LISTing other people’s I came up with something that worked. Before long it had double height text, colours and some basic animation. Included in the program were some basic instructions on how to edit the program to fit the games on your own disk and it spread like wildfire.

Shortly after my father, who made gadget trading one of his hobbies, brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16KB. It was less powerful than the BBC’s at school and had to be hooked up to a television and cassette record to be of any use and had small rubber keys that were hard to type on. I played and programmed on it for hours without interruption and it finally became mine when my mother made it clear to my father it couldn’t be traded out for the next gadget. Within a few months the machine had died after something metallic got in through the edge connector.

I was heartbroken but found a neighbour was selling his Spectrum 48K and persuaded my parents to buy it. The extra memory was useful but even better was the hard-key keyboard and the original Sinclair BASIC programming manual I’d been missing. That year my parents split, my father moved out and we moved to a new parish on our little island of Guernsey which meant new friends and a new school. A school that had IT sharing lessons with technical drawing.

My hopes weren’t high…

[)amien

1. Settling down in the Redmond area and being with my team are some of the things I’m most looking forward to in October.
2. Sometimes I am so deep in thought when people ask me a question I look dazed and confused, failing to answer them.
3. People grow and situations change and that’s why there is a saying, “never say never”!
4. When I’m down, I take a nap, wake up and do something different or creative.
5. Microsoft Building 35 is where you’ll find me most often.
6. A rainy day is good for splashing in puddles, getting wet and drying off near something warm with cocoa.
7. And as for the weekend, tonight I’m looking forward to wrapping things up, tomorrow my plans include going out with my Vancouver friends one last time and Sunday, I want to go parkouring and start packing!

How old were you when you first started in programming?

Some time between 10 and 12 when my father bought home a ZX Spectrum and I ended up delving into the excellent programming manual when I finally ran out of games to play. At the same time my school opened up the computer room at lunchtimes…

What was your first programming language?

BASIC on the Sinclair Spectrum (evenings) and BBC Micro (lunch-times and after school). Multi-platform from the outset ;-)

What was the first real program you wrote?

Probably the MultiFile +3 disk & file management tool for the Spectrum in a mix of assembler and BASIC but I was also creating menu and copy protection for the BBC Micro around the same time.

I also trashed an expensive 3” disk drive at the time with a small bug in my end-of-disk detection code that resulted in the drive trying to step itself beyond the end several times and knocked it out of alignment.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Well I’ve *used* the following although ones in italics for only brief periods involving one or two small applications.

• BASICs: Sinclair, BBC, Microsoft, QBASIC, Mallard, QuickBasic, ASIC
• Assemblers: Z80, 6502, 8051
• Visual Basic, VBA, VBScript, VB.NET
• C, C++, Objective-C, C#, Java, JavaScript, ActionScript
• Turbo Pascal, Delphi, SQL, PHP
• COBOL, RPG, SmallTalk, Algol, Prolog

I’m not sure if XSLT/XPath or RegEx’s count.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Writing IBM AS/400 (iSeries) banking applications in COBOL age 17 joining a team where the leader was already known as the Kindergarten Cop as everyone in his team was “only 23-25”. I got to delve into the kernel, general ledger and securities systems eventually single-handedly developing intricate multi-base-currency support leaving days before my 19th birthday. (Okay, a little pride there ;-)

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Without a shadow of a doubt.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Enjoy the journey, new languages are going to come and go so learn them just-in-time ;-)

It’s a shame computers and languages are more complex now but with the Internet and great books available there is no real barrier to entry.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

Any application that brings a smile to a users face :)

Some ‘interesting’ moments have been revisiting school-level physics for a pool game and an on-the-fly domain class construction system for an international configurable payroll package.

Who am I calling out?

I’m not sure any of them are reading my blog any more but you never know ;-)

• Rob ‘Subsonic’ Conery (done)
• Steve ‘Sinbad’ Streeting (done)
• Adrian ‘Gringod’ Ritchie

[)amien

Joining Microsoft

For those who haven’t been following my blog long I took a job at Microsoft Canada Development Centre as a developer on LINQ to SQL. It turns out my H-1B Visa has been approved and I will be moving down to Redmond in October.

Joining a company of Microsoft’s size is a daunting experience. The sheer number of people, departments, systems, procedures and intranet sites to navigate and learn plus of course the actual job of jumping into the product and seeing where we go from here. I’ve also been helping out a little on the forums and internal lists and getting involved in the regular scheduled update meetings.

Of course you also hear all sorts of interesting news just before it becomes public knowledge such as publishing XNA apps to Xbox Live! and Office getting ODF and PDF support.

On the personal front…

A whirlwind couple of weeks full of new employee orientation, relocating, getting lost, filling in forms, exploring, meeting a couple of hundred people and catching up with a few old friends including one from Guernsey all of which lead to a quiet blog.

There have been some personal stories of getting lost, baby sharks and falling in lakes which will be kept to email now – there’s no way those 500+ subscribers are here for my personal bits! I’ll be sending out an email this week so if you haven’t seen something by the weekend and we’re friends ping me and I’ll forward you on a copy.

Some photos are up on Facebook with a few more to follow.

Envy Code R

Of course what everybody really wants to know (according to my inbox) is where Envy Code R preview #7 is.

It is coming, but every time I think I’m close to a release I find another annoying glitch all related to hinting.

Hinting is the process whereby you tell the rendering system how to shape the characters to better fit into a pixel grid. It consists of a table saying at which sizes to smooth and apply instruction plus a program that adjusts the font as a whole for a given size and then a program per-glyph that tells it how to adjust the points in relation to each other with delta hints providing modifications for specific point sizes.

It’s a complicated process if you’re doing it at the lowest level with a tool such as Microsoft’s Visual TrueType but is made easier with a tool like FontLab Studio 5 which has an autohinter that often gets things wrong but is a lot easier to work with and works with hints at a higher level of abstraction.

Which is why I parted with $999 on FontLab and I’m going to investigate a donate option to try and recoup some of those costs.

The bold variant is the only one now requiring hinting and I’m hoping to have it done in the next 24-48 hours. The regular variant looks just great… as does italics.

[)amien

In February I travelled out to Redmond for three days of interviews (one position grew to two, then three). Having read the Microsoft Jobs Blog I was prepared for long hard days but in reality the process was incredibly enjoyable and exciting.

So much so I wanted to find a desk and move in right then.

With some luck I also found myself at Hanselman’s geek dinner which involved some great discussions and the chance to meet Scott himself, Brad Wilson and Nikhil Kothari who I knew from .NET on-line community as well as some 35 other developers from both within Microsoft and the outside world. It was one fun evening and my thanks go to Scott for kindly driving me back to my hotel in Redmond town centre.

Many white-boards and a few lunches later (including an unexpected one with Phil Haack, Nikhil and two more guys from ASP.NET team – I wish I could remember all the names of the people I met!) I found myself with the hard task of choosing a position.

I settled on a developer role within the LINQ to SQL team starting mid-May and am counting down the days…

[)amien

I visited Microsoft’s HQ in Redmond.

Did you keep your New Year’s Resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I didn’t make any.

What countries did you visit?

England and US.

What would you like to have in 2008 that you lacked in 2007?

The opportunity to work on some great products / solutions.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

My blog has really taken off in 2007, traffic is way up, posts are way up and it’s proving to be a useful reference for myself and others :)

What was your biggest failure?

Not shipping any major projects.

What was the best thing someone bought you?

I got so many great things for Christmas – a lovely new giant laptop bag, some great DVD’s and books too!

Whose behaviour merited celebration?

My girlfriend Steph for being so understanding about how much time my hobbies take up.

Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Nothing that strong in my life!

Where did most of your money go?

In the bank!

What song will always remind you of 2007?

I must confess I’ve not been paying any attention to the music industry for a while. I guess Radiohead’s Rainbow will stick in my mind for 2007 not for what it sounds like (I didn’t listen to it) but for the attention it got by putting it out direct for consumers to name their price.

Compared to this time last year, are you:

• Happier or sadder? Same.
• Thinner or fatter? Same.
• Richer or poorer? Richer.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Put up more samples on my blog, more adventure in life and more discussion and development of ideas.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

Less idle browsing of the net, less sleep ;-)

How do you plan to spend Christmas?

I spent it with my family including a 24-person lunch which my mother, sisters, step-sister and aunty managed to somehow co-ordinate to great effect.

What was your favourite TV program?

Takeshi’s Castle although The Mighty Boosh was also great.

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Who has time for that?

What was the best book you read?

Gateway by Frederik Pohl.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

I’ve been listening to Podcasts more than music.

What did you want and not get?

Career development but I’ve only myself to blame.

What was your favourite film of this year?

Hot Fuzz.

What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

Spent the evening with Steph and enjoyed a relaxing 33rd.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007?

More Esprit less skater :D

What political issue stirred you the most?

National ID database in the UK. As if their fiasco with the child database wasn’t evidence enough of this ticking time-bomb of an idea.

Who was the best new person you met?

I met some great people out in Redmond including Jonathan, Aaron & James.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2007?

Opportunity might come knocking but it still needs chasing down.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

Bouncy bouncy, ooh such a good time
Bouncy bouncy, shoes all in a line
Bouncy bouncy, everybody somersault
Somersault, summertime, everybody sing along
Bouncy bouncy, ooh such a good time
Bouncy bouncy, white socks falling down
Bouncy bouncy, stilettos are a no-no
Bouncy bouncy, ooh, bouncy bouncy ooh
Every time I bounce, I feel I touch the sky!

– The Bouncy Crimp, The Mighty Boosh

[)amien

The last 20 months have been a bumpy ride with the logic board being replaced twice once for whining and the second time when the inner memory slot went dead. The battery has been recalled and the power supply cable started melting and the paint started flaking off the enclosure but thankfully Apple sorted out all these problems rather swiftly with advanced replacement parts and speedy repairs through local service centers iQ Guernsey and Guernsey Computers.

Every company has problems with products, especially first revisions, but how they deal with them is important and one of my logic board failures was a couple of months out of warranty but their customer services department authorised the replacement anyway. Such service counts for a lot in my book and so now I have outgrown my notebook another MacBook Pro will be it’s replacement…

My paltry 100GB disk space got eaten up with an extensive music library and plenty of 10 megapixel RAW digital camera images. Subtract a 15GB Boot Camp and I was soon looking at external storage. Parallels and Visual Studio 2008 meant I needed to up from 2GB to 4GB of RAM and I found myself constantly missing my 24″ Dell monitor. I also need to be able to test 64-bit applications now that I am developing Cocoa apps.

The Apple Store UK just added the 2.6GHz processor and 200GB 7200RPM drive options this week and although Guernsey is barred from The Apple Store UK local reseller iQ matches their ex-VAT prices on Pro gear so on Saturday I ordered my new dream machine complete with the high-resolution 1920×1200 anti-glare LCD (no glossy mirror for me thanks).

They also have friendly shop staff unlike Guernsey Computers (although Vernon in their service department is helpful if you can get to him). One thing I really can’t stand though is Apple’s pricing policy on RAM.

To upgrade from 2GB to 4GB they want £450 extra! Crucial UK will do a 4GB kit of the same spec for just £98. I’m not alone in this observation.

It’s just insanely ludicrous.

[)amien

It was a little too close to my USA trip which has meant I’ve missed my niece trick-or-treating for the first time since I returned to Guernsey 3 years ago which leaves me a little sad. I guess I should be grateful for not being hit with jet-lag and the fact I’m surviving just fine on 5.5 hours of sleep a day which tonight is in a cubicle hotel…

As you can imagine the fun projects I get involved with in my own time have suffered somewhat although I’ve really tried to at least keep the blog posts flowing. Here’s a quick update on things:

SubSonic

I’ve committed the final piece of my refactoring to make the coding languages abstracted. To add additional programming language support you can now just implement the ICodeLanguage interface and add knowledge of it to the CodeLanguageFactory class. The command line and web interface tools will all just magically work with a recompilation.

Rob Conery is now under the employ of Microsoft and will be aligning SubSonic with their MVC efforts. I hope this support of open-source projects is a trend Microsoft are keen to continue.

AnkhSVN

This great add-in for Visual Studio provides Subversion integration continues to face competition from the commercial VisualSVN front and I had an interesting discussion with Aaron Jensen about performance with large projects and some relating to moving.

I have some UI work checked-in to trunk and we are likely to move to a better model for integrating with the Solution Explorer to address these issues that would require we drop Visual Studio 2003 support which is looking quite likely. Various things are moving forward on this project so keep an eye on it!

Envy Code R

I’ve not touched Envy Code R since the PR6.1 release but to be honest this tends to be the way I work with it. Nothing for weeks then 15 hours over a weekend gets it to the next release. Unlike code I find it difficult to jump in and out whilst being productive and consistent. Perhaps when I’ve worked on a bunch I’ll be able to but this is still my first scalable font.

The plan is to add all the essential box-drawing characters for code page 850, extend the # sign (should we slant this in the non-italic version?), increase the curves on { and } and adjust the comma to make it less like a slightly deformed dot. I’m open to suggestions as to whether the .,;: characters should in fact revert back to be square dots rather than round ones… again, leave comments if you have an opinion. I’m not sure whether I would extend this squaring back to the dots on ij! etc.

I’m hoping to get preview 7 out within the next couple of weeks and if that goes well then consider a more liberal licence to allow bundling etc. as I’ve had a couple of enquiries.

Silk Companion icons #1

My pack of addition Silk style icons has suffered as I find it impossible to draw on the move requiring instead a comfortable desk and a proper mouse to draw. As I no longer have a desk at home this means staying late in the office or throwing my lunchtimes at them.

The temptation is to just release the 352 icons as they currently are and produce another set at a later date. The alternative would mean a release some times over the next 1-3 weeks when the number finally reaches the proposed 500 mark.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions, leave a comment!

[)amien

I will also be spending an extra day and a half in Seattle, perhaps taking in some of the sights of and maybe meeting up with a couple of on-line contacts for the first time.

Flights & hotel booked, now where I did put my passport…

The event was a Software Design Review for Microsoft’s ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions including MVC. Twenty-four of us gave our thoughts, feelings and opinions to the teams on how we believe we would or could utilise various aspects.

[)amien

Here are my notes on the experience.

Spam

Akismet is good but I prefer the invisible captcha that Subtext was using. I’ve gone from dealing with 1 rogue spam a month to 1-2 held for moderation a day.

View counts

The WordPress import format doesn’t deal with view counts. I wrote a query against Subtext to list them, a query in MySQL to identify article numbers then manually executed

UPDATE post_meta SET meta_value = meta_value + 123 WHERE meta_key = 'views' AND article_id = 456

For every article replacing 123 with Subtext’s view count and 456 with the WordPress article id. As my blog was previously on Blogger.com which doesn’t provide view counts they are a year or so lower than reality.

Preserving links

I chose a custom permalink format of /blog/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname% which gives http://damieng.com/blog/2007/10/01/first-of-october for posts. This is similar to the old format of http://www.damieng.com/blog/2007/10/01/first-of-october.aspx but obviously has the file extension and www dropped. Apache’s .htaccess file made redirecting the old links a breeze which was important to me as my blog suffered big drops in Technorati and Google when I last moved from Blogger.com to Subtext. The required lines to achieve this, redirect /blog/ and keep the RSS going were:

RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/archive/(.*).aspx$ http://damieng.com/blog/$1
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/$ http://damieng.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog$ http://damieng.com/
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/rss.aspx http://damieng.com/feed
RedirectMatch permanent ^/blog/Rss.aspx http://damieng.com/feed

Editing

The default editor is fast and for the most part okay although it lacks the ability to change from the default paragraph tag to headings, preformatted blocks, blockquotes etc. It also very annoyingly tries to be helpful by turning carriage returns into new paragraphs which would be fine if it was clever enough to leave <pre> blocks well alone.

Steve suggested FCKeditor which is very slow at initialising on my machine and also tends to really mess up my HTML :(

Going forward

There are still a number of things I want to do including further deviating from the Redoable theme. Lightening up the look somewhat perhaps with some soft gradients and alternative typefaces will go a long-way. I’ll also want to do a proper logo at some point as soon as I can decide what it should look like.

Being that WordPress is a higher visibility target Phrixus suggested hiding the wp-admin directory as an extra level of protection against automated vulnerability/brute-force attacks which I shall also try.

I need to speak to GrinGod about the download counting mechanism he mentioned too.

The original Blogger.com content from a year or two ago will be phased out/removed as it would appear it dilutes my page rank having almost-identical content elsewhere not to mention messing up traffic stats etc.

[)amien

Rob Conery provided a useful .NET/Subsonic app to make the transition from Subtext about as painless as possible bar the obvious one of going with a PHP based solution when I know .NET is a better technology.

I simply felt the .NET blogging engines didn’t give me what I want right now and yes, I know I should be contributing to them to get them where I want them but I’m just so busy on various projects that if I was coding a blog in the evenings I wouldn’t be writing on it. Hopefully the great, and no doubt equally busy, guys behind those engines will forgive my little foray into WordPress for a while.

The non-blog parts of the web site (yes, there are some, with downloads, fonts, cursors, little tools and a mini-biography) will be integrated with the site shortly and the theme will probably gradually change to something more me. I also want to add a few extra things, the tag cloud and identicons for a start.

The title of this post also has a second meaning… yes, I’ve put an offer in on a house and will hopefully be taking possession in around 6 weeks providing nothing goes wrong.

Your invite to the house warming party will be in the post…

[)amien

I’ve tried moving some images off site but it’s just typical this happens the week before I move to proper hosting. My poor home DSL line is melting!

Update

Things have calmed down and through a combination of moving images off-site, switching theme and enabling gzip compression for .js and .css the site has survived despite being overloaded at times through lack of bandwidth (CPU and RAM were just fine)

I’ll leave the theme as it is for now in case we get a second wave – the hits appear to come in waves as different time-zones hit different parts of their wake-up, get-to-work and get-home cycles.

The 60 day old post has now had 20,000 hits – about 19,500 of them within the last 24 hours. Slicing and dicing the stats in SQL reveal that my blog has been running for 977 days, consists of 263 blog posts averaging one post every 3.5 days. It has received 1239,51 hits in that time, a sixth of which were in the last 24 hours.

It’s amazing for so many people to read something I have written but as analytics is already pointing out fame is fleeting.

Here’s hoping a few of them decided to add me to their news reader :)

[)amien

Improve programming techniques

My girlfriend gave me the well-regarded Code Complete, Second Edition for my birthday. I shall read it cover to cover and adopt good practices I am not currently practising.

Manage my life

I have started reading GrinGod’s copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I will move tasks out of my head and concentrate on what is achievable right now.

I have set-up these tasks now in Midnight Inbox (great but a little rough) and will keep an eye on OmniFocus. I will be prepared to use my free Moleskine I won in the Moleskinerie summer draw if neither does the job and not immediately write my own software.

Interact with other developers

My Subversion talk at the Guernsey Software Developers Forum went well. I will seek new members and engage in discussions of development with regards to local issues such as those in the finance industry.

I will spend less time on IRC as it is distracting and the non-persistent nature means good answers are lost. Instead I will help more on forums and be prepared to wait for answers to my own questions.

Learn new technologies

I will investigate technologies and learn them where they appear applicable to my work or I find personally interesting. These include:

• Ruby on Rails – clean MVC development with AJAX support… but what about libraries and performance?
• LINQ – simple but powerful object-relational mapping as standard but far away in .NET 3.5
• Cocoa – Apple’s OS X development based around Objective-C giving compilation and dynamic typing
• MonoRail – if I’m going to continue with ASP.NET it won’t be with WebForms
• SharpDevelop – the Visual Studio API is terrible and this project looks well designed and usable

Contribute more to open source

I will contribute more to my favourite open source projects. This includes:

• AnkhSVN – improve user interface and head up the 1.1 release
• SubSonic – refactor more code and help out where I can

Lead development at work

At my new job I will concentrate on the new technology and vision for the next-generation of tools to deliver to our staff and customers and lead my team as appropriate.

I will distil my experience contracting for the last 7 years into the best practices for the company and continue to lead them in adopting modern practices. We now have have source control, formalised request for change and release management procedures however we still need to embrace new tools, write comprehensive unit tests and switch to object-relational mapping for new development.

Switch keymap to Dvorak

I have swapped out my Das 2 at work for my Apple Pro with the key caps rearranged for Dvorak. I will stick to this layout until I can properly touch-type. I won’t actually make me a better developer but it should keep RSI at bay. (This post was written using Dvorak)

[)amien

This in fact turned out to be a bit of a blessing because now that Alex has tagged me I suddenly found I couldn’t think of five things nobody knew about me.

So here are five things you may or may not have known.

1. I learnt to simultaneously program on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and the Acorn BBC Micro at age 11. Both originally in BASIC then later in Z80 and 6502 assembly respectively – I guess I’ve always been platform independent ;-)
2. I was the first Internet Service Provider in the Channel Islands providing free Internet e-mail via my Black Ice BBS a few years before Guernsey.Net and Local Dial formed.
3. I want to build my dream-home in British Columbia, Canada in a small-town a few hours away from Vancouver. Now I’ve passed my degree I have enough points to emigrate without needing to find a job before I go…
4. I accidentally set fire to my kitchen last year. I was out of the house when I got a phone call and upon returning home found the place full of firemen. Whilst the kitchen needed major work everything else was ok and even better the owners insurance paid up for the damage.
5. I’m very lucky in most areas of my life – from little things like finding parking spaces and things I want to landing good jobs and surviving what should be serious accidents with minor scrapes. Alas the luck doesn’t extend to relationships.

I’ll tag Gringod, Steve, Wilco, Arild and Swoo.

[)amien

1. Commercial airlines take the fun out of flying. Airports are often overcrowded and always have so much ‘dead-time’ waiting for check-in, security, boarding, take-off, baggage claim, customs…
2. Heathrow is horrific and I’m glad Guernsey doesn’t fly there any more.
3. When UK customs say one piece of hand-luggage per person they mean it. Handbag and laptops are a piece and taking liquid or gels is still a pain.
4. It takes around 1h 20mins to transfer between Heathrow and Gatwick by coach.
5. Seoul’s airport is impressive even under construction – shame about the one-hour delays on the runway.
6. Korean Air’s fleet delivers interactive individual LCD screens with seat-to-seat gaming or ancient dodgy CRT projectors depending on the luck of the draw.

Trains

1. The JR Rail Pass offers massive savings for those wishing to get around. As well as Shinkansen bullet-trains between major cities you can take slower trains between towns and JR lines inside cities.
2. Show your JR Pass and ticket at gates instead of putting your ticket in the machine. Otherwise be prepared for a polite yet firm official to tap you on the shoulder.
3. JR Pass doesn’t let you get on the Nozomi Shinkansen. The quickest you can ride is the Hikori which is the same speed but has more frequent stops often.

Subway

1. Tokyo subway is quite easy to navigate despite the sheer size and number of people thanks to near-complete Romaji maps.
2. Kyoto subway is a bit of a mess thanks to multiple operators and no unified map.
3. Fukuoka’s subway is fast, clean and easy to navigate… it is also new.
4. Buy a credit ticket that will be deducted per trip. It saves a whole lot of time messing around with machines and costs and lets you get on the last few trains when the ticket machines have closed.

Technology

1. All Internet cafes should consist of cubicles you can sleep in with TV, workstation, bean-bag, unlimited soft drinks and a free comic library like Gera Gera.
2. Mobile phones are everywhere with people texting and gaming in the street, on trains etc.
3. Mobile phone system is UTMS/3G so a GSM-only phone won’t work. You’ll also need to make sure your operator has a roaming partner in Japan because you can’t buy pay-as-you-go SIM’s in Japan unless you’re a resident.

People

1. Japanese people are incredibly polite and helpful whether it’s a stranger sharing her umbrella at a road junction, somebody helping you pick up the contents of your bag sprawled across the floor or somebody from a shop coming outside to help you get your map the right way up and point you in the right direction.
2. Tiny Police stations (boxes) scatter Tokyo and are equipped with maps to help lost people – addresses are hard to find without one. Check the web-site for where you’re going and you’ll probably find a printable map.
3. Emotion is all about the eyes and not the mouth in Japan. It’s not just anime but even emoticons are eyes-only. A sad mouthed-face here is tearful eyes!

Food

1. The street-tent Japanese eateries are a great place to meet people as locals of all ages and foriegners get chatting.
2. Cheese, milk and chocolate are not common. Kit-Kat and Snickers are about the only recognisable brand chocolate bars.
3. Eggs turn up in many many dishes. Boiled and dropped into soups, or cooked and laid upon practically anything or sometimes raw over rice dishes.
4. Food is beautifully prepared, even supermarket sandwiches and lunch-boxes. Crusts are too ugly for their sandwiches.

[)amien