The demise of the all-business class (ABC) airlines Silverjet, Maxjet and Eos didn't surprise me in the least. WTF wanted to hack all the way out to Stansted or Luton to fly to New York? After all, Heathrow's no further - and it isn't too bad once you've got priority boarding and so on.

Plus, they were ruthlessly targetted by the big boys. American in particular ought to be investigated for unfair competition - it set up a Stansted-NY service which, while not ABC, will have soaked up some of the available traffic on that route. Then within weeks of Eos and Maxjet closing down, AA discontinued its service too.

So now British Airways, having bought the only remaining ABC rival (L'Avion, which flys Paris Orly to New York) is about to start an ABC route to NY that makes sense, flying out of London City.

There are snags, of course. Anyone who's been to LCY (or past it on the DLR!) will know it's not exactly a big airport. Quite simply, the runway isn't long enough for anything with the range to reach New York - that's why the existing flights out of there focus on short and mid-range business destinations such as Paris and Frankfurt.

You can get mid-sized planes out with a light load though, so that's what BA plans to do. It's using the "smallest and newest" Airbus, the A318, which has a range of 3250 nautical miles - if fully fuelled, but it can't get out of LCY fully-fuelled, so it'll stop at Shannon to re-fuel.

BA's making a virtue out of the 40 minute stopover because it'll allow passengers to pass through US Immigration in advance - Shannon's obviously got some special deal with the US on this.

40 minutes at Shannon, instead of an hour (or more) from the City to Heathrow, then another hour (or more) in line at JFK. I know which I'd choose...

Earlier this year I was in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress. In one of the hotel lobbies I spotted a sign that I simply had to make a note of - and I just came across that note in my diary. It said:

"Dear Guest: For your security take care of your values."

I'll do my best, I thought to myself....

The Omnivore's Hundred is a list of stuff that the British food-blogger Andrew Wheeler thinks everyone should try at least once in their lives - thanks to jpgsawyer and sbisson for passing it on. I did have to look up a few of the more US-centric entries, but having finally gone through it, I do wonder how much of a challenge it's meant to be!

Anyway, the rules are:
bold those you have tried;
strike-through those you wouldn't consider eating;
italicise any item you'd never eat again;
*Asterisk any items you'd be interested in trying but have not yet.

(Checking out Andrew's original, it's interesting to see how these rules have evolved since his original posting.)

Edit: it turns out the author of the list is also anw.

( My list... )

The 29th floor of the Millbank Tower's 30 floors, that is. It's now a "venue" called Altitude and has a rather splendid view, as you can see here - click on the images for full-size versions.



Looking south-east(ish), I think that's the Crystal Palace transmitter on the centre horizon, the Oval is centre left, and the MI6/Secret Intelligence Service building is the beige and green one on the riverbank to the right.



More or less east, Canary Wharf is on the horizon to the left, and on the river there's a converted WW2-vintage DUKW which is now used for amphibious city tours.



Looking north, we have Westminster Abbey upper centre with the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament) to its right. On the horizon to the left of the abbey is the BT Tower and to its right is Centrepoint.



At this point, the loop of the river means it flows from south to north. In the foreground is Lambeth Bridge, and at its east end you can just see the palace of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Next along the river is Westminster Bridge, with the Houses of Parliament left and the London Eye and the old County Hall right. On the horizon at far right you can just see Tower 42, formerly known to all as the NatWest Tower after the bank that used to be headquartered there.



Another view north a few hours later, this time with the camera placed on the windowsill and set on time-delay. I think it's the window glass that's made the lights flare.

Assuming I noted the numbers down correctly last night (which I hope I did, despite having consumed a little myself!), this year's Great British Beer Festival sold nearly 246,000 pints of real ale to over 60,000 visitors, which is about four pints each.

That's not counting the cider, perry, bottled ales and foreign beers though, so the real total will be rather higher.

We got home at about 3 this morning, and the day's been a tad slow so far as a result.

That's it, the Great British Beer Festival 2008 is closed, the stewards are gradually moving the happy drinkers towards the exits, and the great clean-up is beginning.

At some point this evening we'll hear how much beer was sold, but in the meantime I can tell you that the collectables stand sold over 2000 bar towels, the products stand over 100 CAMRA teddy bears and the tombola ran out of both cuddly rams (a Youngs brewery promo item) and - not surprisingly, given the weather - umbrellas.

See y'all back here next year......

Less than three hours of the 2008 Great British Beer Festival left, and the place is packed. There were still plenty of beers to choose from when I went down there an hour or so back; hopefully there's still plenty now but not quite as many - the aim with events like this (of course!) is to have as little left unsold at the end as possible, while still being able to offer a decent choice right up to the last hour or so.

Then we have to clear the hall of visitors, pack up the office and generally tidy up, and finally.... at some point the staff party can start, and the 1000+ volunteers who've given up much of their drinking tim e for the last week can get a few pints of their own.

Apologies if you already know this - as several of you obviously do - but the most useful vaguely techie things I learnt this week were, first, how to get Facebook to import one's own blog and convert it to "Facebook Notes", and second, how to in turn subscribe to your friend's Facebook Notes as an RSS feed.

I'm guessing this is something that was added to Facebook relatively recently, as there's also a couple of blog-importing external apps, but the two things I wanted are now covered by the built-in Notes app.

One of the options (Settings) it offers - start off by going to Facebook's Applications list (it's moved to the top bar in "New Facebook") and then Notes - is to import notes from an external blog. All I needed for this was to look up the RSS feed for my LiveJournal, which turns out to be http://username.livejournal.com/data/atom.

Also on the Notes page is a Subscribe option, so I now get updates from that in my RSS feed -I'm using the RSS reader built into Opera, it's basic but it does the job.

Yes, we wore silly hats. Here I am, shakin' me bells:



And here's Helma, in a rather fetching topper:

Liverpool brewery and pubco Cains went into receivership this afternoon.

It looks to my untutored eye as if they'd (a) over-extended themselves taking over Honeycombe Leisure, and (b) chosen the wrong wunch of bankers to borrow from. But as someone else pointed out, the right wunch probably doesn't exist - that's why we call them that.

Anyway, I nipped over to the Cains bar for a commiseratory beer - a half of Cains IPA. Either the staff hadn't heard the news or they were past caring, either way I feel sorry for them.

I've just been over to say hello to suaveswede who's working on the Welsh bar today, and on the way back happened to spot these fine nautical fellows:



And it's not even Hat Day! (That's tomorrow...)

I just found this on my camera - it's the old-style carousel at the Ardingly beer festival and classic vehicle show that we went to last month.

Another day at the GBBF, this morning I've been escorting a video-maker around the place - I can't call him a cameraman, although he is, because he's also the interviewer, and by the sound of it the editor and just about everything else. Such is the way things are going it that business, it seems.

I didn't get a chance to unload and post any photos yesterday, so here's a little catchup. First, this is the Champion Beer of Britain trophy, waiting for the announcement:



And a slightly blurry one of the first of the CAMRA bars you'll come to when you arrive:

...but someone's got to do it.

It's the opening day of the Great British Beer Festival today. From noon til 5 was the trade and press session - hundreds of publicans, brewers and others, here to see what's new, and of course have a few beers.

Then it opened to the paying public at 5pm - although they'd been queueing around the building for a while before that. Now the place is busy but not crammed, and from where I sit on "the Bridge" I can hear the muffled sounds of jollity from the bars down below.

Meanwhile for the festival volunteers the CBOB bar has just opened. This morning saw the judging of the Champion Beer of Britain - won by Triple-F's Alton Pride - and of course there had to be a cask of every beer entered. But the judges rarely need more than a few pints of each, so there's quite a bit left - even though they're small casks. So one of the rewards of volunteering is to help drink up what's left.

As I say, it's a tough job...

That was a long day... After a slow morning, I suggested we dig out the book tokens we were given for Yule but still hadn't spent. It being a nice afternoon by then, we decided to cycle the seven or eight miles to Kingston, which would also let Helma try out her new bike - a startlingly light road-tourer that she only collected from the shop yesterday.

( More... )

And I say: Don't tell me how you lost your laptop, tell me how you got it back!

In my line of work you can tell it's summer when - short of any real news to send out - the PR companies start sending us the results of their clients' latest surveys.

Most of these are about as newsworthy as "Small earthquake, no-one killed", but every once in a while something a bit more thought-provoking slips through. It's not always the thought that the vendor wanted to provoke, however...

So when Dell told me it'd commissioned a report on how well business travellers protect the data on their laptops - to promote Dell's data protection services, of course - it wasn't the claim that 800,000 laptops go missing each year in airports world-wide that caught my eye.

The claim that 40 percent of business travellers haven't backed up the data on their machines didn't really surprise me either.

OK, it was slightly worrying to read that my local airport, London Heathrow, has the worst record in Europe, with 900 laptops being lost or stolen each week - that's 26 per terminal per day!

But what I really found myself wondering about was the statement that 51 percent of missing laptops are never recovered - because that in turn means 49 percent are recovered.

Are their owners perhaps using a tracking system, such as the one that Dell's now touting? Or is it just that when a forgetful business traveller leaves a laptop bag in the executive lounge, the chances are it will still be there when they remember?

Update

It looks as if someone got the numbers a bit mixed up when they wrote up the study for us journalists - apparently the 57 percent figure comes from interviews with airport staff and refers only to those laptops that end up in an airport's Lost Property department, and not the ones that are actually stolen.

The scary thing there is that a mere 43 percent of us manage to get a genuinely-lost (ie. mislaid, not stolen) laptop back. Dr Larry Ponemon, whose company did the survey for Dell, adds: "I believe that many airports' lost & found (especially those controlled by airport security) require proof of ownership such as knowledge of the computer's serial number. Airport authorities are reluctant to turn on the device for fear that this might violate privacy."

I guess the lesson there is to make sure you have a note somewhere - preferably not in your laptop bag - of your machine's serial number, or stick an "If found, please call this number" label on the outside.

I'm still wondering though what proportion of "missing" airport laptops turn out to be genuinely stolen, rather than simply mislaid. Unfortunately, that's not in the survey - maybe next time, Larry?

The news from Weston-super-Mare this morning is dreadful - the town's landmark Grand Pier is ablaze, and looks unlikely to survive.

A grand reopening had been planned for the August bank holiday Monday; there's no way that can take place now.

While I've not been to Weston in years, and not been on the pier for even longer, I remember it well - when I was a kid I'd sometimes play under the pier (at low tide!), hunting for crabs and lost coins in the rock pools.

I really hope the fire can be brought under control; if it can't, then well, all things have their time. It is so sad to watch though.

A week on from it starting to be a problem, and three days after reporting it, the drains are still blocked. Now, anything that goes down the kitchen sink ends up in the garden, and the downstairs loo will barely flush away.

Reporting it's not trivial, as well. ( See why )

Hurrah, as of about noon on Friday we seem to have working drains again! The missing manhole cover is back in place too.

A trimmed-down weekend, but busy nonetheless. The original plan was to go to the Greenwich beer and jazz festival on Friday evening, but that part was cancelled once we realised that the ticket price doubled at 5pm, and Helma couldn't get there until 6 or later.

At least it meant a slightly calmer Saturday morning, when four of us loaded up to go to English Heritage's Festival of History, at Kelmarsh Hall in Nottinghamshire. The M1 was the obvious route, but with all those damnable 50mph limits and "safety cameras" - with not a single roadworker in sight, of course - we only just made it in time. Quickly got kitted up and jogged over to the arena with 5 minutes to spare, only to find that back in the real world, EH's scheduling was already some 20 minutes out.

The show was OK - we were sharing the bill with Conquest, a second-generation descendant of The Vikings that specialises in Norman re-enactment. The script was the 1138 Battle of the Standard (not "Standards", as the ignorant EH commentator called it on both days), a.k.a. the Battle of Northallerton, in which King David's invading Scottish army was repulsed by a smaller English army.

Conquest were most of the English army, and found it hard work to keep the fighting going given how outnumbered they were. Everyone was keeping it showy and fairly gentle though - aiming for the lowest common denominator is always a good plan when you have two societies participating who rarely fight together! It reportedly looked good from the audience line anyhow.

Saturday night was party time in the beer tent. These events are opportunities for everyone to bring out their best historical gear - or in some cases to come up with something outrageous or plain weird. In the latter category this year we had a bunch of people doing a variety of steam-punk re-enactment! The losers were the Roman legionaries, who have lovely gear but as soon as their arena show is over they change into sweatshirts. Sad little bunnies....

Sunday brought a little time to look around the market and the rest of the show - as well as the usual suspects (ECW, Vikings, mediaeval, WW1, WW2) we also had Russian revolutionaries and Spanish civil war guerillas. One of the best bits was during the WW2 arena show, when we had a dogfight between a Spitfire (somewhat incongrously painted in photo-recon blue) and not one but two Me108 Taifuns (actually French-built Nord 1002 Pinguins, I believe). The three then did a flypast, passing over our campsite at low level just as we were packing up. Superb! I've no photos though, I'm sorry to say.

We legged it before the end of the afternoon to beat the rush, and picking the A1 instead of the M1 gave us a fairly fast and easy trip home. We still haven't finished putting everything away though - and on Friday we have to get it all out again anyhow, as we've another show to do, this time at the Chiltern Open Air Museum.

I had a surprise phonecall from my mum yesterday morning to say she was on a coach to London to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the Dome (OK, "the O2") in two hours time, and did I want to come along, as the group she was with had a spare ticket.

I'd been thinking of going along anyhow, so two hours later I was at North Greenwich tube - meanwhile, my mum's coach was still in traffic, somewhere on the Marylebone Road...

By the time she and the others arrived we had missed our allotted time - bookings are for a 30-minute window - but they let us in anyhow.

As the full title (Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharoahs) suggests, it's not just about Tut. Indeed, the first half of the exhibition is finds from other royal tombs, with the aim of setting the scene and exploring the beliefs of the time. Well, the beliefs of the aristocracy, at least - I would have liked a bit more general context, while my mum wanted to know more about what happened after the religious restoration of Tutankamun's relatively brief reign.

OK, some of the best known exhibits are missing - I still have the guidebook from the 1977 British Museum exhibition, when we got to see the gold death-mask, the beds and much of the other tomb furniture - but what has made it over is still amazing stuff. Well displayed too.

So yes, there's less gold than in Tut's tomb, but there's still a lot of gorgeous art on show. It's a fascinating exhibition, and spending two hours in there was easier than I expected.