Sky’s Blog

This may be just an artifact of my personal experience, but I think I’m finding that the hotels offering “free Internet” are more often the low-priced hotels than the more expensive ones. At least in Paris and London.

It’s not uncommon to find a hotel over 250€ per night that has a 15€ or higher charge for Internet access. But in the hotels I frequent—I’m fine with just a bed with barely enough space to move around the edges, a shower, and Internet connection, for just over 100€ a night—it seems to be more common to have a free Internet connection included.

Perhaps this is a reflection of younger travelers looking for less-expensive hotels and being attracted like flies (there is one buzzing around my head at this instant here in Paris’ 5^eme where I am connected while sitting in the hotel lobby preparing to take the metro to a meeting) to hotels that provide connectivity.

And the true boon is that Skype on my iPhone can connect to the free wi-fi Internet and I can make Skype calls without having to purchase those “overseas” (and overpriced) mobile phone minutes! Quite a difference to spend USD$0.02 per minute rather than $1.29.

{Part of Sky’s series on using tech when traveling}

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I was reading an InfoWorld article on the benefits and features of HTML version 5, which isn’t a formal standard yet, but many elements of which are already incorporated into browsers.

Media: A major benefit for all of us will be that embedding media (videos particularly) will become standardized and greatly simplified, so the web developer won’t have to worry so much about plug-ins, players and compatibility.

Geo-location: But more fun perhaps than that, there is a geo-location feature built into HTML5, and it’s available today on some browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). In this article Dive into HTML5 — You are here (and so is everybody else), there’s a cookbook for creating a web page that locates you and displays a Google map centered on your coordinates. My page will figure out where you are located and display the Google map — but only if you have an HTML5-compliant browser, sorry. Mobile browsers are particularly good for this because they know your location quite precisely.

I took an hour this morning to build the page, and subject to some debugging (and figuring out that the whole process is asynchronous), I had it working. Clearly if you’re at a wired location, Google is using your IP address and maybe some routing information to locate “approximately” where you are, but on my iPhone it gets much closer to the real location. I used the “You are here…” article, plus some advice from Google code.

(continue reading…)

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{File under Pitfalls of Startup Organizations…}

Every unpaid volunteer; every pro-bono professional; everyone working on some project without pay; all of them are investing in their particular futures. This is particularly true for nonprofit startups.

And I mean to use specifically that word—investing—this means they are giving of their talent and time with some hope or expectation that things will work out in a particular (and good) way in the future. They have some vision of what they are working toward. A truth that so few nonprofit CEOs understand is that volunteers are actually donors and they deserve the same respectful treatment as donors. (continue reading…)

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{File under Boomer tales}

Robert Reich, who is, like me, surfing the advancing wave of Baby Boomers, suggests that we can (and maybe are the only ones who can) solve our own problem. [April 9, 2010]

More specifically he recommends allowing more immigration and the increased payroll taxes that immigration would bring with it. (Don’t confuse immigration with illegal immigration.) (continue reading…)

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