the Grand Tour blog

A brief intermission

An unproductive week as far as preparations for the Tour are concerned, as I have a nasty attack of shingles. Amazing how quickly this has arrived and established itself; how would it be if it had started on Tour? Apart from being very painful, it has the effect (on me, anyway) of dulling the brain and taking away any interest in doing anything. I'm glad that the serious work of deciding the itinerary and finding and booking hotels was done some time ago.

The iPhone World Travel Adapter Kit went back to the AppleStore for a refund, and they confirmed that there is no way they can obtain the continental power adapter in the UK. But the good news is that a contact who lives in mainland Europe has kindly offered to buy one for me and post it when he comes to London at the end of the month.

Updated the rail map with the change to the Lucca-Venezia route, and added hotel locations to the relevant city maps.

The exchange rate offered by CaxtonFX struggled up to an amazing 1.10, so I tried to load some euros onto my currency card. But on a couple of tries there was a technical issue, which turned out to be due to a fire in BT's Paddington exchange. Finally managed it the following day, by which time the rate had inched forward slightly to 1.109 – of course it may continue to rise. There currently seems a possibility of a hung Parliament after the Election, with the likelihood that the pound would crash, so I need to get most of my Euros, I think, in the next week or two. On the other hand, the rate might rise sharply if the Tories get in...

iPhone power and images

Invested heavily in an Apple World Travel Adapter Kit, for charging the iPhone. But I'm now fairly certain I'm going to take it back: I find that Apple have recently (last month?) introduced a tiny continental power adapter – complementing the small UK plug with USB socket that came with the phone – which is exactly what I wanted all along. Unfortunately there is no way for me to buy one in the UK! I called the Apple Store who said that if I tried to buy from, say, Italy, I would need to have an Italian billing address. I will talk to my nearest physical store to see if they can get one for me, but I don't hold out much hope. Sent a comment to Apple Feedback suggesting things like this should be available through all the national stores. 

Scanned and adjusted maps for all my cities, to carry with me on the iPhone. Ended up with 18 files to which I will add the location of hotels, highlight the main attractions, and add anything else that may make it easier to get around. But after carefully sizing them to be a multiple of the iPhone's screen resolution (so they will zoom well), saving them as JPGs and transferring to the iPhone through iTunes, I find they are pretty poor quality when zooming in. Someone on the Apple forums pointed out that images are 'resized' to twice the screen size during copying, even if they're that size already. Pah! Clearly if they're line art they lose a lot in the process.

The trick is to copy them unmolested using a file-transfer app – I've now installed Files Lite, which has a good full-screen image viewer and is perfect for my maps. I already have DocumentsToGo, which I forgot can handle JPGs, but it leaves bars obscuring part of the image, and won't scroll diagonally. Files shows the image filename, which the iPhone photo viewer doesn't (tricky for maps because all the thumbnails look the same).

I hope it's all worth it; the transport unions seem quite keen on striking at the moment.

A Planning Admin week

A number of fiddly tasks this week to try to make sure I have the background information that will help make the trip run a bit more smoothly.

First, checked the timetables for all the Italian train journeys – including the regionals – and updated the train list with the most likely times for each journey, plus options either side. There are some significant fare increases since I last looked, and one reduction, but the increases are apparently due to significantly faster trains:

• Bologna-Florence: was 1h and €18.10, now 37mins and €24.00
• Florence-Rome: was 1:40 and €39.90, now 1:35 and €44.90 
• Rome-Pisa: was about 3h and €35.60, now 3:11 and €29.00
• Lucca-Venice: was 4:40 and €40.30, now 4:01 and €47.10 

Lucca-Venice is now a regional train to Florence, then an ES Italia AV to Venice. I think it used to be a regional train to Prato, then InterCity to Venice. I need to update the map. The time savings are useful.

Then, checked Orange's voice and data roaming charges, for keeping in touch with folks back home, and hopefully for blogging when I'm not in reach of WiFi:

• Call to UK:	38p/min + 19p setup
• Text message:	11p
• Photo message:	60p
• Data:	£3.00/MB

I can post here by email, but it's nicer to use the TypePad iPhone app. While away from WiFi I did a receive-and-reply email test which didn't shift the iPhone data usage at all (shown in increments of 0.1MB). So I don't think there should be a problem with emailing and blogging on 3G, provided I'm not tempted to use Safari or other data-heavy apps. For times when I do have WiFi, TypePad have i.typepad.com for mobile browers, though management of the blog is easier on a proper screen.

I had to set up a Help ticket with TypePad as there's a bug in both the iPhone app and in i.typepad.com, such that in both cases the text field for the post doesn't scroll properly (or at all in i.typepad.com). Later I got a noncommittal reply from TypePad support to say that they are "always looking for ways to enhance TypePad for users". Like fixing bugs? Also noting that the iPhone app is not in fact a front-end to email posting (which I'd thought it might be) but uses their own API. Which is OK.

New Overview page on the GT website

Following on from working on the presentation [see last post], I've also spent some time putting together a photo Overview page for the site. I'm always conscious that it's a biggish site to cover a single journey – 1300 photos for a start – so the Overview page is meant to be an introduction to the 'best' bits. Not quite as straightforward for me as it looks as I want to load different numbers of photos depending on the size of the viewer's browser window, but I think it's OK.