When I arrived at Pinerolo I jumped on my bike to rush home for a quick bite and to throw the essentials in my luggage. I still needed to arrange for travel to the Torino airport so I called a local Taxi which unfortunately had his phone off. This was the only point where the system broke down, the connecting trains to get to the airport would have taken too long, there was no direct bus service from Pinerolo to the airport and no taxi company that makes it easy to arrange a pick-up (I would like to see this as a web service, a network of participating Taxis of which you can check status, position and book online).

Once finally in London I catch a classic black London cab, who only after briefly getting lost finally finds the hotel. Later in the evening I head down-town to get a bite to eat. No easier way of getting around London than the Tubes, as the English call it (metro for Europeans or subway for Americans) . Combine this with my travel to the customer in car and me walking around London to find the Hard Rock Cafe and at the end I have used just about every means of transportation available, just missing a ferry ride up the River Thames. The combination of all these public transportation services makes it so easy for the traveler to reach any destination even with last minute notice and regardless of their familiarity of the area.

A few thoughts on London: One of the parts of traveling is discovering peculiar differences from one country to the next. A few things that caught my attention this trip:

• Low Ceilings – In contrast to the often exaggeratedly high 3 meter ceilings in Italy I felt like a giant in most of the buildings in London.
• Fire Doors – The door manufacturing industry must be booming with the high request for fire doors everywhere.

Side-note: I write this as I am flying over the French/Italian Alps. If you haven’t lived that experience, mark it as one of the must see sites to see from an airplane. Breathtaking!

Want a place where you can log your travels, map your trips, post your trip pictures and gain access to a wealth of useful information such as trip planning guides and packing lists? Okay, maybe you weren’t looking for all of that, but you can find it anyway at TRAVELLERSPOINT.

This is a nice “Web 2.0″ site that has put together some useful information together with a nice list of tools and resources all free of charge. True to form of most Web 2.0 sites, they have also added a flavor of social networking, allowing you to add friends, share information and create a free travel blog. In addition, they have a Facebook app that allows you to post your travel map on your Facebook page (image above is my travel map)

Continuing my previous list of attention grabbers here at CeBIT, here is more of what caught my attention:

GPS with Lane Guidance

This will come in handy next time I am traveling around Paris. During my last trip I mistakenly stayed in the wrong lane causing me to lose a couple hours of travel.

Multiple Screens using USB

When working at my desk I love having multiple monitors, a great productivity enhancer that I previous wrote about. Unless your using a laptop, you may run into difficulties trying to do this on many desktop computers as often they don’t have either dual VGA monitor outputs or a DVI output. Fortunately ASUS saves the day with their VW223B USB connectible monitor! You can plug up to six of these monitors into your PC and run them at full resolution, and the VW223B even includes a few USB plugs to help with the daisy-chain.

Ultra Mobile PCs and Ultra Portable PCs

I was surprised to see the number of new models of UMPCs and also Ultra Portable Laptops. Despite their slow adoption, PC manufacturer’s must believe that their will be a strong market for these portable devices.

Super Small Bluetooth Headsets

When it comes to headsets, apparently small is better.

Mobile Device & Communications

This section of the fair is clearly positioned on GPS; I found it everywhere and in everything. There doesn’t seem to be one manufacturer without their own GPS device, most of which seem to be exactly the same. I was disappointed to not find much innovation with GPS, some improvements in the maps (better 3D images with real-life road signs), but nothing really attention grabbing.

Mobile phones continue along the same path as previous years with improved integrated digital cameras (5 mega pixels seems to be the new standard), similar designs (as expected many iPhone look-a-likes) and of course integrated GPS.

Computers / Notebooks

Common focus here seems to be on gaming, overclocking, cooling systems, and rugged computing. There are some amazing systems mostly decked out with quad core processors and eye catching graphic cards, exceeding needs of the most die hard gamers.

I found a large variety of CPU cooling systems such as this hydro cooling solution. The use of advanced cooling systems are popular for the trend to enable PC over clocking.

Many notebook computers are proudly presenting turbo buttons. The use of which claim up to 20% more computing power.

Rugged computing is grabbing the attention of others besides just Panasonic. The fair offered a wide range of durable notebooks as tested and illustrated in this booth.

Extras

The fair has added some nice other extras this year to help grab the attention of the visitors and to promote certain technologies.

More to come in the next days…

———————————
Related Resources
———————————
1Y0-259 and 70-536 are the basic exams required to pass 70-642, which is mandatory for 642-642.

The beauty of the main Cathedral and parliament house is enhanced by the historical aspect as each were bombed during WWII. Although they have been wonderfully restored, you can still find reminding scars on the facade, bringing you back in time to those horrible events.