The IT Nerd

When you travel, you have to have someplace to stay. Normally I book my own accommodations. This time around my client did it for me. So as a result, I am staying at the Premier Inn in Solihull Town Center. That’s located in Solihull not too far away from my client. The accommodations are good and the food is decent. Plus right around the corner I have access to all sorts of places to eat and things to do that’s within walking distance. That’s all good. The WiFi though has been hit and miss. Last night it was unusable. Tonight it’s usable. Though that’s typical for a lot of hotels as their WiFi is outsourced to third party companies. One thing to note is that you have to pay for WiFi if you want to do anything other than a quick check of your e-mail. Here’s your options:

• 30 minutes free Wi-Fi per day.
• After the first 30 minutes free access a £3 rate applies for 24 hrs use.
• £10 rate for the week.

I decided to go for the £10 rate for the week as I didn’t want to worry about not having Internet access at the end of my stay. Though I didn’t get my money’s worth last night. Because I really needed to get some work done that required Internet access, I ended up using the Instant Hotspot feature which is part of the larger Continuity feature set that is built into OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.1 to get online. Seeing as I had a T-Mobile SIM from EE that gave me 1GB of data for £10, it made sense. Sometimes when you travel, you need a “plan b” of some sort if you need to have Internet access. Fortunately, my “plan b” is cheap. But to make sure I didn’t run out of my data allotment before Friday morning when I am leaving to go home, I went to a local Tesco which is a large grocery store chain in the UK and I bought what’s called a “Top Up.” Here’s how it worked for me:

• I walked into a Tesco
• I then walked up to a cashier and asked for a “Top Up”. You need to specify the carrier. In my case, it was T-Mobile and I choose the dollar amount that I wanted to “Top Up” which was £10.
• I then paid the cashier and the cashier printed a receipt with a ten digit code on it.
• I then dialed 150 on my iPhone 5S and followed the prompts to enter the ten digit code. I then waited for confirmation that it’s been added to the SIM.
• Done. Declare victory and have a beer (which by the way, the beers are outstanding are relatively cheap here).

You can get “Top Ups” at a lot of places. Electronic stores, pharmacies, grocery stores, or do it online. Plus you can use a credit or debit card too. It’s very convenient. Telcos in Canada could take a few lessons from their British counterparts.

As for my assignment I had a very productive day today. Tomorrow is the last day and I am being promised a dinner at an “amazing” Indian place. I guess I will find out how “amazing” it is. Seeing as I had some downtime tonight (unlike last night where I went to bed early to recover from my flight), I leveraged that to install iOS 8.1.1 and OS X Yosemite 10.10.01. Now when it comes to the latter, I haven’t noticed major changes to the stability of my WiFi connection though Apple claims that this will fix all that is wrong with WiFi. But users are reporting that 10.10.01 has not made any difference to their WiFi stability. So I am guessing that 10.10.02 is going to be due soon to address this. Seeing as the Apple Discussion page I linked to is massive, they better get to it. One pleasant surprise that I got from installing iOS 8.1.1 is that I got about 350MB of space freed up. Seeing as I have a 16GB iPhone 5s, that space is welcome. Before I went to bed, I used the external hard drive to back up my Mac just in case I had another one of my well documented incidents of bad luck with hard drives in my MacBook Pro. Backing up on the road is something that most people don’t think about. If your laptop gets damaged or stolen while you’re far away from home and you haven’t backed up your data, you’re screwed. In my case, if either of those happens to me, I will at least have my data. One tip. Don’t carry your backup with you. I usually put it in the luggage that I check in when I travel and it is usually hidden someplace in my hotel room or it’s in the room’s safe it it has one. The hotel I am in does not have safes in the room, so in this case it is hidden. I won’t be telling you where though. In either case, the backup and the laptop should not be in the same place if you can possibly avoid it.

Stay tuned for another update tomorrow.

So I am in the UK, but the flight was anything but uneventful. I booked on Air Canada, and as is typical for Air Canada, they were late by an hour taking off due to the fact that the plane that they were using was late getting into Pearson. That didn’t leave me in a good mood and it didn’t help that the seat that I was sitting in was being kicked by an old lady who for some reason felt the need to do that despite the fact I asked her not to. That made me a not so happy person by the time the flight landed at 7 AM BST (30 minutes behind schedule by the way). One thing that was good about the flight was the fact that Air Canada provided a USB port at every seat to keep your devices fully charged. What wasn’t good is that those USB ports are connected to some sort of computer as my iPhone 5s asked me if I should trust this computer. I felt it prudent not to and simply use the USB port to charge my iPhone 5s. I may be paranoid, but with threats like Wirelurker about, you can’t be too careful.

But you don’t care about any of that. You care about the technology aspect of my trip.

I had a train to the West Midlands, specifically Birmingham International Station booked. Here’s a hint. Train travel in the UK is very civilized and it’s cheap if you know where to look. I booked my return tickets on a website called TheTrainline.com. It enabled me to book coach seats to and from Euston Rail Station in London to Birmingham International for 58 pounds instead of the normal 200 pounds. That’s a significant savings! All I had to do is to pick up the tickets from Euston Rail Station in London. It’s a good thing that London has the famous Underground as I was able to take that to get to Euston. Here’s another tip: If you visit London, invest in an Oyster card. This is a card that you can pre load with funds and then use it to “tap and pay” on buses, the Underground, or some rail services. It’s very handy to have and you should never travel around London without one. You can pick one up at most Underground stations or you can pre-order one in advance of your trip to London. Once I arrived at Euston Rail Station, picking up the tickets was easy. I was booked on Virgin Rail so I simply walked up to their automated machines, inserted my credit card and entered my booking reference. Within a minute, my tickets were printed out. How civilized. A couple of tips:

• With Virgin, you get two tickets. One is a confirmation and the other is your seat assignment. You need both to board the train.
• Pay attention to the time your train is scheduled to depart because you will be using that time to determine what platform you’ll be leaving from.
• Virgin Trains close their doors two minutes before departure and trains in the UK generally leave on time. Don’t be late!

One hour and 15 minutes after boarding the train, I was at Birmingham International and being picked up by my “chauffeur” for the week. He was one of the employees of the company that I am working for this week who volunteered to take me to and from my hotel and pick me up at the train station. Now I didn’t go into their office right away as I had to make a stop at an EE to pick up a T-Mobile Pay As You Go SIM. Here’s why I am using a pay as you go SIM:

• My phone is unlocked which gives me the freedom to choose the carrier of my choice.
• Using a local SIM is ALMOST ALWAYS cheaper than using the roaming plan of your carrier.

Thus I got the following deal. One pound gets me a T-Mobile SIM. An extra ten pounds gets me the following:

• 100 minutes of talk time.
• 400 texts
• 1GB of data

This is more than I need for the four days that I am here at such a low price. There is not a big three Canadian carrier who can offer me a deal this cheap when I travel overseas. And I get 4G access as part of the deal. Take it from me, you never want to roam abroad with the big three carriers ever as there are better deals out there. This way I can stay in touch and not run up a huge phone bill. Now I will admit that I don’t get my Canadian phone number, but very few people phone me on it that it doesn’t make a difference.

As for my day, I only had 1/2 a day today and it was extremely productive. Tomorrow and Thursday should be really busy days. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s report.

I travel on business on a frequent basis, but I’ve been asked a couple of times by readers of this blog to document what I go through from a technology standpoint when I travel. In other words, what challenges do I face and what tips do I have? So, I’ll give you the inside view of what my business trips are like. This week, I am in the West Midlands in the United Kingdom. I’ll be leaving tonight and landing at London Heathrow in time for breakfast in the UK. I’ll be there until Friday morning UK time when I will fly back to Toronto and be home in time for dinner.

Now, I take a fair amount of stuff with me from a technology standpoint. I listed what’s in my laptop bag here, and while it does seem like it’s a lot, it has all been useful at one time or another. Thus I never leave home without this stuff. Now I live very close to the airport, so I take public transit to get there as there is an express bus that goes to Pearson Airport from Kipling Subway Station which is close to my home. To see what time that bus arrives, I use an app called Transit which interfaces with the Toronto Transit Commission to show me accurate route and schedule info. It will also plot a route for me as well. It’s very handy and it saves me money as I don’t have to pay for a taxi or drive and park the car at the airport. In any case, I left for the airport 4 hours ahead of my flight as I wanted to ensure that I would arrive at the airport with three hours to spare. Here’s a tip. Pearson Airport suggests that you arrive at the airport 3 hours before your flight. That’s great advice and applicable to any airport that I have travelled to in the US or overseas. It gives you plenty of time to clear security and check in without being stressed out.

Once I got to the airport, I check in and go through security. A couple of hiccups here. First, Air Canada which is what I fly has self check-in kiosks. It’s a 50/50 chance of letting me check in by myself. About 50% of the time, I have to line up and go to the counter. I should note that Air Canada isn’t the only airline with this issue. But I one thing I wish is that they would all make it easier to self check-in. Next is security. Now this isn’t the first time that I’ve been through security, but this time they did a hand search of my laptop bag as they thought that my Swiss Tech multi-tools were weapons. I thought that was weird as I’ve never had an issue with then before at airport security. Still, I may put these in the bags that I checked in to avoid problems in the future. I did write some other tips about clearing security with a laptop here that’s very much worth reading regardless of which country you’re traveling to.

Now, once I was through security, I had a couple of hours to kill. So I decided to use the free WiFi that Pearson Airport offers. It was pretty spotty in Terminal 1. It took two reboots of my MacBook Pro to get it to connect and allow me to surf the Internet. Others around me had the same issue so I knew it wasn’t just me. Once I was able to connect, it was decent. Though I will note that it had a tendency to disconnect and reconnect occasionally. Now there is a risk to using public WiFi. For example, there is this story that executives were targets of hackers who hacked hotel WiFi, thus you should be running a firewall and make sure your security software is up to date.

While waiting to board my plane, I took the opportunity to charge my devices:

In Terminal 1, there were these power outlets that have AC power as well as USB ports. That way I could make sure my laptop and iPhone 5S are fully charged when I board the plane. After all, it’s a 6 to 7 hour flight to the UK. There was also this:

There are these iPads provided by a company called OTG. Here’s what they do according to the company:

For travelers, this means a new level of comfort at the airport. The experience starts when a customer sits down in front of a new iPad at one of OTG’s chef-driven restaurants or newly renovated seating areas at the gates. From there, they can slect their language and order meals through an intuitive visual menu, where OTG wait staff is on hand to assist throughout the entire process. Orders are then prepared fresh, and delivered to their seat in 15 minutes or less.

Ordering food through an iPad is just the beginning. With OTG’s custom browser, travelers can easily log in to their Facebook, Twitter and personal email accounts, and be confident that their personal information is securely removed from the iPad the moment the home button is pressed. Travelers can also check their flight status, play games and watch the news through pre-loaded apps such as Bloomberg News on the iPads.

I experimented with these tablets and found them to be easy to use, but slow. For example, when I browsed the menu, it took multiple tries to get anything to display. Clearly, someone needs to get better WiFi in this terminal given this and my experience getting my MacBook Pro onto WiFi.

My next stop is London Heathrow Airport and when I get to my hotel, I’ll document my flight as well as getting my hands on a SIM card so that I can use my iPhone 5S  in the UK without getting taken to the cleaners in terms of roaming charges from the big three Canadian carriers. Watch for that in part two. Another thing to watch for later this week is a review of the Nokia Lumia 635 which is my traveling companion on this trip and it comes with a T-Mobile US SIM card that has unlimited international roaming. One wonders why Canadian carriers can’t offer the same deal. Clearly it’s not hurting T-Mobile.

See you in the UK!