Good morning Happy anniversary to Valentina Tereshkova – on Sunday it will be 50 years since she became the first woman in space. Ms Tereshkova now wishes to be the first woman on Mars. We wish her good luck – and a long life, because who knows when or even if we’ll see a (wo)manned mission to Mars. And a happy birthday today – we hope – for the Airbus A350 – described in this [...]
What part of welcoming foreign visitors and businessmen to the US do we not understand? Is it the bit about the billions of dollars they will spend in our country, or the part about the millions of new jobs that would be created if we restored our country’s share of international travel to the historic levels it used to be, prior to when new ‘keep the foreigners out’ policies were enacted? Do we currently have [...]
Good morning Happy Birthday to WordPress. WordPress first appeared ten years ago, originally as a simple blogging software product. Today, it has extended to a sophisticated ‘content management system’ that is used by over 60 million websites and blogs, and powers some 18% of all the content on the entire internet. It is also the underlying product which these days is used to create your weekly newsletter. WordPress is a wonderfully approachable and easy to [...]
Good morning A big newsletter this week (5050 words!). I’ve been focusing on different aspects of Sri Lanka each week as part of explaining why it is our featured 2014 Travel Insider Tour, and hopefully encouraging you to join with twenty of your fellow Travel Insiders on this wonderful experience next February. This week I wanted to talk about safety. Several potential and now actual members of our group have asked about this. It is [...]
Good morning It’s Memorial Day Weekend – the traditional start of our summer. Yay. We’ve a slightly lighter compilation this week because you’re probably filled with thoughts of the long weekend, and indeed, one of the two other articles appended to this week’s roundup newsletter is totally and unabashedly off-topic, but to my surprise and delight, is also proving to be unexpectedly popular. “Hojotoho” to all who understand the term. More directly travel related is [...]
Good morning Our Sri Lanka tour continues to create lots of interest, and we’re now up to 15 people coming, all but three being repeat travelers who have enjoyed other Travel Insider tours in the past. I’ve mentioned several aspects of Sri Lanka and the tour in previous newsletters – for example some of the animal wildlife we’ll encounter – our safaris to see herds of elephants and leaps of leopards (yes, ‘leap’ is the [...]
Good morning Well, here I am, wrestling with my new enemy – Windows 8. Polite words fail me when it comes to expressing the degree of total outrage I feel as I struggle to fight the impositions and idiocies of this new operating system. I’ll spare you the diatribe for now, but do read on to the item below if you’d like to know more about why, for most normal people, and even those of [...]
Good morning Yes, there was no newsletter last week. Computers are funny things, aren’t they, and even though my increasingly aged Dell has had its motherboard replaced twice over the last year, and has a new hard drive too, somehow it has just become ‘tired’ and no longer as lively as it once was. Although the machine is still under a costly extended warranty, it seems that it is just no longer capable of performing [...]
Good morning From the sublime to the ridiculous. Last week’s lovely picture of a Boeing 314 flying boat has been replaced this week by Sir Richard Branson’s latest publicity stunt – the revealing of his airline’s new slogan for its domestic short-haul services within the UK. Oh – and doesn’t he know that a true Scotsman never would be seen wearing anything under his kilt? Lots of readers wrote in about the Boeing 314 and [...]