It can be quite a hassle to order flights from a Chinese website though. The workflow goes a little something like this:

This illustration is actually a shorted version of one of our own bookings this year.

In China there are often different prices for Chinese than for foreigners. Often this just goes for the baseline haggle price for peddlers or at open markets, but this difference can sometimes be more explicit. In Hong Kong in 2006, we saw a sign partly written in English, and partly in Chinese. The English described a breakfast menu, with the price at the bottom at 15 HKD. The Chinese part had a similar amount of text, and stated the price at 10 HKD. My wife confirmed that the Chinese section described the same breakfast menu. I really regret that I didn’t take a picture of this.

When we are travelling together in China, my wife and me, we sometime confuse various sellers, by being in two different price categories. I remember e.g. an episode in the Forbidden City where we wanted to buy a map over the place. The seller clearly wanted to sell it to me, because then he could justify selling his map at the foreigner-price. Our interests were obviously divergent, while it was in our interest to let my wife buy it, in order to save the 1 RMB price difference. After a brief discussion we ended up paying the Chinese price, and were free to spend our saved 1 RMB elsewhere.

Some of these price differences can be leveled out by heavy haggling, but this doesn’t go for flight and hotel bookings online. So if you are going to china, it can be a good idea to ally yourself with a Chinese person to assist with the booking.

I wanted a more efficient way to geotag photos, and a lot of people are doing it by comparing a GPS log with the photos EXIF timestamp, and adding the GPS data as EXIF data to the photos. Often by interpolating between the GPS points, to get a closer match.

But the log itself could become a little amusing, especially on vacations, to see where you actually have been. Not to mention those Sundays, where you wake up and think “hmm… what exactly happened yesterday”. Upload the log to your nifty little web app, and there you go. In 15 years, it could be possible to look back and see where you were on the19th of April 2008, or any date and time for that matter. You can then calculate stuff like how many meters you moved overall for 2008, or what was your average velocity in 2011, compared with the year before. If I ever become so manically obsessed with tracking my own whereabouts at any time (quite likely), I would prefer to keep all this data somewhat private though. That being said, I am really not too concerned about privacy in general.

Anyway, for my new toy, I just ordered this:

I wanted a small lightweight logger at first, to see if this would catch my attention. So by studying the flickr group “GeoTagging Flickr”, to look for advice i found the DG-100 GPS Data Logger to be an interesting choice. This gps receiver should be more precise than the Sony GPS-CS1, and have a newer chip set :O! I am a little nervous about the battery time though, but for a first device whatever must be adequate.

Logging and uploading daily whereabouts will only be step one. When GPS phone prices drops, it could be tempting to write a little java or whatever app, that sends the GPS data directly to a server. In that way, it would be possible to obtain real time life logging, which obviously has tons of opportunities (?!).

In a few years, I image myself with a large hat, which transmits my location and my viewpoint video/audio feed to my server, so I always have an exact multi media log of my life… Well, maybe not.

Other than private amusement, there must be great marketing potentials if GPS logs where publicly obtainable. Even for semi or fully anonymous data. It would be possible to use the data to define marketing segments, and target ads about local shopping or dining specifically to people who is likely to get near these areas. By generating heat maps, it could be possible to forecast trends to where the new hip spots are occurring. It could also be used to optimize transportation, city planning, real estate location relevance and much more.

More on this topic when I actually make an implementation and try it out.

…I think I’ll take the train this time.

The final destinations are not completely set yet, but I guess It will be very close to this. I will probably follow up on this some time. We have bought the tickets, and booked hotel for the first couple of stops, from Hong Kong to Sanya. The rest are still a little fuzzy.

The video is from Akihabara which is the tech district in Tokyo. And yes it is true, it IS possible to spend many many hours there looking at the new tech stuff and comic books and plastic figures. hooray for the otaku. Most larger stores (+1 employee) has its own set of speakers, telling about the good prices. Some also have a small theme song. Our favorite was Biccameras catch phrase which was “irrashaimase, Irrashaimase….” and then something. This simply means welcome or come in, and we could never withstand the offer. So we always went inside whenever we went by a “Biccamera”. Aside to the speakers the streets are filled with people who hands out different kinds of advertisement.