This wonderwall near my home is a good example of immaterial benefits of living in East London. This was before.
Then one morning late last summer it had been replaced by this:
And now it’s this:
This clearly outweighs having to dodge armies of pissed people on weekends and streets filled with kebab wrappers, no?
Last week I had the opportunity to experience two very different no frills concepts. First was Riders Palace, a snow hotel in Laax, Switzerland. The owners obviously know what’s important for boarders who travel without kids – a bed, a good shower, proximity to ski lifts, a lobby bar. Period. There’s no real need for a telephone, 24H room service, minibar, TV or horrible kitsch art on the walls as you’ll anyway be sleeping the whole time you’re in your room. It cost less than 160 pounds for three night including a three-day ski pass. And it’s cool, using only concrete, wood and glass as materials. Brilliant, if not no-frills chic.
I also experienced a Ryanair flight to Friedrikschafen that cost less than a hundred pound on paper and 200 pounds when including luggage, payment fee and a 10-pound online check-in fee. The total price and first two extra items are reasonable but the last is tricky to categorize under “no frills” as you just can’t board a plane without checking in. Anyway, I had forgotten to check in and had to do it at the airport. My bad, and I kind of understand I had to pay 20 pounds extra to check in at the airport without being refunded the 10 pounds I had paid for online check-in. This is according to our terms and conditions as a lady trying to get a queue of people like me organized explained to me in a bored manner. But I also lost my right to check in online for the return leg and had to pay another 20 euros extra on the way back to London. Also brilliant, but in a very different way. In a way where you think: gosh, they must have a team of lawyers and extremely creative product managers to figure out more ways to fuck your wallet in the ass, no lube. (Mom, I only use this kind of language when talking about Ryanair, I promise). What’s next after charging for using toilets? Charging for life jackets under your seat and pilots that have had their eye-sight checked in the last 24 months? Despite loving low airfares (and 200 pounds for a 2-hour flight is not that cheap, is it?) I guess I have to say no to the thrills and chills of flying Ryanair in the future. If you ever fly them, make sure you don’t forget to check in beforehand.
When over at California two weeks ago, I couldn’t help but notice what an incredible opportunity this financial crisis-ridden country has missed. The answer lies in TV, or rather geniuses whose ideas local channels so kindly mediated.
They have these wonderful programs and books that are _guaranteed_ to work. Take the real estate program that makes anyone rich even without putting in any personal money. One doesn’t even need to leave the house. And your credit rating can be as bad as the songs of Eurovision.
Who needs a trillion dollar rescue package when you can a book for each American for 29.95? (19.95 if Obama acts right now.) Once that’s done, buy every citizen the lactose and gluten free diet program that will solve every health issue. And there’s still money left over from the trillion dollar purse for wars and foreign aid!
It’s really a shame I haven’t had a TV for eight years and I can only be enlightened when staying at hotels.
Today I attended Marketing Tailormade, a seminar where you can choose your own program depending on your interests and needs. I love the idea and warmly recommend attending, despite one of the sessions being an absolute waste of time today (you can just pick another session if this happens, capisce?)
Random ideabytes aka notes to self:
Do I sound like a bloody marketer?
Yesterday I was invited to a panel at Tallinn Music Week along with the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tüür, director of London Jazz Festival John Cumming and others to discuss whether it matters where a band is from or not. The discussion turned out to cover more, with topics ranging from the birth of reggae to specifics of Nordic jazz.
I was surprised how many times the word infrastructure was mentioned when talking about something as creative as the music industry. You need to have the systems in place to grow and spot talent and promote it the home country and abroad before you can expect to see truly big stars. Anna Hildur from Iceland Music Export said Björk would probably not have made it so far so fast had Sugarcubes not woken up the Icelandic music scene first. Tallinn Music Week will definitely become part of such platform for Estonian artists. The festival rocked, even based on the little I saw of it. Kudos to the Helen and the rest of the team that made this happen, and kudos for Skype for supporting it.
The panel briefly touched upon marketing countries, too. One thought that occurred to me only after the panel was that the concept of Estonia as a technology country is losing steam. True, we’ve had the government meeting room with very pretty computer screens, mobile parking, Skype and some other cool things going on. Is that enough to claim us to be technologically advanced or does it come across as a “one hit wonder” if I may borrow the music analogy here? We may need another technology chart topper before continuing to talk about e-stonia. If this doesn’t materialize in the next couple of years maybe we’re better off defining Estonia through events like song festivals and TMW instead. Or perhaps a compromise: the country with hi-tech folks that can sing in tune.
When I walked out our office door one lay last summer I spotted the Google Street View car driving up Tottenham Court Road. It seems they spotted me, too.
I’m not giving Google any points for photography, but they sure can make useful map and location-related applications. See what the front of our office looks like on Street View or wonder virtually to other places in London.
Prologue*. A colleague that had bought 700-euro headphones about four years ago said this was his only way to really listen to music because he couldn’t afford proper speakers. Coming from someone driving a brand new Audi A6 and living in a design apartment in the centre of Tallinn, that felt like showing off to me.
I’m writing this post as I’m listening to the new U2 album through the 25-euro Sennheiser headphones. It sounds exactly like the 6 out of 10 review I just finished reading gave it. And yet the new album may actually be worthy of a 8 or 9 out of 10 review, if listened right.
By “listening right” I don’t mean opening the right kind of wine before putting on the CD nor staring out the window expressionless in a semi-trance state while listening. You have to have the necessary short circuits, lamps and kilowatts for something like U2.
I learned that about a month ago when listening to music at a friend’s place through his state-of-the-art sound system that probably costs about as much as a German family car. A vinyl player that weights 70 kilos to ensure smooth rotation of the disc, voltage stabilizer, three amplifiers and speakers the size of an overweight 12-year old kid surely look impressive. But it’s the sound these boxes are capable of producing that blew my mind. I put on a CD and was surprised to learn this was the first time I heard these tunes, though I had listened to a disc with exactly the same name and album art before. Music sounded completely different, especially U2 (which I have never really been a huge fan of, by the way). I’ve rarely felt more out of words than I am now, trying to explain how exactly this sounded. Maybe 3D soundstream that filled the room with armor-penetrating waves of pleasure sounds about right. Or that “Sunday Bloody Sunday” was the closest manifestation of flames expressed through music I have ever felt.
Anyway, you don’t really have to have a sound system that costs the price of a car to listen to No Line On The Horizon. But if it costs less than a Vespa scooter you have every right to believe the critics and not buy it. And if you are one of the unfortunate with a stereo that costs less than a bicycle (as is the case in the rental flat of yours truly) I recommend sticking to electronic music and in addition turning down every offer to comment on music.
I have no idea what the music critic mentioned in the beginning of this post used to listen to U2. He was perhaps using the bestest audioporn technology out there and he just didn’t like the album. I am merely recommending here to give it ago on a Vespa- or BMW-class sound system before declaring an album average.
* Thanks for pointing the mistake out, Jaanus. Copied this from the end to the beginning and didn’t change the word.
You are what you share, said the mood message of a good colleague the other day.
I now share more. If you update the RSS-feed for this blog to http://feeds2.feedburner.com/andrus you’ll not only get a feed with less CO2-emissions, but a range of unwanted goodies on top.
Namely the occasion photo on Flickr, a few timeless quotes, some tried and tested links and Pledgehammer blog posts. I used Yahoo Pipes to mash it all together, added salt and pepper, cooked for half an hour – and so far all seems to work nicely in this feed casserole, mind the initial chronological mess after subscribing.
Let me know if this feed doesn’t work for you (and advise how can I fix the bloody thing).
Had a truly enjoyable dinner conversation with a friend this Sunday evening. You know the kind where you start from random trivia but somehow make your way to the very important topics in life. We started from snowboarding destinations, made our way to the economy (as you do these days) and then ended up defining the pillars that support the sanity of a man past his 65th birthday. Four things are worth being written down here as notes to self and as my endevour to win the title of The Most Random Blog Post of 2009:
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Let’s see in about 40 years whether we were right or not.
Outliers is a book about people that achieve outstanding things, about what sets them apart from everyone else. It doesn’t give you “5 proven techniques that will guarantee success” but it highlights some very useful ideas . My quick notes to self:
My blessing to this book. Read or listen as I did (read by Gladwell himself).