Introduction to Moody's Black Notebook Travels

I have two great regrets in my life.  One is eating a chicken sandwich in Varanasi, shortly before flying to Kathmandu.  This gave me the worst food poisoning I have ever experienced, nearly killed me, and meant that I missed a unique opportunity to visit Lhasa before it was turned into a Chinese Disneyland.  The other regret involves three Inter-rail trips that I made in 1979, 1980 and 1981.  They were extraordinarily rich in sights and experiences.  Stupidly, though, I did not keep a travel diary at that time, so all I have are vague, if important, memories of what I saw, thought and felt.

At least I was able to learn from these two huge blunders.  Afterwards, I no longer ate chicken sandwiches in exotic lands, and I kept travel diaries for all my major trips.  The latter took the form of black notebooks, bought from Ryman's, in two formats: one small enough to fit in a pocket, and another, slightly larger, that I kept in the travel bag I used for longer journeys. 

I now have dozens of these notebooks sitting behind me, filled with my illegible scrawl.  I have been meaning to turn them into digital texts for some years, and to bring them into the 21st century, but have never got around to it until now.  I am not transcribing them in any set order, but will place links to them below, as they go online, ordered chronologically.  There is no overall plan, no overall significance.  They are just what they are: quick thoughts jotted down in black notebooks, captured moments of a specific time and place.

1986 India I: Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri
1986 India II: Kashmir
1986 India III: Jaipur, Udaipur
1987 Italy

1987 Isle of Man
1988 Venice

1988 Boston

1988 Northern England, Glasgow, Isle of Skye
1988 Hong Kong, Bali

1988 San Francisco
1988 India: Delhi, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Varanasi
1988 Nepal: Kathmandu, Pokhara

1989 Zürich 

1989 Oslo

1989 Eastern Ireland

1989 New York

1989 US, New Zealand, Fiji

1990 Egypt I: Cairo, Saqqarah, Giza
1990 Egypt II: Luxor, Aswan, Abu Simbel
1990 Egypt III: Asyut, Kharga, El Amarna
1990 Egypt IV: Alexandria, Wadi El Natrun, Suez

1990 California 

1990 Western Ireland

1990 Toronto

1991 Lisbon

1991 Paris

1991 Berlin

1992 Paris

1992 Indonesia I: Lombok, Bali
1992 Indonesia II: Yogyakarta, Solo, Jakarta

1992 Northern England, Scotland, Orkney
1993 Mexico
1993 Istanbul
1993 Morocco

1993 Prague
1994 Sri Lanka
1994 the Danube: Neuburg, Vienna, Budapest
1994 France

1994 Rome
1994 Trieste, Ljubljana 
1995 Siena, Bagno Vignoni, Pienza
1995 Stockholm
1996 Torino
1996 Lithuania
1996 Ithaca
1996 Vienna, Venice
1996 Helsinki, Tallinn
1997 Seattle
1999 Weimar, Venice
2014 Riga 
2015 Tbilisi
2017 Bucharest
2017 Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong
2017 Georgia
2018 Tirana
2018 Armenia
2019 Reykjavik
2019 Moldova
2019 Uzbekistan

2020 Scotland

2021 Gibraltar

2022 Uzbekistan: Samarkand, Khiva, Bokhara, Tashkent 

2022 Stavanger

2022 Bratislava 

2023 Barcelona 

2023 Paris 

2023 Bilbao

2023 Tajikistan: Dushanbe, Khujand, Panjakent 

2023 Shetland

2024 Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan - new post

A Partial India

In October and November 1986, I went to India for the first time.  It was an important experience,  which I tried to capture as it happened in one of my black travel notebooks, now online as three blog posts.  They are essentially unedited transcriptions of what I wrote as I journeyed.  As such, I hope they possess a certain immediacy and freshness.  But they are also necessarily unstructured, other than by each day's itinerary, rather long, and therefore perhaps rather hard to read.

The experiences of those three weeks were so rich for me I decided to re-work my notes into shorter, more digestible pieces, which together form what I called A Partial India.  Partial, because they obviously captured only a tiny part of the vast land, its people and civilisation; partial, too, because it was born of my gratitude for the experiences India gave me.  

A third of a century later, it describes an India which no longer exists, if it ever did.  Given my inevitable lack of comprehension of India's subtleties during that first journey, perhaps this is the best I can now hope for: that the evident non-existence today of the land I described will make Partial India of mild historical interest to others.

For want of anything better, I organised my memories under arbitrary alphabetical headings, which are as follows:

A is for Agra
B is for Books
C is for Camels
D is for Delhi
E is for English
F is for Fatehpur Sikri
G is for Gandhi
H is for Horns
I is for Incense
J is for Jaipur
K is for Kashmir
L is for Large
M is for Mosques
N is for Nights
O is for Ochre
P is for Poverty
Q is for Queuing
R is for Raj
S is for Shangri-La
T is for Trains
U is for Udaipur
V is for Voyaging
W is for Work
X is for Xenophilia
Y is for Yamuna
Z is for Zenana

Microsoft's Pyrrhic Victory in the Netbook War

The rise of the netbook has been an extraordinary saga. When the Asus Eee PC was first launched at the end of 2007, it seemed to come from nowhere: there was no real precedent for such a low-cost, small machine, using solid state storage and running GNU/Linux. The brilliance of Asus's move was shown not just by the rapid uptake of this new form-factor, but also the high level of satisfaction – the only element viewed less positively was the small size of keyboard, an inevitable consequence of the design....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Dell Joins Netbook Race to Bottom

There are two schools of thought about netbooks. The first is that they are simply another kind of notebook - smaller, a bit cheaper, but otherwise nothing really new. The second is that they are a completely new market sector - a view that I have been propounding for almost as long as they've existed

One indication that they are distinct is that the prices of netbooks are still falling rapidly - and will continue to fall. That's in contradistinction to notebooks, where prices tend to be much more stable, but features are added over time. The netbook is about *minimum* acceptable functionality, while notebooks are about achieving near-desktop capabilities (themselves constantly improving) in a package that's portable.

Here's another proof-point:

Dell fires back at the Taiwanese market leaders with the Mini 9n. Starting at just $250, this Ubuntu netbook is easily one of the cheapest on the market from a brand-name manufacturer.

The catch? The netbook only comes with 512 MB of RAM and a 4 GB hard drive. But remember it uses Ubuntu, which runs significantly more efficiently than Windows. This means of course that it can only run Linux programs but give me Firefox and Open Office and I can conquer the world.

This is just what notebook manufacturers fear: a "race to the bottom", as Sony so memorably put it. Dell's participation in that race will send shivers down the spine of manufacturers who thought they could ride the netbook wave with their low-end notebooks.

Do I hear $200?

Dell Builds on GNU/Linux

Interesting:

Dell’s Latitude On works by bypassing the Windows operating system so that you get immediate access to things like your calendar, email, Internet, and contacts. It’s a fully integrated technology that will appear later this year on the Dell 4200 and 4300 Latitude series notebooks, and is powered by a Linux OS, sort of as a secondary operating system.