Travelling home during #ashtag

Thinking about trying get home overland?

I just did and thought the world would be a richer place if I shared some thoughts about it :-)

1) Decide if you really need to get home now
This is the critical one. Getting home is going to:
- Cost alot
- Be stressful
- Be frustrating
- Test you physically and emotionally
- If you are in a group - test your friendship. My advice, split up into small, agile sub-groups of one or two if you can. If you can't, seriously consider staying put.

2) If you have decided to strike for home, prepare:
- Get information (e.g. European Rail Timetable, maps)
- Get communication (work out how to use mobile and 3G roaming)
- Charge up your phone (and laptop)
- Buy a couple of books - you _will_ be bored
- Get some cash
- Get food and water
- Make your baggage easy and quick to pick up and run with

3) Work out where the problems are going to be:
- Travel throttle points (e.g. The English Channel; Cologne-Brussels; Copenhagen-Hamburg)
- Accomodation near travel hubs

4) Plan it a step at a time:
- Don't book trains you aren't going to make - it just wastes money
- Pre-book hotels in a few potential destinations and cancel once you know where your going to get to
- Don't overstretch, arriving at a station in an unknown city at 2:00am without booked accomodation is a really bad idea

5) Choose accomodation wisely:
- Make it walking distance to the station (you'll probably do the trip a few times)
- Choose hotels with a good cancellation policy (e.g. 6pm local time)

6) Look at the options:
- Train, coach, hire car, boat, bike, taxi ...
- Do you _need_ to wait in a queue to buy a ticket, will the ticket machine not do the job
- Be flexible, you are probably not going to be able to get your ideal routing

7) Gather local contact numbers:
- The internet is great, but an international call to a domestic call centre will have much better quality information

8) Make decisions:
- Don't mess about. Arm yourself with as much information as possible, make a decision when you need to and stick with it (until you make another)
- Flexibility is the most important factor
- This can be really tricky if you are in a group

9) Talk to people:
- Travellers, Locals, Friends at home, Twitter
- Treat each piece of information as a piece of the puzzle, not everything you hear will be 100% correct

10) And finally ...
- Try to think differently, if one route is the obvious one, work out the possibility of trying another
- Use local trains that don't need a reservation (it might uncomfortable, but you are still getting home)
- Put effort into securing space on the throttle point journeys
- Reduce your stress, pre-book accomodation
- Enjoy it - it's an adventure

I left Stockholm on Friday at lunchtime and arrived in Brighton in time for a beer and a quiz on Sunday. Two and a half days travelling. I got lucky. The ticket to Copenhagen - lucky; from Copenhagen to Cologne - planning; not going to Cologne - judgement; Going via to Amsterdam - good call; Eurostar on Sunday - very lucky. It cost me just over EUR 1,000 all in (almost a third of which was one Eurostar ticket)

Special shout out to DSB (Danish railways) who, as early as Friday morning, decided to suspend reservation requirements and ensure that people got to/from Hamburg - even if they had to stand all the way. Compare and contrast to Eurostar, who didn't manage to even keep their booking system working and didn't allow people withour reservations (which they couldn't make, because the systems were rubbish) to travel, meaning that in the carriage I was in, 15% of the seats were empty.

I wish you all good luck.

Samsung 1630 W

I was out shopping with the M-I-L to be the other day and we decided to buy her a printer.

The SAMSUNG ML-1630W looked the business. Cute, black, wireless, quiet and it doesn't look like a printer.

Great, we thought.

Yesterday, I took it round to her house to install it.

Things did not go well.

Firstly, I missed the "Quick setup" instructions, as they looked like a liner rather than anything useful. When I did finally discover them, they had nothing novel on them anyway. (Certainly nothing useful like - "Do you see that thing that looks like an Ethernet cable in the box - just be aware that it's actually a cross-over cable won't you")

Secondly, the supplied Ethernet cable is a Cross-Over cable. Useful. Of course, this took a long time to work out. (Look at page 8 of the booklet, under "Resetting Factory Default Values" - it's there)

Thirdly, there was no General User guide supplied in printed format - although there was a booklet about how to do advanced stuff like wireless network printing in the obligatory 27 languages.

Fourthly, as I did want to do the thing wireless, I tried to follow the instructions in the booklet. First thing to do is, and I quote, "... pressing and holding the Stop/Clear button of your machine as the LED display cycles through until it reaches RNC."

There are no buttons on the device at all. There is an on/off switch and there are a couple of catches to open paper and toner trays, but not a single button. As it turns out, there's a touch sensitive pad at the front right. This is the Stop/Clear button. You can tell this, because there's a circle with a triangle inside it embossed in the plastic. If you load the CD-ROM and navigate down three directories to find the manual as a PDF file, it is actually explained on page 1.4. More fool me.

Now, "as the LED display cycles". If you let the thing settle down (and it doesn't repeatedly reboot itself) then, if you leave your finger on the pad, it cycles through "RSD", "RDP", "RSI", "RER", "RNC" and then stops on a flashing "T". Letting your finger off the pad whilst one of the "R*" options is displayed means that the selected report will be printed (eventually). To confuse you, the display shows "00" when you let go. Maybe a minute later a bit of paper pops out and the display changes to "01".

RSD: Configuration Report
RDP: Marketing gack
RSI: Supplies Information Report
RER: Error Information Report
RNC: Network Configuration Report

So, we print a Network Configuration Report, so that we know the IP address to go to to get to the SyncThru Web page. This is where we can set the wireless settings.

During my abortive attempts to understand what "as the LED display cycles" actually meant, I tried leaving my finger on the Pad as it powered up. That did weird things. I don't recommend it.

So, I had a machine that was repeatedly re-booting itself. Very annoying. It was doing this disconnected, connected via USB and connected via Ethernet. Somehow I coaxed it back into stable life and tried again.

Now I got to the SyncThru page. "Network Settings" - "Wireless". Ooops, no "Wireless". Being thoroughly hacked off with the machine by now, I called Samsung. They made me read out the Model number from about 4 different places and then told me just to take it back as it was obviously broken.

So, A broken machine, that's fair enough, mistakes happen. But discovering this was really hampered by a non-intuitive user interface and an almost total lack of instructions. My guess was that somebody decided not to provide the basic user guide to save some pennies, but this meant that the thing was almost unusable. Why they printed the advanced booklet (which a techie would easily find on the CD anyway) which assumes that you understand the contents of the basic booklet (which isn't printed out) I do not know.

Is it a good printer. I don't know. But it has managed to annoy me enough to resurrect my blog.