I’ve flown in to the UK probably 30 times over the last 3 years. Here’s how
to cut a few corners:

1. It should go without saying – don’t check baggage unless you have to.
2. If you’re not checking baggage, print your boarding passes at home and
   go straight to the gate.
3. Take a seat at the very front of the plane.
4. Ask for and fill out a UK immigration form on the plane.
5. On Easyjet you can buy Gatwick or Stansted (etc) Express train tickets
   on the plane. It’s faster and 20% cheaper.
6. If arriving at Gatwick, take the stairs down to immigration -
   don’t folow the crowd walking down and around the gentle ramp – that’s
   about 4 times as long.
7. If arriving at Stansted, when you go down the escalator look under and
   behind the elevator as early as you can – the shuttle train may be there
   already. You may be able to run for it.
8. If arriving at Stansted, when you get on the shuttle train, position
   yourself in front of the crack between the doors on the far side of the
   train. That’s the side that will open when you arrive at immigration.
9. If arriving at Gatwick without bags, go up the escalator to the
   left to get to baggage. It’s slightly closer to where you’ll exit
   at the top.
10. If arriving at Gatwick, take the side lane “Arrivals from the European
    Union” out of the baggage area. It’s often empty.
11. If arriving at Gatwick, there’s a small train ticket desk on your right
    immediately when you get into the terminal. Even if you have a ticket,
    check their screen for the time your next train. You may need to run for it.

Perhaps the best suggestion is something I haven’t done yet – have an iris
scan that will let you skip the queues to enter the UK. I could have done
it today if I hadn’t been wandering aimlessly around the stores.

Usually when I hear about the thinking behind new web technology I dismiss it pretty quickly. That’s not because I don’t like what people are doing or find it interesting, I just find that almost everything is some kind of application built on an old framework. I’m much more interested in trying to change the framework itself.

I’ve been aware of Radar Networks for some time. I talked to Tim O’Reilly about Fluidinfo in March 2007, and he compared what I was saying to Nova’s claims for Radar. Now that Radar have released Twine, I’ve gone and read some of Nova’s blog postings. I probably should have done that ages ago.

It turns out we agree on many things. Here’s one in particular, in an article entitled Understanding The Semantic Web: A Response to Tim O’Reilly’s Recent Defense of Web 2.0, he has a section entitled “THE SEMANTIC WEB IS THE DATA WEB” which corresponds nicely to my why data (information representation) is the key to the coming semantic web posting.

That’s pretty refreshing. And there’s more, including well-aligned and practical thinking about the word “semantic” and various other words.

I may say more in another posting.