Rantings of a Road Warrior

My sis­ter is get­ting mar­ried in Lusaka in Zam­bia. Below is a quick list of air­lines and how you can get to Zam­bia from Europe and the Mid­dle East.

FLIGHTS

Fly­ing to Lusaka Air­port (IATA Air­port code: LUN)

Direct flights from Europe:

British Air­ways from Lon­don Heathrow (LHR). Every Wednes­day, Fri­day, Sunday.

A com­pre­hen­sive list is on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lusaka_International_Airport#Airlines_and_destinations

Indi­rect flights:

Your options are gen­er­ally con­nect­ing in Johan­nes­burg, as most of the flights from Lusaka end up in Johannesburg.

Flights to Johan­nes­burg are very fre­quent, with most air­lines oper­at­ing daily.

Air­france: Paris

British Air­ways: Lon­don
Cathay Pacific: Hong Kong
Delta Air Lines: Atlanta
EgyptAir: Cairo
Emi­rates: Dubai
Eti­had Air­ways: Abu Dhabi
Iberia: Madrid
KLM: Ams­ter­dam
Lufthansa: Frank­furt
Qatar Air­ways: Doha
Saudi Ara­bian Air­lines: Jed­dah
South African Air­ways: Accra, Blan­tyre, Buenos Aires-Ezeiza, Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Entebbe, Frank­furt, Harare, Hong Kong, Kin­shasa, Lagos, Lilongwe, Liv­ing­stone, London-Heathrow, Luanda, Lubum­bashi, Lusaka, Maputo, Mau­ri­tius, Mum­bai, Munich, New York-JFK, Perth, São Paulo-Guarulhos, Vic­to­ria Falls, Washington-Dulles, Wind­hoek
Swiss Inter­na­tional Air Lines: Zürich
TAP Por­tu­gal: Lis­bon, Maputo
Turk­ish Air­lines: Istanbul-Atatürk
Vir­gin Atlantic: London-Heathrow

Then you can con­nect to one of the many daily flights from Johaness­burg on South African Air­lines, Zam­bezi Air­ways, or Air Namibia.

Kayak.com, expedia.com/co.uk and opodo.com are good places to buy the tick­ets from.

VISA

This web­site will tell you if you need a visa or not, and the cost of the visa.

http://www.zambiaimmigration.gov.zm/zims/VISA_FEES.aspx

Things to do in Zambia

Zam­bia is famous for Vic­to­ria falls, one of the largest falls of the world.

Safaris are great way of expe­ri­enc­ing the wildlife in Africa.

and Plenty more, but I haven’t fin­ished my research yet

Hope this helps, if you have any­thing to add or ques­tions, please do give me a shout.

I was hav­ing lit­tle trou­ble get­ting .SRT file work­ing on Pop corn hour A-110. After some googling, I came across this page: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1060708

To enable SRT files sup­port you need the fol­low­ing steps.

1. Make sure the SRT file­name and the video name match (Except for the exten­sions obviously)

2. Make sure they are in the same directory

3. (OPTIONAL STEP) On your pop­corn hour go to Setup menu, under sub­ti­tles change the lan­guage to Eng­lish (Or any lan­guage, but not NONE), this will make sure the sub­ti­tles always run when you load a movie in your selected language.

4. Using your remote dur­ing play­back you can enable the sub­ti­tles using the sub­ti­tles button.

Pretty sim­ple, isn’t it?

Excel­lent video!

Here is a lit­tle com­mand, if you have loads of emails stuck in exim queue and you want to delete ALL the emails, here is a lit­tle com­mand to do that

mailq |awk '{print "exim -Mrm " $3}'|sh

Be care­ful when using it, like I said, it will delete all emails wait­ing to be deliv­ered by exim.

I used it to clear a queue from loads of spam and viruses after a machine got infected and sent 160k emails in 2hours

What is the mean­ing of courage?

Is it to fight a bull in a bullfight?

Is it to drive a for­mula 1 car?

Is it to fly a fighter in combat?

Is it to prac­tice free falling parachuting?

Is it bungee jump­ing, wild water rafting?

Is it to gam­ble your salary on a coin toss?

Is it to insult the door­man in a bar?

Is it to insult your boss?

Is it to go on a defec­tive fer­ris wheel?

Is it to swim with sharks with­out a cage?

That is nothing.

THIS is true courage!

The real Beer-Lambert Law

From http://students.info.uaic.ro/~andrei.luca/blog/

Some­thing dif­fer­ent hap­pened to me on Friday.

Hav­ing just arrived at home from work, I was still sit­ting in the car, wait­ing for the song on the radio to fin­ish and to make good use of the time I was col­lect­ing the park­ing receipts and other bits of paper scat­tered around the car.

As I was ready to leave and switch the engine off, I looked in the rear view mir­ror to find one police car directly behind me. Look­ing up I was sur­prised to find another police car directly in front. Keep in mind I am parked at this stage.

“They must be here for me”, I thought to myself.

2 police offi­cers got out of the car behind me and approached me, in the mean­time I can see at least 3 police cars fran­ti­cally roam­ing the area.

“Hi, can we have a word with you please” said the first officer.

“There is a 2 year old child that was reported miss­ing, we have reports that she was seen in a black mondeo”

No bonus points for guess­ing which car I was dri­ving at the time.

My heart sank, “Oh dear”, I uttered.

“Can you step out of the car please, so we can ask you some questions”

The ques­tion­ing started

“Why are you here”

“Where are you com­ing from”

“What is your name, Date of Birth and your place of birth”

“Can you open the boot please”

“We’re going back to the car to check you on the com­puter, stay here”

In the mean­time, other police cars were still roam­ing the area, one of them stopped to say the child was found at a neighbour’s house.

It seemed the 2 police­men were wait­ing for con­fir­ma­tion over the radio before they send me on my way, once they got that one of them approached me.

“I sup­pose you heard that, thank you for your time, we have to be careful”

Still in shock, I thanked him.

The strange thing is dur­ing the whole con­ver­sa­tion I was think­ing, I’ve just been in town, I have a park­ing receipt, I must be on CCTV in and out of the NCP Park­ing, I paid using a credit card,  effec­tively I was think­ing of con­firm­ing my alibi.

All in all, happy end­ing. One thing about the Loth­ian and Bor­ders Police, they seemed to have responded very very quickly to the report, cov­ered the area and remained polite even with the adren­a­lin pump­ing in the rush to find the miss­ing child quickly.

“Going to Star­bucks for cof­fee is like going to prison for sex. You know you’re going to get it, but it’s going to be rough”

- Adam Hills

I’ve just received great news, I have passed my Prince 2 Prac­ti­tioner course. I am now a

Cer­ti­fied Prince 2 (2009 Edi­tion) Voodoo Specialist!

Woot!

I am going to start using Euronews no com­ment style posts here

Here is the first one

(From a friend of mine in Belgium)

“Yes, she was driving”