Day 9: Trains and bad beer mix just fine

Today was mostly a travel day for us.  We spent the majority of the day on the train from Łódź to Kraków; Poland's first capital city.  The train ride was pretty uneventful although we were entertained by a Russian (supposed) journalist who was yelling at the train staff about the lousy air conditioning.  Imagine my surprise when she eventually ventured into our cabin and started meddling with the climate and light controls.  I needed no further invitation to leave her with a few "kind" words.

We got to the hotel at about 5:30pm, early enough to shower and run out to see a few things and grab some dinner.  Tomorrow is an early and long day.  We're spending the day at Auschwitz and the Wieliczka Salt mine.

Classic bike down the street from our hotel:

Cess having an "Okocim", not exactly an awesome beer.  However, beer standards tend to be lowered when the temperature is sufficiently high:

Main square in Kraków:

Day 8: Abandoned prison? Nah, that's my primary school...

Monday was our last full day in Łódź.  We started off the day's sightseeing by going to the textile factory district (or "Księży Młyn" in Polish).  The textile industry was the major thing going on in Łódź throughout the 19th century.  The city is apparently selling off quite a number of these abandoned factories and they are being converted into office, retail, and otherwise commercial space.  The interesting thing is that the City of Łódź retains control over all design and architectural decisions made with these properties.  This ensures that such a historical aspect of the city's growth will be retained appropriately.  I do have to say, they seem to be doing a great job with the renovations.

Next up, we went off to visit what would have appeared to be an old abandoned prison that's no longer fit to even house prisoners.  Yup, that's right... that's the impression you would get if you saw my primary school.  The building is in tatters, paint and plaster peeling off everywhere, rusty bars over many windows, etc.

We finished the day's sightseeing with a trip along Piotrkowska street; formerly the major retail street in Łódź.  With the rise of modern shopping centres, the street apparently has lost some of it's shopping glamour.  However, it still has a large variety of shops, restaurants, and cafes along it and is still quite busy.  A good portion of it is even pedestrian only!

Renovated textile factories, now housing office, retail, and commercial space for rent:

Polish automotive engineering at it's finest (from purchased Fiat plans):

Prison or school?  You guess...

Many mansions such as this line Piotrkowska street:

Day 6: Goodbye Warsaw, Hello Łódź

Today is our last day in Warsaw.  We took a quick drive through another part of Warsaw that we haven't yet seen and stopped by my cousin's apartment.  Now we're starting to pack our things up to board an afternoon train to Łódź; my birthplace.  We've had a great time siteseeing and spending time with family so far, and are looking forward to doing the same in the 2nd portion of our time in Poland.

We're not really sure how much Internet access we'll have for the next 2-3 days, but we'll certainly make notes as we go along to post future updates as we can.

Neighbourhood market:

Fruit at the local market.  Poland has always had great quality berries:

Blast from the past:

View from my cousin Kuba's apartment.  Most apartments (even new ones) are low rise.  His apartment on the 7th floor is considered to be quite high up:

Update on Tuesday, July 13, 2010 at 3:26PM by Cess

We travelled by train from Warsaw to Łódź. The journey took about 90 minutes. Ewa and Piotr were pleasantly surprised when the train arrived at the platform in Warsaw and recognized that it was a modern, air-conditioned one. We would travel in comfort! We were met in Lodz by Ania and Gregorz. They will be our tourguides while we are in Lodz.

Day 2: When even new is old...

We spent the majority of today exploring Warsaw's downtown district.  We started off by taking the bus to the "New Town" (Nowe Miasto) district.  For someone who lives in North America, this name is quite ironic as most of the buildings in this district are actually quite old (200-300 years old).  We explored the district for a couple of hours, taking in the sights and sounds.  After lunch in the New Town we continued on to the... "Old Town" (Stare Miasto).  This district lies right next to New Town, and once again, we spent a good couple of hours exploring.  Some buildings (and old city walls) are several hundred years older.  In this district lies a palace which used to be the summer palace of Polish Kings.  These days, the palace is open for viewing, although occasionally there are still State events that occur there.

While not exactly a tourist destination, the next point of interest in today's trek was sentimental in nature.  My grandmother grew up in Warsaw, and we were able to see the house that she grew up in.  It was interesting to spend some time there, see the house and street, and ponder what life may have looked like at that time.

Next up, was a rather contentious place.  The "Palace of Culture" was built in Warsaw as a gift from the Soviet Union in the 1950's.  Given Poland's tenuous history with the Soviet Union there are definitely mixed feelings about this structure.  It's large, imposing, and obviously has Communist connotations, yet it has become part of Warsaw's skyline.  One thing is for sure:  the viewing terrace at the top of the Palace certainly provides interesting 360 degree views of the city.

Finally, we finished off the day visiting with my oldest cousin who lives on the outskirts of Warsaw.  It's been nearly 20 years since we have last seen each other, but it certainly seems like we can relate to one another just as well now as 20 years ago.

New Town:

Old Town:

Jasna St:

Day 1: Arrived in Warsaw, awake for 36+ hours

We flew to Warsaw on Lufthansa with a transfer in Dusseldorf.  All in all, the Lufthansa flights were quite comfortable.  Air Canada should take some notes on the superior amenities these flights have.  Unfortunately, I wasn't able to sleep on the flights at all; I simply couldn't get comfortable and I can't sleep sitting upright.  Cess thankfully managed to sleep a little bit.

After arriving in Warsaw, eating and relaxing for a little bit, we set out to do some sightseeing.  We saw the Royal Palace in Wilanów, Łazienki Park in the middle of Warsaw (think: Polish version of New York's Central Park but with more artwork and historical buildings), and also a modern library belonging to the University of Warsaw.  All of these places were quite interesting.  What stood out for me is the rather modern architecture of the university library that still managed to fit in with the city's historical roots.  We'll post some pictures in the morning.  For now, it's time for us to head to sleep...

Update on Tuesday, July 6, 2010 at 4:30AM by Matt

Royal Palace:

Łazienki Park:

Palace on the water at Łazienki Park:

Chopin monument at Łazienki Park:

University of Warsaw library's green rooftop:

Europe 2010 - 2 countries, 3 weeks

Tomorrow night we embark on a 3 week trip to Europe, where we'll split our time in 2 different countries.  If you don't already know which 2 countries we'll be in, well... you'll just have to check back here to find out.  Unfortunately, bikes won't be involved this time around.  However, at some point in the future we'd like to do a motorcycle tour of several countries in Europe.

Preparations are basically complete and we're in the early stages of packing.  While we've started prep work early, I'm sure we'll need to go through the usual push tomorrow to get things ready to leave.

iPhone Surgery

A few weeks ago I managed to drop my iPhone onto a concrete sidewalk.  Unfortunately, it didn't survive the fall very well and the front digitizer panel (the one you touch) shattered into a million pieces.  I was faced with three options; pay Apple a ridiculous amount of money to fix my phone, wait to buy the iPhone 4, or try to perform the repair myself.

It turned out that a replacement digitizer panel kit can be had for as little as $20!  Armed with the replacement kit, a how-to video on YouTube (thanks Herbet!), and a couple of hours, I embarked on carrying out the repair.  All in all, the repair was fairly simple and my phone is like new! A few pictures I took during the repair follow.

iPhone 3GS Digitizer Replacement Kit:

My busted iPhone before the surgery:

After the first stage of dissassembly, the digitizer assembly has been freed from the body of the iPhone.  There are three small connectors that connect the assembly to the body:

Next up, was separating the perfectly functioning LCD from the digitizer.  Had to be careful to not get any fingerprints on the LCD!:

The most painstaking portion of the repair was removing the broken pieces of the digitizer from the frame that it is mounted on.  This process is quite slow and tedious as you've got to be careful to not damage any of the underlying sensors that are also mounted on the digitizer frame:

After cleaning up the digitizer frame from any excess glue and glass shards, the frame is ready for a new set of double sided stickers which will ultimately hold the new digitizer in place:

The assembly process was basically the disassembly in reverse.  As you can see from this photo, the surgery was a resounding success:

 

Resources used during the repair:

• How-to video from YouTube
• Amazon.ca for the replacement digitizer kit

NAS Roundup

Pardon me while I diverge into geekdom for a minute...

Since I wasn't totally satisfied with the performance of the 2 Network Attached Storage (NAS) units we had, I recently purchased a much more robust one.  I wanted to run some tests to see how much better the new unit with my type of usage.

The NAS units

NAS Unit	Disks	RAID Type
QNAP TS-419P	4 x Western Digital Green 1TB	RAID-5
D-Link DNS-323	2 x Western Digital 500GB	RAID-1
Linksys NAS200	2 x Western Digital 500GB	RAID-1

The first thing you'll notice is that the 3 NAS units I have have slightly different configurations. Keep this in mind as you read the remainder of this article, these different configurations are sure to figure in the overall results.

Test Process

While the NAS configurations aren't totally consistent, I did use a consistent set of parameters to run my tests. I copied two sets of files to/from the NAS units using Microsoft's RichCopy utility:

• Movie - 1 file: 4.3GB
• Photo Collection - 8,900 files: 8.94GB

Test Results

The following chart summarizes the results of my tests.

Observations

The first time that stands out is that the QNAP enclosure is substantially faster than the other two with one exception.  The QNAP lost out to the D-Link in the write test of the photo collection.  The likely explanation for this is the fact that, in general, write operations on a RAID-5 have more overhead compared to simple mirroring as in RAID-1.  In all other tests, in particular the read tests, the QNAP unit performs significantly better.

Another observation not captured by the raw data pertains to working with a smaller amount of files (as in, when editing 1-2 photos for example).  Under these circumstances, the write operations appear to be nearly instantenous with the QNAP, something that I didn't really notice with the other two units.  I'm guessing that the QNAP does a lot more caching than the D-Link and Linksys.  Clearly, that cache isn't large enough to impact the write tests which used such a large amount of data.

All in all I have been very happy with the QNAP TS-419P.  While it is a pricier unit compared to the other two, the added performance (in addition to the feature sets) made it a worthwhile purchase.

Clearly, the Québecois make you sick...

Not a hugely exciting day this morning.  Woke up this morning with a rather sore throat, thinking it must be as a result of the rather dry air in our hotel room.  It turns out that it's more than that, as I seem to be suffering some *gasp* flu-like symptoms.  Good news is that I haven't started growing a snout just yet ;)

After having breakfast at a bakery, we hit up Épicerie J. A. Moisan to look for some cheese.  The store is quite neat, and is apparently North America's oldest grocery store.  In addition to cheese, we bought frozen peas; gotta keep the cheese cool for the duration of the flight, right?

Before Cath and her husband started heading back to Ottawa, they dropped us off at a mall, where we killed some time before catching a taxi to the airport.  We've got about 2.5 hours before taking off, but hey, the airport has free wireless!

Québec City: Plains, Citadels, and other closed things

We were up and around about 8am this morning and were out the door shortly after 9am.  Some people (*cough*Henry*cough*) filed a complaint about scaling the hills on the way to old Québec yesterday, so the plan today was to drive around.

We spent part of the morning looking for breakfast.  As we had noticed yesterday, November is very much a quiet time when it comes to tourism.  As such, many places are closed for the season (including our first choice for breakfast: Restaurant Toast!).  Thankfully, Cess was superbly prepared and had a second choice ready.  We ate at Panache, a restaurant inside a fairly swanky hotel.  Between the four of us, we had a variety of French toast, traditional Québecoise pancakes, and eggs.

Next up, we spent a couple of hours exploring the Plains of Abraham and the enclosed citadel.  Unfortunately, at this time of the year the citadel only offers one tour a day, at a time that was not going to work for us.  Regardless, it was still an interesting place to see, despite the rather cool and overcast weather.

One of the places that Cath had scoped for us to visit was Île D'Orléans.  We drove around the majority of the island, stopping for a light lunch at a bakery (La Boulange).  We also visited a winery where we got a couple of bottles of locally made Port wine.   Just like yesterday, we weren't really hungry at dinner time. We still ate at a local pub and then picked up some hot caffienated beverages at a nearby café.

Martello Tower, Plains of Abraham: