Thomil's Random Ramblings

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you’ll know that I have a very keen interest in urban mobility, and especially in the bike-rental sector. If you’re not a regular reader yet, you now know that as well. More and more countries and municipalities are coming to the conclusion that these systems play a vital role in providing a sustainable public transport offering. The fact that Ireland and its population have significant difficulties in following suit is very telling indeed, but also not the subject of this article. As these systems become more and more popular, more and more companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon and profit from this popularity. While this is generally not a bad thing, there are definitely downsides to it, not least because it has lead to a series of „bicycle wars“ in a number of cities, a battle of systems and philosophies.  On one side, you have the „classic“ station based bike rental systems. As the term suggests, these systems are built around pe...

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit it. I’m a bit of a geek. I love my tech and my gadgets, be they drones, cameras, tablets, headphones, and whatnot. However, one group of devices never really caught my attention, namely the so-called connected speakers, or speakers that access streaming services directly via WiFi or ethernet, without having to go through a smartphone, tablet or another similar device. I was a late convert to streaming music anyway, and for a long time, my „musical land mine“, the B&O Play A1 by Bang & Olufsen, was more than enough for my needs. Until this week, that is.  You see, I work in a business development role, and as part of that role, my employer regularly organises competitions or giveaways to „encourage“ the front line agents to score more deals. Normally, when I see something like that, my brain just switches to „transit mode“, meaning that those words go into one ear and come straight back out on the other side. Don’t get me wrong, I st...

Annapolis, Maryland. A small city on the shores of Chesapeake Bay In many ways, it is just one of your typical small American cities, and apart from the US Naval Academy located there, has little to set it apart from myriads of similarly sized cities between the Eastern Seaboard and the Pacific Ocean. Yet, on June 28th, 2018, this city was suddenly and horribly thrown into the harsh, unblinking stare of global publicity, when a lone gunman entered the offices of Capitol Gazette Communications, publisher of the local daily newspaper The Capitol, and began opening fire on the journalists, killing five of them in the process. The gunman was later arrested. It now appears that the attacker, Jarred Warren Ramos, was motivated by personal reasons, namely supposed “defamation” by The Capitol with regards to his guilty plea in a criminal harassment case in 2011. Following the initial report, he had bombarded the company with a plethora of threats, and repeated lawsuits, all of which had bee...