Still in Prague. Had I blogged using Opera Mobile or Mini I would have been at the airport in time (maybe a posting on battery life on mobile devices at a later time), but as the trip was almost a stopover in Oslo before going to Berlin a couple days later, and Berlin is just north of here, missing it was no disaster.

The travel time from my flat in Oslo to my base in Prague is 4 hours and 42 minutes including busses, metro, and walking distance plus a maximum of 29 minutes waiting (assuming no delays). The cost is 100€ upwards return fare for the ticket plus another 17€ getting to the airports and back (thanks to the the currency converter to figure that out).

Ten years ago travelling by bus would cost half again as much, and take 24 hours (twice that again, and slower and less convenient, if you travelled by train). Six years before that the Iron Curtain was still in effect, which didn’t just separate the “East” from the “West”, but the East from the East. A train journey in those days would entail as much standing still and be processed, or just as likely standing still for the purpose of standing still, as it would be actually rolling along at anything but high speed.

As the wireless connectivity of Prague is excellent, city-sponsored WiFi (partially) and unlimited GRPS connectivity to an acceptable price, working here is just as easy as it would be in Oslo, and a bit cheaper. Fifteen years earlier the Internet connectivity from the Charles University in Prague, the entire republic in effect (there was a further line to Liberec in the north), was a shaky 64kbps line to Linz in Austria. Then again at that time the infrastructure was abysmal, and apart from Austria, the Netherlands, the UK, and the Nordic countries that had megabit lines between their universities, the situation wasn’t much better elsewhere. West Germany for instance was a X.25 morass that didn’t “get” the Internet until years later.