Tom Graves

One of the more interesting distractions in running the Tetradian Books website is in looking up the Whois listings to see who’s downloading what. Right now the Visio function model stencil seems to be the most popular download, but there’s a fair bit of interest generally in all of the practical enterprise-architecture material. And it seems to be completely worldwide, too, though oddly it seems to come in waves. A couple of days ago it was almost all in India; a few days before that, there were a couple of downloads from mid-Africa; most days there’s usually someone from Australia, Britain or the Netherlands (no surprise there ). Today, though, it’s all from the US:

• unspecified, Des Moines, Iowa
• Central Intelligence Agency, twice (yup, my work has come to the attention of the CIA – but panic not, it was only the enterprise-architecture framework reference-sheets)
• Boeing Corporation, Chicago
• unspecified, via Sprint
• State of Oregon, Salem, Oregon

Whether it has any meaning for anyone is another guess entirely – but at least they’re interested enough to download and take a look.

Feels worthwhile, anyway.

A quick note about Internet in Portugal. Wi-fi is available in the larger hotels, such as the Ibis chain at which I often stay, but it is not free – in fact an absurd €5/hr or €20/day (i.e. more than £4 and £17 respectively).

The Portuguese government, however, has other ideas. Most larger towns now have a free internet-cafe, run by the local Chamber of Commerce or equivalent – and they do allow tourists to use them. This one is in the small walled town of Obidos, about an hour north of Lisbon. Back in Coimbra, there was a sign apologising that the building was closed for repairs – but they’d deliberately left their wi-fi running, so there was a huddle of students and others sitting with their laptops on the steps outside. Nice. Worth looking out for whilst you’re travelling, anyways.