Geoff Arnold

Two weeks on the road

I'm just starting what should be a seamless two-week business trip - Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Denver. However because the two weeks were scheduled and booked separately, I'm actually going to pop back to Boston next weekend. (Back on Sunday, departing Monday.) It'll give me a chance to reload my suitcase....

So right now I'm in Menlo Park at the Sun campus for four days of meetings: an all-day DE review, a couple of days on storage technologies, and a number of 1-on-1s.

A rant deferred: Bangalore airport

My colleague Mani Chandrasekaran just posted a piece about the new Bangalore airport which is due to be completed in 2008. He began by saying "Most airports, in India, dont really compare to the modern airports around the world", which reminded me that I had promised you a little rant about my experiences at Bangalore airport. So here it is.

If you remember, I was flying from Bangalore to Mumbai to connect with a flight to London. My Jet Airways flight from Bangalore was repeatedly delayed, and I wound up missing my connection. In these circumstances, when you're stuck in the departure lounge waiting for a flight, most people need two things: refreshment and information.

1. Refreshments: none. Correction: one water fountain of dubious quality, and nothing else: no food, no beverages. No bottled water, no vending machines, no kiosk, no cafe. Zip.

2. Information: Here's where it really gets absurd. Scattered around the lounge were half a dozen televisions. These were used for three purposes: to show advertisements, to display flight information, and to carry a live TV feed. There was no other source of flight information. It quickly became apparent that there was no particular sequence or tempo as to what was shown when. Unless you watched intently you were likely to miss the occasional brief flight status displays.

   But it gets worse. It just so happened that India was playing Sri Lanka at cricket that evening, and the match was very exciting. India was winning: many of the ~250 waiting travellers jostled for the best seats to watch the TV, and when their heroes like Tendulkar and Sehwag were facing the bowling you could forget about anything else. Whoever was controlling the system wasn't going to bother with trivia like flight information (or even advertising). At one point there were 20 uninterrupted minutes of cricket....

I would have taken a few pictures of this place for you, but of course photography is absolutely forbidden at all Indian airports. In any case, the lesson is clear: if you're going to fly out of Bangalore, make sure you have bottled water and snacks with you, and be prepared to grab a seat in front of the TV. And if anyone from the airport reads this, I'm sure you can afford a few extra monitors to dedicate to flight information. Because we're not there to watch cricket, we're bloody well there to fly!

(Thanks. I feel much better now.)

P.S. The December'05 issue of Airliner World (excellent magazine, lousy website) includes a piece on p.68 about the critical state of the commercial aviation infrastructure in India. Airport parking places, terminal facilities, ground services, air traffic control - in every area, demand is outstripping supply, exposing a serious lack of investment. And this also applies to aircrew: a conservative estimate is that India needs an extra 1,200 pilots.

Dale's on board

My colleague Dale Ferrario (with whom I travelled to Hyderabad and Bangalore) is now blogging. Hey, Dale: if you need a picture for your template, I have plenty from the SeeBeyond party.... :-)

"The computers are down...."

I'm visiting Louisville and Broomfield in Colorado this week as part of the ongoing Sun+StorageTek integration work, and so I took the first flight from Boston to Denver this morning. I had a couple of surprises. First, I was upgraded to first class for some reason (something to do with rectifying another travel agency screwup). Then when I checked in my boarding card was marked "SSSSS", which meant that I was pulled aside for the full search: bags, wanding, pat-down, even what the agent called "the TSA back-rub". The wand was turned up so high that the zipper on my trousers set it off!

The flight was uneventful: I slept most of the way. However when I reached Denver, the Avis reservation computers were down, so they were processing every car rental booking by hand. Eventually I got to the front of the (long) line, was asked "Is a red Ford minivan OK?", said yes, and was given a contract and a bay number. I walked out to that bay, and found a blue Chevy SUV. Different colour, different make, and - most important - different registration. I flagged down a passing Avis staff member, we hunted around a bit for the Ford, and then she gestured to the SUV and said, "Are you OK with this?" I shrugged, "Sure - it's got four wheels and a tank of gas", so she amended my contract with the relevant info. So now, for perhaps the first time, I'm driving an oversized SUV. It has the aerodynamics (and wind noise) of a brick, and the driving position is uncomfortably upright, but it works.

Mind you, having AWD may be useful. They're forecasting 1-3 inches of snow this evening, with 25-40 mph winds....

You know you're travelling more than is healthy.....

Oh dear. I actually caught myself gazing at this with interest: "For $1500, you can buy this pair of used first-class plane-seats to use as a sofa in your living room."

Wireless in India (and England)

One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I'd go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.

As I've described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It's a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It's the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There's also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320x320 screen. And since it's a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)

As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went - in India and in the UK - I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn't support GPRS (or didn't allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn't get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.

Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It's not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai's international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.

One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn't work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better....

--
*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I'd be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn't have a camera but does include WiFi - and it's only 2.1 ounces!

Day 18 - the end of the trip

I just got home from Boston's Logan airport after my flight from London. This morning my mother and I went in to Oxford to buy a few small items that, curiously, it is almost impossible to find in the USA:

• Soluble paracetamol (acetaminophen) and aspirin. Quicker acting than tablets or caplets, and much more convenient for those who have trouble swallowing tablets, or for oral pain. In the UK you can also get over-the-counter soluble paracetamol with codeine (500mg paracetamol with about 8-10mg. codeine), which would probably require a prescription in the US - if you could find it.

• Blu-Tack - a simple way of sticking papers, postcards, etc. to vertical surfaces. Comes in a slab; you tear off what you need and squash it into shape.

• Small cash-ruled notebooks - Merry uses them for various purposes, we always get them from W. H. Smiths.

• Wrights Coal Tar Soap. Sounds ghastly, doesn't it? Actually it's my favourite soap, and a British tradition for 145 years.

We also met my brother for coffee in Blackwell's. It's convenient to the Bodleian, where he works, but it has one unavoidable drawback: I cannot enter the shop without buying a book. Today I got away relatively cheaply, picking up philosophy books on Jerry Fodor, the Churchlands, and Indian philosophy.

As for the flight, I'd prefer to forget it. The seat recline mechanism was broken in our row (no, there wasn't an emergency exit behind us), and when the three people in front of us all reclined their seats fully, we were trapped. I had the window seat, and the tall guy in the middle next to me had nowhere to put his legs. (I prefer the Airbus A330/A340 with 2-4-2 seating.) In spite of this, I actually got some sleep, using my iPod and Bose noise-cancelling headphones. The trick is to listen to music that is fairly repetitive but not too quiet: I used a playlist containing two albums by Ray Lynch followed by five or six CDs worth of No-Man. That worked.

And now I have to face my case full of dirty laundry. Perhaps tomorrow....

Day 15-16-17: Leeds/Woking/Guillemont Park

Due to lack of net-connectedness at my mother's house, I haven't been able to blog for a couple of days.

On Monday I visited Tarantella engineering in Leeds. I met with several senior staff, and we had a lively all-hands discussion based on my "Engineering@Sun" slides. A couple of the team were particularly interested in supercomputer topics, and so I gave a short presentation on the status of Sun's DARPA-funded HPCS program. I got a taxi back to Leeds Station, and took the train back to Oxford. (Curiously, the Monday train was a 6-car unit, and was by no means full; on the other hand the "sardine-only" train on Sunday was only 4 cars long. I discussed this with the guard - or train manager, or whatever they call them these days - and apparently this is typical. Bizarre.)

The first day of November was sunny and mild: the forecasters are predicting a brutally-cold winter, but autumn is turning out to be unseasonably pleasant. It took me two hours to drive down to Woking to StorageTek UK for my second visit. This time I spent most of my time with the European field service management team and several engineering groups, including one that works on IBM mainframe software. (Yes, Sun now sells mainframe products! We should probably tone down our rhetoric about migrating mainframe users to Sun servers, just a bit....) The M25 was a bit kinder in the evening, and the return journey to Oxford was considerably quicker - in fact, I got back just before my mother. (She'd been giving a talk at a local group in Oxford.)

So we arrive at Wednesday, day 17 of the trip. There was a bit of a mix-up about the schedule: I think I must have told different people different times, and I got to the Sun campus at Guillemont Park (just off the M3) at 9:30, half an hour later than some had expected. Nevertheless, things went off pretty well. I had one 1-on-1 session, but the rest of the meetings were group discussions about Sun engineering practices and career paths. I wanted to explore the similarities - and differences - between the issues faced by companies that Sun had acquired and by those established Sun engineering groups that were remote from the traditional centre of power in Silicon Valley. As I anticipated, the SunUK team was not shy about sharing their opinions! It was a VERY useful session. Many thanks to Alec and Chris for setting things up.

Right now I'm sitting in GMP03, finishing up some email and blogging on my laptop. (I stole an Ethernet cable from a SunRay; hope that's OK.) Tomorrow, Thursday, I plan to dash into Oxford for a little last-minute shopping, and then head down to Heathrow to get a BA flight to Boston. I should be landing at 9:35pm....

Day 14: getting back on track

Despite my comments about the Air India flight, everything actually worked out pretty well. (Sorting out the expense report is going to be fun, though.) We landed on time; I picked up my rental car, scooted up to my mother's house in Oxford, said hi, and went to sleep. About four hours later my brother woke me with the offer of beer, or Lucozade, or both(!); I chose Lucozade. I felt deceptively human, and took the four of us (my mother, my brother, and his wife) out to dinner at a new Italian restaurant. The presentation was awfully "chi-chi", but the food was excellent.

This afternoon I set out on the next stage of my journey, by train from Oxford to Leeds. I hadn't pre-booked this (which was a mistake), but I wasn't worried: I walked up to the ticket machine and punched in "Leeds", "Return". And then I stopped, and I had a premonition... and without pausing to think about Sun's travel policy, I chose "First Class". (That's £200 - twice as much as the regular fare.) Soon afterwards, the train arrived. It was full. Packed full. Standing room only. Hardly any room for additional standing passengers. (OK, not quite "Tokyo subway" packed, but close.) Except... there were three empty first class seats! Had I not chosen "First", I would have found myself standing for over four and a half hours.... (Weekend journey times are longer, because of re-routing to avoid track maintenance work.)

So here I am at the Queen's Hotel in Leeds. It's visually stunning, with really strong art deco themes throughout. I feel as though I've stepped onto the set of "Poirot"; I half-expect David Suchet to appear in a silk dressing-gown with a tisane! It's a shame that I'll only be here for one night.

Day 13: somewhere over Eastern Europe...

I'm somewhere over Eastern Europe at around 2pm Indian, 9:30am London, sitting in seat 47K in Air India 747-400 VT-AIE. Or maybe we're over Turkey or Western Europe - who knows? The clouds are solid. The fairly primitive IFE (in-flight entertainment) system is no help: no moving map, no altitude, no speed, or time to run. I have no idea when we're supposed to land: there have been no announcements from the flight deck. I just had an indifferent meal: the service is pathetic compared with Jet Airways. No wonder the Jet flight was sold out, while this is around two-thirds full. But even though the load is fairly light, I've wound up in a window seat with a wriggling toddler next to me. His favourite game seems to be to open the tray table, stand on it, and jump back into his seat: his mother seems rather proud of this, and does nothing to discourage him. This must be a circle of the Inferno that Dante omitted to document.

We just got an announcement! We're at FL380, with 1:48 to run; we're just crossing into Austrian airspace. Not a bad guess. So we'll land around 11:30am.

[Written en route from Mumbai to London; posted on Sunday evening from Leeds when I finally got connectivity.]

Day 12, part 2: oops.

This trip had gone perfectly. Too perfectly. It was unnatural. And on Friday evening, my luck ran out.

The plan was to fly on Jet Airways from Bangalore to Mumbai, then from Mumbai to London on British Airways. The flight to Mumbai was due to arrive at 11pm, while the second departed at 2:15am. Plenty of time....

Unfortunately the Jet Airways flight was nearly 2 hours late. (I'll post my rant about the ghastly qualities of Bangalore Airport later.) As a result, I arrived at the BA desk about 5 minutes after they'd closed for checkins. I was not alone, of course, and several of my fellow passengers pleaded - but to no avail.

I had called my admin earlier to warn her of the impending problem. I now checked back with her (NEVER travel without a working, roaming cellphone) and learned that the next flight was Air India 101, departing at 6:30. However e-ticket wasn't feasible, so I'd have to buy the ticket myself. Easy, right?

I found the Air India ticket office. It felt like a scene from Douglas Adams' computer game Bureaucracy. I handed my passport and credit card in at one window, at some point a price was set, then it mysteriously changed, I signed a credit card slip at a different window, and eventually a ticket appeared at a third. I was then told to exit left: fortunately I could see that the door I needed was to the right.

So now I'm in a 500 rupee lounge, where everything is complimentary (except the 240 rupee gin and tonic), waiting for the flight in 2 hours. I'll let you know how it goes. Another day, another new airline.

[Written en route from Mumbai to London; posted on Sunday evening from Leeds when I finally got connectivity.]

Day 12, part 1: StorageTek@Bangalore

Friday began with a quick trip to the Sun building in Bangalore to meet with Vijay, the VP in charge of the site. After that I phoned my driver, Srinivas, and he drove me out to the Tech Park where the-Indian-operation-of-the-company-formerly-known-as-StorageTek (!) was based. I met with the site manager and the architect who works with some of our contract partners; then after lunch I gave my talk on engineering at Sun to the whole team.

And finally my Indian meetings were over, and it was time to drive to the airport, and also to pay Srinivas for two and a half days. He had the invoice ready, and the amount looked correct. But there was a problem: his credit card machine was broken, so could I pay him in cash? I didn't have enough cash? No problem, there was an ATM just down the road. With real misgivings, I withdraw enough cash to pay him, and we headed to the airport. We made it without any alarms or excursions (apart from an unusual number of cows on the divided highway), and I breathed a sigh of relief. Everything on the trip had gone flawlessly.

Little did I know...

[Written en route from Bangalore to Mumbai; posted on Sunday evening from Leeds when I finally got connectivity.]

Day 11 - Bangalore Tech Talk and "Diwali Bash"

The rains returned to Bangalore on Thursday, but not enough to disrupt things seriously. (Chennai looks like it's in a worse position.) I had five things on the agenda:

• A series of meetings about global engineering issues and mentoring. These went well, although one meeting was postponed to Friday, giving me a welcome break to grab lunch and finish a few introductory slides for later.

• An interview with the IEC Newsletter team. They like to profile the senior staff that visit Bangalore; I used the opportunity to encourage them to talk to the people at our new sites in Pune and Hyderabad. I hope that they can immediately start to cover these sites and what they're doing, solicit contributions from Pune and Hyderabad staff, and make sure that the newsletter is distributed there. They gave me a copy of the last issue: it's an absolutely first-rate piece of work. Sun colleagues should check out the online edition.

• I'd been asked to give a tech talk... or a town-hall meeting. I'm not quite sure which, but it didn't matter: I addressed a large group of IEC staff on what I'm up to, and where I need their help; I then reprised my "Future of Distributed Computing" talk. There were some good questions, but I couldn't take too long over Q&A because the next agenda item was...

• DIWALI BASH!.
  
  This seemed to start out as a fairly conventional all-hands, with various recognition awards and announcements. Then we got the results of a competition for the best traditional dress (see above). After that, I completely lost track of what was going on - poetry, competitions of various kind, chocolate breaks, singing (as seen in this 12MB Quicktime clip), and eventually food. I missed the end, because I was invited to an impromptu presentation on some new distributed Java application test tools.

• Finally I returned to the Park Hotel for a dinner with some of the Bangalore participants in the SEED Mentoring program. I was warned that one of the traditional dishes in the dinner buffet would be extraordinarily hot, but it wasn't. (So far I haven't encountered any food which either disrupted my gut or blew my head off. This is good.) We ended the evening with a discussion of languages in India: by my reckoning, none of the 9 people at the dinner (including me) speak the same language at home. Amazing.

I'm completing this blog entry on Friday morning in the lobby of the hotel. In a few minutes I'll get breakfast, check out, and head in to the Sun offices. From there I'll be going to the StorageTek facilities in Bangalore (in another part of the city), and then to the airport to fly to Mumbai and then to London. I'm not sure when I'll next be able to blog, except perhaps through my Treo.

Mystery painting identified

Raj Premkumar has solved my puzzle of the mystery painting at the Salar Jung Museum. It turns out that it was mis-labelled: the actual artist was S. G. Thakur Singh, whose "After Bath" won a prize when it was exhibited in London in 1924. There's a JPEG on that web page, although it doesn't really do justice to the work....

Anyway, many thanks Raj!

Day 10

When last we left our intrepid hero, he was cowering in bed, transfixed by television images of Bangalore under flood waters of Biblical proportions. The following morning brought little relief: the regional papers were running headlines like "Bangalore is now an ocean". Undaunted, Dale and I took a car to Hyderabad Airport. We saw people calmly checking in for the flight to Bangalore, we were advised that there was no delay, and we breathed more easily.

After checking our bags and going through the usual security procedures, we found ourselves in an area with a sign indicating that we should wait upstairs. We did so. Time passed, no flights were called, and by 8:15am Dale decided to ask someone when our 8:35 flight would be boarding. "It's already boarding downstairs," was the alarming reply. We rushed back down the stairs, and found a narrow door into another, distinctly decrepit, waiting area. Our flight was not actually boarding, but it was called a few minutes later. Had Dale not asked, etcetera, etcetera.

We took the bus out to the stand where our aircraft, an ATR-72-500 of Jet Airways (registration VT-JCA) was parked. Still nobody seemed worried that we were headed into a disaster zone. We took off, had the usual excellent hot "snack", and 80 minutes later we landed at a damp, but decidedly un-flooded Bangalore Airport.

Despite my attempt to rationalize the car situation, there were three cars waiting for us at the airport. One was from my hotel, and I accepted the suggestion to have my suitcase taken straight there. The others? Well, one was for Dale and me to go to Sun's IEC (Indian Engineering Centre); the other was for Dale's bags. Whatever. After a ride through distinctly un-flooded streets we reached the office.

For me, arriving at IEC was like "old home week". I ran into a number of Sun engineers whom I'd known in Menlo Park and Santa Clara, and who had relocated back to Bangalore when we opened IEC. A group of us had lunch and I started to come up to speed on what's happening in IEC. After a number of other meetings, Dale and I took the car back to my hotel, The Park, where Dale had arranged a get-together for a number of his staff who are working on Sun's implementation of JSR 208, the Java™ Business Integration (JBI) standard. They're already starting to work with some of SeeBeyond's technology: the technical fit looks excellent, while the overlap is minimal (and fairly straightforward.) Here they are, toasting integration (in all its forms).

When finally Dale left to catch his flight to Mumbai (and thence to London, and thence to San Francisco), I excused myself and went up to my room. Did I mention that this is a boutique hotel (whatever that means)? The style is drop-dead gorgeous: a very Japanese minimalism. (I just checked the brochure, and it's a Conran design. That explains a lot.)

And so, after freshening up, and grabbing some food in the restaurant downstairs (my first uncompromisingly Western dinner on this trip), I shall wrap up this blog and hit the sack. Tomorrow is a very full day - but that's for another blog entry.

Day 9

Tuesday comprised a full day of meetings with the ex-SeeBeyond organization in Hyderabad. Dale and I talked with each of the functional groups: about the group membership; what they were doing; the major issues that they faced (strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities); and how the integration into Sun was going to affect them. After that, we sat down with all of the managers and team leads in order to answer a few more questions and go over some final points: the key milestones of the integration plans; some thoughts about how and when some of Sun's engineering and product practices will be introduced; and how the Hyderabad operation fits into Sun's global plans. The whole day felt very positive.

At the end of the day Sunil took Dale and me out to a traditional South Indian restaurant ("Our Place"). The food was excellent, although I ate a little more than I really should have.... We then went back to the Sheraton to pack and prepare for an early departure to Bangalore. It turned out that a government minister (or some similar dignitary) was staying in the hotel, and security was really tight. All the cars were being searched and checked underneath with mirrors, there were portable metal detectors set up in several places, and uniformed men were wandering around brandishing various firearms, ancient and modern (from state-of-the-art assault weapons to antique 303 Lee-Enfield rifles).

I successfully negotiated the security, retired to my room, packed, brushed my teeth, climbed into bed, turned on the English-language television news, and was confronted with pictures of severe flooding in Bangalore. "And the deluge is expected to continue for 48 hours," said the newscaster, excitedly. What on earth was I letting myself in for?

Day 8 - welcome to Sun for the SeeBeyond team in Hyderabad

Today was the first of two days of meetings with the staff of the former SeeBeyond operation in Hyderabad. On this occasion I was tagging along with Dale Ferrario, VP of Sun's business integration software group. (Dale and I go way back: he's been at Sun 18 years - almost as long as I have - and he's taken on an even more diverse collection of jobs than I have.) After we'd met with the site manager, Sunil Bajpai (pictured below with Dale), and had a tour of the facility, the entire crew drove over to the Sheraton where we had an all-hands meeting followed by a party.

The party started with some wild fun and games outside in the dusk. (Trust me: that MC in the middle of the circle is about to get things really fired up. Unfortunately it was too dark to capture the action photographically. Imagine a combination of "Simon says", a rugby scrum, tag, and Twister!)

Sunil and Dale.

A sudden cloudburst drove everybody inside. Here's the whole gang, in two shots because I couldn't persuade them to move back enough to fit into one.

And finally here is a 2.4MB QuickTime video clip of everybody saying "Hello!!!" to their colleagues in Sun.

Touring Hyderabad

I spent six hours today seeing some of the sights of Hyderabad. I have to say that I was blown away: it's a fabulous city. (This will seem unfair to my colleagues in Pune; after all, I never had an opportunity to get a similar tour of their city. Next time, I hope.) Everywhere you turn are broad avenues, elegant domes, and statuary.

The highlights follow; unfortunately in some places photography was not permitted:

• Sri Venkateshwara Temple. A symphony in white marble, providing a wonderful view over the city as well as a moment of peaceful - albeit alien - ritual.
  

• A drive through the Bergum Bazaar and the old city to see the Chaminar, an exquisitely-proportioned four-square tower.
  

• The Salar Jung Museum. This is a huge, rambling, eclectic, confusing, and ultimately wonderful museum, based on the private collector of a former Prime Minister who devoted himself to art during the first half of the 20th century. There's something for everyone there. Obviously there's Indian art: painting, carvings, ivory, jade, manuscripts, fabrics, metalwork, pottery, bronze sculpture, furniture, weapons, toys, and even wildlife (stuffed). But there are also collections of art from around the world. There's a French room, with one of the nicest Bouguereau's I've ever seen, entitled Biblis. There's a wonderful collection of (mostly French) clocks. There are excellent collections of Japanese and Chinese art and artefacts. It's fantastic, it's overwhelming - after 75 minutes my head was full, so I bought a VCD (video CD) film about the collection, and fled.

• Golconda. The name itself sounds magical. As soon as I knew I was visiting Hyderabad, I was determined to see the ruins of this legendary fortress and palace. Here's my guide, showing the map of the complex.
  
  We went up the main path to the pavilion at the top of the fortress, then descended the steep King's Path into the palace complex. We spent about an hour altogether, stopping to hydrate and take in the details. I took lots of pictures; eventually I'll put together a decent gallery. For now, here's a view from the top looking down on the palace.
  

• From Golconda we drove 3 kilometres to the Grand Qutub Shaha Tombs complex, where the kings and queens that ruled Hyderabad and Golconda in the 16th and 17th centuries are buried. I was starting to feel the heat a little (around 90F), so rather than exploring the whole site I asked my guide to show me around the tomb of Hayat Bakshi Begum (that's me in front of it),
  
  and then we just sat and talked for half an hour, about the tombs around us, and about each other. He was a nice guy, a college student, aspiring to be a Chartered Accountant.

And at that point I was ready for a shower and a long cold drink, so we returned to the hotel. Of course as soon as I entered my room, the power went off, so rather than showering in the dark I started work on this blog entry. Since the power is now restored, I shall post it and head off to get clean.

A final note on traffic

I've uploaded some pictures, and a short (1.1MB) video clip, of my commute to the office in Pune and a little bit of the ride from Hyderabad Airport to my hotel respectively. Quality is lousy - this is from the camera in my Treo - but never mind. Enjoy.

Day 6

Travel day. My original itinerary would have meant that I spent all day at Mumbai Airport, but thanks to colleagues in Pune I found myself booked on a direct flight to Hyderabad. This represented yet another "first": my first flight on Air Sahara. The equipment was a Canadair CRJ, ex-Midway and now VT-SAO. Security at Pune was tight: my checked bag was X-rayed and then sealed; I was "wanded" twice, and my carry-on was X-rayed and then inspected.

Pune is actually a huge Indian Air Force base; the civilian terminal is just a tiny part of the whole. We walked out to the CRJ following a Jet Airways 737-800 that was taxiing out, and we were close enough to the departing aircraft for the jet blast to make some passengers cringe. As we taxiied out, following a very circuitous route, I could see at least a dozen Sukhoi Flankers and SEPECAT Jaguars on the military ramp.

I was in seat 4A, but of course the low-mounted windows of the CRJ meant that I didn't have a very good view. Never mind, I was busy: even though it was only a one-hour flight, we were served a hot "snack" (vegetarian or non-veg) that any US airline would have called a full lunch.

After an on-time arrival, I met the hotel's representative at Hyderabad airport. I had phoned that morning to alert the hotel of my change of plan, but somehow the message hadn't got through: he was still expecting me at 7:30pm. Never mind: he rustled up a car, and we crawled through the traffic to the Begumpet district.

So now I'm ensconced in the ITC Kakatiya Sheraton in Hyderabad, where I'll be until Wednesday. Tomorrow I'm planning to get an all-day guided tour of the city, including Golconda. Then if all goes according to plan I'll be rendezvousing with a colleague for dinner tomorrow night. (Right now he should be at Heathrow, enjoying a 9 hour layover!)

My thoughts on Indian traffic

Suppose that you're driving down a four lane, non-divided suburban street in the USA, with a sidewalk on each side. In decreasing order of frequency, you'd expect to encounter:
- cars
- trucks
- buses
- pedestrians
- motorcycles
- bicycles

In India, the corresponding list would be something like:
- bicycles
- pedestrians (with or without pushcarts)
- motor scooters
- motorcycles (with up to four people on board)
- ultrasmall cars
- auto-rickshaws (passenger and goods versions)
- trucks (huge slab-sided things)
- regular cars
- buses
- cows
- luxury/sports cars
- ox-carts
- goats (in herds)

In the USA, the different types of traffic would be logically segregated: pedestrians on the sidewalk, slower vehicles in the right-most lane, and so forth. Furthermore traffic tends to keep to the right, only crossing the centre line for occasional overtaking.

In India, approaching vehicles keep left when passing each other. That's pretty much the only rule. Any of the types of traffic listed above may be encountered anywhere on the road, including the sidewalk. "Lanes" are a polite fiction, an occasional decoration on the tarmac; road signs are everywhere; traffic lights are so rare that they actually seem to command respect, possibly because they're such exotic creatures. Traffic may be moving at any speed from zero to 50 MPH - and occasionally in reverse! - in any "lane". The sidewalk is simply another space to be occupied by any vehicle, and pedestrians may be encountered anywhere - even in the fast lane of a divided intercity highway. Overtaking takes place on either side; if space is limited, the horn is used incessantly until the gap opens up. At an intersection, nobody stops: they just proceed straight into the flow and somehow they're absorbed (usually with more horn blasts).

[Amusing touch: Trucks and auto-rickshaws have crudely painted signs on the back, saying "HORN PLEASE".]

Why does it work? There seem to be two related reasons. First, there is no prescribed "right of way". You can't assume, or insist on your right of way where none exists. All interactions - overtaking, merging, giving way to crossing traffic - seem to be based on instantaneous negotiations between the various parties, with the "body language" of the vehicles conveying the necessary cues.

The second reason is that nobody pushes 100%. Everybody seems to drive at about 60% intensity. That may seem odd, when you see vehicles packing into a space with scant inches between them, but I think it's true. When in doubt, yield - if it's the wrong decision, you'll be able to make it up later. If you lose a merge, don't fight it, relax - even if that opens space for someone else. And there's a rhythm to it, a kind of balancing that reminds me of the women walking by with bundles of goods on their heads. When a car comes up to pass a bicycle, the rider sways out of the way, just enough to allow the car to pass. It's not a manoeuvre, it's a dance step. It's what the AI guys call "swarm intelligence" of a very high order: self-organization rather than rules-based.

And of course at night it gets even crazier, because half the vehicles have no, or defective, lights. But it still works.

[Another amusing touch. High-end cars have door mirrors that fold out of the way at the touch of a button. When the spacing between vehicles is measured in a few inches, this is more than a luxury.]

What does it feel like? This morning as I was being driven to Pune airport, there was one perfect moment when the car I was in was overtaking an auto-rickshaw, which was overtaking a bicycle, which was swerving round a cow. As we did this, a large SUV overtook all of us. Between us, we occupied the entire width of the street, and not far ahead there were two or three "lanes" of traffic approaching us at speed. Somehow it all just flowed together and past.

I can't imagine driving here myself. I think you'd have to grow up here to learn the music of the street. If you can't sing it, if you're not note-perfect, it must be miserable. But watching the performance is totally absorbing - initially frightening, then exhilarating. I guess it could become almost mundane over time, which would be a shame.

Day 5

My last full day in Pune. The highlights were:

• Beating the traffic! I asked for the driver to come at 8am: he arrived at 7:50, and we made it out to the office in 20 minutes. (Yesterday it took over an hour.) I arrived ahead of most of the regulars; fortunately I had a badge that worked. (To maximise the overlap with the rest of the team in Massachusetts, the Pune group tend to start work late and end very late.)

• Speaking at an all-hands meeting for the engineering team here in Pune. My subject was engineering culture and practices in Sun. The group seemed pretty enthusiastic, so I wasn't too worried about running over by a few minutes.

• Having my travel rearranged, so that instead of having a 6 hour layover at Mumbai airport I shall now be flying direct to Hyderabad tomorrow. Thanks, Monish and Ulka for arranging this.

• And finally, giving an invited talk to the Pune chapter* of the Computer Society of India. The subject was "The Future of Distributed Computing" - and no, you can't have my slides! They only make sense when I'm talking - maybe not even then. Anyway, there was a good sized audience, and they seemed to enjoy it. (I know that I did.)

So tomorrow I leave Pune and head for Hyderabad. I've enjoyed myself here: the ex-Storability team are a really great bunch of engineers. I'm looking forward to returning.

--
* Memo to the CSI Pune chapter organizers: lots of pages link to you as http://csipune.com, but that URL seems to be parked.

Day 3+4

Just a brief note, as it's late and I have to be up early tomorrow for a series of meetings. Setting aside the work... and the driving... what's left? Oh, yes: food. Last night, after checkin in to my second hotel in Pune (The Pride), I ate in the Golden Arch. No, not Golden Arches - the Arch [singular] is one of the restaurants in the hotel. Very pleasant, Kingfisher beer tastes much better in India than whatever they ship to the USA. It has a nice touch of bitterness that most lagers lack.

And yes, the connectivity in the hotel is pretty good: desktop 10Base-T, with only occasionally glitches.
UPDATE (10/22/05): Well, not so good. I finally ran some bandwidth tests, and got figures in the range of 80kbps (that's kbits, not Kbytes). Surely some mistake....

Today I started late due to traffic - the recent rains have washed out even major roads, and things are a mess. After a meeting with the site director, I went out to lunch with a group of managers. We drove (on the Mumbai-Pune toll highway, and at a really impressive speed) to a hilltop resort in Khandala called The Duke's Retreat. The Duke in question was Wellington, whose famous nasal profile can be seen in a nearby ridge. After returning to the office for more meetings running in to the evening, a few of us braved potholes and traffic to reach another noted area restaurant, the Ambrosia, which lies about 20 kms. west of the city centre. [Forget the negative reviews on the website: the food was excellent, and service was very prompt and attentive.]

Enough. I must hit the sack. Big day tomorrow.

Day 2+3

I tried to post a day 2 entry from my Treo at Mumbai Airport, but I fumble-fingered the UI and deleted all my typing, so I gave up.

On Monday night I flew from London to Mumbai on Jet Airways. The service was superb: far, far better than on British Airways the night before. Unfortunately the guy sitting next to me was a fidgeter, and my sleep was occasional and fitful. Dawn over Iran was cloudy, but I got a wonderful view (and some pictures) of the bleak landscape in southeast Iran and western Pakistan: brutally bleak, a uniform dusty off-white with only brilliant white salt flats providing relief. And then after we reached the coast we vectored inland, over Karachi, and well to the east before heading south to Mumbai.

I arrived at the rather shabby 1960s-vintage international terminal, endured the bureaucratic tedium of immigration (there always seems to be one more form, or one more signature), rechecked bags for the connecting flight, and took the shuttle bus to the new domestic terminal. Here I made a mistake: I assumed that there would be services (ATM, food, shops) on the far side of the security barrier. Wrong: there was nothing. It was more like a bright airy modern bus station; lots of seats, and TVs, but no services and (apparently) no way back to the rest of the terminal. Without Indian money or liquids, I was stuck for four hours. I dozed, watched TV uncomprehendingly*, and eventually my flight was called.

[Need to speed this up - I have to unplug in 10 minutes.]

The flight to Pune was short and sweet (complimentary fresh lime juice), my bag appeared on cue, and the car to take me and two other passengers to the hotel was there. The journey... well, it was an eye-opener, as in eyeball to eyeball with a cow in the middle of the road. The roads were very bumpy (exacerbated by recent heavy rains), and the traffic was chaotic - but everything kept moving, and we got to the hotel.

At this point I should describe my first dinner in India. Sorry, no - I was falling asleep on my feet, so after a couple of phone calls I just drank a litre of water, fell into bed and slept for 11 hours.

So now I'm at the Pune office of Storability, the company that came to Sun by way of the StorageTek deal. I've cleared my email backlog, met a number of the staff, and had a delicious lunch at a nearby restaurant. I'm now preparing to head back to the city to check in to a different hotel, which is supposed to have much better connectivity.

--
*The bilingual aspect of Indian communications is oddly confusing. On the TV, they kept putting up "News Flash" in English, followed by the headline in Hindi. It wasn't until I reached my hotel room and turned on the BBC World News that I learned that a government minister in Indian-administered Kashmir had been assassinated in his home by an Islamist gunman.

Day 1

Flew BOS-LHR last night on a 100 percent full BA 777. The bad: a middle seat. The good: World Traveller Plus. We reached the Heathrow area 20 min early, the sat in the Ockham hold for 25 minutes because of fog. We were lucky to get in: visibility was around zero.

Eventually I got my bag, picked up a rental car, and drove down to Woking for meetings with StorageTek UK. I felt they went very well. Late in the afternoon I returned to Heathrow and checked in for my Jet Airways flight to Mumbai. I managed to get a window seat, because I want to see dawn over Iran.

And finally I had a hot meal (having missed breakfast, and having had sandwiches for lunch). I'm now waiting to board, composing this on my Treo.

Random preparations

1. Rather than relying on phones while travelling, I hope to be using iChat AV a fair amount. I picked up an iSight camera for Merry to use with her iBook. Then yesterday and today I spent some time debugging video chat with Merry, Kate, and a colleague of mine who just happened to be in Singapore this weekend. Looks promising.

   (There was only one dumb ease-of-use issue: in order to video chat, it's necessary to open up five ports in the OS X firewall, and for some reason there's no preset configuration that you can simply check off. Instead you need to define a new profile associated with TCP ports 5060, 5190, 5297, 5298 and 5678. That didn't feel very Mac-like.)

2. On Friday I was talking with Jim Waldo (of Jini fame) and I mentioned an iTunes playlist of mine called Music to blow your speakers out. He dragged me back to his office and introduced me to Tool. I was blown away, in more senses than one: I've only known Jim as a jazz enthusiast, and Tool's Ænima was unexpected, to say the least. But I was intrigued, and this lunchtime, while running to the drug store to pick up a few items, I made a detour to Newbury Comics and picked up a copy of the CD. (Oddly it's not available through ITMS.) I've ripped it into iTunes and added it to my iPod; I'll listen to more of it over the Atlantic tonight.

3. Checking in. Well, trying to. I logged on to the British Airways website (after finally realizing which of the four or five ticket numbers and record locators to use), changed my seat on the BOM-LHR leg (no more 53J!), and then tried to check in. And tried. And waited, and tried again. After receiving a number of different error messages, I finally received a vaguely catatonic "Unfortunately our systems are not responding at this time." Oops.

4. In spite of my earlier intentions, I decided not to get up to watch the Chinese GP. I didn't even record it. (No, I don't have a TiVo.) A pity - it would have been interesting to see Montoya's car being ripped apart by a manhole cover (or grating, whatever), not to mention the delicious schadenfreude of watching Schumacher making a fool of himself twice in a single race (the first time before the race had even started!).

All set

After yesterday's high-stress, today is tranquil. (Apart from the constant rain, of course.) I have my tickets, my passport, my visa. There was one moment of concern when I found that I had paper tickets for all six of the Jet Airways flights but only one of the three British Airways segments. A quick phone call from Susan sorted it out: all of the BA flights are e-ticket, so the extra flight coupon was a mistake.

So now I simply have to pack (thanks for the dress code suggestions), watch the Chinese GP, polish my slides one more time, and go. Next stop LHR.... (Which will be a good place to fix 53J, come to think of it.)

Last minute travel stuff

Itinerary seems OK now... all hotel reservations are confirmed... and I remembered to call my credit card issuer to alert them to my travel plans, so that their fraud detection system doesn't have a conniption. I've sent out copies of my slides for various presentations that I'm giving (though I'm not quite finished with one of them). I still haven't tracked down available WiFi hotspots in BOM, where I have two lengthy layovers. (The map at USAtoday/Jwire is less than helpful...) I've booked a ride to BOS on Sunday. All that's [still] missing is my passport with the visa for India, without which all of this is pointless. Time to nag the visa agents again....

[UPDATE] Hmmm. It seems that the visa process is less deterministic and transparent than I had thought. I sent all my paperwork to the visa agents in California; they then sent the paperwork to the Consulate General in New York (which I could have done), and the CG is supposed to express-mail the documents directly to me. And there's no obvious way to check on progress. (I have a tracking number, but USPS knows nothing of it.) Had I known all of this, I'd have been tempted to take a day off and scoot down to New York to take care of it in person. As it is, I shall just have to wait. Patiently. And. Hope.

(I'd assumed that this visa agent thing was a bit like buying a new car, when the dealer employs a "runner" to get the paperwork through the Registry of Motor Vehicles. I thought I was paying for someone to drop off the application at the CG in person, and pick up the completed paperwork when it was ready. I guess I'm naive.)

Seeking advice: business casual or blazer and tie?

Web sources on business dress code in India are ambivalent, not to say downright contradictory. I think I'm meeting customers on only one day; the rest is geek-to-geek, or geek-to-executive. Will business casual be OK, or do I need to take some extra dress shirts and ties? (Or shall I pull a JG and just wear Duke and Jini shirts?) I assume T-shirts and cargo pants will be OK for travel days....

Obviously I didn't cross my fingers firmly enough

For some reason known only to the travel agency bozos, my itinerary came unravelled and had has to be re-woven. Naturally while this was happening one of the key flights became full, with awkward knock-on effects. As Susan was patiently fixing things, I noticed that on one flight my seat had changed: I was now in 53J in a British Airways 747-400. I checked in at SeatGuru (an essential resource) and confirmed my fears: this is a window seat in the very last row, right in front of the toilets (i.e. noisy and potentially smelly), and with limited recline. That's no way to spend nearly 10 hours. Fortunately this flight is in a couple of weeks; I should have time to change it....

"I'm goin' mobile"

I just called Cingular to turn on International Roaming for my Treo 650. I hadn't realized that there were so many wireless carriers in India! I went through the lists of roaming partners and coverage maps at GSM World to see if I could work out where I'd have service, but the coverage descriptions were confusing and the map resolution was so poor that I gave up. A colleague assures me that I'll be OK in Pune, but I have no idea about Hyderabad and Bangalore. (The UK is easy: Cingular partners with O2, Orange and Vodaphone....)

Planning for travel

It seems to be a rule of business travel that (a) there will always be one "gotcha" that requires replanning, and (b) events will expand to fill the available time, and then some. Originally I was going to go to England for a couple of days of meetings, then fly on to Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Pune, before flying home to Boston. First, I discovered that my planned visit to Pune would overlap the festival of Diwali, which would make it a no-op (or worse). OK, let's turn things around. Hyderabad is a fixed point, so fly to India first, visit Pune, Hyderabad, and Bangalore (in that order), fly back to England, have my meetings there, and then fly home. And just as that was settling, it turned out that I needed to add another meeting in England, up in Leeds; in addition, some of the people that I had planned to visit at the start of the trip wouldn't be available at the end. So expand: tack on one day at the front to accomodate a stop-over in England, and add another day at the end for the new meeting in Leeds. My fingers are crossed, but I think everything is set: I'll depart on October 16th and get home on November 3rd. I have one completely free day (a Sunday), so don't expect a tour-blog....

(And my deepest thanks to Susan for wrestling with the stupid travel system. At this moment, their portal is still showing the itinerary as it was a couple of days ago, even though there have been half a dozen changes since then. Fortunately Galileo gets it right.)

Doonesbury on travel arrangements

See my earlier comments on the frustrations of dealing with incompetent travel agents. (You don't want to hear about the way they tried to screw up my simple trip to L.A. earlier this week.) Today's Doonesbury was priceless:

(And now I'm going to India... should I interpret this as a warning of some kind?)

A good week

I'm in the middle of packing up before I check out of the hotel and head up 101 to the airport. I thought I'd blog for a moment before putting away my PowerBook. It was a good, productive week here in California. Picking out the highlights, I got my annual performance review out of the way, spent some time with Greg Papadopoulos on my plans for the rest of FY06, visited SeeBeyond in LA, and had the chance to present a status update on my work with StorageTek to Jonathan Schwartz and his staff. One consequence of these meetings is that I'm now putting together plans to visit the UK and India at the end of October.

But now I must unplug my laptop and prepare for another trip on a Song bird....

Visiting SeeBeyond

I'm visiting SeeBeyond in Monrovia, CA* today. SeeBeyond builds enterprise application integration solutions for a wide range of customers using some really cool middleware technology they've developed - check out their website for details. They were acquired by Sun last month, and ever since the deal closed I've wanted to talk to them. This morning I flew down from San Jose to Burbank** on SouthWest*** and drove down the Foothills Freeway to Monrovia. After introductions, and plugging in to the local network (which is mostly hooked up to SWAN - still some 10.* addresses to worry about), I talked with a group of managers and directors about Sun's technical grade structures, including the DEs, Fellows, and Technology Directors. Then this afternoon I met with a smaller group of directors to share some of what we've been doing at StorageTek and discuss whether any of it could apply to SeeBeyond. I found the exchanges very useful: I think we're off to a good start.

As with StorageTek, it's important to avoid the "I'm from the Government; I'm here to help" attitude. The last thing a bunch of engineering managers who are under schedule pressure want to hear is a lecture on the value of horizontal communications or an admonition to send off all their top people for ARC duty. The goal is to learn from each other while keeping the customer satisfied - not a mindless Borg-like assimilation.

--
* Yes, I was confused by the name too - Monrovia sounds like it belongs in Transylvania, not West Africa. However this Monrovia is a suburb of Los Angeles.
** Of course I'm of that generation that automatically prepends Beautiful downtown whenever I hear Burbank. The curse of pop culture....
*** First time on SouthWest for at least ten years. Of course I'd planned to fly jetBlue, but our functionally challenged travel agents couldn't figure out how to book it....

Three new travel experiences

I flew out from Boston to San Francisco yesterday evening for a week of meetings. Travel has become pretty routine of late, so I'm glad to have three new experiences to relate.

First, I flew out of the new Terminal A at Boston Logan. This replaced the old Eastern Airlines terminal, which was used by Continental after Eastern's demise. The new terminal is for the exclusive use of Delta. They only just finished this, and I was curious to see what it was like. Bright, cheery, nicely laid out... and relatively empty. Oops. And the newness extended to some of the facilities: for example, the Fuddrucker's hamburger place was advertising beer and margaritas, but they haven't got their liquor license yet. Overall it reminded me of some European terminals, and the density of upscale shopping outlets was reminiscent of Heathrow.

Second, I got puffed. That is to say, at the security checkpoint I was selected to go through one of the new devices that subjects you and your clothing to an intense puff of air, directed upwards to dislodge any particles in your garments or hair; the system then "sniffs" the air for any suspicious chemicals. The process takes about 10 seconds. High "geek interest" factor.

And third, and the reason I was using terminal A, was that I was flying on Song for the first time. This is Delta's "airline within an airline", a bit like United's Ted. One type of aircraft (757-200), one class, and relentless fun. (Yes, they will mix martinis for you in flight - $7 each.) The competition is clearly jetBlue, but the style borrows from Virgin Atlantic. The seats are OK - leather (not necessarily a plus), limited lumbar support, decent pitch. The seat-back video is good, and includes the kind of flight map that you usually find on international flights.

As for the flight: the cabin crew issued dire warnings over the PA about it being a full flight, but there were only 155 seats filled (according to the display outside the gate), and I had the 27 D-E-F row all to myself. We pushed back 30 minutes late because of a minor maintenance issue. The flight was very bumpy: the pilot kept changing altitude between FL320 and FL360 trying to find smooth air. Nonetheless I was able to get plenty of sleep. The verdict: recommended; a good (and frugal) way to deal with the "bus ride" between BOS and SFO.

No names, no pack-drill

[Company policy, and contractual obligations, mean that I have to conceal a few details. Never mind - the message will be clear.]

I've always thought that, next to banking, the most mature kind of applications software was in airline ticketing. Like many of you, I've visited airline websites and seen the fare for a particular flight change from minute to minute , often quite dramatically. I've read about the principles of "yield management", and the anecdotes of how one passenger winds up paying a thousand dollars more than another in the same class on the same flight. And I've seen the commercials for the various companies that promise to find you the cheapest flights, hotels, cars, and so forth. Clearly there's some powerful software at work here: indeed were it not for the fact that "Artificial Intelligence" has come to mean "that which we don't know how to do yet", this would seem to qualify.

And yet...

Hard on the heels of my recent trip to Colorado, I now have to visit California for a week. I prepared a budgetary estimate, filled out a travel request, received an authorization number, and sat down to book the travel. (Those of you still living in the 1980's might imagine that my admin or secretary would do this. You can go back to sleep now.) Like most large companies, Sun has contracted with a Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named so that employees can book their own travel through an exquisitely-customized on-line portal.

I logged in, and selected the page for travel planning. (Jakob Nielsen would love this page; it violates almost all of his design guidelines.) I entered the dates of my outbound and return travel, as well as the origin and destination airports. The system offers two ways of planning air travel: choosing each flight individually, or configuring complete round-trip itineraries. I knew that whatever I did the system would follow up by attempting to find a cheaper alternative, so I asked for complete itineraries, sorted by price.

After thinking about it for nearly a minute, the system offered me several choices. Oddly, the cheapest of these wasn't a particularly good fit with my chosen travel times, and it was several hundred dollars more than what I've paid for my last few trips from BOS to SFO. (This also meant that it was well above the budgetary estimate that I'd provided. Oops.) I backtracked to the flight search page, and tried searching for individual flights. I found a pair of flights that looked like the cheapest (though you can't tell for sure until you've chosen), and was $50 less than I'd budgeted. Bingo! But wait! "Your choice violates policy: a cheaper alternative was not chosen." But the [expletive deleted] system refused to tell me what the cheaper alternative might be!!. After trying several times to guess what might make it happy (without once finding a cheaper combination), I chose an override option and completed my itinerary. I'm not going to go into the "Fatal resource error" during my hotel search; let's just say that the whole procedure took me nearly an hour, including substantial duplicate data entry.

So to my divisional controller: if I spent a couple of dollars more than I should on the flight, I'm sorry. I'd love to know how I could have done better, though if you factor in the cost of my time.... And to the Large Travel Service Company That Cannot Be Named: evolve or die. Outsourcing complexity to patients and providers may be an odious but winning strategy for managed care companies, but a travel agent can be replaced in a mouse-click. As for whether this violates any blogging policy, I can't imagine that it does. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this kind of thing affects every large company. As Jonathan has discussed in his blog, the best measure of quality is the customer recommendation index. It's worth remembering that this applies to our suppliers as well.

And as for the trip itself, I'm going to be travelling on an airline that I've never used before! But that's the subject of another blog entry. Now, has anyone got any cheap A.I. software that they want to unload?

Status update

Sitting in a crowded 757 on the taxiway at DEN, with a screaming baby behind me, and a 90 minute ground stop before we can take off for Boston. And to cap it all, the captain refuses to turn on Channel 9. At least I can use my Treo to rearrange things by phone and email... and blog. Sigh.

Back to Boston

After 10 days in Colorado, I'm heading back to Boston today. I went through the on-line check-in just to see if United would offer me an upgrade. They did, but since the only upgrade seats were middles, I decided to stick with my cattle-class window.

I hope this particular flight won't be delayed, since I'm due to host a conference call just 55 minutes after we land. I have visions of standing around in the baggage claim area waiting for my stuff, while hosting a call on my cell-phone....

Ah, well: time to pack.

Boulder: the hinterland

Continuing my "Boulder weekend", I spend this morning exploring the hinterland. (Feel free to follow along on the map.) Starting from Louisville, I drove up Route 36 into Boulder, then west along Canyon towards Nederland. After climbing for 15 miles (from about 5500 ft. to 8500 ft.) the road emerges next to a wholly improbably lake: this is Barker Meadow Reservoir in Nederland. Negotiating an unexpected roundabout (traffic circle) in the centre of Nederland, I headed north along Route 72, the Peak to Peak Highway. At its highest point the road is around 11500 ft.*, and there are several peaks nearby around 12-14K high. Eventually it joins Route 7 and drops to "only" 7500 ft. in Estes Park, where I arrived around 11:30.

I had planned to explore Estes Park and maybe have lunch there, but I quickly changed my mind. There were hoards of people there for the Longs Peak Scottish/Irish Highland Festival, many of them wearing inauthentic kilts and other unflattering garb. I hastily turned east on Route 36 back towards Boulder; as I left Estes Park the westbound traffic into the town was backed up for miles. I counted myself fortunate that I'd chosen the southern route.

I emerged from the front range in Lyons. The transition is startling: one minute you're negotiating switch-back curves with cliffs towering above you, the next you're driving across featureless rolling terrain with nothing much of geographical interest until you reach Kansas City, 600 miles to the east. After Lyons I decided to continue my explorations, so instead of continuing down Route 36 to Boulder I took Route 66 to Longmont. Downtown was hot, dusty, and deserted, but I found a decent lunch and a surprisingly good Hefeweizen at the Pumphouse Brewery. From there I headed down Route 287 through Lafayette (I think I blinked and missed it) to Broomfield, then drove back up Route 36 to my hotel in Louisville.

I took a bunch of pictures just north of Ward on Route 72 (altitude around 10K), and some more on Route 7 close to Mount Meeker. I've uploaded them to Flickr, as an experiment.

And one note for Chris: I passed lots of cyclists on the Peak to Peak Highway. Very impressive, at that altitude.

--
* This is the only spot height I could find on the web, but it seems a bit high; 10K seems more likely. Does anyone have a topographic map of the area?

Peak to Peak

Looking west into the heart of the Rockies,
originally uploaded by Geoff_Arnold.

Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra

This weekend I'm going to set work aside and immerse myself in Boulder. Tonight I met some old friends for dinner and a stroll along the Pearl Street Mall. Tomorrow evening I'm going to a concert by the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Dunner:

• Sibelius Andante Festivo
• Brahms Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op.77 (Corey Cerovsek, violin)
• Nielsen Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, 'The Inextinguishable'

7:30pm at the Macky Auditorium. As for Sunday... well, we'll just have to see.

OAK?

I'm flying back to Boston today. Even though I've been commuting between the Bay State and the Bay Area regularly for over 20 years, this will be the first time I've flown into or out of Oakland. It's actually not the first time I've used the airport; we once had to land at OAK to refuel when SFO was fogged in. (Amazing what a few miles across the bay can do.) I'm stuck with a plane change in Denver; I can't seem to keep away from that place. (I'll be back there again on September 6.)

On not mounting the horse, and dressing to confuse

Zoomed up 880 to Oakland this evening to have dinner with Steve, Wendy, Chris and Celeste. We ate at a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant with the unlikely name of Le Cheval on Clay Street. (OK, I know, it's the French colonial influence - but it still seems odd.) Just inside the door is a large bronze horse and a sign bearing the admonition noted above. The food was wonderful, from the firepot soup and the green mussels to the banana flambé desert. (Fire featured prominently, come to think of it.) And the wine list was varied, satisfying, and modestly priced. (Steve and I couldn't resist the Solaris Pinot Noir, for obvious reasons.) Highly recommended.

Before we ate, there was much trading of goodies. I'd recently completed Stephen Baxter's novel Evolution (B+ for science, B- for narrative, C for character development) and I traded it to Steve for Franklin Foer's How soccer explains the world. (Of course it does!) The "confusion" refers to an item that Chris had picked up for me: a royal blue, long-sleeved polo shirt proudly bearing the name of the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in gold script. (There was also a Graduate Theological Union t-shirt for Merry.) So let's see, I wonder when Carson Kressley would recommend that a hard-core atheist should wear a Divinity School shirt?

A thoroughly enjoyable evening, to be repeated at the next opportunity. (Perhaps the end of September?) There was talk of sushi in Berkeley....

You know it's Monterey Historics weekend....

I spent last night in Carmel Valley visiting family. It was hard to find somewhere to stay because this weekend is the annual Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca. You know it's that time of year when there's a Ford GT-40 parked outside Safeway, Porsches and Ferraris are as common as dirt, and it takes a brand new Lamborghini or a couple of Bentley Arnage's to catch your attention. As I came off the Laureles Grade yesterday afternoon and turned onto Carmel Valley Road, I passed a pale yellow Jaguar D-type, street-legal, complete with the fairing behind the driver's head. Gorgeous. (Though after much searching through A9, I've reluctantly concluded that it might have been this replica - oh well....)

Sushi Zanmai

An unexpected delight this evening: wonderful sushi - in Boulder, Colorado of all places! - at Sushi Zanmai. Some of the best I've had outside of Japan and San Francisco. We were lucky, and got there at 6pm, just ahead of the crowd. (Memo to self: parking really sucks in downtown Boulder).

Travel, with a bonus

This evening I'm off on a rather longer trip than usual: fly to Denver, a week of meetings at our Broomfield campus, fly to San Jose next Saturday, three days of meetings in Menlo Park next week, then fly home next Thursday (out of Oakland via Denver). Apart from a brief family visit next weekend , it's pretty much all work. One nice bonus: the BOS-DEN and DEN-SJC legs both wound up being "Fare class A - discounted first class". All of the comfort without the expense - delightful.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

I'm flying back to Boston tomorrow afternoon. When I made the reservation, United decided not to allow me to select my seats, so before going to bed this evening I decided to log in to their web site and see what the computer had chosen for me. 27E, a middle seat towards the rear. Ugh!

"I wonder if there's any way to get to a seat selection screen," I mused. "Perhaps via EasyCheckin?" I navigated through United's awful maze of menus, and chose checkin. "Would you like to purchase an Economy Plus upgrade for $34?" Probably (holding my breath) - what seats are available? 14A?! A window! The last unclaimed window seat in the plane. Be still my beating heart! (Yes I know it's an emergency exit row: that doesn't bother me.) Selected, paid, confirmed. Oh joy!

Work, work, anime, work, work

Not a lot to blog about this week.... I'm in Broomfield, Colorado, doing a ton of interesting but completely unblogworthy work; when I get a chance, I'm reading... work-related books; even the evenings have been working sessions....

However, while waiting for some colleagues to join me for dinner, I dived into a video store and picked up a delightful anime DVD, Makoto Shinkai's "The Place Promised in Our Early Days". I'd seen the trailer for it on the Anime Network a couple of weeks ago, and was impressed by the luminous colour - somewhere between "Spirited Away" and "Haibane Renmei". Some critics are calling the director "the new Miyazaki". I wouldn't go that far - he loses the pacing a bit in the final third of the film - but it's visually stunning and really draws you into his strange alternate history. Recommended. (See also this glowing review.)

Between the lakes (I guess)

Travelling again. I just flew from Boston to Denver, then drove over to Broomfield where Sun has a major campus. (The flight was full but uneventful; it was nice to fly United again so that I could listen in to channel 9.) As I set out from the airport, it turned very stormy and windy: I found myself driving through huge dust clouds, dodging tumbleweeds and construction marker cones, and holding my speed down below 45 so that I could stay in lane. I'm now in the Omni Interlocken hotel: as soon as I had checked in, someone offered me a glass of champagne. My kind of place... though I'm not sure why this complex was called "Interlocken". It doesn't look like Switzerland, and Google Maps doesn't show any prominent lakes in the vicinity.

Visualising chaos

Over at whitelabel.org there's a brilliant analysis of the state of the London Underground: "In Britain, where trains are so routinely late that punctuality has been redefined as 'within 20 minutes of scheduled time' and even then only around 80% can make it, the people have forgotten that it doesn't have to be this way, and that in the rest of world, including the really poor parts, it just isn't."

The writer grabbed the realtime disruption maps published by TfL and turned them into a three minute Quicktime movie. Tufte would be proud (I think).

While I sympathize with the author, I think he needs to get out more. The riders of the T in Boston would kill for any kind of information like that provided by TfL; disruption is a way of life over here.

(Via Boing-boing, of course.)

Memo to self: always read and re-read your itinerary...

I'm in Silicon Valley this week for a variety of meetings. I flew in this morning, and I'll be returning on the Friday night red-eye. Fortunately I had plenty of advance warning about this trip, so I was able to book window seats (F westbound, A eastbound) before the flight filled up - which it did. There was a large talkative guy in the middle seat next to me, and a shrill spread-sheet wizard behind me; thank goodness for my iPod with Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I dozed to Buddha Bar for the first half of the flight, then made notes for one of my Tuesday meetings on my Treo (attracting frustrated glares from the middle seat guy who was wrestling with his laptop). We got a smooth routing, and with minimal headwinds and light traffic we arrived 35 minutes ahead of schedule.

Having got in so early, I was all set to grab my bags*, jump in my rental car, and scoot down 101 to Sun's Menlo Park campus in time to grab a bite to eat before my first meeting. I'd requested an Avis car, and I'm a member of their Rapid Rental program, so it should have been a no-brainer. Alas, no.

As I rode the Air Train to the SFO Rental Car Center, I re-read my itinerary. What's this? Budget Rent A Car: Car pickup: San Francisco, CA. And I'm not a member of Budget's (somewhat anemic) express program. Cursing our travel agency, as well as myself for not catching this, I got into the long line at the Budget desk to rent a car the old fashioned way. It was 45 minutes before I was on my way. So much for lunch....

--
* I always check my bag - a probably vain effort to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

A bit of history: down the chute at CDG

I was sorting through some old (paper) files this evening and came across some photographs from about 15 years ago. They were of an event that, as you can imagine, I've never forgotten: evacuating an airliner by going down the emergency chute. Since several people have bugged me about this over the years, I thought it was worth posting the pictures.

In brief, what happened was this. I was flying home from Paris on a wet and windy November day: CDG-BOS on a TWA L-1011. We taxied out and started the take-off run, but just below V1 we lost the #3 (starboard) engine in a sheet of flame. Maximum autobrake but no reverse thrust, of course; the runway was wet, the plane was heavy, and we barely stopped at the end of the runway. As we turned onto the taxiway, several passengers reported smoke coming from under the starboard wing. We'd blown several tires and they were smouldering. Fire in close proximity to a wingful of fuel is bad news, and we evacuated via the port slides. For some reason I was sent down first to help to catch people as they came off the slide. A fire truck (visible in the second picture) extinguished the smouldering undercarriage, and eventually we were bussed back to the terminal.

Before they could make alternative travel arrangements for us we had to retrieve our baggage and carry-on items. So we were bussed back to the plane, and were allowed to re-enter (in small groups, under the watchful eye of the airport police) to recover our things. It was after I'd got my briefcase (and two bottles of the nouveau Beaujolais), while I was waiting for the remaining passengers, that I remembered that I had a camera in my bag. Standing in the drizzle under the nose of the L-1011, I used my last bit of film to capture the scene.

The first five thumbnails are the pictures that I took. I scanned them in and used Arcsoft's PanoramaMaker to stitch four of them into a composite. The original photos were a bit scratched up, but I hope you enjoy them.

False generalization

My colleague Tim Bray posted a revealing little rant today about the first flight of the Airbus A380: "On this page there is a frightful lie, namely that the plane will seat 555 passengers with lots of room for lounges and shopping and so on. This claim is oblivious to the facts that most airlines are losing money and most travelers are highly price-sensitive; ergo, this turkey will carry 800-plus suffering souls packed in like sardines"

Now I always thought that Tim, as a Canadian, would be less prone to the typically American habit of assuming that "US = world". If you check the current orders for the plane, you'll see that the vast majority of the customers are non-American companies* that are not losing money. Furthermore it's clear that many of the first A380s will be deployed on the routes between Europe and south-east Asia, which are much less price-sensitive than, say, BOS-SFO. Airlines like Singapore and Emirates aren't going to emulate Ryanair any time soon; they're going to compete on service and amenities. Just because the U.S. domestic airline industry is a shambles....

The bottom line: I expect that there will be plenty of 555 seater A380s with bars, shops, and casinos. Just not here, unfortunately.

* In fact the only U.S. customers for the A380 are FedEx and UPS; presumably their packages don't mind being "packed in like sardines"....

Remind me not to fly Air India....

The BBC reports that Air India is buying 50 Boeing 777 and 787 airliners. Apparently the 777s will be "a bit special": Air India "also gained agreement from Boeing to include nine seats across in economy instead of the usual eight." Ouch. No thanks.

Down on the Cape

No blog entries recently, because we've been down on Cape Cod for a few days R&R. I had planned to blog using my Treo, but every time I went online I found myself overwhelmed by trackback blogspam that needed cleaning up. (I'm writing this from the PC in the clubhouse of the time-share.)

Just got back from dinner in Harwichport; a fish restaurant overlooking the harbour. After eating, we went for a walk around the dock, and I saw my first-ever loon. (At least the first close enough to photograph.) I'll post pics when I get home tomorrow.

In San Francisco

As several of my colleagues have reported, we've just concluded the SEC (Sun Engineering Conference) down in Santa Clara. I don't have a lot to add to what they said, except to note that it's nice to attend as a participant rather than an organizer. (I ran a number of similar conferences over the last few years: it's hard work.)

With SEC over, I've shifted hotels, from the Holiday Inn Express in Mountain View to the Hilton in San Francisco. Obviously the Hilton is a much nicer hotel - I have a spectacular view from my window, looking out over the bay towards Oakland - but it's odd that the little $95/night Holiday Inn Express can give me high-speed Internet access for free while the Hilton wants to charge me an arm and a leg.... (And the Hilton's connection feels a bit sluggish - but perhaps that's because of the hundreds of Sun geeks who've just checked in and are getting a much-needed fix of raw TCP/IP.)

Tonight is the opening session of the CEC. If you read blogs.sun.com or PlanetSun, you're going to see lots of blogging from this conference. I shall be here all Saturday and most of Sunday; I'm flying home on the red-eye on Sunday night. Even though I dodged an eight inch snowstorm last night back in Boston, the weatherman is promising more snow and ice for Monday.

Fleeing the snow

As yet another coating of snow gets dumped on the Boston area, I have fled to warmer climes - California, as is my wont; Silicon Valley, to be more precise. I shall be down in Santa Clara for a few days, then move up to San Francisco for the CEC conference that a number of my colleagues have blogged about. I return to Boston on the Sunday night red-eye.

A few more or less random observations. First, my ticket today was on US Airways, but the flight was actually a United one - ah, the joys of code sharing. I found myself wondering if I could use United FF miles to upgrade, given that I wasn't actually on a United ticket. Of course that would require that I talk to a human being, and these days things like checkin are handled by robots. (Kiosks plus unskilled baggage handlers.)

The flight was uneventful, but spoilt by the presence of a number of small children who had not yet reached the age at which they have any sense of personal space. I gave up trying to sleep after being elbowed in the ribs by a 6 year old girl for the seventh or eighth time. Her father didn't help: this was clearly a custody transfer trip (it's his ex-wife's turn), and he wanted this to be Quality Time the whole way. His voice droned on all through the flight, reading to his daughter, helping her with math problems, playing games (educational, needless to day), reading again (this time some wretched story-book in which the Fibonacci series played a key role - almost as weird as that TV program "Numbers" last week, where the plot revolved around a failed attempt to prove Riemann's Hypothesis). My nice Bose noise-cancelling headphones do a good job of blocking out the noise of a 757's engines, but they were no match for this dutiful father's insistent voice. And on top of this there was a 4 year old behind me who relieved his obvious boredom by kicking my seat every so often.

Two technical notes. First, I find that I can read both my Sun email and my ISP mail through my Treo. This is very cool; I have only to sort out access to Gmail and I'm all set. I picked up both a case and an SD Card for the Treo today. (Memo: PalmOne asks $99 for a 512MB SD card; Fry's in Santa Clara had a 1GB SD card for $89. A gigabyte cellphone.... /me shakes head in disbelief) Secondly, this is the first trip for many years when I don't have my Mac (iBook or PowerBook); I'm using my Acer Ferrari running Solaris 10. I miss all my blogging tools, not to mention a decent PDF toolset. (I'm not impressed by the Gnome PDF viewer. Font substitution isn't that hard.)

Exhausted

Just got back from a day trip. Up at 4, head over to Logan, fly BOS-BWI on an American Eagle RJ, get rental car, drive to office park near DC for meeting. Then drive 90 miles up I-95 to Wilmington for another meeting. Drive from Wilmington to PHL, make good time, successfully switch to an earlier flight, eat, fly PHL-BOS on a US Air A320, and home by 10.

Driving up I-95 between DC and Philadelphia, I saw at least 25-30 state troopers from three different states, busy pulling people over. What's going on? If I saw that many Massachusetts State Police cruisers in one day, it would be because I'd driven past a police funeral...

The future of flying... :-)

Virgin A380 Floor Plans....

Seattle public library

This morning we visited the new Seattle Public Library building. It's an extraordinary, surprising and inspiring work of architecture. We took the strange, green-yellow escalators up to the reading room, and then walked down the spiral stacks structure, emerging into the stunning womblike meeting room level. Rather than posting any of the inadequate photos that I took, let me recommend that you check out the photo gallery and virtual tour at the Seattle Times' page.

Finally I set foot on Concorde...

We visited the Museum of Flight this morning. I was last there 4 or 5 years ago, I think, and it's grown significantly. The new Personal Courage Wing focusses on combat aviation of the two World Wars; a dreadful title, but a stunning exhibit. The section on World War One does a great job of relating the air action to the grinding, bloody mess that was trench warfare. (Too often the affairs of men like Bishop and von Richthofen, and machines like the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane, are portrayed as if in another world, unconnected with the slaughter below.)

There was an interesting presentation by two docents entitled Blackbird Tip-to-Tail, in which they described the history of the Lockheed Blackbird program and conducted a detailed walk-around of the unique M/D 21 variant in the Museum. How fast could that thing really go? It was designed for Mach 3.2-3.5, and according to the docents none of the pilots really pushed it beond that, even though they were only using 70% throttle at that speed. Despite rumours to the contrary, it was never actually taken to Mach 4 - nobody wanted to be the one to find the actual limits.

And then across the road from the main museum is the Airpark, with a Concorde, Air Force One (the VC-137B version of Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon), the first Boeing 747, and others. So after dreaming for years that one day I might get to fly in a Concorde, I finally got to walk through one....

(Click the thumbnails for the full-sized images.)

Back home from England

I just arrived back in Brookline, MA after flying from LHR to BOS. The flight was late, due mainly to fierce headwinds: we took an extremely northerly route, up to the southerly tip of Greenland (around 60N 45W) and then over to make landfall over central Labrador before heading SSW towards Boston.

On Saturday I drove my mother to visit some friends in south-east London; a gruelling drive through patchy freezing fog down the M40, round the M25, and up the A21. It didn't help that the rental car - a Fiat Uno - really sucked: the pedals were too far to the left and too close together. Not only did this mean that I occasionally caught the accelerator when I was braking; there was nowhere for me to rest my left foot, so I had to hover over the clutch or put my foot flat on the floor. (And the car had no torque, and the gear ratios were rubbish, necessitating more shifting than usual.) By the end of of the drive (2 hours each way), my left ankle was showing signs of unaccustomed fatigue.

We got back to Oxford about 7, and I was feeling desperately tired. However my brother and his wife were there, and we decided to try out a new Chinese restaurant for dinner, to see if it would revive me. That did the trick - even though sake doesn't really go with Chinese food! (Better with Cantonese than with other styles, I suspect.)

And to round off the evening, I stayed up to watch Match Of The Day and saw a thrilling game between Southampton and Middlesbrough. Southampton was 2-0 up as the match drew to a close, and it looked as if the hapless Saints (next to the bottom of the Premier league) were finally going to win against a strong opponent (currently 5th). Then in the 89th minute an inadvertant deflection from a corner (recorded as an own goal) made it 2-1, and seconds before the final whistle Downing thumped in a beautiful shot for Middlesbrough to snatch a draw.

Tarnished silver bird

As I noted, I flew on Friday night from BOS to LHR. The trip was probably the most uncomfortable I've done across the pond. First we got away 90 minutes late, because of a faulty spoiler indicator that had to be replaced. Then the seats proved to be too short in the leg, and the placement of the IFE [in-flight entertainment] equipment meant that even though the nominal pitch was reasonable it was imposible to get comfortable. And then the meal service was slow, and things were pretty bumpy from about 20W to the Irish coast. Bottom line: I got less than an hour's sleep. Not surprisingly I slept like I log on Saturday night - from about 6pm to 8am!

I'm posting this from the Sun office at 55 King William Street in the City of London, a few yards from The Monument (see right).

Silver bird

I'm off to England this evening for a week: AA108, BOS-LHR, 777-200. Here's a nice image from Airliners.net.

(I think this is the first time I've included third-party Javascript in a blog entry - I wonder how the RSS aggregators will handle it. UPDATE: It doesn't validate properly according to the W3C tools.)

Carmel Valley at dawn

Monday morning, just after dawn, click for 1600x1200 version.

Heading home

It's just after dawn here in Carmel Valley, CA. A cold night (around 30F), and a beautiful clear morning. Since Merry's parents have sold the house and are moving soon, this will be my final Carmel Valley morning. We're heading up to Santa Cruz (where Chris went to school at UCSC), then over 17 to San Jose to get a flight back to Boston. And (sigh) it looks as if the plane (AA 757) is going to be 100% full....

West coast travel

A synopsis of the last few days.... On Friday we flew from Boston to Seattle for a weekend with Chris and Celeste. On Saturday we drove down to Renton to ride the Spirit of Washington train over to the Columbia Winery for lunch. Then on Sunday we went up to the Joe Bar for coffee, swung by the cathedral to meet folks, and then after lunch went to the Seattle Art Museum to see the stunning exhibition on Spain in the Age of Exploration. We would have gone on to look at the other exhibitions in the museum, but a fire alarm put paid to that. (This is getting to be a habit.)

On Monday morning we flew down from Seattle to San Jose. The plan was that we should get to SJC around 10:30; then Merry would meet up with her parents and drive down to Carmel Valley, while I picked up a rental car and head up to Sun's Menlo Park campus for an important meeting. Initially things went thoroughly pear-shaped. First, we got a phone call from our alarm service saying that the burglar alarm had gone off, and that the police had been dispatched. Then Alaska Air delayed our flight from 8:14 to 9:35. (At least that gave me time to talk to the Brookline police and confirm that everything seemed to be OK at home.) The flight down the coast was OK, although the clouds obscured Mount St. Helens, and it was rather bumpy. And then when we reached San Jose the rendezvous with Merry's parents didn't work as planned. AARGH!! But eventually everything was sorted out, and I was able to phone in to the first 30 minutes of the meeting while driving up 101; the rest of the meeting went just fine.

A triangular route

We're about to depart on a typically complicated trip. This one involves flying to Seattle for the weekend, then going down to Silicon Valley for a couple of days (work - for me, anyway); then down the coast to Carmel Valley for Thanksgiving, and home via San Jose. And, mirabile dictu, all of the flights are non-stop.

Travel plans (slightly updated)

In a couple of weeks I'll be heading back to my birthplace for a Jini Community meeting. It should be a lot of fun....

Nit-pickers will notice that although the graphic shows West End tube stations, the the earlier, misleading graphic has been updated. The original version is still to be found on Jini.org. Graphics notwithstanding, Jini Community Meeting itself will be at The Brewery in the City of London, near Moorgate and the Barbican.

A channel 9 moment

I was flying home this evening on UAL994, IAD-BOS, B752. It was misty in Boston, with RVR fluctuating betwen 1500 and 5000; traffic was landing on 4L and departing on 9. We'd left PVD on the 070 radial to pick up the BOS 4L localizer, and at MILT we'd gone to BOS TWR and been cleared to land. Less than 2 miles out, at about 500 feet, I heard the following exchange on channel 9:

BOS TWR: Eagle Flight 538, cancel takeoff.
Perplexed voice: Er... Eagle Flight 538 is in the air!
BOS TWR: OK, I must have confused you with... Eagle Flight 538, contact departure.

[With apologies to those who don't grok aviation jargon.]

Frustration and optimism

Collective frustration and optimism for a bunch of Sun engineers, marketeers, and managers is....

We're at a week-long workshop held in a secure facility, which means no network connections, WiFi, etc. So we all book into the same hotel (so we can share cars), and we obviously pick a hotel that proudly advertises free Internet access. And then the hotel WiFi goes out... for several days. The poor desk clerk, who has no control of things, gets harrassed by all and sundry. Just now, in sheer desperation, a colleague and I walked to another hotel just down the road and paid $10 each to get a few hours of our "drug of choice" - pure WiFi Internet, served straight up, no chaser.

Although it has been an occasionally frustrating week (bad weather, no opportunity to visit the city, not even a quick look around the Air and Space Museum, though we drive past it twice a day), overall I have to say that it's been a very productive one. It's always good to get a chance to work closely with colleagues from California, Colorado, New Hampshire, and England, whom I usually encounter as disembodied voices on a phone conference. As usual, the challenge is going to be sustaining the team commitment and energy after we all head home and have to work with out different organizations, with colleagues who haven't been a part of this workshop. Nonetheless I'm very optimistic about this particular initiative. We'll see. Kudos to my colleagues Brian Wong and Mary Vanleer....

Getting to Washington (or rather to Chantilly)

Yes, I'm here - so yes, the hotel WiFi works. But the journey was interesting. The flight was United 861, a routine 415 mile hop in a Boeing 757 from BOS to IAD. I checked in online from home, and managed to swap my middle seat for a window - 30A. Boarding was uneventful, though the flight was absolutely full.. The pushback was delayed slightly, and the captain came on the PA to explain that there were aircraft in the "alley" blocking us in; he also mentioned that "radio communications are available on Channel 9". (This is my favourite thing about United - if corporate policy permitted, I'd only fly on United, just to listen to ATC on channel 9. But anyway....)

A minute or two later the aircraft was pushed back, and as it was, there was an audible bump. We stopped, and suddenly channel 9 switched from radio to muzak. Hmmm.... We sat there for about 15 minutes. Eventually the captain announced that during the push-back "the push bar had been bent", and he was "having a maintenance engineer check it out." After a further delay, we taxied out, and normal channel 9 was resumed. Obviously we'd missed our "slot" into IAD, so we were held at the "Bravo hold point" until the top of the hour (0000Z) before we were allowed to take off. (We also switched our call-sign - from "United 861" to "United 8143" - to reflect the fact that we'd had to file a new flight plan.) The flight was uneventful, and so was the landing, though I must admit I held my breath as the nose gear hit the tarmac and reverse thrust came on. We were about 30 minutes late.

In the "mobile lounge" that transports passengers between terminal C and the main building I caught up with the captain of our flight and chatted to him about the incident at Boston. What had actually happened was that during pushback the tug driver turned a bit too sharply, and rather than the tow bar steering the nose gear, it popped off the lugs on either side on the gear. "The tug driver isn't an engineer," said the captain, "and I wanted someone to take a look at it to make sure that it hadn't damaged anything." We talked about what it might have hit, and agreed that "it's better to fix these things on the ground - they're a bitch to repair in-flight!" Various aviation geek stories ensued. "I notice you turned off channel 9 when it happened," I said, and we discussed the fine balance between keeping people informed and alarming them unnecessarily.

So overall it was an very enjoyable flight, more interesting than most.

P.S. Chantilly is the Virginia community occupied by Dulles airport; it's also where my hotel is. Of course I take this on trust; the hotel is indistinguishable from thousands of others across North America (and now, sadly across Europe too).

From Hub to Capitol

Time for another trip: I'm heading out of here to fly down to Washington DC for a week's seminar/workshop/training. (Categories blur.) I'm going to be in a hotel close to Dulles airport, working in an office close to Dulles airport, and I'm not renting a car, so who knows if I'll have any time to get into the city? Last time I was there I went to a really cool Ethiopian restaurant not far from Dupont Circle....

And yes, the hotel has WiFi. So I'll be blogging.

More Ogunquit pictures

As requested... a few more pictures from my trip up to Ogunquit, ME can be found here. Click on the thumbnails... you know the drill. Enjoy.