Author: geoff

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….

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….

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.

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.]

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.]

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.]

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.

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!