Category: Photos

I’ve added a few photos to my album. First there are a few of Tommy visiting on Friday. Then we discovered an interesting conservation area, the Leatherbee Memorial Woods, not far from where we live, and spent some time exploring it today. We found one wild Lady Slipper in bloom; we suspect that visitors may have “collected” others….

On Tuesday evening the rain subsided and the sun came out around 7pm. We walked around the block, and I took a few pictures, including this one of the Boston skyline. I love those clouds….

(There’s also a zoomed version of that shot: at full resolution, you can read the PRUDENTIAL at the top of the tower….)

One of the delights of working in SunLabs some years ago was the location of their headquarters: a building in Mountain View called MTV29. Behind the building was a parking lot, and beyond that was a complex of paths through the salt marshes along the National Seashore. It was – and is – a wonderful place to take a short break from work, and enjoy the landscape and wildlife.
Well, SunLabs quit MTV29 a year ago; it’s now housed in the Menlo Park campus. But the seashore paths are still there, and this morning I spent a happy 90 minutes revisiting the area. You can see the photographs that I took here.

I’ve posted a selection of photos from last week’s trip to England. Among the highlights:

• A BA 767 1,000 ft. below us in the stack at Ockham
• Rabbits (or are they hares?) outside a butcher’s shop in the Covered Market in Oxford
• The Varsity (Oxford vs. Cambridge) ice hockey match
• The “Alison Lapper: Pregnant” sculpture in Trafalgar Square
• Somerset House
• The Millennium Bridge over the Thames
• The Thames as a working river

Enjoy.

As promised, here are a couple of pictures to show both the snowfall from yesterday and the zoom of my new camera. Both shots used “Scene: snow” mode; I have no idea why a useless “compulsory flash” kicked in on the second one.

As you may have noticed, I like to take photos of airliners, airports, and stuff like that. Fortunately I haven’t personally encountered the “cheap prose of patriotic convenience” that Patrick Smith writes about in Salon today – but it feels as if it’s only a matter of time. After Smith had twice been harrassed by clueless security staff for taking pictures at airports, he…

… presented the issue to Phil Orlandella, the media relations director for Boston’s Logan International Airport. As the departure point for both of the 767s that hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, Logan’s security procedures came under intense scrutiny in the weeks that followed. Orlandella’s office sits off a corridor between Terminals B and C, and he’s been intimate with all all things Logan for more than a quarter century.
“Who controls security, TSA or the local police?” he says. “They both do, it’s that simple. And no, it’s not against any rules to take pictures, inside or outside, period. If anyone tells you otherwise, that’s a bunch of baloney.”

I think I’ll carry a copy of this piece with me when I travel… just in case some officious goon tries to tell me that I can’t take photographs because “we live in a different world now”.

I’ve posted most of my photos from Sunday in my gallery. It took long enough to upload them; I haven’t done anything about captions yet. (Nor have I edited out the less successful images!)
Enjoy.

Black kites (Milvus migrans) seem to be everywhere in India. Whenever you look up, you’ll see several of them, lazily circling, looking for scavenging opportunities. They are as ubiquitous as pigeons or sparrows in England.
This afternoon I was looking out from my 5th floor hotel room, trying unsuccessfully to take a few photographs of the kites that occasionally swept past my window. As I was about to give up, I noticed that half a dozen of them were getting agitated about something in the river that flows past the hotel. I decided to try my luck photographing them from the bridge.
By the time I got down to the bridge, the kites had moved on (of course). However I did get a few pictures of kites, and also of the small herons that hang out on the trash in the foul-smelling river. And here’s a 2.1MB QuickTime clip of kites soaring.

I spent most of the day at a “Thriving@Sun” session for some of the ex-SeeBeyond staff in Hyderabad. It was good to have the opportunity to work with the HR and SunU representatives in India, and it was delightful to renew ties with many of the staff I’d met in October. Only about a third of the team were at the session – the others had attended earlier sessions – and to those that I didn’t get to meet this time around I offer my apologies; I’ll be back as soon as I can.
During the break before my talk, I left iPhoto displaying a slideshow of pictures from the welcoming party. I posted a few of them on my blog back in October, but for those who asked I’ve now uploaded all 22 of them into my Photo Gallery.
The flight back to Bangalore was delayed for a while; the incoming aircraft was late, and then we sat on a taxiway for an ATC-imposed hold. Once again there was a hot meal. Did I mention before that on Jet Airways the food is served with metal cutlery and a starched cotton napkin, folded perfectly and secured with a decorative silk cord? In economy?? (I positively swoon at the thought of what they must do for business class.) And after the trays had been cleared away, we started our descent with a pitch-over that must have “unloaded” us by 0.5G. I expected the first officer to announce that “we’ve started our dive into Bangalore”. Very impressive.

I’ve uploaded some pictures of my journey from Boston to Bangalore to my photo gallery. As I pointed out, Lufthansa feels like an early 1990s airline. They tend to focus on the First and Business class customers, with features like in-flight Internet access. I’d have loved to try this, but there’s no way I can get out my laptop and use it in a full cabin of 32-inch pitch coach seating. Lufthansa doesn’t seem to be interested in competing for the economy passenger. For example, they are way behind the competition – BA, Virgin, Jet Airways – in in-flight entertainment (IFE) for economy passengers. LH, BA and VA all bought 744s at the same time, but BA and VA have aggressively updated their economy seating to incorporate the latest technology (video on demand, games, etc.). Moreover it’s not just a question of the age of the fleet: LH’s newest A330-300 and A340-600 aircraft also lack individual IFE in economy.

Is there any point in competing for coach? Clearly LH doesn’t have the kind of cost structure to complete with newcomers like Jet. On the other hand, both BA and Virgin have recognized that there’s a market for a Premium Economy product positioned between business class and economy. Many companies (including Sun) will only pay for economy, and I can’t afford to pay for an upgrade to business class with all the trimmings. However I’m happy to pay a few bucks to get a slightly bigger seat with a few inches of extra legroom, and I’ve done so on several occasions.
The bottom line is that LH feels very much like an old-style quasi-monopolistic flag carrier. For economy traffic between European cities and long-haul destinations, and between North America and South Asia, they have a fabulous hub in Frankfurt (see my itinerary) and a tolerable price point. They don’t think they need to do anything else to compete, so they concentrate on the premium traffic where they are competing against service-centric carriers like Singapore and Thai. (No US carriers offer any real competition any more.)
So why do I fly them? Convenience, and Star Alliance. (Most of my LH flights were purchased as UA codeshares.) But I still hope that some enterprising carrier will put A340-500s or (eventually) B777-200LRs on non-stops from the north-eastern US to India. (BOS to BLR is 8,139 nm; the A345 can do over 9,000.) I’d switch in a heartbeat.