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.)

New England washout

This has been one of the wettest weeks I’ve known in New England. It’s true that it’s relatively insignificant compared to the hurricanes, mudslides, and earthquakes that have afflicted the world in recent months. However in a region not used to such things, the effect has been dramatic. Here in the metropolitan Boston area we’ve been spared the worst of it, but in western Massachusetts and southern Vermont and New Hampshire the flooding has been dramatic, severe and fatal. See Kimberley’s blog for more (with photo). stormtotal.jpg

The accompanying image makes the point dramatically. (Click for a larger image.) It’s the storm total precipitation from the local National Weather Service office. The data is approximate; it’s estimated from the Doppler radar returns, and tends to understate the local maxima. What’s interesting is the date range: this shows “Precipitation totals since 12:44 AM EDT Fri Oct 7th 2005”. We’re talking about a more or less continuous rain event lasting six-and-a-half days so far… and it’s not supposed to wind down until Saturday afternoon.

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….

Alexander Hamilton on Harriet Miers

Andrew Sullivan has dug up a wonderful passage by Alexander Hamilton from the Federalist Papers (no.76). Hamilton’s subject: the role of the Senate in confirming Presidential appointments:

“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”

Read the whole thing. As Sully points out, “Someone who needs a ‘crash course’ on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice”.

From 17th to 1st

I went to bed early to get a few hours sleep before getting up to watch the Japanese Grand Prix in the middle of the night. It was definitely worth it: it was a thrilling race, with an inspired performance by Raikkonen in the McLaren. The TV coverage of the final battle between Fisichella and Raikkonen was great, enhanced by side-by-side telemetry readout of brake and throttle from both drivers at the bottom of the screen.

It was fascinating from a technical point of view. The McLaren is almost perfect, but it has one weakness: the front wing tends to be slightly less effective under asymmetric airflow, so when it’s following another car closely the front end can lose grip. The effect is small, but it shows up quite clearly from the in-car camera. The result was that Raikkonen took a long time getting around Michael Schumacher, and was unable to overtake Mark Webber until the Williams driver pitted. Without those delays, the final dual wouldn’t have been necessary: Raikkonen would have been long gone. (After the last pit stop he was hauling in Fisichella at better than a second a lap!)

(So much for those who think that there’s no passing in Formula One!)

"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.)

Why the Miers nomination is an admission of the failure of conservatism

Here’s an excellent piece by Cenk Uygur on why the nomination of Miers represents the recognition that, at some deep level, the American people don’t agree with the conservative movement:

“Name one liberal or moderate judge who has ever been rejected from the Supreme Court because they were outside the American mainstream. There aren’t any. I suppose a judge could be too liberal for the Supreme Court, but no one has even approached this theoretical barrier. On the other hand, Republican presidents play hide and go seek with their nominee’s points of view on a consistent basis because they are afraid Americans will be scared off by what they really believe.”

(Via HuffPo.)