A strange (but productive) day trip to Munich

As part of the “work” portion of this “family+work” trip to the UK, I was scheduled to do a business trip to Munich on Thursday. We’ve been staying at the Jury’s Inn close to the end of runway 27L at Heathrow, so getting in to the airport for my 6:05am flight was simple: walk across to Hatton Cross station and take the free all-night bus. Check-in was fine, ditto boarding, but then we sat at the gate for 20 minutes before we pushed back. En route to Munich, the pilot advised us that snow in the Munich area might delay things, and our approach pattern seemed to take us all over Bavaria. We parked at a remote stand, and were bussed in to the terminal, so by the time I emerged from the terminal at 9:30am I was half an hour late. Good start.
The meeting had been scheduled for 10-12. based on Google Maps estimate of a 45 minute taxi ride, plus 15 minutes for contingencies, so I jumped into the first taxi, gave the driver the address, and settled down to SMS my colleague and host that I would be late. It was snowing, but we swung onto the autobahn and were soon zipping along at typical German speeds. And then we hit a wall of red brake lights. From the chatter on the car radio, it was clear that there were numerous snow-related accidents and traffic jams around the city. My driver muttered, and then snarled, and then cut across three lanes of traffic to take an exit onto a minor road. I got used to the muttering, but the snarling became worse as we went on. It wasn’t snowing hard, but there was considerable slush even on main roads, and progress was slow. In fact it took 75 minutes to reach the destination: it was now 10:45.
I handed the driver a credit card for the 70 Euro fare. More snarling, and rummaging, and an old paper swipe machine was produced. He positioned my card, inserted the slip, swiped the slider, and ripped the slip. More snarling. Repeat. Same result. Repeat. Intense snarling.
I didn’t have 70 Euros. In fact I hadn’t bothered to get any Euros – taxis all take credit cards, right? So using the currency converter app on my iPhone, I calculated an equivalent amount in GBP and USD, demonstrated this to the driver, gave him the money, snatched a receipt, and exited as quickly as I could.
It was now 10:50am, but the others had waited patiently. Juice and coffee was distributed, and we started the meeting. It was very productive, and although a couple of people had to leave early we kept talking until around 3:00. They called me a cab (with “takes credit cards” clearly specified), and I headed back to Munich airport.
At this point I realized that I was ravenously hungry. I’d had some breakfast at 4:30am (5:30 CET), but nothing since. So when we reached the airport, I quickly verified that I couldn’t switch to an earlier flight (no way – the change fee would have been almost the same as the full fare!), and then found a restaurant and had a good early supper. At 6:30pm I headed over to the gate, to find that boarding was delayed “due to late arrival blah blah blah”. Yeah, whatever. Eventually we were bussed out to the stand, and boarded the A320. LH had screwed up, and allocated two passengers to 14F, but the flight wasn’t very full, so neither of us minded. And then we were told that there was a minor fault with a communications system, and the mechanics were working on it… But eventually we were airborne.
When I had left Heathrow, the weather had been cold (29F) and clear, and I didn’t expect anything different. Was I in for a shock! During the day a windy snowstorm had moved in, and as we descended towards LHR the ride became very bumpy. We were landing on 09L, and coming over Windsor the Airbus was bouncing around like a bronco. It was the kind of approach where passengers glance at each other, quizzically: “Is this going to turn OK? Should I be worried?” My guess is that we had crosswinds of around 15 gusting 30 out of the north, and the landing was hard and off-balance. But we got in OK.
I got the bus back to Hatton Cross and walked the five minutes to the hotel. By the time I got there, the front of my jacket was encrusted with an inch of wet snow. Snow in the morning, snow in the evening. What a day.

Why fly United?

The other day, a friend was asking about our upcoming trip to the UK. She had flown BOS-LHR and SFO-BOS, and was puzzled why the flight time for SFO-LHR was so much less than the sum of those two flights. She was introduced to the concept of “great circle” routes, and the fact that the the great circle from SFO is 5,367 miles, and takes you up over northern Canada, while SFO-BOS-LHR is more than 600 miles longer, at 5,969 miles.
Imagine our chagrin last Monday, when UA 930 from SFO to LHR flew almost straight to BOS, and then took a southerly track to LHR, making landfall at the SW tip of Ireland. Total distance flown was 6,050 miles, and we were still 20 minutes early. (And would have been even earlier except for the now-routine hold at Ockham before descending to LHR.) The reason: tail winds of up to 170 MPH, giving us some of the highest ground speeds I’ve ever experienced.
But enough of the good stuff. I want to consider United. Specifically, why the hell would anyone want to fly United?
First, the good points.

  • Economy Plus. Legroom is (almost) everything.
  • Star Alliance is still the best of the alliances to accumulate frequent flier miles.
  • Channel 9. Crack cocaine for the ATC junky.

But do these plusses really make up for all of the minuses?

  • Price. Internationally, UA is rarely the cheapest option. On SFO-HKG, everyone undercuts them.
  • IFE. The 777 we flew on had tiny seat-back screens that were invisible when the seat in front was reclined, but since there were only a handle of uninteresting video channels this was no great loss. Video on demand? Hah! And some of the long-haul fleet still have 80s-vintage overhead TV monitors.
  • Food service. On our flight they advertised dinner and breakfast. With a 7pm departure, we figured (correctly) that the meal service wouldn’t begin before 8:15, so we ate before boarding and skipped dinner. “Breakfast” was a small, dried-up ham-and-cheese roll wrapped in aluminium foil and a sickly-sweet yoghurt. No tray. Juice and coffee, but no time for refills.
  • Beverages? If you want alcohol, that will be $6. Only in America…
  • Seats? Well, United hasn’t adopted the “shell seating” torture device that CX is now using, but in other respects the seats are pretty bad. They feel, well, worn out.
  • Attentive flight attendants? Not on this flight. Unprofessional, sloppy, clumsy, inattentive… and hardly any offers of drinking water, even though the humidity was set really low.
  • The Red Carpet Club? OK, the SFO International RCC isn’t bad, as RCCs go, but it still doesn’t measure up to the HKG RCC or any of Air Canada’s Maple Leaf lounges.

It’s interesting to note that on the Transpacific routes the United service is quite a bit better. They now have hot breakfast, free booze, decent lounges, and cabin crew who actually pay attention. IFE? Well, that requires investment. But why does the Transatlantic customer get shafted? Complaints (or lack thereof) from code-share partners, perhaps? Who knows….
So why do I continue to abuse myself? Is it really all about Channel 9?

What a week!

It’s been quite a week. Last Monday we flew to the UK, intending to visit my mother, Lorna Arnold, in Oxford and attend the ceremony at which she was to receive an honorary doctorate. It soon became apparent that she wasn’t going to be well enough to leave hospital for the occasion, so on Saturday I attended the ceremony on her behalf and accepted her D.Litt. scroll from the Vice Chancellor of Reading University.
After the event, there was a lunch with a couple of dozen distinguished guests – academics, scientists, MoD, and writers. Obviously they had expected to hear a speech from my mother, so on Thursday I had taken my camcorder to the hospital and recorded a short message from my mother to her friends. At the lunch, I simply held up my laptop and played back the video clip. Then I made a few remarks of my own. I hadn’t prepared anything, and I can’t really remember what I said, but it seemed to be well received. After lunch, we headed back to the hospital in Abingdon to give the scroll (and photos and DVD of the event) to my mother.
Yesterday we left Oxford and headed over to Cambridge. We hadn’t got any firm plans – the previous week had been so ad hoc that planning had been the last thing on our minds. On a whim, we decided to overshoot Cambridge and go on to Ely, where we spent a happy couple of hours exploring the Cathedral. The experience was enhanced by the fact that the choirboys were rehearsing for a concert.
So now we’re in Cambridge, at the Best Western Gonville. It’s a great hotel, unlike any other Best Western I’ve stayed at. Today I have meetings in Cambridge, and then tomorrow we’ll catch up with some family members en route to Ipswich.

One more trip to round out the year

After three visits in a row to China, the final trip this year will be to the UK. We’re heading over next Monday, December 7, for two weeks. We’ll be in Oxford for the first 6 days, visiting my mother and seeing friends. Lorna is being honored by the University of Reading on the 12th, when she will receive an honorary Ph.D. for her contributions to the history of science. I’m really looking forward to this.
The second week is going to be mostly work: meetings with a technology partner in Cambridge, and customer visits in the UK and Germany. We’re still working on the detailed logistics, but we’ll probably stay near Heathrow for a few days so that I can do the German leg as a day trip. After one more weekend in England, we’ll fly back to the US on Monday 21st.
(At some point, I’ll have to add up all of the miles I flew this year. It’s been… busy.)

Spelunking CPUs

As the masthead on my blog says, I’m a Mac lover. I’ve used pretty much only Macs since those days in the 1990s when I was working on hush-hush corporate collaboration schemes between Sun and Apple. Of course at both Amazon.com and Huawei I’ve been required to use Windows laptops for corporate stuff – locked-down beasts, centrally managed, with Microsoft Outlook and all of the trappings of the Redmond monoculture. But I always had Macs for my personal use.
Then I bought my little netbook, an Asus EeePC. OK, that doesn’t really count – it’s like that smartphone that I used to have, which ran Windows Mobile. And pretty soon I replaced Windows XP on the netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix. so cosmic balance was restored.
But this week, I decided that I needed a machine for hacking. Something to play with Xen and Eucalyptus and Open Nebula and all of the cool Cloud stuff that’s coming down. Something to write a little Groovy on. And not a big developer workstation, but something I could take along with me on my travels.
Wouldn’t the netbook do? Not really. I had this idea that I could set up a dual boot configuration in which I could either run Ubuntu to do my coding, or start in Xen and load several VMs to let me simulate a network configuration. Perhaps I could combine them: do my coding in a guest VM under Xen, build a new OVF package on the fly, and launch it in a new VM. In any case, I’d really need a multicore CPU with a decent amount of RAM, and enough disk to manage a number of guest OS images. And ideally the CPU should support virtualization, just for efficiency. But I didn’t want to spend a lot of money: blowing over $1200 for a MacBook was not an option.

So I spent an evening at Fry’s and Best Buy, looking at my choices. There were plenty of really cool, and amazingly cheap, laptops. But the frustrating thing was trying to find one with CPU virtualization. There are so many different Intel and AMD CPUs out there, and even though there are only a few brand names – Core Solo, Core Duo, Athlon, and so on – the different model numbers hide a vast divergence in capabilities. Fortunately I had my iPhone handy, and I quickly got into the rhythm of checking the “System” Control Panel info on each unit and then searching the web for chip features. I found Ed Bott’s useful table, but that came out in May, and by now there were several new chips. I started to see a pattern – most cheap Intel chips did not have virtualization, while all AMD CPUs did. That lasted for a while until I bumped in to the AMD Athlon Neo, which doesn’t have virtualization. Sh!t…
The other thing that I noticed was that over the last 18 months or so the AMD:Intel ratio has shifted decisively in favour of Intel. There were relatively few AMD-powered laptops around, and even fewer in the thin-and-light category. Market forces, or market distortion? Hmmm.
Eventually I found what I was looking for at Best Buy: an HP dv4-2045dx with an AMD Turion II (dual-core M500 at 2.2GHz), a 14.1″ screen, 4GB RAM (expandable to 8GB), and a 320GB HD. Yes, the battery life isn’t all that great, and it’s a bit too thick, and the swoopy-dots-on-white design makes it look as if it’s been keyed in the parking lot, but otherwise it’s perfect. And at $575, it was almost exactly half the price of a 13″ Apple MacBook Pro.
Yes, it’s a Windows machine. Or it was – I just loaded Ubuntu 9.10 onto it… Next step, Xen.
Did I really need to go through all of that? And what about non-geeks? After all, Windows 7 requires hardware virtualization in order to run Windows XP mode. There are plenty of stories surfacing of frustrated PC customers who find that they can’t run some favourite application on their brand new Windows 7 machine. If it was so much work for me, how could the average buyer be expected to get it right? Microsoft really screwed up on this one – and Intel too, I think.

Heading back home after a month in China

So we’re at Hong Kong airport, waiting to board our flight back to Vancouver, and thence to San Francisco. Originally it was a 2 week trip, but we extended it to a full month. It’s been a good, productive trip, but I’m glad to be heading back. On the ferry from Shenzhen Shekou, Kate and I were comparing notes on the things that we’re looking forward to. Clean air is high on the list for both of us, we’ve got mild coughs from the ubiquitous dust and pollution. Quiet will be nice; China is a very noisy place. A nice glass of wine together with a chicken Caesar salad is on my list; I enjoy the food here, but I eat a lot of meat and fish, often cooked in hot oil, as well as noodles and dumplings. And while light lager beer is ok, I would prefer something with more body than Tsing Tao.
But now we face 12 hours of sleep, movies, and eating, followed by a 5 hour layover, followed by a puddle-jumper down the coast. See you on the other side.

Hong Kong, multi-modal

Despite the fact that Hong Kong is now part of China, it is still a separate country for many purposes. You need to pass through customs and immigration to go from one to the other, and you need a visa which will permit this. Even Chinese mainland residents need a visa to go to Hong Kong. Overseas visitors to China can only visit Hong Kong if their China visa is of the “multiple entry” type, because a day trip to Hong Kong counts as leaving and re-entering China.
Both Kate and I had multiple-entry visas, and so the main question about going to Hong Kong was “how?”. In the event, when we returned to our hotel after 11-1/2 hours, we’d covered many different modes of transport:

  1. Taxi from the hotel in Shenzhen to Shekou ferry terminal.
  2. Hydrofoil ferry from Shekou to Hong Kong.
  3. Escalator up the hill through SoHo.
  4. Walking along Caine Street to the Peak Tram terminal.
  5. Funicular (the Peak Tram”) up to the Peak overlooking Hong Kong Harbour.
  6. Funicular down from the Peak.
  7. Open-top double-decker bus to Central Station.
  8. Ferry from Central Pier to Hung Hon.
  9. Taxi to Hung Hon station (which is much farther away from the pier than it looked on the map!)
  10. Train from Hung Hon to Lo Wu (Luoho).
  11. Taxi from the gargantuan station and border crossing at Lo Wu to the hotel.

When we arrived at The Peak it was drizzling, so we grabbed two seats outside the bar and sipped our drinks. I had a Singapore Sling, which seemed appropriately tropical. By the time we left, it had cleared up nicely. On the ride down from the Peak, I grabbed my iPhone and fired up the “iHandy Level” app, so that we could measure the maximum inclination of the tram during our descent. Most of the way it registered between 5 and 15 degrees, but there was one patch where it was over 25 degrees, peaking at 27. That’s intense.
Eventually we made our way to the Central Pier, and had a light meal in the rooftop cafe while the sun set and the Hong Kong skyline lit up in neon splendour. Then we took the ferry across to Kowloon, which gave us a great opportunity to see both Hong Kong and Kowloon from the water. At this point our lack of preparation showed through. The tourist map we were using (free, and worth every etcetera) showed Hung Hon train station to be fairly close to the pier, so we started walking. After a few minutes, we came upon a helpful signpost pointing out various local attractions and the walking time to each. It included the station – 20+ minutes. We found a taxi. From then it was fairly straightforward: a 40 minute train ride, then emigration, immigration, and a taxi ride back.
So obviously the most efficient way to go to Hong Kong is by train. They run every five minutes, whereas there are only six ferry sailings a day. On the other hand, the ferry puts you right in the heart of Hong Kong, while by train it takes two changes to get to the same point. And we wouldn’t have missed the ferry for anything: we saw so much of the harbor and the islands around Hong Kong. So this all worked out very nicely.
A few final thoughts. Shenzhen is a huge, rich, and vibrant city, but Hong Kong is an historic, wealthy, world-class city. We both want to return, to really explore and get to know it. I can see why expats fall in love with the place. And my feelings are only slightly coloured by the fact that in Hong Kong they drive on the correct (i.e. left) side of the road, and have wonderful old tramcars whizzing along Des Voeux Road.
And once again we were staggered by the scale of China. A couple of examples: I’ve seen the ports of Long Beach, and Vancouver, and Rotterdam, but they are puny compared with Hong Kong. I have never witnessed so many ships of all sizes buzzing around so purposively, so many cranes, so many containers. And when we left the train station at Lo Wu, the entrance hall was larger than the concourse of many airports. We went to get a taxi, and lined up for one of 8+ slots. Every 30 seconds, taxis would fill those slots, passengers would board, and the taxis would depart, to be immediately replaced by 8 more. Then 8 more. And 8 more. Nobody missed a beat.
UPDATE: Kate’s comments are here. She reminds me of one of the strangest features of our visit: the women. Everywhere we went, the elevated walkways were full of women. Thousands of them. Groups of 3-12 women, sitting around together, eating, talking, playing cards, painting fingernails, bartering things, surfing the web, gossiping, doing each others hair, or just hanging out. One or two men, some children, but 99% women. We saw them when we arrived at noon, and six hours later they were still there. Some special Sunday Hong Kong tradition? Curious…..

Catching up

I’ve let my social networking – blogging, FaceBook, Twittering, whatever – slide over recent weeks. Mostly it’s because of the sheer frenzy of life, but the Great Firewall blocking Twitter and FaceBook doesn’t help. So let me recap a bit.
Three weeks ago my team and I came out to Shenzhen for two weeks of meetings: architecture, planning, face-to-face time with opposite numbers, and so on. We made good progress – so good, in fact, that my boss asked if I could stay on for an extra two weeks to take advantage of the momentum we’d achieved. Naturally neither Kate nor I were too happy about this, and my first reaction was to say “no”. But then Kate came up with a creative solution. Last Saturday, the rest of my team headed back to the US, and I moved to a downtown hotel, more convenient for shopping and sightseeing. The next day, Kate arrived to spent the extra two weeks with me, having reorganized a bunch of commitments and getting a China visa in record time. And here we are.
During the week, I’ve been working flat out, so Kate’s been checking out the city. She’s photographed and blogged about her explorations, and she’s seen a lot more of Shenzhen than I have. And then this weekend I set work aside, and we planned to have some fun together. On Saturday, we went off with some friends and colleagues for a “team building” in a mountainous area just to the north-east of Shenzhen. The team-building was interesting, the Chinese-style barbecue (small self-organized collectives) was tasty, and the landscape was arcadian though a bit run down. It was a bit of a “magical mystery tour”, with the usual results.
And then on Sunday we went to Hong Kong. That deserves a post of its own.
We’re here until the 14th, when we fly back to the US. We won’t be there long, though: on December 7 we’re flying to England for a mix of family and business activities. That will take us up to December 21, and we’ll be home for Christmas.
UPDATED to correct several misrepresentations.