Jet lag?

I’m taking a “jet lag recovery” day from work, and thinking about why I feel more woozy than I expected after this trip. Obviously the fact that I couldn’t sleep on the FRA-SEA leg didn’t help, but there’s more to it than that. ((UPDATE: Merry points out that my having been really sick on Tuesday could be a factor. Doh!!)) It occurs to me that this was my fourth visit to India, but on each of the previous occasions I stopped off in Europe for at least a day on the way back.

  • In October 2005, I returned via England, and dropped in on the Tarantella team in Leeds.
  • In January 2006, I flew to Frankfurt, backtracked to Prague, and visited Sun’s NetBeans group before flying on to Denver.
  • And earlier this year I broke my journey in England and spent a day with my mother in Oxford. (Of course that last itinerary was westwards round-the-world, and I found it much less stressful.)

Worth thinking about for next time.

Weird anomaly, and a query

Four flights on four Lufthansa aircraft (two A340-600, two A330-300). On each approach, as the landing gear was lowered, the IFE (in-flight entertainment system) would spontaneously reset, and present you with the “Wilkommen/Welcome” screen. If you were trying to follow the approach on the airshow page, you would have to navigate through the language selection and menu pages to get back to it. Why?
And a query: who cares about the “outside temperature” information on the airshow? I mean, at FL320 and up it’s going to be around -56F, innit? Really useful. Why can’t we have a “Pro Airshow” option, with the really interesting stuff like mach number, airspeed, heading, wind, FL, VS, and so forth? No need to make it multilingual, since English is the standard language for this stuff, and it’s mostly symbolic/numeric anyway. Overlay it on a moving map, give the user zoom control, etc.
By the way, our route from Chennai to Frankfurt this morning was interesting. NW across India to the Indian Ocean, up the coast to Pakistan, then straight across Pakistan and Iran towards the southern tip of the Caspian Sea, then west to the Turkish border, pretty much avoiding Iraqi airspace. Cool.

MAA-FRA routing on Airshow
MAA-FRA routing on Airshow

Back in Seattle, bruised but unbowed

I landed at SeaTac just before 1pm, after about 24 hours of travelling from Chennai. The first leg, from Chennai to Frankfurt, was on one of Lufthansa’s two-class A340-600‘s, with a huge business class section (66 seats!), and I had no difficulty in getting upgraded. However business class on the A330-300 that operates the FRA-SEA leg was sold out, so I wound up near the back of economy. I had an aisle seat (44D), and 44E was occupied by a nervous and fidgety woman from Romania with no English, no sense of personal space, and exceedingly sharp elbows. It was a long and uncomfortable flight, and my mood was not improved by the long lines at both Immigration and Customs in Seattle.
One thing worth noting was that even in economy class, LH served two hot meals with unlimited soft and alcoholic drinks during the 9+ hour flight from FRA to SEA. This at the same time that United is reportedly exploring the possibility of charging for food on intercontinental flights. (They already charge for alcoholic beverages in economy.) If they do this, it will simply reinforce my preference to avoid flying on United long-haul. Mind you, I’ll still buy UA tickets, and upgrades, but only if the flights involved are code-shares with other carriers. ((But could the whole concept of code-sharing be threatened by moves like United’s? If you were a Lufthansa executive, would you really want to sell a Lufthansa flight which was actually operated by United? Wouldn’t the inferior United product diminish the value of your brand?))
While in Frankfurt, I poked around the duty free shops, and came across an Islay single malt that I hadn’t encountered before: Caol Ila. I figured that the chances of finding it in a Washington State Liquor Store were close to zero, and so I decided to treat myself to a litre of the 12 year old, reviewed here. I’ll let you know what I think when I finally open it.

Good news, bad news dept.

The good news: I was able to find an Indian cable TV channel that carries Formula 1 races live, so I’m able to watch the Hungarian Grand Prix live today.
The bad news: the channel is ESPN Star Sports, which has two of the most incompetent commentators I’ve ever heard. I think that the chief fool is a guy called Steve Slater, working with a straight man called Steve Dawson. Almost every technical observation that he makes – from the fuel rig problems to Adrian Sutil’s “shattered brake disc” – is simply silly.
Fortunately I’ve programmed my DVR to record the US broadcast, so when I get home I can listen to a competent team of commentators (especially the irrepressible David Hobbs).
And the race? Well, it was quite interesting until Hamilton’s left front tyre failed. (And the way Slater reacted to this event was monumentally clueless.) After that, the only question was whether Glock could hold off Raikkonen for third place.
And now Massa has just blown up! Slater’s asinine comment: “And now that podium will remain empty!” Sheesh! Anyone remember Colemanballs? And so Kovalainen gets his first win, while Glock nails P2 after Raikkonen backed off. Hamilton comes in 5th, and retains the championship lead by 5 points over Raikkonen; Massa drops to third.
UPDATE: The biggest upset from this race was in the Constructors Championship. Ferrari stay in the lead on 111 points, while McLaren jump to second with 100, leaving BMW in the dust.

Just got back from Mamallapuram

A bunch of Seattle Amazonians, including my boss Colin Bodell and yours truly, found ourselves in the Asiana Hotel in Chennai this weekend, and decided to play tourist.

Colin and Geoff under Krishnas Butterball
Colin and Geoff under Krishna's Butterball
We got a driver to take us down the coast to Mamallapuram, a town 60km south of Chennai. It’s famous for its stone carvings and temples, and for a large impossibly-balanced rock known as Krishna’s Butterball. Wikitravel has a good article on the place.
After several hours at “M’puram”, we headed back up the coast, but stopped for a quick visit to Crocodile Bank, a zoo and research centre devoted to all things crocodilian. From their website:

Starting with 30 mugger adults, the Bank has bred over 5000 and now holds over 2400 crocodilians of 14 different species. By 1987 the CrocBank developed a much broader focus, and became the Center for Herpetology, Indias premier institution for herpetofaunal conservation, research and education. Currently besides crocodilians, the Bank maintains 12 endangered species of turtles and tortoises, five species of snakes, including the King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, water monitor lizards, Varanus salvator salvator, two species of pythons and albino cobras. Housed in enclosures very similar to their natural habitat visitors can get a close view of how these reptiles live in the wild.

It’s awesome. Highly recommended.
The photos that I took are presently uploading (slowly – we’re up to number 28 out of 134 but they’re all up on grommit now) to my gallery. Enjoy.

9 hours 15 minutes, with no food

Amazon.com is becoming a large company, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that I met a colleague here in Chennai who had travelled out from Seattle on the same flights that I’d taken. What did surprise me was to learn that on the segment from Frankfurt to Chennai, the passengers in economy had no food whatsoever. I’d upgraded to business class, and I thought that it was disappointing that, because of the strike, we’d got a hot lunch but no other food except a bag of assorted snacks. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was.
Nine hours, fifteen minutes without food. Longer, actually, because our take off was delayed while we received a fresh overflight clearance for Iraq and Iran. That’s ridiculous.
(Now I’m even more anxious about whether I’ll be able to upgrade my return flights on Wednesday. Right now I’m waitlisted…)
UPDATE: It looks as if the strike is over.

Apple or Adobe? Where to point the finger…

I’m visiting the Amazon Chennai office for a few days. Because of the strike at Lufthansa, I decided to travel with only carry-on bags, and to keep the weight down I brought my personal MacBook Air rather than my regular work MacBook. I figured that I only really needed something to take notes and log in to Outlook Web Access occasionally. ((If anyone from security is reading: yes, I do use FileVault.))
I was scheduled to give a talk this morning, and I’d prepared a slide deck, based on the material I delivered on my last visit to India. But yesterday after breakfast I reviewed the presentation and realized that it didn’t really hit the points that I wanted to emphasize. No problem: I settled down to put together a new set of slides. Since I don’t have Microsoft Office on my personal machine, I used Apple’s excellent Keynote. I cranked away, and by the end of the day I was happy with the new slides. I checked them again this morning, added a couple of slides, cleaned up my conclusion, and I was ready.
I walked into the room where I was giving my talk, and asked if I could double-check the compatibility of my MacBook Air with the projector they were using. “Oh, that would be awkward… could you just give me the slides on a thumb-drive, and I’ll copy them onto my (Windows) laptop?” So I fired up Keynote, saved the presentation as PDF, copied it onto a thumb-drive, and thought no more about it.
Soon it was time for me to give my talk. I located my slides, double-clicked the file, and Adobe Acrobat launched. (It seemed to be the first time, because I had to accept a couple of licenses.) I selected full-screen mode and started the presentation. We’d just got to slide 5 when Acrobat suddenly crashed, displaying a small dialog box that read “I/o error”. I tried again, without success. Several people huddled over the laptop, trying to be helpful, but after a couple of minutes I just grabbed my MacBook Air, plugged it in, and finished my talk.
People seemed to really like my presentation, but they were even more impressed that I’d managed to crash Acrobat…

Arrived in Chennai

Seattle-Frankfurt-MadrasChennai. Long. Delayed. But completed. I’ve checked in to my hotel (the Asiana), it’s 2:23AM local time, and I’m hitting the sack.

Comparing cameras

I just uploaded a set of photographs to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between my three digital cameras: the Kodak P850, the Casio EX-S600, and the new Panasonic DMC-TZ4. All were taken from the same spot. I was concentrating on the zoom, but looking at the non-zoomed shots it’s clear that the Panasonic has a significantly wider field of view. (The Kodak and the Casio are pretty much the same in that area.)
I think that the Panasonic with its 8.1MP and 10x zoom is the ideal compromise. No, it won’t fit in a shirt pocket, but that’s about the only limitation. ((OK, I’d prefer a dockable design, like the Kodak and Casio, but I guess I’m in the minority.))