Jeff's LiveJournal

This past Sunday I arrived back in Austin from a 2-week roadtrip that I spontaneously decided to take. My goal was to visit interesting places that I had never seen before. In total I drove about 4500 miles in my Jeep Wrangler (and 18 tanks of gas). I got to meet up with Mike Woss (ex-coworker), Lucent (first IRL meeting with long-time d.net buddy), Mary Bass (coworker), and Rey/Swiggy (ex-coworker).

There were a few cities that I had hoped to go through (Atlanta and Birmingham) that I ended up cutting out so that I could spend more time in other locations. I could have easily have spent more time in most of my stops if I had more vacation time.

I bought a new Digital SLR camera (Nikkon D40) specifically for the trip, so I had some fun playing around with it at the same time. Snorkeling and night-time kayaking in Key West were both pretty fun. Visiting Kennedy Space Center was also pretty neat, since I had been involved with parts of the Shuttle missions but never seen the launch facilities. The Great Smokey Mountains National Park was also a great place to explore and hike around.

• My photo gallery of my trip photos
• Approximate Google Map trail of the path I took
• YouTube video of my Everglades fanboat tour
• My personal wiki page that I was using to plan my trip and sights

(Click pictures above to embiggen)

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Over the Christmas holiday I went back to visit my parents in Pasadena again. We had the usual big group dinner at one of my aunt's houses with all of the other aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Then from Dec 26-28, I went to Las Vegas with a smaller group (Aunt Shirley, Uncle Chuck, and my 4 oldest cousins) to see the Cirque du Soleil: Beatles Love show [wikipedia] and do some gambling. The Cirque du Soleil show was great and incorporated lots of songs by the Beatles with great choreography and a fair bit of acrobatics. It didn't seem to have quite as much of the acrobatics as I think other Cirque du Soleil shows are known for, but it was still quite enjoyable.

While I was there, I also went on my own into the Star Trek: The Experience [wikipedia], saw the museum, the two attractions (Borg and Klingons), and brought back some souvenirs (including a Tribble). The recreation of the ship interiors there were neat to see up close--the ride and experience is kind of similar to the Star Tours at Disneyland.

Although I did a bit of gambling, I didn't really gain or lose very much. I mostly played Video Poker and some of the slot machines. I did much better with video poker than the slots, especially after finding this Wizard of Odds: Video Poker website. A $20 bill lasted me 2 or 3 hours in the quarter Video Poker machines with the optimal strategy.

My dad and mom had just retired, so there was also a big retirement/birthday party for my mom, which was pretty exciting. My parents are also in the process of selling their home in Pasadena, so I was helping with some of the packing and furniture moving to help stage the house for its sale. It's too bad that they'll have to sell such a neat house at a low point in the housing market though.

So the company I worked for, United Devices, officially announced that it had merged with Chicago-based company, Univa. Our new company name will be Univa UD. Although they also focus on grid computing solutions, they have built their solutions around the open source Globus Toolkit and the Globus standards. The press reaction around the deal so far has been pretty positive.

The business negotiations had actually been underway for several months, although the final decision to merge was not finalized until a few weeks ago. In fact, most of my business travel over the past few months (San Jose, Germany, Boston, etc) were related to the merger negotiations.

I'm currently in Chicago (really Lisle, Ill) visiting our new team members as a part of a company-wide meeting and some cross-training activities. On Friday, we had an excellent presentation from our combined management team to discuss and plan the product direction. Afterwards, we drove downtown to the Navy Pier area, had dinner, and enjoyed a company boat trip to see the night-time cityscape.

One of the amusing things of the last week's kickoff activities was a celebrity look-alike contest. As it turned out, I won first place (and a small prize) for looking like Mike Shinoda, the singer from the band Linkin Park.

Since ivo and I had to spend the weekend here, I began looking for interesting activities. As it turned out, my Harvey Mudd College alumni association was hosting a tour of Fermilab particle accelerator the same weekend. Coincidentally, decibel45 was also in Chicago on a business trip for his own company, so we all went together to a guided tour by two HMC alumni who currently work for the facility. Since the facility was currently in a maintenance/shutdown period, we had the special opportunity of getting to safely walk into the underground tunnels that house the giant magnets that direct the anti-proton (antimatter) particles.

One surprising thing is how unsecured and open the facility is. No identification was requested, though we were told that during high-alert conditions the guards at the entry gates might actually ask for ID and record names. They encouraged pictures to be taken everywhere--there are no secrets. Additionally, most all doors are unlocked and unrestricted, except where safety of visitors might be a problem. If someone wanted to walk in an open door and unplug some wires or misalign some equipment, it would actually be quite easy. (click for pictures)

So last week when I was in San Jose on a business trip I decided to try to return back to Austin as standby on a flight that would depart about 1.5 hours earlier (at 4:40pm instead of 7:00pm). As it turned out, that SJC-AUS American Airlines flight was supposed to have regularly taken off at 9:30am, but had been delayed all day due to late equipment.

In any case I got a nice email crediting me some frequent flier miles for my "inconvenience" of flying on an earlier flight. :)

It's completely realistic for our valued customers to rely on the scheduled departure and arrival of their flights. For that reason, we were disappointed to learn that flight 1810 was delayed on June 20 and we wanted to take the opportunity to apologize to you for the disruption of your travel plans.

I realize that our expression of regret is of small consolation in light of the time you spent waiting in San Jose for your flight to depart. I hope you will accept the addition of 10,000 Customer Service Bonus miles to your AAdvantage® account as a more tangible apology. You should see this mileage adjustment in your account very soon.

It looks like I'll soon have enough miles to be Silver Elite on Continental and Gold Elite on AA this year (my first time for either).

And I'm going to Paris for 6 days in two weeks for JFC's wedding! reanimated is coming too, though neither of us have been to Paris before nor speak any French so I'm expecting we'll be wondering around semi-lost at least part of the time. After a couple of days Sravish will rendezvous with us and we'll head to JFC's wedding together. Bastille day (the day of the wedding) should have some interesting sights and celebrations to see also. Anyone have any recommendations of things to see/avoid in Paris? Wikitravel has some good suggestions and tips already...

Well, I'm back from my 2-week trip to New Zealand to visit Greg and Amy and celebrate their wedding. I traveled with Decibel, Heidi, Snax, and Doppler on the flights. Nugget and Monica met us there to join us for part of the time, before they split off to visit some of the other sights on New Zealand's north island. Our travels were exclusively on the south island.

I've uploaded my photos to two places. My gallery on my personal server has the complete set of over 400 photos, but I've also decided to try uploading a much smaller subset to Flickr.



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So a couple days ago, on Tuesday of this week, I had to do a one-day business trip from Austin to San Jose to help support a technical review with a customer. From a business perspective the trip went well, but I had to get up early enough to make the 7:30am boarding and then land back in Austin at 11:45pm.

Even though I made it to the airport on time, my coworker (dzahn) almost missed the flight entirely. When boarding started, I called him on his cell phone to find out where he was--he was still driving on the highway to get to the airport. Luckily he had already checked-in online, had only carry-on baggage, timed all of the stop-light signals just right, zipped through the security line, and was allowed to be the last person on-board.

In any case, I learned that the flights between Austin and San Jose have the industry-recognized designation of "nerd bird". Maybe that's old news to most people.

While in San Jose, I also had the chance to put my new Bluetooth GPS adapter to use with my cell phone for real. Google's Mobile Maps application for Windows Mobile could read my position and give reasonable driving directions on the fly. My dedicated Garmin GPS still has some important strengths over Google's offering, such as automatically matching with your current position with the upcoming navigation, the ability to save waypoints, voice navigation, and displaying your current speed/position.

Maybe I will have to look into one of the other commercial GPS applications for Windows Mobile to get that sort of functionality. I must admit that the convenience of Google Maps being able to get live map and business database updates over the cell network is still very attractive. All of the commercial GPS offerings seem to rely on a static database that is only updated once annually for an additional fee.

Last week was the United Devices third-annual company convention ("UD:07"). It is primarily a sales and promotional event intended to educate existing and future customers about the direction of the company and also the industry.

This year's event was held in Boston, MA but unfortunately this time of year meant that it was slightly below 20F for most of the time we were there. It was fortunate that the Prudential center is connected to most of the surrounding buildings with covered walkways.



One of the highlights of the entire event was an exciting software demo that I (and others) had been helping to prepare for the last couple of weeks. The demos showed how our new "Data Center One" product might be used to dynamically provision a new Virtual Machine or a new Bare-metal machine on demand. We also showed how both a J2EE application or a SAP application server can be dynamically scaled up in response to user load. I'm just glad that the event is over, so that we return our focus back to previous tasks that had been interrupted for the preparations.

During the conference, I learned that I may be getting called upon to start writing for a public company blog about grid computing. I haven't decided whether I like that idea yet--it's difficult enough to write my personal blogs. :)

And apparently there is still a possibility that I may have to fly back to Japan again this week or next. More frequent flier miles for me, if so!

My next trip to Japan has just been booked, and I got talked into attending a grid conference following my return. So in all, I should be gone for about 2 weeks.

• Sunday Jan 21 — Austin to San Francisco, to Osaka (Kansai).
  
• Tuesday thru Friday — Business meetings and technical work in Osaka.
  
• Friday Jan 26 — Osaka (Kansai) to Sapporo.
  
• Saturday and Sunday — Two days of skiing at Rusutsu
  
• Monday Jan 29 — Sapporo to Osaka (Kansai), to San Francisco, to Chicago (Ohare), to Raleigh.
  
• Tuesday thru Friday — OGF Grid conference in Chapel Hill, NC.
  
• Saturday Feb 3 — Raleigh to Washington (Dules), to Austin.

In all, it will be 9 segments and 17688 mi (AUS-SFO-KIX, KIX-CTS, CTS-KIX-SFO-ORD-RDU, RDU-IAD-AUS). Unfortunately, United doesn't seem to have power ports in economy class, so I'll have to make due with battery power alone on all of those flights.

I should also mention that Delta Airlines lost my two bags on my return from Christmas vacation (BUR-SLC-AUS) this past weekend. My SLC-AUS segment had a very close connection (only 20 minutes), which was apparently not enough time for them to get my bags on too. In fact, the gate agent had already reassigned my seat but fortunately still had room and time for me to get on. They were supposed to deliver my luggage Monday afternoon (then Monday evening), but it looks like I'll get them back tomorrow (Tuesday).

So I'm back from my work trip to Japan, and it was actually pretty fun. I'm sure the culture shock would have been a lot more significant for me if I hadn't already been to places like China, Hong Kong, and London. A lot of things seemed almost familiar, like the novelty of a foreign/Asian culture (China) merged with the expectations of modern life and technology (Hong Kong), the population density (China), the street markets (China and Hong Kong), and the advanced train/subway system (London).

Things might have been a little more enjoyable if I hadn't managed to catch some sickness in Austin a day before the trip, causing me to go into occasional coughing fits. There was certainly much more I could have done if there had been more time, but it sounds like I might have at least a couple more opportunities to travel back there again during the next 6 months or so.

(Lots of pictures here)

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Just got confirmation of my flight details for my upcoming business trip to Osaka.

• Sun, Nov 5: AA 2414, AUS-ORD
  
• Sun, Nov 5-Mon, Nov 6: AA 0153, ORD-NRT
  
• Take train from Narita to Osaka, hotel lodging in Osaka.
  
• Thu, Nov 9: AA 0154, NRT-ORD
  
• Thu, Nov 9: AA 2485, ORD-AUS

Too bad I won't really be staying there for very long.

When two of our U.K. customers (Dan and Dave from BT) came to visit our Austin office two weeks ago, they wanted to really experience Texas... So my boss (Billy), another cow-orker (Andy), and I took them to an indoor gun range to go shooting! We were using a Beretta 92F pistol and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that both belonged to Billy. Both weapons were a little old so there were some problems with them, such as frequently jamming, and misaligned sights--but it was still pretty fun.



In related news, I'm going to London again for a week starting tomorrow to visit the same customer. Business relationships have worked out such that nugget and JFC will also be there. Maybe this time I'll be able to see a little more of London than I was able to on my trip last December.

Sat, Jul 8 -- AUS-IAH, IAH-LGW.

Fri, Jul 14 -- LGW-IAH, IAH-AUS.

So I had a quick two-day business trip to Raleigh, North Carolina on Monday and Tuesday with Niranjan and Dick. The business discussions seem to have gone well, so no complaints there. We luckily managed to miss all of the heavy rains that were hitting the east coast.

While I was there, I happened to catch an interesting local news story: apparently some sewage pumping station outside of Raleigh broke down because of the large amounts of earlier rain. Unfortunately, the sewage station was a major collection point so it still needed to be taken up the hill to the treatment plant somehow while crews worked on fixing the pump. So the city arranges for a round-the-clock brigade of "32 trucks an hour hauling 6,500 hundred gallons per truck to [the] waste water plant". And of course the trucks can't keep up with the flow of sewage, so there is massive river pollution at the same time. You can read more about it...

On the way back from KRDU to KAUS, I happened to look out the window and see the letters LUECKE cut into the trees on the ground just as we were approaching Austin. (Looks like a few other people on the web have noticed it too: nasa.gov, wonko.com, googlesightseeing)

So a few interesting things happened during the last few weeks...
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When I went to visit my parents in California for the holidays back in December, my old neighbors (Hal and Ingrid) mentioned that they were caring for a litter of three kittens and were looking to find homes for them. So when I returned back to the U.S. after my two-week vacation to China a couple weeks ago, I took the opportunity to help them out.

On my plane trip from California back to Austin I brought back a four-month old male kitten named Jasper with me as my carry-on luggage.

He's very playful and not as timid as Mary or Wilma. He can also do a pretty cool trick--he can play fetch with his favorite cat toy and bring it back to you (which is pretty special for a cat). Mary and Wilma took a few days to adjust to having another cat around, but there was never any fighting. And even though they are clearly dominant over the much younger and non-aggressive Jasper, they both maintain some wariness of him. decibel45 also took a cute picture of Jasper sleeping on my couch. :)

Yup, so yesterday was my birthday. :)

In other news, I'll be leaving for a 2 week vacation tour to China this coming Saturday with my mom and some aunts. Among other things, we'll get to see Xian (and the great terra cotta army), Guilin (and the Li River), Beijing (and the Forbidden City and the Great Wall), and Hong Kong. One of my cousins is studying abroad in Hong Kong this semester, so we'll get to meet up with her while we're there. Additionally, the trip will overlap with Chinese New Year (this year it'll be on January 29) so there should be lots of interesting events going on too.

So I get to go on a business trip to London tomorrow for work, for a couple of days. I'll actually arrive there on Thursday morning, and depart on Saturday morning. I'll be in town with ivo and a few other cow-orkers. Coincidentally, dbaker will be in town for business of his own, and maybe I can arrange a meeting with ausfrog (aka JFC) too. It looks like it'll be kind of rainy and cold (in the 30-40F).

I know there are a few other #distributed folk I might be able to meet up with, but the short nature of this trip and last minute scheduling makes it a little difficult. I expect to be making several more trips to London over the next few months, so it'll probably be easier to arrange some meetings then.

Unfortunately my Sidekick Color cellphone won't work overseas, since it only supports the GSM frequency used in the U.S. Although the Sidekick II is tri-band, I don't really want to upgrade to right now, since the Sidekick III is rumored to be released early 2006.

After London, I'll be flying directly to LAX to spend the holidays with my parents, so I won't be back until just after New Years.

Last week I had to take a short business trip to help my cow-orker, Niranjan, give a seminar to one of our existing customers in Exton, PA (which is close to Philadelphia). The actual seminar was supposed to last 2 full days, but things went so well that we finished about three hours early on the last day. Luckily, that gave us enough daylight hours to go sight-seeing in the historic downtown Philadelphia.

After enduring a little bit of early afternoon traffic and finding some parking, we started walking towards anything that looked interesting. Unfortunately, government employees like to go home early too, so the U.S. Mint, Federal Reserve bank, and Liberty Bell exhibit must all close to the public at 3pm or something. We did get to see Independence Hall, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the National Constitution Center museum, and a few other interesting things. For dinner that night, we took the emailed advice of my friend Hal and went to the Old Original Bookbinder's seafood restaurant for a very good meal. Of course we had forgotten which garage we parked the car in by the time we were ready to leave, but we eventually located it after walking around in circles for awhile. :)

Here are some pictures that I took there (click for more):

( A busy holiday, plus going to the Rose Bowl game with UT! )

I just got around to uploading the photos I took during this week's trip back to California. My main reason for going back was to attend the birthday/reunion party for my grandma. It was a nice party with about 100 people total, but I didn't take any pictures since there were already a dozen other people taking the same pictures. :)

However here's one picture related to the party... My mom ordered custom Chinese fortune cookies printed with a special message, but the smallest order she could place was for 1,000 cookies. Even though the cookies were liberally placed out on all of the party tables, there were still lots left over after the party so I just had to bring a few dozen of them back to Texas with me in a bag.

Although I only had to be back in CA for that Saturday, I ended up booking my trip for Jun 4 through 9th so that I would have time to relax a bit. I've added a 5 more pictures of my parents' Pasadena pole house that I took while I was staying there.

While I was in Pasadena, my old neighbor Hal Frank encouraged me go walking with him on the trails running behind JPL. We brought along my old school friend David Baker, and Eva wanted to come too. Eva is from Papua New Guinea and came to the U.S. to study Computer Science, and is currently Hal's house guest. She had plenty of exciting stories about living in the jungle and in tree houses as a child. The three of them are also considering taking a trip out to Austin to visit me and see Texas later this summer. In any case, I've added some new pictures that I took during the hike to bottom of my existing Gould Mesa gallery:

  

Greg and Justin and I are back from Colorado and we certainly had fun. You can read Greg's LiveJournal post about what happened.

The day we landed (Wednesday) we met up with Daa and got the United Airline Flight Center tour, had some buffalo burgers at Tommyknocker's pub, and then headed the rest of the way up to our condo at Copper Mountain. The next day (Thursday), we got up early and hit the slopes with Daa. I was snowboarding (on my recently purchased E-bay snowboard), Justin was snowboarding too, but Greg and Daa were on skis. That day was tiresome on me, so I decided to rent some skis and go skiing for the next day (Friday) and the day after (Saturday). The next day (Sunday), was our flight back to Austin.

My photos from Copper Mountain and our visit to the United Airline Flight Training Center are also worth looking at.