Jeff Lawson

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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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)

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. :)