Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

No, it’s not my interpretation of heaven. :-) I’ll explain later.

Monday started like any other day, except that I woke up in Krakow at 6 am. I knew that I needed to get more sleep, so I cranked up the AC and managed to sleep until 8. I read and watched TV until 9:30 or so. The TV here gets a network called NASN (North American Sports Network) that shows American sports 24/7. While there usually isn’t a live game, they show recent games without commercials. Even if you know the outcome of the game already, it’s still fun to watch the game without interruptions.

Breakfast at the hotel was excellent. I love bread and cheese; apparently Poland and Switzerland are the best places for good bread in Europe, so I lucked out. I ate a lot of food that morning and had some excellent English Breakfast Tea.

Then it was off to work. The Google office here is a just a 15 minute walk from the Sheraton. It was a little tricky finding the office. All the street signs here are rather hidden and the streets are packed, so it’s not conducive to stopping and staring at a map. Plus, I was trying to not look like a tourist, which was a little hard, since as far as I could tell I was the only Indian guy walking around Krakow.

Once I got to work, Kacper, Jarek, and Morg took me to lunch. The office here doesn’t have a cafeteria, instead everyone either orders in or goes out to one of the many restaurants close by. We went to get Italian food, and I ordered pizza. The pizza was good, but nowhere as good as the pizza in Zurich was.

The office here is in a palace. A real palace with marble floors, chandeliers, and various marble carving murals. And the bathroom is all marble with a giant tub. Some really wealthy guy owns the building and lives on the top two floors and rents out the rest of the building. It’s strange seeing very casually dressed software guys walking around a beautiful building. Not to mentioned having meetings in a room that has a chandelier. :-)

For dinner, we went to old town to find a restaurant. My vegetarian restrictions made it a little difficult to find a place, but we finally settled on what turned out to be a very romantic restaurant. It was pretty nice; it was in a renovated basement with lots of red lighting, and sparkling pink things. It’s strange that I was in such a place when I wasn’t forced by Crissy.

Dinner was good, but it took a really long time. I like the idea of multi-course meals and relaxing and talking during dinner, but Europe seems to take this too far. I had a bowl of tomato-basil soup (they were out of the minestrone) and spicy pasta with marinara. Both were good, but not spectacular.

For dessert, we went to another place. Charles ordered hot chocolate and we learned that hot chocolate in Europe is just that; basically melted chocolate. And they served it with cream on the side. It looked really good. I was leaning towards tiramisu, but the dessert menu cover had black forest cake and it looked really tasty, so I ordered that. Turns out it was really tasty. :-)

After that, back to the hotel. I had a 5 pm Pacific time meeting in California I wanted to dial into, but I couldn’t manage to stay up. I ended up falling asleep at my desk 10 minutes before the meeting.

And so ended Monday. :-)

I’m in Krakow for a design review with my project engineers. This project is split Zurich and Krakow; since last time we met in Zurich, we decided to meet in Krakow this time around. I left Seattle on Saturday and arrived Sunday to give myself some extra time to adjust to the time difference of 8 hours.

Unfortunately, getting to Krakow involves more layovers than flying to India. I flew from Seattle to Amsterdam to Munich to Krakow. I’m not a big fan of flying in Europe. It’s ok to smoke in the airport, so you get lots of second-hand smoke waiting for the plane. And the boarding process is disorganized (”everyone board as once”). It’s probably faster, but not fun.

It’s especially not fun because of limited overhead bin space. On my flight from Munich to Krakow, the guy next to me kept this carry-on suitcase at his feet (it didn’t fit under the seat in front of him), so he ended up crowding my area quite a bit. It was very uncomfortable, but I was so tired by then that I just fell asleep.

Northwest Airlines couldn’t get the TV system on the plane working for about 2 hours, so I read most of The Blind Side, which was pretty good, but I liked Liar’s Poker better. Which reminds me, I have about 25 books that I’ve read and still need to write about. :-(

My last flight was about an hour late. My hotel had a car that picked me up and brought me to the hotel. The hotel was completely booked, so my room wasn’t available when I arrived (at around 2 pm). I was pretty annoyed (and sleepy), but fortunately, it was ready within 20 minutes.

The hotel is pretty nice. It’s has a nice central courtyard / atrium with the main restaurant and a glass ceiling. This morning I saw a guy mopping the ceiling. It’s the first time I’ve seen something mopped from floor’s perspective. :-)

I took a shower and then went to the main restaurant to get a bite to eat. They weren’t serving from the menu because they had a fancy Sunday brunch going on. Since I couldn’t eat most of the food (meat and fish) they were serving, I went to the sports bar and ate nachos and a brownie while engrossed in a soccer match between two teams I didn’t know or recognize.

Then I went to sleep (finally!) and slept until 7 when Morgwai and Marek (two of the Krakow based developers) met me at the hotel for dinner. We walked to Old Town and went to a traditional Polish restaurant where I had salad (lettuce with sour cream, which was surprisingly good) and vegetarian pierogi. I had both cabbage/mushroom and potato pierogi with a roasted onion sauce. I didn’t really like the cabbage/mushroom or the roasted onion sauce, but the potato ones were good. Much better than Trader Joe’s brand frozen pierogi.

For dessert I had a layered chocolate creme wafer cake thing. It was really good, but a little dry (I think it’s supposed to be like that). And then we walked back and I went to sleep after watching a little bit of Shrek 3 in Polish (I could have watched the English version, but the Polish one was better).

Coming next: Vijay explores the city while trying not to look like a tourist, goes to work in a palace, and finds some pizza.

I’ve had a recent spike in visitors to my blog. Ordinarily, that could mean that people are enjoying my writing. I knew that this was not the case for two reasons: (1) people don’t like my writing :-) and (2) I hadn’t written anything in a while.

But it turns out the recent surge of traffic isn’t from people coming to my blog, but a large amount of bots controlled by spammers. And no, I didn’t need some clever traffic analysis tool to help me figure this out. This one was easy; the 250 spam comments in my moderation queue were a clear giveaway. :-)

Today, tomorrow, and Monday the water in our apartment will be off, from 8 am to 5 pm, while they go through the building replacing everyone’s bathroom sink emergency valves. These need to be replaced periodically (something to keep in mind if you own a house).

I think this replacement, though, was at least partially precipitated by a recent event involving a neighbor running to the leasing office screaming, “My apartment is flooding!”. :-)

It’s annoying not having running water; especially in the morning. Not all of us get out of the house by 8 am. Fortunately, I’m very skilled at getting ready in the morning with a cup of water. It also helps if you regularly shower in the evenings. :-)

Since the maintenance team was going to be in the apartment anyway, I asked them to fix the toilets. The “floating ball” thing is old, so the toilet leaks a bit. It’s not that big of a deal since it drains into the toilet, but it’s a waste of water.

When you call for maintenance requests, you should very specific. And if you know the name of the part that needs to be replaced, it makes it really easy for the repairman.

I recently did the same repair at home, so I knew what the part is called: the Ballcock assembly. What a great name; apparently toilet engineers have a good sense of humor. :-)

Continuing on the topic of stupid politicians, I read that Hillary Clinton is supporting giving a $5,000 savings bond to each baby born in America:

I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home.

Now, Hillary is a really smart person, so this stupid proposal must just be pandering to stupid voters. This idea is so wrong on so many levels it’s maddening. Let’s first start with the obvious: Where’s the money going to come from?

So the government buys a US T-Bond at $5,000 for each kid. Assuming it grows at 4%, but the time the kid is 18, it’s worth about $10,000. Keep in mind, since the government bought the bond from themselves and consistently runs a deficit, the money isn’t in an separate account just hanging around collecting interest. So when the kid turns 18, the government has to come up with the $10,000.

We now know that 4 million kids are born each year. So this program will cost $40 billion a year. And since we run a deficit, this money will come from inflationary or deficit spending! Woohoo!

And when that kid takes their $10,000 and go to buy their first house, they will be competing with other buyers that also just got $10,000. And what will happen? Well, most likely the price will go up roughly $10,000.

Same thing with the college kids. Armed with an extra $10,000 to pay for college, you can bet that tuition is going to go up. It’s the same thing that happened when all the college loans became so easy to get: price goes up.

Another nice tidbit from the article:

Clinton said such an account program would help Americans get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, and has become harder to accomplish in the face of rising college and housing costs.

Yup, there’s nothing that will get us back to the tradition of savings then giving people lots of money. That’s why rich, spoiled kids like Paris Hilton have no sense of entitlement. Sheesh.

And if you want more evidence for the stupid politician theory, here’s some insight from Rep. Stubbs from Ohio:

I think it’s a wonderful idea. Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until their 18?

That should say, “Every kid will owe $27,000, why not make it $37,000?” But, of course, it’s too much to expect our representatives to understand basic economics.