Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The Google office in Zurich was really, really nice. It’s hard to describe everything with words, so here’s a video:

(Amazingly, that was my first time embedding a YouTube video. Hopefully it worked.)

The video is pretty accurate, nothing is embellished with clever camera work or editing.

There is one thing that was even better than everything in the video; even better than the slide, kitchen, game room, and fire pole: the fresh juice machine.

In the cafeteria, they have a machine that takes ripe blood oranges and makes freshly squeezed juice for you. The machine casing is see-through, so you press the nozzle and see oranges fall from a hopper, get split in two, squeezed, and then juice fills your cup.

It was the best juice I’ve ever had; I think each glass took 5 oranges to make. I drank around 4 glasses a day; even when my stomach was sick from all the orange juice, I had to go back and get more. :-)

It’s the coolest machine ever.

And the micro-kitchens: bars and bars of Swiss chocolate, Swiss cocoa, mounds of cheeses, and loaves of freshly baked bread. Even when I wasn’t hungry, I’d make myself a sandwich. I mean, how often in life are you so close to pounds and pounds of Gruyere?

The micro-kitchens also had mayo and mustard. And even though it was in tubes like toothpaste (um, weird!), it was quite tasty.

I’m very tempted to transfer there, but I think I’d end up being really, really fat (or, more accurately, fatter). :-)

One of my new friends in Zurich told me the following joke about Zurich:

A man nervously walks into a Swiss bank in Zurich glancing around furtively and clutching a paper bag to his chest. When he gets to the counter, he leans and quietly whispers, “I’d like to open an account and deposit one million dollars in cash.”

The bank tellers looks at him with a smile and replies in a normal voice that carries through the whole bank, “Oh sir, no worries. There is no shame in poverty.”

And like all good jokes, not only is it funny, it also has an element of truth.

Walking around the shopping district and especially the banking district in Zurich is like a auto show of expensive cars: Aston Martins, Ferrari, Mazarti, and Lamborghini, and other fancy cars I hadn’t heard of lined the streets.

At one point, I saw a guy driving a Porsche and I thought, “Poor guy. He can only afford a Porsche.” :-P

Things were pretty pricey in Zurich. This was made worse by the extremely weak dollar (thanks Federal Reserve!). For example, there are these little novelty shoes in the Amsterdam airport (brightly colored wooden clogs) that are 3.50 Euros. I first bought these as a small gift for Crissy’s mom and it was about $3 around 3 years ago. This time through, each pair was about $8.

Last August, when I was in Zurich, the exchange rate was about 60 cents to a Swiss Franc. This time it was basically one dollar to one Swiss Franc. Thankfully I was traveling on an expense account. :-)

So I came back last week after a very busy, exhausting, and incredibly fun trip to Zurich. The trip back was mostly uneventful. I really wanted to sleep on the flight, so I stayed up late the night before so I’d be exhausted while on the long haul flight back to Seattle.

This, of course, didn’t work. I fell asleep on the plane, and when I woke up I figured most of the flight had past, but only 5 minutes had went by. And I couldn’t fall asleep after that.

And to add insult to injury (or in this case, insomnia), the 10 hours of recycled air on a dirty plane gave me a really bad cold. Because of the cold, I was home sick for basically all of last week. I had to force myself to go on a short walk with Crissy on Thursday because I had been in the apartment for over 80 hours straight at that point.

I even forced myself to go to work on Friday, just to get out of the house!

I was close to going crazy being stuck at home. Since I was half asleep, I couldn’t do anything useful and I ran out of “brainless” things to do pretty quickly — I mean, you can only watch so much inane TV.

Anyway, if you’re one of my approximately two readers, you know that I didn’t have time on my trip to blog . I plan to write a few posts to talk about the trip. And instead of a chronological summary (like my India Trip posts), I’ll try a series of more topical posts.

You’ll have to tell me if this is better or not. :-)

I’m having a heck of a time trying to get over jet-lag here. I’m in Zurich for a week long meeting with my European engineering teams. Originally I was calling it a “Summit”, but that makes it sound much more formal that it is; especially since people started asking if I’d tape the sessions to publish online. :-)

So we decided to call it a “Offsite”, except that we’re still in the home location for half the team. We could call it “meeting”, but that’s boring.

Anyway, I was talking about jet-lag. I’ve been trying to take advantage of being unable to sleep by doing as many of my “chores that require about a quarter of a brain to do” as possible. This way I don’t feel guilty wasting time, but don’t try to do something important.

So, I’ve updated my blog to Wordpress 2.5. You, the reader, won’t notice any difference, but I get to the use the new management UI; which so far is really nice. But, the backlog of 1900+ comments that needs to be moderated? Not that nice (stupid spammers).

I also went back into my Facebook account and fixed all the privacy settings. I’m so glad that Facebook finally fixed their privacy settings interface. It still not great, but it’s a lot better. So now, people on Facebook can probably actually see things in my profile.

The past few nights, I spent some time learning about and thinking about Option ARMs and how to invest based on the big waves of the Option ARM resets coming up. It’s especially interesting considering that the Bank of England, this morning, decided to also trade junk MBS’s for Treasuries. And the Bank of Scotland’s recent announcement. And countless other things that happened recently. Expect a big post on that soon. :-P

And, of course, I’m seeing all sorts of cool things here and have met some really cool people. I’ll start writing about all that soon. :-)

As you may know, I just got back from a business trip to Boulder. And instead of staying at a hotel, I stayed with my parents. It was really nice being home and, since Sri is in Oregon visiting friends, I had my parents all to myself. No sisters or wife to hog the parents. :-)

Yesterday, we realized that this was the first time that it’s just been me and my parents for more than a day. Like the first time ever. In the past 27 years, if I was with my parents, I had to share with one of my sisters.

When you think about it, that’s really crazy. But a nice side-effect was that the house was really quiet and peaceful. :-)

Except we weren’t alone. Sri got a gerbil that lives in a cage in the study room. The gerbil just runs on the hamster wheel all day long. Since Sri is out of town, Amma is feeding the gerbil and taking care of it. Amma really likes the gerbil and you can often find her talking to gerbil in Telugu, [roughly translated] “Hi little dear. I’m sorry I didn’t come visit you yet today. Did you like your dinner?”

It’s really, really funny. Especially so, since the gerbil doesn’t speak Telugu! Amma astutely pointed out that the gerbil doesn’t speak English either, but still.

Sri gave the gerbil some name I can’t remember, but I think a better name is “Sribil” (Sri + gerbil).

And we have one more guest in the house. A woodpecker has burrowed into the house and is building a nest inside the walls by Akka’s room. My parents didn’t notice since no one was using this room. I noticed, though, because bright and early each morning, Mr. Woodpecker start drilling (or pecking) very loudly.

And during the night, he gets bored and starts running around in the wall right by my head. You know, during the day, it would be cute (in an Animal Planet sort of way). But at night, when I’m trying to sleep, it’s rather annoying.

If Mom and Dad don’t do something soon, they are going to have a wall full of baby birds come spring. :-)

… well, except that it was Crissy and me, not trains. And we didn’t pass each other, we stopped and talked for a bit. And it was mid-morning, not night. But you know, the phrase “Like two people talking to each other mid-morning” just isn’t as poetic.

As you know, Crissy was visiting her family last week. And for most of this week, I’m on a business trip to Boulder. I booked our flights so that if everything was on time, we would get to meet at the airport and hang out for 30 minutes or so.

And instead of wasting money on cabs, I drove Crissy’s car to the airport and parked it in short-term parking. And then, Crissy could go to the parking lot and drive her car home. We both had car keys and if we missed each other, I would use her voice mail to tell her where the car was parked.

Despite the simplicity of the plan, there were a lot of things that could go wrong. I could forget to leave Crissy a message with the location of her car. She’d then need to walk around the airport looking for it or wait until my flight landed in Denver. Or Crissy could have lost her keys. Or countless other things.

But it actually worked out nicely. I parked Crissy’s car, went through security and walked to Crissy’s arrival gate as her plane taxied in. I walked with her to the “Exit to Baggage Claim” area and then went to catch my plane.

Given all our recent travel ordeals, I can’t believe it actually worked. :-)

This post is a long time coming. I started it shortly after we got home from Christmas travel and have been slowing adding to it. It’s really long, but there are some valuable travel tips to learn if you’re (very) patient…

For Christmas, Crissy and I had our usual “visit both families” trip. Our flights were all booked on United airlines. First we’d go to Crissy’s house; the plan was to fly from Seattle to Kansas City (with a plane change in Denver). Then fly Kansas City to Denver to see my parents. And then finally fly back to Seattle after the New Year.

It was a fairly straightforward plan. But the travel gods had other plans. Only some luck, knowledge gained by lots of travel experience, and persistence made it work out somewhat smoothly.

Our trip started ominously, as my usually punctual town car service to the airport was 25 minutes late (the service claimed the dispatcher mistakenly canceled our reservation). We rushed to the airport and learned that our flight out was now delayed at least an hour and a half.

As a result it was impossible to make our connection in Denver. The United ticketing system caught this and when we tried to check our luggage, the service agent started the process to book us on a later Frontier flight. Unfortunately, the service agent was having problems getting the re-booking on Frontier.

(Continued)

I’ve heard that you should try to experience everything at least once. It’s a pretty good idea, but recently I’ve been experiencing way too new bad travel experiences.

Recently, I’ve had the “get stuck on the tarmac at JFK for a few hours” and the “have a multi-stopover European flight get completely re-routed due to weather.”

This week I had “your rental car gets vandalized”. My rental car for my business trip to the Bay Area was a Chrysler 300. It’s a nice looking, fancy car that’s generally not driven by mild mannered Indian guys. When I picked it up, I thought, “Cool, but it will attract the wrong attention. On the plus side, if I feel the need to deal drugs I’ve got the wheels.”

My flight out was Friday morning, so I stayed over at Jamie’s place Thursday night for a great intersection of good outcomes: got to hang out with Jamie and got to sleep a bit more because Jamie lives so close to the airport.

So Friday morning, I walk out to the car to discover that someone had taken a really good swing with a baseball bat into the middle of my car’s windshield. They didn’t smash through (weaklings!), but the damage made it impossible to see out of the windshield and there were glass shards in the driver’s seat.

So I called Hertz and explained what happened. They called me a cab to take me to the airport and had me lock the keys in the glove compartment. I went to airport Hertz and filled out an incident report. Since I had LDW (loss damage waiver), it was all taken care of.

Overall, the experience was pretty straight forward and easy. I was impressed, either this sort of thing happens all the time or they have good training.

This little incident delayed my arrival to the airport. I arrived at security 20 minutes before takeoff, but still managed to make my flight. I didn’t however got to get my customary leaving San Jose Airport Togos sandwich. This meant I didn’t get breakfast or lunch so far in the day. I did get a snack box on the plane so I got to have some cheese product and crackers, sunflower butter (weird and good) with more crackers, apricots, and a cookie.

Let’s hope that all I’ve gotten all this travel drama out of my system; a smooth Christmas travel season would be much appreciated. :-)

The last day of my Krakow trip was the trip back. We all had early flights, so we met in the hotel lobby at 4:30 am, checked out and piled in a van to the airport. The roads in Krakow, especially to the airport, are pretty poorly maintained. This was made worse, by the incredibly dense fog that reduced visibility to about 100 feet. It was a beautiful drive through the fog to the airport, but a little nerve-racking not seeing where you are going.

The airport was a little interesting since my passport recently stopped swiping properly, causing delays and funny looks from passport control. And the security guards at the airport didn’t speak English so we had to pantomime things like, “Where are your liquids and gels?” and “Is solid deodorant a gel?” I’m sure it was pretty funny to watch.

Once the snack bar opened up (at 6 am sharp) we all got breakfast; I had hot chocolate (of course), orange juice, a horrible tasting spinach, cheese, and sun-dried tomato sandwich, and some pretzels. I bought the pretzels mostly because they said, “Incredible Smak!”; who am I to turn down a “Smak”?

Then our “plane” boarded. Rather, we all got on a bus that would take us to the plane. The Krakow airport is really small, so the bus drove us about 25 feet from the door to the airplane. Fairly inefficient, but it’s probably better than having a bunch of passengers loaded up on “Smak” wandering around the tarmac.

Once we were on the plane, we found out that the Munich airport had dense fog and we couldn’t leave for at least 30 minutes. I originally was to fly to Munich on Lufthansa, then to Amsterdam on KLM, and then on Northwest to Seattle. I was already nervous about the connection in Munich since I just had one hour (which would be just enough time), but any delay would make things interesting.

The previous night I did some research on alternate flights once I got to Munich. I could take SAS via Copenhagen or BA via London, though both routes would have me arrive hours later than planned.

So, I called my travel agent and had him book me from Munich to Copenhagen and then to Seattle. Since I had paper tickets, I would need to have the issuing airline agree to move me to SAS. Once we landed in Munich (about an hour and a half late), I hurried to a Lufthansa desk to find a 30 minute line due to all the delays and people missing connections.

I finally got through and found out that we needed Northwest to validate the tickets (even though they weren’t the issuer). We tried to get them on the phone for about 20 minutes, then find someone with the authority, and then finally make them agree to validate it. The Lufthansa agent then needed to do the paperwork to transfer the vouchers from Northwest to them so that they could re-issue the tickets. That took another 20 minutes. The airline ticketing system is really old and complicated and could use a major overhaul.

Finally, we decided that since the layover in Copenhagen was only an hour, it was risky to go there, so I got routed through London. I was put on the next flight to London (which was boarding at the time), so I rushed over there to find out that it was delayed another 15 minutes. That gave me just enough time to get a Munich magnet for my mom. :-)

The Munich airport is really nice; it’s like a modern shopping mall that happens to have gates for airplanes. It’s too bad that I didn’t have the chance to explore it a bit more.

Once I got in London, there was a small chance of catching an earlier flight to Seattle. But London-Heathrow is a huge airport and it took about 45 minutes to get to my gate (including passport control, security rescreening, and ticket counters). I had about 3 hours to kill before my flight so I found another magnet for my mom and had dinner (pizza and Fanta).

Finally, the plane boarded and I was on my way back. The British Airways plane was pretty nice, I flew in Coach Premium (or something like that) so the seat was a little bigger than usual. The next class up had these weird pods that faced each other in clusters of 4, they were supposed to be better than normal seating, but it look really strange to me. I was so exhausted, I slept almost all of this flight.

Immigration in Seattle was annoying. The TSA guy asked me where I was (”Poland”) and did I buy anything (”Lots of little souvenirs that say ‘Krakow’”). He looked at me annoyed and confused, and then said, “Why Krakow?” I replied, “That’s where I was; Krakow is a city is Poland.” He looked at me suspiciously and finally let me through.

I learned two important things from this trip home:

1. Paper tickets are good. They are like currency, so you have a lot more flexibility in changing flights as needed. If I had e-tickets, I don’t think that I could transfer my tickets from Northwest to Lufthansa, so I would have stay on NWA and likely fly to AMS on the next flight and then fly to Detroit or Minneapolis and then eventually to Seattle. That would have cost me at least 12 more hours of travel time.
2. When connecting on flights, make sure your outbound carrier is leaving from their hub. For example, flying out of Munich on Lufthansa gives more flexibility than flying with KLM, since Lufthansa has more flights, agents, and more options at a hub than at a spoke.

Well, considering I’ve been home for a few days now, I should probably finish writing about the trip. :-)

Tuesday morning I woke up and checked my voice mail to discover that Charles (who flew in from the East Coast) was doing a bit better with the jet lag and had already had breakfast and gone out for the day. I pulled myself out of bed and headed down to breakfast.

A nice, well-traveled Scottish guy sat at the table next to me and we chatted for a while. He originally took me to be a Canadian since I have a neutral accent and I’m friendly, (”Canadians are so nice you sometimes want to punch them, aye?”). We had a nice and pleasant conversation, and like a lot of people around the world, he had a lot of questions and opinions about the current state American politics.

Next, I left the hotel to head into Old Town for some sight-seeing and souvenir shopping. I found lots of nice things for everyone, but since I haven’t given everyone their presents, I can’t talk about what I bought. The tourist-trap stores were filled with all sorts of amazingly detailed amber carvings. They were unfortunately also really expensive. :-(

This trip, I did by myself something. There’s some legend about a dragon in Krakow, so there were lots of little dragon figures for sale. I spent some time looking for the coolest dragon and finally picked the ugliest dragon figure I could find. It was just so stupid looking, I had to by it. :-)

Next, I went to the office and we started our design review while munching on some pizza (mmm… pizza). The meeting was very productive despite most of the team being having varying degrees of jet-lag.

That night we went out to a nice Italian restaurant for dinner. I had a decent Caprese salad, spinach and cheese cannoli, and tiramisu. The sauce on the cannoli was excellent, but the cannoli stuffing was dry, not very cheesy, and not very good. I’m happy to report that my spinach Manicotti stuffing is far superior. I plan to experiment and see if I can copy that sauce though.

The next day started with a quick early breakfast, brief scenic walk to work, and then jumping straight into the design. Lunch for me was a green salad, a small sheep’s milk cheese appetizer, pizza, and some cheesecake. At the Krakow office there isn’t a served lunch, but they have a neat food service. You go to a website that has menus of 5 or so local restaurants and click whatever you want. And at 1 pm, the food appears!

I also discovered that my Blackberry phone was off by 10 minutes. It’s not that big of a deal, but really annoying.

For dinner that night, we met at the hotel. Most of us were tired, but we still had lots of fun. I had minestrone soup, a Greek salad, and chocolate brownies with vanilla ice cream. The Greek salad was amazingly good, thanks to the high quality feta cheese. I wish we could get Feta like that here in Seattle.

During dinner we noticed that the piano player disappeared when our food order went in, so we decided that the pianist was also the cook in the nearly empty restaurant. Also, if he didn’t start playing before the food came out, the food was cold. Clearly there is some sort of connection. Being the brilliant engineers we are, we realized that the kitchen is powered by the piano. If you want hot food, someone better be playing the piano. :-)

And then it was off to bed for what turned out to be an exciting trip home…