Paul's Down-Home Page

Another verrrrry long day. I got up about 0630 and started packing, then got a call from Louis van Noordyk, the Microsoft speaker who was going to do the event keynote. He wanted to know if I’d mind doing a unified messaging demo during the keynote. “Sure, why not?” I said. I rushed over to the event venue and found that the phone I was going to be using was a cellphone with a headset– not exactly ideal for a demo, but certainly reflective of how Exchange UM will be used in the real world.

After the keynote, the rest of my sessions went very well, and I got lots of questions. As with the events in Lisbon and Oslo, many of the attendees had been thinking about how to deploy unified messaging, but they were surprised– and pleased– with the mobility and calendaring improvements. The max bandwidth available to the home is about 1024Kbps, and even that isn’t common, so anything that improves bandwidth efficiency or time usage is of strong interest.

After the events, we took a cab back to the hotel. This seems odd, since it’s less than a block’s walk. However, both Louis and Isabel (the event planner) strongly cautioned us against walking, since part of that block is an industrial car park that’s normally empty at night. Empty apparently means bad, thus the cab. From the hotel, we walked next door to Ocean Basket, a local seafood chain. I had a plate of grilled butterfly prawns, Nile perch (a relative of good ol’ Lake Erie perch, with a similar flavor), and calamari. It was quite good, although by that point I was so tired I would have eaten almost anything.

Then it was off to the airport. JNB is a huge airport, but it wasn’t at all crowded either time I was there– I guess midday is their busy time. It’s also a “quiet airport”: there are no flight or boarding announcements, even at the gates. This really cuts down on the background noise, as does the lack of public phones. I wanted to call Arlene to let her know I’d made it to the airport, but with no phones, I had to resort to Skype and holding my laptop up to my ear.

Once aboard, I settled in and read the local papers until takeoff, then I went to sleep– and slept until about 45 minutes from Amsterdam! I missed breakfast, dinner, movies, and who knows what else. Now I’m in Amsterdam at the overcrowded KLM lounge, trying to clean up my accumulated inbox junk and getting ready for my flight home.

Summing up: everyone I met in South Africa, from taxi drivers to hotel maids to the event attendees, was friendly and open. I got to try some new foods, including Hertzoggies, melktart, and kingklip (a really sweet, soft-fleshed fish; Glenn kept asking people “what kind of fish is kingklip?” I think he was hoping it would turn out to be catfish in disguise.) Our event was very successful, and though it was a very tiring trip I’d love to go back and see some of the famous sights (like the Kruger wildlife reserve and Cape Town).

Today (by which I really mean “the preceding 24 hours”) was a pretty interesting day. After arriving last night, I met up with Glenn in the luggage area and cleared customs. South Africa allows you to import firearms, as long as you have a permit. Unfortunately, I left mine all at home. The airport is cavernous and was almost deserted when we arrived; most of the international flights arrive early in the morning. While waiting for luggage, I’d tested my Verizon “world phone” SIM. Of course, it didn’t work. I then stopped off at the Vodacom booth to check the SIM. Nope, it didn’t work in their phone either. Sensing a pattern, I borrowed Glenn’s phone to let Arlene know I’d made it, then resolved to contact Verizon later.

We got to our hotel, the Mercure Midrand, about 40 minutes later. Unfortunately, it was dark, so we didn’t see any of the city (except billboards– which are no more exotic here than anywhere else). Midrand is a city of about 240,000 people nestled between Johannesburg and Pretoria. The hotel was about what I expected; it used to be a Best Western, so the small but comfortable room was no surprise. What did surprise me was the fact that the hotel is ringed with a 7′ fence with an electric fence on top of that. Security-conscious bunch! That’s to be expected given that the area of Midrand where the hotel is is primarily a commercial and industrial area. There are lots of folks about at night, and not all of them have good intentions. Surprisingly, some 200,000 of Midrand’s residents live in two black townships comprising 7% of the incorporated land area.

Glenn and I struggled with the lobby’s alleged wireless Internet before giving up. I wangled the desk clerk into letting me use his computer in the hotel office; with a little plug magic, I soon had my laptop open, called Verizon, and asked why my SIM wouldn’t work.To abbreviate the discussion, the answer is “it only works if you have a Verizon global phone”. Oops. Skype works fine, luckily, so I was able to call them in the first place.

I got up this morning about 0730, had a delicious hotel breakfast, and hooked up with the newly-arrived Jim McBee. Our first order of business was to get the right kind of power adapters– turns out that the “type M” style that I’d bought were the wrong kind. We had a nice walk up the street to The Boulders, a shopping center whose chief claim to fame seems to be a very large collection of boulders on the lower level. On either side of the street, there were little stalls selling fruit, candy,various kinds of counterfeit goods, and other things that we weren’t actually looking for. No one was unfriendly, but we did get some semi-hostile glares. At The Boulders, we found an electronics shop (no luck), a sort of WalMart-like discounter (no luck), and a car stereo store (bingo!) I bought some food for the kids (including some Simba potato chips and some assorted unusual candies).

The wireless Internet still wasn’t working, so I rebooted the access point– and voilà! that fixed it! For the rest of the afternoon, I worked, punctuated only by a visit from the local ward’s bishop, Mike Perry. He was an absolutely fascinating guy– he runs African Reptiles and Venom, a sort of one-stop snake superstore. Mike breeds and sells several varieties of reptiles, collects venom for use in antivenom sera, puts on corporate events and kiddie shows, and so on. We really enjoyed speaking to him, and I promised to look him up if I ever come back. In fact, I’d like to hire him; one of the team-building events he does is called “Fear Factor”. The victim, errr, contestant gets to put their head into a glass tank full of (non-venomous) snakes, then retrieve a piece of fruit from the tank using their teeth. What a way to build esprit de corps: “start acting like a team or I’ll bring Mike Perry back here again!”

For lunch, we went next door to Steers, a local fast-food chain, then it was back to the hotel for more work. We ended the day with a visit to the conference venue, which is huge! Jim has room for about 700 people in the room where he’ll be presenting; I haven’t seen my room yet, but it probably won’t be that big. More tomorrow; now I’m off to bed.

Note to self: next time you get ready to go on a big trip, make sure you have your passport before you leave home. Yes, that’s right: I woke up at about 3am this morning with the bolt-out-of-the-blue realization that a) I had forgotten my passport and b) I was approximately 980nm away from it. After puzzling over it for a while, I sent Tim a text message begging for help; he stopped by the house on his way to work and grabbed it, then met me at the Detroit airport. Fortunately, for this trip I’d booked MLU-MEM-DTW-AMS-JNB instead of my original MLU-ATL-CDG-JNB plan, or my goose would have been cooked. Now I have my passport, most of my stuff (missing one electrical adapter, which is survivable), and am headed to AMS to change planes!