Paul's Down-Home Page

Today marks a really special event: I’m taking David on a business trip with me, something I haven’t done for several years. He’s accompanying me to Seattle, so I can meet with some folks at our Redmond office. He doesn’t know it yet, but we’ll also be stopping at the Museum of Flight— I’ve always wanted to see it, and now I have an opportunity. I’m especially excited about the Barry Ross art exhibit. Ross illustrated the “I Learned About Flying From That” column in Flying magazine for many years. If you’re not a Flying reader, you may not know that ILAFFT is a monthly reader-submitted column that talks about dangerous experiences that pilots got themselves into, so his illustrations tend to be filled with peril. Should be a good show.

Of course, David being David, he’s equally excited about flying, eating airplane snacks, staying in a hotel, and seeing my partners– we’ll have a great trip!

I thought I should jot down a few things I learned from my recent trips before I forgot them. First, South Africa really does use those whopping big power adapters. Connectors to make a standard Euro or US plug fit them are fairly easy to find, but you could save a few bucks by buying them beforehand. Don’t be like me and buy the UK plug thinking that it looks the same– the South Africa plug has three large cylindrical plugs.

Second, if you want to use a public phone at the Johannesburg airport, forget it. The only phones are at the Telkom kiosk on the upper level, and it closes well before the evening international flight bank. Take your mobile phone or use Skype (if, that is, you can get the airport wireless system to work with your laptop.)

Third, although the Amsterdam airport has lots of public phones, there are only two phones that allow calling card calls– one near gate D41, and the other near the nexus of terminals C, D, and E. You should expect these two phones to have long lines of folks waiting to use them.

Fourth, if you’re going to travel overseas, don’t depend on Verizon’s alleged world phone service. Their SIMs only work in Verizon-issued phones. Before my next trip, I’ll be making other arrangements.

Fifth, when you see people complaining about the battery life of the MacBook Pro, they’re not kidding. I averaged about 2:20 on each battery charge, which isn’t even close to enough for productive use on long flights. I’ll be much more careful about picking aircraft that have in-seat power in the future.

Sixth, don’t read books about SARS on airplanes unless you want to be unsettled during the entire trip.

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.