Category: Personal

For the most part I think that finding fault with the products emanating out of the Googleplex. I still use Blogger for this blog, use GMail, have Google News as a tab in my Firefox home page, go to their search engine first for news, web, blog and image finding, have enjoyed using a number of the free APIs you offer plus Google Code and Groups, and feel that Google Maps is one of the best features on my iPhone. Heck, I even have a few pals working there.

Still… I’d like to put a bee in their bonnet while time remains for the troika at the top of that massive value pile to make resolutions for 2008:

Gents, the share price is over $700 and as of the last quarterly filing the company had $15.7 billion in cash equivalents in the piggy bank, with that amount increasing at nearly $1 billion per quarter. Admittedly, Google has filed to participate in the current spectrum auctions and that might require about half the cash if you plan to fund it internally.

Fair enough. You’ve been so far over the success horizon I need a, er, Google-sized telescope just to keep in view, meaning my thoughts on running your business barely fit in the room.

But, reading back on my first paragraph, I am a loyal customer of longstanding across quite a few products and from many media reports you clearly value hard data points when making decisions, of which this post can be one more.

Please add more people in customer service. If there’s one part of the company that across the board seems not to have enough staff this is it (okay, I know the Blogger team could use some extra developer and QA hands, so mark that as request 1A). While you could never, as a practical matter, hire enough CSRs to give human attention to every trouble ticket you could certainly do better than now.

The help pages of most Google products include a link to a discussion group for the product; GMail, for example, has a box on the right with GMail Help Discussion in bold and a hyperlink labeled “Visit this group – get answers fast” below it.

For all the zeros in your personal wealth charts, I certainly hope you don’t believe these words are accurate or true.

Clicking through to the Group page, one finds this further promise: “A Google employee will be popping in from time to time to post announcements, share tips, and answer questions.” True, neither statements says those fast answers will come in all or even many instances from a Google employee but from my experience a very large percentage of reasonable questions never do get a useful answer, let alone fast.

For instance, I get a good deal of non-English spam to my GMail account and they are almost always marked as spam and put in the spam folder. But messages written in Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian and almost any other non-English character set are literally useless to me, the only possible exception being Hebrew and, let’s be honest, I might piece out the letters but have no chance of comprehending the meaning.

So why isn’t there an option to just send that traffic straight to the trash? Okay, no option, that would require engineering effort. But over the time that Google’s been offering email and hosting support in the group the question’s been asked more than a dozen times and not once has a Google employee given any type of response.

Let’s estimate that a customer service rep with a useful level of writing skill in English or another relevant language but who does not work in the high cost Silicon Valley offices costs the company a nice round $100,000 per year, inclusive of salary, benefits, taxes, perks and other overhead like managerial and support services.

You could add, say, 2500 new staff, reps plus an appropriate number of managers, at an annual cost of $250 million, a drop in the proverbial bucket. True, that’s $250M per year and the cash account is not bottomless but I have to think that this force would more than justify the bill in improved customer satisfaction.

Further, these people will be a rich source of talent for other parts of the company; certainly that’s been my experience. Over half my support team at NetDynamics went on to be successful members of the development, QA, marketing, sales and consulting groups in Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. Who knows what so many bright folks–you only hire the best, as we well know–will come up with on their 20% free time projects?

Make a long time customer happy. Make bulking up support a priority for 2008.

Finally broke down and got Magic from iTunes last week, with five or so solid listens since. Bruce’s latest isn’t the immediate grabber, at least for me, that The Rising was nor is it a hard rock record in the style of, say, Born to Run, Darkness or Born in the USA, and impression you have gotten from reading the rock critics’ pontifications.

Magic is a good record and it does rock but the connection I’d make is to the more R&B style of his first two albums and the retro ’60s sound spread among The River‘s two discs, updated for the time passed. Lyrically Bruce is continuing with his exploration of a political voice, most explicitly in Livin’ in the Future, Last to Die and Long Walk Home but most of the remaining have subtle messages if read in this light.

Radio Nowhere, track one and the first single, is a bit deceptive in that sense, being the closest musically to The Rising; lyrically I still think its too close to 57 Channels and Elvis Costello’s Radio, Radio, and a whole host of other songs over the years from artists who don’t hear their own product often enough on mass media outlets.

Most of the remaining tracks struck me as Bruce mining the big studio sound of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson (Your Own Worst Enemy, Girls in Their Summer Clothes), with a definite influence from his recent folkie work (e.g., Gypsy Biker, Magic, Devil’s Arcade). I’ll Work for Your Love and Long Walk Home are outliers, the former a straight ahead pop rocker that could easily be mistaken for one of the tunes on Disc 3 of Tracks and the latter almost veering, in a good way, into Neil Young/Pearl Jam musical territory.

Overall I slotted Magic in eleventh in the Rating Bruce Records table, just behind Tracks and Live 1975-1985 and ahead of Nebraska and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

Bonus Humor

Jon Stewart does an adoring fan bit the night after seeing the E Streeters at Madison Square Garden earlier this year:

As Ives Galarcep wrote, “Today is arguably the best day of club soccer action of the year and I have decided to try and take it all in.” I might quibble a tad but hard to argue with the lineup I watched today, in chronological order:

• Manchester United 2-1 Everton: The Red Devils played well but were very fortunate to get a last minute penalty kick for the win after a tired Stephen Pienaar leg-whipped Ryan Giggs with the referee standing feet away.
• Inter Milan 2-1 AC Milan: This San Siro derby was a classic example of Italian club football with crunching tackles up and down the field with the yellow-clad ref showing yellow throughout. Inter kept their Serie A record unblemished when Milan keeper Dida blew a whopper in the 63rd minute to gift Esteban Cambiasso with the second goal, while the newly-crowned World Club Cup champions fell 25 points off the pace at the halfway point.
• Blackburn 0-1 Chelsea: Avram Grant’s crew came to Ewood Park needing the three points to stay in touch with Man U and Arsenal at the top of the Premiership table and overcame a stellar effort by former USA goalie Brad Friedel with a sweet first touch smash by Joe Cole off a very smart long pass from Salomon Kalou to get the necessary goal. Chelsea who, other than all the mishegas over the departure of Mourinho, are having a very quiet yet strong season, will have to worry about the condition of Peter Cech’s hip after he injured it early in the second half and had to call for a substitute. The Blues’ only healthy keeper is their #3 Hilario.
• Barcelona 0-1 Real Madrid: This was a fabulous matchup of the two best teams in Spain in recent years with the only score an absolutely beautiful one touch sequence give and return between Julio Baptista and Ruud van Nistlerooy that Victor Valdez had no chance of stopping. The game was brutal too though only Real defender Sergio Ramos left from an injury and that nearly at the end, but I think the hosts really missed Lionel Messi as Samuel Etoo did not have the skills and pace to manage playing as a lone striker.

The plus of the title was yesterday’s sweet 4-1 demolition of Portsmouth by my boys at Anfield. Israeli international Yossi Benayoun opened in the 13th minute from the finally healthy Harry Kewell’s sweet long cross, quickly followed by a Sylvain Distin careless own goal. Benjani (who’s on my fantasy team) got on back in the second half but $50 million man Fernando Torres cleaned up with two further scores to seal it. Torres was also responsible for the own goal gift as he was the one backing into Pompey’s other central defender trying to turn with the ball towards goal when Distin got too close as the ball bounced off his shin and past David James.

The English teams are on a quick turnaround as the traditional Boxing Day matches Wednesday will have Liverpool visiting bottom-sitters Derby, Manchester United traveling to meet their old captain’s side at Sunderland, Chelsea hosting eigth place Aston Villa and leaders Arsenal going to Liverpool’s victims, who still sit seventh despite the loss. The Reds also play at Manchester City and host Wigan in the final two holiday weeks matches.

In the amazing, now it can be told story, I’ve joined an exciting new company called Marketo as manager of community and content. After three weeks (I started two days after returning from Australia) this is turning out to be a great opportunity and fit for me, and I’ve been able to jump in and be productive from the start.

Marketo is addressing a big open space in the enterprise software world, providing automation for marketing departments through a software as a service (SaaS) platform. There are a few smaller existing players, mainly selling on premise packages that are proving difficult to configure and run effectively but doing modestly well just because there are few good alternatives.

Right now on our public website you’ll see our 1.0 products but we’re working hard on 2.0, which is much more expansive in addressing the company’s longterm vision; the company tagline is “Revenue starts here” and it fits. The 2.0 beta actually launched the week before last and moved into high gear this week.

Engineering operates on an agile basis and we’re fortunate that the co-founders hired an outstanding user experience designer right at the start so that the work of the developers is exposed in very effective, flexible ways. The founding team didn’t just happen to get lucky, though, they’ve been through the startup lifecycle successfully several times before, with companies like Epiphany, Red Brick Systems, Metaphor Computer Systems and Siebel.

Our office setup was also chosen consciously. Only our VP of Sales has her own office, and the CEO and VP of Marketing (my boss) share a second office; everyone else has an Ikea desk in one of two big open rooms and there are no cubicle walls or other partitions. I sit with Engineering, right in the middle actually, next to the CTO. Dave is one of the co-founders and the fact that he sits in among the team is a good example of why there’s very little ego causing headaches.

We’ll see how this turns out but I’m extremely optimistic. In what might be a positive omen, we had a cozy company holiday party this past Tuesday and the last time the company party was held right after I joined it was NetDynamics, which turned out, er, reasonably well.

The academic division at BillSaysThis has completed a new study of the causes of traffic delays called “Analysis of Traffic by Driver Behavioral Characteristics” and has asked me to post the abstract here.

Delays, they found, can be divided into three groups: caused by stupid, moronic or idiotic driver behavior. There was some push for a fourth category, imbecilic, but the consensus was is just a subgroup of moronic.

Stupid driving is defined as driver actions which are based on poor or inconsiderate decisionmaking. Examples include driving significantly slower in only mildly bad weather (say, drizzling rain compared to a serious snow storm); squeezing into the exit lane at the last possible point; and, spacing out or losing focus due to a conversation (with someone else in the vehicle or on the phone), a song or discussion on the radio or simply getting lost in thought.

Moronic driving is defined as driver actions that do not conform to generally accepted rules of the road, such as frequent lane changes in stop and go traffic, or are based on excessive timidity, like driving 10 or more miles per hour less than the speed limit.

Idiotic driving is defined as driver actions that are reckless, beyond the limit of inconsideration, and completely cut off from consideration of their consequences. These are actions that cause collisions or spinouts though the driver causing the result does not always suffer him or herself. Example behaviors are pulling into traffic without confirming a clear entry path, street racing and, always a classic, changing one’s pants.

One of the BST researchers personally witnessed the first example just yesterday. On a semi-major surface road, with cars parked along the curb obstructing vision of drivers entering from an apartment building’s parking, a man attempted to turn left from the apartment parking. Another driver, a woman doing nothing that would fall into any of this study’s classifications, was driving towards the man in her lane on this street.

The man pulled out anyway. The woman’s midsized sedan was turned more than 120 degrees from her initial direction and, though fortunately neither driver appeared to be hurt, her car looked to be totalled. The man’s car showed minimal damage. Unfortunately for him a local police car was two vehicles behind the researcher’s.

The researcher and his wife were in the first car in the other direction, the one into which the driver was coming, and escaped joining the collision only due to the spouse’s alert, immediate reaction. Reportedly if the researcher had been any slower in applying his brakes their brand new vehicle, a lovely white Toyota RAV4, might have suffered significant damage with less than 200 miles on the odometer.

The researchers note that delays caused by road construction were outside the scope of this study but that delays caused by poor design or bad construction are considered as a sub-type of Stupid behavior.

“Analysis of Traffic by Driver Behavioral Characteristics” has been submitted for peer review prior to full publication.

After the poor performance at the weekend resulted in their first Premier League loss of the season the Reds bounced back today in the final match of the Champions League group stage, destroying the French side 4-0.

Steven Gerrard opened the account by putting in the rebound of his saved penalty kick in the fourth minute and $50 million man Fernando Torres showed why he deserved the price tag by adding a second less than ten minutes later. Harry Kewell made a lovely pass off a poor clearance by the Marseille keeper Steve Mandanda, delivering it to Dirk Kuyt wide open at the top of the box and that was number three. Ryan Babel continued his European form by racing past a worn out defender in the 91st minute, then easily touching the ball past Mandanda.

The host’s defense was pathetic and apathetic, to say the least, and Pepe Reina literally did not have to make a save the entire evening. Sammi Nasri came on as a sub for them at the begining of the second half and put a little life into the Marseille side but after about 10 minutes faded into the same black as his mates, and that was that.

The goals took Liverpool’s tally to 16 in the last three Champions League matches, following eight against Besiktas a few weeks ago and the four against FC Porto before that. After a very disappointing draw and two losses in the first three games, this result puts the Reds into the first knockout stage and drops Marseille to the UEFA Cup.

On to Manchester United as part of a Big Four Sunday (Arsenal are at Chelsea in the other game), then a Carling Cup meetup with Chelsea Wednesday.

Roar, Reds!

Reading, you will see, beat Liverpool today 3-1 at the Majeski Stadium in London, the first time the Royals have ever beaten the Reds and the first league loss of the season by the Reds. That is the literal truth, I suppose, but the reality is Liverpool were handed defeat by referee Andre Marriner and for the second time this year I expect a referee to get a sitting down for his terrible decisionmaking against my guys.

As indicated in the post title, Marriner ought to be credited with four scores; while I understand my own tendency to see blame anywhere but my favorites, even the TV announcers saw it this way. The first is the penalty kick he gifted to Reading in the 17th minute, correctly calling a foul against Jamie Carragher but wrongly saying it was either in the box or continued into the box, which Jon Hunt converted.

Stevie G pulled an equalizer abut 10 minutes later but after that Marriner apparently decided that the hosts could do no wrong. Over the remainder of the play, there were at least three clear fouls in the penalty box against Reading and yet the official never came close to putting the whistle in his mouth, much less pointing to the spot.

So yes, Liverpool come away with no points, definitely unfortunate when Arsenal slipped up the other day with the draw at Newcastle and Chelsea and Man United are not letting up in the least.

Part of the blame may also lie with Rafa Benitez–he went beyond the normal ‘rotation is good’ policy and came out with a nearly bizarre lineup. Jack Hobbs, okay, Hyypia could use the day off ahead of Tuesday’s win or go home Champions League match at Marseille, I could see that.

A midfield of Gerrard, Javi Mascherano, Mo Sissoko and Andrei Voronin, though, that I didn’t get and was calling for Ryan Babbel to come on for Sissoko after the PK. Mo is a great defender but a huge offensive liability, his passing constantly too soft or off-target and as likely to end up on an opponent’s foot as a teammate’s. He or Masch in central midfield is okay but not both, Kewell should have been on the left to start, Masch and Gerrard in the middle and Voronin on the right.

Here’s hoping Tuesday is smarter and better.

Hilarious

Schweet! (icing)

Scary

Something I misexplain all the time

Intriguing but from somehow who frequently mispredicts

ruh;)

After a not particularly pleasant airplane experience, which makes me wonder why people told me Air New Zealand is much better than United, TS1 and I are, to quote the great Chuck Berry, “back home in the good old USA.” Tired as heck but not really able to fall asleep. Too many good memories banging around in la cabeza.

Our hotel is plop in the middle of the part of Sydney called The Rocks set right on the water at Sydney Harbor, next to Circular Quay, a key transport hub with ferry wharves, bus stops and a train station. Almost every building is a store, restaurant, hotel or pub with a few museums and churches mixed in, with the Harbor Bridge behind us and the Sydney Opera House on the far side of the Quay (which, strangely, is pronounced ‘key’).

On weekends the Rocks Marketplace, somewhat similar to the arts and wine festivals so popular in Silicon Valley, takes over a long block just below the bridge. Friday nights are the Markets by Moonlight, with food stalls added to the normal vendors and live musical acts, so we had our Friday dinner there examining the merchandise and getting some hot food. Nothing too exciting though one of the performers was the once-hot ’80s band Pseudo Echo. Our room directly overlooks the stage so we had no trouble listening in even after we came back here.

Star City, a huge casino/hotel complex in Darling Harbor, was on TS1’s must see list so we went over yesterday about lunchtime. A little slots for her and blackjack for me, then a bite to eat, and back to the tables for the rest. In the end we left about $30 with the house, not bad for about five hours each gambling.

The casino is a decent one, not as noisy as most I’m familiar with in Vegas but also no smoking anywhere inside, which is much nicer than Vegas where somehow the casino bosses seem to think having a table be non-smoking even if those to either side are full of smokers is good enough.

A few other differences from American blackjack that I didn’t find as nice: Other bettors can bet on your hand, either people who can’t get a seat at the table or others who want more than one hand going at a time. Only hard 9, 10 or 11 dealt hands can be doubled down. You can only split once–that is, if you get a pair of eights, split them and then get a third eight you can’t split again. Finally, a side bet called Perfect Pairs can be made on each hand, paying 5-, 15- or 30-1 for a pair of different colors ,the same color or the same suit, respectively, and again anyone can place this bet on any dealt hand.

For dinner we took a walk around Circular Quay to check out the restaurants right on the water. There are quite a few, all with tables out on the plaza under umbrellas. We ate at a Chinese place called The East, food was okay, service not quite up to the prices.

Today is our last full day of vacation. Sad, very sad, eh? No more g’days or good on ya, mates. Maybe we can start a new trend in the Bay Area of using those greetings.

DI Rebus is in a hot spot, literally, after turning up with both hand burns a day after an incredibly annoying felon dies in a fire in his own apartment. Said felon has been annoying Rebus’ junior DC Siobhan Clark, one might even say stalking and harrasing her, and Rebus was seen drinking with the dead man on the evening of the fire.

Then Ian Rankin turns up the heat in A Question of Blood by giving us a high profile schoolhouse murder, an ex-SAS soldier seemingly gone postal and killing two boys and wounding another. The survivor’s father is a Member of Parliament, and further, was arrested in a prostie sweep a few months previously leaving him with a fairly negative relationship with the police.

One of the killed boys was the son of John’s cousin, allowing Rankin to highlight the DI’s complete lack of connection to any other humans outside of work. Rebus is asked by the lead detective on the killings to consult even though he’s sort of suspended over that dead felon. With his hands burned, Clark is reduced to being his driver, door opener and cigarette lighter and used often for her feminine attractions to get men speaking when they’d otherwise not. As always, there are aspects of the school murders that don’t sit well with Rebus.

The two need to discover the truth behind that apartment fire and make sure that the truth of the school killings is swept under in the rush to put paid to a horrific crime.

recommended

The fourth volume of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, The Merchants’ War picks up moments after the end of vol. 3, The Clan Corporate. Miriam/Helge has escaped with her life into world 3, just, with a bit of assistance from her ex-boyfriend/US agent Mike. Others, including the king of Neijwein and Miriam’s betrothed, the brain-damaged younger prince, have not and as a result the allegedly sadistic Crown Prince (who was actually behind the attack) has become king.

The new king immediately places blame on the upstart tinkerers, in other words Miriam’s family, and with support from the older nobility sets out to destroy the worldwalking clans. Mean he may be but not stupid; he’s put a good deal of planning in place to deal with their ability to ‘magically’ appear anywhere they like–except for space already occupied in the destination world.

Miriam is sort of stuck in the other world’s equivalent of Manhattan with no money or appropriate clothing and unable to use the contacts and resources she’d previously established, nor does she have the locket/pattern needed to get back to her home Earth. Which, it seems clear at this stage, is almost but not quite our Earth. She turns for help to a madam involved in the same underground revolutionary group as her Boston pawnbroker friend and gets it, though not without coming close to being murdered as a security risk.

The third leg of this volume is the effort’s of what’s come to be called the Family Trade Operation, the US agency for which Mike now works. Though the incursion his team made into Neijwein just before the palace bombing at the end of the last book wasn’t close to a success, with a badly injured Mike the only team member to get home alive, the FTO is making progress on tracking down the threat claimed by the turncoat Mattias as well as finding a technological answer to worldwalking.

All in all a good read but don’t expect much in the way of answers or endings in The Merchant’s War. Stross says two more volumes are coming in 2008 and 2009 so this is a middle of the story book. For all I know there may be more after those two since here Stross has shifted focus and opened things up so that Miriam is just one main character among several; in fact with only one or two brief exceptions she doesn’t interact with anyone from her family the entire book.

recommended, but be sure to start with the first book, The Family Trade

Wednesday, during which we flew from Cairns to Sydney, was a day with a great high and several small lows. On the high side was an outstanding offer letter for a new position at a very promising small startup–I’ll post more details after I start next week and know the company policy. Have no doubt that this is a great fit for my interests and skills with a strong, experienced team and large market opportunity.

On the low, the hotel in Cairns messed up our airport transfer and rather than fix it on their coin we had to pay $20 extra. That’s in keeping with the overall experience we had at the Novotel Palm Cove Resort, good but nowhere near great. Services were only so-so yet quite pricey and the physical plant left much to desire, like sidewalks that went all the way to the building our apartment was in, about a kilometer from the reception/restaurant center.

Second, word came through that our ten year old 4Runner threw a rod and destroyed the engine. $12,000 for a new engine, $7500 for a rebuilt or likely more than $20k for a new/new to us vehicle. Got to get to that great new job and mass transit isn’t a realistic option.

Third, on arrival at our hotel here, the Old Sydney Holiday Inn, we found out that someone (probably our travel agent) put the wrong codes in the reservation system so that despite our voucher stating we had a standard queen room what the hotel had for us was a room with twin beds and nothing to be done until the next day. After all the other news and a three hour flight I was really frustrated but we had no choice except suffer one night and suffer the hassle of switching rooms.

Thursday was an altogether better day. We took the ferry across the harbor to Taronga Zoo, which has an outstanding collection of animals. Red pandas, African bull elephants, tahr, kangaroos, emus, wallabies, a Komodo Dragon, meerkats, giraffes, deer, many varieties of birds and much more. After a late afternoon time out, we walked a couple of blocks over to a tasty Japanese restaurant called Nakashima. Pure exhaustion had us asleep early.

This morning we had breakfast at a very friendly cafe in the Clock Tower shopping center on Argyle and then strolled over to the Sydney Opera House. We even saw that the French movie made from Harlan Coben’s terrific novel Tell No One was playing at the cinema just the next block over.

Then we took the Essentials Tour. I’m beginning to realize that I really enjoy architecture; when I was here in 2000 I spent a couple of afternoons sitting with a coffee just looking at the Opera House, it’s so beautiful. The tour was neat, we got the story of its 16 year construction (1957-1973) and to see most of the theaters it contains, all but the Opera Theater as the Australian Ballet was rehearsing for tonight’s opening performance of The Nutcracker.

Danish architect Jorn Utzon is responsible for the breathtaking exterior appearance. He won a global competition for his proposed design, now instantly recognizable around the world, but the interior was done by three Australian architects after the Aussie Premier who originally backed the construction lost his 1965 re-election bid and Utzon and the new government fell out. Utzon’s still going strong at age 89, and for the last few years has been designing updates to major portions of the interior, but to this day he’s not been back to see his creation!

For lunch we took a bus to the city center and visited two shopping meccas, The Strand Arcade and Queen Victoria Building. The former is a sizable mall, with four stories of shops and cafes stretching from Market to Pitt streets, but the latter is beyond huge with three ground level and above floors and two basement levels that, aside from the lack of windows, are as filled with Australian and global name brand stores as the others. Heck, they even give guided tours!

Two more full days here to enjoy before our wonderful vacation must end.

Today was a wonderful trip, worth every Australian dollar it cost. We had a bit of a scare since it was raining lightly when we woke up but the skies cleared by the time we showered and headed over for brekky.

A small comfortable Down Under Tours bus picked us up at 7:15 out front of the hotel, driving us down to the Cairns Wharf to board our boat. The Ocean Spirit is a 105′ catamaran with both sail and engine power, a large salon with bar, upper and lower stern decks and a large open bow deck, plus a full kitchen and row of bathroom stalls below decks; crew complement seemed to be about a dozen or so.

We pulled away about 8:30 for a two hour trip, about 40km, out to a seven mile long stretch of reef called Michaelmas Reef that ends in a tiny island called, not surprisingly, Michaelmas Cay. During the trip Dave, one of the two marine biologists on the crew, gave us a video presentation on the Great Barrier Reef, the coral and other fish in the region and Michaelmas specifically. Flippers, masks and bodysuits were distributed just before arrival.

TS1 and I signed up for the snorkel lesson since it’s been awhile since I’ve done it and she’s never really been in the ocean, much less snorkeled. Our instructor was Heather, the other marine biologist, and I provided the class’s comic relief. Honestly I wasn’t expecting the class to begin literally the moment we got off the beach shuttle and so was caught trying to get my gear stowed and the flippers on. Let’s say I flopped around a bit and leave it at that.

After the class the months of swim lessons I’ve been giving TS1 paid off, as she was able to get in the water a bit and paddle around with me. The salt water got the better of her, unfortunately, so she retreated to the beach while I had a bit of a swim. We bought a disposable waterproof camera and I took a lot of snaps of the coral and fish.

The Cay is a highly protected environment, most of it off limits to people and actually a home for thousands of quite a few different types of birds. I’d expected the included lunch grill to be served on the beach but that was completely wrong 😉 Instead the beach buggy, a simple 30 seater boat, shuttled us back to the Ocean Spirit to eat. Lunch was great, though considering the cost of the trip I was quite disappointed that even (bottled) water and soda were extra cost items.

The tour company keeps a semi-submersible boat out at the cay for 30 minute tours. A bit too claustrophobic for me but TS1 took the after lunch ride and got to see the coral and fish she missed from the snorkeling, plus several large sea turtles that didn’t come that close to the water’s edge.

A little after her tour ended everyone was back aboard from the beach or scuba diving and we made the 2.5 hour ride back to Cairns Wharf. Not long after weighing anchor the chef served fresh baked cake and coffee; we were pretty beat and spent most of the time nearly napping in one of the chairs along the port rail. A half hour before docking crew came around with a glass of sparkling wine for each of the guests, which went down well with the sun getting low on the horizon.

All too soon we were bundled off to the coaches and back to our respective hotels. TS1 made us a simple dinner en suite so we didn’t have to go out and I had a good soak. Tomorrow we fly to Sydney for the last leg of this awesome vacation–I’m writing this Tuesday night but probably won’t post it until Wednesday–four full days in Australia’s biggest city.

Saturday was another travel day. After a relaxing morning and lunch in Queenstown, we had an easy flight to Sydney, a short layover and then another flight up to Cairns; that is, TS1 and I went from the very south of New Zealand to the far north of Australia, crossing three timezones along the way. We had a friendly, loquacious driver for the ride out to Palms Cove Resort, about 25 km west of central Cairns, where our fantastic accommodations are courtesy of my parent’s time share. This is a huge apartment, three bedrooms and two baths, full kitchen, living room and laundry, Too bad we only have three days to enjoy it, and two of them we’re out for full day trips.

Yesterday we went to Kuranda, a hippy village turned tourist attraction way up at the top of a nearby mountain in a rain forest. The trip up was on the Kuranda Scenic Railway, a refurbished real train that climbs through absolutely beautiful scenery, and our travel agent put us on the gold coach, equivalent to first class with free-flowing alcohol or soft drinks, tasty pastry snacks and comfortable individual chairs rather than the bolted-down benches in the other cars.

At the top we had passes for Birdworld, a lovely assortment of tropical birds, and some time to browse the markets. Karoline, our hostess from the local tour company, was wonderful in arranging on the fly a substitute for the second half of the day after I found out that to get to Tjapukai Cultural Park required 45 minutes travel on a gondola. With my deathly fear of open heights that was just not happening, so she switched us to a visit to RainForeStation Nature Park, including getting us a bus ride over, and then back down on the train instead of what would have been another gondola ride.

Which turned out great. We had three activities, a ride through the rain forest on an old Army Duck, a show by Pamagirri Aboriginal Dancers and demonstration by one of the dancers of djidgeroo playing, spear throwing and boomerang throwing, plus TS1 got her picture taken holding a baby koala.

The rain forest ride was my favorite. We had a funny Aussie guide named Matt, who pointed out the amazing variety of flora, showed us some huge termite nests and lovely butterflies and gave us an extended, rare view of a gorgeous wild Cassowary. The latter is a leftover species of flightless bird dating back about 150 million years, picture a cross between a large turkey and a peacock (without the colorful tail); they’re loners, coming together only to mate, quite dangerous if disturbed and endangered due to human encroachment on their native territory. The ducks are six wheeled amphibious open-topped jeep-like vehicles built during World War II and still quite functional; we drove right into a small lake without a drop getting inside.

The four men and two musicians performed about half a dozen aboriginal dances, finishing by calling six people on stage from the audience to learn one of them. Enjoyable but not too exciting. The we were split into smallish groups, with each performer taking one group around the demo spaces and we were fortunate to have what I thought was the best one, Aaron. He explained how a djidgeroo is made (most commonly by inserting a bunch of termite in the center of a small log for three months, then turning the wood over and putting another batch at the opposite end, after which the instrument is used in one ceremony and then is broken and trashed.

Aaron demo’ed how his people throw bamboo spears for hunting and fighting. The trick is not only the throwing motion and choosing the proper bamboo but in a second wooden piece that hooks at the back end of the spear and triples the potential distance as well as substantially increasing accuracy. Plus the hard piece of wood is helpful in delivering the killing blow to a downed animal or opponent, eh? Last he showed us proper boomerang motion and I even got to try a couple of tosses.

All told, ten hours door to door after a very early start. We were pleasantly exhausted, barely able to drag ourselves the better part of a kilometer back to the main building for dinner. Today is a lazy day, maybe a little swimming and a bus ride to central Cairnes in the afternoon. Tomorrow is the centerpiece of our whole vacation, a boat trip out to Michaelmas Cay in the Great Barrier Reef and I’m very excited about going!

In her award-winning novella The Retrieval Artist Kristine Kathryn Rusch gave us an intriguing small scale, star-spanning future. Small in the sense that though colonies had been created on an unspecified number of planets around other stars, humanity was but one of a number of sentient species to do so and we were far from the most significant.

All these races have agreed that crimes committed on their respective worlds are subject to the host race’s legal system, including punishment, and Rusch’s aliens are, indeed, alien so that understanding the various laws are difficult despite years of association. The punishments, on the other hand, are far easier to understand, if not accept.

The most serious offenses visit consequences not on the criminal but on the miscreant’s children. Because of the seriousness, pan-galactic tribunals hear appeals and, like so many systems of justice, the wheels of justice move slowly. That means the convicted have many years and, if they have the money, the ability to attempt to escape. Only among humans, though, have businesses sprung up to assist convicts in disappearing; of course, corresponding operations to track down the disappeared and, more rarely, find ways to retrieve them without endangering their future.

The Disappeared presents the origin story of Miles Flint, the master of all retrieval artists. In this novel he’s a detective with the Armstrong Dome police force on the Moon, only recently promoted from (spaceship) Traffic Control, and partnered with the more experienced, somewhat disgraced Noelle DeRicci. And strange ships start arriving at the dome.

First up, a yacht with three eviscerated bodies is towed in from orbit and DeRicci and Flint are assigned the case. Though there’s absolutely no identification of the people or yacht, it bears the hallmarks of a Disty capital punishment; the Disty being a race of short but powerful aliens who’ve taken Mars as a colony world.

Second, a Wygnin ship has been stopped before leaving with two (human) children. Wygnin law punishes a child of the criminal and the inter-species treaties require Earth Alliance governments to permit this, but the Wygnin lack the documentation required by the letter of the law and so the detectives stall them to try and find a loophole.

Finally, a frantic woman has landed yet another ID-less yacht at Armstrong claiming the crew and passengers were taken by a posse from a third alien group, the Rev. Her story doesn’t quite hang together but lunar politics being what they are, the cops have to treat her carefully and so she’s able to escape while being driven from the port to the precinct.

The cases all turn on Flint’s inability to accept that humans should be punished in ways or for laws that shatter his absolutely reasonable sense of justice and fair play. To give an 18 month old baby boy over to be raised as a Wygnin because her mother built a house–on land the Wygnin willingly sold her, not understanding the human concept of property–that unknown to her killed eggs of a second sentient species living on their world or that a lawyer should face decades of hard time for the subsequent crimes of her client.

Rusch does a good job of weaving these threads together through The Disappeared, finishing by showing us the motivation for Flint’s decision to become the best, or at least the most ethical, retrieval artist. Setting up an entire series of novels which I certainly hope match up to this one.

recommended

Late afternoon, relaxing with a tasty hot chocolate in a little ice cream and chocolate cafe that makes its own chocolate on premises, mmmmmm.

We did take the steamer trip across Lake Wakatipu this afternoon. The boat is the TSS Earnslaw, recycled from its early 20th century worklife as a lake tramper to a tourist transport, and the very pleasant ride was about 40-45 minutes each way.

At the far end we visited Walter Peak High Country Farm which besides hosting visitors is still a working sheep ranch. The staff laid on a decent buffet lunch on a patio over the lake and then we had a tour on the sheep operations. The host was quite loquacious and, as seems common down this way, has a sense of humor that would not, er, go over as well in the US.

He had his dog, a rocket of a Border Collie, round up about eight sheep and bring them down into the pen with us. We had the chance to take some pellets and feed the big hairy animals by hand. Next the dog brought another recently sheered batch down from the hillside to show off the way the dog and handler use whistles and coughs to control the animals. Finally we went inside a shed and he sheered one right in front of us, which didn’t seem as much fun to me or TS1 as you might think.

Tomorrow is a big travel day. We’re catching an afternoon flight to Sydney, hang out for a couple of hours and then get a different plane up to Cairns. Sunday is our day trip to Kuranda, Monday is free and Tuesday the big highlight, a day trip out to the Great Barrier Reef.

Hope y’all are having a happy Thanksgiving. I know what we’re thankful for this year!

It’s just before dinner Thursday here in this beautiful town on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, so for you Americans it’s still Wednesday (or maybe just tickled into Thanksgiving in the East). Queenstown is only about 13,000 people but from appearances nearly all work in the tourism business.

If the word bungy has a New Zealand-ish feel to you, that’s because the folks down here invented it. And Queenstown is all about the extreme outdoor activities, from the wacky Fly By Wire to jetboating to long, multi-day hikes up in the mountains that were featured in the Lord of the Rings films.

We had a bit of trouble getting here yesterday, though. The country’s entire air traffic system was messed up when a small Cessna flipped tail over head at Wellington Airport and so our flight was about two hours late. Making the wait worse was that Air New Zealand switched the gate for us three times, only to end up back where we started.

Then we checked in to our hotel only to find that the ‘renovation’ is more like a major construction project. The room is nice but $23 for the no hot food buffet breakfast was a bit much (the hot food adds $10, all prices in NZ dollars) as well.

But it’s hard to stay upset when you walk out of the terminal and hotel into pure physical beauty. The lake, the mountains, the open countryside are stunning. I took photos but they probably won’t do it justice.

We walked around town yesterday for the afternoon and early evening. Sad to say KFC, McDonalds and Subway have penetrated even this far from home but otherwise the downtown has many nice shops and restaurants. TS1 even dropped $15 at the local casino though I resisted the urge.

Today we drove out about 45 km to a tiny village called Glenorchy (pop. 400) and went for a short walkabout in the area which were used in the LOTR films for Lothlorien and Isengard. Very windy and a bit overcast but fun and a huge change from home. Driving on the left does take a bit of getting used to, and the road was a single lane curving up and around the base of the mountains each way the entire distance.

Then we drove back past Queenstown to Arrowtown. Supposedly a recreation of a 150 year old gold mining town, it was really more like, oh, Main St. in Half Moon Bay with upscale eateries, jewelery and clothing stores and a couple of small attractions. Did I mention driving on the left is strange?

Anyway, tomorrow we plan to go on a ferry ride across the lake, check out a huge working farm and ride back. Saturday we fly to Cairns via Sydney!

TS1 and I started our long-awaited vacation Saturday night, flying from SFO to Auckland. A nice flight, if a bit bumpy and crowded, thumbs up to the Air New Zealand cabin crew for keeping everyone happy and comfortable and for having decent seat room on our 777-200. The on demand seat back video and music system was cool too, as I finally saw Knocked Up (funny and sweeter than expected) plus second viewings of Live Free or Die Hard and Simpsons Movie.

We arrived about 5 a.m. local time Monday morning, meaning no lines at customs or for rides and the hotel (right on the main drag in downtown) was aware of our early arrival hour so the room was ready. After a bit of rest we went out wandering, found an East Asian food court with some tasty choices, wandered more and saw the Sky Tower, a huge Santa over a big bookstore and found a cafe that gave free wireless with purchase (since the hotel charges NZ$30 a day for in-room broadband).

We had dinner at Gina’s Pizza and Pasta Bar. This highly-rated restaurant has a friendly, attentive Italian staff and the food was delicious; we shared a salad and pizza. The hotel concierge showed us a map and said it was maybe 15 minutes or so to walk. Er, maybe if you’re an Olympic class power walker but at more than two miles with some serious uphill climb we needed more like an hour, but I suppose burning the calories made the food go down better.

Today we hit the Auckland War Museum, had lunch at veg-friendly Revive and hit the Auckland Zoo for the afternoon. I completely underestimated the best way to get back to the bus after the museum, so add about 45 more minutes of shoe burning. By the time we got on the bus back from the zoo my feet were literally burning. But it was a good burning, and worth it. Took lots of pictures, will post soonish. Now off for some dinner!

(After dinner)

The museum was nicely done with a mix of Maori and English settler historical material. I have much respect for the Maori and other Melanesian people who crossed huge stretches of the Pacific in uncovered, human-powered oversized canoes! New Zealand was actually one of the last of their migrations as they only arrived here about 800 years ago.

On the bus ride there we had some discussion with a few other tourists about the best stop to get off and so when we left I was very confident that we should go down the hill in the opposite direction to catch the bus closer to our destination. After finding an area map–the museum is on one side of a big park and wooded area called the Auckland Domains–I was sure we should set off on what looked like a short path to the street and, obviously, a bus stop.

Very obvious, except totally wrong. The path veered off on a steep downhill through some pretty woods and didn’t get near a street for about a mile. There also, of course, was no bus stop for another long chunk of walking but we got to it before TS1 went back for one of those nasty looking Maori knives.

Revive was not that big a place and simply packed. Far more women than men in the restaurant, which is down near the harbor. Viv has this organic veg mushroom lasagne, yummy, and I had a three salad combo featuring bulghur.

The zoo was a lot more walking but filled with some beautiful animals. TS1 was captivated by the baby penguin and the family of orangutans. The lions were sleeping but it was feeding time for the giraffes and zebras, which were in the same large enclosure, and I thought the baby giraffe was cute.

We went to Star City for the buffet dinner at Fortuna. More yummy and now we’re both beat.

Auckland is a very cosmopolitan city, as you’d expect for the commercial center of a large island nation. In the downtown area, where we’ve spent most of our time, there are multiple restaurants on nearly every block (or superettes, convenience stores slightly larger than 7-11’s) and never are two of the same cuisine next to each other. The people, too, are a huge assortment and so far all friendly.

Up early tomorrow to catch a short flight to Queenstown almost all the way at the other end of New Zealand. We’ll have a rental car there, should be amusing driving on the ‘wrong’ side of the road again since I’ve only had to do it once before, seven years ago in Australia.