Howzit? Howzit!

Back in Jo’burg. Again. Land of opportunity. Land of malls. It’s like southern California the way everyday commerce revolves around the malls in this city. Sandton City, Rosebank, Cresta, Clearwater and other malls seem to dominate social activities.  Most of the restaurants are in the malls.  Many of the grocery stores are in the malls.  There are flea markets in the malls.  Even liquor stores are in the malls.  Go to the mall or go home.

Anyway, I am lacking in recent posts, but I simply haven’t had time to write nor much of interest to write about.  I’m hopeful this will be the last trip for a long while as I am tired of airplanes.  With travel for work and vacation, the end of next week will mark a six week stretch during which I will have slept four nights in airplane seats against only five in my bed at home and flown 42,212 miles (across United, Delta and Southwest… bummer).  Strange way to live.

On the upside, spring is arriving in SA.  Today it’s a sunny, clear, crisp Saturday.  There are some noisy Hadada Ibis in the garden.  Dawn breaks at about 6:15am and I’ve been able to get back to running in the morning, which is good for my health and sanity.  I ran 4mi this morning, then walked another 3mi hitting a couple shopping centers to complete some errands.  There’s Beijing 2008 Olympics coverage on the TV and the South Africa v Argentina rugby match will be on shortly, so I’m getting a much needed sports fix.

Hopefully, I will be posting more regularly going foward.  Thanks for the patience, iyakubonana (Xhosa) and totsiens (Afrikaans).

(Il)logical Routing

I’ve been to South Africa four times this year with a fifth trip planned for this month. It’s been an interesting time and I’ve learned a fair amount about emerging market business, politics and culture. Still, the first thing most people ask when I tell them where I’ve been traveling is: “How do you get there, anyway?” Weird. Few start with questions about game parks or Jo’burg’s tough reputation or weather; those questions come later.

Most of the time, people go straight to the process and wonder about the state of global air transportation. So, to lay it out for all, here’s my experience thus far.  First, I’ve not done it twice the same way.  I’ve flown into O.R. Tambo International Airport on South African Airways and Delta Air Lines, and will soon add Air France to that list, but the routing has been different each time:

• DEN ATL DKR JNB -> JNB DKR ATL DEN (9710 miles / 15620 km)
• DEN IAD JNB -> JNB DKR IAD DEN (9590 miles / 15440 km)
• DEN LHR JNB -> JNB LHR DEN (10290 miles / 16560 km)
• DEN JFK DKR JNB -> JNB DKR JFK CVG DEN (9590 miles / 15440 km)

Coming Attraction!

• DEN JFK CDG JNB -> JNB CDG JFK DEN (10670 miles / 17180 km)

Flights from the US almost invariably stop in Dakar, Senegal.  Flights from Europe go straight through.  The eastbound trans-Atlantic flights are overnights, the westbound are daytime flights.  Southbound flights from Europe to Jo’burg are usually daytime and northbound at night.  Trans-African flights are typically the same as the Europe legs, heading south in the day and north at night.  But there are exceptions: the trip I made through London had overnight flights for 3 of the 4 legs.  Best to have a neck pillow and get used to sleeping in coach airplane seats if you need to fly like this often.  And plan to spend a minimum of 24 hours in transit which can stretch to well over 30 hours if you have bad connections (like my next trip which will have no less than 18.5 hours of layovers for the round trip).

The best?  For me, it has to be United Airlines to IAD and South African Airways from their, racking up miles on Star Alliance the whole way, but the tickets aren’t necessarily the cheapest that way, hence the variety of routes and airlines.

*UPDATE 23.Jul.08* Umm.  Yeah.  So going via CDG is not so great if you have the itinerary I had, which included a MASSIVE layover at JFK on the way home: took me 36 hours from aircraft door close in Jo’burg to door open in Denver.  Suboptimal to say the least.

On Connectivity and Missed Connections

I find myself this morning sitting in Concourse A at Cincinnati / N Kentucky International Airport awaiting my flight home. There was a bit of weather here yesterday afternoon, causing my Delta Airlines flight from New York, NY to divert to Louisville, KY. By the time the weather cleared and we arrived in Cincy, my flight had departed and there were no other flights to get me home last night. Thus an already long trip home from Jo’burg was extended by another 16 hours or so. Such is life in the country with the most advanced transportation and technology infrastructure in the world. Or is that a fallacy?

Case in point: WiFi connectivity at JFK International Airport. This is one of the busiest airports in America with 47.8m passengers passing through in 2007 alone and the 8th busiest in the world in 2007. Yet, only 1 of its 8 terminals (Terminal 4… the International terminal) has WiFi connectivity available. Surprising, eh? Since I wasn’t in that terminal, I tried to use my T-Mobile SIM to connect to the Internet. For my effort, I received a measly 115k connection that eventually quit working. When I’m in South Africa, I almost always have a 3G network connection that’s 3 to 4x that speed. And it works: I use it all day long when I’m there.

Further, in terms of air transportation, I have traveled to South Africa 3 times this year via South African Airways. I have flown via London Heathrow, Washington Dulles and New York JFK. Each time, my flight has departed and arrived (coming and going) within 5 to 10 minutes of schedule, making me a very satisfied SAA customer.

So, what’s the punchline here? Not sure other than my personal experience of late is that America’s infrastructure superiority isn’t what it used to be. It’s still extremely good, don’t get me wrong, but there are a few holes. I wonder what’s causing this? Any ideas out there?

BTW… If you find yourself stuck in Cincy, I can recommend the Cincinnati Airport Marriott. Reasonable rates, nice decor, decent restaurant and a 5 minute shuttle ride from the airport.

A Perspective on Africa

This weekend I am returning to Johannesburg for my fourth visit of 2008. Hopefully, this time will be no different than in the past, but one wonders what might be different with the recent and on-going xenophobic violence. I generally don’t blog about politics (particularly when it’s politics outside the US), and I won’t pretend to really comprehend what’s happening in South Africa right now, but I will say that it’s a real shame.

From my superficial perspective, South Africa appears to be a country that’s really trying to change, embrace diversity and elevate the entire population. The people are genuine and friendly and the outlook is bright.

So before going all alarmist, consider that the situation there, now, is not unlike other recent incidents of this nature elsewhere when troubles were initiated by a relatively small group of individuals attempting to push their agenda through vigilante means:

• 1992: Los Angeles Riots following the Rodney King verdict which, inexplicably, included racially motivated attacks on Korean immigrants
• 2005: France Civil Unrest following the deaths of two teenage immigrants in a poor Paris suburb which included violence in poor, ethnic neighborhoods across France

While the reasons and back story for these incidents are different, they have the common thread of the people taking matters into their own hands when the government fails to recognize and diffuse tensions. This is the challenge of an open, democratic society.

For the uninitiated, the thinking on the current South African unrest is probably: “Eh. Typical. This is Africa, right?” To those that know better, this is an often unfortunate consequence of progress. If you look at the 250 year time line of America as it made it’s way from a racially divided, colonial economy up until today, you will find a history marked by violence every step of the way. In the beginning, Europeans must have viewed America as a wild, violent country (some still do, I suppose) much like Americans often view the developing world today.

Tagging South Africa specifically, and Africa in general, as an uncivilized, dangerous place is over-simplifying the situation. Recognize the colonial era for the super-majority of African nations ended within the last 100 years. As recently as 1914, only Ethiopia and Liberia were sovereign nations, with independence coming for over 80% of Africa since 1960.

From my perspective, Africa as a whole seems to be doing as well, or better than, America did in its first 50 years of independence. Infrastructure is going in all over the continent; the economies are vibrant and growing quickly; the people are energetic. And despite all the obstacles of poverty, disease, weak education systems and volatile political systems, Africans are figuring it out and doing so very quickly.

I love living in America and I’m proud to be an American, but we should should look, listen and learn before speaking. If you have the opportunity, I encourage you to visit and experience the region for yourself as it will be enlightening, I guarantee it.

End of soap box speech. I’m already planning my next post and I assure my miniscule readership that it will be a bit more lighthearted. Thanks for indulging a rare diatribe on my part.

BolderBOULDER08

BolderBOULDER 2008 has come and gone in the race’s 30th anniversary addition. I once again competed, but unlike 2007, this year I ran my own race just to see what would happen and achieved a much faster result. In fact, I was only 37 seconds slower than 2002. I guess this means I’ll have to do it again next year and see if I can pull off a PR.

I didn’t train particularly hard this time around, averaging only about 11 to 13 miles per week over the past 3 months plus a few Saturday morning pick-up soccer matches. I did “cram” the last week before the race, cranking up the distance to near 20 miles and slipping in a couple sessions in the pool, but not sure if the final week’s push helped or hurt me. Still, I exceeded my expectation of a 5:00 min / km average pace, so I’m good with that. Citizen’s Race winner? 31 year old Clint Wells in 30:52. Maybe next year will be mine? (yeah, right.)

As in the past, the course was packed with goofballs, families, first time racers, old warhorses and everything else in between. The spectator side show was entertaining once again and the race organization was brilliant. Even the weather was to my liking, with an overcast 60ºF topped off by a few sprinkles around 9:00am.

Congratulations, BolderBOULDER, on another year in the record books.

Dave’s BolderBOULDER Race History
(I seem to be re-setting the trend in the right direction.)

Year	Bib Number	Last Name	First Name	Official Time	Age
2001	MM518	Fuller	David	00:54:25	30
2002	GG348	Fuller	David	00:47:31	31
2007	HD396	Fuller	David	01:03:02	36
2008	HB022	Fuller	David	00:48:06	37

Happy 48th Birthday to the LASER

I receive a range of e-newsletters each week, most of them techie / telecom related. This morning’s IDG Connect included a mention that on today’s date in 1960, Theodore Maiman operated the first optical laser in Malibu, California. For a person like me who’s spent his career in telecom, the laser is a serious achievement.

Along with the integrated circuit, the laser is perhaps the most important technical development of the 20th century for the industry. Optical electronics (sometimes called optronics) are the key component for high capacity fiber optic telecom networks. It wasn’t until optical networks came into wide use that packet-based technologies such as ATM (late 1980s) and IP (late 1990s) exploded. Without the laser, the economics of bandwidth would still be hamstrung by 19th century inventions such as copper telephony cables and radio.

So, if you’re going to happy hour today after work, be sure to celebrate Dr. Maiman and the others that came before him (”standing on the shoulders of giants”, etc) for their contributions to our high speed society. Whether or not you like what high speed communications have done for us or to us, I can’t imagine going back to where we were 10 years ago. Trust me: I still use dial-up speeds when I do work in emerging markets and it literally sucks the life out of me. (Luckily, it won’t remain like this for too much longer, but I’ll save that for another post in the not-so-distant future.)

Virtual Machining

I’ve been experimenting lately with virtualization software because I’d like to have a Linux laptop, but I’m not brave enough to abandon Windows (that sure sounds like a sad state of affairs, eh?). I first looked at VMware Workstation, but this product continues to be sold at a high premium over the alternatives. Even though all the reviews I’ve found say this product is best, I can’t justify the cost as science project.

After VMware, I looked at Parallels Workstation. It’s less than 1/3 the cost of VMware’s product and you can take it for a spin before buying. So I did. Parallels installed quite easily and after downloading the latest x86 .iso file from Ubuntu, I was ready to create a virtual machine. The documentation for the software is pretty good and after a bit of trial an error I was able to get a VM built with Ubuntu running inside it. Very nice. Then I hit a snag: the VM couldn’t access the external network interfaces. Not much using having an OS that can’t “see” the world outside my PC. After a couple hours of Googling and scouring Parallels’ forums, I couldn’t find a solution. I tried a half dozen different combinations of Windows Vista and Parallels Workstation configurations, but still no joy. Eventually, I described my problem on Parallels’ support forum under a posting by someone experiencing the same issue. I also sent in an e-mail to Parallels. The silence was deafening. After a few hours, the guy that owned the post I tagged my issue to came back and said he gave up on Parallels. He suggested I give VirtualBox a try.

After waiting a couple more days, I too abandoned Parallels and went for VirtualBox which is an open source project that originated in Germany and had its first public release in Jan’07. A year later in Feb’08, the creator of VirtualBox, innotek GmbH, was acquired by Sun Microsystems. As with Parallels, I found VirtualBox a breeze to install. In addition, building a VM was very straight forward since the VM configuration GUI has a lot in common with Parallels. And the host OS network interfaces were accessible by the guest OS (i.e. I could surf the Internet from inside the VM). Much better.

The biggest problem was screen resolution. The default for Ubuntu seems to be either 800×600 or 640×480, either of which results in the VM consuming a fraction of available real estate on my 13″ laptop LCD. The typical fix for an Ubuntu problem like this is to tweak /etc/X11/xorg.conf via one of a couple different methods (e.g. hand edit with vi or gedit, dpkg-reconfigure, etc.). I tried these, but whenever I then went to Screen Resolution and changed to a higher resolution, the screen would freak out. More reading, more Googling and I learned about a bunch of VirtualBox add-ons called Guest Additions. I found the instructions and installed Guest Additions. Then I tried the xorg.conf tweak again, but with the same annoying blurring screen results.

Frustrated, I gave up for a few days. When I came back, I had resigned myself to the dinky screen. Then I noticed under the “Machine” pull down menu in the frame surrounding my running VM that there was an option called “Auto-resize Guest Display”.

I didn’t recall this being there before I installed Guest Additions, but it sure sounded promising. I clicked the Windows “expand” button in the upper right of the frame, then selected “Auto-resize Guest Display”. Voilà! The resolution for Ubuntu automatically changed inside the VM and expanded to take up all the space in the frame. Very nice. Now I have a 1128×762 display that perfectly fills the screen between the Vista Sidebar and Taskbar. Sweetness.

If you want to do a little experimenting with Linux, but don’t have a spare PC or you want to avoid the dual boot headache, give VirtualBox a try. Who knows if Sun Microsystems will leave it open source, so you may want to try it sooner rather than later.

CanoScan 8800F

The latest gadget in my geek arsenal is a Canon CanoScan 8800F film and negative scanner. If your family is like mine, there was probably at least one shutterbug. In my case, it was my father Dennis. He was always lugging around his Pentax 35mm SLR snapping shots of family, friends and whatever else was in the way. Slides were his favorite film development format; he’s easily got a couple thousand slides in his basement.

With a family reunion coming up this 4th of July (hosted by yours truly), Julie and I thought it might be a good time to start converting celluloid to bits. So we shopped around and ended up choosing this model after reading rave reviews. Who had the best deal? Surprise!… Amazon.com. We placed our order and a couple days later it showed up at my front door.

I should have photographed the un-boxing because it came with an array of adapters for various film types and a bunch of software including a licensed copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 (I know… that’s one version old, but it was free so who’s complaining).

After 30 minutes and a couple CD-ROMs of installation activities, I was ready for a test drive. I found the instructions straight forward and the scanner really easy to use. This particular scanner has a special lid with a light in it so the film is back lit when scanned and it seems to help a lot as I was impressed by the quality of the scanned images, even at the lowest res 300 dpi.

For instance, the one on the left of my grandparents Fred and Dottie was taken Christmas 1970. While a little dark, it was shot indoors without a strobe. I have done no color correction or touch up; this is how it came off the scanner… not bad IMHO. Some others that were taken outdoors are really fantastic.

The only thing flaky is the ArcSoft PhotoStudio 5.5 software that’s used to drive the scanner. It likes to crash about every other batch of slides (the scanner can do 4 slides at a time). Other than that, pretty slick and fast.

I’ve been working my way through a couple carousels of slides I took in high school and a handful of slides from another collection. The mother lode of my Dad’s collection is a future endeavor. I’m thinking some old photos might inspire some blog posts down the road, so keep an eye out for them.

If you’re in the market for a film scanner, you might want to give this one a try.

Bonk Free Boston

Around Christmas 2005 I found myself looking for a challenge. Not sure why, but I was. During a conversation with my friend Randy, he said “Why don’t we pick out a spring marathon? It would be a good excuse to workout and keep off the winter flab.” There are a fair number of spring marathons (including two of the megas: London and Boston) which I guess is a reaction to this common insanity of setting a spring time end goal for an intense winter training project. I cannot imagine how many foolhardy marathon attempts begin with such a conversation, but I suspect there are many. Our objective? The Colorado Marathon.

Training began. Most of the time, we trained independently because of day-to-day work schedule conflicts and training regimen preferences (Randy liked to cross-train, I preferred good old fashion mileage). As the weather grew warmer, we did some trail runs together. The miles piled up and so did my training pains. Plantar fasciitis, shin splints and tight hamstrings. I’ve been a runner since junior high and I have NEVER experienced a training season plagued by as many aggravations. At one point, I had to shut down to heal and missed a full week of training including a planned 20 mile run (not good). I began questioning the wisdom of my high mileage training plan as well as the whole marathon idea in general. But I battled on to May 7, 2006 and made it to race day.

Before the start, Randy and I wandered around to connect with some others we knew that were also running the race. Then we were off. All went well for the first couple hours: I was ahead of plan at the halfway point, zoomed past the classic bonk point at 18 miles, hydrated plenty, ate CLIF SHOT Bloks like they were going out of style and enjoyed the race route scenery. At 21 miles, I hit the wall. Sheer will, and some encouragement from another friend named Jeff, pushed me to the finish in 3:50, well off my planned 3:15 target (which was the Boston qualifying time for my age group that year… more on that later). Randy finished 6 minutes ahead of me. I was so wasted that I couldn’t even drink the FREE beer at the finish. Pathetic and uncharacteristic of me, but at least I completed the race.

The next day, I could barely walk. Post-race recovery was not going to be a pretty thing. For months afterwards I struggled to regain elasticity in my right hamstring: the muscle was so tight that even 6 months later it hurt to drive a car for more than about 15 minutes. I had decided that race was to be my one and only marathon and began thinking about other endurance racing challenges like Olympic Tris and Half Ironman Tris where the race durations and fitness levels were similar to marathons, but with less running (and abuse) during training.

Randy, meanwhile, was thinking about doing the race again in spring 2007. I’ve known Randy for a long time and for years I tried to get him to do a race with me. Even something relatively easy like Bolder Boulder was of no interest to him. “Why should I pay someone to run in a crowd?” was his standard response whenever I pressed. Yet here’s this same guy chasing marathons. Killing me. About the same time in fall 2006, I left Level 3 to start NaviGo Global. The unpredictability of starting the business meant I was still running, but didn’t really have any race objectives in mind since I didn’t know from day-to-day where I might need to be to make a living. Picking a race wasn’t possible. Randy, on the other hand, proceeded to train for and finish the Colorado Marathon a second time, shaving off 30 minutes to finish in an 3:14. And he qualified for Boston which, as I mentioned early, was the time goal I had set a year early. I was impressed and somewhat jealous.

Fast forward another year. This coming Monday, April 21st, Patriots’ Day 2008, Randy will compete in the 112th running of the Boston Marathon after another long winter training program. I’d like to think that in some small way I had an influence on Randy reaching this race, but alas, it’s 100% Randy’s doing. His effort and his motivation got him there. Plus some tolerance on the part of his family since training for marathons is time consuming. I wish Randy the very best of luck and a no bonk race: enjoy the fruits of your labor as they’ve been well earned. It is a great achievement.

BTW… My next race will be Bolder Boulder 2008 this Memorial Day, but I’m already looking past that event. Any suggestions?

Facelift

Picked out a new pre-canned WordPress theme (Connections out, MistyLook in). I was ready for a change after nearly a year and a half. One of these days perhaps I’ll build my own theme.

Image adapted from Alice in Chains "Facelift” album cover art ©1990