Just wanted to post a quick note and say that I made it back from vacation! At this point, I’m still not all here – Kenya and Tanzania are 11 time zones away from Seattle, so there’s a bit of jet lag involved – and I’ve got a lot to catch up on, so it’s going to be a little while before I get back into the swing of things.

With a trip as long and as varied as the one we took, it’s hard to succinctly talk about how it went, but I will say that the trip was wonderful! From start to finish, I’d have to say it was one of the most unique experiences I’ve ever had in my life and one that I could heartily recommend. East Africa is a facinating place both from a cultural perspective as well as a natural perspective. The wildlife was quite amazing and unique, and the people were just great. When all the pictures come back, I’ll see what I can do about putting some representative shots up.

Some thoughts on travel:

• It is a sad fact of travel that you never know what you need (and how little you’ll need) until after the trip is over. Thankfully, we did not forget to take anything important – a fact that I attribute solely to the foresight of my wife, Andrea – but we did take a few things that were completely superfluous. This would have been less of a big deal if we hadn’t been travelling so much and for so long.
• As a corrolary to the previous point, it’s amazing how much use you can get out of a good pair of safari pants without needing to wash them.

Some thoughts on the trip:

• When they found out that my wife lived in Kenya as a child, many Kenyans that we talked to apologized for the state that their country was in relative to the time she lived there. This was one of the saddest parts of our trip, especially given that the Kenyans we met, by and large, were incredibly nice, open and optimistic people. So to hear them say this about their own country was really heartbreaking. (With the recent change in the government, though, many people were hopeful that this situation is starting to turn around.)
• Although I’ve long been intellectually aware of how incredibly wealthy the First World is relative to the Third World, this intellectual knowledge is nothing compared to actually experiencing it firsthand. Even experiencing it firsthand, it was sometimes hard to grasp.

Some recommendations:

• If you’re looking for a luxury safari experience, you should definitely check out the Lewa Safari Camp. The tents are very comfortable, the food is amazing, the staff is great and the wildlife is spectacular. Yeah, if you’re going to Kenya or Tanzania, you really should head to the Serengeti/Masai Mara and see that too, but there is no question that Lewa was our favorite of the safari places that we went.
• If you’re looking for a place to relax, you should definitely check out Loldia House. We stopped off there near the end of our trip, and it was one of the most restful places to stay I’ve ever been to. Beautiful scenery, wonderful food and just a great experience.

(I would just add – as great as Lewa Downs and Loldia House were, they’re only the tip of the iceberg. There are lots of great places to go and things to do in East Africa.)

• I brought both a pair of tennis shoes and a pair of Lands’ End Men’s High Waterproof Lightweight Hikers boots. I shouldn’t have bothered with the tennis shoes – the boots were so comfortable, I just wore them everywhere.
• And, finally, I can heartily recommend our travel company, Global Adrenaline. Our trip was very well organized and went off without a hitch, and they were extremely helpful in organizing our custom itinerary. It was a great experience working with them!

The final comment that I’d make is that it was interesting to see how my worries about travel to East Africa measured up to the reality. In the travel packet that we got from Global Adrenaline right before we left, they included a section that should have been called “Why This Trip Is A Very Bad Idea” or, alternatively, “Make Sure Your Will Is Current.” In it, they call out all the stuff that could go wrong on a trip like this – the current terrorism alerts for Kenya, a list of fun tropical diseases you can catch, and problems with petty theft, armed carjackings and the like. For a careful guy like me, this section made me extremely nervous. (I also made the fatal mistake of rereading them on the plane ride there. My advice: once you’re headed on your way, either you’re ready or you’re not, so don’t obsess about it.)

What was interesting, though, was how relative all that stuff turned out to be. The “high risk” of terrorism, disease and crime is really relative to the US, where the chance of any of these things happening (despite media scare tactics) are incredibly low. In other words, a “high risk” of something bad happening really means something like a 15% chance of something bad happening rather than a 0.5% chance of something bad happening. And if you take relatively simple precautions (avoid certain hotels, get correct vacinations and medications, watch your possessions, avoid walking in certain places at night), the chance of anything bad happening goes way down.

All this would be pretty academic if the East African economies weren’t so dependent on tourism. All these issues have had a real and material impact on the fortunes of the places we visited, which is a real shame. Without my wife’s adventurous spirit, I doubt I ever would have overcome my fears and gone on the trip, but now that I’m back, I’m really glad I did it!

So, in summary: The trip was great, it’s wonderful to be home, and there’s more to come…

As you can imagine, preparing for an extended trip involves an amazing amount of organization aside from packing. Although we were pretty on top of things, nonetheless midnight last night found us madly scrubbing the kitchen counter so that our house sitter doesn’t have to contend with a filthy counter. Very romantic New Year’s Eve, no?

Anyway, it’s all done and we’re off today on our adventure. If I find random internet access that’s reasonable, I’ll post some entries on the road. Otherwise, see you all in February!

Have a happy New Year!

Sam Gentile has a post in which he ruminates on “my blog […] and the place it plays in my life.” I don’t know what motivated Sam to do his thinking, but I am finding myself starting to do some end-of-year thinking about blogging and other subjects. The serious thinking is going to be postponed until after I get back from Africa, but I have been doing this blogging thing long enough to have some idea of what its about and to start to form some opinions as to what I’d like to do with it.

My book will also be close to being published when I get back, which will give me an opportunity to think about how I feel about the whole authoring thing and where I want to go with that. And taking a whole month off from work also provides an excellent chance to “hit the big red switch” and do some thinking about where I and VB might be going. (No worries, I’m not thinking of making a career change or anything radical like that. It’s just a good time to do some reassessing and thinking about the future. Mmmmmm…. Orcas… Longhorn…)

Guess we’ll just have to see…

…that while normally New York is a wonderful and crazy town, New York at Christmas is a wonderful and insane town. Just when I thought I’d never seen so many people in the same place at one time before, we’d go somewhere else and it would be even worse. One of those things in life you want to do once and then say “Been there, done that.”

We went to New York with my wife’s family, which included my 6 year old niece and 9 year old nephew. We did a bunch of “kids in New York” stuff like going to the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show and going to see the tree at Rockefeller Center. The most fun thing was going ice skating at Wollman Rink in Central Park. Beautiful scenery and my niece was a complete natural at skating (it was her first time).

I think, though, the most impressive sight I saw was the Christmas house in the Bronx. Absolutely insane. Pictures don’t even do it justice. You just have to see it to believe it.

Doing my maybe-funny satire of the Molson commercial reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of for a long time… Seven or so years ago, there was an internal “Bad Hemingway” contest in the spirit of the various “Bad” contests that were all the vogue at that time. I entered it with the following story. It completely failed to win anything, which calls into question both the humor value of it and the advisability of my posting it here, but what’s a blog good for if not posting writing of questionable value? I promise – this is it in terms of attempted humor writing. There’s a reason I’m a programmer. (See if you can get all the ancient technical references. “AT?“ Does anyone even remember those?)

Across the Street and Into Egghead

In the city of Redmond there stands a cafe that the natives call “Egghead,” meaning “one who is too smart for his own good.” No one knows why they call it that, but the waiters there serve a tall double skinny half-caff latte capped with white foam to rival even Harry’s American Bar and Grill. It is there that the old fighters go to sit and swap tales of happier days, of bits and bytes, of Pentium math errors and offensive dictionary translations, of Gates and his victories.

It was raining, a gray rain pattering down on the soiled concrete like the beads of sweat from a bullfighter’s forehead. Nick Adams walked across the street and into the Egghead. The Egghead was full at that hour of men and women talking the talk of people who did not know pain or want, who had Pentium Pros and knew nothing of the terrible loneliness of getting by on only an ancient AT. Nick sat.

“What would you like, senor?” the old waiter asked.

“OS/2.” Nick replied.

The old waiter laughed and spat insolently.

“We have no OS/2, ingelse.”

“Then I’ll have a Macintosh.”

“I’m sorry senor but we have had none of those since the war.”

“None?”

“Nada.”

Nick tried not to think of the OS war, but it was always there in the back of his mind, like the aftertaste of cheap beer at a frat party. Before the war he had been happy, spending his hours typing on his Apple ][+ and playing Microsoft Decathlon and writing his AppleBASIC programs and it was like being in love for the first time. But now it did not matter. He had lost everything in the war and the memories swarmed around him like flies on a beached whale. He remembered the hard drive crash, the endless “Abort, Retry, Ignore,” the cruel laughter of the men of the PSS, then nothing more. His machine was gone now and he would never have it back.

“Then I’ll have a Windows 95.”

“The Windows 95 is weak and no good, senor. Would you not prefer a Windows NT?”

Nick stared into the dark void that was Microsoft. He longed for a Windows without crashes or bugs, GPFs or hourglasses, one strong enough for a man but made for a woman, a clean, well-written Windows. But the war had settled all that. It did not matter any longer.

“I’ll have a Windows NT, then.”

“Windows! Windows! Windows!” a balding man across the room bellowed like a bull who knows at last that it will die.

“Who is that?” Nick asked as the orderlies dragged the man away.

The waiter sighed the sigh of the old and said “That is Senor Ballmer. Once he was a great fighter and did many great things in the war. Now he sits in the corner and drinks his Starbucks and dreams the dream of Windows Everywhere.”

“How sad.” said Nick.

Joel‘s starting a technical book club and his first book is Henry Petrosky’s Small Things Considered: Why There Is No Perfect Design. I haven’t read the book, but I have read his earlier Remaking the World: Adventures in Engineering, which I thought was very good. Like many technical people, I suspect, I’m facinated by engineering and scientific history.

The weird part of it all is that I have some glancing connections to Petrosky – he’s an engineering professor at Duke University, where both of my parents worked for many years (and one still does). I also went to high school school with his children, although neither was in my particular class (one was older, one was younger). And the Petrosky’s lived about three blocks from the house where I spent most of my formative years. I used to ride by their house all the time on my bike.

All of which means absolutely nothing, except that it’s one of those weird “hey, I have some completely meaningless connection to that person” things. (Not as weird, though, as when I opened the New York Times one day and found that a classmate of mine who I sort-of, not-really knew from college had won the Pulitzer prize for her book. Makes you wonder what you’ve been doing with your life…)

I’m back, and even with a slight tan… (Thanks, SPF30. Normally, I turn red like a beet.) Things are going to be busy for me for the next few weeks, so the relative silence will probably continue. I’d like to say it’s because I’m working hard on some cool PDC talk, but I’m not – I’m coming up against a very hard deadline for my language reference book, and I’ve got to really cram to get it done. Hopefully I’m going to turn in the final manuscript and then head off to sunny LA to relax at the PDC…

Just an FYI for those of you who hang breathlessly on my every word and structure your lives around my blog: I’m going to be out of touch next week while attending the wedding of a friend in Maui. Yeah, it’s going to be tough, but somebody’s got to show up for it… I expect (hope?) to be completely out of touch for that time, so everyone’s just going to have to take care of themselves while I’m gone.

(Sadly, though, some work will follow me – I’ve got some major deadlines coming up on the language reference book, so that’s coming along with me.)

Chris’s posted some continuing thoughts on the question of whether its a good idea to grade people on a curve when doing performance reviews (or any other place where grading occurs, I guess). Like Chris, I also believe pretty strongly in grading on the curve but I still have lots of reservations about it. That’s because a curve can so easily be misused in a way that is damaging to employees, the company, or both. But the alternative, inevitable grade inflation, seems to be worse.

(Grade inflation is something I got enough exposure to in college, thank you very much. Which is not to say that I wasn’t hypocritically disappointed that my university started giving out graduation honors on a curve starting with my class. It turned out something like over 50% of the class was graduating “cum laude“ or better. It is numerically impossible that every student at a university is above average.)

Ultimately, it reminds me of the famous Churchill quote: “Democracy is a very bad form of government. Unfortunately, all the others are so much worse.” Same for the curve, same for the curve…