Subways and Cicadas

Watching The Karate Kid in an hotel in Tokyo - very strange for some reason...

Just back from an Okonamiyaki restaurant - great stuff.  It's really nice to have people join you for dinner when you're travelling, and even better when your colleagues ake you to good places to eat. After three evenings & three good meals I really appreciate their generosity. 

Tokyo has been massively humid - well over 30 degrees each day and well over 70% humidity. The cicadas are out in force, with that twanging kree-kree-kree that distinguishes them from those we have back home (and raises the feeling of being in a Miyazaki film). It still seems bizarre that my last trip was 8 years ago, but it doesn't seem much has changed, except perhaps more internet access around the place, and maybe a few more English signs here & there.

The one big thing that was different during this trip was the number of taxis we took: at least one or two every day - a complete change from when I at was Sun taking the subway & I've used cabs more on this 4-day trip than all my previous visits to Tokyo combined. The guys said it was a special case for foreign visitors, and considering the humidity I was grateful for that luxury. Ironically, though, the fares don't seem that far removed from what you'd expect to pay in Sydney for a similar duration... an interesting comparison of the way the economies of the two countries have been over the past few years.

Green and Pleasant Land

I've spent the past week in England, my first visit for twenty-five years, and a slightly strange experience. Everything is a little bit familiar, but odd enough to remind me this isn't home. Ironically, having so much family around makes it clear this isn't Australia.

The weather certainly isn't giving a clue this is England - temperatures pushing 30 degrees continuously since last week, and the sky spectacularly blue. In characteristic fashion, some Brits are starting to complain about it being too hot...

So Much for Upgrades

Landed in Dehli last night at 10pm, grinding my teeth that I didn't decide to get on an earlier flight from Mumbai, but then realising that there wouldn't have been anyone waiting to pick me up from the airport if I was early (and the hotel was half an hour's drive away).

The hotel (Sheraton Delhi) is great: one of those palatial kind of places with grounds and be-turbaned guards and doorman. The lady in a sari met me and informed my room had been upgraded, which was really nice, until I realised that it was already pushing midnight and I'd be leaving at 4am just one day later. Oh well, an upgrade for 28 hours is better than no upgrade at all.

A packed day followed: meeting at the office, back to the hotel for media, back to the office for lunch, into a car to do a phone interview on the way to a customer, back to the office for debriefing. Hopefully I didn't make too much of a mess of things with the journos...

Outside a customer's IT department

Traffic Madness

Mumbai traffic is insane. This is something everyone knows, but it's something else to experience it. And I've done a lot of experiencing over the past couple of days. It's not scary so much as just all-in: everyone jostling for that little edge forward. The dumb thing is that if everyone kept lane discipline and, say, didn't run through red traffic lights, the whole system would probably work a lot more smoothly. Still, as the customer I met today said, Indians love to break the rules – to feel like they're winning something over the authorities. A sentiment we can appreciate in Australia, even if trying to drive in this mess would make most of us blow a fuse.

That's one definite upside to having a driver, quite aside from having someone who will pick you up, deal with the issues of parking, look after bags, etc. I'm thinking that if I eventually get to India for a holiday, this is a good way to do it.

There are some good roads – in fact on the first day it was too good: we took a brand new expressway and arrived at the customer site (ahem) 90 minutes early for the meeting. Still, better early than late...
The frightening thing about this 15km raise expressway is that there is no breakdown lane, no turn-offs, and it seems no way to cross over to the other side in an emergency. One broken-down car will cause a huge traffic jam. Two broken down cars will totally clog everything for hours. Fun just waiting to happen.

Open Cloud?

History has shown us how damaging it can be to funnel ourselves down a single proprietary path, no matter how popular a particular platform is at a particular point in time.  

It can even damage organisations who originally benefit from the lock-in: one only needs to look at the trouble Microsoft is having getting people to move on from Windows XP. A lot of that is due to the general move away from desktops to mobile platforms,  but early on a great deal was due to organisations having bought or built internal applications on top of Internet Explorer 6 & that did not work with Internet Explorer 7 or later, so would not work on newer Windows platforms....

Keep things open - make a bigger pie, rather than just trying to take all of the pie for yourself...