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Frankfurt & Capetown

After an overnight flight from Detroit,  I arrived in Frankfurt where I had about an 8 hour layover.  The flight was great – an Airbus A300 provided a smooth, comfortable flight and 1/2 an Ambien provided several hours of sleep so I arrived in Frankfurt ready to go.

I spent the morning and early afternoon walking around town which I really enjoyed.  My expectation was that Frankfurt was all business – a rather dull financial city.  I was surprised by how different the city was.  There is a great waterfront along the Main river and pedestrian zones filled with shoppers and tourists.

The weather was perfect – about 75 degrees and sunny, so I enjoyed both a breakfast and lunch sitting outside people watching.  For lunch I had a Thuringerwurst with potato salad and a beer.  Excellent.

After walking along the river, I made my way back to the train station for the 15 minute ride back to the airport.  There I met up with Meghan who had taken a later flight.  The two of us eventually boarded our flight to Cape Town.

The flight to Cape Town was about 11 hours long, and unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take up the 4 adjacent seats that I was able to on the flight to Frankfurt, so lying down wasn’t an option.  I managed to get somewhere between 3 and 5 hours of fitful sleep, which just wasn’t enough.

Arriving in Cape Town at 5 AM, we grabbed a taxi to our hotel where we were lucky to be able to crash in our room for a few hours.  We showered and were out by 11 AM.  We’ve since spent the day walking around town, down to the “waterfront” area (touristy but nowhere near as bad as Fisherman’s Wharf) where we grabbed a beer and watched several military ships coming in to port.

Now we’re just letting folks know we’ve arrived thanks to the use of an internet cafe and then we’ll head back to the hotel before heading out for dinner.

We’ve got a couple more days in Cape Town and the surrounds before heading elsewhere around the Cape Peninsula and greater Cape Town area.   Tomorrow it may rain but hopefully it won’t be as cool as it was today!

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Digital baggage

Verizon wireless has this really awful data policy, whereby I can only keep so many text messages on my phone – why, I just can’t imagine.  I have storage capabilities on my phone – but it doesn’t allow me to transfer the text messages to this storage.  Additionally, they retire voicemails after only so long – the only way to keep them is to wait for the messages to expire, at which point you can opt to save them for an additional 45 days.

This may beg the question why am I holding onto these messages?  Well there are a few reasons.  The most obvious is that I need to reference the message in the future – it’s a convenient way to carry around information – as I almost always have my cell phone with me.  But there are other, more sentimental reasons as well.  And Verizon should know this.  So why then can’t I opt to store this data off of their servers, on a data store that allows me to eventually transfer it onto my PC?

Without this capability, I’m eventually going to lose this data – either intentionally by deleting it myself (to make room for new text messages) or inadvertently (by not re-saving the voicemail messages).  And while this makes me angry –  because I’m driven to do it by a weakness in their systems – there’s a part of me that looks forward to clearing these things out.

As I’ve spent the last few days helping Meghan pack up and move out of her house, I’m amazed at the amount of stuff that she has, which makes me thing immediately of all of the stuff that I have.  And moving is the perfect time to clean house, and get rid of all of the excess baggage – and there’s something very cathartic about that process.  Perhaps the same is true of digital information.  As I look across my digital domain – at all of the stuff that I’ve accumulated.. perhaps it’s not bad for a little digital house cleaning from time to time..  I wonder if all of the digital stuff weighs one down as much as the physical stuff though?

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graduation

Yesterday was Meghan’s graduation from Vet school.

Meghan\'s graduation

Much of her family flew/drove in from all around the country which was really nice – her siblings and parents were there as well as a few Aunts and uncles and cousins. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t as cooperative as it was a pretty rainy afternoon.

The proceedings were well done – with the right mix of presenters and ceremony while still keeping the program moving.

Dr. Meghan is now insisting that her science degree (as opposed to her Bachelor of Arts) now finally surpasses my Bachelor of Science (always referred to in its abbreviate BS).  I see trouble for my future which may lead to further education for me..

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costhelper.com

I’ve known Ed for many years now. We first met working on a project together at Intuit. As we worked on the project, our friendship grew – there were a few of us on the project who spent way too much time together. We had lunches together at Tung Kee Noodle House (TKNH), we had code acronyms like T.K.MOOT, and we argued over whether Buffy really was a quality show (I think I was the only one who didn’t enjoy it).

Ed has since left Intuit – encouraged by the entrepreneurial spirit not only from the Valley but also from his parents, who were self-employed. His latest project, on which he’s been working for the past few years is CostHelper.com. This site is designed to provide quality information about the many costs that we face on a day-to-day basis, like hiring a plumber or buying an HDTV.

The idea behind the site is to create one location with reliable, well-written information where you can research costs for whatever it is you have coming up in your life with which you might not be that familiar.  In the industry it’s what we call an SEO play – in other words, trying to get good placement in the search engines so that if a customer searches Google or Yahoo for “How much do Kitchen Cabinets cost?” (or as most people would probably shortcut “kitchen cabinets cost”) his site will be one of the first links provided and with each visit to his site, he makes money off of the ads served up on the right-hand side of the page.

It’s great to see this site taking off, and I’ve been impressed with the quality of the information provided as well as Ed’s strategy of attacking the content and features on the site, making sure he balances the investment in the right areas so that the site is constantly improving.

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more data online

One of the goals that I set for myself during this little work hiatus was to get my personal data off of my desktop & scribbled notes. By ‘personal data’ I’m referring to all of that information that we all carry around in one fashion or another that gets us through the connected world – emails, contacts, finances, etc.,

I started with email a few years ago, and that’s worked out pretty well so far. I use Google Mail & Yahoo mail to manage my mail online. Yahoo accepts all of my potential spam while Google mail routes and services all of my personal mail which I generally have sent to knuetter.com.

The next step was to get my bookmarks off of my computers (work, home, etc.,) and I chose Del.icio.us for that service. I’m not completely satisfied with the service (I will probably try out Digg one of these days) but they provide a pretty straightforward service and a few nice tools like Firefox integration that make me happy enough.

Next was my calendar, which I used Google for as I wrote about in an earlier post.

Recently I decided to give Plaxo a try.  Over the years I’ve received a few requests to join and so when I was looking for a way to organize my contacts they were a natural choice.  Their system lets you plug in all of your various contact points (outlook, gmail, yahoo mail, apple address book, etc.,) and it will then gather all of the contacts and publish them out to all of these so that they’re all kept in sync.  Additionally, if any of your contacts are using the service, it will automatically update your contact lists when they change their information.  So far I’ve found it to be pretty useful and while a few features I would like are hidden behind the annual service charge, I’ve mostly been able to work around that though if I continue to find the service useful I’ll certainly consider upgrading.

One of the nice surprises about Plaxo is that it also syncs calendars and to-do lists so the Google Calendar syncing that I set up earlier may not be necessary.  One of the downsides to Plaxo is that they’re desperately trying to get into the social networking space, so I fear random sporadic updates ala facebook.  Hopefully they don’t go too far down this path.

Next up, I’ve got to figure out how to securely store passwords online and I’m still debating whether I want to aggregate all of my finances (ala Quicken) online or whether I’m OK with each of the individual banking websites that I use.  In each case I have to decide whether I’m confident enough in internet security to handle these items.

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Sunny San Francisco

This weekend was an awesome weekend in the city: The sun was out, the fog stayed away, and people were out enjoying the great weather.

Dolores Park

I still had some work to do getting things arranged for my upcoming trip but when I was finished I walked over to Dolores Park to enjoy a little sun myself. It was great to just lay out on the grass and watch the people – Dolores Park is such a diverse place. You get the gay crowd to one side, the Latino crowd to the other, the Mission Hipsters of course show up with their track bikes, and then there’s the sun worshipers who come from all around to get some color after the long winter.

After a while I was getting too a little too much sun (love that Northern European complexion) so I had to head back inside. But it was the first day where I really felt relaxed and enjoyed the possibilities of what lies ahead in the coming months.