On Safari with Oldupai George

Our photographer for the wedding (Phil Holden, great guy) came by the house last week to watch us interact (or something)… he posted a few of the shots from that on his blog. You can check them out here.

Matt’s new video is up. I just watched it for the first time, and am speechless. I clapped, cheered, laughed, teared up, all in the space of four and a half minutes, all alone in my office at home.

Must watch. And watch again.

So I may have just had an epiphany. Not sure. At Mifos, we’re in the midst of really digging deep and thinking hard about what being open source means for us. This covers things like licenses, business models, partnerships, community building, and all that jazz. The tricky bit is that there are lots of models out there, from pure organic developers scratching their itch projects to full-on commercial open source business applications (think SugarCRM). Depending on where you are on the spectrum, you act differently: Sugar’s open source profile is different than Apache’s is different than…

I use ecto for offline blogging - it’s pretty sweet - but I just found a bug that, I suspect, I could just fix right now on the plane if it was open source. (actually, I’m not 100% certain it’s not open source but it is to me right now since I’m on a plane and can’t check).

Here’s the bug (and yes, I should report it when I get back online): I had an entry composed offline, saved, and closed. I reopened it after noticing that I hadn’t thrown a category on it (mild ecto gripe: I want to create a new category while offline), checked the “Travel category”, and closed the window.

Bug: it didn’t pick up the category change, and didn’t flag the entry as unsaved, so it allowed me to close without saving the change. Now that has got to be fairly straightforward to fix (if the app is decently built) but alas, not today.

I can’t quite articulate the epiphany, but there’s something in there related to the ability of users to do stuff in OSS projects - even if it’s just bug reporting - that makes them a deeper part of the development process. Also makes me realize that I would be stoked if my job evolution led to lots of time with customers, lots of time thinking about strategy, lots of time building a killer team and keeping them happy and productive and on mission, and a bunch of time hacking on Mifos directly. I guess I’m in charge, so maybe I can do that.

Stay tuned…

I know, all the airline fees are the new thing to bitch about. I have just one complaint, for now: I arrived at Atlanta from Dubai and cleared immigration and customs pretty quickly. I had booked my connecting flight to allow for slower progress, and it turned out that there was another flight from ATL-SEA an hour earlier than my originally scheduled flight.

Approach service counter. Seat available? Yep. Is it a middle seat? Nope. Great, I’ll take it… except, that’ll be $50. WTF.

To be sure I don’t know the economics of the airline industry, and I know they’re fucked, generally, and it’s about the worst possible business to be in… but something like that makes me cringe. I actually walked away and then went back 30 seconds later, realizing the positive impact of the change on my capacity to solve some hard problems and get things done for the wedding if I took the earlier flight (an hour doesn’t seem like much, but in this case, in the middle of a 10,000 mile trip home, it is), and so I sucked it up and paid the $50.

I would much rather see them bounce the fares up by, say $5 per seat and not just totally thrash us on fees, but that probably has some stupid but perfectly sound economically correct supply and demand impact.

Blah. Annoying. I want a private jet. I still also want to end global poverty, but I would like to have a private jet while doing it. I contain multitudes.

I’ve done some crazy trips, but this one I’m (finally) wrapping up may take the cake. It went like this:

1. Saturday (6/14): Fly Seattle to Amsterdam (arrive Sunday morning)
2. Spend Sunday in a fog, have dinner with Ingrid and Michael
3. Monday: panel discussion at ING Bank seminar on banking for the poor
4. Tuesday: fly to Tunis from Amsterdam (via Paris); go directly into meetings with MFI customer in Tunis, then a brief 45 minute rest at hotel, then dinner until close to midnight
5. Wednesday: up early to catch 8:30 AM flight from Tunis to Dubai. Paid a bit extra to upgrade to business class (a most excellent choice, even if I did sleep most of the way rather than trying to work as planned - the consecutive nights of 4 hours of sleep had finally gotten to me). Arrive Dubai
6. Thursday: meeting in Dubai in the afternoon, then to airport to catch 11:35 PM flight out from Dubai to Atlanta. Sadly, I saw nothing of Dubai; the meeting was in a building adjacent to my hotel, which means that I literally was in the Dubai air strictly while going to and from cars going to and from the airport. Next time
7. Friday: Land in Atlanta after (nearly) 15 hour non-stop flight from Dubai, which is a long-ass time to sit in a coach seat. Have quick conversation with Beth (in London at the moment) about a business firedrill, then catch earlier than planned flight back to Seattle. Arrive around 10:45 AM PDT.

I did the calculations and didn’t spend more time on planes than on the ground, but I think it’s highly likely I slept more on planes than on the ground. The funny think is - I feel pretty awake and alert at the moment. We’ll see how long that lasts… I think my physical manifestation on this dear planet may be more beat up than I realize.

Another interesting number: at the moment I’m averaging 2780 flight miles per night spent in a hotel for 2008, which seems a bit insane. Hoping to keep travel to a minimum for the next six weeks ahead of the wedding, then settle into those comfy class Lufthansa and South African Airways business class seats we burned the miles on for the honeymoon.

PS. Dubai is really far away. Interesting trivia note, though, is that if one were able to get a nonstop from Dubai to Seattle it would actually be shorter than the nonstop from Dubai to Atlanta… this is irking due to the 5 hour flight I’m now on from Atlanta to Seattle. I suspect the DXB-SEA (or any west coast airport) doesn’t work due to the whole ETOPS thing.

I feel that I could write a really killer blog entry on how jetlag affects your brainpower in subtle, interesting ways, if only I had the brainpower to write it.

Apparently it’s forecast to be 102 F in Tunis tomorrow afternoon when I arrive. That’s hot… which is nice, since it’s been winter in Seattle since approximately 2004.

So apparently the folks at TSA have decided that there’s a better way to get everyone through the security lines - I’ve seen this now at SEA at the beginning of this trip and again coming through security after clearing customs in Atlanta. Basic idea is this: three lanes, one each for casual travelers, expert travelers, and families and others with special needs. The black diamond lane - the one for expert travelers - replacing the previously highly useful elite lanes for those of us with gold/platinum/premier/whatever status on the airlines. However, it appears that people who think they are experts can now self-select into these lanes.

I’m skeptical. I’ve counted for a long time on my ability to skip the long security lines, which given that I’m at Sea-Tac several times a month (and often more than once a week) has a tangible impact on my mental wellbeing. Maybe I’m being a snob, not sure, but when I saw the new getup at SEA last weekend I promptly bolted for the other security line where it hadn’t yet been implemented, hit the elite line, and was through in under 5 minutes.

TSA has a blog - which is just bizarre in it’s own right - and the signs for the new lanes direct you there to give feedback. I’m offline on a plane but I think the URL is http://www.tsa.gov/blog. I glanced at it at some point during this trip, and gained zero additional confidence in much of anything. Have a look… but it sounds like an idea that some twenty-something dipshit suggested to his bosses at TSA as a great way to make TSA more accessible or something. No one wants accessible - we want fast lanes, solid and confidence-inspiring security, and the ability to get on a plane without having to be cavity searched. That’s it.

Or maybe that’s just me.

So I’m in Amsterdam (start of a hectic travel week) and tonight Turkey played the Czech Republic in the third match of their group round in the Euro 2008 Cup. Turkey won 2-0 - exciting, yes, but I was thoroughly unprepared for the outpouring of apparently half of the population of Turkey living here in Holland. After the match my friend drove me back to my hotel, and we encountered honking cars with Turkish flags, traffic jams, overall insanity.

I loved the energy but was just amazed to see that energy in Amsterdam for a win by a national team that wasn’t the Netherlands. My friend informed my that something like 50% of all Amsterdam residents under the age of 25 speak Arabic. This astonishes me. Wild, interesting, kinda cool, and should make for an interesting handful of decades watching how the assimilation (or not) goes (see also Paris, London).

And this is why having friends in other cities and traveling is so damn cool. and important. and fun.

I had a big blog entry drafted - OK, well, outlined, by which I mean I had a bunch of nonsensical bullets written to remind me of some things to write about - that I thought would be really scintillating and insightful. Not a chance, but here’s a quick rundown of the things that travel has seemed to force this week.

• Rest: I collapsed on the bed multiple times on this trip intending to think, but brainfog prevented it. I probably could have avoided this impact in Amsterdam if I had stayed at a hotel in the center of town - could have gone out and walked around or gone to a museum - but alas, not this time
• Sometimes the brainfog of jetlag actually enables the most important things to rise to the surface… in this case, some random completely unfocused prodding at the laptop yielded an interesting James Dixon piece of writing on “commercial” and “organic” open source concepts, which happens to be really near and dear to my life right now.
• Focus - in a weird way, in that I never get as much done on trips as I think I will, but have gradually learned to do the most important things first. Actually, I take this back, as this blog posting is a counter-example.
• I had the sense at one point that the slightly manic, thoroughly exhausted jetlag feeling might have some opportunity to it, the ability to unleash some crazy highly creative thinking about really deep important stuff. It’s a kind of focus without focus (or pharmaceuticals) but it didn’t stick - likely needs to be a practice built to really tap into that.
• I always think, while traveling, “next time, I’ll be focuses; next time, I’ll have a plan for jetlag and day 1″. Never happens.
• I also always blog way more when I’m on the road…
• I had the thought that if Dopplr ever really got going (or I got more friends on there) that it would be really rad to randomly meet up with people you know (or sort of know) for dinner in random places would be cool. Also, I suspect that Dopplr would be a fun company to run, apart from the whole business model thing. Wanna bet their strategy is “get lots of users, and then get bought by Google”?

TTFN