Seems sinister, but it’s probably something I’m doing wrong…

This morning, I’m jetlagged in Manila - and at a weird time, having come to Manila via a 24 hour stopover in Geneva, which has really thrown the circadian rhythms out of whack - and since I can’t seem to get my brain to work, I thought I’d throw down a few random thoughts from the last few days…Geneva seems cool - very small town, but with public transportation to beat the band - and it made me really happy to get some good fondue. Didn’t make my digestive tract so thrilled, but it was tasty. Oh, and btw, Switzerland is wicked expensive… and the Swiss Franc is about 1:1 to the US dollar, so you can’t even pretend you don’t notice the prices.

On the flight from Frankfurt to Geneva - an hour or so - they managed to serve a nice, and free, cheese sandwich. Nothing fancy, but the US airlines could learn a thing there. The chunk of Swiss chocolate didn’t hurt, either - even got one of those on the 30 minute flight from Geneva to Zurich.

Hmm. I thought I had more to say, but the brainfog won’t lift… so I guess that’s it for now. Need to fix the offline blog tool so I can capture things in real time. Go read someone else’s blog if you want to be entertained, informed, or titillated. 

(upate: offline tool was apparently working all along, or at least it is now)

Must watch. And watch again.

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…

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.