Delete, Delegate, Defer, Do – Getting to zero in-box bounce (zib)

Delete, delegate, defer, do – processing hundreds of messages with one-touch alacrity. Git 'er done!  The joy of zib is worth pounding through the backlog.

Yeah, baby!

Taipei Shanghai Zurich Day 9 – Traveling through Frankfurt to Zurich

Internet here at the Shanghai Pudong airport is spotty and the “great firewall” is blocking VPN to my company network, sigh.  “Offline” tools that need no network are essential when traveling in China.  I am using Windows Live Writer on Windows and blogger on Android.  The new “offline” speech to text feature in Android is not nearly as good as the online version but it is better than keyboarding on a phone.

This morning I had breakfast at the larger first floor restaurant at the Kerry hotel with my manager outside in the sunshine.  The humidity has let up and it is perfect weather.  The Kerry provides a free shuttle bus service to the magnetic levitation (maglev) train. I was the only passenger on the big bus

The shuttle is timed perfectly, so that the train pulls boards a few minutes after you are dropped off at the station.

The maglev train was going 436 Km/hour (about 271 miles per hour) and took

about 10 minutes.  Door to door from the hotel to check-in at the airport was less than 30 minutes.  The lines for customs, emigration, security, and walking between areas was another 15 minutes.  From the hotel to the airplane gate was less than an hour.

 

[ Update: on the way to Frankfurt ]

In-flight Movies:

• “The Guillotines”  (China, 2012): steam punk; Qing Dynasty ninjas with hooked swords, spiked, sword-launched Frisbees, take on the Han revolutionaries and the emperor’s new fire-arms ** (2 out of 5).
• “The Neighbor” (Germany, 2011): suspense drama; Cub journalist David moves to a new town, with a nosy, invasive neighbor; very good Krimi, recommended!  (***)
• “Combustion” (Spain, 2012): Jewel thieves seduce young, wealthy recently-engaged pretty-boy sports-car fan with a beautiful temptress. “Fast & Furious” with over-the-top Spanish machismo, yuck (*)
• “Elementary” (TV Show, 2012): Sherlock Holmes in New York, (**)
• “Mega Structures” (TV Documentary, 2012): Constructing biggest buildings in the world, (***)
• I also watched the first 5 minutes of many films and TV shows that were really puke awful.  I am very thrilled we have no TV at home.

I spent some time coding, trying to snap in to the CES time zone.  That was fun.  Now I am burning down the email backlog.  So far the flight has been less bumpy than the others but the food is not as good.

[update Sunday 10/14/2013 1300 CET]

Frankfurt is cold; the airport is huge, busy, but not as efficient as Dusseldorf.  Went through three separate security checks, walking 1.5 miles, waited for buses on the Tarmac.  The Lufthansa business class lounge was quite awesome with good Internet (skyped home), very good beer (of course!), and decent food.

Transferred to my flight to Zurich with no problems.  Arrived Zurich on-time but the little puddle jumper had no room for my bigger carry-on so I had to check it, causing a 20-minute delay at baggage claim, sigh.

The 4-story shopping complex is a little daunting but I know my way around so I bought a train ticket and arrived at my hotel quickly, safely, efficiently.  I don’t like the neighborhood where my Hotel (and eBay) are located in Zurich, especially on Saturday night late.  I was accosted by one person and had to navigate past drunk, rowdy, young people standing around drinking outside the dance clubs.  My in-laws wanted to get together but it was very late; I was tired, so I crashed.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich Day 8 -- Work

I was able to hit the gym and work out on Thursday morning (China time) before breakfast.

Then it was wall-to-wall meetings all day again; we had a lunch meeting, and team dinner (again).  I was able to bow out of the foot massage after dinner to get time to read and relax. 

The managers here are going to enormous lengths to make us welcome.  They send out for Starbucks, constantly ask about diet restrictions, preferences, shower us in swag and gifts, and are always asking what else they can do.  They send a car to pick us up at the hotel, have the private car drive us to dinner near our hotel every night.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich Day 7 – 12 hours of work meetings

I was up at 0500, online, and working during the overlap time with the USA.  Great Internet and amenities in the room.

Breakfast with people from work at 0700 included many of the same foods offered at “Happy Hour” the night before, including sushi, salads, fruits, prepared vegetables.  I went in for the “full English” with salads:

Work was wall-to-wall meetings all day and a big team dinner until late in the evening.  The snacks, drinks, facilities here are very similar to the USA campuses with local variations.  The meetings went much better than I expected.  We did make some radical changes to fundamental components.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich day 6 – Kerry Hotel

The Kerry put me into the exact same room number I had the last time I was in Shanghai!

… and after the “happy hour” (great Bordeaux wine, Sushi, hors d’hoevres) there was an awesome fireworks display right outside my window the evening of my arrival.  The fireworks lasted an hour and I was so tired I watched part of the show from the bath tub.  Bathing in the dark, three walls of windows, 300 feet up, watching fireworks against the Shangai skyline.  Then off to sleep.

 

Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 6 - Shanghai arrival

75 minute,  mile long,  fast moving line for a taxi from Pudong airport!

Rain,  but no wind or thunderstorms, so the flight from Narita was smooth. The flooding around Pudong as seen from the air is not so bad.

Smart-phone Offline Blogging Apps

No data plan?  No bars of phone service?  No keyboard?  No problem!

Smart-phones have zoomed past several milestones in many areas that make them an ideal offline blogging platform.  Consider:

• Phone cameras are as good as point-and-shoot dedicated devices
• Phones now have offline speech to text that transcribes much faster than typing, and with surprising accuracy
• Phone GPS devices enable recording and storing exactly where you are, all the time
• Phones have huge storage capacity to cache your blog entries until your device “sees” the Internet again

It is therefore no surprise to see smart-phone applications spring up such as TripJournal, MobilyTrip, BlogPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and WordPress.

Like TripJournal, MobilyTrip uses your GPS sensor to mash up locations, maps, and routes in Google Maps.  It keeps a slick floating time line calendar widget in the web pages it publishes for you.  And it integrates your own trip journals with polished, professional online “Guides” about the places you visit that they curate on their web site.

MobilyTrip is, of course, travel-specific.  And it locks you into their web site to publish your trip journal. The company that publishes it is a French start-up; their port from iOS to Android is weak, unstable, and clunky. 

It takes forever for their web pages to load in North America, and the inefficient JavaScript is slow to update outside of Safari.  I tried to make the Android app work for me, but I could not out how to use the features.  I plan to re-visit the application because it shows enormous promise.  My friend who uses it on iOS wrote a fantastic trip journal that I enjoyed reading as he updated it.

Since this blog is on Google blogspot I decided to try their Android client in my phone.  The App is very minimalistic but worked surprisingly well for my needs.  In particular it can attach photos, add tags, and it uses the Google offline speech to text.  The blogger app really wants to “see” Internet all the time but it does store your draft offline.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich day 6 – flying to Narita

The business class lounge has excellent Internet in Taipei but I was too late to attend the business meeting and there were no notes, grrrr.  I was able to work for a couple of hours, however.  The food was also quite good:

Notice the water cup is sealed.  Even the $2 street meals in Taipei heat-seal the tops of the drink cups instead of giving you those silly lids we use in the USA that always spill.  I speculate this is a Japanese custom.  The broccoli soup was very good (not too salty) and the rest of the meal was ok.

Up here in the air over Japan, there is apparently a spectacular view of Mt Fuji but I am on the wrong side of the plane to see it, sigh.

Leaving taipei we passed over the remnants of the big Typhoon that arrived in Shanghai yesterday.

 

And the food on board ANA is very good.  I love the presentation of Japanese haut cuisine with the pretty boxes and wrappings.

Taipei Shanghai Zürich day 6 - flying to Shanghai

My 0-Dark hundred (5:00am) taxi was early; the sun came up during our very fast drive to the airport.

The ticket counter for ANA was closed when I arrived. It opens at 06:30. Coffee!

Taipei, "the bastard rape child of China and Japan" is well worth the visit. I'm glad I came.

Taipei Shanghai Zurich day 5 – campus tour

The vegan buffet lunch was quite good (a bit greasy but fresh) with large quantities for $1.50.  We ate outside in the sweltering heat, with sweat dripping down our faces and clothes sticking to our bodies. My hair frizzed up in the wet heat.

After lunch, my daughter showed me around the huge library where she goes to study. They have a large archive of physical maps and charts that patrons can unroll and examine.  Some of them are very old.  Many are from Japan.  This one is pre-WW2 era, Japanese.

The library also has a large “media room” with dozens of stations equipped with vinyl LP record players, cassette players, DVD players / burners, and other hi-fi equipment.  They post a large poster weekly of which movie DVDs are most-checked-out of the library by the students.

floor plan of the library Entry-way

architectural model much-beloved by the locals

 

Then my daughter had to get back to her afternoon classes so I headed back.

I finally found a taxi to take me to the airport.  Enterprising drivers post their contact information online and I was able to email a few of them with Google Translate. In Taipei it appears impossible to book a Taxi in advance – everyone calls at the moment they need a cab, never sooner.  No driver or dispatch operator speaks anything but heavily-accented Mandarin; I find this situation odd, since there are so many of us foreigners running around.  I hope I make my flight.