Fall in Hyderabad

I'm back in India for what's become an annual trip to Hyderabad. From now until November 16, I'll be working with the PX engineering team at IBM's India Software Lab, showing them where the bodies are buried in the Orchestrate source code.

This trip began with the customary 21 hour plane trip: Boston to Frankfurt, a long layover, and then Frankfurt to Hyderabad. I managed to catch a few hours of sleep on the first leg, which made the layover a little less difficult. After stashing my carry-on in the Lufthansa business lounge I wandered around the terminal for a few hours, picking up some gifts in the duty-free shops and stretching my legs.

Duty-free shopping seems to be mostly about sin of various stripes: booze, tobacco, perfume (sex), and candy (gluttony) are the featured items. At least one of them comes with some degree of truth in advertising.

From India arrival 2008

After a while I returned to the lounge and dozed, then climbed aboard another Airbus for the second, longer leg to Hyderabad. The mostly sunny skies served up some very attractive views of the rugged terrain of Turkey, northern Iraq and Iran. I've often flown this route in early spring, when the mountains are covered with snow; in early October, they were mostly brown. Pictures through the plane window are always a disappointment, but hopefully these will offer some idea as to what I was seeing.

From India arrival 2008

The plane landed at the new airport at the new Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad, some 23 kilometers south-southwest of the old airport in Begumpet. As usual, I cleared customs very quickly (the new airport has many more immigration control lanes, and they were all staffed), and my baggage arrived much more quickly than usual. BUT - the ride into the city is much longer. I finally settled into bed at the IBM guest house at My Home Navadweepa at 3AM local time.


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Tuesday, my first day at work, was a short one. I collected a temporary badge, and Rajesh showed me to my desk. I got a list of potential serviced apartments from Lakshmi and headed out with Srinivas to hunt.

Our first stop was the Airtel store. Before I left Hyderabad on my previous trip I converted my "postpaid" Airtel account to "prepaid" and got a "lifetime recharge" that was supposed to keep the phone number active. Well, the number was indeed retained, but I had to buy additional minutes for it, and it turns out that "lifetime" meant "one year." I purchased additional time, and when I leave India this time I'm going to leave my phone with someone who can periodically make an outgoing call with it to keep the frakkin' account active. Aside: it drives me crazy that IBM isn't willing to provide prepaid cell phones to visitors.

We then began the apartment search in earnest. I intend to provide a detailed report at a later date; for now, I'll just say that nothing was perfect, but I'm probably going to take a place in Jubilee Hills.

On Wednesday I tried, with only limited success, to actually get some work done at work. People stopped by all day to greet, though, and I made little progress on the stack of chores I had planned. Late in the afternoon Nagesh took me to Srinagar Colony to search for more possibilities. In the process we wound up stopping at Anil's flat, and I met his new daughter. Anil has gotten an H1B visa and is leaving IBM, bound for San Francisco, at the end of October. I hope to spend some time with him - and get pictures - on Saturday.

Today is Dasara. For the second year in a row, Srinivas graciously invited me to his home for dinner. I met his brother's new son and was treated to his wife's wonderful cooking. Here's most of the route to Srinivas' house.


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Srinivas have me the customary missed call when he arrived to pick me up, and when I got downstairs he was cleaning the car from the previous night's drive; it poured rain as we were leaving Anil's, and we drove through a muddy flood.



We stopped on the way to his house at the All Saints' Church in Tirimala Giri (or Tirmulgherry; spelling is always dicey...). Srinivas had never been inside a Christian church; the caretaker allowed us to enter, and for few minutes Srinivas and I switched out usual roles as I explained the inside of the church. I liked the sign at the main doorway.

From India arrival 2008

Our next stop was at Venkateshwara Temple. It's a busy place on Dasara.

From India arrival 2008

Finally, we arrived at his home, and I met his new newphew.

From India arrival 2008

There are more pictures in the album.

After eating, Srinivas brought me back to the IBM guest house; I crashed for a few hours (I still haven't entirely shaken my jet lag) and I posted this. And so starts another season of my Hyderabad blogging.

Visitors and an Anniversary

It's been a busy week. My buddy Dave and his wife Bernice arrived in Boston Harbor on a cruise ship last Saturday, followed soon after by Oki and Clothilde from Germany (via NYC). We stopped by RiverSing on Sunday evening, and on Wednesday night Katy and I drove to New Hampshire to hike Mt. Chocorua as our anniversay celebration. I got a new camera last week, so all these goings on provided an excuse to give it a try.

Dave and I are friends from college; I met him a few weeks after arriving at FTU in the fall of '72, hanging out in the computer room late at night. He got me two of my early jobs (computer operator at Orange Memorial Hospital, and super-junior programmer at Orange County Public Schools), and we've somehow stayed in touch ever since. He and Bernice were passing through Boston on Saturday at the end of a ten day trans-Atlantic cruise, and we had the privilege of putting them up for the night. Here's Dave on our living room rug, noodling around with his fancy cell phone.

From Visitors and an anniversary

It was all too short a visit.

Later on Saturday Oki and Clothilde arrived by car from NYC. I won't go into all the details, but Katy knows Oki (and the rest of his family) from generations of cross-family extended visitations. Oki's brother, Toby, visited us earlier in the summer. Here are Clothilde and Oki at RiverSing on Sunday evening.

From Visitors and an anniversary

RiverSing was a big party in celebration of the autumn equinox on the north bank of the Charles River. It featured many singers (including Bill Staines, one of my favorites), big puppets and general frivolity. We were also treated to a lovely sunset.

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

Today is our anniversary; because my Morris team (the Pinewoods Morris Men) had a tour planned for today, Katy and I decided to celebrate our anniversary early by hiking Mt. Chocorua in New Hampshire. We originally planned to drive up on Thursday evening, but the threatening weather forecast led us to move the trip up a day. This monkey-wrenched our overnight plans; Katy had to find us a new inn for Wednesday night on short notice, and we weren't able to cancel the Thursday night reservation. This turned out to be just fine; once we finished the hike, we decided to spend Thursday in New Hampshire and drive home very early Friday morning.

Chorcorua has an incredibly exposed summit cone.

From Visitors and an anniversary

We decided to try a different route than our "usual" route up Chocorua (the Piper trail to the Carter Ridge trail and down the Hammond and Weetamoo trails) and instead did a loop up the Brooks trail and down the Liberty trail.


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From Visitors and an anniversary

This blowdown looked like a critter of some sort - a dragon? a moose?

From Visitors and an anniversary

The views from the top of the mountain were, as ever, spectacular, although the day was a bit hazy.

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

We took this self-portrait after finishing lunch at the summit.

From Visitors and an anniversary

We clowned around a bit at the Jim Liberty Cabin.

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

The trip down was fast, but it always seems longer that the trip up. We (especially our feet...) were happy to get back to the car.

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

The Gilman Tavern Inn in Tamworth was a great place to stay. The room was nice, and it's right across the street from a very funky little store (the "other" store, next door.)

From Visitors and an anniversary

From Visitors and an anniversary

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Addendum: Katy has been uploading pictures to Picasa, including some from Mom's visit to Boston in August.

Yet Another Hyderabad Map

Someone on IndiaMike just posted a link to a PDF map of the Outer Ring Road, which I've cached a copy of. The original is from the web site of the Hyderabad Growth Corridor Limited.

Orchard Street Block Party 2008

Our neighborhood block party was today. Here are the few pictures I took. It was fun!

Block Party 2008

Lies, Damn Lies and McCain Campaign Statements

The McCain campaign is so full of lies that even Republicans are starting to complain. See this article in today's New York Times.

The policy lies bother me the most; I think the most outrageous are in regards to tax policy, which I've already written about. McCain claims that Obama plans "painful tax increases on working families." In fact, the detailed and well-sourced comparisons at the non-partisan Tax Policy Center show otherwise. Their analysis states:

The two candidates’ tax plans would have sharply different distributional effects. Senator McCain’s tax cuts would primarily benefit those with very high incomes, almost all of whom would receive large tax cuts that would, on average, raise their after-tax incomes by more than twice the average for all households. Many fewer households at the bottom of the income distribution would get tax cuts and those tax cuts would be small as a share of after-tax income. In marked contrast, Senator Obama offers much larger tax breaks to low- and middle-income taxpayers and would increase taxes on high-income taxpayers. The largest tax cuts, as a share of income, would go to those at the bottom of the income distribution, while taxpayers with the highest income would see their taxes rise significantly.

Sarah Palin's assertions about her opposition to earmarks really get to me, too. She has said, "I told Congress, thanks, but no thanks for that 'Bridge to Nowhere' in Alaska. If we wanted that bridge, we'd build it ourselves." This is a flat-out lie. As a candidate for governor, Ms. Palin supported the project. She told the Ankorage Daily News in 2006 that she would like to see it and other projects built sooner rather than later, "while out Congressional delegation is in a strong position to assist." After the bridge drew national ridicule, making it harder to secure more federal money to meet rising cost projections, she abandoned it, citing the financial shortfall. Alaska was able to keep the federal money and direct it to other projects.

Wake up, America!

Update: Go watch the ABC news interview with Sarah Palin. Could she possibly be less prepared to be vice president?

Strange local politics...

I had an odd, unsigned note slipped into my mail slot sometime today, asking me to attend a City Council meeting tomorrow. The details of the situation aren't interesting to the general reader (look here if you really care), but I do want to say that I think it's slimy to slip unattributed political propaganda into people's mail slots.

This gave me an excuse, though, to noodle around a bit with Google Sites. I'm thinking that this is good enough to use for rehosting all the old content from narsil.org, which would finally let me power down the server in the basement...

Energy Balls in the blogospheric echo chamber

A recent posting on Engadget about a new spherical wind turbine design by "the Swedish company Home Energy" caught my attention:





I wanted more information, so I started following links back the chain of blogs - sort of a game of telephone - looking for a link to the company that makes these. No luck. So I turned to Google, and quickly found Home Energy International, a Dutch company. It's amazing to me that none of the previous bloggers did any fact checking - something always to bear in mind when reading blogs...

Anyway - a few of the specs for the turbine:

• Rated power, 10 m/s wind: 100W
• Max power, 17 m/s wind: 500W

And it's supposedly very quiet, unlike many small turbines.

Update: All Small Wind Turbines has a list of small wind turbines. Cool!

Pakistan, Twitter, Schools and Shrinking Republicans

This week's Sunday New York Times Magazine is worth the price of the paper all by itself. Home delivery gives me the luxury of spending Saturday mornings with the Magazine, and today my lingering over coffee was especially stimulating.

Paul Tough leads off with 24/7 School Reform - What poor kids really need can't be taught in a classroom. He describes the two camps he sees in the Democratic Party regarding education - "the unionists" and "the reformers." The unionists argue that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is the biggest problem in public education: that it encourages "teaching to the test" and blames teachers for the poor performance of disadvantaged children. The reformers, on the other hand, see problems with the implementation of NCLB, but applaud the accountability provisions and the encouragement of experimentation through charter schools. (Neither camp, it seems, are particularly attracted to vouchers - a policy I personally favor, which makes me persona non grata with much of my liberal cohort when it comes to discussions of education...)
The two camps are anxiously dissecting Barack Obama's speeches and policy announcements, looking for support.

Tough argues that both camps have missed the point: Obama's education plans are novel and interesting in that they largely involve institutions other than schools. Tough quotes a speech Obama gave last year:

If poverty is a disease that infects an entire community in the form of unemployment and violence, failing schools and broken homes, then we can’t just treat those symptoms in isolation. We have to heal that entire community. And we have to focus on what actually works.

This is a realistic assessment, one I agree with - but not one easily reduced to the sort of bumper-sticker catchphrase that seems so important any more in American politics.


Next up is I'm So Totally, Digitally Close To You, by Clive Thompson. He explores the effect of what he calls "incessant online contact" on friendship and privacy. This is a topic that I've long found interesting and blogged about before. By and large, people who have come of age in the past 10 years or so are very familiar with this. Older people, except for the tech-savvy like me, who've used email for over 30 years, tend to know little about about it and generally don't get it. This sort of "radical transparency" is freeing to some, terrifying to others, and emerging as a new norm.

Thompson is followed by David Frum's The Vanishing Republican Voter. Frum, author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, argues that the growing income inequality in the U.S. is undermining the G.O.P. and must become a conservative issue. Frum seems to be calling for a return to the brand of "main street Republicanism" so colorfully described by Garrison Keillor in Homegrown Democrat (for a real treat, buy the audio book, read by Keillor).

Finally, Dexter Filkins gives us Right at the Edge, an insightful look at the complex relationships between Pakistan, the Taliban, Al Queda and the U.S. It's scary but compelling reading.

Yes, the election matters...

...and Sarah Vowell, frequent contributor to This American Life, author of the wonderful Assassination Vacation and voice of Violet in The Incredibles, has an explanation of why in this Sunday's New York Times. This excerpt captures, I think, the spirit of her piece:

I have spent the last eight years so disgusted with the incompetent yahoos of the executive branch that I had forgotten that I believe in one of the core principles of the Democratic Party — that government can be a useful, meaningful and worthwhile force for good in this republic instead of just an embarrassing, torturing, Book of Revelation starter kit.

If you're not already familiar with Sarah, here's a fun little video clip to help you out.

A map from Owen

Owen's in Budapest for fall semester; today he sent me this map, with a few key places marked. Yea!


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Economic Plans: What are the candidates really proposing?

This week's New York Times Sunday Magazine contains an excellent article on Barack Obama's economic philosophy and plans, by David Leonhardt. It refers to a study of the Obama and McCain tax proposals by the Tax Policy Center (TPC), a non-partisan joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. The Times article is a great read, and I recommend it; the Tax Policy Center's study provides more detail (in particular, breakdowns of tax impact by quintiles, which I find far more useful than the usually-stated means).

Some interesting factoids:

The tax rates for individuals earning $5m/year (in current, inflation-adjusted dollars) have been:

• 1980: %60
• 1988 (end of the Reagan presidency): %35
• 1990s (Clinton era): %40
• current (GW Bush): %34

Both Obama and McCain would cut taxes for bottom 80% of population (those earning $118,000 or less). McCain's cuts would average $200/year for this group; Obama's would average $900. But the quintiles for Obama's plan are far more interesting than the single number:

Quintile	Top Income for Quintile	$ Change in Federal Tax Paid	Average Federal Tax Rate
20%	$19,740	-$617	-0.4%
40%	$38,980	-$950	8.0%
60%	$69,490	-$1,035	15.4%
80%	$117,535	-$757	18.9%
100%	Top	+$6,770	27.2%

The detail for the top 20% is interesting, too.

Percentile	Top Income for Quintile	$ Change in Federal Tax Paid	Average Federal Tax Rate
80-90	$169,480	-$442	21.7%
90-95	$237,040	+$448	23.3%
95-99	$619,561	+5,686	26.5%
Top 1 Percent	$2,832,449	+114,238	34.1%
Top 0.1 Percent	Top	+650,938	37.5%

Obama's plan is clearly targeted at cutting taxes for middle-income Americans, while fairly dramatically raising taxes on the very wealthiest Americans (but not back to even the top rates of the Clinton administration).

McCain's plan cuts taxes for everyone, including the wealthiest. Not surprisingly, this is reflected in projected increases in the national debt, as described in the TPC's summary:

Compared to current law, TPC estimates the Obama plan would cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018. McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion. These projections assume the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts expire in 2010 and that the Alternative Minimum Tax is fully effective.

So who's the fiscal conservative here?

The Journey Home

I'm riding the Acela Express, returning to Boston from a week in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania with my mother. She had surgery on Tuesday to repair her rotator cuff, damaged in the first of the two bad falls she suffered last winter. Katy and I arrived Sunday night; Katy will still be there for at least another week. The surgery seems to have gone very well, and Mom is recovering much more quickly than I expected her to.



My sister Jeannie also lives in Elizabethtown, and on Saturday we seized the opportunity to visit my home town, Windber. Except for one very short visit in 1969 (for Jeannie's wedding), I haven't been back to Windber since we moved to Florida in 1968.

I have a very mixed bag of memories from Windber, and I haven't been especially eager to reopen that chapter of my life. On the one hand, my family was very close when we lived there. We had some wonderful family vacations, and I had a lot of freedom growing up there. I used to spend my summer days riding my bike all over town, or playing in the woods at the top of the hill we lived on. On the other, I was always an outsider: bookish, unathletic, unattractive. Perhaps everyone's childhood is similarly mixed. In any case, I felt a bit of anxiety as we entered a familiar stretch of road on the way into town.



But I'm getting ahead of myself. It's a long drive from E-town to Windber, and Jeannie and I had a rare opportunity to let our hair down with each other. Jeannie is about 6 years older than me, and our lives separated before we really got to know each other very well. It was a treat to be able to talk with each other as adult friends. We traveled well together, and I look forward to spending similar time with her again.

The first leg of the trip was a long stretch on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. We exited at Bedford and drove northwest towards Hooversville, the town where my father was born. On the way we also passed my mother's mother's childhood home. I don't know how Jeannie found it; it's well off the road and overgrown with brush. Here it is.



We also spotted a set of wind turbines; this turned out to be the Green Mountain Wind Farm in Garrett, PA.



Hooversville is not a place I remember well at all, but Jeannie does. There is a small suspension bridge in the center of town that evidently terrified us as kids. It's down the street from the house where my father was born. Here are the bridge and the house.





We headed north from Hooversville and arrived a short time later in Windber. Our first stop was my father's parents' house on Stockholm Avenue, next to the Bestform factory and across the street from what was, back then, a very active train switchyard. The trains are gone now.



From there we went past the old playground (now a church parking lot), up over the 17th street bridge and on to Baumgardner Avenue, and my childhood home.



The house is almost exactly as I remembered it. There are a few obvious changes; the huge pussy willow bush in the back yard is gone, as are the two pine trees that used to flank the front walk. We had a nice chat with the man now living in the house. His parents bought it from my family in 1968 and lived there until their deaths. It's hard to imagine a house in America with only two owners in over 50 years.

From there we went "downtown" - a much smaller area than I recalled. Visiting the building that once held the Callen Baking Company was hard. It's boarded up and unoccupied, and through the windows we could see that the roof in the back is gone, evidently to a fire. I don't expect the building to be there the next time I visit.



Some of the other buildings, though, are pretty much as I remember them, such as the Arcadia Theater...



...the fire station...


...and the building that held the town library.



We came across this amusing juxtaposition as we walked up Graham Avenue.



We then visited the section of town that held many of the town's churches, including First Lutheran, where I was baptised.



It looks like the congregation no longer occupies the church; the sign out front mentioned a "closing service" in December, and the building was locked. We were able to peek in through some side windows at the sanctuary; it remains as I remembered it, a beautiful, peaceful place. I wonder what will become of it?

We drove around and visited a few more places - the town pool, the hospital, the schools - and then began winding our way over the mountains to Roaring Spring, where my mother's parents lived. We passed this funny road sign on the way.



Roaring Spring is aptly named. My grandparents lived right beside the spring itself, in an apartment over the Chrysler/Plymouth dealership ("L & L Motors") that my Grandpa Lauer owned. Sadly, the garage and apartment are no more; in their place is a parking lot. I used to spend several weeks each summer there, and I have very pleasant memories of feeding the fish and ducks (Grandpa kept a bin of feed corn in the garage for this purpose), watching the fountain, and playing at the edge of the water.







A short walk from the spring is St. Luke's Lutheran Church, where my parents were married. Like the Lutheran Church in Winder, St. Luke's appears to have stopped functioning as a church.



Down the street from the church is the paper mill, whose smell I will always associate with visiting my grandparents.



Roaring Spring also has a beautiful, though inactive, train station, a block away from the spring. It's a reminder of the days when trains connected most of the northeast with the rest of the country.



By this time the sun was setting and we turned south toward Bedford and the turnpike back to Elizabethtown. The trip back was a little quieter; I don't know about Jeannie, but I had a lot on my mind. I find it remarkable that we can retain so many memories for so long, and that they can be triggered so vividly by the right conditions. I'm glad I went back to Windber, and I hope to return again soon for a longer visit.

There are many more pictures from this trip in this album:

The Journey Home

As cool as Gene Krantz

Nothing profound here, just a quote from Jim Lovell's book "Lost Moon". Gene Krantz was the mission control flight director for Apollo 13. Shortly after the explosion in the service module, Krantz told the mission control team:

O.K., let's everybody keep cool. Let's make sure we don't do anything that's going to blow our electrical power or cause us to lose fuel cell number two. Let's solve the problem, but let's not make it any worse by guessing."

That's what I have to keep telling myself when debugging: don't guess. Hunches are one thing; wild speculation is another.

The Garden

Katy has done a beautiful job this year on the garden. This album doesn't really do it justice.

Garden, June 1 2008

Visiting Mom in E-town, Memorial Day 2008

Katy and I drove to Elizabethtown over Memorial Day weekend to visit my mom. She fell and broke her pelvis in late April and has been in the health center at Masonic Village. My sister Cyndi drove down from Pittsburgh, so it was a bit of a mini-family reunion. We had a nice cookout on Monday with Jeannie and Bob. I took the train back to Boston on Tuesday; Katy is still in E-town and won't be back for another week or so.

Few of my pictures really came out; maybe Katy had better luck. Here's what I have.

Here's Mom and me in the dining room after supper. Shortly after this was taken I read some Winnie-the-Pooh to her before bed.



On Sunday we went to church in Mt. Joy, followed by a stroll through the formal garden at Masonic Village.

Little India - in Detroit?!?

I'm on the last night of a 4 day business trip in Detroit, and this evening I discovered a little oasis of concentrated Indian culture nestled among the 'burbs of Detroit. Just south of 13 Mile Road, on either side of Orchard Lake Road, are some decidedly atypical suburban strip malls containing Indian restaurants, clothing stores and grocers.

I ate dinner at Udipi, a pure veg restaurant on the eastern side of Orchard Lake Road. It was without a doubt the finest Indian food I've had since I left Hyderabad. My dinner companion and I had channa chatt, vegetable samosa and papadam for appetizers. These arrived with a small dish of tamarind sauce; I asked for coriander chutney and was given a generous dish of delicious coconut-coriander chutney. The chatt contained delightfully fresh and intense cilantro, and the chick peas were carefully prepared to be easily edible but still have some tooth. The papadam must have been roasted, as it was crisp and oil-free.

My main dish was malai kofta with plain naan. It was intensely spiced, but not burning hot -- exactly the way I remember the best food in Hyderabad. My companion had vegetable curry with rice; it looked and smelled delicious. We were too full to try the desserts. If I ever go back, I plan to try the dosas; in retrospect, I was crazy not to do so on what's likely to be my only visit.

The only disappointments were the usual ones I encounter in America's Indian restaurants: I could not get a fresh lime soda with salt (although the waiter smiled and clearly understood what I wanted), and we were not brought fingerbowls after eating. These omissions really stood out, given the otherwise stunning degree of south Indian authenticity.

After leaving the restaurant we turned south on Orchard Lane Road and pulled into the next strip south, on the west side of the road. The Indian stores there were closed, but I looked in the windows of the "House of India." The clothing inside was gorgeous, and if I find myself with time tomorrow afternoon I plan to go back before heading to the airport.

Sigh. I've just made myself homesick for Hyderabad...


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Reflections on a Software Campus

Last August IBM, my employer, announced that it will be opening a large campus for software development in Littleton, MA. A major reason for this, we're told, is to foster collaboration; having all these people together in one place will make it easier for various groups to work together, promoting innovation, which is the second of IBM's company values:

• Dedication to every client's success
• Innovation that matters, for our company and for the world
• Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

But is this really the best way to foster innovation? And how does it mesh with IBM's successful and highly touted policy of supporting employees working at home?

Who's Moving?

IBM will be consolidating workers from offices all over the Boston area: Cambridge, Lexington, Bedford, Waltham, Westford, Westborough, and probably other places I just don't know about. These other offices will not necessarily be entirely shuttered; portions of the Cambridge and Waltham offices will remain, and Westford is more-or-less an extension of the Littleton Campus. The moves will be staggered over about a two year period, with Westborough moving first in late 2008.

In addition, there is an intent to have many employees currently working from home commute to the new campus, again with the goal of increasing interaction among employees.

Any time a company relocates its offices there are winners and losers; commuting time will decrease for some and increase for others. In this particular case, though, where several smaller offices are being consolidated into a single large campus, the effects will be unevenly distributed and fall more heavily on some groups than others. Work-at-home employees may be particularly hard hit.

Fostering Interaction: F2F and Web 2.0

I agree that enabling employees to easily collaborate is critical to IBM's continued success. This is especially true as we struggle to integrate the products - and development teams - brought into IBM in the past few years through acquistions: Lotus, Rational, Ascential, DataPower, Cognos, and others. The question in my mind is how to make this happen.

A consolidated campus, enabling face-to-face (F2F) contact is a traditional solution, and one used by many successful companies, including Microsoft, Google and, yes, IBM. Meetings are easily arranged. Informal contacts (the water cooler and cafeteria conversations) encourage team spirit and can produce unexpected and creative ideas. Getting to know coworkers makes it easier to trust them. Companies can offer services to employees that are impractical in small offices, such as a cafeteria, exercise rooms, libraries, first-class meeting rooms, etc.

But traditional offices have their downsides, too. Commuting can be time-consuming and stressful, to say nothing of expensive and energy-consuming. Cubicle workspaces (the norm for most companies, and universal for the Littleton campus) offer only limited privacy; noise from nearby cubicles can be distracting, and concern about noise can discourage collaboration.

So is a campus really the best way to encourage collaboration?

The continuing growth and evolution of the Internet has brought new tools to the table, and revitalized some old ones, that make it possible for dispersed employees to work together in new and highly effective ways.

Instant Messaging: with IM I can easily see whether or not someone is available for conversation and, if so, contact them easily for quick questions. Sophisticated IM clients, like IBM's Sametime software, provide voice-over-IP (VOIP), making it easy to convert a text chat to a voice conversation (sometimes there's nothing quite like a good old fashioned phone call to convey a lot of information quickly). Sametime also supports screen sharing and group chats, and its logging acts as a useful memory aid.

Discussion Forums: these provide a terrific alternative to email for Q&A, status reporting and other discussions. Forums eliminate some troublesome decisionmaking one always faces with email: Who should I address this to? Do I need to archive this message? Is this important enough to "bother" people with? Forums allow the reader to decide what's important and eliminate the need to archive conversations (since the forum preserves the content indefinitely). Used in conjunction with a feed reader, forums make it easy to prioritize and categorize incoming information in a way that's difficult with email.

Wikis: a wiki makes it easy to "publish" information in a way that encourages frequent revision (to keep the content current) and cross-linking (to make information easier to find). I've been using my wiki as a means of tracking what I'm working on, which, in turn, makes that information visible to my manager and coworkers.

All of these tools make it easier for teams to work together while physically dispersed. But regardless of the effectiveness of these tools, people have to work somewhere, and working from home isn't an option for everyone. Further, many people (including me) find working from home all the time to be isolating and not ideal. So if we need office space, at least some of the time, where should it be?

Clustering by Geography, Not Function

Instead of creating a single large campus for an entire region, suppose IBM provided a number of smaller offices spread throughout the region. Employees would have small, possibly non-dedicated workspace in these smaller offices, and could chose the office they make their "home" office based on geographic convenience rather than product team. Each office would have a number of small conference rooms with excellent A/V facilities linking it to other offices. This would address the isolation imposed by always working at home, and enable members of different teams to have frequent, casual interaction with other teams. If necessary, teams could agree to meet on a regular basis either virtually (via cross-office conferencing) or physically (by agreeing to meet at one specific office).

Many of the services required by software developers don't really benefit much from economy of scale beyond "workgroup" scale: Internet bandwidth, backup power, printing, heating and cooling. The exceptions are things like a cafeteria or exercise rooms; these could be addressed in part by careful siting of the small offices and modest employee subsidies for food or health club memberships.

Watch this Space

It's too late for IBM to change course regarding the establishment of the Littleton campus. But this experience should be carefully observed, and perhaps a few experiments in small, distributed offices could be tried. I think these experiments would be particularly valuable in places like Hyderabad, India, where IBM has a large and growing workforce at the India Software Lab. Commuting is shaping up as a major challenge in Hyderabad, and distributed offices with their own backup power and Internet bandwidth seem particularly appropriate.

Service with a snarl

Ah, what a cap to a difficult week. The business that brought me to Montpellier concluded late this afternoon with, ah, well, "less than success," shall we say. Grumble - we were starting to get the technical issues under control, but events intervened.

Shyam and I walked back to the hotel, changed, and toddled over to "L'Arlequin for supper. Our waiter wasn't exactly happy to see us, it seemed, and at the very end of the meal, as he hurriedly dropped dessert menus on the table, he knocked over my wine - into Shyam's lap. No apology was offered. This, I guess, passes for hospitality.

I managed to spend 7 days in southern France without spending a single daylight hour outside of the office. A business trip, indeed. I'll be happy to be back in dirty, cold, noisy Boston.

Pizza Day

Well, pizza night, but close enough. I ate at Don Camillo pizzeria; a large, fresh salad, 9 inch ("petite") pizza and a carafe of wine for Euros 26.20. Not even close to last night in value, but the food was nice, the ambience was quiet, and I enjoyed it.

I just realized that, of course, when I update my Google Map for Montpellier, new content shows up no matter when I made the link, so I'll stop sprinkling this page with redundant maps.

Eventually I'll start taking pictures, but I already feel like a real rube, and hauling out the camera at night (the only time I seem to have to myself on this trip) for flash photos just feels too much like taping a "Kick me!" sign to my butt.

It's incredibly annoying not to be able to get IBM network access working thru Orange; I have a lot to say on my internal IBM blog and no way to say it. I'm keeping notes in an emacs buffer; hopefully I'll get around to posting once I get back online.

Another long day

So the Blogger interface is IP-address-sensitive and presents the login page in French. Appropriate, of course, but nonetheless disturbing.

Shyam and I just got back from a loooong dinner at Restaurant Cerdan, a truly delightful little place near Place de la Comedie. 14 Euros brought me a delicious salad with chevre and toast, some very fresh, nicely prepared fish in with rice in a delicate sauce, a small carafe of red wine, chocolate mousse for dessert, and cognac. Outrageous!

Work today was long and frustrating. I lost my temper - never a productive thing to do, the momentary relief is followed by hours of regret. On the one hand, I really do understand our goal, and it kinda-sorta makes sense, but on the other, it just seems so idiotic (which means, in my self-centered world, "not the way I would do it"). I'm better at this than I was 20 years ago, but - DAMN!

I want Katy here with me so badly I can't stand it, but there's no way to know how long I'll be here, so I've told her not to try to get a plane ticket. It would suck to have her arrive just as I'm leaving. Sigh.

Ah, well, I get to sleep in tomorrow - we aren't starting work until 10AM. Imagine that!

(Hi, Krishna!)

Eating Out

Last night we went to dinner as a group to Les Bains. Essentially all of the conversation was in French; I ate what was ordered for me (salad, goat cheese, a rice with sauce concoction in red pepper skins, roasted tomatoes, and other vegetable matter I couldn't identify, but ate anyway). All in all a weird experience; I was totally out of my league.

Tonight Shyam and I want to Le Shiva, a nominally Indian restaurant. The food was distinctly Frenchified, but at least I could more-or-less recognize what it was. We conversed in blessed English. The food was affordable, if strange.

I think this is going to be a long trip.


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Back on the road - and out of my depths - again

I'm again out of the country, this time in Montpellier, France, working with a benchmarking group at IBM's Products and Solutions Support Center. I left Boston on Tuesday evening (the 26th), transferred to another plne in Paris, and arrived in Montpellier at 9AM Wednesday. In spite of flying business class, I arrived fried; the guy in the seat next to me stank (cigarette smoke, B.O. and killer farts...) and snored, and so I got very little sleep.

Getting to IBM's office was painless; hail a cab, point at the address, and arrive 15 minutes later. My badge was activated and I began meeting the people I'll be working with. I managed to hang on until about 1PM. When the rest of the team broke for lunch, I walked to the hotel (Suitehotel Montpellier Antigone), checked-in, and crashed for a few hours. I woke up about 4:30 and spent the next hour or so fiddling with the Wifi service from Orange; it basically works, but I can't get the VPN domain name resolution to work with IBM addresses, which seriously crimps the usefulness.

I eventually gave up and started thinking about dinner. After some Googling, backed by infromation from the Lonely Planet guide, I settled on Tripti Kulai. I walked there, and in the process discovered that this is a very beautiful city. After eating, I wandered my way back to the hotel very indirectly (with the GPS running); the Place de la Comedie area I was in is chock full of restaurants and bars. I won't have trouble finding food. The track is a bit sketchy; there are a lot of seriously narrow urban canyons here, which give the GPS fits.


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I'm trying to learn at least a little French; the waitress at the restaurant seemed very pleased that I made the effort, even if we mostly used English.

This is in some ways more foreign-feeling than Hyderabad; superficially it looks like the U.S (well, a really nice place in the U.S....), but then there's this massive language barrier. Hyderabad was just so obviously bizaare that I didn't expect to be able to manage well.

Sleep. Must get sleep.

An Obama/Richardson ticket?

If Barack Obama manages to become the Democratic presidential candidate, who will be his vice-presidential running mate? Hillary Clinton seems unlikely, and I don't think it would be a good combination in any case. John Edwards has stated that he has no intention of being a vice-presidential candidate again.

How about Bill Richardson? He offers complementary experience, as a governor, to Obama's legislative background. I believe that Richardson demonstrated in the campaign that he could be a good president if something happens to Obama. He comes from a different region of the country, and his Mexican roots will help the ticket with Hispanic voters. This could work...

Superdelegate resources

I've been spending this morning noodling around on the Web looking for information about the so-called Democratic superdelegates, and who they're supporting for the presidential nomination. If neither Clinton nor Obama has crossed the delegate threshold by the end of the primary season, these delegates will control the nomination. I've decided to contact any of those delegates with whom I have some connection, and encourage them to withhold their decision at least until the primaries are over.

My list of delegates includes, of course, the members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, but also the delegates I've supported via Emily's List. I've been contributing to Emily's List and its candidates since 2005 (to the cumulative tune of over $1000).

SO - I've had to track down some information about all these folks, like their mailing addresses and which candidate, if either, they've already stated they support. This eventually led me to these resources:

• TheHill is maintaining a list of announced superdelegate endorsements.
  
  
• The mailing addresses of the members of the U.S. House of Representatives are available in several convenient downloadable formats from the Office of the Clerk.
  
  
• The corresponding U.S. Senate directory isn't quite as user-friendly, but all the information is available.
  

Superdelegates I supported via Emily's List:

• The Honorable Maria Cantwell
  511 Dirksen Senate Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510
  announced for Clinton
  
  
• The Honorable Amy Klobuchar
  302 Hart Office Building
  Washington, DC 20510
  uncommitted
  
  
• The Honorable Kirsten Gillibrand
  120 Cannon House Office Building
  Washington, DC 20515-3220
  announced for Clinton
  
  
• The Honorable Gabrielle Giffords
  502 Cannon House Office Building
  Washington, DC 20515-0308
  uncommitted
  
  
• The Honorable Mazie Hirono
  1229 Longworth House Office Building
  Washington, DC 20515-1102
  uncommitted
  
  
• The Honorable Betty Sutton
  1721 Longworth House Office Building
  Washington DC 20515-3513
  reported to be leaning towards Clinton
  
  
• The Honorable Allyson Schwartz
  423 Cannon House Office Building
  Washington, DC 20515-3813
  announced for Clinton
  
  
• Governor Chris Gregoire
  Office of the Governor
  PO Box 40002
  Olympia, WA 98504-0002
  announced for Obama
  
  
• Governor Jennifer M. Granholm
  P.O. Box 30013
  Lansing, Michigan 48909
  announced for Clinton
  

I'll try to keep this updated, but no promises...