Arrived in Korea

I landed in Seoul today after a 12-ish hour non-stop flight from San Francisco. I’m here in Korea and later this week in Japan to test a couple product concepts we’re working on with possible customers and partners before we begin to get way deep in the product development “cycle”. It’s a process called SyncDev, the premise of which is to test your product ideas before you build the product.

I’ve never been to Korea before so this it’s pretty exciting to be out here. After we checked in, we went out to eat at a hotpot-ish place down the road from the hotel. We though we ordered a hotpot with veggies and stuff to put in to the pot, but instead came out a pile of sizzling meat. Not good. The waitress, who shared a glass of beer with us asked us were we were from in very broken English and it turns out she was from China.

Obviously, I took advantage of this and was able to explain to her in Chinese that I needed some veggies and rice and other good stuff. Who knew knowing some Chinese would come in handy in Korea? Instead of starving, I managed to get a good tasty meal in.

We start our customer meetings at 10am tomorrow, so I’m of to bed but I’m looking forward to seeing Seoul in the day light.

Federal Ownership

In the NYT piece today, David Leonhardt covers a bunch of Q&A on the latest round of government bail outs. This one seemed particularly interesting.

Fannie and Freddie are in a conservatorship; the government clearly controls them. A small part of the assets of Bear Stearns are owned outright by the Fed; it controls them.

The A.I.G. situation is a bit more complicated. It’s still a private company, not one technically controlled by the federal government. But the Fed does have the ability, clearly, to veto dividends, among other things.

And I think it’s safe to assume that the Fed also has a significant degree of power that hasn’t been fully spelled out. After all, the chief executive of A.I.G., Robert B. Willumstad, stepped down at the request of the Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr. That may have been a request that Mr. Willumstad couldn’t refuse.

Ouch.

QSF Airport Code

While this not a travel blog (yet), I just found that the Bay Area has an airport code that covers all three area airports: QSF!. Add that to the list like NYC (for New York area airports like LGA, EWR and JFK) or LON (for the London area airports). How cool is that?

Commute Options

I’ve been exploring my commute options to work today in an effort to allow the most flexibility (read: laziness) in getting to work. It’s 1.9 miles according to Google, and probably closer to 1.5 as the crow flies.

Drive – this is by far the quickest. I can make it door to door in about 10 minutes. After 9am, parking on the street is nearly impossible, so it somewhat limits the options unless I want to pay for the garage ($10) which I do sometimes.
Bus to Adobe Shuttle – my most common option. I take the 21-Hayes to Market Street, from where a shuttle takes us Adobe folk to the office. One way is about 25 minutes, but the shuttle stops running at 10am, which means I’ve got to be out of the house by about 9:30 for this option to work.
Bus to Bus – I tried this today, I took the 21 to the 47 and then walked from 8th and Byrant to the office. It was about 30 minutes all told. Not a bad option if you’re going in late and the shuttle isn’t available or if you don’t want to drive.
Walk – there are two walking options. If I walk all the way from home, it’s about 45 minutes so that’s a bit much. On Monday I took the 21 to Market and walked, which put the total at about 25 minutes. It’s nice to do if it’s a nice day out.
Taxi – I’ve done this maybe twice and also takes about 10 minutes. The hardest part (and about 20 minutes of time) is finding a cab in my neighborhood. It costs about $10 one way, so if I do, I take a bus back home.

I can’t think of any others, but overall I’ve been doing the bus to the shuttle more often than not.

Continental Upgrade and Standby Lists

Ever wondered where you stood on a standby list for a flight? How about what the inflight amenities were? Or where you were on the upgrade list? Well, if you fly Continental, look no further than their PDA (e.g. mobile) web site. I’ve never found this information elsewhere, but on this one specific Continental site, you can get all that information! Just plug in your flight number, the day of travel and you know where you stand. I can’t believe they make that info available, but if you travel a ton it’s super-useful. Yes, yes, two travel posts in a row but when you’re on the road this stuff is invaluable.

Northwest Gold/Platinum Elite

This year is the first time in two years that I’ve been a Silver Elite on Northwest WorldPerks. With all my Shanghai travel in the past years, I had managed to be either Gold or Platinum for a while. There are a ton of benefits for being any level of airline elite, the one that I’ve found that I miss the most is the dedicated phone number. Calling the Gold and Platinum line, you had a live person on the phone within 15 seconds. The Silver line? A phone menu, then a three or four minute wait to reach somebody. Alas, life is so hard.

When VMware Fusion Networking Fails

Every now and then my Windows XP virtual machine goes on the fritz and cannot access the network. I restart Fusion, restart Windows XP, try to reinstall Fusion, changing from NAT to bridged, and back again but nothing seems to work. I’ve run in to this problem twice in the last month, and it was driving me crazy. It would die for a few hours or days and just come back to working as if nothing had happened.

The intertubes were of no help until I stumbled upon a set of tools that ship with Fusion that basically restarts the networking stack (actually I think it’s supposed to restart the entire VM). If you can’t seem to get anything to work on your VM in VMware Fusion, give this shell script a go from the Terminal. If you have HardwareGrowler running, you’ll see it detatch and reattach all the VMware devices.

sudo /Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/boot.sh --restart

Getting Hip(er) to Web 2.0

I admit it — I’m a very Web 1.0 participant on the intertubes. I spent most of my time on web sites like Yahoo Mail, New York Times, and the like. I read digg and am an avid Facebook user, but I’ve avoided some of the “cooler” and more interesting Web 2.0 companies.

Thus, I decided last week to get hip(er) with the times and plunge in to the world of last.fm and del.icio.us. Recently I’ve become a fairly exclusive Mac user (one MacBook, one MacBook Pro with VMware, and a Windows Server 2k3) and a Firefox user (never use Safari, and I don’t use IE in Windows any more). The plugs in for del.icio.us in to Firefox and last.fm in to iTunes are awesome. They make the cloud experience seamless with my desktop experience.

A while back I switched from Meebo to Pidgin (and now Adium) since the web experience wasn’t yet as good as the desktop, and I think that’s a kernel of why I like these two Web 2.0 apps a lot: I can use the apps I know and like (Firefox & iTunes) but they add value in to the equation by leveraging social effect and the ability to roam information between computers. The latter is really important to me since I use one machine for work and another at home, I have the same bookmarks between them and my music is scrobbled on both systems. For the bookmarks case, I used to use FolderShare but the Mac client for it is unusable. I still do use FolderShare, but only in my VMware Windows XP machine and my server.

YouConvertIt

While trying to convert some .3gp/.amr files that I recorded from my mobile phone, I struggled to find a way to convert the files to a regular more desktop format (such as .mp3). Enter YouConvertIt. The site is pretty cool. You upload a file, give it what you want the output format to be, and poof, it’ll email you the converted files. It’s a bit of a Swiss Army Knife and since it’s a web app you don’t need to install anything on your computer. Cool and useful site.

Stateside

I made it back to the states on Thursday. Vacation was great — far too short though. It was great to see a bunch of the old Shanghai friends, hang out with my SF peeps in Tokyo and Shanghai, and get up to all the same mischief that I used to. Having just 3.5 days out of the office wasn’t enough. I can’t wait until my next vacations: Burning Man and India. Here’s to a four day week!