The Continuing Adventures of Dr Dzoe

As I’ve noted here, my big Mixx adventure is at an end.  It was a terrific experience, but it’s over now.  And as of now, I’m done with UberMedia, the current owners of Mixx: my employment with them ended on this past Tuesday.

So what’s next?  Time for a vacation!

For the first time in years, decades, I’m going to take a summer off.  And at the end of the summer, I’m going to figure out what to do next, which mostly means to find or make an opportunity to do another CTO-like thing.  (I really enjoyed being Mixx’s CTO.  I loved the start-up life.  I want to do it again.)

So what exactly am I going to do with these great gulfs of time stretching out over the next couple of months?  Well, it’s not going to be a leisurely summer.  So far, I’ve got plans to do the following:

– Travel.   Julie and I are going to New York for a couple days next week to see Sara, Marjorie, and Gary.  In mid-July, we’re taking the family to London for a week.  And in October, we’re going to Egypt – I’m really excited about that one.  And we’re still thinking about fitting in one more trip in August or September, possibly a road trip somewhere.  And there’s plenty of day-trips that I want to take.

– The beach.  Gonna spend lots of time at our beach house, and a lot of that time sailing on the Chesapeake.  The week of the Fourth of July, of course – that’s a family tradition.  And we’ve got guests lined up for two weekends in September.  And the kids have guests coming too – Kate had some friends to the beach last weekend, Kate and Andy are having friends over the Fourth, Diana is talking about having friends down sometime.  I’m sure we’ll schedule a lot more time at the beach, though I’m not sure when.

– Bunches of web projects.  Julie and I are putting together a website for a friend who is launching a set of rules for miniature wargames.  I’m building another site for a stealth-mode startup with some friends.  I’ve got yet another friend who is working on an online game that I’m going to help.  Julie and I have a few other ideas that may or may not come to fruition.

– A little consulting on the side.  I have a friend who runs a tech consulting agency.  She has a possible short-term contract that I may do some work on.  It may involve a little travel – yet another trip.

– Miscellaneous stuff.  I’ve got several thousand old photos that I’m getting scanned, and organizing them takes time.  I’m redoing a room in my house as a library and still have some work to do.  My home office is a frightful mess.  I recently got a new camera and am trying to learn to be a decent photographer, moving beyond point-and-shoot.  I’ve got a bunch of miniatures to paint.  I need to read up on the history of Egypt to make the most out of that trip.

Add it all together, and my summer off may be one of the busiest periods of my life.  What joy!

That’s the problem with waiting so long between updates: I start to forget what I’ve been reading.  There’s probably going to be more to come, but I did just remember one more, this one read on e-book:

– The Fiddler in the Subway, by Gene Weingarten.  This is a collection of feature articles that Weingarten wrote for the Washington Post.  I’m a big fan of Weingarten’s pieces, and I greatly enjoyed this book.  I had read several when they were first published in the Post, but there were plenty of ones that were new to me.  I even enjoyed rereading the ones I had read before.  Relatively short pieces, as you would expect from newspaper magazine articles, consistently entertaining, some quite moving, and all worth reading.

Later: one more, this one I read in dead-tree media, a birthday gift from Andy:

– The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Ariely.  A book by an experimental psychologist, all about the ways in which humans are irrational and, surprisingly, the benefits that can come from such irrationality.  I find cognitive psychology fascinating, and this one was a good read.

Boy, been a while since I’ve posted one of these. Let’s see if I can still remember all of this!

Audiobooks:

– The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex, and Colonel Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris.  Nice big three volume bio of Teddy Roosevelt.  Superbly well-written and researched, and TR was a fascinating character, larger than life in every possible way.  Strongly recommended in any format.

– Bossypants by Tina Fey.  I listened to this one on a trip to the beach and back with Julie and Diana.  We all enjoyed it greatly.  Funny and forthright, with the added benefit that Fey went to UVA, so we were well able to picture the stories that took place in the college chapter.

– On Stranger Tides by Tim Powers.  The latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie was loosely based on this, but don’t hold that against this lovely book.  A fun pirate yarn, complete with derring do, voodoo, and Blackbeard too.  The movie has almost nothing to do with the book except for the presence of Blackbeard and the Fountain of Youth.  (The book is MUCH better than the movie.)

And e-books:

– The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.  A history of the scientists of the late 18th and early 19th century England, focusing on Joseph Banks (naturalist), William Herschel and his fascinating sister Caroline (astronomers – Caroline was the first woman in England to be paid as a scientist), and Humphrey Davies (chemist).  The book also spends a lot of time discussing how the works of these folk influenced the romantic poets such as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.  Extremely interesting stuff, and the tales of, for example, how Europeans reacted the first time they ever saw surfing (which happened when one of Cook’s expeditions, with Banks as naturalist, stayed in Tahiti) was marvelous.  What do you mean, they’re walking on the waves?  Just for the fun of it?  How odd!  A little more focus on the poets than I would have liked, but that’s not my thing, so your mileage may vary.  One odd thing that the book brought to mind: astronomers like Herschel (discoverer of Uranus, the first planet discovered with a telescope) had adopted an old-universe model of the stars well before Darwin was born.  So why is Darwin the fall-guy for Biblical fundamentalists?

– 1635: the Eastern Front, 1636: the Saxon Uprising, by Eric Flint.  These are the next two books in a series that started with 1632, in which a town in West Virginia, by various means, has found itself transported into the middle of the Thirty Years War.  I’ve greatly enjoyed the series, and especially enjoyed these two volumes.  (I haven’t much liked some of the peripheral books in the series, and would recommend avoiding any of the series books that list Virginia DeMarce as an author.)  I particularly liked a twist at the end of 1635, one that plays out in 1636.  (Though I thought it wasn’t carried through as well as might be hoped in 1636 – all details left out to avoid spoilers.)  Certainly nothing serious, but nice, fast reads.  (I read 1635 on the plane ride to Bangalore.  It made for a terrific read for a loooong flight.)

– The Eichmann Trial by Deborah Lipstadt.  A book about the capture and trial of Adolph Eichmann, and its aftermath and the way in which it affected what we think of the Holocaust.  A nice read.

– Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.  I’m fairly certain that I read this way back in high school, but Julie wanted to read it so we decided to read it in parallel to discuss.  Fun stuff, classic gothic romance, though I’ve got to say, I don’t much care for the men in Jane’s life!

At one point on Sunday, my credit card stopped working.  I’m not a deadbeat – I swear – so I was sure that the card companies were wondering who’s the guy in India using Joe’s credit card.  (This was particularly annoying seeing that I had called my main card provider to tell them that I coming here, but I suppose I should be grateful that they’re keeping me safe.

When I got in, I called the American Express hotline to tell them to knock it off and let me start using my credit card already.  But using the hotel phone to make an international collect call to AmEx seemed nigh impossible.  So instead I used Skype to make the call.

As it happens, the representative that I spoke to was in Mumbai.  So here I am, in Bangalore working with Indians, talking over the internet to the US American Express customer service line, connecting via some network back to Mumbai, where I was speaking to an Indian rep from another US company.

Welcome to the wonderful world of globalization!

After touring, I did a little shopping.  (The family have all got their favorite India items, after being the beneficiary of many of my previous trips, but some are in need of replacing.)  Let me describe what it’s like to shop on Commercial Street, one of the major centers of shopping in Bangalore.

FIrst off, you should note that Commercial Street is the place where, when Julie visited here, she threw her hands over her eyes and said, “Too much visual stimulus!  Make it go away!”  Sure enough, there’s vast amounts to see in all directions, all sorts of color, plenty of small shops, and a wide range of humanity.

A typical street in this area is a narrow one-lane road with small shops lining each side.  People walk in the streets, dodging the occasional car, motorbike, or autorickshaw (these are three wheel vehicles that in stability and size resemble a golf cart.  I love them, but Julie, that wise woman, wouldn’t get in one when she was here).  The crowds are big, the shops are small, and the road is crowded.

But if that’s too open, if you’re feeling a sense of agoraphobia, you can always turn down one of the alleys.  Now you’re in a much tighter space, surrounded by yet smaller shops and stalls, and with even more difficulty dodging the cars.

Still, though, things seem rather open.  Now it’s time to go down the alley-off-the-alley.  This is about five feet across, there’s no more cars or autorickshaws, and the motorbikes tend to be being pushed.  But there’s still plenty of small stalls and even a few shops.

Finally, you come out and see the following mixed among the traffic:

Shopping in a shop can be fun too.  They believe in lots of service here.  Visiting one of my favorite shops, Mysore Saree, to pick up some silk (yes, Diana, I got your silk) involved sitting down on a stool at a small table, having the sales staff bring me a drink, and having other salesclerks running this way and that finding bolts of cloth that match my descriptions of what I need.  And match their ideas of what else I might be persuaded to buy.  Finally, when I’ve picked out all of my cloth, they say, “Would you like some pashminas?”  What do you know, those are on my shopping list too, so I say yes.  And they bring forth the nicest ones I’ve seen all day (and I’ve been looking), and I pick out several in different colors for my womenfolk to divide however they so choose.  (Yes, Julie, Kate, and Diana – I’ve got your pashminas.)

(Don’t worry, Andy, I found your wooden snake.  Though I think you would have best enjoyed the Bangalore shopping experience, with your taste for bizarre bazaars.  You probably would even have bought food from the street vendors, a little too daring for me!)

Special bonus picture of animals in traffic:

This was the first time I’ve seen a camel in Bangalore.  I’ve seen them in other parts of India – even rode one once.  But never before here.

After four years, I’m back in Bangalore, once more a tool for global outsourcing.  (When I leave Mixx, a team of UberMedia developers out here will be taking over my code.  I’m here preparing them for that moment.  And a special bonus: I’ll get a chance to meet Raghu Somaraju, ace Mixx developer and our only offsite developer.  Although I’ve worked closely with Raghu for four years, this will be my first chance to meet him face-to-face.)

A few things to note.  First, while India is much different than the US, it’s hard to find a place to be strange and exotic when you’re visiting for the sixth time.  Bangalore has changed a little since last I was here (they’ve got a nice new airport, and they’re working on a light rail system – about time they started beefing up the local infrastructure!), but it’s pretty much the same place.

Second, I flew Qatar Air this time, instead of United (which was AOL’s airline of choice).  An excellent experience – I rather like Qatar Air and would gladly use them in the future.  (They layover in Doha, Qatar, was my first time on the soil of a dictatorship, for those keeping track.  I seem to have survived the experience.  So did the dictator.)

Third, I gave myself an extra day here in Bangalore, arriving a day in advance of when I’m expected in the office.  While I made the most of my day, it wasn’t just a junket.  One thing I’ve learned in my trips to Bangalore is that jet lag sets in strongly in the afternoon of my first day here.  I’d be useless in the office once lunch is over (not surprising, given that I got a total of eight hours of sleep over the past two nights, and four of those were in a plane, and the clock is pretty much turned upside down here – India is 9 1/2 hours ahead of the US at this time of year (they don’t do daylight savings)).

So I spent the day visiting Bangalore.

In my previous trips here, I spent any down days I had visiting sites a few hours from here.  As a result, I never did visit the Bangalore sites.  Today I made up that lack.  Though as it happens, Bangalore is a bit short on tourist sites.  But there were a few:

– Lal Bagh, a lovely and large botanical preserve.  Here’s a picture:

– The Bull Temple, a temple featuring a large statue of Nandi, the pet bull of Shiva.  Here’s me with the bull:

(Note: this is the second holy statue of Nandi I’ve seen in India.  He’s obviously a popular subject.)

– Tipu Sultan’s Bangalore summer palace.  Tipu Sultan fought against the British in the late 18th century, about the same time we were fighting the Revolution (and, in some cases, against some of the same generals that we fought).  I’ve visited others of his sites before.  This was nice enough, but the places near Mysore are nicer.

– Bangalore Palace.  Built in the 1870’s by the British, this is a nice looking castle currently owned by the local maharajah (India still has some, though their powers are limited).  Here it is:

I enjoyed it, but I should note that the Maharani seemed to like furniture made from animal parts, like these rather odd footstools:

The maharajah, on the other hand, really enjoys having art that prominently features naked women, ranging from classic nudes gathered together on a wall:

to this rather strange and suggestive Frank Franzetta-style item:

Now don’t get me wrong: I like female nudes as much as the next guy.  But geez, dude, how about a little variety?  I mean, you might want to have at least one landscape!

Okay, I lied.  I actually did do one more trip in 2010.  Well, a trip that started in 2010 and then ran over into 2011.  The family went to Puerto Rico again this year.  I like it there – see my last year’s blog post for details.

But the weather wasn’t great this year – more cloudy days than not.  So it was fun, but not as beachy as I would have liked.

Still, I did get out scuba diving one day, and did a lovely tour of the rainforest (complete with a trip into a cave).  So much fun was had by me, at least – though I didn’t get any complaints from the family!

I’m falling behind on this rather dreadfully.  Let me see if I can summarize the other trips I’ve taken since fall.

Back in fall, Julie and I went:

– To New York city, to see Sara, Gary, and Marjorie.  This was a trip full of happy coincidences.  First off, we went one day to visit the Medieval art museum at the Cloisters.  A lovely place, but best of all: there was a medieval fair going on that day which we greatly enjoyed.  Then we went to see “American Idiot” on Broadway, a show based on the album by Green Day.  That day, it happened that one of the cast members was out, so instead of an understudy they brought in Billie Joe Armstrong to play the part.  I’ve never seen a show where the audience was so excited – there was thunderous applause throughout, starting with the announcement that Armstrong would be appearing that night.  (And the show was great too, and Armstrong had tremendous stage presence.)  A fun trip.

– To Charleston, South Carolina.  We visited a bunch of Civil War sites, including Fort Sumter and the Hunley.  (The Hunley was the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel.  Built by confederates, it rammed and sunk a Union blockading vessel, subsequently sinking with all hands lost itself.  It was recently discovered in Charleston Harbor and is being restored – I strongly recommend visiting it if you have the chance.)  And we walked around Charleston and had a lovely meal.  Plus, we stopped off in Raleigh on the way back and had dinner with Kate.

– To Los Angeles.  These were a couple of business trips that I went on.  (My company was bought by an LA company back in early November and I was visiting them.)  So lots of boring business stuff, but I did manage to visit a couple of sites, including watching the sunset over the Pacific (always a pleasure), driving through one of those dry southern California valleys in the hills (a fun drive through strange landscapes), and a visit to the La Brea Tarpits (also fun).

And that rounded up my travels for 2010.

For various reasons, work slowed down drastically in the fall.  I took the opportunity of going on several short trips.

The first of these was a road trip to Civil War sites in Tennessee.  I’ve wanted to try a road trip sometime, and this seemed an opportune moment.  So I hopped in the car, crossed the border, and visited the state that had the second-most number of Civil War battles (first, of course, being Virginia).

(As it happened, I had business at the beach right before the trip.  So I drove all across Virginia at its widest point, from coast to mountains, to get to  Tennessee.  Coming home, I came from the southern border of Virginia to Northern Virginia.  So I literally crisscrossed Virginia on this trip.)

My first stop was pre-Civil War: I saw a sign from the highway for the Hermitage, Andrew Jackson’s home, so I stopped and visited.  Fairly standard early-19th century estate, nothing much to distinguish it.  But I did find myself getting really angry at Jackson, who was a pretty lousy human being and, as president, was a key figure in some of America’s most shameful actions (launching the Trail of Tears, for example).

Second stop: Fort Donelson, the site of Grant’s first big victory, in the northwest corner of Tennessee.  A beautiful place, where the Confederates set up a fort overlooking the  Cumberland River.  Here’s a battery of cannon overlooking the river:

Fort Donelson

Imagine gunboats coming up the river and these cannon firing on them.  Which is pretty much what happened on one cold day in February, 1862.

After the fort, it was back to the road, where I saw this lovely billboard:

Then it was back to Nashville, (in north-central Tennessee) where I spent an evening watching the Grand Ole Opry.  I’ve often seen the Lil Ole Opry down in Mathews, and I thought this would make an interesting comparison.  The music was a lot better in Nashville, but the audience was almost exactly the same: all older white people.  It’s not often these days that I find myself in a crowd that makes me feel young, but this one managed it.  And in an audience of around a thousand people, I saw one African-American.  (And yes, I did look.)

Next, off to Shiloh in south-west Tennessee, the first truly bloody Civil War battle.  A nice battlefield where I learned many things that I did not know about the battle – walking the field adds so much to reading the stories.  Plus a special bonus: it turns out that the Shiloh battlefield was, back around 1400 or so, the site of one of the biggest cities of the Mound Builder Indians, a civilization that thrived along the Mississippi valley but which was wiped out by European diseases well before actual Europeans got anywhere close.  Here’s one of the large mounds built by those people:

And another lovely view of a river, this time the Tennessee (the Civil War in the west was all about the rivers):

Then I drove the Chattanooga in southeast Tennessee, site of another two Civil War battlefields.  Chickamauga was interesting, but far better was the view of the siege of Chattanooga, where the Confederates besieged Union forces until Grant showed up and drove them off.

By far the best part of the battlefields was the view from Lookout Mountain, a 2300 foot mountain overlooking the city of Chattanooga.  On the top of the mountain, there’s a tourist trap called the Battlefields of Chattanooga which has a model of the city showing the various military actions involved in lifting the siege.  Then you step outside to a national park and voila, you can see the entire area where all that fighting took place.  Here’s the view:

I hit another tourist trap or two (Underground waterfall!  World’s steepest railroad!), then after a stop in Raleigh where I had some great sushi with Kate, it was back home again.  Zigzagging across Tennessee, then cris-crossing Virginia, and my roadtrip was done.