Trials and tribulations in a busy world..

Incompetence and sloppiness

Rant coming up. My apologies in advance.

One of my pet peeves (out of an incredibly long list) is filling out forms online and then seeing a printout later on where something is misspelled. The implication is that whatever you typed in was manually retyped into a different system. Beyond the fact that it defeats a large part of the advantage of doing things digitally it shows that whoever retyped it didn't bother actually making sure that the information was typed correctly despite having no excuse of not being able to read the handwriting. Almost as bad is the case where something is manually typed off a printout where sloppiness is again the only excuse for not typing it correctly.

The quintessential example is my first name. For whatever reason the majority of people in both the U.S. and Denmark insist on spelling my name as Phillip (Phil-lip) instead of the correct Philip (Phil-ip). And they do it reflexively by habit without checking what's actually written. I've learned to always double check it on pretty much any official form where it matters.

Today the worst example of this happening arrived in the mail. We are (again.. long story!) trying to buy a house here in California. In a real estate transaction in California there's always an escrow company involved. The escrow company handles all the paperwork and acts as the neutral third party between the seller and buyer that ensures the transaction proceeds smoothly and on time.

Let me count the ways in which Lawyers Title, the escrow company in our transaction, messed up:

• My first name spelled incorrectly - the classic! (but "Siw" was okay, probably because it's so unusual whoever did the paperwork was forced to double check)
• The seller's last name spelled incorrectly
• The property address spelled incorrectly
• The deposit amount listed incorrectly (I sent them a check for $5000, I'd like for the paperwork to reflect that and not $1000 like it currently does..)
• Paperwork from a completely different transaction (the case number has two digits transposed from our transaction's case number- another great case of sloppy mistyping)

How much does that leave that was correct? Let me quote from Lawyers Title's homepage: "Lawyers Title is committed to providing unmatched expertise and exceptional customer service."

Um. Yeah. Keep working on that.

Fish stomachs, house buying and snakes

In mid-January I had the opportunity to cross off yet another portion of Asia from my map of places I've been. A short trip from LAX to Seattle then over Tokyo before finally arriving in Hong Kong (no, there was nothing short about the trip.. unfortunately the direct flight from LAX to Hong Kong was sold out). While it was a classic in-and-out business trip with a total of about 40 hours of travelling for 96 hours of actual work, I did get to sample the local cuisine and do a brief afternoon of sightseeing. Among other local delicacies, I had the opportunity to try a dumpling containing shiitake mushroms, chicken and "fish stomach". At least that's the best translation the local guys could come up with. With shame I have to admit that I passed on the fish stomach part. I always say I'll try any kind of food at least once, but having already had a dozen or so more normal dumplings I just wasn't feeling it. Other than the food I enjoyed the Hong Kong skyline over two nights- very impressive and something I've only seen anything comparable to in Shanghai.

About five months ago we made an offer on a house that we really wanted to buy. The reason I haven't written about us actually buying a house is of course that nothing has come of our offer yet. The house we bid on is on the market as a short sale and as the saying goes in U.S. these days: "Short on price, not on duration". Sigh.. However, it seems tomorrow is the big day: we expect to finally get approval and begin the escrow process. Stay tuned!

Today was a holiday - Presidents Day - one of the few but nice holidays specific to the U.S. (yay!). Not only does that make this a short work week, but I am also travelling to Atlanta on Thursday for PyCon 2010 which cuts another two days out of the normal work week. As my first trip to Atlanta, beyond staying in the airport for 2-4 hours, I hope to see more than just the Regency Hyatt where the conference is hosted (and where I'm staying). The conference itself is going to be interesting. I've been using Python for work for a couple of years now but only at a somewhat introductory level. There also a certain amount of humor in that in a previous life back at DTU and Arcanic around 2000-2001 I may have said some pretty snarky things about Python. My good friend Søren will appreciate me saying snarky, judgmental things about technology that comes back to bite me years later (cf. USB)..

The One In Which I Travel and Drive In Snow

After Josephine was born, I stopped traveling for a while for work. Both because I was working on a project that didn't require any traveling, but naturally also to be home with the new little wonder.

Recently I've started traveling a fair bit again because of my involvement with Microsoft's new-ish technology called Silverlight. This year has brought me to Broomfield, Colorado (near my old haunts in Longmont, CO), on my first trip to the Middle East when I went to Beirut, Lebanon and just this past week I was in Buffalo, New York known as the snow capital of the U.S. (although this apparently incorrect- Buffalo is only the 11th snowiest place in the U.S.)

It was an interesting trip to Buffalo when looking at the transportation. For those unfamiliar with the geography of Southern California it is worth explaining the distances involved. Redlands, CA is about 1 hour 15 minutes drive time from Los Angeles International Airport affectionately known just as LAX to almost anybody who's ever been there. Of course that drive time assumes near perfect conditions i.e. no traffic. On Monday I had a flight from LAX to Chicago-O'Hare leaving at 10.22 am (boarding at 9.52 am). As anybody who's ever driven on the SoCal freeways also knows: there's practically never a time with "no traffic". Even Google Maps' directions says "2 hours 20 minutes in traffic". Doing the math I left home at 6.30 am to make it in time for my 11.22 am flight (check-in had to be completed 45 minutes before take-off at the latest).

At 9.14 am I completed check-in and dropped off my one bag. I'll refrain from detailing what I had to do to get to the airport at that time and not an hour later.. Let's just say I may have bent a few traffic laws. I arrived at the gate at about 9.55 am when they were boarding zone 2 (I was zone 4).

Driving from Buffalo Airport to the hotel I immediately got a taste of things to come. My exit off the highway was icy because it had just recently dropped below freezing and the otherwise efficient crews hadn't yet salted everything. As I was braking to stop before hitting the poor soul in front of me, the ABS-enabled brakes promptly kicked in. For once I was happy to have had my driver's training classes in Denmark during the winter. It was disconcerting nonetheless.

Everything was uneventful from Monday until Thursday. On Thursday, December 10th, the Buffalo area was hit by the first major snow storm of the season. And I was in the middle of it. Buffalo is located right next to Lake Erie and suffers from what is known as the lake effect. For this snow storm the lake effect band hit a home-run right down the small area I was driving.

Around noon there was a nice blanket of snow on top of the cars in the parking lot. Around 3.30 pm it looked like there was a pause in the storm. We decided to start packing up and get out before we'd get caught when it started back up. By 4 pm it had started up a little bit, but I ventured out to the car all the same. At about 4.05 pm I was sitting still in my car on Route 5 with the emergency flashers on, absolutely no visibility and no idea where the road actually was.

What followed was an hour of inching along at 5-10 mph following the faint fog light of the car 10 feet in front of me. At several points I stopped and waited until there was just a couple of feet of visibility in front of the car. About halfway I called The Wife and told her where I was and to call 911 to have a search party sent out if she didn't hear from me in the next hour.. and I was only half joking.

I finally got to the hotel after meeting up with five other cars and being led out of the worst part of the storm by a New York State Patrol police car with lights flashing. Route 5 was closed for all traffic right after the exit where I needed to get off for my hotel. Several colleagues got slightly panicky IM messages declaring that there was absolutely no way I was going anywhere the next day unless conditions improved significantly.

As you can tell, I did survive, but I'm not driving in anything like that anytime soon.

Next trip: Hong Kong in January!

Five years on

Just the other day I realized that it had been more than five years since I moved to Vietnam for what I originally thought would be a good year-long getaway to figure out what to do about that pesky thesis I wasn't too keen on writing. It turned out to be that and so much more.

In today's Travel section in the Los Angeles Times there is a great article that could almost have been written by my dear wife and I. It is in many ways exactly like we experienced living in Ho Chi Minh City from August 2004 - August 2005. It is good to see that things haven't changed too much in the intervening years despite the crazy speed of progress in Vietnam.

Goodbye Grandma

State of religion

Fascinating and thought-provoking new study from Gallup: What Alabamians and Iranians Have in Common

A few quotes:

"the 10 least religious countries studied include several with the world's highest living standards, including Sweden, Denmark, .."

"Americans span a range that invites comparisons to some predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East and tribal societies in Southern Africa, .."

Though, I'm sure that for anyone from secular northern Europe this hardly comes as a surprise.

Bacon Explosion

Awesome: Bacon Explosion

For a nice writeup about this fabulous invention see this New York Times article or just search for Bacon Explosion for plenty more commentary. By Internet standards I'm hopelessly behind the craze on this one (I found it not through blogs but the N.Y. Times for goodness sake!), but it was too good not to share.

All hail the pig!

Backwards day

Now this is something you don't see every day: a magnitude 4.7 earthquake in southern Sweden, a mere 40 miles from Copenhagen. And this on a day where it was cold and rainy all day in Redlands, California. Now if that isn't just all backwards I don't know.

Los Angeles: the destination of choice for international fugitives

You will have been hard pressed to avoid reading articles about IT Factory and Stein Bagger if you've read any Danish newspapers the past week and a half. The short story for the non-Danes: Bagger is/was the CEO of the now bankrupt company IT Factory. The bankruptcy came after it was revealed that the vast majority of IT Factory's revenues were faked and part of a leasing scam totaling upwards of $170 million.

This morning came the news that Bagger, while wearing a $3000 Armani jacket and a $65.000 Rolex watch, turned himself in to the LAPD at the police station in Skid Row. A choice quote from the L.A. Times article:

"You never know who's going to walk through the door,' said LAPD Lt. Paul Vernon, head of detectives for the central division. "Today we got the millionaire next door -- the only question is, whose millions does he have? "

I can't help wondering something.. When you enter the U.S. as a foreign citizen, you are given the full workup: your passport is obviously scanned and registered in some vast network of government computers, your fingerprints are taken (yes, all 10 fingers; it's a wonderful way to be welcomed to the country), and so forth.

For all the wonderful Big Brotherness of it, the U.S. authorities didn't realize Bagger was in the country until he turned himself in? The Interpol warrant had been out for several days by then, and I assume it includes such basic information as his passport number. Is it too high-tech to imagine an automatic cross-reference between new Interpol warrants and the passport information of recent entries into the U.S.?

Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. While the origin and celebration of this tradition is distinctly American, the "giving thanks" thought behind it isn't half bad. I'll ignore the whole "but the pilgrims killed a lot of Indians" debacle. Everybody should take a second and consider what they're thankful for.

Personally, I'm thankful that it seems people over here got the message this summer when gas prices went over $4/gallon (approx. 6 DKK/liter at the current exchange rate- which is much higher than what is normal for the U.S.). So while gas prices have plummetted to below $2 per gallon (approx. 3 DKK/liter) hopefully the current focus on producing and buying more fuel efficient cars is here to stay.

And staying on the topic of overconsumption - don't say I don't have great segues - we are doing our part to keep up the U.S. economy (and over-consuming in the process, sorry). Facing facts and realizing we'd never be able to cook a proper Thanksgiving dinner, we've cheated. Together with the rest of the Danish crowd, we've bought an Ultimate Whole Turkey Feast [PDF] from Marie Callender's. In case you're hungry, and too lazy to click through, here is the full list of ingredients:

• 10-12 lbs. whole oven-roasted turkey
• 2 lbs. apple-sage stuffing
• 2 lbs. fire-roasted yams (with cranberry streusel topping)
• 16 oz. cranberry sauce
• 3 lbs. fresh mashed potatoes
• 32 oz. turkey gravy
• 1½ lbs. Chef’s vegetables
• 9” round golden cornbread
• 5 oz. honey butter
• Whole pumpkin pie
• 2½ oz. Marie Callenders’s special blend coffee

Enjoy! (we will)