Though I’ve travelled a lot on my own dime and previous employers have occasionally sent me on business trips, CSR are the first to send me to visit the offices of companies they’ve acquired. I’ve made it something of a habit to try to pick up some kind of memorabilia while visiting these acquisitions. I’ve made it another habit to fail badly in this task.
I’ve been in Shanghai for three days now and a combination of tiredness (on Monday) and laziness (yesterday) has led to the wholly unacceptable situation whereby I have eaten dinner exclusively at the hotel. If this were not bad enough, the hotel restaurant leaves much to be desired. Things had to change.
So it was that I strode out of the lobby and resolved to keep on going until I found a place I wanted to eat at, which in this thoroughly depressing foreigner ghetto part of Pudong wasn’t necessarily going to be easy.
I’ve always believed that I was physically incapable of wearing a baseball cap. I was never really sure why but I knew that somehow, somewhere, something was preventing me from donning that particular type of headgear.
Maybe it was because my head was the wrong shape. Maybe it was because I wasn’t American. Maybe it was because deep down I believed that baseball caps weren’t real hats. Maybe it was solar flares. Whatever the reason, I could never get one of the accursed things to fit properly.
The next stage of my tour was … the 1970s. Or so it appeared as I landed at Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport, the airport that took a raincheck on the last thirty years.
The original plan was for me to spend a week working in Phoenix then return home. As I had forgotten that I was no longer a contractor but a permanent employee who could take time off work and still get paid I had saved up a whole load of annual leave days and so decided to stick around in the US and go on a bit of a tour. I’d contacted some people I know from the internet and despite the short notice (ie "hey guys I’m in the States next week, who wants to hang out?") a few of them were keen to meet up and do … I dunno … stuff … we’ll figure something out … it’ll be fun … and not in any way weird to hook up with people you only know from hanging out online, no sir.
On arrival at the bar I began what would become an ongoing quest to find some local beer. There’s no point going all the way to Phoenix and drinking the same beer that you can find in a Cambridge supermarket, I reasoned. Stella and Budweiser were out. As were the beers I might drink in Cambridge. "What have you got that’s local?" I asked the barmaid. She seemed confused by the question. With hindsight I can see why that might be. After all I was in the bar at a hotel. People go there to fight jet lag by getting drunk, or to watch those curious American sports on TV. They don’t go there to sample local brews.
Once she understood where I was coming from she was able to offer some suggestions from the beer list. Since I didn’t know and hadn’t tried any of them I decided the sensible thing would be to start from the top. The Shock Top.
I found Shock Top to be – not to put too fine a point on it – awful. It looked and tasted more like fizzy orange than beer, and I struggled to finish it. Indeed, had I not been jet lagged, tired and parched I may not have been able to. But finish it I did, whereupon I asked what was next.
Landshark, I was informed, is "just like Corona." As far as I could see the similarity began and ended with the fact that it was served with a slice of lime. This beer was even worse than the first one. It had almost no taste at all. Drinking it served no purpose other than to fill the bladder. Next.
The next beer was a big improvement in more ways than one. A product of the really, actually local Four Peaks microbrewery, Kiltlifter claimed to be a Scottish-style ale. If they say so. In any case it was markedly better than the first two.
Four Peaks is very popular in these parts. In fact I was later informed that they brew and sell so much beer that they shouldn’t technically be called a microbrewery at all, and had to apply for special dispensation to carry on operating as such. Pleasantly surprised by the Kiltlifter, I decided to try an 8th Street, billed as an English-style beer. This too was perfectly drinkable if not particularly English-style.
Four beers down … and only one to go really, because I sloped off to get some sleep at that point and the next day I discovered Widmer which was to become my staple for the rest of the week. Indeed on Wednesday I got talking to a chap from Jacksonville whom I convinced of the merits of my new-found favourite and who was so grateful at being introduced to it that he bought me three more in addition to the two I’d already had. And some Cognac, when I’d managed to explain to the barmaid what it was. And some more. I remember being the last to leave the bar. I remember prodding at breakfast the next morning. What happened between those two events is a mystery which may remain unsolved forever.
Phoenix Sky Harbor claims to be the world’s friendliest airport. I don’t know if that is true, though I suspect it is the world’s best-named airport. I do know that it’s a decent and efficient airport to fly into. I found that out on October 19th. Later I would learn that it’s a thoroughly depressing place to fly out of. Three weeks later, in fact. For a moment, as I descended the stairs to Immigration, I worried that I might discover more about the outbound facilities much sooner than planned.
The very first words I heard spoken on my very first trip to the US were "wrong way boss" as a security guard indicated to one of the arriving passengers that rather than head towards all the desks with the immigration officers waiting to fingerprint you and ask you if the purpose of your visit was to commit a terrorist act, she had indeed chosen to go the wrong way.
At that moment I was suddenly terrified that I wouldn’t even make it through to the next room. Surely I would be deported for making some smartarse comment while getting my fingerprints done.
Maybe sooner.
Logitech’s G13 is their much-hyped answer to the Nostromo SpeedPad and competitors. It was released in December to great fanfare so although I have been very happy with my SpeedPad n52 for many years now I was intrigued enough by the G13′s feature list that I decided I was prepared to pay the not-inconsiderable asking price to check it out.
The G13 is certainly not cheap. With an RRP of £79.99 it is unlikely to appeal much to people who don’t already own a similar device. In order to justify the expense it needed to be a significant improvement over the n52 and really deliver on its promised features.
Instead I found it to be a spectacular disappointment.
The iPhone 2.2 firmware has been available for a while now but I’d thus far resisted the urge to upgrade because I’d heavily customised my jailbroken phone with my own sound effects, ringtones and Winterboard settings.
Official Apple stuff is backed up and restored after an upgrade but I knew I’d lose the personalised changes.
I decided to use Subversion to archive my tweaks and restore them after the upgrade. The exact steps I used aren’t precisely the same as I’ll describe here. I’ll change the description to be easier to follow along for people with no experience using Subversion before.
Everyone in the office is doing it and I didn’t want to be left out so I downloaded VMware ESXi, intending to run it on a machine with an ASUS M2N-SLI motherboard.
As that machine was in use, I tested out ESXi on an older ASUS A8N-SLI board. In many ways the M2N-SLI is an evolution of the A8N-SLI so when ESXi installed and ran on the older hardware I was confident that it would work on the newer board too.
Not so.
Although ESXi worked when booted from a USB stick, the installer refused to run because it couldn’t find any supported disks. Clearly my SATA controller must be supported or the USB version wouldn’t be able to see the disks and create datastores, which it could.
The solution? I installed ESXi and created datastores on the A8N-SLI and simply unplugged the disks and plugged them in the M2N-SLI. Pleasingly the system booted first time and apart from telling it to use the (different) NIC on the new machine I didn’t have to do anything to get it working.
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