jeffpaulsen

just like an iPhone, battery life is pretty cruddy compared to what we're used do. as a pure PHONE it's probably good for a couple days. The more you use the smartphone features of it, the less life you'll have. Expect to have it on the charger every time you are in your car, at your desk, or going to sleep. Not sure how much replacement batteries cost.

There are some odd things missing that could make the phone so much better -- ie, an easy way to get directions to somebody.

Joining duplicate contacts together doesn't work for me.

when you get a new email or other notification, a little icon appears in the top status bar. to expand this, you kinda dwell your finger on the top edge for a couple seconds, then drag it down the face of the phone to sort of "unroll" the notification window. This is the MOST COMMON THING to do with your phone. It should have a much simpler action to get in there.

you can't really tell what apps are running and which ones aren't.
corrollary: you can't easily restart an app that's being wierd

some really common things are buried in settings menus (turning wifi on/off, turning GPS on/off -- both of which you would do to save battery)

there should be a "night mode", where only phone calls and the alarm get to make any noise.

Ula and I went down to the Verizon store and upgraded both of our phones to shiny new Motorola Droids. The one day brain dump review:

Keyboard is fine. The keys are smallish but I'm not making many mistakes with them.
Build quality is excellent, like the Motorola 3000 "brick" phone from the late 80s. Very solid.
The sound. This is the cleanest sounding phone I have ever used, and I include desk instruments in that.

display is bright and clear. touchscreen works fine. it's capacitive, so it works with your fingertip, not your fingernail.

camera - about half shit, but it works after a fashion. The tiny sensor they have demands quite a bit of light. The couple of pics I took of people had a huge red-eye problem when using the flash.

facebook contacts integration - this is pretty slick, especially if your FB friends have put their phone numbers and physical addresses in their FB profile. It does lead to having 250 people in your contact list, half of whom you will never call. This needs more work from me.

if you associate a pic with a contact, it lets you crop the image, which my last phone didn't.

as a MP3 player - sound is great through headphones, and better than expected through the on-board speaker

mail - your gmail accounts are accessed through one app, and other mail through another. This isn't too big of a deal. The UI is very slightly different between the two.

messaging / talk - it's hard to tell at first when I'm sending a text, and when I'm just going into g-Chat. anticipating this, we got unlimited texting.

web browser - more than fine. there may be some pages it doesn't work great with, but it's so much better than the BlackBerry experience.

apps / widgets - the widgets are useful enough that I wish I had more than three screens of real estate

Graphic design awesomeness: Wu-Tang album covers, if Wu-Tang Clan had been on Blue Note records.

Last night we went out for dinner, and planned the next week's menus, roughly. We then turned this into a shopping list. This worked pretty well so far.

Tonight : roast beef hash, to use up last week's pot roast.
Thursday : turkey breast
Friday : sandwich night (Ula out of town)
Saturday : no dinner at home, doing other stuff
Sunday : stroganoff
Monday : broiled chicken
Tuesday : oven fried chicken

Eventually I'd like to get into more of a rhythm -- it's efficient to have things like Meatloaf Night once a week, or Leftover Night.

This process made it abundantly clear that N doesn't like vegetables any more than I do, and she doesn't have the deep reserve of stoicism that makes me eat them anyway. Broccoli, carrots, and salads are about all she'll do. She has a particular dislike of steamed veggies. I guess we'll just have to trial-and-error our way through a cookbook.

I had fun, but two halloween parties in one weekend did not make for eating right and getting enough sleep -- so, back to the diet-and-exercise mine for me.

It's a flying Volga that fights crime.

dog - his skin is doing much better, and the fur is mostly growing back.

travel - no more for a while please.

work - keeping me busy.

books - George R R Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire".

family - awesome.

I have returned from India. Summary:

India is crowded and busy.

Dubai is like Beverly Hills meets Miami Beach -- like Vegas with the casinos replaced by shopping malls.

If you get the chance to fly Air Emirates, do so, even if it costs more than Delta.

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I went to the gym the last couple of days, and found that I have lost something like seven pounds since I left. Go me.

I’m flying from Pune to Mumbai, then from Mumbai to Dubai, today. I should be at the Carlton Tower about 6:30 PM Dubai time.

I have Saturday morning to go seek the souk. You have a few hours to ask for me to buy you stuff before then.

I’ll be back in Portland Sunday noonish, and I’ll try to manage my jet lag as best as possible.

Last night’s absurdly good dinner was at the Meridian hotel. There were just five of us (me, Carl, Afshin, Aniruddha, and Akash) this time, but the meal cost as much as the previous night’s trip to Garden Court for 18. We had a bottle of wine and a cocktail, so the price difference isn’t as huge as that.

Meridian in Pune is a modern hotel for the expense account crowd. Carl says the rooms aren’t any better than at the Gandharv, but the lobby is amazing. There was a incredibly stupid ‘security’ process – a guy with a mirror on a stick went through the motions of looking under the car before we could get into the parking lot, and then we went through a metal detector, and got wanded, before we could enter the lobby. The security guys clearly didn’t care if anything beeped or not.

If you are in Pune, and visit the Meridian restaurant, have the morel kebab. You’re welcome.

On the way back from Meridian a band of street urchins came up and banged on our windows begging. I ignored them; I could see they were working in a large group, begging from every car at the red light in parallel. Ani and Akash tell us that they are an organized group, and it’s assumed some adult ringleader takes all the money they collect.

I was up at 4 this morning with inspiration for a work thing, and then couldn’t get back to sleep.

I overpacked insanely. The hotel does my laundry and puts it on my room tab, and it’s clean and folded when I get back to the room. Every article of clothing has a colored piece of yarn tied through the fabric, so all my stuff now has a little hole near the collar. Carl’s stuff has a different color yarn loop, so I think that’s how they keep the laundry sorted by room.

Today I had an amazingly productive run, saw Afshin off to the airport, and got in some tourist stuff in the afternoon. I am coming back with more stuff than I left with. Not sure how I’ll fit it all in…

India word of the day is “crore”. Just like lakh is 100,000, crore is ten million. One crore rupees buys a very very nice condo.

Last night we went to a restaurant called Garden Court. All our previous meals had been either the catered-in lunch at the office, or eaten at our hotel. Garden Court is better than the hotel food, and the hotel food is excellent. I got to try some Indian Chinese food, which was different. Basically they just kept putting food on my plate, a little bit at a time, until I thought I would burst. The only thing I recognized was garlic naan.

One of the guys asked me if, being from Oregon, I was interested in the Osho Ashram. I had no idea what he meant until he talked more about Osho, and I realized that was the final name taken by the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. After leaving Oregon he set up shop in Poona, and since his death in 1990, he gets more popular every year. This is probably the first time in my life I met anybody with anything good to say about him. He’s now considered one of the most influential Indian persons, in popular polls.

I’m flying out of Poona to Dubai on Friday morning, and I’m kind of dreading it. Poona to Dubai isn’t a nonstop anymore, probably because they are remodeling the Poona airport and there is no working passport control counter. This means changing planes and going through passport control in Mumbai. Here is how that day will probably go:

• pack up
• 40 minute terror drive to Poona airport
• go through security checkpoints several times, getting stuff tagged and stamped, showing the stamped tags to the next guy
• wait hours for the plane to be ready
• fly 20 minutes to Mumbai
• deplane
• wait 30 minutes
• shuttle bus to Mumbai international terminal (two more security checkpoints)
• passport control (more security)
• wait hours
• shuttle bus to plane
• fly 2 hours to Dubai
• passport control (one stop – Dubai is EFFICIENT about this)
• cab to hotel

… and then Afshin will want to go clubbing. Thankfully my flight from Dubai to Portland doesn’t leave until late on Saturday evening, so I will get to do some touristy stuff.

Just some quick notes:

• everything you ever heard about India traffic being insane is an understatement.
• Food is cheap and great everywhere
• TV and print advertisements are in a mix of Hindi and English
• Ads I saw on tv this morning: maleforce vanilla flavored condoms, “unwanted 72” morning-after contraception, “macho” men’s t-shirts, “don’t worry” perfumed sanitary napkins, and two different brands of plywood
• everybody drives a motorcycle – all of them have only one cylinder. this is no big deal, as it’s impossible to drive over about 15 mph in this country, because that’s how fast the pack of intertwining one-cylinder bikes ahead of you are going.
• three on a bike, no helmets, no problem
• lunch is catered in every day, up on the roof. the caterers bring plates and bowls and cook 5 or 6 items, plus naan and stuff. this is better than any indian food you can get at any buffet-type place in portland. I think the cost works out to a buck seventy-five per person per day.
• I mentioned today that I love the food, but I have no idea what I’m eating. None of the guys knew either – I guess that’s for women and professionals to know.
• “lakh” is treated like an English word meaning 100,000, here. Without modification it means 100k Rupees, or about $2100 US. there are property for sale signs that say “35 Lakh”, for example.
• it’s used any time we’d say 100k – like ‘typhoon displaces 8 lakh refugees’.
• english language papers are plentiful and good

My hotel room is kind of a two-room suite thing. It comes to about $120 / night, and the service is great. They sent my laundry out and it came back clean and pressed, although they couldn’t get some staining out of my new favorite white shirt. Stupid white shirts attract hot sauce.

Today’s pics:

          

after hot pot last night we stopped by the Russian bar in our hotel (Carlton Tower – highly recommended) and had a beer and watched the dancing girls. There must be such a job as “mediocre Russian dance choreographer for mediocre Russian dancers in an Arab hotel” – I have seen the evidence.

Last night flipping through channels on the TV, I caught what must be Biggest Loser Arabic. I took some photos of my TV to prove it.

   

Morning I got up with the call to prayer, and watched the sun come up over Dubai proper. I have some photos attached.

                     

Met with Carl and Avshin and went to the airport (DXB). Breakfast at a buffet place in terminal 2. AED 77  = 20-and-a-bit bucks = excellent breakfast. Very multicultural. There were omelettes, and Egyptian-style beans, and Chinese sauteed chicken livers in spicy sauce, and beef ‘bacon’. After a bite Carl paused for a cigarette and some discussion of his favorite TV shows (Deadwood and Battlestar Galactica).

        

If you ever get the chance to fly on Air Emirates, do so. They are twice the airline Delta or United is, even in economy class.

Arrived in Mumbai, which was rainy and very very green. Being from Portland, I know my heavily-vegetated urban areas, and this one wins. This was also my first taste of India beaurocracy: every single thing you do must be accompanied by a stamped form. Leaving the plane? fill out H1N1 form, get stamped. Carry 50 feet, give to the guy who allows you to go through passport control. Moving from international terminal to intra-India? get your boarding pass stamped. Got an E-Ticket instead of a paper boarding pass? sucks to be you, “sorry, very sorry sir”. (thankfully this wasn’t me). Take your carry-on through security? it gets a stamped tag attached.

Avshin tells me that when he was setting up a programmer pool here, he was once asked for an official company stamp – then for a stamp certifying that the previous stamp was an official company stamp.

After a totally bogus wait in Mumbai, we flew to Pune (pronounced Poona, which is how it USED to be spelled in English). We had a car waiting to take us to the hotel Gandharv. I rode up front. They drive on the left here, British style, and I was in the front passenger seat, where the driver would be in an American car. India driving is beyond insane by our standards. Two inches gap between vehicles means someone is wasting an inch and a half. Lane markers are ignored. Traffic signals are frequently just plain turned off. Our driver paused to yell for a while at a motorcyclist who was not willing to turn left across three lanes of traffic that were all ignoring their red light.

U-turns on 4 lane undivided highway where there’s no intersection? A-OK according to local custom.

Thank god for Xanax or I’d never have made it to the hotel with my sanity intact.

Hotel Gandharv is very nice, you’ll see the pictures tomorrow.

Arrived Dubai 7PM local time. Customs is a breeze once you get there – it’s a big airport. ATM to pull out AED 500 ($135 or so). Cab to hotel = AED 33.50, plus I gave the guy a AED 10 tip, erring on the side of generous.

Traffic is balls-out nuts by US standards. Cars are all Asian editions, so you see things like a Toyota Hiace minivan, or a Nissan Sunny compact sedan, all the time. Small objects are couriered around on motorcycles with cargo boxes. Lane splitting (a motorcycle driving right down the lane divider) is apparently legal and normal.

Advertisements are in English and Arabic. There seem to be no restrictions on where or how large a sign may be.

Brands I didn’t realize were global: Dairy Queen, Chili’s.

There is a significant Chinese population here (there may actually be a significant ANYTHING population here). Carl and I went out for Mongolian-style hot pot, where there’s a bowl of boiling spiced broth on the table, and raw ingredients are brought for you to make into food. We ate really, really well for about $30 US, although the wait to get in was kind of long. The power went out twice while we were there – I blame all the induction cookers on all the tables.

Dubai, so far, looks like a giant 24-hour shopping mall, which is not all covered and air conditioned. There are stores of every kind and description everywhere you look. Sometimes they are cheap little shoddy things full of questionable goods, and sometimes they are like those shops at the Bellagio in Vegas, where it’s all things you can’t afford. The difference between these high-end shops and the ones in Vegas is that these look like they do real business, all the time.

View from my hotel window (I’m holding the camera up to the window, and you can see quite a bit of reflection of the camera itself, and of my hand… in the distance, the vertical column of lights is the Burj Dubai, world’s tallest building or somethign)

 

More hotel window views. If it looks foggy, that’s because I opened the window to avoid the reflection, and the lens fogged up instantly. It’s hot here like the midwest gets, really humid even late into the night. Charlie can be seen next to the window in a couple of these.

Self portrait in Dubai

short note for now – internet access is about 80 cents a minute in my hotel room, so I’m going to try to compose offline, then upload a whole big post.

it’s incredibly muggy here, and feels like Blade Runner. Cargo mopeds running between the lanes, neon all over, everything in at least two languages.

I’ve been awake 25 of the last 28 hours, but fortunately it’s almost bedtime here anyway.

On the ground in ATL between flights. Wifi here is $7 / day, or I could have had 2 hours free if I subscribed to USA Today.

The flight here was uneventful, but economy class on Delta is just not comfortable for me. Unfortunately I had a window seat, fortunately there was an empty middle seat next to me – and I was still cramped. Not thrilled about the next leg – 17” wide seats are maybe OK for a movie theater, but 14 hours, Jesus.

There was an in-flight entertainment screen in the seatback in front of me. I could watch some HBO series I already saw at home, or some movies I didn’t want to go see in the theater, or most any basic cable station. The best option was actually the moving map showing where the plane was RIGHT NOW, and that’s not a slam on basic cable. Window seat plus map meant that I could look down and say, oh, THAT’s Wichita.

The South is much more forest-y than I’d imagined, at least where we were flying. I guess my mental map of vegetation was thrown off by the fact that when you drive East from Portland, you run out of forest before too long – Great Falls Montana, not forested – Denver, not forested really, and east of Denver you have nothing. Turns out that pattern doesn’t hold once you get to Missouri or so.

I might be able to get some work done on the next leg of the trip - I’ve heard mixed reports about the power & internet situation on this particular plane & my particular seat, so I’ve got my fingers crossed.

There’s a luggage store across from this gate. Isn’t it a bit late to buy your baggage when you’re already out on the terminal? The staff looks bored.

Travelex currency exchange has a big sign, no fees on exchanges over $500. I’m not going to spend that much – probably better off just withdrawing some from an ATM at the Dubai airport.

My MP3 player sucks a big floppy donkey dick. I might pick up a new one on the road, or a phone with some media chops.

Other in-flight entertainment choices: I have Ula’s Kindle, with a dozen or so books I’d like to read. I have a copy of Lumley’s “Necroscope”, which I have spent the last 23 years not reading, but I finally realized I liked Lumley’s short horror stories, so maybe I’d like his vampire-spy series. I have some classic movies on DVD, watchable on the laptop given enough power. Finally I have music, although the sound quality and interface on my portable player are ultra-hyper-mega-shitty, to be delicate about it.

location – PDX airport 10 am -- free wifi here at gate D7. TSA checkpoint was easy – proper packing for the win.

I’ve got my fingers crossed for power at my seat on the ATL-DXB leg of the trip. Also, I’m kind of psyched about how many frequent flyer miles this is going to be – just under 20,000 round trip.

I am now going to include a couple pictures of my carry on bag, just to test out the workflow for getting pictures uploaded from the road:

Soti has been suffering from itchiness all summer. Over the weekend I saw a second flea on him, and decided it wasn't just food allergies, it was flea bite dermatitis. On Monday I got him some flea killer, and took him to the vet for an allergy shot.

He has been much less scratchy, but I guess every time I left the room he was biting the base of his tail. He came to me this morning very agitated, and I saw he'd chewed himself bloody. I need to get some bloodstains out of the front room couch now.

Back to the vet.

Dog is now shaved and disinfected and coated with ointment. He gets re-disinfected, re-anointed, and dosed with a big ol' antibiotic pill a couple times a day now. Also, he has to wear a CONE OF SHAME for a couple of weeks. Ever tried to load a dog in / out of a 4runner when he can't see his feet, or the ground? Non-trivial.

Since he won't be able to use the dog door with his e-collar on, I have removed the door for a while. We'll have to let him in and out by hand, which will be an adjustment. On the upside, we can now keep the cats inside effectively, which means we can release Leroy from the master bath. I'm giving him a few more hours in there so that N's little cat can enjoy a bit more only-cat time.

cat - Leroy turned out to have a large abcess on his leg, so we had to spend $150 at the vet to clean that up, and keep him in our master bath / closet area, as the most securable area of the house. He'll be ready for release in a day or two, but he's a nocturnal little bastard, and complains all night long out of boredom and loneliness. We've poked and prodded him too often in the last few months for him to see us as companionship, too.

India - leaving Friday, back the following Sunday. Have my visa in hand. Packing continues. Weather forecast calls for Dubai to be around 100F clear and humid, and Pune to be 88F and thunderstormy - I guess the monsoon is dragging on longer than usual, maybe?

health - blood pressure = high. They gave me diuretics to reduce my blood volume. I'm going to see if I can get it down without having to take them.

fitness - still seeing a trainer 2x weekly, and trying to get in as much cardio as possible on other days. I am getting past the insane debilitating soreness phase, I hope. Weight has stabilized and should start to trend down now.

other - I put a new radio in the 4runner, which is worthy of its own post. Short answer: a bizarre combination of too many features and not enough buttons.

It has HD Radio, which is way cool because there are all these stations playing right now that I had never heard before. Example: KGON 92.3 FM, Portland's Rock Station, has an HD subchannel 92.3 ch2, which is classic rock live recordings only, with no DJ to interrupt. It's like discovering the secret menu at Taco Bell and finding out you can get Galaxy Nachos.