In the dark

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Extra caution is required when boarding an aircraft at Santa Barbara Airport. At San Jose airport, a makeshift tunnel guides you from the gate on the tarmac to the occasional propeller plane. You can not mistakenly hop on the wrong airplane. At Santa Barbara airport, all planes are boarded from the tarmac. At 5am in the dark, it is a little tricky to find your plane. Especially if the plane of United Airlines happens to be operated by SkyWest Airlines, and bears no United Airlines logos. They should add a light box in the front similar to bus signs. It doesn't hurt to double check the destination when entering the plane. Helllooo Denver!

Goleta - Santa Barbara Airport

This week I flew in the smallest commercial plane so far: the Embraer 120 is a turbo propeller plane and seats about 25-30 people. It was operated by United Airlines. It is noisy but very stable, unlike the smallest Cesna I flew while in Argentina.


I flew from San Jose to Santa Barbara. The airport of Santa Barbara at Goleta is the cutest airport I've seen. It is a colonial style building. Looking from the outside, you would never know this is airport. You actually get the feeling you landed somewhere in Mexico.

Headline 2014: USA in the World Cup final

It is a bold prediction: USA, the country of baseball, NBA basketball and NFL fatsos, will play semi-final or final of 2014 world cup, if not earlier. Major League Soccer (MLS) is the poor brother of many of bigger sports leagues in the US. Television ratings are so and so. Stadium attendance is up but not like the other sports. And the sports is still mentioned in the same sentence as yawn. The fact that David Beckham and Cuauhtemoc Blanco joined respectively the L.A. Galaxy and Chicago Fire brought some excitement to the game. Even the arrival of old Ruud (Gullit) as the coach for the LA Galaxy brings in hope for the league.

Team USA has been a strong performer in recent world cups. In Germany 2006, except for the first game against the Czech Republic, the US showed great attacking soccer (although the score did not reflect this). During Korea/Japan 2002, the US made it to the round of 16th and lost against Mexico.

However, neither the star power of the MLS, nor the games during previous world cups, show what goes on at the many community parks in the evenings. Impromptu goals are being set up, coaches are fighting for a patch of green to train the many many youth soccer teams. It reminds me a bit of the green parks or along the freeways to Buenos Aires. Everywhere do you see the next Messi or Maradona score his goal. It is a little bit like that in the Bay Area. My son plays soccer for the South Bay soccer league. The excitement at the games is in true American fashion. They are not kidding around. The kids are getting excellent soccer skills. And the believe they can take anyone on in soccer. Soon you will see a US soccer team which will rival the traditional soccer world powers.


Technorati: Soccer USSoccer FIFA

South-Africa 2010

Belgium did not qualify for Uefa Euro 2008. Since I do not have cable television, it is not easy to follow the European Championship qualifying games in the US. I missed a couple of the earlier games of Belgium. And before I realized the qualifiers were going on, the headlines in the Belgian newspapers predicted dooms days. Oh, what an optimism! But they were right: we did not qualify. Belgium (18pts) ended up fifth in Group A, behind Poland (28pts), Portugal (27pts), Serbia (24pts), Finland (24pts), and ahead of Kazakhstan (10pts), Armenia (9pts) and Azerbaijan (5pts).

Today was the drawing for the qualifying groups for South Africa 2010. Belgium was unlucky and ended up in a strong group 5, with Spain, Turkey, Armenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Estonia. Chances will be slim, however traditionally Belgium plays better against stronger teams. Anybody remember the game against Brazil in Japan? If we don't qualify, there will always be Messi and Riquelme.

xkcd

I spent this week between a lab somewhere in North San Diego (at a location I can not disclose) and a hotel room on Shelter Island in the bay of San Diego. The hotel Kona Kai supposed to be 3.5 stars. I snagged it for a decent rate a Hotwire. I rate it 2.5 stars. The hotel is in front of the Navy base at Coronado.

Our software testing was progressing nice. Our co-conspirators had posted two improvised swords and this cartoon of xkcd against a cubicle wall.


It was my introduction to a fabulous geek cartoon of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Check out the background story at Wikipedia. As our test scenarios were progressing, I browsed older xkcd posts. Here are a couple of my favorites:




(You can get the last one even on a cool geeky t-shirt)

The case of the lazy server

Despite the non-standard and closed protocol, the slow performance, lack of Firefox support, lack of basic server side calendar features (e.g. alarm email, SMS, iCal/webdav calendar feed), I've tried to make the Microsoft Exchange server work for me. ... mmh ... trying to play nice ... However, I keep on failing. It is a case of a lazy server:

I entered "meeting minutes" in the search box. The answer:

Your search returned more results than can be displayed. Refine your search and try again to reduce the number of results. 651 results for "meeting minutes" in all folders and items

Can't handle 651 results? Ok, then. I expected too much. Did it show the first few hundred? Oh-nooo. That would be too much work. How would I know how to refine my search. Perhaps "meeting minutes - project replace Exchange" will do the trick. Helloooo Google, shall we dance?

5.6 Earthquake in our backyard

October 30, 2007, 8:04pm
Calaveras Fault
Alumn Rock area, San Jose, CA
5.6 on the magnitude scale

(Images courtesy of USGS, San Jose Mercury News and San Francisco Chronicle)

Nobel Belgians

A colleague of mine is very skeptical about global warming and believes humans have little effect on the warming of the globe. So when Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the Nobel Peace Price, I knew he would drop by for a little chat. What does Al Gore and co have to do with fostering peace? "It's all political", he said. We decided to look up the list of previous Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Indeed you wonder why some did earn the price.

I was surprised to see four five Belgians on the list. Although most of them won in a by gone era, when Europe was the center of the world and when Belgium was a little more relevant in the world.

• 1904 : Institut de Droit International
• 1909 : Auguste Marie François Beernaert, Member of the Cour Internationale d'Arbitrage.
• 1913 : Henri La Fontaine, President of the Permanent International Peace Bureau.
• 1958 : Georges Pire, leader of L'Europe du Coeur au Service du Monde, a relief organization for refugees.
• 1999: Artsen zonder grenzen (Medecins Sans Frontieres) (Wikipedia incorrectly listed them as French/Swiss, although Nobel organization lists them as Belgian)
  

Here's a chart of the number of Nobel Peace price laureates by country. (It is not perfect since e.g. Mother Teresa gives both Albania and India a point.)

Disco in my pants

Halloween, celebrated on the night of October 31th, is always a big deal in the United States. I hear it has become a big deal even in Belgium.

The term Halloween (and its older rendering Hallowe'en) is shortened from All-hallow-even, as it is the evening of/before "All Hallows' Day", also known as "All Saints' Day". ... On Halloween night adults and children dress up as creatures from the underworld (e.g., ghosts, ghouls, zombies, witches and goblins), light bonfires, and enjoy spectacular fireworks displays (despite the fact that such displays are usually illegal). Halloween was perceived as the night during which the division between the world of the living and the otherworld was blurred so spirits of the dead and inhabitants from the underworld were able to walk free on the earth. It was necessary to dress as a spirit or otherworldly creature when venturing outdoors to blend in. The children knock on the neighbors' doors, in order to gather fruit, nuts, and sweets for the Halloween festival. Salt was once sprinkled in the hair of the children to protect against evil spirits. (Wikipedia)

Last year, I missed the company Halloween party as I was on a business trip. However, I helped build on our Disco Scarecrow. Disco shoes $5; a John Travolta suit ($19), a disco ball for his head ($19); a wig, some materials from Osh, a stroboscope in his pants ($25). Kicking marketing and core engineering's butt while having fun with your services teammates ... priceless.

A milestone

(picture by Leo Reynolds)

August 27, 2004 was the beginning of my blog. Since then I tried to post regularly, often once a week, sometimes once or twice a month. My goal was to focus on creating new content and start writing in English. I did not want my blog to be a check-out-this-link listing. This is blog post number 100.

For a while I also posted in the "Carnivals". Carnivals are organized by bloggers: on a given topic (e.g. frugality), the frugal carnival is posted each time on a new blog. The post is list of blog posts on different blogs discussing frugality. The next month, the carnival moves to another blog. It is a great traffic source.

I use Google Analytics to track readership. I do not have the readership nor run my own server to warrant scripts like used in the wide finder project. A couple of tidbits:

• I do have readers from all over the world, with the US in first place and Belgium in second place, and a couple of readers from Australia, Canada and several countries in Europe.
• Firefox represents fifty percent of the browsers visiting my blog. Internet explorer takes 35%. I even had visitors using Opera and Portable Playstation.
  
• Top content includes: Home is where the tank is parked (probably because it was cross posted by various carinvals); Farewell Luis Rest in Peace; Netbeans CND; Lake Wobegon (Not all content is included as the early content (2004) was not part of the tracking.)
  
• Google and Google blog search is the top referred; though LinkedIn ranks higher than technorati. Interesting. Also the blog of my dad refers a steady stream of readers.
  

flanders.california.usa ... ongoing