Back in Black

Our flight went relatively smoothly from Queenstown to Auckland yesterday. At one point there was some very scary turbulence even to the point that I started looking at the exit door and trying to remember how to open it in case we went down. The episode lasted about 60 seconds, but was enough to bring some of the passengers to tears and leave a lump in my throat for the rest of the flight.

I just finished reading a book called "How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People." It's a 400-page book with 1) a great title and 2) promises to contradict the vast majority of "common wisdom" in the world today. Sadly, it had about 300 pages of purposeless ranting by the Australian author and only about 100 pages of decent ideas. Combine this lack of substance with a very large typeface and you have about a small pamphlet worth of decent materials. In other words, something readable in about the time it takes to eat your lunch. After about 150 pages I skipped to "skim" mode.

I have read too many books that were just devoid of substance like this one. Why? I think much of it is because authors are forced to fit into a mold so the books can sell. If you don't have 300 pages and some pictures, forget about getting your book publicized by a publisher and carried in Barnes & Noble. A pamphlet of 75 pages just doesn't carry a price-point sufficient to be economically viable.

I don't necessarily blame the publishers and booksellers completely. I think it's a people problem as well. People just have a feeling that any idea requires 200+ pages to be completely explained. That's simply not the case. Is this a damning problem in our world? Not really, but we could save a bunch of trees if we just changed our expectations and realized that, in literature, "less" is much much harder than "more" to do a topic right. As a co-worker's email signature said back at BEA: "If I had more time I would have written you a shorter email." Perhaps this also explains why these Blog entries are getting longer and longer.

Still in Queenstown

I really believe that the best element of this trip so far has been the ability to meet people out of our "socioeconomic element" (so to speak). In San Francisco, the vast majority of people I know and deal with regularly are college educated, America, white, from the suburbs originally, upper middle-class, protestant Christian folks. On this trip, we've interacted with Italians, English, Scottish, Kiwi, Dutch. We've had hostel interactions with Americans, Swiss, and so on. Some have college degrees. Many from poor (or rich) backgrounds. All over the map.

We spent yesterday driving to Milford Sound on a rickety bus driven by a Swiss river rafting guide named Pierce who moonlights as a bus driver on the side. He (I'm not joking here) was EXACTLY like the bus driver in the Simpsons. He was jamming the whole way up and back on music on his headphones, sometimes singing along. Pierce would stop and call out sights. Or, he'd cheerily try to tell us the upcoming plan and we'd try to decipher what he was saying in between his broken English and slight stutter. Shandelle translated for me so I could participate as well.

Milford Sound is amazing. Truly. It's the result of an Ice Age glacier carving a giant gorge out of the granite mountains. It's difficult to represent it in words, but imagine you're in a 75-foot boat in a 1km wide body of brine. 1500 meter cliffs and mountains are on both sides of you. The tops of the mountains are shrouded in clouds. Water is streaming down from the cliffs in magnificent waterfalls, some reaching 2500 feet high. One km across the water is another boat under another waterfall. It's just a tiny speck in front a huge cliff of granite a half-wile wide. At this point you are really small in comparison to the size of the world.

In the end, all this has given me such a great respect for how small we really are. The power of glaciers, large bodies of water, mountains up to the sky, just make one appreciate just how small is life's day-to-day turmoil. Tempests can so easily appear to engluf the world, yet in reality they're stuck in a teapot. And, as they say, don't sweat the small stuff. The funny part is that New Zealand seems to teach one that it's all small stuff.

Queenstown, not in Jamaica

Working in down San Francisco, I would ride the bus to work. There were just so many offices and so many people streaming around at all times of the day. Going to and from the office, getting a coffee, chatting on the streetcorner. Whatever. I'd look at all the buildings and wonder: what possibly goes on in all of these offices? Then, I realized that my job was to basically talk to our customers and make sure the product we were building was going to make the maximum percentage of the people in the world (with money of course) happy with it. All this in a piece of software that like %0.001 of the human population knows about.

Looking at my little slice of the world, it became clear how much everyone is just a little part of the whole machine and how much I am in awe of it. Take something as simple as coffee. There's some person whose job is it to formulate the cream that goes in that coffee. There's another company that sells that guy the software he needs to figure out that recipe. That company needs to buy power, so it buys it from the power company. The power company has a guy whose job it is to determine how much power is required by that grid that the software company is on. And so on and so on. It's kind of beautiful in a way, like a gigantic Swiss watch that just happens because of capitalism (and greed).

Of course, there's some people whose role in the machine is not so typical. They're not "cogs" like the typical Joe slugging it out day to day formulating coffee creamer recipes. Instead, these people could be called the Leisure Class (or just the Rich). As normal as you or I, except they Own rather than Do. Their "Do" consists of managing what they own. We met one of these folks today while watching the Super Bowl. Shandelle made some friends at the sports bar before I arrived and it turned out that one of these guys were the son of leisure class individual, his hired guide around Queenstown, and an Irishman who worked on his Dad's yacht. Very nice people, though it's clear that the world in which they exist is completely foreign to the normal person. You want to drop everything and fly to New Zealand? Done. Hanggliding at 10 minutes notice? Done. In a world where money is little or no object, you just do.

But, what's also interesting about this trip is how easy it is to be happy with so little. We're travelling cheaply, living in hostels, and doing just fine. Our current hostel room, in fact, has a better view than some of the high-end hotels around here (yes, we go lucky). I look back and wonder: do I really need all that crap sitting in storage back in California? Sadly, I do because it's not fun to watch TV sitting on the floor and we won't be travelling forever.

Down to Queenstown

Our balloon trip finally happened, though a day late. The event began at a painful 4AM, when the little ballooner bus came and picked us up at the hostel. After rendzevous'ing with about 30 other passengers and crewmembers, we headed off to the launch site. The "site" was actually some remote township's cricket field. Being freakishly tall, I was chosen to help with the balloon inflation by holding a very large fan and being the last to jump in the balloon. Things went well and we were off. It was a big balloon though I had seen Cast Away the night before and was thinking that if a 747 can go down, this little canvas balloon could easily do the same. I refrained from
mentioning this to Shandelle until we landed and everyone had had a glass or two of champagne. I'm clearly the ideals travel companion.

On the bus ride back, the chatter from the other passengers was all about the death-defying stunts they'd performed earlier in the week (bungy jumping, jet boating, going down rapids in a wetsuit, etc. etc.). It seems that everyone's idea of fun is to come to New Zealand, one of the safest countries in the world, and jump off a bridge with nothing but a big rubber band tied to your feet.

Shandelle prefers to risk her life a bit more intensely by braving the hostel kitchens on a nightly basis. She's recently dragged me into these food preparation efforts. It's a madhouse. Usually 15 people sharing 4 stoves, three sinks and 30 sq ft of space. Five or six different languages flying across the room. I've learned how to say "you burned my chicken, you idiot" in four different languages already.

The key to kitchen survival is to keep your distance from the Brits, who are usually smoking, grilling some nasty beef thing, waving knives all over the place and
chugging some god-forsaked cheap beer. The Asians present a problem as well, as they are usually steaming something. The Germans, Dutch, etc. are the
best since they're usually just putting jam, butter, and bananas on bread. While their cooking is beneficial because it causes no hazard to fellow
chefs, it's clearly much more dangerous to the coronary arteries than any of the "adventure" sports down here.

Tonight, I plan to give Shandelle some respite by playing video games alone at an Internet cafe here. If she's not going to risk her life jumping from an
airplane, I clearly don't want to shorten it with too much "Michael".

Christchurch

We've posted some photos from the trip here:

http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/shandelle_michael_south_pacific_trip/lst

Sadly, our balloon trip was canceled this morning due to high winds. We're potentially back on for tomorrow, depending upon the weather. The pleasure of the whole situation is that we (meaning I) must telephone a number a 4am tomorrow to see if the ride is on or off. If it's on, they pick us up at 4:45am and we go fly. If not, we go back to bed.

NZ is a strange place. Let me document the ways:

1) A milkshake is not really a milkshake in the American sense. In NZ, it's essentially chocolate milk. If you'd like an American milkshake, you must order a "thickshake."

2) The sinks are built completely funky. Instead of having a single faucet the combines hot and cold at desired ratios to make the temperature you require, you are offered a wide basin with two faucets at either end. One is hot and the other is cold. In addition, these faucets don't provide enough clearance to actually rinse your hands under them.

3) The toilets have two buttons to flush. Evidently, they each do something different. We have no clue and limp along by just randomly punching the two until the defecate runs down the tube.

4) If you are a tourist to NZ, it's assumed that you're interested in risking your life. Every tour company offers bungy jumping, jet-boat rafting, and the like. Shandelle and I are out of place, as it appears we're the sole couple not interested in motion sickness travelling through here.

5) NZ also appears to be a magnet for foreigners who eat incredibly poorly. Richard Simmons would have a coronary watching these folks eat. Today, I watched two Germans cook an entire three course mean with exactly ZERO items that were not brown, grey, or yellow. These same folks had toast, Sprite, bananas, jam, butter and peanut butter for breakfast. Of course, the young ladies then insist on wearing half shirts with grossly distended bellies. Perhaps it's my American sensibilities, but *yuck*.

6) The papers are generally happy. Unlike American papers and news, there's just a general air of positivity. I can't really explain it, but you don't finish reading the paper and want to crawl into your Panic Room. In the States, one read of the San Francisco Examiner and you need some Halcyon to bring you down. Either that, or a twelve guage in the gun-rack of your Ford F-150 pickup with the Bomb Osama bumper sticker on the back.

That's all for tonight. More travel details from an angry American later on.

Sonoma

This morning we caught The Interislander. It's a ferry that took us on the 3-hour journey from Wellington (in the north island) to the Picton in the South Island. The weather, as in San Francisco, was night and day. Wellington was cold and windy, while the northern end of the South Island is warm and sunny. The town where we're staying, Blenheim, claims to be the sunniest place in New Zealand. If Wellington was the San Francisco of New Zealand, then we've definitely found the Napa Valley in Blenheim.

We've been feeling that we're driving too much. So, we're planning to cut that down significantly and *slow* down. The realization came that there's 1-year's worth of stuff to see in New Zealand and we only have 6 weeks. We have to book it a bit to Christchurch so we can make our Ballooning trip on the 23rd (http://www.ballooning.co.nz), but after that we're going to chill a bit. We started the "calm down" today by hitting a winery outside of town and having a few glasses of wine in the sun. I've also started a personal, symbolic contribution by sleeping in an extra 45 minutes while Shandelle showers in the morning.

We've also discovered a new segment of the backpacker market. These are the "week-to-week backpackers" who have come here with the plan to backpack for a long period, perhaps a year or more. They manage to run out of money within 4 or 5 months of their stay by blowing it on liquor and expensive sites. They then flock to places like Blenheim so they can work their way through their trip.

Sadly, there are so many of these folks that migrant labor wages around here are pathetic. They make the equivalent of about $4US an hour in the fields. To put that in perspective, the cheapest rooms at the hostel here are $20NZ a day or about $10US. The week-to-week'ers are invariably malnourished (or have that fluffy appearance that you only get by eating unhealthy/high-calorie food), drinking cheap beer, and eating pork and beans straight from the can. One quaint young Scot informed us that he had 40 cents to his name until payday -- three days away. He arrived last May and ran out of money in September. You're only young once, I guess.

No Update Yesterday and It Wasn't My Fault

We stayed in a little town named "Wanatui" last night about 150km north of Wellington. It's at the mouth of the largest navigable river in all of New Zealand. Much like Easton, PA (where I went to college) and Spokane, WA and any other town that grew up around river traffic in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This also means that the advent of truck and air transport seems to have stifled its growth around that time as well. The place has a thriving artist community and strangely, a huge sports complex that includes both a Velodrome (a bicycle track for those uneducated among you) and a regular running track. We sat on a hill where we could watch both the track practice and bicycle racers. Shandelle cared for the running. I for the cycling.

We've sprinted down to Wellington, which today seems to be in the middle of a windstorm or something along those lines. It's strangely warm yet the wind is blowing at like 30-40mph gusts across the ocean. I hope this isn't normal but everyone seems to act like it is. In general, Wellington was cursed with limited land area. So, much like San Francisco, it retains character that is otherwise lost in places like Auckland. If Wellington is the San Francisco of NZ, then Auckland is the Seattle. Just with much less rain and fewer Starbucks.

We have made it a point to avoid Starbucks, Subway, and every other American chain here. Of course, that doesn't matter too much. Shandelle and I have remarked consistently that NZ is much much like the States. The only differences being that everything is 50% at stores because of the exchange rate and people say "cheers" instead of "your welcome".

That's about all for today. Tomorrow, we hit the ferry for the south island. We're hoping to reorder our trip so that we can proceed at a more leisurely pace. We've just been doing too much driving lately.

And finally, the House of Morgan book is now completed. I have to read some of the 9 books I brought on this trip so I don't have to carry so many. Once they're read, I'm shipping them back home.

To Waitomo Caves and Beyond!

Today, we ventured from Rotorua to the world famous Waitomo Caves. The caves are part of a very large grop of limestone caves about 1 hour drive southwest of Hamilton, NZ. The most notable of these caves are the famous Glowworm caves, which features thousands of little worms that glow in the dark to attract insects that they then trap and eat. We went through two different cave tours, one featuring the glow worms en masse.

From looking just at these different attractions we've visited already, it's clear that NZ is a much less litigious society than the USA. Things that would never fly in the USA because you, as the attraction owner, are beholdent to John Q Public to ensure that he doesn't do anything stupid and hurt himself, go over very well in New Zealand. Yesterday, for example, we went down a concrete luge on little scooters easily reaching 25mph down the side of a mountain. It would be simple to drive off the edge of a cliff. Protection? Bicycle helmets were required and elbow pads were "optional." You can also bungy jump off basically anything with height in this country as well.

Shandelle's bogged down with allergies and I'm desperately trying to finish The House of Morgan, a 750 page tome I started earlier this week. Like an idiot, I packed more books than clothing. So, I'm hoping to finish this book and post it and other victims back to the States so I needn't carry them around any more.

Quote of the day: "This whole place looks like Lord of the Rings." -- Shandelle on today's hike.

Tomorrow, we're heading for the coast. We're hoping to outrun Shandelle's allergies that have been acting up down here.

Rotorura, NZ + Marginal Adventures

We've safely departed the Big City of Auckland (only about a 1mm people and constitutes nearly 1/3rd of the Kiwi population) for Rotorura. It's a big tourist destination that a motel owner in Auckland claimed was "too touristy." This person clearly hasn't seen hard-core American touristy areas like DisneyWorld or Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco.

Rotorura is famous for a large lake, which is the result of an extinct volcano and some volanic springs. We're staying in a campground, where we have the "nicest place in the premises." It's $39NZ a night, which is about $20US per night. Apart from having to share a communal bathroom, it's nice and offers hot-spring baths.

My big brain fart so far is the engagement of two activies. First, we're taking a two-week sailing class in Auckland beginning 2/1/03. It lasts two weeks from the "world famous" Penny Whiting (http://www.pennywhiting.com/). After that, we're chartering a sailboat that we'll sail ourselves in an area called the Bay of Islands. Our boat will be a 29.5 foot monohull from the Sunsail corporation (http://www.sunsail.com/brochure/bareboat/bareboat_intro.cgi?languageid=us&origin=2&rescode=nzbi). It'll be a thrill!

Not much other excitement happening. Shandelle is very helpful in reminding me to drive on the left side of the road. It's interesting how isolated one also feels here. The combination of timezone and distance mean that we're very far from home.

We Made It

We've made it Auckland, which is great. Our flight arrived first thing yesterday morning and, all in all, it went decently. Shandelle did manage to get cramped in about 10 hours in the flight so I galantly exchanged seats with her. Her seat was in coach and I can vouch that it did suck.

Our motel is in a quaint little area about a mile outside of downtown. It's great because 1) it's darn cheap (equivalent to 30$US a night) and outside of the touristy inner city/backpacker area of town. We've had two great breakfasts in the area (Ponsonby), which is very similar to the Marina district in San Francisco.

Yesterday, we managed to see some great sights with my friend Hunter and his fiancee. They had to leave this morning, sadly. We'll be able to connect with them again in Australia. People tend to "Wow" when we say that we're doing this for 3 months. Hunter & Mrs. Hunter are doing this for a year. That's real dedication. I feel like a poser in comparison.

Shandelle is sunburned for the first time since I've known her. I'm slightly sunburned, but I don't look funny like her. She got mad when I called her "Rudolph" in front of a group of Japanese tourists yesterday. We're trying to be more responsible today.

The highlight of the day was the tour through the America's Cup pavilion and seeing all the racing boats. Only Alinghi (some Swiss dudes) and Oracle/BMW (Larry Ellison's team) remain out of a field of nearly a dozen. They're fighting to see who gets to go against the Kiwi's (Team New Zealand) in February for the Cup itself. The boats are tugged in and out of a little harbor and we managed to see them return after the race.

Sailing is not such a great spectator sport, which is probably why the events so often include heaving drinking of Champagne. We're looking into going out on a charter to watch later this week. We also met a nice person on the plane who is doing some business over here. So, we may drive over and hang out with her for a bit. We'll see.

Other than that, life is pretty normail in New Zealand. People eat, take the bus, hang out in Internet cafes, etc. There are little differences: the newspaper has a decidedly positive bent, the people have a more English manner of moving/walking than the Americans, and everything is basically half-price because the exchange rate is great. For example, our bus ride this morning was $1.20NZ. That's about 65 cents in the USA. Can't beat it.

Leaving Tomorrow & The Detroit Project

Our flight to New Zealand leaves tomorrow night at 6pm. It's promising to be a great 15 hours of flying time. Thankfully, I'm in business class.

I need money so I can do crazy things like this: http://www.thedetroitproject.com/about/default.htm

Expanding My Prius

Took a grand leap today on my Toyota Prius: It's getting the front seat moved back 6-8 inches so I have more legroom. Reality is: I don't fit well in any standard automobile. When you have a 37 inch inseam and the standard distance from driver seat to pedals is 43 inches, it just doesn't work. So, "Ricky" at a body shop here in Florida is welding some magic onto the frame and moving the seat back. I feel like David Robinson, the San Antonio NBA player, who had them replace the back seat in his Porsche with the front seats, just so he could fit. Of course, I'm neither 7'0" nor a multi-millionaire basketball player.

On Pro Sports and Buffett

Watched a bunch of football recently (that's what happens when you're staying in a 900 sq ft condo with 3 die-hard Ohioans and only 1 TV). A few
thoughts: The quarterback is always running around calling audible plays, as are the defense. Why not expand the 2-way radio system they use to call plays from the coach to the quarterback to do the same with the rest of the offense? In other words, put radios in the offensive players helmets as well and allow the quarterback to broadcast plays to them.

It wouldn't be difficult technically to do. Imagine a football offense running silently -- no huddles. The quarterback is speaking, rather than
yelling, "hut-hut-hut". It could be a significant advantage over the defense. Interestingly, one could do the same for the defense, providing a
significant improvement. Today, pass coverages can't be changed easily due to crowd noise factors and the distance between defenders. Linebackers screaming defensive changes in the Metrodome could be a thing of the past.

Also interesting would be to combine these radios with sensors that could tell players what to do *real-time*. Imagine a small electrode placed
strategically on the body of an offensive player, such as a lineman. In many situations, a play develops and a lineman should change his blocking
direction. The overhead coaching staffs (The offensive coordinators usually call plays from above where it's easier to see what's going on) or more
likely computerized systems could signal the lineman to change their direction *mid-play*. Purists will hate it, but an idea...

On Warren Buffett, I'm in the middle of my second "Buffett" book (which the New York Times stated "Buffett books are about as rare as cornfields in Nebraska and they're correct) and I'm thoroughly impressed with what I've read. Two thoughts: American culture is terrific in that it idolizes the
titans of industry like Buffett, Morgan, Carnegie, etc. The legend of the lad pulling himself up by his bootstraps to riches is terrific. We should
perpetuate it because it's the greatest draw to this country possible: the american dream.

Second, great people (by in large) are great consumers of books. Reading is a passion for them. Buffett reads 5+ newspapers a day. Jeff Bezos from Amazon reads 1+ books a week. George Kassabgi is the best-read VP of Engineering BEA has even seen. The list goes on. I always laugh at the NBA for their "Reading is Fundamental" program designed to encourage kids to read, but there's definitely merit there. If I could run any business (irregardless of profitability, etc), it'd be a book store. But, who wants to do that when some Warren Buffett has bankrolled a Barnes & Noble that is going to run you out of town?