The home straight

I'm in the home straight now. Just today at work and then I'm on a plane and home.

I woke up early this morning. I realised that I'm now not going to sleep again for about 46 hours! Pretty freaky.

Weekend

I had a pretty quiet weekend. I went to the movies and spent a bunch of time in Borders reading books and drinking coffee (a couple of my favorite activities). It's been cold and rainy this weekend. Maximums around 12-13 degrees and very wet. I guess there's a reason everything's so green around here and I must have been very lucky to get such great weather the first week I was here.

Just three more days to go. I can't wait to get home.

You know what I miss?

I miss milk in my coffee. What is with 'creamer'? Here in the office, they basically have powdered milk that you add to your coffee. I've even had a few black coffees because I just can't deal with the yuck powdered milk!

Mind you, that's certainly not the biggest thing I miss :)

Birthday

Many thanks to everyone for their birthday wishes. I got a hilarious phone message from the Hartwichs and had some nice chats. It was very good timing, I was feeling a bit lonely and really appreciated the contact from home.

Weekend

I had a fairly busy weekend somehow. When I tell you what I did, you'll be amazed that it filled out a whole weekend, but if you include all the times I got lost while trying to find various shops and then when I couldn't find the car in the carpark it all adds up.

On Saturday morning I visited "Pike Place Market" which is a fairly well-known landmark in Seattle (I hadn't heard of it either!). It started as a fish market and has an amazingly eclectic collection of shops. Then on Saturday and Sunday I visited various shopping malls and did some shopping. Dave wanted to buy some pressies for his family and he was only over last weekend, so I've got all my shopping out of the way early. I bought some books (a birthday present from Mum and Dad - thanks!), some jeans and some presents for my girls.

By the way, here's a photo from the airport when the girls were seeing me off :)

Car

One of the guys here at work has loaned me his car for the time I'm here. He's obviously a very generous guy and it's made a huge difference in terms of what I am able to do (public transport being almost non-existent). It's been very handy. I've been driving it around and haven't yet forgotten to drive on the wrong side of the road! Although I always have to double-check which side of the car to get into and I keep hitting the door reaching for the gearstick!


While I'm talking about cars, you should see the size of the cars over here. I'd say 20% of all vehicles are massively oversized compared to cars in Australia. Here's a great example of the kind of thing you see scattered through supermarket carparks. It's absolutely massive!

Baseball

I went to a baseball game on Friday night. It was quite interesting, because I'd never been to a game before. I've watched it a bit on TV and thought I had a fair handle on the rules. However, there are a lot of little rules that I was not aware of! It's quite a slow moving game. If anybody acutally got onto a base there was a huge cheer. This probably only happened about 6 times. The end score was the Detroit Tigers beat the Seattle Mariners 1-0. That's a soccer scoreline!


It was freezing. Only 3 degrees! I was wearing a t-shirt, a long sleeved shirt, a fleecy top, a jacket, hat and gloves and I was still really cold. You really get the sense that a Seattle winter would take a lot of preparation!

Click on the pictures for a larger (albeit still blurry) image.

The food

The food here is very rich. I mean very rich. I am really craving some plain food that isn't covered in dressing, cheese, sugar or all of the former! Every coffee shop has tons of donuts and pastrys and everything is sugar coated. I seriously don't understand how anybody here can be slim.

A couple of unrelated food incidents:

I went to the supermarket to buy some breakfast supplies. Wandering among the aisles of unfamiliar food I saw Special K! I was stoked to see something that I knew I would like. To my surprise, this was not Special K as I know it. It was frosted with sugar and was incredibly sweet.

Yesterday for lunch I went to a Thai restaurant with some of my colleagues. I had Massaman Beef curry and it was delicious. I only managed to eat about 1/4 of it and was very full.

Today I felt like something light. I went to a Deli and saw they had Chicken salad sandwich. Fantastic. What I got was a sandwich with chicken (good so far), lettuce, pickles (not what I was expecting for salad!) and a huge amount of mayonnaise.

I'm finding it hard to predict what I'm going to get when I order/buy food. It's kind of weird.

Plans

My plans for the weekend are starting to come together. I'm going to the baseball on Friday night, of which I have almost no expectations or knowledge! Should be a fun experience. My manager who's over from Toronto is going, as is Dave.

For the rest of the weekend Dave's got some shopping he wants to do (clothes are very cheap over here) so I'll go along and spend some money too. Any requests from back home?

No other big plans. I'll probably hang out with Dave a bit since he's heading back home on Monday.

Life is full of oddness

It's amazing how in my normal routine I take so much for granted. For example if I'm going to leave a room I can tell if the lights are off by just glancing at the light switches and noting their position. I don't consciously examine whether they're up or down, I just subconsciously must know that the image looks right for me to leave the house. However here in the states lots of things are just slightly different and force my conscious mind to kick in and do some work.

For example:
- Lights are off when the switch is down, not up. So I notice that the light is on, glance at the switch and get all confused!
- With mixer taps, the hot and cold directions are reversed. So that while I'm waiting for the hot water to arrive I'm not constantly checking that I'm pushing the tap in the right direction.
- Cars drive on the other side of the road. So every time I approach a road on foot, I glance in the wrong direction first!

Arrived

I've arrived in my hotel in Seattle. It looks quite reasonable, although I haven't really done anything except drop my bags yet!

If you want to see where I am on a map, click here. The hotel is that white, bent building right in the middle. You can use the + and - signs on the left to zoom out or in and see where it is in context of Seattle.

Travels

I'm going to take a brief diversion from my usual ramblings for some... um... unusual ramblings. I've just arrived in the States for a 3 week work trip. I hope I'll be able to fit in some non-work activities too, so I'll be using this blog to keep family and friends updated with what I've been up to.

I'm currently sitting in LAX waiting for my flight to Seattle. It's 9:15am here and it's lovely and sunny. Pity I'm dressed for 10 degree Seattle weather :) According to my body clock it's 2:15am so I'm feeling a bit weary. Looking forward to this leg being over and arriving at my hotel so I can have a shower and relax.

I think I've handed out about 4 different, incorrect, methods of converting Melbourne to Seattle time... sorry about that! To set the record straight... As you may have deduced from my figures above, add 7 hours and take off a day and you'll be set.

Hope everyone in Aussieland is well... bye for now.

The future of Mobile Development?

There are a number of companies out there that create products that synchronise data between a server and mobile devices. The type of synchronisation I want to talk about today is over GPRS.

Basically (very basically), a program is installed on the server back at the office. It monitors a database and if any changes are made, it sends the data out to the device over GPRS. Then a program on the device updates the local database.

One of the reasons for this approach is that GPRS is still too slow to have data requested from the server in real time. The local database is effectively a cache.

I forsee the day that WiFi coverage will be so extensive that we're not even going to need a GSM network. Hence products like this WiFi mobile phone.

Now I'm going to digress with a little trip down memory lane. Back in the early days of my programming career, we couldn't assume that the executing PC had a fast network connection. So we had to build complex data synchronisation products to get around this network limitation.

But as networks (both LAN and broadband internet connections) became faster and more prevalent, it became simpler to have a single data source and remote applications accessing the data in real time. Thus the spread of web based applications to the point that I haven't worked on a Windows Forms application for a very long time.

I hope you can see where I'm headed here. I'm not convinced that there is a future in data synchronisation across GPRS. I expect that once WiFi/3G connections are reliable and fast enough mobile applications will be replaced by web based applications. Especially as the newer generation of mobile web browsers get more sophisticated in their display options.

Top 10 Science movies that were never made

Another amusing rant by David Wong from Pointless Waste of Time.

I've read/seen most of the books/movies he covers and I agree with almost all of his points. In particular, I was hugely disappointed with the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie and I'd love to see a Neal Stephenson book made into a film.

Find it here.

Gravity and Weightlessness

The International Space Station is in low earth orbit, approximately 360km above the surface of the Earth. They experience microgravity. I always assumed this is because they are far enough from the earth that the Earth's gravity no longer had a significant impact at this altitude.

It turns out I'm wrong. Gravity only reduces by about 3% for each 100km altitude. So they're still experiencing 91% of the gravity that we

What we experience as weight is known as "Apparent Weight". It is perceived because of force gradients across our body, where each horizontal cross-section of our body is supporting the weight of the parts of our body above the cross section.

When we're standing on the ground, we experience weight due to the reaction force of the ground. When in an aircraft, gravity acts on all mass within the aircraft (including our bodies), but the lift is generated by the aircraft shell, which also causes a reaction force that triggers apparent weight. The fact that gravity acts on all objects in the aircraft, but lift is only generated by the aircraft shell creates this force differential. If you were in a box that was in free-fall (ignoring friction for the moment), you would experience weightlessness because there is no reaction force provided by the box.

So back to the astronauts... They still experience gravity, but it is balanced by the centripedal force created by their orbit around earth. They experience weightlessness because the space station is moving at the same rate and with no friction does not provide a reaction force.

This has got to be my most confusing post yet! As always, for more information, see this Wikipedia article