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I’ve wedged another business trip rather hurriedly into my schedule, sandwiched betwixt (oh, you gotta love that word) our recent holiday and my impending departure for Siggraph in about 10 days. It came up at really short notice and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to fit it around my existing commitments, but luckily I was able to organise it to happen over this weekend, which just about worked (although I still have to leave early Friday). This will be my first trip to Sweden, specifically Gotland, so I’m looking forward to it, although my time there will be short and I’ll spend an enormous amount of time in transit. It’s a bit of a tortuous route, requiring 3 flights and a coach in each direction (Guernsey-Gatwick-Heathrow-Stockholm-Gotland), plus a short transfer to Heathrow Terminal 5 on the way out (uh-oh). I can’t really complain though, living on an island myself I know all about having to shuttle through onshore international hubs, you just learn to live with it - but I have it at both ends this time!

Should be good anyway - with luck some business and/or future partnerships will come out of it, but at the very least it should be an interesting trip.

I’ve only been to Siggraph once before, in 2006 when it was held in Boston. It happened to coincide with a trip I wanted to make to see some friends / clients of mine anyway so it dovetailed in quite well - I also held a Birds of a Feather (BOF) meet-up for the OGRE community while I was there, and it was good to meet a few of our users.

I enjoyed the experience but given my small / micro business status it’s hard to justify the expense to get out there, especially with airline prices seemingly increasing by the second. It’s generally just more cost- and time-effecient to cherry-pick the papers I’m interested in afterwards, unless I have a specific business case to be there in person.

Nevertheless the thing I enjoyed most about it last time was meeting people, so I’m glad to say I’m going again this year, as part of the entourage for a company whose project I’ve been working on quite a lot over the past 6 months. As such I’ll be spending a fair amount of time manning a booth, but there should still be sufficient time to enjoy the event and meet up with people. I haven’t decided whether I want to run an official OGRE BOF this time around, or even if I’ll have time for it - I’m actually thinking an informal meet-up at a bar nearby or something instead might be better. If you’re going too and you have any ideas or suggestions, let me know! This will be my first trip to LA but I’m expecting to have some reliable guides

It’s no secret that I’m a sucker for good food. The thought of eating anything from a fast food establishment utterly repulses me, and although I did go through the usual period of bachelorhood that most of us males do, when plastic knives and forks, take-away food and Pot Noodle were de rigeur, I quickly came to the conclusion that I was going to have to learn how to cook. Luckily Marie feels the same way and while we don’t claim to be experts, at least the majority of the meals in our house are prepared with fresh ingredients rather than from packets and we have quite a varied menu.

I got a taste for Thai food many years ago around the time I first visited the country, and since then have learned to make some dishes, and regularly dined in local Thai restaurants. We’re lucky here in that we have lots of good quality restaurants and our current favourite local Thai is very authentic, owing to the fact that it’s small and run very traditionally by a native. They make a killer Tom Yum Goong there, provided you are willing to accept that it will take the back of your head off if you eat it too fast.

Thus, on my second trip to Thailand, I found we had to be a lot more choosy about where we ate. The first time round I was fairly green, and I enjoyed the food but I realise now I was getting the ‘Farang‘ version which is deliberately toned down. Less chilli,  but also less of the other flavours too such as galangal and sweet (holy) basil. Being super-tired on the first night we ate in the hotel restaurant in Bangkok, and were pretty disappointed at both the price and the taste - way too bland. The key, as always wherever you go, is to seek out the places where the locals are eating, which is usually the small, sometimes shabbier looking establishments - in Rome they had a saying: ‘the more you pay, the worse you eat’, and that seemed to apply in Thailand too.

One of the best places we ate while we were there was a place called ‘Same Same But Different’, down in our second port of call of Koh Lanta Yai. It was literally built out of driftwood directly on the sands of the beach, a short stroll from our hotel, and run by a family who seemed to work there almost 24/7. The food was dirt cheap but absolutely fantastic, and the ambience particularly in the evening (provided you don’t mind defending your food from bugs and wandering cats) was great. I remember one night we ordered some fish, and what they had that night was a really large black and white snapper. It was delicious but the owner ended up apologising to us afterwards when she brought the bill because it was quite expensive (as with many places most fish dishes are unpriced, and the amount you pay is based on the type and weight) - but in fact this meant it was about a fiver! We could obviously live with that, even though it pushed our meal up to a record-topping fifteen quid that night (with drinks)

Probably my favourite Thai dish is Pad Kaprao , preferably with chicken (Gai). It’s hot, but it’s a slow-burner unlike a good Tom Yum which is liquid fire, and the blend of flavours, particularly from the thai basil leaves (which are completely different from european basil), is something else. Same Same did that dish really well so I was well catered for. There’s really nothing quite like traditionally cooked Thai food, and if you’ve only ever eaten Thai in the west, bear in mind that what you’re getting is probably not a lot like the real thing, less hot and probably a bit over-sweet unless you’re lucky enough to have access to a place which cooks it more traditionally.

On a final note, I was surprised that one of our hotels had Vegemite on the breakfast buffet, and having heard some Aussie’s claiming it’s better than Marmite, I just had to try it. I’m sorry for the inevitable offense chaps, but Vegemite is just a castrated version of Marmite. Yes, it’s really just like Marmite would be if you could somehow unman a foodstuff. I spread a little on my toast, and took a bite. Waited. And waited. Hmm, there was a slight hint of a taste there. So I spread it a bit thicker, and yes, indeed there was some taste there - almost exactly like if you took Marmite, watered it down by a factor of 10, and then somehow extracted any remaining tang/kick it was desperatey holding on to.

If I’d spread Marmite on my toast as thick as I had to spread Vegemite to actually get any taste out of it, my mouth would be smouldering for the rest of the week. Highly disappointing - I liken it to the difference between English mustard and the embarrasingly weak French or American varieties, which you could almost drink with your food. But on the upside, it’s always fun to watch an American visiting the UK encountering our local mustard for the first time, and spreading it on his food like he does on hot dogs back home. Sit back, relax and wait for the fireworks to start - tee hee

The first stop on our Thailand trip was to spend a few days in the capital, Bangkok. When you fly into Thailand you have to pass through it anyway, so it makes sense to stop off there for a while, and particularly at the start of the holiday rather than the end, especially since one of our main aims was to relax. Having done quite a few multi-stop holidays in the past, I’ve learned that doing a city at the end is a mistake if you want to get any lasting benefit from the unwinding you do elsewhere, particularly a city like Bangkok which is one of the more chaotic. It’s smoggy, overcrowded and hot, but it’s definitely an experience worth having.

Last time I visited Bangkok we stayed in a fairly packed area of the city, and at the time public transport was dire - if you wanted to get anywhere in any reasonable amount of time, the infamous Tuk-tuks were pretty much the only way due to the almost 100% gridlock at many times of the day. Of course you take your life into your own hands here, as the driver (necessarily) seeks to use absolutely any paved or even unpaved surface as a valid highway, and damn any other road users or pedestrians.  Crazy Taxi has nothing on this. Of course it’s a lot of fun too, in small doses - one of my enduring memories of my last visit (in my early 20’s) was barrelling headlong along pavements with a friend in the back of one of these things, trying to get back to the hotel in time for our airport pickup, choking on other road users deisel fumes as we darted between them like minnows in a shark pool. The key to using them successfully is to avoid the ones hanging about touting outside tourist attractions and use the ones that queue up separately in ’stands’ in the street, and to barter the exact price and destination, preferably knowing the approximate route and decent price before you get in to avoid getting ripped off and/or taken to all sorts of intermediate locations like the gullible, fleeceable tourist you are. For example, Sathon to around Siam Square should cost about 30 baht (about 50p), but they may try to charge a tourist up to 200 baht and / or go via dodgy gem shops if you’re gullible enough. Luckily everyone is always friendly, even when they’re trying to cheat you, and once they realise you’re not buying it you can normally get the ‘local’ price and service, always with a smile of course.

  This time we used Tuk-tuk’s sparingly, firstly due to the fact that I deliberately picked a hotel bordering the Chao Phraya river  - a little more expensive, but worth it. Being there meant we had the option of using the ‘express boat’ public water buses for some trips, which are just as crowded and directed by a conductor with the loudest, most high-pitched whistle ever created outside the range of canine hearing, but you can at least get a little bit of fresh air that way, they’re very regular, stupidly cheap (13 baht each!) and you can’t get lost - even the stops are numbered so you don’t have to remember the local names The second reason is the relatively new Skytrain, which wasn’t there when I last visited, and handily our hotel had a free water shuttle down to the nearest station. There’s only 2 lines so far but they pass though the major places you’ll want to stop, cheap (30 baht each), fast and even air-conditioned. Combined with the express boat, some leg power and the occasional Tuk-tuk we managed to get everywhere we wanted to in fairly good time without getting gridlocked. I pitied the poor suckers grabbing regular taxis as they sat there stationary with the meter racking up

 We of course visited the Grand Palace while we were there, as well as smaller temples like Wat Pho which headlines with the gigantic Reclining Buddha but I also liked the warren-like nature of it which made it rather interesting to explore, as a contrast to the wide boulevards of the Grand Palace. We also visited various markets and eating establishments, the detail of the latter I’ll save for another post. As it turned out, we happened to be in town at the time of the Loy Krathong festival, which was totally unplanned but turned out to be well worth seeing. Almost endless streams of military landing craft had been converted into floating spectacles covered with lights and digital screens, while fireworks went off all along the river and thousands of people released small banana-leaf based rafts with flowers and candles / insense onto the river. Our hotel was obviously ideally placed for this, which was a bonus since it was our last night before we headed south and we had to be up at 4:30 the next day to catch a plane down to Krabi province. 

I’m sorry to say we just got back from a great 2 week holiday in Thailand - sorry because I could have easily stayed there a few more days at least. I’d been before, about 13 years ago, but this was the first trip for my wife, and she thoroughly enjoyed it too. We’ve relaxed, eaten some fantastic (and of course, at times extremely hot, if you head for where the locals eat, which we try to) local food, and generally had a good time.

The return journey was somewhat demanding though, clocking in at 27 hours due in part to the fact that for the latter part of the holiday we stayed in a somewhat less travelled area (at least compared to the now arguably spoilt tourist centers of Phuket and Koh Samui), and given that we also live on an island, the whole journey amounted to 1 boat, 2 car trips, 1 bus transfer, and 3 flights, with all the inherent waiting about in between each.

I have a ton of things to blog about regarding the trip and other subjects, but they’ll be delivered in a gradual fashion over the next few days. Needless to say, lack of sleep and jetlag means I’m taking a couple of days to catch up with things and adjust to normal life again

Typically having had just enough time to finally adjust my various mental and physical cycles by 8 hours to GMT-7, I’ve returned and am undergoing the exact same process in reverse. As such I’m feeling a bit rough but at least I can adjust in familiar surroundings.

In the meantime, here’s a few photos of me doing the rounds at various Silicon Valley locations (click for full size versions):

I managed a few hours in downtown San Francisco too on Sunday before heading back to get the flight (all of yesterday was travelling, what fun), which was ok I guess. This was more of a business / tech trip than anything else and I must admit that once all that was done (and it was pretty hectic), I wasn’t really in the right frame of mind for general tourism. Beyond that, travelling alone for business & geekery is fine, but when it comes to leisure tourism, it’s best enjoyed in company. I only had a few hours spare on this trip anyway as I said (thus it wasn’t worth Marie coming along this time) but I did find myself thinking that those hours would have been much more fun had they been shared.

Anyhow, I’m starting to catch up now, best give me a day or so to re-acclimatise if you’re waiting for a reply to something.

Had a good time at Google today  - their campus is absolutely massive and there are quirky things like the replica of  SpaceShipOne hanging over the main stairwell (pictured) and a T-Rex skeleton inexplicably present in the grounds - apparently its name is ‘Stan’ athough I actually think ‘Alta Vista’ or ‘Lycos’ might have been more appropriate.

The mentor summit went well, I met Greg (aka Xavier) in person finally which was cool, along with loads of other people including Marten from Crystal Space, the guys from BZFlag (I’d met Sean from BZFlag at Siggraph before so it was good to talk again), plus developers from Theora, Eclipse, Apache, Drupal, Joomla and lots of others. Just being present at a gathering of so many senior members of popular open source projects was really quite cool - some people were saying it was the largest gathering even counting OSCON. Security was tightish, but I’d imagine Microsoft would have had a lot to gain by bombing the place this weekend; damage Google and over a hundred or so top open source projects in one strike? Hmm…

Once again I’m struck by what an awesome thing it is Google is doing here - more so having seen just how many people they’ve flown in at their own expense, to host at their own campus over a weekend. So much money and effort going into assisting open source projects that are mostly unconnected to their business - sure there’s a ‘halo effect’ in terms of publicity, they get to recruit people as a spin-off, and it’s in Google’s interest to challenge proprietary software traditions through disruptive models, but largely I got the impression that, at in individual level, this was as much about Google people just wanting to give back as self-interest. They make extensive use of open source, so they’re pumping resources back in on the expectation that in the round it’ll be good for them for the whole open source model to thrive.  More cynical companies could be cherry-picking that investment more closely to target things that are very specifically going to benefit them, but instead they’re funding the whole sector based on general merit - I can’t imagine funding open source game projects is ever likely to be of direct benefit to them for example. I don’t know how many more years it’ll carry on, but while it does I think it’s something rather special. To use the phrase Leslie from Google used a lot all day, I’m ‘feeling the love’ - it’s pretty hard to imagine any other company doing what they’re doing. Google, you rock.

Phew, the jet lag certainly isn’t beaten yet. Even though I managed to stay up until about 9:30pm last night before succumbing (remember, this was actually 5:30am according to my body clock), it hasn’t entirely compensated and I’m feeling pretty tired now (6:45pm aka 2:45am). I didn’t notice until I got back just now because I’ve had a really busy and interesting day.

This morning I was at NVIDIA where I had a tour of the campus and some really interesting discussions on a variety of subjects. Anyone reading this blog will know I’ve been a long-time nvidia card fan (even though I have to try to stay impartial, I can’t help it), so this was a cool moment for me. We talked about a lot of things from how we can cooperate in the future to the nuances of material systems design (.fx vs .material and such). Very productive discussions, and I was particularly glad to hear the view that there are several aspects of OGRE’s material system that are regarded as good examples of how other systems like .fx could adopt & learn from in the future. They were also kind enough to complete my GPU Gems collection with books 2 and 3 (I only own number 1, although I have read some articles from a borrowed 2 before). I may need to pay extra baggage charges now though

A couple of guys from Intel joined us for a 3-way joint lunch (a very nice Mexican), after which it was time to head down to Intel’s offices where I did some troubleshooting with them. We spent an afternoon talking about design issues and solving a few problems they’d had with an app using OGRE. By the end of the afternoon we’d resolved all the issues raised so that went very well. I won’t say much about this in detail just at the moment (it’s still under wraps) but it’s really nice to know that people from companies such as this are noticing OGRE and investing time in it.

I had my photo taken at both campuses, but I forgot to bring my camera USB cable so I’ll have to wait until I get home to upload them. Geek tourism rocks.

I recently touched down at San Francisco International (SFO) and have made my way to the hotel, which as you can tell, has wireless internet. Well, this is Silicon Valley, I’d personally expect pedestrian crossings to be internet enabled here (they’re not, I’ve tried).

I didn’t expect to get a lot done today, owing to the jet lag, and indeed, I’m feeling it. It’s ostensibly 6pm but of course, due to this being GMT-7, which because of daylight savings is 8 hours behind, I’m in a sort of grey half-wakefulness right now. I’m deeply, deeply grateful that the hotel room has filter coffee on tap because I need to at least try to stay awake a few more hours yet to avoid stretching this condition into the coming days. It’s funny how even when the upper layers of your consciousness are engaged, lack of sleep does weird things to the lower levels, like screwing with your sense of balance and peripheral vision. I usually find this passes after about 2-3am, when I think your body figures out that it’s not going to bed after all, or the dopamine it starts pumping around the same time every day runs out or something.

Heathrow was mercifully calm this morning, certainly a breeze compared to passing through it earlier in the season. Security on the flight was characteristically tight, this being a flight to the USA; I know why this is of course, but I’m always struck by how much air travel sucks now - it used to be fun and exciting (except for the long-haul bit), now it’s one incessant set of queues with people asking you the same questions 7 times and to remove (or even more curiously, just undo) various items of clothing. At least this time there weren’t hour-long queues and it was just tedious but constantly moving.

I was sat next to a rather odd bloke for the 10 hour flight - someone who professed to be in ‘the film industry’ but it transpired he was a projectionist. He was travelling alone, like me, but his was a holiday, and during the 10 hours it became rather clear to me why he was alone. Rambling conversations that started with an interesting point of discourse but seemed to go absolutely nowhere, an intensely anally retenive attitude which manifested itself as him explaining how he likes to plan his trips at least a year in advance, resulted in him checking his documents every 30 minutes and pestered the flight attendants to double-check them for him, and every time an announcement piped up (like please read the safety card, or check page blah in the magazine for airport layouts) he’d instantly leap into action an begin enthusiastically reading and pondering. It’s not like it was his first time either, he was explaining how he’d been to SF before, which should have been an interesting story but he found a way to suck the life out of that too. For some reason his perfectly good-natured but nevertheless infuriating behaviour drove me absolutely nuts. I’m a pretty mellow chap, my wife will tell you it’s pretty damn hard to get me really pissed off, but this guy managed to get me gritting my teeth in a very short time - I just wanted to jump up and shout ‘for fecks sake, chill out and live a little!’, but of course instead I just buried myself in my book and tried not to get involved in any of his startlingly dull conversations anymore. I feel sorry for the guy opposite him who then bore the brunt.

Anyway, I’m here now. This is my 4th trip to the US and once again I’m struck by how spread out everything is. I guess I’m just used to compact places that are easily navigable on foot or using public transport (like London and Edinburgh)  - hub-like systems with sparser regions between that probably have a lot to do with historical settlement evolution. This part of the country just seems to go on forever in all directions with a fairly uniform distribution of similar landmarks, which just feels kind of .. odd. It does mean that the car is the king here though, which is a shame; all the traffic does tend to detract from otherwise quite pleasant surroundings. The sun is shining at least.

Now, rather ironically, I’m wandering and probably boring anyone reading this to death, just like my temporary flight companion. I’m going to blame the jetlag for the lack of focus…

If the post title made you think of an awful film of the same name and the awful title single that went with it, I apologise. It popped into my head this morning unsummoned, and I’ll be darned if I’m going to be the only one trying to engage a mental decontamination protocol.

Yes, over the next 24 hours I’m heading over to the west coast of the USA to attend the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, for a full day of debate and general open source geekery. The summit itself isn’t until Saturday, but since I have to get over to London too to catch my transatlantic flight the timings mean I have to leave a little early. I deliberately left myself some extra time, although some of that has been booked up now so I have a busy few days. My itinerary is:

• Tonight (Wednesday): plane to London Gatwick, then bus up to London Heathrow region to crash in a cheap hotel overnight
• Thursday: leave LHR for a 10 hr flight to SFO, arriving a little after lunch local time. No doubt spend an age in passport control; unfortunately the days when you could simply flash your British passport and breeze through are gone. Head down to Sunnyvale, locate hotel, confirm schedule for Friday, drink lots of coffee (GMT-7), explore a bit
• Friday: nvidia (am) and intel (pm)
• Saturday: Google (all day)
• Sunday: sightseeing in San Francisco (am), back to SFO for flight back to London (pm)
• Monday: Arrive Heathrow (+7 hours), bus back down to Gatwick, flight home. Collapse & sleep!!

So I’ll be back Tuesday, hopefully operating at at least moderate capacity. Any trip across to the US involves about 2 days of mostly ‘dead’ time, what with the double-hop I have to make and the time difference, but it’s worth it; I’m really looking forward to it.