Posted by John Patrick on Mar 31, 2005 in
Travels 
Dunedin was the home of Robert Burns and his statue sits prominently in the center of this quaint New Zealand city. Some people took a train tour, although we decided to do our own thing again. The train comes directly to the port to pick up passengers. It was a strange site to wake up in the morning, look outside and there was a ten car train parked right beside the entire 1,000 foot length of the ship.
From Dunedin we cruised roughly 350 miles to the Fiordlands at the southern tip of the south island. The scenery was beautiful, some of it near breathtaking. I have seem some debates in blogs about whether it is more or less beautiful than the fiords of Norway. Consensus seems to be that they are very similar but that the lushness of the vegetation on the sides of the mountains is greater in New Zealand. There were waterfalls gushing out from the highest levels pouring down into the Milford Sound.The ship went into the Sound as far as possible and turned around. At the time it did not look like the available width was enough to allow the enormous ship to make the turn. There was excellent commentary from the onboard naturalist which could be heard from open decks, as well as via your stateroom TV.
From the Fiordlands it was out to the open Ocean again, into the Tasman sea. The path was nearly due west and gale force winds plus rough seas (waves 20+ feet high) made for some unpleasant sailing. Between this and the Norovirus there were hundreds of sick people on board. Hobart was the first port in Australia, so we had to go through immigration. The line was long and the process not automated. Everyone had to get off the ship and clear immigration, even if they did not plan a shore excursion. Still wondering how the quarantined persons with Norovirus were handled. We took an excursion to Bonorong Wildlife Park — and wildlife there was aplenty. The kangaroos were jumping all over the park and snacks could be purchased to feed them. The park had many other interesting species including koala bears, walabes, wombats and Tasmanian Devils. I knew the latter from cartoons but had never seen a live one. They are nasty critters. The Tasmanian devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) cannot be mistaken for any other marsupial. Its spine-chilling screeches, black color, and reputed bad-temper, led the early European settlers to call it The Devil. Although only the size of a small dog, it can sound and look incredibly fierce. It ate a eviscerated rabbit, skin and bones, for lunch.
The 500 mile cruise from Tasmania on a northwestward trajectory brought us to Melbourne. There was a lot to see in Melbourne and you could easily spend many days there. We visited Melbourne’s shopping mecca, the Queen Victoria Market. The historic landmark is the largest open air market in the southern hemisphere. Officially opened in 1878, the multi-square block covered market sells meat products, fruit and vegetables, clothing, shoes, baggage, toys, pets, travel goods, jewelry and just about anything you can imagine. Some of the meat and fish items I saw there I could not imagine.
Downtown Melbourne was quite modern and full of action. A highlight of the entire trip was lunch at Cookie. Their business card — they have no website — says "Beer Hall, Eating House, Disco". The Thai food was great and the New Zealand wines and local beers were outstanding. The bar was the largest I have ever seen anywhere in the world. (Cookie is at 252 Swanston Street, Melbourne Victoria Australia +03 9663 7660)
The final leg of the journey was the 625 miles along the southeastern coast of Australia to Sydney. The most interesting part was the first ninety minutes which is how long it took for the ship to break loose of the intense winds to get free of the dock. Two huge tugboats plus the engines and bow thrusters of the Sapphire eventually won out. It was quite an experience to watch. We woke in the morning to a view of the amazing Sydney Harbor Bridge and the famous Opera House. There was no time in Sydney, because we had to immediately go the airport and fly to Auckland. Fortunately, I had been to Sydney a few times before and my wife and I were there for two weeks during the Olympic Games in 2000. From Auckland we flew to Los Angeles and then home. The return trip was approximately thirty six hours. In spite of a few inconveniences and a lot of travel overhead, it was a trip I will always cherish.
Photo gallery pictures from Zealand 2005 trip
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Posted by John Patrick on Mar 27, 2005 in
Blogging 
Someone asked me this week when I started blogging. The precursor to blogging for me started after a talk at Internet World in Washington, D.C. in December 1994. In my talk I shared a vision about the future of the Internet (which I have been talking about ever since). People would call my assistant at IBM and ask if we could mail them a copy of the "slides". It did not take too many of these requests before I got the idea to build a website and put a copy of my presentations there for anyone who wanted them. The website was ibm.com/patrick. Wish I could recall the date when it started. The ibm.com site went live on May 22, 1994. I think my homepage was about a year later. There were a number of people and technologies involved in the "/patrick" website and it’s evolution, but that is a story for another day.
I have enjoyed writing for a long time and in 1996 I got the idea to write short stories, which I called "Reflections", and share them at /patrick. The Reflections were similar to blog postings in that they were a way to share thoughts with others — there are roughly 50 of these stories here. The first story was written in January 1997 about a trip to Asia. What Reflections did not have was the consistent and structured context tags (date, title, author, category, and content) of a blog nor the syndication features of a blog that allows others to subscribe in various ways. I guess you could say I was a blogger in spirit but not in reality. I do plan to convert all the Reflections into blog postings.
In trying to piece the timeline together, I culled through my archives and so did my former colleagues Mary Keough and David Singer. As best we can determine, the first real blog on /patrick was born in June 2001 using software called Greymatter. It was not the easiest thing to use and I am grateful to Aniket Patel for his assistance in setting up the software back then. A year or so later I switched to Radio Userland software and then on March 1, 2003 I switched to Movable Type which I currently use and with which I am quite pleased. I write my stories using Macromedia Dreamweaver and then post the stories into the blog using Movable Type. There are now more than five-hundred stories posted.
In December 2002 I wrote a story about "The next big things" and said blogging was one of them. It made some people laugh. Blogging? You have to be kidding. I still think blogging is one of the next big things. We are at the very beginning. In David Strom’s latest Web Informant, he writes about examples of new uses for blogging that go way beyond story writing. One that he cites is package tracking. Today we go to shipper websites and check the status on a shipment. With blogging, you could create your own subscription to the shipper’s information. When your package moves from point A to point B, your "news" feed is updated. There are many things that might be in the category of "tracking" where blogging technology would be useful. Notification about a song, book, or wine which you are specifically interested in. Progress of a hurricane or news item. An upcoming doctor appointment or automotive checkup. Why not do all these things with email? For most of us, the email inbox is a jumbled array of all forms of communication. It is easy to miss something important because it is buried in the midst of a lot of things that are not important. There are tools to filter and organize mail but it takes a lot of time and thought. With blog feeds, you proactively subscribe to something you want to know. If you use Newsgator, your blog feeds are all nicely organized in folders — like email except that everything in your blog folders is something you care about and you know exactly where it is. In a way you could say that it is self-organizing.
I see blogging as the tip of the iceberg — the beginnings of the semantic web — a web where all content has context and everything is related to everything else. Context is the subtle power of blogging.
A number of us were talking about "tagging" at PC Forum last week. Tagging of music and pictures has accomplished more in the past year or so than AI (artificial intelligence) has in decades. There is a lot of focus on search (several new search companies at PC Forum) these days — finding things you are looking for among the billions of web pages. Blogging comes at the problem from the bottom up. Content created with blogging has tags: date, title, author, category, body. The tags allow people to find things more easily. And of course we are not limited to those simple tags. How about part #, listing date, price, # of bedrooms, genre, etc. As sure as I can spell my name, I am certain that blogging remains as one of the next big things. We haven’t seen anything yet.
Other patrickWeb stories about blogging
Posted by John Patrick on Mar 21, 2005 in
Travels Departure from Auckland was the beginning of a 3,500 mile cruise along the eastern coast of New Zealand, almost due west to Tasmania and then on to Melbourne and Sydney. There were seven stops including the final one in Sydney. The cruise to Wellington was 615 miles and took roughly thirty-six hours. It is a bit strange to go to sleep while the ship is moving at sixteen knots and then wake up, look outside, and see that the ship is docked — either a harbor view or a land view depending on which side of the ship is tied to the pier. The most noticeable thing on shore at Wellington, and some other stops, was an enormous amount of cut timber piled up and waiting to be exported to Japan or other parts of Asia.
(Note: I promise to post pictures in the photo gallery. Between the four of us, we took more than 500 pictures and I plan to weed out the duplicates and ooops’es before uploading to the gallery.)
The day in Wellington went quickly. We saw a few highlights of the capital city and visited a nice pub on the waterfront for lunch before heading back to the ship for departure to Christchurch. Very early in the morning, a ten-car train had pulled up parallel to the ship to take interested passengers on a scenic tour of this beautiful part of the southern island. Our friends decided to take the train but we decided to take a taxi and invent our own tour as we went. Organized tours can be great but there is a lot of overhead in getting everyone loaded and unloaded and making stops that you may not want to make. By doing your own thing you can decide instantaneously to stop to see something and stay a longer or shorter time as you choose. Christchurch is world-renowned for its beauty — especially the beautiful gardens. The homes along the Avon were gorgeous.
It was in the middle of the night on the next leg of the cruise that our friend was stricken with the Norovirus. When checking on how their day on the train was, we found out that she had been quarantined to the stateroom for forty-eight hours. We later learned that when the bio-suited team came to their room, that there had already been 150 cases. That evening, on the way to Dunedin, the Captain announced that the ship had been placed on "red alert". You could hear a pin drop in the dining room as the Captain was discussing this. Our friend recovered fully and none of the other three of us got sick, but daily life onboard changed for all 2,600 passengers and 1,200 crew for the remainder of the cruise.
Norovirus is a name created in recent years to describe the "Norwalk" class of gastrointestinal viruses. You can imagine the symptoms. The virus is believed to spread through physical contact. A number of measures were taken to get control of the virus. Dispensers of Purel-like sanitizing liquid were prominent at the entrance to all the ship’s seven restaurants. Crew members were dispatched continuously to wipe down handrails, elevator buttons, tables and chairs. Salt and pepper shakers and snack dishes were removed bars and restaurants. Buffet meals had additional staff assigned to serve rolls and salads. The ship’s officers and crew handled the incident very professionally. There were certainly inconveniences, but we still had a wonderful time.
Index to more stories about New Zealand 2005 trip
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Posted by John Patrick on Mar 16, 2005 in
IBM,
Internet Technology 
I have to admit that I have been talking a lot about Linux lately. On February 16 the LinuxWorld Conference was held in Boston and I was fortunate to be a speaker there as I previously discussed. An interview entitled "It’s About Freedom" was published in Linux Executive Report and distributed at the conference. It summarizes my thoughts about Linux pretty well.
One month later, this past Sunday, the COMMON Conference was held in Chicago and I reiterated some of the same points. The conference was a bit smaller (2,000 vs. 8,000) attendees, but nevertheless an very enthusiastic audience of 1,200 was on hand. COMMON attendees are users of IBM’s iSeries eServers. Most people in the world never heard of "iSeries" but there are hundreds of thousands of them out there serving the needs of small and medium businesses and distributed locations of very large businesses. The Chief Information Officers of companies using the iSeries are passionate about the speed, flexibility, security, and reliability of the systems. IBM attends the COMMON conference but doesn’t need to extol the iSeries virtues because the IBM customers do it for them.
Tomorrow night I will be speaking at the Society for Information Management – Fairfield/Westchester branch in Stamford, Connecticut.
From
iSeries “News Wire Daily”…
Out of Context: Penguin Power
"Linux is not about "free" — it’s about freedom. There will be a lot of studies coming out saying Windows is cheaper or Linux is cheaper. I don’t know which is cheaper, but I know which is better. … Ultimately, Linux is going to be the most secure."— John Patrick, COMMON keynote speaker
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Posted by John Patrick on Mar 14, 2005 in
Travels Having been away for nearly three weeks, there is a lot to share but I don’t intend to bore you with all the details. I’ll try to write a small summary each day for awhile There is an index that will be kept up to date. There will likely be some technology news and views interspersed along the way.
The first thing I can say about the trip is that Air New Zealand is an excellent airline in every respect. Auckland gave a very positive first impression about New Zealand. I have heard numerous people say over the years how great New Zealand is and I now see the reasons for that reputation — friendly people, beautiful and also quaint cities, spectacular topography, abundant wildlife, and many nice pubs!
We left home at 7:30 am on February 19 and arrived in Auckland at 5:30 am two days later — not only a very long flight but also crossing the International Dateline. We were able to spend two days in Auckland before the cruise departed and so we were able to see some sights and get acclimated to being eighteen hours ahead of home. The most memorable part of the Auckland visit was a forty-five minute ferry-boat ride to Waiheke Island. After arriving at the dock of the island of 7,000 people, there are buses and taxis to take you up the mountain to the town and various attractions, but we decided to hike instead. It was a workout but well worth it to get to The Mudbrick Vineyard. It must be one of the most picturesque wineries in the world. The winery itself is rustic and beautiful but the view of the rolling countryside down to the waters of the Hauraki Gulf, scattered with Islands, and out to the distant City of Auckland is spectacular. We sampled a number of their premium wines — not available in the States — and then had a delightful lunch just inside the terrace. If you ever get to Auckland, I highly recommend taking an extra half-day to visit Waiheke.
New Zealand is roughly 1,000 miles southeast of Australia and consists of two major islands known as the north island and the south island. The City of Auckland is located on the northern coast of the north island and has a population of approximately 400,000. It is historic in some sections and very modern in others. An interesting area to visit is called Sky City.
Sky Tower stands 1,076 feet above the ground — taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the tallest tower in the Southern Hemisphere. The main structure of Sky Tower was built using a special reinforced concrete to create a shaft measuring nearly forty feet diameter with a foundation that goes nearly fifty feet into the earth. Construction of the tower required nearly 20,000 cubic yards of concrete, 2,000 tons of reinforcing steel, and
660 tons of structural steel. During construction, daily real-time readings were taken of the structure using seven global positioning satellites to confirm the exact position of Sky Tower.
Three of us (not including me, the coward) took a "Vertigo Climb" — a two-hour guided tour up the inside of the Sky Tower mast, including a climb from the upper observation deck to the first crow’s nest. If you are a thrill seeker, you can also do a "Jumpstart" by leaping 630 feet from near the top of the tower. The "base-jump by wire" allows you to fall for 16 seconds at nearly fifty miles per hour. No thanks. I just enjoyed the view. We had dinner in the rotating restaurant atop the tower that evening. Sorry to say it was not as good as the view.
The Sapphire Princess departed Auckland at 6:15 PM on Wednesday, February 23, and headed for Wellington. This was the first of seven stops. Click here for a table showing all the stops.
Index to more stories about New Zealand 2005 trip
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Posted by John Patrick on Mar 12, 2005 in
IBM 
Here are the IBM announcements for February. It was a busy month for the company. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.
Posted by John Patrick on Mar 11, 2005 in
Blogging,
People,
Travels 
Two new books arrived this week that may be of interest.
Naked Conversation – How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel is very timely with all that is going on in the world of blogging. I know Robert from Microsoft. He has been active in evangelizing the potential of blogging and very much practices what he preaches, even when his postings may at times not be consistent with company practices. The book explores how blogging has changed the rules of communication and competition and gives business owners the tools to launch an effective blogging strategy. Robert and Shel interviewed many business leaders including Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, Bob Lutz from General Motors and Johanthan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems.
Let Go to Grow – Escaping the Commodity Trap by Linda S. Sanford with Dave Taylor is about strategy and management practices. Normally pretty boring stuff, but Linda and Dave have organized the book in a way that makes it flow very nicely. It is all about driving innovation and gaining productivity — both urgent topics for anyone in a leadership position today. The book explains the concepts of componentization, outsourcing, and off-shoring in a clear but strategic way and then lays out an approach for leveraging the concepts across an enterprise. Practical case studies about Dell, eBay, GE, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota bring it all home. I have known Linda for quite a few years. She has had a number of top-level executive positions in systems, storage, and global sales and is now Senior Vice President of IBM’s internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiatives. In addition to being one of IBM’s highest-ranking women, she also serves as a member of the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame and the National Association of Engineers. She was named one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Business by Fortune magazine, one of the Top Ten Innovators in the Technology Industry by Information Week, and one of the Ten Most Influential Women in Technology by Working Woman. She is also a nice lady!
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