Flight To The Kremlin

I have learned a lot during the last two weeks while visiting six countries. One of the most interesting days began with a flight from Pulkovo Airport in St. Petersburg to Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow. The Russian airports could use some upgrading of services, shopping facilities, and direction signs in English, but they are said to be quite safe. Boarding the Ilyushin-86 aircraft was an experience. Like many European airports, the first step is to ride on a bus across the tarmac to the plane. What was different was the entry — it started by going up steps into the belly of the plane where luggage is stored. From the storage area a stairway led to the main cabin where there were approximately 350 seats arranged in three sets of three per row.

The Il-86 development was announced at the 1971 Paris Airshow and the wide-body entered service in late 1980. This particular IL-86 was showing it’s age and may easily have been twenty-five years old. The interior of the plane and the uniforms of the flight attendants were outdated but the service was efficient and friendly. The four Kuznetsov NK86 turbofan jet engines lifted the plane to cruising altitude very quickly for the one hour trip. The flight to Moscow and the return to St. Petersburg both left on time and arrived at the destination on time.

The afternoon at the Kremlin far exceeded my expectations. Kremlin means "fortress” in Russian and generally refers to any major fortified central complex in Russian cities. The one we visited is the best known one, the Moscow Kremlin, where the Russian government is based and where the President of Russia lives.

Standing in the center of Red Square was a real treat with spectacular sights in every direction. Saint Basil’s Cathedral and the Kremlin towers are majestic and incredibly colorful. The Red square separates the Kremlin from an historic merchant quarter and the major streets of Moscow radiate from the square in all directions. The square is steeped in centuries of history. I don’t recall the famous events that took place there in 1941 and 1945 nor the establishment of Lenin’s Mausoleum, but I do remember when a German pilot named Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 on Vasilevski Spusk next to the Red Square in 1987.
On the eastern side of the square is the spectacular GUM department store which in addition to shops offering all the top retailing brands of the world had dedicated the first floor of huge open ceiling building to the inventions of Leonardo Da Vinci. It would have been easy to spend a whole day there.

Following a one-hour tour of the Kremlin art galleries — which rival the Vatican Library in Rome — we had a traditional Russian dinner, complete with vodka, and then a return flight to St. Petersburg. We got back to the ship after midnight. It was a day I will never forget.More on the rest of the trip to follow.

Behind The Scenes In The Blogosphere

Last month I got an email from Nora Barnes who is a professor of marketing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She said she was conducting the first academic study about blogging and wanted my input, which would be combined with that of dozens of others. Her goad was to report on what motivates bloggers, how they handle legal and ethical issues, and how blogs have helped promote their businesses or points of view.

This morning Dr. Barnes reported that her blog study is now finished and up on the UMD Center for Marketing Research web site. The report is in pdf format and you can find it here. Nora’s study takes the emotion out of the subject and adds some substantive research and a great deal of insight. She said that what started out as "just another researcher trying to study something interesting" revealed what makes bloggers "different from those of us watching (reading)". I am certain her report will be quite valuable to institutions of all kinds who have not yet gotten their blogging strategy to the level they want.

Other patrickWeb stories about blogging

IBM Alumni

One of the many innovations Sam Palmisano has spearheaded at IBM is the idea of reaching out to "alumni". The first initiative was a few years ago when he started a semi-annual reception for executives and former executives of the company. That was just the beginning and now the idea of reaching out has been opened up big time. The number of past and present IBMers is probably close to a million people. Establishing communications with such a huge base can be nothing but a good thing for the company.

When I left engineering school and joined IBM in 1967, it was common to look for a job at a company and expect to stay there your entire career. Nobody thinks that way anymore. If you tell someone you were with a company for decades, they might ask "what’s the matter, couldn’t you find any other jobs?". Another change is in the old days if someone left the company they were considered a traitor and barred from coming back. Today, there are many executives that left the company at some point, got some experience at one or more other companies, and then brought that experience back into IBM.

The Internet has enabled everything to be connected to everything, so setting up a blog to “connect” past, present, (and maybe future) IBMers to each other and with the company seems like a very good idea. The The first step was the Google Group, the logical step two is the new Greater IBM blog. Over time other forms of web technology such as wikis, audio and video podcasts, instant messaging, and various mobile technologies will likely enter the mix.

The possibilities are endless — collaboration on projects, personal networking for jobs and deals, referrals to and from IBM, and social networking for the fun of it. I look forward to being part of this as it evolves. Upon e-tirement in 2001 with nearly four decades at IBM, I don’t really feel like I left anyway! Feel free to visit patrickWeb. There are a number of categories that I have been writing about for more than ten years. Things related to IBM are at this site, I am sure I will be writing about and linking to the Greater IBM blog as will others. Cross linking will increase the overall “connectedness”. That’s what the web is all about. I am really proud that IBM is taking the blogosphere so seriously.

Greater IBM Blog
Greater IBM on Google Groups

Book Update: 2Q2006

So many great books, so little time! This posting is to recommend two books that were extremely interesting and enjoyable. First is Genome by Matt Ridley. After the Computational Biology panel at Demo in February, I asked the panelists what book I could read to learn more about the mapping of the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes that make up the human genome. All three experts recommended Matt Ridley’s book. Genome is organized into twenty-two chapters as a convenient way to tell the incredible unfolding story of what we are all about. Each chapter is like a story unto itself describing the characteristics of some of the more important genes that are part of that chromosome. The twenty-third chromosome pair is what we learned in high school — two large X chromosomes in women and , one X and one small Y in men.

Ridley explains in almost excruciating detail how some of the genes work and the implications of having a particular gene that doesn’t work. For example, there is a family of genes called the apolipoprotein genes, or APO genes, that comes in four basic varieties — A, B, C, and E. If you happen to carry of the E variety genes, your probability of getting Alzheimer’s disease is dramatically higher than the population at large. Whether you would actually want to know that you have propensity to get a disease that for which there is no cure or prevention steps is another question. One thing for sure is that by reading Genome you get an appreciation for how much is actually known about genes and how incredibly fast the knowledge base is growing. There is no doubt in my mind that the improvements in medicine over the next ten years will surpass what we have seen in the past 100 years.

Equally intriguing but much more entertaining is Digital Fortress by Dan Brown. To call it a techno-thriller is an understatement. It is riveting and chilling from the first page to the last. I could not put it down. Like The Da Vince Code, you will question how plausible some of the happenings are and you may question the validity of the details of the inner workings of the NSA. The core theme of the book has to do with one of my favorite topics, cryptography. After designing a computer that could break any encryption, the NSA found itself hostage to the technology. Highly recommended read.

Stories from the "favorites" category of patrickWeb

The Application Web

This week I attended an IBM software technology briefing about SOA. Only brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let’s see, is it safe operating area,
School of the Americas,
Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the
Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. Maybe it is about an architectural firm that has great customer service? Or maybe it is about the architecture of a building that has a good service entrance? Neither. The SOA of the briefing stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it is about a new way to get things done with software. Actually it is isn’t new — the idea has been around for decades — but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly call it “so a”. After an IBM briefing about "virtualization" a year ago, I tried to explain the word in simple terms (see Virtually Real or Really Virtual). I’ll try that approach here with SOA.

In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet — to build a people-oriented and user-friendly integrated experience for all parties involved – employees on the intranet, suppliers, customers, partners, analysts and prospective constituents. There is more to this story. (read more)

IBM Happenings: May 2006

The month of May was filled with a slew of IBM announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and corporate initiatives. I am particularly excited about IBM’s leadership with OpenAjax.
There are a few skeptics emerging and that is how I know that Ajax is sure to be a really big thing. It will change the Internet experience for all of us more than anything so far. Here are all the announcements made by the company during the month. The complete index of prior IBM Happenings is here.