My son Steve has been working with my wife Carmen to get her up to speed on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. I was browsing his LinkedIn profile and saw that she was linked to Steve. So I of course had to ask him to connect me:

Fortunately she accepted my connection!

• Hack’s Haven: An Era Passes at NOAA – “After over thirteen years in my current division, next Monday I’m being kicked out of the proverbial nest. Assuming I don’t hit the ground and splat, I’ve been tasked with creating a “virtual worlds” project for NOAA’s “Technology Outreach Branch.”“
• New York Times: Extinction Is at Hand for Paper Airline Tickets – “Eliminating paper will not make life easier for all carriers. The airstrip serving Lamu Island, Kenya, for example, lacks electricity and, as a result, computers. Kenya Airways must print out passenger lists on the mainland and send them by boat to the airfield.“
• User:Zero Linden/Office Hours/2007 Sep 25 – “Zero Linden: Internally, inside Linden Lab, I’ve taken responsibility for “Develop The Platform”“
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: Colonial Philadelphia Reborn – “Drexel’s project is part Second Life virtual world, part social and economic history, part video game, part computer science, part teaching tool.“

• Don Lancaster: September 8, 2007 – “I can’t believe the number of people who are enthuasiastically getting sucked into the recent “burn saltwater” utter fiasco. There are enough alarm bells going off here for a Pink Floyd Time intro.“
• MeetingsNet: MeCo Hosts First Chat Lesson in Second Life – “Approximately 20 avatars gathered in Second Life on September 20, on the lawn of the MeCo Mansion for the Meetings Community listserv’s first Chat Lesson in the virtual online world. Participants sat in bleachers facing a large stage, complete with podium and projection screen, where technology expert Corbin Ball, in avatar form, presented on such topics as Web 2.0, wireless and mobile technologies, and the impact of the Web on meeting planning.” – – Via Mal Burns.
• Tara Hunt: Geek Marketing – “It’s simple and explanatory of how a new ethic is emerging in marketing. This format is more realistic and relationship driven. Realistic because it doesn’t try to fool itself into thinking that any measurement formerly known as ROI means anything. Click-throughs and traffic and numbers of hits don’t really do it, although if sales are involved, sales still say something. But not everything.“

I had a really rough day on Thursday. I was supposed to fly back to Seattle on a 3:05 PM British Airways flight. There was some sort of mixup with my tickets and I ended up spending nearly 4 hours walking through the airport in a futile attempt to get them to make good on my old ticket. I ended up purchasing a new ticket and will have to rely on our corporate travel department to figure it out.

Within the space of 4 hours I ended up visiting 3 of the 4 terminals at London Heathrow (I say this to get your sympathy, not your admiration).

I had purchased T-Mobile wireless access in Terminal 4 which turned out to be totally useless in Terminal 3. While fiddling with my laptop I witnessed something that started out odd, turned funny, and may have ended badly for the subject of this post.

I was on the second floor of the terminal, and glanced up to see a guy carrying a guitar step off of the up elevator. He was wearing a down vest and a cowboy hat. I did find it strange that he didn’t have a backpack, messenger bag, or briefcase with him.

He took a few steps toward the seating area, laid the guitar down on one of the seats, and stepped in to a gift shop. I returned my attention to my laptop and thought nothing more of it.

A few minutes later he was back, and two police officers were giving him the once-over. He apparently lied to them about having stepped away from his guitar, because I heard one of the officers say that he had watched the suspect walk around the entire second floor. The urban cowboy didn’t realize that he had aroused their suspicions and apparently gave a glib reply. I saw him laugh a couple of times.

The officers got very serious and said “I’m not very happy with you right now, as far as I am concerned you could be a terrorist.” Cowboy still didn’t see how serious this was. He was asked if he had ever been arrested, and he was thoroughly frisked. He kept laughing throughout. I’m not sure if he was nervous or simply thinking that the response was disproportionate to the action. Either way, it didn’t help his cause. They made him take off his shoes and his vest and they even inspected each of his shoes with considerable care. They peered inside the guitar hole.

I didn’t stay to see how this all turned out but it was certainly interesting to watch.

Lessons learned so far:

• Don’t use London Heathrow.
• Don’t be a cowboy.
• Don’t leave your guitar laying around while wandering through the airport.
• Don’t laugh while being interrogated or frisked.

• Bad Astronomer: The Supernatural Does Not Exist – “Anything that has a physical, measurable manifestation is within the realm of science. Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.“
• GigaPan – “GigaPan consists of three technological developments: a robotic camera mount for capturing very high-resolution (gigapixel and up) panoramic images using a standard digital camera; custom software for constructing very high-resolution gigapixel panoramas; and, a new type of website for exploring, sharing and commenting on gigapixel panoramas and the detail our users will discover within them.“
• Dave McClure: VCs & Tech Lawyers: INNOVATE, AUTOMATE, SIMPLIFY – “If you continue to use complex term sheets, please at least acknowledge to the entrepreneurs you’re funding or providing legal services to that you’re intentionally screwing them over with complexity in order to gain a negotiating advantage.“

I am heading home today after a very successful Amazon Web Services evangelism tour through Vienna, Berlin, London, Slough, and Edinburgh. I left my home on the morning of September 10th and I’ll be back at home tonight.

People who don’t do much business travel seem to think that it is a lot of fun, like an all-expenses-paid vacation. Granted, I get to do a lot of good work and to meet a whole lot of interesting people, but life on the road is grueling, not to mention the fact that I’m away from my family for extended periods of time.

Evenings are usually spent working on email and planning the next day — figuring out where I need to go, which tube (subway) lines and trains I will take, and so forth. Due to the time difference between London and Seattle, my colleagues at the home office are just starting to flood my inbox when my working day here should be winding down. That makes for some really long days.

Just for fun, I recorded a number of interesting facts about my current trip:

• 1 canal boat ride
• 3 private car rides
• 3 hotels
• 3 buses
• 7 taxi segments
• 9 meals eaten sitting in front of the computer
• 10 plane rides
• 50 train or tube rides

When I get back I need to spend some quality time with my family, file a massive expense report, and get ready for my next trip or two — some short excursions to Silicon Valley.

I’m all packed up and will be heading to the airport in a couple of hours!

I’ve been trying to simplify my life in various ways for the last couple of months. This includes getting rid of old books, donating old clothing and other surplus household goods to worthwhile causes, unsubscribing from various mailing lists that didn’t bring me any value, and so forth.

I am also trying to adopt a new discipline wherein everytime I get something new I need to get rid of one or two old things. This will help me to organize, simplify, and prioritize the things that I keep. Mathematically I suppose that this should also improve the quality of everything that remains.

I’m doing the same thing with feeds. If I add one new feed to BlogLines I now have to unsubscribe one or two. For example, today I added Tim Ferris (found via Janet) and I dropped Tom’s Hardware and the Yahoo Search Blog. Bye!

How do you go about simplifying your life? Leave me some good comments and I will do a followup post!

• KnowNow Co-Founder Proposes “Syndication-Oriented Architecture” to Manage Information Overload – “It is not farfetched to consider Facebook as an example of the future of enterprise knowledge management. Its personalization and collaborative filtering features may be at an early stage, but its platform strategy makes clear that its members view the world as a continuous stream of written information and social interactions. This infrastructure for scalable information routing is one of the most broadly used publish/subscribe applications in the world.“
• Ernest Prabhakar: Rohit’s SynOA takes the “Sin” out of SOA – “Rohit (as usual) went one step further by coining (and describing) the term Syndication-oriented architecture at the Gartner Financial Service Technology Summit.“
• James Governor: You Can Keep Your “Business Language”: That’s Not Meaningful Conversation – “I don’t only want to know What Stephen and Cote Are Working On. Rather I want to know How They Are Doing. Good managers take a view of their people that goes far beyond the tasks they assign. Twitter helps to keep us all in the loop.“
• Daily Kos: Why American Consumers are Signaling Recession – “The only way American consumers have been able to significantly improve their lifestyles is either to take on debt, using assets which have appreciated in value as collateral, or to refinance their existing debt at lower interest rates.“
• MadConomist: The New American Ghost Town – “In many cases, when the true costs are revealed, the brokers who arranged the mortgages at unfavorable terms have long moved on with their fees, while the original lenders have already sold the loans on the secondary market to banks that used them to back securities.“

• Bad Astronomer: How Wrong is the Flat Earth? – “If someone thinks the world is black and white, then their own mind is too small to be able to hold more than one bit of information.“
• Sean Koehl: Rattner’s Virtual World’s Keynote: Research Reflections on IDF Day 3 – “Virtual worlds are perhaps the most interesting example of the model-based applications that will be enabled by tera-scale computers.“
• Seth Godin: Seven Tips to Build for Meaning – “You have a blog to turn a browser into a raging fan for your candidate or your product. You have a lens designed to teach people what they need to know to confidently sign up for your tour.“
• Boston Globe: Predatory Borrows – “The fact that the federal government is considering ideas on how to help those facing difficulties in paying their mortgages, deserving or not, seems contradictory. Politically, it sounds like some new type of hybrid economics that provides the benefits of capitalism on the way up and the safety of socialism on the way down.“

I left my hotel at 10 AM today with the intention of visiting the Camden Market and Little Venice. Given the rigid structure of my trip to date, I didn’t really plan or map out anything. Instead, I used a very simple map provided by the hotel to orient myself in the right direction, and then filed the map away.

I started by walking down Abbey Road, turnling left on St. John’s Wood and passing in front of the Lord’s Cricket Ground. I continued on up the road, went partway round a traffic circle, and then consulted my map again. I was very close to Regent’s Canal and I found a little set of stairs which gave me access to the towpath next to the canal. As I was walking down the stairs, three London police officers rushed past me and started looking for someone or something under a bridge. I left when they went right and was wondering if there was any imminent danger along the path.

Fortunately the path was alive with cyclists, joggers, families, and dog-walkers and there was nothing to be afraid of. Several riverboats made their way up and down the canal, moving just slightly faster than I was able to walk. Based on a quick glance at a damaged sign, I thought that I was heading toward Little Venice when in fact I was getting closer to Camden Market.

I took a short diversion from the path and walked past the London Zoo. I’m not a big fan of zoos due to an unfortunate event that took place when I was a child, and so I didn’t go in. I returned to the path, walked past a man playing an accordion, and before I knew it was I was in the middle of Camden Market. Curiously enough, I entered the market just feet from the spot where my son Andy and I had eaten lunch when we visited the market in July.

The market was alive with sights, sounds, and smells. People of every possible description were shopping, eating, playing, and just enjoying the wonderful Saturday afternoon sun. Camden is apparently the home of the goth and post-punk populations of London. Girls and guys with unusual hair, lots of piercings, and industrial-looking boots were a common sight.

There was so much good food on display that I couldn’t decide what to eat. I ended up eating some West African curried chicken over rice, and a little while later I had a grilled tortilla stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, and rocket (arugula if you are reading this from the US).

I bought a few things for my kids, a pair of voodoo dolls for myself (another long yet non-disclosable story there) and then took a riverboat ride to Little Venice. The ride retraced my morning walk and took about 50 minutes. We arrived in Little Venice and I didn’t see anything too interesting around there. I walked a couple of blocks to the Warwick tube station and rode the tube back to Kilburn Park and my hotel.

All in all, it was a really worthwhile day. I’d prefer to be home with my wife and children of course, but that will have to wait for another few days.

Here are some of my favorite pictures. You can also see my entire collection on FlickR.