April 20th, and still no sisters. I was completely fogged in today, with no chance to view the 3 sisters (apparently if you were standing there looking at them at precisely 11:15 am, they revealed themselves for about 5 minutes). So, I continued to catch up on some work, and I headed to Leura, the town next to Katoomba, which had a great set of cafes and small shops, and took care of some errands and had some outstanding oolong tea at the Post Cafe.
All around, today was a pretty boring day as I didn’t really get to see anything, but I was able to immerse myself a bit in the local culture. Lilianfels again did not impress me as much as expected, but again, the same friendly face for room service. I usually try to not have room service, but having dinner out alone in a romantic town is a bit much. I had breakfast at the hotel restaurant which was good, but Lilianfels and Katoomba is really not the perfect place for someone traveling alone, in my opinion.
On April 19, it was time to bid farewell to the kiwi nation and fly to Australia. Upon arrival at the Auckland airport, I discovered that there was an entirely separate checkin and passport control section for first class, business class, and star alliance gold members, a nice touch. After being returned to the customs counter to purchase an Australian visa for 30 New Zealand Dollars, I was then quickly dropped to the front of the security line which was convenient.
After finding a few postcard stamps, I made my way to the Koru lounge which was, not surprisingly, much nicer than the other Air New Zealand lounges. Also, the flight was a direct contrast to the Tokyo to Auckland flight, as this flight was on an Air New Zealand 777:
Their 777 which has their best lie-flat business class configuration. It’s somewhat silly because their 10 hour flights have their oldest business class configuration, while their short 3 hour flights between Auckland and Sydney have their best seats. I was told that because of reduced flight traffic, this allowed them to keep their non-stop flight from Tokyo to Auckland with a smaller plane (767 instead of 777), and then use the 777 to run a few less flights a day, with a larger plane, between Auckland and Sydney.
The view over Sydney was breathtaking, and when I landed, I caught a glimpse of the Singapore Airlines A380 which will be my next flight in a week.
Both Australia and New Zealand are very tight at customs with regards to not wanting anything allowed into the country that can destroy their island ecosystem. That said, passing through customs was a breeze. I was met by Eric Moore who drove me to Lilianfels resort in Katoomba so I could see the 3 sisters at the Blue Mountains, a sort of shorter but large and green version of the grand canyon just west of Sydney.
Unfortunately, as you can see from above, just beyond the pool is a massive set of fog, so I was not able to see anything today.
Eric was an extremely informative guide about Sydney and the Blue Mountains region, and provided me with a wealth of information about the region.
Because of the weather, I called for a massage at the hotel, but they were sold out for my entire stay. Note to future self: whenever staying at a hotel with the word “spa” in its description, book your massage in advance or they will not have any appointments available. This afforded me time to catch up on some work, and use the gym. I was told that the gym used to be a honeymoon suite, with the last couple to stay their being Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. I think it serves a better purpose as a gym.
Lilianfels resort is a very nice place for couples and families, but I felt a bit out of place being there alone, more so that anywhere else I have stayed so far on this trip. I ordered room service, which was delivered by a lady that is best described as a clone of Natalie Portman.
April 18th was definitely a day to remember. Web’09 had a great group of attendees and a solid collection of speakers. I was up to give my talk after the morning break, and gave a talk on the Open Web. While I have given this talk several times before, each time I deliver it is quite different. The conference had a number of vendor-specific pitches, which gave me some fresh fodder.
Today was by far my best delivery of this talk, if the audience response and Twitter feedback was any indication. Most importantly, I had fun and I think it made the conference more enjoyable all around, which is a rare accomplishment at a technology conference. I also had the new experience of soliciting Twitter feedback during the talk, which gave me some great ideas for future iterations of the talk, as well as a great way to follow-up with people about the talk. I believe the Web’09 people are still working on putting the talks online, but it should be available soon. All in all, it was a very fun experience.
After lunch, I walked around the harbour a bit, and had lunch and drinks with one of the attendees from the conference, and then Rob Coup joined us for a small Dojo Beer event before the conference after-party.
Among the discussions about Dojo and other topics, another topic I’ve often held dear to the heart is a goal of eliminating the term “red head” from the vernacular. Why? Well, because it’s only my hair that is red, and because we don’t call people blackheads, brownheads, or yellowheads. So, for a while I’ve wanted to come up with a new name, and the best I had come up with was “redh” would was an abbreviation for red hair.
However, redh was pretty odd and unlikely to have any staying power, so when I heard that the phrase Ginger was popular in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, and Ireland, I immediately took a liking to it, in spite of some potentially derogatory interpretations of it. I hope we can replace “redhead” with “ginger” in the US vernacular asap. I also found it amusing to learn that the term “borange” is used to describe people with orange-brown hair, but that term doesn’t really apply to me.
After the Dojo Beer event, I returned in time to attend the Web’09 after party which was a lot of fun. I talked to a bunch of people that attended the conference and had a great time. To top it all off, Morgan Nichol and Mike Forbes knew that I like cider, and took me to a cellar where I got to try a home brew cider that was legendary. Web’09 was one of the best conferences I’ve had the chance to attend, and hopefully I’ll get invited back next year!
My first morning in Auckland, April 17th, was met with a nice view of Sky Tower from my room at the Latham:
This was also Day 1 of Web’09, one of the most enjoyable conferences I’ve ever attended. With about 200 attendees, conferences for me are all about the people and the hallway track, and this conference was great both for that and for some of the talks. I had the chance to have meaningful discussions with about 50% of the people in attendance which is exceptionally high. The kiwi web development community is very cool and tightly knit relative to other countries.
The morning began with a very impressive video of very cool introductions to the speakers, and nice kick off talks by John Ballinger and Rod Drury, who gave a kiwi-centric overview of the web today:
A few talks in, I felt a bit of vendor overload and had acquired some nice fodder for my talk on Day 2, so I headed back to my room to get some work done before lunch. At lunch I met a number of interesting people, including Rob O’Neill of Computerworld who would later write the follow-up article, Pushing the limits of Flash
I quick sidebar to clarify his comment that referenced me, which was:
At the Web 09 conference in Auckland last month, Flash was still getting some brickbats, most notably from Dojo toolkit co-founder Dylan Schiemann, an open source advocate and HTML and JavaScript fan.
It’s not that Flash and Flex were isolated in criticism by me on Day 2 (I bashed Silverlight and the Open Web as appropriate), but the point of my talk was about freedom (not in the Stallman way) to do what you want with the things you create, to not be stuck with a single vendor as your only choice, and to use it in environments that can easily be migrated or deconstructed, on your own terms. The reason I say not in the Stallman or GPL way is that I want to be able to do what I want with the things I create, and I do not believe that people building on free and open source software necessarily need to give back to the community, as it is their choice to be open or not. In general, I don’t like organizations that waffle frequently on their terms as it confuses people. Also, specifically with regards to Flash, I argued that Flex should have just extended HTML rather than creating an XML syntax from scratch, like we did with Dojo. Why force developers to learn a completely new grammar?
Back to the general part of this story… I had a number of good chats today with people, enjoyed Pamela Fox’s talk about Maps APIs (she’s from Google, but gave a nice overview of other services as well):
I also called Jarrod out during his talk for mentioning every other Ajax toolkit except Dojo, even when talking about Bespin is developed in part with Dojo. He made up for this omission on Day 2 in a big way (Thanks Jarrod!):
If there’s a favorite talk from the conference that I attended (note, I generally only make it to a few talks at any particular conference), it would be Pamela’s talk about maps… it was informative and unconventional.
Prior to dinner, there was a good reception in the foyer of the conference and again I met and chatted with a bunch of great people. After that died down a bit, we headed to the Grand Central bar and had food from the next door restaurant, Murder Burger. While no Fergberger, it was a great burger. A bunch of us sat outside (John B., Morgan, Karl, Pamela, Mike Forbest and about 12 or so more including significant others) and continued our conference conversations for several hours, with only a slight interruption from a guy telling me conspiracy theories that I already know and that perhaps aren’t conspiracies but he was crazy enough to make anyone not believe a word he said. I then headed back to the hotel to finish up some work and make a few minor adjustments to my slides for my talk on Day 2.
As I slip further and further behind on my blog posts on my trip, I will note that I’m having a great time and still plan to blog everything eventually. I visited Warwick Castle in England today.
On April 16th, I left Queenstown for Auckland where I gave a talk at the Web’09 conference. An interesting thing about Air New Zealand is that they have their Koru Lounges even in tiny little airports like Queenstown. I wish I could have stayed longer in Queenstown, enjoying the natural beauty of the area.
Alas, I took a short flight from Queenstown to Auckland where I was met with long-time Dojo Contributor Rob Coup. It’s always fun to meet people for the first time in real life. Rob and I had a quick pint at the Langham Hotel after a couple of mishaps (they couldn’t find my record, and then gave me the key card for someone else’s room). The Langham Hotel was nice, but the service was subpar compared to any of the hotels I’ve stayed at up to this point.
There was a speaker’s pre-event scheduled. I quickly met a bunch of people: John Ballinger, the host of this great conference, as well as fellow speakers Philip Fierlinger, John Casasanta, Tim Heuer, Jarrod Bishop, Pamela Fox, and many more. We headed to Cactuslab where I got to learn all about the Google Maps API from Pamela, learned to enjoy a few great cocktails provided by the hosts (), and I got to meet Karl von Randow, who I knew because of his work on Charles, but that I didn’t know was that person until about 20 minutes into the conversation. I also got to learn about Robert Songsmith!
We then headed to dinner at Rocco, where I had the chance to meet David Karp of Tumblr (and his girlfriend), and a number of other speakers from the event. All in all, it was a great kickoff to Web’09.
I slept for a brief amount of time, and then had a very early breakfast again at the Dairy on April 15th with an incredible sunrise:
The BBQ Milford Sound tour bus picked me up at 7:15… the tour guide rocked, knew all the best places to stop along the way to the Milford Sound, told dry meat-eater friendly jokes that I think I only got (e.g. check out the hamburgers up on the right, when pointing to a large field of cows). Well, he was much funnier in his rendition than I am in repeating it. And he prepared a mean BBQ!
The bus was mostly filled with Japanese and Korean tourists, and a few people from the UK. I sat near a German high school student spending a year in New Zealand learning English, and a girl from Scotland spending many months in New Zealand as her Mom is kiwi.
I’ll let the scenery along the way speak for itself:
Finally, we arrived at the Milford Sound, which I think is probably the most beautifully preserved place I’ve ever seen. We took a two hour boat cruise which got a bit rough near the ocean side. It rained a bit near the end, which caused the waterfalls to come to life. I can’t really go this place justice, so here are some pictures and videos that attempt to capture the essence of this incredible place.
I basically never wanted to leave, but I had a 4-hour bus ride back ahead of me. I considered taking a helicopter or small plane back (there’s no view on the bus at night), but the storm that arrived eliminated that option. Instead, I got to watch a movie on board, “The Fastest Indian”, which was a great story about an old school kiwi engineer that set the speed record for a motorcycle… it did an outstanding job of capturing the essence of Los Angeles in the 1960s.
When I arrived back in Queenstown, I braved the 30-minute take away wait for the legendary Fergberger, and it was worth it. It’s one of the best burgers I’ve ever had, and a great way to end my Queenstown experience. Today was an incredible day.
And finally, a couple more pictures of Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown:
Queenstown and the surrounding area rocks and is ridiculously beautiful. The entire area feels like one massive national park. It is a bit trendier than I expected, with lots of people straight out of high school or college tramping around New Zealand.
I began my first full-day (April 14, 2009) in Queenstown with a great breakfast cooked by the owner at the wonderful Dairy Private Luxury Hotel . I then embarked on a bike ride through Queenstown and along the lake. Riding a bike on the opposite side of the road is even more unnatural than driving on the wrong side, because every time you hear a car coming, your natural instinct is to veer right, which of course is right into traffic when riding on the left side!
Queenstown is the adventure capital of the world, including the place where Bungee Jumping was invented. As part of this trip, I’ve been trying new things and in general trying to break myself out of stubborn ways. For example, in Japan and China and Korea, I pretty much ate anything that was presented to me and wasn’t horribly cruel to animals. I found for example that I do like well-prepared sushi. So, I didn’t want to freak anyone out, but I tried the bungee jump since it was invented in Queenstown. Sadly, it was pretty anti-climactic. I wasn’t particularly nervous, and it was over pretty quickly. The free-falling was an interesting sensation, but it’s not something I’d likely do again as it’s just way overrated in my opinion.
Given the relaxing beauty of Queenstown, for the rest of the day, I mostly caught up on work and explored the cafes of Queenstown, prior to an excellent Dojo Beer and dinner event:
We have several attendees from the Dunedin that made the drive over, and a couple of local web developers as well. In typical New Zealand style, we started with a drink or two at a tapas pub with a waterfront view, then had a nice dinner, and then crawled to a few bars and pubs for the rest of the evening. It was really great to meet people with an interest in Dojo and just great people all around.
On April 12th, I left Tokyo for New Zealand. My lack of understanding of the size of the Pacific surprised me when I learned that the travel time from Tokyo to New Zealand is approximately the same as Los Angeles to New Zealand.
Anyways, after my final hours in Tokyo, I rode to Narita airport and took a 10+ hour red-eye flight to Auckland on an older Air New Zealand 767 with business class service that should really be classified as premium economy. After my awesome experience on Asiana Air, I was a bit underwhelmed with everything about this flight except for the friendliness of the staff which was great.
Arriving in New Zealand was interesting due to the very strong warnings about bringing anything in through customs that might harm the ecological purity of the kiwi nation. After a layover for a few hours in the Koru Lounge, I was on my way to Queenstown. For the non-cloudy portions of this flight, the views were breathtaking.
The landing was particularly surprising as our 737 landed right between two hills on a single runway. At the end of the runway, the plane stops and turns around to head to the terminal. It’s an oddly small airport for such large planes. Air New Zealand did serve veggie chips, my new favorite short flight snack.
Queenstown is simply astonishing in beauty.
I checked into the lovely Dairy Private Luxury Hotel with a nice view of Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu and then headed down to the lake for a quick hand-make fish and chips dinner. I met a few people from Germany and China that were there for a few months studying English and learned more about the town. I’ve been meeting my fair share of randomly interesting people throughout my trip. I then walked around Queenstown, and realized that it also has the requisite Starbucks, before crashing early after the long red-eye the night before.
The weekend of April 11th was my final two days in Tokyo, so I packed them full with things to see and do. Bill Keese and I met up with Floyd and Werner from QCon and we set out to find the cherry blossoms.
We started out in a pair of parks with temples and cherry trees that were mostly past their blossoming prime, but we did find a few remaining, mostly those trees that live in the shade.
I actually found better blossoms that night on the streets of Ginza:
We ate some great street vendor food in the park (bento boxes, yakitori, rice sandwiches, etc.). The parks were was both serene and entertaining depending on the section and crowd level. We witnessed a couple of very traditional wedding proceedings, and written prayer boxes.
I also had some time to people watch, including the owner of Pinky, a dog that weighs as most 2kg that took a huge liking to me.
Then, for some nice contrast we went to the Akihabara Electronics district, where I believe that if it is electronic and has been made within the past 40 years, you can buy it:
One of the QCon reps then drove us to dinner. Driving in Tokyo is and insanely organized chaos. We even drove into a car elevator at one point while finding parking in Ginza. We had dinner at the most amazing Tofu House (梅の花, pronounced ume no hana) in what was probably a ten-course tofu meal. I have no idea tofu could taste this amazing or variant.
I also got to see a number of familiar west sites, with the good being Apple and the bad being the proliferation of 7-11 and ampm everywhere. Notice the different selection of iPhone App Icons.
We found an excellent french cafe on a random floor of a non-interesting building in Ginza as well.
On Sunday, while searching for food, we stumbled upon a random car show of old Datsuns. It was very cool as these were not cars you would normally find at US car shows:
I was determined to find good yakiniku or teppanyaki as my last meal in Tokyo, and it took us a while, but we finally found a place open for lunch on Sunday, and it turned out that it was the original teppan place, with a great view of the city (I forget the name, I’ll add that later). Teppan is much nicer in my opinion in Japan as it is not some cheeky gimmicky show, and it is much more efficient. The tables are very long so the chefs can quickly go between groups as needed:
It was then time to fly to Auckland and Queenstown which I will cover in my next post.
Meanwhile, fast forward two weeks, and today I’m heading to Amsterdam now from Sydney on Singapore Air’s A380… 30+ hours of transit including flights of ~9 and 13 and 2 hours, plus layovers. Luckily I’m in business class and the lounge in London, site of my nearly 5 hour layover, is supposed to have decent shower facilities. This was somewhat of a struggle as my segment from Singapore to London was just confirmed yesterday.
