1) Joel West, despite his vow, got a blog. Although there are only a few posts there yet, I get the feeling that this is going to be very interesting if you are interested in “open IT strategies”.

2) Whenever I go online, be it morning, evening, or night, my new colleague Martin Wallin is online as well. That is scary. Is he really that productive, needing no sleep at all?

3) Japan’s 71-year-old health minister Hakuo Yanagisawa gave a speech in which he called Japanese women “birth-giving machines” and called on them to “do their best per head.” To his defence one has to add that he concluded “although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.” (from boingboing.net)

The other day, I tried to pay with my Mastercard at the supermarket. However, the display would just issue: “Bank rejected payment, call 044……..”. The lady at the cashier said that she had never seen this message before, so I was a little concerned.
Today I called up the hotline. I told the lady what had happened and she told me “ohh, we detected a suspicious transaction which we need to confirm. Have you on Jan, 3 used the card in Hawaii for a sum of 15USD?” I told her yes, why? (I bought Internet access for our hotel room with that) She said, “OK, that’s all, you can continue to use your card now.”

I am really happy it was nothing serious, and I am glad to see that credit card companies actively identifying fraudulent activity, but hey, they do have my full address and phone number. Can’t they call me up and ask me instead of just closing down my card and waiting until I would call their hotline? I could have needed the card for something serious.

Disabling the card because of one payment of 15USD? I wonder what algorithm they use to detect fraud.

Today I got to know Martin Wallin our third Postdoc at the chair. I’m looking forward to be working with him. Although he needs to work on his Google juice (can’t find his blog to link to it, searches turn up scientology related stuff :-P); plus he doesn’t like Macs :-).

Attended Joel West’s session on standards and standardization, which was interesting (Although I am happy that my mother is not attending during my presentations as happened in one presentation). The room was friggin’ cold though, brrr.

Our presentation at the conference was also yesterday. The Open Source session was comparably crowded, about 25 persons attended. Matthias Stuermer did a very good job at presenting our stuff, and he managed to stay exactly within the given time with Swiss precision. Well done Matthias! Lot’s of questions and comments followed, however these were constructive and helpful, I got the impression that our study came across as credible and not boring.

I also like the other two presentation. Greg Madey looked at Sourceforge data, identifying social positions (using social networks and chi-square tests) from the distributions of the type of activity that persons did there.
Jay Asundi presented a comparative case study on the patch review process on the mailing lists of projects. While the results table looked very impressive, I was missng a little the next step: little conclusion was given, or implications discussed. However, he came there with his “guru’s wife”, a term and job description which I simply love.

In the evening, we went to dinner with Hala Annabi, our session chair. I had read many of her articles before but never actually met her. She is a charming, entertaining, friendly and very clever person and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening with her and Matthias. It was a great pleasure getting to know her.

Stefan Haefliger, please note that we got two potential presentation for our brown bag series: Kevin Crowston is in Zurich in May and Joel West will tour Europe the week after the Euram conference. Can you send them a mail, reminding them of the invitation and giving them some info on the brownbag series?

FUN FACT: It seems impossible to send e-mails from the hotel. The Mail server won’t give any error messages, but the e-mails won’t arrive. Neither Matthias nor me we able to send a mail using a mail client with the eth account or a private mail account. The only thing that work are web mail frontends. When Heidi had booked our Hotel room, the Hotel staff was also not able to send a confirmation e-mail to either her official or her private e-mail address. Weird. I guess they are being intercepted, printed out and George Bush just takes some time reading the pile before they are allowed through.

Travel to the HICCS conference in Hawaii began. (This is a long post)

Battery trouble
Of course the adventures began at home. Stefan Haefliger had kindly lent me his spare set of powerbook batteries (the exploding ones which were never returned to Apple). However, during the night I could hardly sleep as I tried to imagine what would happen if some kind of explosion would go off in my handluggage. I don’t want to go to Guantanamo, so I thought this might not be such a good idea. The more I thought about it, the more I became absolutely sure that the batteries would indeed explode, so I’d better not take them with me, but where should I store them in the meantime, living in a wooden house. I put them safely in our fireplace and could start my trip to Hawai.

Zurich Airport
Almut brought us (Matthias and me) to the airport at half past 4 in the morning (thanks Almt, I love you!) where we checked in and went through the passport control. Matthias then remembered that he had forgotten to deposit his GA (train ticket) at the train station counter. So we had to get out of the restricted area again to get to the counter, however before 6AM it is not possible to leave the airport as the only exit is through the regular customs exit and they don’t open until then. A friendly employee then opened the automatic doors just for us wondering what why we would be leaving the airport before the first arrival. Matthias deposited his GA (after we waited until 6.16 when the counter opened and we went all the way back. From then on everything went smooth until the start except that Matthias had to leave his new Deodorant behind as it was over 150ml.

San Francisco
After a long flight we arrived in San Francisco with a beautiful view over the area during the landing approach. The immigration officers were really relaxed and friendly. The customs guy asked us were we had our main luggage when we wanted to continue to our connecting flight. “It’s checked through all the way to Hawai” we answered. “No, you’ll have to pick it up and re-check it” was his reply and indeed our luggage already circled on the belt. We picked it up, re-checked it just 100m further again. After a fat Burger (note to myself: Willow Street Wood oven Pizza is not necessarily to be recommended for friendliness nor quality) we watched a Dvd and drove the terminal-connecting AirTrain back and forth as we had a total of 5 hours waiting time there. Matthias bought a drink just before checking in and during the next security check he was duefully presented with the options of leaving his drink behind or leave the area immediately and drink it up. So he was escorted behind the fencing lines (although unwillingly, arguing that he could drink just some of the liquid until he reached the permitted maximum quantity) where he stood with two security guards. After finishing his bottle he had to re-queue at the security check go though the detector where the same lady which had examined him before undertook a thorough check. (It might not have helped that he set off the alarm twice by forgetting to take of his watch and his belt :-)).
We finally made it to the gate in time, but the time was not half as boring as I had it imagined to be.

Kona, Hawaii
Finally the flight to Kona, Hawai went comparably eventless. We just had to wait for 50 Minutes to get our luggage and later the same amount for the rental car, as everybody seemed to want one. The clerk overheard some complaints and simply said: “Just get used to it. Everything goes a little bit slower here.”

First impressions on the hotel tomorrow. Tired… falling into my bed now.