According to the TSA’s John S. Pistole, as quoted in the New York Times, about 1M passengers/day are enrolled in PreCheck. There are about 800M passengers/year (2-3M/day), so I would expect about half or a third of all passengers to go through the PreCheck line. Unless roughly one third of the lanes are PreCheck, it seems the advantage of PreCheck is not shorter lines, but rather that you don't have to remove your shoes.
Burma (aka Myanmar) is changing quickly. Political prisoners are being released, draconian rules are being relaxed, and if this continues I expect tourism will explode from tens of thousands to tens of millions in a few years. Here are a few random observations over my week and a half visit over New Years 2012 :
Like many underdeveloped countries, the place is a garbage heap. Plastic bags and used bottles are everywhere, except in the trash can.
The domestic airlines – Air Bagan, KBZ, Mandalay, Asian Wings—are almost always late for both departure and arrival.
Here are a few books about Burma that you may want to read: George Orwell (who spent a lot of time here), and The White Umbrella.
Economic sanctions means you see relatively few foreign brands. Sure, you can find Coke here but it’s imported from Singapore. Try Star Cola or the various local coffee mixes instead of the real thing.
Ubiquitous sunscreen. The local women cover their faces in a yellow protective paint ground from the bark of a tree, apparently to prevent sunburn.
I didn’t find the food especially appealing: the mohinga noodles are great for breakfast, but the curries (and most everything else) are too oily, without anything special in taste.
You spend a lot of time barefoot if you visit temples or pagodas, where the rule is “no footwear”.
The United States government (as well as the UK and most other European democracies) officially refers to it as “Burma”, a perfectly fine name for the country. Unlike India, whose democratically-elected government deliberately renamed many of its place names in a nationalist effort to assert independence from its British-ruled past, the name “Burma” is simply an anglicized word the locals have always used to refer to the majority ethnic group and the language of the inhabitants. They still refer to their country as “Burma” in verbal conversations.
The name “Myanmar” was arbitrarily hoisted on the country in 1989 by a whim of the repressive military junta that still runs the place. Linguistically, Burmese uses different sounds for the written versus spoken forms of some proper nouns, and “Myanmar” is the sound of the written, formal version of the country name. So why did they change the name we foreigners are supposed to use? Perhaps the ruling junta wanted us to treat their government with more respect.
It’s not an entirely bad name change. Unlike names like “Stalingrad” or “Soviet Union”, which were brand new terms specifically intended to force a new political agenda, there is some logic in asking English speakers to use the pronounced form of the written names. The change is applied consistently to all place names including the (long-time) capitol city Rangoon (Yangon) and the main river, Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady).
But that is a decision that should be up to the people, not the military. Perhaps someday the citizens of a newly-free Burma will elect representatives who will themselves choose to call their country “Myanmar”, at which point I’m sure the United States and other countries will recognize the change. Until then, I’m going to call it by the name the people used the last time they were free.
Okay, you're not really doing iPhone directly over Ethernet, and you'll need a Mac close by to do it, but this is a trick I find handy in hotels that offer wired ethernet for free, but where they charge for WiFi (like Marriott Changfeng Park in Shanghai).
Set up your Mac (I use a MacBook Pro) to do internet sharing over Airport, and you can become your own WiFi hotspot, easily connected to from your iPhone or iPad.
Under System Preferences (available under the apple menu), under "Internet and Wireless", select Sharing, and do this:
Note: I have file sharing turned on as well, but that's not necessary (and normally it's a good idea to keep it turned off).
Also, remember that you'll have to uncheck the Internet Sharing box before you can select different ways of sharing your connection. You'll want to select "AirPort" to create the WiFi hotspot.
I’ve been a little quieter than normal online the past few months. There were a bunch of changes happening at work that were keeping me busy and it just wasn’t appropriate to go into details until it was final.
So here’s my news: my family and I are moving to Beijing! I’ve received a wonderful offer to work with Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, which it turns out has an important office in China. It’s not a localization office – it’s a true development org, responsible for many of the core components that go into Macintosh Office. Specifically, I’ll be working on Mac Excel, which has me especially excited because it’s not only my favorite Office App, but it lets me dust off some of my Apple experience since I’ll be part of a team where everyone uses Macs pretty much exclusively.
Now that the decision has been made, I need to work very quickly on logistics. Since we plan to be there at least two years, we’ve decided to sell our house (know anybody who wants a well-kept home on Mercer Island?) We’ll have a big garage sale this weekend (tomorrow!) and then we’ll be selling our cars sometime in July (want to buy a great, slightly-used Prius?). Meanwhile we have to get visas, do the packing, say goodbye, etc. etc. – it’s going to be a busy few months.
The kids are enrolling in an international school that starts in mid-August, so that’s our big deadline. Now that the word is out, I hope to be much more active online (I’ll need lots of advice!), so please continue to follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and this blog. See you in China!
There are no wine lovers in the San Francisco Bay Area (or in Seattle for that matter) who haven’t been to Napa Valley. But comparatively few people know about a similar wine-growing region just two hours east of Mercer Island (over the soon-to-be-tolled I-90 bridge), in the Rattlesnake Hills area of the Yakima Valley. We spent our weekend there, where some good friends are getting started with their own winery.
First, we picked some grapes:
then we crushed them:
and now look at the toes on my 6-year-old:
You should go too! Best place to stay in Zillah is the Comfort Inn, for about $100/night, including a big breakfast, a pool, and free use of their grill!
As far as I know there’s no law forcing us to do it, but for some reason it seems like all Mercer Island fathers enroll in the Y-Guides program of the Lake Heights Family YMCA, a highlight of which is when we dutifully schlepp our kids to Camp Orkila, in the San Juan Islands each October. Usually they try to schedule it on a cold and rainy weekend, but this year it was absolutely beautiful.
The fathers in my tribe were too busy at work to take the 4+ hour trip via ferry, so instead we did something different: we flew on the Northwest’s own Kenmore Airlines, which has a fleet of seaplanes that take off from Lake Union. I can’t believe I haven’t done this before! Instead of a long, roundabout drive up I-5 and over a ferry, we were at our destination in only 40 minutes.
The prices are pretty reasonable, considering the time saved. For about $100/person each way, we saved about a day of our weekend in travel time. The plane literally landed us right on the beach of Camp Orkila.
Getting there is half the fun, of course. Nothing like flying around the Space Needle in 9-seater airplane.
I haven’t had this much fun in the air since last year when a friend took us up in his private plane and we flew over Mercer Island.
Whenever I’m on a flight, I like to imagine how many people must be in airplanes at the same time all around the world. My favorite flight info site, flightstats.com, has excellent information in real time about everything related to current flights, but what does the world as a whole look like? The answer is in this video, a simulation of all flights worldwide over a 24-hour period.
I love the way you can just watch the traffic spill from east to west as the world wakes up.
[via Air Traffic Worldwide 24HR from kouko a on Vimeo.]
We brought the kids yesterday to Plymouth, Massachusetts to see the Plimouth Plantation, and the full-size replica of the Mayflower. My wife's family can trace itself back to John Howland, one of the original 104 passengers back in 1620 and the oldest surviving pilgrim (he died in his 80s, having fathered ten children). There were no Spragues on the Mayflower itself, but several of the passengers either later married Spragues or had daughters who did, so although as far as I know there is no similar well-documented genealogy on my side of the family, I'm almost certainly a direct male descendent. Genetic testing on my grandmother last Fall shows that I might be descended from some of the native people as well.
That's less of a big deal than you think. In fact you, my dear reader, are almost certainly a direct descendent of the Mayflower passengers too. It's obvious from simple mathematics. Four hundred years have passed since the Pilgrim days. If you assume that each of your ancestors had children somewhere between age 20 and 40, then you are something like 10 or 20 generations removed from then. Each generation has a mother and father, of course, so the total number of your direct ancestors who were alive in 1620 is somewhere between 2 to the 10th and 2 to the 20th power, or anywhere from 1,000 to 1 million people. You are a direct descendent of every single one of them, so don't be fooled by your last name or what you think of as your ethnicity.
This is true even if you think your ancestors are from China or India, or Jewish, or African. Think about it: you had as many as a million ancestors alive and breeding back in 1620. Only one supplied you with your last name, yet each of the others contributed just as much of your genetic material as he did. That's a lot of people, and a lot of years for all kinds of mixups: orphans abandoned and rescued because of war or disease, "non-paternity" events from rape or infidelity, kidnappings. All it takes is one, just one of those events and you are part of another lineage even if it's not preserved in your name or looks.
Welcome to the family!
A very smart, well-read, highly-educated friend of mine is convinced that the "standard explanation" for 9/11 is a hoax. As one proof, he points out that you can't make a mobile phone call from an airplane in flight, like supposedly the passengers of United 93 on Flight 93 did before the plane crashed in Pennsylvania. That famous "let's roll" from heroic passenger Tom Burnett? Never happened, he says.
So in the interest of debunking the conspiracy theory, I risked the ire of the flight attendants during my plane ride this weekend, turning on my AT&T Tilt in order to test the signal strength. I figured I'd call my friend from the plane, maybe leave him a ha-ha-guess-where-i'm-calling-you-from message on his answering machine. Yeah, yeah, I know they ban cell phones out of fear that they'll interfere with "sensitive communications equipment", but the New York Times says there's no evidence for that, and my experiment was for a good cause.
But guess what? It didn't work. Try as I might, I was completely unable to get a signal. It just wasn't there. Only as the plane was on its final descent, not more than 5,000 feet from the ground, did the signal strength become strong enough to detect.
So what does this mean? I can think of a few possible explanations:
What do you think? I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so those are the only explanations I'll suggest, but I admit it does make me curious. Have you ever tried successfully to make a phone call from a plane?
Sixteen years ago this week, I was traveling in my family's ancestral home of Panevezys, Lithuania. A New York Times travel writer visited there now, searching for his family roots, just like I did, only he was more successful.
What a difference sixteen years can make in the life of a country! The place I visited was terribly poor, and although it was a free country, it had been liberated from the Soviets only six months before I arrived. I saw Russian soldiers everywhere, people paid for everything in rubles, and absolutely nobody spoke any English whatsoever.
Of course, during the same period things have changed a lot in the U.S. as well. Average Americans were much poorer back then (per capita incomes in the U.S. are up 77% in real terms in the past 16 years (15% in the past 4 years). Almost nobody used the internet or email. Cell phones were called "car phones" because they were so bulky, and only rich people had them. Although a lot of people had PCs, they were hard to use -- no Windows back then. Digital cameras? GPS? none of that stuff existed.
And what about sixteen years from now? If anything, I'm sure the world will have changed by an even greater amount. You'll be richer (probably at least by double). There'll be new, impossible-to-imagine technologies as significant as the internet in common use.
It's so easy to take today's bad news out of its long-term context. Step back a little, though, and you'll become an optimist like me.
Everywhere in Costa Rica, all the time, there's something interesting to look at or hear. One of our days was spent on Rio Frio, watching some of the incredible wildlife, including this basilisk lizard, better known as the "Jesus Christ" lizard because of the way it walks on water.
My kids and other travel companions are always embarrassed with the way I seem to be constantly taking photos, so this photo wasn't so much a "lucky shot" as it was just one of the hundreds I was taking.
And here's a Hercules Beetle that was given to us by a store keeper in the Poas Volcano area, when she saw how enamored my son is with all things entomological:
Spectacular volcanoes are another reason Costa Rica is like Hawaii, only cheaper. The best example of this is the Arenal volcano, as seen from the window of our plane:
Here's the same volcano as we saw it from our room in the morning at the Arenal Observatory Lodge. All day and night you hear booming explosive sounds of hot boulders crashing down the sides of the mountain. Supposedly it's totally safe for us this far away, though a tourist was killed was a few years ago, apparently from hiking too close when the volcano was having a bad day.
That lodge is a great place to stay, by the way. Our family (3 kids) is too big for a single room, but we were able to get two rooms side-by-side in what they call the Smithsonian section of the hotel. The view, as you can see, is spectacular, but that's not all. There's a wonderful "infinity pool" just outside the room, and plenty of nature hiking. The rates are on the order of what you'd pay at a Holiday Inn in a big US city ($100-$150), and include good US-style breakfast food.
The only downside of the lodge is its remote location. It's an hour-long, very bumpy ride up a desolate but well-traveled road. No dangerous cliffs or curves, but you will be very glad when you reach the top.
We're back from our trip -- a very busy, jam-packed, hectic vacation in Costa Rica. This was my first time to visit the country, and as I always say when arriving in a new place, visiting in person is the best way to pick up interesting facts, so here are some of the tidbits I discovered:
I had expected it to be poor and run-down like other developing countries, but I was pleasantly surprised. For a tourist, even traveling in the countryside, I found it not much different than Hawaii, only cheaper. Everyone takes US dollars and is friendly to Americans, and you won't have trouble speaking English anywhere. Plus, it's only a 3 1/2 hour flight from Dallas, and you're on basically the same time zone when you arrive--no jet lag!
I felt safe and clean the whole time, no nasty mosquitoes or other annoyances. Definitely recommended, even if you are traveling like we were with small children.
