As promised, I wanted to give some observations and thoughts on our trip to Latvia for Robert and Laura’s wedding. Giving a day by day account is not my thing, so for that, look at my previous entry which has links to Tiffany’s journal of our adventure. I tried to make some notes of things that struck me as unique and interesting as I was jostled around in the mini-bus (very, very mini) as we left Liepaja back to Riga.

As is probably logical when visiting a former Soviet block country, I really wondered what evidence of the former U.S.S.R would still be visible. Latvia gained independence in 1991, so there have been many years for the country to remove the traces. While traveling through Latvia, it is clear that the economy is still very agriculturally based. I think to me a perfect example of the difference in the economy and how the society operates was the food market in Liepaja.

In the US, “Farmer’s Markets” are places that generally get set up on weekends as destinations for the upper middle class to show up and shop with their little dogs in tow. It is a specialty type of place and it is considered socially responsible and earth friendly to shop locally grown foods. It is viewed as “progressive” to participate. There is a certain irony in this view when you look at a country like Latvia. In reality, there is nothing “progressive” about those kinds of markets (except maybe the extra costs in the US). They have existed for centuries. And until you see one in a country like Latvia, where it runs every day and is used as a primary source of food, that you can truly understand and appreciate what a market can be. The quality and variety of locally grown food was amazing; from great vegetables to more variety in meats and fish than you see in most any store or market in the US.

Another food observation. Fruit trees were everywhere! Mostly apple, you would see them in almost everyone’s yards, along the sides of roads, in the city. And as far as I could tell, these were not the nasty, inedible crab apple varieties you see used as ornamentation in the US; no, these were regular, pick off the tree and eat varieties. At one point I wondered where Gunta (one of Laura’s bridesmaids) kept getting an apple to eat until I realized she was just pulling them off a tress above us.

The cuisine was also unbelievable. Before we left, Tiffany and I did some quick research into Latvian cuisine. Unsurprisingly given the climate, we found that it was heavily based on root vegetables. We were a little concerned given the US mentality of how these are cooked; often resulting in relatively tasteless piles of mush. We could not have been more wrong; what these people could do with potatoes? oh my god. I think it is a lesson to learn for anyone traveling: No one likes to eat nasty food. If a country has a particular ingredient that dominates its cuisine, they will find the best, most tasty ways to cook it. The item that the articles we read failed to mention, was the wonders that the Latvian cooks can do with sauces. Yes, many of the meals that we had were pork and potato based, but, oh, the sauces. Rich, flavorful, mouthwatering; they added such variety to what would in the US be considered simple, not particularly sexy ingredients. Dill seems to be a favorite herb, one I was not overly used to cooking with, but they used it so expertly to add to the fresh ingredients they had at hand. I will never again scoff at the native ingredients when I travel.

It felt to me like Latvia was a country that was still firmly rooted in the 19th century but was either running or being pushed headlong into the 21st century. Wonderful, local food could be had for a fraction of the cost that we pay, however a piece of electronics that is cheap in the US would be exorbitantly expensive. This dichotomy showed itself when we visited Laura’s family at their farm; They had reasonably reliable internet access provided by what appeared to be a mesh network, but still had an outhouse.

It appears I meandered a bit from my topic of lookouts for Soviet influences. The simple observation is that I did not see many. From what little I understand of Latvian history, the local population was not overly fond of their place in the Soviet Union, so it is unsurprising that in 18 years they removed the overt signs of their dominion. However I did notice some things that I think are probably hints. While riding the train from Riga to Liepaja, we went past many train stations for small towns. After about 2 or 3 of them I realized that for the small towns, they were all identical in architecture and decoration; the only way to distinguish them from each other were the signs. I picture for myself a book given to architects that when a new train station was needed, they looked it up, indexed it by town size and built the appropriate one. I was also surprised that even given the abundance of forests, all of the power and communication poles were made of concrete, not wood. I have no idea why this may be; there are certainly durability reasons, but maybe there was also an imperative to use more concrete.

One last cultural note for anyone else traveling to Latvia. Prepare to give lots of flowers. Going to a wedding? Bring Flowers! Meeting someone for dinner? Bring Flowers! Going to a party? Bring Flowers! This we learned before we went on the trip, but there is another secret; how many? For positive, happy events (weddings, party, etc.) you should bring an odd number of flowers. For solemn events, bring an even number of flowers. There; now you know.

It was an amazing trip, I would love to go back and have more time to wander and visit the country (and eat more of their wonderful food).

What a trip! I could not have imagined the amazing sights and experiences I had in Latvia. It is unlike any country I have ever visited. I have a list of topics I want to touch on, but I think I will do that in subsequent posts. This post is a quick reference for all of you to the various pictures that I took from the trip. I will try to collect my thoughts on other topics later this week and do some writing.

For more information on the trip itself, I refer you to the great job that Tiffany did documenting the trip every night (and sometimes multiple times a day) on her blog TLB Entries: Days 0 and 1, Day 2 part 1 and part 2, Day 3, Day 4 part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5, and finally Days 5 and 6.

I stayed on after Latvia for a business meeting in Switzerland, so there are also pictures from there.

• Wedding Rehearsal Dinner
• Around Liepaja
• Robert and Laura’s Wedding
• Robert and Laura’s Wedding Journey
• Wedding Reception(s)
• Aarau, Switzerland

Enjoy the pictures and pass along any questions you want me to answer in subsequent posts.

Just a quick note for now. If you want to follow Tiffany and I’s adventures in Latvia, she is posting daily on her blog.

TLB Entries

It seemed like the day for Meghan and Jeff’s wedding was always 2 years away, but it kind of hit me two weeks ago as I packed for my whirlwind trip to Iowa and then the wedding that 2 years was now. It still seems like a blur from the time when I first got introduced to Jeff to the way that he just fit in with all of us so well to this past weekend, watching him and Meghan start the rest of their lives together.

I can definitely say that this was one of the most enjoyable weddings I have ever been to. Both Meghan and Jeff’s families were open and welcoming and basically adopted Tiffany (who was Maid of Honor) for the whole process. I played a far smaller role as general gopher for anything they needed help with and as unofficial, adjunct photographer but I still felt like I was a part of this new, wonderful family. Between the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and the reception, I took over 1300 pictures and that was not a hard number to come to. I can’t imagine how many the official photographers have to wade through.

I don’t feel like I can do justice to the events in words here, so I will only share the pictures that I took. To me, looking at them, the happiness and pleasure that is on everyone’s faces is testament to this wonderful event.

• Rehearsal Dinner - Held at Reynold’s Tavern in Annapolis.
• Wedding and Reception - Held at the Chesapeake Bay Beach Club on Kent Island, MD.

Congratulations Meghan and Jeff! I couldn’t be happier for both of you.

I received a postcard in the mail yesterday with regards to a magazine I unexpectedly started receiving for free about a year ago:

Dear Subscriber,

Recently we sent you a notice letting you know that you would receive Magazine B in place of Magazine A, which suspended pulication as a stand-alone publication in late 2008. Regrettably, we have decided that we will no longer be publishing Magazine B.

In its place, we will be sending you magazine C…

If I had paid for Magazine A I would probably be annoyed, but I am just subtly amused.

If you had asked me 10 years ago my thoughts on project management, I would have lamented the overly restrictive activities, rules, and heaven forbid processes. I have leRner since not that I was necessarily wrong, but that I was biased from a viewpoint of a company that had that natural, instinctive operation. The addition of what I naively considered project management just made things worse. Due to smart people and good leadership, we already had found that sweet spot of operation.

In the majority of my subsequent jobs, I have been lucky to have similar situations. Recently, however, as I have moved up in my organization and talk with others in different companies, I have seen the risks of both too little and too much management.

On the too much side of things, I see organizations that are burdened with huge handbooks defining every aspect of how a project is supposed to proceed. These are generally written by well intentioned peole who have never actually worked on a project. They sound good in theory, but as I like say, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in practice they rarely are. What does this result in? It results in a process that is ignored or only partially followed. You end up with people frustrated that they cant count on the process to work because the cost of implementing it is far too great. Token compliance is the inevitable result of reality; frustration with the process but no benefits.

On the flip side, you have organizations with little or no project management. This has many causes; ignorance, small companies who are growing, companies that dont know how, or key people in the organization who think like I did when I started working in the tech sector. In this scenario, you end up with a group of people which rely only on the personalities of the group. Some people are better able to function in a completely free form (or anarchic) environment. But as projects get more complex and more people get involved, the costs of the lack of planning take a toll on everyone. Without a plan, people face the risk of being pulled in many directions simultaneously. It has been shown that the human brain is most efficient when it works on a single topic (being in the zone). But when you are interupted, it takes at least 30 minutes to get back to that same level of productivity. And with no plan, this happens more and more frequently, potentially dooming the project to failure, frustration, or cost overruns.

To me, that is the one and only goal of project management; to keep the team on focus, out of the weeds, and in the zone. Scrum, agile, waterfall, I really couldnt care less. Find what works for you and your team. Use it just enough to make things flow but no more. Find the right tools and embrace them. You will work better.

So just about a week after my first ever semi-professional photo shoot, I got to do it again, this time at the Blue Talon Bistro. What fun!

We actually did it over two nights this time since Chef was not at the restaurant on Monday (yes, everyone just refers to the chef as Chef). After we did the shots of the dining room on monday, the kitchen treated us to a full dinner which was quite amazing (including wine). Food just kept coming out to eat; I was quite stuffed and was slow to want to move around even the next morning. This is what makes doing restaurant shoots worth it. Tiffany and I spent the whole time chatting it up with the bartender, who is an up and coming graphics designer.

On tuesday , we worked in the kitchen. The Talon’s kitchen is much more of a “working” kitchen as opposed to the Fat Canary’s “show” kitchen. They both get the job done, but the Talon’s does not have a lot of extra room to stand in and the lines of sight are not there, making this much more challenging. But the light was much better and that made taking the shots easier.

I was amazed at the difference in the attitudes between the two restaurants. I realized that a chef, like that at the Fat Canary, who is comfortable having a kitchen that is wide open to the dining room clearly has a more outgoing and gregarious attitude. This attitude carries over to his staff and the feeling in his kitchen. The Talon has a more traditional kitchen, and while everyone was very nice, they were also much more serious and interested in getting work done. You can even get a taste of the difference with the servers and others outside the kitchen.

So much fun; I hope I can get to do this more.

Blue Talon Shoot Gallery

Good morning everyone. I thought I would share a technology solution to a problem I have been facing with calendars. Up until a year or so ago, I was generally anti-calendar. This was not really a technology problem, it was a bandwidth control one; it was my belief that if I had so many things going on that I couldn’t keep them in my head, it was too many. This was probably foolish, but it worked for many years. My life tended to be “event driven” so many things I didn’t have to plan towards. But as I have moved on, expanded my social circle, expanded my work activities, and frankly, gotten older and slower, this method didn’t work so well. As an example, here is a week from my work calendar:

So keeping it in my head is not going to happen.

Here is the landscape I am trying to manage as it stands now:

• Calendars I pay attention to:

  1.  My personal calendar 2.  My work calendar 3.  My travel schedule (provided by the awesome [TripIt](http://www.tripit.com), highly recommended) 4.  Shared calendars for Tiffany and others
  

• Devices I use:

  1.  Personal computer at home 2.  Personal laptop 3.  Work laptop 4.  Personal iPhone 5.  Work Blackberry 6.  Other internet enabled computer
  

• Another item of note. I don’t want to use something web-based all of the time. I like desktop applications (iCal by choice, Outlook by necessity at work), so supporting those is critical.

I initially solved the problem of dealing with calendar 1 and devices 1, 2, and 4 by using Apple’s MobileMe. This worked very well for syncing those devices but it fell down in trying to sync external calendars (like 3 and 4) or getting it to other devices. (I still use MobileMe for keeping bookmarks and contacts in sync, for which it is great.) It also had no way of getting my work calendar in place.

As is unsurprising, I finally settled on switching over to Google Calendar as the central repository for all my calendars. It has worked very well, with only one hack to get a limitation of Google’s Outlook sync to work right, but more on that later. So here is my solution:

• A central Google Calendar account. It contains:

  *   My personal calendar as primary *   Subscription to my TripIt calendar *   Subscription to friend's calendars *   Subscription to secondary Google account for work (see hack below)
  

• Google Sync for my iPhone with visibility to any of the calendars above.
• A secondary Google Calendar account to sync for work using Google Calendar Sync. I had to create a secondary Google calendar account for this because the current version of the Google Calendar Sync only syncs Outlook with a primary google calendar, which is my personal calendar. I didn’t want to mix my personal calendar items with my work ones. By having Outlook sync with the secondary Google account, I can keep them separate. Additionally, I only view work events through Google, so the extra hop was not a problem.
• Google supports CalDAV integration with iCal. This allows me to see and edit all of my Google calendars through iCal.
• Outlook can get a read-only copy of my personal calendar via a private feed allowing me to view it in Outlook.

Phew. Make sense? It isn’t really as complicated as it sounds, I promise. With the exception of the hack to get Outlook data up into the system, my primary Google Calendar account sits at the center and everything else syncs with it.

So, this solution works for me. I am currently investigating how to maintain to-do lists through the system. Google has them, but I don’t yet know how they will sync across the system. Also looking at Remember the Milk which also integrates with Google Calendars.

I hope this information is useful helping someone else set up a central system without all the fuss I went through to get here.

It has been a bit since I posted. I keep having ideas of things to post, but just never get the energy up to do so. My friend Michael has started posting again on his blog, Madking’s Musings, about all kinds of techie stuff. I love reading the entries and often want to make a response, but haven’t yet done so. Nor will this post correct the lack.

Nope, today is just a quick note about a great thing I did this past Sunday. After a great mother’s day weekend with Tiffany’s family (and yes, I called my mom too), I got invited to help with a photo-shoot for The Fat Canary in Williamsburg. I have never really done an “official” photo-shoot before, so this was new. We had a list of types of shots we wanted and the “feel” we were going for. The idea being to capture the neighborly, friendly aspect of the restaurant, which I can attest to as it is one of my favorites in town.

We spent over an hour trying not to get run over by the wait staff and trying not to annoy them too much as we took their pictures doing their work. The kitchen staff seemed to enjoy the attention (for the most part) and was very chatty while we watched them work. The general darkness of the inside gave me a new appreciation for my el-cheapo 50mm prime lens and makes we want to look at getting one of the slightly better ones.

I think what I enjoyed most is that given the event was a “sanctioned” one I did not feel awkward taking pictures of people. It is something I feel generally uncomfortable with while I am in public or just hanging around with friends. But in this instance, it really worked and I am proud of the shots I got. I think I was able to really capture the emotions of the people working at the restaurant.

I’m looking forward to doing more of these in the future.

Fat Canary Shoot Gallery

For many years, there has been a trend in all industries to look to outsourcing as a method to “reduce costs” and “improve efficiencies.” In the software industry, this has given rise to large numbers of firms in countries where the cost of labor is low; India, Eastern block countries, Malaysia, etc. This is a popular topic in management and business books. But does it really work? Does it let a company produce better software for less? I think not. And I think it fails on several fronts.

Team building - Producing quality software requires a strong team. What makes a strong team? The question that is usually asked, is whether a team has “jelled.” To me this means are they all thinking on the same wavelength. Does the team communicate outside of the traditional methods of email, specifications, designs, memos, meetings. Do they get together for a beer or dinner after work to socialize, but end up hashing out that tricky algorithm? The thing you may see here is that all of this requires physical proximity. It is very hard to create this jelled team when you are in 4 time zones spread across the globe. As an example, I had a conference cal yesterday with all of the software managers in Swisslog; in order to make it work, I had to wake up at 5am and the guys in Australia were up at 10pm.

“But wait!” you say, “what about all of those open source projects that have people all over the globe? They can do it! Why can’t you?” Simply put, they are different. If you look at most open source projects, you will find while a large number of people may have contributed, there are usually a very small group of core contributers who do most of the work. They receive patches and suggestions from the group but do the critical work themselves. The other huge difference is that open source projects don’t have to be cost effective, everyone is working for free.

Costs - Cost is the bean counter argument for outsourcing. Why pay $120/hour for a programmer in the US when you can get 4 programmers in India for $30/hour? On the surface it seems like you an get far more work done for less money. But in reality can you? I don’t think so. From my experiences, you end up spending far more money with offshoring. The cost of the off-shored programmers is cheaper, but you end up spending more money on on-shore activities. In order to have a successful offshore, you need rock solid requirements, specifications, and designs. You also need far stronger project management. This all takes time.

Communication - So now you have a bunch of code from your offshore team, now what? You need to test it, which will inevitably find bugs. If you are in the US and working with a team in India, you generally communicate via email. I have heard the argument that since they are nearly 12 hours off that they can be productive while you sleep. That sounds good, but in reality what it means is that every email “transaction” now takes 24 hours to complete.

Obviously I am not a fan of this method of development. Can it work? I’m sure it is possible for large projects where the entire project takes place in another country, but then you are not really offshoring, you are just onshoring it in another country. I have seen multiple companies I have worked at try to make this work, and I don’t believe it can in the small/medium sized tech companies.

What do you think, am I right?