Random Walks in the Low Countries

It must be 2012 when…Thor arrives

2012-01-26T22:51:00.000+01:00

Another busy week – patent filings underway, IRB submissions going in, pitch-training ahead of investor evenings.

And on those occasions that I look to see what’s cooking on my Twitter-feed from Dutch Daily News, it’s looking bad:

Over 9.5 thousand Dutch bankruptcy filings in 2011 dutchdailynews.com/?p=9744

Ready, set, hike in Dutch property taxes dutchdailynews.com/?p=9693

The Netherlands lost 12 thousand millionaires in 2011 dutchdailynews.com/?p=9690

Dutch household wealth down 12% in 1 year dutchdailynews.com/?p=9688

And the Netherlands is one of the bright spots in Europe just now.

A colleague of mine who specializes in creating computer models of complex systems released a new analysis of the world economy this week. He forecasts that the EU will break up in Q3 2013, while the US economy, “its structure weak and unable to absorb any increase in uncertainty or inefficiency”, will hold on only until 2018.

Similarly this week, a writer for the Times Higher Education magazine echoed the concern, suggesting that western economies are facing a fundamental realignment:

All mighty historical upheavals are crises of belief and ideas. The present splitting open of neoliberal capitalism is no exception. What happens when an economic system and its political order reach their terminus is that governments will try anything, at whatever human cost, to retain the old system, fighting to the end and at other people's expense to retrieve a familiar world.

I’m afraid that I’m still in the optimist’s camp, though.

I see growing technology and knowledge as the fuel for vigorous innovation, enabling products and enterprises to emerge from vision, hard work, and execution, There are scores of talented people who can be fit together to staff projects; opportunities for any entrepreneur to win big through through insight, luck, and persistence.

Even in 2012.

I attended a talk given by Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson at the MIT Enterprise Forum in London this week. Thor, a billionaire investor who was leading two of Iceland’s leading banks during the run-up to their 2008 collapse, spoke on Entrepreneurship in Challenging Times, and he was similarly optimistic. You spot opportunities, take risks, build companies, exit, move on. Sometimes you lose, but then you dust off and, again, push on to the next opportunity. Overall, listen to your intuition and not to believe your own hype.

Good, but not enough, I was thinking between the lines of his talk.

He assumed that success in one area (his self-professed love of building factories) translated directly to another (banking). But skills don’t leverage laterally, across domains, only radially within them. In his case, both charismatic and successful, wealth brought hubris. He did not have, and still does not have, and sense of his limits.

His immense wealth enabled him to gain immediate control of companies without any understanding of their business. “Banks made money; banks were safe. How could I go wrong?” He admitted to feeling like it was all moving too fast, but “the smart people seemed to know what they were doing.” He forgot that these are also people who want to please him, and perhaps catch crumbs from his table.

We’re in the middle of fundraising for CamStent now, and a big part of the process is engagement with investors. They are rightly critical, challenging our assumptions, analyzing risks, and finding flaws in people and projections. The tempering has made our processes stronger, and it’s a step that I think Thor, self-financed, never had to take.

What if large acquisitions could be vetted just like large mergers already are. Maybe there should be oversight able to ask the basics: Can the buyer run the company competently; Do their plans make sense; Are there risks that extend beyond the company; Will their actions threaten customers or employees.

Perhaps buyers should be allowed only provisional control until they demonstrate their abilities; maybe they need to carry insurance or hold assets against unanticipated costs imposed on customers and employees.

‘Back to creating pitch slides…

Key Lime Pie

2012-01-22T18:54:00.001+01:00

Its turned a bit wintry in the Village, no snow, but spitting rain and biting wind. A good opportunity to pull out a summer recipe and imagine the warm times to come.

I decided to make a Key Lime Pie, pretty straightforward but impressive for the neighbors who don’t get many American desserts (I do try to explain that this isn’t a “pudding”, but they insist).

I thumbed through a bunch of recipes before settling on one from the Joy of Baking, with accompanying video.

The base is a graham-cracker crumb crust. Problem 1: no graham crackers in the UK. Digestive biscuits are an okay alternative; add a bit of sugar. So, process a package of biscuits, mix with about 200g butter and a little salt and sugar until the mixture holds shape in your hand. Press into the pie tin and back at 170C for 10 minutes to harden.

The filling is made with 3 egg yolks (beat 5 minutes), a can of sweetened condensed milk (beat together 3 minutes), and a half cup fresh lime juice (beat together 10 minutes). The video advises getting 20 small limes to make 1/2 cup juice. I seriously mis-overestimated “small”, it took six limes to get the juice and zest. I now have enough limes for a winter of gin-and-tonic.

The resulting batter is yellowish, not green, with flecks of zest scattered like peppercorns throughout. Mine didn’t taste quite tart enough, so I think the next round I might do a touch less milk (or use unsweetened and add the sugar myself) and a touch more lime juice. Fill the crust, bake for 10 minutes at 170C and refrigerate for a couple of hours.

I wanted a meringue topping instead of a heavy cream one, so used a different recipe from Lifetips. Meringues come in three types: a Swiss one is really creamy and thick and gives a nice layer, it also browns well under a broiler. I mixed the 3/4 cup sugar, three egg whites, and a pinch of cream of tartar together, then lightly warmed it over simmering water, stirring, to dissolve the sugar. Then whip it to death until it forms stiff peaks. Spread it over the firmed filling and brown quickly under a broiler.

I garnished with a few lime slices (still 20 limes to go) and it looked great. It came out of the fluted tart tin more easily than I thought it might and the crust and filling have stayed set at room temperature.

I’m tempted to use ramekins next time: the tart pan just isn’t deep enough to hold more than an inch of filling which makes the pie thin by US standards. But it’s easy and worked the first time and (with a few gin and tonics) is, indeed, evocative of the tropics in winter.

And, of course, tweet your success (in Dutch): Ik heeft een Key Lime Pie gemaakt - een taartje met linde vulsel en schuimpje sierlaagje. Niet makkelijk, maar erg lekker (ik hoop...)

Crossings, classes, quizzes, and saffron quests.

2012-01-20T22:04:00.000+01:00

I packed up and headed out of Maastricht late Wednesday. It wasn’t really late in the “darkness falls” sense, but late to be getting to a 4 pm ferry. There was lots to wrap up, issues with the banks, a couple of utility questions to settle, and a component to drop off with the design engineers. By 1 pm, though, I was aimed east with a full tank of gas and didn’t stop until I pulled into the Dunkirk docks at 3:30, minutes ahead of the 4 pm loading. They’d put a nicer boat onto the line and it was a much more pleasant voyage, filled with waves and spray but warm and well-lit.

The second of my four Cambridge class presentations was on Thursday morning, describing the process of medical device creation. There is a template, both an engineering best practice and a directive from regulatory bodies, so it’s a pretty cut and dried topic. I try to get everyone engaged and thinking by using some case examples for discussion: these are drawn from real life and, again, the class has lots of good suggestions that would enhance the actual design effort. I really hope that some will take the plunge and start something exciting on their own.

Our Cambridgeshire village held their annual Quiz Night on Friday evening. It’s one of several big community events, and a good proportion of the residents come to the Village Hall to compete, mercilessly. There’s a dessert buffet (what we’d call a PotLuck in the US where people contribute a dish) and the inevitable charity raffle. Topics ranged from local history (How many acres in the Village Green?) to culture (Richard Dreyfus’ character’s name in Jaws?) to literature and sports. Most of it was pretty Brit-centric, so I wasn’t much help to my table (even with the Dutch question: How many languages has Anne Frank’s diary been tranlated to?). The one I did know, the most common element on earth (Iron) was wrongly corrected by the QuizMaster to Hydrogen.

But it was lots of fun, especially since we *won* at the end of the night.

I’m finding a lot of shortages on shelves lately, odd sorts of things. Light bulbs, cashews, hard disk drives, and, most recently, saffron. The stores say that they are being left empty by suppliers, and some of the flooding and earthquakes in Asia may be to fault for the computer parts. But it would be worrisome if the global supply chains were generally so delicate. Saffron turned up, finally, at the local garden store, but cost several pounds for only a few threads. ‘barely enough to cook with.

That seems like a price where supplier substitution should kick in – I know it’s usually a ‘hot / arid’ sort of plant, but I’m almost willing to give it a try at $1000 / pound, commercially.

Snow, Dutch, and the IB

2012-01-19T09:21:00.000+01:00

I saw the first word on the US news services, then the BBC picked up the story. Seattle, a maritime city that usually gets a dusting of snow for a day before it gets washed off in rain the next day, was in for a storm. It’s been over 20 years since the last snowfall like this: it always meant toppled rhodies, downed power lines, and cancelled school and work schedules. This year was no exception. The good news is that the 7KW gas generator we installed after the 2007 storms forges through the worst weather, and there are no kids in school any more (although Karen still teaches) .

As predicted, six to 14 inches fell, depending on wind patterns, and the city ground to a halt. The best story came from my neighbor, Mike: Today, as I was snowboarding, my dog was chasing me. We collided. We rushed him to the vet. Now he's in a cast. That's right. My dog is in a cast due to a snowboarding accident.

We haven’t seen any snow in either Maastricht or Cambridge so far this season. The Alps are buried, having a wonderful ski season this year and burying the higher villages, but it hasn’t drifted north through the low countries at all. So, rather than skidding through the streets as I was last year at this time, I’ve been gradually wrapping up engineering and in-town activities, catching up with friends in the evenings. There have been several new arrivals over the holidays and it’s delightful to get to meet the new family members – hard to believe that mine were ever this small.

I’ve also taken inspiration from the IamExpat post Yes! 2012 can bring fluent Dutch! The core of the article is that you have to build and keep momentum. That means daily practice, not weekly, and sustaining it over months. I have the materials at hand, I have to pass by the end of the year to keep my promise to the Gemeente who is paying for my lessons and the opportunity to nail the permanent residency. (Side story –happy ending: After 7 months, IND has finally sent me the letter to come to Eindhoven and pick up the new card from my 2011 visa renewal).

So I’m spending an hour or so a day streaking through the end of the Rosetta course that I was given three months to finish. It’s hard to learn vocabulary and grammar only by example, but with a word book and grammar book at my side, I’m deeply enmeshed with subordinate clauses, word order, and tenses this week.

I’ve also found a great set of podcasts on the RNW (Radio Nederland Wereldomroep) site. Klare Taal is particularly good; I access it through the exercise bike (which has web access built in) or download it to my music player each day.

And the Welkom in Nederland book arrived, the vocabulary is pretty basic, so there’s no problem with reading and picking up the ideas. They match a lot of my experiences anyway (except for taking kids to “zit op” basisschool and middelbare school - they don’t “studeert aan” school until they get to the University).

So, it’s moving ahead well. The only issue is that an hour or two spend on Dutch is an hour or two away from something else: the day is a zero-sum schedule. “Prioritize” doesn’t mean “Finding what to do first”, it means “Letting go of what I won’t have time to do.” I used to hate it when our corporate VP told me “Dave,Strategic Planning is deciding what not to do.”, but I’m finding that there’s some truth in it after all.

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Separately, while thumbing the news, I found that the International Baccalaureate program is the latest institution to come under conservative attack in the US. The IB program, available to qualified students in many public districts, intended to “develop the intellectual, personal, emotional and social skills to live, learn and work in a rapidly globalizing world.” No less a newsmagazine than US News and World Report has determined that critic al thinking and cultural awareness “Undermines US Founding Principles”.

A curriculum crafted in Europe, with a decidedly non-American and non-Judeo-Christian outlook on the world…not merely to impart knowledge or teach thinking skills, but rather to develop "citizens of the world" with "universal human values."… —presumably including activities not endorsed by the United States.

I think I need to stick with the weather pages. Or MasterChef.

Morning and evening over the Maas

2012-01-17T16:45:00.000+01:00

This time of year the sun rises late and sets early. My apartment looks east over the river, so I really have a good seat for the changes in the sky during the course of a day. And even with the way that my days go, there’s time for coffee and to marvel at the variety of shades and colors.

New Year’s renewal

2012-01-15T11:42:00.001+01:00

Around Thanksgiving, I start working on Christmas lists. It cuts both ways: what things do I need to watch for in Europe for family and friends, how do I respond when they ask what I want and need. I joke that a father should change hobbies every few years just so that their children have things to get them at Christmas and birthdays.

This year’s list was heavy on replacement items though: a couple of years of hard entrepreneurial work and diminished startup salary had left threadbare gaps. The battle-suit was frayed from many pitches, trains, and cleaners; my watch had gone missing after a quick dash through Schiphol security last summer. My shoulder bag was scuffed, my shoes lopsided. My camera has shadows on the LCD, my music player is scratched, my netbook cracked. Like field ribbons, each tells a story, but together they feel tired when I’m not.

So, rather than making resolutions, I think this New Year’s should be a renewal, maybe even start a jubilee year (the biblical seventh-year tradition of canceling debts, applied to my seventh expat year).

I started at the Nordstrom Half Yearly sale, suits and accessories half-off after Christmas. I need a suit that looks successful, but like I still need the money I’m raising, I told my sales assistant, Reece, probably not quite 25. “Modern, but not flashy; European and tasteful,” he mused, opting for subtle stripes and a bit of lapel trim. I sucked in my cookie-inflated waist for the measure; my daughter came over from handbags to offer advice (I made sure to introduce her to Reece – no harm in her getting to know young men who know how to dress). She chipped in a very nice tie; I resisted the upsell to a new shirt.

The new me was, of course, fabulous.

I took it for a spin last week, it got good initial reviews and we closed a couple of deals. I sent my daughter thanks.

I picked up a watch, swapped the player, loaded up with new podcasts. The camera will have to wait (Costco ran out of the HX9V I’ve had my eye on). Inspired, I swept through a series of lingering jobs in the home and apartment, crossing off repairs and replacements. A cracked chambord coffee press, a flaking saucepan, a peeping smoke alarm, a broken refrigerator magnet: large and small, they came and were healed.

I confess that the progress does wonders for my mental attitude as well as my environment. No longer surrounded by visible reminders of wear and tear and things to be done, now there’s ‘change for the better’.

‘beats making resolutions.

A frosty Maastricht weekend

2012-01-14T22:38:00.000+01:00

It’s easy to mistake the thick frost along the riverfront terraces for a dusting of snow. It’s certainly more like January in Maastricht than in Cambridge, but still nothing like the snow and ice of years past. The river is running a bit high and fast, but no sign of the water that topped dikes in Groningen earlier this week. Indeed, friends tell me that the snow pack in the Ardennes, to the south, is lighter than usual.

The Christmas lights are still up, although the city is starting to turn towards Carnival, Feb 19-21 this year. The fraternal organizations are already marching between the Wijk and the Vrijthof, kilts and brass instruments, members shaking hands with local officials on the steps of the City Hall in Markt Square. “Vasteloavend in Mestreech” doesn’t really get going for a few weeks yet, but the yellow, red, and green lights and bunting are starting to appear.

I’ve settled in to make a determined catch-up on my Dutch. Insego had a really good series of articles on the NT2 language and social Inburgering exams this week, and I’d determined to get a an early start on the 2012 goal of passing the tests. The Welkom in Nederland textbook was, curiously, not available in Selexyz Dominicanen, my go-to bookstore in the city, so I had to order for UK delivery. Otherwise, I’ve been putting in a solid 2-3 hours a day of reading newspapers, working the lessons, talking with neighbors, and generally getting my head back around my Dutch.

The car needed it’s 40K service, an engine light had started flickering and I had lingering concern about the blowout in Dover a month ago, but the dealer gave everything a thumbs-up. The bike park has instituted a 0.50p / day fee for dropoffs, I’ll have to start leaving mine in the outdoor park or fees will quickly outstrip its value.

Even with the cold, it’s nice to be mobile on the bike again: YouTube has a short documentary on How the Dutch got their Cycle Paths, which is pretty good if you’ve ever wondered.

I’ve also returned to daily exercise, the Health club blocked my codes with the New Year so that they could be sure that I would check in with an instructor (of course, none were available). It reminded me that my postage stamps (postzegels) might also be out of date (kapot).

Dutch postage stamps come in three varieties: Nederland, Europa, and Wereld: you put zone stamp on up to 20g and 2 stamps up to 50g for wherever your letter is going. It’s a pretty simple system, but with all of my stamps dated “2010”, I was concerned that I might need a supplement. No worries, though: if the stamp has the number 1 in the corner, they can be used any time.

I hit the Jumbo and AH for a quick grocery shopping (boodschappen), picked up a bottle of wine for a dinner invitation tomorrow, gave some TLC to my Olive tree. ‘funny how quickly (yet another) familiar routine settles in. I’m feeling a bit sad that several expat friends repatriated this winter; it leaves a gap in my thin social fabric as I reconnect with friends this weekend.

Still, it’s been good catching up with the rest, sharing holiday stories and making plans for the coming months. ‘taking an easy weekend, koffie, vlaai, gesprek: Life’s good.

Musing my way east

2012-01-12T20:09:00.000+01:00

‘twas a cold cloudy evening headed down the M2 towards the Dover ferry docks. I had booked the 4:00 boat (vier uur’s middags, I drilled), but meetings had run late and there was no way to make it.

So I accepted Maastricht by Midnight (twaalf uur's nachts) and set the cruise control.

It’s been a good week; we’ve been meeting our investors, getting their advice and collecting funds for the next year of CamStent’s development. In contrast to the visionary pitches last year, we have some good data to share and an experienced team that presents with knowledge and confidence. We’re a good portion of the way towards securing the further investment that we need, and the discussions are helping to bring the business into sharper focus.It’s a good feeling that thing are on the right track.

A friend asked how life would change if we were ultimately successful: the product meets it’s goals, improves patient outcomes, saves hospitals money, is acquired by a global manufacturer / distributor. What is the impact of success?

Clearly, the rent and the health insurance would be covered forever: the two bottom elements of Maslow’s Hierarchy (right). But would the ripples affect anything, everything above? For some, success triggers a quest for a better relationship, for the respect of the famous or well connected, for aspirational crusades in sport or politics. For others, it strengthens commitments to family and philanthropy. Many of our angel investors are doing it right.

I’d like to think that it wouldn’t change my beliefs or values. Nor would I stop caring about the people and causes that matter to me today. The biggest change would likely be time: what would I do with the two, three days a week that are now spent on maintaining and operating the business. I’d do more mentoring, more exploratory travel, more creative work, more time for family and friends.

Less running to the Dover docks and across the A16 through Northern France, the E40 through Belgium. Less time on the junk ferry that DFDS puts on the Channel runs in winter. Less effort chasing VAT refunds and lowest-cost airfares on New Year’s Eve.

It’s a nice train of thought. The alternative, being unsuccessful, would also impact every level, but that doesn’t bear too much thought. Especially on a week so full of possibility.

More great moments in Dutch advertising

2012-01-11T18:24:00.000+01:00

Famously, Dutch women are the happiest in the world. This may be due to the lightened state of Dutch society, or to the ease of taking part-time work. A cover story in a recent Dutch medical trade journal suggests that Prozac and it’s kin may also play a role? It’s slightly reminiscent of Ms. Bachmann’s famous Newsweek cover – if I saw this facilitated smile, I’d probably steer clear.

Then there was this come-on-in as spread across the second story of my local car dealer. It made me smile, but I wonder how long it would last if it were posted in Fort Worth or Minneapolis?

My favorites are still the Bavaria ads on television with Hugh Hefner and Mickey Rourke. Or almost anything from Centraal Beheer, the insurance company.

Re-expatriating for New Years

2012-01-09T12:51:00.000+01:00

My first full week back in Europe is behind me, and its left me feeling a bit more stressed than usual. Not at all the intent after two weeks away! I ran through the usual list of excuses: I fell behind ahead of the holidays, I took a week off during the holidays, I fell out of touch after the holidays, I caught jet lag.

None seemed to fit.

I wished for Coach Steele’s handy List of Excuses for Missing Swim Practice that he handed out to our swim team in High School:

101. Girlfriend not friendly last night.

102. Girlfriend too friendly last night.

‘There was always something that fit.

On reflection, though, I’ve decided that there are two nominal problems, both connected to slipping back into expat life after a couple of weeks in repat life.

First, two weeks back in a familiar setting resets expectations for how easy it is to get things done. For two weeks, I’d drive to the store, products were where I expected them to be (mousetraps, for example, are in Housewares at Safeway, not at the pet store), costs were denominated in familiar units (and at lower prices), I understand what people were saying (okay, people still don’t always understand me).

The old scripts worked again.

Coming back into England and the Netherlands, life became more deliberate, less intuitive. I need to remember to think harder about how to say things, take more patience with the steps needed to get things done, accept that it will take more time to find things I need. It’s not a bad thing, but it’s an unfamiliar friction, leading to a sense that I’m falling behind.

The other is that a break is also a reflection. With family and friends, I’m talking about the year, the things that went well or poorly, the plans and hopes for the coming months. I’m thinking about what went well; what needs to change. Lists, then Resolutions follow.

An hour a day of Dutch practice. Catching up with an email to a friend a few times a week. Weekend trips once a month. Seeing my parents more often. Getting to bed by 11:30 on weeknights. Exercising 3 times a week. Reading more; Charcoal life drawing.

But the realities of expat business life haven’t changed. There are things that must get done or the work doesn’t go out, the money doesn’t come in, the fundraising doesn’t start, the experiments don’t close.

I did get to exercise three times, started a new book, sent some emails, fell into bed most nights before the clock struck twelve. But the Dutch lags, weekend travel is still too aspirational, charcoals are tucked into a lower drawer.

And so, as the second week starts, I’m taking stock. Again.

The five biggest jobs are done (well) and the remainder are manageable. I’m adapting to the rhythms of weekday shopping and left-side driving again. I’m back; I’m equilibrating.

The temptation to thrash harder, to move faster, to shovel the work aside to make more time is there, but I’ve mostly resisted the call. It’s a seductive idea for catching up; but I know, in reality, it will throw life even further out of balance.

YaGottaWanna was Coach Steele’s constant exhortation. He was always talking about working harder, achieving more, pushing limits, going to State.

But it’s as true about achieving a balanced life as achieving a successful one. I gotta wanna do better, year by year.

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PS: I am amazed to find that my high school swimming coach, circa 1968, Bob Steele, is still kicking around and doing motivational work. Wow!

And still selling the same slogan he used to chase us up and down the pool with.

Weekend miscellany

2012-01-07T16:02:00.000+01:00

A bit of a windy start to the New Year here in Cambridge. The weather is warm and wet, but very strong winds rattling the windows and whistling over the roof. No damage, but an artistic layout of the trash cans in front of the apartment. I righted them, but they were back in the same arrangement an hour later. There’s no winning against Nature.

I have a lot of catching up to do in the coming week (I’ve been joking that I’m not even able to keep ahead of organizing my to-do list, much less shrinking it…

Clean your apps: mypermissions.org is a free website / utility suggested to me by a US-based friend. It scans your add-ins for Facebook, twitter, Google, etc and brings the permission settings out into the open. Most settings can be modified through the app, and I’s a great tool for getting some transparency and control over your social networking sites.
Wire your money: I’m paying my business invoices and hit an especially large one from a vendor in the Netherlands that needs to be paid with cash in the US. I asked the bank to fill in all the wire details and track / verify the transaction, always a good practice since money that goes astray because instructions are mis-typed is not easy to recover. I checked the exchange rate: the WSJ rate is $1.277 /euro: the bank quotes $1.322/ euro plus a $30 fee. On a 10K transfer, that is a $450 excess charge. It doesn’t depend on how fast the money is sent, only on the amount: more than 25K$ must go to get a better differential.
- Western Union, World First, and American Express offer somewhat better rates: their service are free, but involve filling in a lot of paperwork and getting interviewed. I suppose that’s a sign of our political and economic times.
- Frustratingly, after three days of emailed questions, AMEX rejected my application out of hand, despite a longstanding business card relationship. Their condescending note refused to give a reason, but their interview questions centered on what a BV is and why my US company address matched my home address.
- Anyone have better ideas?
Understand your British (or Americans): It took me a long time to sort out that when you ask Brits whether they want something, “I don’t mind” means yes. In the US, it’s sort of a grudging acceptance at best (“if you must”, unless you say the whole “Don’t mind if I do”, which means “Yes!”). Reciprocally, it’s become obvious that their ear is not tuned to the difference between “That’s fine”, which means ‘yes, I would, please’, and “I’m fine”, which is ‘no more, thank you’.
- Only the Dutch is more confusing, in which ‘yes’ sometimes means ‘yes, I don’t want any more’. I’ve taken to just leaving the plate of cookies in the middle of the table. I know, very un-Dutch.
Catch up on your reading: Growing up, I read a lot of science fiction. Over the years, I fell away from it as the genre was overtaken, first by New Wave literature that was nonlinear and unreadable, then by fantasy, and finally by serializations of TV shows and movies. Classically “Hard SF” is difficult to find, I subscribe to author David Brin’s twitter stream (and I’m a big fan of Startide Rising and his writings on information privacy), and he recommended Best SF Books, a very nice compilation of SF authors, titles and reviews. This will leaven my sparse diet of Dutch language, China analysis, and “how to fix the financial system” readings of recent months.

For some reason we’ve been getting some really spectacular sunrises and sunsets lately. With all of the wind and rain, the atmosphere should be pretty well scrubbed, so I’m not sure what’s causing it. But I am enjoying it.

Disclaimer: All opinions are my own; I have not been solicited nor compensated for these comments.

Being a long-term expat

2012-01-05T13:53:00.000+01:00

I’ve lived in Europe for six years now, initially in England, then the Netherlands, now scattered a bit everywhere. The first years were filled with the newness of the experience, learning how to execute everyday tasks in unfamiliar settings, fitting into a job and a neighborhood, learning the rudiments of the language (whether Dutch or British English: the latter is almost harder because I thought I understood it).

Prior to leaving the security of my corporate expat assignment, I thought that I probably understood about 80% of what I needed to know to live successfully in Dutch communities on my own. I quickly learned that I understood about 10%. My subsequent adolescence as an expat was spent mastering everyday processes for establishing a business (in all aspects of legal, accounting, and operations, not just leading a project), moving about without a subsidized car (acquiring passes, cards, and a taste for off-peak services), re-registering with the Gemeente and IND (a 6 month process, yearly), paying taxes (un-equalized business and personal, in Dutch, UK, and US jurisdictions), and shifting between social communities (disconnect from Corporate; reconnect with neighbors).

A close friend who passed away last year used to define a long term expat as one who’d been away more than five years. She held that people became noticeably weird after that, going native and adopting unrecognizable political positions and social customs. I hope I’ve avoided that, but still find that perspectives change after suck a long time. It has to: the businesses are doing well, I encounter fewer day-to-day surprises, and I’m thinking more about how to fit in rather than just get along.

There are four tasks in this regard on my New Year’s list:

Complete my language training. I need to take my NT2 exam by year’s end under my learning agreement with the Gemeente, and it would just make everyday life so much easier.

Travel more, take a weekend each month to visit a village or museum, perhaps the countryside for a walk or a sail. I did that a more during the first two years, but have unfortunately transitioned to running the businesses 24/7 in the past two years.

End the visa renewal cycle. After 6 years, I’m finally eligible for permanent residency (or dual citizenship). The distinction hinges, in part, on how freely I want to be able to settle elsewhere in Europe and the perceived risk to my US passport: permanent residency is the goal.

Straighten out the housing situation. As business opportunities multiplied, residences followed. More than two places to hang my hat is expensive in many ways: I don’t spend enough time anywhere to stay connected with people, it spreads my belongings around, and it consumes many days in travel time every month. ‘pushing towards a USNL solution.

A post-adolescent expat, like a twenty-something, starts to worry about their place in the world, professionally, personally, residence, career, comfort, security. These turn out to be lonely issues to try to solve. After six years, family and friends worry that “fitting in” means “settling in”. Nobody’s staging an intervention (yet), but it’s become harder to practice language over the Internet, to suggest a Dutch universal care model in a health reform discussion, or to share weekend photos from Alsace without risking disapproval. And that, in turn, leads to further compartmentalization at a time that I’m trying to integrate the important ambitions, people, work-life balances, and family connections in my life.

It’s a phase in an evolution along a journey, I know: I do enjoy living here and the opportunities it provides. And I’m optimistic about assembling the pieces into a wonderful whole this year. But there aren’t any really good examples or guidance for how to do this after the first few years. The trick is always to find the path forward without just becoming isolated or discouraged.

Vermeer’s Women

2012-01-03T12:11:00.000+01:00

Johannes Vermeer was a Dutch painter active in Delft in the mid-1600’s; he captured everyday, domestic scenes characterizing middle-class life of the Golden Age. Het Meisje met de Parel is probably his most recognized work, but thirty-four authenticated paintings have been catalogued into museums. Four of those (including The Lacemaker, right), along with two dozen associated works by artists of the same period, are collected in Vermeer’s Women, a free exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (UK). It’s a short train ride north from London and a worthwhile detour if you are interested in everyday Dutch life as depicted by a variety of painters contemporary with Vermeer.

The paintings center around women at work in the home. Tradesmen bring their wares to the front hall (voorhuis) for sale; servant girls offer selected items to the wife living in the personal spaces at the back, interrupting her sewing. There are scenes of women lost in their reading of books and letters, leaning from windows to talk with friends, attending to morning or evening dressing (left is Jan Steen, Woman at her Toilet).

As with many Dutch paintings, these often seem dark and brooding, dim settings rendered in melancholy blacks and yellows. I don’t know if that is realism from the time (large wooden rooms lit by candlelight, with few windows), aging of the paints, or the influence of Rembrandt. The women look luminous within the pictures, porcelain skin and satin clothes, all finely rendered in bright colors as compared to the flat textures of objects in the rooms. The accompanying text does a good job of describing the narrative symbolism of objects in the rooms, and of the conventions of household layout and management in the 1600’s (right is Jacobus Vrel, Woman at the Window, exchanging glances with a young girl who might be outside or might only be a reflection).

The pictures, to me, suggest a very solitary life. The rooms have few furnishings apart from plates above the hearth, a chair and a table and lots of empty floors. The women seem lost in their own work, seldom talking or making eye contact with one another or the viewer, often turned away. Children are more often seen entreating distant mothers than playing with them. The technique and use of colour is lovely, though, and there is lots to reflect about Dutch life both then and now.

The exhibition runs through mid-January. Lines were long leading into the exhibition but they moved quickly. Once inside, the best strategy to is drift between paintings: the crowd flows in knots and it’s easy to dip into the gaps and see everything without waiting for each work in turn.

For details on Vermeer’s life, works, and upcoming events highlighting his work, I like The Essential Vermeer, a well constructed and actively maintained web resource.

HNY 2012

2012-01-01T20:17:00.000+01:00

2011 ended quietly, somewhere over Greenland.

It’s hard to say where, even when the calendar rolled over to 2012. I know that I left Seattle on Saturday afternoon, clear skies, unseasonably warm temperatures, and a lovely view of The Mountain over the hangers.

I dropped into New York City about 9 pm, the city aglow and the skyline shimmering in a faint haze. Television monitors in the deserted SkyLounge showed massive crowds jamming into Times Square: no fireworks dotted the horizon when I left at 10:30 pm.

I would have expected an announcement from the captain, perhaps a bit of champagne instead of wine for the discount-seekers filling his plane on a holiday evening. A friend told me this afternoon that BA did hold a small celebration aboard his flight.

But ours passed quietly. I landed at Heathrow at 11 am on Jan 1, 2012, to clear skies, unseasonably warm temperatures, and a lovely view of, well, Hounslow over the hangers.

So, in the absence of alternative New Year’s Celebrations, I publish this year’s “Dad And Daughter” picture: Happy New Year from the random salmon sculpture marking the entrance to metropolitan Woodinville. I wish you all the very best!

Peer reviewing

2011-12-30T13:40:00.000+01:00

One of the foundations of the scientific method is publication of results so that they can be assessed and reproduced by the wider community of researchers. Peer review is the first step in that publication process, voluntary, anonymous review of work by experts in the field, with comments returned to the author so that the paper can be improved prior to publication.

I serve as a peer reviewer for several journals and probably get requests about twice a month to comment on a paper. Generally it takes about an hour to understand the work, to assess whether it is correct, clear, open to alternative interpretation,and properly positioned within the relevant landscape of background literature. I try to write balanced comments, praising a clear hypothesis, a well-reasoned discussion, while perhaps suggesting where figures could be more clear or an alternative method might yield better results. The revised paper comes back the next month and I generally pass it if the author has replied to my points (whether or not those result in changes).

Occasionally I run into situations where I struggle. I received one where the author had copied an earlier paper, word for word, yet not cited it. I talked with my editor (the lead author was fairly senior) and we recommended that he include the citation: it was enough to alert him that we’d found the earlier work. Another was proposing pages of dense calculation for an obscure visualization technique that, in the end,m didn’t reveal anything new in the data. I think that, in six revisions, we did everything but rewrite the paper for him.

Last month, I received a work that was analyzing structure in short-and long-term heart rate changes. It’s a tricky analysis, since it’s statistical rather than deterministic, and the author had calculated some crude ratios to support his hypothesis. Worse, his underlying technique destroyed the very ordering among data points that he based his hypothesis on. I pointed out that the results weren’t supported by the method, suggested some alternative approaches fo analysis, and worked out an example to illustrate my point. Throughout I was constructive and respectful (I though), allowing that I might have missed his point, but didn’t follow the logic.

The authors absolutely blistered me in their reply.

…there are many comments made by the Reviewers with which we disagree, comments which we consider unhelpful and comments which are just wrong…we strongly believe that the Reviewers should be aware of the fact that, even though they are anonymous, they should put time and effort in reading and reviewing the papers. We are frequent reviewers for a number of peer-reviewed journals,and we always try to helpful for the Authors and never write from the position of someone who, by definition, knows better.

Most of my comments were subsequently dismissed with this is an opinion and there is nothing we can do about it, except state that we disagree. Fair enough: I went back through my analysis and still cannot link their conclusions with their data using their method. I had to just recuse myself after that: while we might have solved the disagreements over a beer and a whiteboard, their reaction was so strong and their comments so dismissive, that there just weren’t actually any explanations to discuss.

I felt badly about the comments and about the outcome: I do take the job seriously and give every paper a good read. I know how much work it takes to do research and to write it up. In the end, if they are right, they should be able to refute the counter argument and to say why. If they are wrong, they need to make corrections.

And, fundamentally, I disagree with them that Reviewers are there to serve the Authors.

Reviewers are present to serve Readers.

If, as a first reader, I think that a paper is wrong, I have a responsibility to (nicely) say so, suggest why, and present alternatives. Maybe it’s a real mistake, maybe I just don’t understand, maybe the Methods contain omissions or ambiguities. But honest and differing perspectives should be addressed openly.

We might argue that every author is entitled to his view and the Readers will sort things out. Eventually, yes. But errors enter indexed literature, then pop up on searches, news reports, and blogs.

The Letters to the Editor don’t have much impact, and are presented as a debate that obscures rather than resolves issues. It can take years before the truth is sorted by Readers, years of contradictions and misinterpretations in which true facts have been undermined and genuine debates get muddied.

The argument presented by these Authors, that Reviewers should only check for clarity of language and labels on graphs, is wrong. The peer review process is intended to engage experts as surrogate Readers, not as supplemental Editors.

The long tail of travel

2011-12-28T13:55:00.000+01:00

I was riding the airport escalator, lost in thought, the aspirational airport ads gliding by. Island resorts that I’ll never visit; books I’ll never read; restaurants I’ll never frequent; shows I’ll never attend. It’s like an airline magazine brought to life.

Then an HSBC poster caught my eye – one of the many “ways of seeing” ads that they post on jetways worldwide. This one made me smile, though.

It captured the contradictions of expat psychology so well. It’s a Jason Bourne / Jeremiah Johnson archetype, of being more comfortable with environments than with people. Of being lone hunters rather than communal gatherers.

It reminded me of an October 2011 graphic in Wired Magazine, reproduced below. They surveyed everyone’s passports in the office an counted up the countries visited. The results produced an long-tail distribution, with some countries being visited by almost everyone and others by only a few.

As with the HSBC poster, I can recognize myself within this picture, placed about a third of the way from the left. That places me in the top 7% or so among the most travelled Wired staffers.

I’m torn as to whether this tells me that I travel too much or that others should travel more.

And there’s an aspirational aspect to the statistics. I’m instinctively looking right to find my next destination: prescriptively I should be visiting Brazil, Egypt, Norway, and perhaps delaying Albania and Sudan.

And no sign of when the time is right to start exploring the ‘Stan countries – I may leave that to my son, reporting in from Turkmenistan and Afghanistan.

Piddling with the plumbing

2011-12-26T22:20:00.000+01:00

Home ownership comes with as many jobs as joys. I don’t mind most, from yard work to wiring, but plumbing has always held a special challenge for me. Technically, it’s no more difficult than electricity or ventilation: follow the flows, remove the blockages, replace the fittings, clean the connections. I’ve developed a special relationship with my local hardware stores, Ernst, Home Depot, McLendon’s, who always seem to be able to supply a diagnosis, a part, and a smile that puts me on track to getting the lights on and the heat through.

Not so with plumbing.

Innumerable times, I have replaced fittings, tightened connections, and turned on the water to get results varying from drips to geysers. Water is relentless in finding gaps and flaws. Then it all has to be taken apart, cleaned, reassembled, two times, three, before either finally working or triggering a call to a neighbor or plumber. There’s always a temptation to solve problems with plumbers tape and bathtub caulk.

Toilet seals (simple instructions lead to dire consequences: seat the bowl over the wax ring and press down firmly; flush once), faucets (filled with tiny springs and valves), and underground pipes (a favorite of moles and tree roots) hold special dangers. Even today’s simple task, “Please replace the four leaky shutoff valves”, revealed unexpected complications.

Like compression rings.

Our fixtures are old and out of date, corroded and dripping, original to the house. The shutoff valves are the likely culprit, so I bought four at the local Home Depot, turned off the main water (provoking howls from the daughter) and attacked the process of disassembling the pipes.

And quickly ran into the day’s challenges.

Lesson 1: Turning off the main shutoff doesn’t disconnect internal reservoirs, such as the hot water tank. I got caught full in the face by a geyser of (fortunately warm) water as the valve popped off the pipe.

Lesson 2: Compression rings may turn but they don’t pull. The ring slipped easily off the first pipe, with difficulty from the second, and refused to budge from the next two. No amount of twisting and tugging set it free, yet the corroded wall plate and worn threads of the sealing nut meant it had to come loose. Cutting off the pipe behind it was not an option: the Internet suggested a hacksaw (but don’t nick the underlying pipe).

Lesson 3: Compression ring pullers. Yes, it’s $20 for something I’ll seldom use (and probably lose), but it got the job done. Insert the tip into the pipe, the collar around the ring, turn the handle, and it pulls the ring right off the pipe. Lovely.

Lesson 4: The value of a box of old plumbing parts. The job was done, and I was reassembling the drain pipes. The main one of the bottom of the sink wouldn’t attach, in fact, it looked like it had never attached. I took pictures up to the hardware store (third trip of the day) and they said that the old ring had literally fallen apart. They gave me a new one, but that just slipped over the threads, refusing to pull the pipe and sink together. Rummaging through an old box of pipe parts, Karen came up with a plastic fitting that happened to fit perfectly. I’m a skeptic about holding onto useless boxes of miscellaneous hardware, but this one saved the day.

By late evening, double the estimated time for the job, the work was done and the water was back on. Simple, really: just unscrew the old valves and replace them with new ones.

Except when it’s plumbing.

Christmas Day

2011-12-25T21:49:00.000+01:00

‘wishing everyone a very warm and happy Christmas with family, friends, and traditions.

The European straw man

2011-12-23T18:39:00.000+01:00

It’s always interesting to immerse back into the turbulence of US media after months away. The economy is Topic One on the news and talk shows, television and radio, money or politics. And, whether looking behind for reasons or ahead for alternatives, the next sentence is always the same.

With the Eurozone teetering on the brink of collapse…

Although I think it’s a comfort for Americans to believe that they are weathering a storm gusting in from across the ocean, it seems like more myth and distraction than cause-and-effect.

The worst outcomes of the Eurozone crisis leads to some form of restructuring or abandonment of the euro as a common currency, not the bankruptcy of Europe as a whole or the fall of its sovereign nations. There will still be European production, consumers, financial centers, and governments. Border controls may re-emerge, economic buffers proliferate, and local regulators re-assert, but it’s more likely to be a painful adjustment than a total collapse.

And, despite the scenes of riots against imposed austerity programs and the rotation of prime ministers throughout the southern margins of the Union, no country is descending into anarchy or civil war. The trains still run (perhaps a bit more grimy and irregular), the banks are all open (although quick to impose a new fee at every turn), and the grocers and shops are filled with goods (and shoppers who are buying them). There’s frustration and apprehension, but not widespread privation.

…a consequence of socialist economic policies…

At home, politicians have developed a shorthand that links Europe Collapse to Socialism to Obama. The links are forged from stimulus spending, healthcare reform, and bank bailouts, all policies demonstrated to have failed on the Continent.

Only they haven’t. Bank breakups in the Netherlands have eliminated “Too Big To Fail” institutions without harming competitiveness. Universal mandates and cost controls result in my paying$150 per month for Dutch health insurance (In the US I pay $2500 per month, more than my daughter’s college bill). Interest rates on Dutch bonds is 2.1%, Germany 1.8%; unemployment is 5%, and they retain their AAA bond rating.

Still, Europe remains a favorite target this campaign season.

“We have a choice in America to be remaining a merit-based opportunity society that follows the Constitution, or to follow the path of Europe. And I'm the guy who believes in the former. I believe America got it right. I believe Europe got it wrong. I believe America must remain the leader of the world. . . . I am absolutely committed to an American century. I see this as an American century." -- Mitt Romney, WSJ, 24/12/11

I think that if the US were to simply acknowledge and address both our problems and potential honestly, we could accomplish far more. “What cathedrals will our generation build?” asked one commentator: Where has American confidence gone, our willingness to come together as a nation to take on a task larger than ourselves? In science, art, infrastructure, economics, production, the US has always been outward looking, optimistic, free to take the best and adapt the rest from global cultures, giving back products and ideas that change the world, and ultimately to create a virtuous circle of success.

Returning home, I see a surly shifting of blame, loss of confidence in institutions, hoarding of resources, and division of people by class, geography, and party. There are an astounding number of unchallenged untruths being told.

And how stupid is that? Very.

Pundits and politicians erect simple straw men as convenient rationalizations for genuine hardships and inequalities. But the world isn’t really anything like the one they depict.

As a start, don’t believe any of the straw men illustrated on this page.

Three cookie recipes

2011-12-21T16:58:00.000+01:00

Bourbon Balls

1/4 c Bourbon whisky
1C Vanilla wafer crumbs
1.5T Corn Syrup
2T Cocoa powder
1C finely chopped pecans
1C Powdered sugar

Combine bourbon and syrup, set aside. Combine crumbs, pecans, cocoa. Add bourbon mixture, shape into balls, roll in powdered sugar.

Cutout Cookies

Bowl 1: Cut 4 – 4.5 cups flour into one cup oleo / butter.

Bowl 2: Beat together 2 eggs and 1 cup granulated sugar.

Bowl 3: Mix together 5 tsp whole milk, 1 tsp vanilla, 1.5 tsp nutmeg, and 1 tsp baking soda.

Add bowl 2 and 3 to bowl 1. Roll out very thin, cut shapes. Bake at 375F until just barely tan on the bottom. Frost or sugar when cool.

Rugelach

1 C Butter
2 C Flour
1 Egg yolk
3/4 C Sour cream
3/4 C Granulated sugar
1 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 C Chopped walnuts
1/4 C butter, melted

Cut butter into flour. In a separate bowl beat egg yolk and sour cream well, then add to flour mixture. Mix until blended. Cover with plastic and refrigerate at least 3 hours. Prepare filling from sugar, cinnamon, and walnuts. Preset oven to 375F.

Roll 1/3 of dough into a circle 1/8” thick. Brush with melted butter and spread 1/3 of filling over top. Cut into circle into 16 wedges and roll each up towards the point. Bake on ungreased cookie sheet for 15 minutes until lightly browned.

On the move at Christmas

2011-12-20T15:06:00.000+01:00

Sunset over the Wasatch Range alongside Salt Lake City. both the lake and the city are buries beneath a layer of low clouds, lapping against the foothills. Really a beautiful evening.

We’re all on the move this season. I’m off from Cambridge to Boulder, visiting my parents for a long weekend ahead of heading back to Seattle for two weeks. Shopping is high on the list, both for Christmas gifts and reprovisioning. My battle gear is getting badly worn, from my suit to my shoulder bag, from the watch lost at Schiphol security to the MP3 player flooded at Dover. Reading glasses, med refills, a few books and spices requested by friends: the bag will be going back full.

My son is moving this Christmas as well. He was deployed to Afghanistan where he’ll be flying aerial recon assignments in support of coalition ground troops. His wife and their puppy stay behind in Alaska; our hope is that 10,000 feet provides sufficient buffer to keep him save for the next 8 months. He’s excited about the assignment, doing great work and optimistic about where it leads.

I saw ex-National Security Advisor Rice being asked how she felt about the sacrifice in lives and injuries over the past ten years after she jumped us into a war on mistaken pretense. She smiled broadly and said that nothing worthwhile comes without sacrifice.

Lovely.

My daughter is coming back from college for a couple of weeks of work at Nordstrom before returning to finish her last semester. She’s exploring a European rotation at one of the fashion houses alongside possibilities here in the States. It’s not an area that I can help with (except for providing an apartment), but she seems to have it all well in hand: knowledgeable, motivated, optimistic.

Couldn’t ask for more, from either of them.

A lot of families cluster close all year around, not just at Christmas. Mine scatters across the globe year- around, gathering improbably at reunions and Christmas. Some folks ask whether that is a failure in our parenting, but I’ve always believed that the goal is to raise happy, confident, independent adults.

Not without a few bumps, to be sure, but they’ve both turned out as we hoped.

Research management

2011-12-19T13:16:00.000+01:00

Before I became an expat, I was a research director with Physio-Control, a Redmond WA company, the world leader in resuscitation techno0logy. It was a great job, we had 20 talented people, a $3 million annual budget, and a dozen projects and studies ongoing that each had potential to directly save lives. It was a great job.

At the time, though, I didn’t pay enough attention to the context of the job. I was good at managing projects and people but missed the context of my department: someone was paying the bills and expected something in return. I thought that performance alone mad us immune to budget cuts and office politics; I was wrong.

I met the current research director for dinner shortly after I returned to Seattle this week, and we talked about managing scientists and expectations.

It seems to me that there are two dimensions involved: the balance between creating insight and technologies (ideas vs. innovations) and the balance between internal and external focus (on Customers or on the Corporation). In classic b-school partitioning, this creates four styles of research management.

For those with an idea orientation, research produces some combination of white papers for the marketing folks, bolstering the company’s offerings through focused studies, or conducting blue-sky investigations alongside (or in place of) university labs.

If innovation is more the style, then you create some combination of components for project teams or try to start entirely new businesses.

Intrinsically, all are valid: I leaned towards creating startups, the current director is a solid idea guy: both work.

But politically, the department can’t survive if the model doesn’t align with senior management’s conception of what research is for.

Despite lip service about organic growth and open innovation, the company didn’t really want an intrapreneurial group challenging established projects. In the end, I was out and the group was disbanded in favor of a more consultative model. The current director plans the politics better than I ever did, and the group; has greater stability and is able to take on longer-term projects.

It’s not just about positioning and performance. Awareness and alignment also matter.

Work-Life Balance

2011-12-17T12:43:00.000+01:00

Wrapping things up in London prior to heading to the US – the Board has set a price for our next offering (£25/share, up from £15/share last spring, pegging our valuation at just shy of £2 million), our experimental plan is in place with the Universities, my syllabus for the new term is almost ready, my outline for the Poland Business Education grant is complete. Most importantly, my bags are stuffed with goodies and gifts from the far flung corners of my travels. I’ll scatter them along the way as I fly back, first to see my parents in Boulder, than on to family in Seattle. A bit of St. Nick, almost (I don’t think a flying sled fits Dutch tradition).

It’s been a busy few weeks, and looks worse going forward. A course to teach, clinical trials coming up in the US in February and March, fundraising across the UK in January and February, development and experiments to finish by first of March. And Dutch classes to catch up with.

So, I read with interest an article in Business Traveller about re-establishing work-life balance. They catalog not listening, becoming aggressive, losing your humor, and decoupling from social activity as key warning signs. I would add sleep disruption, irregular eating, lack of exercise, and nagging guilt over missing personal and business commitments as a few more. It doesn’t necessarily rise to the level of stress: I find that it’s just a pervasive feeling that I can’t catch up, flailing through tasks but always extending the list faster than I can cross them off.

So, the five solutions:

Designate time to your personal life. This varies from just scheduling guilt-free evenings off to planning events you can’t back out of. Or take Matt Cutts’ “Try something new for 30 days” challenge. The temptation for me would be to assign it to Dutch practice, but in the spirit of “New”, I’d probably learn a new cooking technique each day.

Take care of your body: Get regular sleep, regular meals, regular exercise. I am pretty good on the first, a bit lax on the second, progressively worse on the third. That’s especially worrisome because my genes have handed me a “Use them or lose them” deal with my muscles, and regular exercise is important to strength, flexibility, and endurance. For many years, I took a mid-day break to go exercise, and need to get back into the habit.

Consider workshifting: “Work remotely to achieve a more productive day”. In a virtual business, flung across three countries, that’s pretty much my life anyway. Where I do fall down, though, is in travelling too much, losing a few days every month to air and train travel between three base locations. Even cutting that by one would make a huge difference.

Turn off technology: When we were young, our family took vacations in the Northwoods, by canoe, so that my father could escape the phone and the office. Today, communications are even more pervasive, breaking down barriers to segmenting any part of life away from the others. Think about how you take doctor’s calls in the grocery, work calls on vacation, and (apparently if you’re female, none of my male-friends do it) taking friend’s calls in the bathroom (tub or toilet). I’d seriously like to take one week-long hike or sail in the new year, with the mobile and computer unavailable except for family emergencies.

Find time to do nothing: When I’m in the Netherlands, I take one night a week for recreation at the local bars, jazz music, quiz night, poetry. I’m searching out the same sort of venues in Britain (harder because there’s no WeekIn/WeekUit in Cambridge!). It’s relaxation; so it taking a pleasure book to a pub or café or hottub for a read, or the bike into the countryside. It’s a bit of “sit still and breath” turn-your-mind-to-idle relaxation time that I probably need to do daily, but don’t.

I’d add taking time to celebrate your successes (give yourself small rewards), keeping in touch with friends (I periodically pick out an old friend that I haven’t heard from in a while and write them a note), finding something to laugh about (and share with someone else each day), and taking a reflective moment each day to keep it all in perspective.

Two Thursday thoughts

2011-12-15T14:23:00.000+01:00

I called a friend “Idealistic” today. I meant it as a compliment; he took it worse. It seems odd.

Idealistic, for me, meant that he had vision for a better way of doing things and a passion for making it happen. I knew a research manager who carried a brick around for a year, saying that a defibrillator should never be any larger than that. He built a working defibrillator out of watch batteries once to show it could be done. A very tall stack of batteries, to be sure. I’m not sure how to describe someone like that other than idealistic – a characteristic we admired around the research table.

I consulted the authorities. Someone guided more by ideals than by practical considerations, declares one dictionary. Thinking of things as ideal forms rather than as they really are, accuses another. Having high ideals that are usually unrealizable or at odds with practical life, sniffs a third.

I see the point. But if not an idealist, what? Some of the most delightful people I know are people who don’t believe their ideas are impossible. More than dreamers, they go on to demonstrate that they are right.

====================

Brain drain reverses course, flows away from America.

I find this delightful. 6.3 million Americans are studying or working abroad, the highest number ever. Over 5% of all Americans 25 to 34 are actively planning to relocate outside of the US; 40% of those 18-24 express an interest.

Reasons vary, but “There's a feeling among more entrepreneurial Americans that if you really want to get anything done, you have to get out of country.”

It wasn’t always that way. In the 80’s, Europe was conservative and traditional, suspicious of innovation and hostile to invention. I remember bringing a new brainmapping device over to show to British colleagues. “How have you calibrated it?”, they sniffed. The Japanese, meanwhile, took turns hooking one another up and joined in speculation about what the images might mean.

Now the situation is reversed. There is a lot of creative technical talent to hire and strong university research centers to collaborate with. Clinical studies are easier to do; regulatory hurdles are lower: I can get innovation to patients faster and cheaper than in the US. The EU is a common market with as many consumers as the United States: the spending isn’t as high, but opportunities have been growing. I feel like I can get more done here, despite the euro-crisis.

I’m happy with my choices and the opportunities that they’ve provided; others are discovering the same differences. I suppose that the main question remaining is What is the best country to relocate to (probably varies by age and profession)?

And on the boat back…

2011-12-14T07:01:00.000+01:00

Once again gales were predicted for the Channel; once again the clouds darkened during the drove across Belgium. After the German glow of Christmas lights and gluhwijn, the beating rain and deepening cold of northern France felt more unpleasant than usual – it would be good to get off the road and back into Cambridge to a warm night’s sleep, gathering thoughts ahead of the year-end board meetings.

4:00: pulled into the docks a half hour ahead of departure, only to find the back end of a ferry pulling out against a wall of clouds to the west. Schedules were already disrupted, and the attendants warned that the 5 pm ferry would be at least an hour late. I’m suspecting that NorfolkLine runs any schedule they want, dropping a boat or two along the way, when the weather gives them an opening. Then there’s the grim alternative: an empty concrete cafeteria that never seems to open. I bundled up and hunkered down.

A boat pulled in at 5:30, not the usual cruiser, but an old ship glowing faintly along tiny windows cut along high steel sides. We were waved back to our cars and herded on board. The upper decks were closed; Seating was strictly airline-style – ‘not a good sign. The captain warned of a rough and slow crossing on a crackling intercom as we launched towards sunset.

I kept at my work, pecking at the computer as the ship bounced and heaved across the Channel. Occasional ferries emerged from the rain, spray blown from the bows over the upper decks, then passed on into the night. People slept or glumly focused on an imaginary horizon. We reached Dover by 8pm, but found the tugs busy and the slips full. We circled the outer seawall, nautical equivalent of a holding pattern, and waited. 9 pm: out turn finally came and we dropped out of sequence and jostled into place, tumbled our cars off the boat.

I looped into Dover, freed, looking for a faster route towards the M25. Focused ahead, I missed the road debris, maybe a stray curb, that blocked my path. The car lurched, shuddered, pulled hard to the left. A horrible noise pounded out of the left front wheel well. ‘Not much doubt that I’d blown a tire, but where to land and fix it? I punched the Tom Tom, looking for a restaurant: MacDonald's glowed a quarter mile off to the right. Around the roundabout, thumping up a hill, through the entry, and park – in a MacDonald’s undergoing full refurbishment. We apologize for the inconvenience: Brit-slang for not being very sorry at all.

I popped the trunk to look for a spare, but found only a package shaped like a spare with a tire inflator inside. Not much help for a shredded wheel. Time to think things over, preferably over a sandwich. I stood in the queue of cars passing the drive-up window. A Little Person leered. We cannot serve anyone who isn’t in their car: I explained that my slumped conveyance wasn’t going to make the 20-yard run: could they make an exception? The manager was summoned, who glared and began to apologize for the inconvenience. But then, moved by the spirit of Christmas, said he’d make a limited offering in exchange for cash. Deal.

Back in the car, I started phoning into the Netherlands, first ANWB, who bounced me to the lease company, who skipped me to Mondial, my insurance group. Can you please find the following numbers on your tire: diameter, manufacturer, an odd code number, all black script against a black rim in the darkness. I squatted in the gale and tried to read them by the light of my phone. Eventually, as though exchanging nuclear codes, we agreed on the values and they disappeared to consult. I waited, cleaning up from where the wind had knocked the Coke over in my console, flooding a camera and MP3 player (both old, but still a loss).

Callback: 2 1/2 hours to get a tire out from London. I bundled up and hunkered down. The car swayed in the wind, the rain sheeted over the windshield and spilled down the back. I think I dozed a bit. The MacDonald’s closed as the trickle of customers ended. A bit after midnight, headlights shown through the windows: a yellow-slicked mechanic knocked and waved me to the van. “Almost blew over three times,” he shook his head. “Would have cost at least £250 to pay for the call.” He grinned. “All you need to pay for is the new tire.” Deal. £53 and ten minutes later, I had a new wheel and was back on the road.

The drive north was long but uneventful, the roads empty and fast at 1 am after a storm. Home by 2:30, bed by 3, meetings at 9: I’m starting to feel used to it. Its making the Eurostar and RyanAir look better and better.

Traditions maintained: The Koln Markets

2011-12-12T14:36:00.000+01:00

My disappointment with Maastricht’s Christmas markets this year led to a quest for cities where spirit and tradition still thrived…and it led to Koln.

Koln has always had a sprawling market presence – at least six markets are dropped into city parks and along the rivers – I favor the crowds gathered among brightly lit stalls beneath the enormous brooding central church. an hour’s drive from Maastricht, it’s an easy afternoon excursion, and the festive spirit still overwhelms the high prices charged for eierpunsch, stollen, foil ornaments and beanbag toys. It’s enough to just wander and take it all in without buying lots.

It seems ironic that the better markets are being fielded by the sometimes parsimonious and dour Germans, but maybe it follows their emphasis on local over central institutions and a different sense of civil / commercial balance.

More pix at my Flickr site

Kerst af de Maas–Maastricht Markets

2011-12-10T10:05:00.000+01:00

I look forward to the Christmas markets each year: they flower across major cities in Europe in lights, foods, music, and drink. The gluhwijn flows, the skaters crow the ice, the Skywheels twirl. It’s good fun in the weeks leading up to Christmas and on through New Year’s.

Last year, Maastricht put on a spectacular show, with venues spread out across the town. Kerst aan de Maas was held outside my windows, convenient for hot krakauer sausages and fragrant mulled wine. I pushed things in England to get back to Maastricht ahead of the holidays so that I could enjoy the festival again this year. But this year, the apron along the river was dark except for an avant-garde piece of street art, a movie showing black and white prison scenes with a howling operatic accompaniment.

‘no joke.

The Christmas Market, such as it was, filled half the Vrijthof square – in earlier years it filled the area. The Skywheel still glowed against the churches, but the Christmas shop was gone; the stands still served potato cakes and oliebollen but the rides and crowds were gone. The SMS Christmas tree, changing colors with a text message, was still in the Mossae Center, but sponsored by MacDnalds. The whole effect was shrunken and spare, not too well attended and missing the noise and laughter of earlier years.

I’m not sure what happened to the festival. Merchants shrugged and blamed high prices; friends shrugged and said that the prior year’s venues had been excessive. Who really needs two ice rinks? The recession, the euro crises, the moves to cut taxes, balance budgets, and shrink services may be biting even here.

Still, it’s unfortunate. The small-government anti-tax folks are quick to aim at municipal excess, and fireworks displays, libraries, Christmas festivals, and park maintenance is the obvious place to cut. But it also cuts to a communities pride and cohesion, the communal traditions and shared services that gather people together and mark the seasons.

Their loss diminishes us.

In much of North America and Europe, the holiday retail experience has become one that is devoid of imagination or any sense of giving back to the consumer. It smacks of miserliness and spending freezes…its more about Merry Cuts-mas than Happy Christmas. -- Tyler Brule for the FT

A bit of a rough crossing

2011-12-08T16:29:00.000+01:00

Work done in England, it was time to catch up with end-of-year work in the Netherlands, drop in on language classes, and take a break at the Christmas Markets. The bags were packed, appointments in place, the car fully fueled. At 6:30 am, I pulled out from Cambridge to catch the early ferry. BBC4 was starting to sound warnings about a major windstorm battering Scotland that could spread to the Channel by mid-afternoon, but I sounded like I could beat it.

The winds were rising as I crested the hill and descended into Dover. The check-in agent advised that boats were already running an hour late (at 10 in the morning), and that it would be a bit bouncy on the way over. I gulped a Dramamine and joined the queue.

Our boat appeared and turned, struggling to angle into the docks despite being inside the breakwalls. Tugs hustled around the enclosure to keep boats separated and to nudge them into place. Even at dock, there was a perceptible sway to the deck. Everyone found a table with a good view of the horizon and settled in: there were no queues for the café.

The pitching started in earnest as we cleared the harbor. The captain angled well south so that the wind was a bit more head-on, minimizing the roll a bit. Spray crested the bows and splashed over the third-story panoramic windows. The crew closed the children’s play area.

We were well over two hours completing the run to Dunkirk – a bit better once we were into the lee of the northern French coast, but not a great crossing. But they did complete the run: later boardings weren’t so lucky.

It’s hard to know the best means to get between England and the Netherlands at this time of year: fog closes airports, storms interrupt ferries, ice stops trains. It’s just a time to schedule a bit loosely and stay flexible.

What were they thinking?

2011-12-06T21:13:00.000+01:00

A long trip back from the US – lots of time to get some sleep, catch up with emails, do a little reading, maybe watch a movie. The flight was direct Chicago – Heathrow, good in most respects except for having left from Gatwick. This required me to close the loop back to Terminal South on the only transport available, National Express. £24 for the one-hour, one-way trip; preceded by a one hour delay in the all-concrete Heathrow Central Bus Station, complete with intermittent fire alarms.

What was I thinking when I booked that open loop (besides the few dollars saved)?

Actually, the same thought washed up on the plane during the in-flight-entertainments: Glee! Live! The Movie! 3D! I’ve watched a few episodes of the show on other flights, and found them oscillating between tolerable social comedy and overwrought teen angst, compelling or unwatchable. Unfortunately, the movie veered towards the later: a cacophony of anthems to self confidence and set pieces highlighting cast members. Entirely self-absorbed, overwhelmingly superficial.

The show features a disabled character, Artie, who competently tooled through the concert sets in his wheelchair. The “What were they thinking?” moment came in a dream sequence, when Artie aspired to be a dancer. Rising from his wheelchair, he joined a troupe of dancers wheeling and shuffling across the stage.

This seems like a terrible idea on so many levels. In a show that is so frankly aspirational, should the disabled character reveal that he is played by a fully functional actor? That he aspires to be a dancer? That he has failed to embrace his own inner Gleek?

It seems like a breach of the ‘fourth wall’ that has to be jarring to fans of the show. If fans embrace the idea that everyone is beautiful (in their own way), does Artie’s artifice bring the whole construct into question?

I sank into a podcast, the 100th episode of This Week in Travel. Ordinarily an entertaining compilation of travel stories and tips, this was a live broadcast from a travel convention, featuring an assortment of travel bloggers and podcasters.

The “What were they thinking?” theme was why marketing people didn’t treat travel bloggers with the same respect as “mommy bloggers”. The ideal would be to travel the world, receiving payola from destination resorts, tour companies, and manufacturers of travel gear. Yet the meme was slow to catch on with companies: what could be done?

The answer was publicity. Travel bloggers needed to network better, sell themselves (and their products) more aggressively, track their performance more transparently. It was all about endorsements, page hits, and publicity. They shared tips on how to become a paid speaker at key conventions (“otherwise, why attend at all”), how to create a hook (“I can learn the language in 30 days!”), and how to find compelling products (“It purifies water no matter who’s been swimming in it.”).

I hadn’t realized how aggressively (and shamelessly) people run social media accounts simply to gather an audience and sell them something. Years ago I saw a fascinating presentation by creative people from publicity firm Saatchi, describing how they created ads designed to demolish reputations of opposing politicians. This struck me the same way, an ethics-free hour dedicated to deception. Why would you want to publicize that?

In either case, I think it comes down to authenticity, whether asking you to root for Artie overcoming his handicap or an essayist telling about their journeys. When the curtain is pulled back and the character is revealed to be an actor or salesman, isn’t trust lost?

Accelerating into the holidays

2011-12-04T20:40:00.000+01:00

December is going to be a little insane…

In part, it’s a natural consequence of the holiday – a couple of weeks off with family at the end of the month, returning at New Year’s.

In part, it’s a natural consequence of business rhythms – closing a development phase, opening a fundraising round, organizing timelines, contractors, and budgets for the new year.

And, in part, it’s what I want - taking in the Christmas markets and spending seasonal time with friends in Maastricht and Cambridge. From Christmas choral concerts in Cambridge to Gluhwijn in the Vrijthof, it’s a special time of year and filled with events that I don’t want to miss.

And so the schedule fills. This week, it’s a quick trip to Chicago to organize a clinical trial for the spring. Waiting until January would delay the whole study by a month, but hard fundraising deadlines mean that we need to push forward. So it was that I boarded Aer Lingus today for a one-day trip to the Windy City, fingers crossed as a major storm swept east after dumping a foot of snow on my parents in Boulder.

It was the first time on the airline – intensely green but clean and modern. I caught up with budgets, reports and back episodes of Blue Bloods as the plane pushed through 120 mph headwinds, arriving 2 hours late at O’Hare. I think that we were barely moving forward at times: the little airplane icon crawled across the map. At least the trip home should be equally accelerated.

So, then, back in Cambridge Tuesday for Meerkats and Avatars, the pitch event at St John’s Innovation, then the ferry to Maastricht on Thursday. Back to Cambridge Tuesday for a Board Meeting Wednesday, another on Thursday, to my parent’s house on Friday, Seattle on Sunday.

‘tis the season!

London Christmas Lights

2011-12-01T10:13:00.000+01:00

It’s turning into a busy week, ahead of a busy month. I took the train down to Brighton today for a site visit, reviewing our microbiology progress ahead of a milestone review in mid-December. The trains back dropped me into London with a couple of hours to spare before the off-peak ticket north to Cambridge kicked in. Rather than fight it, I took a long stroll between Oxford Circle and Piccadilly – lovely evening to enjoy the lights and browse the stores.

Evening lights in Maastricht

2011-11-28T15:18:00.000+01:00

In the run-up to the holidays, Maastricht begins to bustle in the evenings. The stores are open later, tables are harder to find in the café’s and the light shows arrive around town.

The Vrijthof has been hosting a Light Spectacle projected onto the front of the Hoofdwacht: a history of the city in seven acts. The effects are fairly impressive and the history is concisely and colorfully conveyed.

Here’s the daylight image:

And the spectacle images, with historical maps of Maastricht and a dynamic effect that makes the bricks rise out of the building. The show is about 15 minutes long.

Video is, of course, on YouTube, and another of a work by Ukranian engineer who may have started it all.

The Bok Bier is on tap (and bottles) for the cold herfst, strong and syrupy, a little sweet and a little bitter, it’s a nice comfort drink for jazz night Thursday at the pub.

And if you stay up very late, there are the morning lights to watch.

Explaining Thanksgiving

2011-11-26T17:23:00.000+01:00

‘Hope you’re having a wonderful Thanksgiving !, my friend greeted me on Thursday morning. Then they turned serious.

It’s a religious holiday, right?

“No, a family holiday, actually. People gather at someone’s house, cook an enormous feast, and share it together.”

We used to all go to my grandfather’s house: he’d have the grinder out early in the morning and we’d all take turns cranking while he put bread, egg, vegetables, turkey bits in to be minced into the dressing. A sign of maturity was being allowed to feed things into the hopper without having adults fret about whether fingers would join the giblets.

We’ve since lost the trick of making stuffing using that recipe – it’s been years since someone could get it to come out right. But we do have a killer cranberry recipe to replace it.

So everyone cooks all morning…and then?

“A glass of wine when the bird goes into the oven, and everyone settles down to watch television while it cooks. Mostly parades.”

What sort of parades?

“The New York department stores put them on – it involves lots of bands and, well, enormous balloons. And football. American football.”

It was a day for getting out the wooden railway tracks and building out across the room, adding cars and Lincoln Log houses, staging complicated wrecks. It was a day for reading books, playing in the snow, getting reacquainted with cousins.

And always turkey for dinner?

“Always.”

And red candied crabapples and green candied pears, a relish plate with olives and celery. The turkey, separate plates for white and dark meat, a bowl for the stuffing, another for gravy. Mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, string beans and mushroom with the crunchy onion things on top. Cranberries, pumpkin pie, mince pie: Wine, tea, wine, coffee.

And then?

“Actually, the cleaning up was a family event, then sitting around the living room for some conversation or a movie if one was on TV.”

Or, lately, take a nap before heading to stores at midnight to start Christmas shopping. Don’t ask.

Every Year?

“One way or another.”

It’s a bit of a moveable feast these days, we take I on the road, sometimes check into places with buffet dinners on the coast, occasionally do core elements out of a box and focus on the essentials.

Five years ago, ‘Liam came over to Cambridge for the Expat Thanksgiving organized by Cambridge MA, in the US. The turkey was wrapped in bacon, there was a lot of wine for 2 pm, lots of patriotic flags around the room. It looked like there might be dancing. At 2 pm.

The Vice Chancellor gave a toast saying that “We don’t understand Thanksgiving, we’re not sure that we approve of it, but we know that you miss your families, so try to have a nice Thanksgiving!”

Here, here.

And note that the Pilgrims do, in fact, look a bit Dutch. There’s a reason.

‘Sounds special.

“Absolutely.”

Thursday’s links of interest

2011-11-24T12:00:00.000+01:00

I have lots of little jots in my notebook – things that I want to write about but that don’t merit a whole essay. So just scroll through and watch for something of interest.

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Learning: Stanford University runs a very good set of online technical and management courses. I took their Certificate of Management program, four courses that were all excellent: I don’t know how I would survive without their Accounting class in particular. The school is now giving courses for free: lectures and classwork online, backed up with readings and faculty support. The Lean Launchpad, for those starting a business, is here, and the links to other courses are at the bottom of the page.

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Thought 1: Do we get suspicious of people in situations where we feel vulnerable, or just in situation where we’ve previously had bad experiences?

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Politics: Now the OWS has been evicted from parks (I love the images of city workers cleaning up in HazMat suits to reinforce the health risk that bearded protesters pose to the public), the discussions seem to be shifting to thoughtful debate rather than civic actions. I liked Ursula Le Guin’s 99% parable and Sen Bernie Sanders plea for Democrats to stop caving:.

Here is something we all can agree on: Federal deficits are a serious problem. Here is something no one seriously disputes: Today's big deficits were caused mainly by big tax cuts for the wealthy, two unpaid-for wars, and a horrible recession caused by Wall Street greed.

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Light Reading: Book View Café. Wonderfully written daily essays by outstanding writers. Along with BBC’s From our own correspondent and NPR’s This American Life, it’s both an enjoyable and informative collection of content and a strong example of how to tell compelling short-form narrative stories.

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Thought 2: Does the truism “Past returns are no guarantee of future performance?” increasingly apply to the value of a colelge education?

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Tech tools: Google Chrome. IE has become unusable – it takes forever to load and fails too often. Firefox is a trusty alternative, but speed is again an issue, I gave Chrome a try and am pleasantly surprised: it’s lightweight, compliant, includes build-in spell checking and has a rich supply of plug-ins. I recommend adding session Buddy – I’m always having to save sets of tabs after doing some research.

Resource Monitor. This one is from TechRadar – my Windows Live Writer hung in the middle of a process. I could see it dragging 50% on the CPU, accomplishing nothing, but didn’t want to kill the process and lose the work. Resource monitor lets you see the process tree and kill the sub-process causing the problem, allowing me to recover the main window text. Yes, we shouldn’t need it, but when we do, it’s a lifesaver. The utility is built into Windows 7 but, like Snipping Tool for screen capture, you have to search to find it.

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Consumer tip: I increasingly find that when I dead-end with a company’s support department, a quick tweet with the company hashtag produces results. BT and Rosetta Stone certainly monitor their tag, and the public shout-out seems to get their attention., It may not resolve anything, but it’s another avenue to try.

A foggy time in Eindhoven

2011-11-23T15:35:00.000+01:00

The week ahead was beginning to fill with UK-based meetings and most matters Dutch had been settled – it was time to hop back across the Channel to Cambridge. Ryanair offered fares that were half the going rate on Eurostar (43€ vs. 80€), so I booked my seat…well, a slot… and packed my 10 kg/single bag to head north.

Uneventful hour up to Eindhoven Airport, the trains were on time (even if the do divert to Heerlen ahead of Sittard on Sundays, adding half an hour to the journey) and the airport bus was running regularly. The Big Board showed only one cancelled flight to London City, a localized weather problem. No worries; I settled in.

The call came to passport control, where the officer dug into the 5-month delay with IND (now approved, dank u wel) as the grumbling line swelled behind me. A brief wait, a boarding call, and we walked out into the gathering dusk,

and the pea-soup fog.

No planes on the tarmac; ground crews settled on silent tugs and luggage tractors. Not good. We were diverted through baggage claim and back into the main terminal to wait for bus transportation to an alternate airport. A quick check confirmed the Ryanair got caught by surprise and it was at least two hours before busses could arrive.

After the mess with the volcanic ash 18 months ago, Ryanair has become more attentive to European Regulation 261/2004(8) - they even hand a copy to every passenger- and the deal is clear: U kunt de vlucht omboeken of restitutie vragen …er bestaat ook een mogelijkheid de vlucht om te boeken in de terminal.

Cool. I jumped onto the Viggo Servicedesk to see if there was an alternate, and they swiftly booked me onto the 9:30 flight the next morning.

No fees; no hassle – it was a whole new Ryanair experience.

I unwound the journey and got a good night’s sleep, printed my new boarding pass, and headed back north at 7 am.

and back into pea-soup fog.

There was no fighting it: I joined the refugees boarding waiting buses and headed to Dusseldorf – Weeze. The local television station sent a camera crew to take pictures as we shivered in the fog. It’s an hour-and-a-half journey to Germany, I dozed and listened to the back catalog of BBC4’s Analysis (iPlayer or download: seriously the best half-hour on radio if you want to understand contemporary social and economic issues). They dumped us off of the buses and through security onto the planes within 30 minutes of arrival, I suspect there must have been folks left behind looking for food or duty-free gifts.

All in all, a delay of 18 hours and 20 euro additional train/bus expense. But the new policy gives choices when the weather gets bad: no-fee refund or switch, take the bus when it suits, and expedited handling in Germany.

‘Lots better than it’s been, but it may still be a better idea to take the train if temperatures are likely to drop during high humidity.

Social mobility and the Spirit Level

2011-11-22T13:53:00.000+01:00

What is the correlation between income and health? I would guess that those on lower incomes are less healthy, and that they might also score worse on related attributes of life expectancy, addictions, literacy, and criminal or domestic violence.

And this is, in fact, what the data shows.

But now an intriguing study suggests that many measures of social health also worsen with increased income disparity.

Income Gap is the ratio of the average income of the richest 20% to that of the poorest 20%: it’s value is 5 in the Netherlands, 7 in the UK, and 10 in the US.

The study argues that this multiplier directly correlates, and potentially causes, all sorts of social ills.

Wilkinson and Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why more equal societies almost always do better

The statistics fill graph after graph (available through the Equality Trust). They are compelling and could factually motivate positions like OWS’s stand against rising income inequality.

The Spirit Level’s argument is controversial, of course. If true, it completely undermines the conservative position that rising income inequality elevates society as a whole by empowering the winners to spend, create new businesses, and pay the majority of taxes. BBC4 had a good pro-con debate on Analysis, and the Right has predictably weighed in to say that the facts don’t speak for themselves, the evidence is incomplete: tactics used to hopelessly muddy the climate debate.

The Spirit Level is not perfect: I particularly struggled with this graph of Income Inequality and Social Mobility.

The data is sparse and the line is created by two outliers: the US and UK – I doubt that this graph proves anything. More disturbing is the characterization of the US as dead-low in Social Mobility: our “classless” society where merit determines earnings determines social rank should be more mobile, not less.

This drove me back to the literature – “Social Mobility” is, not surprisingly, a slippery concept. It can be based on at least four definitions: Inter-generational and Intra-generational, each in Social and Economic dimensions. Is your income highly correlated with your parent’s income? Yes: and in that way, the US has low social mobility. Is your income highly correlated with your own educational achievement? Yes: and in that way, the US has high social mobility.

The truth depends on the myths we tell ourselves about our society and the often differing ways that we choose our definitions in different cultures. While this is an issue in making the global comparisons, I don’t think that it obscures the central truth of the Spirit Level’s argument: greater income inequality is bad for society.

Learning Dutch - Flikken Maastricht

2011-11-21T14:37:00.000+01:00

I visited my Dutch college this week to try to get my inburgering back on track. The past couple of months has been hard on the daily time that I set aside to work on my language skills, and I’d fallen badly out of sync with classwork.

I’ve been able to continue reading and writing: most of the Dutch newspapers and radio stations are available on the Internet, and I spend time daily reading selections and writing about them to a Dutch friend.

New words go onto a growing vocabulary list that I can drill through VTrain, a flashcard trainer that is easy to set up with Dutch-English pairs.

The War of the Week with Rosetta Stone ended in a draw – they refused to renew my subscription but gave me a three month free preview of the new TOTALe course, with progressive drills and live chat. I’ve started working through the exercises again but still need to see how the studio sessions work.

The problem is the listening and speaking, more mundane conversational skills. My administrator stresses that there is no way to pass NT2 without regular and focused Dutch language presentations and conversations.

I do bi-weekly Skype chats with Dutch friends, which helps, but would like something that I can watch and follow more often. There’s limited availability of Dutch television outside of the Netherlands, but some shows have been serialized and can be obtained on DVD or BitTorrent.

Such is Flikken Maastricht, a police drama set along the otherwise placid Maas. It’s got a bit of a Hill Street Blues feel at the intro (being from Chicago, I can appreciate that):

Title and intro–Flikken Maastricht

In it, Wolf and Eva sport fashion worthy of Miami Vice, zip around town in tiny police cars and big speedboats, and hyperlink around familiar venues connected by imaginary alleys. It’s all good fun.

The stories are familiar, so the Dutch is understandable – I never really get lost and can always pick up the thread if I lose a few words.

And, here, Wolf sits and broods outside of my old apartment. The bench actually never existed here (it would be nice if it had), but my bicycle’s been parked at that same spot countless times…

… and in unusual ways.

De economie krimpt, en de 30% regeling

2011-11-20T12:05:00.000+01:00

I stopped into a pub to sample some Bok bier and catch up with the news after a long day’s train ride. I picked up The Volkskrant, a center-left paper, to find the front page full of graphs with all of the indicators pointing down. “Consumption falls, recession looms!” The Telegraaf (center-right, above) and FD were the same: the world’s troubles had finally arrived at Dutch doorsteps.

I’ve previously written that the Dutch have done an amazingly good job over the past two years of tacking through the swirl of global economic riptides. GDP was growing at 1.7%, unemployment hovered around 5.5%, the current-account balance was broadly positive. But this was a big change: “The Dutch economy shrank in the 3rd quarter, the only one of the five largest Eurozone economies to do so. A combination of government cuts and falling consumption caused the economy to shrink by 0.3 percent compared to the preceding quarter...” (Volkskrant)

It may be a relative thing, a long run of good news followed by a quarter of bad, but it’s a surprising change. People I talked with blamed it on bank layoffs driven by weak mortgage lending. If so, it may be a one-time event before government activism and Dutch optimism re-asserts itself.

National statistics are kept by the CBS (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) and their report (good practice in Dutch) can be found here.

It will be worth watching how changes in the economy drive changes in tax policies. Another negative sign was an alert from my accountants about upcoming changes to the 30% Tax Ruling. This is an expatriate tax break that allows expatriate employees to earn up to 30% of their compensation tax free for ten years. In a country with 52% marginal tax rates, this is a huge deal.

The rules are being tightened, and this will affect knowledge workers and graduate students directly. Expatica summarizes the rule changes; most accountants are being proactive in issuing advice. The government will check that eligibility conditions are being met (that the employee or researcher has been recruited from abroad and meets salary conditions) and may, in some cases, reduce the duration of the discount.

If you already have, or were planning to apply, for the 30% exemptions, find out what the changes mean to you: this will have a big impact on expat living costs.

What does 50 years feel like?

2011-11-19T21:36:00.000+01:00

There’s not a lot to do on the train to Dusseldorf: I could try to catch up with email or read a book but the scenery and the swaying make it better for listing to a podcast. I happened onto Rethinking the Sixties from PRI, remembering figures like Hayden and Dylan who defined the decade for a generation in the US.

I was slightly young for it, I entered high school in 1968; I watched the riots at the Democratic convention on my grandmothers television while on holiday in Ohio. The music, the war, the protests were things that the older kids did, things that we would do when we were in college. Of course, in 1972 it was largely over: I got my draft lottery number (over 300) even as the war was ending.

Not really that long ago: it feels like yesterday.

Only it was fifty years ago.

I paused to get my thoughts around that fact. Think about it: today, we are as far removed from the 60’s as people of that time were from 1912. That is an absolutely stunning idea: in 1912, the Titanic sailed from Southampton, Woodrow Wilson became president, Amundson became the first person to reach the South Pole. The Beaumont Hotel opened in Maastricht in 1912. In the intervening fifty years there would be two world wars, a Great Depression, a revolution in Physics, the arrival of business and transportation and communication technologies that were unimagined at the start of the century.

1962 was a completely different world from 1912. So, is 2012 a completely different world from 1962?

It doesn’t feel like it. Nothing feels unfamiliar, only more evolved. I had access to a computer in high school (granted, there was only one computer for the whole school), color television had arrived, we shopped in food stores, cars weren’t too different, my father went to the office much as people do today. Some things feel qualitatively different: internet access to goods, knowledge, and people, wide social equality among genders and ethnicities, a lot more ethic restaurants that truly reflect their origins. The Port Huron Statement that captured 60’s youth politics feels out of time now. But there isn’t anything that feels different on the scale of change, on the magnitude of events, that filled 1912 to 1962.

My grandfather was just a boy in 1912, I wonder how he would compare the two periods. Was there less change after the 60s, or do I just have less perception of it? By assimilation, accommodation, figuring out what to adopt, and where things fit in life, everything from cell phones to mission statements emerged and then became everyday-ordinary to us. A digital camera, a blog: who can say what looks antique from my children’s perspective, or revolutionary from my father’s.

50 years. Strange how I really don’t feel it: how recognizable old friends still are and how relevant the knowledge from high school still seems.

It seems like it should feel a lot more…different, doesn’t it?

Trolling through Medica

2011-11-18T21:20:00.000+01:00

When hospitals who need to buy things and companies who wish to sell them meet, the result is Medica, a yearly trade show held at the Dusseldorf fairgrounds. I’d never attended before, there’s no scientific program and physicians generally don’t attend, so it really wasn’t my audience. This year, though, I was shopping for service providers and exit partners, design ideas and competitive pricing.

And everyone was asking if we could meet at Medica.

The show is absolutely vast: 17 gigantic buildings, each holding all of the companies serving a particular specialty. Genomics, for example, were in Building 1; electromedical in 9-11; plastics in 5, physiotherapy in 4. It can take an hour to survey one building, methodically walking each aisle and scanning every booth. Fortunately, it runs for four days, 8 1/2 hours per day.

The exhibits range from fascinating to bizarre: in a venue that big, companies reach to get noticed. Usually it’s a matter of putting souvenir pens and young greeters out front, cookies and coffee farther back into the booth where the salesmen lurk. Other times it’s a matter of mounting models in the scanners or sweating on the treadmills. The biggest crowds seemed to gather where samples of handcreams were being distributed.

Sometimes the promotions work, sometimes not.

It was a good show, though – despite being refused entry to the US Chamber of Commerce pavilion (for lack of an appointment!?), I met a lot of people and did a lot of business in a very short time.

Zusatz: Crossing the frontier

2011-11-17T22:51:00.000+01:00

Even after six years living in the Netherlands, the little things can trip me up.

This week, the big medical device show, Medica, is running in Dusseldorf. The easiest way to get there is by train: NS to Roermond, Veolia to Venlo, then the VRR to Dusseldorf. Simple.

Almost.

The problem is that the station is two miles from the German border. And any train ride, even a two-mile one, requires a ticket.

The solution is a Zusatz.

A Zusatz is a train ticket that covers that two mile stub: I’d never heard of it but it’s required to ride the VRR out of the Netherlands. They can only be obtained at the point where the VRR embarks, using a separate ticket machine. And, since the trains only run once each hour, there’s no time to learn about that process during a five minute transfer.

So, cooling my heels in the Venlo station for an hour and five minutes, there was plenty of time to understand and document the process for those who may follow my tumbling footsteps:

1) Find the special Fahrkarten ticket machines. (Men and women seem equally confused by the process: the difference is that women cluster and consult, men frown and jab at buttons in solitary frustration).

2) Hit the Zusatz Tickets button, then the Ausgabe… option. They are the same price, but the top Tickets option gives you a stamped ticket good for only 90 minutes, while the lower Ausgabe choice gives an unstamped ticket that is good anytime.

3) Add a ticket: since I want to return to the Netherlands, I need two for the round trip, and I can’t buy a Zusatz in Dusseldorf. In fact, buy several, so that this won’t happen again tomorrow during a tight connection.

4) Pay the extortionate fare.

5) Wait one hour for the next train. (Bring reading material – there is little to do at 8 am in the Venlo station.)

6) Stamp the Zusatz. Don’t do it earlier – don’t do it in Maastricht: the ticket is only good for 90- minutes once stamped.

7) Have the Zusatz ready when the conductor comes by to ask for it. They actually did.

8) Remember to stamp the remaining Zusatz before leaving Dusseldorf. Otherwise you have to hunt for a machine in stations along the route down.

PS: Don’t forget to punch-in and punch-out during transfers from NS to Veolia. Although both trains accept OV-Kaart, they run different accounts and you have to be checked in with the carrier you ride.

And, yes, at least I did that bit right…

The logic of share pricing - 2

2011-11-16T22:42:00.000+01:00

I wrote yesterday about the tension between setting a high share price and setting a low one when going out for funds. A further twist is that the decision drives the amount of funds that company raises.

Lets say the company is prepared to offer 30,000 shares of stock. At a high share price, those shares bring in more money than they would at a lower price. Obvious, but the converse, less evident, is also true: if the share value is low, it limits the funds that the company can raise.

In our case, the slope seemed to be about £50,000 per point of share price, or per £100,000 in overall company valuation. So, if our milestones, asset growth, and risk reduction doubled the company’s value, doubling its share price, we were probably in a position to raise £500,000.

That would fund a year’s operations, further suggesting that we would be back in the market in 9 months time. The logic is cold that way: I’d rather have raised enough to reach first revenue, but we’re just not far enough along yet.

Even this doesn’t end the tweaks of getting to the right price. Will the company’s story justify the change in price since the last fundraising? Will enough current shareholders take up their preemptory rights to reassure new ones (we’d need six figures from our current angels)? Will the holidays divert investors spending?

It can all be a bit daunting: it’s more complex and subtle than I would have thought. But it also build confidence to get good counsel, to understand the process, and to reach a decision that works the way it should.

Students come to me asking if they are ready to enter business: another degree, an internship, maybe a consultancy, will give them the skills they need to succeed.

I think that they lack confidence more than they lack skill.

A learn has to be learned this as I go along, staying alongside good people with ears open and mind engaged.

And the confidence comes simply from the trying and succeeding.

The logic of share pricing - 1

2011-11-15T17:01:00.000+01:00

High price = Good price.

How hard can it be?

Actually, share price is a deceptively simple idea, based only on the value of the company and the number of shares held by investors.

So, if the company is valued at £1 million, its equivalent share price is £1,000K/70,000 = £14.29.

Conversely, if it has 70,000 shares outstanding at a price of £15, it’s value is £1,500K.

For a public company, value is set by the open market. But for a private or startup firm, it’s set internally.

Take the same company, previously priced at £15 per share, but now a year on from that. It’s met some milestones, acquired some assets (equipment, knowledge, patents), reduced it’s overall risk.

Its ready to raise more funds by selling additional shares to private investors.

Should it set a low or high share price?

A high price is the obvious answer: it raises the worth of existing shareholders and validates the progress that the company has made.

Further, if minimizes dilution. To raise £1 million, the company must issue 40,000 shares at a price of 25, diluting existing shareholders by 36%. However at a price of 35, only 28,571 shares must be issued, diluting by far better 29%.

But…

A low share price allows existing shareholders to buy a larger quantity of shares. A £1 million fundraising requires a 1% shareholder to put £10,000 more in to maintain her percentage ownership. A lower share price, 25 instead of 35, means 400 shares rather than 286 for the money, and a correspondingly bigger profit if the stock later rises in value.

So, there’s the dilemma: when the Board of Directors sets a price, do they go high or low?

It’s complicated, because Directors have a responsibility to both the company and to the investors, whose ideal price is widely different. And when Directors are Shareholders, its a direct conflict of interest.

The tension is there in Board discussions; I hadn’t appreciated it until going through it. But a good Board, my Board, discussed the pro’s and cons and never wavered from doing what was right for the company, not themselves.

‘just another one of those things Business School doesn’t teach you.

Kind of, almost, missing meetings

2011-11-13T14:25:00.000+01:00

Back in the day…

I’d pull into the parking lot at 8, grab a cup of coffee from the cafeteria, and head upstairs to the office. A few people were generally in early, I‘d poke my head into or over their cubicle and see how life was going, what news there was to give shape to the day ahead. Coffee empty, I’d drop into my office chair and bring up the calendar

…which would be colorful and crowded. Another day packed tight with meetings.

And at 5:00, I’d be surrounded by unfinished writing and unread papers and undreamt thoughts.

So one of the small pleasures of self-employment and virtual offices has been the near-total lack of meetings.

I probably have three meetings a week: they all involve making room reservations and driving at least half an hour each way. With that commitment, we plan ahead, prepare materials, and make the most of the time.

The rest of the time, I communicate with my far-flung team by Skype and e-mail. More flexible, less intrusive, and I can work contact around reading, writing, thinking, rather than the other way around.

I stay clear, coordinated, and transparent with everyone, almost every day. As people add to the team, I add them to my circles.

and so the number of connections grows, exponentially.

No problem, I write a lot more e-mails, make a lot more calls,

but,

I’m starting to wonder if the occasional meeting might save a whole lot of pointless writing and calling.

What kind of business vehicle?

2011-11-12T21:23:00.000+01:00

A Board Meeting is coming up on Monday, and its making me think hard about business vehicles.

<------------

No, not that sort. It would be nice to trade up from the Fiesta, but they’d never go for it…

No, the vehicle I’m thinking about looks a bit more like this

------------>

Back in 2006, my academic advisor and I were debating the principles of new business formation.

Classically, you start with a market need, a product or service that can fill it, a business model that can profit from it, buttressed with good people and abundant funding.

As an exercise, though, what if you built the structure ahead of the product? Put together a process for transforming undeveloped ideas into refined ones, add people with good generic skills in a few key project and financial management roles. Qualify a good list of supporting service providers, from legal and regulatory through laboratory and fabrication. Then find something to apply it to.

In short, build the vehicle before loading the cargo.

It’s a lot like building a house on spec: take undeveloped land, manage a project to put a house on it, sell it onward.

But there’s a danger to that analogy too: market conditions. What if the process succeeds, but the buyers aren’t there?

I suppose, having built the house, we could live in it, rather than let it lie fallow or sell it at a loss.

Similarly, having created a prototype product, validated it, and run it through regulatory approval so that it’s ready for market, we could simply start selling it.

Take that a step farther: should we be making revenue shipments?

And this is the core of the thinking – maybe the whole idea of building a great product, then giving it to someone else, is flawed.

It’s all about what the business should be when it grows up:

A. A vehicle, creating and selling a portfolio of assets needed to make the product: it’s formula, test results, CE Mark, and patents. License revenues are reinvested into building the next spin-out prototype.

B. A company, manufacturing a product to sell through distributors. Profits are reinvested in market development and product improvement.

Either way, it’s a sustainable business, one run as a process irrespective of the product, the other focused on product without leveraging the process.

I’ve been thinking about how the business would develop under each scenario.

We’d need more people and plant for Plan B, producing higher revenues but lower percentage profits.

We’d be more flexible and profitable under Plan A, but its risky to depend on repeated success of early stage projects.

Plan B creates jobs and tangible assets to float on a stock exchange; Plan A is a partnership that deals in intellectual property.

I haven’t figured this out yet. We definitely validated the model, creating a successful vehicle. The question now is whether to drive it or trade it in.

My brief life as a consigliere

2011-11-10T20:12:00.000+01:00

The assignment was simple – to convey an “offer they couldn’t refuse” and secure a cash for shares ‘win-win’ exchange. But I couldn’t close it. Robert Duvall might have – I’ll study his moves all weekend to understand where I went wrong.

The phones started ringing before 9: a client struggling with a ‘pay or vacate’ ultimatum from their landlord. This isn’t a situation that I have resources to solve (nor was that my role), but the folks I work with were willing to help. Initially we talked about covering the rent with a loan, but shifted to a discount share offer to keep the balance sheet clean. Terms were set, subscribers lined up, we were good to go.

I went in and laid out the terms, a good deal under the circumstances: cash immediately in exchange for 0.5% of the share offering at 50% discount. I’ve taken worse offers to secure services or supporters that were critical to the business, and know that sometimes you have to be practical in giving some to get some.

But they refused. No counter-proposal; no discussion.

What went wrong?

I’ve learned that “Time kills deals” – the longer you talk about terms, the more doubts can overwhelm the early enthusiasm. The close has to happen in days.

I’ve learned to “Stay in the room” – given the chance, people will shop around in search of something better. Car dealers tell you that their offer ends once you leave the showroom, knowing that you’ll go next door to ask if they’ll beat the offer.

I’ve learned to “Guard the exits” – currency is hope: if there’s one offer, there are probably more. Heartless as it sounds, the alternatives have to be methodically extinguished ahead of time.

But I haven’t learned enough.

It all sounds heartless, I know, but three times, now, I’ve negotiated good, equitable deals that fell through. In each case, our work was leveraged to stimulate a better offer, rather than refused outright.

The job of a consigliere is to make an offer that sticks, to close the deal.

Maybe its time to bring out the horse’s head.

Transiting west

2011-11-10T12:26:00.000+01:00

Packed up a few clothes and a lot of Sinterklaas treats, powered down the apartment, and headed off to the Eurostar. I’m dragging generally, uncharacteristically, and not just my suitcase.

It was a pretty good couple of weeks in Maastricht. I’ve got IND back on track (still no approval, but working on it) and all of the banks back in line (What, really, do these institutions do for us besides create friction and expense?). We made good progress developing the new anesthesia stimulator that I’m building with folks over at the University. I got back to the PT and to exercise, so am feeling a bit lighter on my feet. The Christmas lights are being lit.

Still, the inburgering is hanging out and the college is not being helpful. Travel keeps me out of class, but not out of touch. I do reading, e-learning, exchanging Dutch emails with Dutch friends. But I don’t have conversations, and can’t find a path either to have occasional Skype calls with a Dutch-buddy or to stay in sync with my class. Walking in for a few days each month is more disruptive than instructive. I’m pushing a bit harder and will see what we can work out, but inburgering is clearly a program that requires physical attendance.

The Eurostar tossed their annoyance onto the pile, as Belgian trains refused to honor “Any Dutch to Brussels” tickets unless the passenger had an actual paper ticket issued in Brussels. If you travel with a printed confirmation, they will ask you to buy a 1-way ticket (no penalty, just the 13.70 euro) and seek reimbursement from Eurostar later. Beware.

Overall, I’m just feeling tired and frustrated, short on patience and behind on task lists. I’m not good company. It will pass, but I feel like just shutting away from the world for a week to read books and eat cashews.

A disquieted week

2011-11-08T18:32:00.000+01:00

How long can you stay on the road without crashing?

Conversations among international businesspeople generates lots of advice, rules of thumb that make life on the road work. One good bit of guidance holds that two weeks of airplanes, hotels, and meetings is a practical limit: travel loses its charm, meetings become simply tiring, and and resentment builds against the treadmill beneath the schedule.

Similar ups and downs accompany expatriate life. There are many days that settings, people, language, and events are wonderful and stimulating. There are some days that the same things are tiring, pedantic, frustrating, and difficult.

This week it has just been cumulative. Work has been unrelenting: we are working through some critical phases, I’m worrying the details, and there’s nobody to talk with. Some folks are inappropriate; others are long-distance. This leads to a sense of separation, then alienation.

I’m feeling a long ways from family.

Time with friends is spent catching up, not making plans: I’m becoming a drop-in everywhere.

Corporate colleagues jet first-class while stand in the rain, waiting for buses.

I’m seeing an older face in the mirror.

A lot of expat friends seem to be headed home, closing blogs and moving on.

In the end, I feel more ranger than wizard, more janitor than miracle-worker, more of a visitor than a friend. ‘probably a sign that I need a break, a re-balancing, better connections with people.

Maybe a sign things have to change.

Fashionable, but does it sell clothes?

2011-11-05T18:00:00.000+01:00

The holiday shopping season is underway, and Maastricht’s merchants are trying to attract shopper’s attention. These are a few of my favorites, but I have to wonder if they are as effective at selling clothes as at stopping traffic.

Or is that one and the same?

Op de Blotevoetenpad

2011-11-04T21:11:00.001+01:00

‘Literally a “Barefoot Walk”.

Ages ago, when I was a camp counselor for the YMCA, we were trained in “Nature Immersion”, the technique of going belly-first through grass and into swamps to get a better connection (and smell) of habitats.

This is similar: the blotevoetenpad is a park in Belgium, set up as a 2 km path through the woods. Visitors join small groups that walk in barefoot silence behind a guide. Since our tour was very early on a Sunday morning, They included a philosophical / spiritual element alongside the tour.

It’s an interesting experience, the path changes texture all along the way. The grass was soft and cool, infinitely pleasing; stones were sharp and miserable. There was knee-deep water and shin-deep mud, squishing between my toes and warmly caking my ankles. Startled toads emerged from the soup as we squished through, hopping off into the woods. The hills were a little challenging to climb, even with log steps to balance on; the tower even moreso.

The tour ended with a small breakfast and a lecture on healthy living.. Our guide had recently passed through a health crisis so was emphasizing the need to slow down, recognize what was important, and then find the right balance in life. She illustrated her points with symbols from along the path: the maze, the tower, but waterfall, the stones.

My friends took unwarranted delight in singling me out as one of the most unbalanced lives in the room. “Life is short; opportunities are few. When you have a chance, you have to jump for it,” I offered.

Neither of us embraced the other’s point of view that morning. Still, I see the wisdom in the talk: the day will come when I’m sure that I’ll share her perspective.

Leven is vurrukkulluk

2011-11-03T16:06:00.000+01:00

Amsterdam was rainy and stormy while in London the sky was blue, the trees blossomed and people got their T-Shirts out. To celebrate the beautiful weather we ate strawberry and cream out in the garden yesterday lunch time – for the first time this year. Simply vurrukkulluk.

Simply Delicious.

The title is from a famous Dutch novel from the 60’s, ”Life is Delicious” by Remo Campert. The excerpt is from a delightful blog by Meike Ziervogel, Things Syntactical, nicely illustrating the meaning of the phrase.

The phrase is also the slogan of this year’s Nederland Leest campaign, promoting reading and literacy. What better time to go join your local library.

I am a reader and have always been a library patron, but somehow never got my library card here in Maastricht. The city has a beautiful modern stadsbibliotheek just across the river, so I took motivation from the event to go sign up.

In the Netherlands, libraries are membership organizations: library use is free but you pay a yearly fee (36 euro per year) to be able to check out books. A simple form, backed up by a passport or ID, got me my card (in the UK I also had to bring a recent utility bill to show that I lived in the community), but everything is online and electronic immediately after that.

The library features a l;arge selection of books, magazines, CDs and DVDs, with a small English language collection. There’s free wi-fi and lots of meeting rooms and study areas, serving a lot of small businesses and community organizations as well. A museum fills the ground floor, with space for performances and readings, there is a café up a floor and a delightful research room overlooking the river on the top floor.

It’s quiet and sunlit and couldn’t be better for curling up in a corner with a bit of good writing.

Dutch currency transfers and internships

2011-11-02T10:33:00.000+01:00

I got a nice banking surprise this morning as I paid the monthly bills from the business bank account: a transfer from the UK yielded an unexpected bonanza of euros.

The European debt crisis has pounded the euro in recent days, and a dollar or pound buys 10% more euros than they did last summer. It’s not the time to be moving money out of Europe, but a great opportunity to move money in. This is especially true if you can afford to move the money slowly (over 5 days rather than 2) and can take advantage of SEPA credit transfers (a mechanism for making cross-border transfers in euros that cuts fees in half).

Conversely, if repatriating funds to the US or UK, it might be a good time to wait or hedge until things resolve (I don’t believe that the Greeks will leave the euro but the uncertainty will weigh on exchange rates for many weeks.

I am not one for watching exchange rates closely, nor for hedging rates, but I keep general track, monthly, of price movements and fees and will shift excess funds towards cheap currencies for “rainy day” savings when I can.

---------------

A friend and I discussed job prospects for graduating students over a wonderful Italian meal last night. Dutch unemployment generally is enviably low, under 5% overall and under 8% for youth 15-24, so there should be a good market. In part, this reflects broader Dutch labor policies, but it’s also a product of the way that Dutch youth enter the workforce.

There is a much higher reliance on temporary internships in the Netherlands (and in Europe generally) than in the US. Graduating students take 4-month positions at 500 euro / month wages to build skills and networks. Since these are not permanent employment, hiring firms don’t have to pay the same social and severance benefits. There are various clearing sites to connect opportunities with students, and most universities have services for employers looking for students.

It’s an intriguing possibility, but I’d have to do some serious planning to know what I’d expect an intern to do and then find the right one. But students I know have a lot of interest in global markets, products, and careers, and could do a good job across my global organization. Certainly there are lots of projects to re-assign that I just don’t have time for: market, patent, and competitive landscapes, data analysis, contract pricing of service providers, web site maintenance.

I felt a bit guilty outsourcing my web site redesign to India for 6% the cost of doing it into the US or Europe – this might be a way to do some good closer to my base. I wonder if I can include “learning Dutch” in the remit somewhere…

If yesterday was Halloween…

2011-11-01T23:00:00.000+01:00

Today must be the beginning of Christmas.

Or so it seems in Maastricht.

Layers of Leadership

2011-10-31T10:07:00.000+01:00

“Dave, a Board meeting is not a milestone review,” the Chairman gently chided. “They are there to advise, not to judge.”

We walked through the consequences together: a higher-level agenda, more focus on financial performance, less detail on development, questions phrased as propositions, a single-page operating summary.

Yet another way of doing business.

The seamless hierarchy of business organizations suggests that every manager understands the detail of what people beneath them are doing. It implies that managers at all levels differ in the quality, but not the type, of their reviews and presentations.

Employees earn promotions based on performance: applying knowledge, leveraging contacts, and gaining experience that qualifies them for the next level of leadership. A research manager will have successfully innovated; a research director will have completed several projects. At each level, new skills (budgeting, market analysis) and processes (financial reporting, disciplinary rules) are added.

And so, there was a straight progression from scientist to director. Department meetings were large versions of project meetings. And everyone there shared a vocabulary and design model; everyone understood the company’s expectations and the customer’s needs.

We told similar stories. We lived by stage-gate reviews.

And it defined how I did my job: I knew the format of the weekly milestones list and how to frame a goal. There was a particular report outline and presentation template that spoke to my engineering audience, much like scientific papers and conferences fit diverse information to an expected style.

This changed a lot when I became a general manager at Vitatron. The people around the table came from different departments, with different processes and vocabularies. I viewed the group as a confederation of specialists: I was the science guy who could help others understand what was going on in the literature and the design teams.

But what they wanted was confidence that someone understood and had control of the science. I learned to frame the details rather than to present them, touching on aspects familiar to the diverse perspectives around the table, and addressing the risks that they worried about.

How did my activities fit into their processes, what would I need from them? How did it fit the portfolio budget, how did it support the strategy, , when would I be in the market?

It’s qualitatively different from engineering leadership meetings, where Matlab graphs were the norm.

And, again, at the Board level. They approve goals, pose questions, leave instructions for the next meeting. My response would be to give a detailed rundown on what had been accomplished, performance against expectation. A milestone review.

But, again, there is a qualitative difference. These folks have a very distant and abstract view of the business, not an operating perspective. They want to know that the leadership has it’s priorities straight, that I have a plan, that I am on top of problems and events, and that I am making money. Our monthly agenda runs through those aspects, more reassurance than judgment.

Detail only matters when matters become public or affect investors. The press release and fundraising were disproportionately discussed; operational status matters much less than financial ones.

There’s a temptation to say “Look, this is important; we worked hard on his, look what we did”, naked approval-seeking <laugh>.

But I’m learning to create and stick to brief updates and Q&A. They willingly engage if I have a question, but I’m also learning what questions they can be most helpful with.

It’s not that milestone reviews aren’t important, or that experience doesn’t matter. It’s that audiences are more diverse at the top of the hierarchy than lower down. So Board presentations are not just more polished department presentations. And there are still meetings that will want technical detail (the science review) and operational status (my CFO and I).

The trick is not in being able to hold more polished conversations, but in being adept at leading more types of conversations.

Once around the Albert

2011-10-30T22:05:00.001+01:00

Il Fiore, my local gym, closed early this afternoon. A moment’s frustration, followed by the happy realization that the sun was out, the breeze was warm, and the road lay open to the south.

‘time for the Albert Loop.

It’s one of my favorite rides, south along the Maas to Eijsden, then a ferry crossing into Belgium (in reality, a tiny bike-platform of a ferry, shown above). Up the hill, over the bridge, and down to the locks (under construction – looks like a third passage is being dredged?). Around the dam to the left, right turn, and onto the gently curving bike path that lines the blue waterway.

The Albert Canal is a bypass for barges circling Maastricht, cut deep through the hills in a broad semicircle through Belgium. Normally I turn off at Kanne, taking the scenic route past Chateau Neercanne. But the weather was warm and the path empty – how far does the Albert Canal go?

A long, long ways.

Eventually I started doing calculations: if it starts three miles from town and follows a circumference, it’s about a ten mile path.

‘ lined with flaming trees and capped by soaring bridges, it’s a scenic run but not a well-traveled one. For long stretches there was nobody in sight, then I’d find a cluster of anglers and birds competing for fish (neither seeming to have much luck).

The path ends at Simaco. a silicate manufacturing operation dwarfed by massive wind turbines. The adjacent village of Smeermaas is known for its churches, cormorants, and bike trails. But, with taverns and shops shuttered for Sunday afternoon, I found more in the bucolic fields and cows that ring the town.

It’s a quick run back into Maastricht from the north, completing a 2.5-hour loop in total. I’m not sure that there’s enough in the northern reaches of the Canal to recommend it over the route in from Kanne. But it was a perfect day for exploring, and opened a few new areas for future rides to the northwest beyond the river.

Doing my civic duty

2011-10-29T21:31:00.000+02:00

I’ve remained a registered voter in my native King Country, WA, following the instructions provided by Democrats Abroad when I first arrived as an absentee /expat . It really works well: I get notified of upcoming elections, review the on-line voter pamphlets, fill in an on-line ballot, then sign / scan / email to vote. Makkelijk!

This year’s King County ballot has three initiatives, two resolutions,, and a dozen races ranging from judges and elections directors down to school board, fire, and water commissioners. ‘Twas time to settle in for an evening of long-distance research.

The hardest part is finding enough information about microscopically local races to make choices among candidates. Maybe I’m over-sensitized by stories of stealth judges and school-board members with off-center agendas, but I really want to tick a box, not leave a blank, and to know what ticks inside the folks I’m ticking for.

The state guide covers the headline issues and county propositions, and I’ve always appreciated the way that Washington informs the voters. I never feel misled by double negatives or confused about the meaning of proposals in the guide, and can skim through this year’s transportation, caregiver certification, and liquor regulation proposals. There’s an intriguing Senate resolution debating whether to use “extraordinary revenue spikes” to top off the state’s rainy day fund rather than to spend on new temporary services – that probably took the most thought.

The lower-level races didn’t have any obvious lunatics among the candidates, and I hate to just apply a simple rule (“vote against the incumbent”) – that’s not much better than picking the first name. So, time do dig down. Two good sources turned up. The Bothell Reporter had a pretty good set of interviews with the school board candidates, the objective and subjective, soft and hard, philosophies shake out fairly quickly.

The Woodinville Patch was even better, featuring a series of “Meet the candidate” profiles that really illuminated the candidates and issues. I especially liked the Comments sections that followed – at best they allowed some give and take between candidates and their opponents that highlighted key issues and positions. (Building the Brightwater sewage treatment plant was controversial ten years ago: it still is….)

I wrote to the Patch’s editor to say how helpful the series had been, she turns out to have Dutch connections (doesn’t everyone?) and a nice touch with the language. It’s really nice (and reassuring) to find people committed to creating high-quality local content at a time when we are all worried about the death of big-city newspapers.

Back in my groove

2011-10-28T21:44:00.000+02:00

De herfst, het najaar, has spread itself over Maastricht. Cool mornings give way to warm afternoons; early twilight, wet nights. The trees are brilliant against the blue skies; the Maas is drifting lazily at low ebb.

I’m bundled into data analysis, numbers and waveforms, as the World Series echoes from Channel 700 in the background. What is the best way to separate evoked activity from noise, nerve responses from muscle? Skype hums with discussions and ideas along with a few questions and doubts.

Evenings are wrung out with quick rides at twilight, essential shopping for the next day, dinners with friends. Encouragingly, everyone seems pretty successful, projects and businesses moving forward. Conversation touches on product ideas, talent migration, expat tips, local news, and travel stories.

Indoors, the work spreads and flows, colonizing surfaces, clustering, processed then filed. Outdoors, Christmas lights are being raised in defiance of Halloween.

It’s been a good week, a stimulating mix of progress and discovery, social and solitary, busy and quiet. Another week will see everything back on a firm footing, better organized and better planned, ‘Wish I could keep it balanced in this spot more easily, but it’s nice when it comes together even for a few days.

Back among the Dutch

2011-10-26T21:41:00.000+02:00

Its always a challenge coming back after a long stint traveling. The mail is piled high, the ‘fridge is empty, The bicycle could be anywhere: I’ve taken to writing the location on a slip of paper – fortunate this time around since the bike-park folks moved mine. The leaves are starting to turn and the wind is blowing colder (although sun-worshipers, bundled in overcoats, are still filling cafes along the river). The girls downstairs are back from their summer break; the tourist boats have shifted to a lighter schedule.

The first day is down to a routine, though. Get the apartment opened back up, reboot the internet / TV, pick up perishables at Jumbo, find the urgent bits hidden in the junk mail. Call a half-dozen friends, get caught up on the local news (and gossip), swap the local credit and membership cards back into my wallet.

By noon, things are getting back to normal.

I find a letter from IND, Sept 29th, letting me know that two bits of information are missing from my residence permit renewal file. Not unusual: their reporting rules constantly change, and business registration and 15% reserve investment need to be formally confirmed this year. ‘could have been worse, there was an early suggestion that payroll tax payments and receipts would need to be documented every month.

However, they asked for a response within two weeks or they would review the incomplete file on October 28th. Since it’s already the 26th, this quickly rose to the status of Emergency.

Business registrations come rom the Kamer van Koophandel (KvK), which recently left Maastricht for Sittard. Nothing to do but to hop the train north and walk to their offices to get the formally annotated registration document (uitreksel): two hours.

The 15% reserve rule requires showing that 15% of Stone Bridge’s capitalization amount, in my case 4500 euros, is present in the business bank account at ING. Since banking reform hit the Netherlands, local branches can’t print and stamp balance statements: those have to come from Amsterdam and require weeks to process. ‘best I can do it print the Internet Banking page and attach a lame letter saying that I hope this suffices: two hours.

A run to the TNT and it’s off to Zwolle. This is why learning the language for permanent residency actually makes sense.

Arcus College writes to say that this is a holiday week, so all Dutch inburgering classes are cancelled. I’ve developed a knack for hitting town on holiday weeks, but it gives me time to catch up with the e-lessons. I’m starting to feel the deadline looming, even though it’s a year away.

Still things have settled down and look routine by twilight (5 pm), so I celebrate with a glass of wine and a back copy of the Economist. The first article is an essay reflecting on how Maastricht, the birthplace of the euro, has become suspicious of Europe:

Surrounded by grand 17th-century painted-leather wall coverings, the mayor of Maastricht, Onno Hoes, is grappling with a problem: how to mark the anniversary of a treaty that put his city on the map, when the euro could yet break up? Indeed, how to celebrate European integration when the Netherlands itself seems so disenchanted with it? “There won’t be fireworks” but there could be an exhibition, says Mr Hoes, a euro-supporter. Or maybe Maastricht could reunite the euro’s founders “to tell us what they think, now that they are free to talk.”

‘nice to be back.

Crossing the Channel

2011-10-25T20:18:00.000+02:00

Maybe I should go back to writing about China.

I headed back to the Netherlands this morning, weighing the alternatives of train, car-ferry, and airline before settling on the Eurostar. £89 round-trip fares from London to Amsterdam are being advertised, but I was only able to find a £69 one-way to Maastricht. Still, it beats Ryanair/NS or Total / Norfolkline this time of year.

A 10:57 departure from St. Pancras allows for a leisurely trip down from Cambridge/Royston, usually less than a 1-hour trip. Unusually, when I checked the National Rail website ahead of walking to the station at 8 am, I discovered that all trains to London were cancelled (‘National Rail regrets any inconvenience that this may cause.’).

All ?!?

It seems that an overhead line problem between Kings Lynn and Ely stranded a lot of trains, while a broken engine blocked the tracks somewhere near Hitchen. Delays of over an hour were already being reported; a quick call to Panther confirmed that there was already a run on taxicabs.

I tossed bags in the car and headed to Royston, where at least occasional trains were reported to be leaving.

The first obstacle was long-term parking. UK stations subscribe to an automated payment system, improbably called myringo.com. Dial in, enter your license plate, location, and credit card, and you’re parked. The first problem was that the system didn’t recognize Dutch license plate configurations – it sent an SMS to the phone, asked for the plate in a return text, then a call back to confirm the text. Meanwhile, the stationmaster was on the loudspeaker: All passengers are advised to board the train now in the station; severe delays of up to an hour are expected until the next train. I hammered frantically at the phone; RingGo’s voice recognition mangled every American utterance.

The station was empty and quiet as I dashed onto the platform. Two technicians bent over a flickering yard status board, LED-red showing everywhere. “Are any trains getting through?” Hard to say. “Any guesses?” Hard to say.

Nonetheless, an express appeared, somehow routed around the wreckage to the north. It slipped through the maze of rerouted trains and filled platforms and arrived at King’s Cross 45 minutes ahead of the departure. With entry gates open until 30 minutes ahead, I was home free.

Then I hit security, who decided my cable- and book-filled luggage was likely a terrorist threat. We camped out at the x-ray, one guard and me, while she picked up, shook out, and inspected each (and every) item in my suitcase. One at a time, deposited in a big box next to her counter as she finished. Each package had to be opened; every book had to be riffled. And, at the end, she handed me a big box of my tossed belongings and my empty suitcase, asking if I wanted help.

Nee, ‘dank.

I still made the train, though not by much. My random seatmates, a Dutch family returning home, couldn’t have been nicer. And, emerging from the Chunnel, the clouds opened up, and the sun came out, and there was a whiff of Belgian wafels in the crisp autumn air in Brussels. My attitude progressively brightened; my ear gradually tuned back towards Nederlands. ‘Not sure that the car will still be at the station on my return, but there’s every prospect that, with the worst behind, I might get a good week ahead.

Katrina and Nola

2011-10-23T13:27:00.000+02:00

Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast six years ago. I had recently attended a heart meeting in New Orleans and was transfixed by the scenes of homeless and desperate people filling the Convention Center. I could trace my steps through the water on Canal Street, remembering a tour guide who warned that if the levees ever broke, water could reach second story windows across downtown. It seemed fantastic; now it was real.

I’ve been to New Orleans many times, from band trips in college through business trips to Tulane. The city is filled with memories, beignets from Café du Monde, oysters from Acme, the voodoo shop at the end of Bourbon Street, riding streetcars to see where the lines end. Karen had never been,so we decided to celebrate her birthday with a pilgrimage and and some fine dining (dinner at Bayona was superb).

Some cities were much worse hit – we stopped in Biloxi to find…nothing remaining. There were city blocks along the waterfront, borders of trees and cracked driveway pads to mark addresses, but no buildings. Not even “For Sale” signs. The casinos had returned, along with some of the shrimp boats, but, apart from a few damaged civic buildings, there was very little left. It may not all be Katrina, I think that casinos exert toxic effects on the surrounding town economies, whatever the promise of new jobs and tourism.

The outskirts of New Orleans were still damaged, roofs and siding torn from houses, tarps covering window holes. The downtown core is better, wash marks visible but the reconstruction complete. Bourbon Street is unchanged. The big news was that the Hyatt Hotel, blown out during the storm, was reopening after six years of renovation.

But the city retains a lot of charm and friendliness, the music playing late and the coffee served early. From a base at the Royal Sonesta, we enjoyed two days of food, drinks, and music. Krystal is still serving small, square classic gut bombs; Pat O’Briens pours bright pink Hurricanes (with no irony), the Café is still enveloped in a haze of chicory coffee and powdered sugar (we opted for a quiet bench in Jackson Square). The Funky Pirate hosted wonderful blues, the superlative “Big” underestimates both Big Al’s size and his Blues Masters group’s music.

The cheapest drinks along the strip are shots, delivered in test tubes and running about $2. Beers ran up towards $5 and mixed were above that, hustlers promised ever bigger glasses and higher proofs for half-price or less. Our running favorite was Everclear, served with a cherry and cheerfully illegal in 19 states.

The Louisiana State Museum has a good exhibit remembering Katrina – it’s frank about the scale of the disaster and the inadequacy of the response. The overriding theme is We can do better next time. Upstairs is a history of Carnival, interesting to contrast it with the Maastricht equivalent (nowhere mentioned on the list of worldwide celebrations). The musical organization and heritage is different; there is an emphasis to floats over costumes. But the spirit is the same (and the beads, still flying overhead even out-of-season).

I don’t think New Orleans will ever “come back”; it will endure and move on. I compared it to Yellowstone Park after the fires: The landmarks are still there, but it is otherwise smaller and humbler than it was, yet more rooted to its unique characteristics and heritage. With the tourists going elsewhere, there’s less need to be what people expect, more of a chance to be who you are. New Orleans is small discoveries in restaurants and shops, a slightly skewed French heritage jumbled with Southern gentility, and authentic music and relaxation.

We are the 1%

2011-10-22T12:44:00.000+02:00

I visited San Francisco a week ago for a mixture of business and pleasure: a few friends had asked if I would consider joining a new business venture and my son was completing his training leading to his deployment to Afghanistan. It was an enjoyable visit in all regards, with time for good meals, serious conversations, and a nice mental stretch in a great city.

There was even time available to visit the ‘people’s park’ of the Occupy Wall Street movement down by the ferry terminal. Which, reflecting on the 1%, inevitably got me thinking…

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The Small Business Administration reports that there are 6 million businesses registered in the United States: about 600,000 are formed each year and about 540,000 die. The difference, 60,000 successful businesses, represents 1% of the total number of employers. Odds are long against any new business succeeding: I believe that funding, talent, commitment, persistence, and focus are key elements that determine success.

Since joining the ranks of entrepreneurs three years ago, I’ve wondered about how to increase the 1% odds in my favor. On the one hand, hard work on a single idea is crucial: making the most of every opportunity and accomplishing as much as possible each day. On the other, I mitigate risk by spreading myself across several different opportunities, diversified roles, products, and geographies that make up a varied portfolio of self-investments.

AT, the new SF business, is an example of going broader rather than deeper. It’s made up of people that I know well, coming together 'around an idea that makes great “back-of’ the-envelope” economic sense. Everyone is good at what they do and respects what the others contribute. The early work is funded; the conversations are generative. It feels like a winner.

Nothing in my broad, early portfolio of five ventures takes a lot of my time or resources, so I can play my part in all of them within a day each week and wait see what develops. Then, when one hits, I’ve doubled down fast and hard to push that success ahead. Two ventures currently demand that level of effort, and both are responding wonderfully.

One day I want to model whether I’m reducing or increasing my overall risk with this strategy – it would be unfortunate if I am making more work and increasing my meltdown potential. It already makes for very full days (and weekends), but has the virtue of keeping focus on my most productive ventures.

I’ve also been able to claim salary as things ramp up, based on the contribution of prior sweat equity during the embryonic portfolio stage. Hopefully, the broad strategy also pays off with at least one large equity exit, sometime soon.

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The United States has 1.6 million active servicepeople, 5.1 per thousand, suggesting that around 1% of families have sons and daughters in the military. Ours has no military tradition, so it’s been a learning experience since ‘Liam joined the Air Force three years ago. Karen and I are both proud of what he does as a surveillance specialist, yet worried about the risks he takes as an active combat participant.

I’m still reconciling the contradictory impulses, conversations with family and friends elicit a similar mix of concerned patriotism. Discussing it, there’s not the sense of a moral calling so much as a task that needs doing with reluctantly good reasons for doing it.

Still, we all are delighted that he is excelling in a job that he enjoys so much, and it was wonderful to see him before he goes.

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Occupy Wall Street makes much of the struggle between the 99% and the 1%. I’m sympathetic to their cause: the Tea Party has been a discouraging mix of selfishness, short-sightedness, and intolerance, and I’ve longed for a counterweight. Near the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco, I found the local encampment (staked out by a large group of police), and stopped in to see what it was all about.

Unfortunately, this group was completely incoherent. More street fair than political statement, the signs railed against oil, government, money, the Fed, global trade, Wall Street, school cuts, banks, and the media. It made me realize how broad the problems are, how frustrated people get, but didn’t suggest that the opposition has found cohesion, direction, or goals. Right-wing talkers sneer at the protesters lack of unity and length of hair, and, from what I saw, they do make easy targets.

But there is underlying truth. I’ve been reading Jeffrey Sachs book, The Price of Civilization, and the issues are clear and well-understood (and nicely enumerated by the Financial Times in their review): Stagnant wages, diminished savings, rising inequality, and declining health and social program effectiveness, exacerbated by the pernicious view that “government is the problem”, mismanaged globalisation of labor, and the corrupting influence of big business and big money on politics and media. An accurate and coherent description of the problem could lead to constructive discussion of solutions.

But this is not the group that can carry that banner. A pity.

In the dumps - Hotwire specials

2011-10-21T12:40:00.000+02:00

I travel a lot for business, a lot for fun: a lot of driving and overnight stays. Although it’s nice to upgrade for a special occasion or a unique place, most of the time I figure that I’m not spending much time in the hotel room, so look for someplace with a good location and a good price.

Despite the “We’ll match any price” claims of individual hotel chains, I generally go through an aggregator, Orbitz (if I can link up a room to a flight) or Booking.com. The latter site has always given me a good room and a competitive price and, most importantly, has bailed me out with a new room if the hotel made a mistake with the booking.

In the US, I sometimes go for deep discounts through Expedia or Hotwire. And there the trouble starts.

A recent visit to Sacramento: Hotwire offers a great rate at the DoubleTree Point West Way. On arrival, the desk clerk hands us a room in the Folsom Wing (its real name!), reserved for recruits on their way to basic training at a nearby air base. Beds are stained, carpets are dirty, furniture is stripped down, the door opens the wrong way. One bad night and two stiff conversations with the manager and we broke out of prison to the regular wing. Hilton refuses to give credit for the stay.

A recent rental from Hertz, another 1/3 discount through Hotwire for Sacramento airport pickup. First, there’s the hassle of getting the car at the price I paid. No, I don’t want gas, no I don’t want insurance, no, I don’t want a bigger car: okay, that’s expected. What wasn’t expected was the difficulty in getting a GPS for navigating the city – in my rate category, the only way to get a GPS was to upgrade the entire car at $30 extra per day (I bought a map for $4 at Target). The car itself was stripped, tiny, rattling, nothing automatic, miles of road use to catalog so that I didn’t get charged for ‘new’ dents and dings.

I understand that a deep discount links to a ‘spare’ room or vehicle, not a suite, not a limo. But that should be a standard room, or a compact car, not the ’Hotwire special’ reserved for fools.

If hotels and rental agencies don’t want to offer a room at a discount price, then don’t.

But if you do, remember that this will likely be the first and only time that this customer will be doing business with you.

What sense is there in giving them a bad experience?

Especially I they can write about it on TripAdvisor?

Years ago I experienced the Expedia Room at the Renaissance in Amsterdam. It’s an otherwise lovely hotel that literally checked me into a maids closet at the back, with exposed ceiling pipes and dripping sink next to a flop-mattress. I spent the night scrawling invective onto the complaint card, then wrote Expedia to say I just couldn’t book with them again when hotels do this. They wrote back to say that they were aware of the practice but were helpless to control it.

And, lest you think it’s just me, there’s a delightful PowerPoint on the same topic posted to the internet years ago: Yours is a Very Bad Hotel. ‘Required reading, and a sadly familiar story (it even tags the DoubleTree).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with any of the companies mentioned, and pay my own way everywhere: nobody asked or incented me to write this account.

Wrapping up with China

2011-10-19T17:03:00.000+02:00

I put together my pictures from China today, running through the notes that I scribbled along the way. It really was a remarkable trip, although it ran so quickly and intensely that there just wasn’t time to get my head around everything during the journey. This series of photo essays has been a good chance to think things through, even though I feel like I’ve only been able to touch lightly across a portion of the ideas and experiences.

And here, life rolls on. It’s been a busy couple of weeks since returning and I feel like it’s time to move along to more immediate things. There are still a few China topics I’ll return to, but ‘back to the here-and-now’, for now.

And, yes, the figure on the right doesn’t belong: it’s Haroobang, a Korean fertility idol. The rest are all Emperor Qin’s army.

Boats and babies

2011-10-17T20:49:00.000+02:00

Travel on the waterways follows a hierarchy similar to travel on the streets: a little of everything from one-person push-powered rafts to large people-movers that churn in endless lines through tourist sites.

The best (most relaxing, most scenic) travel is via river raft, a long array of parallel bamboo poles, turned up at each end, and pushed with a long pole much like a Cambridge punt. There are a lot of similarities in the design, the major difference being the water seeping between the poles (especially when the whole raft submerges going over dams) and the 180-degree spin that boatsmen give the pole after each push. I’m dying to try this technique out when I’m at Scudamores again.

As with bicycles, these rafts are also used commercially for fishing and to deliver fresh fish and shrimp to tour boats. When ferrying tourists, they are often armed with pump-action water cannons to keep the kids amused, so people tend to give one another some space.

Add a motor, and the same raft becomes a lethal missile, arrowing up and down the banks and darting between the boats. The motor is a single-stroke engine driving a propeller at the end of a long ole – this keeps it from catching on the bottom and simplifies steering. They travel in packs that remind me of Apocalypse Now.

Boats and barges are large and, in contrast to the cars, well regimented as they ply the rivers. Navigation buoys are oppositely arranged from what we use in the US, but the signaling via horns and lights is very familiar. Boats load up with tourists in the morning and take off, single file, to visit countryside and canyon for three hour trips. No wilderness experience, but the on-board dining and open-air viewing is superb.

Oh, right, and the baby…

Bikes, cycles, and automobiles

2011-10-14T14:03:00.000+02:00

China moves with a greater variety of vehicles than anywhere else I’ve been. While subways and airports (left and right, below) are modern and crowded (just like major cities worldwide), people generally make their way on more placid and personal conveyances for surface travel.

A lot of folks ride bicycles, similar to the Netherlands. There are designated lanes, but they often abut busy streets and occasionally vanish along major thoroughfares. Still, on a quieter road (or along a city wall), it’s a pleasant (if rattling) ride.

Most working bicycles are three-wheeled, like the Dutch Bakfiets (left) but with the load in the back and lots more space and versatility. Often, they serve as both haulage and storefront for vendors.

Another step up adds a motor, generally electric. Motorbikes are the biggest hazard going on Chinese streets: they are dead silent, douse their lights after sundown, and obey no line or law. Check the baby in the center position in the lower picture.

Cars and busses occupy the top of the food chain on Chinese streets. They are large, late model, impeccably maintained. Trucks, in contrast, are large, ramshackle, and occasionally missing front cowling (maybe it keeps the engine cooler.

And, when everything plays together, the symphony looks like this (there are corpuscular flow groups who spend a lifetime modeling veins that come together like this). I especially like the lone policeman trying to whip things into order off to the right.

Signage in China: Be Careful Tumble

2011-10-11T16:38:00.000+02:00

Signs are the tools that we use to navigate, to stay safe, to understand the society around us. Symbols and words in North America and Western Europe are pretty well standardized these days – there may be the occasional double-take, but seldom a need to stand and think.

Not so in the Far East.

Numbers: Convention dictates that numbers on keypads arrange differently; feng shui means some numbers don’t appear at all.

Maps: Sometimes maddeningly complex, other times strikingly artistic. And place names are always evocative. “Use your imagination”, our guides always suggested.

Symbols: Much more varied than in the West, I grew especially fond of the Fred Astaire kick to signify a moving line.

Prose: Its surprising that in a globalized and connected world, translation accuracy still lags so far behind in China. The mistakes say a lot about Chinese grammar and syntax, though, so there are lessons even amidst the noise. The sign at the right appeared on mountain peaks to discourage visitors from walking over the cliffs.

Celebrity culture: More than any US president, Bill Clinton was ubiquitous,. I would have expected Nixon. And King and Buffet trump Trump in bookstores. There’s also the irony of selling “Blog Weekly” where blogs are absolutely not allowed.

Where’s the Party?

2011-10-09T15:26:00.000+02:00

I expected the government to be a constant and pervasive presence throughout my visit to China – from Western media, we build up an image of an institution that is always watching, always listening, always controlling: heavy-handed and coarse. My initial encounter with the great Firewall was exactly in-line with those expectations, opportunities to share ideas and publish opinions were severely restricted and search was less effective at finding information.

A friend sent me an overall advisory on Chinese government internet monitoring: I’m not sure how true it is, but I took the overall point and didn’t access bank accounts or confidential records while in Asia.

That said, there were few other signs of the government during my stay.

Every city had a central government building, set apart from the city center and all of the style we might associate with banks. A high fence, wide concrete apron with a tall flagpole, surrounding a square, solid 5-story building with the Party symbol at the top. There never seemed to be much activity, no cars through the gate or people talking in the yard, but it was always gleaming, neat-as-a-pin, radiating authority and efficiency. No explosion of signs, billboards, mottos, or loudspeakers, either in the vicinity or anywhere that I went.

Police and uniformed security were more common that in Western society, although it was impossible to understand what the rainbow of uniforms meant without being able to read the shoulder patches. Most of the police that I saw were in intersections, managing traffic, and in airports. One night, a 20-something on a scooter grazed a pedestrian: the police drove in, stood him next to his motorcycle, took a snapshot with a cellphone, then hustled him into a patrol car without hesitation or discussion. Efficient, silent, surprisingly subtle.

The army was more evident around national monuments. A phalanx of soldiers stepped in unison through an exhibit hall before distributing themselves around the doorways. A soldier stood at attention inside the Forbidden City, body motionless, eyes constantly flicking over the crowd. New recruits drilled in parade grounds alongside a police station. Some of it may have been in anticipation of the October 1 national holiday, public squares and parks were being decorated all week. But it was consistent with the security I’d find in most US cities, post-9/11 environment: something you notice but that only causes minor inconvenience.

Our speakers and guides were boosterish, but open: they easily acknowledged both the advantages and shortcomings of living and doing business in China, and had specific examples of how corruption and social failures were being addressed. China Daily was surprisingly blunt in it’s assessments. I don’t buy the assurances that things have changed, but didn’t expect hearing both sides either. People were curious and open in conversations: discussions of local health care systems were very self-critical, acknowledging that too few people get care and the system is too slow and expensive compared to Western standards.

Still, there is always the feeling that the Party is hidden just beneath the surface. There were many plainclothes officers in Beijing (right), and others in our group told stories of how security would melt from out of crowds when dissent emerged in city squares.

In a way, I liken it to US casinos. Twenty years ago, we did a clinical study in Las Vegas: I was always struck by how fast (and how many) “ordinary people” would emerge as security guards when the cameras captured a medical incident. I think that China is likely the same – although there are few outward signs of Party involvement in, or control of, everyday life, the network is widespread and effective just beneath the social surface.

Plants and Animals in China

2011-10-07T21:52:00.000+02:00

First-person accounts of China often discuss the environmental impacts of economic growth and social pressures. They are certainly in evidence: brown river, denuded banks, flowing sluggishly through industrial landscapes beneath smoke-stained red skies. To be honest, those scenes were much less prevalent than I expected: smaller rivers could be surprisingly clean and green.

However, I was really surprised by the huge disparity in the respect shown for living things amidst the landscapes

The Chinese dote on their plants. Driving into cities, every broad boulevard is lined with trees and flowering bushes, each kilometer tended by three of four gardeners sweeping, raking, trimming, and tending. Broad trees have their limbs supported by poles anchored into the ground around them: the Old Banyon Tree is a famous source of luck and longevity if you walk around it once (no word on whether clockwise or counterclockwise). Hotels and public spaces have soaring floral arrangements; the shape, color, and shadow of blossoms are celebrated in art and dance.

Chinese are hard on their animals. Several areas that I visited are in the tropical south, yet birds were few and well hidden. Farms have a few desultory oxen or sheep; only the occasional dog roams the street. Outdoor shopping areas have exotic animals to pose with – monkeys in clown costumes, peacocks with tail feathers pinned up, a camel out of all likelihood. Mynah birds fill cages in front of shops; occasional flocks of ducks cluster in reeds along rivers.

I’m not sure what spiritual or moral sense drives this division, but it seemed universal. It’s strange to see park grounds with only the occasional butterfly, silence where there should be birds, strollers without pets. I’m doing a bit of reading that I hope will sort the mystery, but it leaves the impression that animals simply exist for food and fun.