On arrival at Zia airport, I thought about the last time I was here. 41 years ago.

41. Wow.

I saw the Air Force Base at which I must have landed, a chubby one year-old coming to see his uncle get married. Air travel must have been glamorous back then, in 1971, even (especially) in the subcontinent.

Visiting the graves of my ancestors, I felt privileged to step in the sand shifting over everything. Peaceful is a cliche for cemeteries but what else to say when you can hear birds and the incredible lack of noise smack in the middle of a capital city of a nation of 160 million people? My aunt’s stories regaled me about their past. My favourite aunt who passed away in England not many years ago, had a smaller trapezoidal plot, possibly to make the best use of space near her cherished husband.

We travelled in a microbus through town, visiting family and friends. Banani district’s shops and stores we’d visit to get fruit, coffee, water, a haircut, and shoes. One early morning, my Uncle Reza took my father and me for a brisk walk, four turns around Gulshan Lake which was really a reservoir which sat between some of the choicest real-estate in Dhaka offering a pretty view to nearby residents. We chatted with neighbours and felt the brisk December air burn off as the sun emerged: by 7:30 we had put our winter hats into our pockets.

Winter hats? It was cold. Most rooms are unheated because the temperature only drops for a few weeks a year. On my visit, 12-degree Celsius felt a lot colder as I bundled up in the guest room under two blankets. It was delightful waking up and wanting a hot drink and exercise.

Sightseeing wasn’t the point of this visit. The one glaring exception was seeing the houses of parliament designed by famous Philadelphia architect Louis Kahn. Kahn’s signature primary shape designs and mysterious life made him the Gehry of his era. His son shot a documentary about his father when it was found he had multiple wives and families. The film rushed through the masterwork in Kahn’s oeuvre, these houses of parliament, shaped like a lotus flower opened up, sitting on the still water. The design is circles and equilateral triangles, spiralling rotundas, and radial rooms. At its centre, we were admitted onto the Assembly Floor. My aunt, who used to have one of the nicest offices in the building and who now runs a high-profile NGO, used her connections to get her son and me way beyond where visitors are allowed, into the inner-workings of this beautiful building. Out of session, in the dead of winter, quiet, misty bright, soulful, the buildings made an indelible impression on me. And talking to MPs and librarians and staff, they attested to its excellence in both form and function. No photos allowed; all the better so as to enjoy the moment and instead point to my favourite images from the Web.

Bangladesh is in a lovely time warp. It is not at all like India. It certainly doesn’t feel as perilous as Pakistan either. Admittedly, I was vicariously seeing Dhaka life through the eyes of a well-off gentleman in Banani/Gulshan; but there was no taint. The country has something right. Its people are less caught up in material aspiration, in insane progress, and in putting itself on the world stage. People don’t think about Bangladesh except possibly regarding tragic loss of life during typhoons, extreme poverty, and textiles, but there is so much more. And for me, that ‘more’ shall be Chittagong and tea country and, dare I say, Sunderbans tigers?

My NGO aunt repeated, “41 years?” Yes, I said, “it’s been 41 years since I’ve been to Bangladesh. Since I visited the homeland of my father and my father’s father.” She corrected me, “Well actually, you’ve never been to Bangladesh. Back then, it was East Pakistan.” Her son objected, “That’s a technicality.” But she was right; I had never been to Bangladesh.

Houses of Parliament of Dhaka (all credit to photo owner)

Exterior of Houses of Parliament

You can always reference the old site at http://www.unusualday.com/aud

An Unusual Day is a travel website created in 1995, by Zia Zaman

Ontologies are Fun.

As usual, relatively early (but not too early) in the lifecycle of a technology, there is a plethora of terms that is created to describe each individual vendor’s category. This ratatouille of terms needs to be sorted out so that we can better understand what is what. Groupings are formed, complex ontologies are sketched and simpler ontologies are created.

This is where we are with Cloud Computing. On The Wisdom of Clouds, two such ontologies are drawn. The UCSB is simpler, the more complex from Hoff possibly more useful.

Here they are:

I wonder if the former misses two boxes that have been interesting to me:

The importance of each of these concepts is that adoption to cloud computing will be dependent on the ease-of-management, security, governance, and integratability of the cloud services.

More on how to get on the cloud easily later.

Cloud Day (Groundhog Day)

Many years ago, we (at Sun) were thinking about the logical extension of the concept “The Network is the Computer” and surmising that if resources and applications and data could exist and be “processed” in the network (and not locally), then effectively we would be able to order exactly the right amount of computer we needed. Sometimes we called it Utility Computing. Other times, Grid (to refer to the large complex problems that required clustering of many large servers, something Sun sells well), but now, seven to ten years later, the concept has been redefined as Cloud Computing.

So what is cloud computing? Why are so many vendors talking about it. ZDnet’s Cath Everett does a nice job of defining it. She says,

“…cloud computing is a form of outsourcing by which vendors supply computing services to lots of customers over the internet. These services can range from applications, such as customer relationship management, to infrastructure, such as storage and the provision of development platforms.

The services are provided by massively scalable datacenters running hundreds of thousands of CPUs as a single compute engine, using virtualization technology. That approach means workloads are distributed across multiple machines — which can also be located in multiple datacenters — and capacity can be allocated or scaled back according to a customer’s needs.

Moreover, because applications are multi-tenant in nature — multiple instances of the same package that can be executed on the same machine — system resources can be shared among a large pool of users, which reduces costs.”

She goes on to say that SaaS is a subset of Cloud.
Grid is a subset of Cloud.
Utility computing is a subset of Cloud.

Another visually simple video (which oversimplifies) is here.

Sometimes, the easiest way to define a service is by showing the most real and telling example in use today. Amazon’s EC2 cloud service for all intents and purposes is the standard. Simply, it allows any entity to buy any amount of computing resource and run just enough of its core applications, remotely, and in exchange it pays a fee to Amazon. There are no servers or IT equipment whatsoever locally and the resources/applications are ordered in a flexible manner, somewhat like the vision we really had in the nineties at Sun.

Groundhog Day, indeed.

Guest Post from Costa Rica

The following entry is courtesy of Dan Glickman who comments on our recent trip to La Fortuna and Monteverde, Costa Rica.

The highlight of our trip to Costa Rica was Arenal volcano. I guess I expected to see a dormant volcano in the distance. Instead, it was really active, larger than I expected, and frankly the approach to the volcano as seen from a pleasureful boat across a serene lake was probably the best moment. Plus we didn’t just see a mountain; it was a real volcano with glowing lava flows, rumbling hydro-magmatic eruptions, and truck-sized boulders.

Beyond the volcano, we really had a great time hiking to a pretty waterfall, exploring the cloud forest, seeing wildlife, and risking life and limb on a zip-line and on a short flight on a Cessna. There was a lot of adventure but there was also creature comforts like great food, particularly from a place called Chimera in Monteverde. We saw a toucan, a howler monkey, a 2-toes sloth, an unnervingly large tarantula, a great big bird called a guan, a crocodile, and strangler trees. The downsides were not seeing the setting of Jurassic Park, Isla del Cocos, which I really now want to visit and that Zia was sometimes too tense. All in all, it was a reminder of the power of evolution and that we are just specks in the continuum of life on this planet.

Thirds – three rules about three things

Travel.

The joys of travel can be split into thirds. A third is in the anticipation. A third is in the actual voyage and a third is in the recollection.

Blogging.

The value of a blog can be split into thirds. A third is in the actual blog. A third is in the response or comments on the blog. And the final third, is in the interaction, how the original writer responds or someone new builds upon the conversation.

Words.

The magic of words is threefold. The choice of the right word to say something specific. The stringing together of words to tell a story. And the multiple meanings and interpretations as words are amorphous labels and are relative.

Wow, has it been 13 years?

The vast majority of posts have found their way up on From A to Z, a blog about Alex, or Twitter, or fastforwardblog, my old work blog. Since it’s time to move on, I figured I’d capture more of my thoughts on my Established 1995 blog simply called An Unusual Day, where you are right now.

It’s hard to believe this site was created 13 years ago. Since then many posts have gone up (almost none have come down) and it’s had 3 facelifts and now is a full-fledged blog as opposed to just my html ramblings.

When it started, An Unusual Day was an experiment to help me learn more about coding and to just put up a web directory page about myself. This was early-1995, prior to Stanford GSB. At business school, it became more of an author’s blog where I put up some of my stories, book reviews, novel, capsule film reviews, travel musings. It had a virtual interface of a room with various clickable elements. I spent far too much time drawing that room and making each rug, picture, chair clickable. It was obtuse and random but it had a look and feel of its own. Plus, the name was evocative and gave the user a sense of the serendipity of the collection of content on the site. You didn’t know what to expect when you went there.

My friend Dan Glickman credits me for my capsule film reviews. He claims I was one of the first people on the web writing short film reviews for easy consumption and gave me credit for my signature feature, an equation which describes a movie. Say for example the latest Ricky Gervais movie Ghost Town = Signs * The Office (BBC version). I also had a film scoring database which recorded my ratings on hundreds of movies which I made accessible. There was also such junk as a fantasy hockey spreadsheet, an incomplete map of all the cities I had visited, and links to websites that had been defunct for over a decade. Mercifully, one of my hard drives crashed and much of that content is lost forever. Still, I think I was able to recover some of the better stuff here.

In 2002, my writing took a more prominent place on the site and An Unusual Day became really just a travelogue. Many of my stories were published on the web and in print and it served as a landing page for many readers to read more of my stuff.

In 2003, the site became a promotional site for my book, Losing Oneself in Remote Asia. My publisher helped me decide that it should be prominently displayed as the only reason people should come to An Unusual Day and that we should solely try to encourage clickthroughs to Amazon. It worked for a while, until the book went out of print (notice I didn’t technically say sold out) and then the site was neglected for about a year as book sales ceased and it was yet another post-release book site.

Blogger came along and I decided to scrap the previous content and created a simple weblog with my daily (or really weekly) posts on where I had been and what I had seen and eaten. I ended up spending much more time on food (and far less time on me) and while I liked the read, it didn’t inspire me to write more.

Alex came along in 2007 and boy oh boy, did I enjoy creating From A to Z. It’s a private site for friends only but it gave me an outlet to simply update family and friends about Alex.

In the meantime, my blogging for work increased and my personal blogging became Twitterfied and An Unusual Day proper, again fell by the wayside.

But now, it’s back. Perhaps with more of an angle on the serendipity of what you might find, should you meander around the real and digital world. I will talk about information access, about revolutions in the way we think, interact, and work. It will have 2.0 stuff in it but I hope to keep it more philosophical and less technology-oriented.

I say that with my first hyperlink, an interesting take on information by a professor in Kansas.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

Day 21 – Singapore (in New York) – The brilliant government of Singapore held a Singapore Day for Singaporeans living abroad. It was held in Central Park and featured some of the best food from the actual hawker stand vendors who were flown in courtesy of Singapore Airlines. The event was brilliant with 26 degree celsius sun, great music, and of course, the awesome food.

Char Kway Teow is the seafood noodle dish shown to the right and
Nasi Lemak, below it, is my father’s personal favourite. Nasi Lemak is “Rich Rice” cooked in coconut milk with the classic toppings of deep fried fish, sunny side up eggs, cucumbers, fried crispy anchovies or ikan bilis and a lemony sweet chilli sambal. Fried chicken wings and spicy grilled fish paste or otah is also added.

Can’t say enough of how well the government of Singapore has done to make Singaporeans abroad feel connected, via their craving for their unique street food.