The Longest Day
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14 Ianuarius 2023
Thirty-five hours. That's what happens when you fly eleven timezones westward. The day started at 5AM as I got up, showered, and ate some Rice Krispies before heading out the door to catch the bus to the train station. It's a quiet busride at that hour on a Saturday, and I was still half asleep but I picked up a Coke at the Coop before transferring to the first train. I finished it on the second as the symphony of the Swiss train system whisked me to the airport. I arrived two hours earlier, but today I didn't need to. There was no line to check my bag or go through security. My short connecting flight to Frankfurt was only 40 minutes compared to the 4 hours I spent in airports waiting for one flight and then the next. One must take the time for a Frankfurter in Frankfurt though! The Bundespolizei once again stamped my passport in the middle of a page rather than neatly using a quarter of one, much to my annoyance. On the Turks are more wasteful. At this rate it won't be too much longer until I need a new one. Ironic that my first passport from 1998 only took me to one country (Honduras) and expired unrenewed. Finally on the plane to SFO with quite a bit of work done and half this week's Economist read, I decided to settle in and catch up on a Marvel movie I'd missed: Dr. Strange Multiverse of Madness. Unfortunately Maxwell was right and it's a clusterf%$k of a movie that I didn't need to waste my time on. And yet I did, which perhaps is a syptom of the softening of my mind with age. Right now we're over Greenland and I can't help but think back to four years flying from Frankfurt to San Francisco this time of year to visit the Dynata offices just after PopResearch's acquisition. That was a good trip during the hopeful period when I thought Cara's mission to destroy my family life wouldn't succeed. How foolish I was! Two startups later my view of the world is much more jaded and I have cut many of the encumberances I do not need. Maxwell came for a week and Zara is messaging me again. A father's love for his children never wanes, despite how much bile their mother tries to poor into the way his children see him. Which I guess explains why I distract myself with silly movies, geopolitics and work. I'm still trying to fill the void of my missing children. But I didn't really mean to blog about all that.
The reason I'm flying to Hawai'i is to meet my cousin Kristen's son, Jaxon. The little guy didn't quite arrive on July 4th and weigh in at 10lbs like I'd predicted, but somehow I was the closest on both counts in our family pool as well as predicting his sex. I sadly never made it to see them during the years she and Dillon lived in Alaska, so that state remains the only one I haven't visited. I was also coming to see the first eruption of the biggest volcano in the world, Mauna Loa, in 30 years and perhaps the last in my lifetime, but sadly it ended a couple weeks back. Kilauea, however, is quite active and should provide my first sight of hot lava. Ever since my first trip to Maui when I was 9 I've been fantasizing about this trip. I used to dig in my backyard in California in the hopes of reaching the mantle and starting my own volcano. Packie and I would do some digging and then pretend the earth felt warm and we'd bike off down the street singing "run for your life", which I'm not sure if we made up or heard somewhere. It was sufficiently dramatic for an 80's kids movie at least. Kristen was a baby at the time and while my dad corrupted her with Coke, I saw an opportunity in her learning to respond to "What does Santa say?" with "ho, ho, ho". The budding young aspiring capitalist that I was taught her to respond to "What does Bradley say?" with "mine, mine, mine". This had the side effect of my nickname becoming Mine Mine in her eyes. But with the divorce and Covid I haven't seen her since her and Dillon's wedding nearly 5 years ago.
In software engineering we're often forced to think globally about the solutions we develop. How can we distribute content to nodes around the globe so that users can download things quickly from a server nearby to them? How do we handle the different languages are customers speak and the different directions they write them? How do we balance the loads as different parts of the planet experience peak activity hours? How does our application handle different connectivity speeds and different devices and different browsers? And, unfortunately, increasing we must pay attention to compliance with government rules in different jurisdictions. Google famously pulled out of China to protest censorship, but then lost it's scruples and cosied up to the surveillence and censorship state in the US. And GDPR was a thinly veiled push to limit competition from smaller companies selling advertising on the internet in favor of the big few. Earth is certainly big enough for all of us, but it's a much smaller, more connected place than when I was young. If I can handle planet scale engineering, then I should be able to handle planet scale travel. Imagine doing this every day though; adding 11 hours. How long could living on 35 hour days if I just kept flying westward? Will we adapt to the 26 hour days on Mars one day? The mental picture of Mitchell Feigenbaum wandering around a national lab at all hours while he experimented with lengthening his days is one that's stuck with me. I have found myself tied to the sun though, which meant Norwegian Winters didn't see me getting up willingly before 10 or 11AM, but also sometimes at 4 or 5AM since I fell asleep and 5 or 6 PM the night before.
Not exactly planet scale, but I saw a lot of Europe in 2022 . . .
Looking at the map I can see we're still over Greenland. Out the window it's just clouds in the twilight of the early afternoon. Then we have many hours still over Canada north of Hudson's Bay before we dip down into the west coast of the US. Probably I will fall asleep, but I kinda wish I didn't put my toothbrush in my checked bag.
Cousin time begins!
