Endless Knots

Eight years at the airport?

A colleague told me an astonishing statistic yesterday. One of the units of her multinational (sorry, I can't share its name and, no, it's not the one you might think) did a survey of how much time its professionals spend traveling. Including the end-to-end bits, meaning leaving the house, waiting at security, flight time, car rental or its equivalent plus travel to the destination, the average business person in said firm spends EIGHT YEARS OF HIS/HER LIFE ON THE ROAD!

The next statistic I'm looking for: how much of that time did the traveler find meaningful? Some people like traveling for the sheer solitude it brings; others, imagine, actually find the meetings they go to worthwhile.

Which brings the question I ask often: how many of the meetings you've traveled to recently were worth the trip? I'm traveling today - but it's only across town and I KNOW this one will be worthwhile (just in case the attendees are reading).

Sun's good results from telecommuting

Ted Samson has an instructive and fact-filled report in InfoWorld on Sun's success in sending workers home, "Sun, employees find big savings from Open Work telecommuting program." This is the emblem of the article I want to just steal and post here but alas, you must click. You MUST, it's that worth reading if you're in the ranks of those who make such decisions or in the ranks of those who'd like to see such decisions made. Thanks to Stella for seeing this one first:

Sun found that its U.S. employees worked at home an average of 2.1 days per week in 2007. In doing so, they saved an average of $870 per year in gasoline (back when it was just $3.26 a gallon) and around $1,770 dollars in wear and tear on their car (by driving 3,700 fewer commute miles). They were also spared -- get this -- 104 hours of commute time, which translates to around two and half weeks. This is based on the finding that Sun U.S. employees have an average commute of 40 miles round-trip per day.

Presumably those savings make up for the fact that employees do need to pay a negligible amount -- less than $20 per year, according to Sun -- for the energy required to work from home, including heat.

Sun also found that employees used less energy at home than they do at the office. "Office equipment energy consumption rate at a Sun office was two times that of home office equipment energy consumption, from approximately 64 watts per hour at home to 130 watts per hour at a Sun office." Contributing to the difference: Office employees tend to use workstations and monitors while more home employees use laptops as well as Sun Ray thin clients, both of which require less power than traditional desktop PC/monitor combos.

"I flew all the way here for this?"

Seth Godin throws out a few wise zingers about the necessity of travel in "The new standard for meetings and conferences." Wise words to speakers, particularly:

I think the standard for a great meeting or a terrific conference has changed.

In other words, "I flew all the way here for this?" is going to be far more common than it used to be.

If you think a great conference is one where the presenters read a script while showing the audience bullet points, you're wrong. Or if you leave little time for attendees to engage with others, or worse, if you don't provide the levers to make it more likely that others will engage with each other, you're wrong as well.

Here's what someone expects if they come to see you on an in-person sales call: that you'll be prepared, focused, enthusiastic and willing to engage honestly about the next steps. If you can't do that, don't have the meeting.

Here's what a speaker owes an audience that travels to engage in person: more than they could get by just reading the transcript.

Thanks, Stella, whose blog is always worth the read.

From West Newton to Lund to Christchurch

Mr. Sampson has taken the next step with the "Do we need face time?" checklist. Blogged "green teams" first here near Boston, which was picked up and expanded via blog in Sweden, and now has up-leveled again in the countryside outside Christchurch in New Zealand.

Michael's drawn a decision tree that logically steps through the 11 questions in the current checklist. If this, then that, good for the cognitive type that functions this way for sure - and excellent for stimulating a group discussion.

Take a look and send suggestions. My first: maybe add a "benefits" branch if you make the choice to travel? I sometimes write a lot while traveling, which is an incentive.

The entire "When to Travel Flow Chart" is at this link; here's a snippet:

Sunrise in Kaikoura

It's very cold in Boston and apparently there was a power outage during the night, proof being that the furnace was off when day broke as was, yes, online access. This got me thinking about where I was last year on this morning: Kaikoura, South Island, New Zealand. Here's a shot taken by one of my favorite photographers on that trip.

When do we need face time?

Back in December, I began a series of posts on "green teams," the idea being that it's not only us as individuals or them as companies who/that can do something about CO2 emissions. Teams can too by making wiser choices about whether they need to meet in person or not. Very soon thereafter, The Content Economy, a blog written by  a handful of good thinkers in Sweden, picked up on the idea, posted to their blog that there might be something to this. Soon they held a meeting (face-to-face, causing one wag to criticize them for that but they had a good excuse - there was also a client meeting at the same time) and came up with a basic checklist for making teams greener. I posted that list back here.

Thanks to a client, who's looking to promote virtual teaming more broadly in her organization, I had reason to noodle on The Content Economy's list some more, adding to it. Some but not all of The Content Economy's list is included (reworded in some cases). I'm posting the expanded list here with the hope that you, my darling readers, will give this some thought, add some ideas, and we'll all end up with something useful. If anything belongs to all of us, it's a list like this one. (Thanks again, Oscar and company. If you'd like me to specifically annotate those considerations that you all first came up with, let me know.)

Before your next face-to-face meeting, consider these questions:
    1.  Do you need to have a difficult conversation?

    2.  Do you need to make decisions that depend on interpretation of subtle cues in body language?

    3.  Do you need 8 or 16 hours of continuous work together?

    4.  Do you have to share “things” that would be difficult to experience at a distance, like touring a facility or using a piece of equipment?

    5.  Have you calculated the true cost of the meeting in terms of direct expenses and personal wear-and-tear?

    6.  Have you done a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the meeting’s contribution to CO2 emissions?

    7.  Do you sometimes travel because you like it or get the feeling that you are important for doing so? Is the meeting you’re planning one of those?

    8.  If you do absolutely need face-to-face, could you:
            A. Organize a high-end video conference if people have never seen one another?
            B. Or, conduct a series of highly organized conference calls over a week’s time?

    9.  If you absolutely need face-to-face, are you traveling to the most convenient location for everyone?

    10. Is everyone attending the meeting essential? Could some call in for part of the meeting?

    11. If you choose not to travel, can you explain your decision clearly to others?

Checklist for green teams - beta version

The folks over at The Content Economy led by Oscar Berg's efforts (sparked by my post, "Carbon neutral teams") are working on a checklist for "green teams." Do you really need to meet face-to-face or will virtual meeting via conference call or videoconference work? When you do travel, what small gestures can you make that also reduce CO2 emissions? What can you do right this minute, today, to contribute to wiser use of our precious natural resources (ah-hem, always turns off your computer, perhaps)?

After brainstorming with his colleagues (they met face-to-face in Stockholm, he took the train from Lund in the south of Sweden), Oscar has posted their first list on their blog in the hopes that others will comment. Let's call this the begining of a collaborative process of creating a checklist that we all can use to make wiser decisions about how we meet. Check it out and add your thoughts there. Great work, you guys! (For the record, I don't "know" Oscar at all; we've never even exchanged emails but our mutual interest in this topic has sparked this creative undertaking via our blogs.)

And in the interest of getting as many people to think about this as possible, I'm poaching their list right here as well. Please think about what Oscar and his colleagues have come up with and make some comments, which we can share back and forth among blogs:

1. Start with yourself and where you are – think of how you can reduce the CO2 emissions that you cause at work (we already assume that you think of what you can do at home). Here are some of all the things you can do:
   
   - Turn off your computer when not using it – and unplug the power adapter
   - Drink water on tap (filtered if necessary) instead of drinking bottled water
   - When you go to meetings nearby - take the bike, public transportation by train or bus, or share a car
   - When you stay at hotels - shower instead of taking baths, reuse your towels, choose a hotel with a climate policy…
   - When you need to eat - choose seasonal fruits for the fruit basket, walk to the nearest restaurant, eat locally produced food…
2. Ask yourself when a face-to-face meeting that requires travelling is really necessary - and when it’s not. Reflect on and question your own behaviour – are you sometimes travelling because you like it or get a feeling that you are an important person when doing so?
3. If you need to meet but not necessarily face-to-face, ask yourself if any of there are other ways to meet and communicate than by a face-to-face meeting in real life - phone conference, instant messaging, group chat, web conferencing…
4. If a face-to-face meeting is really necessary, is it an option to meet virtually? Video conferencing, virtual meeting place (Second Life)…
5. If you really need to meet face-to-face in real life, check if you can meet at a location where as few of the meeting attendees as possible have to travel to the meeting, thereby shortening the total distance travelled by the meeting participants. Also question what persons really need to participate in the meeting (identify and try to stop meeting professionals from attending).
6. If you need to travel yourself to the meeting, check what transportation options you have at hand. Try to choose the means of transportation that produces the least CO2 emissions but still offers a reasonable travel time and cost – and be sure to include the cost for any CO2 emissions in the cost! If it takes a few hours longer by train than by plane – can you motivate taking the train if you can work during the travel?
7. If possible, always try to compensate for the CO2 emissions that you cause by traveling. You can calculate how much CO2 emissions you produce and how much you should pay on the CarbonNeutral Company’s web site: http://www.carbonneutral.com/pages/businesscalc.asp
8. Finally, be open and proud about your achievements when it comes to minimizing CO2 emissions. Tell others that you choose not to travel to a meeting because you did not find it necessary to meet and that you solved it with other means of communication instead, that you walked instead of taking a cab to the nearby meeting, that you chose to go by train instead of flying, and so on. It will not only show that you care about the environment, but also that you are a responsible and caring person in general. It builds trust. Don't be afraid of how other people might react. For some, it can be an eye-opener and they might be impressed with your reasoning and behaviour, and eventually they will start changing their own behaviour. Others might be offended since it might cause bad conscience. But whatever kind of reaction you will get, telling others about your choices will help move things in the right direction.

Could BookCrossing lead to world peace?

How many meetings have you been in where someone says sarcastically (and as if you're the organization's idiot): "Well" (huff, huff) "we're not trying to solve world peace?" Well, huff, huff, some of us--call me naive--would like to. Thus, the second in my new series on things that might (see "Why Twitter may lead to world peace").

Thanks to Nathan Brandsford's cheeky and helpful blog for writers (he's a literary agent at Curtis Brown), I've learned about BookCrossing, the brainchild of Ron Hornbaker. In the effort to "make the whole world a library," Ron came up with the idea to create a website where people register books (which means obtaining a "BCID"--BookCrossing ID) then leave them in public places. Someone else picks up the book, notices that it's got this special marking on it, then goes to the BookCrossing site and posts where the book has traveled. That person, in turn, drops it elsewhere and long/short in its six or so short years of existence, BookCrossing has registered 633,242 (with me) members who've registered some 4.5 million books traveling around the world.

Of course, there is a huge online community that's grown up around BookCrossing with members stretching from the Antarctic to the Arctic (may they forever remain cold).

Incredibly, the second most traveled book? A Passage to India by EM Forster, within which is my favorite phrase from all literature: "Only connect," my Rx for world peace.

Oscar takes the challenge

Further to our new friend Oscar Berg in Sweden, who's thinking about green teams. Go, Oscar! He's "taking the challenge to write a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible."

A post by Jessica Lipnack about “carbon-neutral teams” gave me the idea and being quoted on her blog provided some extra motivation. I am involving my fellow bloggers Henrik and Anders (Anders wrote a peace called “Are we finally ready for eco-meetings?” a while ago). Anyway, we are compiling a list of candidate items for the checklist and I hope to present it in some time.

By the way, do you know that you can calculate how much emission of carbon dioxide you cause by flying? The CarbonNeutral Company offers calculators and the airline SAS actually allows you to compensate for the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) that you cause when you travel with them. Good initiative. But what we need is to do is also to compary flying to other transportation alternatives.

Let’s take my flight next week from Malmö to Stockholm and back again as an example. By taking the plane, I would have caused an emission of 0.1644 tonnes of CO2. By taking the train instead, I will cause an emission of only 0.00012 tonnes of CO2. Do I need to say more? I guess not. I will take the train from now on.

And I posted this back to Oscar's blog (nothing like self-quoting): "I played with the numbers a little to make them more understandable to those of limited intelligence like myself: if a ton is 2000 pounds, then your flight would release the equivalent of a sumo-wrestler worth of CO2 (328 pounds), while the train ride would release something like a cup of coffee, four ounces."

Choosing trains over planes in "The Content Economy"

So on The Content Economy, Oscar Berg blogs today about "What others predict for 2008," mentioning Bill Ives's post about my "carbon neutral teams" post. I like the example Oscar gives of choosing the train over flying from Malmo to Stockholm, Sweden, and asked him if I could post here, to which he said, "Hi Jessica, please do. I'd be happy to serve as an example of what you're thinking ;)." And, Oscar, I hope you can publish the checklist for green teams you come up with -- so I can publish it here too (as might Bill) and we can really get things rolling quickly on this idea. And soon every team on earth will have to fill out a "green team checklist" as part of its travel request...or something like that. Thanks, Oscar:

As a comment to that [referring to Bill's post, I actually (encouraged by my wife) decided to go by train instead of flying from Malmö to Stockholm next week (600 kilometers). Not only am I saving the environment by not going by air, but I also save money for my company (or actually, the customer) since it will be cheaper than flying - despite the fact that I have to pay for one extra hotel night. The only thing I won't be saving is time. But that depends on how I look at it. On the train, I will be able to work for almost four hours and access the Internet via the wireless network on the train. Maybe I will take some time to sketch on a checklist for situations when I need to get together face-to-face and when other alternatives such as web conferencing might be just as suitable or at least possible. In addition to that, I also need a checklist for deciding what means of transportation I should be using in situations when a face-to-face meeting is absolutely necessary – should I go by train, air, car or bike? Then I will publish these as post on my team’s internal blog so they can read it via RSS – wherever they happen to be. Well, as long as they are inside the corporate firewalls.

Carbon neutral or, shall we say, green teams

For years, we've been singing the praises of virtual teams for their ability to bring together differing perspectives, amass greater intelligence, and gain the benefit of more human diversity--then wrap it all together in a world where the sun never sets. Nice stuff.

Along the way, people have also been pointing out that working at a distance is less expensive, less stressful, and more environmentally friendly.

Now comes the news that HarperCollins UK, a Rupert Murdoch company,"has claimed it is the first major trade publisher in the UK to become carbon neutral, after reducing its carbon footprint by 8% over the past year and investing in carbon offsetting."  According to The Bookseller.com, "After focusing on reducing its electricity and gas consumption, cutting business air travel and curbing fleet mileage, its carbon footprint dropped..."

Thus, let me introduce the idea of "carbon neutral" or perhaps better, "green teams." When we talk about "individual" efforts to reduce emissions, perhaps we can also consider "team" efforts. OK, we already have such teams--in our beloved city of Newton, Massachusetts, anyway--that "team up" every spring to remove detritus from the banks of the storied Charles River. Thousands of other communities are doing the same.

But what about making our at-work teams carbon neutral? Instead of that next in-person meeting, whether a few miles away or a few thousand, how about meeting online? How about developing a checklist for why you need to get together face-to-face, then rating each upcoming event? Unless you exceed a certain threshold, you stay put.

I'm not saying we should never have conferences or team get-togethers or anything like that. But consider this: tomorrow morning, we will have an important meeting where we go over some fundamental ideas with a client, or I should say, a client and a potential client. We will be here in West Newton; another will be in Boston; and the third? Bangalore, India. Carbon neutral, all the way.

PS: There's a great roundup on UK and US publishers' efforts to reduce emissions at Publishing News. And need I say that a simple Google search turns up the world's first carbon neutral soccer team?

Traffic

We had our first heavy snowstorm of the year today here in Boston. Tonight, people are trading "how long did it take you to get home from work?" stories (even as the storm is over, boo-hoo). Our local fable belongs to Annie, who left the NetAge office at 1:45 and arrived home at 3:15. Distance traveled = 3 miles (5 km). There was total gridlock across the metropolitan area, apparently, which nicely dovetails with my theory...

...which is that the day after Thanksgiving everyone gets in their cars and doesn't get out until Christmas Eve. I'm not sure where everyone is going but they drive around a lot to get there.

Overnight update: Two emails this morning from friends with similar problems yesterday: one, on Boston's North Shore (north of Boston, south of New Hampshire, along the coast) spent four hours trying to get home; our neighbors tried leaving an academic medical center in Boston, where he works, and where she had gone for an appointment, in the afternoon and ended up not being able to leave the city until traffic cleared - at 9 PM! That said, it is absolutely gorgeous this morning as dawn is breaking. What are those two little heads peaking out of the snow? Click on the picture.

Second update: My friend Kate had to drive home from the North Shore last night. It took eight hours, a trip that normally requires 45 minutes.

Third update: Those friends who were stranded at the Boston medical center report that the hospital opened the cafeteria to all (free food!) and that beds were made available to staff who couldn't get home.

Fourth update: Those friends in the third update? Well, see Paul Levy's comment below. It was in fact his hospital where this all transpired, so I just added a link in the paragraph above on behalf of all those who are thanking him. Click comments this time, for sure!

Red Sox rule in NZ

It’s time for this picture. For the Red Sox fans, moi with Jay, my son-in-law, in Milford Sound, New Zealand, Feb 23, 2007, long before we knew that the Sox could turn their scores into those resembling (American) football games.

Which way to the Arboretum?

Certain things are not supposed to happen. For example, drivers of trolleys, those happy little conveyances, are not supposed to get lost. With full passenger loads. On their way to weddings (especially those as elegant AND socially-aware as Daria and Aaron's). But guess what? The trolley we were on today, headed for the National Arboretum, hardly a top-secret location in Washington, DC, had a very hard time reaching its destination. As it turned out, we were the lucky trolley. We only took four u-turns and an hour's drive time for a 15 minute excursion requiring two turns--total. The trolley behind us arrived nearly an hour-and-a-half late. On the return, one trolley got lost leaving the Arboretum. Google maps? Training? AAA? Rogue trolley service? This one defies explanation.

But, and a very important but at that, the transportation snafu did nothing to detract from the spectacularity of the festivities: A Latin-American pre-wedding party with salsa dancing, a ceremony that paid tribute to the remarkable commitment of the couple to human rights (they've already used their lawyering skills in Ecuador, Egypt, and South Africa), and a reception dinner where wild sturgeon enjoyed its best preparation in known-fish culinary history. Thank you, Alan and Michelle, and Carole, for these gifts to your guests and the whole world.

On a clear day...Mount Washington

The Hindu-Kush have Annapurna, K2, and Mt. Everest, the Rockies have Mount Elbert...and the White Mountains have Mount Washington, visible today, the grey eminence on the right of this photo, from 65 miles away, with the beautiful old Chris Craft belonging to our friend, Jack Merselis, in the foreground.

Telecommuning - yup, it's spelled right

Eleanor Wynn at Intel takes the "t" out of travel, replaces it with an "n," and presto-changeo, we have a whole new slant on working apart: telecommuning.

It's Monday: It's Roland

Ever traveled to Europe by ship? Roland Merullo nails a certain ennui and the cloud of memories such conveyances can bring in today's Boston Globe op-ed, "Voyage of Emptiness." He and his family took the Queen Mary II back from their Italian adventure, where he was working on a new book. He couples his ancestors' (and not that long ago) coming to America under much less luxurious accommodations with that haunting look on the faces of people who've paid much to enjoy themselves but appear as if they never will.

Google Sky - what's next? Google Body?

Google Earth has a new friend: the universe, right here on your screen.

Google Sky allows you to tour the celestial canopy. I think. I've tried downloading four times and still it quits "unexpectedly" (Send Report?). I've been as thrilled as the next person about the stuff coming from Google Labs, though Google Street, the (potential?) Peeping Tom, has me quite worried (likewise, Google Print, copyright laws and all). But I love the sky idea. I love the sky. Having pointed around the whole globe and now the whole universe, what's next? Google Me, Inside Version--Google Body?

Update: I am far from the first to think of Google Body, I've just discovered. One way that people get to blogs is through searches on topics (duh) - and it turns out that someone searched on Google Body, which got them here, which I then reverse engineered and have found these posts that reach all the way back to...March 2007.

Photo, Fly Me to the Moon, Kaikoura, New Zealand, 11 PM, March 5, 2007; for an excerpt from "A Long Prayer for New Zealand," read on.

Sting and I

Tomorrow night, the Green Monster at Boston's sacred Fenway Park welcomes The Police, perhaps the only rock band in history to sing Arthur Koestler's thinking ("Synchronicity," their 1983 album). Koestler is how I learned about The Police, actually. In 1978, Jeff Stamps was just finishing Holonomy, his dissertation, when Koestler, the great systems theorist, invited him to his cottage in the English countryside. Jeff had drawn heavily on Koestler's work on holons, work that still undergirds much of our work. From then on, I noticed anything connected with Koestler...thus Sting.

Fast forward to 1995. Apple Computer (not Records) was taking its first steps toward creating a "global" software development organization. Doesn't sound like much today but it was one of the early experiments (during a non-Steve Jobs period) to create a seamless software organization across many countries and cultures. Steve Teicher, an Apple VP at the time, hired us to help.

Our book, The Age of the Network, had just come out. Books take a long time to write, which means countless hours listening to your own voice in your head. Thus, every writer has a method to prevent madness. For this book, Jeff and I used the same one: "Fields of Gold," Sting's luscious linger on nature and love. Over and over. Literally thousands of times. So many times that when we wrote the Acknowledgments, he got one: "Sting provided Fields of Gold, the background music."

Meanwhile, the Apple group had convened in Tokyo, where The Park Hyatt had just opened, thus deals available. So did we find ourselves in a hotel with Al Gore, then US vice president, Bill Gates, a dozen six-foot-tall, one-hundred-pound models, and ...

Steve Teicher, Pam Martin (project manager for the global group), Jeff and I were at breakfast in the hotel's main dining room (not the place where you have to make reservations). Just the plain old dining room. When all of a sudden, Pam grabbed my arm and screeched in a high whisper, "JESSICA! THAT'S STING OVER THERE!"

Indeed. Sting, two tables over, with three friends, the night after he'd performed in Tokyo.

And I had our book.

So I got up, thinking about how the sleeves of my sweater were too long, and how intrusive it was for me to be doing this, and how completely absurd I felt, when I found myself standing next to Sting, apologizing for intruding, explaining the background music, whereupon he took the book. "So I'm responsible for this," he said, and read the subtitle: "'Organizing Principles for the 21st Century.' I need this book. I was very disorganized in the 20th Century."

And thus began my career as Sting's tour manager, a brief but rewarding period.

(Did anyone believe that?) No, I turned it into fiction, or maybe, more accurately, faction, a story called "Sting and I."

Turkeynose heads home

Two of my closest friends will return to the US soon after six months travel in Oceania and Asia. I was lucky enough to join them for three weeks in New Zealand and recorded my impressions. They've kept a detailed itinerary and a fascinating blog of their adventures--many funny and poignant posts, zillions of good pictures, and "Turkeynose Lists," where each accommodation, restaurant, and activity is documented and rated by stars. If you're headed to any of the countries they've visited, you'll love this. And I'm really looking forward to saying, Welcome home.

Bono's Africa, Part II

Wait, there's more. A bit stunned that I'm flogging Vanity Fair's July '07 issue again, I read on and have to relay this: There are also worthy reads on Jeffrey Sach's approach to economic development in Uganda, the effective use of anti-retrovirals, and a music festival in the Sahara, snapshots of 20-some inspiring leaders a la Mandela and the Ivory Coast Soccer Team, and ... because it is, in the end, Vanity Fair, Tina Brown on Princess Diana's "love that got away."

Bono edits Africa, July '07 Vanity Fair

I was going to wait to blog this great primer on Africa until I finished the whole issue but that would be selfish.

Oprah's on the cover whispering to George Clooney: “The children of mothers who have a primary education are 40 percent more likely to reach the age of five.”

Annie Leibovitz’s photo essay of celebs having “a conversation about Africa” is superb: Don Cheadle to Barack Obama to Muhammad Ali to Queen Rania of Jordan to Bono to Condoleeza Rice to George Bush to Desmond Tutu to Brad Pitt to … Madonna…Warren Buffet to the Gates to Oprah…and finally back to Don Cheadle. I’d like to see these photos in person; slide show is here.

There’s a short essay on science (we’re all out of Africa), “Generation Kenya,” on the confusions of a young nation, by Bingyavanga Wainana, writer-in-residence at Union College in upstate New York, Sebastian Junger (A Perfect Storm, etc) on oil, China, and Darfur, and “The Continental Shelf,” a superb roundup on Africa’s premier writers by Elissa Schappell and Rob Spillman. Among the superstars is Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who just won the Orange Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun.

Zoetropers remember her: she workshopped there too.

Hello from Hanoi

Many people dislike Instant Messenger, find it intrusive, wish it had never been invented. Not me.

1. I have the luxury of working in a small organization so even if everyone interrupts me at once, it's quite manageable;

2. I don't have many other people on my buddy list (perhaps I'm unpopular, after all); and

3. It allows me to be in touch with my kids.

Such was the situation night before last when my traveling daughter's name came up with a big hello!

--How's Cambodia? I said, their last known whereabouts.

--We're in Hanoi and why don't we do a video ichat?

Which we did for the next two hours, with near-perfect reception, talking from our chicken coop to a hotel in Hanoi with faultless high-speed internet service, absolutely free, cheaper than Skype even.

Hanoi.

I couldn't get over it.

--Imagine, I said, 30 years from now, your child contacting you from Baghdad, then appearing as a hologram in front of you.

Two thumbs-up for this hospital

Next time I need a hospital, I'm booking a flight. A young woman I've had occasion to meet sadly needed to see a doctor while on Koh Samui, an island off the coast of Thailand, where she was engaged in deep studies of the culinary arts. There, a doctor's visit usually involves a hospital. Take a look at her description and should you have the need, be sure to dress up.

Here's a picture of the Out-paient Dept at the Hospital, along with its description:

Our OPD with 10 examination rooms serves as an OPD for all of our specialist doctors. The waiting area is cozy, comfortable and homelike. Complimentary refreshments are available in the unit. For non-Thai speaking customers we provide a one-stop service within the OPD area.