The training is over, and I finally have some time to update on the last week.

We used all Sunday, just before the training, to walk around downtown Chicago. The weather was favorable, even though we got to know what “windy city” stands for - in the morning we got sun burned while spending some time on the shore, whereas in the evening we were freezing on our way back.

The Chicago for us was mostly about skyscrapers. It’s a birthplace of skyscrapers, after all.

Chicago Temple Building, located close to where we started, attracted our attention first, with its Sky Chapel high above.

More photos below. (read more…)

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Firstly, trip to Frankfurt, then, 9 hours flight to Chicago. Travelling fatigue worse even than in case of trains to Wroclaw, but in the end I made it to here - first time in the US.

Surprises at the airport, first on how dirty it looks, then with our reservation in the hotel, which turns out to be in the suburbs, instead of downtown, oups, someone reserved the wrong hotel - but no problem, we will take a cab.

We take the cab, it gets lost in the dark suburb.

Only after some circling around we find our hotel. Inside we see a presbyterian gathering - lots of people with colorful badges are all around, some of them carry peculiar oversized golden plastic trophies; we wonder what their purpose might be.

It’s too late to go to the city, so we go for a beer to the bar downstairs. They don’t want to sell us beer, because we have no IDs to prove we are eligible. Not even corporate credit cards impress them. We go back for IDs, get beer, sit and listen to the American accent all around us.

It’s interesting that, so far, Americans that we meet hardly understand our English, and vice versa. It adds funny twist to every conversation.

The next day, we take a cab to downtown Chicago, for a whole day sight seeing.

To be continued.

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Thursday morning, ascending from the subway.

Time to start work.

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It’s a shame but only today I noticed, from the taxi, that the Warsaw School of Economics has finished its new building on Madalinskiego street. Looks impressive!

Now I know where all this money I paid for being late with master thesis ended up.

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I just returned from the train station, where I bought a ticket to Warsaw for tomorrow. I had a peculiar experience at the ticket office and I didn?t have a camera with me, not even a crappy phone one, shame on me. The picture is worth thousand words, and video would be even better, but I don?t have neither, so I will go for words.

At the station, the ticket seller was sitting in front of a machine which instantly attracted my attention. Instead of the old ordinary computer that I got used to see there, it was a shiny, actually cream white, new piece of equipment with a monitor and a printer, but interestingly, no keyboard. (read more…)

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It’s a reading for Friday. Florida’s problem with pythons is spinning out of control:

“Last year, we caught 95 pythons,” said Skip Snow, a biologist with Florida Everglades National Park. That’s not counting the 13-footer that exploded after trying to eat an alligator, or two others that got loose and ate a Siamese cat and a turkey.

Pythons are bought as pets and released when they outgrow expectations of their owners. Idea of python as a pet is controversial in itself:

Lawmaker Poppell says he’s no snake lover and doesn’t understand people’s fascination with the slithery creatures.

“How can you want something for a pet that looks at you when it’s hungry?” he said. “I don’t want something to look at me as food, I’d rather they (pets) come to me for food.”

It will only get worse.

Three years ago, a 15-footer stopped traffic when he spread himself across a four-lane road. Last year, another 15-footer gave a 60-year-old woman quite the jolt when she walked outside to find the snake sunbathing on her patio. And rescue workers had to save a cat from the 10-foot python that was chasing it around the backyard pool.

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Is there anything wrong with having all the answers at your fingerprints? You don’t know, you type, and Google tells you, or you go straight to Wikipedia.

I use Google News on a daily basis to lookup my favorite topics. Hundeds of news sources there, but they say the same thing most of the time. For fresh view, I wait for articles by Carr or Andrew Orlowski, who, by the way, wrote the piece in Guardian which inspired this post: A thirst for knowledge.

Britannica’s president Jorge Cauz identifies a homogeneity online he finds unsettling. “Internet discourse has the ability to negate the diversity of voices, and no one can differentiate between truth and myth,” he says.

How to avoid being another mirror in the hall of mirrors? With such amount of information sources at hand, it’s difficult to go back and do thinking on your own:

“It’s a false supposition we can endlessly delay having to interpret and judge things by stacking more and more bits of data in front of us,” he says. “That data is a comfort blanket in a way - we all do this. People are becoming addicted to getting more information all the time.

Accumulating information is now easier, and thinking is difficult. You would expect that critical insight will rise in price, since it became so scarce now. On the other hand, when the free is (seems?) good enough most of the time, few will pay premium for a quality content.

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At least, but fortunately, hardly any gets through the filters. Still, every day I need to waste some time deleting them from the queue. Maybe installing CAPTCHA would be worthwhile (and fun). First on the list, though, an upgrade to Wordpress 2.0, required sooner or later, but will be pain for sure.

I wonder why such increase? I thought spam comments are ignored by the search engines anyway.

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NYT article by Steve Lohr pictures journalism trying to cope with new search engine driven reality:

This Boring Headline Is Written for Google

Not that it’s only today that the profession is shaped by technology and marketing: headlines were always meant to attract attention, and telegraph invented the pyramid.

But now comes the Google and the rules change again. After the editor and the reader, the spider becomes third stakeholder that needs to be satisfied.

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Judas Iscariot not a betrayer after all, instead the trusted one, to sacrifice himself and eventually surpass them all - two thousand years of defamation. New Gospel, copyrighted by Gazeta Wyborcza and National Geographic, to be published soon. Feels like Phil K. Dick novel today.

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Yesterday it turned out that Karina, our Russian teacher, is also a chiromancy fan. Upon reading my palm she discovered that I have no heart line - that’s why I’m perfect consultant, heheh:)

Maybe I should get that restructuring job last year, after all.

She also concluded that I always do what I’m told. Manager I am working with vigorously disagreed.

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In how many ways can you screw sushi delivery? One of the Warsaw restaurants, Sushi 77 from Zelazna 41, is determined to find out.

Count to three

Sushi 77 gets into trouble whenever your order exceeds two sets. With three sets, there is 90% probability that you will receive only two soy sauces. You would expect that it would help if after couple of such cases you specifically demanded ex ante that they make sure about that, but you would be wrong.

Still, nothing compared to ordering even more sets - things are getting out of control then. Yesterday when we ordered 6 sets, we received 6 sets, 5 soy sauces and 0 sticks. On the second try to deliver 6 missing sticks and one sauce, the driver appeared with 5 sticks and, for some reason, 4 sauces, reaching required number of 6 sticks only after the third and final round.

Six sigma excellence

Jack Welch would find Sushi 77 to be an attentive listener to his six sigma preaching - one inconsistent product per 3 millions and all this stuff. We are still figuring out how to prevent octopus (no one likes it) from randomly appearing in our orders. According to the menu, it is not a part of the pieces we ask for, but it matters little. Composition of ?standard? sets seems quite flexible.

Streamlined invoicing

We order from a lot of places, but Sushi 77 is the only one not able to attach the invoice to the delivery ? instead, it is supposed to be sent by mail within a couple of days. It never is. I have a dedicated spreadsheet for tracking invoices flow. Average delay for booking invoice is one month.

Final verdict

Basing on the available evidences we can conclude that Sushi 77 has one of the worst, if not the worst, service in Warsaw.

Nevertheless, we are still ordering tons of food from them.

Others providers have sometimes faster delivery, often worse-tasting sushi, and always at least twice as high prices. It seems that if you have a good product and good pricing, you can fail in almost everything else. And with this optimistic conclusion I will leave you, thank you for your attention.

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I owe to Steve Shu for the opportunity to read (only now) this interesting essay by Malcolm Gladwell about talent mind-set in the context of Enron situation:

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_07_22_a_talent.htm

Of particular interest, for me, the research showing pitfalls of basing one’s confidence in his intelligence instead of in his persistence and efforts.

Then, as could be expected, smart people vs smart organization issue.

I found accidentally that the essay even ended up as an example for analysis of good writing.

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Still reading Ulysses, last night I stopped on this:

“What was their civilization? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae: sewers. The Jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be here. Let us build an altar to Jehowah. The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct a watercloset.“

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It’s either because I didn’t think about it, because I didn’t care, or simply because Mike’s Torres post does such a good job in explaining it, that only today I started to appreciate the grand idea of Microsoft’s “experience” (emphasis mine):

It isn’t about Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X or Google vs. Windows Live. It’s ultimately about the digital lifestyle and convergence. It’s about the complete “stack” from your PC to your mobile device, television, the web, and beyond.

The thing is: Windows isn’t just a PC operating system anymore; it’s quickly becoming the best seamless end-to-end experience. Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, Xbox 360 (Windows Media Center Extender), and Windows Live. One without the other will work just fine, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

It isn’t about the web any more than it’s about the office… or the mobile device… or the living room. The key is to make it all work together like magic. And Microsoft, more than any other company in existence, is in a fantastic position to do this.

And why shouldn’t be Microsoft pursuing this “experience” strategy. Like Google, which started online, then moved to desktop, and then started to put itself on the mobiles. Like Apple, with its “iPod lifestyle” environment.

However, while the other guys can leverage on the reputation based on simple and elegant solutions which “just work” and try to stretch them further, Microsoft might have more difficult time trying to convince people that experience with Windows is the one they want to see extended.

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