Ken Levy's Blog : Travel

Enduring adventures to Antarctica and Microsoft

klevy — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 21:36:00 GMT

I was inspired to blog this entry based on a comment posted by Danny Thorpe on my recent blog post I made about Shackleton's adventure story in Antarctica, where he commented:

If you have a yen for travel, it's possible to retrace Shackleton's steps yourself. Lindblad Expeditions runs an extended photography tour about once a year (see: http://tinyurl.com/9xadr) on the polar explorer ship "Endeavor" that usually includes stops at South Georgia Island and at Point Wild on Elephant Island. In the few days at sea without landings, the Lindblad staff dig into the Shackleton story in amazing detail. There's nothing quite like actually being there. http://tinyurl.com/loggf.

I've heard about this photography adventure trip to Antarctica. In fact, Susan Graham who I use to work with here at Microsoft (who worked at Fox Software and then Microsoft retired in the late 90s) actually went on that same trip to Antarctica in January 2004. She is a close friend to this day, and after her trip to Antarctica she showed me some photos when she returned. The photos were pretty amazing and she said the trip was far more spectacular than she had anticipated. She went on the trip with a friend, and the boat had about 200 people on board. The story goes that she was on deck during the boat ride out of Argentina heading for Antarctica when she heard a voice say "Susan, is that you?". The person who recognized her was actually the former president of the company she use to work for years ago at Fox Software, Dr. Dave Fulton, who went on to become the head of database strategy at Microsoft in the early 90s after Microsoft bought Fox Software. What are the odds of meeting someone you know on a boat to Antarctica?? I guess we could say: Big continent, small world. Just before that trip, Susan had finished a project as executive producer of a documentary called 200 Cadillacs which details the generosity of Elvis Presley, including details of how he cars as gifts to people. I guess word got around on the boat about this documentary and they ended up playing the Elvis documentary one night for the travelers and crew on the boat. When we launched Visual FoxPro (VFP) version 9.0 at DevCon in late 2004, in the keynote session I showed a photo of Susan and Dr. Dave from that trip as well as a recent video interview Susan did with Dr. Dave talking about the past and present FoxPro days.

For a good quick summary of Dr. Dave Fulton's role in the evolution of desktop databases on PCs, below is an abstract from a session given by Jeb Long at a Visual FoxPro conference in 2004:

dBASE and FoxPro from Jeb Long perspective

Where did VFP (Visual FoxPro) come from? Well, in this session, you will learn. It all began in 1973 at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, USA, when a database management system was born called JPLDIS. In 1979, Wayne Ratliff working as a contractor at JPL, wrote a program to help him with football pools, called Vulcan. Vulcan was based on JPLDIS. Vulcan ran on an 8-bit 8080 microcomputer running under CP/M. George Tate started Ashton-Tate to market Vulcan (renamed dBASE II) for Wayne. Then Jeb Long (who created JPLDIS) converted dBASE II to run on the IBM PC under MSDOS and dBASE II became famous. Jeb and Wayne left JPL to join Ashton-Tate and developed dBASE III. Meanwhile Dr. David Fulton and some of his computer science students thought dBASE III was a terrific program so they cloned it resulting in FoxBase+. Ashton-Tate developed dBASE IV and sued Fox Software. Fox cloned dBASE IV and produced FoxPro 2.5. Ashton-Tate was bought by Borland. Borland dropped the lawsuit. Fox Software merged with Microsoft and the rest is history.

In the early 90s, I had successfully used FoxPro 2.0 DOS version as a touch screen front end in a public safety dispatch product used by various agencies including the California Highway Patrol communications center. It was rare to use FoxPro in a mission critical real-time application rather than a traditional accounting or inventory application back then. I had shown the FoxPro based application to Hal Pawluk who at the time was a key marketing guy at Fox Software. After FoxPro was bought by Microsoft in '92, word got around to a few people the details of the way I was using FoxPro in a mission-critical product. In 1992, one of the FoxPro product managers was Tod Neilsen, who invited me to a database summit meeting at Microsoft along with about 50 well known FoxPro industry experts and influencers. We got to meet the newly merged FoxPro team, Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Mike Maples, Dr. Dave Fulton, and others. At an evening dinner at Bill Gates' old house, I happen to get in line for dessert just before Bill did and I ended up talking to him about the FoxPro application that I wrote for use by public safety dispatch systems. He was curious about it and asked to see a demo. The following month I ended up meeting Bill again and I spent about 15 minutes showing him a demo of demo of the FoxPro based application I had designed and developed. Dr. Dave Fulton was one of the people in the hotel suite for that meeting.

At the dinner at Bill's house, I sat at the table with about 5 other people including Adam Green and Tom Rettig. It was the first time I had met Adam Green, who was then probably the most well known industry guru in the dBase community. Tom became a close friend of mine soon after that event, and I use to hang out at his place in Marina Del Rey fairly often and I would go to his various annual parties. Sometime in 1995, I was over at Tom's apartment one evening. He and I had just come back from dinner at Benihana's down the street, walking distance from his place. When suddenly there was a knock at his door, it was his next door neighbor who had locked himself out of his own place and needed to hop over to his balcony to get in. His next door neighbor was Roger Clinton, former president Bill Clinton's half brother. Roger was a fun guy who was a musician, he would come to Tom's parties, and you wouldn't have guessed that his brother had just become president. I recall being the first geek on the block to have a handheld laser pointer, and when I let Roger try it out he ended up spending more time with it than I did shining it on boats going in and out of the harbor at night.

In 1993 I went to work as a contractor at JPL working on FoxPro based add-on productivity tools and OOP related efforts for teams developing various MIS solutions, While there I got to meet Jeb Long. In some ways, Jeb was the original developer who's program lead to the first database applications on the personal computer. That year I wrote a utility called GenScrnX that extended the FoxPro 2.x GenScrn program. The first person I showed GenScrnX to was Y. Alan Griver (yag), then co-founder of Flash Creative Management. I joined Flash in 1993 after JPL reporting directly to yag working on add-ons that shipped in the box of Visual FoxPro 3.0 like the Class Browser. Eric Rudder was the group program manager and architect for VFP 3.0. Many of the great OO and data-centric features added to VFP 3.0 have continued to evolve in VFP as well as into Visual Studio as well as the VB and C# .NET programming languages. When the VFP 3.0 Xbase projects ended when VFP 3.0 was released, I left Flash and became a full-time contractor at Microsoft working on the VFP team. Flash ended up being bought by GoAmerica where yag became CIO, then yag joined Microsoft in early 2002 and soon after was the of the VS Data and VFP teams, and I reported to him directly (again). I also worked with lead program manager Randy Brown and lead developer Calvin Hsia working on VFP past the release of version VFP 9.0.

I was inspired to write my GenScrnX utility for FoxPro 2.x after I had seen a demo of an early preview of Borland's dBase for Windows shown at a user group by then Xbase industry expert Adam Green. The next time I was to meet up with Adam Green was just a few weeks ago at the Mashup Camp event in Mountain View, Calif. I chatted with Adam at the Mashup Camp event for about 30 minutes. He showed me on his notebook computer that he still uses Visual FoxPro today to build his own desktop database applications - there were Fox icons all over his Windows desktop. Some of our chat included the past and other parts included why we were at the event - to learn more and discuss mashups and possible tangible outcomes of what is being called the Web 2.0. These days, Adam Green spends most of his independent business efforts in the Web 2.0 area, just as I do in my new role in the Windows Live Platform team. I discovered that Adam now has a great blog http://darwinianweb.com/. He also has an archived blog at http://adamgreen.org/ where he has some great MP3 podcast shows. For historical references on the topic of Xbase history, a great podcast Adam created is Software Stories #6 about the rise and fall of Ashton-Tate and the details of how the company was bought by Borland. This particular podcast is a interview is with Ron Dennis, Russell Freeland, Rick Chapman, and Hal Pawluk. Lots more Ashton-Tate history details on Wikipedia.

After Borland bought Ashton-Tate, Borland had some very well known developer tools industry experts including Anders Hejlsberg who created Turbo Pascal and started Delphi. Anders is now at Microsoft and is the lead architect of C#. Some additional irony here is that I recently spent nearly 5 years as the product manager for Visual FoxPro, the same job Tod Neilsen had over 12 years ago. Tod recently became the CEO of Borland. If I talked to Tod today, I would thank him for inviting me to the database summit at Microsoft in 1992. For some interesting history about Delphi, Danny Thorpe wrote an article on Borland's web site Why the name "Delphi?". In a quick photo image search on "Danny Thorpe" using live.com, I found a photo of Danny Thorpe in Antarctica taken in November 2003. This means Danny was probably on the boat trip to Antarctica just before the one that Susan Graham and Dr. Dave Fulton were on in January 2004.

In late February 2006, I moved from the developer division here at Microsoft and joined the Windows Live Platform team as a product planner on Scott Swanson's team. Scott is a group product planner for Windows Live Platform and has a strong developer background. He was on the VB and VSCore team's here at Microsoft and worked recently worked on the Messenger Activity SDK. Defining the 'platform' in the Windows Live Platform team, the platform is about working on unified API roadmap across all Windows Live services, to release great new content online such as SDKs and sample code, as well as new developer community activities. Some

Now back to how this all relates to Danny's comment submitted on my post Endurance and leadership of Sir Ernest Shackleton... Like some memorable movies endings like in the Sixth Sense and the original Twilight Zone TV show, this post as a bit a twist at the end.

Danny Thorpe, former Chief Scientist at Borland, left Borland 4 months ago and joined Google. This week (on April 10, 2006) Danny Thorpe joined Microsoft to work on the recently formed Windows Live Platform team. Danny is joining George Moore's team, a rapidly growing team working on new developer focused projects for Windows Live services and APIs. Nearly all of my responsibilities as a product planner on the Windows Live Platform team involves working with George's new team. Danny Thorpe's created a new blog today at http://blogs.msdn.com/dthorpe/. While there might not be much going on in Antarctica, there is rolling thunder activity going on here at Microsoft in the Windows Live division.

Rick Steves' travel site, center, and podcast show

klevy — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:58:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of Rick Steve's guidebooks and travel gear. I've been fortunate enough to visit Europe 14 times over the past 10 years speaking at various developer conferences and events. If you plan to travel to Europe, check out the various books, maps, videos, train tickets, and travel gear that Rick Steves' company offers. And if you ever visit Seattle and you are a European traveler, I highly recommend visiting Rick's Steves Travel Center walk-in store in Edmonds, WA. Edmonds is about 15 miles north of downtown Seattle. Edmonds is a nice place to walk around, and it's on the shore of the Puget Sound with a ferry dock, shops, restaurants, all walking distance to Rick Steves travel center

I found an Explorer Europe site on msn.com linked to from the home page of the new MSN Travel beta site. A while back I blogged about the CIA World Factbook which contains great detailed information for any country you might visit. I also blogged about 6 detailed posts while touring around in Europe in June 2004, including one entry that describes how I was in 5 countries within 9 hours by car. It's now looking like I will be back to Europe this fall speaking at some developer events on the topic of Windows Live, but nothing specific is planned yet. Maybe I can do some more video interviews of Microsoft employees who work in Europe like the one I did last November now on Channel 9 posted at In the field in Switzerland.

Two additional useful related articles I recently found on msnbc.com are Rick Steves: Helping millions explore Europe and Europe: by train or by car?. One thing you won't find many of on the roads in Europe are SUVs and large pick-up trucks, almost none. The price of gasoline is over twice as expensive in Europe as it is in the U.S.. The price of gas in Europe was around $6US back in June 2004 when I was in a car touring 2500miles (4000km) around Europe, not sure what the price per liter is there now.

Trains are a great way to get around Europe, and traveling by car allows you to stop and see many interesting non-tourist locations. The sightseeing and tourist type hot spots are usually fun and interesting, but the best part about European travel is socializing with people who live there. The train system in Europe is a great way to get around and to talk to people, both locals and other travelers.

Rick Steves is now podcasting. Here is the RSS feed for the Rick Steves podcast show. There are now over 50 MP3 podcast shows already, not just about European travel but also about locations world-wide, wines, food, and even one on World Cup Soccer 2006. Lots of free useful tips and travel planning content on Rick Steves' Plan Your Trip page.

June 2005 event tour trip report - Part 2

klevy — Sun, 03 Jul 2005 04:22:00 GMT

Taking a quick break during my vacation on the Greek Island of Mykonos, here is part 2 of 2 for my central/eastern European speaking tour in June 2005...

Prague, Czech Republic

There is an update to the figures we announced during the Praha DevCon 2005 keynote after Igor Vit did some mining into registration data. Turns out that 60 people have been new to this year's event and 60 have been attending all 8 years (not 50 and 100 respectively as previously reported). I believe the original data was based on Igor's guess or memory, but we wanted to be accurate in the reporting. There was a closing Q&A session on Wed. June 23rd which I was not able to attend being in route to speak in Budapest on June 24th. It was reported that all went well for this year's event and DAQUAS (host and organizer of the event) said "with that feedback we promised we are ready to organize the event next year again.". I am fairly certain that Alan Griver is already packing his bags for Praha DevCon 2006 as he has never been to Prague and he really wants to attend this great VFP annual conference. It was great to see VFP MVPs Andy Kramek and Marcia Akins speaking there again along with all the other speakers and attendees that I've grown to know over the years by my attending 5 years in a row. The Praha DevCon events are held at the Czech Technical University. In case you missed it or did not read it all, the UT Praha 2005 conference report is a must read, plus browsing the archive photos.

Budapest, Hungary

The special VFP event in Budapest was held at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics organized and hosted by Sandor Nacsa and Istvan Kerese of Microsoft Hungary. The event was equipped with facilities for simultaneous translation which was used. It appears about half the audience used the translation headphones while the other half listened to my presentation in English. Budapest is certainly once of the nicest European cities and is getting better every year so I am told. It is very comparable to visiting Prague.

Bucharest, Romania

This special VFP event in Bucharest was held at the very nice and modern Howard-Johnson Hotel conference center organized and hosted by Dorin Badea and Zoli Herczeg of Microsoft Romania. The Romanian language is close to Italian and French and there are a lot of investments from companies from these European countries and others. One of the largest investors in Romania is Renault. There are many VFP developers in the central European and Balkans regions with many Romanians, Bulgarians, Turks, and Serbians who offer VFP development services. Visual FoxPro is extremely popular in Romania and is taught in many schools and universities. Everyone I talked to on the train ride to Bucharest, even non-programmers, and heard of FoxPro. One 21 year old Romanian law student said he first used FoxPro when he was about 12 years old in the early 90s.

Romanians have a great sense of humor, more than any European city I've ever visited. The county of Transylvania which includes Dracula's castle is in Romania. The story of Dracula in Hollywood does not follow the real legend of Dracula, so I included a slide bullet at the start of my presentation that received some big laughter: Hollywood needs new Dracula movie… Dude, where’s my castle? A special thanks to Romanian VFP developers Grigore Dolghin and Sergiu Cazan who helped promote the event and make my visit to Romania as productive and as fun as possible. These guys were also at the Praha event, so it was fun to see them at two events within one week.

Sofia, Bulgaria

On June 28th–29th Microsoft Bulgaria organized the annual Microsoft Days 2005 event for Developers and IT professionals held at the International Exhibition Center. This year a third track was added to the event dedicated to Microsoft's MBS product line (Navision, Axapta & CRM). My participation was organized by Plamen Hristov of Microsoft Bulgaria. English presentations were the norm. Why? There are neither books nor help documentation for any software in Bulgarian. All is in English. If someone wants to be a computer programmer in Bulgaria, they have to at least be able to read English, and most understand spoken English. Most of the programmer speak English too. English speakers just have to talk more slowly than normal just as when speaking in any non-native English speaking locations.

The Dev Days event in Sofia was visited by more than 1400 attendees divided in three tracks: Developers, IT Pros and MBS. The main focus of the event was Technical preview of SQL Server 2005 and Visual Studio 2005 and the Launch of Bulgarian Navision 4.0. My sessions were on VFP 9.0 with VS 2005 and also XML tools in VS 2005, topics that I covered at all of the events in my tour. A special thanks to Venelina Jordanova and her husband Jordan for meeting me at the train station when I arrived in Sofia and all the tours, dinners, lunches, etc. outside of the event itself making my visit to Sofia one of the many highlights of my trip. Jordan actually surprised me and met me on the train at some stop in Bulgaria so we met for the first time and chatted for 3 hours or so heading into Sofia. And also thanks to another VFP developer in Bulgaria named Boris, as well as my new buddy Soykan Ozcelik who took a bus from Turkey to the event in Sofia and toured around Sofia with Jordan and I. Soykan is a Greek VFP developer who lives in Turkey. I need to find a way to get Soykan at the same event with some of the Romanian VFP developers to raise the fun and humor factor to 11.

Greece and trip summary

Part of my trip plans this year was to take 5 days vacation in Greece after my central/eastern European speaking tour. Here in Greece, the currency used is the Euro and when late in the day July 1st, the ratio to the U.S. dollar was $1.195 per Euro (via http://xe.com) which is down over 6% more in the past month since my blog post Currency conversions on the go, and down 13% since my previous visit to Europe last November.

During some of my recent travels I had a chance to watch several more Channel 9 videos on my Sony PSP, and loaded onto memory a few new ones for the long trip home to Seattle. Using the PSP Video 9 conversion program, I found a good setting to convert Channel 9 WMV video files to MPEG4 files for the Sony PSP. This setting converts to high quality video and audio MPEG files and are about the same file size as the WMV being converted, setting: Default Profile set to 320x240/29.97fps/QB4 Stereo/96kbps.

I listened to my UE-10 Ultimate Ears headphones for dozens of hours on my trip (music, movies, and videos) while traveling and doing computer work in various locations from hotel rooms to airports to train stations as well as on trains and airplanes. My review of the UE-10 Ultimate Ears was recently added to the Ultimate Ears reviews web page.

I've been exchanging email with a VFP developer named Dimitris who participates on the UniversalThread.com who lives in Athens. Dimitris was going to go to the Sofia event but had a conflict in his schedule and couldn't attend. I will probably be having a drink with Dimitris somewhere in Athens on Monday night, to add to the long list of VFP developers I've meet for the first time on this spectacular trip. While seeing sites and new places is certainly a great party of foreign travel, I would say over half the experience is meeting so many friendly and interesting people along the way (work related, other tourists, locals, etc.). Just waiting outside the hotel this afternoon waiting for the bus to stop to head into downtown Mykonos, people riding by on motor bikes would smile and wave. This is the type friendliness I've experienced over the past 2 weeks of my trip.

This has certainly been the most interesting, educational, and insightful trip of mine to date from a social and historic perspective. My tour had me in 10 countries within 12 days. Including all the stops and visits on my trip between June 18th and June 30th, I was in the U.S., Denmark, U.K., Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece. I will probably spent some vacation time in Italy after my European tour this fall. Later this year I will be speaking at the following events:

Southwest Fox 2005, Phoenix, October 13th
Frankfurt DevCon 2005, Frankfurt, November 8th
Zurich FoxPro User Group, Switzerland, November 11th

Blogging from 35,000 feet to start my eastern European tour

klevy — Sun, 19 Jun 2005 10:34:00 GMT

Right now I'm on my computer flying on SAS Airlines from Seattle to Copenhagen (on my way to Prague), it is 10:30pm PT. SAS Airlines now offers wireless high speed internet on some planes ($30US for unlimited internet for the entire flight), pretty amazing. So when you read this blog post, it was sent from the air. I can surf the internet and do email right from my seat in coach, as long as my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC notebook computer battery lasts (about 2.5 hours total). I must say it is very cool to be able to post a blog entry live while flying just south of the Article circle far north of Montreal Canada.

In June 2004, I did a Europa tour speaking at various Visual FoxPro events and traveling through many parts of western Europe by car and train. My June 2004 blog posts have many of the details. I plan to post similar blog posts on this trip I'm starting now through the rest of June speaking at 4 Visual FoxPro events in eastern Europe. This will be my 5th trip to Prague in 5 years, and my first visit to countries east of Czech Republic. Below is an overview of my travel schedule:

June 18: Leave Seattle for Europe via Copenhagen Denmark, London UK, on to Prague Czech Republic, arriving the evening of June 19th (9 hours ahead of Seattle).
June 21: I speak in Prague at the Praha DevCon 2005, the keynote with VFP team members Randy Brown and Richard Stanton plus 2 general sessions.
June 22: Take 4 hour train ride from Prague to Vienna Austria. My visit to Vienna and all other locations on my trip from here on out will be first time visits for me.
June 23: Take a 5 hour boat ride from Vienna to Budapest.
June 24: Speak at a special VFP event hosted by Microsoft Hungary.
June 26: Take a 13 hour train ride from Budapest to Bucharest Romania.
June 27: Speak at a special VFP event hosted by Microsoft Romania.
June 28: Take a 10 hour train ride form Bucharest to Sofia Bulgaria.
June 29: Speak on VFP and XML tools at a Dev Days event hosted by Microsoft Bulgaria.
June 30: Fly from Sofia to Athens Greece. From this point on, it will be vacation time for me.
July   1: Leave Athens for the island of Mykonos of the Greek Islands plus some island hopping.
July   5: Fly from Athens back home to Seattle.
July   6: Back to work to start getting busy on Sedna planning and development.

This blog post was typed out and posted while sitting in seat 40C of an Airbus 340 on SAS airlines.

Currency conversions on the go

klevy — Tue, 24 May 2005 13:03:00 GMT

I find myself checking the XE.com web site about every other day just for fun to take a quick peak to see how the U.S. dollar is against the Euro. When I was in Europe last November, it was around 1.31 $ per Euro. The $ was down to 1.34 per Euro maybe a month ago. But the $ has been doing better over the last week. It was hanging around 1.285, but today it is up to 1.259 per Euro. An 8% differential is significant, especially for traveling in Europe. Gas is actually cheap in the U.S., by perspective. One thing Americans who are complaining about high gas prices should realize is that during my drive through much of western Europe last June, I did not find one country (out of 9 visited) that sold gas for less than $6 per gallon. That probably helped explain why I saw less than two vehicles on the road that were either large pickups or SUVs in over 2500 of driving from Norway to Germany to Austria to Switzerland, and many countries in between.

The coolest new Smartphone application that I have on my Audiovox 5600 phone is called Calc-1. It is not only a great calculator with metric and temperature type conversions, but it has a cool tip calculator. The best best feature in Calc-1 for me during travel is a currency converter that lists all world currencies and auto updates every time I sync my email over the air. So while I travel, I can select the local currency and have the local currency rate calculation up to date.