Tumbleweed at the Hifi

Welcome back Tumbleweed... One of my all time favorite bands, I have fond memories of all ages Tumbleweed gigs at Wall Street (now Hifi bar) . They played there again on Thursday night to a sold out crowd about 15 years since the last time they graced the stage with their unique brand of fuzz fueled rock. I think I recognised most of the people there too, they just looked 15 years older than last time I saw them. Tumbleweed were typically brilliant. Here's hoping they keep going and start writing again...

Mission Critical SOA

I was trawling through some old presentations over the weekend and I stumbled across something I’d presented on “Mission Critical SOA” at an Enterprise Java Australia event a couple of years ago. A colleague and I put this together a little earlier on in the evolution of SOA when it was closer to the height of its hype cycle and promising to be the answer to every CIO’s problems. Having worked through a number of challenging SOA implementations since then, the guts of this presentation is still very relevant so I figured I’d reproduce the main ideas here in a blog entry. The original presentation can be downloaded here

What is Mission Critical?

It’s clear that we’ve become increasingly reliant technology as we’ve evolved. You only have to watch how kids interact today to see technology is embedding itself deeper into way we function. I used to talk to my friends for fun but these days it’s not uncommon for kids to communicate by occasionally passing each other an earphone for a quick listen, followed by a smile and a nod then, back to the iPhone – I must be getting real old. Whilst this is hardly a mission critical situation, the basic foundations upon which we live are supported by technology.

• We flick the switch and we expected the lights to turn on.
• We turn the tap we expect water to flow
• We get on a flight, we expect to arrive at our destination safely
• We dial ‘000’ we expect to get an emergency operator

We expect mission critical technology to just work. If it doesn’t, bad stuff happens – lives may be lost, someone may lose plenty of dough, or someone’s reputation gets a caned.

So mission critical can be seen as the “technology pillars of life” and no doubt, we’ve made our lives easier, but to the extent that we’ve become complacent to the risk of these pillars crumbling, we’ve also made our lives more dangerous. Mission Critical technologies have to just work - failure is not an option. Under this simple façade how do we actually address real mission critical concerns to make sure solutions never go down, handle exceptions elegantly, ensure data accuracy when handling massive throughput.

We’ve become reasonably good at dealing with many of these concerns but does mission critical and SOA work together?

SOA + Mission Critical

In 2007, Gartner predicted a few things:

"SOA will be used in more than 50% of new mission-critical operational applications and business processes designed in 2007 and in more than 80% by 2010."

"New software products for SOA have hit the market, but given their immaturity, have disappointed users in terms of reliability, performance and productivity."

We’re nearly at 2010, and whilst 80% is a big call, no doubt, everyone seems to be implementing SOA and which is now on the “slope of enlightenment” beginning to meet our expectations – or as Matt Wright commented at last weeks EJA futures event, this may be more about a shift in our expectations of SOA. The one thing Gartner did say back then that resonates strongly is that in many cases “SOA principles have been applied too rigidly, and this has led to unsatisfactory outcomes as projects became too costly and didn’t meet deadlines” We are still some way from maturing to the extent that we can reliably delivery Mission Critical SOA solutions. Addressing this challenge requires us to distinguish between means and ends.

Means and Ends

The fundamental business outcome (ends) we are striving for in any SOA delivery is business agility; the ability for the business to adapt to changing needs. We’re looking for rapid delivery cycles, shorter time to value, lower delivery risk and only an incremental delivery costs when introducing new capabilities. Underpinning agility we have the “enabling” outcomes. These are the outcomes we strive for that naturally result in agility. We want maximised reuse, infinite extensibility and maximised interoperability all leading to agility. It’s obvious why we strive for these outcomes;

• We want reuse, so we abstract service designs to produce agnostic services that are not tied to a specific business process.
• We want extensibility, so we design loosely coupled SOA solutions that minimise dependencies between services allowing easy adaptation to future needs.
• We want interoperability, so we follow industry standards to maximise the possibility for re-use and easy integration.

So far so good… This is all a part of the standard formula for SOA benefits realisation, however, when you add Mission Critical to the equation, a tension arises between our means for SOA outcomes and fundamental mission critical requirements such as Performance, Reliability and Availability.



Abstraction and Reuse

High levels of re-use on individual services leads to increased performance, reliability and availability requirements on these reused services. A mobile subscriber service at the centre of the universe for a Telco can lead to a single point of failure should an enterprise rely heavily on this service to deliver core business functionality. This service must now meet the performance needs of all consumers that depend on its functionality. The service must also be as available and reliable as the neediest consumer. The key point here, is the more we centralise solution logic into reusable services, the more we need to consider the ability of the service to meet NFR requirements now and into the future.

Extensibility

Similar tensions exist when considering extensibility; In focussing on designing loosely coupled services we distribute functionality across a service taxonomy. In doing so, we significantly increase the number of service to service interactions, leading to performance overheads, especially when using a standard protocol such as SOAP/HTTP.

Interoperability

Whilst adopting standards such as SOAP/HTTP is a great idea in our quest for ultimate interoperability, we also adopt it’s baggage of being a verbose communications protocol leading to runtime performance overheads, and it’s inability to support reliable messaging and transactional integrity, all leading to reliability concerns.

Whilst there are many Web Service standards (WS-*) aiming to address these issues, they are at differing levels of maturity and as such are not supported by all SOA stacks available. Some recommendations Firstly, it’s important to acknowledge that many of the levers sit with the technology rather than the architecture. The most brilliant architecture, implemented poorly will ultimately result in failed outcomes So:

1. Review the SOA principles and determine which ones are important to you
2. Define a set of standards and patterns to which the organisation will follow, but the key is to make these guidelines, the default position, and deviate where the benefits outweigh the costs.

As an example of this, on a recent project for one of our customers we’ve implemented an SOA solution with a typical mission critical profile:

• 24x7 uptime
• Transactional integrity is paramount
• Transactions per day is in the millions

Some key considerations are:

1. Solution is to be based on standard communications protocols (SOAP/HTTP)
2. Solution is to be developed using the provided SOA stack and technologies (e.g. BPEL) as far as possible
3. Solution must scale up and down as far as possible

Given this, we have 2 options.

1. Throw a wall of silicon at it just to get it to run at the required volumes
2. Deviate from the standards where necessary to get the required performance.

In this case we’ve taken the decision to make use of native communication protocols via WSIF (RMI-IIOP) and built in SOA stack optimisations to significantly improve transactional performance and to also provide transactional integrity support between service calls. The idea here is to define standards and use them as the ‘default’ where it is fit for purpose.

Break the rules provided you are doing it for the right reasons, and in a controlled manner. The right reasons means we must understand the rules, why they are there and what their limitations are. We must also understand the technology, not only the standards but how the product sets implement them, in order to understand any traps. A controlled way means we must ensure there is some governance to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Establish an Architecture Review Committee, and ensure they don’t operate in a vacuum. There should be a good mix of architects, business representatives and hands on technical specialists to get the best holistic “outcome”.

The uptake - if managed effectively we can achieve most of the benefits of SOA and meet all of our mission critical drivers without introducing prohibitive cost.

When should we use SOA?

So when is it appropriate to adopt a vanilla SOA approach versus an approach that requires deviation from SOA principles?

This can be modeled via the following quadrant - the horizontal axis shows increasing levels of change and/or reuse with the vertical showing an increasing level of mission criticality

• Sweet spot (Green): In the bottom right hand corner, with high levels of re-use, and low levels of mission criticality, we get the most our of a vanilla SOA approach. Just follow the rules and watch the benefits roll in.
• Easy Cases (yellow): Here we have low mission criticality, but also low levels of re-use. Here we need to understand the business case for SOA. Do the additional SOA overheads such as governance really make sense? Here we should optimise for budget.
• Hard Cases (red): As we increase the mission-criticality, we need to start thinking about the trade-offs. Do we compromise robustness? Budget (additional effort and hardware)? The hard cases are where we need to optimise the use of stock standard SOA for the outcomes we are trying to achieve and this is the arena I’ve been discussing.
• Mission Critical (blue): It’s these cases where we really need to think about what we are trying to achieve. Does it make sense for this to be an SOA solution, what are the real tangible benefits that we can derive from an SOA approach? What defines success? Can SOA deliver it?

SOA doesn’t replace everything that preceded it, and it is not “the one true path”. Like any technology, it builds on successful ideas from the past and leverages new technology innovations. There is great value in SOA but there is even greater value in perspective. Understand your business first. Then do what makes sense.

The mapping between concept and reality is not transparent. The truth of the matter today is that to realise your vision, you do need expertise in the underlying technologies — what works well and what doesn’t.

While all of us work in an abstract industry, we are here, at the end of the day, to deliver tangible things. No matter how elegant, how compliant and how service oriented an architecture is, the business just wants a robust solution that works.

A unique opportunity...

I was having drinks with friends last week and the topic of 'green energy' came up in conversation. A couple of us in the group were now signed up to the 100% renewable energy plans which are readily available through many of the major energy suppliers but I was surprised at the scepticism amongst the many in the group.

"Why would you pay a power company more than double the price of coal fired power when you really don't know if they’re making good on their promise anyway?" Fair question - but it's also a disappointing position for someone to take as it absolves them of any responsibility to act differently - you can just do what you’ve always done.

The reality is that this we have an incredible opportunity to fix this problem - one that no other generation in the history of everything will ever get again. Tim Flannery put it best in his quarterly essay 'Now or never - a sustainable future for Australia' - "this generation - those of us living at the dawn of the 21st century - is destined to achieve an extraordinary transformation, one unique in the 4 billion year history of earth and one which will influence the fate of life from now on."

The only problem with this statement is the use of the word ‘destiny’ which by definition suggests it is inevitable that we will beat climate change… but it won’t just ‘happen’. It will be the combination of intelligent industry vehicles such as emission trading schemes, science, technology, innovation, and most of all responsible action from all individuals.

Inaction due to scepticism is not a get out of jail free card– it’s a conscious decision to keep doing what we’ve always done which is getting us nowhere… fast…

What next?

A colleague of mine PEG was recently blogging about the “value of information”. There are several ideas in his posts, one of them being that the value of the information to your organisation is largely influenced by the ‘freshness’ of the data you have access to. This aspect of data gives you a certain level of decision making power to determine 'what next' -the fresher the data, the more quickly we can react and potentially the more influence you can have on customer behavior.

Architecturally, we have established some fairly common approaches to dealing with data at a varying level of freshness. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) solutions have been helping us look at historical data so that we can better understand long term business performance, customer behaviour, and therefore tune our business to perform better. Actions taken as a result of analysing BI data are usually optimisations to business processes, the introduction of new products or the removal of poorly performing products. These changes generally take weeks to months to implement as they require development changes to systems to recode, redeployment, and potentially training staff to take advantage of the new processes.

At the other end of the freshness scale, we have Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) which is all about real time event capture, aggregation, and monitoring via dashboards. BAM gives operational staff the ability to monitor performance metrics in real time and make decisions as business performance changes. Actions taken as a result of viewing BAM dashboards are usually immediate – e.g. to increase the number of call centre staff due to higher than average call rates, or to order additional stock due to higher than expected customer numbers.

There still seems to be some confusion with many customers on when to use BAM versus when to use BI, what is more valuable to the business? Whilst they both have their place in the enterprise, it’s the combination of data across the ‘freshness spectrum’ - BI, Operational, and BAM that can provide the complete picture needed to make well informed decisions.

A great example of how this concept has been applied is a story I heard about a casino. Every punter entering the casino would complete a short questionnaire, hand over some cash and be issued with a gaming card which they’d use at the various tables and pokies machines. Based on the completed questionnaire, the casino could establish a rough profile of the punter and estimate their expected spend. The gaming card provided an indication on what the punter was doing – betting on pokies, playing the tables, or cashing in for the night. If a punter looked like they were leaving prematurely (having not reached their estimated spend), casino staff would conveniently appear and offer a nights cheap accommodation or some credits to encourage the punter to stay on and keep gambling. The information involved in the decision to intercept the leaving punter is:

• BI data: Used to look at historical trends of punter profile against estimated spend. This data is likely to be used to influence questions asked to establish the profile and other major initiatives influenced by punter behaviour (e.g. what promotions were most effective in attracting people etc).

• Operational data: from the gaming system tracking bets, wins and losses etc, and operational data from the system handling hotel room reservations (where cheap accommodation is being offered).

• BAM data: real-time tracking of punter activity what each punter is currently doing in the gaming room and how much they’ve gambled.

So any single of type of data, whilst useful on its own, is not enough to take the decision to intercept. BI tells you what has happened historically, and therefore what to expect, BAM tells you what’s actually happening now, operational data tells you what you can offer – all three together tells us ‘what to do’.


To support this we need subsystems to manage this information and a means for integrating between them.

The BI data belongs in a data warehouse and data marts optimised for analytical slicing and dicing. There are plenty of BI solutions out there such as those offered by Oracle which provide end to end warehousing solutions complete with ETL components and analytical reporting front ends. Alternatively a basic star schema with a front end reporting tools such as Yellowfin or Crystal will do the trick also. The BI data will be updated frequently (e.g. nightly/hourly) via data feeds from operational data stores. This should be handled via change data capture (CDC) and a typical ETL technology such as Oracle Warehouse Builder or Talend which will provide the mechanisms to extract, transform and load data structures in an appropriate format for the warehouse.

The BAM system is responsible for capturing events fed from the gaming system as they occur in real time, and displaying on a dashboard for users to interpret - e.g. punter issued card, punter placed bet on roulette, punter cashing in etc. Events are usually published to the BAM system via asynchronous means such as JMS however this will depend entirely on the system creating the events. In some solutions the BAM event capture is ‘pull’ rather than ‘push’ – e.g. polling a database table for a change in source data. When particular events are captured, there may be a need for additional integration with other operational data stores to enrich the event, in this case to identify vacant rooms – e.g. a punter leaving event, a vacant room that is unlikely to be booked, and a reasonable level of confidence that the punter is likely to spend more. This integration will once again depend on the technology interface of the system being queried but many of the available BAM tools are well positioned to integrate with SOA environments, particularly where standards based web services are in use.

Lastly, the final data feed is the business user acting on the information in front of them which completes the cycle…

So this is an example where various types of information have been combined to answer the ‘what next’ question. All information is valuable, but the value can be increased when it's combined with other information elsewhere on the freshness scale.

Got any good examples where data fusion like this has been used effectively - let me know via comments.

Delivering Reliable Software

Why is it, that delivering reliable software seems to have become a bit of a 'black art'? We’ve been doing it for so long, surely we should be able to get it right by now? I was recently asked to give a presentation to an IT department who seemed to have perfected the process of starting projects that would either be canned well before ever making it into production, or if they did go live, they would end up disappointing and under whelming users.

It reminds me of recent experiences my friends and I have had building new homes with one of Australia’s biggest residential developers. In some ways you’d consider them the IBM’s of the building world based on the sheer volume of construction and number of builder’s and sub-contractors they keep in business each year (one difference – they don’t charge like IBM, I couldn’t afford those guys building my house). Their staff were extremely efficient in the sales process. They’d walk us through the display home, highlight the features, recommend variations from their catalogue and help us visualise life in a new home with “alfresco entertaining and expansive spaces". It would be our very own slice of the good life. Their experience in having built these houses so many times and then their efficiency in throwing it together was evident – in my case the house was delivered 3 months ahead of schedule.

Personally, I was pretty happy with the result, however, there were some minor (and some more major) problems that we and our friends experienced. Once our houses were planned, variations were particularly difficult to make happen. They resulted in schedule delays, cost increases, even when the change meant less work for the builders. Some friends wanted alternative materials used which not only added cost, but as the builders were inexperienced with the materials, they were implemented poorly. Once in the house, poor design of some features lead to increased operating costs. For example, heating in one of the homes didn’t allow for zoning off specific rooms which lead to extreme inefficiency – every room was heated all of the time when only a couple of rooms were to be used.

These sorts problems parallel the software world closely. The business starts with what they believe to be a well defined set of requirements. Developers design and work against these requirements but as requirements change, inflexible delivery approaches lead to scope, cost and schedule blowouts. Poor technology selection which may be inappropriate for the problem being solved, or may not be well understood by the implementer can lead to performance, reliability or maintainability issues down the track. Rigid architectures that don’t consider how the business will actually use the software to meet immediate, and just as importantly, future needs lead to unnecessary expense in extending the solution.

So whether we’re building a house, or building a software solution, here's 3 principles worth a look:

1. Be adaptable during delivery: The saying goes something like “the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes” and this is no different when talking about business requirements. We’re kidding ourselves if we think the business won’t change their mind or won’t need to introduce features as they learn more about their problem domain and the right solution. Business moves so quickly now that businesses need to change their mind just to keep up. It’s no longer practical to deliver using waterfall methodologies or manage scope with an iron first for projects susceptible to significant change. Agile methodologies such as SCRUM lend themselves well to dealing with this, but we need to be great negotiators and clearly communicate the impacts of changing requirements late in the delivery cycle to stakeholders. Quite often dropping some scope to make way for the ‘must have’ new requirements is achievable when put into context for the customer.
2. Architect the necessary flex points: It’s easy to focus just on the current requirements, but the architecture usually needs to be cost effective when meeting future requirements. The other extreme almost as bad. Often we aim for ‘infinite extensibility’, trying to satisfy every possible future enhancement. This is common in SOA environments where it manifests itself in the form of massive service catalogues and the needless creation of services that have a low likelihood of reuse. The impact of such an approach is twofold - governance of so many individual services slows delivery, and the number of individual hops necessary to complete a transaction slows runtime performance. The focus should be simplicity - design the ‘necessary flex points’, build them in and forget the rest. To quote a colleague of mine “Creating good software is about keeping it simple. If its simple, it gets done quickly and can be maintained more readily”
   
3. Prove the selected technology: Selecting the right technology needs to consider more than just “will it work”. Does the market have the skills to support it? How will it impact TCO? Is it malleable enough for developers to respond quickly enough to changes in requirements? Use technologies you are familiar with and build a prototype up front to prove the executable architecture. A little investment up front can save a lot of pain later on.

Branson - Business Stripped Bare

I hadn’t read any of Richard Branson's books before but “Business Stripped Bare - Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur” was recommended to me via a lecturer in business and entrepreneurship so I figured it was worth a look. I didn’t really know much about the Virgin business other than the fact that they seem to be in everything including transport (planes, train), finance (credit cards, banking), communication (mobile phones, wireless broadband). I’ve experienced the Virgin Blue airline and I also use Virgin's Wireless Broadband at home. Both services seem good value to me despite some frustrating broadband flakeyness now that I'm living back in the burbs but the one thing that strikes me about Virgin is how strong the brand really is. As pointed out in the book, successful companies generally pick something that they do really well, make it core to their business, and focus on it. Coke focuses on drinks, Adidas on sports, Oracle on software. Virgin focuses on a consistent customer experience across all businesses – youthful, vibrant, different, and inexpensive. Like them or not, the ability to apply this brand successfully across so many markets is an achievement. This book gives you Richard’s take on people, brand, delivery, mistakes and setbacks, innovation, leadership and entrepreneurship, responsibility and success. Within each topic Richard weaves in successes and war stories from his early teenage days setting up the mail order record business, to founding the creation of ‘the elders’. Overall, it’s worth a read and by the end of it, Richard has done more of what he does best - build the Virgin brand. Here's some of my notes:

People

• Get good people, let them think for themselves - their conscience is the greatest taskmaster so don’t control them, give them more responsibility
  

Brand

• Your brand should reflect who you are and what you promise to deliver. Never pretend to be more than you are.
  
• Consistent delivery is the only way to control your brand.

Delivery

• Success one day doesn’t buy you a free lunch for life. Delivery is endless and must be capable of adapting to the needs of a rapidly changing business world.
• Focus on attention to detail and communication of everything you do to your people and your customers.
• Don’t be afraid to ask naive questions. Focus on questions from the customers perspective.
• People don’t want the best quality, they want good enough quality. If they wanted the best quality Beta would have been the mainstream, not VHS.
  

Mistakes and Setbacks

• Never do anything that means you can’t sleep at night
• Protect your reputation, but never be afraid to make mistakes.
• Always have a disaster protocol. If something goes wrong respond quickly and personally.
  

Innovation

• The best way out of a down-turning market is through adaptation and experimentation
• Luck is essential, but everyone has about the same amount of luck, not everyone is prepared to act when they are lucky
  

Leadership and Entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurship is not about working yourself into the ground, it’s about turning what excites you into capital.
• "The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all"

Social Responsibility

• It’s possible to turn a profit and make the world a better place through ‘creative capitalism’ – servicing both wealthy and poor
• Social issues will impact your business, don’t ignore them and invest in researching them.

Success

• People aren’t interested in what you are bad at and it shouldn’t interest you either.
• The definition of success is “if you’ve created something that you are proud of”.
  

Ryan Air - is it really worth it?

Sitting on a Ryanair flight from Perusia to Barcelona (although, not really Barcelona, Girona which is in fact about 1.5 hours drive from Barcelona) I was feeling pretty damn tired from the days events and I was trying to nod off without leaning on the bloke next to me. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to sit next to my wife as despite being near the front of the line, the crew had opened the front doors to the plane at the last minute. We were foolishly waiting at the back door where we'd been directed by cabin crew and as a result we were one of the last to get on when the front of the plane quickly filled.

I was listening to some music with the faint sound of the cabin crew messages filtering through when I could have sworn I heard them explaining why you couldn't smoke on a plane. Surely nobody was trying to smoke on the plane? No, they weren't - the crew were actually selling nicotine fixes to addicted ciggi smokers - smokeless cigarettes that don't contain tobacco, but do contain nicotine. Are you serious???

This got me thinking a little more about Ryanair and they way the operate. Despite some recent losses, Ryanair has been one of the worlds most profitable carriers for years and their approach is pretty simple. Very basic service (a seat, a seatbelt, hopefully a life jacket) for an extremely cheap price. The main differences with Ryanair are:

• No allocated seats - you fight for your seat when you get on or get 'priority boarding' for a fee
  
• No meals - if you want one you can buy one.
  
• No baggage allowance (you pay individually for each bag you check) and luggage limits are watched closely.
• No flexibility to change (once the ticket is sold it can't be changed)
• Fly from locations that cost them less (see previous comment on their Barcelona location)

A shed load of revenue is made as ancillary revenue (from means other than tickets sales) and this is evident all throughout the entire flight. The once customer service oriented flight attendants are now selling machines. They efficiently and pleasantly go through the take off saftey routing and then once you are securely belted in, the sales barrage begins with everything you'd expect such as food and grog being offered, to everything you wouldn't expect such as bus tickets, lottery tickets and smokeless cigarettes.

I quite like the simplicity of their model move heaps of the cheapest, simplest non-flexible product, and product users will pay extra for what the services they want. You are getting what you pay for - A to B, cheap and quick.

Not always...

To get from Sienna to Barcelona I had to:

• Get a bus from our hotel in Sienna to the Sienna train station. (4 Euro)
  
• Get a bus from the Sienna train station to Perusia train station. (14 Euro)
  
• Wait and hour for the airport shuttle which turned up with only 3 seats left - despite us being the second people in line, a lovely family who had just arrived 5 minutes before the bus got there pushed in front of us and the other 20 odd people waiting so we were forced to get a taxi or risk missing our flight (25 Euro)
• Buy some food at the airport cause we weren't going to eat for the next couple of hours (10 Euro)
• Compete in the shitfight line up for nearly 1 hour before the flight was boarding closely followed by the shitfight to get a seat next to my wife (didn't happen - see earlier comment).
  
• Buy bus tickets from Barcelona Girona airport to get us into Barcelona (1.5 hour trip - 12 Euro)
  

So really this trip from Sienna to Barcelona cost us: Flights ~ $40 Euro, Transportation / food etc other than flight ~ $70 Euro - Total $110 Euro.

Not that bad really, but here's the clincher for me. Our day started at 8 am and finished at 9:30pm - an entire day for what really should have been a pretty short travel experience.

On our overall trip we had a couple of these days which resulted in ultra early checkouts for 7am flights from whoop whoop, our earliest checkout being 3am to make a 7 am flight.

In the end, I can't complain as this is part of planning and once again, getting what you pay for but given this experience (and limited other travel experience) I see there being 3 types of carriers:

• Tier 1: Big boyz - E.g Qantas, British Airways - expensive but you get a meal, as many drinks as you can consume, movies etc etc... but it costs you
• Tier 2: Low cost carriers - E.g. Virgin Blue, Jetstar (not sure of the european equiv) where you get the basics included such as baggage, allocated seats etc at a reasonable cost. If you want to watch a movie, get some food you can do so, just pay for it, also at a reasonable cost.
  
• Tier 3: Thrifties - E.g Ryanair - do the hard yards to get to where they fly from, run the gauntlet to the plane and you'll get a seat, next to your friends if you're lucky. On the flight you can buy pretty much anything you can think of.

Not wanting to be biased to the Aussie low cost airlines, but given my experiences to date, the Tier 2 wins for me with the biggest advantages being flying from major airports, allocated seats, a customer centric service, all at a reasonable price.

Overseas travel - 2009

So I know you're supposed to do these things whilst you are travelling but I struggled to find the time and with barely a single day under 35 degrees it was far too hot to sit on a computer typing all day. So here is a snippet of our first overseas trip for a while (and probably the last for a while)... retrospectively...

All photos following were taken during the trip.

The Itinerary

Me, Cheree, 3 weeks, 3 countries, hot weather, no phone, no work, good vibes (hopefully).

The Flight

Melbourne to Barcelona, a leisurely 27 hours in transit flying first to Singapore, Milan and the finally Barcelona. I've never found long haul flights to be that great an experience. The first couple of hours tend to deceive you into thinking it's fun but I figure that's actually more about the fact that once you finally take your seat and are taxiing down the runway, there's absolutely no way that you can do anything about the work that you've just left behind. After the first movie, and first dodgy meal it all becomes pretty uncomfortable so to keep it brief and in case Steve Curry reads this ala ´The Castle´ the first movie was 'push', second movie 'taken', both were average. Reading Richard Branson's Business Stripped Bare helped although the several stories relating to poor quality airlines that skimp on maintenance were a little ill timed.

Barcelona

Having visited only a handful of other European cities including Rome, Sienna, Florence, Amsterdam and some of Turkey, I don't have heaps to compare Barcelona to, but it is a city I feel that I could spend plenty of time in. The lifestyle is the first thing that you notice, late mornings, afternoon siestas, and very late dining which takes some getting used to, especially with a Melbourne body clock. I can't help but feel this is a city that rates stress fairly low, and focuses on good times with good friends - perhaps we can learn something here!

Unfortunately Spain has been hit pretty hard by the GFC and unemployment is currently up around 18%.



Some places worthy of a mention:

• Chic Basic and Born: Our hotel which has some pretty weird but stylish rooms - completely white with colored lights that continuously change. Free internet, very helpful staff, in the Born district which is very cruisey - highly recommended.
  
• Re-Pla: We had tapas here for lunch on the day we arrived, awesome bravas and calamares (calamari)
• La Pizza Del Born: killer deep pan pizzas - we went there twice!
• Esglesia de Santa Maria del Pi: a beautiful Gothic church just a short walk from our hotel
• La Sagrada Familia by Antonio Gaudi: quite eccentric architecture for a church which started construction in the early 1900's and won't be finished until around 2030. We also went to Guell park which has several Gaudi architectural pieces, maybe it was the heat or the fact that my foccacia lunch fell out of its bag onto the footpath as we arrived (no ten second rule here kids) but the park didn't have such an impact to us...

• UBJK, Pedro Collares: Some great muso's playing jazz on the Hang Drum and Soprano Sax - bought a cd, good stuff
  

Granada

Granada was our second destination for 2 nights, a magic place in the south east of Spain. Everything appeared to operate just a little bit more slowly than in Barcelona, and just as well as it stayed well above 35 the 2 days we were there. Highlights:

• Churros: for breakfast everyday at a little place in Plaza bib Rambla - can't remember the name of it but they made excellent Churros (I do think they are hard to get wrong) and one of the strongest coffee's I've ever had.
• The Alhambra: originally a fortress from the 9th century the Alhambra evolved into a palace during the 13th and 14th centuries. Over time it's undergone many changes including having it's mosque replaced with a church after the Christian conquest, being abandoned to thieves and beggars during the 18th century, and now it's a world heritage site.

• Casa del Capital Nazari: An old reinnassance palace built in 1503 which was abandoned and occupied by squatters for some time before being restored into the hotel it is today. Great location below the Alhambra with ultra helpful and friendly staff.

• The Albayzin: Granada's old Muslim quarter which sits opposite the Alhambra is a neighborhood maze of cobblestone streets that twist and turn in, out and back on themselves.
  

Cordoba

After a short bus trip ~ 2 hours we arrived in Cordoba which was at one time the biggest city in Europe which is quite hard to believe when you are there because it actually looks pretty small. Highlights:

• The Mezquita: A piece of Islamic architecture that is a mosque with huge 16th century cathedral plonked right in the center. It was founded in 785 and underwent significant expansion in the 9th and 10th centuries. This place is surreal and has to be seen.

• Hotel Mezquita: Good hotel with friendly staff right next door to the Mezquita

• La Tranquera: It's only been open a couple of months but this place will stick around. The owner is an Argentinian that has recently moved to cordoba and the menu is a fusion of Argentinian and local flavours. The empanadas here were the best meal of our trip!

• Ceramica Elhumo: We spent a small fortune on the ceramics put together by artists Jesus Rey and even made a special trip back to Cordoba from Seville on our way to Madrid after we procrastinated for too long before we originally left. We managed to get several boxes of this stuff back to Melbourne in 1 piece after a quick check by security that one of our ceramics wasn't a gun. If we were closer to the end of the trip I think we would have bought more of this stuff.

Seville

A couple more hours in the bus got us to Seville, a city with roughly the combined population of Granada and Cordoba. Due to the heat and a debacle buying our train tickets through to Madrid we didn't really get time to do Seville justice although we did manage to check out the real Alcazar, the cathedral, and have a general wander around the city. We also had one of the most informative discussions with a guy working in a smoothy bar just around the corner from the cathedral. We never did get his name, but it was a great overview of why Spain and in particular Seville was how it is today. My favourite quotes from him once he found out we didn't want to go to a bull fight was 'good, bull fighting is just for old people and fascists'.




Madrid

Our last stop in Spain was an overnight stay in Madrid. We didn't plan on doing much here, we were actually talking about just having a night in but after a quick chat to Luca (one of the most friendly and helpful people we met on our trip) at our Room Mate hotel (one of the best places we stayed at), we did a few hours walking around the city and finished with a great meal at the Sushi Club. With the benefit of hindsight, we should have spent a few nights in Madrid.




Malta

Malta is a truly intriguing place with one foot deeply entrenched in a fascinating culture and history heavily influenced by epic wars and religion, and the other foot riding a wave of rapid tourism growth which appears to be consuming it. It seems that this tension is only a problem for some people - a walk along the waterfront from St. Julian's back to Sliema is the best example of this contrast as a parade of kids (16 is the legal drinking age in Malta) not wearing a whole lot make their way towards Paceville, with the old Maltese gentlemen and ladies just sit, watch, and chuckle to themselves late into the evening. They really don't seem to mind although our cabbi on the way out of Malta certainly was concerned that the 'old Malta' was starting to disappear.

Some amazing facts on Malta (thanks mainly to lonely planet):

• It is suggested that Malta was once linked by a land bridge to Sicily and southern europe, with it's earliest inhabitants said to be around 5200 BC
  
• Malta has the oldest known surviving freestanding structures in the world - megalithic temples about 1000 years older than the pyramids.
• The Nights of St. John, warrior monks made up of European noblemen arrived to Malta in the early 1500's and battled to victory during The Great Siege of 1565 against ridiculous odds (Maltese forces comprised 700 Knights and about 8000 irregulars and mercenaries vs approximately 30,000 Turkish troops).
• After the Siege, Napolean invaded and took over, promptly abolishing Maltese aristocracy, defacing the coats of arms, desecrating churches and closing monasteries. He left with a ship full of Maltese treasures (which was later sinking to the bottom of the ocean when the British destroyed the French fleet) and around 4000 French troops stayed in Malta only to be defeated by a spontaneous uprising of the Maltese people. With some help from the British, Malta was out of French hands by 1802 and back under the Order of St. John.
• During WWII, Malta was a strategic holding point for managing supply lines through the Mediterranean. As a result, in 1942, Malta was subject to with approximately 154 days of continuous bombing 6700 tonnes of bombs being dropped on the Grand Harbor in a single month. The entire population nearly starved but persisted and was awarded the George Cross - Britain's highest award for civilian bravery.
  

We stayed in Malta for 3 nights, it easily could have been a week. Some highlights:

• Valletta: Malta's capital - we spent a day just wandering around and eating pastizzi's (I haden't had one since I was about 10 years old when my Nanu (grandfather) would make them, these things are amazing!). This first photo was from our balcony at our hotel - nice!

• Mdina: The 'silent city' - very few cars and it really is quiet...
  
• The Kitchen: we had an excellent meal here, one of the best of our trip
  
• The Palace: a 5 star hotel that we splurged on for 3 nights which has a brilliant rooftop pool with 360 degree views of Malta. The hotel was unfortunately let down by unresponsive staff. Our air conditioner was broken and only worked in two modes - off, and hurricane. After asking for something to be done every day we were there and not sleeping for two nights as we were either too hot with the air con off, or getting blown away with it on we were offerred a room fan on the final night).

Pisa

Pisa was another of our overnight stops on our way to Florence. We didn’t do much other than check out the leaning tower. We also resisted the temptation to join the thousand odd other people taking cheesy photos pretending to hold up the tower. We stayed at a great hotel - nh Cavalieri right next to the train station - highly recommended.




Florence

We were initially pleasantly surprised with a very cheap train trip from Pisa for about 2 hours to Florence. After paying about 60 euro per ticket to get a train from Cordoba to Madrid in Spain, at about 5 euros a ticket, this was a bargain… Ahhh, no air-con, nowhere to put your bags, quite a smelly and sweaty experience...

Florence has some great art and architecture and was a nice place to start winding down our trip. We stayed at Hotel Universo which was pretty good.

We bought a few pieces of artwork from a great artist Vitorria Scaffidi as gifts and contemplated a bigger piece that she was working on when we were there. Eventually our procrastination meant we missed out on getting it...



Sienna

One of my personal favorites having been here before, Sienna is a quaint little gothic inspired city with a maze of streets that you can get lost in all day which is pretty much what we did. Unfortunately we didn't manage to find any inspirational food here (figure that one out) but I recommend not eating in the Piazza del Campo. As you'd expect this area is just rigged up for tourists and as such, service and food quality is sketchy at best.

Make sure you get a gelati, no one place to recommend, it's like Starbucks before they busted, one on every corner.



So that was 3 weeks away, and the 35 odd hours in transit on the way back has meant that our body clocks are completely out of whack now. Reflecting on the trip I think Cheree and I both agree:

• We'd both go back to Spain in a heartbeat - friendly, beautiful people, and a great entertaining lifestyle. Whilst language wasn't really a problem, a few lessons wouldn't hurt when going to a restaurants - a basic food cheat sheet would do.
  
• We should have spent more time in Malta to really get into the food and history, 4 days was not enough.
  
• Whilst cheap - I don't think Ryan Air is worth the hassle - see an upcoming post on this one...

If anyone want's any further info feel free to email or tweet at me...

Cheers,
Rod

Karnivool - Sound Awake? Sure does....

I saw these guys at the Queensbridge Hotel in Melbourne about 18 months ago. The only other time I'd been to QBH was about 12 years ago when it was a seedy nightclub. Let's just say it was welcome change to see 'the vool' take to their craft live on the QBH stage rather than the bundy and coke, disco bikki infused patrons that were there all those years ago. Karnivool were brilliant that night and at the time, their magnum opus Themata was burning a hole in my brain and was firmly in my top ten albums (you may recognise the name of this blog site). I've been eagerly awaiting the release of Sound Awake for far too long.

4 weeks in and I won't lie, it took me a few listens to get into it. Sitting at well over an hour long, it's well produced and is a definite progression from Themata. There are several layers of additional complexity in this album with the band opting for less traditional song structures and instead applying a more organic approach to transitions between angsty heavy grooves and more subtle passages.

I haven't studied the lyrics on this album in any detail, I've always found the soundscape created by Karnivool to be the real attraction to their music and as you'd expect, there are some stellar moments on this album - from the delicately unsettling introduction of 'Umbra' to the simply beautiful last minute of 'All I know' which you can't help but stop whatever you are doing to listen to it fade out. 'New Day' is a song that you connect with the first time you hear it and will etch itself in your head for the day, especially the simple but emotive vocal harmonies in its verse. 'The Caudal Lure' twists inside out and back on itself, demonstrating once again the more complex song structures and 'deadman', at just over 12 minutes is epic.

Overall, this is a more consistent album than Themata, but it was always going to be difficult to match such a brilliant debut for impact. Maybe Themata just came along at a time when I was desperately looking for something new but Themata is littered with moments of sheer melodic intensity - the crescendo of cote aching to 'sing alone, sing aloud to feel alive', the tension build up which is then unleashed in the chorus of 'Roquefort', and the brutal mayhem of 'Scarabs' will keep Themata as one of my favorites for many years. On a scale of 1 to 10, Themata runs runs at 8 most of the time, but moments like these push it to 11. Sounds Awake, sits closer to 9 the entire album long, nudging 10 every now an again.

Don't get me wrong, Sound Awake is another brilliantly crafted work and is pretty much on constant repeat at the moment - it's the sort of progression we'd expect from these guys. I'm just disappointed I missed the opportunity to see these guys live when they toured here at the forum last week!

In the beginning...

Ok, so this is the first blog. The start of something beautiful, grand, random, and quite probably useless.

The plan for this blog is subject to change but given my interests, it's going to focus on a fairly eclectic mix of music, sport, technology, and general thinking. Some potential topics floating around in my head include:

• An album review of Karnivool's new album 'Sound Awake'
• Some opinions on why The Dillinger Escape Plan continue to produce some of the most intense moments in music
• Commentary on the Brisbane Lions and why Jonathan Brown is so courageous he'd run with the flight of the ball into a pack even if that pack included Chuck Norris trying to scissor kick him in the head. He'd probably still take the mark too.
  
• A look at reliable software delivery - I work in IT and need to put a preso together on this soon so I should have an opinion on it!

When it comes down to it, I'm not sure of the distinct purpose behind this blog. Surely it can only really do more harm than good? Perhaps that will depend more on my mental state when putting the blog together. There's many reasons I imagine that people blog, and I don't profess to know much about it but potential reasons are:

1. Fame: the blogger has an opinion on everything and believes their opinion is the right one. Everyone else should agree
2. Communication: with friends, family and communities. In many circumstances this ends up as a bit of a journal. I've tried this several times via various spreadsheets, software, notebooks etc... The best of done is about 1 month before I read back what I've written and think I'm such a tool, I have to stop...
   
3. Building a brand: many businesses out there, including key people in the organisation I work with believe that blogging is an essential part of building your brand. After all, an organisations biggest asset is it's people, their talents and their opinions. The challenge seems to be managing the balance between empowering employees with the freedom to say what they want without worrying about the implications of a 'shoot from the hip' communication attached to the company brand.

In my case, the purpose isn't really defined yet, but from this hopefully I'll get a little bit of everything and the more I do it, the more the purpose will become apparent. Hopefully along the way, somebody will stumble across this and take something from it... even if it's just that they won't bother reading from this blog again...