When I think of safaris (and whenever I hear about them for that matter), they involve expensive safari lodges or fancy safari tents and small jeep tours into the African wilderness.  Since I can rarely justify spending so much on a single vacation, the concept has never held that much appeal.  The idea of visiting Africa and seeing the animals in the wild is certainly attractive, but it would mean spending a bundle to book a safari package, right?  After all, you need a place to stay and eat out in the African wilderness.  And you can’t just go driving around looking for elephants, right?  You need a jeep with a safari guide to take you to the right places and drive you out over the untamed African wilds!

I had no idea how wrong I was.

We headed off to our first safari  in South Africa back in April, invited along by some friends in Oslo who’ve traveled to the area before.  Although we split the cost of the trip four ways, doing a similar trip for just the two of us would have cost under $600 for a 3-day safari (including food, car, accommodations, park fees, etc, but excluding airfare to South Africa of course)!

Thanks to the infrastructure at Kruger National Park, there actually are budget safari options that mesh with our independent travel style.  Park visitors can simply drive around the park in their own cars between sunrise and sunset, and there are a number of rest camps inside the park providing food and accommodations.  There’s no need for a swanky lodge; no need for a jeep and a safari guide; no need to spend a small fortune!

We flew into Johannesburg, where we rented a car at the airport and then spent the night in a guesthouse nearby (since our flight arrived quite late in the evening). The next day we set out driving east toward Kruger.  Our first destination was the Blyde River Canyon in Mpumalanga province.  We had originally planned to drive part of the scenic Panorama Route, but we arrived late in the day, and after a late lunch of pancakes in Graskop, we didn’t have much time to enjoy the views before it got dark.  We did make it to God’s Window, and Lucas convinced the guard to let us in for a quick look at the Bourke’s Luck Potholes, even though it was past the park’s closing time.

Both places were well worth visiting, and I think it would have been a good place to spend a night or two en route to/from Kruger.  Our GPS directions took us back through the area when we left the park (giving us a second chance to stop for pancakes in Graskop), and we were all struck by the scenery along the drive (the weather was much clearer on the return trip).

Since Kruger’s park admission is a little expensive (around $20/person per day) and the best game viewing is in the early morning and late afternoon, most people recommend spending a night on the edge of the park so that you can enter the gates when they open (around 6:00 am depending on the season).  We stayed in a cottage at the very pleasant Komati River Chalets, where we had a kitchen and a braai (barbecue) to self-cater our dinner and breakfast.  We weren’t sure what kind of groceries we would be able to get inside the park, so we visited the local supermarket the night before to stock our cooler with meat for grilling and materials for sandwich lunches.

Our original plan had been to enter the park through the Crocodile River Gate, but the gate was closed due to flooding, forcing us to drive 45 km back to the Malelane Gate.  We left early and got to the park just before the 6:00 opening.

I honestly didn’t know what to expect driving a little Volkswagen Polo around a safari park in South Africa.  How would we know where the best spots were to look for wildlife?  How much would we really be able to see from the car?  Would the car even make it over the park roads?

It turns out that we saw an amazing amount of wildlife, even from the car’s low vantage point.  A lot of animals were right alongside (or in) the road.  As for the roads themselves, even the dirt roads were very well maintained, so driving was quite easy even in the little Polo.  Although you are more likely to see certain types of animals in different areas of the park, based on their climate and landscape, figuring out where to look isn’t all that difficult.  The easiest method is simply to look for a big crowd of vehicles stopped along the road and ask someone what they’re all looking at!  Even with no one else around, a lot of the wildlife isn’t that hard to spot.

We had read and heard quite a lot about the park’s Find It guide that allegedly contains great information for where to spot the different wildlife, but we never actually saw a copy of it at any of the park’s shops.  Instead, I picked up a copy of Andy & Lorrain Tinker’s Kruger Park Guide & Map (The Tinkers are responsible for most of the photos seen on the  park’s postcards).  Along with maps, a brief wildlife guide, and a spotting checklist, the booklet contained a list of the Tinkers’ favorite drives for wildlife spotting and photography.  It gave us some great ideas for some of the best routes to travel between camps, and we got a lot of use out of it over the next few days.

During our three-day stay, we got to see all of “The Big 5” (lions, elephants, buffalo, leopard, rhinoceros) along with plenty of zebras, giraffes, antelope, etc.  Unbelievably, we were even lucky enough to see a pack of wild dogs and a pride of lions with a large kill.

A lot of people have asked if we were worried about being so close to such large predators in our little rental car, but the park has strict rules about staying inside the car except in specific designated areas.  For the most part, the animals are completely indifferent to the vehicles and don’t really pay them any mind.  Of course, a bit of common sense is called for, but as long as you follow the rules, the risks are relatively minimal (to both you and the wildlife).

Since one of the rules is that overnight visitors must be inside the rest camps from sunset to sunrise, the larger rest camps offer sunrise, sunset, and night drives to allow wildlife viewing outside the daylight hours.  We opted for a sunrise drive, which began before dawn, and while we didn’t see much in the dark (even with the spotting lights), the sunrise itself was beautiful.  In retrospect, I might have opted for the sunset drive, since we seemed to find some of the most exciting wildlife in the half hour before the gate closing!

We spent our two nights in the park at Satara Rest Camp, where we opted to tent camp.  On our first night, the camp was fully booked (because of the South African school holiday), but we had reserved a campsite early in our planning.  Arriving just a few minutes before gate closing, we had a bit of trouble finding a campsite, since the spots aren’t really marked, and there is no way to reserve a specific location.  For dinner, we used one of the campground’s braais to grill the meat we had packed.  Satara had a small grocery section in the store, which would have been good to know in advance, since there was no refrigerator.  Instead, we had to keep all of our meat and perishables in our cooler (in the air-conditioned car during the day), and each night we bought a new bag of ice.  Our campsite was right across the road from one of the camp’s “kitchens” which was equipped with sinks and a small electric stove top.  Mostly the kitchen served as a communal charging station, and the many outlets were all filled with digital camera chargers and laptops.  The campground was also equipped with a bath house, so we had running water, showers, etc.

Had we chosen not to pack our tents, the rest camp also contained a number of cabins of varying levels of amenities.  We did opt to eat in the restaurant once, and I was quite surprised by the quality of the food.  It was a little expensive, but the menu had a good variety and some very tasty dishes.

For safety and peace of mind, the entire rest camp is surrounded by a high electric fence.  This was understandably comforting when I woke for our sunrise drive to a lion roaring outside the camp!

Overall we had a great time, and based on our sunrise drive, I think we had a lot more fun going it alone than we would have had being shuttled around on a safari truck all day.

The rest of our photos from Kruger are posted here.  (For reference, all of them were taken with a basic 3x zoom point-and-shoot Canon Powershot.  It would have been nice to have a fancy telephoto lens, but so many of the animals were close enough that it wasn’t a necessity.)

I’ve been a sappy sentimental tourist in Europe before, and I vaguely (but fondly) remember the first time I heard someone playing La Vie en Rose along the Champs. I remember wondering where all the anti-accordion sentiments I’ve heard over the years came from.  While it may not be the most beautiful of instruments, surely it deserves this reputation less than other more irritating instruments (I’m looking at you, piccolo).  On the contrary, the accordion provides ambiance and atmosphere.

I got to thinking that maybe it was simply a problem with over-exposure.  If you have to listen to accordion music all the time, whenever you’re out and about in a European city, then perhaps you do just get sick of it.  Vigelands Park has its fair share of accordion players, especially in the summer, and so I’ve had a chance to put this theory to the test over the past few years.  Every day that it’s sunny, we load up the grill bag and head to the park.  More often than not, there is an accordion player hanging around busking for spare kroner.  I find that I don’t mind this.  Quite the opposite, I continue to enjoy the ambiance and the music lends a hint of the old-fashioned to our modern lifestyle, reminding me of old Audrey Hepburn movies where Europe was a far-away land of fantasy,  rather than an everyday reality.

However…

This year all of my accordion tolerance has finally been drained.  As I said, the instrument itself is not to blame.  Rather, I have finally been exposed to shameful accordion misuse.  Our entrance to the park has fallen victim to the worst accordion player I have ever heard!  I cringe whenever I walk past, and I even have fleeting fantasies of kicking over his little container of donations (no huge tragedy, since he appears to earn no more than one or two kroner per hour) to force him to stop playing for a little while.  I’ve also considered paying him a few hundred kroner to go away, but I fear this might just encourage him to come back.

Imagine the accordion equivalent of the worst American Idol audition, and play it on a continuous loop.  That should give you the basic idea of what this is like.  He “knows” only three songs:  Für Elise, The Godfather theme, and the Chicken Dance.  And none of these he plays at all correctly or particularly well.  He knows a few bars of each and repeats them endlessly until awkwardly transitioning into the next one.  On one occasion, he played his adaptation of the Chicken Dance non-stop for at least ten minutes straight.  The Chicken Dance is far from my favorite tune under the best circumstances, but after ten minutes of an out-of-tune accordion rendition I was about to pull my hair out.  Since this guy plays right across the street from our apartment, he is almost impossible to avoid.

To remedy this kind of problem and to preserve the good name of the instrument, I think someone needs to introduce an “Accordion License.” You can only play in public if you have undergone extensive training and passed a rigorous exam in order to prove that your accordion playing will not harm the general populace.

Now that we have finished our prototypes, the time has come to begin the final product, the Level 2 Menger Sponge.  Looking at the completed Level 1 Menger Sponge, we tried to visualize just how large the Level 2 model would be.  The task seemed daunting.

So, to get an idea of how long it would take us to finish this new version, we began some high-level project estimating.  Of course, the first reaction was to consider the Level 2 Menger Sponge to simply be 20 times that of the Level 1, since it would take 20 Level 1 cubes to build a Level 2.  However, wherever two cubes are joined together, the connecting faces would be inside the model and should therefore be eliminated.  Thus, 20 months (20 cubes x 1 month/cube) was probably a significant overestimate.

Instead, we decided to look at the work in terms of faces of the Level 1 cube.  Although this wouldn’t be exact, it should hopefully be much more accurate than estimating by cube.

Defining a story point as a Level 1 cube face, we could say that our initial velocity was 6 story points per month.  Splitting the Level 2 cube into three layers, the top and bottom layer are essentially the same.  Each is composed of 8 faces on the surface, 12 around the outside, and 4 faces forming the inside edges of the hole.  That makes 24 faces for each of the top and bottom layers.  The middle layer forms four pillars that connect the top and bottom, and each pillar has four faces.  Thus there are 16 pillars in the middle layer.  So the total number of Level 1 faces is roughly 64.

Given our past velocity of 6 faces/month, we should expect to finish the Level 2 Menger Sponge in around 11 months.  Of course, like all engineering projects, there is a cone of uncertainty, so vacations and business trips will skew this estimate.  Also, we have started to write fewer and fewer Post-It tasks lately, so there is also a risk of resource limitations.

After about a week and a half of work, we’ve completed roughly two faces worth of modules.  That means that we’re pretty much on schedule.

Now if only software was this easy to estimate.  Unfortunately, programming rarely involves doing exactly the same thing in exactly the same way (despite what books on software estimation seem to imply)!

Related posts:
Scrum Task Origami
Scrum Task Origami – Part 2: Changing Priorities
Scrum Task Origami – Part 3: Iterative Development

Every time I go back, I experience little moments of reverse culture shock, and this trip was no different.  Since it was my first typical work experience, there were lots of small experiences that felt oddly unusual to me now.  Driving to work instead of taking public transit, going out for lunch instead of eating in the company canteen, etc.

The biggest shock, though, was the surprising lack of environmental awareness!  I remember when my friend Scott did a semester abroad in Sweden during university, and when he came back he was uncomfortable with all the disposable silverware and takeaway packaging that our dormitory dining halls went through.  I now completely understand how he felt!

In general, Scandinavia has a long tradition of environmentalism.  (Here in Norway, with such beautiful natural scenery, it makes sense that the general reaction is to try to protect it!)  Recently our office has gone a step farther to try to obtain an official environmental certification.  Beyond turning off the lights when we don’t need them and recycling just about all of our trash (including food, which goes into some kind of organic waste program), there are policies on how soon your computer should go into low-powered standby mode, etc.  We’re even advised to power off our monitors instead of just letting them programmatically power down, since they’re still using electricity to light the little orange standby LED!

Outside the office, almost all soda bottles/cans carry a deposit and are returned to the collection points at the supermarkets.  Most of the rest of our trash is recycled, and the city has plans to implement a new program to provide more extensive plastic recycling and some kind of city-wide composting or organic waste disposal.

So frankly I was a bit shocked to arrive at our office in Texas and find that not only do most people use disposable cups for their daily tea/coffee, but the cups provided are styrofoam!  I haven’t seen styrofoam in years, and here were towering stacks of Texas-sized 24-oz styrofoam cups next to every coffee machine or water cooler.  And of course they all went into the trash, where they will inevitably find their way to a landfill with no hope of decomposition.

This made me start to notice other things as well.  People would ride the elevator for a single floor instead of taking the stairs.  Some of the offices had overhead lights that never turned off (they didn’t even know where the switch was).  The air conditioning of course was turned down to “Finnmarken.”

And it wasn’t just the office.  I just noticed it there more, since I spent most of my day there.  For example, I also went to a restaurant that served very decent food entirely on disposable dishes.

The amount of wasted materials and energy made me physically uncomfortable.  I was very glad to get back to this land of public transit and recycling centers every few blocks.

But first, since I have a large American audience that has the misfortune to not watch Eurovision, I’d like to share the actual 2010 winner, a pretty decent* song by Lena from Germany:

She definitely has a Lily Allen vibe about her. Her voice? Her dress?

But she wasn’t the only sound-alike performance this year. Belgium’s Tom Dice was definitely channeling some John Mayer.

And now, the WTF Winners!

I had a tough time deciding on my WTF champions this year, because most of the acts were all very much in the middle of the pack.  The truly bad performances were just people who couldn’t sing without auto-tuning, so instead of making you raise a confused eyebrow, they just made you groan.  There were a lot of acts this year that were clearly going for the goofball vote, and in this category, I’d like to offer an honorable mention to both Estonia and Lithuania (watch it to the end for their brilliant, shiny finale).  They each had us laughing for days, and we were all sad that they didn’t make it to the final.  Surprisingly, both of my WTF choices this year actually made it through the semi-final round!

2010 Eurovision WTF Runner-Up:
Moldova – “Run Away” by SunStroke Project and Olia Tira

(If the video gets pulled, search YouTube for Eurovision Moldova 2010.)

I actually really like Moldova’s performance, and it can really get stuck in your head.  The bizarre wardrobe and crazy makeup are certainly a little left-field, but it’s the fabulously obscene saxophone player that makes them the runners-up in the WTF category.  (We’ve all been joking about the sax player for days, and his solos have since been looped into a single video, introducing the concept of “saxrolling” in the same vein as Rickrolling.)

2010 Eurovision WTF Winner:
Serbia – “Ovo je Balkan” by Milan Stanković

The hair!  The song!  The backup dancing!  The androgyny!  W.T.F.?

Serbia actually came in 13th!  Out of 39 entries, that’s pretty good!  This just goes to show that people clearly have different tastes, because this is one act that I just did not get.  At all!  I could never quite tell how much of it was farce and how much was semi-serious.  I found the crazy robot-dancing bridesmaid strippers on turntables extremely distracting.  I do find it amusing, but not in the way that I would vote for it.

And that’s what I love about Eurovision!   There’s really no standard formula for success, because you just never know what people will vote for!

Unfortunately for us, we tend to avoid the roaming data charges that a lot of said travel-related iPhone apps depend on, and I don’t have the 3G option on my iPad anyway (we were concerned about how easy it would be to get a data plan for an early-adopted foreign-purchased device).  Also, a lot of interesting travel apps are US-centric, so when I read about exciting new iPhone apps on my favorite travel blogs, I’m always disappointed to find that they have no international coverage.

Up to now, my travel app repertoire has been mostly limited to iPhone apps in disguise (if you can call stretching the app to double screen resolution a disguise).  I have Skype to call home for free, Angry Birds and Word Warp to keep me busy at the airport, and Google Maps on the massive iPad screen to help me find my way across Houston to Lan & Debu’s.  I also have a few handy translation and unit conversion utilities.  The one glaringly obvious iPad travel advantage is of course its e-reader dual-identity.  I’ve already overdosed on iBooks classics and free Kindle book downloads!

Lucas and I briefly toyed with the idea of travel guides on the iPhone, since paper guides tend to be heavy and awkward, but the small screen made them prohibitively hard to use.  Thus I sense an iPad-shaped opening in the travel app market, but so far no one has stepped up to fill it.  I plan to buy a few Lonely Planet PDF chapters for our visit to Tallinn, Estonia next week, so we’ll see how that goes.  It would be fantastic if Lonely Planet also started publishing them in the EPUB format, since I like the iBooks app much better than our PDF  reader.

However, other than the utilizing the e-reader functionality with existing digital guidebook support, I have yet to find much that’s truly useful for travel.  Despite having read plenty of articles and blog posts with titles like “5 Great Travel Apps for the iPad” and “7 Wonders of the Travel App World” and “Three Ways to Use Your iPad on the Road,” I continue to come up empty-handed.  Most of the apps seem to be useful only in online mode or only in the US.  Most of them require both.

So a few days ago I was trying to catch up on my favorite travel blogs, and I came across a post about an upgrade to an older iPhone/iPad app.  Technically, this one falls into the “Only in the US” category, but I’ll forgive it that caveat because it fills a personal niche (and maybe some day it will expand to cover some international territory).

The Point Inside app, which previously served as a portable map inside the nation’s shopping malls has been expanded to cover airports!  This could be hugely useful!  When I’ve just gotten off of (or am just about to board) a long-haul flight, the last thing I want to be doing is trekking all over an airport looking for a place to sit down with a beer or a cup of coffee.  Problem solved!

I don’t really fault the app too much for not having international airports, because honestly I find this much less of a problem in the big European hubs.  Schilpol, Frankfurt, Heathrow, etc. are all dripping with full-service cafes and restaurants in dozens of cuisines and price ranges.  However, on my last jaunt through O’Hare, I explored three entire concourses, visiting every single dining option on the terminal map, before finally finding a Chili’s that actually employed wait staff rather than just counter jockeys.  I would like to believe that this little app would have saved me at least a half hour of searching.

Also, as much as I hate to admit it, the mall-mapping portion of the app is also slightly appealing.  One thing we do without fail when we’re in the US is shop, and my first trip to the Galleria meant studying the mall directory in detail, trying to figure out the best route to get to the Apple Store while minimizing the shock of American consumerism.  Inevitably, I will have more shopping to do next time I’m stateside, so I’m sure I will be able to find more uses for this.

When tickets went on sale, the Final sold out in a heartbeat, but we had a chance to take our time and get a small group together for one of the Semi-Finals.  Since May is a peak travel time in Norway, we only ended up with a few people, but we were able to get fantastic seats!  We splurged on the highest priced tickets, but we ended up with four seats in the front row of the second floor section:

I love watching Eurovision at home with a group of friends, laughing at the bad acts, admiring the good acts, and cracking MST3K-style jokes through the entire production.  But I have to say that actually being there is a completely different experience!

There’s so much national pride, and everyone is brimming with enthusiasm.  I imagine that the Olympics would have a similar vibe, but Eurovision is free from the emotionally-loaded “I’ve been working for this moment my whole life” kind of feeling.  It’s just pure, unadulterated fun and silliness.  Some of the audience costumes are even more bizarre than the outfits on stage, and everyone is clearly out to have a good time.

It’s also a vexillophile’s dream!  I love flags, and there were some fantastically obscure flags at our semi-final.  When I learned all of the nations’ flags for the Bar Blu pub quiz, it was partly for moments like this one.  After all, how many other times does being able to recognize the flag of Azerbaijan come in handy?

I was very disappointed to have to attend Eurovision without a flag (we toyed with the idea of bringing an Indian flag for Lucas and Paavani).  However, Paavani totally came through for me!  Before the show, she ran up to someone with a badge and a couple of Turkish flags and scored one for us!  At the arena entrance, representatives for Georgia had been handing out flyers with a picture of their hot female singer, trying to convince us to vote for them, but Turkey definitely bought one of our votes with the flag!

Our seats were pretty good, and we could definitely see the stage, but even the show is a little different when it’s live.  The acts are clearly designed for a television audience, and there are often little extra things going on at the sides or in the back that the TV viewers aren’t meant to see.  Costume changes, prop mechanics, etc.  Even some of the choreography doesn’t make much sense unless it’s viewed from the right camera angle.  So while we could see the stage and the performers, the visual appeal of the acts was much different than when I watched the broadcast later.

One other huge difference is in the appeal of the music itself.  At home, Belgium’s talented singer-guitarist was one of our favorites during Semi-Final #1, but in a crowded party atmosphere, the slow songs don’t go over as well.  Everyone reacts so much better to the crazy antics and energy of Lithuania’s silver-shorted goofballs than to Israel’s soulful ballad.  Sadly that means a lot of disappointment when the finalists are announced, since the votes of the home audience vastly outweigh the few thousand performance attendees.  We did feel bad for Lithuania, since their performers spent the rest of the show streaking through the audience in their sparkly silver shorts, waving the Lithuanian flag.

Overall, the entire evening was just so much fun!  The energy level, the fans, the whole experience!  This is one of my personal definitive European experiences, and I’m so glad we were able to go!

Last weekend we had particularly nice weather and a three-day weekend, so the park was popular and crowded.  In the span of those few days, I saw the largest variety of park sports I’ve ever witnessed:

Kubb, Frisbee, Football (Soccer), American Football, Badminton, Croquet, Cheerleading, Cycling, Skateboarding, Slacklining, Capoeira, and Sumo Wrestling

Yes, sumo wrestling!  We’re pretty sure that was a bachelor party, but they were definitely sumo wrestling!  Right down to the pre-match intimidating ground stomp!  It was very funny!

Every night, I found myself planning to go to bed around 10:30, but even after changing into my pajamas and nestling into bed, I didn’t feel sleepy.  Of course this meant that I ended up staying up until a ridiculous hour reading or surfing the web (thank you, shiny new iPad!).  And after sleeping in the next day, it would be easy to stay up late again, creating a vicious circle.

With all that extra time at night, I had plenty of opportunities to analyze what was going on.  I started to realize that it wasn’t so much that I was still stuck on Houston time, but the long hours of daylight were affecting me more than they usually do.  When I left for Houston, sunset was just after 9 pm, and it was getting dark by 10:00 pm.  It was the beginning of spring, and we were starting to appreciate the long days, without having especially long, bright evenings.  However, since I was gone for quite a while, by the time I got back the days were nearly an hour longer, and sunset was pushing 10 pm (with dusk lasting until nearly 11 pm).  The sudden shift had pushed the end of the day right up to my ideal bedtime, and that combined with a little bit of jet lag managed to completely skew my internal clock.

I’ve often told people that I don’t have problems with jet lag, and when people ask if it’s hard to sleep through the sunny Norwegian summer nights, I say no.  I guess this means that I have to bite my tongue now, because while I don’t have problems with either one, I clearly can’t deal with them both at the same time!

So I’ve been excited about the iPad since it was announced, and i pre-ordered one to pick up in the States on this trip. I would have liked the 3G version, but originally I would have been here too early to get it (volcano delays changed that), and we didn’t know if we could get a data plan for it in Norway anyway.

In general, I really like it. It’s a convenient way to browse the web, and I actually like the iBooks e-reader app more than I thought I would. It’s heavier than a paperback, but it’s easier to turn the pages and bookmark my page, and it weighs less than a hardback or heavy paperback. Also, it can take some muscle to hold open a mass-market paperback without cracking the spine (pet peeve), so in some cases it’s more comfortable to read with. Especially in landscape mode, where the shape and size is book-like and familiar.

So far, reading is the only productive thing I’ve tried to do with the device, and there is one productivity pitfall: Whenever I pull it out to start reading (not uncommon when traveling alone), it’s apparently an open invitation to be interrupted. “Is that an iPad?! What do you think of it? I’ve been considering getting one, but I’m not sure. Do you think it’s worth it?”

Since Lucas could already get a job for Apple selling iPhones, MacBooks, and just about everything else the company makes, he would probably relish this, but I’m not much of a talker, and I made my iPad pre-order knowing that it filled a very specific niche in my life. I’m sorry, Mr.Stranger, but I don’t know if you should buy one or not! Though as an Apple shareholder, I should really get my spiel together so that I can convince everyone else to buy one and keep the stock price up. But deep down, I’d really rather just read.

* This post was written on the iPad, making it the second productive thing I’ve done now. But it was in the comfort of my home, with no interruptions from chatty business people.