Working my way through the huge pile of physical mail that accumulated during my trip, I found the usual door-to-door ads. There's the one psychic who promises immediate results, while the other psychic guarantees results. Always a difficult choice. Sometimes they're just plain funny, like this one advertizing a Clean Mistress. I just hate dirty mistresses.

Of course, poor English is not limited to door-to-door mailings. There's this sign at Schiphol airport here in Amsterdam. The Dutch never understand why this is hilariously funny (or threatening, depending on how sadistic you think the airport authorities are.)

There are no direct flights from Amsterdam to Denver, so I was forced onto the Layover Roulette playing field. It hardly ever snows here in Amsterdam, but on the morning of my flight to Detroit of course it did. With the snow plows and the deicing equipment overstretched, my flight was delayed to the extent that I missed my connecting flight to Denver. I was rerouted via Minneapolis in the end, and my luggage even managed to keep up with me. I think was lucky to make it. In any case, on the final flight from Minneapolis to Denver I sat next to a woman working on her laptop. I know it's rude to peek, but with the screen always within my peripheral vision I could not help but notice what she was doing.

She spent quite a bit of time working in Excel. Now, in my job, I spend a ridiculous amount of time working in Excel, and I have broken the program many times. What I saw on the flight was probably how the vast majority of people use Excel, and I was astounded. It was completely contrary to anything I have ever done with a spreadsheet. She was hardly using any formulas other than SUM() to add numbers together. Even more astounding was that she was creating new views of the same data, but kept on re-entering the numbers from cells on other sheets. Sometimes she copied the numbers over, but often she'd just type them in again. Then she actually whipped out a huge calculator, did some multiplications and divisions on the numbers shown on the screen, and entered the results in yet another cell. Absolutely amazing.

My spreadsheets tend to get out of hand. I parametrize everything, because I know that I will want to play around with various scenarios later (and I don't mean the built-in Scenario option, it's too limited). I am lazy. Very lazy. I don't want to solve problems more than once. So I prefer to solve a class of problems rather than an instance of a class. This means more work initially in building a spreadsheet to deal with all aspects of the class of problems I am solving, but it pays off enormously later on when a different instance of the same class of problems comes along. It also means I break Excel a lot. It has a tendency to disappear. Not crash, but disappear. It usually happens in running VB code, and I have not been able to isolate the conditions yet... you're happily running your code and suddenly Excel is gone. It does not even go through its Dr. Watson-post-crash thing. Excel also tends to become unstable if you have large amounts of data in the sheets. Filling a few sheets with say 20 columns of data that's 50,000 rows deep will usually do it. It'll crash sooner the more formulas you have in the cells.

In any case, this brief glimpse I got into the world of Excel usage supports the thesis that computers are already fast enough for most people. Reducing the complexity of computing is likely to bring far greater benefits to these ordinary users than faster chips. For my work though, I could always use a faster computer, although here I have run into a curious problem as well. I have a dual P4 running at 833 MHz at work, while one of my colleagues has a newer machine with a dual 1.7 GHz P4, DDR RAM versus my SDRAM, etc. In running some of our heaving spreadsheets there's hardly any speed difference between the two machines. I am absolutely stumped as to why this should be. Raw CPU speed is almost double and memory bandwidth is much greater. The spreadsheets are not I/O-bound. Yet the speed improvement of running them on the newer machine is marginal. There's something very strange going on. But that's nothing really new...

Good heavens, the Wall Street Journal is considering publishing a Saturday edition! I'm all in favor of that, and that's coming from someone who occasionally still pines for the WSJ's old layout. The question is what the content on Saturdays would be, but the Financial Times is doing a pretty decent job of publishing for the weekend, so the WSJ should be able to pull it off too. I hope. The FT has been giving the WSJ a good run for its money though. And it's had pretty good guerrilla marketing too. In the aftermath of September 11th, many airlines had cut back on providing free newspapers on board, and the FT started to hand out free copies at airports. An excellent idea, and it worked really well. At least, in my experience it did. And on the flights from Amsterdam to London City (and vice versa) the infernal KLM still does not give us free papers. Fortunately the FT still dispenses free copies in Schiphol's D-Pier, so I can pick one up on my way to the gate. Smart thinking at the FT there.

Good thing I am not a news junkie anymore.

Speaking of Rome, in December last year I had more near-death experiences than usual. Two of my Italian colleagues joined me for the meeting, which was late in the afternoon, scheduled for around 5 PM or so. In true Roman fashion, the meeting did not even begin until 6:30. This is by no means a record, as the longest delay I've had in starting a meeting was about four hours (and I almost missed my plane in that case). Starting meetings on time is just so north-Italian. Life in Rome is more relaxed. My Roman colleague would stay in Rome, but the other one was flying back to Venice, and it was getting pretty late for his flight. The number of flights to Venice is limited, so he was very keen to make his. He told the cab driver to get to Fiumicino airport as quickly as possible. The cab driver took this very seriously, which resulted in one of the most hair-raising cab rides ever.

Taking a cab in Rome is somewhat exciting under normal circumstances, but this was exceptional. The cab driver drove as if he had strobe lights and a siren. He ran several red lights (not too rare, but still), wormed his way between several cars, cut others off and generally drove like a maniac. Merging onto a crowded thoroughfare was done under the motto "they'll stop when they see me," even though they had the right of way. I saw several cars coming straight at us, braking hard. There were numerous occasions on which we came close to being flattened against some antique relic or other (they're fairly common in Rome). Ah, to die in an accident with 2000 year-old aqueduct!

Then as we were getting closer to the highway, we were on a small winding road uphill out of the city, with several feet of rocky incline on either side. In other words, there was no shoulder, no room to escape. And traffic in our direction was mostly stationary, since it was the late end of rush hour. The cab driver pulled out onto the other side of the road whenever he spotted a gap in oncoming traffic, accelerated hard and hopped ahead by a few dozen meters. Except traffic was stationary on our side of the road, while the oncoming traffic was not. So he slammed on the brakes really hard and somehow managed to press himself back into the right lane before we got flattened by another Italian maniac coming from the other direction who seemed very disinclined to stop. It was his side of the road after all, and he was damn well going to use it. Not daunted by a single close escape, the cab driver performed this maneuver several times.

In the course of the trip, we also came close to killing three drivers of the little Italian motorscooters that are so popular in Italian cities. And in this case, it's not an exaggeration. In the various swervings we were subjected to, some had to be aborted very rapidly. In one case, there was less than an inch between death and some poor Italian sod on a small motorcycle. This was by far the most frightening cab ride I've had (and I have had many). My colleague just missed his flight. I made mine.

Who says business travel is boring?

Rome is one of those cities with just the right amount of chaos. It's highly unstructured, but it all does work in a weird sort of way. Not getting killed in traffic depends on the skills of your cab driver, and thus far I managed to cling on to life. Of course, today's traffic was even more chaotic than usual, as the pope was making his historic speech to the Italian parliament. This meant that there was a huge police presence with heavily armed men on every streetcorner.

For someone used to the atrocious climate of Amsterdam, I also enjoyed the weather down there. With temperatures in the high 60's (around 20 C) it was pretty much like a summer's day in Amsterdam. All the Romans were wearing heavy coats though. It must be the time of year, or they're even more sensitive to cold than I am. There was an actual log fire burning in the lobby of my hotel. Very nice. Of course, I did not get to see much of the town, as usual, but I suppose it's better than nothing.

Now back to more regular blogging.

Oh boy. How bad a sign is it for the New York Times if an election analysis in a Swiss newspaper pokes fun at it? The newspaper in question is the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, which always has had excellent international news coverage. I don't always agree with it, but they do have reporters in weird places that tend not to get covered well by other newspapers. Anyway, they have some good election analysis, in which they have this right at the beginning:

With the risky big deployment of their very popular president the Republicans have succeeded in obtaining majorities in both houses of Congress. That is very unusual in mid-term elections, and the "New York Times" reacted with marked reluctance in the comment section "Mr. Bush's Big Night."

Before I fall asleep here, just another random observation on Italy: driving along the A8 highway that takes you to Malpensa airport, you'll see a big cineplex called Medusa Multicinema. Why one earth would one name a movie theater after Medusa? Are they literally trying to petrify their audience? Are the films they show really that bad?

I could imagine calling a multi-headed cineplex after Hydra, but Medusa has the distinct whiff of mythological confusion about it. Then again, their logo was rather head-with-serpent-hair-like. (In German, that would be one word.)

I also bought some grappa at the airport. Good stuff.