Rational Telecom

A Chinese colleague just sent me some amazing tea as a gift. I’d love to purchase more for myself, so I did a Google search for “Puerh Tea,” which I thought would result in the usual tea.com type listings. Instead, I was consistently able to “break” Google, no matter how many times I submitted the query.

I’d be really surprised if anyone is able to duplicate it, but lemme know:

Perhaps I have a special Luddite super power that breaks technology?

So I’m looking for a receipt to print out for my expense report. I purchased a UI mockup application called Balsamiq.

Here I’m searching for “Balsamiq”. No luck.

So I go look for it manually. It’s right there, on top, with “Balsamiq” as both the sender and subject. I think this explains why I had trouble finding my receipt for the Mark Knopfler concert I’m going to next week (the Ticketmaster entry in the image is for Roger Waters next December. I’ll probably have trouble finding that one, too).

I travel to Southeast Asia on business every so often. If I have a choice, I’ll always connect through Changi airport in Singapore.

There are lots of nice things about the airport; it’s got a nice transit hotel, a gym, amazing shops, and reasonable food. But there are some things that set it apart. Top five reasons I love Singapore’s Changi Airport:

Reason Five: It’s got some beautiful areas. Here’s the orchid garden, which surrounds a koi pond complete with dabbling brook, nice wooden bridge and huge voracious koi. To give you an idea of how big this “meditation area” is, the woman at the left of the photo is sitting at the edge of the koi pond with her feet dangling above the water:

Reason Four: Free video games and free WiFi(!) throughout the airport. Lots of geeky types congregating in the XBox area, so of course I didn’t stay long.

Reason Three: The bizarro Asian soda you can get at the airport 7–11. Note that the Bird’s Nest Drink by Super brand features “The Best Good Taste,” as opposed to the inferior good taste offered by other, lesser, Bird’s Nest Drink distributors.

Reason Two: Free Movies, playing 24 hours a day in a real theater. “It’s Pat” was playing when I took this picture. Had I stuck around, I could have caught “First Blood” followed by “Porky’s.”

And the number one reason Changi is the best airport in the world:

Here’s the kicker: when I took this picture, there was no one monitoring the whiskey tasting station. Just a bunch a booze and a stack of paper cups. I’m not kidding.