Headworx

I lost my passport when changing planes in San Francisco. Arrived from Seoul, Korea, on the way to Denver, Colorado. Deplaning was fast and immigration even faster. The bag was already on the carousel. I headed to the United bag re-check area, then visited a bathroom and cleared the US security screening with ample time to reach my connecting flight.  Re-checking my belongings after the security I realized the passport was missing. And immediately I remembered I had it in my hand when exiting the customs and put it on a shelf in the bathroom at the bag re-check area. I would have realized earlier as security checkpoint requires passports, but I had Clear+ , so breezed through the checks without any documents. I made an attempt to get back to where I left it, but it just did not work. San Francisco airport undergoes heavy modernization and terminal patterns are not what they used to be. Suffice to say the United flight from Seoul arrived at gates B, which is T2 (the Delta terminal)....

Last week I had an overnight layover at the San Francisco airport. Landed in the afternoon and then took the hotel shuttle bus to the nearby hotel. It turned out the bus could not enter the hotel parking area: the automatic barriers were lowered and a number of cars before us was already lined up. We ended up disembarking the bus on the street and walking up to the hotel. The front door did not open. "We have a power outage" - a staff member explained - please use the side door. I did. Then the check-in was by means of writing my name and CC number on a piece of paper and walking up the stairs to the 3rd floor. I still could open my room with the keycard (battery-operated?) but inside it was dead silent - no usual ventilation hum. There was no WiFi either.  They fixed the power in the evening, but many systems still did not work. Elevators required a service company next day to get started. WiFi was on but the captive portal did not work until next morning. This whole situati...

Last week, with 184 visa-free countries, Polish passport has moved up to #5 rank globally. Interestingly there are 3 other post-communist European eastern block countries at #5. Actually positions 3-8 are all occupied by European countries. #1 is Singapore an #2 Japan and Korea. This is just one illustration of the transformation the former Soviet-block countries have gone through. But also Europe as such, despite much criticism about bureaucracy, poor state-driven economy, lack of entrepreneurial spirit and general over-regulation, to quote Fareed Zakaria, Europe has done something very extraordinary, even as it has declined in terms of raw power. Europe has shown that past a certain level of economic wealth, what matters is not just sheer economic wealth. What matters is quality of life, what matters is certain level of equality, and things like that Europeans have. For most of history, general quality of life was closely correlated with wealth. The richer you were, the better. A...

July was not travel-heavy. A week in Trondheim, Norway (a great place to be in Summer) and then the rest of the month at home / Krakow. Ah if you don't count a weekend trip to Spa, Belgium for the F1 GP race. But it was busy preparing for the intense 2nd half of the year. It starts just now, with the Korea Build in Seoul this week followed by the IES26 in Denver, CO, so another RTW trip. And three presentations to deliver over the next two weeks - the keynote in Seoul, the Bluetooth NLC roadmap in Denver and a joint webinar with US DoE / PNNL / IES on lighting systems integrations. Three different venues and events, three different topics, so plenty of preparatory work on my end. Add to that the Embedded World America (that is in September) and my days were busy compiling PowerPoint slides. I like doing that, but always the tedious part were illustrations. Text-only slides are boring. Visuals help. But when doing them on my own the results were not that great. And working with a gr...