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Shanghaied

I am sure no-one is particularly interested in the trip details from Washington DC to Shanghai, assuming anyone is interested in what I am writing at all, so will keep this short.

 

We were up by 4am to leave by 5am to pick up my younger daughter, Tamar, at 5:30am, to get to Dulles airport at 6am, where we got through the entire ticketing process and security within 30 minutes so were way early for our 8am flight. I can never get the timing of these things right.

 

We had two flights to take us to Shanghai, the first to Chicago and the second from Chicago to Shanghai. The second which was scheduled to take off a little after 10:30 was about ½ hour late due to debris on the runway, a new reason, at least for me, for a delay, and took just under 14 hours; the longest flight I have ever had.

WHAT I DID FOR MY SUMMER VACATION

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On Monday, July 13th at 8am, my wife Ellen and my two daughters, Miriam and Tamar, and I are getting on a plane at Dulles Airport.  Approximately 18 hours later, we land in Shanghai, China at 1:55pm, July 14th.

Eight days later we hope to see the longest total solar eclipse in this century, slightly less than six minutes long at Wuhan, China. Regardless of the viewing conditions that morning,  we will get an all too short glimpse of this still controversially emerging global super-power between July 14th and July 27th when we leave Beijing to return home.

First Blog Entry – Responding to Government RFP's

During the three years I was the CIO at the US Department of Transportation, I found ready mechanisms to articulate my opinions about government management, the challenges of being a CIO, the impact of social networking and the internet, and how to deal with technology decisions.

As a Departmental CIO, I was invited to far more events and meetings than I had the time or inclination to speak to. There were frequent requests for interviews and when I wrote a column it was eagerly accepted for publication. Whether the reasons for this happening were the title of the provider or the value of the contents I will leave to those who listened or read.

Over time I became active on Facebook and Linked In, and over the last six months in the Government experimented with the challenge of saying something that at least potentially would be of interest 140 characters at a time on Twitter.