Robot Apple Monkey Blog

Becoming a Bar Raiser

Cassian Cox — Wed, 06 May 2020 12:05:57 GMT

Becoming a Bar Raiser

So today I graduated from Amazon's internal training program and became a Bar Raiser. This is something that I've thought about doing on and off for something silly like 2 years, but at the end of November last year I decided to sign up.

My time at AWS has had a constant thread of team growth and expansion. When I started at AWS I was part of a team of 5 - one of which I'd actually referred before formally starting (my manager!). In the first year, we grew the team to 8. After 3 and a bit years, the team had blown out to over 20, and then split into multiple teams. By the time I left RDS, I'd filled 14 positions as a hiring manager and done around 110 interviews, almost all of them for my team or peers. Along the way, I'd continually been "encouraged" by a few of the bar raisers in tech-focused roles in Sydney to sign up. Given how much I sometimes struggled to find a bar raiser for my interview events, I'm sure this was a bit of a stitch-up designed to reduce their interview workload. A few of the bar raisers I talked to said they really enjoyed. Two of them adopted a model of only bar-raising for international hiring ~~junkets~~ events, where you do ~40 interviews in an intense week of nothing but hiring. Most of them warned me that bar-raising took up a lot of time, and it required constant "calendar protection" to prevent every gap being filled with interviews.

Despite the warnings, and not being able to exploit the junket path, with some itchiness to introduce some change in my role at Amazon at the end of last year, I finally decided to take the plunge. I chatted to a friendly bar raiser who agreed to put me forward for the training program and off I went.

The standard process for the "onsite"¹ round of Amazon interviews is 4-6 interviews, called a loop, after which each interviewer makes a yes/no vote, and writes up their feedback based on the Leadership Principles and functional competencies they covered. We then hold a debrief where a Bar Raiser guides the interviewing group through all the feedback, covering the strengths and any concerns about the candidate, and we make a final decision².

The structure of the bar raiser training program is really very similar to the way we do interview training at Amazon. First, you shadow some experienced bar raisers throughout the interview and debrief process. Step two is to take the lead in the process, with an experienced BR shadow. Step three is flying solo on the interviews (not really challenging since you need to be an experienced interviewer before starting the BR training anyway) and only having your shadow for the debrief process. After each debrief, the experienced BR provides feedback on how you did, along with the strengths, and the areas for improvement. Throughout the whole process, you have a "BR Mentor", someone with a lot of experience as a bar raiser to help you parse all the feedback, and tie it together.

One of the best things about being a BR (and specifically the training program) is that your role is to be external to the hiring team, and you're also not required to be familiar with the role - your goal is to maintain the quality of the process and make sure that candidates exemplify the leadership principles. I've now interviewed Recruiting Coordinators, Construction Managers, Data Centre Engineers, Technical Account Managers, Program Managers, Solutions Architects, and Sales reps for roles all over the APAC region. One of the best parts of Amazon's interview style is that we essentially ask candidates to tell us stories of the awesome things they've done. Becoming a BR just means I get to hear awesome stories from a much more varied audience. The leadership principles stay the same, but the examples are always different.

The same idea goes for seeing how other hiring managers (and bar raisers) prioritise and balance the leadership principles and functional skills for their roles. Every debrief I'll ask for the key things for the role, things that we should pay extra attention to in the debrief. Hearing different perspectives on why certain things are more important than others has opened my thinking on how I weigh things for my team's roles. Also reading feedback from a broader group of interviewers (and the pressure of being the "leader" of the debrief) has pushed me to improve on the quality of my written feedback.

So now I get to cast off my shadow and start my Bar Raiser journey in earnest³. I'm looking forward to hearing more awesome stories from people (and if you're looking, we're always hiring).

Now all virtual and held on video conferencing, due to COVID-19. ↩
Yes, this is a big time investment in finding the right candidates. ↩
With 5 interviews this week, and another 5 next week, I'm definitely not moving slowly ↩

Shortcuts on iOS

Cassian Cox — Sat, 25 Apr 2020 11:30:00 GMT

One of the things that I've started to use more and more lately is the Shortcuts app on iOS. This was a 3rd party app called "Workflow" a few years ago, but in 2018 Apple bought it out and introduced "Shortcuts" as part of iOS 12. The idea is that it introduces a bunch of different automations to iPad/iPhone, including integration with third-party apps that support it.

Since I just spent the morning playing around with various shortcuts and creating a few new ones to streamline my blogging workflow on the iPad, I thought I'd write up a few words on how I use it.

Overview of Shortcuts

There are more words and subreddits about Shortcuts out there, so I'm really only going to talk about the stuff that I've been playing with.

Use Cases

I have 5 main use cases for shortcuts:

Home Automation - this is a mix of interacting with Home Assistant and HomeKit¹.
Deep-linking into specific sections of apps, such as playing a particular podcast in Overcast, or creating a new entry with a specific template in Day One.
Saving content from the web either in Drafts or in Dropbox, for later linking / reading.
Changing device settings, like turning brightness + volume down and setting Do Not Disturb in the evening.
Playing with apps that interact with Shortcuts that I think will make me more productive with Shortcuts. This has not really panned out yet. See Launchcuts and Toolbox Pro

Of course there's the chaining of several of these things together - and that's where shortcuts really opens up some cool stuff, but at the same time, can be quite a frustrating tool to use.

Building and Developing

In many ways shortcuts is a continuation of Apple's user-automation journey, building on the legacy of Hypercard, Applescript, and Automator as a simpler way of building up simple programs + scripts.

The entire interface is drag + drop actions, that allow some things to be passed between them, along with some basic flow-control actions like if, repeat, and choose from …, as well as actions for setting variables. This is great in that it's really easy to quickly pull together different pieces to build a shortcut, but it can be quite frustrating when you need to restructure your "code", like when you want to move a chain of actions to a different part of the workflow².

One of the ways I try to mitigate this, and a pretty awesome feature of Shortcuts, is to build up individual shortcuts to do a specific task. For example, I have a shortcut called "📅 Schedule" which takes an (optional) date as the input, and then displays a summary of all the calendar items on the given day (or today if no date is provided). Sounds trivial, but what it means is that I can then have another simple shortcut called "📅 Tomorrow", which takes the current date, adds one day, and then calls "📅 Schedule" with tomorrow's date as the input.

This then lets me build up nested workflows like "Master Control Program", which is a shortcut designed to live on my home screen, and give me 2-tap access to many different functions - all implemented as separate Shortcuts that get called based on a menu choice.

One cool action that both allows a lot more powerful workflows from the iPad / iPhone, but is also cheating a bit, is "Run Script over SSH". This is an Apple-provided action that does exactly what it says on the tin - you enter hostname, port, username and ssh key or password, and then a series of commands you want it to run. Bonus points - this also includes an interface for generating a new SSH key directly in Shortcuts, and then copying out the public key to configure your remote server. This turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle for my iPad blogging workflow - and has eliminated a "manual" step of connecting back to my mac mini at home (that "builds" the static site for the blog and uploads it), replacing it with the "RAMB: Deploy" shortcut.

My Go-To Shortcuts

So the shortcuts that I've either downloaded or written and use extensively?

Bart - this is a "meta-shortcut" that can backup and restore shortcuts. Super helpful right before you try some funky new menu system and totally hose one of your main daily shortcuts ... 👀
Daily Shutdown Procedure - This shortcut I've written uses several nested shortcuts to run through stuff right before I put my phone away for the night. It turns off all the lights and aircon in the house via HomeKit, turns the brightness on my phone down low, sets the volume to 0³, shows me the next day's schedule (mostly so I know if I need to wake up earlier for morning meetings), and if I haven't already made a daily "mood" entry in Day One, prompts me for a mood rating from 1-5, and then opens up Day One with a custom template and my mood score pre-entered for me to capture some thoughts on the day.
Do Not Disturb Until Time - This shortcut lets me specify a time of day, defaulting to the top of the next hour, so minimum 60 minutes, and set DND for that duration. Particularly useful when I have several back to back meetings and want DND to last for all of them, where the default options in the OS are only until the end of current/next meeting.
App Store: Updates - Since Apple moved updates out of their own tab and into a part of the user profile screen, I made a shortcut that could live on the home screen and take me quickly to the update view. Since I don't have automatic-updates turned on, and have 328 apps on my iPhone (144 on the iPad), I end up using this almost daily.

And then there's the blogging shortcuts:

RAMB: New Entry - This will prompt for a title, and then generate the metadata for the post, and open up a new post in 1Writer using x-callback-url (essentially used as the predecessor to Shortcuts on iOS). The nice thing about this method is that 1Writer interfaces directly with Dropbox, and if I'm offline when I start a new post, the file will just get sync'd across next time I'm online.
RAMB: Open Halcyon Build - This only works on my local network, but opens up a Safari window with the auto-built version of the blog. Could just be a bookmark in Safari, I guess, but I was in a Shortcuts mood when I wrote it.
RAMB: Deploy - What it sounds like - gives me the option to deploy to either the staging site or "prod", or both. This uses the "Run Script over SSH" action, and is much nicer than firing up an SSH client manually.

I'm sure there's some photo-management shortcuts in my future - I think that's the next thing I'll take a run at, and see if I can find a better workflow for sharing some of the myriad photos I've been taking of my son ...

Home Assistant is the "master", but I keep all the basic devices and a small subset of scenes available in HomeKit to allow for easy automation, since it's much better integrated with Shortcuts. ↩
The technique I use here is to add a repeat block right at the start of the chain of actions I want to move, move them all into the repeat block, drag the repeat block to where I want it - thus taking all the actions with it - and then delete the repeat block, keeping the actions as I do. Hacky, but gets the job done much more reliably than individually dragging each action in the chain. ↩
Usually. Volume control in shortcuts seems to be a particularly buggy thing in iOS 13. Sometimes it just stops working until a reboot of my phone. It's just like Windows 95! ↩

My Next Computer Is Not A Computer

Cassian Cox — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 12:35:36 GMT

I've not had a purely personal laptop for several years now. At my previous job, I decided that I was blending work + home so much that it made more sense to just have one machine for all. Luckily, I was in a position to institute a "BYOD" program at work that actually let work save on hardware costs, and also let me recoup some personal costs for the machine I really wanted (13" MacBook Pro) - win-win! Once I moved to Amazon I was issued a 13" MBP as standard, and didn't want to manage 2 laptops. The "old" one (essentially the same spec as the AWS-issued one) stayed in the family, but I settled around just using the same laptop for work and pleasure, using my Mac Mini at home occasionally.

Trying out the iPad

In 2017 I decided to create more of a separation between work and personal, but I still didn't want to cart 2 laptops around when travelling - especially if it was a trip that was going to include some personal time and work time. I bought myself a 10.5" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard and decided that would be my personal "computer".

For the most part, it worked well. Email / web browsing was great, going through my photos was good, and occasionally playing some casual games like Hearthstone, or writing up notes for draft blog posts was "fine". But I still found myself gravitating to my notionally "work only" laptop to do heavy lifting. My general "workflow" for things that weren't work was a bit messy. I didn't have a good setup for blogging¹ or photography² - the two bigger things I was trying / doing in my non-work time. Of course I made it all worse when I bought myself a gaming PC running Windows 10 and breaking basically all my automation. About the only thing that I had "nailed" was using GoodNotes for hand-written notes and D&D character sheets using the Pencil.

Settling down the workflows

Fast forward to 2019 and I decided to simplify things. I started to use the (excellent) Working Copy app to manage source-controlled text editing on the iPad - covering both the blog and other things like my home automation configuration. I went all-in on an Apple-centric photo workflow - iPhone for almost all photos, iCloud Photos for library management, and Darkroom for editing beyond the basics. Earlier this year, I started using Secure ShellFish to essentially give me an SSH file system and Textastic to remove the need for round-tripping through git to push blog drafts back to my mac mini at home doing auto-builds and then just Prompt to deploy.

I broke the work/personal boundary a bit on the iPad and installed a few apps to allow me to do a limited subset of work easily, and remote control a virtual workspace for essentially "full work", if a little bit clunky.

All these things combined to make the iPad a much more viable "personal computer" for me, and feel like 2019 is when I really started to "get it"

My next computer

When Apple announced the first 11-inch iPad Pro in 2018 I was tempted, but it wasn't enough of an upgrade, and I didn't really feel like I had enough of a handle on the iPad workflow to justify it. This year I was settled on my iPad workflow, and was a lot more tempted. As soon as I saw the Magic Keyboard I was sold. I bought the iPad, the 2nd generation pencil, and a cheap case off Amazon to wait for the Magic Keyboard to be released before making a final decision. I realised very quickly that I really rely on using my iPad with a keyboard. I plugged in a keyboard and paired up my trackpad to see if the iPadOS 13.4 trackpad support would help justify the ridiculous price of the Magic Keyboard. It did, so I forked ponied up a few hundred bucks and ordered it as soon as I could. Yesterday it arrived.

In general there's not much to say about the 2020 iPad Pro compared to my previous iPad. It's a little faster, it has better graphics, and the new pencil is just generally "better"³. With a shitty stand, an awesome keyboard and a bluetooth trackpad, I really found myself getting in to using the iPad for everything personal. The iPadOS 13 default to making Safari request "desktop" versions of websites rather than "mobile" or "tablet" versions also makes a big difference.

The Magic Keyboard is heavy. It basically doubles the weight of the iPad. But it's awesome. The scissor keys have a reasonable amount of travel, and feel like typing on a decent laptop keyboard. The backlight is good, and the trackpad - while small - feels a good size, and easily allows for gestures that translate well from MacOS⁴. I love the USB-C pass-through power, especially with it being low-down on the case, so it feels more like a typical "laptop" positioning. The opening angle is a bit wider (and thus better for me) than the Smart Keyboard was on the 2017 iPad Pro, but I could still use a little more of an angle sometimes when standing at the kitchen counter. This is definitely a rock-solid option for making the iPad a little more laptop-like.

I didn't actually notice until reading/watching some reviews today that there isn't a function row. Now that I know it's not there, I am missing some things - and I realised I'd quite missed the volume buttons being where my fingers already were, but at the same time either using the trackpad to whip up to Control Centre to change it, or reaching out to the hardware buttons on the top of the iPad isn't really that problematic. What I have noticed - especially while writing this post in markdown with square brackets - is that while most of the keys are full-sized, some aren't. What's especially annoying is that the square bracket keys are different sizes. I was also a little surprised that the gestures that involve sliding in from the edge of the screen (notifications, control centre, slideover, dock / multi-tasking) when touching the iPad directly, instead involve slamming the cursor into the edge of the screen from the inside out when using the trackpad. I've adjusted to it already, but it does seem a bit odd - especially given MacOS has support for things like two-finger swipe in from the side of the trackpad.

Oh - and in the iPadOS settings I can now remap caps lock to Escape. This is how it should be.

So why not just get a small laptop? I mean the 13" Macbook Air basically weighs the same, costs less, and doesn't have the same multi-tasking limitations as the iPad. Two reasons. The first is that my iPad has cellular, which is much more pleasant to use than tethering to my phone whenever I'm out and about and don't have wifi access. But the biggest one is the real magic of the keyboard/case. It's not the keys, it's magnets. With the iPad on the Magic Keyboard it's rock-solid and feels like a single unit. But the iPad just pulls away, and suddenly you're in Star Trek: The Next Generation, you've got a PADD. It's magic AND the future.

So that's my personal computer.

I had the source documents for the blog in a repo, but then individual virtual environments for building/deploying the blog configured on my laptop + mac mini. Combined with the fact that my host requires IP whitelisting for SSH, I would often be writing blog posts + doing builds on my laptop, only to then commit the source, SSH into my mac mini at home, just so I could rebuild and publish from a fixed IP. Gross. ↩
I was using Lightroom + Olympus Micro 4/3 camera for "real" photos, and iPhone + iCloud photo stream for "quick" photos. I had automation on the mac mini to pull things into a master Lightroom library, but whenever I was travelling, I'd be using Lightroom on the laptop and then have to manage manual iPhone imports + Lightroom library merges. Gross. ↩
Attaching and charging magnetically on one side of the iPad is infinitely better than the shitty lighting plug on v1. The double tap gesture is a cool idea, but I find it super hard to trigger with the way I naturally hold the pencil. ↩
Probably helps that in my WFH setup I am using an external trackpad rather than a mouse. ↩

Return to the DMG

Cassian Cox — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 08:35:00 GMT

Last night I had virtual drinks with a couple of mates - one from Sydney, and another who moved to Japan at the start of the year (what a time to change countries!). To make it feel a little different from the standard daily VC load, I rugged up and sat outside on the verandah instead, lounging in a comfy chair with a mosquito coil burning under me. The bottle of Shiraz Mataro helped too.

Just like the virtual breakfast the other day, it was really nice and it didn't at all feel like the video conferencing I've been doing for work. Sure, there's some common elements, but it really is a different thing altogether ¹

But it spurred me to follow-through on some of the other virtual activities I've been bouncing around in my head - in this case, running a Dungeons and Dragons session over the long weekend. It's been a while since I last played (courtesy of both my son, and my regular collaborator/DM also having a kid).

So today I've pulled out the source books, and the dice, and started pulling together a mini-campaign. It's been a lot of fun, and I've even managed to get some story written, rather than just faffing about refining my selection of digital tools for managing the session. No spoilers - but I'll try to remember to put up some session notes here after Sunday.

I think I'm saying this more for me than for anyone reading this. ↩

Life Update

Cassian Cox — Sun, 05 Apr 2020 22:30:00 GMT

So since I only come back to this blog every few years, I thought I'd document a life update …

So during the Europe 2017 trip, my wife was pregnant and at the end of the year we had a son, and I took almost 3 months off. That was a thing. At the same time, I decided to change my role in my team from an individual contributor to a manager. I would not advise a big role change at the same time has having a child.

In September 2018 my manager + mentor moved on to a different team, and I went from managing a small team under him to managing the combined team he'd been responsible for (about 15 people). In the next 6 months I grew the team from 15 to 23, and hired 2 more managers (not reporting to me), split the team, and got a promotion.

By mid 2019, after a whirlwind 9-10 months, I was back down to a team of 6 engineers, a clear group of projects, and a reasonably clear roadmap for at least the next year. I was approaching 4 years at AWS, all of them in the same team (RDS). I was the second person hired into the RDS team in Sydney (by 25 days), and had seen the team grow from a scrappy band of 5 in a very operational role, to a solid engineering centre, and the 2nd biggest site outside the USA. Maybe at some point I'll write a post about why, at this point, I decided to move on, but at the end of 2019 an opportunity came up that was really interesting, so I took it.

At the start of 2020 I moved over to a newly announced project, with a brand new team¹. While it's exciting to be working on a brand new project, the pressure of having to build out the service from scratch - through private preview through to our launch - is definitely something new for me.

And then we come to the SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19 pandemic, which has turned the world into a very strange and scary place. Before my team could really get off the ground, we were working from home full time. Just as we'd worked out a playground + shopping routine with a young toddler, we're only going out shopping individually, and trying to explain to a 2 year old why he's not allowed to play on empty swings. In Mid-Feb I'd booked a trip to meet my new manager + new international teammates in Palo Alto. Last week is the week I was supposed to be there - with everyone in California and Seattle now a month into "shelter in place", and the US outstripping the rest of the world in reported cases. At some point I should document somewhere what the current state of the world is: supermarkets stripped of toilet paper, pasta, flour, soap, and hand sanitiser; public gatherings ratched down from 500 to 100 to 10 to maximum 2 people; conservative governments making childcare free and doubling unemployment benefits; international travel banned and states locking borders ... (there you go, that's some of it documented). I really hope that in a year I look back at this post (and the last) and shake my head without really remembering. But it does feel like this one will be big enough to change some things for "good".

So anyway, that's the update. Now you know.

By that I mean empty headcount and a need to hire as fast as possible. ↩

Virtual Breakfast

Cassian Cox — Sat, 04 Apr 2020 05:41:00 GMT

Normally on a Saturday morning we'd hit the Cooks River Parkrun, and then go pick some cafe in the inner west to have breakfast. Today we had our regular PR crew (only 4 of us) jump on a virtual breakfast instead. Challenges of wrangling a toddler (me and my wife) and a baby (one of our friends) aside, it was really awesome.

I've been wondering a lot over the last few weeks why I haven't done any other video calls like this with friends. Today I actually stopped and thought about it a bit (as opposed to idly wondering).

I've been WFH for 3 weeks now. My team is based in Sydney and Palo Alto, so I do a lot of VC meetings in the course of my regular work. My 1:1s are all on VC. Daily standup, weekly scrum, design reviews: all VC. We also have a rule in the org that if conversations in chat are getting long/involved we spin up a call to hash it out "face to face".

On top of that, I'm hiring for my team, and I'm training to become a Bar Raiser, meaning I'm doing somewhere between 2-4 interviews per week, plus the attendant debrief sessions.

Long story long: I spend a lot of time on VC. My work day usually ends no more than 30-40 minutes before I need to go pick my kid up from daycare, and that time is notionally for exercise / self, but tends to be either sneaking in a few more work tasks, or doing dinner prep so we can continue to chase the ever elusive early dinner and bed combo.

So when it comes to having a VC chat over cocktails or board games or something else, I just can't really bring myself to go and fire up the same screen, the same app, and put on the same headset.

It's similar to the cabin fever that comes from extended WFH. I actually have no problem working from home on an intermittent basis - before the Pandemic I had actually set up Tuesday as my regular WFH day for focussed work - so I was a bit surprised at how much I was struggling mentally after a couple of weeks. But the challenge with WFH every day, combined with the "shelter in place" (one superficial area where I prefer the US terminology) directives is that there's no variation in environment. Work at home is fine. Weeknights at home is fine. Weekends at home is fine. Everything at home except going to a supermarket to fight over toilet paper makes Cass something something.

So what to do? I'm trying to draw more motes from the change of context, since there's no change in environment. I'm trying (with varied success) to draw a harder boundary around work time, to help enforce the context swap. And after today's delightful breakfast, I'm going to try to apply the same to VC with friends - it's NOT a work video conference, the same as seeing a friend face to face is not the same as a face to face interview.

Lookout to Home

Cassian Cox — Sun, 04 Jun 2017 00:00:00 GMT

HOME! Finishing up the journal on the couch, MasterChef catch up on the TV, and a mug of coffee in front of me

Amsterdam, 2017-06-02

Departure day. The four of us were heading in different directions at different times today. We packed up and set off for Centraal where we would drop our suitcases while we went to grab breakfast. We had a simple but tasty breakfast at Prins Heerlijk restaurant before Nadine bade us farewell to head to the airport for her flight. After some half-hearted window shopping, Andy, Amy and I wandered back to Centraal.

A&A sorted out their tickets, boarded their train to Brussels and I set off to find somewhere to kill a few hours before heading to Schipol Airport. I sat in Starbucks with a cold brew and a cookie to catch up on some journaling, then decided to hop on the ferry across the IJ. I walked along the shore a little and decided to take advanatage of the clear day and head up the A'DAM lookout tower. The views of Amsterdam were fairly impressive, although the school excursion group up there didn't exactly make for a serene experience. After enough views and photos, I went back across the IJ, picked up my suitcase and jumped on a train to the airport.

I was a little too eager, and I arrived at the airport 2 hours before check-in opened! I found a cafe, had a beer and some lunch, and waited to be allowed to drop my bag and head through to the lounge.

Once I was through security it was nice to just sit and chill in the lounge, have a snack and catch up on more journaling¹.

EY78, AMS ✈️ AUH

I think this was my first flight (on any airline) on a Boeing 787. Certainly a first with Etihad. I had an empty seat next to me, which was nice. The guy on the other side of it was Alex, a Dutch ship captain, who lives in Panama, but was flying to Abu Dhabi for work, via Amsterdam. He was a little chatty.

The service on this flight was the best I'd had on any flight (not just this trip). The senior attendant came and introduced herself to me after boarding, and then before the main meal service the crew again asked for my preference and brought it out early. Was a bit strange, but I definitely wasn't complaining.

At Abuh Dhabi I had some time to check out the Al Reem lounge. It's not bad - had decent food and comfortable chairs - but it was strange that it was an internal room with no windows at all. It also got very crowded for a couple of hours, but since I'd found a nice quiet seat, out of the way but close to the on-duty barista, the crowding didn't really affect me. After a few hours of chilling and writing in my journal I had a hot shower² and then walked through the library (!) to my gate for the next flight.

EY450, AUH ✈️ SYD, 2017-06-03

The flight to Sydney was a more familiar Boeing 777ER. After boarding I actually had a whole block of 4 seats to myself, but before we even taxied out to the runway, some old dude plonked himself in the opposite end to me. I spread myself over 2 seats to discourage further opportunists. One guy actually pointed at the seat next to me and asked if anyone was sitting there, but I wasn't having any of it, and told him that I was using both seats. He didn't put up any resistance and went back to his allocated seat, so I was able to basically have 3 out of 4 seats in the block and get some sleep lying down. Didn't get the same personal service on this flight, so I'm guessing the previous flight was an outlier (or they misread "VA Gold" and thought it was much higher status). Thanks to the sleep and a couple of the Nolan Batman movies, the flight went quickly.

In another first, my passport worked in the e-passport gate in Sydney, and I was through passport control in just a few minutes. My bag took a while, but by the time I'd picked it up, my customs form had already been checked and approved (which is weird to me), so I had a quick walk out to the train station, and then HOME.

And so ends another trip, and another bout of journaling.

Journaling was a theme for any "free time" in transit on the way home. ↩
The magic of a hot shower and change of clothes between two long-haul flights cannot be overstated. ↩

Art and Canals

Cassian Cox — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 19:30:00 GMT

Amsterdam, 2017-06-01

For our last full day in Amsterdam, we decided to head back to Rembrandt Park before breakfast. I ended up running solo, with Amy and Andy going their own pace, and Nadine walking. I did 5km, a little bit slower than my normal pace at home, but it felt really good. This year my goal is to get my 5km time under 25 minutes, but more importantly, I'm aiming to stretch distance to a half-marathon.

After the run and breakfast, we headed into the Van Gogh museum. I'm not a great one for articulating opinions on art, but I know that generally, I enjoy Van Gogh's work, at least the stuff that is more pointillist-influenced, and less of the realism. The museum also gives a lot of context into Van Gogh's life, which was not particularly long but was "interesting" in the cold, external view of a bystander who isn't a brother or sister-in-law who has to watch someone with a mental illness decline and then commit suicide.

We also saw an exhibition of prints and lithography in Paris. This was cool, but I was mostly "museumed out" by this point, so I don't really have much commentary¹.

After Van Gogh, and a walk through the Art Square for a tourist photo (alas, not with my, so I don't have it) with the "I Amsterdam" sign, we walked back to Dam Square for another walking tour. This one took us through some of the more modern history elements of the city, covering some background on the (ongoing) issues with squatters in the city, the fancy shopping district (9 Streets), and the old Jewish quarter and what happened there during WWII. It was a very interesting tour, but our tour guide - Tim - did himself no favours by telling us it was the first time he'd done this tour before we even started.

Once the walking tour was done, we walked back to the edge of the 9 Streets district to visit Screaming Beans - a well-rated coffee roaster and coffee shop (as opposed to "coffeeshop"). The coffee was pretty good, but not amazing, and very expensive at €4 for a regular cup. The break from walking and the carrot cake made it all worthwhile though.

Since it was our last day, we decided to round out the trip with a Canal Cruise. We picked Friendship² and had a one hour cruise with just the right amount of commentary³. Thanks to some filming on the Seven Bridges, we had to take a detour that didn't really have the clearance, which made for a little bit of excitement. It was very relaxing to slowly drift down the canals, and it was a great end to the trip for the four of us.

We decided to order in for our last dinner, as we were all feeling quite tired. We ended up with some particularly uninspiring Iranian food. We didn't get the dishes we ordered, but given the quality of most of the rest of the food, it probably doesn't matter. We did have a bit of excitement when a mouse showed up on the kitchen counter looking for food. Finding little but some loud yelling people, it soon gave up.

I did note down Du haut des Tours Notre-Dame from Series Paysages Parisiens by Henri Rivière, which stuck with me. ↩
The second best in Amsterdam, something they drew attention to on the cruise. ↩
Also just the right amount of chilled rose and cheese. ↩

A Lesson in Un-Eroticism

Cassian Cox — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 19:00:00 GMT

Amsterdam, 2017-05-31

I did not sleep well. I woke up feeling a little bit dizzy and with a general "sloshiness" in the brainpan. I decided to just chill in the house, letting my head recover, while Andy & Amy went exploring. It was a wise decision.

Another of Andy's friends - Nadine - arrived in the afternoon, and we made plans to go have dinner out, and then see a show in the Red Light District.

Dinner was at a pretty decent Italian restaurant called Il Pacioccone. They made a point of saying "This is not a fake Italian restaurant" on their business cards, website and front door. They definitely pride themselves on the fact that the food, wine, and staff are all Italian. They had a relatively small menu and fairly tasty food, so it was a solid choice to start the evening.

After dinner, we had decided to go to a live sex show. We'd been warned that the experience would not be particularly erotic, and these warnings were accurate. The clubs work on a model of having ~1 hour's worth of acts, continually cycling. You arrive whenever, pay your entry, and after 1 hour you should have seen all the acts (although you're welcome to stay longer, especially if you're buying drinks). We arrived at "Moulin Rouge" right in the middle of a live sex act. Two people, on stage, having sex. It was quite possibly the least erotic situation involving naked people I've ever seen. Neither person was making eye contact with the other - the woman was either staring at the ceiling or had her eyes closed, while the man was staring into the audience, his eyes roaming, and his face somewhere between pleasure and leering. All while an up-tempo Latin beat played, his thrusting largely in time. The weirdest thing (which we didn't work out until the post-mortem discussion) was that neither of them made any noise at all. After a few minutes, the music stopped. He pulled out, they put on robes and walked off. No big finish, no fanfare, just the end of the track.

The other acts were more interesting and had more of a "show" vibe. The banana act - with four audience volunteers, each taking a bit from a banana - was excellent for the sheer volume of embarrassment it spread amongst the volunteers. Sitting near the stage, I got "volunteered" for one of the acts, but all I had to do was blow out a candle, so the embarrassment scope was low. One (un?)lucky guy got called up, made to take his shirt off and had one of the dancers write "HOT BOY" on his chest in permanent marker¹, but he got his own back by volunteering a mate for the next act, who got to see just how long the "never-ending ribbon" was.

Once the hour was up, and the live sex couple came back on stage, we made our exit. It was definitely something I'm glad I went to, but it was quite strange, and definitely much bigger on intrigue than it was on titillation.

We rounded out the evening with a proper seedy peep show. "Private" booths, just big enough for 2 people to stand in, arranged in a circle looking in on a round, rotating bed where a performer does a strip tease. Only the glass isn't one-way, so the dancer can see you, and you can also see the faces of the people in the other booths. Definitely more erotic than the sex show, but still probably more intrigue and curiosity for me. I'm not a big fan of seeing other people's leery faces (much like I doubt people are interested in mine). At €2/2 minutes, we didn't stay long before heading home.

She was not holding anything in her hands. ↩

Running and Walking

Cassian Cox — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 18:00:00 GMT

Writing continues in the Al Reem lounge in Abu Dhabi airport after the shorter of the two flights home.

Amsterdam, 2017-05-30

Our Airbnb was right next to Rembrandt Park, so we woke up in the morning and headed over there to take a bit of a run and get the legs moving. The park is quite impressive, and is obviously an arterial route for cycle commuters, as the traffic was quite high. The bike path was very wide and clearly marked with red asphalt for the bicycle traffic, and a separate path for the pedestrians. So far we'd seen a lot of running in the bike lanes, and this seemed to be largely tolerated, but with such generous space, we ran in the pedestrian lanes.

The park also had some outdoor exercise equipment. This was in very good condition and had weights you could slide into position - a massive improvement over all the outdoor exercise gear I've seen in Sydney, which is all either passive (like benches for sit-ups or parallel bars) or just uses body resistance. We stopped for a few minutes to do silly things like chin-ups and such to ensure that our muscles hurt later on.

Running/exercise done, we went back to the house to sample the delicacies Amy had bought from the nearby mini-market. Apart from stroopwafels, which are magnificent, Amy had bought "rinse appelstroop". This is a sweet/sour syrup, very thick, which is monumentally amazingly good. I think this could be a substitute for anything that calls for water + sugar, and the tart/sweet apple taste is so good, I had trouble stopping myself from eating it by the spoonful¹. I'm also happy to report, after extensive testing, that it goes very well with Vegemite².

We took a free walking tour around the centre of Amsterdam in the middle of the day to get a feel for the city. The very first thing the tour guide told us (after her name: Karen) was that Amsterdammers are really nice, friendly people. Until they touch a bicycle. At this point, they become bikopaths, hell bent on reaching their destination as quickly as humanly possible, and woe betide anyone or anything that stands in their way.

The tour was very good, and took us through the Red Light District again, in daylight this time. We got told the meaning of the different coloured lights³, although we didn't see anything other than red lights in our tour. We also learned the normal fee: €50 for the standard service, which includes oral and vaginal sex. There's no time limit, but the average time taken (including undressing, washing, and then dressing afterwards) is 6-8 minutes. Obviously, these women are professionals at the top of their game. They're also well organised (as an industry), and treated as any other profession, with taxes, mandatory health care, etc.

Karen also told us a few other interesting tidbits, such as the old church offering "pre-confession" for sailors planning a final night in the Red Light District before skipping out of port the next morning (before the priests would be available for confession). She also explained the "XXX" motif that is visible throughout Amsterdam. The version of the story she told us is that each X represents a great hardship the city faced. The first is water - Amsterdam is largely below sea level and is built on a swamp. The second is fire, as the city has had several fires do significant damage done to wooden houses and high winds. The third one, depending on the story, is either the plague or the Spanish. The Dutch seem to uphold the good European tradition of pissing off everyone else in Europe, and it was the war with the Spanish which prompted the East India Trading Company and the golden age of the Netherlands. Based on this I've decided I'll pick "the Spanish" as the better-sounding version of the third "X".

We also learned that the houses in Amsterdam lean all over the place. Left and right because the city is built on a swamp, and things sink. Forward because the houses are tall, but the staircases very narrow, so each house has a hook for a pulley at the top to lift furniture off street level. The narrowness is due to an old tax law, where tax payable is based on frontage, which encouraged skinny, but tall, houses.

After a late lunch, we headed to Bodyworlds - a museum that uses cadavers to create their exhibits, with an obvious focus on showing what is underneath the skin. There were various different models with skin/muscle/blood vessels/organs visible. Seeing the various plastinated bodies was fascinating.

We decided that we would have a chilled, and frugal, dinner at home, rather than another night out, so we got off the tram a few stops early and popped into a supermarket. This was where we had a big culture-shock moment: Amsterdam (or possibly all of The Netherlands) is very anti-credit-card. We could only pay for groceries with Maestro/Cirrus (which none of us have anymore), or with cash! This is a massive contrast to home, and even more so to the US⁴ where I use my credit card everywhere. In reality, it's probably a good thing ⁵, but it was a bit confronting to scramble for cash once we got to the checkout.

It was really nice to have a home-cooked meal, especially a fresh salad. This is probably one of the things I end up missing most when on holidays. Obviously, it is possible to eat fresh fruit and veg on holidays - even when eating out - but it does seem to be a lot harder.

I failed/did not attempt to stop myself from starting to eat it by the spoonful. ↩
Andy and I took a tube of Vegemite with us from home. This is an important travel essential. ↩
By convention, not rule, red = cis-woman, blue = trans-woman. ↩
Last time I went to the US I spent a grand total of $8 in cash over 2 weeks. Everything else was on credit card. ↩
I have no data on this whatsoever. ↩