Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

There's very little glamorous about business travel. Continental has managed to maintain a perfect batting average in the past three weeks: five out of five flights have been an hour or more late. I'm going to spend about 24 hours in Berlin, and while it's the second time I'm visiting the city on business, I've never seen the remnants of the Berlin wall, the Brandenberg gate, or bought a Steiff bear. Hoping to correct some of these cultural deficiencies on this trip, if there are a few spare hours between our last plenary and bulk food.

Music: "In the Cage", Genesis Live Over Europe; "Pass the Peas", Maceo Parker Roots & Grooves (the bass line and guitar solo in this version just kill); "Ozark", Pat Metheny Group As Falls Wichita; "Your Majesty Is Like A Creme Donut", Hatfield and the North, The Rotter's Club; "Lines on My Face", Peter Frampton, Frampton Comes Alive. There's probably some bizarre Cambridge (UK) connection between Genesis and Hatfield; I'm waiting for someone at our GSE meeting to fill me in (last year, someone handed me a sampler CD of Porcupine Tree and I was hooked).

Words: Finishing up Rush drummer Neal Peart's Ghost Rider, the travelogue of his 55,000 mile journey during which he attempted to re-assemble his life after the deaths of his wife and daughter. I read his Road Show: Landscape with Drums and adored the travel writing interspersed with behind the scenes concert vignettes so I went one level deeper into his work. Great backdrop for having seen Rush just a few weeks ago; the books provider greater appreciation of Peart's lyrics on the last two Rush releases.

Threads: I may be able to complete the hat trick of Diesel Sweeties venue-appropriate shirts: I'm currently sporting the metallic Clango shirt to arrive in Berlin, a tangential nod to Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk; on my way to Montreal on Friday I'll cross the border in my Canada 2.eh maple leaf shirt and then for California the week after, it's Electric Sheep and obscure Blade Runner references. The electric sheep shirt gets only slightly fewer stares than my xkcd sudo shirt, but that's part of un-glamour of business travel. I tend to travel comfortably unless I'm going directly from plane to meeting; if I have time to change I'm going to represent the Sun brand in my behavior (despite any number of delays, bad meals and weak coffee servings) but dress code reverts to my peculiar brand of culture.

If I'm going to make a serious effort to improve my writing, and maintain something of a regular cadence, then I should attempt to blog every work day. I don't want to make yet another resolution on some calendar boundary condition that only returns "true" for a few days. I'm going to make a concerted effort to write with the clockwork regularity of gulping my daily Dunkin Donuts allowance: that means something every work day. One of the deciding factors is a need to be more transparent about what I'm trying to drive in Global Systems Engineering, and how that relates to our customers, our markets and the industries in which Sun has a presence. There's no better way to get that transparency than to essentially open up the daily diary.

Today's plan: I'm writing this 39,000 feet over France (listening to Genesis Live Over Europe, which just struck me as coincidental) on my way to Berlin to meet with the systems engineering management of our entire European region. We're about to get into the thick of kick-off season, where each country or group of countries hosts a meeting that's one part strategy setting and one part celebration. I try to convey my messages to as broad a cross-section of our management team as I can, allowing them to translate into local language, local emphasis and local culture. My themes this year: how we are going to grow into the space created by the "big trends" in computing infrastructure, how we are going to fuel that growth through cross-field organization teamwork, and how we equip those teams with stronger technical skills and communities in which to share, grow and highlight the applications of those skills. Customers, Competencies, Communities. That's FY09 in a GSE nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Tim O'Reilly.