Scott Hanselman

While in Spain this Autumn at TechEd:Developers Europe, I had the good fortune to do an ARCast with Ron Jacobs (mirror). The episode is up now on Channel9; hopefully it's not complete poo and I provide some value. I tried to come up with a topic, but Ron said, well, just start talking, so we did, and this is the result. We had a fine time, even though I've known Ron for over 10 years and he still misspelled my name. :P

What do you give to the architect that has everything? How about a grab bag of really good advice an interesting discussion with a very smart architect and fellow podcaster Scott Hansleman [sic]? This episode defies a single description because we covered so much ground but if you have ever listened to Hanselminutes you will know what I mean when I say that Scott is a very interesting guy to listen to. Scott and I led a pre-conference seminar at Tech-Ed 2006 in Barcelona called "Introduction to Software Architecture" and we caught up for a quick chat while in Spain.

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Thanks to Brian Windheim, a fellow architect at Corillian, who came up with the tagline "All non-software artifacts should approach zero" that I've been talking about lately.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm not a "colonial safari" type by any means. I'm not interested in dressing all in khaki and running after a rhino on a Jeep. We did however want to check out some animals in their (mostly) natural habitat so we hired a local guide and packed the whole family into two trucks for a day of amateur photography. My mom was a the night zoo-keeper at the Washington Park Zoo and worked for the zoo for years and years. She prides herself on her handling of the Asian elephants, although she's never worked with African elephants, so it was a goal to see an elephant or three. Yesterday we headed out from Njiro (outside Arusha where we are staying) to the Ngorongoro Caldera at the Ngorongoro Crater Conservancy/National Park.

According to Wikipedia, the park is about the size of Crete - about 8300km². Oy. It's interesting as a national park because it also allows human habitation. There were many Maasai in the park herding and we passed some large Maasai bomas. A Boma is a family village, usually fenced in like a smallish compound. The traditional way of life is changing and they don't move around as much as they used to. Inside the park at the second gate to enter the crater itself there are usually a dozen or so kids with an elder hanging back who will literally rush your cars if you stop when you drive in. They are selling necklaces and bracelets and what not, usually asking for TSH5000. You can easily talk them down to TSH2500 or even less per item, but I don't usually haggle when I think that I'm already getting a decent exchange rate and when the money will (presumably) help someone. We picked up some trinkets but we sincerely had to be agressive to keep these gentleman out of our personal space. After having 10 guys push stuff literally in my face, I ended up insisting that they all sit down, (with respect) shut up, and I'd look at their stuff one at a time. We all bought something small, but it was a little "high-pressure" sales environment. :) Fun, nonetheless.

The Caldera is 2000 feet deep and 14 miles across (620m and  22.5km respectively). An estimated 75,000 animals live in the crater itself. The floor is incredibly level and there's a lake inside. It's basically a big, perfect pasture of green in the middle of an extinct volcano. The view from the top is truly amazing. There isn't a wide-angle lens that can really capture what you see. Make sure you bring high-powered binoculars...not the standard 7x35 kind, but a really nice pair. Borrow if you don't want to buy.

I'm not a big digital photography guy...well, that's not true. Let's put it this way, I have enough hobbies now, and I know if I got a nice Nikon Digital SLR like Greg Hughes or Omar Shahine then I'd begin the long descent into expensive photography gear, so I've consciously stayed a "snapshot" photographer, knowing full well that photography - the quest for really good photography - would ultimately consume my life. So, my photos suck and it's ok. I even tried sticking the digital camera into the lens of the binoculars and frankly, it didn't turn out too bad if I do say so myself.

Halfway through we stopped at the very ostentatious Ngorongoro Crater Lodge. If you are looking to spend between US$400 and $US750 a night for a big colonial experience with a private butler, this is the spot. We were not, so we checked out the view and moved on. If you're looking to make two days of it, there are a number of passable inns and hotels in Karatu, a dusty town just 20km outside the park. Suggestion: bring your own treated mosquito nets anyway. It's not worth counting on theirs. The Elbam Annex Inn is a nice and reasonably priced spot. Many of the hotels will overcharge foreigners. Don't be afraid to shop around, but make sure you've left time to do so. We saved money buy packing a lunch ahead of time in Arusha at Shoprite, the Arusha equivalent of Costco. A smidge spendy, but worth it as they have everything you'd want to eat.

We went with a local Black-owned guide company. They have three cars, and we rented one, a Toyota Land Cruiser, along with a guide. We also brought my sister-in-law's Mitsubishi Pajero. We made sure both SUVs were serviced the day before. Ordinarily you pay the guide a large fee, usually in US dollars, but we negotiated a deal in TSH (Tanzanian Shillings) along with petrol. Basically we filled up both tanks of his giant truck and gave him a flat fee. It worked out OK, but in the future I'd probably check to make sure the guide's car was in a little better shape. We had a flat tire before we even got to the park, plus he didn't have a jack or a lug wrench, so that didn't inspire a great deal of confidence. In the end, though, it was clear the guide knew what he was talking about and it went very smoothly, although we did lose a fuel injector on one of the cars due to dirty petrol, which ultimately reduced the trucks power and made going up hills a problem.

The road from Arusha is tarred, but lousy at best with many potholes. Once you get outside of town about 50km you hang a right and the road suddenly becomes perfectly flat and freshly tarred all the way up to the park entrance. The fees to enter are US$50 for Foreigners and 1500 TSH (about US$1.25) for locals. However, the way it consistently works out (we saw this to be the case in Zimbabwe as well) is that it's 50 bucks for Whites and Indians and local prices for Blacks. Even though we were two trucks with 12 people, 5 Americans (3 white, one black, and the baby), 3 Tanzanians and 4 Zimbabweans, we ended up playing US$ for the whites and everyone else paid local. Apparently this is a known "loophole" and African-Americans on safari can get great prices at local parks and museums if you keep your mouth shut and possibly say a few greetings in kiSwa. Some suspicion was arose on the part of the security guards when the teenage girls started jabbering in English as girls do, and it faded away when we hushed them in Ndebele and told them to switch to kiSwahili. What was going to be a very expensive entrance turned into US$150 and ~30,000TSH including the vehicle fee so that was a pleasant surprise - one my wife, as a Shilling-payer on this expedition, was thrilled with considering her recent Americanization.

Inside the park the roads are all dirt. There are barely roads, actually, but are constantly under construction. They're very very rough and the older people had some back and butt trouble with the six hours of severe jostling. Bring a pillow if you have a sensitive tuckus. The roads are being worked on, often by hand using a shovel, and the rains return and undo the work. These roads shall not be moved. I wouldn't recommend driving yourself, better to go with someone who knows what they are doing. The best time to go into the park is first thing in the morning. We headed out of Arusha at 7am and should have left even earlier, like 4 or 5am, but it's a challenge to get a dozen folks and a baby out on time. :) We saw giraffe, cranes, wildebeast, elands, Thompson gazelle, kudu, baboons, colobus monkeys, zebras, water buck, cape buffalo, and five African elephants. Not bad for a day's wanderings.

On the way out we bought some local art from local artists. Typically the smaller the shop, the better chance you're dealing with the artist, or at least one of his/her relatives. If the place takes credit cards, it's likely a "clearing house" or middle man. We went to a shop run by the uncle of a friend of a friend, so even though we were likely "led" there, we were able to use the local connection to get a bulk rate on five nice original paintings. It's a good idea to have both US dollars and TSH on you, as the question will come up how you're going to pay. Pay in the currency that they prefer and you might get a small break on the total price. Also, do try to speak some Swahili in a respectful way, and hopefully make it all the way through a greeting exchange. Depending on who you're working with, I do distinctly get the impression that they appreciate the effort.

If you stop your car in any towns that are near the lodge (towns that are not near Arusha) you'll need to be very assertive to make your purchases as crowds tend to form if there is a caravan. We bought some bananas (be sure to ask for "sweet bananas" - the little ones - they are great for cereal or a snack, and much better than the crap Chiquita bananas we have in the US) and also some roasted corn of the side of the road. Highly recommended, both.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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My sister-in-law manages the internship program at the UN ICTR here in Arusha, Tanzania. ICTR stands for International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Tanzania borders Rwanda, and the UN put the court here in 1995 after the 1994 genocide.

Interns at ICTR are lawyers or law students from all over the world who work here for three months or so doing the grunt work and a lot of writing. I won't try to rehash the genocide in this blog post, as many people smarter than I have already written about it much more eloquently than I could, suffice to say, it's incredibly moving, scary, overwhelming and difficult to deal with. If you think about it long enough, it can consume you - mostly because it's a horrible example of what humans are capable of. It's even more shocking that we (the world) are making similar mistakes in Darfur. Anyway, I'm not qualified to analyze such things, so I'll talk about what I do know, first-hand as we visited.

The internship sounds like a very interesting job, and made me wish for a moment that I was a lawyer. My sister-in-law has a number of great stories, including one about a 70-year-old retired lawyer who wanted to do the internship. There's no age limit, so I think it's great that all kinds of folks from all over are considered for the program. They do have a rule to limit the number of candidates from the same school at once, so they won't end up with, say, five students all from Princeton. This helps to keep the interns integrated and avoids the "clumping" and groupthink that comes with traveling to another country with a large group of people from your home country.

Security, as you would expect, is very tight, and we had to leave our passports at the front office and went through metal detectors. This is required of everyone, even if you just want to visit the restaurant on campus and have lunch. Folks were very kind, but prices in the restaurant were, shall we say, "international" in scope. ;) The food was great, and my sister-in-law took us on a complete tour to see not only her office, but also the large conference rooms where the Burundi peace talks happen and where the East African presidents walk when they come for negotiations and meetings.

The offices are actually inside of the Arusha International Conference Centre (AICC) in Arusha (map). There's three buildings, Ngorongoro, Serengeti and Kilimanjaro, and the UN has leased all of Serengeti and half of Kilimanjaro, and local offices take up the other spaces.

We did get a chance to visit the ICTR Library. It's a specialized legal library that holds all public documents and transcripts (in English, French and Kinyarwanda) of the ITCR's affairs as well as references on other international criminal courts. (Apparently one of the most difficult things about the ICTR's work is the constant translations and employment of so many translators during the trials.) On the day we visited the library was full of folks doing research and very active when we were there. Apparently it's a fairly well thought-of library.

All in all, say what you will about the UN and their role globally, but this local office sure works very hard and it shows in the way they conduct their affairs. I saw a notice as we left that you can order the complete work product on searchable DVD.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I post a lot, of course, about Diabetes, most specifically the technology behind the solutions that I use in my own personal struggle. Diabetes is tough enough in the "Western" world with (nearly) all the technology in the world available, but it's wicked hard, darn near impossible, in underdeveloped nations.

When I travel, as a diabetic, there's a number of things that cause me trouble:

• Time Zones: When you're 11 hours away from home (it's 4:30pm in Arusha right now, but it's 3:30am at home) the body tends to take at least one day per one hour time change to adjust. I'm just literally about now getting my self on local time. I don't mean this in a jet-lag per specific, but from a blood-sugar point of view.
  Diabetics have different sugar/carb sensitivities at different times of days. An apple at noon affects me differently than an apple at 9pm. This becomes tricky when you have to calculate "what time it is in your body " versus local time, versus home time.
  Diabetics have a marked sugar rise called the "Dawn Phenomenom." Regular folks have this to, it's the body's internal alarm clock as it releases sugar to prepare to you start the day. Some people get it at 3am, others at 9am, but it happens in nearly everyone. What this means for a diabetic is a sudden rise in blood sugar in the morning. Many diabetics set their alarms for very early in the morning just to take a shot, only to go right back to sleep. It's a hassle. Less so with a pump, but still irritating. When you travel across timezones you have to keep track of when the body thinks this is supposed to happen. It'll start moving, as I said, at about an hour a day as you adjust to local time.
  This can also cause a problem for diabetics who use long acting insulin that lasts for 24 hours or 12 hours at a time, because shots can overlap and severe insulin reactions can happen if timing is paid attention to.
• Equipment: Every diabetic has their favorite or preferred manufacturer. The farther you are from home, sometimes the harder it is to get the stuff you're used to. South Africa has international manufacturers in-country and fairly decent prices, but when you get farther and farther "out of town" you'll be paying a premium for diabetic supplies. I use a specific brand of supply for my insulin pump and I always bring three times (or more) as many supplies as I could possible need. For example, I change my pump every 4-6 days, but I bring enough supplies to change the infusion set every other day. I brought enough insulin for 6 months. You can always have someone at home DHL you stuff, but it's a LONG 24 to 36 hour wait while you suffer.
  Most pump manufacturers have a loaner program where you can bring an extra pump along with you for a simple (and large) refundable deposit. I also packed replacement batteries for everything, including those hard to find watch batteries for my meter.
• Heat: Newsflash - it's hot in Africa. We're 4 degrees from the equator and it's hot as hell. A lovely hell, but hell nonetheless. Insulin is supposed to be refrigerated and lasts about 20-28 days at room temperature. You'll know right away if your insulin goes back because suddenly it just stops working. I always bring many ice-packs and insulated flexible containers to store my stuff in. For example, the power and water were out all day yesterday, but my insulin (I think) stayed cool, even as the refrigerator was without power.
• Sugar: Nothing sucks more than having a low blood sugar reaction and being 100km from anywhere and have no sugar. It's not just stupid, it's damned dangerous. I brought 50 granola bars from the states and packed tubes of glucose tablets in each bag so there's always glucose nearby.

For those that live here with Diabetes, fortunately there's many organizations promoting diabetes care in Africa like the IDF and there was just a Next World Diabetes Congress meeting last week in South Africa. Access to insulin and glucose strips is the first step along with education. I'm very blessed to have the financial means (mostly insurance) to have a pump and sufficient test strips to manage my blood sugar tightly.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Greetings again, from Arusha, Tanzania! My forty-forth Podcast is up. This will likely be the last one until the new year, where we will emerge from the Holiday Season energized with new listener-supplied topics (both listeners have offered topics! ;) ) and a re-commitment to avoid wasting your time, dear listener.

This final show of the year is a little different, as we turn the microphone around a bit and focus on something that Carl knows piles about, so this is a "Carlminutes" to round out our 44th show at the end of 2006. Carl educates me on professional audio and talks about some of the equipment that goes on behind the scenes to make a (we think) good-sounding show like Hanselminutes possible. I hope you enjoy it.

CALL TO ACTION: We're going to hit 50 shows soon, and let's hope for another 50 after that. What I need from you are topics. I've got about 15 topics queued up, mostly programming topics, which is good. We'll start the year with these topics, as well as any that you send me NOW! So, dear listener, what do you want to talk about?

We're listed in the iTunes Podcast Directory, so I encourage you to subscribe with a single click (two in Firefox) with the button below. For those of you on slower connections there are lo-fi and torrent-based versions as well.

Subscribe:

Links from the show are also always on the show site, although this show had no links to speak of. Do also remember the archives are always up and they have PDF Transcripts, a little known feature that show up a few weeks after each show.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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