Here is a CPU % chart of one of the web servers from this last week. Can you guess when we switched to nginx? (Hint: its on Monday evening when the CPU usage drops to near 0)

CPU usage plummets as nginx is added

Kudos to Igor and the rest of the team, nginx is really impressive.

1: Stop Speaking.

When using the inflight PA system, less is more. Virgin America got this so right on the JFK - SFO leg, using the PA system exactly twice during the entire trip, and both times in a polite whisper. It shows that they care. You really do not have to welcome me to whichever airport I am arriving at, it has zero effect other than to annoy me. Note to South African Airways (SAA): Your cabin crew seem to love the sound of their own voices, sometimes repeating the same announcement no less than 3 times. Stop this immediately.

2: Offer Family Flights.

Parents and passengers both cringe at the thought of babies onboard a long flight. The parents don’t want to be “those parents” unable to control their kids onboard, and nobody wants to sit near yelling kids on a 20 hour flight. So why not offer frequent “Family Flights” which feature cabin crew trained in the art of entertaining little kids, permanently fixed baby seats (and possibly changing stations) and maybe even play areas (2 or 3 rows of seats removed to make a little playroom)? You offer these flights at a slight premium to families with young children and at a significant discount to everyone else. This solves two problems: allows parents not to feel terrible that their kids are yelling during the flight (this is expected on a family flight) and allows other passengers to get cheaper flights with the tradeoff being the knowledge they will be disturbed by kids onboard and not be allowed to feel all indignant about it. I really think this is an opportunity waiting for an enterprising airline to try. Thoughts?

3: Sell The Exits.

Again, Virgin America wins in this regard. The emergency exit seats, which have a little more legroom, can be purchased for a reasonable amount online prior to the flight. Contrast this with SAA, where you are facing an entire day onboard the plane for many of their routes, and you have to haggle, bribe and charm your way into these seats at the check in counter. Sell them, eliminate the haggling, it’s better for both of us. Delta wins here as well, allowing the pre-booking of the exit seat, however they seem to miss the revenue opportunity here by not selling these seats as an optional minor upgrade.

4: Passengers Are Customers. You Want Customers.

Anyone who has flown SAA will know how the cabin crew views the people on board: Apparently as inconvenient obstacles to be routed around as rapidly as possible. I have countless stories about varying levels of abuse at the hands of SAA cabin crew, the most recent being the male air-steward who boarded Sunday 8/31/08 flight SAA203 at Dakar. This guy yelled at a sick passenger while trying to assign seats to boarding passengers. It wasn’t me, luckily for both of us. Contrast this with the Delta and Virgin America cabin crew, who were all so gracious and friendly.

5: SAA and Kulula.com: Your seats are ridiculous.

SAA flies the Airbus A340 between the USA and South Africa. The seats are incredibly uncomfortable. It really is an engineering feat to make them so hard and unfriendly to the human form. I am curious if other airlines’ Airbus seats are equally uncomfortable, or if SAA bought the “screw the passenger” configuration from Airbus? Kulula.com: Your seats are not bad on their own, but the rows are so tightly packed in that anyone over 6 feet tall is going to struggle to physically sit down in them. Delta leather seats on the Boeing to Cape Town were actually very comfortable and I don’t remember anything in particular about the seats on Virgin America, so thats a good sign. There is no excuse for crap airline seating in an age where we have things like the Toast Messenger. We have obviously have our design geniuses working on the wrong problems.

6: Eliminate Empty Seat Anxiety (ESA).

ESA is when you are sitting with an empty seat next to you, waiting for the aircraft doors to close, and suspiciously eyeing each boarding passenger wondering if they are going to be in the seat next to you. The relief when then doors click closed and you don’t have anyone seated next to you is a sublime travel moment. The disappointment when the 300LB traveling salesman looks at your empty seat, then looks at you and says “Is this 76B?” is crushing. We could eliminate this anxiety altogether by displaying the assigned passenger’s initials on the personal screen at each seat. No initials next to you? Kick back and relax. Will also help wayward passengers find their seats. Won’t work in exit rows where the screen is hidden in the armrest (however, if you are in an exit row you have nothing to complain about anyway) and won’t work in some aircraft (for example: Delta Boeing 767) where there are no personal screens yet.

7: Onboard Impulse Upgrade Option

Would it make sense to offer 2 or 3 passengers the opportunity to upgrade to premium class or business class once boarded, for a sum which is considerable, but not out of reach? Would it decrease the value of the business class offering? The seats are there, and already going to New York, why not sell them at the very very last minute? On my recent SAA flight, I would have paid (up to a maximum of a couple hundred dollars) to upgrade to a business class seat when I realized the Satanic check-in clerk has assigned me a seat next to every screaming baby and sniffling toddler onboard and without any vacant seats around me at all. The typical business person doesn’t want to take the chance of not getting the business class seat, so you know she is booking business class anyway. I don’t think it will devalue the premium offerings. Hey, it’s just an idea.

8: There Is No Need to Fly South African Airways to South Africa from New York

Delta flies to both Johannesburg and Cape Town from JFK. Just saying.

What are your wishes for airlines?

South Africans are doing interesting things with WordPress, and it has found use in many of SA’s most prominent media outlets. Justin Hartman and Vincent Maher gave some good insights into the back stories of WordPress implementations at established media institutions. They both deployed pretty large scale WordPress-powered sites in SA and had some good tips on things they learned in the process. Vincent is an insightful person and a calm and engaging speaker. I owe much of my early career to help from Vincent as he essentially mentored me during my final year at Rhodes by sending me manuals on cutting edge (at the time) technologies including something called Cascading Style Sheets, and then helping me get a job at VWV.

Matt spoke about WordPress and Automattic and focused on lessons learned building an online business, with some predictions and commentary on the business of software in general. It was a good talk, went down well. The thing about Matt is that he is the same approachable guy when he is talking to you at dinner about camera lenses, or talking to 120 people in Cape Town or talking to 500 people in San Francisco. People appreciate this about him.

I snuck onto the schedule and did a quick talk about WordPress.com and people seemed to enjoy some of the stats of a site of that scale. I was a little nervous and jetlagged, operating on 20 minutes sleep the night before. I am taking a lack of mass rebellion and hostile heckling as a good sign.

Some common themes which emerged in the talks and the conversations: Challenges and merits of WordPress vs WordPress MU, “does it scale?” (yes, it does), getting buy-in to Open Source in a culture of “Enterprise Software” and people responding “yes, we hope to” to my asking if they plan to Open Source the plugins and themes they have developed.

Some other highlights of the trip so far: Tyler Reed, Denham Coote and Jason Bagley are a great group of guys who not only put on an impressive event, but took Matt under their wing and looked after him and I so well in Cape Town. The future of social media and Internet technology in SA is in good hands with these guys. Also, the future of the food industry in South Africa (especially chicken related fast food chains) is secure as these guys will singlehandedly keep the sector viable. Personal thanks to them for being such entertaining hosts.

Chris Rawlinson from Stormhoek Wines is a fantastic guy, a gracious host (even at 5am) and now also a wonderful archive of fascinating Jennifer Aniston anecdotes. I wish Chris and Stormhoek Wines continued success in the future. Dave Duarte is an impressive and natural speaker and a warm and personable guy and I am glad to have hung out with him a bit. Good to run into old friends like Elan Lohmann again, he is a smart guy and looks to be doing good things in SA. Also met Jaques Marneweck and he is an interesting and smart guy with some strong opinions. I met many other cool people like Ashley Shaw, Malan Joubert and of course WordPress Rockstar, Adii Pienaar. Henk Kleynhans and the Skyrove team pulled out some real South African ingenuity and hauled in a truck-mounted mobile satellite wifi hotspot when the heavy Twittering at WordCamp took down the first one.

It was a worthwhile trip, but was very short and rushed. I still have family and friends in Cape Town and so I chose to selectively miss a few events to fit in time to see everyone I wanted to see. This is the kind of stuff that stresses me out, so I had to do some mental yoga and just be sure I was doing the right thing even when it felt wrong. I managed to see everyone, but not spend enough time with some.

More pics on Flickr soon when I have some bandwidth again.

Matt, Joseph and Ranaan and the rest of the team have created something pretty great with this tool.

I was quite amazed at the controls Apple places on iPhone application development. To just get an Xcode build of the app onto my iPhone took some serious permission granting and cert signing from Matt.

It will be in the AppStore soon so enjoy!

I haven’t blogged in a while, time for a quick rant:

Medical practice is huge business. Recently I was at a medical group where there are 10 or so various types of medical rooms in one building. The parking lot was so full that there were double parked cars in every open nook and cranny in the lot. The receptionists had the stern, harried approach which only comes with trying to tame controlled chaos. It seems the demand for medical practitioners must be outstripping the supply. One possible contributing factor, of countless others no doubt, seems to be that there are too many lawyers* gearing up to rain lawsuits down on the medical practitioners, scaring away potential medical students as well as driving the cost and bureaucracy of the whole industry up.

That might be a tough situation to address, but here’s one that isn’t: The filling out of forms and paperwork and optimizing waiting times. The systems person in me rebels the fifth time I write my name and Social Security number on a badly copied form of some kind while “checking in”. We have had the tools to fix this for years and years. Yes, of course, we have HIPAA and other controls, which impose serious restrictions and barriers to entry on any solution here. But, if we are comfortable enough to bank online then we should be comfortable enough to know that the correct system will result in the privacy needed to adhere to any regulations.

Of course, privacy and doctor visits do not go together. I find it quite amusing that we go to some great lengths to ensure medical record privacy, yet leave some of the most obvious privacy issues in the chain unchecked. Back to the doctor’s waiting room, while reading Bass Fishing Monthly (aside: what’s with waiting rooms and gun, fishing, golf and car magazines?):

Receptionist, in tone of utter disdain: “Take these forms, fill them out. What you here for?”

Patient, in apologetic whisper, for the whole world to hear: “Uh, for a checkup to prepare for my colonoscopy next week.”

Also, while actually IN the doctor’s room, getting my leg chopped open, through the paper-thin “walls” between the consulting rooms:

Doctor: “OK, Mr. Jones, lets take a look at that incision in your belly. Hmm, OK it’s not healing as well as it should be. Let’s prescribe you some anti-biotics”.

Wow, the privacy of it all. By the way, Mr. Jones I hope you are doing better. He was a vet, in a wheelchair, and laughing at the same nonsense in the waiting room that amused me.

This can’t be too futuristic: The first time you join a medical practice you see paper forms for the first and last time. You enter in all your details and one of those friendly, unjaded ladies in the decorative scrubs does some data entry and you and the pen are done. In future, I open up http://mydoctorsgroup.com, click “Make appointment” where I enter in all the details about what I am seeing the doctor about. It already, of course, knows everything it needs to know about me. I get an SMS conforming my appointment, the receptionist has a nice control panel in front of her planning out her day and she can concentrate on her people skills. I can go online and read the doctor’s notes on my previous visits. Make comments, make notes. I can _export_ my records, take them on a USB drive to my other medical practitioner’s office and have them imported into their system. Or I can authorize another medical practitioner’s system to access my records online.

For extra points: The doctor doesn’t schedule 15 patients for 10:30am, some patients actually get a 4:30pm appointment and realistically expect to see the doctor before 5:00pm. I get an SMS on the day of the appointment if the doctor is running more than 30 mins over schedule. The receptionist has a button panel: Notify patients current schedule is [15 mins] [30 mins] [45 mins] [1 hour] behind.

I feel like Lewis Black with his “No flying cars” bit, like the future has let us down. Hoping there is a company out there working on this problem. From Google searching, it looks like there is.

Also, do we need an endowment fund which will reimburse tuition costs for students currently studying to become lawyers, who have a change of heart and decide to become doctors instead? (Sorry, lawyers seems I am picking on you today, please don’t sue me)*

* By reading this article you are agreeing not to sue me, or my pets, for any damages whether emotional, physical, financial, to yourself or your reputation caused by my clear and undisputed negligence. You are also agreeing to not sue any doctors for stupid shit, thus driving away thousands of potential doctors in the process and making me pay a lot more in healthcare costs. While we are at it, you are also agreeing not to put those annoying disclaimers on your email, to stop with the the mind numbingly inane warning labels on the patio chair cushions I just bought, and to cease and desist with those hurried garbled terms and conditions which follow radio advertisements which are too annoying to comprehend and force me to actively seek to NOT purchase any products which have these types of commercials.