So, as many of you already know, I’m in India this week to work with my company’s Bangalore team. It’s my first international travel experience, so I had – and since today’s my first day in the office, still have – no idea what to expect from the week. Nonetheless, here’s a quick list of first impressions in (roughly) chronological order:

1. That’s a long time to spend on a plane.
2. Flying business class is a big improvement over coach and essential for long flights, I think.
3. The boarding “process” in Frankfurt (my connecting flight) was a complete gagglef***.
4. I need to figure out how to sleep on planes.
5. The culinary options on flights aren’t so bad. I was well-fed and most of it was really pretty good.
6. The aesthetics of the airport in Frankfurt look frighteningly similar to those of an IKEA store.
7. I was less impressed with “Lufthansa:“http://www.lufthansa.com/online/portal/LH_COM than I expected. My United flight out of Dulles offered better service than did Lufthansa.
8. I couldn’t use my laptop on the flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore (the Lufthansa flight). The power plug was there, but I couldn’t maintain a connection for more than a minute before I’d lose juice and switch over to battery. That sucked. I had planned to get some work done.
9. Deboarding in India was a breeze. They did a really nice job of getting us through everything very quickly.
10. My hotel room has two single beds. I’m traveling alone, so it’s fine, but I can’t remember the last time I slept in a single bed (not counting last night, of course).
11. My hotel has free wireless access. I say again, free wireless access. Wish hotels in the US would offer that.
12. Traffic in Bangalore is beyond insane. Quite.
13. Bangalore’s population is ~10 million. Evidently they were all driving to work this morning at the same time we were.
14. Bangalore appears to offer the same mish-mash of wealth and squalor you might see in any big city. The squalor is a bit more visible and maybe a bit more pronounced, but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
15. There’s more green (in the way of vegetation) here than I’d have imagined. And palm trees. I didn’t expect that.

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From time to time, I find the need to start Caffeine on my Mac, but my use is infrequent enough that it’s not something I like to keep open and available all the time. Invariably, once it’s running, I forget how to quit the application to get it off of my menu bar. It’s not an easy thing to Google so, for the sake of my own sanity, I give you:

1. Cmd+Click the menu bar icon (the coffee cup)
2. Select the Quit option

It’s a simple enough process, but I guess it’s just different enough from that of other menu bar icons that I can never seem to remember it.

Although I’ve stretched my response to the conversation I had with the folks from Wesabe over far more days – and by “days”, I mean “weeks” – than I’d intended, I wanted to touch on one other turn taken in the conversation that I’m fairly passionate about.

The topic, of course, is transparency. I’m a firm believer that transparency is, in general, a very good thing and engenders loyalty, trust and a lot of other positive feelings. It’s been my experience, as both a developer and a consumer, that organizations can make an awful lot of mistakes as long as they’re accountable for those mistakes and make them right.

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Being a long-time (and still part-time) Windows user, I’ve spent many a not-so-happy second typing the following:

> ipconfig /release
> ipconfig /renew

Today, though, I made a few changes to secure my network and needed to renew the DHCP lease of my Mac. Usually, I’m sitting in front of the laptop so I can just use the System Preferences GUI, but not today. Today I had to remote in so I only had the command line available and I realized that I had no idea how to map the Windows commands above to the Mac terminal. Mostly for the sake of posterity:

$ sudo ipconfig set en0 BOOTP
$ sudo ipconfig set en0 DHCP

In typical Unix fashion, there’s no output to indicate that succeeded or did anything at all, for that matter, but it seems to do the trick.

Oh please, please let this be true.

There are very few rules on microblogging platform Twitter. But if you use it for unsolicited “tweets” about male enhancement products, watch out: Twitter has started to shut down accounts that it has flagged as “spam,” reported blogger Jesse Stay.