Royal Bank online banking now provides an extra feature – the ability to see a breakdown of expenses by category. “Food, telephone, entertainment…” One category is notably excluded from the list, however – ‘Bank Fees’. It’s hidden in a grey pie-slice called ‘Other Expenses’. Nice.

“Executive Summary” articles are highly compressed versions of semi-important things that I’ve read.

The Mythical Man-Month : 3 – The Surgical Team

The Problem

• Teams, of course, should not be more than about 10 people.
• Certain employees are much better at producing code than others.
• How do we maintain the conceptual integrity of a single, well-architectured system if there are 10 people building it?

The Surgical Team

Instead of divvying tasks up equally amongst all team members, Brooks suggests a ’surgical team’ – with the bulk of the coding responsibility on one man, and the support tasks divvied out amongst the team members.

• The Surgeon: Designs the software, writes the software, writes the tests, and writes the documentation. He is a very busy man.
• The Co-Pilot: The pair-programming partner to The Surgeon, the Co-Pilot understands all of the code, and has more time to discuss it with the rest of the team.
• The Administrator: Handles money, people, space, and machines – everything non-technical. Can serve multiple teams.
• The Editor: The documentation produced by the surgeon is likely to be a bit technical, unclear, and ‘engineery’. The editor takes that documentation and polishes it like nobody’s business.
• The Secretary: For filing and typing and answering phones. This book was written in 1975, remember. Replace this today with The Bitch, a young and semi-useless fellow (co-op) used to fetch coffee, make appointments, fill out Sprint charts, test, fix minor bugs, and dance for the entertainment of others.
• The Program Clerk: The guy who runs batches. 1975. In the case of 2010, replace The Program Clerk with The Build Engineer – the guy who manages source control, constant-integration build/compile/test chains, and what-have-you. Can also serve multiple teams.
• The Toolsmith: When The Surgeon says “I need a library that does X” or “I need a tool that does X”, the toolsmith finds or builds it.
• The Tester: Writes tests. Executes tests. Manual tests. The tester wants to break the system.
• The Language Lawyer: One guy who knows the language/library/toolkit really, really well, for consultation & code review. Can serve multiple teams.

The Benefits

• The Surgeon is the single point of contact for any work on the code, making inter-team collaboration easier.
• If The Surgeon gets hit by a bus, The Co-Pilot can step in right away.

It took three days, but I’ve posted every last picture I took to flickr.

… which is an awful lot of pictures. Over a thousand. Far too many. Ridiculous, really. So I picked out my 137 favourite pictures and made them a separate set.

In the morning, we got up early so that we could visit the Uros Floating Islands.

We took bicycle-powered rickshaws to the harbor. They’re very cheap, and fun, if a bit slow. Some of them are equipped with loud radios. The rickshaw nearest to us was playing “Thriller” when we arrived at the harbor.

We boarded a standard boat – none of this ‘reeds and mud’ for us, this was a real boat, with two levels and seats.

Lake Titicaca is huge. Enormous. The name ‘Titicaca’ means ‘gray puma’ in Aymara, the local native language.

The Uros Floating Islands are man-made islands, made entirely out of reeds. Reeds upon reeds upon reeds. The Uros, as a people, have lived on these islands as fishermen for a very long time, trading excess fish for grains with local farmers. Now they live on the islands as combination fishermen/tourist attraction.

We sat in a circle on the island while our guide told us what she could about how the island was constructed and how the Uros culture operated.

We were briefly distracted – the island had a pet kitten, who was causing trouble by chasing a few young chickens around. The kitten was clearly still getting the hang of the uneven footing on the reed island.

Our island had maybe 13 families on it. We were each invited into huts by islanders. The islander I followed spoke fluent English, albeit very quietly. He had a university degree in tourism, and when his wife finished high school, she would study nursing. They had a small child and a solar powered television.

Kristen decided to support the local economy by using some of my money to purchase some expensive hand-made crafts. Seriously, I don’t know what we’re going to do with all of this hand-made pottery and knit wool when we get home. (Thanks to my intimate relationship with the ATM machines, I’ve been providing most of the scratch for this trip so far.)

We took a short trip on a reed boat, a short trip that took a very long time. The islanders have since converted to the much faster, much safer metal boats for fishing and chores, but they keep the reed boats around for tourists.

After the reed boat trip, we took a motorboat back to Puno. We had a slow lunch of fresh trout. Well, the lunch wasn’t that slow by South American standards, but my impatience with the speed of meals here is getting worse as I go along. The culture is different and meals out are very relaxed and very slow.

It was time to bus from Peru to Bolivia.

Bus bus bus.

At the Bolivian border, I exchanged my Nueva Soles to Bolivianos. Bolivianos are worth even less than Soles – about 7 Bolivianos to the dollar, as opposed to around 3 Soles to the dollar. My small amount of remaining Soles tripled into a much more significant amount of Bolivianos.

While Peru feels open, and democratic, and poor, Bolivia still has that lingering Millitary Junta feel to it, at least at borders and checkpoints. Men who look like General Medrano from the movie ‘Quantum of Solace’ stand at checkpoints in military uniforms. Palms must be greased to move through the country at any pace- fortunately, our Spanish-speaking tour guide knows his way around the whole process pretty well by now, and quietly and privately expedites the illicit deals.

We had our documents stamped and moved on to the city of Copacabana. Honestly, based on the name (and the fame of the name) I was expecting an expensive-but-posh resort town on the beaches of Lake Titicaca. What we ended up finding was Yet Another Little South American Town. No hot showers here, either.

The next day in Cuzco we stopped by a faux-English pub for their ‘full English breakfast’ – something that the many brits in our crew were lusting after. Eggs, bacon, toast, potatoes, baked beans, fried tomato, sausage, and tea. The bacon was a little off – Peruvian bacon, or “Tocino”, has a reddish hue and doesn’t quite crisp up the way that one would expect it to. The potatoes were more ‘fries’ than hashbrowns, and the sausage was the driest thing in the universe. The tea was imported from Britain, “PG Tips”, but it really didn’t hold a candle to my home-brewed loose-leaf Irish Breakfast tea. Maybe it was a proper English breakfast, but it was a far cry from a proper Canadian breakfast.

After breakfast, we visited a few museums – a museum of history and a museum of contemporary art.

The Historical museum was filled with the same-old-same-old pottery and rocks that we had been seeing for the entire trip. Okay, we get it, the Pre-Inca and Inca liked their pottery and rocks. The upstairs half of the museum was full of Spanish artwork – the only thing in the world more monotonous than pottery and rocks. At least the natives had a diverse pantheon of animal and earth gods. All of the Spanish artwork revolves around the same Jesus fellow looking progressively more beaten and battered, and then an army of apostles, martyrs, saints, friends, well-wishers, and miscellaneous. The one thing that the historical museum had that was impressive was the first and only piece of non-religious Spanish artwork that I’ve seen in Peru. With a placard saying that non-Catholic Spanish artwork was quite rare (so I’ve gathered.)

The Contemporary Art museum was … well, full of the sort of confusing, obfuscating art that Emily Carr types love to wank endlessly over. Canvas covered in blocks and squares and abstract imagery, yugh. Upstairs? A whole hallway of potato-themed art.

Yes, you heard me, potato-themed art. The art gallery doubled as a convention center, and they were having a potato convention. In order to get in on the potato goodness, the art gallery had put out dozens and dozens of potato-related artworks. Pictures of potato farmers holding their potatoes. Tasteful nudes with potatoes obscuring the naughty bits. Potato spirals. Paintings of potato farms. Potato potato potato.

We decided to eat lunch at a fancy restaurant. It was expensive, and slow, but pretty delicious. We shared tempura-battered shrimp, fish, and vegetables with a sweet-and-spicy chili dip. I had roast duck served with a port reduction and ‘asian greens’, and Kristen had braised alpaca with a sagey sauce. For dessert, I had a chocolate souffle, with some mango goo, that was… okay. It was soft and moist, but the flavor was lacking. Kristen’s dessert was more like a marshmallow that had been flattened and fried, and I could barely stomach it.

After the museums and lunch, a briefing – the itinerary for the upcoming Andean Community Trek, and a small sack to fill with travel essentials. We spent the rest of the day packing and preparing. Another early day, tomorrow.

I felt much better the next morning. We had breakfast with our homestay – potato pancakes and hard-boiled egg.

One thing about Peruvian cities, in general, is that dogs – domesticated dogs – tend to just wander around free.

We drove to Cuzco, a few hours. Cuzco is a tourist mecca. Everybody comes to see Machu Picchu, and everybody going to see Machu Picchu – via train, trail, or bus – has to stop at Cuzco.

On the way into Cuzco, we stopped at a Inca ruin – this one a grand gate that led into the city.

We arrived at the hotel around noonish, and it was time for showers. Oh yes, showers. Nothing like clean clothes and a shave.

We wandered out for lunch, and to explore some of the museums in the town. Cuzco has an impressive Plaza de Armas – not quite the same as Arequipa, but definitely impressive.

The Museo de Historical Something Something was the only museum open on Sundays. The rest closed early, and we missed them. This museum, however, was full of the Same Ol’ Same Ol’ – arrowheads, pottery, inca artifacts, and Spanish art featuring Captain Jesus and his Merry Men. Our trip has been packed full of these things, so nothing that new. There were only a few things in the museum that I had not yet seen – some weaponry (bolas, heavy maces, a sling) and a bit of non-religious Spanish art. Seriously, Spanish art has been so aggressively catholic in Peru for the past 400 years that the rare finds are the pieces that aren’t expousing some sort of divinity.

We just sat in a park for a bit, looking at the fountain and sitting in the shade.

My headache was coming back, in spades, so I stopped at a Botica (Pharmacy) and bought a couple of blister packets of Ibuprofen from a big, generic looking container with IBUPROFEN GENERICA written on it in Helvetica. My Spanish is terrible, but I can usually navigate most transactions given a few basic words. (“Please”, “Thank you”, “How much?”, numbers 1-10, 20, 30, 50, and 100, and “Check, please.” )

Later, we took off for dinner at a nice “Peruvian Fusion” restaurant. I had a quesadilla stuffed with sour cream, cheese, chives, tomatoes, guacamole, salsa fresca, and alpaca tenderloin meat, with some Chilean Sauvignon Blanc and a big glass of water. Kristen had a bacon cheeseburger. (For shame!)

We returned to the hotel room, and I finally got a crack at the internet! Currently describing the trip in painstaking detail – but it’s 12:35, so bed soon.

Tomorrow? A free day in Cuzco (and a little more internet), and then after that, our trek starts, and I go offline for some time.

We woke up the next morning. We were all chilly, and a layer of frost had settled on our tents.

It was time for more driving, this time on roads a little bit more paved.

We stopped at the little town of Raqchi. Most of the towns we’ve stopped in so far have been at least a little bit metropolitan – I mean, aside from dumpy ol’ Chivay. Raqchi, however, was a little rural town built next to an Inca ruin.

We were led on a quick tour through the ruin. It was apparently a vast food bank, selected thanks to the area’s natual water reserves and optimal microclimate.

We passed a fountain that poured water constantly, despite the fact that nobody knows exactly where the water comes from. Apparently the Inca were deft hydrological engineers.

After the ruins, we met our homestay families and walked to our individual farms. Me, Kristen, Lars (the Hollander) and Brendan (the Aussie) settled in and were served a delicious lunch of ‘miscellaneous vegetables in soup’ and ‘rice, pork, and potatoes’.

The family had three daughters, several chickens, a duck or two, a puppy, a dog, and a cat.

We loafed around a bit, then followed the family back into town for a pottery demonstration. We were allowed to watch them make pottery, so long as we bought some afterwards. It was a painstaking process, but one of the homestay women turned out a perfect little pot. One of the tour group members tried, and proudly turned out a sad, lumpy little pot.

We trudged back to the homestay’s farm. Long walks at high altitude are painful.

We took this opportunity to share a few gifts with our homestay. A Vancouver picture book, with words in Spanish. Some soaps. Canadian change. They seemed happy with the gifts, looking at the Vancouver cityscape and going ‘whooaaaah, wow!’ and the younger daughters fighting a little bit over the coins. (Brendan gave the two of them little stuffed Koallas, and the older daughter got a bigger one. You had better bet that created a bit of sibling unpleasantness.)

It was about here that my headache grew from ‘persistent and irritating’ to ‘nigh incapacitating’. I couldn’t eat dinner, or celebrate Pachamama with the rest of the revelers. I don’t even really know what Pachamama is, but I’m sure I missed it. Whatever it was, it involved dressing us all up in traditional Peruvian clothes and dancing in the city square? Kristen looked hilarious. I just sat in my bed, clutching at my head in agony until I fell asleep.

The thick wool blankets were really nice, though.