Dan York

Heading To Singapore for ICANN 52

I'm sitting in Newark airport (EWR) right now in the midst of a 5-hour layover waiting for a United flight that will take me to the other side of the world... quite literally! UA 179 flies directly from Newark to Hong Kong... for 16 hours in the air!

After that I'll have another 4 hours of travel time from Hong Kong down to Singapore... getting me in there about 1:40am Sunday morning, February 8, 2015.

With the funky aspects of timezones, I will be losing "Saturday" almost completely except for the hour or so I will be on the ground in Hong Kong.

Here is what the flight looks like on the Great Circle Mapper, complete with my return trip back through Tokyo:

(With the usual non-intuitive notion (to me) that we are flying north over the North Pole to get to the other side of the planet. My brain always thinks I should fly west... but north is actually shorter.)

I'm off to Singapore for the 52nd meeting of the Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers, better known as "ICANN". ICANN is the nonprofit organization that oversees the world of domain names and the Domain Name System(DNS) and I have a specific interest in how we secure the DNS. I'll be there primarily for a series of activities related to DNSSEC that I describe here:

• Many DNSSEC and DANE Activities At ICANN52 Next Week In Singapore

There are a great number of other activities happening there, too, and one of my colleagues outlined some of the items related to public-policy:

• Return to Singapore: From chili crabs to names, numbers and protocol parameters

I will of course be monitoring those issues as well. I expect to be doing some writing from Singapore for multiple sites... and probably some video and audio as well.

I've had the privilege of being able to visit Singapore twice before and have been impressed by what a beautiful city it is. I took some photos on my first trip there that I posted to a set on Flickr:

You'll notice how the grove of "supertrees" captured my attention. Here's one of my favorite photos from that set:

The supertree grove is a rather surreal (and unreal) place to visit - definitely worth seeing! I don't know if I'll be able to get there on this trip... my schedule is extremely packed... but we'll see.

It should be a good week.

P.S. And talk about temperature changes... it was -10F (-23C) when I left Keene, NH, this morning and it will be near 88F (30C) during the day in Singapore!

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I recorded an audio commentary about this trip:

We Don't Know How Much Time We Have Left

We don't know how much time we have left in our lives. We don't know when the lives of those around us may end.

It could be today.

It could be tomorrow.

It could be twenty years from now.

It could be in some dramatic fashion such as an explosion or an airplane crash.

Or it could be in some more mundane way like slipping on ice and hitting one's head... or being in a car accident... or being hit by a car while crossing a street... or just... simply... having... one's... heart... s..t..o..p.....

We don't know.

We will never know.

Until the time runs out... and a life is gone.

At which point... it's too late to say all those things we wish we would have said.

It's too late for that extra "I love you" that you wish you could have said, or the hug you wish you would have given.

It's too late.

We need to realize that each day could be our last... or could be the last of those around us.

What do we want those last memories of us to be?

Do we want people to remember us as kind and helpful? Or mean and angry? Or somewhere in between?

Do we want the last words people heard from us to be ones of anger? Or dismissal? or hatred? Or do we want them to be words of love and kindness?

Do we want to live our life regretting that we didn't tell someone how much they meant to us before they passed on? Or regretting that the last words they heard from us where those in anger?

In our every action, we choose whether to build people up... or tear people down. It's our choice.

We don't know how much time we have left. We don't know when the lives of those around us may end.

We will never know.

Image credit: elycefeliz on Flickr