Category: Diary (Page 6 of 38)

The TV in the hotel room woke us up at 6:30 am, which was what we’d told it to do the night before, so I give it full marks there.

I groaned as I got out of bed. My arms and shoulders ached, my bum throbbed, and the backs of my thighs protested. The last time I went go-karting must have been years and years ago, with the Cornerstone guys, and I think Josh and Derek were there too. Well, I remember being sore afterwards then too.

I showered and went down for a last breakfast before coming back up to the 4th floor to pack away my pajamas and and toiletries. We came down to the lobby with our baggage and checked out. We’d ordered a taxi for 8:00 am. The lobby was full of kids. They appeared to be several sports team from England, or something like that.  They weren’t all wrestlers! Some of them must have been. But we found our taxi OK shortly after they started filing out to their bus.

On the way to the airport we saw some wonderful images alongside the river, with mist hovering over the water and the rising sun lighting up some old brick buildings. I wished I hadn’t packed my camera. Our taxi driver knew the best way to go and we were soon at the terminal.

Before we could check in we had to go through an interrogation by a U.S. immigration official. This was fairly serious stuff: She started out straightforwardly, asking what our reasons for travelling were, etc, but before long she was asking for evidence of the conference and did I have a business card, and other questions that I don’t remember now but at the time I felt like every answer I gave was incorrect. By the end of it we were both pretty nervous, and L had our marriage certificate handy in case we needed it.  Finally it was over and we were allowed to approach the check-in desk.

We wondered later if our varied forms of travel and ports of entry – along with our two passport nationalities – had made us stand out as worthy of inspection.

Our flight was due to leave at 11:10 am but when we got to the gate it was all shut up and we had to wait. People arrived at a steady rate and soon they opened the gate, we queued up, showed our boarding passes and then we could go through the glass fence and sit down. We looked for a handy power point to top up our laptops but decided that it wasn’t worth it.

We left Frankfurt airport in bright sunshine and clear skies and headed West. As we crossed over the Channel I looked for the “white cliffs of Dover” but I couldn’t see anything that might be them. I did notice that we appeared to be going to fly right up the Thames Estuary and over central London. And shortly, we were. I looked intently for some landmarks. “I’ll orient myself later by that big white round thing…” I thought, under the impression that I wouldn’t be able to make out any real detail. And then I realised that the big white round thing was the Millenium Dome… and then everything snapped into focus and I realised what I was looking at.

I saw Westminster Bridge and Big Ben, where we had stood with Mitchell on the first evening. There was the commons, where that guy was protesting…

Westminster Abbey, looking spiky, and Victoria Street which led back to the train station…

And there was St James Park, and the Birdcage walk, and Buckingham Palace!

And then, unmistakably, Hyde Park, with the curly Serpentine and Kensington Gardens with the Round Pond. And… was that the Albert Memorial?

But it was drifting steadily behind us and my eyes were watering and I couldn’t recognize anything anymore. England slipped behind us as the aircraft flew Westward over the Atlantic Ocean. I dozed and read more of my book. There may have been a meal of some sort. I kept looking out my window and eventually there was something there – a very distinctive land formation that we couldn’t figure out from the map in the back of the airline magazine:

(Later we determined that it was Cape Cod Bay and that we were heading South-West, about to fly over Boston.) A little bit later I was sure I recognised Long Island and sure enough, eventually Manhattan slid past our window in the distance. I couldn’t make out any particular building.

It was another couple of hours before we landed at Atlanta. I wish I could say that our connection was uneventful but it wasn’t. For a start I messed up the customs form and we got “picked” to be interviewed. We thought our bags were going to be searched but instead we had a *very* casual conversation with a security guy who was very interested in the fact that we were computer software people and eventually he waved us through without further inconvenience on our part. Lucky us I think. Except that then we had to go through security which was just horrible, just the worst ever. Shoes off, belts off, laptops out, and L got the PCMCIA eject lever on her laptop bent as she tried to get it back into the bag. We changed over our remaining Euros into a scarily depleted number of dollars and scrambled to find our connection flight.

I don’t remember much about the flight from Atlanta to Vegas but obviously we arrived safely. It was only two weeks since we’d left but it felt like a month. The drive home was uneventful, and the house, when we arrived, was peaceful. We’d have to change that: we’d pick the cats up from Creature Comforts tomorrow. We’d deliberately arranged to take the day off from work because we knew we’d need a day to recover.

Saturday was free of sessions but packed with entertainment that R had organised for the speakers. First up was Go-Karting. After brunch we all piled into a bus and drove off to a warehouse somewhere in Frankfurt, where an indoor go-karting track was located. We had a great time, with two trial races to settle the final line-up, then followed by a “real” race. I did ok. [Update: Apparently the most-used muscle in go-kart racing is the Gluteus Maximus. I kid you not. Very sore the next day!]

Back to the hotel for a freshening up, then into the bus again, for a trip out to the airport, where the Boeing Simulators are. Heh. They’re pretty good. You get to dress up in white overalls and booties like the Intel Engineers, then climb aboard a replica of one of several different kinds of aircraft. We got the 747. We sat up in the business class and enjoyed the experiences of losing cabin pressure; aborting take-off; a forced water landing; and exiting the craft via the giant inflatable slides. They are fast slides. You can burn your hands from friction which is one reason why the information cards tell you to cross your arms across your chest when you jump out.

On the way back from the airport the sun went down. I snapped a picture out of our hotel window, a simple shot of the Frankfurt skyline, looking away from the city.

That evening we were all invited to a wonderful dinner hosted by Hans and Gaby Lochmann. This is a regular conference event, apparently, but the first time I’d been there. Wow. It was also the first time I’d ever eaten roast goose, red cabbage, and some exquisite fluffy potato dumplings. Divine eating and wonderful hosts. Thank you!

Repacking everything acquired on this trip wasn’t such a big deal as we thought it might be. Thanks to L’s skills and the Amazing Expanding Bag, everything fit.

This was our second day of presenting material to people who were probably expecting something different. I think we presented the material as well as we have ever done. The attendees were a different group of people, but again I think they had the same expectations as those who came to our Tuesdays sessions. Some got it, some didn’t. We did our best.

This evening R held the Speaker Dinner at the back of the restaurant. Yummy food. And ice sculptures.

I found out today that filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was killed in Amsterdam a few days ago. [Update – I wasn’t sure of the exact date – seems it was November 2 when we were still in London.] He made a film that cast Islam in a somewhat negative light – or at least was interpreted to be doing so – and had been receiving death threats for some time. I only mention this because I read in the news report that 5.5% of the population of the Netherlands are Muslim. I do remember seeing a fair number of people walking around Arnhem in traditional middle-eastern dress, and although it didn’t occur to me at the time, on reflection this does make sense.

We managed to catch a few more sessions today. Rick Strahl in particular is always fun to see.

No sessions to present today. We probably should have gone to some sessions by other people, but instead, we rested and worked on some outstanding bugs.

In the afternoon I did venture out of our room and checked out a couple of sessions.

We had almost a full day of sessions to give today, starting at 10:00 am and finishing up at 5:30 pm, with regular breaks of course. Then L had an extra bonus evening session after dinner, which I contributed to, a little.

Despite the flood of new information we delivered, I think most of the attendees understood where we were going with it and appreciated it. But I’ll be the first to admit that it would have been a hard slog.

When news first leaked out about major revisions to Visual FoxPro’s reporting system in version 9.0, I think everyone had their own expectation of what that might be. Well, today we presented the reality of the new reporting system, and almost inevitably, there was going to be some disappointment. This really put us at a disadvantage. It was very obvious after 10 minutes or so into each session that a portion of the audience were thinking, “but this isn’t what we expected…”

Luckily, I think the rest of the attendees made up for it – there was always someone in the audience nodding and smiling every time they realised what they could now do that they couldn’t do before.

Still – it was hard work.

We had time for a leisurely breakfast before having to check out and catch our train to Frankfurt. When we tried to settle up at reception with Traveller’s Cheques, they informed us that they could not accept them. I see a definite pattern here…

The train station was across the road from the hotel, so it took almost no time at all to lug our bags across and sit in the cafe at the station for a while, drinking my second coffee of the day in my case.

Several trains pulled up at our platform, including some double-decker carriages. I’d never seen anything like that before. I wondered if our train would be like those, but as luck would have it, it wasn’t. The ICE high-speed train just had plain ordinary single-story carriages. Car 23 was somewhere near the middle of the train. We stashed our bags in the above the seat racks and found some seats. Shortly afterwards, the train pulled away from the station and we concentrated on watching the Dutch countryside.

It’s hard to take pictures on the train. Just as I was positioning and focusing, a tree in the foreground would whip by and mess up the shot. I can’t help but feel that if I were more proficient with pre-setting suitable f.stop and aperture settings, I’d get more acceptable photos under these extreme conditions.

I saw only one old-style windmill, but I was unable to snap it in time. “No worries”, I thought, “there’s bound to be others.” There never was. There were many turbine-style ones though. After about an hour I tired of taking pictures and just watched the scenery go by.

I have no idea when we crossed the border into Germany, but looking at the route it must have been fairly immediate. We went through Duisburg, Dusseldorg, Koln, Bonn… In total it was about a three hour journey, with the surroundings slowly becoming more industrial in nature.

Eventually we arrived at Frankfurt.

We waddled down the platform and found the taxi stand and thrust a piece of paper with the name of the hotel written down on it so that we wouldn’t literally get lost in translation. The taxi driver took some back roads but eventually we found some familiar landmarks and we pulled up at the Lindner Congress Hotel. I remembered it from my last visit in 1998.

We checked in, went up to our room, and collapsed. Later on we joined the conference organizer, R, for a very pleasant dinner in the hotel restaurant.

It’s Sunday, and breakfast is available a little later than on other days, but still we woke up at the usual time, got dressed, and went down. I found the milk this time – it’s over the other side from the coffee, with the fruit juices.

We had no specific plans for the day, but at 4:00 pm we expected to be met by B who had invited us to come back with him to his house for dinner to meet his wife E and their 5 (?) cats. But that was some time away, and instead of going out and walking around the town as we had planned, I crawled back into bed and went back to sleep for 4 hours. This was unexpected, but I have learned that jet lag is not to be disregarded – at least if you are me. I would have expected this to hit me several days ago, but it seemed like it out-waited me and hit me on day 5 instead. I knew it was bad; I knew I consequently wouldn’t be able to sleep well that evening, but I can never resist the ‘lag unless I absolutely have to.

B meet us downstairs at the arranged time and we walked to the bus stop to catch a bus to his house. I have to remember to carry my camera everywhere because the number of times I see stuff and realize that I don’t have my camera with me are countless.  This time, fortunately, I was prepared. The light was fading as the sun hid behind the cloud in the West, but I kept seeing things I wanted to take pictures of. L pointed out this image on her side of the bus – I leaned over and did my best to capture it.

We had a great time with B and E in their house, being introduced to their cats and E’s artwork.  And B’s cooking! And not talking about work for a change.

Much later, B walked us back to the bus stop and we caught a bus back to the hotel. For reasons I still don’t understand, it cost exactly twice as much to go the same distance but in the opposite direction.

As we got into bed, I didn’t feel sleepy at all, but somehow managed to doze off. At 4:00 am I woke up, completely awake. Arghh.

I don’t know what it is about the Dutch. They live in a country famous for its butter and cream, yet the hotel restaurant supplied only condensed milk as a coffee creamer. Where was the milk? I could not find it.

After a quick breakfast, we waited downstairs in the lobby to wait for B and S to collected us. Well… we waited a bit longer than we expected because they got a flat tire! It was hard not to doze off while waiting. I’m not used to a big breakfast, but it was all so tasty…

Eventually they showed up and we drove down to the place where the VfpSig.nl user group was due to assemble. It was a nice long room with a desk and two long parallel tables with chairs at which the group members arranged themselves. We had a little LCD projector which worked fine after a little tweaking and setting up, and then we just got stuck into our sessions due to the late start.

The sessions went well. I’ll say it again here: Thanks guys for putting up with a large amount of new material (some of it new to us, in that we hadn’t presented it before), and for allowing us to go later than planned, even though this meant missing out on some hands-on time that was on the schedule. Thanks to B for organizing it and for doing so much to make everything work out.

Several members of the group took us out to dinner at a place called Restaurant Falstaff just down the road from the hotel. It was very crowded (quite a small room really) but truly wonderful food. I chose grilled smoked salmon. It was fantastic. I’m definitely eating too much. So far I still fit my pants though.

Our British Midland Airways flight to Amsterdam was due to leave from Heathrow at 4:20 pm, so after breakfast, checking out, and leaving our bags downstairs with the nice gentlemen at reception, M, L and I wandered out for a last walk up Warwick Way and, in my case, a last Latte and almond croissant at Cafe Nerd. Sorry, *Nero*.

I had an ulterior motive, which was to use the Cafe’s wireless access point to get online and retrieve email, which had presumably been piling up for the last few days. No go. Couldn’t get online. Oh well.

Originally we were planning on catching a train or bus to Heathrow, but as M pointed out, he was driving back to Southampton and Heathrow is practically “on the way” so we’d let him win the argument and agreed that he could drop us at the terminal. Such a nice guy.

We had plenty of time so he took the scenic route around the Chelsea Embankment – I think. I had packed the map away by this time so really I’ve no idea which way he went except that we had a good view of the Thames for a while.

We said our goodbyes to M and wished him a safe drive back to Southampton, and waddled into the terminal with our bags. We’re way too early for our flight to be able to check our bags, but what the heck. We sat for a bit, taking turns to wander around the terminal.

Once our bags were checked and we’d gone through security to the other side, we spent some Brit money on presents for J and A, then approached the TravelEx desk to see if we could get some Euros. Well, they took our pounds and pence but wouldn’t accept our Travelers Cheques. Grr. We used some more of our supply of $US cash to get Euros.

Our boarding pass said we needed to be at the gate by 3:45 pm and it was getting pretty close to that and our departure gate still hadn’t come up on the board. We clutched our bags and watched the board, and as soon as the flight came up, we looked at the gate (40) , then at the sign that indicated how long it would take to walk to the various gates – we needed 15 minutes! We did it in 10. I think 15 was the pessimistic estimate. Once at the gate, we ended up sitting around for a bit. The gate was empty. Apparently, 3:45 pm didn’t mean anything serious. We weren’t the only ones who thought we were late… shortly after we settled down, a guy came sprinting up the corridor thinking he was too late to get on to the plane.

More people arrived at a more leisurely pace, including what could have been an entire soccer team but the paunchy physique on some of them, and the sheepish look of one of them convinced us that they were, in fact, a stag party. Going to Amsterdam. Yup, my money’s on that.

The flight was short, the airline food quite possibly the worst ever, and if I’d known the drinks and cocktails were free I would have indulged. Free cocktails on a 1 hour cheap flight to Amsterdam? We wouldn’t have guessed.

We were met on the other side by our host B. He had already met up with S from Yorkshire who had come in for the conference earlier on a different flight. L managed to identify them despite the fact that we’d never actually met in the flesh before.

The drive to Arnhem took about 1.5 hours. I watched the stars through the window. The Pole star is much higher towards the zenith here. And it is Autumn so perhaps this was exaggerated.

B made sure we are comfortably checked in to the Hotel Haarhuis, then after dropping our bags in our room we went down for a late dinner in the hotel restaurant. I don’t know if I was very hungry, very tired, or both, but it was a fantastic meal. We were well looked after by a talkative, cheery hostess who commiserated with us for having to eat British cooking for the last few days. Hey, it wasn’t that bad!

…I’m eating too much and we aren’t even in Frankfurt yet.