Viewing posts tagged travel
Arrived on time in Frankfurt and had a rough flight to Nürnberg. My blood pressure must have been at the lowest possible value, I was sweating cold, my stomach rebelled and I had to fight to remain conscious. The amplitude of the turbulences wasn't even that high, but the plane was shaking like a ship in a storm. After more or less fleeing from the plane after arrival I had to sit down for a couple of minutes in the baggage claim area to recover at least a bit. To my surprise, my luggage actually made it onto the plane from Denver and arrived with me in Nürnberg...
I spent the night at a Motel 6 north of SLC, which was quite cheap and clean. It has one disadvantage: it is next to a railroad line, and everyone who's been to the West knows what that means... Got up early, brought back the rental car (fortunately, they recognized that they had the wrong one of the two reservations, at least it was much cheaper than it would have been with the fee for the additional 9 days and they didn't say a thing.) My flight to Denver was posted to be delayed by one hour and fourty minutes, but the lady at the gate refused to book me on the next flight, as I would have one hour to reach my connection even with the delay. The flight actually started at 3:30 PM, thus even half an hour later, as they were waiting for some folks booked to the delayed flight, as they would not catch their connection in Denver as well. I suspect, however, that they wanted to fill the plane even more. I actually caught my connection to Frankfurt. The last minute, after sprinting through half of concourse B. Thank you, United Airline, for screwing up again. (And, honestly, thank you Lufthansa for waiting. I really appreciate the service.) Can someone recommend a US airline which does not suck?!
After getting up far too late, I drove to Vernal on Saturday morning. Many motels were already fully occupied, so I ended up in the local Days Inn.
So this was the last day of Brainshare. I watched the morning Keynote, which was quite a show. For drawing the winners of the ten custom-painted laptops they had the crew of the American Chopper show on stage, after showing a three-part spoof of the show during last week.
The last talk for this year, only seven people in the audience, but very interested ones. And that's much better than 70 bored listeners. The rest of the day, booth duty in the technology experts, and tonight: meet the experts. It was quite interesting to talk to various customers from all over the world. In the informal environment we got valuable feedback on our products we wouldn't get otherwise. And today they even had very good wine (additionally to the micro brew and that dreaded dishwater Americans call beer.)
No tutorials for me today, instead eight straight hours of booth duty. I did this voluntary, though. I get paid to work there, so I do. And in fact, it is quite interesting to talk to customers and partners about technology and their opinion about our products.
I held two tutorials today: the second session of the basic Linux troubleshooting tutorial, which went much better than the first one. Despite the early time (8:30, welcome to the midnight lecture!) about 80 people actually showed up, very few walking out, and I've got at least some questions in between. One participant "complained" that I put into one hour what took him two years to find out...
My first tutorial didn't go too bad, but it wasn't a roaring success, either. Not even half of the people who registered were showing up, some folks left during the presentation (which is quite normal, though.) I've never had such a silent audience, there was no reaction on the few jokes. Not even bad reaction. But I had a couple of listeners coming up to the table afterwards, asking some questions. The second session of this talk will be tomorrow at 8:30, and I'll have another tutorial on IPv6 tomorrow and on Thursday.