Still going after all these years.
Sitting in BWI after a blitzkrieg business trip. I flew in yesterday evening after two intense days spent preparing for a surprise demo that ultimately ended up going poorly, then left our site near the Delaware border and hauled butt back to BWI.
Ah well. At least we got to have dinner at Phillips last night.
… is how I felt the last few days, thanks to a surprise gastrointestinal upset that hit about 4:30 am on Wednesday morning. Fortunately the convention floor was already closed and I didn’t have to do booth duty—which would have been very difficult, since the exhibit hall was a good long hike from the men’s room.
I was fortunately able to change my flight, which had been scheduled as a red eye with a connection through Long Beach, and got home in time to get a reasonable night’s sleep. I’m starting to be able to keep fluids down too. I guess what they say about men being the worst patients is true; I want to stand up and cheer that I’m not visiting the bathroom every half hour. “Yay me! Fluids aren’t passing right through me!” What do you want? A cookie?
I think my Vegas experience (outside the business aspects) is summed up, so far, by the following experience that happened as I was checking in at about 1:30 this morning:
My colleague and I leave the check-in counter and begin the long trek toward the elevators (which, as in any good Vegas hotel, takes us right through the middle of the casino). Even after the long day, I am taken aback to see in the middle of our path two young women—girls, really—wearing fishnet stockings, tiny leather bikini bottoms … and honestly I don’t know what else, because I was too busy turning to my colleague and saying, “Only in Vegas…”
“Are you lookin’ at my daughter???” comes a female voice to my right. I turn and there’s a couple, probably not old enough to be the girls’s parents (but you never know). Actually the parents? Pulling my leg? Hard to tell. Playing safe, I reply, “Excuse me?”
“You lookin’ at my daughter?” comes the reply. She’s making eye contact and not smiling. The last thing I want to do is get a beat-down before the conference starts, in the lobby of the most expensive hotel in Vegas.
“Ma’am,” I reply, “I’m trying awfully hard not to.” And we keep on walking for the elevator.
If my luck were any worse, or if I were a Wil Wheaton calibre storyteller, the offended mother would have attacked me there. Fortunately I moved on without incident and the rest of the day went OK.
Well, I was scheduled to fly out this morning at oh dark thirty. Alas, fate, in the form of the almost Blizzard of 2006 (we aren’t quite up to 35 mph sustained winds), intervened. My first flight was cancelled late last night, and I rescheduled to a 3:55 flight this afternoon. At noon after blowing the snow off the driveway, I came in to learn that that flight was cancelled too. I am now on the last flight out to Las Vegas, and am hoping that the snow slackens enough in the next three hours to let me get out of here.
It surprises me a little that the worst travel experience I had in the last week might just be the drive into work. It took about 2 hours to make a 40 minute drive from our place in Arlington into the office, thanks to a snowstorm whose peak activity was during the morning rush hour and which is still continuing, albeit less fiercely, now. (Confidential to Mother Nature: Yes, you have a sense of humor, we get it. Now knock it off.)
The day at Ft. Lauderdale was constructive and the flight home uneventful. I’m awfully glad to be back in one piece now, and to have enough leisure to finish submitting my expenses.
—Speaking of which, am I the last person to figure out that you can go with an e-ticket number directly to an airline’s website and it will provide a printable receipt? I went through a fair amount of hell reconstructing my final receipts from credit card statements when I went to Germany last fall; it appears that on at least one airline, Northwest, the process can be much simmpler.
It’s nice to kind of be back in the US. My VP of sales and I are in the Summer Shack in Logan’s Terminal A, after a fun day of travel that included the following:
Next stop: Ft. Lauderdale and a sales call tomorrow morning. Ah well. As the Beasties said, No sleep till Brooklyn.
Until I get back into a normal updating routine, I leave you with this thought: the prospect of an evening of fine ulcer inducing cuisine at Hell Night at the East Coast Grill is a lot more attractive after a week of Austrian food. Even fine Austrian food. We were planning to go last fall but couldn’t get a reservation, so we’ll be there next Wednesday. Looking forward to seeing a bunch of friends and any random Boston bloggers who might be in the house.
We’ve been working pretty hard here the last couple of days, so no real time to write and reflect. This morning, though, most of my team took advantage of a little extra recuperation time, so I sat in a quiet corner of the hotel lounge, taking advantage of the wireless LAN, drinking coffee and watching the snow come down. It was incredibly peaceful here at the Waldklause.
Our hosts have been determined to share with us many traditional Tirolese experiences. Last night, that included driving in a four-wheel-drive vehicle up a steep and winding icy road with many switchbacks to a small inn, taking dinner in a cozy wood-paneled room, and, after much trepidation and building of courage, donning miner’s headlamps, hopping atop wooden sleds, and rocketing back down the road. This is called “bobbing,” and while the sleds weren’t really the traditional bobsleds, they felt as though they were going about as fast. I acquitted myself well, being the second of the five Americans down the hill. But it was after midnight by the time the sleds stopped at the bottom of the hill.
The most interesting moment of the evening, though, was a powerful Proustian moment I had just after stepping inside the lodge. The faint aroma of sauerkraut permeated the air, and I was back for a minute in my grandmother’s kitchen. We sat down to dinner, which was to be served family-style with no menu, and my seatmate wondered what the meal was to be. “Well, we at least know there will be sauerkraut,” I said. My tablemates were astonished; none of them had smelled anything, and they poked fun at my specificity—“Not rotkraut? Only sauerkraut.” To my delight, it was sauerkraut, and really good too, with a plate of ribs and potatoes. “To give you extra weight going downhill,” my neighbor said. Um. It was good, but after last night I need no additional help to slide down hills at top speed.
Day one of this trip, since it turned out to have the best weather, was our outdoor fun day, and we spent it at Sölden on the slopes. I skiied longer and faster than I ever have, starting about ten in the morning and wrapping up at 4 pm with a final ski down to the parking lot on icy narrow trails in the fading light. Keeping up with our company’s regional VP of sales was a challenge, as he skis about as fast as he drives on the Autobahn, but I managed it.
In the process, I learned a few things. Like: you can stretch your legs longer and further and work your body harder than you think. And: your muscles may still beat you up in the morning, but at least you’ll be able to remember that you went skiing in the Austrian Alps at a height of between 2000 and 3100 meters with a bunch of crazy Germans, and you only fell twice. Not bad for less than three years since I started skiing in earnest, especially considering I didn’t get to the slopes at all the winter of 2004–2005.
And alas, I mean in the airport, not the city. After an hour and a half my coworkers and I have exhausted the (admittedly impressive) shopping and entertainment options, including an outpost of the Rijksmuseum, and are parked on benches awaiting our next flight, which takes off five hours from now.
I’ll have to see if I can find the art installation that turns up as the top result for killing time schiphol airport. It sounds like about the most interesting thing going right now.
Conference season is starting early for 2006. I’ll be at the grandly named Pink Elephant 10th Annual IT Service Management Conference and Exhibition in mid-February at the Bellagio, the hotel famous for inclusion in Ocean’s Eleven and for its masses of art glass by Dale Chihuly.
Looks like I won’t be the only Sloan person in attendance, either: Professor Ralph Katz, a research associate at Sloan (and a professor at Northeastern) will be speaking in the IT Business School track about managing innovation during uncertain times. If you feel like talking a little business at the show, or just quoting lines from O11 at me, I’ll be on the exhibit floor.
Sometimes I wonder: how much time and money does United waste moving passengers between flights that are delayed, then ultimately cancelled?
Context: I arrived at Logan this morning for an 11:55 flight. I attempted to check in at the self service queue, but the computer indicated they weren’t taking any check-ins at the current time. I asked around and found out that the flight had an equipment problem and wasn’t taking off; my travel agency informed me that it would cost over three times the cost of the existing reservation to change my flight to a different airline.
So I waited in line, and they booked me onto another flight that was to have been leaving earlier but that was also delayed, and said I would make my original connection. Sounds good, right?
Not so good, as it turns out. Now the new flight has an equipment problem, and they’re cancelling it and moving everyone… to the flight I was originally supposed to be on in the first place.
In the Wishful Thinking department: they put me in a business class seat on the new flight. I’d say the odds of my keeping that seat on the new flight are slim to none, but maybe there’s a chance. Heh.
Pictures from the train ride last Sunday. Every time I take the train down to see my in-laws, I think, “I should have brought my camera.” This time I did, and took mostly very blurry photos of things passing by outside. But I got a few good ones, I think.
The leaves haven’t quite turned on our street, or much of anywhere; the weather has been too weird for autumn to do its magic. But fortunately there was a bit of good foliage along the way.
I did think that the regional train left something to be desired compared to the Acela in terms of comfort, but it got me there on time.
In the light of day, the Gaylord Palms looks like the sort of resort that makes you say, “Now I know what Disney’s contractors do on their days off from the Magic Kingdom.” The central atrium has a kind of Disneyfied view of Florida architecture, from a mock Everglades to a faux spanish castle to multiple fake Mission-style buildings. Not to mention the alligators. It’s all very theme park and all very subtly wrong. Gibson’s Cayce would convulse in a massive allergic reaction to all the not-quite-reality.
The show floor is about 80° and humid. If that doesn’t get better by the time the day is over, I’m going to be dripping wet. That makes for an attractive sales experience.
I’ll be in Orlando for a few days for the Help Desk Institute IT Infrastructure Management conference. Drop me a line if you’ll be in the vicinity, or just come by the iETSolutions booth, where my feet will be nailed for a few days.
Just realized I never posted anything about Oktoberfest. Probably because of lack of sleep—coupled with my dead laptop (which is now completely resurrected, btw). Or because on the first day of Oktoberfest, I almost couldn’t get a beer.
It was wet. In the morning, anyway. My German coworker Peter, bless him, hopped straight off his red-eye back from Boston and came with his wife to our hotel to take us over. And it was pouring. Have I mentioned that?
Anyway. Oktoberfest, which originated as a wedding feast, has grown into something halfway between a themepark and a kegger. On steroids. Walking into the southeast entrance, the biggest thing you notice are the rides—roller coaster, Ferris wheel, haunted tunnel. Which, I think, would be a big mistake after a bellyful of Bavarian cuisine and a couple Mas (the menu word for one-liter mugs of Märzen). I’m imagining staying away from the base of the Ferris wheel is a really good idea.
And the funniest part was, I didn’t even think I was going to be able to get a beer. Even with twelve beer halls there. Each of them had outdoor seating for extra capacity—none of which could be opened with the pouring rain. So all the halls were full to the brim. We finally got into one, the Paulaner hall, where I snapped a few shots, including the one here of the beerfrauën waiting to pick up their mugs. (My coworker’s wife, Beata, says that the number of beers that they can hold at one time ranges from eight to 12—depending on cup size. The size of the beers is always one liter; it’s apparently the size of the server’s anatomy that is the deciding factor.)
We went away and took in the sights of Munich, returning later after the rain had stopped. By this time my coworker Peter was jetlagged hard, so we sent him and Beata home and explored on our own—and found a free table outside the Paulaner tent.
You know what? Those big 1 liter beers, for about €4.50 each, were worth every cent.
—A note on the photos: this set was taken with my new phone. 1.3 megapixels—respectable but not ideal, so forgive the fuzziness.