Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life: category: USA
Smalltalk and my misinterpretations of life

• Home again..
  

  The longest leg of the trip. Not by design. From the time we left Canberra to the time my head hit a pillow in Tacoma it had been 30 hours. It was 36 hours from the time I left Seattle to the time I stepped foot in home on the way back.

  First things first: Fly direct, do not stop off in Auckland. On the way back we were hit with some terrible bad luck that had not happened to Auckland airport in 15 years. It fogged in so badly no one could land or take off. Mind you - at first it was only that no one could land and people happily took off.

  And that's where the trouble started. There were over 10 people on my flight, NZ5, that had a connecting flight NZ103 which had decided to leave without us in the fog. Wonderful...

  We spent about 3 hours on a military base east of Auckland stuck in the plane because the planes interior is still International space and they naturally couldn't fly out a customs official to bless a hanger or something.

  They then needed to fly out an engineer because the fuel pump at the military base wasn't designed for a 747. They had to wait for the fog to clear in Auckland before they could send him out.

  Once we finally got in to Auckland, we discovered chaos. No one was there to help fix up connecting flights. There was one flight leaving pretty much straight away that would have kept us on schedule - then another flight that would have put us only a bit behind.. then another. Time passed. We were waiting in the line that never moved.

  Some silver haired moron had managed to be up the front of that line for 45 minutes before we started getting really irate. Finally we got some answers by capturing a lady who we decided needed to experience some of our bad day.

  The answer: We were already moved to NZ105 which was going to take off at 3:30.. wonderful, why didn't they have anybody around finding us to tell us this and fix up our boarding passes etc?

  Answer: Go sit in terminal 2 until NZ105's crew arrives and the people at the gate will fix it up. Naturally, the lady at the gate denied that she was allowed to do this and found herself facing an angry mob of international accents.

  I suppose she got her own little chuckle, as she carefully took down the details of our luggage and promptly failed to make sure they were even on the plane. Yes, that's right - I'm down to my last few pairs of very old illfitting underpants right now. My luggage is out there somewhere being sat on by somebody who has trouble saying 'Six' correctly.

  When we finally arrived in Sydney we discovered (by walking to one end of the large airport) that Air Newzealand had -not- booked us on to a new connecting flight to Canberra. So we had to walk to the other end (of the large airport) to talk to Air New Zealand, who immediately weren't sure if they should be giving us what we wanted - a frellin' flight home.

  They yielded when they started to hear the strain in our voices. They managed to book us on a new Regional Express flight. They gave us a nice piece of paper. Off we trekked/shuttled to the domestic airport.

  More trouble, Regional Express had never seen such a piece of paper before and when they checked their computers they said "All is well, you just have to pay now".. which got a glare and gruffling noises from us. There was no way we were going to pay. Air New Zealand was definitely going to pay.

  It didn't take long to convince the Regional Express girl that this indeed was what was going to happen too. She tapped away filling out the rest of the important details that Air New Zealand failed to fill in, grumbling back at us that this was the worst booking she'd ever seen entered in to the system.

  Finally.. only about 5-6 hours late, we step on to Canberra soil. No bags, just what we had on us. Qantas is looking for our bags and will give us a call when they get them in to Canberra Airport. Here's hoping I don't have to start buying a whole new wardrobe (travel insurance covers this!)

  So anyway, I won't be flying Air New Zealand again.

• Smalltalk Solutions
  

  Well, Smalltalk Solutions is over now and I only have good things to say about the people I met. No body here was a nasty person - every body was really approachable and very easy to get along with. Sometimes it was hard to meet up with other busy people, such as Avi Bryant who did a Keynote and thus was a very popular person to be seen with :)

  I hope WithStyle went over well and we got a lot of good support from people I'd only ever talked to over IRC before. The list of those people is too long to remember and leaving people out may just insult them. So here's a big HI to every one I met - you know who you are :)

  We have tomorrow and half of friday left here in Seattle before we begin our long journey home. I'll be glad to get back home except that I know as soon as I get back there I'll be facing the barrage of failures from QA heh :)

  I know I feel a lot closer now to the people I met face to face than I did on IRC and perhaps I'll even think twice before telling them I think they're wrong :). The quality of speech here at StS this year was really high and I think you can take my little comments inside my blogging of the talks as an indication of how I thought.

  Two of the talks I went to I didn't record and I really wish I had. At least I blogged about them: SmalltalkDoc and BottomFeeder. I also have a sneaking suspicion that the recorder turned off during the Resilient keynote.

• Back to Seattle...
  

  Portland's 'downtown' as its called - which is the CBD in our lingo (Central Business District) is extremely clean - as clean as singapore is. We looked at Powell's bookstore while we were there too - big bookstore :)

  Skipping over Portland a fair bit.. the Oregon gorge is really nice. We went on the Oregon side and I recommend others do the same. There are lots of nice little waterfalls on the old highway instead of the main highway. The scouts were out camping at Rooster rock which was fun to see.

  The multnomah falls were great - quite tall and spectacular to look at. We went the hard way - we stopped at a smaller set of falls and did a 1 mile walk to the falls and back again.

  From there we went to Biggs and back in to Washington up to Yakima.

  Yakima's inn was the best yet! They had milk and cookies!!! Wowee! It was great. We went to a five star italian restuarant too which was good for our memories in Yakima.

  Today, from Yakima, we drove back to Seattle and met up with some Smalltalkers in the lobby of the Crowne. Both mine and Steve's credit cards managed to bounce on the full stay! ugh, how embarassing. I moved some more money in so hopefully I can sort it out.

  We went to dinner at a nice asian place - I've had that sort of food many times before in Canberra so it wasn't a huge culture shock or anything. Met lots of people today that I'd previously only heard about or talked to on IRC. Wym was great fun - he's from Belgium and we had many fun conversations over beer and wine. Sam is a real character and dominates the table with his conversations of test driven development. I called him the poster boy of test driven development. I hope to get some good 1-1 with him at this conference.

  .

  I'm staying up too late already and I've been drinking which is a big-nono when you're talking tomorrow. At least I'm talking at 2pm not 8am!

  Trying to remember some of the people I met. Another Belgium who's name was hard for me to remember let alone say. Brian Rice the slate guy. Rich Demers and Mark Roberts were a pair. Gorgio was a character and I look forward to more animated conversations with him. There's even a guy here who makes Liberty Basic and he's got the same sort of programming language interests as me. In short, I'm in smalltalk-geek heaven :)

  Tomorrow the conference starts in earnest... more to follow...

• Some nice Automatrons
  

  Here's two good ideas I'd like to take back to Australia. You can swipe your credit card at the airport to get your e-tickets. And at the shopping malls you do self-service paying as well. I'm not sure companies are trusting enough in Australia to do that one though :)

  The shopping places are interesting here. Instead of having a building with lots of stores in it and a grocery store - the whole building is the grocery store and there are several shops inside it. Nice inverse and more convenient too as you don't have to purchase your groceries to go to another store.

• More USA trip thus far...
  

  One thing of interest is how simila