I go back to Hamburg next week! Unsurprisingly, my time there will be dominated by business concerns, but I'll still have this Sunday and next Saturday for wandering around.
Conveniently, I get to leave for Hamburg from Orange County's own John Wayne Airport: flying from Orange County to Newark, New Jersey, and then from Newark to Hamburg. Unfortunately, my trip back has a six-hour layover in Newark — I looked at making a quick run into Manhattan, but with the train ride costing $14.00 each way, I'm not sure that pencils out. (And what do I do with my carryon luggage? Do airports even have luggage lockers anymore?) Either way, between my laptop, my iPod, and my books (Amazon just delivered China Mieville's Iron Council, Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, and Douglas Coupland's All Families Are Psychotic — the last one is more Shelby's choice, but I enjoyed Microserfs), I'm sure that I'll be able to handle whatever opportunities for boredom that intercontinental travel chooses to throw at me.
In September, I'll be travelling all the way to exotic . . . Los Angeles! I'll be attending Microsoft's Professional Developers' Conference at the LA Convention Center. Given the price of the conference and its full plate of activities (a couple of days have an agenda running from 7:30 AM to midnight), I was able to convince my superiors to spring for a hotel room in downtown LA, rather than my getting up at the crack of dawn to fight my way through SoCal traffic and then dozing through the conference sessions.
The PDC should be interesting; I'm not sure how useful it will be, though. Other Microsoft events I've been to in the past (and Apple's Worldwide Developers' Conference, as well) are full of a lot of cheerleading over Future Attractions: just you wait until [the next release of our operating system] comes out! It has [technology X]! And also [technology Y]! [Apple or Microsoft, depending] can't even hope to do this with their OS!
. . . the problem being that, since we're a cross-platform product, often it doesn't matter how cool Technology X or Technology Y are — if it isn't supported on the other platform (and it really is so groundbreaking or fundamental that we can't easily port the functionality), then it may not be worth our while to pick up. Or we may be slavering to roll Technology X into our product — but if it's only supported on Windows Vista or MacOS 10.4, and we've got a customer base that's never upgraded from Windows 2000 and MacOS 10.2, well ...
Posted by Kevin at August 16, 2005 12:50 PM