I finally arrived in Pisa on Thursday evening. My rescheduled flight was supposed to arrive around lunch time but when we got to Pisa there was a storm. It looked really beautiful above the storm but the propeller plane was not able to fly into it. This meant that the flight was diverted to Genova and after a lot of chaos I ended up on a bus to Pisa. Surprisingly I had met up with some friends on the flight so the whole thing felt more like an adventure than a disaster. I had also come to terms with the fact that I was going to miss the second day of the conference and ended up quite enjoying the drive along the coast.
I was a bit bedraggled when I arrived at the conference venue. The lightning talks were about to start but I decided that a shower was a much better idea. Once I was finally wearing clean clothes I ventured out to catch-up with some people. There is no doubt that I enjoy the social aspects of the conference. There are so many fascinating people to chat to in the Perl community that the part of my brain that was still alive at 2am was buzzing with thoughts when I finally went to bed. It was not the best start I have ever had to a conference but at least I ended the day smiling and looking forward to the next day.
. . .I’m fairly fed-up tonight. Instead of being at Pisa for YAPC::EU I’m in a hotel at Munich airport. My plane from London was delayed and I couldn’t get a flight out tonight. The airline staff did try to find a way to fly me somewhere close to Pisa so that I could have gotten a bus or taxi but it wasn’t possible.
As it was the airlines fault they have put me in a hotel. I don’t have my suitcase and the thoughts of wearing the same clothes tomorrow that I’ve been wearing from 8 this morning are not cheerful ones. Tomorrow will be the fifth day in a row that I have had to go to an airport. I’m exhausted and the things I had hoped to do during the conference are becoming more and more unlikely. I hoping that tomorrow is a better day.
. . .I’m finally on my way to YAPC::EU. I’ve been travelling since Sunday and I’m really tired. Part of me thinks that I’m crazy to try to make this conference but I’ve been at all of them since 2001 and now that I live in Asia I miss the European Perl Mongers. The conference started this morning, so I’m missing the first day. I’m also going to miss the conference dinner but I’ll still have two days of talks to attend and hopefully enough time to catch up with people.
As I wasn’t sure that I would make the conference I only submitted a five minute lightning talk called 10 Things To Do With A Conference T-Shirt. This has been scheduled for tomorrow afternoon and is completely prepared as I gave it at YAPC::NA earlier in the summer. I have been considering translating this into Japanese for YAPC::Asia but I don’t know if I’m brave enough to get up and talk in Japanese.
I’ve another couple of hours before my first flight so I’m going to try to catch up on some of the backlog of email that I have. It’s going to be a busy week!
. . .On Friday evening we took my two sisters and Ashleigh, our current house guests, out to sing karaoke. Both Christine and Sarah have done this before but it was Ashleigh’s first time. There is no doubt that karaoke in Japan is all about having fun and we spent a lot of our time laughing. Sarah and Ashleigh have no idea of the difficulty of any song and I think they were a bit surprised by how difficult it is to sing like Lady Gaga.
Ashleigh and Sarah at Karaoke
My sister Christine has a beautiful voice, but we ended up laughing over her song choices. It’s true that sometimes I pick ridiculous songs for the humour value, but Christine actually likes Dusty Springfield’s “You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me”. And it appears to sing it correctly you have to stand up and make large sweeping gestures with your arms… She did manage to sing one song that was released this century, Katie Melua’s “The Closest Thing to Crazy”.
Christine, singing about being crazy...
I’m involved with a couple of Perl organisations and from time to time I am asked to blog about the things that I am doing. The problem though is that a lot of what I do isn’t overly interesting and can simply be incredibly dull administration. This week I decided to make some notes on what I have been doing, but I don’t plan to do this every week. At the minute I am trying to fit my volunteer work around doing fun things with my house guests and I’m having to schedule in the time, which means I’ve a much better idea of how long everything is taking.
I’m on the YEF venue committee and at this time of the year we work on choosing the venue for next year’s YAPC::EU. We have two proposals this year and I spent an hour or so on each, going through them to see if I had any queries about the proposals.
I’m working on a legal matter for TPF that I unfortunately I can’t discuss the details of yet. I spent about 4 hours on this on Sunday, 1 hour on Monday, 1 hour on Tuesday, 3o minutes on Wednesday, 30 minutes on Thursday, 1 hour on Friday, and 1 hour on Saturday. It’s exceptional for me to spend quite so much time on one thing but it looks like I will be spending quite a bit of time on this matter throughout the summer.
I’m the TPF grant manager for Dave Mitchell’s grant and I spent around an hour on this.
I spend a lot of time reading and responding to email. This week I have sent 61 emails either as responses to queries or initiating new conversations. If I take out the emails that are related to tasks that I already mentioned this took up about 7 hours. The main categories of emails at the minute seem to be Hague Grants, general administration, volunteers, and YAPC. I have also spent time chatting to people about projects and dealing with blogs.
All in all this week I spent around 20 hours, which is about usual for me.
. . .I just glanced at my blog and noticed that I haven’t written anything at all this month. July is a really busy month for me as I have house guests. And as two of them are only 16 years old they need quite a bit of supervision. I spent a couple of weeks in June travelling and really only found the time to write whilst sitting in airports, so it wasn’t a great month for blogging either. I’m hoping that things calm down but that may not be a very realistic hope!
. . .Chicago O’Hare is not one of my favourite airports. Last year I ended up stuck here for over a day because of a cancelled flight. But so far this morning things have gone to plan. I got through immigration and customs really quickly. Transferring to another terminal took a bit longer, because of the security queues, but it went smoothly enough.
At the minute I’m sitting in United’s business lounge. It’s not particularly impressive but at least I’ve managed to find somewhere to sit and use my computer.
I was surprised by how unfriendly the staff are who check your boarding card as you enter the lounge. Whilst I was waiting to get in a Japanese man approached the desk and asked about problems with his wifi. No-one could help him and the response he got was “look, I just don’t know”. And then they turned away from him and left him standing looking confused with his computer. I know that the staff may not be able to help with what they think are technical questions but they could have at least said that they were sorry. Instead they looked really put out that he had asked them a question.
Unlike other lounges I have been in you are expected to pay for most of the food and drink. It’s seems that you also have to pay for wifi if you are travelling with a Star Alliance carrier other than United. I am flying with United but nobody offered me either drink vouchers or wifi. I had to ask for the wifi voucher when I heard the other members of staff offer this to people they were checking in. I miss the friendly ANA staff who treated me so well at Narita airport.
. . .I have been living beside the Sumida River for over a year but last week was the first time I had the opportunity to travel on it. I took a boat trip from Odaiba to Asakusa with a couple of friends. At times travelling across Tokyo can be stressful, as the trains are so full, but the boat trip was relaxing. There are a couple of different boats and I was disappointed that we just missed the strange silver futuristic looking one. But that just means that I’ll have to try this again the next time we have visitors.
As well as a boat trip we also took the driverless train across the Rainbow Bridge. There are some touristy things that I would be happy to never do again but I still enjoy going across the bridge by train.
Rainbow Bridge
One of the good things about growing up with a rainy climate is that I rarely consider not doing something because it’s raining. Yesterday we wanted go and see the Tokyo Sky Tree, which we reckoned was about 40 minutes walk away. I’m not sure exactly how long it took us to get there but it was an enjoyable walk even with the fairly heavy rain.
The Sky Tree is not complete but it is now taller than Tokyo Tower. This makes it nice and easy to find, even for someone like me with no sense of direction.
Tokyo Sky Tree - Under Construction
Today I walked along the river for an hour in the rain. This wasn’t something I’d planned but it was overcast, not warm or cold, and the rain was light. It was almost perfect walking weather. I want to make the most of being outside before Japanese summer hits as it will bring torrential rain that even I want to hide from.
. . .I realise that I have been very quiet lately. I have had a head cold for the past few days which has made it difficult for me to concentrate. Even today I’m still not 100%. I know that I have done quite a bit in May but I am having difficulty remembering specific events apart from a trip to Hong Kong at the beginning of the month. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll start to feel more like myself and my memory will improve!
View from Hotel Room