It was supposed to happen in 2007, but due to some private issues I never made it to Hotsos that year. I have been wanting to attend since several years but was not succesfull in talking my (former) employer(s) into it. Actually the lack of growth in a professional way was the reason I switched employer(s). Unfortunately I had to switch two times in a row to actually join a ‘club’ that not only talks about technology but is really sharing knowledge about technology. (Yes I am still happy that I switched to AMIS )
Finally the trip started.
I haven’t had much too sleep due to a big storm in the Netherlands, and arriving at the airport 04:45 didn’t help much either. I was meeting my travel companions at the Airport and Marco showed up at about 05:10 and Gerwin some 20 minutes later. BTW Gerwin is presenting at Hotsos 2008 (http://www.hotsos.com/sym_speakers_hendriksen.html).
The flight started at 7 am in the Netherlands and we arrived at the Omni Mandalay Las Colinas at about 4 pm local time which correlates to 11 pm Dutch time. So it was a very long day. Actually we didn’t go to sleep for at least a few hours later because we needed to adjust to local time. But that didn’t stop me from waking up at 3 am local time… I could manage to delay it until about 6 o’ clock but I’m sure I’m not going to make the 9:30 breakfast meeting Marco and Gerwin planned. It’s just too late for me
’cause I’m getting hungry as I write this.
A nice picture of Gerwin
Marco and Gerwin couldn’t stop mentioning at each oppertunity that ‘this situation could be optimized’ or that ‘Performance could be improved here’ when standing in queue’s for whatever official reason. So they are really into Performance Tuning. They are ‘living’ it. It is very good to see that Gerwin is very enthousiastic about his presentation. That gives me thoughts that I want to do that also in the near future. And I’m sure that Amis will be supportive of that. The only thing that could be in the way is my own critisism.
Marco tends to chew on something and loves to drink a lot of coffee. I’m lucky to travel with these guys because they are fun to be around. Below is a picture of ‘one of the newest planes in our fleet’ that we used to get across the Atlantic Ocean.
And yes the seat had a powersupply, but I couldn’t find it that easily. I found it when I no longer wanted to use the laptop. None of us had and aisle seat thus getting out meant bothering the passenger next to me which I didn’t want to do so often. (Mental Note: Change seats for the flight back to at least CDE or EFG so we will have an aisle seat).
The next picture is taken on the way to the Omni Hotel in Las Colinas.
View taken from the floor where Gerwin and I are located (we enrolled the Select Guest program to get Free Wifi, which otherwise would cost 9,5$ plus taxes Click on this link to join And that is what I’m using to blog right now. I also set up a VPN connection to the office to get some privacy for my data traffic. Thanks to Chris for keeping me aware of security)
In the distance you can see Dallas, at least that’s what I think. And I will be spending some time this week in the picture below, just to clear my mind
If only to get rid of the tiredness of travelling…
(see picture below)
More to follow, some about the conference some about the experience and maybe some about the people that come to this conference.
Patrick
Have fun, you guys!
LOL 😉