Travel

New England Vacation Album

Yeah, lots of pics of hotels and airplanes, I know…

Well, my abbreviated trip (Sunday->Wednesday instead of Saturday->Thursday) comes to an end today. Some highlights:

- I saw a guy in a kilt & cod-piece yesterday. Yes, he looked alot like Henry VIII, jowls and all.

- Had a nice dinner with Mark at Sam’s Seafood Grille. Pretty good, overall.

- The breeze shifted to a sea-breeze yesterday, and the temps plummeted. Imagine it being 72 and warm in the morning and 50, damp, and chilly by the end of the day. Lots of folks in shorts & t-shirts weren’t happy.

Turns out, it’s The Tenderloin

Savory, and only a few blocks from here.

I particularly liked the stuff about it being resistant to gentrification…

WTF? Thought:

Me have logistic/organizatio… Whitney - Nov 2, 2008

WTF? Thought:

Me have logistic/organizational charts in head
all times
overlapping
flowing
haiku much

Charlotte have nonsensical
bullet
point
ammunition
Dad Christmas
Adobe house
Adobe MAX = whacked house in
skeletal Maria California
sunny
PEETS

Snow here, ice
go boom boom floor
Maria
word verification
pitcher

CHARLOTTE GO HOME!

Wow, your summary hurts my head. I’m definitely too old to survive one of those!

8:47am – Moscone center, West

Well, public WiFi seems to be a pipedream. I sit here on the 3rd floor…it’s wall-to-wall people, seems like a mix of folks–guys in french blue business shirts, Bohemian guys with messenger bags, and lots of fat guys with ponytails.

Male to female ratio: 5:1. Better than I expected, but we’ll see how things turn out in my sessions.

Somehow my Adobe Login got hosed, and I can’t log-in to my account on Adobe.com to change it (again, no WiFi out here)

9:15 am
Nervous. I’m nervous…I get chatty when I’m nervous, but I don’t have anyone to talk to. I’m in seat 46A, which is the last window seat, port side of the plane. At the moment, I don’t have anyone to talk with.

The 767 I’m on is NICE. Seems very much like the one I flew on to Zurich, Switzerland 3 years ago. Minus the smelly Eurotrash, of course.

Off to Adobe Max 2008, I guess. Left Whitney asleep (or, groggy, at least) at the Airport Courtyard by Mariott. Flight from Louisville was cramped and cold on an MD-88 that sounded like a cuisinart from takeoff to landing. Glad Whitney wasn’t there…wasn’t quite so bad as the Embraer we suffered on from Philly to SDF, but bad enough.

The Transcontinental leg has me on a767, seat 46A. I can’t seem to get free WiFi at either airport; guess those innocent, available days are long gone…perhaps at Frisco.

So, around 4:30 Friday, busily trying to make the UBS server work as advertised, I heard something go ’tink-tink'.

Now, UBS’s tech building is a huge cube-farm, arrayed around a central stack of elevators.  “Conference rooms” in such an environment are just a big cube with a conference table.  So, I swivelled my head left and saw the WHOLE AREA around a table, two cubes over.

Okay, I figured…birthday party or something.

Mushing along at only 486 MPH, headwinds blocking us all the way. As restful and serene as our last trip was, this is a cattle-car. Seems like every coach seat is taken, and I’m seated in the middle of the 767 off the left Aisle. Turbulence has people getting airsick and the ‘fasten seatbelts sign’ constantly illuminated. Ugh.

At least we ARE going home today. For most of yesterday’s marathon, 8am to 1:30am session, it looked like we hade no end of problems and that we’d have to stay through monday or deep into next week to solve their problems. However, we caught some breaks in the afternoon, and again in the evening, culminating in a successful test at 1:30. If we did the same procedures 10 times, probably 9 out of those 10 times, UBS would’ve demanded us to stay.

Hungry and frustrated. The bed was comfortable (it was a BED, not an airplane seat…yay!), but Im still jet-lagged. Need…coffee…

India didn’t come through for me (at least, not yet). We’re due @ UBS around 8am, and we haven’t eaten yet.

Met some interesting people yesterday…Kurt, the guy w/cool blue eyes and a quick smile who seems to be under a great deal of pressure, Yvonne the 6-foot-tall middle aged gal who’s our main contact. All were nice, and UBS seems much like any other large corporation, when you get down to it–cubes and politics and processes to follow for everything.

Midnight Thursday, Zurich time, 30k feet above the earth, in a 767 going 500 mph

6400 miles…that’s what it is roughly from Atlanta to Zurich, and this ultra-mobile cylinder is eating them up smothly so far. They’ve just done first food service, announcing we’re to be in the air long enough (8+ hours) that we’ll be having dinner AND breakfast on this flight. Yikes.

What has me here? Stupidity, mostly…the customer saved their mission-critical issues for last, and their rollout of Lexmark printers is due Friday, one way or another. So, $6k worth of last-minute tickets has C and I headed over to Switzerland.