14 Nov 2000 tigert   » (Master)

Airports.. pieces of no man's land

It's time for diary writing again.. seems like these waiting times at the airport are very productive for diary creation :)

I had an early flight from Helsinki to Stockholm, got to the airport before 7am. The good thing about that is there was not much queueing to check-in (even though I only took the certified-for-cabin -sized bag with me this time) Before I had a backpack with me, but looks like those are not very nice in the customs - they seem to get too much attention or something, and one ends up checked way too often. This nice wheel-and-a-handle thing is much more convenient in that sense.

For some reason an American Airlines security guy wanted to talk with me.. Maybe it is because my tickets had been purchased from the States or something. He asked me if I had packed my stuff myself and all that stuff you already know.. Of course it is nice to see that they do care about our safety :)

I am about to board the Chicago plane in about twenty minutes.. I have been waiting for this flight: 9.5 hours of (hopefully) sleep! I might as well read some of my largish (70MB!) inbox .. Lots of mail backlog to clear up. The last week has been a horrors for me to get all the stuff done for COMDEX, and I didnt have much time to rest before the flight. Sounds like a few days off after the show. That's the plan atleast.

Hmm.. looks promising, I am starting to yawn and the boarding should start very soon!

..and on the air again.. This time it's the American Airlines flight from Chicago to Las Vegas, landing will be in another one and a half hours, so there is plenty of time to write some diary stuff and other things.. I might as well compile my first kernel in 28000 feet! I actually managed to get some sleep during the previous 9.5 hour connection, which is good. I dont even want to know about the jetlag, better get some sleep at the hotel so I can do stuff at the booth during the week.

It will be fun to see the Helix Code folks again, it's been a while since the last visit and it is a lot cooler to talk with people in person instead of over irc or email. Seems like the remote working stuff is going pretty well though, but I have noticed it still makes a lot of sense to have phonecalls and meet in person every now and then. The bandwidth of IRC is not enough, one can get stuff done, but you dont hear the talk what happens in the cubicles, you dont see the naked monkeys on Peters cube, you dont smell the Bertucci's pizza, you dont poison yourself with the PopTarts (eek!) and you have no idea what you can do with Cozmo.com. (Hi Chris! :)

I noticed that in COMDEX the Helix Code booth is about 10 meters away from the SOT booth. The (finnish) acronym SOT stands for "Finnish Software Engineering" if I remember correctly. They make a localized version of Redhat for Finland and Eastern-European countries. (Yeah, original.. Though Turbolinux seems to be doing pretty well in that business in Asia..) I wonder if they have any of the finnish staff around, since they do have US offices too. That remains to be seen :) Sometimes it's a small world, even in COMDEX..

Ok, starting the final approach soon, so I'll wrap this up for now. I should be seeing Larry at the gate, where we were planning to take a cab together to the hotel. Going to write more stuff once I get this submitted first.

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