26 | 27 | Unfortunately, at this stage, blogging the conference came to an end due to the conference being blogged to bits elsewhere...
New seriese of travel diaries: The trip to the O'Reilly Mac OS X conference 2003
Day 1 - Sun Oct, 26th
KLM proved to be a poor choice. I tried to get a seat with more leg room when I came into Amsterdam and the lady at the counter confirmed that I got one in the front row. It turned out, however, that it was the second row. I was not very sad, because the seat besides me was one of the many empty seats. However, the lady at the counter had made another mistake leading to my place being given away twice. So I was relocated - right next to a guy who has about the same size as me.
We had a fantastic view over Greenland, so that kind of made it well again.
Coming into San Francisco, I wonder why Immigration now takes a lot longer than it used to be before they opened the new terminal.
I got to the Westin using a Door to Door Shuttle. The asian guy driving it had less knowledge of the area than I did and a poor command of the english language. I ended up being the travel manager for this trip, translating between the driver and the passengers. Two guys got on, told the driver a (non existing) address and sat back to see what happend. This got us an involuntary tour of the Silicon Valley. I can't believe how passive those guys where. The driver was obviously at a loss regarding their travel destination, but they made no attempt at all to help him.
Anyways, the hotel is very nice and they have free wireless access in the lobby, so I get to be online. My room is on the 8th floor, a nice room with a view of the parking lot. But I am not here to enjoy the sights which are pretty daft anways.
The conference seems to be a high quality, moderate volume event with about 400 people attending. More about that later.
Now I am off to the next In-n-Out and Jamba Juice for a real american dinner and then relaxing from the very stressful traveling.