I recently spent a week in Amsterdam, attending the Novell BrainShare conference there. This visit to Amsterdam was unlike any I’ve made before: certainly unlike the last one, where I barely made it halfway from the airport to the city and was there for less than 40 hours.
Firstly my arrival was disrupted by the Iceland volcano. About 45 minutes away from Amsterdam I noticed that the little diamond that represented our destination on the flight-map display had jumped somewhere into western Germany, and the plane’s direction had changed — we were now flying almost due south instead of following the gentle arc that traced almost all the way back to Hong Kong. About 5 minutes later, the captain announced that due to volcanic ash we had been diverted to Frankfurt: “we’re 40 minutes away from Amsterdam, but they’re closing the airport in 20”. To the credit of Cathay Pacific, however, they had arrangements for our “connection” to Amsterdam underway before we had landed. Cathay’s airport manager at FRA boarded the plane almost as soon as the door opened, and made an announcement that we would be bussed to Amsterdam and what the process would be. Once we made it into the Frankfurt terminal we only had a couple of hours wait before we got to shuffle ourselves to some waiting coaches for our unexpected bus tour of north-west Germany and north Holland.
The bus ride was uneventful — except that I don’t ever tire of seeing fine German automobiles at-speed in their natural habitat: the autobahn. As it turned out, the whole event actually solved a problem for me: how to fill in the nine hours between arrival at Schiphol and being allowed to check in to the hotel (S thought I was being way too positive when I told her that). It actually was not an unpleasant way to spend a day post-long-haul-flight.
After catching a train from Schiphol to Centraal, finding my hotel, checking in, and cleaning up from the trip, it was time to get a bit of rest before meeting the rest of the Australian contingent to BrainShare for dinner. We dined at Restaurant d’Vijff Vlieghen, a fine restaurant that (unbeknown to me beforehand) is one of the best in Amsterdam for traditional Dutch cuisine. I’m amazed I stayed awake through the five courses, but luckily my travel didn’t catch up with me until I made it back to the hotel.
I had Tuesday pretty-much to myself. I did quite a bit of walking around, trying to push through the jet-lag. Early afternoon I walked with a couple of colleagues from Novell to the conference venue to register, and had a late lunch afterward. By late afternoon I realised that I wasn’t over the jet-lag and decided to rest up for the start of the conference.
The next couple of days are a bit of a blur. Keynotes, demos, technical sessions, product launch parties, beer, food, sunsets after 10pm… It was an incredible week. As far as the BrainShare content goes, even though Linux is just a part of the Novell “story” I was never really starved for something interesting. I enjoyed the demos of SUSE Studio, and learned some things about the High Availability extension for SLES and the Subscription Management Tool.
I had a great time. The crew from Novell that hosted me were fantastic, and every time I go there I fall a little bit more in love with Amsterdam.
Crossed Wires 