Finally touched down back home after giving my talks in Frankfurt, which was a good conference, although not as busy as I would have liked. They perhaps need to promote the 'training aspect' more than the 'conference' to get more paying customers.
I gave my two talks ,one a bit too technical perhaps on compiler design, the other (was I think was well recieved) was as a step by step tutorial on Glade & PHP, and how to build quick GTK applications with only a few lines of code..
But whats a good blog without pointing out some of the odder parts of traveling around the world..
Frankfurt Airport
A reasonably OK airport, although a little oddly layed out for arrivals (eg. you wander through the departure area/ticketing area to get to baggage reclaim..).
But one absurdity really stuck out.. - kind of "
do these guys have half a brain" questions, was
Wireless Lan in the airport - there are nice dangling signs saying 'Wireless Zone'.. but there are two fundimental Problems.
a) There is no instructions on how to connect to it anywhere.. (do you need to sign up to something..)
b) There are no power sockets.. - If you have ever traveled with a portable, you know that only the new ones have batteries that last more than an hour, the rest of the human race has portables that need juice! - So the Wireless zone at frankfurt airport had no power sockets (and no users!!!)
I guess they didnt bother spending the huge amount of money on Customer research that Hong Kong Airport does (as I had 4 hong kong tourist/researchers come up and ask if I was a tourist and would answer some questions..).. I guess it's like an addiction, Hong Kong knows they have idiots' incharge of airports, so they are trying to cure it, buy employing people to spot the bleeding obvious (which will probably be ignored anyway). where as Frankfurt hasnt quite got that far yet..
Luhthansa Airlines
Last year I flew Emarites from Hong Kong to Frankfurt, it was pretty nasty due to the extra 3-4 hour stopover in Dubai, which basically meant I was travelling for 20 hours, including hanging around the departure halls. This year I got a bit smarter and managed to get a direct flight with Luhthansa.
While 12 hours is a bit more survivable, Luthansa is a bit of an antique airline when it comes to TransContinental Flying.. - No 'Personal Entertainment system'. Christ, Virgin Airlines did this 10 years ago, I was amazed that they hadn't caught on..
They have to realize that squeezing human beings into a space designed for sardines has very little in the way of pleasure (and their chairs are hard and pretty unbearable for a 12 hour flight). So In-flight Personal TV screens are there to make that slightly less painfull.
Oh well back in one piece, and looking ahead to my fight against Hong Kongs new smart ID card..
