another travelogue 1

August 17, 2006

there’s nothing like a trip to a regional airport to take a trip to a regional airport, so instead of parking in a pink elephant for a million pounds a day we shelled out seven pound fifty for a nice black taxi to Norwich International Airport to start our tour of bastides and empty roads. still, as there were five of us and black cabs aren’t the best luggage transporters (aside from people as luggage), we rumbled up the boundary road with 20kg suitcases and child seats flying around our heads, but it’s a small price to pay to pay a small price to fly. being the inconsiderate parents we are, we took our children out of school for 2 days in order to get cheap fares and so deprived them of valuable end-of-year educational experiences like stacking chairs or playing Monopoly, so I guess we’ll burn for that, or at least get in trouble with the school govenors. oh, hang on, I’m a school governor. I guess it’s alright then. anyway, the fares were a nice regional price with flybe.com and we’re looking forward to 2 and a half weeks in whatever you want to call the region of France we’re going to (Perigord, Lot-et-Garonne, Bastide country, Lot Valley, Haut Angenais or something, Aquitaine, South-West France – delete as appropriate to whatever bed and breakfast or rough guide you’re reading).

Norwich International is undergoing extensive redevelopment to make it a 21st century airport, so that means there’s a couple of partitions in the departure hall and some workman round the back smoking tabs. I say departure hall, but that might be overstating it slightly. departure room maybe. departure shed. something like that. anyway, we get everything shuffled through the baggage check, including our hastily wrapped up in a Daisy and Tom plastic bag child seats that went through the ‘special’ baggage check for ‘stupid’ items, make our way to the departure utility room and then, as we’re filtering through the final security check onto the tarmac, Sam proceeds to fiddle with and break a plastic leaflet stand, scattering 1000s of NIA and special offer leaflets over the floor and clattering deliberately (I’m sure) super-noisy plastic leaflet holders over an acre of hard concrete flooring in such a way that I’m sure many hands were hovering over panic alarm buttons throughout the airport just 1 step from total security incident. in the end, the Polish cleaner was very helpful with picking them all up again as I tried to reconstruct the 17 plastic holders into the 1 metal rack while presenting my boarding card and passports for the flight we were now already late for that we could see through the window about 10 yards away.

as I’d pre-booked everything, including seats, it didn’t matter anway, so we took our seats on the plane, which had propellers and wings on the top, which was a novelty for us, until we realized we would actually be sat next to the engines all the way and they’re not like jets which just kind of whine, they’re props, which mean they rattle the whole bloody seat until you’re feeling like your teeth are falling out. whatever. we’re on holiday now so nothing matters. we taxi around a bit and then we’re climbing like a snail might climb into the sky and I’m pressing my face against the plastic windows because I can see my house from here, just like on that Camel album.

if you know what I mean by that, you’re probably Geoff Arnold.

daddy, my daddy

February 23, 2006

what day is it today? saturday. what are we doing today? we’re going for the rest of that walk we did the other day. what walk? the one we didn’t finish because it started to rain and you were banging on about some stuffed chicken in that shop up the hill for one pound fifty so we had to go up there in just as everything was closing and bother that woman again and pull everything off the shelves and pushing them back on again in a space about 10 feet square with 6 of us in it when she really just wanted to go home and show her mates the one that goes boing when you slap it on the counter and you really wanted another one of those stuffed things but you’ve got a hundred already but we said we would go back if you were still interested which obviously you were because you moaned for about 2 hours and growled at everyone so that’s it. oh.

just as the sun arcs over the moors and the mist is still cloaked on the tracks we scuttle down to the start of part two, just crossing over to brow hill as the 9:15 blows through and we’re lucky enough to be crossing the bridge as it goes underneath which is terribly exciting and so we all stick our heads over the tunnel exit and wait for it to emerge forgetting that its not an electric one or even a diesel one which would have been alright but its a chunking great steam one straining to get up the first hill and so as we all look over the edge and it passes underneath we are totally whited out in an explosion of combustion and half of us are shrieking and running around in circles of panic while the rest are just are laughing maniacally and also shrieking a bit but in a strange idiotic way that we haven’t done since we were about six years old and after a couple of seconds the steam begins to clear and we’re saying things like ‘wasn’t that exciting?’ to small children who are clinging onto our legs like petrified koalas and we watch as the thing lumbers up the hill to the next station which is probably about 30 seconds away as the whole line is only about 2 miles long or something and coicidentally that’s where we’re headed so we can get the train back, isn’t that exciting? it’s the one from the railway children, you know the one at the end where their dad who isn’t a spy arrives and we all burst into wails of tears.

what day is it today? what?

travelogue 11

February 9, 2006

that’s it, its time I was going, so back in the suzuki geriatric and we’ll head down the toll road to the airport where I might even get my trainers shined up by those guys by the stairwell before getting a double scoop of artichoke and onion and syrup of figs ice cream from errol who plainly doesn’t want to be there serving me so my lame english jokes about tubs and cones and traffic go down like a lead balloon but I’m past caring by this stage because I’m never going to see these people again and in 2 hours I’ll be dribbling into an all day breakfast that comes in a cardboard box at dinnertime while the lights are going out all around me and the seat in front is tilted so far back that I’m licking the lcd screen in the seatback everytime I try and take a bite of this nondescript food thing which is just dropping stuff all over my trousers which I can’t see anyway so who cares but it’s the principle even though its cheap BA class I want to be able to move a leg from time to time.

in the end I strike lucky on the journey back like I did back in november and there’s 2 spare seats in the whole plane and they’re both next to me in the row of 3 so as soon as the seat belt sign goes off I’m shifting to the middle, putting all the armrests up, making myself 5 feet wide and sprinkling unsavory looking items from my hand luggage around the place so it looks a bit of a slum. mind you, having a row of 3 seats to myself in world traveller plus is about as exciting and comfortable as having a row of 3 upturned crates in a row in a dark cupboard if you’re over 6 feet tall/long and so try as I might to lie down during the 9 hours flight I just end up sitting upright in the middle falling in and out of consciousness but just aware enough to know that I’m regularly snorting myself awake with a horrible ad hoc snore and my head is nodding like a deranged donkey on speed and so by the time we’re taxiing up to the terminal I have stretch armstrong neck and my head is wobbling all over the place.

only security to go now though. oh, and I have to walk through the labyrith of the heathrow airport connectiong tunnels for about 30 minutes. and then take a 4 hour bus ride back home. nice. at least we’re going to the pub tonight when I get home by which time I’ll probably have been up for about 3 days and so I’ll have a gin and tonic and go mental and lose all my friends. looking forward to the next time already

travelogue 10

February 8, 2006

I think we can do this tomorrow right I have the morning and probably some or most of the afternoon before I leg it back to the airport where that same woman as last time does the fast track BA check in except this time she’s not a new clerk and so hopefully I won’t have to tell her how to do it and where the homeland security stand is where I’ll have to leave behind some stem cells or something before I can buy an ice cream except this time it’s moved next to the BA gates and there’s another scary looking DIA staff member placing my body parts on the scanner before I can go to the bit in the middle of the departure lounge where you just walk round in circles for ages wondering where the rest of the departure lounge is until it slowly dawns on you that this is all the departure lounge and what’s wrong with it just being a stairwell anyway?

perhaps we can do 10 til 12 and then maybe add a 12 til 1 and add it to the end until 3 but you know I’ll really have to get going then and I agree it’s valuable use of my time here to sit next to a whiteboard and scribble the meaning of user experience life because we don’t often have all these brians in one room, especially a room where have a big enough whiteboard to solve the services into ecommerce problem but then maybe we’ll do that later because right now we should probably start to think about actually what the scenarios are that are applicable to folks in the yemen who really want to interact with us via the web to control their account information and download service plans but they actually want to do it in spanish with yen prices because that’s an acceptable local business model apparently and anyway who’s to say the yemen isn’t a growth market for us, oh, you do. so let’s just do a french person in france buying stuff in euros shall we? can we do that? oh.

right, I do really have to go now and pack up before tomorrow because I’m checking out in the morning and I’m due to go out to some place where the pope’s head spins around and spits chianti at you while cheerleaders bark around the sistine chapel and so I’m not anticipating being particularly clear headed in the morning when I have to navigate web tv to avoid breathing over the concierge when I want to check out without checking out so I’ll see you in the morning. I feel tired all of a sudden.

travelogue 9

February 7, 2006

nice jacket. hmph. after a successful day in a conference room where we all decided we all had the same problems but we hadn’t published a list of solutions since 1996 and that we should probably really think about getting on the same project management dashboard for at least the things that we know we can collaborate on which is apparently most of them it was time to round up some of the outcomes and assign some actions and depart for the next set of meetings feeling like you’ve at least justified the travel expenses and the rest of the week will probably be spent cruising into meeting rooms on the second floor called something like Shirttail Hammer Creek Ironing Disaster where we’ll solve all our globalization problems with a sudden collective brain schism and we can all go home and have sausage with the pope.

except it doesn’t happen like that. the first thing that doesn’t happen is that the adaptor adaptor I need for the electric shaver that yes I packed myself and no nobody has had the chance to tamper with has not been found and so as the day progresses I’m looking more like I chose to look like something out of miami vice which of course would be a social disaster but maybe I can just carry it off but looking really tired and pretending that actually jetlag affects me coming this way and not going that way and so I might even turn it into a sympathy vote thing except its obvious that I always look this tired anyway and so that’s not going to be any good as an excuse for bristling in an engineering meeting about acceptabe exceptions to the globalization rule where everybody else will have chins like beech worktops rubbed with baby oil but hey, I’ll just use the intellectual juxtaposition card and make sure I wear the nice brown jacket and my glasses that make me look like a cross between something out of 1960s britain, 1970s france and 1990s netherlands but mainly the british bit like damien hurst except his cost like £500 and mine were 35 quid from dolland and aitchison which says it all really.

dammit. it must be in here somewhere. idiot

travelogue 8

February 5, 2006

“hello. is that reception? ah good, you see, I’ve just been out with some lovely work colleagues talking about data architecture models and functional spec politics to a place that does orange beer and things like that which was really near to place that you can play indoor luminous golf in the dark, oh, you know the place, haha, anyway yes, so, I probably had a couple of shandies and got a lift back in Kristen’s seat-warming multi-function space station, at which point I made for the elevator where I pushed all the buttons at once to see what happens and now I think I’m on the 7th floor but I have absolutely no idea where 730 is and I appear to have lost the will and wit to actually find out. could you be a super chappy and send somebody up to help me out? I think I’m near, but everything looks so far. yes, 730. mr caynes. that’s me. ok, I’ll hold…”

in the end I just crawled my way along the hideous 70s carpet like something out of splinter cell until I reached the end of the corridor and as luck would have it, just before I hit the fire escape where I may have taken the splinter cell thing a bit too far by trying to rappel down the wall and hanging in a dark corner of the lobby until a receptionist wandered past and I snapped their neck with my legs, there was 730 with my door key already stuck in the lock and the sound of the tv filtering under the door. I guess I’d already been back to the room at some point and raided the imported fruit and nut supply that I was supposed to give to Julie and my blood suger level shot off some dial somewhere which was why I was jibbering around the corridors like a loon, looking for bottled water that I already have in my room. either that or I just really needed to go to sleep. or I already was asleep. all work and no play makes jack a dull boy…

travelogue 7

February 3, 2006

“you wanna have your 5 year old technology platform and migrate onto our content services architecture and keep all your functionality intact because your director likes the way that he can generate a report that nobody reads? yeah. ok, have a nice day! bye! it ain’t gonna happen” and “it’s about standard practices and technologies and even if we’re not 100% there, we’re 90% there which is what we can deliver now and, oh, by the way you ain’t ever gonna get that 10%, right? oh, you want 50% of that 10%? sorry. have a nice! bye!” and “you’re the business you should be telling us” and so on.

having spent the morning in the hotel room finishing off the 3 slides I spent until 3:04 am trying to finish last night this morning I made the mistake of uploading the finished presentations to the collabspace via the hotel broadband link which has an upstream capability of around 2 bytes an hour or something and so I spent 40 minutes just watching a logo twizzle round on the top corner of a browser until what is left of my hair was scattered liberally around a gideon bible having been dragged from my scalp through the unbearable tension of network stasis and a desperate urge to just jump out the window. but it did upload eventually and I made a tom cruise mission impossible type disconnect/unlink/snapshut laptop move and dashed out the room into the maid who was just putting something unsavoury into a yellow plastic bag that said ‘medical’ on it and down the elevator and slid manaically across the hood of the suzuki gelatin like starskey always used to do at the beginning of starskey and hutch, or was that hutch, no, he did that thing where he jumped off a wall and landed on his arse on the hood of a car. I had planned to meet up casually with some colleagues to break into the 4 days ahead, but now I was going to have to screech around Interlocken Everdecreasing Loop like an idiot, leg it up to the lobby of building 5 at which point I will pass out in a sweaty white heap because I always do at the lobby of building 5 and then I’ll get lost for 20 minutes looking for a meeting room called Yellowfoot Beaver Catastrophy or something which I will eventually find by walking past it 3 times while everybody inside wonders why I’m just walking past 3 times and so I’ll stumble through the door just as somebody is reaching a climax and it’ll take all my powers of being a stupid english person to ingratiate myself with a bunch of folks who have been in this room for an hour already and really would rather be writing taglibs or something.

“think of it as a utility subscription convergence services architecture model. if you can” and “so there are really 3 parts to it. no, 4. yes so there’s the, oh, hang on, 5 parts. 5? what’s the fifth part. I though we weren’t going to, oh, right. anyway, so, there’s 5 parts to the basic…what? right, I see. so, the basic 4 parts…” and “so, back to the presentation here, this is how I see our cascading delivery model for our service orientateted model thing which is what it really is, right?” and “aha, you see, that is correct, but I wish to understand how one should begin to test that which we have no means to determine whether the potential outcomes are dependent on the allocation of and development of and attribution to, per se, those suites to which we do not yet have developement schedules against those to whom the testing will be the test of the testing under which we should be managing the scope of the discussions here pertaining to that which is preventative but untested” etc. after 4 hours of that with the occasional “we’re all shareholders, right?” I was ready to turn my back on another day and discuss things like sausages and hummers over dinner instead and so retreated to the flex space at the end of the universe for a while, plugging and unplugging ethernet cables to nowhere for about 20 minutes until I got one that got me connected and my battery died, laughing.

travelogue 6

February 2, 2006

I’m going to get back to the hotel far too early and I mght have to do more work than is necessary so I get the suzuki granola back on the right side of the road and head back to Broomfield the long way round even though the sun is kind of losing the will and the looming clouds are starting fights over the edge of the hills but I like the look of that little road and its got an old gas station on the corner and it looks like it might lead to an interesting kind of town where I can stop off at a grocery store and get 5 gallons more water because my internal organs are like walnuts by now and there I shall have a pleasant tourist conversation with a local park ranger with squirrels on his back or something like that. despite the rapidly darkening skies the short drive is just as I’d hoped with a beautiful view of rattlesnake gulch and shirttail peak and places with names like that spread out in front of me with suitably placed bumps in the road which are giving the shocks on the suzuki a bit of panning and they’re now crunching around which is a nice compliment to the grinding and grating noise the front nearside wheel has been making every time I put the brakes on since I left the airport and in a short while I’m approaching the outskirts of Eldorado Springs. well, I say outskirts but in fact by the the time I’ve entered, I’ve exited and all I can see now is large signs written in paint with a large brush which say things like DON’T PARK HERE IF YOUR NOT FROM THE COMM-U-NI-TY and NO PARKING HERE and PARK ENTRANCE NOT THIS WAY and I’m beginning to get the feel that there ain’t a friendly grocery store here and actually its a bit like the Witterings in the UK which are deserted in winter and you never see a human but in the summer is full of signs made out of industrial size letraset from B&Q and A4 card which say things like OH NO, YOU CAN’T PARK HERE and PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T PARK ACROSS DRIVEWAY and NO CHANGE FOR PARKING and GOLF SALE and suchlike and for 3 months the only road in and out of the village is nose to tail with vauxhall vectras, golf gtis and renault megane scenics spewing out carbon monoxide, churning up herbacious borders and generally metropolizing an area of outstanding natural beauty although the garage on the edge of town does a good trade in bottles of water and happy shopper sandwiches and ginsters at that time of year probably which I how I imagine Eldorado Springs must be between May and September on its one road in and out of town where enterprising locals set up stalls at the side of the road selling litres of water for 5 bucks and replacing the signs with ones which say PARKING HERE $20 ALL DAY and LAST PARKING BEFORE NATIONAL PARK and things.

that’s not to say it didn’t look like a nice place. it was just kind of closed and I wasn’t going to stay long enough to pay whatever is cost to park in the national park parking area so I swiveled the suzuki geronimo around in the dirt, dropping it onto the deck at least a couple of times when the wheels hit any particularly tasty potholes which resulted in a rather nice banging noise from under the passenger seat every time I turned left from then on, and I headed back towards Broomfield where my other presentation on globalization was on he tadpole mocking me into including a slide about engagement models and business requirements for a next generation ecommerce platform that can pop up storefronts in uzbekistahn at the flick of a switch but probably can’t take any money for some reason and might be in English anyway and so I get back on the 128 and hope that it eventually turns into a road that includes ‘Interlocken’ in its name because then I’ll know I’ll only have a couple of hours drivng insanely round in circles trying to get off any raods with ‘Interlocken’ in their name before I’ll be back at the renaissance and taking pictures out of the 7th floor window thinking that I might one day stick them all together as a panorama of a number of car parks, which will be nice.

approaching Broomfield by the back door it was apparent that the snow was waiting for me over the brow of Interlocken Endless Loop and so I stopped by the side of the road, pointed my camera at the sky, quickly ditching it and pretending to be on my upside-down callphone when the local police slowed down as they passed and then decided to brave the elements in a kind of head-on fashion. I got back to the hotel about 3 hours later, but not because of the snow. while I wasn’t looking, someone put a golf course in the way and I’d got to the 15th green before I realized I’d lost the plot.

travelogue 5

February 1, 2006

“DON’T GO HERE. PEOPLE DIE HERE, LIKE, ALL THE TIME, D00D”. that’s what it says on the tourist board when you cross the highway to take a closer look at Boulder Falls in the snow at least it says something like that which in effect says if you climb up here when there’s a perfectly icy disjointed loose graveled and shiny rock laden path down here then you deserve to plummet 10 metres to your death in the icy flow of the falls you stupid ass why did you come here anyway it’s not that exciting its not like niagara or anything even if you’re from the UK right you’ve got waterfalls don’t you jesus. still, notwithstanding the advice I thought I’d check out the falls again because there were some pretty nice snow covered sections of the river on the way up that caught my eye when I should have been looking at the road and the snow trucks and explorers coming in the opposite direction on the carriageway I’d just crossed over onto which the suzuki didn’t repond to particularly well to as I screeched back across to the right using full lock and whizzing the wheel through my hands like steve mcqueen on lombard street and so I though the falls might yeild some nice winter shots I could tag with ‘winter’ and ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and stuff like that in flickr and join all sorts of new groups called things like ‘snow’ and ‘winter snow’ and ‘joys of winter snow – READ THE BLOODY RULES’ and things like that and post my winter snow shots and see how many people completely ignore them because well they’re just a bit rubbish next to the nikon d70s club who’ve trekked up the himalayas and have stunning sherpa silhouette shots looking down at the cloudbase with the sun overexposing on the virgin snow at the highest peak in burma with a flock of eagles flying past in the background waving free tibet flags in their beaks while an airbus380 leaves a heart-shaped vapour trial in the distance so my grainy closeup of a bit of cold water and half my foot doesn’t really cut it and even though someone who lives in norwich and so is polite enough to leave a comment like ‘er, I like the movement on that, I think’ there’s not really much to stop me just deleting it except I’ve geotagged it now and I can’t be bothered

after a couple of experiments with the self-timer and the edge of a cliff I’m getting pretty cold anyway and I really should be heading back to the hotel now to contemplate the strategy for web globalization over an endlessly distributed and fragmented internal infrastructure soon to be converged around common content services and the extension of the software lifecycle to incorporate the whole research, get, subscribe support process when we’re looking at how to accomodate licence purchases with briefcases full of cash in China and so I head back to the suzuki generous and attempt a complicated reversing manoevre into the path of an oncoming snow truck while in a forward gear and hanging over the edge of the river like something out of the Italian Job. in the end I just kind of screech wildy around while everybody pulls up and watches but I put on my best ‘sickly grin I’m a tourist and even worse I’m british’ look and end up looking a bit like john cleese which mostly always gets me off the hook and I even throw a silly walk in for good measure usually but right now I’m content with just sticking my hand out of the wrong window in a kind of apologetic but thankful gesture which probably ends up looking like I’m giving everyone the finger but now I’m careering down towards the 36 and so I don’t really care anymore until I hit a school bus and bounce into the front yard of a surprized looking family from Wisconsin who’ve only rented the place for the weekend.

I made that last bit up about hitting the school bus by the way, but it happened like that in my mind…

travelogue 4

January 31, 2006

its monday and I’m supposed to be holed up in a hotel room in broomfield putting the finishing touches to a globalization strategy presentation that our director will present back to me and a number of other colleagues who are currently making their way to colorado where the world is congregating this week to talk about really important stuff and then some really unimportant stuff but instead I’m holed up in the Boulder Café on the corner of Pearl and 13th waiting for the waitress twins to appear again as if by magic with some orange beer that’s been brewed by a local hippy in an underground cavern at the foot of the rockies using a pedal bike and some healing crystals and today’s special which happens to be a prawn and chicken satay thing which sounds nice but until they arrive plus the gallon of water I need every 5 minutes in colorado I’m just looking out the window with a blank stare wondering why nobody is coming to Boulder today even though its a bit cold but then its always cold in winter and then I remember why I’m not actually holed up in a conference room instead on a monday lunchtime on january and thats because its Martin Luther King day and nearly everybody round here has taken to the hills to stand on rocks on one leg and cast huge shadows or experience the love of life at 10200 feet up in leadville or is probably just sat at home in a house in the middle of nowhere that probably used to be a forge or steam engine or something and posting clutter on ebay so they can get the car in the garage again and that’s why I’m sat here on my own with 2 waitresses looking after me and one old man at the table next to me who thinks I’m some kind of progressive liberal freak because I’ve got a fleece on with the collar up and I haven’t had a shave and my camera is kind of pointing at him in a way which is making him slightly edgy and so he’s rustling the Daily Camera around like an impatient father-in-law shooting daggers at me

the special is special and the amber is nectar and I decide to forego the cheesecake in case its anything like the cheesecake at the renaissance which arrives in 10 seconds but takes about 10 hours to finish because its the size of a flatiron or something and well, you have to finish it even though its not tasting that great washed down with flat tire and so I try and sneak a couple of shots of the waitresses on the way out but as usual I thought they were being nice to me because I was english and on my own and they kind of liked me but now I’ve paid I’ve suddenly become invisible and they’re clearing the table before I’ve even stood up and so I give up on candid for the time being and just get my dad’s killy coat on that I’ve borrowed for the colorado winter which is the one he got free when he was working on the winter olympics in japan years ago and I ding out the door and decide its probably time I took a quick tour of the deserted pearl street mall and then head back to the suzuki for a quick detour around a couple of landmarks around here while the sun is out but wait it looks like snow best be quick and so I screech out of the deserted parking garage like starsky and hutch with slippers on and head vaguely west, no, east, ah well round in circles for a while before I finally point the suzuki getover up a hill and we’re headed into the clouds which might be an interesting thing and a mildly stupid thing depending on what happens in the next couple of hours but its only 1 o’clock and I can probably do that set of apocalyptic web venue slides in a few hours after a couple of beers later so lets just go for it

Things what I writ