its iterative you see that means I change little bits all the time no I’m not going to tell you which is which I put numbers on them so you can work it out but in case you think you have I’ve neglected to tell you whether they are finished or not because I don’t know whether they are except the one for mexico which isn’t so don’t start there but think about pulling a left at wal-mart and slipping some fructis and a couple of travel soaps into your lap while henrietta offloads the kansas city fire department into the disabled spot that’s rumbled by the fat bloke.
in 17 minutes it’ll be just as difficult to poke a stick at a melon so why don’t you check into the residence inn and stock up on doritos and sour cheese and I’ll bring over 3 litres of belch and we can sit laughing at pedestrians on el camino like what we were doing that time before but really you were on your own working out the time delay on being charged for videos and wondering where your fob was until the dixie chicks started mangling your banjo and the bottom fell out. the all seeing I.
good evening sir, what’s the purpose of your visit to the united states today? er, I’m working. oh, you’re working sir? do you have a visa? er, no I don’t. but you said you were working in the united states, so you must have a visa. um, but I don’t need one. what do you do when you are working? I’m not sure I understand what you mean. I mean sir, what does working mean to you? oh, er, I work in marketing and stuff, for a network computing company. yes, so what’s the purpose of your trip today sir? I, um, I’m just, er, visiting my work. just visiting? is that all, you’re not doing any work for your company while you’re here? well, yes, I… so what do you mean when you tell me you are working on this trip? what? what company do you work for mr caynes? sun microsystems. and how long have you worked for sun microsystems? 11 years. and what is the purpose of your visit to sun microsystems this time? er. it’s, um, business. so it’s a business trip? yes, no, I think so. for which you don’t need a visa? oh, yes. I see. yes, it’s a business trip, for which I don’t need a visa. and how long are you staying in the united states for this business trip for which you don’t require a visa? 5 days, no, dammit, 6 days. 6. and when was the last time you came to the united states on a business trip to sun microsystems? what? er, about 6 months ago. I think.
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
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.
“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…
“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.
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.
“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…
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
wake up. you’re there. humph. shuffle. so I’ll just stand here stooped under this overhead locker while you all dither around detaching your armstraps and dropping your duty frees on the heads of unsuspecting latvians who are wrestling their super-sized carry-on bags out of the seat in front of them as a million blankets cascade from the aisles and an armful of BA headsets careen up the aisle as backpacked 7 year-olds push through to the exits past the world traveller plus and the nice ladies in club world who are picking up 17 discarded newspapers from each reclined seat as my large russian friend is pulling what looks like a sack of potatos from the space over our heads with a look on her face that says she’s not really very pleased with having spent 9 and a half hours squeezed between 2 armrests with buttons on she’s doesn’t know how to use and all this goes on for about 30 minutes because we’ve stopped taxiing about 50 metres short of the terminal building because the plane the should have already been taking off has still got a pipe sticking out of it and hasn’t made room for flight ba219 so we’re just stuck in this neverland trying not to catch each other’s eye while self-consciously fiddling with the loose change in our pockets that we can’t use in this country anyway and we didn’t put it all in one of those charity envelopes so I guess we’ll just set off some kind of security alarm instead when all we really want to do is get through security and use a proper toilet that doesn’t move around when you’re trying to use it
40 minutes later we’re on the avis bus to the rental car pickup where I let them know I’m a preferred customer and so my car will be ready for me and as usual they can’t find caynes timmr on their palmtop until I point out its with a c and not a k and also its a y not and i and an n not an m and its tim, not timmr which is just a concatenation of tim and mr (ahh! I see!) and anyway sir, we don’t seem to have a car ready for you like they never do for some reason and so I check in with the rental station after being hoofed off the bus and actually, they do have a car for me in slot N9 have a nice day. so this looks like me, the one between all the enormous suvs that have been hired out for a colorado weekend and are about 10 feet tall with full beams on in the parking lot just to let you know just how big and impressive they are, the one that says ‘suzuki’ on it and has done about 38000 miles with the pedal to the floor and never got past 50 miles an hour and its a lovely grey with a name like a ‘gerona’ or a ‘genoa’ or something but its got a walnut dash, so it must be good. righto, let’s hit the toll road and we’ll be at the renaissance in about 30 minutes, which we are, because the toll road is alway completely empty save for the poor souls who man the tolls in the middle of winter and have to deal with the english and their $20 bills and fumbling around in their laptop bags and getting receipts and all that but then you still have a nice day so everything’s alright thankyou sir no problem you drive safely etc.
after picking up 17 complimentary breakfast coupons, 500 free marriot points for standing up straight in the restaurant, free internet access because nobody else is using it right now and a letter about how there really won’t be much inconvenience when we start doing building work on the roof tomorrow morning I’m up to the 7th floor and turning the wrong way out of the lift until I get all the way to the end of the wrong wing of the hotel and consider just hitting the fire escace and getting back in the suzuki and straight back to the airport but instead turn back and hike across the wilderness of the horrible patterned carpet until we’re at 730 and the key works and I’m in and they’ve folded the corners down on everything which is nice so lets think about the rest of the day. ooh, I’d like some of that water, I’ve not really had any for a few hours and that looks nice. $4.50? dammit. where’s the vending machine, ah, down the corridor. right. 2 dollar bills? I spent those of the toll road. dammit. right. where’s the bar?
