I’ll be at the OLS next month. I just got around to booking parts of the travel. Turns out, it’s no more expensive to fly LHR (Heathrow) -> IAD (Washington) -> BOS (Boson) -> YUL (Montreal) than it is to fly direct to Ottawa (YOW) for a whopping 672GBP direct. So I get to tack on a couple days of meetings and catch up with folks in the Boston/Cambridge area – and check out Arlington rent prices for future reference. I might take the wekend out in NYC and do the train ride up to Montreal again – or just go via NYC anyway.
Why Montreal? Aside from the fact that I enjoy visiting random Canadian provinces – and why the heck not – I guess I should mention that we (a friend and I) are thinking about cycling from Montreal to Ottawa over a period of a couple of days. Last year, I took a 3,000 mile train ride to get to OLS so it’s lucky that this is only a couple of hundred miles – but it’s still quite enough for me to contemplate cycling. In the future, I’d like to be one of those people who can cycle entire continents in one go – but that’s for some time in the future. Whether we bike back or take the train is an open issue and one that I think will be influenced by other travel plans.
While I’m blogging stuff, I guess I could mention that we had a BBQ on the weekend up in Nottingham. I enjoyed seeing the folks that were there, but I came away feeling that I’m glad I don’t live in Nottingham itself any more – it’s ok as towns and cities go, but it’s nothing special and very negatively affected by the local nightlife. I stayed at the Holiday Inn Express in the middle of town and was just very appalled by the experience I had on Saturday evening. Luckily, the Sunday BBQ made up for all of that. I think I’ll refrain from trying to BBQ salmon in the future – that didn’t really work out too well for my digestion.
Finally, I’m writing. I’ve got lots of other stuff going on but I’m also finishing up this book. We should get done in the next couple of weeks of evenings and weekends and then it’ll be done! Wow! I guess I’m already looking forward to the next one (despite the pain of trying to produce so much content within the alloted time). I’m just so totally psyched that it’ll hopefully be on sale next year (go pre-order it on Amazon today!). In another life time, I could have just been a writer – I’m sure that one day (when I decide to take things easier in life) then I will be.
Jon.
P.S. Check out the speaker list at the UK 2006 LinuxWorld. I’ll make a special trip back for that one if necessary.
I met a Slovakian guy the other week who was cycling around the world, it’s a pretty cool thing to do, but I’d count on even crossing a continent to take a fair amount of time. The person I’d met in Phnom Penh had been going for 13months and estimated he had maybe another year or two to go. It’s definitely feasible and rewarding, you have to stop every hundred or so kilometres and so you see areas that nobody else would normally travel to.
Comfort level might be a little less than Holiday Inn standards though