Well PGDay EU is almost over and it’s been a fun and interesting few days. This is the my first trip to a conference for work as one of my colleagues is presenting a talk and giving two training sessions on PostGIS. It’s been an intersting trip with the craziness happening before I left the UK, also it’s a lot warmed over here and while there is snow, their trains do work and the hotel is massive that we don’t actually have to leave the place.
The trip started on Sunday leaving my home where I;m now living in the UK in Aldershot, turns out flying from Stanstead is a large pain in the rear end in trying to get there! Getting the bus to Stanstead meant leaving at 9am but I thought it wouldn’t be too bad as I’d get to see some places while travelling and I did. So flying out at 8pm and getting to the aipoort at 2 you can only imagine how bored one can get very quickly. Armed with mini 9 and usb with some things to watch I was sorted as I found a chair that had a power supply or so I thought, it wasn’t charging. I decided I’d seen and done all things before departures I may as well go through security and have a drink.
So now comes my rant! As everyone knows when travelling and bringing liquids on board you need to put them in a see through bag and put them through the scanner seperately from yoru bag and laptop and shoes ( depending on which airport you fly from) When it was my turn I had all my things on top of the desk for the security guard to push them into the scanner however upon seeing my clear see through ZIPPED up bag he said the bag was not correct I was told if I questioned the security guy at Stanstead airport over the see through bag he won’t allow me on the flight! Grrrrr All I wanted to know was how the bag I used recently in Orlando, Newark, Shannon all was fine but he had an issue with it! *numpty* ! So I had to leave the long queue go outside go to boots pay 20pence for a ZIP LOCK bag and put my stuff in it and go back and join the queue.
It seems crazy that one cannot ask a simple question, but you get told you may be refused your flight! It was frustrating and rather upsetting to be honest, I do fully appreciate the guy had a job to do, however his attitude was just all wrong.
When Mark arrived at the airport we had one more cider before the flight to Stuttgart, talk about efficiency, the flight arrived 30 mins early. I was carrying my Ubuntu bag with me and on two occasions from the time we landed to our hotel people came up to us talking about open source what are the chances and they weren’t even going to the conference.
PGDay kicked off with a keynote from Simon Phipps, who as always delivered an insightful and witty talk which was a good way to start the morning off. Not knowing a lot about PostgreSQL I found some of the talks to be really interesting and informative however some did go well over my head. I found one of the best talks came from Bruce Momjian the way he delivered his talk made it very easy to follow and it was rather interesting plus he used Ubuntu.
I have to hand it to the organisers it was very well run the venue, the Millennium Hotel was a great venue, one part hotel, one part conference center with a cinema and 2 theaters in it with 19 bars and restaurants so lots to see and chose from including the Irish bar!
Now to go back to the UK, I’ve not seen much of Stuttgart so shall have to return at some point to see more of it, but it’s been a very nice experience and the people were very friendly, always a bonus!