Off to England

After some back and forth for forgotten items, Steve and I finally arrived at Concord Trailways in Portland. We both prefer public transportation to driving and the cost to park for two weeks in Boston is outrageous. Since I am going to be in land of Real Ale for an extended stay I fortified myself with a does of Maine's own beverage: Moxie. I like it quite a bit, but it still tastes like Crest and Coke. Cheers!

The attraction bringing us to England, other than the great beauty of the land itself, is the ACCU Conference. The conference is ostensibly about C and C++ programming. It delves much deeper than that into the issues attendant on large scale software development efforts: design and architecture. As a software architect, this information is at the heart of what I do on a daily basis for *******. Last year the sessions covering architectural analysis, team coaching, and software cost estimation were insightful. At the other end of the spectrum there were many sessions which resurrected the important lessons of computer science and applied them to the craft of software development. Few accomplished this task more effectively than Andrei Alexandrescu and John Lakos. Suffice it to say that I find it difficult to choose my schedule as there are so many valuable, overlapping sessions.

Having arrived at Logan Airport in Boston, we learned our flight was delayed. Not by a few minutes, but by three hours! Poor Steve has wretched battery life on his Latitude (hate those machines), so we were continuously tethered to power sources. Why is it that airports never have comfortable seating and power in the same place? The airport WIFI infrastructure was also not particularly great. Though it teased us with promises of flight information, the link always returned us to the front page.

Our flight finally boarded at 11pm and we settled into our slightly dilapidated seats. Apparently our scheduled plane had a problem, leaving us with a model previously headed for retrofit. The staff on board were plenty nice, as always, and we had a relaxing flight to England.