UK Admin Dev Conference: The Day Before

I've arrived in London. Well, in Hounslow to be more precise. This may in fact be the same hotel that I stayed at 19 and a half years ago when I was on my very first international business trip for Wang Labs, but if it is it has certainly been extensively remodeled. Hard to say.

I flew Virgin Atlantic from Boston overnight. On the plus side, my sinuses didn't explode even though I forgot to buy chewing gum. In fact, I think the cabin pressure stabilization on this plane was exceptional. The water bottle that I kept in the seat pocket didn't undergo any noticeable compression or decompression. The landing was also exceptionally smooth. Also on the plus side, the plane was not quite full, including the middle seat of the group of three in row 53 of the starboard side of the 747-400, so I had a little bit of room to spread out. That really came in handy when the fellow in the seat in front of me reclined while I was trying to do some work on the companion wiki I'm doing for my presentation. (Hint, hint! Watch this blog for more info about that!) On the minus side was the very unhappy baby in the rightmost seat of the group of four seats in row 53's center section. Not that I was likely to get any sleep on the flight anyhow (I rarely do), but this little girl made it her mission to assure it. I did manage to get quite a bit of reading done, including this article in Scientific American about electronic voting systems, and this article in Foreign Policy about homeland insecurity, along with several other articles in each of those magazines.

I must, by the way, have screwed up the power management settings when I reconfigured my laptop after the hard disk crash a week ago. I was typing up some final notes on my slides, taking screen shots and putting them into the aforementioned wiki, and then suddenly went into hibernation without giving me any low-battery warnings at all. Note to self: double check that the laptop really is plugged in during the presentation tomorrow :-)