I’m writing this from the Admiral’s Club lounge at LaGuardia. It is on Concourse D, but my flight is leaving out of Concourse C. Unlike other airports, there is no way between the two concourses without leaving and returning through security, so I’ll be visiting the x-ray machine for the third time on my way out.

Despite that quirk, I’ve had a fun time in New York. I came up to teach a three day class on OpenNMS for Lime Wire. It has been a good trip and if the storms hold off long enough for me to get home on time, it will have been a great trip.

Lime Wire is in the process of moving into new offices in Tribeca. They are amazingly decorated, as if Pottery Barn and Crate and Barrel had a love child. There are some issues, however, such as a problem with the elevator buttons that resulted in a post on Failblog.

Friday night after class I met a friend of mine from high school, and he was kind enough to take me to a restaurant called Corton. After figuring out that Broadway was not the same street as West Broadway, I was able to meet up with him and dine on some very fancy dishes (the type where each little morsel comes on its own oversized plate that matches the shape of the food). We ate, drank and caught up on each other’s lives since we’d last met in DC, about 10 years ago. It’s the occasional night like this that makes the travel bearable.

Saturday night the Lime Wire guys took me out to the Odeon. It was a lot of fun, although Stuart (the manager) was they only one who got some of my cultural references, since we are both about the same age and somewhat older than the rest of the team. I visit a lot of companies and I’ve come to be able to recognize certain vibes, and from what I can tell Lime Wire is a great place to work. Plus, they’ve been using OpenNMS for a long while so they are obviously well above average in intelligence, and as you can see, extremely good looking.

Just before I came up someone pointed me to the Techcrunch article on the “Lime Wire Pizza” fiasco, so I was eager to get the whole story. Unfortunately, while some of the guys were at the party, no one was near enough to give me an first hand account. In the beginning of the story I was definitely sympathetic to the Dovecote guys, but when I got to “One of the Dovecote guys grabbed a whole pizza and tried to run away with it” that vanished. When one decides to escalate things to the point of theft, you’re kind of signaling that anything goes. But I guess when you think it is okay to publish stolen documents from Twitter, the theft of a pizza is nothing.

Even though I was asked to teach on the weekend, I had fun (well, as long as I make it home on time). Plus, it gave me a lot of ideas for decorating the OpenNMS offices when the time comes.

I travel a lot, and I tend to travel on American Airlines. Not that they are really any better or worse than the other airlines, but from Raleigh they are convenient and they tend to be competitive in price.

Last month I broke the million mile mark on my frequent flyer account.

Note that this was not “in seat” miles but the total of all miles from all promotions that I’ve logged with the airline.

The last time I checked the AAdvantage website didn’t have much on what happens at the million mile mark (or marks, I’ve seen some travelers with 3 and 4 million miles). So I thought I’d post the letter one gets when you hit this milestone.

The one really cool thing is that it appears I am “gold” (the lowest elite level) for life. I’ve gotten used to things like boarding early, so I appreciate that. Perhaps at two million miles you get to be lifetime Platinum.

I am simultaneously eager and scared to find out.

(Other titles I thought about for this post included “Post Falls from the Edge”, “My Own Private Idaho” and the ever popular “I da ho”)

I am writing this from a hotel near the Spokane, Washington, airport where I am awaiting my usual club sandwich and trying to catch up on e-mail and such.

I spent this week in the middle of Washington state with a client. It was quite a departure from my normal trips which usually involve big cities, but I enjoyed it since I live in a small town and it made me feel more at home. Small town, desert Washington is much different from rainy, west coast Washington.

Even though I live in a small town, I still have some biases. When I was contacted by the client for some training and consulting services, I was curious what a small rural community would need with OpenNMS. I asked them how many devices they needed to monitor, expecting a couple of hundred, and was surprised when the answer came back 6800. We were replacing an OpenView install (as well as Netcool, but while they bought it they were never able to get it into production so “replace” is too strong a word).

Turns out there is a lot of fiber in that sagebrush, so not only do they have a lot of devices, their network is fast. The motel I was staying in had screaming bandwidth. I decided to try it out by running, uh, a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large files, and found I was able to download a 1.5GB file in about 10 minutes (peaking at 2 megabytes per second).

Most awesome.

Speaking of awesome, I drove through a thunderstorm on the way back to Spokane. Storms on the prairie are something to behold. I’m driving along in bright sunshine, with the car’s outside thermometer reading 89F, and up ahead I spy a massive, solid-looking black wall streaked with bolts of lightening. After what seemed like an eternity, I finally reached it. The world went dark and raindrops the size of golf balls pelted the car.

Then the situation reversed itself. Off in the distance I could see it was lighter, and before I knew it I was back in the sun and the road was starting to dry. The temperature was 70F.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.

Oh, back to Idaho.

I have never been to Idaho, and since I had pre-paid for a tank of gas I decided to head over to Post Falls.

I was going to eat there but I realized I wasn’t hungry, so I stretched my legs, hopped back in the car, and headed to the airport.

So now I can say I’ve been in 45 of the 50 United States. Many of those have been to work on OpenNMS, including Iowa, Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont and New Hampshire. I’m still missing Rhode Island, Maine, Nebraska and the Dakotas, so if any of my three readers lives in those states, I hope to get to visit you soon.

I just got back from spending some time with a client up near Boston. My hosts were kind enough to drive me to New Hampshire, which is the 44th state I have visited.

Any OpenNMS users in Maine, Rhode Island, Idaho, Nebraska or either Dakota need some on-site consulting?

I hope the ‘canes pending victory over the Bruins won’t strain our new relationship. (grin)

Note: This is one of my “travel” posts with little OpenNMS content.

After the successful Users Conference in Frankfurt, I decided to take a few days to visit a friend of mine in Dresden. Although the weather did not cooperate, I had a great time.

I took a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt to Dresden, and after one of the craziest landings I’ve ever experienced (the pilot took that 737 on basically a slalom course before landing, hard, on the runway – I swear that at one point the wings were vertical) I met my friend and we took the train into the city.

The first stop was lunch and where I got to experience the German take on the döner kebab. It was fantastic (I liked it so much that I had it for lunch the next day). After lunch we took a walking tour through the city while trying to ignore the light drizzle.

In one section of town the buildings were decorated to reflect different natural elements: water, sun, earth.

Right on the river Elbe are a number of impressive buildings, including the Dom (the Hofkirche) and the Church of Our Lady (the Frauenkirche).

The latter was basically destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II (I will now always remember the dates 13-15 February, 1945) but it was rebuilt in 2004.

One of the original crosses was on display where one can see how the heat from the fire melted part of it.

I got a picture of me with the Golden Reiter, a golden statue of Augustus II the Strong.

While the statue is incredibly bright and shiny, there are only about 300 grams of gold used in the coating. Augustus was also king of Poland, so the statue faces toward that country. His body was buried in Poland but his heart remains in Dresden (in the Hofkirche).

There is a common misconception that the stance of the horse in equestrian statues illustrates how the rider died (both front legs up – died in battle, one leg up – died from wounds sustained in battle, all legs down – died at peace). While the Golden Rider has both legs up in the air, Augustus died of complications from diabetes.

Speaking of Augustus, he liked to fashion himself as an eastern version of Louis XIV and so collected a number of treasures. Many of these are on display in a gallery called The Grünes Gewölbe. Each room in the gallery is dedicated to a different type of art: from things made of amber and ivory to items of silver and gold. The most impressive pieces were the jewels and jeweled artwork. Definitely an exhibit not to miss.

Another thing I was delighted to see: the pedestrian crossing lights, or Ampelmännchen. On my first trip to England many years ago I stayed with Jonathan Sartin and his son had a odd pair of toys: a red figure with his arms outstretched and a green figure that was walking. He told me that these were “East German” crossing signals. I had totally forgotten about them until I saw them in Dresden. There is something about them that captures the imagination.

Apparently there are different versions as well. I saw the Ampelfrau as well as the Ampelmann and a bicycle. One thing I didn’t see was much else to remind me that Dresden was once part of the Soviet Union.

I was only in Dresden for a couple of days, but already I would like to go back. It is rather close to both Berlin and Prague, so perhaps I’ll be able to visit those places as well, using Dresden as a base of operations.

My only wish is that next time the sun will come out.

When I travel, especially to other countries, I tend to want to experience the place in a greater sense than most tourists. For example, I’ve been to London a number of times, but still haven’t managed to do many of the typical touristy things, such as ride the London Eye or watch the changing of the guard. But I have visited some historic pubs and wandered around the grounds at the Greenwich Observatory.

This seems to be in stark contrast to some Americans. Since I travel a lot on American Airlines I sometimes get upgraded to first class. Once I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me on a flight from Los Angeles to Dallas. From what he told me, he appeared to be very wealthy, but in that kind of aloof way of the nouveau riche (the wealthiest people I ever met were some multi-billionaires who were rather down to earth and lived somewhat modestly for their means, although even modestly their means were well above mine). I mentioned France, specifically this small town called Menthonnex-en-Bornes, that I enjoyed visiting in the Alps, and he countered that the only place worth visiting was near Versailles. He always stayed at this hotel where you could look out on the countryside, see goats, etc., but they had a special elevator down to the spa so you “never had to leave the hotel”.

Never leave the hotel? Then why bother. I’m sure there are some good spas in Dallas where you don’t have to leave the hotel either. You could probably go there and save some money (and the French a bit of grief).

Personally, I really enjoy getting out amongst “the natives” and trying very hard to disabuse the notion that Americans are loud and rude (not sure if I succeed at either but I do try). Unfortunately, on this trip to Germany I have been pretty much hotel bound.

The hotel is pretty funky, and comfortable

but for some reason my immunity to jet-lag isn’t working. I haven’t been able to sleep well, and I needed to finish up my presentations for the OpenNMS Conference happening this weekend so I’ve been in front of the laptop most of the day.

I did manage one small adventure. Last year I decided to start collecting Harley-Davidson T-shirts on my travels. It gives me a goal and since most dealerships are outside of tourist areas, I get to experience a little of the local flavor.

Frankfurt is no different. After figuring out how the subway system worked (Frankfurt is a little confusing, especially at the Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof which is a large station with both proper trains and subways) I road to the edge of town and then walked about a kilometer to the Frankfurt “Harley-Davidson Factory“.

It was pretty large, larger than many of the dealerships I know of in the US. They even had a display of antique bikes. I bought a shirt (“Made in the USA” – rare for textiles these days) and headed back to the hotel.

I also got to pat myself on the back for my growing understanding of the German language. For example, the German word for “zoo” is … “zoo”.

But there are some things that need no translation