Just a quick travel post. I’m spending a couple of days in Chicago this week. At OpenNMS we have a surprising number of clients in Chicago (mainly in finance) so I get to come here often, and I really like this town, but, geez, can’t someone get me up here in a month without an “r” in it?

I got to meet up with some friends and we went to Vong’s. For once they were open (for some reason the last couple of times we tried to go they were closed for a “private party”) and I got to have their passion fruit soufflé again. This has got to be one of the best desserts ever made. They serve it with a scoop of passion fruit sorbet, and the best way to eat it is to poke a hole in the top of the soufflé and drop the sorbet in so it melts.

Seriously, this is an amazing treat. Don’t miss it if you visit Chicago.

While we waited for our table I also discovered that I like gin. I hadn’t had any gin since college and at the time I thought it tasted like wood alcohol. But apparently martinis are pretty darn good – especially Bombay Sapphire Gin martinis. Made it a little hard to get up the next morning.

When I got to the hotel they put me on the “concierge” level. The room is huge. I’ve stayed in nice rooms before, but this was the first one to have a television built into the bathroom mirror.

It’s made by a company called Electric Mirror in case you need one for the home.

It has actually been a little warmer here than in North Carolina, but this weekend is supposed to be beautiful so I’m eager to be back home. Next week I’m off to Frankfurt for our first Users Conference. There are still a few places left, so I hope to see you there.

I read on Larry Augustin’s blog that this weekend is the annual Open Source Think Tank event in Napa. I have never been invited to one these things, but I believe that I would get an invitation if I asked him.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the time right now, which is a shame since I bet with enough notice I could get a reservation at the French Laundry, which is on my list.

I’m not sure how well someone like me would go over at an event like this, since my views are a little different than most of the commercial open source community, but I’ve never really been afraid to speak my mind so at least I would have some fun.

But in keeping with our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money” I’m on the road part of each of the next five weeks.

At the end of this week I’m heading up toward DC to help out one of our clients with a performance issue on Windows. The Windows software and the Linux software are exactly the same (OpenNMS is Java after all) so we can’t understand why they are experiencing performance issues on this huge machine they are using. I also lack the knowledge and the tools for diagnosing performance issues on Windows, so the plan is to install Red Hat Linux and see what happens.

Next week I’m spending a couple of days in Chicago doing a “Pimp My OpenNMS” project. We have a surprisingly large number of clients in Chicago so I like going up there, but my only wish is that we could do some of these engagements when it is not so darn cold.

The two weeks after that find me in Frankfurt for the first ever OpenNMS Users Conference, with a short side trip to visit a friend in Dresden after that. This conference definitely falls into the “fun” category and promises to be a great day. If you haven’t registered already, please do so soon since we are limited to the number of people we can fit into the rooms we have acquired and I’d hate to turn anyone away. We had hoped to repeat this in the US sometime this year, but due to the current economic climate that probably won’t happen, as our potential sponsor is having to cut back on the number of conferences they can host due to overall belt tightening.

Finally, I’m off to Portland, Oregon, for a couple of days the last week of the month to work with one of our larger clients on a migration to the latest code. If I didn’t live in God’s Own Earth I’d probably be living in the Pacific Northwest, so I always look forward to these trips. Plus the client is pretty cool.

In these uncertain times it is nice to be busy, especially doing something you enjoy.

I’m spending the week in Milan with our kind hosts at Sun Italia. They provided a training facility for both our Basic and Advanced courses and they are also hosting an OpenNMS business seminar on Wednesday.

Unfortunately, the curse of the upgrade took an evil turn when, while I was upgraded to business class from JFK to MXP, my luggage didn’t arrive when I did. This is the bag with my dress shirts, my pants, and my very American “tidy whitey” briefs.

All I had with me was a pair of decent jeans and my Troy Polamalu jersey, and since I had to teach on Monday I had to go shopping.

Thus for the first time in my life find myself now decked out in Armani. Even on sale I think I spent more in one hour on clothes than I spent all of last year (since my wardrobe consists mainly of OpenNMS polos, Harley T-shirts and Levis it isn’t all that hard). I am head-to-toe stylin’.

The pants are pretty neat, I like the way they fit, and the shirt is made of cotton from plants grown by ageless monks in Tibet that is so soft I can’t cross my arms – they keep slipping off each other. The Armani T-shirt is even comfortable, although for a basic white T-shirt it cost more than I have spent on business suits (remember, I have to use US dollars). I even got a pair of those European socks that seem to come up to mid-thigh, which makes me feel like the Major from Ghost in the Shell.

But I can’t seem to get comfortable with Armani’s interpretation of the men’s brief. Let’s just say I have a lot of acreage to cover, and I’ve seen more cotton on the end of a swab than went into these undies.

Luckily my bag is currently in the same country as me, although I have no real idea when I can expect it to make it to my hotel. Shouldn’t be too long now, but it snowed all day today making the usual uncertainty with such things in Italy even more so.

I’m also pretty zoned out due to lack of sleep. Being a Pittsburgh Steeler fan I stayed up to watch the game. Wikipedia actually had the information we needed to figure out which channel to watch, but the time difference meant that it wasn’t over until after 4am.

It was weird watching the game in Italian. What was even stranger was the lack of commercials. During the traditional breaks they just showed a wide-angle shot of stadium or highlights from recent plays.

Soon it should be time for some pizza and then off to sleep. I should be better in the morning – rested and I hope adequately covered.

When I got the mail yesterday there was a thick envelope from New Zealand. I opened it to find:

This was kind of funny. I’m an old guy and I rarely drive over the speed limit. I also haven’t had any kind of ticket in years, but in New Zealand not only did I get a speeding ticket, I also had to pay a NZ$12 parking fine.

New Zealand was the first time I ever drove a car on the left side of the road (well, I should clarify with “for any length of time” before Mr. Byron takes me to task again to point out that to drive in the US you sometimes have to drive a short distance on the other side of the road). It wasn’t that hard to get used to with the exception that my muscle memory kept trying to signal using the stalk on the left side of the wheel, which just turned on the windshield wipers.

But there were two things that tripped me up (and that the car hire agent never told me about). The first was parking signs. In New Zealand you’ll see these little white signs that say things like “P-30” or “P-120”. Those are parking signs where the number represents the minutes one can park in that particular area. Once I got the ticket I put two and two together.

The second thing is an unusual traffic rule. It appears that if you are in a city and a car wants to make a right turn (remember, this is the turn that crosses the on-coming lane of traffic), traffic going straight must yield.

I found out about this in Rotorua. I was making a left (I liked lefts) and I didn’t notice the car in the opposite lane wanting to make a right onto the same road. We both made the turn (I assume he thought I was going to yield since I was slowing down and probably running my wipers). Luckily there was no accident, and in the slim chance the person I did this to is reading this blog – mea culpa.

I find the whole speeding ticket thing funny for a couple of reasons. The first is the traffic camera watermark on the citation (tres cool), and the second is that we are in talks with a company that supplies these cameras to provide a monitoring solution based on OpenNMS.

In English measurements, I was cited for doing 10 mph over the speed limit of 50 mph. I’m pretty sure I remember where this was, since the only time I did speed in Wellington was trying to get around a car that was driving erratically. There doesn’t appear to be a choice for that excuse on the form, so I guess I’ll just pay the fine.

LinkedIn is the only social network I even remotely keep up with. Recently Matt Asay introduced me to TripIt.

TripIt adds Dopplr-like travel information to your LinkedIn account. While I liked Dopplr I never really bothered to keep up with it and it seemed to be a pain to have to re-link to all of my contacts.

After dealing with some “server too busy” issues, I managed to get next week’s trip to Chicago added. It doesn’t seem like many of my contacts are using TripIt, so I decided to pimp it here.

Probably my favorite aspect of my job is meeting people in the community, so if you see me in your neighborhood, be sure to let me know if you want to meet for a beer or three.

I am back from my holiday in Fiji and New Zealand, but not fully back in spirit. That should change over the next week as I get back into the swing of things and it will take awhile to dig out from under the pile of e-mail and news.

We heard about the attacks in Mumbai, of course, but were shielded from most of the news coverage since we didn’t watch television or get on the Internet for much of the trip. My best wishes go out to those people affected, and I know that there are probably a couple of OpenNMS users in that group. In more bad news, a friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer in my absence, but I have no doubt that he’ll pull through. What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

It’s also December and the holiday season is upon us. Again, I’m not quite in the spirit as I just spent time in really warm, really sunny places, which is not the norm for December in North Carolina.

Believe it or not I didn’t think too much about OpenNMS during my vacation. When at home it occupies most of my waking thoughts and quite a few of my dreams, so I was surprised that I was able to unplug as much as I did. A good portion of that was due to the lack of Internet access. As much as I love the network and the opportunities it provides, it has really eroded the divisions between the work place and personal life, sometimes called the “work/life balance“. I’m pretty much in my office whether or not I’m actually there, at home or on the road. It takes getting out well out of my element for me to get away from it all, and this trip made that happen.

It was 44 hours from the moment we left Wellington until I got home, but the trip went as well as could have been hoped. I was surprised at the number of people on the domestic flights, but then I realized that it was the Thanksgiving holiday weekend which is known as the busiest travel weekend of the year. I have to agree with Louis CK that we don’t appreciate air travel as much as we should.

I wish I could do it more often, but a two week holiday once every other year is about all I can manage. I think the Europeans have it right when it comes to time away from work. I scrambled to see as much of New Zealand as I could in 10 days, and even limiting myself to the north island I missed a lot. During my stay I met a couple from Belgium and a man from Holland who were both spending five weeks in the country, which is more reasonable.

I did get to meet one OpenNMS user for lunch while in New Zealand. Daniel Lawson lives in Hamilton which was on our way out of Auckland.

It makes travel fun to know that almost anywhere I go I can run into someone from the community. Next stop: Chicago. Why do I always end up there in winter?