Last week I travelled to New York to attend the Kairos Global
Summit. The event took part 16-18 April and I was planning on
flying back 19 April. Due to the volcano eruption though, this
departure never happened and my 4 day stay in the US suddenly grew
to 11 days. After a mini New England tour this resulted in the
opening of a temporary Scott Logic office in New Hampshire.
Hello, Wall Street
On the Kairos
summit 500 selected students from top universities within
the US, China, India, UK, Spain and Hungary had the chance to
exhibit their projects and network with each others and of the many
invited CEOs. The event itself was really good, the most
unforgettable part being entering the New York Stock Exchange
trading floor on Saturday where many of the projects were
exhibited. It was nice to see some of our clients' trading seats as
I walked around. The trading floor itself was really impressive
even with the stock market being closed with screens, phones and
indexes everywhere.
On the NYSE trading floor (on the
right)
Hello, volcano
I was lucky enough to make it to the summit as London Heathrow
was closed down just a few hours later than I flew off to New York.
Needless to say that my flight on 19 April was cancelled. At JFK
they told me that I could choose to either move my ticket to the
next available seat or they could give me a refund on my ticket.
The next available seat for New York was 8 days later - that is
quite a lot! I found out though that it's possible to change
departure location and for some other cities like Boston and
Washington DC the waiting line was a day shorter.
The problem with being in the US and travelling to the UK is
that getting back in a reasonable time can only be done by either
flying over the Atlantic ocean or sailing across it. Since it
seemed that I couldn't get a flight back in a week I was wondering
if I could perhaps sail back under a week. The fastest ship I've
found to do this crossing was the Queen Mary 2 which crosses the
ocean in 8 days for about $2000. Waiting a week for the flight
still seemed a better alternative so I re-scheduled my departure to
fly from Boston.
Hello, Newbury Street
I had some luck in my situation: I spent a semester at the
University of New Hampshire and a lot of my friends back then were
now scattered on the East coast, especially in the Boston area.
What better excuse for catching up than the flight ban! So I went
to Boston, re-visited some famous places (like the Prudential
Tower, Newbury Street and the TD Banknorth Garden) and re-connected
with old mates.
I got slightly pissed at the volcano though when I realized that
I've just missed
Jesse Liberty's Silverlight talk. And if that wasn't enough I
couldn't even find a .NET or ALT.NET group in Boston to stop by and
say hi either - maybe next time!
Boston, view from the river
Hello, Main Street
Had it not been for the eruption I would have been working all
week. Developing software however can be done from any part of the
world with a laptop and a decent internet connection. Well... I
didn't have a laptop with me, only a tiny netbook which was great
on battery and awful on anything else. However I was actually
planning to get a laptop in a few months so I though I might bring
this purchase forward. Looking at notebook prices in the US I
decided I was shocked to see how lower prices here are compared to
the UK so quickly decided to invest in a new laptop.
The thing about prices in the US is that the ones advertised
don't contain state tax, which is usually between 5-10%.
There are a few states however where there's no state tax, the
closest one being New Hampshire. To my luck I had a good friend
living off Main Street in Concord, New Hampshire, who offered to
put me up for a few nights. If you haven't heard of Concord, it's
the capital of New Hampshire, north of Machester and south of
Lebanon and Berlin. I mean, north of Manchester, NH and south of
Lebanon, NH and Berlin, NH which have nothing to do with the more
famous cities apart from having the same name!
After my laptop had arrived here (thank you, express delivery!)
and having a room to myself with broadband I basically had the
fourth Scott Logic (for now temporary) office set up after London,
Newcastle and Edinburgh :). So should you get an email from me the
next few days around 10pm it's not because I'm working terribly
late but because I'm still on Boston time!
