22 March 2000
Got back from GUADEC yesterday at 4pm. 17 hour flights are way too long. Good thing they had a SNES at every seat. They also had a phone at every seat, and it looked like you might have been able to plug in a modem. If there was somewhere to plug in a laptop, Singapore Airlines would be almost perfect for hackers :). Here are some notes on what I did in paris: Wednesday, 15 March: Got through customs at about 6am. It was still a bit dark, so it took a while to realise that I was 2 floors up from the ground. I dedided to take the train, as from the instructions on the GUADEC web site, it seemed the simplest. It took me a while to get to the train station, as I didn't realise that aerogare meant airport terminal rather than a train station at the airport :(. After getting off at Denfer Rocherau. The 300m walk down Boulevard St Jaques to get to Rue Barrault turned out to be closer to 1km, and passed a few metro stations. After getting to the hotel, I dropped off my bags and went sight seeing. I went to the Eiffel Tower, which is a great place to go first, as you can see a lot of Paris from there. They have a lot of boards up about the history of the Eiffel tower, which is really interesting. The french complained about it as an eyesore, then agreed to put the same advertising on three sides of it for over a decade. Go figure. I also went to see the Arc d'Triumph. Tried not to look australian while standing next to the eternal flame :). You get a great view of the traffic from the top of the arc. You will probably never see anything like that round about anywhere else in the world. After that, I was starting to feel a bit tired (a 7 hour time difference does that to you), so went back to the hotel, where I fell asleep from 6pm to 7am. Thursday, 16 March Got up, feeling a bit shaky as I hadn't had a proper meal since yesterday breakfast. It was good that the hotel had a buffet. Around that time I found Miguel and met a lot of the other HelixCode guys in the dining room. I forgot to ask for one of their cool T shirts, which I am regretting now (if there is a second screening, I would love to get a copy). Had a bit of a conversation with Michael Meeks about whether the ideas of the canvas needs to be rethought to make it easier to use in a model/view type application (currently it is easiest for a single view apps, and I think there is a lot of code duplication in doing up multi view support which should go in the canvas). Went to the ENST after that and met up with some more hackers. Commented…