I got back from the Launchpad sprint in São Carlos on Tuesday afternoon. It was hard work, but a lot of work got done. Launchpad is really coming together now, and will become even better as some of the things discussed at the sprint get implemented.
One of the things discussed was to formalise some of the development workflow we’ve been using to develop Launchpad inside Launchpad itself so that it will be usable by other projects.
I really enjoyed the time in Brazil. The food and fruit juices were great (especially the ones made from native fruits like Açaí).
At the end of the second week, Mark flew us up to Rio de Janeiro for the weekend on his jet:
We took a cable car up Corcovado mountain to see the Cristo Redentor statue. There was a great view from the top.
Since I was leaving that weekend, I didn’t fly back to São Carlos with everyone else. Instead Kiko got a local travel agent to book me a flight directly to São Paulo, so that I could catch my international flight.
Unfortunately, when I went to the Varig ticket counter to pay for the ticket there was no record of the booking, which was bad.
However, I was able to buy a ticket on the flight anyway (which was due to leave in an hour), which was good. I even ended up paying less for the ticket than I expected.
Once I got through security, I found the flight had been delayed, which was bad. After the departure time changing about 3 times, we ended up boarding about an hour after the original listed departure time. This happened to coincide with the listed departure time of the next Varig flight to São Paulo (which had the same gate listed too), causing some confusion.
They served chocolate fondue on the flight, which was nice.
When I reached São Paulo, it turned out that my checked luggage hadn’t, which was bad. I filled out a lost luggage form, and the staff said they’d try to get my bag to the international airport in time for my next flight if it turned up.
At the Buenos Aires and Auckland airports, I tried to find out whether my bags had made it onto the flight. The conversations would go something like this:
me: Hi, my bag got lost on a previous flight and I want to know whether it made it onto my current flight. Here is the lost luggage form with the bag tag number.
them: do you have a bag tag?
me: no, they took the tag when processing the lost luggage report.
them: well, I can’t track the bag without the bag tag. You should have kept the tag.
me: …
It was almost the same in Sydney, except the guy at the desk took a look at the form and realised that it had a bag tag number on it (the thing they wanted the bag tag for), and found that the bag had been put on my flight. Sure enough, it turned up on the carousel.
The rest of the trip was fairly uneventful, which was nice.