Sunday, March 17, 2013

Travelling is a PITA at times!

I spent pretty much all of the week before last in New York and Boston visiting many of our financial services customers. It's a great opportunity to hear what they like, what they don't like and work together to make things better. I'd do this much more often though if it didn't involve flying! It seems that every time I fly I end up getting ill; usually a cold or (man) flu. Unfortunately this time was no different and when I got home at the weekend I could feel something coming. Sure enough, it was a heavy cold and it laid me up for days (I'm still not recovered completely yet).

Then while I'm recovering I remember that I missed QCon London. I vaguely remember many months ago while planning that my trip conflicted with QCon, but it had slipped from my mind until last week. It's a shame, because I love the QCon events. However, what made this one worse was that I appear to have completely missed the fact that Barbara Liskov was presenting! It's been the best part of 20 years since I last saw Barbara, so it would have been good to hear her and try to catch up. Back in the 1980's I visited her group for a while due to the similarities between what they were doing around Argus, replication (both strong and gossip based) and transactions, and of course what we were doing in Arjuna. She was a great host and I remember that visit very fondly. Oh well, maybe in another 20 years we'll get a chance to meet up again!

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