I’m back on the road again. I have a killer of a flight this morning as I’m heading off to Frankfurt for the German Fox DevCon. I started off last night at 8pm with a flight from Maui to Kona, one hour layover, then off to Seattle for 5 hours. I got in at 5:30am and my next flight to Amsterdam is not until 1pm. 7 hours layover, but at least there’s an Internet connection to get some work done in the meantime. I’m kind of out of it already though, so it’s not going to be terribly productive. Then another 10 hours flight, another 1 hour layover and then another 1.5 hours to Frankfurt. Sunday will definitely be a ‘dead’ day… luckily I get a few few days to adjust as my sessions don’t start until Wednesday.

I always look forward to the German DevCon, because it’s well, in Germany. If nothing else there’ll be good food and good beer <g>. Rainer Becker, who runs the conference also puts on one hell of a cool show in terms of the conference arrangements that make both speakers and attendees very comfortable to say the least.

I’m doing 5 sessions this year plus two vendor sessions, so once again I’ll be busy. And I get to practice my German that’s been getting rusty. Ok, not that rusty – I am German born and a German citizen after all, but I don’t get to speak German all that often. No, I’m not going to do my sessions in German, although that could be amusing. Technical German escapes me though – so, unless there will be lots of beer DURING the sessions (as was the case during at least one session last year <g>) a session in German is not in the cards.

One good thing about a conference in November is that it’s Christmas time and you can get all the nice Christmas candy. Oh yeah! I’m going DominoSteine hunting <g>… I’m also looking forward to the old inns in old town Hoechst where there’s always very good traditional German food to be had. Ah the food is worth the trip alone. Oh yeah, and the conference too <g>… nothing like a bunch of stodgy Germans in a room, he he.

Markus, Kevin and I always joke a bit about the difference in ‘attitude’ at conferences/training in Europe vs. the US, where there usually is some two way interaction and questions from the audience, in Europe people seem to reserve that until after the session. And then you get grilled in detail. I remember a lot of very interesting and technically deep discussions after sessions and in the evenings at these Franfurt conferences which is always fun...

This trip will be round one. At the end of the month I get to go to Australia. Luckily that's a little closer for me than this 'half-way around the world' trip...