Thursday 28 August 2008

This is the way, step inside...

Venetian philosophy

Holidays are a time blissfully free of the modern distractions of computers, mobile phones, games consoles, televisions and a time for the family to spend some quality time together and eventually fall out.

Inevitaby, this leads to varied, interesting, thought provoking discussions. During the Brightside annual vacation in Venice, the following thorny questions were posed:

  • If you immersed yourself in a foreign country, how long would it take for you to become proficient in the language ?
  • If there was a 15 km stretch of beach resort including hundreds of young people, bars and restaurants in England, how many riot police would be required ?
  • If soldier ants are so damn clever, how come they didn't land on the moon first ?
  • When the bus was forced into that emergency stop, was it the German tourist or the Italian bus driver who screamed 'BASTARD' ?
  • What's the Italian for 'Cornetto' ?
  • If mosquitoes could be trained to attack people with the same blood group, would the bites be rendered harmless ?

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BRU-LHR

On Friday I returned from a very enjoyable week in Brussels. Hard work, challenging customer and miscellaneous technical issues. However, unusually, I had the pleasure of the company of a few of colleagues so we were able to have a chat over a meal and share a few excellent beers together.

Over the past five years, I have visited so many European airports, that they all tend to blur into one. However, certain key characteristics soon reminded me that I was indeed back in Brussels.

The lenghty queue for the 123 taxis to pass the roadworks to reach the set ...

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London Heathrow incident

Last Thursday, 152 people (16 crew and 136 passengers), in addition to a significant number of people living in Hounslow, narrowly escaped death when a British Airways flight from Beijing (BA038) was forced into an emergency landing at Heathrow airport. Several things struck me about this incident and the aftermath:
  • After a phone call to update me on all the domestic news and gossip, my wife somehow negated to impart this tidbit of useful and relevant information. I hung up and turned on the TV news to be staggered by images of the wrecked fuselage of a British Airways jumbo ...
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jet lagged

I am jet-lagged because a customer asked me to fly, at short notice, from Newcastle to Belfast at 07:05 on Wednesday morning. I had a suspicion this was important because when I told the client that my flights between London and Newcastle were non-refundable he replied 'I don't care about that. Just get on a plane to Belfast.' Initially, I was harbouring hopes of watching Newcastle play Stoke City in a Cup Replay on Wednesday evening and I was about to politely enquire about the possibility of departing early on Thursday morning when the project manager added: 'Oh and take ... Read more

Solihull to Amsterdam via London

Norman - Your next post will be in the style of Micro-Blogging... Monday - NSCR. Plaintive request from a customer to truncate a Siebel intersection table. Siebel's official stance on the use of any direct SQL to modify data in Siebel base tables is well documented. However, for reasons that are too lengthy and tedious to divulge here, this particular request was approved. Mainly because they deposited £2500 into my offshore account. Tuesday - Team Meeting at BVP. Interesting to hear what my counterparts on eBusiness Suite do. Ate here. Not as dire as the reviews suggested. ... Read more
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