London Update

DevWeek is drawing to a close. Jeffrey is upstairs right now doing a full-day post-con workshop on writing great managed applications. I’m downstairs in the speakers’ lounge relaxing with a cup of coffee and doing e-mail. This is my first day off in a while, and I’ve been looking forward to it. I have lots of little things to do that desperately need doing, including starting on my next column for MSDN Mag.

Sara left for Prague yesterday morning. Brian Goldfarb tells me she’s stuck in Amsterdam with passport problems. I’m sure Sara’s feeling a lot of love for those immigration officials right now.

I love London (especially the Islington section where DevWeek is held), but it’s expensive. In Victoria Station last Sunday, I saw a Krispy Kreme donut stand. Of course I had to stop. A hot donut cost me $2.00.

I took a car to Reading Wednesday night and spoke to a local user group. Jeffrey did the same last night in Coventry. Traffic getting in and out of London is murderous, and the fact that it’s been snowing off and on all week didn’t help matters. Jeffrey spent 4 hours in a car; I spent 3. We both came back exhausted since we had been speaking most of the day.

Speaking of Jeffrey: traffic was a little slow one afternoon at our booth at the DevWeek trade show, so Jeffrey took matters into his own hands.

During breaks this week, I’ve been walking over to Yo Sushi, my favorite sushi hang-out in London, and having raw fish snacks. There are three Yo Sushis in London; one opened last year (or the year before) and is just a 3-minute walk from the Business Design Centre where DevWeek is held. The great thing about Yo Sushi is that you don’t have to wait for your food; you just walk in and begin grabbing sushi off the conveyor belt. I don’t know if Yo Sushi was the first restaurant to put sushi on a conveyor belt, but when Richard Shaw introduced me to the Yo Sushi in London’s Soho district a few years ago, it was the first time I had ever seen conveyor-belt sushi.

I just read a disturbing story in the London Times. It seems that a British Airways 747 headed for London lost an engine right after take-off from LAX. The pilot circled out over the Pacific for a while and announced to the passengers what had happened. Then he pointed the plane to London and resumed their journey minus one engine. Because the aircraft couldn’t climb to its normal cruising altitude on three engines, it comsumed fuel faster than normal. Somewhere out over the Atlantic, the pilot realized they didn’t have enough fuel to get to London. So he radioed in an emergency and put down in Manchester, England. A photograph of the plane in the Times shows one of the engines literally hanging off the wing!

The scandal is that three days before this incident, a new EU regulation went into effect that makes it extremely expensive for a European airline to strand passengers overseas. The airline as much as admitted that they decided to fly the ailing plane to London because landing back in L.A. would have cost them $200,000 plus more than 100 tons of jet fuel (which would have been dumped over the Pacific prior to landing). Good to know that British Airways has its passengers’ welfare at heart. I’ll fly Delta home next week, thank you.