Back to Summer

Thanks to everyone who made my stay in North America so much fun. I'm flying out tomorrow morning and will be back in the big dry brown land I call home this weekend. I definitely enjoyed my time here, though most of the time I was simply confused. Large pizzas that cost less than medium pizzas, sugar in milk cartons, and vitamins in your milk; deep fried orange cheese and the sun and the cars both on the wrong side. Even so, it will be nice to go back to a land where I understand the sports, a land where the 5c coin is smaller than the 10c coin, and a real hamburger comes with a slice of beetroot. In any case I'll be back in SF for VSLive this January, so if anyone wants to say Hi then drop me a line. Obviously there may be a slight delay in posting updates to the site for the next few days. Thanks to everyone at Dundas Software for the loan of office space in Toronto, to Microsoft for putting up with my pestering and wild innuendo, and to everyone who has helped out over the last few months - especially Nick Hodapp, Uwe Keim, Erik Thompson, Mike Dunn and everyone who has contributed to the Code Project. The Trip Home I'm back and ready to do the final instalment of The Search for Kent, post the backlog of articles, write you guys a ton of .NET articles, parade around in my swanky new Microsoft gear but first, some scribbles, then a nap. I was wearing a fleece from the Whistler/Blackcomb ski resort on a plane from Seattle to SF, and in the cattle crush to get out of the plane a woman next to me peered at the fleece and said "So you work for Microsoft?" It took me a bit to try and work out if she was saying that because maybe I had that steely glint of vision in my eyes, that jaw of determination, that palor of CRT, but then it clicked that she was looking at the word Whistler and getting a weird Pavlovian reaction to it. I said "no, but by any chance do you?". Turns out she worked for the CEO. Pretty cool. SF airport is wonderful if you have one of those electric cars that beeps, but otherwise it can be a little frustrating. I had spent far, far too much while in the States and was paying the price of too many bags, too few arms. I made discreet inquiries about where, exactly, was the international terminal since I had been lead to believe they had lockers I could store the pesky bags until later. 2 airport employees pointed me in a certain direction assuring me the international terminal was close. I even checked with someone halfway to the destination to ensure I was on course, and when I got there, there was, in fact, no international terminal. Another inquiry, and this time I get a stern arm pointing in the direction I had just come from, and a laugh that said "you'll be gone for days if you want to walk to the international terminal". Unbelievable. So I make my way back. I find maps. I find the terminal, the luggage stores, and the elevators on the maps. Each hundred yards I recheck the maps along the way. Luggage storeroom still there. Eventually I make it to a terminal that seems so new you expect bubble wrap to be piled up behind the potted plants, and there, on the map in front of me was a picture identical to every other map I'd looked at except it didn't show a luggage store. The luggage store was closed for refurbishment. No problem - I was so out of time that the whole luggage storage thing was a moot point. Evidently there was thick fog in LA which meant we got to sit on the tarmac at SF in the plane with the engines off and the air conditioning down low, then we did the slowest flight between SF and LA in history (they said they were flying as slow as physically possible, THEN we finally got to LA and they did the "well, we could take you to your gate, or we could continue to taxi down to New Mexico and then get some buses that will be able to take some, but not all of you, back to the gate. Then we'll come and pick up the rest of you, and then (I'm assuming this ne