After several hours attempting to sleep on the plane, gave up and decided to watch The Green Hornet. Not bad from what I saw, but what I saw didn’t include the last 20 minutes since we landed just as the movie was reaching its climax. Going to have to Netflix it just to watch the end.
We landed in Frankfurt just late enough for me to miss my connecting flight to Budapest. Seven others were in the same boat. We banded together to support each other as we navigated the Frankfurt airport on the wild goose chase that was our attempt to get scheduled on another flight. As we deplaned on the tarmac we were met with a shuttle bus for people heading to Budapest. They rushed us back to the terminal but we were stymied at passport control and sadly were not able to make the flight. The nice folks from the airport apologized profusely and guided us to the Lufthansa desk so we might get rebooked. Unfortunately the Lufthansa folks couldn’t do anything for us, as we’d all originally booked on US Airways. Even more unfortunately, the US Airways desk was outside the security perimeter (As an aside, what is the point of the whole “Star Alliance” thing if they can’t just call each other to get someone on a flight? As another aside, the Frankfurt airport is HUGE). We exited passport control again (I have TWO German stamps on my passport for the price of one!) and took the airbus to the other terminal. Once there we tracked down the US Airways ticketing desk and rebooked on Malév Hungarian Airlines for a flight two hours later. We tracked down the Malév check-in desk then headed back through security and found our gate. After a couple of hours spent joking about what else might keep us from getting to Budapest we finally boarded and were on our way.
Landed in Budapest around noon, only three hours after I’d planned to. Traded in some dollars for Hungarian forints and hopped on a shuttle bus to the hotel.
Emailed my new manager asking where I might meet him then took a much-needed shower. Got a response by the time I was done and headed down to the main floor to start my first day of work.
Spent most of the afternoon meeting various Canonical and Ubuntu folks and attending UDS sessions.
The session on cleaning up the startup apps was pretty interesting. It was more about cleaning up the UI for setting startup apps, but there was some discussion of what should be there by default. (blueprint, notes)
Also attended the session discussing whether to continue limiting the size of CD images to 700MB (I know that sounds weird). Points were raised about how many folks actually burn the images to CD vs. using a USB thumb drive and whether the DVD image might be made smaller. (blueprint, notes)
After the sessions was a meet-and-greet where everybody was able to schmooze it up over free food, beer, and wine. Speaking of schmoozing, I met Mark Shuttleworth and got to talk to him for a few minutes. I managed not to ask him about space (I’m sure he gets that a lot) and he said he was very excited about what the OEM team (which I’ve joined) is doing and how it will help spread Ubuntu to the masses.
Caught up with Lyz Krumbach and a couple of my new coworkers. Heard some stories of past UDS shenanigans. Apparently the UDS in Brussels was legendary. They told me tales of pants dropped and cut rear ends.
Once the free beer ran out we took the party to a nearby bar. Discussion ranged from perspectives on working for Canonical to Lyz’s perspective as a community member and mine as the new guy and what type of beer is popular in Australia.
Got back to the room way too late. This is the start of a pattern.
