Oxymoronical

I thought it would be amusing to look at some of the numbers associated with my travel home from San Francisco. This is taking into account the time between leaving the place I was staying in America to getting back to my house:

• 63 hours total travel time
• 29 hours in hotel rooms
• 16 hours sleeping
• 15 hours in the air
• 4 plane flights (on 3 different planes)
• 8 hours sat in planes that weren’t flying
• 3 hours in a car

I’m normally pretty happy to be getting home after a trip to the States. Not because I don’t enjoy being out there of course, but you know home is where you’re most comfortable and living out of a bag in a hotel gets tiring after a time. Today is the first time that that has really changed.

I really didn’t spend as much time in San Francisco as I would have liked. A mere 4 days meant I totally failed to hang out with some of the friends I wanted to and didn’t have enough time with even those that I did get to see. I’m really grateful to those that put me up and took special efforts to catch up with me.

My flights home have pretty much been my worst air travel experience ever. First Houston has some rain so my first flight gets diverted to Austin to refuel and then continue on to Houston (after 2 hours on the tarmac), landing well after my connection to the UK was long gone. Then the guy trying to get me onto a later direct flight walks off to help someone else and when he comes back decides it is then too late to make is. So I have to stay in a hotel and take a non-direct flight the next morning, the nice guys at Continental send me to one of the dingiest hotels I’ve ever stayed in, of course without my luggage so no clothes and no wash bag.

Needless to say my flight the next morning is delayed. Thankfully it still lands in time for me to make the connection. Just as things seem to be going well the cargo doors on the plane to the UK break and we have to sit on the tarmac for 3 hours waiting for maintenance to fix it. Then we start moving and just as things seem to be going well we stop. After a quarter of an hour we pull back up to the gate. Apparently we ran over something and two of the tyres got punctured and have to be replaced. 2 hours later (after the in-flight meal has been served) we finally take off. That’s a nice 5 hour delay on what was only a just under 6 hour flight. I was frankly amazed to find that we did finally land in London and my checked luggage was there too.

I’m sure others have worse tales to tell, but this is on top of me being disappointed at having to leave so soon. When someone had suggested that I could just rearrange my flights to stay longer I had decided it was too much hassle since I would have to rearrange my hotel and car parking in London too, which of course I ended up doing anyway.

Plus of course I want to move out there anyway. There are becoming less and less things to interest me here and it’s getting disconcerting to see all the cool stuff my friends out there are getting up to and I’m missing out on.

So now I’m sat in a hotel room in London, trying to force myself to stay awake a bit longer to ease myself back into UK time. Still a 3 hour drive to go when I wake up but at least that will be under my own steam and on quiet roads. Well assuming nothing happens to my car overnight that is…

Finally back home after my two weeks in North America. Both Toronto and Mountain View included fun and disappointment. Traveling to these places is generally awesome but somehow I always manage to generate some form of drama for myself, and really living out of hotels and restaurants gets old pretty fast. I’m not much of a cook but I am looking forward to sitting down with a homemade meal this evening, well maybe tomorrow with the jetlag.

Right now I’m feeling even worse than normal for jetlag. I’m following my normal routine, I went to sleep at 6pm yesterday and got up at 2am today. Normally this sees me about right and I can slowly shift myself by a few hours a day till I get onto UK time somewhere around Wednesday. Right now though I am feeling shattered. I have a suspicion that even if I don’t fall asleep during the Grand Prix I’ll end up passing out shortly afterwards. This probably means I will be even more cranky than normal this week, sorry about that.

I guess it’s not much of a secret that I am planning on moving to either Toronto or Mountain View, but even after visiting both I am having real trouble figuring out which. Both have great people there and seem to be in good areas. I like Toronto because even though it is a city it does not feel very cramped and getting around seems easy. I like Mountain View because it isn’t a city at all, yet San Francisco is right there if I need one.

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for me and I wanted to touch on a few of the highs and lows before I forget them all.

It started with flights to get me to Toronto (for those of you that don’t know I live and work out of the UK). I was speaking at the Toronto Developer Day as well as attending a Firefox team work week (two things that conflicted more than I would have liked unfortunately). I normally manage to find direct flights but this time I had to connect through Amsterdam which wasn’t too bad, even if they seem even more mad for security than Heathrow. Incidentally terminal 4 at Heathrow is miles nicer than 3 where I normally come from, even if the 6 police officers armed with automatic weapons was a little disconcerting.

The Developer Day seemed to be a success and I hope all the attendees got something out of it. I’d encourage those that didn’t to let us know where we went wrong of course, not point in us running these things if they don’t give you anything. I think the people at my session found it useful, though I suspect I really need to work on my presentation style for such things. I feel kinda bad though that I’m not more confident about speaking and so could have taken some of the massive workload that Mark Finkle took on off his shoulders.

The rest of the week was spent with the rest of the Firefox team either figuring out concrete plans for the immediate future or working on those plans, interspersed with pizza, barbecue and poutine (Who’d have thought that Canadians would mash together some of the quick takeaway foods I used to get here and serve it in a restaurant!).

Next stop was Mountain View, via Detroit this time. I have to say that Detroit is a really nice airport to change at, even if it does mean that you’re probably flying Northwest if you do so.

I had a weekend to kill so on the Saturday a friend took me to a Renaissance Faire. I thought it might be a bit too geeky even for my tastes at first but it turned out to be a lot of fun, not sure you’d ever get me dressing up to attend like many do though. Fairly fun to watch Americans celebrating a history they never had.

Sunday I headed to the Winchester mystery house. I probably wasn’t in a good mood for it to be honest, jet lag had hit me and then the tour guide was a stereotypical over the top American tour guide trying to make every little oddity out to be spooky. Still it was an interesting place to walk around and the gardens were quite spectacular.

Tuesday I headed into San Francisco proper and went to meet up with the guys at Songbird. One of the things I really want to do is avoid writing the add-ons manager for just Firefox so it was good to chat with them about what they would like to see and how important they find the future plans that we’ve already toyed with.

That evening I had a great meal with some new friends at a German restaurant (yes I had to go to California in order to eat at a German place for the first time). I also got to experience the fun of driving out of the city back to MV at eight in the morning. I think I’ll be avoiding that in the future.

Thursday it was fun to attend one of the monthly labs meetups. Pretty cool to see plans for what is coming both in experimental stuff and in Firefox itself. I think it’d be really useful to stream these events so more people can get an insight in what is coming and why. Too often we can land things in the nightlies seemingly without any discussion when in actual fact a lot of thought does go into pretty much everything.

Finally Friday morning was painful. I maybe took people too seriously when they advised me on how long it would take to get to the airport and to check in, and then I added some for safety leaving me getting up at 5am and then ending up waiting at the gate for an hour and a half.

Seriously, why are so many people carrying on multple bags rather than checking them. I suppose I understand the risk of lost luggage but it is getting really annoying when I have to stick my single carry-on bag under my feet, decreasing the already sparse space there, because the overhead lockers are filled with trolley cases.

Northwest has to be one of the worst airlines I have flown. Poor food, very little movie selection, no tv episodes available at all. Thank god I have taken to putting movies onto my iPod so I always have something decent to watch.

Now I’m sat in a hotel room trying to stay awake for a bit longer. After I get back to Heathrow, after some 20 odd hours travelling (and I can never sleep on planes) it seems to be a good idea for me to sleep before taking the final 3 hour drive back home. But I also need to start the shift back to UK time. I shall probably be waking myself at around 3am for a leisurely drive back to Wales and then slowly shifting myself a couple of hours a day for the rest of this week.

It’s 6:30am Sunday UK time (though in my weird method of getting over the jet lag that works out as just after lunchtime) and I’ve just got home to Swansea. As many others are I’ve been thinking back over the great times I’ve had over the past two weeks. Needless to say I got out alive, as I believe everyone did (though apparently some are still stranded in Vancouver), despite Canada’s attempts to break us.

After a short visit with my sister trying to avoid getting licked to death by her new puppy I spent a week in Toronto at the Mozilla offices there. Thanks guys for having me, it was a fun week and I’m sorry I brought the Welsh rain over with me. Although I do have a shared office that I work from for most of the week I forget how good it is to actually be in a place where others are working on the same stuff. Maybe I’ll give in to Beltzner and move out there.

The summit was nothing short of amazing. So much larger than the last one and so much more enjoyable for it. As with all of these events I never got chance to do the things I had planned on and missed meeting many of those I wanted to, but met others I had never known and did more interesting things anyway. Dan and the rest of the organising team should be seriously proud with how the event went and how they coped with the upsets.

I think the Add-ons Management session I ran on Tuesday went pretty well all things considered. I have never really done interactive sessions before and combined with the hangover I was sporting I was a little nervous about it. Thankfully you can always rely on the Mozilla community to be talkative so in the end we actually ran out of time to talk over some of the ideas for the future of the Add-ons manager. Hopefully those there found it useful, I know I will take a lot from being able to get feedback and suggestions on my plans.

I guess the only minor disappointment (which is always the case since it would be impossible to avoid) is that there were many sessions I wanted to attend but conflicted with others. I hope there are some notes around for some of them so I can skim over what I missed.

Somehow I managed to find the journey home easier than normal. I suspect it helps that there were so many of us at the airport and I did the journey in a couple of stages to avoid the drive home immediately after getting off a plane which always turns into a dangerous race between traffic and my body trying to fall asleep.

I forgot how cool it is to drive down the motorways at 4am in the pitch black with nothing but good music and your thoughts to enjoy. Now, if only there were some shops open so I could actually get some lunch and a decent cup of English tea…