Beantown

Not much to post about my trip to Boston...it was over before it began. Wednesday was another early start, getting up at 3:45am to be at the airport for 5am. The joys of a 6am flight. I ended up getting to the airport a bit late, and thanks to the ever so speedy Gold service at the Air Canada desk, it took a lot longer than it should have to get checked in. Thankfully I made the flight on time (walked up to the gate just as they started boarding).

The flight itself wasn't too bad, but I forgot my back roll to help out with my posture. Needless to say, I was a bit sore when I came off the plane. Then it was off to Dollar for the rental, and to stand in another line. 20 minutes later and I'm finally on the road in the middle of a thunderstorm, so my original time line for getting to the customer site is now officially out the window.

Once I got to the customers office (albeit 30 minutes late), I spent most of the morning writing up some documentation, and reviewing the process to change languages in our product. For those familiar with our product, it takes 1 line of code, so there wasn't too much to review. The afternoon was much the same, with a quick review of the process in the doc, and then trying to help figure out a bug in their app. After sending off a quick email to our office in Ottawa, I was off to find my hotel.

Checking in was a breeze, but I got stuck across the hall from the ice machine, which was pretty damn noisy. Not good, but the air conditioner (set at 60!) overpowered the sound once I closed the door. I swear, Bostonians must be allergic to sweat or something...everywhere I went I had to put a sweater on as the A/C was just cranked. Anywho, I ended up at a mall for dinner, trying a nice little Italian place. Nothing like Italy, of course, but it was pretty good.

Thursday morning I was up, checked out, and off to the customer. Training was the order of the morning, after a company wide meeting at 10 am...had I known this, I could have gotten more sleep :( Then it was lunch with the software team, and more bug fixing in the afternoon. We did a bit of a code review to try to figure out what might be causing the bug, and like I had originally suspected, it was their code and a character array that was too short for the string they were using. A quick fix, and everything was working again.

The day wrapped up around 5pm, when it was back off to the airport, trying to find something to eat for dinner (I ended up eating mozzarella sticks, blech), and heading home. All in all, a long day, but it felt so good to be in my own bed that night...the joy of being home. As nice as it would have been to see a bit more than just the highway between the airport and the customer, I'll take being home most any day.