Thing have been busy lately, and I haven't been blogging as much as I'd like. One reason is because I'm in the midst of my second business trip for EDS. This second trip is a two week affair, during which I am going to be training a team of engineers on how to support the product that I work on. The rub (of course, there is always a rub), is that this team is based in Rüsslesheim, Germany. So, last Sunday, I was dispatched to Germany.

From a work perspective, I would say that my first week in Germany went okay. My position on conducting training is somewhat lukewarm -- I generally like teaching, but I don't like being in the position of talking about things of which I'm not an expert. If I had plenty of time to prepare, I could have learned a whole bunch more about our product, and things would have been great. Unfortunately, like everybody else on my team, I don't have any extra time, so I really only know the parts that I coded well. And of course, as is my luck, the team in Germany won't be using 2 out of the 3 components that I coded. sigh.

But, the team in Germany has been great to me. They are quite helpful and friendly, and they seem to be interested in what I am saying. I'm getting quite a few questions, which is provoking some interesting discussion.

Now, from a me-travelling-abroad perspective, once again, things are only going okay. I was super sleep-deprived when I arrived in Frankfurt. I arrived on Monday morning, after leaving San Francisco very early the previous morning. I had a lot of material to cover, so I worked almost a full day on that Monday. But when sleep-deprived, things can happen. Within an hour of being in Germany, I had forgotten to get a receipt from the Taxi that I took from the airport to the office (which means I probably can't get reimbursed for that), and even more distressingly, I lost my cell phone.

My phone wasn't working in Germany, even though it is a "world phone". It was able to connect to several different European GSM providers, but I wasn't able to actually roam on their network. So, I was fooling around with the settings on my phone in the Taxi, and that is the last time I remember having it. So, I either left it in the Taxi, or dropped it on the sidewalk while walking to the EDS office.

Damn.

I'm not really too upset about it, however. The most important data on the phone (all of the phone numbers) is backed up -- thanks to Bluetooth and iSync on MacOS X. It is just been really annoying -- not only do I never know what time it is (on top of all of the jet lag), but I am also forced to screw around with pay phones again (ug). But on the upside, whereas before I was just toying around with getting a new phone, now I have to get one.

Other than that, I have been eating some good German food, recovering from all of the jet lag, keeping up with my American TV interests (via my Linux PVR), and experiencing a different culture. But still, I'm not much of a traveller, and I do miss being at "home", and going to sleep in my own bed. :|

-Andy.