Conferences, lost passports and undocumented Microsoft updates
It’s mid-November and I’ve been meaning to do a blog entry for ages – well since the end of October snuck up and took us by surprise!. So, what has been happening over the last 6 weeks?
From a sales perspective it is, as previously mentioned, a very busy time of year with budgets needing to be spent and contracts being finalised. It’s also the ‘conference season’ and everyone is trying to cram everything in before Thanksgiving. My October can be summarised by: days in the UK = 15, days in the USA = 16.
There were two conferences that I attended in October. The first was RAPS (Regulatory Affairs Professional Society) held in Baltimore. I’d not been to Baltimore before. Well not stopped that is - I’m normally flying past on the I95 en route between Washington and Philadelphia. It is a nice city with a nicely re-developed harbour although I find it hard to believe the claim that the Inner Harbour now attracts more annual visitors than Disney World. Are they counting the people in the cars going past on the I95 in that statistic?
Having been in the US for 10 days for the RAPS conference and prospects/clients visits I managed to get home for 4 days (just to remind my family who I am) before flying out to Chicago en route to the AMWA (American Medical Writers Association) conference to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was with a sinking feeling that I realized I couldn’t find my passport. I knew I had it when I left immigration at Chicago airport and now, 24 hours later, in the Chicago hotel it was no where to be found. Having stripped the hotel room and called everyone I could think of (and at this point let me put in a brief ‘thank you’ to the customer services agents at both United Airlines and National Car Rental who went beyond the call of duty to assist me) I accepted that it was lost and called the UK Embassy emergency help line. One slightly amusing aside to this, which made me feel a little bit better, was that National Car Rental did indeed have three lost passports (two Dutch and one German, seeing as you wondered).
Well the good news was it could have been so much worse. I happened to be in a city which had a British Consulate and which could issue me with an emergency passport. It helped that I had photo ID with me (UK Driving license) and was able to get a copy of the passport faxed to me from the UK. So, I had time to slip down to the Embassy 1st thing in the morning, get the passport and still make it back to O’Hare for my flight to Albuquerque. This is exactly what I did. The only damage done was to my pride and wallet. I also had to miss a presentation to a client but that was handled by others. All in all - a small price to pay.
I’ve been travelling independently since I was 11 years old (it’s a long time – trust me). I’ve travelled all over the world and never lost my passport. I am somewhat annoyed with myself and still have no idea where or when I lost it. I just can’t believe it wasn’t found and handed in somewhere – after all there are contact details on the back page.
But life is a learning experience and here are a couple of lessons: (i) Make sure you have a copy of your passport. Now I’ve actually got scans of the entire family’s passports stored in a password protected Zip file on my laptop. We also have copies on file and backed up in the house; (ii) make sure that you have some other form of photo ID on you when you travel; and finally (iii) If you are going to lose your passport try and do it in a city where there is a consulate which can issue you with another one
AMWA went fine and I suspect we will be back next year. However, I have to say that I wasn’t particularly taken by Albuquerque. Perhaps it was the whole passport thing. Perhaps, it was the fact that it wasn’t a particularly easy place to get to. Perhaps it was the taxi driver ripping us off on the way in from the airport. More likely however, it was the fact that, on the first night out, I couldn’t get a beer until I had gone back to the hotel to retrieve my photo ID. What kind of state makes a law which says that a ‘forty something’ year old man needs to show photo ID before he can buy a beer? I know it isn’t Albuquerque’s fault per se, but it does get tarred with that brush.
As a side issue, perhaps someone can tell me whether the New Mexico state law also says that a taxi driver can collect two entirely independent travellers (both Europeans incidentally – did he see us coming) from the airport, both of whom are going to separate downtown hotels, and then charge them both the full fare! He claimed it was state law. I call it a rip-off.
The journey had one more surprise! I was heading home via San Francisco which necessitate an over night stay. I arrived at my airport hotel in SF only to discover that the hotel was full of people attended the annual Exotic Erotic Ball. Some very ‘interesting’ costumes were on display – who says business travel doesn’t have its side benefits!
If we force ourselves back to business for a moment. From a development/testing perspective, the technologists among you know that Microsoft had announced in July that it would release IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates in Q4. We didn’t see this impacting our corporate clients but did see it potentially impacting our subscription clients whom are typically smaller organizations and individuals – the very people who would have automatic updates turned on. This meant that we had to prioritize testing with IE7. Whilst we didn’t expect any issues we had to be sure.
And yes there was a ‘gotcha’. Windows XP supports 2 types of font smoothing ("antialising "), standard and ClearType. This is controlled under ‘appearance/effects’ in display control panel. The default is ‘standard’. In it's infinite wisdom, IE7 has it's own setting that overrides the XP setting and it is set to ClearType by default. So what? Well this means that the same font, when displayed in, for example MS Word and IE7 will appear differently. For many people/applications this is not an issue. It is however, somewhat more important when reviewing documents! It’s a simple fix (make sure the settings in both Windows and IE7 are either standard or ClearType) but it takes time to identify.
We also had another ‘left field’ Microsoft event in October. An Office update managed to break one ‘modus operandi’ and fix another which, incidentally, had been broken a year earlier - all undocumented, of course. I won’t bore you with the detail, but it’s this constant making and breaking of functions which consume our most valuable resource - time. The first thing we know is when something goes wrong and then we have to experiment and work out what has failed, how we can work around it. In doing this we sometimes discover that a previously broken feature has been fixed. It’s part of life and I only mention it because sometimes clients wonder what we do for the annual support and maintenance fee.
I’m heading out to the Far East over Christmas (China and Malaysia) and before that will be in Berlin for the European DIA EDM (Electronic Document Management) conference and there is a quick visit to the East Coast (just to test out my new passport!) shaping up.
From a sales perspective it is, as previously mentioned, a very busy time of year with budgets needing to be spent and contracts being finalised. It’s also the ‘conference season’ and everyone is trying to cram everything in before Thanksgiving. My October can be summarised by: days in the UK = 15, days in the USA = 16.
There were two conferences that I attended in October. The first was RAPS (Regulatory Affairs Professional Society) held in Baltimore. I’d not been to Baltimore before. Well not stopped that is - I’m normally flying past on the I95 en route between Washington and Philadelphia. It is a nice city with a nicely re-developed harbour although I find it hard to believe the claim that the Inner Harbour now attracts more annual visitors than Disney World. Are they counting the people in the cars going past on the I95 in that statistic?
Having been in the US for 10 days for the RAPS conference and prospects/clients visits I managed to get home for 4 days (just to remind my family who I am) before flying out to Chicago en route to the AMWA (American Medical Writers Association) conference to be held in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
It was with a sinking feeling that I realized I couldn’t find my passport. I knew I had it when I left immigration at Chicago airport and now, 24 hours later, in the Chicago hotel it was no where to be found. Having stripped the hotel room and called everyone I could think of (and at this point let me put in a brief ‘thank you’ to the customer services agents at both United Airlines and National Car Rental who went beyond the call of duty to assist me) I accepted that it was lost and called the UK Embassy emergency help line. One slightly amusing aside to this, which made me feel a little bit better, was that National Car Rental did indeed have three lost passports (two Dutch and one German, seeing as you wondered).
Well the good news was it could have been so much worse. I happened to be in a city which had a British Consulate and which could issue me with an emergency passport. It helped that I had photo ID with me (UK Driving license) and was able to get a copy of the passport faxed to me from the UK. So, I had time to slip down to the Embassy 1st thing in the morning, get the passport and still make it back to O’Hare for my flight to Albuquerque. This is exactly what I did. The only damage done was to my pride and wallet. I also had to miss a presentation to a client but that was handled by others. All in all - a small price to pay.
I’ve been travelling independently since I was 11 years old (it’s a long time – trust me). I’ve travelled all over the world and never lost my passport. I am somewhat annoyed with myself and still have no idea where or when I lost it. I just can’t believe it wasn’t found and handed in somewhere – after all there are contact details on the back page.
But life is a learning experience and here are a couple of lessons: (i) Make sure you have a copy of your passport. Now I’ve actually got scans of the entire family’s passports stored in a password protected Zip file on my laptop. We also have copies on file and backed up in the house; (ii) make sure that you have some other form of photo ID on you when you travel; and finally (iii) If you are going to lose your passport try and do it in a city where there is a consulate which can issue you with another one
AMWA went fine and I suspect we will be back next year. However, I have to say that I wasn’t particularly taken by Albuquerque. Perhaps it was the whole passport thing. Perhaps, it was the fact that it wasn’t a particularly easy place to get to. Perhaps it was the taxi driver ripping us off on the way in from the airport. More likely however, it was the fact that, on the first night out, I couldn’t get a beer until I had gone back to the hotel to retrieve my photo ID. What kind of state makes a law which says that a ‘forty something’ year old man needs to show photo ID before he can buy a beer? I know it isn’t Albuquerque’s fault per se, but it does get tarred with that brush.
As a side issue, perhaps someone can tell me whether the New Mexico state law also says that a taxi driver can collect two entirely independent travellers (both Europeans incidentally – did he see us coming) from the airport, both of whom are going to separate downtown hotels, and then charge them both the full fare! He claimed it was state law. I call it a rip-off.
The journey had one more surprise! I was heading home via San Francisco which necessitate an over night stay. I arrived at my airport hotel in SF only to discover that the hotel was full of people attended the annual Exotic Erotic Ball. Some very ‘interesting’ costumes were on display – who says business travel doesn’t have its side benefits!
If we force ourselves back to business for a moment. From a development/testing perspective, the technologists among you know that Microsoft had announced in July that it would release IE7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates in Q4. We didn’t see this impacting our corporate clients but did see it potentially impacting our subscription clients whom are typically smaller organizations and individuals – the very people who would have automatic updates turned on. This meant that we had to prioritize testing with IE7. Whilst we didn’t expect any issues we had to be sure.
And yes there was a ‘gotcha’. Windows XP supports 2 types of font smoothing ("antialising "), standard and ClearType. This is controlled under ‘appearance/effects’ in display control panel. The default is ‘standard’. In it's infinite wisdom, IE7 has it's own setting that overrides the XP setting and it is set to ClearType by default. So what? Well this means that the same font, when displayed in, for example MS Word and IE7 will appear differently. For many people/applications this is not an issue. It is however, somewhat more important when reviewing documents! It’s a simple fix (make sure the settings in both Windows and IE7 are either standard or ClearType) but it takes time to identify.
We also had another ‘left field’ Microsoft event in October. An Office update managed to break one ‘modus operandi’ and fix another which, incidentally, had been broken a year earlier - all undocumented, of course. I won’t bore you with the detail, but it’s this constant making and breaking of functions which consume our most valuable resource - time. The first thing we know is when something goes wrong and then we have to experiment and work out what has failed, how we can work around it. In doing this we sometimes discover that a previously broken feature has been fixed. It’s part of life and I only mention it because sometimes clients wonder what we do for the annual support and maintenance fee.
I’m heading out to the Far East over Christmas (China and Malaysia) and before that will be in Berlin for the European DIA EDM (Electronic Document Management) conference and there is a quick visit to the East Coast (just to test out my new passport!) shaping up.
posted by David Cornwell, PleaseTech Ltd at 11:11 AM
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