Posted on 1 Comment

Waiting at Vancouver airport

Ok I admit it, I was chatting up the nice AirCanada lady at the check-in counter. Consequentially, she forgot to give me the luggage tag for my suitcase. Travelling from Canada to the US, you first check in (but don’t drop off your checked luggage), then actually go through US immigration “Welcome to the USA”, and then you drop off your luggage. Just as I was trying to extract practical and solution-focused assistance from the person there, the AirCanada lady came running through with my luggage tag. Now there’s friendly service.

The US visa waiver form still has the same typo I spotted a few years back, even though it’s a newer version… in the text about the time required to fill out the form, they talk about something like “5 minutes total for an average of 6 minutes per question”. I presume they mean “6 seconds”. I’d gladly report this bug, however, the elaborate contact details (not a website) are on the part of the form that I had to hand in. I’ll try again later.

US customs thought I worked for Google, since today I’m wearing this very nice white polo with Google logo. I said sorry no, I work for an almost equally cool company called MySQL. He had no idea. Ohwell.
The reason I have the polo is that I did visit Google on Friday, a number of us did talks there, which will in fact be available via Google Video later. Funnily enough, I visited Jeremy Cole at Yahoo! straight after, and apparently the appropriate response on spotting a Google logo at Yahoo! is “how was the interview?” 😉

Friday was an interesting yet relaxing day after the buzz of the conference. Sadly the clutch of Jeremy’s car gave out on the way to the airport (right around Oracle HQ ;-). Did you know that San Carlos municipal airport near there has airport code SQL? According to Wikipedia though, the assignment of that code pre-dates the founding of aforementioned database company. A curious case indeed.

But back to Google and Yahoo! They are of course are both big MySQL users. Yahoo! writes plenty about that themselves, and Google won’t confirm or deny much in public (nor can I tell, on punishment of Chinese water torture). Anyway, it was interesting to talk some more with these big real-world users of MySQL, and I got some excellent feedback to follow up on. Some of that will be easy, since my next stop on this trip is Brian Aker’s place in Seattle. Aloha.

I should also comment on my arrival in Vancouver, a few days ago. They have this glorious waterfall, carved wooden statues, as you walk from arrivals towards the customs area. Very welcoming and relaxing. US airports and security personnel may take hints from this.
The Canadian customs official appeared a tad grumpy, but it was very late in the evening and he probably hadn’t visited the arrivals hall recently. That’s ok.

My hint: when travelling, always have a sense of humour and be kind to airport personnel. They can either help you out (and say get you a nicer seat or get you out of hassles), or (mainly in the case of security personnel) cause you so much grief you wish you’d stayed home.
Also pick a suitable nationality. I exit/enter Australia with my Australian passport, but around the world I use my Dutch one. Overall, it appears to be one of the safest nationalities to have, respected in both (Middle) East and West. No idea why (considering the Dutch invented slavery and colonised most continents), but anyway. It works.
Harmony’s passport is Australian, and I have seen consequences: she needed a visa for the Czech Republic and Hungary, whereas not even New Zealand citizens need that. So either John Howard or Alexander Downer must have said something nasty, or dumb. Or both. Nothing new there.

Posted on 1 Comment

1 thought on “Waiting at Vancouver airport

Comments are closed.