Been outta the spaceship a couple of days, going to the UK. Londin Engerlund.
Every time I go back to London I remember a quote from some rabidly ambitious WallStreet guy who had just been posted to the City (The financial district in London is called the City, and means a small section of the rather larger non-capitalised city where the banks all hang out.)
He arrived at the office every day for a week, using London's tube (subway) system. One of his colleagues asked him how he was settling in to the new routine.
"You know," he replied, "London is a great city, except for one thing. It doesn't fucking work!"
Now, all cities have their problems, but London is what you get when you have a mediaeval streetplan, Georgian Buildings, Victorian Sewers, Edwardian Subways and Third World traffic levels.
Then in order to try and make it all hang together, you let the socialists run it in the sixities, seventies, and early eighties, and when that kinda doesn't work, you make the whole thing an ideaological exercise in testing the free market.
Imagine the result.
Suffice to say that I have never paid so much to go so not very far, so slowly. Still I lived there for ten years, so I guess it is kind of nostalgic.
Meeting was good. Talking with a firm called Microgen about a new version of their product, called Aptitude. Very good ETL (Extract Transform and Load) and EAI (Enterprise Application Integration). I personally would have had more in detail in the website, but that's me, guilty of premature elaboration every time, as one of my old sales colleagues put it.
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