England in Brief, Part 2

Early for us meant that we met at 5:00 AM. We picked that time because that’s when the McDonalds opened. Plus, we figured, as long as our sleep schedule was going to be temporarily mucked about, we might as well get some work out of the deal. So we got in and started chipping away at our work. It was slow going, but we did find some useful stuff.


Hey, check out the hotel. Posh, eh?

At 11 we went back to the hotel to pick up our boss, B, who had flown in the day after us. She was feeling off from the flight but after some lunch was up to staying awake and working with us. We went to dinner at the Queen’s head, the Pub at which we had stayed last time, and had some of our favorite Old Peculier. Good stuff.

The next day was the long one. We met up at 5:00 AM, took an hour off for lunch so that C could take a nap, and then didn’t leave work again until, I think 9 at night. We were supposed to be demoing some software of ours, and for some reason we were having a horrible time finding anything that worked. We found several bugs, I eve n helped figure out that it wasn’t entirely our software that was on the fritz. It was one of those sets of problems where the question wasn’t “why isn’t this working?” It’s “why has this ever worked before?” We were supposed to be demoing in the afternoon the next day and almost nothing was working properly.

On the way back from work, we closed out the kitchen at a pub because we were hungry and wanted to make sure everything wasn’t going to close before we got food. I also had an appointment with Jessie. We had agreed to meet up on Google Chat at 10:00 PM my time, 4:00 PM hers, to say hi. I was a bit late, but we did manage to chat several times throughout the week.

Oh, and on that note, the hotel charged 12 Pounds for 24 hours of internet access, bandwidth-limited. Unlimited internet was 18 Pounds a day. That’s ludicrous. I almost considered not buying any until Jess informed me that work would reimburse me for it.

The next day was the demo, so I put on my slacks and black shoes and even a tie, so you know it was serious. We managed to do some more bug searching in the morning, but we mostly just put together a suite of data that showed what our software did (when it worked) and some slides about the history. B did the slides and C did the technical demo where we ran the software live. It worked, thank heavens, but it was all on data that we had carefully screened. We would have liked to have just run it on real stuff, live, but the system was too flaky for that.

Still, we did manage to show off our prototype code and no one came down on us too hard for having a sub-optimal demo, so congratulations were had all around. In the afternoon we showed on of the local workers how to run our software so that they could check it out, and then we went out for celebratory food and beer.

The celebratory food was at a Thai restaurant. I just got Pad Thai, which wasn’t particularly adventurous, but was really good. Then we went back the pub with the Beer Festival. The pub was actually in the old Royal Bath House in Harrogate, a very pretty venue. I had 6 beers...all 1/3 the size of a normal beer. But I got to try out a lot of good stuff. There was a rasin flavored beer, an ale with 8% alcohol, one brewed by a japanese master brewer specially for the festival, and even one called Banana bread, that, yes, tasted like bananas. I liked that one just for being different.












Beer!


Tired, we turned in relatively early, and then came friday.