Events

Except for one minor problem, this has been a good trip. I'll have photos of the super-cute hotel probably this weekend. And the meeting today went surprisingly well, notwithstanding the 10 times I had to leave the room.* One amazing thing happened: at the end of the meeting, we stopped by reception and asked about getting a taxi. The receptionist pushed a button on a small device, which promptly spat out a receipt, which she handed us. By the time we got outside the building, there was a taxi waiting....

It's coming up on 11:30 am back home, so it's 18:30 here in Oslo, and I'm finally settled and unpacked. The bed looks so tempting. I have to stay up until 9pm, I really do. Photos and stuff eventually. Right now I really, really need a shower.

Posting will be sporadic the next couple of days, to say the least. At least Norway is a more advanced country than ours, with ubiquitous WiFi, so there will be some new items here.

I don't know why, exactly, but Dutch daredevil Nik Wallenda walked from Marina City to the Leo Burnett building last night the hard way: Wallenda, 35, began by walking more than two city blocks from the Marina City west tower to the Leo Burnett Building. That first crossing — which took 6:51 minutes and was done at a 19-degree slant across the Chicago River — set the world record for steepest incline for tightrope walking between two buildings. Wallenda took a Leo Burnett elevator down to the street and...

The Apollo Chorus of Chicago will perform at 3:30 this afternoon at St. John Cantius Church in Chicago, right by the Chicago/Milwaukee Blue Line stop. We'll perform two movements from Schubert's Mass in A-flat, five choruses from Händel's Messiah, and a few other pieces (including a beautiful soprano duet by Monteverdi). The church is gorgeous. I mean, gorgeous. Even if you don't hear us perform you should at least poke around the space. Oh, did I mention the concert is free? You should still subscribe...

Ah, FitBit. I'm guessing the device only stores time stamps and not time-and-date stamps. I'm also guessing they haven't worked out daylight saving time, either. Because apparently going to bed before 1am CDT and getting up at 7:30 CST was only 5½ hours. (It was actually 7½.) This seems related to a problem I saw Wednesday. I got to Atlanta just past midnight and synced my FitBit to my phone—which had already switched to Eastern time. Since the device never got past midnight, it's daily summary value...

It's hard to overstate how much we live in a sci-fi world. In 24 hours, I've booked a trip to Oslo, Amazon has delivered an inexpensive guidebook, and Weather Underground has already forecast the weather through next weekend. (Oslo will have very similar weather to Chicago, owing in part to the record heat they're having in Europe recently.) But where's my flying car?

Well, the travel ambiguity resolved just a couple of minutes ago, and I'm now booked to Oslo, Norway next week. We're doing a site visit and writing the technical diligence report before we land back in Chicago about a week from right now. This is unusual, but not unprecedented. We do technical diligences all over the world. And it's not really a problem for me personally, because I'd already planned to be in Los Angeles next week anyway. It's just rather farther than California. Oh, and our site visit...

I mentioned yesterday that I may travel next week for a technical diligence. We've got our team ready to travel Monday, we've got our flights picked out (but not bought), we've got our agenda and our hotel, but we haven't got a signed work order. If that doesn't come by noon today, it's going to be very difficult to do this work. I don't actually mind last-minute travel orders. But hearing a week out "be ready to travel" and then not knowing for certain makes it hard to schedule anything else. Updates...

For the record, I hate Hartsfield-Jackson airport. More specifically, I hate the people who are responsible for signage here. Mostly, they forget to put up the last sign in a sequence, both inside and outside the airport. Say there's a turn, followed by a straight path, then a Y-shaped fork, then another straight path to the destination. At ATL, they'll have a sign telling you which way to make the first turn, a sign along the straight path, and then...nothing. I know now what lies along every fork at...