It’s Cold in Montreal!
Spent most of my flight thinking through my slides and material and making adjustments, then watched through Harry Potter the Half Blood Prince, but we arrived before the movie finished! Now I must find out how it ends… 
Arrived Friday night around 9pm. Discovered this while in the customs line that my passport was no longer in my pocket. Holy fucking shit! Frantic 5 minutes – back to the plane and we discovered it had slipped out of my pocket and down the side of my seat. Phew!
Through customs I arrived at the Hilton Bonaventure and checked into a very nice room. At this point, I dressed up warmly and headed out to Old Montreal to check out some restaurants and bars. A very nice area but a bit quieter than I expected. I found a really nice bar with good food and had great short ribs, a nice syrah and Creme Brulee for dessert. Oh yes.
This morning I woke up feeling a bit tired… a slight time difference between here and LA. Went around to explore downtown Montreal. I found St Catherine Street and the main area and walked up along all the shops. Walked past the strip Club area. Pushy bouncers. No thanks I don’t want to go in. No really. I mean it. Hit the Apple store to buy another USB ethernet adaptor for my Macbook Air (I left it home =p), then enjoyed some good Coffee at Cafe Myriade.
A few hours on my talk then met up with Aaron Contreras an old Pandemic buddy. Checked out the plateau area around Ubi and the italian neighbourhood. Good times. Aaron has a sweet studio style apartment. Jealous!
Back at the hotel now and some more work on the slides. I want to finalize the first half of the talk tonight, then hopefully I’ll have a bit of time tomorrow to spend walking around Montreal at lunch instead of spending the whole day preparing for the talk!
cheers all
Update: the demo from the talk is now available at google code, slides and resources from the talk are available here.
Snape kills Dumbledore.
You bastard!
Hey Glenn -
It’s Ben, the music producer / sound designer. We met at the hotel’s bar monday. I unfortunately missed your conference and hope it went better than in the morning…
I sure hope you liked your stay in Montreal! It is in fact cold but you’re lucky, we sometimes have snow this time of the year.
Great blog btw, will send a link to some of my contacts.
Don’t forget… YOURS is VOTRE!
Ben
hey Ben, it was great to talk with you guys – the second session went very well, we had no technical problems and everything was smooth. i was very relieved!
ps. I still can’t roll my R’s in VOTRE properly… working on it!
Hey Glenn,
Too bad there was some technical difficulties at the site but you still managed to pull out a nice talk and demo.
And thanks for spending the time explaining things to me during the lunch break
John
no worries john, it was good to meet you – we managed to do the session again in the afternoon and that one went off without a hitch, so phew!
Update: the demo from the talk is now available at google code, slides and resources from the talk are available here.