As you read this magazine, it should be impossible to ignore
the fact that this is the 100th issue. This is, on so many levels, a remarkable
achievement, and one that is worthy of celebration. I have written columns for
a number of different magazines, and few of them have survived long enough to
reach this impressive milestone (though I admit no hand in their demise). So
let me begin by expressing my heartfelt congratulations to everyone involved in
this magazine, past, present, and future.
I will celebrate this 100th issue by keeping this secret no
longer
As a regular contributor to the SDN Magazine, I have been
asked to contribute something more on the personal side. And although I have
always enjoyed sharing technical material, I am delighted to oblige this
request.
I will, to put it simply, tell on myself. Specifically, I
will share with you, dear reader, an embarrassing episode that I was at one
time committed to keeping secret forever. But secrets kept are lonely, at best.
And therefore, I will celebrate this 100th issue by keeping this secret no
longer.
To begin with, I have a confession. Actually, I have two.
The first is that, as a conference speaker, the conferences offered by the
Software Development Network, an organization that has undergone a variety of
name changes over the years, are among my favorite.
The reason for this affection is simple. It’s the people
involved: organizers, attendees, and fellow speakers. I know of no reoccurring
conferences that so consistently bring together such a good group of people,
and I appreciate it very much. Thank you for making me a part of this.
I was first introduced to this organization, which at the
time was called the Software Developer Group Netherlands, in 1995. Following a
talk I gave at the annual Borland International Conference in Anaheim,
California, Joop Pecht, SDGN Secretary, and Ad van der Lisdonk, then President
of SDGN, introduced themselves, during which they gave me a call for papers for
the upcoming SDGN event.
The SDGN Conference to the Max 1996 was my first conference
for this organization, and I have since had the honor and pleasure to speak at
12 of this organization’s major conferences, as well as a number of the smaller
events.
And this leads me to my second confession. In December of
2003, I nearly missed my own SDN Event presentation. To be more precise, I
missed part of it, the first part, to be exact (which must be obvious if you
give it any thought). And here’s the weird part. It was a successful
presentation. But you’ll have to read on if you want to know why.
As I begin this confession, I imagine that your reaction
might range from “Oh, who cares? It’s not the end of the world.” to “How dare
you! We, who committed our time and energy to travel to these events, deserve
better.” Regardless of whether you are among the “yawn” group or the “hang him
up” contingent, I must admit that this mix-up was nothing short of a worse
nightmare come true.
I’ve been delivering corporate training, training tours,
user group meetings, workshops, and the like, for more than two decades. With
as much travel as I have done, and as many courses and seminars I’ve presented
across North America and Europe, it’s a miracle that I haven’t encountered some
situation where, due to events beyond my control, I have failed to arrive on
time for the event.
In most cases, I would fly into a city where I was
presenting one or two days in advance. And though the odds are against it, I
was never late due to weather or equipment malfunction. Although I lived with
the constant dread that I would miss an event, and anticipated what actions I
would take if the circumstances arose, it just didn’t happen. (I should really
end that last sentence with the word “yet.” It’s like the old adage about
motorcycle riding. If you ride a motorcycle, you’ve either fallen, or you will
fall. As long as you keep riding a motorcycle, a fall is certain.)
If you ride a motorcycle, you’ve either fallen, or you will
fall; as long as you keep riding a motorcycle, a fall is certain
So, with this in mind, you might imagine that I put a fair
amount of planning into my travel in order to minimize the possibility that
something may happen to keep me from making my presentation. And the days
leading up to December 10th, 2003, were no different.
This particular SDN Event was held at de Reehorst Hotel and
Conference Center in Ede. This, it turns out, was a contributing factor. A
second factor was that I was scheduled to give my first presentation during the
day’s first time slot, immediately following registration.
For those of you who’ve been to de Reehorst, you can
understand why my wife, Loy Anderson (whom many of you are familiar with, and
who always attends SDN events with me), and I decided to stay in Amsterdam the
night prior to the conference. To put it bluntly, de Reehorst is in the middle
of nowhere. Actually, it’s in the middle of a charming neighborhood, but
compared to Amsterdam’s nightlife, that constitutes the middle of nowhere.
To put it bluntly, de Reehorst is in the middle of nowhere.
Actually, it’s in the middle of a charming neighborhood, but compared to
Amsterdam’s nightlife, that constitutes the middle of nowhere.
Mind you, Loy and I are not big nightlife people. We do,
however, like to shop and stroll around the walking streets of central
Amsterdam, and Ede simply does not offer the same opportunities for this. No
problem. We’ll stay in Amsterdam the night before and take the train in the
morning.
As I mentioned earlier, when travel is involved, I tend to
plan extensively, and this time was no different. I choose to take the 7:46
train, which would get me to the Ede-Wageningen train station at 8:45. The
Hotel is a short three blocks from there, so I would be at De Reehorst at least
35 minutes or so before my talk, which was schedules to start at 9:30.
In addition, and here’s the clever part, if for some reason
I missed that train, there was another scheduled to depart at 8:16, which would
still get me to the conference center with a few minutes to spare. With this
bit of insurance, what could possibly go wrong?
We left our hotel, which was very close to Amsterdam’s
Central Station, at 7:20 the morning of the conference. It was a bitterly cold
morning, and the sidewalks were icy. No problem, however, as we had given
ourselves plenty of extra time. And we arrived at the train platform 10 minutes
early.
This story is a little better if you understand that Loy and
I are seasoned travelers, even in Europe. For us, taking a train is no problem
(which is why the SDN organizers trusted us to make the journey alone, rather
than arranging for someone to drive us in the morning). But the Dutch language,
of which we can understand only a little, aggravated our downfall. At 7:45, a
mere minute before our train was expected, there was an announcement. My
limited Dutch allowed me to comprehend that it had something to do with the
arriving train. But that was all.
My first clue that something was wrong was that the train
arrived, right on time, from the wrong direction. The train arrived from the
east, the direction of Utrecht, and I knew that we had to travel through
Utrecht on our way to Ede. But what do I know about this train. Maybe once it
picks up its passengers it will head back towards the east. (Please note that
the monitors on the platform still showed a train to Utrecht at 7:46, and their
was no indication of the train’s destination on the train itself. Believe me, I
checked.)
So, here we were, on the correct platform (5b) at the
correct time (7:46) with a train arriving. It must be our train, right? But
then there was that announcement. What was actually said? There was little time
to think, and certainly not enough time to ask someone whether this train was
heading towards Utrecht or not. We had to act. The train doors were about to
close. Loy gave me one of those urgent “what do we do?” looks, and I said
“Let’s go!”. We boarded the train just as the doors closed.
As soon as the train began moving, I knew I had made a
mistake. The train continued on its course to the west, and I had no idea where
it was going.
I panicked. Obviously, this was the wrong train, and we
would miss the train that was scheduled for 7:46 (and apparently, in hindsight,
delayed). My best hope was that this train was a stoptrein, one that made
frequent stops. We could then get off, and take the very next train back to
Amsterdam Central, in time for the 8:16, which would get us to the de Reehorst
in time for my talk.
As most of you know, there are several different kinds of
trains. As mentioned, there are the stoptreins, which stop often, and then
there are the sneltreins, the fast trains, which stop infrequently. It turns
out that we were on an InterCity sneltrein. Next stop, Haarlem.
The trip to Haarlem took almost 15 minutes. This alone was
cause for concern. If we could not get back to Amsterdam Central for the 8:16,
there was no way I would arrive in time for my talk.
We got off the train upon arrival in Haarlem. Loy tried to
find out which platform we needed to go to in order to catch the train back to
Amsterdam Central Station while I used a pay phone to call the cell phone of
our conference contact, Johan Parent, with whom we had spent a lovely afternoon
the day before in central Amsterdam.
Johan didn’t answer his cell phone, and to this day I am not
even sure that I dialed the correct phone number, but I left a message anyway.
As I hung up the phone, Loy approached me without having discovered where we
needed to be. At this moment, I noticed that the train we had just disembarked
was preparing to leave the station, and that the monitors indicated that this
train was bound for Amsterdam. With almost no time to spare, we once again
boarded this train as the door closed. Fortunately, this time the train left
the station in the opposite direction in which had it entered (why didn’t this
happen in Amsterdam?).
In fact, this train was the next train
As the train departed the station, we did a little math in
our heads, and realized that, not only was this train returning to Amsterdam,
but it was scheduled to arrive at 8:16. In fact, this train was the next
train, our 8:16 backup train. What a relief. I should make my talk.
Shortly after the train departed the Amsterdam Central
station for Utrecht, where we needed to change trains, I realized that I should
contact Johan in order to let him know that I would arrive only minutes before
my presentation. I noticed another passenger, a young man, talking on a cell
phone (I didn’t have a cell phone that worked in Europe at the time). After he
hung up his call, I explained my situation to him, and asked if he would be so
kind as to let me pay him to make a short call.
This time I got through to Johan, and explained that I was
not going to arrive until just before my talk, just as long as we made our
connecting train in Utrecht. Johan thanked me for warning him of my late
arrival, and said he looked forward to seeing us again. At this point, we felt
like we could relax and look out the train windows at the cold, frosty fields
as the train made its way. It was still quite early, and the pale blue of
morning was only beginning to spread across the sky.
We arrived in Utrecht with 5 minutes to spare before our
next train was scheduled to depart for, among other stations, Ede-Wageningen.
But while we waited on the platform, there was another announcement. Again, my
Dutch language skills failed me, but we both knew that something was up. Everyone
else waiting on that platform gathered their belongings and left.
Having learned a hard lesson from the morning’s earlier
failure, I immediately sought out a conductor. The gentleman I found explained
to me that the tracks were icy, and that our scheduled train had been canceled.
The next train that could take us to Ede-Wageningen was leaving from another
platform in twenty minutes.
That did it. It was now impossible for me to make my talk.
Before we caught the next train I had to contact Johan with the bad news.
Maybe, I rationalized, another speaker could give a talk scheduled for later in
the day in my time slot.
On our way to the new platform we found another pay phone,
and called Johan again. I explained to him that, at best, I would be 20 minutes
or so late for my talk. I suggested a couple of possible actions to minimize
the damage of my absence.
Now, you are going to need a little more information before
you will understand the difficult position we were in. To begin with, my
scheduled talk was unusual for an SDN conference. Heck, if it had been on a
Delphi, Visual Objects, VB, or other similar topic, there would probably have
been a dozen or so people who could have stepped in to provide at least an
introduction prior to my arrival.
No, this was a talk on the Advantage Database Server, a
product about which Loy and I had just recently published a book. And I could
think of only one person who would likely be able to help. His first name was
Simon (his last name now escapes me completely, and he has long since retired).
Simon was the BeNeLux representative for Extended Systems, the company that
owned the Advantage Database Server at the time (it is now owned by Sybase).
So, I suggested two options to Johan. First, swap my first
talk with that of another speaker (and this was the option that I hoped would
work, but you never know. Scheduling talks can be difficult, and it simply may
not be possible to swap two talks so close to the beginning of the event).
Second, ask Simon to take the opportunity to give the audience an introduction
to Advantage. I would then come in and cover the technical side of things.
As I got off the phone with Johan, I promised I’d get to the
hotel as soon as possible. In the back of my mind, however, I had doubts.
Things had not gone well so far, why should they get any better now? It was
still very cold, and the tracks as well as roadways were slippery. Nothing was
certain at this point.
Nothing was certain at this point
Fortunately, things did start to go right. The next train
arrived on time, and we soon found ourselves at the Ede-Wageningen station.
Before arrival, however, I had started up my laptop, loaded my PowerPoint
presentation, Delphi, and the Advantage Data Architect (a graphical application
for configuring Advantage objects and data dictionaries). I then placed my
laptop in sleep mode, so I could quickly resume if necessary.
Foot travel was difficult as Loy and I made our way to de
Reehorst. The sidewalks were icy, and running was not an option, that is unless
we wanted to practice falling down. Therefore, we choose the slow and steady
method. I don’t recall either of us falling, not even once.
… that is unless we wanted to practice falling down
We arrived at the conference center, and walked directly to
the room where my talk was scheduled. On the way there we saw nobody who could
confirm, one way or the other, if my talk was actually in progress.
I opened the door to the conference room and walked toward
the stage. On stage were two people I knew well. Speaking was Jeroen Pluimers,
a long-time friend and fellow conference speaker. Next to him, apparently for
moral support, was another friend and SDN member, John Blaauw. I knew that both
Jeroen and John where Advantage users.
Simon, on the other hand, was nowhere to be found. (It turns
out that he suffered from stage fright, and was unable to give an introduction
to an audience the size of which turned out for this talk.) Fortunately, Jeroen
and John were available, and pitched in at the last moment. For this, I am
forever grateful.
As it turns out, just as I entered the room, Jeroen had
covered just about all of Advantage that he was ready for given the spur of the
moment. But what he had shared provided the perfect introduction to the
material that I had prepared.
Upon seeing me, Jeroen smiled widely, and announced my
presence to the audience. This resulted in a rather embarrassing and certainly
undeserved round of applause for me. Several people mentioned to me later that
it was the perfect rock star entrance.
As I walked down the aisle towards the stage, I removed my
coat and took my laptop out of sleep mode. It no time my slideshow appeared on
the overhead projection system. And in the transition between Jeroen and I, we
scarcely skipped a beat. And, as I mentioned earlier, the overall talk was a
success on nearly every level.
You sometimes hear the phrase “Someday we’ll be able to
laugh about this.” At the time, I was sure that this would not be the case.
However, I hope that you have had a laugh or two, even if it was at my expense.
Indeed, it was fun sharing with you this little secret. I ask only one thing.
Please don’t tell anybody.