dow.ngra.de

So once we got to Wiesbaden, we had to actually set up a booth. Of course, being software developers we lacked both the basic mechanical skill and any kind of eye for design. Therefore we experimented a lot.

We started by putting up the back wall:

Well, it turned out that it’s huge!

In fact since we had a bit of a unfortunate location, we ended up using the wall to set up a ZeroTurnaround themed coffee corner:

Once we were done with that we just had to set up the booth itself. It wasn’t easy:

We tried a couple of variations on the booth setup. The first one was like this:

But we changed it as soon as the monitor arrived and ended up with this setup:

The Expo is open today from 10:00 to 20:00 and so far we managed to talk to about 50-70 people. It’s a great feeling to see people’s eyes light up when they understand what does JavaRebel do exactly and that there is no 200 MB download or 100 lines of configuration to write to make it work.

When a bunch of geeks go on a road trip you can be sure that something funky is gonna happen. When you add to that a flight at 6 AM and a night with barely any sleep that something’s gonna hit you hard.

In our case it started when we arrived to the office to pick up 40 kg worth of stuff we had to take to the conference. Toomas had the key and once we got in and disabled the alarm, we started taking out the bags. Of course we thought that we disabled the alarm, which seemed to disagree on the matter. After about two minutes the alarm hit us hard, both inside and outside the office. Slight panic ensued, as patrol would delay us by at least 20 minutes while they sort this out.

Since getting to flight in time was most important we made a field decision to grab the stuff and run (we are thick as thieves after all). We both grabbed some stuff (the majority was left in), and ran out. Of course by running out we locked the door, leaving the doorcard inside. So here we are, hour before the flight, most important stuff in the office with the key, patrol due to come and delay us some more, getting to conference in time for the opening an impossible feat.

Ever tried calling people at 5 AM on Sunday morning? Well, we went through the whole list of everyone who has a doorcard. “Fortunately” it was short, since I recently exchanged the SIM card and most of the phone numbers were left behind. And it’s not true that people hate receiving calls that early. Nowadays they just don’t get them.

Luckily for us after about 10 calls we did get to someone who not only picked up, but also lived nearby. I was too panicked to make photos before, but I did photograph the two taxies standing side-by-side before our office. So this ended up costing us no more than double taxi fare and about half a year of life each.

Of course it would be prudent to assume that with such a beginning anything else could go right. Obviously when we got to Frankfurt our backdrop was missing from the luggage and of course we got out on the wrong train station on the way to Wiesbaden and had to wait for the next train for an hour. The train station was quite in the middle of nowhere:

In the end all ended surprisingly well. The missing luggage was brought to our hotel room at about 10 PM. Turned out that it was forgotten in Estonia and then rushed to Frankfurt through Copenhagen. By now we have set up the booth and are fully ready for the expo.

The dow.ngra.ders (which at the moment is me and Toomas) will be going to both JAX’08 in Frankfurt and JavaOne’08 in San Francisco. If anyone feels like having a coffee (or a beer) with us, just comment this. Of course will also cover the conferences, live.