On trains

I am halfway to Berlin on a cloudy and cold day. This is an older, first generation ICE, which are slower, noisier and less comfortable than the new ICE-3's - though they are much quieter and comfier than the British Rail 125's which I rode daily when I worked at a computer company in the west of England.

For some reason, the train is nearly deserted (at 11am on a workday, on what I expected to be one of the busiest routes in Germany). I have a compartment to myself, and am typing contentedly as the world flashes past my window. The corridor is full of babies crawling happily back and forth while their parents stand guard.

This particular train has been retrofitted with power points for the laptop but not with canned music, so I am limited to what's still lying around from when I last topped up my iPod. Since the iPod has a larger hard disk than the laptop (o tempora, o mores!) this isn't much at all for a five hour trip. Currently playing is "A Stream with Bright Fish" from The Pearl by Brian Eno and Harold Budd, which is exactly what anyone familiar with either of them would expect it to be; excellent music for being alone and thoughtful on a cloudy day. Budd's contribution is clear, the songs are much more melodious than Eno's rather austere recordings in this vein. Serene, very beautiful in a minimal way, the album is highly recommended if you are into ambient sounds but certain to appall anyone hoping for a tune that they could whistle in the bath. Listen before you buy.

The further north we go the more snow there is on the ground, although even here the temperature seems to be above freezing, the ice on that lake was definitely rotting. The snow looks to be only ankle deep, no danger here of roofs collapsing under its weight.

I have to amend the impression I gave earlier of the flatness and decaying-industrial-sprawl unsightliness of northern Germany, which seems to apply only to the Rhine valley and the coal&iron complex around Essen. This is a different route from what I took then, we are heading northeast from Frankfurt through what I guess are the Taunus mountains, and the landscape is correspondingly open and hilly, at times quite pretty.

Just saw a big whitish hawk, recognizable as such by its beak, the upswept feathered-out wingtips and its sheer size, but it was gone too quickly to identify it exactly. There have been a few rabbits in the fields, and some larger birds. I think I saw cormorants on a river near Frankfurt.

Germany is threaded through with quite large rivers, the names of which I don't know and cannot easily discover. It's odd that each Autobahn bridge is clearly labelled with its name, length and height above the valley bottom, in a little sign beside the road, but there is no equivalent sign for the rivers that we cross. I should suggest this to the Powers That Be, surely other people would also be glad to know?

I will spend some 220 Euros (not counting my time = lost earnings) and nearly 12 hours in trains, buses and taxis, to attend a two- or three-hour meeting. 762 kilometers each way, not counting the local ground transport at each end. Call it 1540 kilometers, just under a thousand miles, in one day for one meeting. Is this not absurd, foolish, frivolous and wasteful?

(Going by plane would have cost about the same and taken nearly as long, door-to-door. This way I can avoid airports and enjoy the scenery, both big advantages from my point of view; on the other hand, Lufthansa's coffee is free and much better. 'Tis an imperfect world, and we must live with compromises.)

The purpose of the journey is to sell a client/server system (worth nearly what I earn in a month from the architects) and additional data import (worth half a month of work), with possible knock-on effects should they in turn recommend us to other companies, which is of course the reason we are I am knocking ourselves myself out. This pair of Dilbert cartoons seems relevant to the trip: in theory I am responsible for development and my partner is responsible for sales, however when the going gets rough I am the one who stands behind the car and pushes. Pah.

[Continued at 7pm on the journey home] And now, the punchline:

It was a complete waste of time and money.

Their server runs on Linux, our database does not. End of story, thanks but no thanks, don't let the door hit you on your way out.

I am so mad that I could just kill somebody, but I'd have to start with myself: I too have spoken to them, I too failed to ask this particular question. I just assumed that someone among my colleagues would have cleared this up before wasting my time by passing on the inquiry, and further assumed that the inquirers would have read either the website or the promotional bumpf that came with the CD, both of which clearly state that the DB does not run on Linux. (In my defence, when we spoke they mentioned "Mac" and "server" in the same sentence, they are running the demo on a Mac, and they never mentioned any other operating system. But still: Bah.)

For all the good it has done us, I might as well have spent the day at home, drinking beer and picking my nose reading blogs.