At ECCB06 in Eilat

ECCB06 is starting tomorrow in Eilat. The story of this travel is full of sound and fury. And time. Lots and lots of time. Waiting. And things breaking. Or not working. And did I mention time?

I am presenting accelerated informatics demos for AMD at 10:30am monday morning. Should be lots of fun. Ok, being a good little presenter type, I gathered up everything I needed and got it into my carry-on bags for the trip. Was a little feat, but it was doable in the end. Headed out for the airport at 9:50am Friday morning. Got there around 10:15am. A little early, but thats ok. All checked in, I go to the gate to wait (but pick up the canonical Starbucks on the way). When I get to the gate, we are informed the plane is delayed. Ok, we have a little room in the schedule, I can live with this. The connecting flight to Tel Aviv is at 3:50pm, so even if it is 1 hour late it won’t be exciting. 2 hours late gets exciting. Would cause 2 missed flights. Alrighty. Our plane arrives at 2pm, and pulls out of the gate around 3pm with me on board. Ouch. Ok, I know I am going to miss the 3:50pm to Tel Aviv. Fine. I had been told there were many seats open… That is until I asked to make sure I can get an aisle (essential to long flight IMO). Nope. In the middle. Ugh. A 10 hour flight in the middle. Ok, I deal with it. We get here to Tel Aviv, and I make my way over to the other terminal. I have to explain the sequence of planes to the counter person. The Israelis I have met have been friendly and helpful. The counter agent helps me get the ticket I need, and off we go … As we are climbing out if the airport on the Eilat flight, it was struck by lightning. It is a remarkable experience (not worth replicating). The Faraday effect is important, and helpful in this case. I was looking out the window at the right wing, and I saw a purple flash and a slight pop. Because we were going a significant fraction of the speed of sound in air (speed of sound ~1000m/s, we were going probably around 1/4-1/2 of that), and I was slightly ahead of the impact point, very little sound energy reached me. I thought the people at the rear of the plane may have heard more. They said it sounded like a bomb going off. The sound was redshifted down from me, and for them, partially blue shiftd. The pilots did the right thing, turned the plane around, and unloaded us at the gate. We let the storm pass (about 2 more hours). Tried again. A little bumpy, but thats ok. Get in, get to the hotel. Get my room. Plug in my power strip (rated for european voltage/current) with my adapter plugs and **** fizzzz POP **** (the room is now entirely blacked out, and there is a smell of burnt power strip in the air) This just isn’t my day. Turns out my adapters which work great in the UK and Austria, do not work here (they said they did on the package). I need to fix this, get some more, as without adapters, one of the critical demos won’t work. Small detail. One worth fixing. I will try to take a few pictures and post them. More later.