"I haven’t been to this airport before Mr. Hare, have you?"
If there’s one thing I will take away from the J. Boye 2009 conference in Aarhus, it’s the benefit of reading a bus timetable properly.
Having confused destination and starting point, I have just been driven at high speed to Billund airport to catch my flight home. Hearing the above words spoken by a taxi driver normally wouldn’t instill confidence, but as his satnav indicates we’re only five minutes away, I’m feeling a deal more relaxed than 45 minutes earlier. Then I was standing outside the Radisson Hotel wondering where my bus was. Closer inspection of the timetable revealed I had planned my journey around the incoming schedule instead of the outgoing. The bus I needed had departed an hour earlier.
(The loathed cliché “the devil is in the details” reminds me of an appropriate Danish swearword, one of a few words of the language I picked up in the ’90s in several visits for parties and the ’95 MidtFyn rock festival, the others being “jordbaer”, “kartofler” and “nej ikke er der”. Now when I travel to the country, I am confident I will not starve and I can direct people to urinate elsewhere – which is especially useful when camping at MidtFyn.)
None of this can detract from what has been a wonderful couple of days. I’ve attended slick conferences and professional conferences, but this is by far the friendliest conference I’ve been to. Janus Boye walks quietly around the sports hall venue, nodding and smiling at everyone, seemingly greeting everyone by their first name and generally creating the sense that he’s throwing nothing more than a party to which he just happens to have invited several hundred leading web thought leaders and practitioners. Oh, and me.
I’ll post reviews and reflections from the conference over the next few days.
