On Mon, 25 May 2009, Michael StJohns wrote:
Hi Ole -
You actually are answering questions I didn't ask. What I asked was
"which IETF meetings did you find problematic and why"? One of the
reasons I'm asking is because of your IAOC membership. I'm just
curious what your thresholds are for travel pain (and how and maybe
even why they differ from others on the list).
I didn't say that ANY IETF location has been "problematic". That term
was used by someone else. I was just saying that landing in Amsterdam
and taking a train somewhere is no worse than landing in Chicago and
waiting for a connecting flight.
To respond to your comment that this group believes that "train" ==
"pain" - its not that exactly, but it is the number of changes and
segments and delays and connections for each and a general
unfamiliarity with each of the destination train systems Speaking
for myself, I'm perfectly happy taking the train if there are a)
lots of schedule possibilities to match up with the airplane - after
flying for 10-24 hours the last thing I want to do is sit in a train
station waiting room for 2-3 hours and b) that (a) doesn't require
me to spend 3 hours changing trains in a system I'm not familiar
with and that I might not travel again for years if ever and c)
getting there by air is either impossible or not timely.
Well, my suggestion would be to spend a night in a hotel and tackle
the wonderful world of train travel the next day when you are rested.
How the above is more painful than connecting flights (subject to more
irregularities and weather delays etc) is beyond me, sorry. Yes,
changing to a train is slightly different from going from Terminal A
gate 5 to Terminal D gate 27, but so what?
I know how to travel in the air system and I can figure out the
connections well in advance - the same has not always been the case
for trains in the destination countries and at least once I boarded
a train that wasn't going where I needed to go (fortunately, I
realized the error in time) because of poor signage, and local
spelling that didn't match what I'd researched. This was 10-12
years back, and the Internet has improved the availability of
information quite a bit - but still the ground truth of the train
station is not always immediately perceivable to a traveler who
hasn't been there before.
Right, well the Internet has improved availability of this info,
besides you would expect a local host to provide the most crucial
bits. In the case of Hiroshima I have personally put together a
set of web pages at hiroshima-info.info which are meant to augment
the local host pages once they become available. So, the basic
information about how to get there is available today, 7 months
in advance of the event. (Also linked from the main IETF page).
For this trip the questions have mostly been "why Maastricht and not
someplace with an airport" and I still don't think we've gotten a
great answer on this. E.g. why didn't the IAOC go looking for
another venue that met the "close to airport" criteria?
I think Henk answered this, but let me repeat: There are MAYBE 3
convention centers in The Netherlands that could hold an IETF size
meeting. None of them are near airports, and each have pros and cons
in terms of cost, availability, ease of deploying a network and so
on. We picked the "best" one, based on a number of criteria.
Ole
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