Every roadside stop on the 401 westbound east of Kingston is closed for renovations, so we’ve just been driving straight through without stopping. We’re just 30 kilometres east of Kingston, where we’d planned to fill up, but the dashboard display says we’re 11 kilometres away from an empty tank at the current rate of consumption.
Shall we chance it?
With TechDays Montreal wrapped up – and yes, I’ll post photos from the actual conference soon – it’s time for me and Damir to pack up our stuff, board the Ford Flex and head on home.
As I write this, we’re on Highway 401, just about 100 kilometres east of Kingston. Damir’s at the wheel, we’ve got Raw Dog Comedy on the satellite radio and I’m working away on my laptop (as you can see from the photo above, with my “Bruce Lee as the Green Lantern” desktop), getting info to a couple of just-added speakers for the TechDays Winnipeg conference, which happens the week after next.
I’m actually surprised at how much work I can get done on a laptop while in a car. My dad had some pretty strong motion sickness – even standing on a floating dock made him queasy – and I’ve inherited a diluted version of that malady. I can do stuff as complicated as writing code when on a plane or train, but for some reason, I can’t do it in a car. I can write blog entries, send email and tweets and do some light photo editing while in a car, but felt some motion sickness when I tried a little coding. Maybe I should try bumping up the font size – it might help.
I tweeted about not being able to write code in a car and Ken Rachynski tweeted back that it was a first world problem. He’s right!
Here’s the Ford Flex that we drove to TechDays Montreal, parked in front of my building:
Here’s the interior, as seen from the front passenger-side door:
Here’s the back of the Flex, with Damir applying (non-permanent) Bing and Windows 7 stickers to the windows:
Here’s the magnetic bumper sticker we affixed to the back of the Flex:
Here’s the Sync console:
We have lift-off! Here’s Damir getting us out to the open road:
The open road at last!
Here’s a video featuring some pre-fab houses being moved on the highway to their final destination. It inspires a quick discussion about how we might want to travel down to the TechEd 2010 conference in New Orleans:
Here I am, marvelling at the Big Apple’s pie selection, while looking for people to show Bing in action (I was using a Rogers stick for internet access, which worked quite well).
I was wearing my Crazy Go Nuts University (a.k.a. Queen’s University) Science ‘91 jacket while in the restaurant, which a guy in the corner noticed. He turned out to be from the class of Science ‘90 and had never heard of Bing. I walked him through a couple of demos and he was impressed — “I need to show this to my IT guys!” he exclaimed.
Here’s another video – it’s got me and Damir enjoying the Big Apple’s pie and how “cutting the cheese” onstage at a tech conference can have serious (ahem) blowback:
In this second video of our Ford Flex road trip from Toronto to Montreal, Damir arrives at my place to pick me up:
(In case you missed the first video, you can watch it here.)