I’ve just returned from four weeks travel to Athens, The Netherlands, Australia (Brisbane and Sydney), and Las Vegas. It is good to be home in Sherwood sleeping in my own bed. This trip was a combination of vacation, work, and geeky holiday. I spoke at three different conferences in three weeks. JAOO Brisbane and Sydney was an opportunity to hear Erik Meijer give a great talk about why fundamentalist functional programming languages (think Haskell) solve the problems we procedural and oo language programmers just sweep under the rug. And then I got to grill Erik on why he thinks that declaring types to include side effects so important to writing good programs. Where else does a geeky woman get to hang out and talk shop with other software geeks? I snuck in some sight seeing too. The picture is of me taking rental bike across the Brisbane Harbor on a ferry. A bike ride with Dave Thomas and Kresten Thorup was about the only sunny day we had in Brisbane. The rains came to Australia just in time for JAOO.

In Greece I saw lots of ruins, attended the annual IEEE Software planning meeting, and ate lots of Greek salads, simply prepared fish, and drank thick coffee. They call it Greek coffee, but a few years ago even the Greeks called it Turkish coffee. But one highlight I won’t forget is hearing Linda Rising and her husband Karl sing ”Take me out to the Ball Game” at the ampitheater at Epidaurus, Greece. They volunteered to demonstrate the phenomenal acoustics. It gave me goose bumps. Constructed in 500 BCE, the ampitheater perfectly amplifies sound from on stage to everywhere in the theater. You can whisper stage center and people in the back row can hear you perfectly. And sound is amplified back to you, too. Truly an engineering marvel, the acoustics are because of the location and how the ampitheater was carved into the rocky hillside.

I’ll be sliding back into a more normal work routine, but before the magic of this wonderfult trip fades, I hope to share some thoughts and reflections and experiences over the next few days.