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The “day” really started at some point during the flight, as I arrive at Frankfurt airport at about seven in the morning. I find my way to the front of the taxi stand, am greeted with a gruff “Morgen”, by the taxi driver, and subsequently take off at breakneck speed for nearby Raunheim where the NS Frankfurt Rhein hotel is located, which is also where the conference is being held. Once there, I check in, make my way to the room and immediately have a shower. Once changed I manage to take stock of my new surroundings: the room is somewhat Spartan but functional. The bath tub I take the shower in a narrow and small, the duvet on the bed is not quite 6ft long, so I will need to sleep at an angle onto the other double bed so that my feet don’t stick out in the open, and the swank-looking leather chair is in fact too low to the ground to be either relaxing or useful. Okay, I might seem to be grumbling here, and in the end it was comfy enough for my needs. The view from the window looks into the inner courtyard of the hotel, and trains occasionally whiz at high speed in the near distance. Still somewhat wired, I settle in and end up watching the British-produced version of CNN until the keynote speaker launches the conference just after 9am.

My Room at the Frankfurt Hotel

A few minutes before the start of the conference I make my way down to the reception area, sign in and get my speaker’s tag and the thick book containing all of the conference proceedings. In the conference room I immediately see my colleague Graydon S., and soon after I am flanked by France B. who is also there as a co-presenter at our presentation, as well as another one she is giving by herself. The room rapidly fills up, and soon somewhere over a hundred people are filling the conference space. This conference is much small in terms of attendance than the last one I attended in

JoAnn Hackos launching the DITA Europe 2006 Conference

First JoAnn Hackos stepped up and welcomed everybody to the conference, and gave a brief speech on how DITA has progressed and seen greater adoption. She also remarked on the number of people in attendance (might have to hold it in a different venue next time, since we collectively just about filled the available conference space), and how far afield some of them came from – there was at least one fellow from Australia, and someone from China in attendance as well as people from all over the European Union and North America. She also talked briefly on the relatively rapid uptake of DITA in the industry and expressed personal interest in several of the talks to come over the next couple of days.

Michael Priestly Gives the Keynote Address at DITA Europe 2006

Then Michael Priestly from IBM came up and delivered the keynote presentation, entitled “DITA Evolves“. He was one of the original people responsible for drafting the 1.0 specification, and works out of the Toronto IBM lab. I note that he is dressed in a tie – which might seem typical for an IBM representative but is in fact the first time I have seen him in decidedly non-geek attire over the several times I have run into him. He talked about its current capabilities, how it has been adapted to suit many different uses that were not originally envisioned, and how the upcoming 1.1 specification will include better books, be more extensible, will handle automatic image scaling and better translation support.

His talk was solid and interesting, but I found that during his presentation my lack of sleep was catching up with me, despite knocking back a coke for a shot of caffeine prior to keynote. I made my excuses at the end of the talk, headed back to my room, and crashed out for a few hours.

I woke up a few hours later, having unfortunately missed lunch and a few presentations in the process. I ended up seeing two further presentations that day: “Moving to DITA – An Engineering Case Study” and “Best Practice for Global Industry: DITA as a Competitive and Strategic Advantage”. Both presentations were good, but neither of them told me anything much that I didn’t already know, having already been working with DITA professionally for some time now.

Before I knew it was time for dinner, and there was a group heading to the nearby Corner Steak House. Their specialty was servings of various types of steak cuts served up sizzling on a slab of hot lava rock. So about forty of us descended on the place, with the intention of talking about semiconductor specializations for DITA while we waited for our meal. With forty of us there, we ended up waiting a long time; it was a full half hour before our beer orders were filled, and well over an hour before we got our particular pieces of sizzling steak (mine was the spicy hot pot variety, which was excellent, though by the time I got it I was ravenous). Met some interesting contacts both in the semiconductor business as well as a couple of the organizers for the conference.

The Corner Steak House, Frankfurt (Picture Taken the Following Day)

Waiting for the Food at the Corner Steakhouse (with Michael Priestley, sans Tie and Suit, at the Head of the Table)

At dinner’s conclusion I headed back to the hotel and gratefully went to bed for a full night’s sleep.

Today is the day I fly out to a conference in Frankfurt, Germany. I am co-presenting at the DITA Europe 2006 conference there, along with a colleague from work. He left yesterday, but I stayed behind an extra evening so that I could take the girls trick-or-treating for Halloween. Both of them look forward to the event and it didn’t seem right not to have one of their parents around for the big day (Erika was working on a film and couldn’t make it). I will probably for it later in terms of jet-lag once I arrive, but it was well worth it.

The almost 8-hour long flight is aboard an Air Canada Airbus A320. I savour the relative luxury of being in business class for the flight there and back, and for the first time in ages I have appreciable leg-room and elbow-room. Champagne was served while we were still on the ground, and the food was definitely much better than average, but I most enjoyed the luxury of space.

While I had loaded up my video iPod with a number of TV shows and movies, I needn’t have bothered, as this plane is equipped with a personal display touch-screen, and I have whiled away the time playing chess and watching “The Prairie Home Companion” starring Garrison Keillor and directed by the Robert Altman (while relatively low-key compared to previous films like Nashville or M*A*S*H*, it still very much shows his influences, and the solid ensemble cast makes it a fun thing to watch, though still it is ultimately not one of his best. Never knew before that Lilly Tomlin couldn’t sing; now I know).

I picked up a copy of Dava Sobels‘ The Planets before heading out. I end up getting to the beginning of the chapter on Mars by the end of the flight. I very much enjoyed her biography on Galileo as seen through the letters of his daughter the nun, and considered picking this up when I first saw in hardcover. It was an immediate purchase when I saw the softcover version. She is a long-time science writer and has a certain verve for description and evoking vivid memories from her childhood that impinged upon her interest in the planets, though I find the occasional Christian religious reference (straying beyond the obvious ancient Roman personifications for the planets) jarring and cloying. I know the book is aimed at the general reader, but there are numerous times I keep thinking about other related things that she spends a bare paragraph on, or other interesting tangents which may only be hinted at.

After the first in-flight movie ends (some non-descript thing starring Keanu Reeves and a familiar-looking female co-star who end up emoting endlessly in and around a country house built by a bay; I didn’t don my headphones for it but I suspect that this film’s silence wouldn’t have been improved by dialog), the lights were dimmed and most people ended up putting back their seats and drifting off to sleep. I ended up having a look at the print-out of my portion of the presentation, cribbing notes to the pages, and was amused to look around me to see three others working on their own PowerPoint presentations, either by the glow of their notebook screens or on paper, like the fellow beside me. Thanks to the presentation text size I can make out that one young lady to the left and forward from me is presenting on a radiological test machine (medical? industrial?) of some sort, the fellow beside me is doing something relating to mining engineering, and a professorial-looking sort of man is working earnestly on something to do with improvements in electrical engineering processes (according to one slide, there have been significant changes since 1987, apparently).

Later, after watching the conclusion of the film, I try to fall asleep. Despite the relative comfort of the seats – they recline to a near-vertical angle, plus a motorized footrest – and the sleeping blindfold I brought, I just cannot fall asleep. I toss and turn for about an hour before giving up and returning to my book. The lights slowly come back on, creating a false dawn, and breakfast is served soon afterwards. The plane arrives slightly ahead of schedule at Frankfurt airport and I debark.

Erika is currently working on a low budget film and her only days off are Thursday and Friday (which means that she will unfortunately miss out on Halloween again this year). Her trumpet partner, Dave from across the street, was having a concert with his new band this evening, so we both opted to go to it.

Dave and Erika had formerly been members together in the East York Concert Band, comprised of big-hearted people whose music unfortunately had the tendency to sap one’s will to live. I had been through enough torturous performances over the years to have simply fallen out of the habit of going to the performances, but I knew that this band we were going to see tonight, though still comprised of amateurs, was considered a serious step up in terms of quality.

And so it was. Held in an auditorium in a west-end collegiate, the concert was very enjoyable, and featured not only some truly outstanding individual players (the bassist, drummer, a trombonist and the saxophone player who also arranged many of the pieces played that evening) but was clearly comprised of a good ensemble cast of musicians. On top of that, there was a featured young local musician just back from a stint at a prestigious Manhattan music school who played excellent piano, clarinet and drums at various points during the night (a “triple threat” as the conductor put it).

It was hard not to make comparisons to previous EYCB concerts: this was fun, the pacing never seemed to drag, and the pieces clearly within the abilities of the musicians. At the end of first half there was a jazz jam session which featured a select group of the better musicians who proved that they could swing as well as play classical pieces. The conductor is a bit of a ham (and a helluva trumpet player), and a separate announcer injected the right dose of humour and banter. In the end there were a few dud notes, but they were few and forgivable. I had been expecting a better concert this time around and was not disappointed.

Afterwards we joined Dave as he joined the rest of the band at a nearby pub for a couple of drinks.

Am looking forward to seeing Erika’s performance for the “Brass Conspiracy”, another band she has graduated to from the EYCB.

Due to a scheduling snafu, I had to teach the second full-day session of my Information Architecture course at the U. of T. on the Thanksgiving long weekend. I was pleasantly surprised to see all of my students there, thinking I might not even have half the class turn up.

Afterwards, with no family to return home to (everyone had gone up north to the cottage at Deloro for the weekend, I decided to head over to the nearby Royal Ontario Museum and take some pictures in an unhurried manner. Here’s some of what I took:

Protective cladding is being applied to the angled surfaces of the “crystal”.

Jousting mural in the southwest quadrant of Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery. The image features the Directors of the museum at the time it was painted in the 1940s, and features Currelly himself (the man behind the tapestry).

A Hadrosaur skeleton “stranded” in the Samuel Hall/Currelly Gallery while the new dino gallery is being built.

“Just arrived!” says the sign in the lower-left: A Triceratops skull giving a tantalizing glimpse of some of the new things to expect in the renovated dino gallery to come.

More signs of change as this glimpse of the former Insect Gallery, in the middle of being dismantled, shows.

This was a shock: finding that the European/Mediterranean ancient civilization galleries were closed and being renovated.

Bust of St. John the Baptist in the European Medieval Gallery

One of the Haidi Totem Poles — with nobody on the stairs! (the place was far from full when I visited).

There was an installation in a newly opened gallery on the ground floor by the Cuban artist Carlos Garaicoa. This and the next image are panoramas I stitched together from several photos of a couple of his larger pieces. This one greets the visitor to the gallery, and is a model of a fictional urban complex made out of rice-paper lanterns.

This one is called “Negatividad”, made up of wooden toy trains.

The magnificent mosaic ceiling in the main foyer of the R.O.M.

Completely unlike the day before, it was a clear and sunny day. Though it is probably the single most tourist-y thing to do in Toronto, I had promised the girls that I would take them up the CN Tower on a suitably appropriate day. This was that day.

I ordered the tickets to simply head up to the main observation deck for myself and the two girls. The total cost including service charges: about $60. Ow. But it’s a treat.

If you go to the CN Tower, you have to bring a camera, so here are the shots:

Metal Salmon at Waterfall Pond at the South Base of the Tower

The CN Tower from its Base

One of Mel Lastman’s Moose Painted as a Mountie

Panorama of Toronto Looking North

The CBC Building as Seen from the CN Tower

Shadow of the CN Tower Pointing Past Roy Thompson Hall

The Royal York Hotel from Above

Panorama of the Toronto Islands from the CN Tower

Exhibition Place from the CN Tower

‘I Was Here’ Graffiti Etched into the Base of the Window

Vanessa and Annie on the Glass Floor

Looking Straight Down from the Glass Floor

We headed out just after 8:30am in the van we had rented — along with Josef and Cassandra — to Monaco, primarily in order to visit the Aquarium there.

The drive was long, but Josef is a very capable driver at high speeds and we arrived in the coastal city state less than two hours later. One of the more interesting aspects of the drive was the repeated plunges into long tunnels — one that was 1.5 km long — cut into the heart of the mountains surrounding Monaco.

The place reminds me of pictures I have seen on Hong Kong: densely crowded with buildings queued up tightly against each other, seemingly lined up in a tight march into the Mediterranean Sea. A Hong Kong filled with Italianate-styled buildings. The harbour teemed with the spires of the innumerable boats, yachts and ships that filled the water almost as much as the buildings filled the land. Looming over the buildings were several construction cranes, and in the far distance, the mountain range enclosing Monaco, capped with clouds.

Our destination was the Oceanographic Institute, which houses the Aquarium. Josef found a spot in an underground parking garage relatively near by, and map in hand, we handed for the Institute. My map-reading was off, so we ended up being on the wrong side of a finger of land that jutted out into the harbour, though it was lucky from a picture-taking point of view, as the vantage point offered a grand glimpse of the harbour and hillside.

We found a sign pointing the way to the Institute, which also gave us a chance to look at the sea-side as we made our way. When we turned a corner past another parking garage, we came upon the sea-facing facade of the Institute building — an imposing late 19th century edifice founded by the nautical-minded Albert I of Monaco, which was built to impress, which it certainly did.

The Sea-Facing View of the Monaco Oceanographic Institute

We made our way to the front of the building where we got our tickets and made our way inside. We were not disappointed.

The Family Looking at the Top of the Coral Reef Display

The first thing that one sees is a panorama of fish living at the top of a coral reef. Clown fish danced in anemones, large and colourful jacks swam around, and a saucer-sized manta ray flapped back and forth, its fins occasionally cresting the surface as it paced back and forth.

A Ray Gliding by the Top of the Coral Reef Display

As we looked down we could see that the actual tank was huge – at least two stories high, and we were only seeing the top quarter or so. Below we could see cleaner wrasse picking off dead skin and surface parasites from larger fish below, and occasionally a shark would slide into and then out of view. A nearby sign explained the intent: the top part devoted to the showing off “a multitude of brightly coloured fishes and coral species and, on the other, the part of the reef exposed to the open sea with large pelagic fish and great predators.” The intent is to actually grow coral in the facility, and daylight is simulated in the tank by using 23 massive 1,000 and 2,000 watt lamps. Another plaque talked about its impressive statistics: the total volume was 400 cubic meters of water, the transparent “panel” (not glass apparently) was 35cm thick, and itself weighed 20 metric tons, which helped to keep in a weight of 600 metric tons of water, sand and sea life. Development on the tank continues, and the plaque noted that hundreds of invertebrate species, useful in maintaining the ecosystem were to be added in the following months. We walked down the stairs to see the larger fish lurking, or just plain resting, on the bottom.

Vanessa at the Bottom of the Coral Reef Display at the Monaco Aquarium

On the bottom floor were the rest of the aquarium displays, a very extensive collection of all sorts of fascinating fish and other underwater creatures.

Annie Beside the Aquarium Reserved for the Youngest Fishes

Stone Fish: Don’t Touch!

Lion Fish. Also Don’t Touch!

A very impressive display overall, one that definitely tops the previous extensive aquarium I have visited, the one in London.

Afterward we had taken a look at all of the exhibits, we took the elevator to the top floor, where there was a restaurant. I had my BlackBerry with me, and couldn’t resist sending a cheeky email to some of my friends and colleagues back home while I was there.

I wrote:

From: captmondo
To: “his friends and colleagues”
Sent: Wed Mar 15 08:24:47 2006
Subject: Greetings from Sunny Monaco!

Just had to say that! 😉

Am about to have lunch at the Oceanographic Institute.

Fish you were here.

—————————–
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld

I’m such a bastard. But I had to do it. 😉

After we finished with lunch and had a look at the city from the rooftop of the building, we left the building and made our way to the castle, going alongside the Japanese Garden to the Monaco Cathedral, and then through old narrow streets filled with tourist shops to the royal palace, guarded by a single soldier in military dress garb wielding a very recent automatic rifle.

Monaco Cathedral

We made our way back down the causeway that the palace is perched upon and made our way back to the van. Then back to the Chateau.

Got a birthday card from my Aunt Jane today, just prior to my 40th birthday on the weekend. Paperclipped to the inside of the card was an obituary notice for Barbara McWatt, who was a bit like another Aunt to me when I was a child. So the experience was one of being cheered by the card, and then dismay upon reading the notice. Couldn’t help but think of it a sign of my times.

I am not entirely sure of the relationship: I think my Father knew her husband James/Jim McWatt through the Masons, though that is a guess. He was a portly, cheery man with a north-English accent. I remember her as a very nice lady who with her white hair always seemed “old” to me, who took the time to talk to me whenever our families got together, which tended to happen mainly around Xmastime I think.

Communication became less frequent as my parents moved north and out of the city, and even less as first Jim McWatt and then my Father died. But there were always Xmas-cards from Barbara to my Mother over the years, usually accompanied by a little note talking about what she was up to, which mainly seemed to be playing golf in Florida (which was something noted on her obituary notice).

Another figure from my childhood is gone. My sympathies to her family.

Saw an example of this traditional sign of spring while on my commute up to work this morning. Oddly enough I saw several of their “cousins” while in France, the cute, small and very un-thrush-like English Robin, who typically appeared first thing in the morning, perched on top of masonry prior to diving down and finding something interesting to eat in the undergrowth. So I have seen English and North American robins within the space of a week.

The Canadian Geese have also started their return up to the Markham area. Befouled sidewalks and encounters with overprotective parents loom in the near future.

I was also amazed to see not one but two deer grazing in the hydro corridor just south of where I work. That was a first.

On Saturday mornings there’s a farmers market on the public grounds in St. Tropez, so that’s where we headed after breakfast. We thought that what with this being the off-season that things wouldn’t be too crowded, but as Jennifer would remark, it seemed even busier than during the tourist season. Part of that impression may have been due to the roadwork that was occurring along one of the major streets leading into town, meaning few parking spaces than usual. In the end we waited and got a spot in the insanely clean (the floors are polished!) underground parking garage there.

We made our way through the stalls, and Erika ended up picking up a pair of nice sweaters, some cheap but nice-looking bras (“much less expensive than at home” apparently), and a fine blue Indian silk skirt. I gave Annie just enough Euros to buy a small, colourfully painted wooden that she was captivated by at a local stall. I didn’t find anything I particularly wanted or needed, and I couldn’t find any small jars of the lavender honey that usually go down well as gifts for people back home.

Annie and the Colourful Wooden Cats (I Love the Expression on the “Grandmother” Behind Her)

Around noontime everything started shutting down, and we made our way over to the small merry-go-round which has always been a favourite for the girls. Vanessa was with her Grandpa, so Annie got about 10 euro’s worth of rides, which latest the better part of an hour. She had a blast.

Annie on the Merry-Go-Round Horse at St. Tropez

When she had finished we made our way over to Le Café, which was as full as could be. The older men of the town were now playing games of bocce on the boulevard where all of the stalls had been less than an hour before, and the pigeons returned in strength. Since we couldn’t get into Le Café, we settled for Café des Arts, which was something of a relief since after several days straight of incredibly rich food, it was nice to have filling “peasant fare” instead. I had a dish comprised of several kinds of meat — lamb, sausage, and pork — on top of a bed of couscous, accompanied by a small jug of warm, lightly-spicy sauce that could be poured over it. Good hearty food, spoiled only by the French habit of smoking copiously indoors at the dinner table both during and after a meal.

Afterwards we made our way down to an ice cream store down by the harbour, where just about everybody came away with insanely rich and sugary ice cream. Yum!

The afternoon was spent wandering around the grounds of the chateau. This was an even greyer day than the one before, so the chances of good photography were even less than before, but I took what I could in the hopes that something would turn out okay despite the poor lighting.