Linköping, Sweden

I spent a week in Linköping, Sweden last week.

Outbound I had 3 flights; LAX to FRA, FRA to CPH and then CPH to my final destination, Linköping, SE.

The FRA layover was tight to begin with, only 1:45, but the plane left late and never made it up so I had to "walk briskly" to my connecting flight. I made it OK but then I was REALLY late for the final leg. I made it though with about 2 minutes to spare after being asked a stupid question by the counter person ("Why are you so late?" "Ask Lufthansa and SAS, I did my part.").

The week was pretty boring at times so I ended up re-writing a spec for the software guys since they didn't know how to do it themselves and only partially participating in the meetings. While I was there I saw 3 Swedish National Championship hockey games on TV; the hometown team won all three.

Going home was only slightly better; I took the train from Linköping to Stockholm, overnighted at an airport Euro-Motel 6 and then got up waaaaaaaaay too early to head home with that plane ending up being late and my 2 hour layover being reduced to a brisk airport walk again only to find out the homeward leg was 1 hour late, too.

By the time I'd gotten home I'd been up 20+ hours, feel asleep too early and then woke up at the wrong time so last night I fought to stay awake until 9 PM.

One thing that really love about my job is that we are getting more and more international on each successive project. My San Diego location has gotten away from writing software and are now more of a hardware design and systems engineering location. For example, for this "Japan" project we have a team in Japan as main interface to the customer. The hardware and systems are being done in my location and the software is being done in multiple locations; Linköping, Sweden, St Petersburg, Russian and Bangalore, India.

We had folks from all of those locations in Linköping last week. During lunch one day last week, we discussed where we wanted to have the next meeting. Mikhail from St Petersburg commented that he was only about an hour or so flight from Stockholm. I looked at him and said , "I would love to come to St Petersburg. That would be the most incredible trip I've ever taken."

I was thinking about how amazing my career had changed in 20 years; to go from ultimate Cold War Doomsday Machine aerospace asshole to Silicon Valley start-ups to international travel for a huge high tech company to a place I would NEVER have been allowed to go to even 15 years ago by my first employer.

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