Dylan Schiemann

On April 12th, I left Tokyo for New Zealand. My lack of understanding of the size of the Pacific surprised me when I learned that the travel time from Tokyo to New Zealand is approximately the same as Los Angeles to New Zealand.
Anyways, after my final hours in Tokyo, I rode to Narita airport [...]

The weekend of April 11th was my final two days in Tokyo, so I packed them full with things to see and do. Bill Keese and I met up with Floyd and Werner from QCon and we set out to find the cherry blossoms.
We started out in a pair of parks with temples and [...]

I’m about 10 days behind on my travel blog… I had a extraordinary time in New Zealand and I’m enjoying Australia before heading to Amsterdam this weekend. Maybe I’ll catch up during the 30 or so hours, door-to-door, of travel from Sydney to Amsterdam. It’s going to be nice being on a time [...]

April 10th was the final day of QCon Tokyo and the first ever dojo.sake event as well.
I began the day with a meeting at a large Japanese company that has an interest in Ajax. After that, I took Henrik up on his advice to walk around and pick a place somewhat at random and [...]

I’m a bit behind on these posts due to imperfect hotel internet connections.
On April 9th, QCon Tokyo began. But first a few initial observations:

ATMs: hard to get cash, as most only work with Japanese cards, and many stores don’t take American credit cards. It also helps if you try to withdraw $300 instead [...]

So far, I’ve yet to have nearly enough time in each city, but I’ve made the most of it while still keeping up with work. On Wednesday morning, I spent a short amount of time networking and more time repacking my luggage more efficiently.
Henrik, Floyd, and I shared a taxi to Beijing Capital International [...]

On Tuesday, I gave my talk at QCon about the Open Web, which was well attended and received. The use of professional real-time translators was an interesting change from every other talk I have conducted previously. I don’t think the translators were able to keep up with my pace, so I forced myself [...]

On Monday, April 6th, our local QCon Beijing hosts gave us a tour of Beijing. We began early with a trip to Tiananmen Square, which can hold approximately 1 million people, dwarfing any of the squares or piazzas that I’ve ever seen, and is an amazingly powerful and symbolic place and includes Mao’s Tomb [...]

I’m behind on my blog posts about Beijing and Tokyo which were both incredible and amazing, but I’ll catch up after I arrive in Queenstown New Zealand after an 11+ hour flight to Auckland and a short flight to Queenstown! I can’t wait to see the reversal of the coriolis effect for the first [...]

On Sunday, I again took the Beijing Subway to meet up with Eric and Michael, who took me to see the Great Wall. Nothing that I have seen really comes close to the Great Wall except for some of the architecture in Rome, but the size and scope of the Wall is astounding. [...]