Dylan Schiemann

April 18th was definitely a day to remember. Web’09 had a great group of attendees and a solid collection of speakers. I was up to give my talk after the morning break, and gave a talk on the Open Web. While I have given this talk several times before, each time I [...]

My first morning in Auckland, April 17th, was met with a nice view of Sky Tower from my room at the Latham:

This was also Day 1 of Web’09, one of the most enjoyable conferences I’ve ever attended. With about 200 attendees, conferences for me are all about the people and the hallway track, and [...]

As I slip further and further behind on my blog posts on my trip, I will note that I’m having a great time and still plan to blog everything eventually. I visited Warwick Castle in England today.
On April 16th, I left Queenstown for Auckland where I gave a talk at the Web’09 conference. [...]

Queenstown and the surrounding area rocks and is ridiculously beautiful. The entire area feels like one massive national park. It is a bit trendier than I expected, with lots of people straight out of high school or college tramping around New Zealand.
I began my first full-day (April 14, 2009) in Queenstown with a [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]

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. [...]

I don’t think anything could have prepared me for Beijing. In the US, we’re led to believe that China is a communist state, a.l.a. the former Soviet Union, but the people of China are capitalists to the extreme!
Kevin and Shinling, our local hosts, were a lot of fun to hang out with, but I [...]