Dylan Schiemann

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. An interesting thing about Air New Zealand is that they have their Koru Lounges even in tiny little airports like Queenstown. I wish I could have stayed longer in Queenstown, enjoying the natural beauty of the area.

Alas, I took a short flight from Queenstown to Auckland where I was met with long-time Dojo Contributor Rob Coup. It’s always fun to meet people for the first time in real life. Rob and I had a quick pint at the Langham Hotel after a couple of mishaps (they couldn’t find my record, and then gave me the key card for someone else’s room). The Langham Hotel was nice, but the service was subpar compared to any of the hotels I’ve stayed at up to this point.

There was a speaker’s pre-event scheduled. I quickly met a bunch of people: John Ballinger, the host of this great conference, as well as fellow speakers Philip Fierlinger, John Casasanta, Tim Heuer, Jarrod Bishop, Pamela Fox, and many more. We headed to Cactuslab where I got to learn all about the Google Maps API from Pamela, learned to enjoy a few great cocktails provided by the hosts (), and I got to meet Karl von Randow, who I knew because of his work on Charles, but that I didn’t know was that person until about 20 minutes into the conversation. I also got to learn about Robert Songsmith!

We then headed to dinner at Rocco, where I had the chance to meet David Karp of Tumblr (and his girlfriend), and a number of other speakers from the event. All in all, it was a great kickoff to Web’09.