I feel like the title should have been more lyrical than that, but I’m running on a ridiculous sleep deficiency so I’ll settle for offering only excuses. Nonetheless, I am – as the title may suggest to those of you with minds astute enough to crack my code – going to Portland. I’ll be in town for a week attending the OSCON 2008 conference.

If anyone (read: either of you) is in the area and interested in meeting up for a beer or your preferred social beverage, feel free to leave a comment, send me a direct message on Twitter or contact me via email at r o b (at) r o b w i l k e r s o n (dot) o r g (take that, spammer wannabes). I’ll be flying solo all week.

Since this will be my Portland deflowering, I’m also taking suggestions on what to see, where to go and any other touristy advice. Please donate. I don’t want to spend the week sitting by myself in my hotel room.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about Classmates. For example, I don’t like the obscene quantity of (unnecessary) email that I get from them and I don’t like that they make me seem rude by not allowing me access to my guestbook unless I pay for the service. That said, I signed up a while back out of sheer curiosity and filled out my profile. Today I clicked a link in their latest mailing and saw this on my profile homepage:

Hmmm. Nope. I’m almost certainly not.

Seems their personalization “feature” is somewhat flawed.

So, as many of you already know, I’m in India this week to work with my company’s Bangalore team. It’s my first international travel experience, so I had – and since today’s my first day in the office, still have – no idea what to expect from the week. Nonetheless, here’s a quick list of first impressions in (roughly) chronological order:

1. That’s a long time to spend on a plane.
2. Flying business class is a big improvement over coach and essential for long flights, I think.
3. The boarding “process” in Frankfurt (my connecting flight) was a complete gagglef***.
4. I need to figure out how to sleep on planes.
5. The culinary options on flights aren’t so bad. I was well-fed and most of it was really pretty good.
6. The aesthetics of the airport in Frankfurt look frighteningly similar to those of an IKEA store.
7. I was less impressed with Lufthansa than I expected. My United flight out of Dulles offered better service than did Lufthansa.
8. I couldn’t use my laptop on the flight from Frankfurt to Bangalore (the Lufthansa flight). The power plug was there, but I couldn’t maintain a connection for more than a minute before I’d lose juice and switch over to battery. That sucked. I had planned to get some work done.
9. Deboarding in India was a breeze. They did a really nice job of getting us through everything very quickly.
10. My hotel room has two single beds. I’m traveling alone, so it’s fine, but I can’t remember the last time I slept in a single bed (not counting last night, of course).
11. My hotel has free wireless access. I say again, free wireless access. Wish hotels in the US would offer that.
12. Traffic in Bangalore is beyond insane. Quite.
13. Bangalore’s population is ~10 million. Evidently they were all driving to work this morning at the same time we were.
14. Bangalore appears to offer the same mish-mash of wealth and squalor you might see in any big city. The squalor is a bit more visible and maybe a bit more pronounced, but that’s a difference of degree, not of kind.
15. There’s more green (in the way of vegetation) here than I’d have imagined. And palm trees. I didn’t expect that.

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I’m officially part of the international jet set. Well, that may be overstating it just a bit, but my trip to India is locked and cocked as far as the State Department is concerned. Until I started scheduling this trip, I didn’t realize how late I was to join the fraternity of international travelers (I’m not counting trips to Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean or Los Angeles). For whatever reason, the opportunity just never presented itself before.

The thought of spending 18 hours on a plane is a little daunting, but I’m looking forward to it nonetheless.

So after a few weeks of, um, tweeting, I’ve decided that I kind of enjoy it although I’m not sure I can fully articulate why. I entered the fray as a skeptic to say the very least, but I have to admit that it’s grown on me.

If I had to describe the service concisely, I’d say that it’s IRC without the noise and instant messaging without the immediacy. The first is a good thing, the latter is probably a push. I also like that I can vent, think and write without feeling like I should be expecting a response or like I owe someone else a response when they do the same. There’s no, how do I phrase this, pressure of actual dialog. That sounds sad and antisocial, but sometimes it’s kind of convenient. As @sunrisedesign so congenially pointed out the other day, I often use Twitter as a vehicle for self-communication.

Short story: I didn’t think I’d have much use for it when I started and that’s probably true – I don’t have much use for it. Nonetheless, I’m having fun with it. What’s life without a little inexplicable whimsy?