Diary of a trip to the UK & Ireland – Day 3

Dateline London 14-April 2010

MagicRoundaboutYesterday (Tuesday) was terrific.  The drive from Bristol to London was punctuated by a quick side-trip to  drive through the Magic Roundabout (you didn’t think I could resist, did you?)  It was brilliant.  You can go all around, but you don’t, and it is not at all confusing or difficult. It is very straightforward.  First I drive from the entry at the bottom of the map to the first exit (pointing directly to the left).  Then I reentered and cut across the center to go out M4, which I realized later is the yellow arrows in the illustration in yesterday’s post.

Then, on to London. Now, I drive in Boston and have been a cabbie in NY, but nothing quite prepared me for London, downtown, rush hour.  I opted to put the car in a car park and walk around, but the spots were fairly tiny (of course, right after passing up one spot as too small, I watched a woman younger than my daughter effortlessly back into that very spot in her minivan!)

The presentation was co-sponsored by the London .NET User Group, the London Silverlight User Group and Microsoft UK.  They rented out a cinema (movie theater) and nearly filled it. It was great fun,  and my favorite review was this from twitter:

At @jesseliberty talk on SL4 MVVM
Very entertaining presenter but completely bonkers

Who could ask for more?  Folks here are incredibly friendly but there is a bit of a difference in audience reaction. As it was explained to me, “You Americans seem to feel that when you have a thought you have to act on it. If you like something, you applaud and cheer.  We feel we can have an opinion without immediately expressing it.”  Fair enough. But I’m pushing everyone to feed my need for constant approval

Today, a quick side trip to Acton (named after my town in Massachusetts) and then on to Cambridge (named after the town where we have Harvard.  I understand they have a college in their Cambridge as well. How cute.)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects and is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen online courses. His latest book, Building APIs with .NET will be released early in 2025. Liberty is a Senior SW Engineer for CNH and he was a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Microsoft MVP.
This entry was posted in Community and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

8 Responses to Diary of a trip to the UK & Ireland – Day 3

Comments are closed.