To get to Düsseldorf, I took the ICE fast train which took 2:41h for 410km distance, which is the fastest way to travel between those cities. On this course, Deutsche Bahn is offering WiFi on board (unfortunately not for free), so you basically have Internet at 300km/h - nice. While being on the train I also started about implementing a Standalone PluginContainer wrapper that can be used when implementing a new plugin to test it; I will post about this separately.
After I arrived in Düsseldorf I first went to my Hotel, which is nicely located in the old town - only 5 mins by subway from the main station. after check in I walked around a little bit in the old town and went to the Rhein river. On the next picture you can see locals with one of their favorite occupations:
People were just standing outside a brewery and drinking Altbier. In summer that place is crowded.
Düsseldorf is supposed to have "die längste Theke der Welt" ( 'the longest bar counter of the world', which is not to be taken literally ) see also:
There are lots of other restaurants and bars in that area too, as you can see from this picture:
I took the tram to the Heinrich-Heine-University where the talk was taking place in an auditorium. The first people were already there and enjoying food and drinks sponsored by Red Hat Germany.
Michael Jastram from the JUG opening the evening by welcoming all of us and doing a little lottery - prizes were a Jetbrains license, a backpack and a copy of my EJB-3 book.
After this my colleague Joachim Schröder who is living close to Düsseldorf briefly introduced Red Hat before my talk started:
My talk was taped by the user group and should soon be available on the Rheinjug.tv web page
(Installation of the camera)
Around 40 people had found their way to the presentation at that time. The talk itself went well. As usual I was also talking about the thermometer chip monitoring that I implemented a while ago. And of course I did a live demo of the system which was well received. In the Q&A session we had some good questions from people who obviously have an administration background.
When this "official" part was over we relocated to a different part of the building and did some more socializing.
Joachim drove me to my hotel, where I arrived around midnight. While this he told me that he especially found the thermometer chip part very interesting, as he recently implemented some monitoring of his heating system with this exact chip and with some proprietary code. So he is now interested in replacing this with a Jopr based solution :)
This morning when I went back to the main station, I met Mete again, who was in the talk yesterday. He invited me for a coffee (thanks again) while I was waiting for my train and we had another good conversation.
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