Random Thoughts: T3CON09, Lodging Woes, Germany, and TYPO3 Training

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Hotel in Rodalben

Grafenstein Tower

Grafenstein Gate

Merzalben view from the tower

Grafenstein - my favorite pic

Grafenstein outer wall

By: Virgil Huston

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I am really looking forward to T3CON09. I get to see European friends and meet more, learn more and more about TYPO3, and I have an excuse to go to Germany. I love Europe, I would live there if it were practical. Hopefully, at least I will be able to retire there,

Back in the day, I spent five years in Germany, in a small village called Merzalben, not far from Pirmasens, where I worked while a soldier in the US Army. We were 15 minutes from an unguarded border crossing to France, so also went there often (that was before the open borders).

I was the only American in Merzalben, I was not one of those Americans who complained that German beer is not like US Budweiser (which is swill) and wanted nothing to do with the people whose country we were living in. I loved it there. After T3CON07, I took my wife to Merzalben and it really hadn't changed a bit and the ruins of Grafenstein still silently overlooked the village.

During World War II, my landlord's father and he had reinforced the old tower for anti-aircraft guns (they were masons). Then Alfons (my landlord) was sent to the eastern front, where he was eventually captured and spent years in a Siberian salt mining camp. He didn't get home until 1948 or so. He was 73 years old back then and cooked with a wood stove/oven and had a wood fired hot water heater. He could bake bread better than any electric oven. He spoke broken English and I very broken German, so for a long time, I thought the German word for "money" was "monig," his way of saying the English word.

OK, so you can tell I am looking forward to getting back to Germany.

T3CON09 is being held in Frankfurt at the Holiday Inn Frankfurt City South Hotel. It looks like a really nice place for a conference and expensive for a room. But, I checked yesterday to see prices and found it was fully booked already. So are half the other hotels and even hostels I looked up.

I know I can find a place to stay somewhere, hopefully somewhere that won't take me hours to get to the conference. But what really disappoints me is that one of the major advantages of a conference like T3CON09 is that the majority of the attendees are staying in the same place. People can gather at nearby bars and restaurants or in the hotel itself and not have to travel to and from a hotel somewhere else. At a minimum, people should all be able to stay within a short distance from the conference location.

I would like to see an effort to identify good and inexpensive hotels, self-catering lodgings, etc., where T3CON09 attendees can concentrate since we can't all stay at the same hotel.

On the Typo3 Training Methods Effectiveness Survey. I am really happy to see good participation, mainly from Europe and the US, but also from other places. I would like to get as many responses as possible from across the world, especially countries with large concentrations of people working with TYPO3, such as India, Ukraine, and Russia, just to name a few.

So, if you haven't already taken the survey, please do. Click here.

I would also appreciate any promotion you could give the survey on your blogs, tell your friends, etc.

Once more here is the link :-) http://www.acqal.com/typo3-tutorial-typo3-video/training-method-survey/

If anyone coming to the conference is from the southern Rheinland-Pfalz or Saarland, please bring me a Parkbrauerei Perminator!