A Tree Falling in the Forest

I once again had the honor of being invited to the DLD conference . I guess no one read my post from last year. In case you are curious, my hotel was better. . . well, better is a complicated concept. There is no weather pattern over my bed, but of course there would not be as heat rises and tends to collect in the attic - or as they call it here, room 504. It may not really be the attic. I only call it that because the elevator stops on the fourth floor and I had to exit the warm portion of the building and walk up the wooden staircase to the fifth floor to get into a room with a slanted ceiling and a dormer window. My client picked the hotel and did warn me it was not the caliber of the one I stayed in last year. But with the frostbite wound earned in my five star hotel room last year still visible on the little toe of my left foot, I figured it could not be worse. The VC's behind this startup are certainly very proud of the selection, it reinforced my belief that I am ...

I am sitting in a Munich hotel room for the first time in 27 years and the only thing that’s changed is me. On the train from the airport I realized I am old enough to measure time between actions in decades. Not so long ago 27 years was a reasonable age for a person and now it’s the time in between two trips I took as an adult. The area around the tube exit in Marianplatz is the same, the Glockenspiel looms overhead and the crowd is standing in the same place I left them 27 years ago. In Europe, where “old” describes increments of hundreds of years this is normal, but in America, “old” is measured in single digits so it is unusual. Other than a 275 Euro a night difference, even my room is indistinguishable from the youth hostel I stayed in as a newly minted high school graduate. I naively booked the hotel because it had “four seasons” in the name. I say “naïve because I thought four seasons referred to hotel chain when it reality, it can only refer to the number seasons it is...