Wednes­day 5 Sep­tem­ber
Icelandair’s fleet con­sists entirely of nar­row­body (single-aisle) Boe­ings. It sounds unde­sir­able for trans-Atlantic travel, but with the stop-over in Reyk­javik, the two halves of the trip are accept­ably short. The food is not bad either. Our land­ing in Reyk­javik coin­cides with sun­rise and the effect is stun­ning. From the air, one can see glacial ice sparkling and steam ris­ing from the earth.

For once there is no line at Heathrow immi­gra­tion, and before I know it I’m walk­ing in the front door of Jeff and Josh’s new flat in Oxford. It’s a nice lit­tle place, if you can for­give the strange quirks of British archi­tec­ture (like vaulted ceil­ings that slope below head height). We grill some burg­ers and walk around Oxford a bit. Josh fixes tasty Sky­line Chili for din­ner. In spite of my overnight flight, I man­age to rally for a Half-Moon pub lock-in.

Thurs­day 6 Sep­tem­ber
Noth­ing starts the day off right like the com­bi­na­tion of jet lag and a hang­over. After tour­ing the office (pos­ing for secu­rity as a vis­it­ing sci­en­tist from MIT) Josh and I return to Lon­don and tour around a bit. Din­ner is Indian from Kens­ing­ton Tan­doori. Delicious!

Fri­day 7 Sep­tem­ber
Setup begins at the exhi­bi­tion cen­tre. The truss is assem­bled and ready to be flown, but lit­tle else goes right. All the tools were stolen in tran­sit. The cables are found to be stuck in cus­toms and new ones will have to be fab­ri­cated overnight. Truss clamps are miss­ing. The power feed is not con­nected. The UK power cables for our lights did not arrive, so I walk into a local light­ing sup­plier and (to the amuse­ment of the cashier) fill my shop­ping bas­ket with 13 amp UK mains plugs. Back at the cen­tre, I am told to let the exhibit con­struc­tors han­dle the assem­bly of the giant back­lit scrim ceil­ing piece. When I return from lunch, they have bolted together all four sides of the square box and are argu­ing over how to get the scrim inside it. I pick up the blue­prints, which have as assem­bly instruc­tions: “Step 1. Assem­ble 3 sides of the square. Step 2. Assem­ble scrim and slide it into the open side. Step 3. Now install the fourth side of the square.” Com­pli­cated, isn’t it.

Sat­ur­day 8 Sep­tem­ber
Every­thing comes together at the last minute. Cables and clamps show up late. Two pieces of equip­ment were early pro­to­type ver­sions with the unfor­tu­nate prob­lem of blow­ing up upon con­nec­tion to 230 V power. To the amaze­ment of our mar­ket­ing peo­ple I repaired them on the spot with a butane-powered sol­der­ing iron. Some prob­lems with our con­trol con­soles (mostly due to human errors) lead to a late night at the con­ven­tion cen­ter. Just as we were leav­ing for the night, the exhibit peo­ple drop off a huge box full of UK mains plugs. “I don’t know what you wanted these for since it looks like you’re all wired up now, but you ordered them a while ago!”

Sun­day 9 Sep­tem­ber
The show opens. Busi­ness in Europe is strange. Many of the larger booths are giv­ing out free alco­hol, and by 11 AM most of the Ger­mans in atten­dance are drink­ing beer. By 4 PM, half the atten­dees are in var­i­ous states of ine­bri­a­tion. The slo­gan printed on the bags is “Mix busi­ness with PLASA,” and I sup­pose they mean it. Jeff and Josh arrive in the after­noon and I sneak them into the show. Blanca joins us for din­ner in Soho at Bus­aba Eathai. I unin­ten­tion­ally order the hottest item on the menu (South­ern Lamb Curry) but it is extremely deli­cious and I man­age to fin­ish my meal with newly-cleared sinuses. We walk to some ran­dom and curi­ously empty pub not far from Trafal­gar Square where we pon­der the source of the dis­tant loud beats. We would later dis­cover that we were miss­ing an out­door Chem­i­cal Broth­ers con­cert just a few blocks away. Argh!

Mon­day 10 Sep­tem­ber
Today I sat in on a ses­sion about rig­ging for acro­bat­ics given by the head rig­gers of Cirque du Soleil. Fas­ci­nat­ing stuff! The show is so com­plex it nearly defies expla­na­tion. But unbe­liev­able to watch, back-to-back, the “audi­ence view” of the show together with night-vision videos of the rig­gers (of the Vegas show) 100 feet up on the grid and 50 feet below the stage in the trap room. It’s incred­i­ble enough that they can pull off the show as it is, but on top of the nor­mal require­ments they have planned for han­dling every pos­si­ble con­tin­gency of equip­ment fail­ure and mid-air res­cue with­out not­i­ca­bly dis­rupt­ing the con­ti­nu­ity of the show. The tech­ni­cal side of the show is run by a small army of peo­ple, with all the pre­ci­sion of a mil­i­tary oper­a­tion. After the show, my cowork­ers and I rode the Lon­don Eye (lit by our prod­ucts!) and ate din­ner at a Tapas place near Pic­cadilly Cir­cle. A good evening.