Together with Per, Claus and Michael I have just visited Motorola in Swindon, england to take a one day course on UMA (Ip network Controller/Media Gateway part). Motorola keeps the UMA name eventhough UMA has been renamed 3GPP.
The trip over there from copenhagen seems like a small flight, but all in all it ended up being a 7 hour trip! (Delays in departure, delays on the inflight (circling twice over heathrow) and ofcourse our gate had been taken by another flight and so on. Some day I’ll write a real flightplanner application. Can only be better than the junk application that airports use at the moment.
The course reminded me of the openview course Henrik and I attended last year. It was a little bit better but Motorola managed to screw up the “hands on part” (why do these screwups always happend to big companies?). Luckily I was able to fix it using my laptop. This enabled me to dig really into the UMA system. I managed to take the system down by thinking out of the box. Ooops motorola! And ofcourse I managed to guess the root password on both the UMA test system and the associated accesspoints. LOL. But it was way better to break the system and fix it afterwards than following some sandbox drill on the system!
With regards to food I can just say. Been there, done that, never going to move to UK permanently. They deepfry EVERYTHING and has absolutly no culture for vegatables! We went to a fine and expensive restaurant to get a decent steak. The steak and wine was good. But the garnture consisted of deepfried potatoesticks and 2 pieces of carrots and 3 pieces of asperges. All 5 were waaaay overcooked and could be “chewed” by someone without any tooth. Sigh.
The talks with Per, Michael and Claus over some drinks however, were really really beneficial. We learnt alot about their work and thoughts about Telia and vice virsa. All in all the course was fine, but I would rather have taken it somewhere else in the world.
