Arrival and preparations

We already went to Bonn on thursday to start building up everything. Jean and his father had the longest trip, coming straight from Paris, picking me up and going further to Bonn. You wouldn't believe me how much stuff you can actually fit into a Renault Clio! Not only the luggage of three people, but also all the material we needed to set up our booth.
When we arrived at 14:00, the organisers were already busy building up and yet, we had the opportunity to see the Maritim Hotel in a pretty empty state, showing us how big it actually is. A large main corridor which connects several conference halls and among them: The so-called "mainbridge" where the major panels and events like the costume contest would take place. You can fit over 2.000 people into that hall alone. And as if that wasn't enough already, the entire convention spans two floors. What is most striking about the Maritim though is not its size. If you recall Kultima, the effective space was a lot bigger, but that was a trade fair hall. The Maritim however was not as cold, but very warm and welcoming with its marble floors, wooden wall panels and retro-style lights.

After some introduction, we received the key to our room, which was upstairs. The "Salon Planck" was one of the smaller rooms intended for fan-art and model builder exhibitions as well as for workshops and photo sessions. And in fact, the photo session room was straight on the opposite side of ours. So whenever people would cue up to get some professional photos of themselves and the guest actors, they would probably be well aware of our 2 meters banner in front of our room. Even though ours was one of the smaller rooms, it provided a lot more space than we had expected from the plans. A perfect headstart for us.

But wait - there was one thing missing: The computers! We had kindly been sponsored by Shuttle with 14 complete XPC systems. When I went downstairs to check for the computers, they had just arrived in that very moment. What a perfect timing! The magazine curator of the Maritim actually went through all the possible storage rooms with me. When we had just left the wine cellar behind us, the carrier had arrived with our pallet.

So, the actual building up of our room could begin. While connecting all the pieces and installing the systems is a quite tedious task, we were full of excitement and it actually became fun once we saw the pieces coming together. In fact, the array of 14 Shuttle XPCs looked quite nice and gave the entire booth a far more professional look than the mixed machinery at Kultima did.

However, no fair or convention passes without problems and we were about to face one. Since the machines required specific drivers, we had to download them from the Shuttle website. What is usually no problem turned out to be a major challenge with the Telekom HotSpot of the Maritim which was totally overloaded at that time.
Gladly, my hotel was just 400 meters away and they also provided a HotSpot there. The speed was not outstanding, but we were finally able to download the drivers. Since it would take quite a while nontheless, Jean and his father decided to get to their hotel for some well-deserved sleep after a long trip. As for me, the first FedCon visitors arrived at the Gsi for a community meeting that evening. So I spent a little time with the people whose faces I had not seen for a year. It was a nice evening, but at a certain point, I went upstairs to my room to check the download progress.

And voilą: It was finished - at 1:00 in the morning. To avoid a backlog of work later this morning (as it was Friday already), I decided to get back to the Maritim and do the installation. At that time, most of the people there were already through with their work and a very tired looking Sandra (one of the main organizers) crossed my way. A long, but gladly successful night followed. At 3:00 I was finally through with the installation and network setup and the last person I met was a security officer who was puzzled that someone was still working.