It's a good job I don't get travel sick

London City Airport has its merits but the tiny little runway isn't one of them. It means that only tiny little aeroplanes operate from it.

The plane to Munich this morning was one of those tiny ones with three seats across (i.e. in a seat-aisle-seat-seat configuration) and about ten rows from front to back. It was small enough for one air hostess to run the whole show. It was most amusing to watch her stop every so often as she was giving the German safety presentation so she could put down the microphone and pick up her prop (life jacket, oxygen mask, etc, etc).

However, the best part of the journey was just how easily these little planes can be thrown about by turbulence. For most of the journey the plane was shaking up, down, left right, sometimes all at once. It made for an entertaining trip but spoiled my attempts to read the paper.

Anyhow, I'm now in Munich and helping deliver education on WebSphere Process Server to a group of skilled IBM Software Consultants.

My pitch today was on our support for JMS. I think I did a reasonable job of getting the concepts across but it reminded me again how important it is to be able to tell a story with a presentation. The core of the deck was an advanced topic on solving a particular problem that is created when you try to interface a legacy messaging system with a web-services oriented environment. The solution is very easy with WebSphere Process Server. The difficulty is showing that there really is a problem to be solved. So - I had to spend a lot of the presentation making the case for why there was indeed a problem to be solved and - once the existence of the problem was accepted - why it wasn't something that could be done "out of the box". I think I may have overdone the set-up but hopefully the attendees will be able to explain why this is a genuine problem that any integration product must solve and, more importantly, be able to see through the complexity of the problem and articulate the simplicity with which which this new solution allows us to solve it.