As readers and listeners know, I’ve been very much looking forward to heading over to Stockhom, Sweden, for VON Europe 2007 and the co-located Podcamp Europe. Unfortunately, when my flight leaves this afternoon, I will not be on it.  I’m now not going.

Since about the middle of this past week, I’ve been experiencing some pains that made it extremely uncomfortable to sit or stand for long periods of time.  Oddly, walking is fine, but sitting or standing still starts to really hurt.  After spending literally the entire day Saturday in a medical center and then hospital, they think it might just come down to something like a severely pulled muscle… but they don’t know and suggest watching it for the next couple of days.  It’s strange because I can’t recall doing anything that would cause a muscle tear.

The net of it, though, is that: a) spending 10-ish hours in airplanes getting over there is going to be very painful; and b) if anything gets worse, I don’t really want to be going into a hospital in Sweden… (and then fighting with US health insurance about coverage!)

So very unfortunately, it looks like I’m going to have to miss…

I mentioned it previously, but James Duncan Davidson has now put the set of photos he took for O’Reilly up on Flickr.  So if you would like to vicariously experience the conference, check out the set.  I particularly liked this one to the right (click for the larger image).  Just a great use of focus and depth of field.  The person in focus is actually Jay Phillips, developer of Adhearsion, a Ruby framework for building applications on top of Asterisk.

I was rather dumbfounded a few minutes ago when I went down to the kiosk in the hotel lobby to print my border passes.  After logging in to United’s webs site, I was immediately confronted by a big warning message:

Due to cancellations you have been rebooked onto the following flights:

<new flight info>

[No thank you]                                         [Accept this flight]

“No thank you?”  Huh?  You have just been told that due to cancellations you are being rebooked – so why would you NOT choose “Accept this flight?”  What happens if you press “No thank you”?  Could you try another route?  In this case would I have actually been booked on the same flight?  Huh?  (Needless to say, I didn’t try it.)

I guess the good news is that I’ll be avoiding Chicago tomorrow and flying down to DC (to Dulles) and then from there to Burlington. The other good news is that I’m not going to have to be at the airport at 4:45 in the morning… the bad news is that the flight gets in 2 hours later… but hey, I just want to get home!