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Wurzburg On Line



Herr Gold -

I was at the Kongress last week, but only on Thursday.  I tried to find
you, but was unable to.  (Actually, you may have seen me - I am the
Jewish fellow who was wearing a suit and walked around with a camera - I
took alot of pictures to share with fellow members of ILUG, the Israel
Linux Users Group.)  I wanted to share my story with you, so that you
could mention it in your talk.  Oh, well.  At least you can pass it
along - maybe post it to a Linux mailing list Germany?

The Wurzburg site made a VERY important difference to me, and really
helped me out a lot.  I had scheduled a business trip to Japan so that I
returned to Israel via Frankfurt right before the Kongress - instead of
stopping over for a couple of hours, I arranged the stopover for a
couple of days, so that I had basically free transportation to Germany
for the Kongress.  The company had to buy the airplane tickets for me,
anyway, nicht wahr? :-)

I arrived in Frankfurt in the afternoon from Tokyo, and because I had
some remaining administration work to do on my server in Tokyo, I went
into town, found an Internet Cafe (Cyber Surf?) and finished my
configuration.  Then I caught the ICE train to Wurzburg, arriving in
town around 8:30 PM, many hours later than planned.

When I showed up (by taxi) at the place that I had arranged to stay,
outside of town, they were unable to take me because I was too late. 
The place was shut up, and I had no phone or anyplace to go.  I began
walking around, carrying all of my luggage (LOTS after a few weeks in
Japan,) and finally found a bus which took me back to the
Dominikanerplatz in the middle of town.  I got off the bus at around
9:30 at night, loaded down with my suitcases, and didn't know what to
do.  It was dark, and no taxis or anything were passing by, there were
very few people - I was stuck out on the street with no place to go and
no idea of how to get anywhere!

(I found out later that I was only a few blocks from hotels, etc., but I
didn't know it at the time.  Even if I had, it would have been difficult
to carry everything to the hotel, and with all of the shops already
closed, there was no place I could ask to leave things for a few minutes
until I came back.)

Well, I called our office in the United States (our Israeli office had
already closed - it was 10:30 in Jerusalem, but only 3:30 in
Washington.)  I asked to speak to somebody who could spend a few minutes
surfing for me.  After using various search engines, and finally WebBot,
we were able to find the link to the Kongress' site, and from there we
went to Wurzburg.  I explained to him where I thought I was - near the
center of town.  He began clicking around on the map of the city to find
me a hotel.  Eventually, he gave me a list of three hotels that he
thought were nearby, and I hung up.  Then I called the first place on
the list, the Strauss Hotel, and got a room.  The night desk manager was
very nice, and sent a taxi to pick me up, and then I was set.

Your web site for Wurzburg really made the difference, and it made me
think that the day is no longer so far off when a traveler with a laptop
computer and a satellite telephone will be able to access the InterNet
from around the world and do simple things like finding his way around a
strange town or ordering a taxi to pick him up from the location that
his GPSS encoder will identify.

Thank you.

				Eliyahu

-- 
Eliyahu Skoczylas <eliyahu@photonet.com>     Internationalization Coord.
PictureVision, Ltd. R&D for the PhotoNet -      "Your Photos on the Net"
http://www.photonet.com/ "With PhotoNet,every camera's a digital camera"