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From the 30-Minutes-Ought-To-Be-Enough-For-Anyone Department: the only downside of the meeting was the metered Internet access at the Schiphol Sheraton Hotel at the Amsterdam Airport. In order to access the Internet, you had to purchase access for 20 Euros a day. After you had made the purchase, you were given a unique code to type into your web browser that allowed access to the Internet....in 30 minute chunks. That's right, each session expired after 30 minutes, even though you had paid for 24 hours. So if you wanted to use the Internet throughout the day, you had to reload the authorization page and re-enter your unique code every 30 minutes.
On Wednesday, the hotel's metering software stopped working entirely. The hotel reported that "the Internet was down," but as it turns out, the Internet was reaching the hotel just fine. Only the metering software was down. The hotel could have made access available without metering but chose to keep us off the 'net entirely for a day. By Thursday morning we had had enough and, fortunately, were able to hack together a workaround.
For all I know, the hotel probably still thinks "the Internet is down."
