Hartford Connecticut is sometimes called the insurance capital of America so a contractor with insurance knowledge stands a good chance of ending up there sometime.

As it’s a good policy to treat your clients money as you would your own,I was doing it on the cheap also like many Londoners I tend to love public transport and dont hire a car unless I can help it (which marks me as a freak to many Americans).

There are plenty of hotels in the middle of Hartford but these tend to not only be a bit expensive but when I tried to book they were also full up, so I ended up in Glastonbury, a suburb town a few miles south with a couple of huge hotels which always seem to have rooms free and surprisingly good Internet access (the Hilton Garden Inn Hartford and Home wood Suites) these suited me perfectly as they have 2 shopping malls within 5-10 mins walking distance, both with supermarkets ( the Garden Inn has microwaves in its rooms and as the homewood suites are grander I assume they have the same or better) as well as a variety of reasonable restaurants and fast food places.

Travel wise your hub is the square round ‘Central Row’ in Hartford, all major clients are walkable from there, all the buses I describe below both arrive and leave from this area, it also contains a large round booth in the centre island that is the ticket office to buy your weekly travel pass from (the buses take cash but don’t give change or a ticket for receipt purposes).

The buses are clean, air conditioned and everyone I met on them was very nice. The ones that you will need are:

30/30x this is the airport bus between Bradford international and Hartford downtown

4/14 this is the park and ride between the two Hilton hotels at Glastonbury and down town Hartford, fast with no stops but very limited running times, you seem to have pay an additional $1.05 per trip if have a travel card (normal price $2.30), it picks you up next to the brown wooden shed on the parking lot opposite Burger king near the outdoor mall on Main street. ( the official stop is called Putnam bridge Part and ride), If you miss the 4 or need to travel on Saturday Then the 95 is the bus for you (if you need to travel on a Sunday you will have to get a taxi into Hartford)

35/64 these are the buses from Hartford to West farms mall which is Apparently the best mall in the area for souvenirs for loved ones

The http://www.cttransit.com/ site is where you will get the the details you will need. and a good set of maps can be found here

Notes:
1) Hartford dies at 6:30 pm , West Hartford is apparently the place to be (it certainly looked far posher and more residential on the basis the one meal I had there)

2) A taxi trip from the The airport to Hartford is about $30 + tip, from Hartford to Glasbury is just over $20 + tip, a taxi all the way from the airport to the Glastonbury is about $57 + tip, to a Londoner the taxis are pretty naff, not only can they say ‘no’ to your fair (quite gave me a start when one did) but they don’t know where anything bloody is!!, if you need one, pre book it from either your hotel or the little booth at the Airport.

Old Comments

Rajesh Haran(01/07/2012 19:12:22 GDT)

Hi Mark,

I live in E.Hartford let me know if you need any help or assistance. shoot me an email.

Mark(02/07/2012 11:36:59 GDT)

Coool  thank you!

Andrew Magerman(02/07/2012 20:31:39 GDT)

there can only be one Glastonbury.

chris(09/07/2012 13:40:34 GDT)

good article very informative

As a member of LDC I’m re posting its “year in review“, as it basically mirrors my own

“A week before IBM Lotusphere / Connect we realised this was by far our biggest conference yet, with 2 speakers, 3 sessions, 2 sponsored parties and bleeding t-shirts everywhere. So, what have we been up to during the last year?

Well, bucking the global slowdown for one thing, new clients now include one of the worlds largest media websites, another multi-national insurance company, and myriad smaller interesting clients, with some monster projects in the pipeline (fingers crossed).

International clients are now the norm rather than the exception, with contact coming in from all over Europe and the US. To cater to these requirements our skills set has diversified even more. Adding to bleeding-edge IBM and Microsoft stuff, we have had large client implementations using Spring and Spring webflow, PHP and advanced HTML5.

Nearly every new project contains a mobile element and all coding now caters to this as a matter of course.

This was especially true of our XPages work which seemed to really reach a tipping point in 2011. Like other projects, everything we’re doing with XPages also has some mobile aspect to it, but the interesting thing is that there is now a constant stream of new applications being created with XPages (NB: that’s “new new”, not “new upgrades”). And 2012 doesn’t show any sign of slowing down.

2012 will be more of the same, providing more for our clients and keeping pace with the ever accelerating rate of change in both IT and business requirements.

It’s time to kick arse (we’re British) and write / delete code (remember: less is more, and more code means more test cases!).”

Its cool working with you lot, bring on 2012 🙂

Old Comments

Mary Beth Raven(07/01/2012 01:51:13 GMT)

Congratulations on a great year and best wishes for a better one to come! And, I hope to find some time to chat (er, or drink) with you at Lotusphere/Connect

Mark Myers(08/01/2012 11:50:29 GMT)

@marybeth thanks and count on it!