At DIA I used my hour wait to not only check mail from the Red Carpet Club, but chatted to the National Guard kids with guns. "What happens if you shoot someone?" (short answer: administrative leave during the investigation, and nothing else if it was justified). "How long do you have to train before they let you carry a gun like that?" ("it's ongoing") "Did you receive special training for this job?" ("Yes, but we can't talk about it.").
Arizona is bloody dry. Apparently they are more humid than Colorado, but Colorado is semi-arad. Arizona is really bloody arid. There's exposed sand/soil, no lawns, and lots of cactus. There are mountains around the town, so it feels little like a transported Colorado.
The shuttle ride from airport to hotel was 90 minutes long. We're way the hell out of town. As one attendee here said, "this is a hotel for people who don't like people". It's a fifteen minute drive to the nearest supermarket.
This is important because I have a fancy room with BBQ, DVD player, surround-sound, fridge, etc. We're going to have a hackathon pissup there tonight. Even the shower is fancy, with multiple nozzles and a control panel to change pressure, frequency of rotation, and god knows what else. It's very futuristic. All this with desert outside and bare mountain hillside looming on the horizon.
It's great to see the conferences group again. We went out shopping (buying steaks and booze for the party tonight) and had dinner together. I only see them two or three times a year, and it's always fun. We get to bitch about management, budgets, and all the stuff that coworkers bitch about, but also catch up with each others' families--how're the kids, my brother had a heart attack, I'm now a vegetarian, .... It's like a family reunion every six months. You know this already, though--it's just like a Perl conference.
The terminal room is all OS X machines. They even have one of the new iMacs. Sweet. These are awesome computers, and we're working to get the same thing at OSCON. The networking and computer guys are really on the ball.
--Nat
What's really dry is when you break down just outside of Death Valley, Nevada and half to walk half a mile to get to a trailer where you ask where the nearest town is. ("This is it: Amargosa Valley, Nevada!")
I've traveled the Southwest a lot, so I know what you're talking about.
Re:Arizona is dry?
vek on 2002-01-27T07:54:55
And I actually live here so I definitely know what you're talking about. Moving to Arizona from England was a little bit of a climate shock I can tell you.Re:Arizona is dry?
ask on 2002-01-30T11:25:47
eh, Death Valley is in California. No? Or there is more than one?Re:Arizona is dry?
jdavidb on 2002-01-30T20:55:08
And so it is! Oops. But it's on the border.
As I recall (and this was many years ago), my head was buried in the Star Wars Roleplaying Game Gamemaster Handbook, so maybe I wasn't paying attention as to where the border was.
After a google search, I've got a map that shows the park is almost completely within California, with one corner in Nevada. It's right on the border, so when we got out of the park and our car broke down, we were in Nevada.
And it was dry!
