Live from Austin!

Thank you, Bush administration. I’ve just been required to spend the most mind-numbing couple of hours carefully reading page after page of ethical guidelines. Rules that should be blatantly obvious to anyone with any ethical sense whatsoever. It’s all about ensuring that I don’t do things like take Dick Cheney out to the Country Club in order to get juicy government contracts on a no-bid basis, or organize a price-fixing system to defraud California.

Apparently some government agencies no longer allow their employees to accept any free food or drink from contractors. There’s a written notice I have to make sure is displayed before I offer any government employee coffee or a doughnut. If I’d known public officials were that cheap…

Much as I appreciate the problem, I can’t help despairing of a world where there’s a need to tell people “You are prohibited from engaging in fraud”. The course material even then goes on to define the term, enumerating examples. Perhaps at some point someone said “What, false invoices are fraud? Fraud isn’t allowed? Nobody told me!”

I have a bottle of Diet Vanilla Coke. I didn’t buy it; peapod.com included it in our order as a free sample.

I don’t drink Coke. Don’t like the stuff. But I’ve tried Vanilla Coke, and the added vanilla makes it bearable. I don’t drink diet drinks at all, though.

Nevertheless, I’m tempted to drink the bottle of Diet Vanilla Coke. Because I’m too cheap to let free food or drink go to waste.

Again Ryan has woken me up with his snoring. It’s quieter today, but not quiet enough. I’m going to go have an early breakfast, then when I get back I’ll wake him up in an annoyingly cheery and unsympathetic manner, upload a couple of LJ entries, then wander off to the 08:00 kick-off presentation—four hours of morale-building talk from senior executives. Kill me now.

Last night was the opening beach party, on the fake Disney beach near the hotel. Free food, and it wasn’t bad either. Afterwards I played pool with Stephanie. She has been having lessons, apparently, but we ended up quite evenly matched. In other words, I was a lot better at it than I remember being last time I tried. Maybe I had just the right caffeine levels, or maybe it was because the table was in poor condition, equalizing our abilities.