Live from Austin!

We can’t remember whose idea it was. At one point I had suggested to sara that we could get married in Vegas, but for some strange reason she didn’t go for it. Nevertheless, the idea of visiting Vegas had appealed, and we had talked about it on and off for a couple of years. Then in the fall of 2003, my mother started pestering me as to what we were planning for Christmas. While we were talking about vacations, I asked sara if she had any ideas for Christmas, and she jokingly said that maybe we should go to Vegas for Christmas and solve two problems at once.

The idea stayed a joke for a week or two, until I was nagged further by my mother and told that I was leaving everything too late. At that point I told her that we were hoping to go to Las Vegas for Christmas, just to shut her up. Having said it, I decided out of curiosity to see if it was a sensible idea. It turned out that it was; and better still, it was a cheap idea.

Las Vegas hotel rates are higher at weekends, and suddenly double or quadruple on the 26th as everyone flies in to spend the week between Christmas and the New Year there. By traveling down on the 21st and back on the 26th, we managed to get a good deal. That, in turn, meant that we could afford to stay in a luxurious hotel, rather than the usual Holiday Inn grade motel…

After an evening of reading up on hotels, we picked Mandalay Bay. It’s the newest of the big casino hotels, located at the far south end of The Strip. The theme is “tropical beach”, and as well as an artificial beach with wave machine the hotel also has an aquarium and shark tank. Best of all, every room has a large, deep bath for soaking in. It’s not quite an in-room hot tub, but add some bath foam and it’s a very close simulation at less than half the price. Just the thing after a long day exploring.

We arrived at Logan Airport in plenty of time. Given that it was about 35 celcius, I felt it was justified to hire a cab rather than lug suitcases on the T. I did my usual thing and tried to remove all metal from my person and put it in a pocket of my carry-on bag, in a vain attempt to evade the metal detector. Unfortunately, something set off the doorframe detector, and I was given a severe wanding. As mentioned earlier, the security guy even asked me to unbutton my jeans—the buttons at the front set off his metal detector wand, so I think he suspected I might have shoved sharp knives into the front of my underpants. Hey, the terrorists are mad zealots…

The flight was as pleasant as any six hour plane flight can be. They fed us, they remembered that I’d asked for vegetarian food, and there was coffee. So that’s three points for United, zero for American.

We got a shared van ride to the hotel. We were taken on a delightful tour of south San Francisco. It turns out to bear a startling resemblance to Liberty City in Grand Theft Auto 3… in fact, SF in general reminded me of Liberty City, right down to the hilly Italian district, the maze of tunnels and bridges, the subway, and the look of Chinatown. Our hotel even had dubious looking clubs nearby offering “adult” entertainment. (San Francisco Tourist Office may use the above endorsements in advertising.)

Yes, as you can guess, some corners had been cut in the hotel department. We were at a Holiday Inn on the edge of the theater district, which is one of the seedier parts of town. Also, I’m told, one closest to some of the best restaurants. If the bums had been aggressive, like their East coast counterparts, it would have been unpleasant. Fortunately San Francisco’s homeless seem to be a mellow Californian type, and pretty much leave you alone. Anyway, point is, it was the only place near all forms of public transit and less than $100 a night, so I wasn’t complaining.

Public transit in SF is pretty good. There are abundant buses, which run until 01:30 or so, followed by “night owl” services. There are also trams, which are mostly authentic old streetcars that have been repaired and put into service as a tourist attraction as well as a form of transport. Below ground is a network of more trams; and of course, there are the famous cable cars, which climb some of the more picturesque hills. A $15 pass got us unlimited travel on all of the preceding. To go further afield involved the subway, BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit). Aimed at commuters, it heads out to Berkeley and Oakland and the delights of Contra Costa County.

Well, here I am in Disney World.

I’m here for an IBM internal conference. Pretty much the whole of the IBM software group sales organization for the USA is here, along with Canadians and some Latin American folks. Tomorrow I have the first of many long meetings filled with information that could be communicated by e-mail much more effectively if you could trust sales people to read their e-mail.

The plane trip down was uneventful. I was surprisingly calm about the whole thing, said goodbye to Richard and told him he really needs to write more LJ entries, and got the T to Logan. As the train passed over the salt and pepper bridge, I suddenly thought to myself: why am I on a train? Why did I drag my suitcase through the snow when IBM could have paid for a taxi? Ah well, I could use the exercise.

Then I realized that I turned off the heating in the house, because I didn’t want to reprogram the thermostat and leave poor sara to work it out when she got home. Except now she’ll get home and the house will be freezing, and I’ll be down here in Florida basking in 25 celcius sunshine. I’m not sure what I should have done, as the “Hold Temperature” feature didn’t seem to be working.

At Logan I actually made it through the metal detector without setting it off, in spite of forgetting to remove my watch. I can’t work out why sometimes it beeps and sometimes it doesn’t. (Maybe titanium doesn’t trigger it? Except then, surely people would make guns and knives out of titanium?) I didn’t get wanded either, and they didn’t search or drug-test my bag. Nor did they ask me to turn the laptop on to prove it was a genuine laptop.

Discussing random logistical issues with the rest of the team, I suddenly realized I hadn’t thought to cross-check that they’d booked me to check in at the hotel on the same day they’d asked me to fly down to Florida. You’d think that would be the sort of detail you could leave to the travel planners, but of course you’d be sadly mistaken. A quick phone call to the hotel sorted things out, luckily, or I could have been pulling an all-nighter.

My seat was in the last row of the plane. It was narrower than I remember airline seats being, and since the plane was heading to Florida, naturally there was a large late-middle-aged woman wedged in next to me. The flight attendant came back just before takeoff and asked if I’d mind being moved to the front of the plane. I asked if there were any small children at the front. He said no, he was trying to move them back here. I said in that case, I would very much like to move to the front of the plane.

So I found myself sitting next to a cute guy who does something relating to DB2 that I probably would have known what the job title meant if I’d been at IBM for long enough. He was mostly interested in talking to the guy to his right, though, so whatever.

Once again, no food or coffee for security reasons. Since I’d had to be at the departure gate at noon, and there wasn’t any food past the security checkpoint, I basically didn’t get any lunch.

Got to the hotel, checked in, Ryan fell asleep watching American football on TV and I didn’t have the heart to wake him. Rested for a while, then played Nethack a bit. Then we all went out and I finally got my first proper meal of the day.

The hotel room is about what you’d expect an $80 Holiday Inn hotel room to be like. Unfortunately, since it’s a Disney hotel, it’s $270 a night. If you’ve never been to Disney World, the most surreal part of it isn’t the amazing and pervasive fakeness of the surroundings—rather, it’s the prices. I’ll admit I’m no gourmet, but food is easily double what I’d normally pay in Boston. Anyone visiting from a cheaper part of the USA must get major sticker shock. You can easily end up paying $8 for a burger and fries.

Don’t bother looking for me online. I didn’t know it was legal to charge by the minute for calls to toll-free numbers, but apparently it is. I’ll be writing offline then quickly uploading.