This morning was the beginning of the conference, and I am bored to tears. After about an hour I have found out how to route around the Hotel firewall and get Internet for free. How come nice hotels charge $10 per day for Internet access while cheap hotels give it away for free? Oh, that's right: because they can. Well they're not getting my money, the bastards. Speaking of rip-off, the hotel provides bottled water (Aquafina) for $5 a bottle . Five fucking dollars for bottled tap water. Not only that, but they charge you instantly when you remove the bottle from its special holder. The refrigerator is rigged the same way. I skipped the bottle and just got water out of the tap last night.
Back to the conference ... oh god am I bored. After a few more of these talks the Linguist goes on stage, and afterwards we will be setting up the hardware for our demos this afternoon. Three hours of pain and glory, and our work here will be done.
(10 hours later ...)
Pain? Yes. Glory? Not so much. The demo went well for the most part, but of course there were some snags. We brought only personal laptops, so when it came time to set up I was asked to lend my computer to the cause. I could not explain, but I was strongly hesitant. I soon realized why ...
We spent from about noon until 2pm tweaking settings on my laptop (which I'll have to revert tonight), and got things working. We actually had two demos running (overkill), one to a remote server and one locally. The most significant snag involved difficulties with my hackish subversion of the hotel wireless Internet and a certain Smurf cleaning my baby room carpet at home. Very confusing and complicated, but the full story is too embarrassing to not tell in person.
After the demos, we packed up and shoved all the hardware into our hotel room before going down for the "awards ceremony", a.k.a. "The Wake". This was an exclusive event, requiring a $35 prepay to simply attend. Naive as I am, I assumed this sum would include some sort of celebratory drinks. Alas, I was sorely mistaken. It was $35 just to get into the door, and another $7 for shitty beer. I once again gave a hearty "F You" to the hotel (existentially), and vowed to take my drinking money elsewhere. Each one of the teams were awarded cute little "homemade" trophies, and then we GTFO.
When I first heard of a restaurant named Mexican Manhattan, I laughed. I've eaten at enough out-of-town Mexican food restaurants to know that I wouldn't want anything of that genre in some place like New York. Unfortunately the conference directors obviously haven't the same experience, and that is where we were to go for dinner. The peeps and myself did a bit of scouting to confirm the suspicions. "It's like a Mexican Waffle House," I stated as we peered into the dirty windows of a truck-stop style diner. We cringed, and we laughed. Soon over 50 academics and government officials would be cramming into this tiny shithole of a Mexican food restaurant.
We needed drinks, and we had to keep moving to avoid being mugged. Around the corner and back towards the hotel we found a fantastic restaurant along the Riverwalk, called Ácenar. We told our waiter that our final destination was Mexican Manhattan; he rolled his eyes in an "Oh god that place is nasty" kind of way, and seemed motivated to ease us through the pain with servings of alcohol. The Linguist bought us a couple of rounds, I personally partook of a Three Citrus Magarita and an Amaretto Sour. I was sufficiently intoxicated at this point to encounter the rest of the group and take my chances on the sketchy MM.
It turns out that the place had a lot more seating than originally advertised, including a balcony overlooking the Riverwalk where we all sat. The locals gave us serious "WTF" looks as we all clamored towards the back. The six of us sat with the Big Boss and had good conversation along with our awful food. The Linguist ordered nachos but instead got a big vat of cheese with a few chips thrown in. J-Dub and myself both got cheap dinner plates that looked and tasted straight like Pancho's. I had another margarita (hey, why not?) but it was extremely salty (oh, that's why not ...)
After dinner we embarked on a quest to find The Alamo. It didn't take too long for us to find ourselves lost walking around downtown San Antonio looking at the confusing street signs. At one point The Skeptic pointed out that we were headed towards the Alamo Dome, which we had to explain was actually a sports arena and not a historical site. We backtracked a bit, and almost as soon as we were back at our hotel, we found the Alamo. Apparently the Hyatt is only a block from it, and none of us knew. The Skeptic took some pictures, and The Captain was scolded by a Texas Ranger for touching the outer wall.
Filled with new inspiration, we crossed the roads like chickens and wandered into the little tourist shops along Alamo Plaza. The Captain bought a shirt to send home to his parents, and the Big Boss bought something as well. I made the most of the opportunity by purchasing some Ozarka bottled water for $1 a piece, practically a steal considering the hotel prices. We then triumphantly stumbled a block west into our hotel, up the elevators, and back to the room in which I now sit.
Tomorrow morning will be filled with more boring presentations, but at least we have no demo to set up. We will be leaving here around 5pm tomorrow, hopefully arriving in Richardson by 10. I may need a ride from the airport since I haven't exactly made arrangements for dropping off the rental van yet.
