Travels without Rolly and Plink
(I really need a travel icon, don't I?)
11am: SJC
I'm travelling lighter than usual this week. Decided to go back to a backpack as my carry-on after finding out the hard way that a TravelPro rolling briefcase is remarkably easy to overstuff to the point where it won't fit under an airplane seat. Ended up with a pretty nice backpack with the Rick Steves brand, but actually made by somebody else. It's enough larger than my old Jansport that it comfortably holds a modern 15.4" laptop, and the front flap hangs in front of the zippered back section rather than over the zipper. So you can get out the laptop without unsnapping the flap.
The flap is also asymmetrical, covering a sizeable zippered pocket (which I'm not using at the moment) but not the mesh bag that holds a water bottle. Yay! There's a back compartment that the straps stash into, and enough room over the front pocket and under the flap for me to put my shoulder bag in order to convince the airline that I only have one bag. That's less important this trip because I decided not to take Plink, my little Vagabond travel guitar.
Instead of Plink I took my new Yamaha recorder and my (very) old recorder book; I'll either re-learn recorder or get dragged out of my hotel room by my neighbors and drowned in the pool. To give you some idea of how long I've been out of practice, let me just say that the book is only a few years younger than my wife.
This is being written at around 11am in the San Jose airport -- they have nice desks where you can sit and plug in a laptop, but they don't have free WiFi. So it'll get posted sometime after I get to Portland.
I note in passing that the master for CC&S has been dropped off at work for UPS to pick up this afternoon.
4:20pm: Portland Convention Center
I'm here. Nothing much going on, and it seems to be difficult to connect with LJ here. Hopefully that's temporary. Doesn't matter much, since I'm currently ssh'ed in to home. I just love the net!
The Mac is its usual hatefull self. Should've brought a real keyboard. Think I'll go out and look for something to eat before the Meet and Geek at 7:30.
6:34pm: Convention Center
Seems LJ is totally hosed due to a power outage in San Francisco. So it goes. Dinner at a Red Robin's. Fried shrinp and fish and chips. Tasty, and not terribly expensive. They have several local brews on tap; I had a porter from a brewery whose name I don't remember.
The new backpack is definitely more manoeverable than Rolly, and holds at least as much stuff. Turns out, from having stuffed it under an airplane seat, that it's almost exactly the same dimensions. But because it doesn't have the wheels and so on it's lighter and holds more (though arranged differently and not necessarily more accessibly. Not quite as handy if you just want to toss something into it and move on (for example in a dealer's room or trade show). I'll probably keep using Rolly for SF cons, for example; you also can't easily use a backpack as an impromptu music stand.
6:30 am: Red Lion Hotel at the Convention Center
LJ may be back, and my master is "out for delivery". Web access here at the hotel is unuseably slow, but I can ssh ok, for the moment. Here goes!