The Obligatory....
The obligatory "I am still extant" message, with LJ still extant.
I took the train to and from Spokane. It is a long ride.
I did not get any pictures of eagles, though I saw perhaps six of them, nor of the wolf someone spotted in Glacier National Park.
Bookviewcafe had a very nice, relatively party, and I saw people at it I've not seen in years and years.
The convention was -very- spread out, and the convention center seemed laid out for visual impact, at the expense, massively, in convenience and access for conference attendees. The outside was the fastest way to get from some parts of the facility to others, and even then, staircases from the upstairs sections, doubled back away from doors to the outside, between areas which sometimes connected in the upstairs sections, and sometimes did not It did not help the the Doubletree Hotel nestles independently within the convention center, surrounded on three sides plus a bit in the front like ears, by convention center (the front is driveway to the street). There one corridor linking the Doubletree to the Convention Center, in the back of the hotel, and it's a rather long passageway. The room numbering in the Convention Center makes MIT's campus layout look linear (which is difficult to do, when going though a firedoor takes you from e.g. the fifth floor of Building 9, to the third floor of Building 7, so you gone from seeing rooms numbered e.g. 9-510 to 7-301 by going through a door. At the Spokane Convention Center, room 100 was IIRC on the ground floor of a different section of the facilty from room 103, either one had to go outside and cross under some of the facilty and go inside to get to 103, or go upstairs, traverse an area, and then go downstairs, doubling back, to get to 103 -- and 101 was on the other side of 100, from where the section of the building with 103 was. The 200 series rooms, and 300 series rooms, were in entirely different sections of the faicility, much further away, and did NOT correspond to floor levels, either....
I had to recalibrate to west coast memes about outside space being virtual corridors for going between rooms in parts of the convention center...
I took the train to and from Spokane. It is a long ride.
I did not get any pictures of eagles, though I saw perhaps six of them, nor of the wolf someone spotted in Glacier National Park.
Bookviewcafe had a very nice, relatively party, and I saw people at it I've not seen in years and years.
The convention was -very- spread out, and the convention center seemed laid out for visual impact, at the expense, massively, in convenience and access for conference attendees. The outside was the fastest way to get from some parts of the facility to others, and even then, staircases from the upstairs sections, doubled back away from doors to the outside, between areas which sometimes connected in the upstairs sections, and sometimes did not It did not help the the Doubletree Hotel nestles independently within the convention center, surrounded on three sides plus a bit in the front like ears, by convention center (the front is driveway to the street). There one corridor linking the Doubletree to the Convention Center, in the back of the hotel, and it's a rather long passageway. The room numbering in the Convention Center makes MIT's campus layout look linear (which is difficult to do, when going though a firedoor takes you from e.g. the fifth floor of Building 9, to the third floor of Building 7, so you gone from seeing rooms numbered e.g. 9-510 to 7-301 by going through a door. At the Spokane Convention Center, room 100 was IIRC on the ground floor of a different section of the facilty from room 103, either one had to go outside and cross under some of the facilty and go inside to get to 103, or go upstairs, traverse an area, and then go downstairs, doubling back, to get to 103 -- and 101 was on the other side of 100, from where the section of the building with 103 was. The 200 series rooms, and 300 series rooms, were in entirely different sections of the faicility, much further away, and did NOT correspond to floor levels, either....
I had to recalibrate to west coast memes about outside space being virtual corridors for going between rooms in parts of the convention center...