It’s Sunday morning in Monterey, CA and I’ve found my way across the street from the Portola Plaza Hotel for some free WiFi so I can finally uplaod some photos, a video, and make this post. Yesterday was an interesting day…
I woke up to snow in Denver and didn’t notice it until I opened up my back door to head out to the car. The plane taking me from Denver to San Francisco had been sitting all night at DIA so a total de-icing was required. Somehow we let Denver 30 minutes late but got to San Francisco only ten minutes late. (Don’t tell me those “estimated flight times” aren’t being manipulated by the airlines to make them look good.) Anyway, I got my rental car quickly (thank you National Car Rental for giving me executive level in our program as I was totally able skip the long line @ SFO) and hit the road down to Monterey.
I decided to take the scenic route so I headed down US280 and cut over to Half Moon Bay on CA92 to take CA1 south to Monterey. Well, as the computer in the car told me when I got to Monterey, I’d averages 31.5 mph the whole trip. 100 miles took me about four hours. The two worst spots were CA92 where I never put my foot on the gas pedal, and Santa Cruz where everything was backed up again. The problem on CA92 was a large pumpkin patch and fall festival in Half Moon Bay that had traffic backed up for miles. In Santa Cruz, your guess is as good as mine.
The speed of the traffic did allow me to get some good pictures on the way (in the flickr photoset of this trip) and I did stop at Pescadero State Beech and got some great photos of the coast and a video of some waves coming in. (Posted to my YouTube account. Links at the end.)
I check into the hotel, got to my room, logged on to their DSL connection and agreed to pay the $9.95/day fee. I did a search, downloaded a file, typed in the URL to upload my vid to YouTube and everything stopped. Their system would no longer give me a valid IP address and despite a tech coming to help me try to fix the problem for 30 minutes, nothing was to be done. I don’t believe it’s my laptop (as that it’s working here but not in my hotel room) and I desperately hoping that it’ll work in the room where my pre-conference is this afternoon. I’ll be getting to the room 1.5hrs early and meeting the tech there to see what happens. Cross your fingers everyone.
I then went to dinner with Karen Coombs (University of Houston) and Jason (Montana State University, Bozeman) for some Sushi, a great walk down to Cannery Row, coffee, and some spectacular conversation about conference politics, wikis, blogs, servers, and book writing. I wasn’t up as late as I could have been but later than I should have been.
A full eight hours of solid sleep later, I’m up and taking it easy for the morning, catching up on the uploading and e-mail, and waiting to see what’ll happen when I try to use my laptop for my session.
As promised earlier in this post, here are the links to my YouTube videos and to my flickr photoset for the conference.
