Flametoad

Here’s a little bit of insight into my professional life–that is, the other, non-publishing professional life. For the next few days I’m at a conference for Higher Education web developers and I’ll be blogging my session notes for my colleagues back home.

Travel/pre-conference

Looong day of travel. The alarm reeled me out of bed at 4 am. By 4:45 I was on the road. Made it to the airport and to my gate for my 7:15 am flight with maybe 10 minutes to spare. Got into Atlanta a couple hours later. Found a place to grab some food and free fountain drink refills. That is where things went wrong.

When I traveled in July, my phone followed the time changes. Unfortunately, I forgot that I was carrying a different phone this time. After spending a couple hours in the restaurant finishing the Larry Bond book I was reading (which is a post in itself), I strolled over to the gate. About 30 feet from the gate I passed a bank of monitors showing flight times, what I saw sent my stomach to the floor. I’m sure you guessed by now that I missed my flight. Rather than 45 minutes early to the gate, I was 15 minutes late. 

Fifty dollars later, I’d booked the last seat on the next flight a couple hours later. I suppose it could have been worse. I could have been stuck there another six hours or forced to buy a whole new ticket from another carrier. You can bet I won’t be forgetting my $50 lesson in double-checking details while traveling..

Once in Rochester, I watched the dwindling lumps of luggage clunk along the carrousel with a feeling of resignation. Fortunately a helpful airport person was nearby and led me to the airline office, where she located my luggage in about 30 seconds. More than 12 hours after 

After getting checked in and unpacked at the hotel, I wandered down to the conference registration area and picked up my badge and bag. A pre-conference mixer was well under way, including music provided by attendee iPods. What did you expect from a web conference?

The mixer was well attended but I didn’t really know anybody, I’m not great at “mixing”, and I was pretty exhausted from 12 hours of travel. Someone gave me a tip on a good place to eat only a couple of blocks away, so at about 7:45 I walked over to the Dinosaur. Dinosaur bills itself as a BBQ/blues joint. Coming from Texas, I was pretty skeptical about a BBQ joint in New York. I sidled up to the bar and checked out the menu. A “Texas” style BBQ sandwhich? Well that was a challenge I just couldn’t resist. I’m here to tell you that it was a pretty good BBQ sandwich. The sauce—which is key–tasted authentic. As icing on the cake I got to try something I’ve never even seen in Texas—root beer on tap! Mmmm. I’m sold. I have a feeling I know where I’ll be having dinner for the rest of the convention. Monday night is acoustic night.