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Day 4of the Conference. The closing party is tonight at California Adventure, starting at 7:30pm. (The park closes at 6pm anyway, so that'll give Huey Lewis and the News time to setup, and maybe even a few free minutes to make that theme park, y'know, cool.)
| Wednesday,
17 September 2003 |
|
| 6:00am | The alarm was set, Tubby crossed the room, and hit the snooze button. |
| 6:09am | The snooze alarm went off. After opening the drapes, we had the discussion about if either of us sat down on the bed, we'd fall asleep again. The discussion went poorly, and we fell asleep once more. |
| 6:42am | Stupid comfortable room. We both woke up for the last time and hurried out the door. |
| 6:59am | We got to the convention center, Tubby swapped the machines out for the 4:18pm person from yesterday, and virus scanned the machine. |
| 7:43am | I politely pointed out that by coming directly to the work room, we missed breakfast. I further explained that this wasn't in my Top 10 list of things that were okay with me. Tubby said he'd consider remedial actions. |
| 8:56am | I finally pry Tubby away from his computer long enough for him to fetch me some munchies. |
| 10:02am | Back to back, two machines are here that essentially don't boot to, or past, a login screen. |
| 11:21am | The first machine gets referred to desktop support to reinstall the operating system. It's quite toast, and for you techy types, keeps failing at a blue screen with the error EXCEPTION_KERNEL_TRAP_MODE message. Sounds fancy, huh. |
| 12:09pm | The second machine isn't doing much better. It scans okay for disk problems, but still no workie. |
| 12:23pm | Tubby, Jennifer and I are compelled to go to lunch. We do as we're told; we're good like that. |
| 12:47pm | Lunch completed, Jennifer wants to tour the conference floor. We do so, although she seems a bit taken back at the fact that damn near every exhibitor wants you to talk to someone or fill something out before you get free stuff. |
| 1:31pm | Jennifer finds Darin, a helpful and tall chap, who gives her some of the blinking Mardi Gras styled beads. Jennifer is pleased to get them, as well as not having to fill out a form (and heck, Darin offered, we didn't have to solicit them). Life is good. |
| 3:43pm | The room is down to five cans of Diet Pepsi. Tubby just took two; leaving three (it's math for the new millennium). I'm concerned both about the soda supply, as well in my new-found talent in writing word math problems. |
| 4:57pm | Tubby rises to fetch a Diet Pepsi, only to find that he's not the only one who drinks this stuff. He is forced to revert to regular Pepsi, and I'm forced to ensure his infantile whining. |
| 5:56pm | As we were closing up, a woman from Tokyo came in with a laptop problem, so we began fussing with that (she was sent our way from the support folks in Sydney). |
| 7:02pm | The machine (from Tokyo) was brought back to a normal state... it just too considerably longer than expected. |
| 7:13pm | Tubby and I got out of the room and returned to the hotel. |
| 7:48pm | We arrived at the Disneyland parking garage, loaded up into the tram, and were headed off to California Adventure, where the conference's closing party was being held. (The park closed to the public at 6pm, as it does Monday-Thursday, apparently, and re-opened for our conference at 7:30pm.) |
| 7:59pm | We met up with the oh-so-nerdy Rachel (who works for me as the director of Medical Services). |
| 8:04pm | After we got through the gate (with relative ease, I'm not afraid to mention now that it's closed and the risk of party crashing is nil), we were handed a map specific to tonight's activities. |
| 8:11pm | We met up with some others from Tubby's work (four in all), and we wandered around a bit. Most of the rides were up and running, and looked lovely from across the pond, er, lake. Someone even figured they'd project the company's logo onto the giant Mickey Mouse outline along the roller coaster's support beams. |
| 8:28pm | Figuring food is nice, and the description of burgers and fries sounded nice, we headed over to Burger Invasion. Like the invaders of Hastings in 1066, however, we were a bit disappointed that the bounty at our destination wasn't as exciting as we'd expected. In this case, yes, it was just a McDonald's place within the park. 80 or so people waiting in line for McDonalds. (My order, Tubby's and Rachel's each hit $12.68 exactly, which was an outrage had it not been pre-paid by the company hosting the closing event.) |
| 9:01pm | Huey Lewis and the News began their performance, and I eventually managed to get a handful of pictures... but if you've ever tried to take a photo of a moving person, from a long distance, at night, while balancing a camera and perched on someone's balding head, you'll forgive the less than stellar photo quality of Huey, Huey, and Huey (in purple, duh). |
| 9:31pm | I guess it's not just burgers. A fair number of folks lined up for corn dogs, too. Nothing special about corn dogs, mind you, just your average corn dog (or so I was told). |
| 9:38pm | It takes a very brave soul, who's not afraid to stick their nose up at the fashion world, to wear red tennis shoes with white socks and khaki shorts, but it was done. (He wasn't this blurry in real life, but we were trying to be subtle... didn't work, and he fled without getting any food.) |
| 9:46pm | Here, too, the lines were impressive for pepperoni and cheese pizzas, macaroni salads, and the like, available at Pizza Ow Mou Mou (or something like that). |
| 9:59pm | Yup, 15 minutes later, I got to the counter to gather the snacky foods. |
| 10:01pm | From there, the food to table time was very brief, much to my delight. |
| 10:22pm | We wandered along the pseudo-boardwalk to see most of the games were open, and running at no cost, but you'd still get the prize -- a win-win if I ever saw one. |
| 10:25pm | Tubby wanted to stop for a churro... burgers, pizza, churro. And you thought only call him Tubby to be cruel. Now you know the truth, for the truth is out there. |
| 10:27pm | As a result of what I can only assume is contractual obligation, the carousel (aka merry-go-round) continued to run every few minutes, despite being deserted. I enjoyed referring to it as the ghost merry-go-round, but a few nearby us seemed to think that meant the thing didn't exist. Silly humans. |
| 10:35pm | We found the riders that could have been on the carousel -- they were all in line at the roller-coaster ride thingy. |
| 10:52pm | Tubby, Rachel and I opt to head back to the hotel and call it a day. Mostly because I'm sort of sleepy, Tubby considers waking up at 6:30am every day to be an issue, and Rachel didn't get much sleep before her trek down here. But that said, sleepy eyes. Ta! |