The Golden Age from the album Sea Change by Beck
Here I sit on the floor, next to the nearest power outlet in the airport. Note to the people who run this monolith known as O'Hare, you need more outlets and Wi-Fi. Have spent the last two days here on business. Spent yesterrday in meetings and today touring print vendors who had survived our Commercial Print RFP process. The weather here has been fine. A little snow, not too cold. Much better than last week when they had -4 degree weather with -25 degree wind chill. Have had too much food and am now just waiting on the plane home. Which of course is delayed a bit, not because of weather but due to equipment problems. So, I'm sitting here trying to get my mind going, writing, and allowing my battery to get its power back up.
It's 6 pm Central Time. That's 7 o'clock back home. The kids didn't have school today because of an ice storm that didn't happen. Just a day of heavy rain, temps near 40 degrees. Of course tomorrow it's supposed to drorp to 27 degrees in the morning and that means ice problems and most likely, knowing the Baltimore mentality, a two-hour delay.
You can tell how much we talked about the possibility of bad weather over the last forty-eight hours. Really, besides the meetings which were basically some bridge repair/building, shared gripe session, supporting a friend in need (she very recently lost her husband) and meeting some new faces. Have gotten some positive feedback on the design I developed for my birthday invite. Funny, it's something I would have normally procrastinated on until the point of going out and having to buy something instead, but this time I actually got it done.
Wow, seeing little kids in the airport, makes me miss my kids and Karen even more. Sometimes these little trips are a good get-away but in truth, I prefer the one day, up and back, trips. I don't miss the kids and Karen as much, get my chance to do a little something for myself and still sleep in my own bed. But you know, there really isn't much pleasure to business travel. Your're stuck in meetings, you are trying to finish project for clients or get things to a printer, you have to FTP files (once you find a place that you can FTP from), and then there's the social component. You have to be an active participant in business dinner conversation, and how do I the 'plant' appear to my friends and co-workers. How is my lack of sparkingly, witty conversation perceived? These are the things that drive me nuts.
Speaking of FTP, those of you who work with comptuers will appreciate this story. At my hotel in Chicago they had T1 lines and Ethernet cables in the rooms. I plugged in my Mac and got an IP address but no connection to the hotel's ISP's server. I called the front desk, who sent me to their Internet tech support and I spent about an hour on the phone trying various tricks of the trade to get in their server. All to no avail. I even walked down to the business center and tried their Ethernet line and no luck. The problem was I had to download some images from a stock vendor to place in a brochure that needed to be at the printer (FTP) by today. I was stuck. No hotel Wi-Fi, no Internet cafe nearby, it was almost 11:30 PM (this was an 1.5 hour ordeal) and I returned to my room feeling defeated. Then the idea struck me, I would war-drive from my hotel window. It was the best idea I'd had all day. I found not one but two Wi-Fi networks with a strong enough signal. One was password protected but the other was not. By 1 am I had downloaded and placed all the image files that I needed. The final step, FTP'ing everything to Baltimore, didn't go as well, the connection kept stalling, but I did mange to send everything from using a T1 line at one of the printers we visited. (Sorry this was so wordy, I just thought it was a great Wi-Fi tale.)
It's now 2:15 am and I got home around 11:30 pm EST. So, why am I still awake????
you are right...two hour delay this morning...correct prediction about the insanity that is baltimore weather!
Posted by: kelly at February 4, 2004 07:31 AM