Rob Huddleston

One more week. April and May have been positively insane, and I am going to really try hard not to repeat it.

It started in the middle of April, when I taught a class in Orlando. According to WebFlyer.com, a (really badly designed) site that calculates frequent flyer miles, the round trip from Sacramento to Orlando via Kansas City (Southwest doesn’t fly direct) is 5020 miles.

The following week, I taught for three days in San Francisco, another 218 mile round trip. After that, I actually stayed home for a week. But then May started…

I spent two days teaching at Fort Polk, Louisiana. That meant I got to fly a normal plane to Houston, and then what is politely referred to as a “regional jet” to Alexandria, LA and back – a total round trip of 3600 miles.

Next, I drove to San Jose for the Adobe Community Summit, an annual conference where they make us user group managers and community experts feel extra special. Chalk up 288 miles for that one.

After that, it was off to Fort Lauderdale for another week of training in Florida, again via Houston – 5148 miles.

I got to spend another week at home, thanks to a nice jury summons that forced me to cancel a class in San Francisco for what turned out to be nothing. Now, I’m doing a 3-day stint in LA, another 746 miles. I get home late Wednesday night, and then I’m taking a red-eye Thursday night to go back to Orlando for TODCon over the weekend. This time, I’m flying United via Denver, racking up another 4894 miles.

So over the course of 8 weeks, or 58 days, I will have traveled roughly 19,168 miles. After not having visited Florida for about 15 years, I will have been there three times in that span. Right now in LA, I’m about two miles from the ocean, so I may try to drive out to the coast while I’m in Orlando so that I can have been on both coasts within the span of one week. Or I may just collapse from exhaustion…

The good news about this adventure is that I did get to visit a state I haven’t been to before – Louisiana – and I saw baseball games in two ballparks that are new to me: Tropicana Field in St. Petersburg and Dolphin Stadium in Miami. The wrong team (the Yankees) won the first one, but the second gave me a chance to see my Giants (probably the only game I’ll get to this year) and they even won, so that was cool.

As things stand now, I won’t be traveling at all for the rest of June, so it will be nice to just be home and relax for awhile.

And abandon the idea of wireless service for their guests, until such a time as they can figure out how to properly allocate bandwidth.

I’ve been traveling a lot lately – a lot more than I want to, to be honest – and thus rely on hotel internet connections. These days, I dread the thought of needing to get work done on a hotel “free wireless” connection, because they all suck. In fact, in the few minutes that it’s taken to type this up, I see that the connection here has been lost.

Come one, people! You don’t expect hotel guests to be courteous enough of others to share other resources, so why do you expect this to work? Just invest the money in wiring up the joint. I would in fact quite happily pay for a wired connection in the room that was reliable over the hit-and-miss connection that invariably comes with wireless.

OK, enough ranting for today… On a side (and only slightly unrelated note), central Louisiana is really quite nice.

I had a great time last night seeing the game. The ballpark in nice, even if I was a bit confused about having to go to St. Petersburg to watch (it turns out that the body of water is Tampa Bay, while the city on the eastern shore is simply Tampa, so the baseball team can play in St. Pete’s and still call themselves “Tampa Bay”.

I walked up to the ticket counter about an hour before the game and asked for one ticket, best possible seat. Turns out I’m a bit too used to Giants games, where the best seat at that time would have been somewhere in the top section where the game is only a rumor way down below somewhere, because the guy said, “Are you sure? The best seats are the club-level right behind home plate for $267.” Oh. So I “settled” for a seat about 30 rows up, but still right behind home, that was a lot cheaper. The picture below is a view of the ballpark from my seat.

(Click on the image to see a bigger version)

I’m not a big fan of the poor excuse for a game that passes for American League baseball, and I frankly couldn’t care less about the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (it turns out, and this is a shocker, that “devil” might have negative connotations, so they dropped it from their name as of this year), but I am American enough to hate the Yankees, plus it’s fun to root for the home team, especially when the home fans were practically outnumbered by the Yankee fans in attendance.

Anyway, the game started out badly – home run on the second pitch, followed two batters latter by an HR from A-Rod got things started for the Yanks. They led off the second with another HR, and then things got bad in the third when they finally chased the starter and pulled to a 7-2 lead. It got interesting again in the 7th, when the Rays’ lead-off guy hit the Yankee’s starter with a come-backer, forcing him out of the game. The next guy connected for a 2-run shot, followed by a hit batsman and another 2-run shot, followed right away by a solo HR and all the sudden it was a tie ball game. The Yanks, unfortunately came back with a HR to lead off the 8th, and that was all they needed to end the night.

It’s always fun being at a good ball game, and seeing three almost-for-sure Hall of Famers play (A-Rod, Jeter, and Rivera) play was neat, too. The drive back was a bit long – it took over a half an hour just to get out of the parking lot (something else that I’ve gotten spoiled by at Pac Bell) – but it was worth it. It’s too bad that the Rays will be on the road when I come back here in June.

I’m in Orlando teaching Flash this week. A few somewhat random thoughts:

• Why am I in Florida, of all places, and freezing? Everyone around here seems to think that air conditioning has one setting: full blast. I get that during the summer, it’s hot and muggy and coming inside into an air conditioned environment is probably nice, but right now, it’s not hot: it was in the 60s when I got here yesterday afternoon, and is supposed to be about 70 today. Unfortunately, the actual outside temperature doesn’t seem to have any impact on the theory that the air conditioning needs to be going on full power all the time.
• I flew Southwest – the Greyhound of the skies – to get out here. If you haven’t ever flown them, you should know that they don’t do assigned seating. It used to be that you got assigned a boarding priority – section A people got to get on first and pick a seat, while section C people were restricted to the random remaining middle seats when they finally got on. Your boarding number had to do with how far in advance you checked in, so experienced Southwest travelers knew that you had to check in as close to the 24-hours-in-advance mark as you could in order to score an “A”, and then you needed to be at the airport a couple of hours early to be sure that you go in the front of the “A” line. About a year ago, they changed it around so that you are now assigned a letter and a number, so you don’t have to show up early (and people can’t cut). But even better, you now have the option of paying for a “high A” by using their “Business Select” service. It’s basically like Southwest’s version of First Class, so if you’re willing to pay a bit more, you can be assured of a good seat. That’s what I did coming down here – I paid for Business Select and, even though I only checked in about 10 hours before the flight, I was A2. Anyway (and I’m finally getting around to my point) I sat in the exit row for the extra leg room, but I also chose the side of the plane where the exit row only has two seats, figuring that on a flight that wasn’t full, I was likely to have that seat empty … until this guy decided to sit there! I was the only person on the plane who had a stranger sitting right next to me… grrrr. It turned out that it didn’t matter a whole lot in the end, since the second half of the flight from Kansas City to Orlando was full, so the seat would have been taken anyway, but it was still frustrating.
• And about my seatmate … he was a nice enough guy. I’m not one of those who likes to talk for hours to complete strangers, and thankfully neither was he, but he did feel the need to occasionally chat about the size of my laptop and occasional other points. But it got, uh, “interesting” as we were approaching Orlando. First, he pulled out the Southwest magazine and turned to the page at the back with the big map that shows all of the airline’s destinations, and he proceeded to complain about how far out of the way we had flown by going to KC, since after all if you draw a straight line from Sacramento to Orlando, it passes more through Texas, whereas Missouri is way the heck up north. Is the fact that the Earth is a globe really not common knowledge yet these days, or did he just miss that day in school? It was even more humorous a few minutes later when he commented about how he couldn’t believe that the Spaniards had come and walked around in Florida’s heat in their heavy armor “two hundred years ago”. I’m not sure if he didn’t pay attention in history class or in math class for that one.
• Tonight is the one highlight of my trip. I’m going to go to Tampa, which is about 90 minutes from here, and watch the Devil Rays take on the Yankees. It’s not real baseball of course, but it’s better than nothing, and it will be a chance to see a game in a new (to me) ballpark. So that will be fun. While I honestly don’t care too much either way, I’ll root for the home team because … well, because they aren’t the Yankees.
• One last thing. I’m staying at a Holiday Inn, which is fairly nice, but they have this demon alarm clock in the room, which is ultimately why I’m doing this post. I got the clock set when I got here last night, and thought I had the alarm set, too. It definitely said that it was due to go off at 7am, and the clock was definitely correct … which did not stop the alarm from going off first at midnight, and then again at 5. While I was able to get back to sleep pretty quickly after the midnight alarm, I wasn’t at 5, so here I am. I unplugged the damn thing and will use my cell phone for an alarm the rest of the week.