An audience of two

Sunday October 01, 2006

The turkey died of dehydration
Off to the Hilton for the "State of The Union" address.

My fears about the food were partly justified. Trying to feed 3,000 people at one sitting is extremely difficult. As my friend Jan remarked, the turkey appeared to have died from dehydration.

Unfortunately the pastry chefs don't suffer from the same restrictions and had produced a rather splendid assortment of confectionary. I suspect I've just eaten at least a week's recommended intake of saturated fat and sugar.

Another thing that US hotels seem incapable of doing is ordering enough decent beer. I have never yet been to a hotel bar that ran out of Budweiser or Coors, but good luck finding a decent beer half an hour in to any event. There must have been one case of Sierra Neveda for the whole room. Given that they were asking $8 for a beer that cost less than $1 you might think that they'd stock up on the product with the higher profit margin?

Managed to catch up with a few old colleagues today including Barton Fiske, Phillippe Muller and Bernhard Strobel. I also met Erik Fischer for the first time. That's the great thing about events like CEC - you can work with people for years but there are so few opportunities to actually meet up and chat.

Best overheard quote from the evening: I was in the bathroom, saying goodnight to my kids.

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Day 0. The calm before the storm.CEC2006

Had to drive down to Milpitas to pick up forty DVI to VGA adaptors and bunch of 25 foot power extensions. Moscone wanted to charge $25 per day for each one! Unbelieveble. I picked up some really nice contractor grade ones from Home Depot for $10 each, with an outlet every 8 feet. I may go back and get one for myself.

Everything has gone fairly smoothly. Configuring the Xerox N2125 networked printers was harder than it needed to be until my good friend Eric Bezille told me about a trick he'd discovered: If your printer is configured with IP address 1.2.3.4 then lpr -P1.2.3.4:1.2.3.4 works. Or at least it works if the printer is configured correctly; it seems that changes the IP information made on the printer's front panel dont take effect until you power cycle it. So once we'd got that sorted the rest was straightforward.

I wish I could say the same thing about configuring Mozilla. All I wanted to do was to change the default start page from google.com/firefox to our local schedule builder web page. It ought to be a relatively trivial task, but I'm guessing Google pay Mozilla a significant sum to make it harder than it needs to be. I must have edited a dozen files (including modifying two files that were inside chrome/en-US.jar) before I finally got it to work. If I finally figure out the exact voodoo to make it happen, I'll make a note.

So now the SunRay servers are serving, the printers are printing, the systems are all where they are supposed to be and so far everyone is happy. We seem to be short two 19" LCD monitors, at least one of the systems has a DOA hard drive and one of the presenters is missing 11 boxes of T-shirts. The usual stuff. I'm off to the hotel for a shower then trying to decide between one last decent meal (convention food is never any good) or a few beers.

Or both.

8AM start tomorrow (groan). I'm not a morning person. And I'm dreading having 3,000 attendees moaning at me about why the SunRays aren't on SWAN.

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Third in the league!
A 2-0 win against Liverpool on Saturday has lifted Bolton back into the top three!

1 Man Utd	7 16
2 Chelsea	7 16
3 Bolton	7 14
4 Portsmouth	7 13
5 Everton	7 13
6 Aston Villa	7 13
7 Reading	7 13
8 Arsenal	6 11

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