I was in Utah
August 15, 2008 – 3:18 pmIt’s a great story.. if you want to commit suicide. My flight left at 6am on Sunday. That means that I was in a car traveling to the airport at 4am. I can see your jealous eyes. I flew to Denver. Nice city, mostly. I like Boulder a lot more, but that’s mostly because of the memories I have of there and that it’s smack up against the mountains. In Denver I wandered several hundred feet to another terminal. I got on another plane and flew to Salt Lake City, Utah. I then got into a car and drove myself and two coworkers up to Logan. It’s about 1.5-2 hours. We checked in to the EconoLodge (better than it sounds) and met up with a couple professors we knew at Olive Garden.
Monday rolled around without much event. I gathered my coworkers and we sped to the University (up a hill and around a couple corners). We presented and were presented with presentations associated with our satellite and with the work of others. At the first break I took our CSci guy back to the hotel so he could work on some code for our demo. (Which was pretty pointless, actually. No one really cared about that.) He took longer than estimated so I went back to the conference to help our Project Manager (henceforth PM). She was doing well enough, but there were a lot of people interested in my GPS reflectometry research, and rightly so! It’s fascinating and you should be impressed, too. Decided to leave the CSci guy working on the demo until the next day and we’d set it up then. This transpired.
Tuesday was a very long day. Over nine hours of standing on my feet repeating the same thing over and over again. It was tiring and annoying. I started to wish I’d just given a presentation on it and been done with it. It was around 2pm that I suddenly realized I was at a science fair: students presenting their volcanoes (thanks, Kat) and the teachers judging them. Only, it wasn’t volcanoes, it was satellites and it wasn’t science, it was engineering. So, it was an engineering fair. Once I was in that mindset I laughed a little and was able to do just fine with all these big scary industry people. Who really aren’t that big or that scary. I was able to impress and be impressed by several individuals from the USA and England. I got into my groove and things went much better.
Wednesday was similar, but ended earlier. Thankfully. I went from wearing dress shoes on Monday to tennis shoes on Tuesday and Wednesday. That helped my fatigue a lot more. We wrapped things up and drove the 2 hours to Salt Lake City, stayed in a hotel near the airport and were on a flight at 10am for Denver. In Denver I sat around. And sat. And sat some more. I got up at one point to charge my computer. I finished several hundred pages of the book I was reading. Then I sat around some more. Five hours after arriving, I got my new boarding pass and wandered over to the correct terminal (I’d been sitting in a vacant one). An hour after my flight was supposed to leave we were shifted over to another terminal for a different plane because the previous one had mechanical problems (it was probably just that an exit sign was broken, but when I asked they said “uh, I don’t know…” in an ambiguous way that makes me think the plane I was getting on might not be any better).
I flew. Home.
The PM’s boyfriend picked us up at the airport. And promptly got lost trying to get us home. We took Penn to Lake Harriet… Yeah, that lost. It was around 10:30 or 11 that I finally walked into my apartment, plopped my (still packed) suitcase into my bedroom and collapsed into bed.
Moral of the story is this: never let someone else make your travel arrangements as you’ll most likely end up traveling 12 hours just to reach your destination.
Contrary to some people’s (NikLovin’s) belief, I did not convert to LDS or marry several women. That would be big-of-me. Get it? Ah, Fletch.
Oh, you noticed that I only talked about the daytime activities? Well, let me tell you: what happens in Logan, UT stays in Logan, UT. Because, there’s nothing fucking there. I talked to several locals about what there is to do and this is the reply: drink, go bowling, drink, go cruising, drink while bowling, hike. I and the PM did do a short hike, but it was late and we only made it 2/3rds of the way up. We ran into a very eccentric gentleman on the way down who was from the same conference and he was nice enough to keep us company on the way down.
Other than that, it was uneventful and boring. I attempted several times to generate some excitement, but was shut down. There were parties, but the PM wasn’t interested and the CSci guy and I felt bad abandoning her. Of course, the next day she said she’d have been fine with being dropped off.
Sitting here, thinking about the trip, I realize that I don’t remember shit from the conference except the people I met. In that regard it was cool. I don’t know for sure if I’ll ever see them again, but I do think it was enlightening to get to know some people from industry and realize that I really don’t enjoy engineering. I’m more into the science of things. It might seem like a fine line to the uninitiated, but really it isn’t. Or, maybe it is and I’ve just separated the two so much in my mind that I don’t see the difference as being all that close.
Who knows. At least I’m home.
Something that did come out of the conference (well, the ride home from the airport) is that I’ve devised a new kind of blogging. Stay with me while I explain: what you do is take a picture and GPS tag it. Now you’ve got a picture of a place with a specific (and later locatable by you or anyone else) place/situation/event. You post it with some comment on your blog and VOILA! You’ve got a photo blog.
I call it “phlogging”. I’ve passed the idea to D (who is a genius internet guy) to see what he thinks.



