Month: September 2004

“We’re so bleeding edge, when the Red Cross comes around asking? I have to pass. I ain’t got nothing for ’em.” – Greg Hughes (greghughes.net)

Made it! This is my first time in Lake Tahoe (in this case, I’m in South Tahoe, for those who know the area). What a fascinating place.
I do admit that going from Tampa, FL (Hot. Humid. Flat), to the Sierra Nevadas (Cool. Dry. Mountainy) was a bit drastic. Someone probably should have mentioned ot me that Lake Tahoe is at 6100ft, (and my hotel room is on the 11th floor, so I’m up around 6300ft). Nothing like running up the escalator and having to stop and gasp for 2 minutes before continuing.
On the important front, all my gear got here in one piece, it’s all set up and running. Gnomedex will go on as planned! Minor twitches that are the norm for any event, but the show shall go on!
One interesting tidbit. Lake Tahoe straddles the Nevada / California border. Since Nevada allows casinos, and california does not, all the casinos are -right- against the border (as in, crossing a street in town has a sign “Welcome to California”. 🙂
I’ll try and keep things up to date here, but the wireless for the event hasn’t gotten set up yet (and what’s with Harrah’s not having broadband access? It’s a mighty nice hotel, but no net access? Sheesh!

What fun! The hotel lost power last night around 7pm. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the backup generators they said they had could only run emergency lighting. Not, say, the plumbing or the kitchens. Apparently a huge chunk of Tampa is without power – we’re guessing that a station got damaged badly. THe power came on at 2:30am for about 30 seconds, flickered, and went out. Probably Something Bad [tm] happened at that point, and the poor guys in the power company are rebuilding things from scratch.
The hotel stuck it out until noon today (I just went to bed early) and then they gave up the ghost and kicked everyone out. (It wasn’t much more pleasant than that, really). Through some fantastic help from Cat, we got the Fedex shipping arranged for my equipment, and I wrangled a room at a nearby place.
Arrived here, got the room, and lo! Power! Air conditioning! Running water! FOOD! Internet connectivity! (Yes, ranked that one last, it was getting that desperate). This is a ‘Chase Suites’ which is… shall we say, a step up from the Doubletree. This is a full studio apartment. Complete with kitchen. Really. Dishwasher, stove, over/under refridgerator, and microwave. Paradise!
Net connection is established, so I’m good there, now I’m gonna go scrounge some food.

Well, now I’m seeing a hurricane kicking along at full speed. Jeanne is down to a Cat 2 hurricane, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive. I’m probably less than 50 miles from the eye now, it’ll past to the northeast of me, but the ‘turn’ all the meteorologists were hoping for didn’t happen, and it looks like the eye-wall will pass pretty close to me. The picture is from the tropical section of Weather Underground which has always been my favorite weather site. The X is where I am.
I’m really tired of “on the spot” interviews and pictures on TV (right now the TV has a big colorful graphic “JEANNE’S FURY!!!!”. Dude, it’s a storm. Don’t anthropomorphize it. It doesn’t like that. They keep replaying this interview with some idjit newscaster who got blown over last night. He was on the shoreline where a category 3 hurricane was coming ashore, and he got blown backwards about 40′ by the wind. I suppose no one mentioned to him that it’s pretty hard to stand upright in 120mph winds.
I woke up to the sound of whistling wind outside my room – this room looks onto the courtyard where there’s a swimming pool and other hangout spaces. They took all the lounge chairs (metal frames and plastic seating spacestuff) and just tossed them into the pool. That actually makes sense – they won’t fly around and smash into the rooms.
Power and internet is working (yay!) and I think I’m going to make my way down to the restaurant and get some breakfast. I saw some families coming in last night with blankets and supplies and stuff to take shelter for the day.
I don’t think we’ll sell many registrations today 🙂

The eye of the storm is about 110 miles east, south-east of me, on the other side of the state. THe eye is just making landfall, just north of West Palm Beach.
Here it’s just ‘windy’. I just went out on top of the parking garage to check things out – we’re not seeing any rain at all, but the clouds are _SCREAMING_ overhead. Not very windy as far as hurricanes go – at least here. Winds are around 20-25mph, gusting up to 40 or so. CNN just said that Tampa is expecting 2.7″ of rain, as opposed to Orlando (about 100 miles north east of me) which is expecting 7 1/2″.
Things may change in the next hour or two, but we’ll see – it’s supposed to turn north just as it hits land, but if it doens’t, it’s gonna get uglier here 🙂
The coolest part was standing on the roof, chatting on the phone with arora, listening to wind whistle on the phjone – looking up through the -really- thin layer of clouds that was screaming south, and seeing stars and the moon shining through. Neat.
There’s a lot of chatter on the news about the surfers, who are having a field day.

Apparently large chunks of the folks who were at my 40th birthday party have come down with a cold. I know of a dozen or so at least. Headcold, sinus drip, the whole shebang. Whee I tell you, whee.
Sorry everyone, but thanks for the party!

I’m totally exhausted, but I have to just say I have an amazing group of friends and SO’s and just cool folks around me. For those not in the know, today was the culmination of Cat’s scheming and planning that resulted in a surprise birthday party for me on the Schooner Fame out of Salem. Although I had a few hints along the way, I had no reason to suspect the beauty of the boat, the 40 or so folks who showed up to yell SURPRISE!, and the lovely get together at homeport afterwards. There was food, a cake, family and friends all around.
Special thanks to Rosa for being wonderful company and apparent distractor leading up to the event, and of course to Cat for planning and executing a great party. Thanks to everyone involved for making it a very special day. Ya’ll are great.
There’ll be plenty more on this later, but for now I’m just too pooped.