Kevin's Weblog

I arrived in Toronto late yesterday afternoon and so far things are not auspicious. I’ve had a slowly growing headache most of the time I’ve been here, and probably not nearly as much food as I should have.

The arrival dinner last night was very well attended, which was unfortunate as the restaurant was not well prepared to handle us and the table I was at didn’t get any food at all until almost 2 hours after we sat down. Afterwards, we went to see Batman Begins, which was good, but by the time it finished I had a decent headache going and not enough hours until I needed to get up. Then I tossed and turned for a couple hours.

I dragged myself out of bed in time for the opening remarks and keynote, which was probably a mistake. I barely stayed awake, then crawled back to my room and proceeded to sleep through lunch. I wandered over to a Thai place a block away, picked at my food, then returned for a far too packed session.

(This is giving me a preview of the room that I’ll be talking in. Apparently, there’s a full-on podium and a fixed microphone. Ugh.)

I can also tell that I’m going to have network issues on this trip. I paid the extra $5 for internet access in my room. They gave me a modem, but forgot to give me the authorization code I apparently need. Down on the conference floor, the wireless seems a bit unreliable. To make things worse, it appears that there are two cron bombs that have been going off for the whole weekend, and I have about 5000 new main messages which are very, very, very slowly getting downloaded. Some day I might actually be able to find out if I have some real email that needs attention.

Late afternoon update: Acquired Advil; headache much improved. Network still iffy, but snagged someone else’s wireless from my room and left my computer alone for a couple hours to sort out the mail situation.