TechEd 2006 - Day 0 - Fire in the hole!

Well, here we are off to TechEd 2006. I’m traveling with James Kovacs and we’re splitting a room at the Lenox Hotel here in Boston, so it’s all good.

Is it a Minneapolis thing or what? There were dozens of Amish people on the plane which was odd to me (not hanging out with the Amish very often). Didn’t matter to us since it wasn’t like they were looking for us to seed the community or anything, I just thought the whole Amish/Mennonite thing generally avoided technology. Just shows how ignorant I am about the world.

As we flew into Minneapolis we passed over a fairly large plume of smoke with a grass fire or something fueling it. Hey, when you’re geeks at 30,000 feet any excitement is fun. Although the picture doesn’t look that terrifying, it certainly was more impressive when we went over it.

As we were deplaning at the airport, they announced that walking sticks were available as we left. Cool. James and I looked at each other and thought “free stuff!” as we leave. Way to go Northwest. Unfortunately no, they didn’t have any walking sticks for us. We’re landing in Minneapolis and then doing a 4 hour stop over to Boston. Of course, as geek-luck would have it we’re re-planing in concourse F10. I would have personally preferred the F1 concourse as I think they would have been more helpful, but at least there’s power here to plug in while I drain my laptop battery.

I’m always fascinated by the oddities there are at airports. Like why would an airport have a dry cleaners? Are people that desperate and have that much time on their hands to really get laundry done while traveling? The Minneapolis airport is no exception as there were a couple of things I haven’t seen before. One was a phone charger which I thought was cool and it supported almost every type of phone. The problem is the 15 minute wait for the “turbo charge” service. The other one was a little odd. It offered scratch and win lottery tickets. Yup. Drop a buck in the machine and get a lottery ticket. My brain just doesn’t get it and I look at this as a poor mans VLT. Guess walking over to the magazine rack isn’t good enough for some people.

Of course I’m grumbling that there’s no free Wifi. Scratch and win dispensing machines, but not Wifi. Is there somebody we can contact and tell them how much we’ll love and cherish them if they just tossed us a frickin’ bone and gave us a connection to check our mail? What’s even worse is that these pay hot spots (like the one here) charge $6.95 for the day. Okay, that’s not too expensive and works for me but since we’re only here for a couple of hours, it’s not $6.95 per day, it’s $6.95 per hour (more or less). I don’t see anyone who would hang around an airport all day long and if they did, then Wifi is the last thing they probably need.

Well, as long as there’s no free Wifi at airports I’ll continue to gripe and bitch about it.