PDC starts, despite LA fires

Yesterday was the day for me to head to the PDC.
My flight was to leave SeaTac at 9:15. We got on the plane, they pulled
back the jetway, they stopped, the pulled the jetway back again, and we got off.
Fires in LA had closed the radar station. I wound up spending the rest of
the day at the North Satellite with most of the USC Trojan Marching Band, who
were also on my flight. They enjoyed hacky sack, I played with the new
bits. We finally left at 5 pm and made it here to LA. You could
really see the flames from the plane as we passed overhead.

Today was the first real day. The keynote address was great with Don,
Chris, et al writing all of the demo code in real time. They wound up
using emacs, vi, Slick Edit (a personal favorite), and finally VS.Net.
Cool stuff. I have been working on the CLR machinery that makes all of
this stuff work for years, but I confess I don't often see the end product of
the cool things people do with it. Avalon is just cool! (even if Asp.Net
did the design/coding split a while back ;-) ) Seeing the xaml mark up with
transparent wmv playing under controls and a right slant was pretty cool.