And so it begins...

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Vox 004It's Sunday morning, April 29th and I'm heading for Las Vegas for MEDC 2007 - the journey hasn't gone quite as smoothly as I would have hoped...

My flight *was* at 6:00am... (not that it *was* at 6:00am), so I left home at 4am, arrived in plenty of time for check-in, only to discover that my hardware bag (containing all of the hardware needed for one of the MEDC 2007 keynote demos) was too large, and too heavy to be booked on the flight - this is a Pelican 1690 case which weighs in at about 130 pounds!! [including hardware] (see below).

 

So, I got redirected to Alaska Air Cargo (which doesn't open until 5am) to get my bag shipped to Las Vegas - I had some AMAZING customer service at the Alaska Air-Cargo building, the team went out of their way to make sure that the bag would be delivered to Las Vegas on the same flight as me, and that I made it back to the airport in one piece (I missed the 6am flight, am now waitlisted for the 8am flight, and will probably end up on the 10am flight).

It also looks like I'm going to have "fun and games" when I arrive in Las Vegas - The bag is going to be delivered to the Alaska air cargo building, probably about an hour after the flight lands at the airport - this means that I might not make it to the hotel/conference center until 2:30pm today, nearly 12 hours after getting up, not too shabby for what should have been a two hour flight at 6am today.

We're scheduled for a keynote rehearsal later on this afternoon, it will be good to make sure that the hardware all still works.

I'm hoping that I can drop the majority of the hardware onto our "TSG" truck for the trip back to Seattle (would be much better than doing the air-cargo dance again).

I'm wondering whether a change of job might be in order - perhaps joining the Windows Mobile team, a keynote demo would comprise of a laptop, Visual Studio (which doesn't weigh too much), an emulator, and, if you are really lucky, a Windows Mobile device that you just happen to have in your pocket (sounds appealing, right!?).

- Mike