Day Zero
. . .was an adventure unto itself, mainly because it was the first time the three year-old kiddo flew on a real-live airplane. Since Shelly had accrued a bit of vacation-time, we decided that it'd be nice to make a family vacation of things. Biggest problem is that, being insufferable cheapasses, we went with the Priceline flight, which was cheap but left at 6:30 am. Which means that you need to be at the airport around 5:00, which means that you've gotta be out of the house around 4:30 am, which is a time completely incompatible with three year-olds. She was at first very excited about the plane-ride, but as soon as the excitement and the breakfast wore off, she couldn't keep her eyes open. Bits of excitement now and then woke her up, like the people-movers at the Denver airport. The whole trip, though, threw her schedule off pretty badly and she ended up spending about 16 hours sleeping once we hit our hotel.
We're staying at the Carl Hotel, which is a little place in the Haight-Ashbury(sp?) area. We chose it because it's near a cousin of mine, and there's also a train stop near the hotel. And when I say "near", what I mean to say is that the train stops approximately three inches outside our window. Thankfully the train doesn't run from midnight to 6 am, so we've got a built-in alarm clock.
The hotel is also about four blocks from Golden Gate park, which has a terrific place for kids to play. The weather was absolutely perfect (72 degrees and sunny), so there were hundreds of people in the park. . .all of whom brought at least eight dogs. The weather forecast is partly cloudy and beautiful for the rest of the week, which is about the best forecast I've seen for a GDC.
The GDC is only about 15 minutes old right now, so there's not much to report on yet. Moscone center (the new GDC digs) is several times the size of the old San Jose Convention Center, so we'll see how well it'll scale to the event.
Funniest conversation so far. . .
Security guy: Are you going to ride the elevator.
Me: Yes.
Security guy: You need your GDC badge to ride the elevator.
Me: The press lounge is on the third floor, which is where I get my badge.
Security guy: But you need your badge to get to the press lounge.
Me: So I need to have my badge if I want to get my badge?
Security guy: Yes.
I got it straightened out a few minutes later before we ended up causing a contradiction that would break any laws of physics.
Talk to you later!
