JavaOne trip Part Two

JavaOne SF Trip Part 2 – 5/9/2007 11:49AM
The date and time above might be a little misleading. I'm seated in my session and waiting for it to start so I thought I'd keep working on the updates.
So, I explained the “Uncle Marius” thing by mentioning what happened at the hotel but we didn't get to the hotel until pretty late Sunday night.
We got out of the airport area around 10:00AM here, and we were going to be going sailing at around 11:00. So, we had lots of time to get to the marina. Which turned out to be a good thing, since I took several wrong turns, and had a very vague idea of where the marina was.
We stopped at Peet's coffee, which would become a theme of sorts for all of our wrong turns. “oh, it's okay, Eric, we don't need your GPS for the drive home. We're going to stop for coffee on the way back to the hotel.”
So, we made it to the marina and I won't go into the entirety of the seven-plus hours spent on the water but I will say some.
It was sunny, sunny, sunny. I sun-blocked everything that showed but I still burned my elbow-pits. They're coming around now but they were pretty red for awhile there.
The helm doesn't move. I discovered this, to my pain, by experimenting with my nose. I thought I had missed a spot with the sunscreen, since there was a very tender spot, but using my scientist-powers I deduced that sunburns turn red and the spot on my nose was definitely brown. Just – like – a – bruise.
I am a tacking-genius. Okay, so it's not so hard to tack. You just have to turn 90 degrees. But Tom, whose boat it was, said that I got sailing right away. I think that's the highest praise I've ever gotten from him.
Seven hours on a boat in the hot sun can tend to make you stink. The bath at the hotel when sailing and eating and getting Eric back to his car were FINALLY taken care of seemed to be better than any shower I've ever had before or wil ever have again.
And of course, for those of you who don't know, Kim and I chose two and a half years ago not to keep cable. It's nice but it wastes so much time and the absolute crap that is out there, we can get for free. I only mention this because the hotel room has cable – ESPN, all the networks (couldn't find Fox), Comedy and soe others. There are a lot of buttons on the TV remote. Buttons where you can rent movies, buttons where you can turn on the GameCube, buttons for channel changing, volume control and some other crap. The only button that has any meaning in my life anymore is the up-channel button. I pressed that button over and over and over again, going around the horn over and over again.
Now, if I were to do this kind of thing at home, around the horn is four, maybe five channels and I'm done. The same things are on, the same commercial is usually on if I don't catch anything interesting, I get bored and turn off the TV.
The hotel has in excess of 40 channels. This means the usual around the horn takes 9-10 times longer than at home. Coupled with the fact that there are three ESPN feeds, there's always something catching my attention for a couple of minutes. That means that by the time I get around the horn all the way, there's always something new and interesting on a given channel than there was the last time I flipped by it. Unless there's a movie on, then forget about it. Random movies are my special crack and I will sit and watch that until there's a commercial, which just slows the flipping down even more.
I say this because I made the mistake of turning on the television when I got to my hotel room, thinking it would be once, twice around the horn and then straight to bed.
I stayed on that sucker until 1:30 in the morning. Stupid me. Around the horn is a professional's game. You don't go cold into American cable thinking you can spend less than two hours idle time. Being tired made it worse.
That's it for this update. It's long enough.