Archive for July 2007
Updated: 28 Jul 2007 08:46 am by
Filed: Food • Life in General
I made it home from a week in Orlando without incident yesterday (although it was a pretty long day, factoring in a 3:45am pick-up for the shuttle to the airport and the two-hour timezone difference). After spending a week there, I will reiterate my feeling that Orlando is not a place that holds much of an attraction for me. No plans at present to return unless I have to for work…
The conference itself went reasonably well. Our presentations were well attended and seemed to be fairly well-received. As always, it will be good to get the feedback from the conference group from the evaluation forms all of the session attendees were requested to provide.
As for food, we had what I felt to be one very good meal (surprisingly, one of the hotel’s restaurants is a top-notch steakhouse called “A Land Remembered”; I had the 8 oz. fillet and it was very, very good and the service there was excellent), and two good meals (one at a little Indian restaurant called “Passage to India”, and the second at a little hole-in-the-wall Brazilian barbeque called “Crazy Grill” — both on International Drive). Other than that, what we found was average at best.
By the end of the week, I was so tired of being in air-conditioned buildings that it was wonderful to return to the warm, but dry, West. There were times that I had to go outside in Orlando just to warm up, and the warmth — even if almost unbearably humid — felt wonderful. Waking up this morning at home with the windows wide open and temperatures in the upper 50s felt like heaven.
Updated: 23 Jul 2007 04:16 am by
Filed: Life in General
I’m in Orlando this week for work, presenting several sessions at a Federal conference. Note the absence of an exclamation point on the end of that sentence. Orlando has never ranked very high on the list of places I have wanted to visit. Still doesn’t…
We’re staying at one of those massive resort hotels that has 1,500 rooms, a golf course, 6 restaurants (the best of which is typically average), a small deli and a grocery store, so the odds of finding anything truly exceptional to eat are probably not all that great. The conference itself is one of those that we attend based on the work we do (or perhaps, because of the groups for whom we do it), rather than because of interest in the subject matter. The best part of the conference is typically the opportunities to talk to and work with lots of people that we generally deal with over the telephone or via e-mail.
On the subject of e-mail, my work Blackberry is wierding out. It throws some unhandled exception anytime I try to access my e-mail, won’t send, won’t sync. The phone works, the calendar works, the alarm clock works, but it almost acts like it can’t access the network. Great. I can only imagine what my in-box is going to look like when I get back home next week… unless I can find some way to get ahold of someone on the help desk at work in between meetings for some help in getting it reset or fixed or something.
I ran this morning. Early. Like pre-5 AM. I had forgotten what it’s like to run in humidity. It was 75 degrees (F) and 90% humidity. Just a wee bit different than the 50 degrees I am used to at home at this time of day. And I had forgotten what it’s like to run at sea-level rather than at our 4600+ feet of elevation. It was kind of nice to have my legs be the limiting factor rather than my lungs.