I went to Hoover Dam on Tuesday and took a few pictures. Here's a pan from the Nevada side, just above the dam. You're facing Arizona, and Lake Mead is on your left.

Mood: accomplished

This trip was fun. I flew down to Las Vegas from Seattle. Leaving home, I was late to the airport because of weather; the plane was also late to the airport so it was all right. I would have missed my connection in Long Beach CA so JetBlue bought me a ticket on Alaska. Their systems aren't integrated, so JetBlue had to cut a paper check to Alaska. (Fun fact: This check ($130) was approximately equal to the total fare I paid ($140).)

When I arrived, I came in several hours earlier than planned, so I was able to meet John Covert at his gate, which was in the same gate complex as I landed in.

Here should be paragraphs and paragraphs about visiting Death Valley, the Las Vegas Strip, and Hoover Dam. If I'm perseverant enough, I'll write them tomorrow on the airplane. In the meantime I'm skipping forward to tonight.

Aw fuck, I'm lonely and screwed.

In which I bitch about not knowing how to do things, and not wanting to spend money.

This afternoon (Wednesday afternoon), after I arrived at the airport and John departed on his way home to Massachusetts, it started to snow. Watching with a mixture of amusement and fascination, I commented on it to my friends over the free intertubes provided by the airport. Of course, when the departure time of my flight rolled around, there was a line of twenty in front of the departure counter, because the flight was cancelled. Sucks.

This was my first time being screwed on my own, I ought to say. I don't really have developed coping strategies, and I've never really done things on my own. Like an adult who doesn't know how to read but copes by coming up with excuses to get others to read for him, I've been getting along by travelling with friends who are more experienced or just more confident than I am. I've got some measure of confidence in my abilities, but not really that much. I just don't like to do things that need to happen. I just have trouble with maintaining myself, such as making appointments with doctors and so forth. So, I don't know, I had trouble with getting a hotel room and finding transportation to same. John was wonderful and threewayed me with an agent who helped me take care of registering the room, but I had to find my own transport.

Vegas has nothing in the way of public transit, and I didn't know any of it anyway. Cabs are a new animal to me, so first I looked for the shuttle bus terminal. This wasn't at all forthcoming. I bit the bullet and took a cab to this place, called “Tuscany Suites & Casino”. Cabs are expensive, damnit. The room's less than $22 after taxes (which is amazing, btw), but they make up for it by charging out the ass for everything else. About the only thing that's not an extra charge is an electrical outlet, and the bed. Room service is a $10 minimum, and everything costs $9 (clever, yes?). Local and toll-free calls are a $1 per call charge, while toll is a whopping $7 connect fee, plus AT&T rates, plus a surcharge of unspecified size. Wow. It's as if phone calls cost money again.

I don't really want to get dinner (this city isn't walkable at all, and the hotel food is expensive), so I'm considering just eating the rest of the package of oreos I have sitting next to me. Not healthy, yeah, whatever. Don't know what I'll do about breakfast tomorrow, maybe I'll skip dinner today and have oreos then. Breakfast is $9 delivered.

I don't know what there is to listen to on the radio, but there doesn't seem to be any dance station; it's all Latino music and christmas carols. This city is so focused on extracting money from people, and it's impossible to navigate in a reasonable amount of time on foot or transit. I don't want to ever live here.

Edit before I got to post this: Andy said he'd pay the $13 for wifi so I wouldn't be so lonely. *hugs* Andy, you're amazing and I love you.

It's snowing! We only get snow a few days a year, so this is sort of a big deal.

I wish my family weren't too poor for either proper heating or decent insulation.

I wish it weren't snowing right now, or alternatively that I weren't on a flight at 10am tomorrow.

It'd be funny if JetBlue cancelled on me. (Sort of.) That'd be my third attempted, and third cancelled, flight on that airline. I swear it's like they don't want me flying with them.

I wish that we had really high-speed rail instead of airplanes. Trains are awesome.

Mood: cold

Oh my God.

Can I have one? Or maybe two.

Mood: amused

I'll be travelling for the next two weeks. Yes, there hasn't been an update in months. Apparently that's what happens when I pay for a journal—I don't use it.

Here's my itinerary:

Train – Seattle to New York City I'm leaving Seattle at 4:45 pm on 13-July-2008, arriving Penn Station at around 10pm on 16-July-2008. I'm travelling with Andy Filer, a really neat guy. I plan to offer free wireless Internet service to fellow train passengers, using a cellular modem. It goes almost without saying that I plan to log every bit that goes through the connection. No expectation of privacy and all that. But trains are awesome also.

Chilling – Andy and I are both transit nerds, so I'm sure we'll be able to occupy far more time than we have alloted.

HOPE – Hackers On Planet Earth is at the Hotel Pennsylvania for what may be the very last time. Across the street from Penn Station, the Hotel Pennsylvania has the longest continuously active phone number in New York City. It was originally PEnnsylvania 5000, then PENnsylvania 5000 (in fact it was the first exchange in NYC to transition to 3L4N dialling), then PEnnsylvania 6-5000, then 212-736-5000, and now +1 212 736 5000 in full international format. HOPE has some really rather interesting talks this year. It's also my first convention.

Boston, MA – At some point on 21-Jul-2008, we're going to mosey up to Boston, MA. At 6pm we'll meet with John Covert, whom I met when he visited the Museum of Communications (the phone museum in Seattle where I volunteer). The plan is for him to show us around MIT and then retire for dinner and conversation.

Ellsworth, ME – There's a phone museum in Ellsworth. John and Andy and I are going to visit in the afternoon of 22-Jul-2008. I've been deputized to attempt to convince them of the worth of joining CNET, a thoroughly neat project. I guess I have to put the Seattle museum in the directory, as I am sort of the Responsible Person there.

Flying back – Portland, ME to Seattle We're leaving Portland at around 6pm on Wednesday 23-Jul-2008. As all good things must come to an end, this must too. I don't really like flying. (Some people dislike flying because it's scary or whatever. I like to feel of the plane moving around me. That's a beautiful feeling. I just don't like being cooped up for so long, and I don't like how loud planes are inside. Trains have much more leg-room and walking-room, too.)

Mood: excited

Today I went to the museum (again). The Audichron time announcement machine is working insofar as it speaks the time. Not hooked up to trunks yet, so you can't dial it. The 3ESS has a grand failure, we discovered; the multifreq receivers aren't working. So incoming calls are left high-and-wet. I installed a small PC as a replacement for the teletype. Now everything the cute little switch says is being recorded. Yes, I just called a computer the size of a pickup truck "cute" and "little". :P

I paid for my lunch using dollar coins, but not the Golden Dollar that the Mint is trying to get everyone to use. The bank only had Susan B Anthony and Sacajawea dollars, so I paid with a combination of those and quarters. The cashier didn't even blink; she recognized the SBA dollars as not quarters. Cool.

Perhaps there will be a #tcpa IRC meetup in Portland this July. (spengo take note; I actually mean it. I tried to arrange a meetup on the ticalc.org boards a long time ago, when I was in middle school. It didn't work but I didn't give up.)

I'm posting from Oregon. We are visiting a family friend who lives a few miles from Siletz, OR. Just before we left, I had the presence of mind to slap a copy of emacs and my latest code onto my bulla. I collected 13 payphones so far.

44.75531 deg N
123.90110 deg W

My file manager program (latest project) is now to the stage where it displays a list of files with all the goodies (name, user, group, size, mode). The mode is just octal, not -rw-r--r-- or anything nice like that; the size is in unadulterated bytes; and the date is not formatted or displayed. In short, it just looks pretty. :)

Day before yesterday (last day of school), Marie, Collin, and I went to the Seattle Telecommunications museum. It's great. They have four (4) working mechanical exchanges: Step by Step (SxS), No. 5 Crossbar (5xb), No. 1 Crossbar (1xb), and Panel. The brochure says that their panel exchange is believed to be the only working one in the country. (!) All the exchanges are connected together, and every working phone in the building is hooked up to them (but not to the outside world). The museum is in the top two floors of a working exchange in Georgetown.

I found the crossbar exchanges most interesting. It's fun to stand inside a working relay computer. I never thought I'd have the opportunity. You can hear streams of activity shuttling around the space surrounding you, and each stream makes a kind of grinding/chewing sound, even though an individual relay is just capable of making a clicking sound. I plan to organize another trip (or 3) this summer, and need at least ~5 people to get them to open the museum on a non-Tuesday. Since I'm working Mon-Fri, it will most likely be on a Saturday. I hope to go soon. Prospective customers: Collin, Rob, Alex, Marie, parents of above, etc. Reply if you're interested.