{"id":16323,"date":"2009-10-19T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T07:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2009\/10\/19\/leaving-reflections-projections-2009-travel-marathon-part-two\/"},"modified":"2009-10-19T07:00:01","modified_gmt":"2009-10-19T07:00:01","slug":"leaving-reflections-projections-2009-travel-marathon-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20091019-01\/?p=16323","title":{"rendered":"Leaving Reflections &#124; Projections 2009, travel marathon part two"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks, everybody, for coming out to the Job Fair and attending my talk at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.uiuc.edu\/conference\/2009\/\"> Reflections | Projections 2009<\/a>. Though I should have predicted that scheduling a talk on Saturday morning means that attendance will be somewhat sparse. Thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.uiuc.edu\/conference\/2009\/staff.html\"> the conference staff<\/a> with special shout-outs to <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/kimvlcek\"> Kim Vlcek<\/a>, Bhargav Nookala, Jim Wordelman, and Matt Dordal for taking care of me during the conference.\n Returning to Seattle was also a minor adventure. On my way out out of town, I stopped by Papa Del&#8217;s, generally considered the benchmark for Chicago-style pizza, but they don&#8217;t sell single slices for take-out, and I didn&#8217;t feel like eating an entire pizza. I guess I&#8217;ll have something to look forward to at my next visit.\n For the drive back to O&#8217;Hare, I once again stopped in Bourbonnais, this time at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grinderspizza.org\/\"> Mancino&#8217;s Grinders and Pizza<\/a>, which appears to be another Midwestern restaurant chain, though I didn&#8217;t know it at the time. My rule of thumb when traveling is &#8220;If I&#8217;ve heard of it, then don&#8217;t eat there.&#8221; Translation: Avoid the national restaurant chains; eat something local. It may be great, it may not, but it&#8217;ll be different.\n I took too long of a dinner break, and when I arrived at the airport, the ticket agent told me my flight was taking off in five minutes. I went through security (no line!) and raced through the terminal. Of course, when you&#8217;re running to your gate, your gate is inevitably one at the far end of the airport. As I ran past a pair of twentysomething white guys, one of them shouted, &#8220;Run, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Chink\"> Chinky<\/a>, run!&#8221;\n Wow, I haven&#8217;t heard that epithet since elementary school.\n Up until that point, my interactions with the fine people of Illinois were uniformly positive, and I had found them all to be unfailingly polite and helpful. I&#8217;m going to give the state the benefit of the doubt and say that the guy and his buddy were visiting from another state. (Like maybe New Jerkland or something.)\n I arrived at the gate in time. I&#8217;m not sure, but if I wasn&#8217;t the last person on the plane, I was definitely one of the last. We landed in Seattle at around midnight, but since the last train to downtown Seattle departs at 12:06am, I asked my wife to pick me up.\n Although I caught <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.uiuc.edu\/conference\/2009\/speakers\/ohanian.html\"> Alexis Ohanian&#8217;s talk<\/a> (and enjoyed it), I had to leave early to catch my flight and missed <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.uiuc.edu\/conference\/2009\/speakers\/north.html\"> Ryan North&#8217;s talk<\/a>, which the post-conference chatter suggests was a monster hit. I&#8217;ll have to wait to catch it when the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.acm.uiuc.edu\/conference\/2009\/videos.html\"> video<\/a> is posted.\n <b>&#8230; until I met a man who had no feet<\/b>: My travel day was nothing compared to the gentleman in the seat next to me, who was in hour 25 of a 30-hour itinerary: Minsk to Kiev to Warsaw to Chicago to Seattle to Kennewick to home (the last leg by car).<\/p>\n<p> <b>More travel day chatter<\/b>: The scientists on <a href=\"http:\/\/thepolarisproject.org\/blog\/\"> the Polaris Project<\/a> have to suffer through <a href=\"http:\/\/thepolarisproject.org\/blog\/?p=238\"> a four-day trek from Bellingham, WA to Cherskiy, Russia<\/a> even though the two cities are only 3000 miles apart. Reason: <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fly_American_Act\"> Federal regulations<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Thanks, everybody, for coming out to the Job Fair and attending my talk at Reflections | Projections 2009. Though I should have predicted that scheduling a talk on Saturday morning means that attendance will be somewhat sparse. Thanks to the conference staff with special shout-outs to Kim Vlcek, Bhargav Nookala, Jim Wordelman, and Matt Dordal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-16323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Thanks, everybody, for coming out to the Job Fair and attending my talk at Reflections | Projections 2009. Though I should have predicted that scheduling a talk on Saturday morning means that attendance will be somewhat sparse. Thanks to the conference staff with special shout-outs to Kim Vlcek, Bhargav Nookala, Jim Wordelman, and Matt Dordal [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}