When I left work this afternoon, I though is was goin to be immediately followed by departure from San Jose. Though last minute preparations for my Boss' weeklong vacation delayed my airport ride a bit, I thought I still had a good hour to make the 10 minute drive to SJC. I mused about how I would spend all that slack time at the airport as we left the corporate parking lot.

Ten minutes later, Lane & I were stick in the worst traffic since Christmas Eve at the mall. Weather had shut down SFO and all incoming flights were being diverted to the smaller San Jose airport, where inadequate road access combiners with an accident in the wrong place created a bottleneck which delayed passengers anywhere from 2 to 6 hours as they attempted to reach the airport.

"Passengers" included your humble narrator, who seriously missed his flight by a good 2 hours. Lane and car long since swallowed up by gridlock and vacation, I was stranded with 2 carryons and a printer. No one could reach me here in the center of traffic jam hell, and Ed was unreachable for comment (or housing). My printer and I decided to get a room.

I don't remember ever having to juggle so much luggage before. It's not easy to negotiate escalators and push-doors while carrying a shoulder bag, a satchel, a box full of printer, and a styrofoam box of food that was supposed to be a slack time snack but which would most likely be hotel room dinner. My solution was to shoulder the (duh) shoulder bag and balance the satchel and food on the printer, frontally carried.

Finding the specific location of ground transport was problematic. The guide arrows converged on a corner of baggage claim staffed only by houseplants. Finally, I found the "Taxi Zone" amidst hundreds or slightly displaced San Fracisconians. waiting for shuttles or friends or something. Strangely, no taxis ever stopped in the taxi zone or responded to hails. There was a pile of taxis across the street, but the ignored the folks running back and forth waving at them on that sidewalk. Even so, there was a steady stream of passengers being taken. Finally, I realized that this pile of a hundred people was actually the Taxi Line.

An hour later (the cab driver I got pronounced Hotel as "Hotle"), I made it to the room that corp travel (emergency edition) had found me. It had a computer in it. This computer was set up such that Microsoft Internet Explorer would start on boot, and was the only function available to the user. No right click menu, no icons, no start bar. Still, the underlying OS was NT4, so 5 minutes later I was installing SecureCRT and using the lame NT command line interface to try and get out of the hotel firewall. No dice.

If you're ever at the Hyatt, you too can get into the dir tree by going into MSIE's option screen (view menu->options or something) and hitting "open history folder". A windows explorer window will open. On that window, hit view->toolbar. Then you're able to get back up out of the directory and into whatever stupid thing you want. You still can't do anything useful over the network because A) you're firewalled and B) this is Windows.

Despite my best efforts I have no email and no update access, thus this one lives on paper until I get back.

I'm sure everyone's aware that this is the last Odd Day.