moar travel

Is anyone surprised?

On Sunday (May 5th) I fly off to England to spend a week in Reading. Friday night I fly home, arriving Saturday morning. Then Sunday (May 12th) evening I fly off to Waterloo to spend a week there, home Thursday evening. And, that following (long) weekend I'm going off somewhere, not sure where yet, to go climbing.

Penguicon report

Life back in Ottawa has been busy, resulted in a delayed report. There was the catching up on internet, the spending time with people, and the work where work this week is presenting a training class. Right now, they're doing an exercise... so I have a few minutes.

Penguicon has moved to a new, much larger, hotel. It needed to -- it was overflowing in the previous one. This hotel has much more extensive function space, not all of which the con needed to use, and this allowed for (I would say) more tracks of programming with less jamming up of the schedule. Of course, I didn't go to any of the programming. It also has more suites, allowing for more parties to have suite space -- though the suites are at opposite ends of long hotel floors, making for a bit of walking between parties. Stairwells were, also, open and available for use -- if a bit tricky to find on the main and function space floors of the hotel (which is quite normal). What the hotel was missing, though, was a nice central collection/lounging place that everyone wandered past. I think this will be true of most any hotel that is as large as this one. With much more function space, it needs a much more distributed lobby space.

I had a good time at the con. I had dinner out Friday and Saturday evenings with friends. I enjoyed the parties both evenings, especially Nathan's Completely Random Cocktail Hour, which was my primary hanging out space on Friday night and the latter half of Saturday night. The first half of Saturday evening I hosted (or venued?) a small get-together of the port-drinking crowd, many of which were in town but not at the con officially -- and a couple of which might (or might not) be leaving town for California this coming weekend. It was very good to get this crowd back together.

I got to spend much time hanging out with old friends, flirting with attractive ladies, drinking good booze (including a Scotch that was older than I am), making new friends and the rest of the fun stuff that goes with convention.

Also, it was nice to see elizilla and redrunn on Sunday after the con.

Despite Penguicon being in the prime middle of spring climbing season, I expect I'll continue to attend.