Wow! That's all I can say, is WOW. With a keynote speech from Bill Gates, a presentation of Avalon from Don Box, a look into the new features of Yukon, and I had the privilege of attending a not highly attended presentation of MSBUILD, the universal build engine for Visual Studio (Whidbey). This is such an awesome place to be!!!
Well, my travel here to PDC03 could not get much worse. My itinerary had that I would leave Kansas City at 7:10 am, have a one hour layover in Denver, and end up in Los Angeles at 10:10am. However, this was not what happened. The trip was going fine at first; I had gotten onto the plane on tim from Kansas, we got to Denver with no problems, and the outgoing plane in Denver was present at the appropriate time. Then problems started occurring. We were listerally
FIVE minutes away from landing at LAX and we were informed that we were being redirected to another airport!!! We were told that the fires forced the evacuation of one of the Regional Air Traffic Control Towers and that all air traffic was being grounded indefinitely. At first, I thought that we'd be delayed for only an hour or so. This was not the case. It ended up that we were grounded at the airport until 4:30, and only had a 45 minute window to get to LAX. Once we learned of this window and got clearance, the flight crew went through all those safety proceedings that they go through at the beginning of each flight, and finally we were off. When we got close to Los Angeles, we all noticed the smoke being emitted from the fires. It was unbelievable!!! I could never imagine seeing the site. THE WHOLE CITY was blanketed with a cloud of smoke!!!!! We had to go through the smoke to get to the airport. But, finally, we did. I got my bags, I got a cab, and I got my hotel with no other real incident (THANK GOD!) Later, after meeting up with
Jeff Julian, I found out that there were many people who weren't in yet and were supposed to. In fact, I later found out that some of them were grounded in various places around the country and had to find alternate routes into Los Angeles. What a first day, but alas, at least I made it!!!!