On the road again: Austin, day 1

The day began with the flights looking ominous: a middle seat on one leg, and no assigned seat at all on the other. Fortunately, being a lifetime American Airlines Platinum traveler paid off again, and both the upgrades I requested came through. Thus, I was able to work quite a lot on the first leg, and I was never forced to curl in my shoulders to avoid sharing body heat with a stranger.
The luggage pick-up was slow but not unusually slow, and the rental car pick-up was the same.

Then we hit the hotel: the Omni Austin Downtown. This place appears to be a nice establishment, and the room is fine, but the rest of the experience here has sucked rocks. The bandwidth is the worst I've experienced in a long time, our reservations were messed up, the reservation and wireless sign-up software systems use different rules (which I had to figure out, explain to their tech support, and get the manager to act on), and the staff seemed nice but clueless. I will not stay here again if I can possibly help it, and I cannot recommend this place.

To be fair, I must give the hotel this one excuse: It is full of attendees of the Supercomputing 2008 conference, SC08. I suspect at least some of the Internet performance issues have to do with the fact that this is one seriously geek-heavy crowd. That said, I wish I could move to another hotel, one where it didn't take 37 minutes to download 11MB of email or six tries and ten minutes to upload five messages, but I can't.

I continue to chug along on Overthrowing Heaven and hope to move soon from pass two to pass three--and for the first time to let another person (Dave) see it. I'm sincerely hoping it doesn't suck. I don't think it does, but at this stage of any book I can't trust my own opinion.

Time to unpack, then back to work. I hope each of you had a less frustrating day than I did.