13-X-2007.
The day before I bought a cell phone, a 20$ smalljob from Walmart, I guess it had some 30 minutes on it for the money.
In the evening I was messing with Rick Strahl's WC5 classes, probably trying out stuff for the web edition of Feds. I see there's a bunch of freshly genarated weblog*.prg files.
Around 15:30 I was still messing with the phone, trying to register it - it takes twice 10 digits, and I guess I missed one somewhere, so had to repeat the process, while being in chat with Jan, who kept asking when was I coming. It's a 4 hour drive, plus some time to park... He said „ ok... don't fotget the garfield dvd's :) So I guess we'll see you in 5 hours or so. Anyways your room number is 835...“. (ah, so it's seventh floor). Amazingly, my new phone had a local area code. In most other countries cell phones have their own area codes; in the US you don't know if it's a cell phone by number alone, they get local area codes.
Something's off with the times - I was supposed to have been in this conversation with him at 15:30 but then I said I should be there around 16:00... so I guess the timestamps were translated into CET, i.e. the conversation happened ta 9:30 or 10:30. Don't remember much of the drive, it's the same old 64 to Richmond, then 95 to Dale City, where I left the car at Jose. He's got a new wife, freshly imported from Peru. Didn't get her name first, because he kept pronouncing it as duiđa, dweedya or something like that. Spells as Twiggy. Go figure. He drove me to the nearest subway station (which is yet another Springfield, spare me the originality of colonial toponyms). Got the system with how to purchase a ticket strait from the ticketing machine's instructions on the box, and arrived at the Du Pont's circle near lunchtime. We, of course, pronounce it dipon, much closer to french rules, but no, here it's dew ponts.
The hotel was just a few steps from the subway station, so I easily found the guys - David, Jan and Norman were already there. I actually used my cell phone to announce myself.
The fair stand for asrm was already set up - the two Torontians drove all night to get to DC, it fit into a somewhat elliptic plastic barrel in David's car. Everyone else was also there, in various hotels in the area, and we had at least one party of guests in his room (and Norman's - Jan was my roommate).
In the evening we had a dinner with two of the ladies working at one of the clinics. Not SFBC, but with Noriko being a Japanese it should be somewhere in the neighborhood. There was also the famous drSperm (the founder of many clinics) with his wife, and of course David's dežurni chick. Wine flowed. The place was a covered terrace, in glass, attached to the hotel itself, so it gave the impression of a luxury tent.
David's chick was quite sexy, though not in a centerfold manner. I'm getting an impression he's got one in every port. Nice smile, though it looks like she's been at the mirror, practicing.
Afterwards, the guys from Xyorg came to David's room and we sat there for a while. I wasn't quite in on the conversation, the whole area of how Feds connects to various analyzer, scanner and other lab machines was still unknown to me, and these guys are the makers of one of those.
Note that David is sitting on Norman's pillow. That was a cause for a scene.
For breakfast we took what they had in the hotel. I'm putting this picture here as a rare example - it shows that it actually is possible to have something in nice colors in the US, despite the overall stalinist grayness of everything, including the walls and ceiling in this same room, and most of what people were wearing and the cars they were driving. And the breakfast wasn't bad at all, reminded me of those scrambled eggs in the hotel the first week in september 1999.
The next day we mostly sat and discussed things. Jiang came by and kept Jan occupied for quite a while. Mostly about gathering and exporting data for her sheets, as if they didn't spend hours on that already, two months ago. She was probably working on her PhD thesis at the time.
Most of the time I had to pay special attention, no rebate, when listening to what she says, because she can't pronounce two consecutive consonants - that'd be conesecutive conosonanetes.
Mentions: asrm, David Berton, dežurni, Feds, Jan Brenkelen, Jiang Wong, Jose Bariero, Norman Shen, SFBC, in serbian