This blog is a focussed experiment. I wanted to test my ability to publish and produce a taut multi-media blog on something. I attended TAM7 in July. It struck me as the perfect 4-day crash course. The "course" didn't go as well as I hoped, but I learned a lot. I'm continuting to update as I have the opportunity to - eventually I'll have covered the entirety of my experience at the conference.

Thursday, July 9, 2009

37823ft...somewhere near the Oregon/Nevada Border – though I can’t see a line painted on the ground from up here.

The flight is filled with people attending the big UFC event in Vegas. I got lucky. Many of these folks are BIG. Not too many are the pound-packing tubs'o'lard that I really hate sitting beside, but a lot are heavily muscled pound-packers who look to be wanna be Brock Lesnars. No, I'm the widest load in these three seats.

Got lucky and got the window seat. The lady at check-in told me it was the last window seat left on the flight. Have been able to see some cool stuff. Mount St. Helens was obvious. And there was a weird cloud that looked like a Man'o'war jellyfish. And I may have seen crater lake... then again I wouldn't really know it to see it, but I'm guessing it was about the right latitude... though I think we were too far East – so who knows what it was.

Read the entirety of the 98-page advertisement they call in in-flight magazine and also a good portion of a back-issue of Skeptical Inquirer that I hadn't managed to finish yet.

According to the in-flight real-time map we've crossed into North East California since I started this post. I'm beginning to doubt the accuracy of the map. Detail out of Vancouver and over Washington was quite good – though that was where I began to feel like the precision was off. Oregon was little more than a half dozen cities a mountain or two and Crater Lake National Park. California has even less specific detail surprisingly, but at least there's a (probably faux) topographic overlay. Nevada... nothing but Carson, Reno, Vegas and two highways... though we aren't over it yet according to the map.

Really starting to look like desert down there. I'm guessing we'll start descending soon.

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