I spent a week in St. Louis One Afternoon
Feb. 11th, 2006 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sinanjuWell, okay, it was three days rather than an afternoon. But it felt considerably longer. My employer sent me to St. Louis for three days to attend a users conference for the database software we use. The conference was moderately useful. Some of the sessions I attended turned out to be aimed at people with less familiarity with the software than I have. Others, however, were very useful. I left St. Louis with some useful new ideas, new techniques for doing queries ("data mining", they call it), and a couple of leads on possible additional pieces of software that might be worth looking into. We also learned about the latest updates to the software, as well as what they're working on for future service packs. And the users group also voted on what enhancements we most wanted to see the software folks put into operation.
The hotel was physically very nice. It was, however, located in downtown St. Louis. Aside from a convention center across the street and a number of other hotels very close by, the hotel we stayed in is surrounded by a handful of functioning businesses, and lots defunct businesses and empty buildings. There wasn't much at some of the closer subway stops either, as I discovered on Thursday night. No doubt there are places in St. Louis that don't resemble a ghost town after 5 p.m., but I never saw them.
The convention hosts fed us well. Breakfast and lunch every day, as well as three--three!--snack breaks during the day. Breakfast two days was sliced fruit, bagels and fixins, and coffee or juice; the third day it was eggs, ham, sausages and so forth. The snacks included (not all at once) sodas, juice, energy drinks, whole fruit, power and granola bars, chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies & milk, candy bars, popcorn, honey roasted peanuts, Crackerjack and the like. They provided dinner on Wednesday night, along with a visit to the Anheuser-Busch visitors center. I wasn't terribly excited about that, not being a beer drinker, but it beat staying at the hotel and eating a room service meal. Thursday night we were on our own for dinner and I did end up having a late dinner via room service. Friday we had conference sessions in the morning, then lunch and then my co-workers and I were done (though there were afternoon sessions, but none we felt necessary to attend).
But the internet service in this hotel sucked. I've been in Holiday Inns that had vastly superior service. The in-room internet used one of those stupid wireless keyboards that interacts with the television. The "free" service was all but useful. If you sprang for the $10.95 for 24 hours of paid service, you could check your email. Whee. You could even surf websites...as long as they didn't require cookies of any kind. If so, you were SOL because this lame-ass set up didn't accept cookies. Plus, even trying to read email on Yahoo was a pain in the ass--the tv screen showed you maybe a quarter of the page. You had to put a lot of effort into using the arrow keys to try to work your way down or across the page to whatever link you were trying to use.
The business office didn't even have web access. They had wireless access or modem connections for anyone who happened to have brought their own laptop, but if you hadn't done that, no internet for you! I don't own a laptop and don't have one from the office, so I was out of touch with the net for most of the duration of the conference. It sucked! Our IT director let me use her laptop Friday afternoon (while we waited for our trip to the airport to fly home), so I got a little surfing done. But I've spent most of today catching up on emails, livejournal and the like.
We also visited the Arch. It's very tall, and looking out was mildly interesting, but that was about all. But having done that, I don't think I have any reason to ever want to return to St. Louis.
As for traveling, that went pretty well. The flights from Portland to Chicago, and then from Chicago to St. Louis were only about half full. Plenty of room to stretch out. The flights back were another matter. Important Travel Tip: never, ever take the 5 p.m. flight from St. Louis to Chicago on a Friday evening. It was jammed. It took us forever to board, it was late arriving and took forever to deplane. My co-workers and I only made our connecting flight because one of them was seated near the front of the plane--and he got to the next flight just as they were preparing to close the doors. He managed to get them to wait for us, but if he hadn't gotten there in the nick of time, we'd have missed our connection. Even so, we arrived in Portland about 20 minutes ahead of schedule.
I walked in the door at home about 10 p.m. My lovely and talented wife was waiting for me and I was very glad to see her. We spent most of today together. I like my life a lot better when she's around.
The hotel was physically very nice. It was, however, located in downtown St. Louis. Aside from a convention center across the street and a number of other hotels very close by, the hotel we stayed in is surrounded by a handful of functioning businesses, and lots defunct businesses and empty buildings. There wasn't much at some of the closer subway stops either, as I discovered on Thursday night. No doubt there are places in St. Louis that don't resemble a ghost town after 5 p.m., but I never saw them.
The convention hosts fed us well. Breakfast and lunch every day, as well as three--three!--snack breaks during the day. Breakfast two days was sliced fruit, bagels and fixins, and coffee or juice; the third day it was eggs, ham, sausages and so forth. The snacks included (not all at once) sodas, juice, energy drinks, whole fruit, power and granola bars, chocolate chip or oatmeal cookies & milk, candy bars, popcorn, honey roasted peanuts, Crackerjack and the like. They provided dinner on Wednesday night, along with a visit to the Anheuser-Busch visitors center. I wasn't terribly excited about that, not being a beer drinker, but it beat staying at the hotel and eating a room service meal. Thursday night we were on our own for dinner and I did end up having a late dinner via room service. Friday we had conference sessions in the morning, then lunch and then my co-workers and I were done (though there were afternoon sessions, but none we felt necessary to attend).
But the internet service in this hotel sucked. I've been in Holiday Inns that had vastly superior service. The in-room internet used one of those stupid wireless keyboards that interacts with the television. The "free" service was all but useful. If you sprang for the $10.95 for 24 hours of paid service, you could check your email. Whee. You could even surf websites...as long as they didn't require cookies of any kind. If so, you were SOL because this lame-ass set up didn't accept cookies. Plus, even trying to read email on Yahoo was a pain in the ass--the tv screen showed you maybe a quarter of the page. You had to put a lot of effort into using the arrow keys to try to work your way down or across the page to whatever link you were trying to use.
The business office didn't even have web access. They had wireless access or modem connections for anyone who happened to have brought their own laptop, but if you hadn't done that, no internet for you! I don't own a laptop and don't have one from the office, so I was out of touch with the net for most of the duration of the conference. It sucked! Our IT director let me use her laptop Friday afternoon (while we waited for our trip to the airport to fly home), so I got a little surfing done. But I've spent most of today catching up on emails, livejournal and the like.
We also visited the Arch. It's very tall, and looking out was mildly interesting, but that was about all. But having done that, I don't think I have any reason to ever want to return to St. Louis.
As for traveling, that went pretty well. The flights from Portland to Chicago, and then from Chicago to St. Louis were only about half full. Plenty of room to stretch out. The flights back were another matter. Important Travel Tip: never, ever take the 5 p.m. flight from St. Louis to Chicago on a Friday evening. It was jammed. It took us forever to board, it was late arriving and took forever to deplane. My co-workers and I only made our connecting flight because one of them was seated near the front of the plane--and he got to the next flight just as they were preparing to close the doors. He managed to get them to wait for us, but if he hadn't gotten there in the nick of time, we'd have missed our connection. Even so, we arrived in Portland about 20 minutes ahead of schedule.
I walked in the door at home about 10 p.m. My lovely and talented wife was waiting for me and I was very glad to see her. We spent most of today together. I like my life a lot better when she's around.
