CES - Rough First Day

I woke up Friday morning very excited to know that by that evening I would be in Vegas hanging out with a lot of the Microsoft communities and bloggers. Many of whom I have never met or met quite a long time ago. My flight was at 1pm so I finished packing killed time around the house with my family watching some stuff off the DVR and we left the house about 10am. 

Oakland airport is a little less than 30 minutes from me and so I was in line to checkin by 10:30am.  Using the e-ticket line I breezed though checking in under 10 minutes even with a large checked bag (for all the goodies) then was off to the security checkpoint. The security line was moderately busy and took about 15 minutes to get through.  I think people have started to get the hang of the new screen procedures.  Used to be that you would have to wait a long time for people to get all the way to the front of the line and not know they need to take off their shoes or jacket so would add loads of time, but not this day. Through the security check point I was at my gate, which was in terminal 1 in about 5 Minutes.

I get to the gate and listen to my Nano for a few minutes then decide to break out the laptop and surf the Internet because I am two hours early.  I had figured there would be more of a hassle getting checked in and through security. The free Wi-Fi would never give me an IP address so I payed for the sprint wireless and that worked for 9.95 a day. That is such a big scam they know most people will only use an hour or two at most but feel obliged to charge me for a whole day, anyway.

A half hour into surfing on the Internet and chatting with various people a voice comes over the loud speaker telling everyone in the terminal to exit the terminal there had been a security breach. At first I thought it was a very unfunny joke, but given airports lack of humor and the thousands of people starting to file out of the terminal I decided to play along. It took us about 30 more minutes for everyone to file past the security check point and across the street from the terminal as we were being directed to do.

We were unaware of what the breach was at the time, but turns out a man had security escort him into the terminal to get a bag he said he had left.  Then he took off from security and they were unable to locate him which is when all this fun ensued.

After sitting out side for 20 minutes in only a thin jacket, my thicker one was packed since I figured I would be inside all the time, I headed back down to terminal 2.  I figured since I was on Southwest if I needed to re-ticket I would need to be down there plus they have a little bit better system for security lines in my opinion.  They have full separate lines for each machine where as the line at terminal 1 is one line until after they check your boarding pass.

Ten more minutes go by and some people come out of the terminal and start to escort the handicapped individuals back into the terminal. Cool the end of this is in sight.  A few minutes later the stamped begins as people are making a mad rush back to the security lines. Me being in the front since I had walked down from the other terminal made it easy to get back to the security lines at terminal 2 and within 20 minutes I was through the security check and back on my way to terminal 1 where my plane was waiting happily for my arrival. By 1:30 I was on the plane and had my seat all picked out.  After a quick call to the wife to update her on the my situation and a trip to the restroom we were off.

We had wheels up by 2:15 and I arrived into Las Vegas airport by 3:40pm a little more than an hour later than what I was originally planned to be in and awesome considering what the airport had just been through. I have to give the Oakland airport props for getting everything handled with this unfortunate event so quickly.

As soon as I got off the plane I was making phone calls to the different people that I knew were coming in about the same time and found that Mary Jo Foley was just a couple minutes ahead of me and was on the tram over to get her bags.  I caught up to her at the baggage claim area and them spent forever finding where my baggage should be coming out from.  After locating carrousel 14 at the very end of the baggage claim area there appeared to be three flights ahead of mine with luggage to come out. A good 30-45 minutes later luggage for our flight was finally coming out, thanks to Mary Jo the time flew by as we were catching and I was sharing with her what I had been through earlier in the day.

A little after 5pm the taxi dropped us off at our hotel and with no line at checkin I was in my room, which is huge, in just a few min.  Another call home to let them know had made it and kit was time to find some food. At this point I am starving and would eat about anything, all I have had to eat today was a piece of toast for breakfast. I figured I would get something somewhere along the way, but that never presented me an opportunity. A text message from Bob Stein of Activewin let me know a bunch of people were at the snack bar in the hotel lobby.

Took me a few minutes to locate them as casinos are designed to disorient you and never let you find the exit or let you know what time of day it is. I show up and already there are a bunch of communizes and bloggers.  There were, and I may miss some (sorry if I missed you)... Mike - Hardwaregeeks, Ryan Hoffman -extended64, Bob Stein - Activewin, Tom & Steve - Neowin, Patrick - OSNN, Barb Bowman, John - abesolutevista, Robert Mclaws - Windows-now, Paul Donnely -Microsoft, Mary Jo Foley - ZDNET, Sandi, Long Zheng, Steven Bink, and a slew of others...

A few hours of chit-chat and me polishing off a basket of chips and salsa people went in search of food. Me, Robert, John, Mike, and Sandi hit the TGI Friday's that they have in the hotel here and continued talking about everything under the sun from how to fix our health care system by putting caps on malpractice and doing something about prescription drugs to badgering Sandi about what might be coming from the Internet Explorer team, they have her trained well as she didn't give up any details sadly.

After dinner Robert said he had some news to break (here) and we all split up to call it a night.  A little catching up on email for an hour or so and it was off to bed. Whew what a day.  Today is the first day of the Windows Vista Labs and I will be sharing all that I can from the event.