Yup - It’s going to be a long week. I just checked into my hotel at around 12:30am local time and had two priorities - Internet and beverage, in that order. I walked into my room and found the Internet access to be a dialup connection - lovely. Fortunately (sarcasm), there was a list of fine dialup providers next to the phone such as AOL, MSN, and even Juno.

Giving up on that, I went in search of beverage. I saw the red glow of some vending machines across the lobby and headed out for some exorbinantly expensive refreshment. Coming up to the “Ice and Beverage” area on my floor, I discovered mine was the one floor they put a snack machine on instead of a soda machine. No problem, I’ll just run up to 7. Oh, that machine doesn’t accept dollars. shrug 8 it is, I guess. What? Sold out? Well 9’s not that far, but…there isn’t any machine at all on 9! Hustle on back down to 5 only to put in my dollar and hear the machine grind for a good 15 seconds before my soda gets dispersed.

Well that wasn’t so tough. Now I’m back in my room on 52.0 Kbps dialup. Ironically enough, this is the week that I’m getting bumped up to 3.0 Mbps at home. I will note that there is “high-speed” wireless, but you pay in 24 hour chunks by credit card. They can’t make it easy and charge it back to your room, of course. I have to drop my CC# into one more database each day for the next four days.

I think I’ll just go to sleep.

Oh…the modem jack also wasn’t actually hooked up to the wall…it was just there to look pretty. :-p