:: 16-Aug-1999 07:40 (Monday) ::

Well, I’m back from my fraternities (www.triangle.org) national convention and
BEEFREST(tm). It was great to be able to finally meet some of my fellow DCTIers
face-to-face. It was such a good time that I thought I’d fill everyone in on some
of what happened.

The DCTI part of the story started Thursday afternoon. I’d gotten into Birmingham
(where Nugget and Stacey live) early in the afternoon. I spent a few hours seeing
the sights (the Sloss blast furnace historical site, which I recommend to any
technical people, and the Souther Museum of Aviation, which was interesting as well).
I wanted to surprise Nugget, so I dropped in at HFDirect un-announced at about 5PM.
I wish everyone could have seen the look on Nugget’s face; he certainly was surprised!
Nugget and Stacey were gracious enough to let me crash at their place that night,
but not until we’d “chewed the fat” until about 2 AM.

Friday saw us off to BeefRest in a mini-caravan of Nugget’s Miata and my 1978
Mercury Cougar XR7 (www.enteract.com/~nasby/car), which gave me the second and
final bit of trouble for the 2800 mile trip it took, including a straight shot
from Chicowgo to Orlando, FL (1200 miles) and this afternoon/evening’s jaunt
from Atlanta, GA back home (600 miles or so). For you math whizzes, the rest of
the mileage was from Orlando to Birmingham, AL as well as driving around
Birmingham and Atlanta. But, enough about the car!

We got into Atlanta Friday just in time to enjoy rush hour. It was rather
interesting trying to stay behind Nugget on the way to the hotel with the way
the Atlantians were driving. I quickly gave up on ‘southern hospitality’ and
switched back to Chicago-Driving-Mode, which worked much better. After we were
settled into the hotel, we ventured forth in search of food/beer and found John
Harvards, which had excellent examples of both. We even found a beer that Stacey
liked! Unfortunately, Murphy reared his ugly head and Stacey started getting a
headache since her migraine medicine was back in Birmingham. We bought some
aspirin and some diet coke for her (you don’t want to know what the hotel was
charging for pop!!!) Luckily, the aspirin did the trick well enough for us to
finish the night in the hotel bar. Though somewhat pricy, they did make very
good drinks. One of us (I’m not gonna mention any *cough*Stacey*cough* names here)
was soon having some difficulty staying in their chair. BeefRest was off to a good
start!!

Saturday we rolled out of bed just in time for lunch. We met up with Alde and had
some excellent calzones at a pizza place that was across from the cheesecake factory
(all of this was in the Buckhead area, for those who care). We also met up with Daa,
and tried to hook-up with thebigo, who unfortunately had other things to take care
of.

The next order of business was visiting “World of Coke”. We got lost on the way there
and ended up at Phil’s house, whom Nugget used to work with (and who will hopefully
be showing up in #distributed soon!) Unfortunately, Murphy showed again and Stacey
ended up with a pretty serious migraine. Phil and Nugget took her back to the hotel
(we’d been driving around in the Cougar, which doesn’t have working air conditioning.
not fun if you’re sick and it’s 95+ F outside), while Daa, Alde, and I went on to the
World of Coke. It basically was a big coke commercial, though not a bad way to spend
an hour and $3 or whatever admission was.

We finally all ended up back at the hotel where we met up with Alde’s fiance Becky and
her friend Amp, but not before Daa had to leave. After burning some more cash
at the hotel bar, we headed off to dinner, sans Stacey :( Dinner was excellent,
although Alde did end up with enough leftover sushi to choke a horse!

After dinner, Becky and Amp left us to our ‘guys night out’ and went to a mooovie.
We headed to Fado’s (Irish pub just south of John Harvards). They didn’t have
Killian’s, but they did serve Coors. Go figure. Naturally, they had Guiness on tap,
which is why we went in the first place.

After a while, we went over to John Harvards, where we finished the night. We can’t
really figure out what we did to deserve this, but the bar actually picked up our
entire bill!

Sunday was somewhat un-eventful. Nugget was mildly hung-over, which is understandable
with the amount of beer he consumed v. his body weight. Alde was VERY hung-over! I
wouldn’t have figured him for a lightweight! ;P Anyway, we met up for lunch at
Steak-n-Shake, and then it was time for our farewells. 10 hours later, and I’m back
at home, and looking forward to the remainder of my vacation. :)

I wish we had gotten more of our staff together; it was a great time. I guess we’ll
just have to do better next time. In case any of you were wondering, we intentionally
kept this event under-wraps… please don’t take it personally, but we wanted to be
able to meet just amongst ourselves, without 100s of distributed.net participants. I
have a feeling that having met these guys IRL finally will make it that much easier
to work with them virtually. We also had some great discussions about what we need
to do to improve distributed.net.

Well, I’ve rambled long enough. I hope you guys (and gals) found this interesting to
read. Also, for those of you who applied for the Logistics Coordinator position, I
hope to finalize that stuff this week.

Moo!