Flights were direct on USAirways/republic, out was on an embraer erj170, which is pretty good for seat space but not great for legroom. Return was on an erj145 (the 2-1 seat layout). Tiny seats and I couldn’t even pretend to stand up in the aisle, which had a clearance of maybe 5 foot 8, so I was practically crawling in it. Not something I intend to aim for…. I’ll stick to the 2-2′s in the future if I can.

Louisville itself was uneventful — we spent a lot of time onsite, and went to Buck Head’s again for one dinner (it was pretty good). Watched some curling. Really, not much to say there.

Right now I’m in Minneapolis. This is the first solo business trip I’ve taken, so I guess that’s a bit of a milestone. I’m on this trip to install a dev server on the site here, so it should be pretty easy.

Flying in out and back are all southwest, via midway. I was initially uneasy about flying Southwest, because of the no-assigned-seating thing (fearing a long line-up and a big free-for-all scrum), because of the whole we-only-fly-737s thing (they spec out as having some of the smallest seats in US airframes), and because of the very recent, very salient, very relevant-feeling Kevin Smith “too fat to fly” episode. I’ve been sort of yo-yoing in the 350-360 range pretty much since the days got short… something like seasonal depression or something I guess.

Well, it turns out that so far, so good. You do online check-in on southwest, and get into it fairly early, and you end up in the A group and find a place to sit. Flying in the middle of the week, middle of the day, seemed like both flights so far were running between 1/2 and 2/3 full, so all the middle seats were open, and while the seats are certainly no 777 seats, they’re also not as bulky as big modern seats, so the seats themselves don’t take as much space as the seats on a lot of other planes. I was actually, just barely, comfortable on both the trip from IAD to Midway and from Midway to MSP. Nobody gave me crap about being big, and with the open space I could pretty easily spread out after takeoff. So that was cool, I guess.

Anyway, so now I’m chillin in a Fairfield literally across the parking lot from Mall of America. I wandered around there tonight to find food (ended up just grabbing a slice at Sbarro). Mall of America is almost surreal … it’s definitely pretty huge, but other than the massive surplus of materialism, the most striking thing I noticed was the food courts. Every one of the standard-issue mall type food court spots was waving samples at everyone walking by. It’s such a buyer’s market getting cheap food on a weeknight, you could hit the two courts sampling and leave full without spending a dime. It’s also kind of a trip how they have like 3 or 4 roller coasters (including one that looks pretty goddamned intense) right in the middle of the mall, where most malls put the food court. To say nothing of the store with the 9 foot tall vases. I wish I had brought my camera on this trip.

Oh, also, Minneapolis in February…. not really a good idea. Just saying. It’s pretty bitter now that I’m acclimated to the mild winters of temperate Maryland.

Right, so … tomorrow onsite, then tomorrow night red-eyeing it back to dulles (again via midway). Might follow up the post, might not.

The dream started out at something not unlike a large supermarket. I was working there, just stocking shelves and whatnot, but that was just a front. My real role was infiltrator.

See, this supermarket was, itself, a real supermarket in a rather insane world.

See, I was actually an elite special operations soldier, infiltrating a rather mysterious compound. From the outside, it looked like it was two stories tall, and it flew, and allowed airplanes to land in the top floor (so … pretty huge).. But occasionally it would land, and open up the doors to the bottom, and people would get out.

My team was investigating it, in the hopes of taking it down. We infiltrated in one of the infrequent landings, and tried to generally act like an infiltrating military team, once we got inside. And over the course of a couple days sneaking around, trying to figure the place out and find a weakness we could exploit to bring it down, we had made no progress. We came in with a crew of 6, and over the course of the time we were there, other members of my team died to the fire of mystery soldiers, until it was just me and one teammate left. And, unsuccessful, we found our way out.

But just as we were leaving, my buddy refused to leave. For some reason, our having an opportunity to get off this head-trip was extremely rare. Even to get that opportunity, we had to fight through hundreds of enemies, in colorful and concealing body armor, with tanks and jeep-like vehicles, while we drove whatever we could find. The place was huge. Bigger than it could possibly be.

Well, my friend and colleague’s refusal to leave blew our last opportunity. He ran off the same day, apparently betraying me to the enemies in the process. Now I was living my life trapped in this psychotic mgs3-on-acid hell.

Back to the supermarket. They were re-tiling the floor in some areas. The deli closed at 5, and it was 5:15, they were just rolling up the mesh carpet thing in front of the deli now that it was closed, and they were going to re-tile that area tonight. I was acting like I belonged, and listening in on conversations of random workers. Most of them revolved around what sounded like some work of entertainment — a tv show or something called “the Betrayer”. Then I got out of there.

Flash to a scene from my daily life. I go through a door next to where I usually sleep, into my bathroom. There’s three doors in it other than the one I came through: one next to the toilet, which is sometimes open and sometimes closed, and when it’s open it leads to a different place every time. There’s a linen closet across from the toilet with a door, and just enough space to hide in. There’s also a door to a staircase going up, right next to the linen closet. My door is on the other side of the toilet from the random-door, and I’ve consistently kept hidden that I had a hiding spot there to keep it safe. This time, the door was open, and I could see as far as the eye could see a long line of identical toilets. And half a dozen guards walking around casually, patrolling the area. I quietly closed the door, but not before one of them caught a glimpse of me. So I ran up the stairs, but there were civilians at the top of the stairs. They hadn’t noticed me, but they would give me away if I passed by them, and it wouldn’t be ethical to hurt them. So I wedged up into the ceiling above the door, and when the soldiers came in and looked around, they didn’t look up and see me. They left, stationed one guard in my bathroom, and closed the random door on their way out. Then I climbed down, cqc’ed the bathroom guard, tied him up and shoved him in the linen closet with two others that met a similar fate, and went about my business. This was apparently not an unusual cycle, though the civilians there were a bit of a disappointment.

There’s also a scene involving me and the crew driving what amounted to a gunboat, trying to escape, while “they” chased us in orange cruisers that I could only say would be grub-like. As we fled, they shot similar mini-grub torpedoes at us, which we used a dilapidated machine gun to fend off. I knew that they were testing our tactics, but we took advantages of lulls in their torpedo barrages to attack the ships, and one by one sunk them.

This dream was very, very surreal. It had sort of a portals/simulacra feel to it … like I was in some sort of insane alternate universe, or trapped in my own mind and in a world that only vaguely bore any resemblance to reason. I think it would make a good video game.

As an added bonus, the title had two meanings, because my buddy was a betrayer for betraying me, and I was a betrayer of the operators of this surreal world, sneaking around attempting to destroy them from within while trying to make some sense of it.

No, seriously. The whole world. Every building, every person, everything.

for some reason this dream really creeps me out. I can’t quite explain why.

In my second round of sleep, I had two distinct and strange dreams.

The first one involved Chris Cornell and one of the members of Audioslave (I’m not entirely sure why). They were doing random crap, like bungee jumping, and learning to do magic tricks and houdini-esque escapes. And banging attractive women. And for some reason, videotaping all their antics and putting it all on their website — the random activities, and the amateur hardcore porn.

And then they moved in to the apartment next door, and had very loud parties, that were fun to be at.

Yep, that’s it, that’s the dream. I don’t quite know where the hell that came from.

Then there was another one. I went to lecture, and several large men in dark suits were there, and were collecting a “federal learning fee”… making people give them their credit card numbers and signatures, saying “you’ll get the bill later”. And I was resisting their strange activity, and they flagged me as a terrorist, promising that I’d never work anywhere in this country again. And then I demanded to see identification, and they didn’t produce it, and so the class rioted and pummeled them senseless and took their wallets to look for ID, but they didn’t even have driver’s licenses on them.

Yep, quite strange. I don’t know where that came from either. Just one of those things, I guess.

I had a dream last night. It was extensive, and I don’t remember exactly what it was about. But I distinctly remember writing several RAID implementations. An attractive female student submitted her own RAID implementations (for some reason, I don’t remember why), and I remember saying to myself “Wow. These are rough-looking. They’re real, working, optimized implementations. They make mine look like nothing more than proof-of-concept code… like ‘hello world’.”

I don’t know why, but that’s the only thing I can remember from the dream. Maybe it’s my subconscious telling me that I’m not meant to be a programmer? Or that I AM meant to be a programmer? I don’t know.