Transit update

[chipotle]

I've made it to the con hotel, after a day of flying. Midwest Express is as good an airline as its reputation says it is; a flight with their "Signature Service" -- like the second flight, from Kansas City to Pittsburgh -- is pretty fabulous. First class seats at coach prices.

The shuttle driver from the airport knew about Anthrocon. It seems everyone knows about Anthrocon. I'm not sure whether this is encouraging or frightening.

The Westin Convention Center Hotel so far has been the letdown of the trip: the room I have has two twin beds. I haven't seen anything that tiny in years. The free wifi appears completely broken, for reasons I haven't been able to debug yet. (I've noticed that when it thinks I'm trying to use the "premium" $6/day wifi, or if it has cookies left over from hooking up the $10/day ethernet cable [but not paying for it], the hotel intranet sections I can reach suddenly become surprisingly snappy. I hate to sound like I think they're making the free service deliberately suck ass to make you break and buy the premium service, but,well.) I'm online right now because someone in a nearby room has an open wifi network that works.

On the mildly bright side, the convention center area appears full of little restaurants, even in the hotel itself, and -- assuming I can get online -- I'll research more. The Pittsburgh skyline coming into the city over the river was surprisingly pretty, and what little I've made out of the downtown area so far has looked nice. We'll see.

Comments

[smackjackal.livejournal.com]

I will note that when I woke up, the morning show on at least one of the local rock stations couldn't seemt to shut about about Anthrocon and Furries. By guestimation I'm thinking that _EVERY_ morning radio show was going about it. And probably every morning television show. From what I gather, AC is one of the [if not THE] highest profile conventions that has stumbled through their multi-million dollar tax-payer funded Teamster's controlled super huge and awesome convention center since it's recent construction.

Doesn't surprise me at all that the "furry invasion" seems to be all that anybody can talk about. I'm guessing that the convention center was part of marginially hair brained scheme to revitalize the downtown area and they're hoping that AC will give their experinces there a glowing review so as to attract even more large sci-fi[ish] conventions.

I'm already forming some opinions of my own but will withhold too much comment until the 'con is actually in full swing. Thursday has been...Odd.

[kereminde.livejournal.com]

You mentioned a thought about the convention center being a hare-brained scheme . . .

The home town I'm originally from (Cleveland, on the other end of the Rust Belt) had been getting similar ideas before I fled/left/departed it. So I'm thinking you're not likely far off the mark.

Out of curiousity, what were the tones of those stations?

[smackjackal.livejournal.com]

The tone was more or less what you would expect, deragatory at best. I only listened to the one station in the mornings but the things they had to say were the typical morning DJ gigs trying to get a laugh at the expense of other people, furries in this case.

As for the Hair Brained nature of the convention center it's almost a chicken and egg problem. You build a big convention center to draw in big events but nobody wants to expand hotel capacity until big events start rolling in but big events that would utilize all of the space of the convention center pass the city over because there isn't enough hotel capacity. It isn't that a huge convention center is a bad thing to invest in but at the same time, you really do need to invest in the infrastructure to support those events and then market the hell out of services that you can provide. Pittsburgh only got one of the three right.