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]

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.