I had my first experience with SuperShuttle yesterday. Wow! I didn’t think that a big-ass van would be able to be driven like a cab in Mexico. I was very wrong on that part. Unfortunately, I was also the last stop for the driver, a Russian immigrant who’s been in the U.S. for three years now, so I got the benefit of extended conversation induced by and punctuated with awkward silence. I now know more about this Russian-born SuperShuttle driver than I ever thought I would or wanted.
My room at the Hilton Torrance-South Bay is nothing special, but the air conditioning unit was singularly driven towards cooling the room. So much so that my repeated attempts to turn it off or convince it to heat were ignored. I woke up with one unfortunate leg uncovered, which had to be amputated for frost bite. Okay, but it was numb from the cold.
I’ve also realized anew that I would never want to live in Los Angeles. It’s big—I know Phoenix is big, but it’s not crowded—but this trip exposed me to a side of it that I had never really seen: the residential areas. I always wondered how 20 million people could be squeezed into an area that is either slightly larger or smaller than Phoenix. I don’t wonder that anymore; they compress the houses, make duplexes (and probably more-plexes), and get creative with living arrangements. It’s very interesting to me and reinforces my happiness about my decision to stay in Phoenix forever.
The Guerrilla .NET course is about to begin and I’m surprised at how many people are attending. Rough count of computers set up is 68, which is exactly not what I was expecting. I thought for the price that we paid ($3,995) that it would be intimate. We’ll see how it goes.