I had a long travel day yesterday. My scheduled return flight was supposed to leave Phoenix at 3:30 in the afternoon and arrive in Fort Lauderdale (via DFW) after midnight. I went to the aircraft in the morning, assuming that I could get an earlier flight to Dallas, and thus get home earlier, on standby.

Wrong.

I ended up spending all the time at Skyharbor not getting on to three separate flights, and ended up taking my original flight anyway. Next time I'll do more than verify that the flights exist--who would have thought that so many others would be so desperate to get out of Phoenix yesterday?

Michael Mealing has a summary of the results of the panel discussion that ended the conference Saturday night. Thanks again to Henry Vanderbilt (and particularly for getting a hotel with wireless everywhere) for putting on another good get-together for this growing community.

[Update at 10:30 AM EDT]

Clark Lindsey has some good further coverage of the sessions that I didn't get to, or write about.

Sorry to hear about your extended stay at that notable cultural institution, Sky Harbor Airport. But one of the reasons we wind up the Space Access conferences Saturday night is that Phoenix is a big weekend destination (at least until we get to oven season a few weeks from now.) Seats back out of town Sundays are hard to find at the last second, hard to find even well in advance for Sunday evening. If you want to book early, book early Ditto our Thursday start versus the Friday inwards rush to Phoenix.

As for the wireless everywhere, we're glad that worked out - they'd just installed it and weren't sure how well it would work in the conference hall. Remind me as next year comes up, we need to set single rows of bloggers-only chairs down either side of the conference hall - I'm just glad nobody broke a leg tripping over all the power cables run across the outside aisles this year; I saw at least one laptop hit the deck.

Remind me too to have a serious talk with the hotel about not closing their bar before sessions end in the evening... All in all, though, we were pretty pleased with the new place. Glad you could come!

Henry Vanderbilt
Space Access Society

Better than a dedicated row of chairs, Henry, set up a press table for us, so we have something to put our laptops on besides our laps, and I don't get carpal tunnel in my wrist from running a mouse on the chair next to me at a weird angle. It also makes it easier to get up and down without having to figure out how and where to set down the computer and navigate around the cables.

While that would help those of us who are actively blogging, I think the majority of the laptops belonged to non-bloggers. Having done the IETF for many years the best method I've seen is to daisy chain power strips down the rows of chairs. And buy 'em from Costco or Wal-Mart instead of from the hotel...

So if we do have a table does that mean we get little placards with our domain-names on 'em and interns to fetch us drinks like real press people? ;-)

RE an actual press table, well, maybe. Depends on other factors like available space in the hall. (Not to mention on whether I want to take on the consequent of determining who does or does not get a seat there.) As for interns to fetch refreshments, the press gets those right around the time that I do. Which may be a while....

Seriously, one of the things that lets us do all we do is that we're ruthless about not letting frills suck up scarce resources. "Laptop Rows" down the outside walls will remove the cords-across-aisles hazard, will improve matters slightly for bloggers themselves, and won't eat up much scarce floor space, so it probably will happen next year. (hm. Maybe you need a sort of portable airline tray table that'll clip on to the back of the chair in front of you? Maybe some reader would like to make money addressing that market?..)

Henry

Bloody, uh, heck. Insert "h3adache" right after"consequent" in the above; the silly software told me "h3adache" was inappropriate content, then elided my entire first attempt to get around that. Sheesh.

Henry

nah, i would hope that in a couple years Wireless Power Transmission conferences have solved the problems of laptop power cables for Space Access conference :)