At the moment, I am sitting in the lobby of the Westin Hotel & Spa in Whistler BC. I first must preface this entry by saying that I have had an amazing week, and a great time here. I thank Mozilla for putting on a really cool experience, and I do not regret coming up here one bit. Also in between each of the following paragraphs I was attending some really cool sessions, eating great food and hot tubbing.

Monday we took a flight from Seattle to Vancouver, minus the screaming kids it was relatively painless flight. Meg was planning to meet me up here, and crash in my room... somehow she left SF that morning and still beat me here. I have no idea how that happened. Anyways she was here waiting when I arrived, and I quickly had to check in and get to dinner. Huge buffet with all kinds of delish foods, a pretty impressive spread with a solid bar.

Tuesday was a good day.

Wednesday morning I wake up and turn on the news and find out that the only reasonable road between Vancouver and Whistler (highway 99) has been closed due to a rock slide. Not only was it a rock slide, IT WAS A FREAKING HUGE ROCK SLIDE: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/s ... VNewsAt11. Apparently it wrecked the entire road, and the train tracks and to remove it they will have to BLAST the van size boulders with dynamite. I didn't panic until they told us that it would take a bare minimum of 5 days to start getting the road back open. As you can imagine, poor Mozilla crew organizing all this must be pretty stressed. Two funny things happened as a result of this incident, during the "Travel Update", Mike Schroepfer yell out "Have we determined if Microsoft is responsible for the rock slide?" which under the circumstances broke the intensity in the air. The second was that a bug was logged in the Mozilla Bugzilla which marked the messed up road with severity:blocker, and that we may want to look into convincing Google to "Come pick us up".

Thursday, we woke up to silence, no lights, TV's, dead laptops and the quick realization that the power was out for the whole hotel. As you can imagine, this is a slight problem for a "Tech Conference". I actually slept in a bit later in the nice quiet darkness and caught up in probably a month of lost sleep. In the lobby they had posted that the hotel transformer had been "hit by a laundry truck"... UHM, are you kidding me? The giant green metal box sitting in the woods next to the hotel was "hit by a laundry truck". This HAS to be Micorosoft's doing, I can't image any other way something insane like this could possibly happen. We got to spend half the day without computers or A/V doing presentations off of notepads and then discussing in the dark. This did make for an interesting dynamic, and in a lot of ways was still pretty productive albeit very strange. Fortunately right before our 5:45 presentation of GristMill, our firefox automation framework "Talk" the power came back on so that I could give my sweet demo. I really like doing talks at conferences because people immediately have ideas, and uses for whatever it is you are doing. It's very gratifying to know that people are going to go home and start playing with your stuff.

Thursday night dinner we jumped on the gondola and headed up to the top of the mountain for a pretty rockin shin dig. A beattles/elton john/other cover band was playing, it was snowing outside, and they put on a huge spread. John Lilly talked, Mitchell Baker talked and after many toasts and rounds of applause Shrep went up and clearly fighting his emotions, thanked everyone for the last few years.

A wise sage told me, that when you go to a conference/event it's always a good idea to make a list of the people you want to worm your way into a conversation with. So this time around, I made my list. During the day people have been crazy running around all over, but last night people were a bit more relaxed and in a social mood so I had the chance to introduce myself to some folks and have a couple conversations I had been waiting to have all week.

Today is friday, its 11:58 AM, my float plane was supposed to take off at 11:45 AM... clearly this is a problem. The word I was given was that the planes couldn't fly because of the high tide and that the planes weren't able to land safely at the moment. Well, the way I feel about this is that we basically have tides mapped out like clock work... someone booked a flight to leave at a time when they would be landing during an unsafe high tide? I don't think so. There is a massive cloud cover, but mostly I think it just makes sense that the trend of insanity would continue.

I am feeling a little bit burned out, pretty tired, sick of eating, drinking, and talking frankly. Please someone send your private jet and get me the hell out of this beautiful, tree covered resort town before I do something insane like deciding to go backcountry snowboarding on the glacier in the middle of the summer!

Please leave your base.

I would like to note that the Washington State University - Cougar Basketball Team won their first game in the NCAA Tournament yesterday and are now slated to play Notre Dame on Saturday. It's exciting to see them competing with the big boys, when I was in Pullman the record was a little bit less exciting. However, it was always a good time to watch them beat the UW.

Last year we lost in the second game, I hope to see them making it to game three. Go Cougs!

The other competition is a little less fun, but very important. All of my favorite news sites have switched from technology news, to Politics and honestly at this point I would just like it to be over. The news gets nastier by the day, and if the democratic race isn't decided soon it will clearly do permanent damage to the party. Give me back my technology news!

My last blurb about competition is the Nintendo Wii, I would have to say that 'Crossbow Trainer' with the Wii Gun is probably the most fun I have had with a video game since Duck hunt on the original Nintendo.