I owe an update. Boy howdy, I owe an update. Where did all of those days just go? Gone. This past week has been one of the more blistering ones of late. I spent five days in San Francisco attending DrupalCon and suffering from massive camera equipment misplacement (about which I have already lamented) and a visual migraine aura so long-lasting and freaky that I had to seek medical attention.

Yes, folks. The weak constitution. I have it. By the time I turned grey in Amye Scavarda’s well-executed conference session on Wednesday about project management—grey enough that she came to check on me afterwards because she could sense my shivery pallor from the speaker’s podium—my poor compadres had already been through my various travel-addled tube woes and the whole waking-up-unable-to-see neurological freakout. Sharing an undersized hotel room (really, Hilton? A room for three consisting of two double beds and a single chair? Is this, as Steve Martin would ask, the new cruelty?) really served to expose how damned sickly I am.

The Wednesday pallor, by all estimations, was random. Maybe I ate something unwise. In any case, the several hours I spent that day at Oakland International was mostly a combination of fist-shaking at the airport’s wretched fail of a free wifi system (Grade: F+) and swallowing the sense of imminent hurl, which, of course, never materialized. I am, if nothing, solid in my ability to avoid the puke.

That was the bad stuff. Here is some good stuff.

Good stuff number one. This regards exhibit A, the $3800 of camera hardware I left on a Horizon flight from Portland to Oakland.

The Horizon Airlines Twitter user is responsive and thorough. The same can’t really be said about their normal channels of lost and found reporting—for example, the message I left on their “left on plane” voicemail system was never returned, and the form David submitted via their web site somehow got marked as regarding a flight originating from Portland, Maine—but their Twitter-based customer service was superb. Via a Twitter-based interaction, I was connected with a representative and then, very quickly, with a Horizon representative at Oakland. The latter was especially wonderful because she had my camera. I was able to pick it up (with relief that they made me show photo ID) on my way back out of town.

Good stuff the rest. The conference was brain-stuffing and technically inspiring. Aileen and Megan and I had a great tapas meal at a place, I dunno, on a hill with orange trees and general San Francisco-ness. On our way back, I rode at the very front of a cable car, hanging off of the side. Three observations here. One, I am a grinch, but not totally irredeemable. Two, There are about a thousand million ways to get dead doing this; I am amazed there aren’t daily fatalities. Three, holy crap it’s fun to hang off the front of a cable car and go tipping down ridiculous hills (see observation one).

Aileen on the Cable Car

Megan and I on the Cable Car