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not the old guy in da club
Friday, June 16 2017
room 515, Hyatt Hotel, Downtown Columbia, South Carolina
I showed up at 9:00 at the main conference room of the ConvergeSE just after Ca and Ni. The first talk of the day was about the need (in a web development group) for dissenting opinions, coupled (importantly) with a culture that provides the freedom to express them. This seemed uncannily topical given how the shit had gone down last night at Bourbon (and I'm not talking about the unexpected price of shots of obscure Japanese whiskey, either).
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After several such talks, the four of us (that is, all except Allison, who had yet to be seen) returned yet again to Lamb's Bread Café. This time I had a simple tempeh reuben, which was based around an enormous slab of tempeh. The tempeh-to-other-stuff balance was off a little because of this, but it was nevertheless a satisfying sandwich. It's interesting to notice on the occasions when things I know really well are completely unfamiliar to my co-workers. One of those things is Judaism (though the new people, Allison and Dan, are both Jews). Another today was sauerkraut, the word for which didn't immediately pop into Ni's head. It's something I grew up with and eat nearly every day, but she was referring to it as "that special cabbage."
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While we were talking about this and that, one of the employees (a wiry dark black man with crazy hair) thought he overheard us say the word "rottweiler" and he came over to show us his "baby" on his smartphone. We talked for some time about our love for dogs (particularly Ni and me) and how fur babies were the only ones we wanted to have. We also talked about the discrimination that dogs associated with various human subcultures face. When Ni said she had trouble getting her rescue pit bulls into hotels, I noted that Gretchen and I had faced no such problem with our rescue pit bulls at "the fancy dog-friendly hotel in Philadelphia." I couldn't remember the place's name, but I meant the Hotel Palomar. To get all this across in as pithy of a way as possible, I combined the protocol of the West Los Angeles Hotel Palomar with the experience our dogs have had at the Philadelphia one, though substituting Neville for Eleanor (Neville has never been to a Hotel Palomar), saying, "When we stayed at the fancy dog-friendly hotel in Philadelphia, there was a chalk board welcoming Ramona & Neville, and they didn't care that they were rescue pit bulls."
This afternoon I took a recreational 40 milligram dose of Vyvanse, hoping it would make me more attentive during the Converge talks. It worked, but this might've been partially due to the way it made me imagine sexual tension with everyone, particularly the senior frontend developer from Georgetown University giving a presentation on making websites accessible to the disabled (particularly the blind). She stood there spunky-yet-demure in her knee-length floral skirt looking precisely like the nerd girl of my dreams, and I hung on every word. In the process I learned some things about HTML 5 I hadn't known. I had no idea, for example, that there were these new semantic tags such as <NAV> and <SECTION> to help robots and web browsers make more sense of the content.
After that, I attended yet another talk on CSS Grid in that smaller upstairs room. I don't know why there was a second presentation on this subject, since it contained more or less the same content as that lecture I'd attended yesterday.
All of us in our contingent, including Allison, attended the last talk of the conference, one about the science of usability. I learned a few useful things, such that at the center of our eyes (the fovea, though the lecturer never used that word) we resolve 4000 pixels per inch (though I don't know at what distance) whereas the resolution for most of the eye is only 35 pixels per inch. For this reason, for example, it's important to cluster form errors around the submit button, since that is where the eye can see them. They won't be noticeable elsewhere on the page unless they are large and garishly colored. The speaker (Cian O'Connor) also mentioned a formula explaining the rapidity with which user interface elements can be accessed, a formula that proved essential when redesigning jet cockpit controls (where fractions of a second count). This led Cian to suggest that the Macintosh has a more rapidly-accessed UI because it has a menu along the top (and, because a cursor cannot go beyond it, edges of screens are the best places for UI elements). In saying this, though, he was forgetting about the Windows taskbar, which is also along a window's edge.
After the conference, we all returned to the Hyatt to unwind for an hour or so before dinner. And then Da ordered us an Uber and we went to The Good Life Café, that vegan place that tries to produce food from the tiniest, most-accepted part of the food Venn diagram. This evening, though, they had some cooked food on offer. So I ordered the meatball sub with my pint of Imperial Stout. It was okay, but not great. Meanwhile Da had ordered a platter done up to look like chips and salsa, though the dips were all a bit dry and fibrous, while the chips were thick flaxseed crackers, evidently the only material that can be cajoled into being a chiplike object without cooking. Unfortunately, these flaxseed crackers were gummy, sticky, and, once dissolving in the mouth, slimy. One would have to be a masochist to eat those, and I think Da was the only one who ate many of them. Yet again I'd gotten a choice of two raw sides with my main course and yet again I'd grudgingly ordered two raw kale salads. Everyone else at the table seemed to think this salad was great, but not me. I'd been traumatized by my Dad with raw kale in my childhood, and that flavor took me right back there. Our waiter was a total "it's all good" hippie type (with a buzzcut), but he seemed unamused with my raw kale aversion, saying, "So you're a vegan, but you don't eat kale." "Raw kale," I corrected.
By now we'd been joined by Allison, who'd come to the café on her own and been sitting out in front drinking a glass of wine when we arrived. She seemed to be eager for the more festive part of the day to begin.
We thought we'd start out at The Whig, a dive bar directly across the street from the State Capitol, and on the walk there, Da was telling what it was like to remove email addresses for people who had been fired without their knowing it. This reminded me of the day I'd been fired from CollegeClub.com, and which I gave a quick account of, with an emphasis on the delicious fact that when College Club managers tried to get my picture off the intranet to give to a security guard in case I decided to come back with a gun, it turned out that there was no intranet any more; the whole thing had been hosted on my personal workstation, which was now wiped.
The Whig was crowded and way too horrible for anyone with a working credit card. Not only was it physically underground (with smokers smoking at the bottom of the stairs leading to it), but inside it was dark, loud, and filthy. So we turned around and left, returning (as always) to The Art Bar.
At the bar of the Art Bar, Allison immediately began looking for a way to charge her phone, evidently unaware that all the little illumnated robots were charging stations. Tonight I mostly drank that topshelf rye I'd been drinking since Tuesday.
On this particular Friday night, the crowd was more photogenic and gay than it had been. There was a lesbian with a shaved head that Allison thought was hot, and later I drew her attention to what looked like a pair of hot librarians, easy on the eye for someone "were he to have a librarian fetish." (Among other things, Allison is a trained librarian.)
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Allison kept trying to get Ca and me to go back into the blacklit backroom where a little dance party was happening, but we kept resisting. Eventually she just grabbed some big guy who materialized out of nowhere and went to dance with him. This caused Ni and Ca some concern, so they went to check on what was going on, but everything was fine. I'd followed them back there, and now I felt like dancing. I danced with Allison, and then sort of danced with an older African American gentleman. Ni was watching all of this from the sidelines and she later reported that when I started dancing, a group of men seemed to get really excited in precisely the way that men normally get excited when an attractive woman get out on the dance floor. I'd been reticient to dance partly because I didn't want to be "da old guy in da club," but this crowd was so eclectic that I was not that. Meanwhile Ni was feeling a little left out by all the fun we were having from our inebriation. She can't drink because alcohol doesn't agree with her, and as she explained this to an older white woman in a white party dress, the woman offered her a hit from her vaporizer. Ni turned her down, but I totally would've taken a puff.
I would have to get up early tomorrow for my flight back north, and the 20 minutes I'd spent dancing (the best part of the whole day) had all happened as I'd been trying to make my way out. Da, Ni, and I returned to the Hyatt. I set an alarm, ordered myself a future Uber, and took an ambien to make myself fall asleep. Ca returned before that kicked in, and his voice was slurring with happy intoxication. Initially he said something about maybe watching teevee, but then he fell asleep.
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