Twenty four hours ago I didn’t expect I’d be where I am now. I’m aboard an America West flight about 30 or 45 minutes out of Las Vegas, NV.

I got around four hours of sleep this last night, but awoke feeling well enough to tackle the day. After taking a shower, grabbing a couple mini-muffins and a banana from the continental breakfast, I took a cab to the training facility.

I was real bummed they hadn’t put the hot items out on the breakfast bar yet when I went down at 6:40 or so. I would have loved some sausage and eggs.

It snowed through the night so there was about six inches or so on the ground this morning where there was only a light dusting of snow when I arrived last night. The cab driver had some difficult finding the facility, but eventually we found it, but it didn’t look like anyone was inside. The driver suggested I go try the door before he left. I did and it was locked.

I was sure what I was going to do at that point. I suggested he pull around the back of the building to see if there was another door in that might be open. There wasn’t but there was a John Deere “Ag Management Solutions” office. I paid the driver and told him I’d wait in there until someone arrived at the training facility.

The door to the John Deere office only allowed people with security badges in, so I had to ring a bell so someone would come get the door. I explained I was teaching for the people next door and just wondered if I could hang out there until someone showed up over there. They said that would be fine.

I learned a thing or two about tractors while I was sitting there in their reception area for 30 minutes or so.

I had the telephone number for the training facility so I called them every 10-15 minutes and finally got through. After I talked to a gentleman there, I walked over and got settled into my classroom. The training facility had already set up Fedora Core 1 on all the systems in the classroom, including the instructor machine/server, so there really was no preparation to do. I set up my laptop so I’d have a machine I could use to check e-mail and IM when I had a chance.

I had twelve students in the class and they all seemed I.T. oriented from various backgrounds including Windows, Novell, and Unix. All in all, During the first half of the day, we concentrated on the Linux installation under Red Hat or Fedora and concluded with a lab in which the students reinstalled everything on their computers.

Then we broke for lunch. After lunch, I got a message from GuruLabs that I needed to call them. I called and they told me they had run into a problem with one of the other classes where a GuruLabs instructor and another instructor both showed up to teach the same class. This was a problem and would cost them some money. The decided to minimize the damages by sending the now-free instructor to Des Moines and sending me (the contractor) home.

I feel bad I wasn’t able to finish the class, but I’m not upset.

I told the class they would have a new instructor tomorrow to finish out the rest of the week and we finished up the next section of the class which was on post-installation configuration and Red Hat’s kickstart.

My flight to Las Vegas left Des Moines shortly after 9 p.m.

I thought the Des Moines airport felt more like a high school than an airport. I kind of expected to see rows of lockers embedded into the walls of the terminal corridors. But, it’s not too shabby.

When I approached the security checkpoint, I was the only non-staff person in the corridor (yeah, real quiet night at the Des Moines airport). The security personnel proceeded to have me take off my shoes and coat, remove my laptop from its bag, and put everything through the X=Ray scanner. I was instructed to stand at the entrance of the metal detector for about 4 minutes while the personnel shuffled around on the other side. Finally, one of them motioned me through the metal detector and informed me that I had been selected for a detailed search and body wand scan.

I looked around and muttered something about being the ONLY person they could pick at random at that time, but it was obvious they were under orders not to acknowledge my humour. WHile they were wand scanning me as I stood in a crucify-me position, two or three other people went through every item in my carry-on luggage, carefully inspecting each item. One of them, a chubby kid, got all excited when he pulled out a small metal gadget out of my fanny pack that looked like some kind of lethal instrument of terror. It was just my space pen, but I was concerned it was going to be confiscated.

And here I am... getting closer to Las Vegas where I’ll lay over for some time until I catch a 12:30 a.m. flight, arriving in Salt Lake City around 2 a.m. I called my brother earlier about picking me up.

Kind of a bummer I was able to finish the class- we could use the extra cash. I tried to make it clear to the guys at Guru Labs that I would be gleefully willing to do 2 classes a month for them. I don’t feel comfortable committing to more than that right now beause it would (a) take me away from my family too much and (b) make it next to impossible to contirbute to Iodynamics in a productive way.

Alright. I’m going to try to catch a few winks of sleep before we land in Sin City. I wonder if I could get a lapdance at the gate. If you can’t now, it’s probably only a matter of time until you can. Heh heh.

(Note: Christine made the observation that the previous paragraph insinuated that I wanted to get a lapdance in Vegas. I guess I was more trying to make the point that it wouldn't surprise me if that was a service you could easily get at the Las Vegas airport someday.)