We're in Des Moines at

We're in Des Moines at the Savery hotel. If you're a fellow attendee, stop by room 334 if you want to meet me. :) The Savery isn't the most geek-friendly of hotels, they charge $1.00 for each outgoing local call, and I'm only get 26,400 baud out of this crappy phone line, though I'm hoping that's the lamp thing that I'm plugged into, I'll have to try bypassing that later, or I'll just go to my cell phone for wireless data, as it's faster than this primitive stuff. It's called broadband, Savery, look into it!

Since I'm from Iowa, I feel that I can bash Des Moines. I've never stayed in this part of the city before, and tonight when we went looking for a place to eat in walking distance, we didn't find much. A Domino's Pizza, a Quizno's, and that's about it. We wound up at the Marriot, a few blocks down, eating at Allie's, a restauraunt in that hotel. They had good food though, and it wasn't totally absurdly priced like many hotel restaurants.

I do wish this area of Des Moines was more like the area of downtown Minneapolis, full of great bars and eateries. Here, most of the restaurants were already closed at 7:00 on a Thursday night. Not exactly a happening place...