It's review time at my employer, which means that everyone is running around, frantically polishing turds and trying to make themselves look as good as possible. Since there is no hope for me any more for this year, I was looking at my list of "commitments" for next year.

One of the commitments that I have is to attend a conference that my company holds every 6 months or so for all of their technical services teams. Originally, it was a conference for all of the sales and technical people in my organization, but since the things that interest sales people is orthogonal to the things that interest technical people, they split the conferences. Amazingly, the sales people have a convention in Orlando, whereas the techical people have their meeting in Seattle.   My manager is currently at the sales people convention.

I have in the past, avoided going to these meetings (for a variety of reasons). However, since I am going to now get graded on whether or not I go, I suppose I will go to the next one, which is being held in February.

Seattle in February...that will be fun.

Anyway, I was looking for something to make the trip more interesting, and I saw that I can get a train ticket for about 655.00 each way. Without getting a bed, it is only 211.00, but I don't want to rough it THAT much.   I think that would be a really cool way to see the country.  I will have to clear it with a few people, both at home and at work, but it looks like it would be neat.

Amtrak has a place where you can play with schedules, and I just spent an hour fooling with it. I should be asleep.