I think PyCon could have continued at the Dallas Fort-Worth Airport this evening given the number of stranded Pythonistas I recognize here. It’s snowing back home in Chicago and I’ve already crashed and burned on standby twice. My original flight is now slated to leave 3.5 hours after its scheduled time and I have my fingers crossed.

In the meantime, I have made several observations about the DFW airport experience:

  • The software listing flights & times on screens at the rental car lot had crashed. However, it still offered degraded functionality in the form of a tattered piece of paper that listed airline to terminal mappings.
  • The PeopleMover is cool. It’s fast and it compensated for the fact that I had no idea what terminal to go to.
  • The faux authentic Texas food at the airport is serviceable enough if you have a sufficient amount of nasal congestion. (Damn this cold leftover from Chicago.)
  • The handicapped cart that keeps going back and forth has a slogan on the back: “Follow me to McDonald’s.” That doesn’t exactly seem responsible.
  • The airport has a chapel. (My sources tell me this is not all that uncommon.)
  • There is a wine bar in the terminal. If I didn’t have the aforementioned cold, I’d probably sample some of them.
  • T-Mobile wifi access may be $10/24 hrs, but it’s getting cheaper by the hour the longer I sit here. It is also bitchin’ fast.
  • Power outlets are an extremely scarce resource. There is a kiosk that offers to power up your devices for $2, but no one seems willing to pay that. Fortunately, it is really hard to eliminate working power outlets anywhere in the modern world, so a few desperate souls like me are now defending their power connections vigilantly.
  • Sometimes AA’s proritized standby list really sucks. I saw a poor family of 6 miss a flight because they didn’t have enough standby seats left. Maybe their algorithm should include some prioritization for little kids? As a single traveler I can deal with delays, but I’d stranded with 4 kids.

Okay, back to coding in Django. After taking the Django tutorials and talked to some like-minded folks at the BoFs, I now realize where I have to do some refactoring.