Texas Boondoggle; July 2004

It was high time Our Hero Steve got a good deal which came in the form of a boondoggle trip to the Rational Software Development User Conference ’04, July 18 through 22, at the Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center in Grapevine, Texas. Grapevine is on the northwest perimeter of the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex, where I lived for over a decade before I pressed on to Houston, then Austin, and then the DC area when Texas ran out of jobs after the big tech bubble burst a few years back. So I got to combine some professional advancement with visiting my old pals in DFW and some sightseeing to boot.

Washington Reagan National Airport. I like Reagan airport much more than Dulles, mostly because the Metro delivers me right to the terminal but also because they just built a new terminal that’s quite a Palace of Transportation. Also, there's that Reagan name, a brand name famous for quality. There really should be a Reagan airport in every town, dontcha think?

A United Boeing 737 parked at Reagan with its tail pointing across the Potomac to downtown DC three miles away, where you can see the Washington Monument and the dome of the Jefferson Memorial.

Taxiing out to takeoff in an American Airlines Boeing Super 80, which something like a big DC-9. You'd think that after 700+ hours as a navigator / weapon system officer in F-4 Phantoms, a flight in a commercial airliner would not be a big deal but you'd be wrong. I just love to jump in a jet going anywhere. Wheeeee!

Turning left onto Runway 1 and looking down 6869 feet of pavement pointed left of the Washington Monument. This is the runway on which Air Florida Flight 90 tried to take off on a snowy January day in 1982 with its wings and engine iced up. It stalled out and smacked the 14th Street bridge, to the left of the runway, and went into the Potomac. I'm probably not a good guy to sit next to on a jet because I remember all these things and am happy to tell you about them. You don't really want to know, do you?

A few seconds after takeoff. That's the Pentagon on the right and Pentagon City over to the left where you can see my office.

The Pentagon. That green patch facing us is where they have a lot of formal ceremonies. This is the approximate view that the skyjackers of American Airlines Flight 77 had after they commandeered their Boeing 757 out of Dulles on Sep 11. They made a wide sweeping turn to the left, over Arlington Cemetery at the upper right of this photo, and impacted the Pentagon on the far right side, next to the road, just right of center as you faced the building. Bastards. Some people in my building saw the jet make its turn. My boss was driving down the freeway on the left and saw it. However, a best-selling book in France says that it was a robot plane flown by the US government with nobody on board. Idiots.

Flying over the orderly suburbs of north Dallas on approach to DFW airport.

The fabled city of Dallas lies off on the horizon as we come close to touchdown.

Karl, my room-mate from the Air Force Academy. He flies Boeing 757/767s for American Airlines now, which is headquartered in Dallas. The one thing I've always admired about Karl as a pilot is that he can really hold his liquor.

Karl and I began our second year at the Blue Zoo by giving everyone who entered our room a wedgie, the two of us furiously yanking each victim up off his feet by the underwear until it was wedged firmly up the crack of his butt. Then we would mark our "kill" on a board by our door. We quickly became wedgie aces with five quick kills and were well on our way to our Blue Max (15 kills) when, inexplicably, people stopped stepping through our door.

Undeterred, we developed new weapons and tactics to continue our reign of terror against our classmates. Karl was fond of Ding Dongs which he kept in an open box from which many a passerby would filch one, prompting complaints from Karl. So one night I cut the back off one with a hunting knife, ate the cream inside, filled it up with menthol shaving cream, and then carefully melted the chocolate back. I wrapped it back up like new, placed it in the box where Karl would pick it up first. Then I waited.

Karl came back from the library and grabbed the Ding Dong as I casually meandered toward the door. I took off running as soon as he bit into the shaving cream and gave out a yell. I was certain upon mature reflection that Karl would see the humor in this, though perhaps not immediately. Sure enough, after fifteen minutes and a short foot chase, Karl said, "We need to do this to somebody else." That's why Karl and I got along so well. We both enjoyed poisoning people.

Our first victim was disappointing. Markoe was a nice guy who we easily tricked into accepting a doctored Ding Dong. We felt guilty about pulling such a mean stunt on poor Markoe but the feeling passed and gave way to curiosity when we couldn't find him. When we finally quizzed him about how he liked the Ding Dong, he shrugged his shoulders and said it was good. He said the filling was awfully minty.

Well, that wasn't the effect that we were shooting for so we went back to the drawing board and bought ExLax, carefully melting it into the back of three Ding Dongs. Our first victim was George, another nice guy. He gulped down the Ding Dong right before we joined the noon formation to march to lunch at the massive dining hall.

Later he told us what had happened, unaware that we were the perpetrators of his distress. It hit him in the middle of his first class after lunch. He felt the need to go but you can not go anywhere in class at the United States Air Force Academy until you are dismissed at the end of the hour. Poor George crossed his legs and recrossed his legs and bit his lip and pinched his butt cheeks as the pressure inexorably built to a throbbing crescendo. When at long last dismissed, he left his books and heel-sprinted to the nearest latrine. George said it was like a door opening. We drew a Ding Dong kill on our door board.

Delighted with our success, we fed a Ding Dong to John "Uranus", a nice enough guy but something of a by-the-book military myrmidon. Uranus dropped out of sight for a couple days. When I finally knocked on his door, his room had a sick smell in it and poor Uranus was lying in his bed with a defeated expression on his face. The dispensary had diagnosed him with "gastrointestinal influenza" and put him on bedrest. I knew that he was perfectly healthy but the doctor had told him he was sick so he accepted it and acted sick. There is a profound life lesson encapsulated therein about accepting too readily other people's opinion of you.

This was an alarming development which prompted Karl and I to cease our secret insurgency before we were found out and dealt the punishment we deserved. We erased the Ding Dong kill. However, somewhere in the confusion, the last Ding Dong disappeared. Its destination remains a mystery, its story untold.

I'd like to say we had sense enough to give up there but I began investigating phenolthalein, a liquid tasteless laxative that seemed an ideal addition to our Air Office Commanding's coffeepot. He was a nasty little captain who had flown OV-10s in Vietnam. I thought a good purging would improve his disposition. Fortunately, the end of the semester stopped us from evolving into full-blown serial killers.

Karl waited a few years before he told Uranus about the ExLax Ding Dong. Sometimes comedy has to age, like fine wine, until all the sediment settles and it acquires that mellow taste. If you serve it too soon, before its time, it can have a bitter taste instead of that sweetness that comes from long years in the deep dark cave, you know what I mean?

The convention was held at the fabulous Gaylord Texan Hotel and Resort in Grapevine, not far from the airport on Lake Grapevine. Evidently, this is a chain. There are others with the same basic design spread across the United States. They're talking about building one in the DC area.

Here's a look across the pond at the front entrance where valets wait to drive off your car. It looks like it might be a good summer job for a college kid.

I fired up my jetpack to take this aerial shot high over Gaylord. Actually, this is an architect's model in the lobby. The hotel is in front. The convention center is the square building in back. It's quite massive, as any Texas hotel should be.

Here's the view from the balcony of my hotel room into the vast covered atrium.

The atrium has a San Antonio theme, recreating the famous River Walk there but without the dead fish smell.

Behind this Alamo façade lies a nice little Madeleine's-style deli.

I'm not really sure what part of San Antonio this is about. Maybe a church bell tower.

"Software Runs The World" was the theme of the conference. Rational tools runs a lot of that software. And we run Rational. It's all part of our mad conspiracy to take over, pal.

A mosaic in the center of the atrium.

Above the mosaic, the yellow star of Texas. Actually, all the Gaylords sport this star on their atriums.

My old girlfriend from way back when, Sandi. Oh, could I write a lot here. But I won't. She and monkeys don't mix. I will tell you that much. Nuff said.

Me in my $205 per night room at the Gaylord Texan. Now my tastes ordinarily run more toward the $30 per night motel but if the company is paying, expense is no object. Shoot the moon, I say.

Here's another view of the lower level of the atrium, where they have wedged a River Walk style restaurant beside the faux river.

My coworkers Chuck and Maureen with a Rational guy, Scott, at the welcome reception.

Here a couple of software configuration managers dressed in our traditional garb.

This is a traditional software configuration management dance. We are a festive people.

This is what brought me into software configuration management, the dancing. Software configuration management is really a world of romance that way. As the old SCM song goes, "Configure we must, for tomorrow we may be dust! So dance, Configure Man, dance!" It's in our blood, I guess.

This is called the Code Dance, which was customarily done after all the source code was harvested from the fields by the peasant software configuration managers, baled, and put up in the barn. All the village would celebrate the code harvest. Ay yi y yi!

At night, they turned up the fountains in front of the Alamo.

Off we went to conference, which started every day with a keynote speech. The keynote speeches were fantastic. Really interesting stuff.

Each keynote speech began with a performers from Cirque du Soleil, that European-ish style circus accompanied by New Age music.

Here's a closer look at one of the Cirque performers.

These might be marketing guys. It's hard to tell.

About two thousand people showed up for the conference at $1500 each. Most were from America but a few came from far afield: Asia, Latin America, Germany, Croatia, Israel. There were two guys who had been to every one of the ten annual conferences held.

Recruiters often call me and ask me if I can tell them the name of other software configuration managers but I come up empty. We don't run in packs like developers do. We are solitary animals, like bears. Usually, I'm the only SCM guy in the shop. However, here at the conference I saw an acre of SCM people. They looked like a pretty geeky bunch, with only a couple cute girls in the lot.

Rational had banks of PCs outside the meeting rooms where you could check your mail.

This is Grady Booch up on the Big Giant TV, telling us all about the history and future of computing. Booch has been Rational's Chief Scientist since it was founded in 1981 and has written a series of widely-read books on software engineering. He invented object-oriented design and developed the Unified Modelling Language along with Ivar Jacobson and James Rumbaugh. OK, that doesn't mean anything to you, does it? But he's a Big Cheese in the Rational world.

My room-mate from the Air Force Academy, Karl, told me that Grady was in our class. Karl and Grady were in the same comp sci class. To look at him, you'd never guess that he was a graduate of the Blue Zoo. He looks kinda like a hippie dude now. Looks like a bad reaction to military discipline to me. Anyway, after he was done speaking, I introduced myself as a classmate and told him we were all pleased to see him do so well. He kinda choked up and looked down at his shoes. Thank goodness he wasn't one of the guys Karl and I poisoned.

The conference ran for three and half days, with a keynote speech and six lectures per day. The lectures were full of good stuff for Rational users, though my eyes began to glaze over by the back half of the third day.

Between lectures there was an exhibit hall where firms were pitching Rational-related products. I got a free book and some toys.

That's Mary, a coworker of mine, manning the booth for Praxis. She wasn't giving anything away for free so I left.

The good thing about the exhibit hall is that it featured a wet bar. A lot of computing would flow more smoothly if we incorporated this far-sighted innovation in our thirsty IT shops. A few well-placed daiquiris would produce some bitchin' code. You need to oil the software engineering process, you know.

Chuck and somebody and Maureen at the Number Six party at the end of one of the days. That marguerita is mine. Number Six served decent margueritas which leads me to believe that they are a good consulting firm.

Number Six forsaked their customary karaoke, thank goodness, for RUPardy, which is like the TV game show, Jeopardy, but focused on questions about the RUP, the Rational Unified Process, the philosophy which all the Rational tools ultimately support.

The first team, on the left, did well enough but then were challenged by another team, on the right. However, the new team contained a ringer, the guy in white on the right, Ivar Jacobson, one of the authors of the RUP and the inventor of the use case. He’s from Sweden.

The chick in the white blouse in the center is Ivar's daughter, Agneta, who works with him. I am strongly in favor of any software methodology which introduces hot Swedish blondes into the mix.

After trouncing the other team, Ivar gave a small talk in his Swedish accent to we assembled software professionals, many of whom were sober enough to remember it.

Meanwhile, back at the conference, the Cirque performers kicked off the keynote speech with a reminder that there was a big touristy event at a Real Texas Ranch that night. It sounded pretty hokey to me and I could find my own fun so I passed but people who went said it was pretty darned good.

The most interesting keynote speech was given by Scott Ross, CEO, President and Co-Founder of Digital Domain, a special effects company in Hollywood that worked on scenes in the movies "Titanic", "X-Men", and "The Day After Tomorrow". This isn’t him. His talk was so interesting that I forgot to take pictures. It was full of visuals of how they constructed scenes, layer by layer, such as the tidal wave swamping New York in "The Day After Tomorrow."

Ross didn't outright say that James Cameron, the director of "Titanic," was a bastard to work for but he certainly led you to that conclusion. Digital Domain would work on its scenes in California all day, then upload its work on the Internet so that Cameron could view it in the morning in Mexico, where he was working on the big wet set with a full size Titanic deck. It was contentious.

One morning, the seagulls set Cameron off. Digital Domain added seagulls flying around the Titanic but Cameron shouted that they were too big. Ross assured him that they had looked up the size of seagulls in books and put them in the proper perspective with regard to the ship. They were only five pixels across anyway. Cameron dismissed the claim. They were using Pacific seagulls, he said, when he needed North Atlantic seagulls.

Digital Domain did the sweeping shot in "Titanic" where the camera flies by the Titanic steaming across the open ocean on a sunny day. Ross says that almost all the men you see walking around the ship are his company's financial officer, filmed in different clothes and dropped electronically all over the digital ship. If you look closely, there are two men fighting on an aft deck of the Titanic. That's Ross and James Cameron.

Ross says that they are getting better at making virtual actors, or vactors. The bodies were fairly easy to digitize but it was hard to put clothes on them. Hair was the next challenge, then facial gestures. They are working on eyes, now. All these effects are captured in computer subroutines. Part of the contractual struggle between his special effects company and the studios which hire him is who owns the software after the movie is finished. Both want to build up their libraries of software for reuse in future movies.

Ross says some studio executives like the idea of spending twenty million on creating vactors rather than human actors who may be temperamental and difficult with which to deal. Ross says those executives have never met the developers who program the vactors.

Ross said that all the special effects in the world are no substitute for a good story, which is just as scarce now as they were in the golden days of Hollywood. In fact, Ross says there has been a general decline in plot and story-telling in Hollywood because nobody really knows how to make a good movie. Anyone who says they do, lies.

Ross visited Howard Koch, a famous screenwriter, in his office which featured posters of some of his work, such as "Sergeant York" and "Casablanca." Ross asked him how he wrote all these classic movies, what was the secret? Koch said, "Kid, I threw a lot of shit at the wall. Some of it stuck."

At the end of the conference they gave away some good stuff, like this Apple Powerbook and a free trip to next year's conference in Las Vegas. The Rational executive is on the right.

The last performance by the Cirque du Soleil were these two strongmen who lifted each other up in impossible poses. The software people from San Francisco seem to clap the loudest for them.

So we bid adieu to the Rational software conference, determined to make the world our footstool by controlling all software in our mad quest for power.