With Wings As Eagles: Craig P. Steffen's Blog

Oregon

2013 August 04 10:21

I went to a conference in Oregon in April. Here are a very few photos to commemorate the trip. I few by way of Austin, TX, for reasons that made sense at the time. I got to visit family in Austin and played with Smart Cars, but that's another blog entry.

I flew into Portland but the conference was a ways away, so work renteda car for me to drive. I ended up with a Chevy Impala. Despite dislike of the water-bed-like mid-1980s Impala, the modern one is a very nice car.

Interestingly, it seems to have the weird retro semi-LED shift graphics as the Chrysler 200 has. I guess it's a GM thing.



It does have one thing that modern GM cars do right, a "cruise control engaged" indicator in the upper right:

And here it is at night:

I actually took a vacation day on this trip and visited a friend and colleague of my wife's in Eugene, Oregon, before I continued on to the conference. The drive to Eugene...well, the view didn't suck.



She walks to work every day. This is the view ahead as she's about to enter campus:

and the view 90 degrees to the left of that:

While I was in town, I stopped by the campus storage and got some Oregon Ducks gear for my friend who's a huge fan.

Here's the book I broguht along on that trip to read:

It's Off To Be The Wizard by Scott Meyer, who writes the awesome web comic Basic Instructions. The book is excellent, and it's written more specifically to a programmer's point of view than any other fiction book that I've ever read. It's his first prose book, and frankly it's a much better first offering than most authors give.