I'm sitting in a hotel room in Crystal City, VA, which is about as D.C. as you can get without actually being related to Edison (ooh, now that's a bad one...)

Anyway, I'm sitting in my room because I'm worried about walking outside to go to my favorite restaurant (Legal Seafood) or one of the other many fine establishments here.

Basically, I'm concerned because if I were a sniper, I'd choose this spot in heartbeat. It has all kinds of tall vantage points, there's no police presence, and most of the people you'd spot on the street would make excellent targets as they amble around in utter confusion wondering which of the many concrete structures is the Marriott, and then, whether that Marriott is the one they are booked into (there are at least 3 Marriotts within a mile of where I'm sitting).

So, instead of going out, which I probably will do later, I've been trying to install the STSN hotel highspeed internet on my machine. It's a wonderful thing. It's like my home system except that I'm paying $10 a day for it, which is a lot higher than I might've paid otherwise, except that Marriott charges $1 per local phone call and my experience with the dialup modem on my laptop is that it disconnects frequently, thus incurring additional charges because each new connection costs that darn buck!

So, contrary to Icarus' lament about the hotel high speed connection when he was in Miami, I'm sitting happy as a clam. It's a wonderful thing.

Among the other amenities available to me are:
1. In-room movies ($12 or so per movie)
2. A 1 liter bottle of Evian (room temperature) with a label sayin if the bottle is opened, I'll be charged $4.00!!!
3. In room coffee (apparently free).
4. A game controller if I want to use my TV as a bad Nintendo ripoff.
5. An iron and ironing board which is just laughable if you know me.
6. tiny shampoos and soaps. We're holding a Lilliputian convention later where I think they'll all get lathered up and start sliding around. Could be fun.
7. Two arm chairs in case some guests drop by. Uh huh.
8. A table for the guests to set the Evian upon as they suck my wallet dry.
9. A silly rack to put a piece of luggage on. If you own the kind of luggage that fits on these racks, you haven't traveled in a decade.
10. A do not disturb sign which I am now wearing on my forehead.
11. Two double beds. Conceivably, if find Carol, Ted and Alice, we can have a re-enactment. (showing my age again)
12. 3 lamps. In a 600 square foot room, they have managed to position more lamps than I have in my entire house. And they aren't just part of the ambient heating system.
13. A dresser/entertainment center console. It has lots of drawer space which is nice because I like to sort my dirty clothes by whether they can be worn again or not and if you have too few drawers, your options are similarly limited.
14. Two pictures depicting wilting flowers. I don't know what to make of this, but perhaps they are there to discourage sexual behavior. The Marriotts are LDS, after all, and perhaps they were thinking that people shouldn't get to frisky while on the road. I'm not putting a lot of stock in this explanation, but it seemed good enough at the time.
15. A giant mirror placed so that as you type on your laptop computer, you can also watch yourself. In keeping with my theory about the wilting flowers, perhaps this is there to embarrass people into avoiding internet porn... Or perhaps to enhance the experience. I'll let you know.

Well, time to hit the elevator and see if my buddies show up for a bit of dinner and dodge the sniper!

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I'm sitting in a hotel room in Crystal City, VA, which is about as D.C. as you can get without actually being related to Edison (ooh, now that's a bad one...)

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Yup, that was really bad. Made me laugh though. . . .

The more you use it, the better this value.

The difference is you're using it on your own laptop. The kind I struggled with in Miami was the kind where you use a remote-control keyboard on the hotel's own TV. I once stayed in a hotel that had what you're using; the only problem was that if you logged off and then back on, you got charged a second time. Have you made sure that's not the case where you are?

Stay in your hotel room and order a pizza--Hatrack has too much at stake here!

$12 for an in room movie? Last time I was in a hotel the movies were $7-$8 and only the porn movies were that... Um... Never mind.

And how do they know that you OPENED the bottle of Evian?

These in-room movie things say they don't put the title on your bill, but the charge itself always gives it away. That, and the fact that porn is just so abyssmally bad, keeps me from ever ordering it or owning any.

Icarus. I forgot about your experience with the bad keyboard thingy. I've seen those. Yuck! This is legitimate highspeed internet and they charge $9.95 per 24 hour period, noon-to-noon. I had to dial in to download a driver for the USB port, and then fool Windows 2000 into using that driver instead of the one it thought was better (it wasn't giving me choice so I had to rename the other .inf file to an .ifn file so Windows wouldn't recognize it. It kept saying this file was "better", would select it without letting me over-ride, then it would give me an error message saying the file didn't work -- arrrrrrggggggghhhhhh.)

Actually, this was the first time Windows 2000 has been even mildly frustrating for me. But got it solved through cleverness and wreckless (as it turned out) abandon.

The beltway's a cakewalk-- it's getting off the beltway that is the difficult part.

Epsecially getting off the beltway at the mixing bowl.

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Latest estimates are that the porn industry outstrips the "legitimate" movie industry by a factor of 2 or 3.

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Latest estimates are that the pun industry outstrips the "legitimate" humor industry by a factor of 2 or 3.

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Not until you reach Florida anyway, and then you have the Bermuda Triangle to deal with.