ASTE 2014 in Anchorage

So I am in Anchorage for the ASTE conference again this year. I am staying on the 11th floor of the Hotel Captain Cook, which is in tower 2. The stay has been very healthy for me, because with only one working elevator it's faster to hoof it up the stairs than wait for the elevator.

Turns out while I wasn't looking, someone advanced the hell out of automobiles while I wasn't looking. I present to you the 2014 Ford Fusion :

It has more knobs, dials and switches to adjust than a woman.

Aaaaaaaaand, of course, it took Microsoft to screw it up. There is no doubt this could have been a great interface to the car; naturally, Ford went to the anti-professionals at Microsoft to design it instead of Apple. Do you see that screen on the right? The one with four quarters? Yeah, you can't actually touch any of those stupidly large buttons to do anything. The actual touch interface is limited to a box about 2 inches long, and 1/2 inch high tucked in the corners of the screen. Half the time, even when sitting in Park you can't get the slivers to actually recognize you touched it.

Now stop and think about that for a minute. You are piloting a two-ton-plus vehicle at speeds up to 65 MPH. Which makes more sense :

a) taking the driver's eyes off the road for a split-second to find a stupidly large button, or

b) taking the diver's eyes off the road for several seconds to find a tiny sliver of a button?

If you said "a", then you have proven you are completely unfit to work at either Ford or Microsoft, you idiot. What the hell were you thinking?

Even so, Anchorage and the surrounding area continue to be spectacular. Here a kinda-panorama from my hotel window :

No visit to the big city would be complete without stopping at Fred Meyer. The old joke goes that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a convenience store, not a government agency. Well, Fred Meyer lives up to that, and more. By God, you can buy guns, groceries, diamond rings, furniture and more under that one cavernous roof. You can also buy things like this :

Holy Art Deco, Batman !

Huh. If I could have found a way to stuff that in my luggage, I would have taken that bad boy home. I would have made space for it back home. I don't need it, but it's just so cool it's almost a crime to not buy it.

Also decided to take in a couple of movies while in Anchorage. One was the RoboCop reboot, and the other was the Lego Movie. I was surprised at RoboCop. I went in expecting they had screwed it up like every reboot that has come down the pike. I was very shocked and pleasantly surprised they had not totally screwed it up. To be sure, they came at the movie from the opposite direction from the original. They more or less ended up in the same parking lot as the original if not the ballpark itself.

Then again... maybe my opinion was influenced by this on the way into the theatre :

To give you a sense of scale, that podium came

up to my waist.

The Lego Movie was another surprise. It has been decades since I have seen a movie this much fun, this entertaining to watch. The kids are too taken in by the eye candy to get the jokes aimed squarely at the adults, but that's their loss. This is a stupidly funny movie that has no reason to exist except to over-deliver and under-promise entertainment.

The running gag throughout the movie is time. Whenever a character tells another to  - for example - meet up downstairs in the oddly-specific timeframe of 10 seconds in the future, then the screen is always taken over by a placard that reads "downstairs, 10 seconds later", then immediately cuts to the downstairs scene. It shouldn't be funny, it should be repetitive. But in this movie, in this context, it works so that kids and adults are laughing their asses off. Each. And. Every. Time. I can't wait to get the DVD or download it. This one is a keeper for sure.

So I went out exploring Anchorage a little bit and then it happened. The Holy Mecca of Outdoors anything came into my view :

Imagine Handel's Messiah as the background music. It's what I was hearing.

But then all hope was lost as quick as it came. The sign draped across the front stated it was opening April 10.

Crap.

Oh, well. I suppose we can make the pilgrimage sometime after that. In the meantime it's back to work for me.