Sysadmin Field Notes

March 19, 2006

I thought it would be a cool idea for my dad and I to take Hudson to the Capitol Airshow.

I had no idea that these things were attended by tens of thousands of people, it's been a very long time since I had been to one. So we spent nearly 2 hours in traffic trying to get in. We did finally get in and have a good time, so all's well that ends well.

Another note to airshow organizers, the best place to tell people that the best travel arrangements are to take the light rail to a nearby stop where they'll have special, police-escorted bus service all day long is not on the caltrans traffic radio that you can't tune in until you're already stuck in traffic.

You should probably also consider mentioning something about the traffic in the frequently asked questions on your website. Oh, and a rough schedule would be nice. Mostly though, I'd just really talk up the transportation issue, and mention that the air show will be turning all neighboring freeways and streets into parking lots with all the traffic.

The website is a classic example of terrible, terrible web design, but at the time I thought it was because it was the way it displayed the information it did have, not realizing it was terrible because of the info they left out. It's so terrible that "due to overwhelming traffic" they replaced their home page with a link to the identical page on two different servers. Funny, I would have just removed the pointless animations, and huge graphics that don't render right anyway...

Hudson really liked walking through the C5. The cool thing about the C5 is that it's really wide, and when they open both ends for the public to walk through, it's the only plane with no line to see the inside of. He also liked "all the planes doing the fancy tricks."