Washington DC

I’m giving a talk at DC PHP in… oh… 40 minutes.  I started the day in New York City, and hopefully will make it back there tonight.  Long day.

This morning, when I got to Penn Station, I tried to use the ticket machine’s barcode scanner.  It usually scans my confirmation page and prints out the tickets.  Nothing.  I put down all my stuff and tried a bunch of variations, but the barcode scanner continued to ignore me.  Fine.  I took out my credit card and retrieved my tickets that way.  I picked up my coat and… it was all wet.  Ew.  I wiped my coat off on my jeans, figuring jeans would dry out faster.  As I was walking over to the trains, I had an unpleasant thought.  Maybe that wasn’t water… I sniffed my coat.  Ugh.  Nope, not water.  Now, not only does my coat smell like hobo piss, I brilliantly wiped it on my jeans so now I smell like hobo piss.  Hopefully I’m talking in a big, well-ventilated room.

So far, Washington gets an A+.  The train station was great (although possibly Penn Station is such a cesspool that my expectations have been lowered, but it was really nice) and the information booth gave me good directions to the Metro (which I promptly ignored, but that was hardly their fault).  The Metro was really nice (padded seats!), fast, well-marked, and made sense.

I was walking along K Street and saw the Washington Monument, which I took a picture of like a total tourist.  Then I realized that there was a white house under it, possibly the white house?  I was actually kind of excited to see it in real life, so I moved in to get a better picture.  Once I was closer, I realized it was just a white house, not the White House.  I took a picture of it anyway.  It was probably something.

Edit: my talk went great and the people were super nice.  Here are the pictures I took of DC.