khedron

L.A. Trade Show journal #3
Downtown · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 9:30pm

I'm at my hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It's the Moxy hotel, in one of the newer high-rises downtown. Actually a lot of the high-rises downtown are new to me. The last time I stayed in downtown LA was in the early 00s, and there's been a building boom since then with new hotels and residential towers.

I knew when I booked the Moxy that the rooms here are small. Like, tiny by US standards; and more like what I saw at salaryman hotels in Tokyo. But still I didn't expect it to be quite this small....



I have to squeeze past the foot of the bed to get to the other side. The only furniture in here is two tiny nightstands and a kid-sized chair. One of the nightstands is meant to double as a desk— and that's what the tiny chair is for.

Also, the gal at the front desk who checked me in gushed about my elite status (Marriott Titanium) and the upgrade they had for me. It's an upgrade to a City View room. Except the city view is a view of the convention center, two major freeways, and a freeway interchange.

One big plus, though— and this is the primary reason I booked at the Moxy— is that the convention center is right across the street. I won't have a long trek tomorrow to/from the show, which will especially be good if I need to make the trip twice.

Update: The longer I spend in this room the worse its design gets. It's like the designers didn't even spend 2 hours trying to stay in this room, even as a solo traveler, for even a few hours, let alone a full night. In addition to the problems I identified above, there's pretty much no horizontal surface onto which to place things. Need to lay out clothes to change into? Lay them on the bed. Need to open a briefcase to find something? Have to lay it on the bed. I do not like using my bed as a workbench, but here I have to! Hanging clothes is silly. The only places for hangers either (a) leave my clothes dragging on the ground because they're so low, or (b) have my clothes hanging over the front of the TV because, yes, that's where the hanger hooks are. And the lighting in this room is terrible. It's like living in a dive bar.

L.A. Trade Show journal #1
SJC Airport · Tue, 16 Sep 2025. 1:30pm

Today I'm headed off to Los Angeles. I'll be staffing my company's exhibit at AWS Connect tomorrow.

Travel to LA from here is fairly easy. I'm even flying through Burbank airport on this trip, which is so... cozy 😅... that it's fast to navigate and avoids all the hullabaloo of LAX. Well, it should be fast. But I'm flying Southwest, which means...



Yup, my flight is delayed. It looks like we're going to be 15 minutes late.

Thankfully I've arranged my schedule so being a little late this afternoon isn't a problem. I'm traveling in the afternoon rather than late at night— so a late flight doesn't mean getting to the hotel at midnight or later. I'm also not trying to jet in to LA tomorrow morning at dawn to work the show same-day.

Ditto on the return trip: I'm not trying to rush home late tomorrow night. Partly that's because airlines don't even seem to offer late evening flights to SJC from LAX/BUR anymore. But partly it's because my company is hosting an after party tomorrow evening. I've got to be a gracious co-host and be there for my customers and prospects. Which means I'll stay over Wednesday night and fly home Thursday morning.

All told, I'll be back a whiff under 48 hours after leaving.

Saul Gone is the finale of the Better Call Saul series. I finally watched it a few nights ago after pausing right at the end of the series for four months. This episode is interesting because it features Jimmy being at the height of his Saul Goodman persona, the swashbuckling lawyer who's about to get his own sentenced greatly reduced, and then, on the spur of a moment, throwing the Saul Goodman persona away and taking full responsibility for everything he did. That makes the title "Saul Gone" a double entendre. Saul is both gone away to prison and gone away as a persona.

Jimmy is at his swashbuckling best as Saul after he's apprehended by police in Omaha, where he was foolishly and pointlessly committing thefts. After being extradited to Albuquerque, federal prosecutors there read him a list of the crimes they have ample evidence to prosecute him for. "Life plus 90 years," the lead prosecutor says as he tots up all the likely sentences. Then he offers Jimmy a deal of just 30 years in a plea bargain to avoid trial. It would seem Jimmy will be lucky to see freedom again before he dies of old age.. Uh-oh,... "Better Call Saul"!

Swashbuckling as Saul Goodman, Jimmy tells the assembled prosecutors and victims' families that he, too, is a victim. He recounts the night he first met Walter White and how Walt kidnapped him, took him to the desert, and made him kneel in front of an open grave with a gun to his head. I'm a victim, too, Saul explained, asserting that everything he did from that point forward was in fear of being killed if ever he refused Walt.

The lead prosecutor sees through Saul's story. "You expect a jury to believe that?" he sneers. Saul responds that it takes just one juror [to believe a story and give him a mistrial]. Saul taunts the prosecutor about his unblemished record— having never lost a case, would he want to lose this one? He exploits the man's ego. And after a long night of negotiation, he's whittled his plea bargain down to just 7½ years.

Jimmy's well crafted plan goes out the window when he gets to court. He sees Kim Wexler sitting in the audience area— and he recognizes that the plea bargain story he's told the court would jam up her up. Apparently he's lied about her involvement in Howard Hamlin's death— though exactly what lies he told happened off screen. He begs the judge to address the court. He starts his story from earlier in the episode about Walter White holding a gun to his head over an open grave in the desert... but then says that everything he did after that, he did willingly.

The court room becomes a zoo with Jimmy's co-counsel demanding the record be stricken, the prosecutor demanding he be allowed to continue speaking, and the judge demanding order. But when it's all done, Jimmy's told the version of the story that has him taking responsibility for things. Including driving his brother, Chuck, to suicide. ("That's not even a crime," his co-counsel chides him.) "And my name's McGill, James McGill," he concludes. Saul's gone.

I've been pretty sanguine about the layoffs at my company this past week. I'm surprised how sanguine I've been about it. That makes me wonder, why am I so sanguine, this time? And yes, it's "this time" because this isn't the first layoff we've had this year. We had one in January that also impacted my team heavily. And while there were none in 2024, there were two in 2023 and one in 2022.

I think an obvious dimension of the answer for why I'm so sanguine is that, after all of these rounds of layoffs, I've become numb to it. Each one of them has hit my department, along with others. Each one has resulted in the dismissal of decent workers who were getting the job done, along with some who weren't. It's always when good people get whacked that I take it harder. This time there were more good people whacked, as a proportion of those dismissed, than last time. That tells me I should be taking it harder. And that's where the numbing effect comes in.

It's possible I'll be less sanguine about this layoff as take more time to think about it. The effects of January's layoff got worse and worse for weeks as flawed planning and execution became clearer and smart, capable people chose to quit because they lost faith in Management. (In the tech industry we call the latter brightsizing, a play on words against the euphemism "right-sizing" that Corporate America created to put a positive spin on the term "downsizing".) Within two weeks every seasoned manager in my department quit.

Indeed I already see reason for growing alarm over this layoff. This layoff hit the sales team hard. Cutting sales people is a pretty extreme thing in business. Sales people generate the revenue! I mean, cutting development staff has consequences, too, but those consequences often take 12-18 months to materialize. Cutting sales staff means a hit to the company's numbers next quarter.

And it's not like Management was just "trimming the fat". We were already running lean. When you make significant cuts to a team that's lean, you're not just trimming fat— or excess capacity. You're trimming muscle. You're dismissing good people who were doing work that counted. And the people left can't just "pick up the slack". They weren't slacking.

Management even acknowledges that they cut people doing real work. They've told us to think in the coming days and weeks about what we won't do because it's just not high priority enough. And while they've phrased that with empathetic words and intonation, and framed it to imply that we individual contributors have agency, it's starting to stink like 5 day old fish.... Why are they asking us to figure out what work gets cut? That should have been part of their strategy in planning the layoff!

I did it. Tonight I finished the series Better Call Saul. Recall that I got up and walked away from it... four months ago now. And I was only 2 episodes from the end!

Yeah, the last several episodes of the series, which were a lengthy flash-forward to Saul's antics months after the finale of Breaking Bad, when he's in hiding in the midwest with a fake identity and worries his cover has been blown, became too tedious for me. I quit watching after two flash-forward episodes. But tonight I came back to finish them up.

Why? Why finish the series now? I think the main reason is I wanted it off my plate. I haven't watched anything else on streaming these past 4 months. I guess I've felt like this was in the way, unfinished, and that I couldn't move on to anything else until this was done. So tonight I decided to Git 'Er Done.

I'll write about the last two episodes soon. I'm putting this marker down right now, though, in case it turns out to be another gap of 4 months until I write. 😂 But I hope I'll get to it this weekend. Then I'll be free to go on and watch other stuff on the many streaming services we pay for again.

Napa Trade Show blog #8
Back home - Wed, 10 Sep 2025, 5:30pm.

I'm back home from the trade show in Napa. It's earlier than expected. Booth visits were slow again today, tapering off to nearly nil by 2pm, so our event coordinator encourage those of us not already booked to stay overnight to head home early. I left at 3, which was just an hour before the official closing time, and used that early start to mostly beat traffic on the way home. Still, there was some traffic, making it a 2 hour drive. I got home at 5pm. That's 48 hours + 3 hours after I left on Monday.

It's just as well most of us left early. Our team spirit was close to nil as we spent most of the day trying to figure out what's going on with a layoff today. Oh, we totally put on game faces for talking to customers and prospects. Selling was the one thing we all could be positive about. But the moment it was just us coworkers again, the dismal "WTF is going on?" discussions started back up.

Speaking of those dismal discussions, it looks like tomorrow morning is going to be back-to-back-to-back meetings with various levels of leadership "explaining" the layoffs to us. I quote explaining because do we really need 3 hours of meetings on the topic, with each layer of executive management needing to have their own say? That says to me we have too many layers of executives. Maybe they should have laid off one of them. But of course they didn't.

Napa Trade Show blog #6
Getting ready for Day 2 - Wed, 10 Sep 2025, 10am.

After staying up too late Monday night at the trade show then having to get up really early for a full day yesterday, I was careful last night to pace myself better. It wasn't so much that I made a mistake in pacing Monday night; I didn't. The problem was that I was already running at full speed when a bit of illness tripped me up for 4 hours. It reminded me that I need to under-schedule my day so that, if and when something goes wrong, there's spare time to devote to fixing it.

Thus last night I bowed out of the celebratory dinner, the post-dinner concert, and the post-post-dinner piss-up at the bar. Instead I went out for a quiet dinner offsite by myself, got back before 10pm, and was lights-out at 11pm. Then this morning I slept in until almost 8am. I was able to do that because I don't have any fixed responsibilities until the show at 11:30am. It felt so decadent getting 9 hours of sleep while at a trade show!

So far this morning I've been catching up on work. One of the things about working trade shows in sales is that sales remains the "day job" while the show is also taking up most or all of the day. So we salespeople are always stealing moments here and there to catch up on emails, respond to Slack messages, and keep business moving forward with all of our customers. It's relaxing, though, having only one day job this morning. 🤣 My shift in the booth begins at 11:30am. Update, 10:45am: Today's keynote ended really early, and my colleagues have called me to come to the booth as it's being mobbed.

Napa Trade Show blog #4
On break in my room - Tue, 9 Sep 2025, 2pm.

Today the vendor part of the trade show kicked off. Yesterday was arrivals and was also a training day for people who wanted classes from the main sponsor. Plus a chance for our team to enjoy dinner together before everyone's worn out from long days.

I was up early today for internal meetings from 7 until 8:30 then walked over to the trade show at 9. It's so convenient being in the same hotel as the show— and that hotel not being a Las Vegas mega-resort with 3,000 rooms in multiple towers where getting from a sleeping room to a conference room entails a walk of a mile engulfed by clouds of 25 years of accumulated second-hand cigarette smoke.

Right now I'm back at my room taking a break after lunch. It's been a slow start at the booth today. Why slow? Frankly, because of poor planning by the conference organizer.

I got to the booth at 9 today... and it was pretty much dead. It was dead until after 12pm because the keynote speeches were running. We knew the keynotes would be going and they'd suck all the attention away from the vendor area. But the keynotes all ran long, gobbling up the breaks between sessions when attendees might come out to visit us. The physical layout of the show disfavored us, too.

Yes, it's important for a show to support its vendors. We vendors help sponsor the show! We're all paying money to be here. ...And I don't just mean spending money on salaries and travel costs. We're paying fees in the five figure range directly to the host company just to be here. That's in addition to what we pay the hotel for our rooms, the construction team for assembling the booth, and all the travel costs of the staff. In return conference organizers need to treat the vendors well.

What does it take to treat vendors well? Give the attendees reasons to visit us. Put ample break times in the schedule for attendees to browse the vendors exhibit area. Put the free snacks and drink in the vendor area, so there's extra reason to come by. Put the lunch and dinner either in the vendor area or on the other side of us, so attendees have to walk past us.

So far today these show organizers have not done the above. There have been no breaks for attendees to come visit us. Everyone's running long on presentations— one ran 30 minutes over— and they're just slotting the next speaker immediately after the previous. Then at lunch today, lunch was in the opposite direction from where we vendors are. People had no reason to walk past our displays. In fact, worse than no reason they specifically had reason not to go near us— because we were in the opposite direction and nobody had extra time because the schedule was still 15 minutes behind.

Now, you might scoff at supporting vendors at the show as the tail wagging the dog. People are here for the show, right? We're just the advertisers everyone would be happier ignoring. But like advertisers in commercial TV, we're paying to help support the show. We're here because we want the opportunity to talk to prospective customers. And we have metrics. We measure the number of contacts in the booth ("raw leads") as well as the quality of conversations ("qualified leads"). And when those metrics are low, especially the qualified leads score, we stop sponsoring the show.

This is our third year at this show. The past two years it was very productive for us. This year, unless things turn a massive 180° later today, may be our last at this show.

Napa Trade Show blog #2
At the hotel - Mon, 8 Sep 2025, 5:30pm.

I've joked various times before that Every trip, I forget one thing. It's a joke not just because it's amusing but also because it's not strictly true. I mean, there are some times I don't forget anything. And there are plenty of times I forget to bring something I thought about bringing but turned out to be inconsequential anyway. But occasionally I forget something that's a doozy. And that's when the joke is funniest... though that's also when I'm the butt of it. 🤣

I forgot something that's a doozy on this week's trip to a small software trade show in Napa. I'm planning to dress up as Jenkins the Butler part of the time at this show. "What's Jenkins?" Here's a reminder from a show I did in March this year:



The doozy is that while I packed my tuxedo shirt and jacket for this trip I forgot my tuxedo shirt pins, cuff links, and bow tie. The cuff links are the least important of that set. The shirt pins, medium-important; the shirt has buttons for people who don't have pins, but pins are critical to the overall authenticity of dressing in a tuxedo. And the bow tie is crucial. Jenkins isn't Jenkins without the red bow tie!

I realized the mistake when I was driving across the bridge over the Carquinez Strait Monday afternoon. Why there, on the bridge? No particular reason; that's just where it suddenly occurred to me, "Oh, crap, I forgot these important things!" And the bridge is a landmark on trips along that corridor. For Monday's trip it signaled that I was about 3/4 of the way there in terms of travel time.

It was too far from home to want to turn back. I'd add minimum 3 hours, likely much closer to 4 with rush-hour traffic, to my drive. I decided instead I'd have to see what I can find once I got to the hotel in Napa.

Once at the hotel I looked up menswear stores in the area and started calling around. One, a name-brand place you probably have in the big city nearest you, wasn't sure what "tuxedo shirt pins/studs" are until after I explained it— and then confirmed they don't carry them. With the help of the hotel concierge I found a local men's suit shop that was open 'til 5:30pm, called ahead, and drove to quaint downtown Napa. Shirt studs, cuff links, and a bow tie set me back $50. The things I do for my craft!

It's been another taking-it-easy around home weekend here. That's much like last weekend. And much like last weekend, taking it easy around home was Plan B. Plan A this weekend had been to stay at a resort in Mammoth Lakes on the eastern Sierra but heavy smoke and a road closure due to wildfire led us cancel the trip Thursday. So, what did we do instead?

Saturday morning Hawk went to the monthly flea market at DeAnza College in Cupertino that she likes to visit. She trolled primarily for gems but also found some cookware and a boardgame worth buying. Meanwhile I stayed home and slept in.

Saturday afternoon we went out for lunch together then visited the Mountain View Art & Wine Festival. While it had some of the same vendors as the Los Altos Art & Wine Festival in July it had a fair number that were different. We enjoyed strolling around past all the booths. Ultimately we didn't buy anything.

One reason we didn't buy anything is that while wine is right in the event's name, and I really enjoy wine tasting, I just don't find what's on offer at these festivals that compelling. It's too expensive. Ditto for the beer they offer, too. And that beer is generally stuff I could find in any supermarket anyway. I look at the prices and selection and think to myself, "I'd be way happier drinking at home on my patio." So that's what I did!



I even tried a beer that's new to me. It's one I picked up during a shopping trip at the liquor store a few days ago. Mostly I was buying beers I already know and enjoy but I saw this one, a variety similar to one I've enjoyed before from the brand, and figured it'd be worth a try. It was more or less what I imagined it would be. And it was good.

Saturday evening we went out to Comedy Sportz in San Jose. Wow, it's been like 20 years since we last saw a Comedy Sportz show. (They're a small chain of community-level improv comedy theaters.) They have changed... pretty much not at all... in the past 20 years. That's both a good thing and a bad thing. And it reminded us that we need to get back into going out to live shows more often.

Saturday night we capped off our "date night" with a late dinner after staying for the encore performance at Comedy Sportz. There aren't a huge variety of restaurants open at 10:30pm on a Saturday evening anymore. Covid and its aftereffects have really slammed the restaurant industry. But the chain restaurant we stopped for dinks and appetizers at was doing brisk business at 10:30pm, so it's clear there's still some demand out there even if most businesses can't figure out how to serve it profitably.

Sunday morning we both puttered around until almost noon, then went out for what we call a "ritual" lunch. Our lunch ritual is to eat at a casual restaurant and linger over the food with our smartphones/tablets out. 15+ years ago we did it with the Sunday newspaper! It's fun to have these long term habits and update them with the times.

Sunday afternoon we treated ourselves to ice cream then came back home for an afternoon at the pool.



As is our usual for the pool, we spent some time doing walking laps in the water, then relaxed floating around, then took a soak in the hot tub (well, I did that solo while Hawk stayed in the main pool), then dried off on lounge chairs while reading from our smartphones/tablets again.

Now we're taking it easy indoors (walking laps in the pool takes a lot out of us!) until dinnertime. We're talking about grilling hot dogs for dinner. Exact plans are still up in the air.

Tomorrow will be back to work for me— including 3 or 4 days of travel. So on that basis I'm not totally pissed about giving up our Sierra trip this weekend. Call it only 50% pissed. 🤣 Relaxing at home this weekend has been a nice alternative.