Right now I'm narrowcasting from the Hidden Valley in the....wait, lemme get out my card-key...I'm narrowcasting from the Hidden Valley of the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort. I don't know how to pronounce 'pointe' but I think it means 'point' in some language.

Overlooking Sunrise Level 4 and the Pointe in Tyme Grille & Tavern. I'm going to survey my arrival. I just watched a guy hunting the giant lizards and snakes of the Southwest but I'm not hunting the giant lizards and snakes of the Southwest tonight. I'm the network server point man on the team setting up the GoMobile2001 wireless networking conference. The location is somewhere outside Phoenix Arizona.

I arrived via an airplane this afternoon with five of my coworkers. We are mobile networking conference professionals. We make mobile networking conferences. We design the mobile network that the attendees of the mobile networking conference will network mobilly upon. Tonight we ate pizza and drank soft drinks that were chilled by ice in a grey plastic tub.

I was the first to jack-in. The A/V point man, a redhead in a black suit, provided the stereo-mini-phono jack into the conference PA system. I began to play an MP3 of The Carter Family from my laptop.

We met our partners-in-conference: the team from IBM, assorted security men - our 'muscle', if you must use the term, and Doug from Symbol Systems. I was let into salon C of the Grande Ballroom and saw Doug shuffling wireless pc-card adapters and stacking them in long rows like punchcards in a hopper. Our job was to slide those cards into the PCMCIA slots of 275 IBM R30 laptops. My job was to make those laptops deliver the mail.

The air crackled from static built up by the short pile carpet. It singed with the slash of boxcutters. Marketing schwag spilled out by the boxful onto said carpets. And I tore into the biggest boxes, the servers, the beasts that we would ride to the finish of this six day epic.

By the end of the night, cut short by one time zone, we had 2 networks. I could print and browse the interent. I could smell a way through the challenge of automatically adding logins and mail profiles for all the attendees to the Active Directory. I thought to myself that tomorrow would be a good day indeed. I will then speak of the inhabitants of this place, of it's character and layout, and of my reasons for being here. If they weren't obvious enough.

The first project, as I see it, is to assemble one specimen from the various offerings of schwag and photograph them individually in the context of some representative local physical feature. I will commence gathering tomorrow. I would like to gather samples and empirical evidence in a pseudo social science study. May my vigorousness never falter.