6 o'clock is very early

I am sitting in a very weird position, here at 7:37 a.m. on a Monday morning.

First, I have been up since 5:30 a.m., which is one of the few times that I’ve been up at 5:30 a.m. in the last decade. Well, actually, ever. I was up that early to get here to the Cleary Centre to set up the wireless Internet for the Access 2002 conference. Unfortunately nobody else was up that early, including the engineering staff who were supposed to be here at 6 a.m. So I wandered around the bowels of the hall looking for a missing cable modem. People started to show up around 6:30 a.m., though, and we’re in action here.

Second, I am sitting at the back of the main hall, and directly ahead of me is the Detroit skyline, which seems close enough to be able to see the workers in the GM Tower at their desks. The sun is just coming up over Detroit, and I’ll soon find out whether it looks better in the day or the night. My taxi driver from the airport claimed I would be let down in the morning when I got to see Detroit in all its gritty glory.

Speaking of which, the taxi ride from the Windsor Airport to downtown Windsor was thrilling. Apparently there was some danger of getting “stuck behind the train,” — something that, from the way the taxi driver said it, seems tantamount to getting stuck forever. His solution to this horrible possibility was to drive as fast as his taxi would go, and to weave in and out of traffic constantly. We didn’t get stuck behind the train, and we made the trip in about 10 minutes. And I lived to tell the tale.