Phthursday Musings: Texas Talkin'

I publish this week from San Antonio, Texas, a city I’d never really thought that much about, but which I think may be one of the more curious of American cities. I’m here for work, two weeks after having been in Las Vegas for work, and I have this sort of mad tumble of thoughts about these places, and, well, I went off the rails, but, I think you’ll agree, gloriously so:

I think walking around downtown San Antonio at night has made it a little easier for me to figure out the point I wanted to make about Las Vegas so here goes:

The Las Vegas Strip is shockingly clean. Even though the nominal main activity is gambling, even though traditional Las Vegas is this sort of rough and tumble Old West place… today, at least when you’re in the core Strip areas, it’s like being in Anaheim, if the hotels were simply part of Disneyland proper.

And yet Las Vegas is still known as Sin City. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, and you see a lot of weird stuff if you walk up and down the Strip, and of course all of these places are casinos. There’s a raging dissonance there and it’s this crazy American thing where what they’ve essentially done is made all that sinning very antiseptic. I was in Las Vegas 33 years ago and it had definite rough edges. The Diamonds Are Forever Las Vegas was glamorous and glitzy but also dirty and smoky and I feel like that was always part of the point. But what they’ve done is, they’ve taken away the friction. And I think that makes a lot of sense if you’re about to ride “It’s a Small World”, it’s supposed to be magical, but Las Vegas is supposed to be decadent, and I don’t think decadence is supposed to be so damn spotless.

All that said, while in Las Vegas, I got to see the Sphere, and it is indeed super impressive. They were showing a movie about 50 minutes long and it’s like IMAX on steroids, complete with seats that shake to provide an alleged 4-D experience. It’s not the kind of thing I would have done if it wasn’t part of a work outing, but I’m very happy to have had the opportunity:

San Antonio isn’t a city I’d thought a lot about. Aside from The Alamo, and the nearby Alamodome (where the Spurs play), I wouldn’t have been able to name any actual place in the city. Having walked around the downtown a little bit though… this place has more interesting contradictions. It’s less sure what it’s all about but it’s more honest and appealing for it.

I visited the Alamo, which is one of the stranger historic sites I’ve seen, both in terms of its siting and in terms of the interpretation offered. If you don’t know or have forgotten, the Alamo was the site of a historic Catholic mission, where in 1836 the Mexican army under President General Antonio López de Santa Anna laid siege to a band of separatist fighters, ultimately killing most of them, most famously Davy Crockett. Weeks later, separatists fighting under the leadership of Sam Houston routed Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto, effectively securing Texan independence.

The entire size of the mission grounds is hardly more than the size of a square block, and the church itself is small, and only two rooms even had a roof originally. Unlike other battle sites I’ve been to, you don’t really get a sense that a military event happened, but this is perhaps a side effect of the siting and presentation. The mission was adjacent to the small community of San Antonio de Béxar, and today, the site is essentially at the center of the downtown of a city of almost 1,500,000 people. That’s right: San Antonio, Texas is the seventh-largest city in the United States.

So this major historic site is like a national park or something, right? Nope. It’s owned by the State of Texas and administered by a non-profit. If you read all of the extensive signage around the site, you get almost no historic interpretation whatsoever, not a whit of explanation as to what this very famous battle was about. If you tour the church, you learn about its pre-garrison history and about how they’re trying to preserve it.

Now, I didn’t go to the adjacent museum. I can’t speak to what might have been in there. What I can tell you is that I saw nothing that even hinted at how Mexico had abolished slavery and the rebellion was largely an attempt to preserve slavery in Texas. The Texan creation story - the whole Lone Star State thing - well, shall we say, it’s a little complicated.

San Antonio seems to have deeply internalized the complication that is Texas. The Alamo - a sober, involved, incredibly romanticized historic site - is somehow also the centerpiece of a wacky tourist destination. There’s literally a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not right across the street! The adjoining Riverwalk is a series of open air midscale bars, clustered in numbers I’ve rarely seen, and then an artwalk with things like this:

There are homeless people around, and there are Black and Mexican guys on skateboards, and at night there are horse-drawn carriages bejeweled with crazy lighting, and there’s some fascinating Spanish revival architecture, and then other buildings that just don’t match, and there’s a lot of old-school neon signage, and police on bicycles, and the river itself seems so small that Salt Creek back home would laugh at it, and it all feels like a weird combination of authentic and awkward, and I wish I could see the rest of it, or at least the rest of it that isn’t just massive Texan sprawl. At first I don’t think I liked the vibe I was getting from San Antonio, but finally it hit me:

San Antonio has grit to it in a way that Las Vegas should but doesn’t. And I like that. It’s big and complicated, just like humanity.

It also has a big piece of twisted orange metal like all good American cities:

My company doesn’t have customers in Las Vegas or San Antonio, and our corporate parent is based in Canada, so what am I doing in these places?

Las Vegas was selected as a location for a series of small meetings called Business Unit Service Reviews, or BUSRs. San Antonio is the site of a large corporate gathering called Operational Excellence, where over 500 people from a lot of business units gather to learn about best practices. And, well, I’m a vice president now, so I get to go to things like these.

There are a number of reasons why I don’t write too much about work here, not the least being that I don’t think much of what I might share would be of much interest to most readers, which is kind of an extraordinary thing to claim given the sorts of things I do write about.

At this particular conference, I somehow wound up as a presenter in the general session. This meant that I had 12 minutes to talk over the top of a PowerPoint presentation. Four other people gave similar presentations before and after me, all of them on the theme of their experiences dealing with a cyberattack and how painful it was. But my presentation wound up being about how one of our customers experienced an attack, and it led directly to our company become a managed services provider (meaning, our customers migrated from on premise servers to cloud-based servers where we manage the hosting solution), and now our company has over $2,000,000 in annual revenue we didn’t have six years ago.

Naturally, I framed all of this by referencing a console video game from 1980:

Yes, Texas Instruments released a game called The Attack, and yes, it was bloody awful. I did not actually own this game, but I did rent it at one point from Learn-A-Bit, a housefront store which, yes, rented TI 99/4A games in the 1980s.

I wore my brown western shirt with silver threading, which turned out to be an even more impressive choice than I expected, because the silver thread apparently shined in the heavy light pointed at the stage. And I cracked jokes about cybersecurity and the pandemic, because who wouldn’t?

My boss claims that someone came up to her afterwards and said “Your VP of R&D is bitchin’!”

No, I am not making any of this up, and yes, this is all completely ridiculous. The last time I gave a presentation in front of 500+ people, I’m pretty sure, was when I was co-chair of the Green Party national convention in 2008, and no, I am not making that up either, and yes, in retrospect, that was completely ridiculous too.

It turns out that one of the more important skills I picked up was PowerPoint, which on a couple of occasions I trained some of the good people of Peoria on circa 2003. (Mostly I trained good people of Peoria on Excel and Access.) It’s not that if you don’t use PowerPoint you can’t learn it, but having used it for 20+ years now, even though I don’t especially like it, I don’t much have to think about it, I just do what I have to do, and, yeah, that’s pretty useful.

Another useful skill I picked up was the ability to talk about things I don’t actually know anything much about, like, you know, cybersecurity. The thing is, I don’t need to know very much detail. In putting together the presentation, what I needed was to find transitional sentences where a little bit of information could tie things together.

The most professional presentations at the conference were a lot like TED talks. Mine was not. TED talks have their place, but people can only handle so much of that. I like to add pop culture references and get people thinking about what’s going on, as opposed to trying to be super precise with my pixels and sentences. I try to talk less like Steve Jobs and more like, I don’t know, Eddie Izzard from Dress to Kill:

At this time I should be ver ver clear that I am not seriously attempting to compare myself to Eddie Izzard. I am merely pointing out where I get my inspiration from to get up in front of a few hundred tech professionals and talk about cybersecurity incidents by referencing a terrible console video game created 44 years ago.

Now, my wife is horrified by the prospect of getting up and talking in front of 500 people. But here’s the tradeoff. Presenting to all of those people? It was fine (with one exception, that being that I wasn’t prepared for the lighting.) But the after party at the end of the conference, where a country band was jammed into a big conference room with atrocious sound, and a freaking mechanical bull was brought in, and there was all-you-could-drink booze but no food? That’s what I can’t really handle, and I tell you this, that’s never going to change.

For what it’s worth, I really did have a number of people come up and tell me how much they enjoyed my presentation… but really, I was just hoping someone would come up to me and talk about the TI 99/4A.

I went hunting and found the Classic99 emulator - not the one I remember, but at this point I’m not sure what I had. It comes with a lot of ROMs, but The Attack isn’t one of them. I went with the next closest available thing though and loaded Tombstone City:

This was also not exactly a good game, but it was much better than The Attack.

I also loaded Chisholm Trail:

Chisholm Trail is a somewhat better game, I suppose, because I remember that it was a game where it seemed like it was always challenging when in the highest levels.

The truly amazing thing though is that this emulator comes with Terminal Emulator II and a DLL for the SPEECH SYNTHESIZER which means I get to do this to close everything out: