Calling Tom, he negotiated for a private room at the Stratosphere. One of Tom’s friends had five private suites booked for tonight that weren’t going to be used. All Roger had to do was cover the Gnu/Hurd Desktop Summit in Oregon. He’d have to do it alone and he had to bury the MCS story, but it seemed like a fair trade. “Tom used to give that stuff away to all the staff,” Roger thought to himself, “now we have to beg for it. Oh well, corporate sponsorship will do that to a person.”
Before leaving, Roger filed his report on MCS to his unofficial private blog. The story about the Xperience was filed on his official private blog and the overall conference report was filed for work. His unofficial personal blog was audio only, of course, with the voice modulated up to be ambiguously male or female. He was just one of many on secrets.blog. Even Cherise didn’t know which one was him – of course, he didn’t know which one was her, either.
He called the Stratosphere and ordered an ambience of candles and pink noise. He had asked for all the monitors to be turned off, but the maitre d’ said it took a full day advance order to have a no-video suite. Roger said that he would settle for a video ambience of ocean sunset, instead, because he didn’t want to be any trouble.
“No trouble at all sir, we’ll see you at 7:30,” said the maitre d’. Roger made one more call to his buddy, Grah. After that, he went upstairs to change into his tuxedo.