I'm curious what everyone here thought of the venue. I think the ballroom was phenomenal. It was large enough that the sounds weren't so overwhelmingly loud. There was a lot of room to maneuver.

I generally liked the hotel. The room was nice and comfortable. The staff was really the only sore-point. I wouldn't have minded if I hadn't asked any questions, but we were giving incorrect information on two things that caused us to spend more money than we wanted.

Well, there is one thing that really irritated me about the hotel. In my opinion, the Internet prices were extortionate. $12.95 / 24 hours / device. This is one of the items the staff did not lead us properly on. We were told $12.95/night. That's it. Because of that, I didn't read the print on the sign-up page which clearly stated PER DEVICE. I didn't notice it until I signed up two iPads and an iPhone. I was so irritated by it, I considered trying to hook up an AP in my room and NATing my devices. I had the equipment. I just couldn't be bothered.

Nothing ruined the weekend, though. It was great and TPF did a fantastic job from my viewpoint.

Oh we saw that! My wife moved a bottle and put it back down. We had to check with the hotel to make sure we weren't charged. I suppose you could do something like Indiana Jones did with the statue... you may or may not have to run for your life afterward.

For the food thing, I'm fairly lucky in that I have a few friends who live in the DFW area that could tell us where to go. We met up with them for lunch and dinner on Saturday at a couple of different places. There was a road less than a mile from the hotel (Oak Lawn Ave.) that had a lot of neat, funky eating places.

We ate at the media place the first night. The food was okay. (Actually, we had a interesting cauliflower side that was awesome.) The MAIN trouble with that place though was the noise. I wanted a break from the exhibit hall noise and this was not the place to go.

I got mainly coffee and bananas at the place that "proudly serve[d]" Starbucks. I looked deep into the servers' eyes. I didn't see any Starbucks pride there.

If I go next year and I'm still on Pinside, maybe I can throw out a few places.

We stayed at the hotel and our parking was free. We only had trouble parking on our return Saturday night, but that makes sense considering the tournament.