Portland is Weird

I don't normally get to travel outside of my regular sales territory, but this week there was a convention in Portland that my company wanted us to sponsor, but my colleagues on the west coast weren't available, so they asked me to cover it.  I've never been to Portland. (Well, at least not as an adult. My grandpa's brother lived in Oregon, and we visited them when I was a kid, so maybe I was in Portland, or maybe I wasn't.)  So I was excited to go.  I flew here Monday morning, and I'm flying home tonight leaving here at 10:40pm (taking the red-eye back to KC through Atlanta, since I might as well take the longest route possible since I'll be sleeping anyway).  The convention was the Open Source Convention (OSCON), which is a convention for open source software.  The amount of nerds in the place was astounding.  And also the amount of weirdos was similarly surprisingly high.  But I'm not sure how much of that was because it was a conference of people who have a high probability of being socially inept, and how much of it was just that it was in Portland.  I didn't know this ahead of time, but Portland is weird.  Very weird.  It's hard to describe, but there are just a lot of things about it that are just a little bit off or different.  But the weirdest thing was when I was at dinner with my coworker, and we spotted a guy riding by on a unicycle. (Um, I guess some people do that, but it's a little strange).  While playing the bagpipes. (Well, some people know how to play them, but wait, while riding the unicycle?)   While wearing a kilt and a Darth Vader mask.  (Wait, what are we talking about again?)  A quick Google search indicated that he's somewhat famous and is known as the Unipiper.  So good for him, I guess.  Also, one of my friends told me about the "Dream of the '90s" Youtube video from the show Portlandia.  It's frighteningly accurate.  What a strange place.  But it's been fun, mostly because the guy working the conference with me is one of my good friends at my company whom I don't get to see very often.  But it's also been tiring, as these things tend to be, which should make me easily able to sleep on my flight tonight.