March 9, 2010 at 11:09 am
Two things that the typical hotel can and should do to be better than everyone else:
1. Provide real towels. I don’t understand why every hotel around offers those small, barely-fits-around-your-waist towels that no one loves. It would be so easy to offer regular-sized towels.
2. Provide real toilet paper. I also don’t get why hotels all feel that they have to offer that industrial strength stuff that’s barely softer than sandpaper. Bust out some Charmin and separate yourself from the competition.
Why don’t hotels do this stuff? Is there some industry rule that towels need to be small and toilet paper has to be rough?
December 26, 2009 at 9:55 pm
If the TSA/FAA is going to create a bunch of silly, new in-flight rules (see story here and read comments here) as a knee-jerk reaction to the attempted attack on Christmas day, I’m going to change my travel plans for 2010.
After missing most of the SEO/SEM conferences in 2009, I was hoping to attend more next year. But flying was already a big enough pain in the arse, and now it seems things will only be worse moving forward. I’m glad that I’ve already committed to speak at one event here in the Tri-Cities, and two others that are within driving distance. And at the moment, the only U2 show I’m planning to attend is also a short drive away. (I have Oakland tickets, too, but not sure about using them. If the TSA/FAA rules are going to be silly, I’ll probably sell those.)
Terrorists suck. Kneejerk reactions do, too.
November 13, 2009 at 3:00 pm
I’m not much of a gambler. Don’t have a clue how most of the dice games work. Don’t play cards enough to ever play for money. But I’ve been to Las Vegas a few times in the past and always had fun dropping a few dollars into a slot machine to see what might happen. And I was planning to do it again a couple weeks ago when I was in town for the U2 concert.
Only it seems times have changed and Vegas doesn’t want my money anymore.
That sign was on every slot machine I saw over the course of four days. You can’t insert coins. You can’t insert dollar bills. Apparently you have to find the casino desk and buy some kind of credit card-type thing and insert that into the machine when you want to play the slots.
Too much effort for casual gamblers like me.
I spent more than 3 hours sitting on my duff at the Las Vegas Airport on Sunday. I had change in my pockets and plenty of $1 bills. I would’ve surely dumped a lot of that into a slot machine, but it was too much work.
Not that it really matters and not that I really care, but I wonder how much casual money from people like me Vegas is missing out on with these new slot machines.
August 11, 2009 at 12:07 am
After the girls got back home last week, Sean and I took off for an overnighter in Seattle — boys night out of sorts, you could call it. It was perfect: 8th row seats at Safeco Field to see the Mariners and Tampa square off, an amazing game that ended with the Mariners winning 7-6 in 11 innings on a 2-run, walk-off HR with 2 outs and 2 strikes on Ryan Langerhans, and even a 4-star hotel room at a 2-star price (thanks to Priceline).
I’ve put 21 photos on Flickr. I think this one is my favorite because of the 4-level depth of field — from Crawford to Hernandez to the Rays coach to the fans. Pretty cool.
July 21, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Cari got home last night from a 4-day trip to Minnesota, and I decided to follow her flight on FlightAware.com just like she and the kids do when I’m traveling. Thought this image of her flight path was cool:
I like how they flew through the maze of storms approaching Minneapolis, and I really like how I can follow this kind of thing on the Internet. Technology is amazing, y’know?
February 25, 2009 at 11:02 pm
I’m no globe-trotting jet-setter, but I have stayed in plenty of hotel rooms in the past couple years. And I’ve never stayed in a room with as bad a bathroom as the Hyatt Hotel in Santa Clara, California.
How bad was the bathroom? Let me count the ways:
1. Sink
It’s bad enough that the sink sits up high, on top of the counter; everyone knows sinks should be below counter level. But look — the darn thing is sideways! Who’s the genius that decided we’ve been doing it wrong, all these decades of having the faucet to the rear of the sink?
2. Hot/Cold Faucet
Everyone knows that hot water is to the left and cold is to the right. That’s how it works when the faucet is behind the sink. So, in this sideways arrangement, you’d assume that pulling the faucet closer to you (i.e., to the left) would be for hot water. And you’d assume wrong. Not only is the sink sideways, but the faucet is also backwards; pulling the faucet closer (i.e., to what should be the left) is for cold water. Stupid.
3. Towel Rack
How do you explain putting the towel rack below the sink, where the water will splash all over the dry towels as you wash your hands and face? It’s a terrible spot for a towel rack, and it also means you have to lean a bit to get your face above the sink — you can’t get right up close to the counter.
4. Vertical Toilet Paper
Again, who needs years of familiarity with having a horizontal roll of toilet paper? Not the Hyatt. No, they have the TP sitting vertical, so all your learned muscle movements related to pulling and tearing the bum wipe are completely useless. Total fail.
5. Toilet Paper Placement
It’s not just the vertical stance, but also the terrible placement. You don’t really get a sense of the depth in this photo, but that roll of TP is way back against the wall, completely out of reach to anyone not named Plasticman. To get there, you have to turn your body, rotate your neck like Sybil, and contort your arm into a position that it wasn’t meant to form. I strained muscles I didn’t even know I had just reaching for some TP.
Why not put the TP near where the towel rack is (and hang it horizontally), then move the towel rack to the wall above the toilet … like at every other hotel on earth? And mix in a normal sink while you’re at it, Hyatt.
On the bright side, the water pressure in the shower was pretty good.
February 16, 2009 at 1:12 am
I have a lot of them coming up again this year. Not as many as last year, which was completely ridiculous. But still, it’s looking like I’m traveling at least once every month for the first half of the year.
And then the U2 tour starts in the second half of the year, so who knows what’s going to happen then.
Thing is … I think this may need to be the last year of so much work/business travel for me. I love going to the search marketing conferences and seeing all the great friends who I usually only trade emails with, but I practically go “off the grid” when I’m gone. The email backs up, and that’s a problem when you get about 200 emails per day (as I do). And I get no client work done, no personal work done, no U2-related work done, etc.
Most of all, every time I leave, I miss Cari and the kids more than ever. For a variety of reasons, I’m quite aware these days that our time is limited, and no one ever lay on their death bed thinking, I wish I’d spent more time traveling and working. I just don’t like being gone so much.
So I’m thinking next year I need to not be.
August 25, 2008 at 12:54 am
When I fly, it never fails: I always end up right near the loser who thinks the “Please turn off all electronic devices now” warning doesn’t apply to him. On one of my flights last week, the guy right in front of me kept talking on his cell phone for about three minutes — loudly, in a foreign language — after the crew asked for phones to be put away.
Then, on a different flight, as the flight attendant was walking down the aisle to check that everyone’s ready to go, I heard her say this in a loud, pointed tone of voice:
“No, you’re not turning it off. You’re sending a text. I’m not an idiot. Now please turn it off.”
Ha! Good for her, I say. I can’t stand the dopes who think the rules don’t apply to them.
June 25, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I have a friend getting married later this summer (Hi Phil), and finding a flight back east has become the biggest pain in the arse I can imagine. I’m trying to fly into either Philadelphia or Baltimore, and I almost always start on Orbitz because it lists lots of different airlines. (Kayak does the same thing, but Kayak mainly lists Orbitz fares when I search….)
So I check every day, usually a couple times a day, and have zero luck — prices are too high, or there’s a 10-hour layover in the Great Midwest, or this: crap price information.
I keep finding Northwest Airlines’ flights that are generally acceptable, like this one from earlier today:
Sure, I’ll leave at 6:00 am so I can get in early and relax. Price isn’t great, but Phil is only getting married once so let’s do it! Let’s hit that SELECT button and make that reservation!
I do that, and then I get this:
Ack!! That $619 flight has suddenly become a $1,400 flight. And worst of all, this has been going on forever. You’d think I’d learn my lesson and just skip the NWA listings, but they’re always the best combination of price and schedule … so I keep clicking … and I keep screaming at the computer.
I don’t know if NWA is to blame for this: Orbitz? NWA? The Others? The Dharma Initiative? Halliburton? Hillary Clinton? All I know is that I’m tired of it. Air travel is bad enough; making the reservation is supposed to be the easy part.
June 7, 2008 at 5:34 pm
I’m not one of those “I hate to travel” people, but my schedule so far in 2008 has me leaning in that direction more than ever. I’ve done more travel in the past four months than in any year of my life so far.
Where I’ve Been So Far This Year
It started with what was supposed to be a 2-day trip to Seattle in late January, but turned into a 3-day trip because the worst storm of the year shut down the Tri-Cities Airport. The photo at right is what my car looked like when I finally made it home. After that, the travel schedule went like this:
February 25-29: Santa Clara, CA
March 9-10: Portland, OR
March 10-12: Seattle
March 16-20: New York
March 28-31: Martinez, CA
April 20-22: Houston
April 22-24: Long Beach, CA
April 30-May 2: Seattle (I canceled this one, needed a rest.)
May 6-13: Philadelphia (and New York)
May 20-21: Portland, OR
June 2-5: Seattle
I get tired just looking at that list! But, if all goes well, the only traveling I’ll be doing between now and August is a quick drive to Portland later this month for a friend’s wedding. I can handle that. With air travel being as expensive as it is these days, and being such a complete hassle, I’m going to aim to stay home as much as possible. There’s a wedding in August I hope to go to, and a conference in September I’m already committed to. Other than that, I’ll be quite happy right where I am.
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