Browsing Tag: travel

    Miscellany

    Las Vegas: No Coins, No Bills

    November 13, 2009

    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.

    vegas-slots

    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.

    Miscellany

    Mariners v. Rays in photos

    August 11, 2009

    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.

    Felix Hernandez (& Carl Crawford)
    Miscellany

    Detour at 35,000 Feet

    July 21, 2009

    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:

    flight path

    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?

    Miscellany

    Bathroom = Usability Fail

    February 25, 2009

    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:

    bathroom-fail

    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.

    Miscellany

    Speaking of conferences & travel…

    February 16, 2009

    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.

    Miscellany

    Flight Attendants Getting Feisty

    August 25, 2008

    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.