Hal's Blog

Not quite totally abandoned

2010-03-04T09:40:00.000-08:00

OK, yeah, pretty much abandoned.

Two excuses for not posting here for the last 8 months:

Laziness. Microblogging at Facebook is just easier.
Even less interesting in my life. My travel has gotten much more infrequent and without that, the life of a working geek just doesn't include much worth writing about.

I've had to lock down comments on this blog. Since I'm not posting, all I'm getting is spam comments.

Yard project, after the landscaping

2009-06-29T05:59:00.000-07:00

So here we are after the huge backyard landscaping project. We had this work done and boy are we glad we didn't attempt it ourselves.

Prior to the start of this, there was an ugly concrete "brick" retaining wall across part of the yard. That's now gone. There were two large areas where Bermuda grass had been allowed to grow over gravel, one from a giant play-set, one from an above-ground pool. The pool and play-set are long gone, now the gravel that was under them is also gone with new St. Augustine sod laid down.

There wasn't a single plant anywhere in the back yard. Now we've got somewhere around 200 plants in six beds. Three beds, each between 15 and 20 feet long are along the edge of the patio. Two beds about 20 to 25 feet long run along the side fences. And one bed runs the entire length of the back fence, about 70 to 75 feet.

Pictures from top to bottom are:

Looking along the length of the patio. Foreground right is the old dining set, soon to be replaced.
View of the large seating area, opposite end of the patio from pic above. New furniture here, most of it covered up. I'm going to build about a 16-ft square pergola over that area to help with the sun. The back of the house faces south-east so it gets a lot of morning to afternoon sun.
Essentially same view as the one above but pulled back to show one of the side beds. The lighter green grass is all new (and thirsty!). You can see how the yard slopes down in this shot.
View down the length of the back bed. This bed is somewhere between 70 and 75 feet long. You can see some tiny colored flags and a line of dead grass out in front of the bed. that's where one of the sprinkler lines was put in. The area in front of this bed (to the left in the picture) gets swampy when we get our normal heavy spring rains. We're planning to put in a dry creek bed meandering through there to hold the water and break up things a bit.
Not a very good shot but this is, obviously, looking back at the house and patio from out in the hard. Perspective is odd because I'm down at the bottom of the slope looking up.

Beginning of the Big Yard Project

2009-06-07T18:02:00.000-07:00

We've finally admitted that the work to be done in the back yard is beyond our time and muscles.

Hired a landscaper to come in and do some serious grunt work and build beds. First step was Saturday June 6th. She marked the bed locations and sprayed gallons of Round Up on the Bermuda grass that needs to be killed off for regrading and/or resodding.

The marking is so that the guy coming in a couple of days to put in a sprinkler system in a couple of days will know where to put 'em.

Wow, guess I missed May entirely

2009-06-07T17:59:00.001-07:00

Without any business travel to speak of, my life is pretty mundane. The month of May slipped by without anything interesting enough to even write about.

I did get a business trip to Pleasanton in Northern California last week but it was work, work, work. Ten to twelve hour days, dinner, bed, and do it all over again.

Refinished the front door

2009-04-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Not very exciting except that now I don't have to look at the deteriorated front door any longer. The house we moved into about three years ago has a nice wood door with leaded glass. But it looked like it had never been cared for in any way. And it's fairly exposed. No significant overhang to protect it and faces mostly west so it catches a lot of weather straight on.

I didn't think to get any good "before" pictures. The top shot is, obviously, the door in progress but well along. My neighbor Paul helped me with this project. We got it down and sanded it down to bare wood. Between three and four hours with an assortment of power sanders, sanding sponges, and plain ol' hand sanding. There was some water damage along the bottom panel and the molding around the raised panels was a real mess.

We stained it, each working down one side, with a walnut stain that matched the original color fairly well and looks good with the brick. Then I put on two coats of satin polyurethane.

With drying time for everything that took most of the day on Good Friday and all of Saturday. It really could have used a third coat of polyurethane but we had company coming over on Easter Sunday and it didn't seem like a good idea to leave up the OSB board that was screwed in place in the doorway. :)

The end result isn't perfect but it is so much better than it was.

The next generations out in the bluebonnets

2009-03-23T11:40:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post. Been horrible about blogging. No time, no time! Aryn and Anna came to stay for the weekend this past weekend. A friend of ours let us know that the bluebonnets behind her house were in full bloom.

So we loaded everyone up along with Alice's DSLR. Here's what I think is the best of about 20 shots.

Sunny morning..

2009-02-12T07:53:00.001-08:00

Walking into the living room on a bright sunny morning like today, I am struck by how much I like this house. We liked our previous home but the living room in that house was like a cave. This one has lots of windows and higher ceilings to give it a terrific bright, cheery feel.

Of course, it took a lot of imagination to see what it could be with the previous owner's ... decor (lower picture). White walls, whitish carpet, and not much imagination.

I've got to say that the previous owner probably wouldn't recognize the interior of the house.

The home office

2009-01-27T13:02:00.000-08:00

Three reasons for this post:

Finally got pictures hung on the wall behind the computers
The room is about as picked up and clean as it ever gets
Might soon be my only office.

After a very long time sitting in the closet I finally just hung up the pictures for this wall. Mostly from my travels in 2007.

Top left is a piece of aboriginal art from Australia purchased on my first trip to Sydney
Top middle is a shot of the Eiffel Tower purchased in a little shop in Monte Martre on my second trip to Paris.
Top right is a triptych of iconic Sydney sights purchased at a street market on my second trip to Sydney
Bottom left is a panorama of the Seattle skyline purchased at a shop in Pike's Market on our Vancouver/Victoria/Seattle vacation trip.
Bottom middle is a photo of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall of China. Not the section I visited, that was Mutianyu. Purchased from the photographer at a flea market in Beijing.
Bottom right is a Paris skyline with one of the Notre Dame gargoyles in the foreground. Purchased at the same time as the other Paris picture.

The room is in decent shape for a change. I tend to pile stuff on the footstool, a bad habit I'm trying to break. My shiny big 26-inch wide screen monitor is paired with the older 19-inch wide screen in a dual-monitor setup. That's where I spend 8 to 10 hours a day. I've taken to using RDP to the laptop so I don't have to change between the two keyboards. The solo monitor to the left is for our home computer, Alice's laptop, which happened to be gone when I shot this.

And finally, the office situation. My employer is going to compress more people into cubicles to save on office rent. Our Houston space has shrunk from occupying our own campus of four buildings to selling the campus and compressing into 3 then 2 and soon to be 1 building. For the moment there are still more employees than can fit even in cubicles. So the solution is to convert some people to office-at-home with a few cubes fitted for "hoteling" (i.e., empty with a phone and network port). Since I work about 9 days out of 10 at home anyway, I've volunteered. The main upshot for me is I'd lose my office phone. I tap into that via some magic software that causes my office extension to ring my work Blackberry and, more importantly, lets me make calls that originate at the office. We'll see how this proceeds.

Another project done: Laundry room tile

2009-01-07T23:00:00.000-08:00

(Catching up on past events, however unexciting)

Before and after pics of the laundry room floor. It is so much better. Cruddy, worn vinyl and beat-up rusty drain pan all gone. And all the squeaks removed in the process.

As the long break I had at Christmas wore on, Alice reminded me: "If you let this vacation slide by you'll never have time to do the tile and you'll have to hire someone." When she's right, she's right.

This occupied all my free time from New Year's Eve until January 6th. Not a horrible job but my knees are getting too old for this. Kneepads, of course, but the straps on those damn things irritated the back of my knees almost as much as kneeling on hard floors did the front.

I did a lot better job of working this room so that I wasn't waiting for things to dry. When I did the hall bathroom back last January, I kept sort of tiling myself into a corner. I was able to work this back to front much better. I also planned and cut the "baseboard" tiles for this one at the beginning instead of as an afterthought. So those went in as I went along and not as a separate job after the floor was done. And the layout came out exactly as I intended with whole tiles at the exact planned spot at the doorway.

Anyway, that's three rooms floored upstairs. That leaves the two guest bedrooms, the master bedroom, the master bathroom, the hall, and the stairs still to go. Thinking of wood for the master bedroom, tile for the master bath, and new carpet for all the rest. As the budget allows.

It was odd after I got this done. Put away the tiling tools and leftover tile. I had the pile of tile boxes, morter mix, etc for this project all piled in the garage for barely short of a year.

Snow on the Gulf Coast

2008-12-10T23:15:00.000-08:00

(Catching up on past events)

Snow in Pearland. Last time this happened was Christmas Eve, 2004. The picture is of the front of the house at about 11pm. By then the snow had stopped and temps were hovering just over freezing. It was all gone by morning.

Off to the right on the driveway, you can see the material for the new roof.

New furniture for the breakfast area

2008-11-25T11:00:00.000-08:00

The new furniture arrived for the breakfast area arrived last night. Since I'm on vacation, I assembled it this morning. Kind of a retro-modern soda fountain set. The size and the angled corner bench fit in the space like they were custom designed for it. I think this puts the proverbial period on Alice's decorating of the breakfast area. Ha! What am I thinking!?

Tucker to the rescue!

2008-11-22T16:53:00.001-08:00

Today, we had a rare Saturday without projects to take up our time.

Alice came up with the idea of making the trek to Millie Bush Dog Park out in the far west Houston suburbs. We go to a little dog park about 10 minutes drive from our house several times a week to give the hounds some room to stretch out and run. But Millie Bush is a 40 mile one-way drive so it hasn't been on our regular agenda. The place is huge, 13 acres, with two big dog ponds, one on each end. And doggie showers so you can wash the mud off before the trip home. Seriously.

About five minutes in, we're mosying in the general direction of one of the ponds and Tucker's ears stand up. He goes "on alert" and then takes off at full gallop towards ... what? There's a little white dog, sometimes he flashes back to racing and thinks little white dogs are that dang rabbit he could never catch. But no, he flies past the white dog and literally launches himself out into the pond!

Over the course of the next hour or so he is in and out of the water. And the really odd thing is, he only goes in when he sees another dog in swimming. Lots of labs running in and out fetching balls and doing normal dog things. Every time Tucker sees another dog in the water he goes flying in after it and follows it out. I swear he's acting like a lifeguard! "Hang on, buddy, I'm coming".

Greyhounds swimming are ... interesting to watch. He's got pretty much no body fat to help him float so it's a lot of work for him to swim. After a while he had really exhausted himself. Also, it was a little cool. So he'd come out and be shivering with his teeth chattering. I finally had to put a stop to it and walk him out away from the ponds.

The last picture looks like "Nessie", Tucker, the Loch Millie Monster.

Finished Cornice for breakfast area

2008-11-10T15:01:00.000-08:00

Got another project knocked out. I started on this one the weekend before Anna was born. Didn't make any progress the weekend of her birth. One final day on Saturday the 8th got 'er done. Plus some spackle and paint in the corners done on Sunday evening.

This is made from 1x12 with crown molding attached to the top and a small chair-rail like molding along the bottom. The long side (to the left) is about 7 feet, the other two segments are around 4 feet. It stands off from the wall only 2 inches as we don't intend to hang curtains behind it.

Tricky bit was figuring out how to attach it. I did some consulting with my neighbor Paul who used to do finish carpentry. He came up with the method I used. Two-inch deep blocks predrilled and screwed into the wall above the window frame where the studs are doubled up. Then I used the nail gun to attach the cornice to the blocks.

Once again it was handy to have both a table saw and radial arm saw.

At the Greyhound Reunion

2008-11-09T10:38:00.001-08:00

On the 9th, we went to the 14th Annual Greyhound Reunion at Gulf Greyhound Park. We were there two years ago, just after we adopted Gert but missed it last year due to my travels.

The first picture is Tucker trying to get the rabbit! They ran some practice races just after we got there. Tucker was very excited! He barked and then jumped up onto the table. When the race was over, he had no clue how to get back down so I had to lift him down.

The previous years the reunion had the run of one floor of the track betting areas. This year the other floor was closed due to damage from Ike so there wasn't much for an open space for the dogs. This made the whole thing less fun. We were in the little spaces usually used for bettors to sit and watch the races with dogs laying in the aisles.

We all got to go out on the track and have the dogs introduced. As part of that we were able to get a good look at those wascally wabbits that the dogs chase.

Baby Anna has arrived!

2008-11-03T09:09:00.001-08:00

The grandbaby has arrived! On Halloween, her due date as guessed by the doctor back in February. Six pounds, eight ounces and nineteen inches long.

This was my first chance to hold the little tyke. She had mostly been sleeping but opened up her eyes and really seemed to study me. Probably thinking "Oh, please tell me I'm not related to this goofy looking person!". :)

Baby Anna just minutes old

2008-10-31T19:15:00.000-07:00

Pic from Anna's daddy's cell phone in the labor and delivery room.

What my blog is really about...

2008-10-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

I think that this comic pretty well summarizes the exciting content of my blog.

Update: link wasn't right... which pretty much ruined the whole joke.

Mexico City recap

2008-10-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

I got back from Mexico City the morning of Friday, October 10. The trip was mostly uneventful.

Arrived Sunday night. There were five of us on the same plane, me and four of my students. Yes, four of the students came from Houston. Makes little sense to me, too. The hotel had sent a van for us, charged to one of the rooms. Beers at the hotel bar and dinner at one of the hotel restaurants was about as much as anyone could stand that night.

Class was ... class. Four days of lectures by me and labs for the students to do. I was fighting off a sinus infection the entire week and mostly right on the edge of losing my voice. That made teaching extra interesting. Seven students from the US, the rest from Mexico and points south. I know there were students from Panama, Brazil, and Argentina. Possibly some other countries.

Meals at lunch were at a mall food court near the office. It was all decent food, better than you'd find in an American mall food court. I have to keep lunch pretty light when I'm teaching. It's one thing if the students drift off after lunch, but entirely different if the teacher gets a nap.

One evening I met up with some of the students and we walked down a street near the hotel with very expensive shops. We had dinner at a place called Garabato's. Good, cheap, and crowded. They had a killer dessert tray but I had filled up on dinner.

Class wrapped up at 4pm on Thursday. The Houston group, including me, had a 7am Friday flight. We decided to ride the double-decker tour bus. One guy in the group spoke a little Spanish so he was tasked with getting directions. Didn't work out so well. We did eventually find the bus. It was only later when the bus stopped across the street from the hotel that we found out how far we had wandered in the process of not being able to understand directions.

Pictures in this post are from the bus tour. We rode it from the hotel to the center of the city, the Zocalo. The line of riot police in the picture with the police are are around the corner from the Zocalo where there was a demonstration going on. That's only a small part of the police presence at that spot. Note the full riot gear. So what do the crazy norte-americanos do? Get off the bus near there, of course. Again with vague directions where to catch the tour at a later stop and even vaguer plans to find somewhere to eat.

To make a long hike into a short story, we wandered for quite a while, maybe close to an hour. Narrow little streets, even narrower little shops and not another gringo face to be seen anywhere. I eventually convinced myself that nobody knew where we were going so called a halt to the march. I pulled up Google Maps on the blackberry. Between that and the mostly useless map from the tour bus, I did get us set off in the right direction. We made it to another bus stop barely in time (with some traffic dodging jay walking).

Dinner ended up being ... back in the hotel, room service while packing for most of us.

Then a 2:45am wakeup to be down at the lobby by 3:30am to be at the airport... 45 minutes before the check-in counter even opened up.

Final image from Mexico City, blue screen of death on one of the monitors at the Delta counter.

Lining up for a trip to Mexico City

2008-09-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

Not somewhere that is on my list of desirable places to visit but... seems I'll be spending the week of October 6th to 10th in Mexico City running another iteration of the class I taught in Melbourne and Singapore.

There are also classes lined up for late October in Tel Aviv and mid-November in Moscow. I had asked to not travel for the end of October and all of November due to impending grandfatherhood. So these will be conducted by a team member who is based in Tel Aviv.

September 20, 21: We have acheived normality

2008-09-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Not too much to say about the weekend. Saturday was consumed by laundry catch up and cleaning. Sunday was ... normal. Except for delivering the generator to some friends' house.

Still debris piles everywhere. And power is still off two blocks from our house.

Note: I'm doing some throw-down blog posts to outline the events of the last three weeks. Details will follow as I have time to load pictures and do the writing.

September 14 to 19: The days without power

2008-09-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Quick sketch:

Neighbor Don gave us a line from his generator so we rescued the contents of the refrigerator. Water, including hot water, remained on but for several days we were warned to boil before consuming it. Gas range and propane barbecue grill got a workout.

Heavy rains on Sunday as a cool air mass moved in. After the rain drained away the air turned cool and dry. Major blessing!

Cleanup and stacking of debris on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

"Meat cooking night" on ... Tuesday? Had neighbors over to help consume the steaks that had thawed. Multiple bottles of wine. Met back fence neighbor for the first time.

Back to work on Thursday and Friday. Offices are on west side of Houston, no damage and power off for only a day or so.

Alice declared "Day 6 is the day it got old". Broke down and bought a generator on Day 6, Don's family due back Saturday.

As we were having a somewhat hang-dog dinner figuring on several more days in the dark and heat, power came back on Friday, Day 7.

Loaned the generator to friends. They went without power for 11 days total. Aryn was without power for 10 days.

Note: I'm doing some throw-down blog posts to outline the events of the last three weeks. Details will follow as I have time to load pictures and do the writing.

Saturday September 13: final journey home

2008-09-13T23:00:00.000-07:00

When I wake up about 8am, Ike is still pounding the Houston area.

After much deliberation and against the advice of some friends I decide I'll leave about 1pm. There is a curfew announced for home at 6pm. In normal traffic the drive would be 3 hours. Nothing is normal.

I get cash, will be handy in the no-power zone of home. And for the same reason I do two loads of laundry at the hotel. After two weeks out, I'm carrying nothing but dirty clothes and no idea when we'll have power to wash them once I leave. If I had been thinking a bit more clearly there's other stuff I should have gotten.

The drive home is totally normal. Traffic going in to Houston is light. I pass a number of disaster relief convoys. National Guard, HEB grocery store, ServiceMaster cleaning service. Not even a drop of rain until I get within maybe 30 miles of Houston. Ike has moved on.

The inbound I-10 close to Houston is supposed to be under water according to the local newstalk radio. I press on figuring I'll see cars coming the wrong way at some point. But I get all the way to the exit for my daughter's place.

Lots of trees down in various places. Power is spotty. One intersection will be normal, next one the light will be dark and people trying to figure out how to do a 4-way stop.

At my daughter's I find Alice, the cat, and the greyhounds. Also Aryn's mother-in-law stayed with them with her two cats and a dog. So 4 people, 4 cats, 3 dogs.

We convoy home, I drop the mother-in-law and her part of the menagerie. Alice finds about a mile of power lines down in the road between the freeway and our house. Hope those don't bring juice to our house.

We find the neighborhood looks ... just like a hurricane struck it. Lots of fences down. Power out. Some damage to homes here and there but nothing very bad. Our house has a few shingles off and some water blew in around some of the front windows. The house has a lot of MDF trim instead of real wood. Water causes it to swell up so it's clear which window sills got water.

We have water service but it's not declared safe to drink without boiling. Landline non-digital, old no-power-required phones work. Cell service sucks. Closest neighbor has a generator running. His family evacuated to her mother's place in Mississippi. He gives us an extension cord's worth of electricity to run the fridge.

Sleep with windows open in the heat and humidity.

Friday September 12: The race for home

2008-09-12T23:00:00.000-07:00

My trek started at 3am Friday morning, Singapore time, when the alarm rang. Flight was at 6am.

It's easier to do this one all in Houston Time as I was covering 13 time zones and a crossing of the dateline again. So 6am Friday the 12th in Singapore is 5pm Thursday the 11th in Houston.

Projected path of Ike looks to have dead aim on Houston and right over our house. My planned landing in Houston is 4:20pm on Friday the 12th with the last leg being straight down from Minneapolis. Talked to Alice again. Then in line to board I overhear a guy saying he's heading for Houston and that the airport will close at 2pm on Friday. Not good.

Seven hours to Narita airport, Tokyo arriving about midnight Thursday night Houston time. At the connections desk I book a flight to Austin instead of Houston. They can't assign a seat. Bad sign.

Ten hours to Minneapolis, arriving about noon (Houston and Minneapolis time) Friday. After customs, at the baggage recheck, I have to sort out somewhere to send my bags that will match up with where they can get me. Can't get a seat to Austin but seems I can to San Antonio. After security and checkin to the flight, I talk to Alice. Plan is for me to get to San Antonio and use a one-way car rental to get to Houston. Projections for Ike have moved east a bit, which is good. Puts most of Houston including our place on the "dry side". Called Hertz to get the rental car set up.

Bit over a three hour flight from Minneapolis to San Antonio, arriving 5-ish. It's now been 24 hours since I took off in Singapore. Ambien-forced sleep on the ten-hour leg but still exhausted. Also starving, NWA is a per-for-snacks airline and I'm cashless. Never took time in Mpls to get money or food. Have multiple voicemails from Alice. Trying to get bags and listen to them is beyond my capabilities so I wait until I have my bags and my rent-car agreement and can sit down.

Gist of very long voicemails is that they don't want me driving in to Houston at this point. I'd arrive about 9pm and the outer edges of the storm are already causing rain. What we'll find out at some point is that the inbound freeways were being closed at 6 or 7pm. Aryn has been online and rented me a hotel room at a Holiday Inn Express in San Antonio. Damn good thing she did that or I'd've had to sleep in the car. San Antonio hotels are bursting with evacuees. Alice and I talk some more. Aryn has "bullied" her into coming up to their place. That puts everyone together, a few miles further from the coast, and in a more protected location. I find the hotel and check in. Then we talk some more. I'm really not sure this is the right thing. Really wanting food, water, and to get on the road home to be with them.

I get talked out of leaving but still feel guilty for being in a comfortable hotel room while they get pounded by Ike. I walk across the street and get pizza. Want beer but there's none handy and I'm not feeling like driving anywhere so I settle for a big lemonade. Settle in front of TV on the Weather Channel until maybe 10 or 11. Then a full belly and exhaustion overrides worry and I get a little sleep. Miles calls at 1am. A bit after that I get a couple of texts from my daughter. Power just out there. Wind and rain whipping.

After a bit I take an Ambien so I can sleep. Drive to Houston tomorrow.

Updated: Added screen grab from radar archive. Houston at 2am on Sept 13.

September 8 to 11: Teaching class in Singapore

2008-09-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

Late night arrival. Albert Court no jewel but clean and close to office. Hot & humid. Flying solo on the class this time. 16 students. Would have been more but the room wouldn't hold them. Eyeballing track for Ike as the week wore on. Really hating travel during hurricane season. By the time class ended Thursday evening it's obvious Ike and I are in a race for the Gulf Coast.

Talked to Alice early morning Thursday her time. Also called the kid for her birthday. Nervousness all around.

Note: I'm doing some throw-down blog posts to outline the events of the last three weeks. Details will follow as I have time to load pictures and do the writing.

Sunday September 7: Travel day

2008-09-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

Time to leave Sydney. Me for Singapore, co-instructor for home. So of course it's a stunningly beautiful spring day in Sydney. Absolutely perfect. We walked two blocks from the hotel into the side of the Royal Botanic Gardens. Saw huge number of giant bats. About a two-hour leisurely walk down to water's edge, along the water to the Opera House, up to Circulay Quay, and a couple blocks on up to the hotel again. Off to the airport at noon.

Note: I'm doing some throw-down blog posts to outline the events of the last three weeks. Details will follow as I have time to load pictures and do the writing.

Saturday September 6: Saturday in the park... in the rain

2008-09-06T23:00:00.000-07:00

Free day in Sydney. Co-instructor had been to Australia about 10 or 15 years ago (touring in a band!). He needed pics of the Opera House. Started out with shopping in the QVB, then subway to Circular Quay. Absolutely pissing down rain the whole day. I found out my little windbreaker isn't much good in true rain. Sat in the hotel bar nursing some Australian Pinot Noir most of the afternoon.

Note: I'm doing some throw-down blog posts to outline the events of the last three weeks. Details will follow as I have time to load pictures and do the writing.

Friday September 5 Customer visits

2008-09-05T23:00:00.000-07:00

Co-instructor and I flew to Sydney on Thursday evening. Travel inside Australia is like a flashback to ten years ago. You show up at the airport, walk thru the metal detector, and get on the airplane. The only thing that had to come off or out for inspection was the laptop. No removing of shoes. No pulling out of the baggie of liquids and gels. I remember when it was this easy at home.

We're at a Sofitel again in Sydney. The Sofitel in Melbourne is much nicer than the Sofitel Wentworth in Sydney. The rooms are crackerboxes

The entire day Friday was devoted to customer visits. It drizzled on us almost the whole day. Except when it was downright pouring. I had an umbrella until the wind between buildings turned it inside out.

This is the day that filled me with angst. I'm still a pretty introverted person and my job is slowly sliding me into stuff that has been outside my comfort zone. Doing sales calls, even in a technical role, is right out there. But it actually went quite well.

September 1 to 4 Teaching class in Melbourne

2008-09-04T23:00:00.000-07:00

From Monday through Thursday I taught a about some of our software products. I had a co-instructor for this run, someone with more experience with the main subject of the class than I have had. It was a nice, small class of eight students. All very involved and asking good questions.

And that's about it. Really. Here I am in Melbourne, Australia for the first, possibly only time. What do I see? Hm... The hotel, one block walk to the office, a food court where we eat lunch, the conference room where we do the class, and a handful of restaurants. When I have the chance on these trips, I'll stay in the city for a weekend to get a chance to see some sights. But for this one, we're booked on a flight to Sydney Thursday night so we can do customer visits there on Friday. Melbourne looks like a really nice place, though. I hope I get back some day.

Couple of pictures. The top one is a nice sunrise out the hotel window, which is where I took almost all my pictures in Melbourne. Hot air balloons seem to be a popular advertising medium. Several would drift across the city early in the morning. I'd see them out my hotel window. I guess they were advertising.

September 1 is the official first day of spring in Australia. No worrying about the equinoxes for them. The park that our classroom/conference room overlooked has trees planted in the shape of the Union Jack. All done back when they were a colony, of course. You can make out sort of part of it in the picture. It's the trees that haven't yet leafed out.

August 29 to 31 Long travel day to Australia

2008-08-31T23:00:00.000-07:00

I love Australia but I don't much enjoy the process of getting there.

This trip is especially excruciating since we added on a jump from our original destination of Sydney down to Melbourne. We built in a long-ish layover in Sydney to allow for any issues in customs or late arrivals of our flights from California.

Not a whole lot of interest here so feel free to look at the pictures and move on.

My first flight leg was on Continental from Houston IAH to Los Angeles LAX. Because of all my travel last year I've got "status" on Continental so I get a better choice of seats, can use the short lines, and do early boarding. Not so the rest of this trip where I'll be on Qantas. For some insane reason, Qantas doesn't do anything except airport check in. I managed to get an aisle seat way in the back. I used to do window seats but ... aging... need more trips to lavs. Sigh.

My flight leaves LAX about 11pm Friday night. Fourteen and a half hours later and across the international date line, I'm on the ground in Sydney at 6am Sunday morning. My co-instructor for the Melbourne class arrives a bit later on a flight from San Francisco.

Customs is very busy but a breeze. A visit to the ATM, then we hunt down the transfer to our Qantas domestic flight to Melbourne. Coffee in one of the few things open. "Skim milk" does not register with the girl at the counter, "skinny" does.

Short 90-minute flight to Melbourne and a taxi ride to the Melbourne Sofitel arriving around noon. It's about 28 hours since I left the house in Pearland.

The Sofitel is a very nice place! The hotel lobby is on the ground floor but rooms start on the 35th floor and go up to the 50th. The floors between the lobby and the 35th are an office block. I'm on the 48th floor looking more or less south.

After all that travel last year, this is the first trip where I've got a working phone. Got a company-issue Blackberry a month or two ago. Not just a working phone, but full function email, web browser, Google Maps, etc all work here in Australia.

We scout out the building where the company office is and then wander down a random street in search of food. And wine. Most things in the area seem to be closed but we find a little Italian cafe. Good food, a glass or two of nice Australian red wine and exhaustion hits.

I spend the rest of my day going over material for the class.

Tweeting...

2008-08-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

Finally took the time to sign up on Twitter. If you think the blog here isn't enough info about my mostly boring life, get even more boring details by following my tweets here.

Oregon trip for Dad's 80th

2008-08-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

Did a short trip to Oregon for Dad's birthday on the 25th. He's in good shape, thankfully. Still very active. Still can't sit in one place for more than about 5 minutes. I hope I'm in that good of shape if I make it to 80.

I got to see my brother, Mike, and his new girlfriend, girlfriend's children, and girlfriend's grandchild. But I didn't manage to see Mike's kids or ex.

The trip was short because of my impending trip to Australia and Singapore. Arrived mid-day on Saturday and left Tuesday morning. I did the air travel on miles and managed to snag a first class ticket for the trip home. That brings my Continental miles down to ... not enough to do anything.

Houston to Melbourne the hard way

2008-08-20T19:11:00.000-07:00

About 5pm yesterday I got an email asking me "Oh, did we tell you that the Sydney training has moved to Melbourne?". Ah, no, nobody bothered to inform the instructor.

Non-refundable plane tickets were sorted out a couple of weeks ago. Houston to L.A. to Sydney for me. SFO to Sydney for my co-instructor (my safety net!). And for me, a trip on the following Sunday from Sydney to Singapore for round two of this class.

So now we're going to Sydney, allowing 3-1/2 hours to clear customs and re-check baggage, then on to Melbourne. Instead of an early morning arrival, shower and all day to get settled and discuss the class, we'll get to Melbourne in extra-exhausted state about noon. Door to door will be something like 30 hours. Ick.

Returning to Sydney Thursday evening, on to Singapore on schedule. Home on Friday the 12th.

And now they're making noises about a run of this class in Latin America and Eastern Europe in October.

Back dated posts

2008-08-19T17:23:00.000-07:00

In case all you do is look at the top of the blog on the web, I just inserted a couple of back-dated posts about the Loran family reunion.

http://halmobileblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/fire-fire-fire.html

http://halmobileblog.blogspot.com/2008/08/reunion-was-great-success.html

Netflix issues

2008-08-15T14:57:00.001-07:00

I'm on a two-at-a-time unlimited plan with Netflix. There's a distribution center here in Houston so I typically see two day turnaround from when I put a movie in the outgoing mail to when there's a new one in my mailbox. I haven't seen delays in the ... two or three years I've used the service.
<>So today I realized that I hadn't seen the usual "We've received..." email from stuff I sent back earlier this week. On checking the website I find this:

Our Shipping Centers Are Mailing DVDs
Delayed DVD Shipments Are Being Sent Today (Friday)
Click here to learn more

We’re happy to report that all of our shipping centers are resuming normal operations (after 3 days of issues). If you should have been shipped a disc Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it will ship today (Friday). Your Queue may not yet reflect what we have received and shipped. We expect your Queue to be up to date later tonight.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. To all of you whose shipments have been delayed, we’ll be automatically applying a 15% credit to your next billing statement. Or, if you are new to Netflix and your first shipments have been delayed, we recognize that this is not a good way to begin your Netflix membership and we’ll automatically extend your free trial by a week.

Again, we apologize for the delay and thank you for your understanding.
The Netflix Team

I wonder what the "issues" were?

Falling behind in blogging

2008-08-15T13:45:00.000-07:00

OK. It's been way too long since I've posted. Got some stuff I'll be catching up on. Soon, I hope.

Never did finish up posts for the Paris trip.
Did some interesting stuff in Amsterdam that I can post
Just back from a Loran family reunion, my mother's side. The trip and the "run up" to it were interesting.

And some stuff coming up:

Short trip to Oregon to see dad for his 80th
Two-week business trip to Sydney and Singapore. Found out at the reunion that I'm leaving Sydney the same day some of my relatives are arriving.

Reunion was a great success

2008-08-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

The family reunion was a great success. It ran from noon on Saturday August 9th to noon on Wednesday August 13th. We flew Houston to Billings via Denver on Frontier airlines, got into Billings at 7pm on the 9th and got to the camp about 8:30 after a 5-minute stop at our motel.

Frontier airlines is the one that Southwest spoofs on their commercials. Fees for everything. We had two flights each around two hours. They wanted $3 for a "snack" (bag of chips type snack, nothing substantial). Each seatback had a nice video display. You could watch it run ads for free. Or watch TV for $6. I ran the brightness control down until it dimmed out of view. Soft drinks were still free. But a bottle of water sold for $2.

Anyway. The reunion was a good time. I hadn't seen my mother since Aryn got married in April 2005. And hadn't seen my brother Jerry or his wife in probably 5 years. They all came to the reunion two years ago but we had just moved so skipped that one. I think we were still rebuilding the kitchen or had just finished it.

We had Mom's one surviving sibling, Uncle Ben with his wife. There were several cousins from my generation. A good number from my daughter's generation, and a gaggle of young kids who are my cousins grandkids. Folks from Alaska, Washington, Minnesota, Texas, California, and Montana. I think that's all the states represented. There was way too much food and I attempted to eat all of it.

I think it's been close to 20 years since I've been in the Montana Rockies. Beautiful country!

Can you trust your business to Google's cloud?

2008-08-06T19:17:00.000-07:00

This article asks if you can trust a business to the Google cloud for mail, documents, etc.

Right now I'm thinking ... no.

GMail has been down for at least the last four hours.

Fire, fire, fire...

2008-08-01T15:18:00.000-07:00

Posting this long after the fact. Just so nobody gets too worried, all was well.

We're having a family reunion in the mountains of Montana in a few days. They're expecting close to 80 folks for this one. Probably.

Seems there's a little 10,000 acre forest fire just over the ridge from the place we're all hanging out. Two good sources of information are InciWeb and the City of Red Lodge Cascade Fire site.

Some of the family, including us, are staying in Red Lodge in a motel. The reunion site is the Billings Lions Beartooth Mountain Youth Camp. The fire is just west of Red Lodge and just north of the camp.

First thing in the back yard

2008-07-30T13:14:00.000-07:00

When we moved into this house in April of 2006 we tsk-tsked about the back yard. At that time the house was 11 years old and had exactly zero plants back there. The contents of the back yard consisted of an incredibly ugly and broken gas light stuck smack in the middle of the yard and a big wooden play set (swings, climbing stuff).

In the first month we got the play set taken away. Gave it to someone. "This can be yours but you've got to disassemble it and remove it." That left the gas light. I eventually dug that out of the ground and capped off the gas line at the meter.

Time and money have finally freed up to do something in the back. First step is in the picture above.

We now have about 1,000 square feet of gauged slate laid down over what was two separate sections of concrete. The concrete sections were joined by a narrow walkway. We had that dug up and filled in with new concrete to make it all one big patio. Then the slate was laid down over the whole thing. The picture is of the larger space. What looks blue in the picture is shades of grey picking up reflections of the sky. It is sooooooo much nicer than the plain concrete.

Next up, build a pergola and put in some beds. And do a dry creek in the lower part of the yard. And rip out the ugly retaining wall. And regrade the area where the wall is. And... oh, my aching back.

Amsterdam again

2008-07-02T23:00:00.000-07:00

Fourth trip to Amsterdam, first one in the summer. Well other than the one last July when I was on the ground for a shorter time than I was on airplanes coming and going.

Had a lot of fun this trip. No "coffee houses" for me, but other fun.

Statues are from Rembrandtplein. They're figures from a Rembrandt painting (follow that Wikipedia link). When I was here a year and a half ago they had just been erected. I was sure there was a sign saying it was a temporary thing.

The manager of the software consultants arranged some activities. One was a tour of a distillery where they made a liqueur. Good Stuff. Free samples. Several.

The distillery visit was part of a walking tour which, of course, had to take in the Red Light District, "De Wallen". I've wandered thru this area before but never noticed the sculpture set in the cobblestones next to the Old Church. Oh, and this area is way busier in the summer than winter!

Heading to Amsterdam.

2008-06-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

I didn't have this happen much during my heavy travel last year. My flight to Amsterdam is delayed 3 and a half hours due to the plane being late arriving from London.

Update: Since my year of massive travel gave me platinum status I spent the time in the airport sucking down free bloody maries in the lounge. And Continental credited me with 4,000 extra miles for my inconvenience.

Paris Diary: Views from the Eiffel Tower

2008-05-22T23:30:00.000-07:00

Looking upriver along the Seine.

All the pictures I'm posting here are 640x480 reductions of stuff taken with the 7-mpixel Canon SD800IS ("Img" in the name) or the 6-mpixel Nikon D-40 digital SLR ("DSC" in the name). I haven't done any processing other than some cropping here and there and the down-convert to the reduced size.

In the distance is La Défence. You can see just a bit of the big square Grand Arche.

Looking down the Champs de Mars at the École Militaire (Miliary School, Napoleon was a graduate).

Les Invalides. The dome is the church where Napoleon's tomb is now. The green space just beyond the dome is the Musée Rodin sculpture garden.

Green space that starts at the left edge and goes up and right is Jardin des Tuileries. At the end of that is the Louvre.

The Grand Palais.

Extreme zoom on Sacré-Cœur.

Late afternoon view. Just like the colors on this one.

Paris Diary: Thursday, here and there.

2008-05-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

For some unknown reason, the transit strike didn't happen. I never saw any mention on the news but my limited French skills might have caused me to miss it. Great! Let the sightseeing continue!

First order of business for today was to check email. We thought we'd hear the gender of our first grandchild today but not yet.

Alice needed a bit of extra rest so I ended up doing lunch on my own. Just another café on Kleber. There are a half dozen or more within a couple of blocks of the hotel. A nice leisurely lunch with a carafe of wine, then finish up with a little espresso. Ah... what a life! :)

Sightseeing today started out with the Musée Rodin, next to Les Invalides. Rodin's works are amazing. Everybody knows The Thinker and most know The Kiss. The Gates of Hell is ... disturbing. Lots of other works displayed here.

After the sculpture garden and museum, Alice needed a quick bite then we took the subway to Pont de l'Alma, famous now as the place where Princess Diana died.

There we took a Bateaux Mouches sightseeing ride on the Seine. It's a great way to spend a couple of hours or so.

From Pont de l'Alma down the Seine past the Grand and Petit Palais, Place de la Concorde, Jardin des Tuileries, Louvre and Orsay museums, Notre Dame, a loop around Ile de la Cité and Ile St Louis. Then back past the same stuff and on to the Tour Eiffel and on to the miniature Statue of Liberty.

Got a huge number of good pictures on this little float.

Final sightseeing item for the day was to go up the Eiffel Tower. Alice doesn't do heights very well so I was a little surprised that she'd do it. Yes, she is gritting her teeth in that picture!

We took a cab from there to the Champs Elysée to find dinner. I had a half memory of an Asian place recommended in one of the guide books we had along but didn't have the guide book or a good enough memory. We ended up in a place that had good food but I think we were the only people over 30 in the place. Then a nightcap of ice cream and espresso at one of the cafés by the hotel.

Paris Diary: Le Marais

2008-05-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

Wednesday of our week we visited Le Marais district to the east of the Louvre.

We started out at the place where the Bastille used to be. Nothing there now but an obelisk in the middle of a traffic circle. From there it was a museum death
march.

Victor Hugo home in Place des Vosges
Musée Carnavalet (history of Paris)
Musée Picasso
Centre Georges Pompidou (modern art)

The Victor Hugo home is part of a square of 1600s era buildings called Place des Vosges. There was a very long line when we first arrived but it was all 20-something young women. We figured out that it was not the line for the Victor Hugo home. No line there. All I learned in the Victor Hugo home is that I haven't read much written by Hugo. After touring through the home we tried to get a wine and cheese break at a cafe in the square. But it was lunch time and they wouldn't serve us unless we ordered a meal.

From Place des Vosges we walked to Musée Carnavalet. Lots of interesting paintings of Paris over the centuries. And a nice formal garden in the center. We only made it thru the 16th century before deciding to move on.

We picked out a random cafe in a small square for lunch. Cafe food such as salads and sandwiches and house wines have all been excellent.

Final museum stop was the Centre Georges Pompidou with it's external plumbing and modern art exhibit.

About the coolest thing was the giant spider sculpture in the entry space. Modern art is sometimes interesting but very often weird. We both think that a lot of the pieces are scams being perpetrated by the artists and critics. Like three identical gray canvases, each with its own identifying plaque. Or the life size red fiberglass rhinoceros.

While I was dropping my backpack off at the "cloak room", Alice struck up a conversation with a couple from Chicago (they took the pic of the two of us). As we were about to part, they asked if we had heard about the transit strike. Um... no. Seems there was to be a general transit strike beginning this evening or at midnight. Could be bad. Very bad. We and the whole city gets around on Le Métro, the buses, and the trains. If those were down we'd be fighting with the entire population for the cabs.

Back at the hotel, the desk clerk had not heard of any transit strike. We arranged dinner for 10pm and took a bit of time off our feet, recharging our batteries and those of the cameras.

Dinner was at Le Sheffer, a neighborhood bistro. It was close enough that we could walk back to the hotel if there was indeed a strike. It was really excellent! And it felt like a little neighborhood hole in the wall. Le Métro was still running when we headed for "home". But there was a was a sign I couldn't read up in one station and at the hotel the clerk had posted a sign stating "General Transit strike tomorrow!".

If so, we've still got the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe in walking distance. And plenty of cafés with wine!

Paris Diary: Day 2, Montmartre and Basilique du Sacré-Cœur

2008-05-20T23:30:00.000-07:00

After returning from Versailles we had a nap and then hit the subway to Montmartre. The area is my favorite in spite of being totally packed with tourists at all times. And the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur is, for me, much more moving than Notre Dame. I think that's largely because they don't allow photos and reasonably well enforce quiet. There was a huge black man just inside the door suspiciously eying everyone who came in and periodically saying in a very deep voice: "No photos!".

The views of Paris from the steps of the Basilica are very cool (see the Wikipedia page linked above for a panorama).

We walked around the Montmartre area a bit. Mostly too tired to go far after Versailles. We were up there too late to visit any of the galleries or famous artists' hangouts. I tried to remember the name of a particular restaurant that was recommended as not being totally a tourist trap. I saw La Crémaillère in Place Tertre, thought that was the one so we ate there. Not sure it was the one I was looking for. We ate outside. It was good fun watching all the people go by but it was really too early in the season to be outside at 10:30pm. Even with the heaters they had, we got very cold.

Paris Diary: First full day, Versailles

2008-05-20T23:00:00.000-07:00

Off not too early, it is vacation after all, and up to the Arc de Triomphe to buy Museum passes. This little gem costs about the same as admission to three museums but gets you into as many as you can stand to visit in four days. And the extra bonus is you get to skip the lines, there's always a shorter line or separate entrance for pass holders.

Then subway and train out to the Château de Versailles. The lines were immense... but we had the Museum pass! Woo hoo! Skipped ahead of hundreds of people!

Versailles was pretty ... stunning. One of the first things we saw was the royal chapel. In the royal chapel, the king sat above the main floor and in the back of the room. But the members of the court sat facing the king with their backs to the altar. The artwork and decoration work all through the place is non-stop. There's no such thing as a plain ceiling or wall, everything is gilt and paintings and tapestries.

The gardens are immense, literally miles from the palace to the end of the cruciform lake. It's hard to imagine how much of the country's wealth went into building and upkeep of the place.

One of the things we took along were some free audio tours from Rick Steves' website. We had some difficulty with the Versailles one. One reason was that it was a little hard to follow, the other reason was that Alice had her player on shuffle!

Paris Diary: Arrival and a little jet lag

2008-05-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

Nice, uneventful flight to Paris. Luggage all OK, quick pass thru customs and a cab ride to the hotel by about 2pm. All good. Hotel is about half way between the Trocadéro and the Arc de Triomphe.

We bought a two-day pass on one of the open top double-decker bus lines. Rode down to the Île de la Cité area to visit Notre Dame. Notre Dame is impressive but has no feeling of being a church. The tourists (yeah, that's us) run pretty much free. Loud talking, photo flashes, and very crowded.

We walked over to Sainte-Chapelle and got in line. But about 5 minutes later they closed.

Rode around a bit more on the bus. Got off near Invalides for some pictures and a bit of a walk about. Then back to the hotel.

Alice picked a restaurant out of our "Top 10" guidebook called La Butte Chaillot (annoying flash web page). The desk clerk at our hotel got us reservations. The food was excellent. It's a "baby bistro", kind of a third-tier restaurant for a famous chef in Paris. The same chef's main restaurant would have needed reservations months in advance and would have cost us three times as much.

Trying to get with the Paris schedule, we ate dinner about 9pm. Practically bed time if we had been back home!

Off to Paris for vacation

2008-05-19T18:03:00.000-07:00

Today all the travel I did last year pays off. Vacation in Paris with Alice!

We got to the airport early. Since we were checking luggage I wanted it to have plenty of time to find the airplane. Killed time at the Continental President's club.

I learned a new trick this flight. I booked us into an aisle and window seat leaving the middle open between us. My thought/hope was that a single middle would be low desirability and might not fill at all. And it worked! So we had extra space for legs and the overhead to ourselves as well.

Note:This series of posts is being done after the fact from entries I wrote in a journal. But I'm dating them as of the day they were written.

Bush thinks being in Iraq is romantic...

2008-03-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

I guess W's only experience of war has been watching movies.

From Reuters (and other sources)

"I must say, I'm a little envious," Bush said. "If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed."

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

His "romantic" never-ending war has killed quite a few more Americans than all the terrorist attacks combined. But it's OK because

Bush said in a speech at the Pentagon, "The successes we are seeing in Iraq are undeniable."

What a difference the right tool makes!

2008-02-11T12:42:00.000-08:00

Picked up the air-powered flooring stapler on Thursday night. What a huge difference this made!

Got the floor done in the room and it's gorgeous!

I took Friday off work. With one thing and another I got started about mid-day on Friday. Worked until the light and my back gave out on Friday, then a full day on Saturday. At that point I had all the floor down that the air stapler would do. And again, my back was done in. It isn't hard labor with the air tool but most of the time you're bent over, either whacking wood into place or whacking the stapler. Took the stapler back in time to only get charged two days rent. While I was putting down flooring, Alice stained the shoe molding and gave it a coat of polyurethane. Then it was miller time.

Sunday I got the rest of the room floor down, the last four of five strips. I had to use my finish nailers for those, the last two strips only have 1-1/4-inch nails because there wasn't even room for the bigger finish nailer. Finished the day by cutting and installing the shoe molding and the threshold to the hallway.

I got to use my new-to-me radial arm saw. Last October I was having a beer with my neighbor, Paul. Someone he worked with was selling his tools. I got a radial arm saw and a 12-inch planer, both for $175. Paul delivered them when I was out seeing the world and I haven't had a project that needed them yet. I set up the radial arm for 45-degree cuts one direction and the table saw for the opposite. Made it all go very quick, especially around the multiple corners you can see on the right in the picture.

I spent a lot of today reinstalling "the data center". Three computers now up and running.

The rest of the room is mostly empty. We got rid of the love seat and ottoman that were in here. My favorite big ol' comfy chair and ottoman will go in, but it has to be reupholstered. I've also got a half-dozen framed photos from my travels that will go up on the wall above the computers. And the rug that will go back down needs a pad so it doesn't scratch the wood.

I've still got the closet to floor. And I'm going to build in shelves to store our office clutter. But that'll be for another weekend.

Switching to Plan B

2008-02-05T11:10:00.000-08:00

We got started on laying the wood floor in the home office this past weekend.

Saturday was "tearout day".

Took down all three computers (two work plus one of our own).
Moved out the love seat and ottoman. That went to the garage and then off to the lady who does Alice's hair.
Moved out as much of the other furniture as we could
Emptied out the closet. Something of a monumental job, it had a set of MDF shelves, a set of metal shelves and was crammed full of office detritus. Boxes of financial records, bits of computer equipment and supplies, the usual stuff.
Ripped up the carpet, pad, and tack strips.
Did "squeak removal" on the subfloor, a few extra screws where needed.

Alce helped a lot with the tear-out. She has an unnatural affection for shredding the old carpet with a utility knife.

All this moving of stuff has got the entire upstairs in a wreck. The spare bedrooms and the hallway are full of boxes and extra furniture. The master bedroom ended up being my opens space for opening up boxes of wood so I could get a good random selection as I worked.

I did a "dry layout" of the wood. Laid down small pieces side to side across the floor to help gauge how to cut the last pieces on each edge.

Sunday afternoon I got started on laying new floor. What's going in is 2-1/4-inch x 3/4-inch Bellawood Brazilian Teak. It took me a long time to get the first strip cut, positioned, and nailed down. That first strip, three pieces of wood, has to be positioned and aligned exactly straight so the rest of the floor will be straight and gap-free. I did the next three strips by hand, drilling 45-degree holes through the tongues, hand nailing and setting.

And then I found out I'd made a mistake.

I had done some searching around for and research on nailers. Found a lot of articles praising the Bostich MFN-200 manual floor nailer. This is a damn expensive hand tool and I couldn't find anywhere to rent one. So I bought it from the local Lowe's. What none of the articles said is "this isn't a tool for an old, out-of-shape do-it-yourselfer".

It drives 2-inch L-shaped cleats. If you do it just right the cleat goes in at 45-degrees right where the tongue meets the body of the strip. There are two tricks.

One is getting the thing positioned just right and having it not wiggle.
The other is, as you're holding the tool absolutely still, you give it a prodigious whack with the mallet. That sets the board tight against the previous one and drives the cleat. The cleat has to be driven all the way in one blow.

If the tool wiggles, it drives the cleat through the tongue and splinters it. If you don't hit it hard enough, the head of the cleat is left sticking out and has to be cut or twisted off and then hand set.

I discovered that it is right at my physical limit to smack the thing hard enough. I managed about 4 or 5 strips (cleats about every 8 inches across the 12 feet width of the room). I thought I could keep going but on the next piece my best smacks left four cleats sticking up.

Depressing. At that rate, it would take me a couple of weeks of working every day to get the whole floor down.

So I'm switching to Plan B. Did a lot more calling and googling and found that a Home Depot about 10 miles away has a pneumatic floor nailer that I can rent for $33/day. The pneumatic nailer still gets whacked with a mallet but that is to set the board, the compressed air does the driving of the cleat or staple. This should have been Plan A. Oh, well. Live and learn.

January weather and whatnot

2008-02-01T06:44:00.001-08:00

Really not too much going on here for the last couple of weeks.

Since my last post, there's been another layoff announced in the business area. This one is especially fiendish. Think Catbert the Evil HR Director. It was announced that a layoff was coming and that it would be February 15 before people would be told they would be let go. Those being laid off will be kept on long enough to train their Israeli and Indian replacements. I've been told that I'm not affected. I guess that means I'm good for a week or two more anyway.

Also did another exciting trip to Dallas. Well, not exciting. And possibly will be back for a third trip next week.

On the weather front (pun intended)... we're used to winter being pretty variable down here on the third coast. But this week has been ridiculous. I take the dogs out for a 30-minute walk every morning that I'm here. We hit the road about 7am give or take a bit. Temperatures this week have flip-flopped between t-shirt weather and winter coat weather. Tuesday morning was about 70, Wednesday was below 40, Thursday was 70, and today it was mid-30s. For the cold weather mornings (below 40) we actually had to buy the coats for the dogs. Got them both "home coats" from HoundTogs.

Yesterday I found out that Tucker is afraid of thunder. There was a little front that blew through about mid-morning. He got agitated at the first tiny rumblings of thunder, then when it rumbled through got very whiny and darted all over the house. He stayed agitated, pacing and whining for a good half hour after the noise was totally over. Gert just looks at him like he's an idiot when he's doing this. I swear that if dogs rolled their eyes, she'd be doing that.

First of the flooring projects

2008-01-14T17:08:00.001-08:00

Click here to see animated sequence of the exciting tile process!

I got started on the upstairs flooring last weekend. Installed ceramic tile in the hall bathroom. It had some cheap, ugly vinyl flooring that was poorly installed and was badly marred. But other than that it was fine. (grin).

The room is only about 7 feet by 5 feet including the vanity but not including the tub. Something just over 30 square feet of actual floor to be done.

It took me one Saturday to take out the toilet, rip up the loose vinyl enough to be level and install Hardibacker. Then Sunday afternoon to do a dry-layout and install the tiles in the center. I worked from the doorway back because I wanted a clean "factory edge" at the doorway. That left nearly a full tile at the tub. Weekend number 2 Saturday to finish laying the tiles, these all needed cutting. I also did a tile "baseboard" all around the room except in front of the tub. Finally, a couple of hours on Sunday to grout.

Still to be done are the toilet re-install and vinyl strip down at the tub. Oh, and seal the grout in a couple of weeks.

New year, new layoffs, first business trip.

2008-01-04T12:02:00.001-08:00

Well, that didn't take long. Yesterday my employer laid off between 5 and 10 percent of the staff in the business area I'm part of. I escaped another one. Not sure if that's 20 but it's somewhere around there.

I just booked travel for my first business trip of the year. Short jaunt up to Dallas for a customer visit. Out very early Tuesday, home Wednesday night. Southwest Airlines. Always a joyful experience. General seating, what fun.

Gert at top speed

2008-01-03T07:59:00.000-08:00

There is a new dog park near us, a converted softball field in Pearland's Independence Park. We've taken the dogs a number of times. Once in a while Gert will feel the need for speed and take off at full gallop.

A couple of days ago, Alice was also there trying out her shiny new Nikon DSLR (Christmas present, of course).

The pics here are small clips out of the full images. Greyhounds have a "double suspension gallop". They completely leave the ground twice in each stride, once with legs together, once at full stretch. Didn't get a good shot of her at full stretch. She's just leaving the ground in the middle pic.

And in the last pic again just stretching out in a turn.

Alice did a nice job of catching these, the dog's going close to 40mph. When she does this, you have to spin around just to watch!

One very happy dog!

Capacity 1,000,202,240,000 bytes

2008-01-02T08:58:00.001-08:00

I got a terabyte drive for Christmas. A Western Digital My Book, USB 2.0 external drive.

The first thing I did is move all my music on to it and make it the source for the SlimServer software that drives the Squeezebox.

Also got it set up as backup for the local systems. I run the free version of SyncBack for the moment. May switch to the pay version, it has some more options. I'm looking for a good three-way sync program. I'd like to sync up the My Documents tree between the laptop, the work home desktop, and the external terabyte drive.

Hippo Birdie to me.

2007-12-29T09:05:00.000-08:00

Ho hum, another birthday come and gone.

Pretty low key day. Alice is still recovering strength.

We went up to Lumber Liquidators and ordered wood for the office floor. At the moment I'm planning to do the install myself. We're looking at tile and carpet for the rest of the upstairs.

Dinner for two at Killen's, the local steakhouse. Terrific food there. One of the few places in Pearland, possibly the only place in Pearland, that attracts customers from outside the suburb.

Slim Devices/Logitech Squeezebox

2007-12-26T10:54:00.000-08:00

Aryn came through with the number one gadget on my wishlist this year, the Slim Devices Squeezebox.

This is a sweet little gadget that plugs in to the sound system, in my case the A/V receiver in the living room. It communicates via the house Wi-Fi network back to one of the computers up in the office. That computer has all of the 10,000 music tracks I've accumulated over the last few years.

So now, with the touch of a couple of buttons, we can pull up any music we've got. Right now it's working through all the jazz on the system.

As an added bonus, the device can connect out to external sources such as Internet radio stations. One of the servers that Slim Devices run is the SqueezeNetwork. I've marked the Ocean Surf track there as a favorite. Like having a beach house without the sand. :)

Surgery all good...

2007-12-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

Alice is now short a gall bladder. They took it out laproscopically so she has only three small incisions. She came home about 4 or 5 hours after the operation started.

Plan for the party is to have her sit in a comfy chair and be waited on hand and foot. I'm sure she'll be loving that!

House is almost clean, our son-in-law is picking up the food. Daughter or son-in-law picking up booze. I've got one or two errands to deal with.

Update

2007-12-20T17:26:00.000-08:00

Well, Alice had her pre-op check today. Tomorrow, Friday, the gall bladder comes out.

The anniversary party on Saturday has grown to between 50 and 60 people.

And I finally came up with a couple of good, but expensive, Christmas gift ideas for Alice.

Oh, and I got the new car yesterday (Wednesday). Love it. The dogs fit much better than in the other vehicles.

Busy few days

2007-12-18T19:01:00.000-08:00

This week is kind of nuts.

This Saturday we're having 30 to 40 friends over to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary.

I've been chasing details for buying the new car.

Alice is fighting thru some medical problems. I've been ferrying her to doctor visits. She's been ill in some form since the week before Thanksgiving when I was in Brazil. At first it was just a garden variety cold or sinus infection. But that developed into bronchitis. After whacking that out with a round of antibiotics, steroids, and decongestants, she started having pretty bad stomach trouble. She's had dang little solid food for the last two to three weeks and is surviving on gatoraid and jello.

Today she got 'scoped (both ends). I told her that she promised me all sorts of things while she was still under the effects of the anesthesia (insert goofy grin here). And a CT scan has showed up gall stones.

All in all, not a very happy holiday so far for the love of my life.

New dog carrier

2007-12-18T18:56:00.000-08:00

Well, the new car is all but a done deal. Went out yesterday and fought the good fight with the salesman. I had the Consumer Reports dealer cost info. Got a price a bit below "invoice", so the dealer made some money but not a lot. They didn't have the color (Barcelona Red) and model (RAV4 Sport V6) that I wanted on the lot but another dealer in the area did. The salesman called me back today to tell me they had the car on the way and I could come do the deal tomorrow.

Car shopping

2007-12-15T16:59:00.000-08:00

Finally found some time to go for a quick look at a couple of cars.

Since we want space for the dogs but also decent gas mileage, we looked at the Honda CR-X and the Toyota RAV4. Both are small SUVs. Room for the dogs if the back seats are folded down.

Hated the Honda. Liked the RAV4 quite a lot. The interior of the Honda looked cheap. Just didn't care for it. And the 4-cylinder motor isn't enough for it.

We test drove the RAV4 Sport with the V6. Lots more reasonable. It's not going to win any races but at least I won't feel like merging onto the freeway is taking my life in my hands.

Going to call the credit union for car rates on Monday and go do a bit of negotiating.

New geek gadget

2007-12-13T06:26:00.000-08:00

After my laptop died, more on that further down, I decided to bring home a Windows computer from work. Which meant that I had more computers than monitors. My monitor at the home office is a 19-inch wide screen combo TV/Monitor.

So I invested in a good KVM switch. The monitor is DVI and the keyboard and trackball I use are USB so that put me into the expensive KVM switches. I got an IO Gear GCS1764 switch. It will handle up to four computers.

It can also independently switch the "console (video and mouse/keyboard USB ports), audio (speakers and mike ports), and USB hub (two more USB ports). Which turns out to be pretty sweet. I can flip the keyboard and monitor over to the work Windows computer to do email etc while leaving the audio on the Linux computer running Amarok and playing music.

The computer I brought home is reasonably powerful but not a killer. Dual core 2.8GHz with 4GB of memory and a 250GB drive. Just right for running a handful of virtual machines.

My laptop did finally get replaced. The company is into serious penny pinching just now so I ended up with a cast-off Dell D-610, slightly more powerful than the antique D-600 that died. But at least I'm prepared if I need to travel. With the fast computer at home now, I'm considering not bothering to haul the laptop back and forth. Might just leave it in the docking station at work except when on the road.

Quiet couple of weeks

2007-12-07T09:04:00.000-08:00

Not a whole lot going on here since I returned from the last trip. No travel planned for the remainder of 2007. Not sure what 2008 will bring but unlikely to be as much travel as this year.

Tucker has settled in to home life very quickly. Since he showed no interest in the cat, we went ahead and taught him to negotiate the stairs. Less difficult with him than it was with Gert. At first Gert wanted to leap down from the landing, he didn't show any signs of that. We crated him at night the first week or so and crated him when we left the house until just a couple of days ago. We're still being more careful to get him enough potty breaks to the back yard than we have to with Gert. We've had a couple of "accidents" but nothing tragic and no repeats in the last 10 days or so.

Not much conflict between the two of them. They sleep at night on beds in our bedroom. There was a bit of a skirmish over that. Gert has been sleeping on a smaller bed for the last year. When I went to get one like it for Tucker they didn't have anything the same size. Since he's a big dog, I ended up getting this huge round bed (5-feet across). Gert immediately glommed onto that as hers. She barked at Tucker once and growled at him if he got too close to it. Tucker, for his part, wouldn't use and didn't really fit in Gert's old bed. So I went ahead and bought a second bed identical to the new one. Good thing we have a huge master bedroom!

I finally got to see Gert really open up and run flat out! She's fast!! There's a new dog park near us so we try to get them over there regularly for some socializing and exercise beyond their daily walks. A couple of days ago I was there with them when a guy with a pair of boxers showed up. Gert and the male boxer had great fun running and chasing. Then Gert decided to really run. She kind of hunkered down and launched herself off into a top speed lap around the park. The boxer just stood and watched, no way he could even come close to keeping up.

All the dogs that show up at the dog park are Gert's friends. Tucker is still a little overwhelmed by it. Since greyhounds spend their whole racing life only around other greyhounds, we're not sure if he has figured out what kind of creatures the other dogs are. He trots about a little bit, sort of tagging after Gert.

Oh, and he's also showing signs of having been mistreated. He is very wary of men and startles away when anything is thrown. There have been a couple of times where other dog owners were throwing frisbees. Gert would happily run after the frisbee or after the other dogs chasing the frisbee. But Tucker would bolt off in a different direction at each throw. One of our previous dogs, Zoe, had a similar fear. It took a couple of years before she got over it. Sigh...

Tucker

2007-11-21T09:31:00.000-08:00

Tucker seems to be settling in just fine.

Did some googling on his racing name. His isn't as unique as Gertie's but I did turn up one racing program where both of them raced at Gulf Greyhound Park on the same day, but not against each other. Gert was third place in her race and Tucker was second in his. Alice said she turned up some info that showed Gert was racing in a higher classification than Tucker and that Gert won more. Also turned up some results from when Tucker was racing in Ireland where he was born.

The first afternoon and evening home, you could tell he was on sensory overload. A house full of stuff is just a lot more visually rich than a kennel and the track. He did a lot of pacing around looking at everything. He didn't poke or climb or jump, just had to walk around and eyeball the whole place.

As it was with Gertie when she first came home, the stairs are a mystery. When we go up them it must seem like a magical disappearing act to him. I did take him by the collar and walk him upstairs for a bath on Monday afternoon. He took this first trip up better than Gertie did her first one but he hasn't shown any sign of wanting to repeat the experience on his own.

Tucker also seems less interested in the cat than Gertie was at first. Hopefully it will stay that way. With Gert we had a good month of high tension when the two were in the same room.

Everything else is going fine, just more of a "production" than before. Mealtimes, walks, etc., all just a bit more complex.

Took the two of them to the vet on Tuesday morning. Plan was for Gert to get some needed annual stuff done and leave her for a teeth cleaning. Combined with a first checkup for Tucker. Turns out Gert was a bit off on some tests, kidney and pancreas showing some high readings and blood pressure high. Rather than throw in anesthesia to complicate things she ended up coming home.

I discovered from this trip that we're going to seriously have to think about a vehicle with more interior room. Two big leggy greyhounds just don't fit well in the jumpseat space of the pickup. And they don't fit a whole lot better in the back seat of the four-door Accord. I've been thinking about a small SUV anyway, Honda Pilot or Ford Escape sort of sized. Something where I'm still sitting up a bit, not looking at bumpers when in traffic. But something that gets better than the 15 mpg I get in my F-150 pickup. And now, something that will hold the dog pack.

Partial closet rebuild

2007-11-21T09:07:00.000-08:00

I've taken this week off, Thursday and Friday are holidays so I'm using three vacation days.

I spent most of the day Monday with a couple of hours yesterday and today to partially rework the master bedroom closet. The closet is big but it isn't rectangular, it's kind of "z" shaped. Rectangular box but with two big corners boxed out. Wire shelves, which are fine, were installed by the builder. Like they always seem to do, the shelves were run around the corners. Corners like that end up wasting space since the corner really isn't usable.

I took out the shelves that ran down one side and around an inside corner. The originals were poorly installed so that the shelf they form tilted in a way that things stored on it tended to slide off. I replaced the original single set with a double set, upper and lower rods for hanging stuff. I installed some 1x3 to form a back plate so the shelves could be better anchored. And used the 16-inch deep shelf type for better storage space. Not to mention hanging them so that they're level or a bit tilted back so storage boxes won't be jumping off any more.

It was a good little project. Right around $150 in material and what was about 7 feet of usable closet rod is now replaced with 16 feet.

Bet you can't stop at one...

2007-11-20T12:23:00.000-08:00

Greyhounds are like potato chips, can't have just one.

Alice has wanted a second greyhound almost since the day we brought Gertie home. I finally relented Saturday afternoon. And once my mind was set, I was ready to get on with it. So Sunday afternoon we got a call from the adoption agency at the track and bundled Gertie to find her a friend.

We came home with Tucker (racing name Dark Ocean). Tucker is a 72 pound male. Black and white in a "tuxedo" pattern.

After only a couple of days, all seems to be going well. Tucker is still a bit on sensory overload with everything but despite that is pretty calm. Pictures later.

Brazil recap

2007-11-18T16:11:00.000-08:00

The Sao Paulo experience was pretty much miserable. As I told one of my coworkers via email, sometimes it's just work no matter what continent you're on. The picture is the view out my hotel window, obviously, that's my hotel reflected in the building across the street. Lovely day... no, not really.

The dead laptop caused me several problems through the week, files I should have had with me were all back on my backup in Houston. Accessible via the network but slow. And setup of the student machines that should have been done before I arrived had not been done.

With one exception the students in my class were all locals. So when the class day was done, they hit the trains and cars and headed for their normal lives. And, as usual, the office wasn't in a district that was very interesting after hours and the hotel where I stayed was picked to be convenient to the office. And the weather was unseasonably miserable, 50s and raining in the evening. And Sao Paulo isn't the safest place to walk around by yourself in the evening.

That combination pretty well left me feeling like doing nothing in the evenings. So I stayed at the hotel, did email on a laptop borrowed from the office IT guy, and ate in the hotel restaurant. Which was about like most hotel restaurants. Tolerable but not exactly a fine dining experience.

The trip home was uneventful. Got to the airport about 7pm too tired to do anything on the way. Platinum status got me access to one of the lounges while waiting for the flight. Flight out of Sao Paulo at 11pm Friday, nonstop to Houston, arrived 5am Saturday. No empty seat next to me this trip. Got enough sleep on the flight to have a pretty normal Saturday.

Laptop DOA ... and the hotel room is miserable again

2007-11-12T12:32:00.001-08:00

Well, I guess I just proved that I don't really need my laptop. After arriving I booted up to check email and watch some episodes of Heroes to kill a rainy afternoon. Later in the evening I booted it up to review the material for class and ... dead dead dead.

Boot, blue screen, boot blue screen, rinse, lather, repeat.

After several attempts at safe mode and other variations I set it to not automatically restart after a failure. The message I get is "Unmountable boot drive". This happens after it has booted, let me choose the OS (there is only one, nothing fancy on the thing) and has started loading the Windows kernel.

Up until this trip I've been totally obsessive about:

Backing up all my stuff to an external drive connected to a desktop machine at the office, and
Making a copy of everything I need for class onto the small external drive I carry with me.

This trip I did the first but not the second. So the class got started a little late as I had to copy a few dozen megabytes worth of PowerPoint slides from the machine back in Houston to a commandeered machine from the class.

The IT guy down here had a spare laptop of the same antique vintage as mine. So I spent my lunch break transferring things to that. At least I can do email and watch movies.

Oh, and once again I've been given a hotel room that sucks. The hotel is 22 floors and I'm on the lowest one. First room was on the same floor, by the elevators, I asked to change. After making me wait a couple of hours because no rooms were clean, I got moved to a corner room. I think the room by the elevators was quieter. It's a little windy out and every little gust roars around the corner of the building as if there's a hurricane in progress. Plus we're right on the flight path for the local airport. And there's an eight lane busy street right outside. Kind of makes me long for the nice quiet cave of a room I had in Beijing.

Yeah, I know, I'm whining. Most people would love to have the problem of being in Sao Paulo in the spring time. But I'm just ... tired and ready to be home. So this week is all about endurance.

On the positive side, once I got class going it's all good. Fifteen students, mostly locals, all bright and interested. One I had met before, one I know only by email.

Ninth week out of the country

2007-11-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

I'm heading out tonight for Sao Paulo. This will be my ninth week out of the country, or eleventh if you count two weeks in Canada. Also gets me to my fifth continent this year and will get me to platinum elite on Continental.

Although it's been mostly a blast visiting all these places, I'm tired now. I didn't book this trip to give me any extra time on the ground in Brasil. I arrive mid-day on Sunday, about a 9 hour flight with a four hour time change. The flight is direct so no extra time wasted passing through extra airports. I will be teaching Monday to Friday and booked my return flight for 11pm on Friday.

I'm ready to be home for a while.

I've discovered that I cannot pack without a packing list. On the trip to Vancouver a couple of weeks ago I decided I didn't need no steenkeeng list and just started in packing. There are really only three things that can't be replaced easily: my laptop (because of the contents, not the machine itself), my passport, and my Ambien prescription. Especially just now when I'm heading for my 6th time zone in as many weeks, my sleeping patterns are totally wrecked. So I use Ambien to jump start myself into the new timezone.

Well, packing for the Vancouver trip I first planned to work from home on the Monday that I traveled. Then discovered that I had forgotten a vital bit of equipment at the office. Then I changed plans, packed and went to the office intending to go directly from the office to the airport. While at the office I realized I had forgotten to pack the Ambien so ... back home. And finally to the airport. All for the want of using my packing list.

Home, please

2007-11-02T22:21:00.000-07:00

End of the company conference. This evening those of us who chose not to take a red-eye home and arrive at 5am went out for drinks and dinner. It was a good group, good conversation over some nice Pinot Noir and Italian food at Don Francesco's on Burard Street in downtown Vancouver.

Back to the hotel early. Alarm set for 4:30am to get a 5:15am cab to the airport. The new arrangement requires U.S. citizens to have passports to travel to Canada by air. But we'll clear customs in Canada, not back at home. Which makes for an early ... early! departure to be thru the bureaucracy prior to a 7:45am flight.

O, Canada... the glamorous life... or not

2007-10-30T19:39:00.000-07:00

End of day one in Vancouver. Now I remember what attending the user conference was like last year. Mostly tedious.

Last year we were in San Francisco. From the day I arrived to the day I left, I managed a total of two hours outside the hotel. This year will be slightly better because I've got a lighter set of duties, for example I don't have to work the booth. And they wouldn't let us stay in the hotels closest to Canada Place so it's a four block walk and I get to see the outside world.

I guess this balances out the trips to the Eiffel Tower and Great Wall. It's almost 8pm and I'm back in the hotel. Been on my feet most of the last 9 hours and ready to kick back and catch up on the episodes of Heroes that I've got squirreled away on the hard disk. Pretty thrilling.

Gone again... Vancouver BC in ... almost winter

2007-10-30T09:28:00.000-07:00

Late flight out of Houston last night for a midnight arrival in Vancouver BC.

Up here for a company conference at Canada Place, the big exhibition center here. I should have a quiet morning catching up with email before plunging into it. Got two speaking gigs here, one this afternoon and one on Thursday. I'm doing part of a 3-hour tutorial today and just a quick update on our product line Thursday.

Flight home is scheduled for Saturday morning but I might see if I can change it to Friday.

Home again, not quite un-lagged

2007-10-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

Rush hour on Dong Chang'an Jie, Beijing

Been home for a bit over two days but still not back to this time zone. I'm falling asleep at 8pm and then wide awake by 2 to 4am.

The flight from Beijing took off at about sunset on Monday Oct 22 and landed in Newark 13 hours later at about sunset on ... Monday Oct 22! The route was northwest out of Beijing to the Mongolian border. Then turned north-northeast over Mongolia and Russia, up close to the pole, down over Canada to Newark.

The trip back was full of small annoyances.

Late taking off from Beijing due to plane being late to arrive from Newark. On the plus side one of my colleagues on this trip had lounge access on his airline so I spent most of my waiting time in a comfortable chair with free food and drink.
The boarding process was horribly mismanaged. Perhaps because they were trying to rush everyone on board, perhaps because Chinese people don't queue up, they jam in. There was just a total crush of people trying to board and the gate agents had jammed tables in the way to force two single file lines.
Continental 777 layout sucks. Way too few restrooms in coach, no space to even pass by someone. I did manage to get a window seat with an empty seat next to me, which helped immensely.
Customs in Newark was a mess. They routed a couple dozen of us from the U.S. citizens lines over to the foreign visitors lines. Problem was that about every third foreign visitor had fubared their paperwork and got escorted out to the little rooms in the back for processing. So I spent a good 45 minutes in line there.
Rushed to my flight... well what I thought was my flight just in time to board. Only when I presented my boarding pass did I find that the agent in China had rebooked me onto a later flight. Everything going out of Newark was late so I really didn't want to wait. I managed to get on the original flight... but my luggage didn't.
Arrived at Bush Terminal E. Baggage claim for domestic flights arriving at Terminal E is over at Terminal C. A solid 10 minute walk, just the thing after over 24 hours in transit.
By the time I figured out that my baggage wasn't on my flight, the next one in from Newark was due in 30 minutes. So I waited. Got bags, left the airport about 90 minutes after landing.

It was really, really good to get home!

Campagna T-Rex

2007-10-23T17:13:00.000-07:00

This little hotrod was in the parking lot of the local Tex-Mex eaterie we frequent. Picture doesn't do it justice. Some kind of cross between a go-kart and a motorcycle. Three wheels, one fat one in the back and two up front. Two side-by-side seats, butts less than 6 inches off the pavement. Looks incredibly fast!

Final impressions of Beijing

2007-10-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

It's Monday morning in Beijing. This afternoon begins the 18 hour flight back to Houston via Newark. The inbound airplane was 90 minutes late leaving to come here so my flight is showing to be delayed.

There would be enough time for a final shopping trip, at least over to Wangfujing... but I'm out of money and out of energy.

Final impressions of Beijing

Weekend "Dirt Market" (PanJiaYuan Antique Market)
Enormous. The city spreads for miles and miles in all directions. The drive up to the Wall at Mutianyu took us about 120km out from the city center... and it was all occupied. Some farmland interspersed but apartments and "suburbs" all the way.
Traffic. All the time. Saturday morning and afternoon, Sunday night, Sunday morning. People going places all the time. And "right of way" is what you take, not something that is given. Pedestrians, bikes, taxis, private cars, and buses all mostly just go where they're going and dare the other to hit them. Saw surprisingly few accidents just lots of near misses.
Air pollution is an issue. I had blogged that it wasn't bad. We had a fluke of the weather that kept a fair breeze blowing most days and so the air was perfectly fine. Yesterday, Sunday, the breezes were absent and you could see and taste the air.
Security everywhere. I don't know if this is the norm. This trip coincided with the once every 5 year congress of the Communist Party of China. A hotel quite near ours was cordoned off with police tape and surrounded by a combination of military guards, uniformed police, and civilians with red arm bands and jackets marked "security". As near as I can tell, the meeting is in a huge edifice called the Great Hall of the People which is more or less across Dong Chang'An Jie (the 12-lane street in front of the hotel).
Lots of manual labor. Saw lots of jobs being done by labor that would be done with some sort of mechanical aid in the West. For example, driving up to Mutianyu on Saturday morning, we would periodically pass someone sweeping the road shoulder with a long broom made of twigs. There didn't seem to be any job in the hotel that didn't have two or three people assigned to it.
Everything is well used. Lots of bicycles, electric bikes, enclosed gas powered tricycles and such. Almost all are battered and rusted.
Clean but dusty. I saw very, very little trash on the streets. But there's also very little sign of streets and public walkways being washed. Kind of a ground in dirt and dust patina on everything. Not helped by the massive amount of construction going on.
CCTV buildings going up
Construction absolutely everywhere. 24x7. At 10pm on Sunday night we were walking out from the restaurant last night to where we could get a taxi. We passed a crew digging up the street to lay a cable. The cable was being pulled off the spool through the trench by a gang of men. Not just small projects and also not just Olympic projects. There are a mind-boggling number of huge office buildings going up.

Truly perfect day at the Great Wall

2007-10-20T10:36:00.000-07:00

My two compatriots and I had arranged a trip to the Great Wall of China at Mutianyu today. Absolutely an amazing place.

There are four segments of the Great Wall accessible from Beijing. We had been warned away from Badaling as a tourist trap. One of my companions on this trip had been to Jinshanling on a previous trip to China and also seen Simatai off in the distance. He was trying to be nice about it but really wanted to make it clear that those were too challenging for someone of my fitness level... poor.

So Mutianyu was our choice. We arranged a car with the help of the office. Set price of 700RMB (less than $100) gave us the car and driver for the day. A bit under a two hour ride up to the parking area, the driver would wait until we came back down and then drive us back to our hotel.

From the parking lot we hiked up a row of t-shirt vendors, snack vendors et cetera until we reached the cable car terminal. Cable car up to just below a point on the wall at more or less the center of the accessible part of the wall. Then hiked on the wall.

The day could not have been more perfect, sunny and comfortable very early fall day with the foliage just barely starting to turn colors. For me, it was an overwhelming experience to be in this iconic place. It's one of those places that I never really thought I'd see.

From the cable car head we hiked westward and upward until we made it to the limit of the area where tourists are allowed. The last section (second picture) was pretty challenging for someone whose exercise has been limited to a 30 minute daily walk on the flats of Houston. The very last bit is very steep, practically a stone ladder. After a couple of rest stops on the way, I caught up to my younger, fitter friends at the top. I was gasping and seriously wondering if I had overtaxed.

We rested quite a while up there, had snacks and water and let me get my heart rate back to normal. Then back, mostly downhill, to where we started.

When we hit the spot to turn off and take the cable car down we sat for a bit again. If we ignored the cable car, the next stretch was also mostly downhill. At the end of it were three ways to get down: a gondola, a "toboggan run", or walk. We ended up walking it all the way down. Massively easier than up.

We were by no means alone on this segment of the Wall. But it was also not very crowded. The vistas were beautiful as the wall snaked along the mountain ridges. And even though the wall has been restored, just being on this ancient thing is very moving.

Altogether we spent about four hours hiking on the wall. We didn't quite cover all the way to the eastern end of the Mutianyu section but reasonably close. Total trip time from leaving the hotel until returning was a bit over eight hours.

Training of Willpower - Party Office Department

2007-10-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

We're in a pretty high priced hotel even though the company rate is dirt cheap. The room has all sorts of folders full of information about the half-dozen restaurants in the place. One of the things says "newsletter" on the top of the cover. It's about 90% very poetic descriptions of particular dishes served or the furnishings of the nicer rooms.

Near the back of this is this little gem of an article:

In the running up to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Grand Hotel Beijing commenced its preparations for the training sessions in hospitality reception and services geared at 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, all relevant activities are fully underway with definitive objective and focal point in an orderly manner.
As an important part of the training for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, Party Office organized the employees in batches to participate in "Willpower Training Activity" - they are sent to Beijing Canal Golf Club to go in for labor of getting rid of the weeds. The training strengthened the willpower of the entire staff members, tempered their superior quality of willingness to work under pressure and to adopt the work style of hard struggle as well as the team spirit, so that the employees of the Hotel can perform the arduous reception tasks during Olympic Games period with excellent skills and sound mentality.

Um. Wow.

Beijing impressions

2007-10-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

Some random impressions:

There is no such thing as "right of way" in Beijing. Cars and bikes routinely drive right through crosswalks packed with pedestrians.

Traffic lanes are only a mild suggestion. I've mostly been in the back seat of taxis but last night was in the front. The driver wandered freely from lane to lane including encroaching into the oncoming traffic lane.

Less pollution than I had been led to expect. The weather has been perfect. A couple of cloudy days but mostly sunny and beautiful blue skies. One day had something like a temperature inversion and the air looked a bit ... thick.

Construction every freaking where! They're in the run up to the 2008 Olympics. So there are major projects, building new venues. And there are alos signs of sprucing up everywhere we've been. Piles of bricks and tiles and mounds of dirt, lots of them.

Enormous. Everything is big and spread out. From the 12-lane street the hotel is on to Tiananmen Square to the spread of the place. Today I walked up a hill in a park just north of the Forbidden City. City as far as the eye can see in all direction.

Lots of people trying to scam the foreigners but also some that are just friendly and curious. Today while walking to the Forbidden city, two 20-something kids walking the same way struck up a conversation with me. I was wary, expecting them to want to sell me something. But we walked and chatted for a few minutes, then they said "good bye, have a nice stay" and headed down into the subway. I also had I think three "art students" want me to come see their school's exhibition and a dozen folks selling books and maps and flags hit me up during the afternoon. But that one encounter was ... pleasant.

Scorpion on a stick and less recognizable ... treats?

2007-10-17T16:51:00.000-07:00

Just have time for a quick post. The picture is from a street market off Wangfujie a few blocks from the hotel. The market stretches for a very long Beijing block, probably a good 600 yards, of booth after booth selling all sorts of stuff. Most of which are not something I'd care to eat. The scorpions are obvious, I don't know what the heck those things to either side are!

Beijing has been quite different from my expectations. Not that my expectations were clear but I expected something quite foreign. In a lot of ways, it is. Almost everyone dresses in western styles. The people passing on the street wouldn't draw a second glance in any U.S. city. And there are a lot more signs and such with English on them than I expected.

But most people speak very little English if any. As a rule, taxi drivers do not speak any English. So to take taxis we have to get someone, either hotel or at work, to write the destination in Chinese characters. And we carry a card from the hotel with the hotel name and location in Chinese characters.

Everyone is either friendly or just ignores us as inconsequential.

More later.

You are kindly requested not to exit your room barefooted

2007-10-15T07:24:00.000-07:00

I'm now two full days in Beijing. My free Sunday and one work day.

Sunday was a down day. I was depressed or culture shocked or maybe still just jet lagged even after a week on this side of the world.

I did get myself out of the hotel for a couple of walking tours of the neighborhood. The geographical center of Beijing is the Forbidden City. My hotel is just off the southeast corner of the wall enclosing that vast space. One of the several restaurants in the hotel is called the Red Wall Cafe because it looks out at the red wall that surrounds the Forbidden City. One block west is the gate to some parks that then lead up to the Meridian Gate. The trick being what comprises a "block".

The scale of this place is a little hard to get sorted out. I went walking Sunday, went about 1/2 kilometer west and got to a gateway in the red wall. Thinking I had made it to the entrance to the parks I turned in and headed what felt like a long ways north, probably a kilometer. Nothing that looked like the Forbidden City. I ended up looping around back to the hotel.

Well it turns out that I had gotten only about half way to the gate I should have taken. And it's the Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, a huge hundred foot tall structure with an enormous banner of Mao Zedong's face on it. Not something that could have been missed if I hadn't been a zombie.

My compadres both arrived at midnight last night after their own airport adventures. Tonight after we let our students loose, we struck out for a little stroll down to see Tiananmen Square, the largest public square in the world. The size of the space is ... stunning. It's a rectangular space that's 1/2 kilometer by over 3/4 kilometer. About 80% just open space paved with concrete pavers. We walked more or less around the perimeter. At 7pm or so on a weeknight, there were thousands of people out walking or taking pictures. And thousands didn't crowd the place, far from it in fact.

I managed to get out tonight without my camera so have no pictures of the square. I'll get back to do that but pictures aren't going to convey the scale of the place.

Oh, and about the title of the post. I was idly flipping thru the booklet that lists the hotel services and came on the "safety and security" section. In there are the kinds of things you'd expect. Lock your door, no animals, no explosives allowed etc. And there tucked in the "Prohibitions" list is ... You are kindly requested not to exit your room barefooted. Um. OK.

Not in Kansas anymore... travel to China

2007-10-13T21:47:00.000-07:00

Saturday Oct 13 was a long travel day for me. Sydney to Beijing, 15-1/2 hours from take-off to final touchdown, two flight legs on China Southern Airlines.

Up at 5:30am to get a 6:30 cab and be way too early at the airport.

First flight was Sydney to Guangzhou (what we used to call Canton). That was the long segment, almost 9 hours. The seating configuration was 2-4-2, I got lucky and had a window/aisle row to myself. So room to stretch out, easy to pop up and down but no getting whacked by carts and passengers in the aisle.

The transit through Guangzhou was ... an adventure. Huge spread out airport from what I could tell. I cleared through customs there. Three separate forms filled out, three separate queues, none of them excessively long waits but it all added up. Then an interminable wait for the luggage.

I hadn't been paying close attention to the time as my schedule said I'd have 3 hours in Guangzhou. But at the transfer counter where I had to recheck luggage for the flight to Beijing, the agent got very excited. Her English was good enough to make me understand that I had to hurry but not good enough for me to understand just where to go! Turns out that I had 15 minutes before my flight would board. I was tired and a bit disoriented and just not "getting it".

Finally one of the young guys handling luggage grabbed my backpack, motioned for me to follow and took off at a trot through the terminal. They had been trying to get me to follow another young guy in a sort of bellman uniform. Turns out he drove the cart (which cost me $US2 to ride!).

After a bit of hurry up and wait we ended up with a full cart of mostly Chinese passengers and headed off through a maze of empty walkways. After a 10 minute drive from the A terminal he dropped us at the B terminal. Up the stairs, through security, down the stairs just in time to join the end of the boarding line. But this boarding line led to jam-packed buses bound for the actual gate... back at the A terminal. Up three flights stairs to the outside access to the jetway and onto the plane.

When the plane pushed back it had been maybe 45 minutes total from when I dropped my bag at the transfer counter. So I figured it would be a miracle if my bags actually made the flight.

But it all worked out. Two and a half hours later in Beijing, my bag was one of the first half-dozen on the carousel. The office had arranged a car to the hotel. I managed to follow the right exit sign and meet up with the driver. So probably 15 minutes after the plane started to unload I was in the back of the limo on the road into the city. Hit the hotel at midnight and was exhausted.

I planned to call back home, Alice and Aryn are off to "Dr. Penny's" wedding this weekend and I thought I could catch them... but I couldn't figure out how to dial home from my cell. The cell actually works in Beijing, a first for all my travels.

Last full day in Sydney

2007-10-11T14:28:00.000-07:00

It's 7:30am on Friday Oct 12 in Sydney as I write this. This will be my last full day in Sydney. Flight to Beijing is at 10am tomorrow morning.

My work week here consisted of doing a 90-minute presentation on Tuesday followed by an all-day training on Wednesday. The software for the Wednesday training was loaded into a virtual machine. And when I checked it out on Tuesday it was completely fubar. The person who normally does training on this software was in Amsterdam this week. When it hit daylight there we started in trying to fix the problem. It took until 11pm to resolve the issue. For a while there it was looking pretty tense. The training went off pretty well.

Yesterday was the turn of my two colleagues to take over the training. I camped out in a cubicle at the office to fix up some very out of date material that I'll be using in the Beijing training next week.

The week hasn't been very adventurous. Dinner twice in the hotel restaurant. I had kangaroo. Rather like slightly lean beef. So now I've seen a kangaroo in Australia, cooked medium rare. We went into the city with one of the locals one night for dinner at a Lebanese restaurant named Habibi's. Excellent food there. And dinner last night was at a nearby restaurant named Basil's. The food was very good but it was a bit of an odd place. It claimed to be Italian but the menu was 90% seafood and the staff was all Chinese or Japanese.

My two colleagues aren't flying to China until Sunday so they will be moving to a downtown hotel this evening. It's not worth the trouble for me. I'll probably cab into the city with them and have dinner. We've got some sorting out to do for the training next week that is best done over a couple of bottles of wine.

Spring time in Sydney

2007-10-07T15:11:00.000-07:00

Arrived in Sydney bright and early Sunday morning. The flight was uneventful. But note to self: try to remember that "exit rows" in 747s pretty much suck. I had the pod that holds emergency evac slide right in front of me. We had an abbreviated overhead storage and zero under seat storage as we faced the big door and a crew jumpseat. The only positive was unlimited leg room if I angled out past the slide. My other alternative was a middle so this was better.

After getting settled in the hotel (out in the boonies) and meeting up with one of my coworkers, we headed into town to mostly kill some time. Wandered about Circular Quay and The Rocks. There was a big street market going on in the Rocks. After a couple of beers there we decided to do a ferry ride to somewhere. Decided to go out to the Taronga Zoo.

We took the train over to Town Hall and walked to Darling Harbour. It was starting to rain a bit and had gotten a bit cooler. Dinner at Nick's on Darling Harbour was very good. Back at the hotel about 8. By 9pm I was crashing. Lots to do for work but still got time.

www.TimeAndDate.com

2007-10-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

I deal with a lot of different time zones on a daily basis. My team is scattered across four time zones on three continents. And I answer questions or do conference calls with people all over the world. But not too long ago when I traveled one time zone away I couldn't figure out what time it was at home.

And let's not even talk about Daylight Savings Time rules in different countries and different hemispheres!

At some point I googled up www.TimeAndDate.com. This has been incredibly useful!

For example today I had to set up a time for a conference call that will take place next week. I'm currently in Houston and the person I'll be calling is on the U.S. East Coast. Next week I'll be in Sydney and he'll be in Amsterdam. I used the meeting planner on timeanddate.com. With that it was a snap to find a time that was suitable for both of us. And then translate it to my current time zone to put it on the Outlook.

Kudos to this site! Not only useful but very clean.

Charlie Chan, cure for insomnia

2007-09-30T17:27:00.000-07:00

Twenty-some years ago when Alice and I were young and broke, Saturday night entertainment consisted of a bowl of popcorn (popped on the stove, pre-microwaves) and whatever movie was on television. We lived in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN. One of the Minneapolis stations was running the old Charlie Chan movies.

The only reason these are memorable to us is that week after week, Alice would fall asleep 15 minutes before the movie ended. In other words, just as Charlie was solving the crime.

Well, the magic still works. I put Charlie Chan on Broadway on top of the Netflix queue and got it last Thursday. We watched it Friday night. Alice was out like a light about half way through.

Cube sweet cube

2007-09-21T10:09:00.001-07:00

OK, last post on the subject of cubicles. Been in the cubes for a couple of weeks (minus travel days). It's not quite as bad as I thought it would be. Not sure if the folks around me work some odd hours. Or maybe we're all on different days working from home. The noise level isn't bad overall. Some phone conversations, but I do plenty of those.

One hassle came up today. I did a talk via web and conference call. To reduce extraneous noise on my end, I had to pack up the computer and go to a conference room. Could be worse.

Saner schedule achieved

2007-09-19T10:58:00.000-07:00

Whew, dodged a bullet. The travel agency came up with a different itinerary for my Sydney and Beijing trip. It came in a few hundred more expensive but not enough to cause management to balk.

I'm now doing a straight three-legged route.

Houston to Sydney via Los Angeles
Sydney to Beijing via Guangzhou
Beijing to Houston via Newark

The other good news is that all of the flights will get me miles on my Continental account. Houston to LA and Beijing to Houston are Continental so those will count towards getting me to higher levels of elite. The other legs are on carriers that give miles on Continental.

The travel I've now got booked puts me within striking distance of platinum. That'd give me access to the Continental lounges all next year.

Miles and miles

2007-09-18T15:02:00.000-07:00

I just got a few thousand more miles added to my October travels.

Due to screwy airline pricing, round trips are hugely cheaper than one ways. So I'm doing a round trip from home to Sydney with a round trip from Sydney to Beijing in the middle of it. This reduced the fare by $5,000 from a more sane and simple point to point route.

My trip home at the end will be Beijing to Hong Kong to Sydney, lay over 6 hours. Then Sydney to San Francisco to home. From the time I lift off the ground in Beijing to wheels down at home will be almost 42 hours in transit. Ugh.

The total trip is nearly 30,000 miles.

The paperwork is in for approval now. We'll see.

Thumping noise and shaking house

2007-09-18T06:03:00.000-07:00

After being rained out twice, the city crew is out front with a backhoe.

The sidewalk in front of our house had settled unevenly and is a nasty tripping hazard. The settling also affected one section of my driveway. The sidewalks here are the city's to maintain, the driveway was a judgment call by the crew boss. He decided the settling was caused by problems around the sewer that were their fault.

They are out there this morning, beginning at 7am, ripping out most of the sidewalk and the affected section of the driveway. It's partly manual labor but mostly a big ol' backhoe thumping away to break up the concrete. Some of it seems to be extra stubborn. When they thump down on those the whole house rattles.

Plan is to demolish it all today, lay sand, forms and rebar. Then pour and finish the replacement tomorrow.

The crew boss and backhoe operator is one of my neighbors from the old house. He's really precise with the demolition. We have a big circular flower bed around a tree in the front. The edge is defined by stacked stones. The driveway segment they're demolishing is less than a foot from one edge of that bed and he hasn't disturbed a single rock.

Update: Added picture. I didn't get a picture of the demolition in progress. This is how it looks this morning. Bottom leveled, forms and rebar all in place. As of now there's a crew standing about waiting for concrete to arrive.

October: 27,000 air miles

2007-09-13T17:53:00.000-07:00

This has all been in flux for the last several weeks but it looks like it has settled out and will actually happen.

I'm scheduled for some more international travel in October.

Back to Sydney, Australia the week of October 8th. That means leaving as early as the 5th. The trip is close to 24 hours and a day gets lost crossing the date line.
Straight from Sydney to Beijing, China for the week of the 15th.
Home for the week of the 22nd
Up to Vancouver the week of the 29th.

I'll be teaching classes in Sydney and Beijing. Vancouver is the company's annual user conference. I've got a speaking gig there and will be back up staff for one of the booths, doing product demos.

Further out is a slim possibility of a trip to Sao Paulo either the week before or after Thanksgiving. And a week in Florida in mid-December.

If I can get enough of those trips on Continental, I might make Platinum Elite and get free access to the clubs. Probably going to come up short, though. No Continental or code share flights to Sydney. And the Continental route from Beijing back to Houston is via Newark.

Hunkered down for Humberto

2007-09-12T18:06:00.000-07:00

Tropical Storm Humberto sprang up off Galveston today. I was completely oblivious to it until the facilities folks at work sent out an email. Chances of anything more than a good rain are slim. If you look at a county map of Texas, our house sits in the northernmost tip of Brazoria county. We're in the 20 to 30% band on the National Hurricane Center's tropical storm wind prediction chart. Humberto is expected to hit Galveston overnight and head to the northeast.

We dragged all the patio furniture into the garage. The new house has a single-car garage door that opens on the patio so that was all of a five minute job. There's enough wine in the chiller for a few days in case we get rained in. :)

Update

Humberto decided to visit someone else. About 15 minutes after we pulled all the patio furniture into the garage it became obvious that we weren't going to get so much as a good rain out of this one. Not that I'm complaining, mind you.

Busch Stadium waiting...

2007-09-05T17:15:00.001-07:00

Raining here in Busch Stadium the third. Roofs may not be "pure" but there are no rainouts at Minute Maid!

This game did get played and with only a 30 minute delay from the original start time. Watching them pull the tarp back and make all the water disappear down a drain in shallow left field was pretty fascinating.

Trying to come up with the handful of stadiums where I've seen a baseball game.

The old Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, MN. Saw the Twins there. That stadium is long gone. I think Mall of America is on that site.
Shea Stadium. Saw the Mets play the Astros probably 20 years ago.
SafeCo Field. Saw the Mariners there in 2002 and met some of my cousins for the first time (long story there).
Astrodome. We've been in Houston for 27 years now. Not sure when we went to our first game at the 'Dome. Dome dogs, Dome Foam, Dome Patrol. No rainouts and always comfortable. The big scoreboard that lit up when the 'Stro's hit a homer was a sight to behold. The TV recreation of it in the new park is a pale shadow.
Enron Field and Minute Maid Park. Originally to be called The Ballpark at Union Station before high flying Enron paid big bucks for naming rights. The ball park was the beginning of the renaissance of downtown Houston.

Lightning struck plane...

2007-09-05T15:56:00.000-07:00

Just after I posted about being off on a trip to St. Louis, they announced that we'd be delayed.

Seems the airplane was coming from Baton Rouge and it had been struck by lightning while on the tarmac there. Everyone from my flight tried standby on the next flight, which worked for only a couple of folks. After not getting out on that later flight I found that the original flight was back on and the plane was on its way from Louisana to Houston.

To make a long night into a short story, I arrived in St. Louis 3-1/2 hours late. The only trouble this caused me was navigating a mostly unknown city at 11pm. Printed directions are all well and good until you're alone in a rental car driving in the rain and the dark. But even with a construction detour I managed to get where I was going without any wandering about. So all's well that ends.

Oh, and about the plane that was struck by lightning: I rather suspect that lightning struck nearby and emp-ed out the electrical systems. It was checked out by maintenance and sent on its way. So that's the plane I flew on to St. Louis. Heck if the captain and rest of the crew are OK to fly in it, how bad can it be?

Off again

2007-09-04T14:45:00.001-07:00

Off on a short trip. Continental ExpressJet to St. Louis. The terminal segment at Houston Bush Intercontinental for these little planes is more like a bus station than an airline terminal. Weather report for St. Louis is miserable. It's either going to be hotter than Houston or it will be raining. I've got a two day meeting with a customer on this trip, coming home Friday morning.

Packed and labelled

2007-08-31T14:32:00.001-07:00

The office contents are all packed up. The company moves people so much that they've gone to reusable plastic boxes. All my stuff fits into two boxes. That excludes computers and furniture, of course.

Dreams

2007-08-28T10:29:00.000-07:00

This is part of the Dilbert strip from Aug 23, 2007.

It's particularly appropos since Friday I'll be packing up my office for move into a fabric covered box. Apparently having over a decade with the company meant that I was at the top of the list for a primo fabric covered box. One side of my box will be glass. I'll have a third floor window cube with a panoramic view of the parking garage and the fitness center I never have time to use.

Oh, well. As things are shaping up for the next couple of months, I won't be spending much time in the box. Trips scheduled for the week after Labor day and almost all of October. More details to come. It seems to change daily.

Aug 8 and 9, Vancouver and Whistler

2007-08-18T07:27:00.000-07:00

Not going to belabor the rest of the trip. It was a good time but nothing as fun as the whale watching.

On the 8th, we did a bus tour of the city of Vancouver. Something to help us get our bearings in the place. More for a future trip than this one as we pretty well booked up the time we had this trip. The bus tour got us into the Harbour Place tower which has a circular observation deck with great views including this one of Canada place with a cruise ship docked.
It took us thru the major districts of the city, Gastown, Chinatown, etc. And out around Stanley park for a good look at the Lion's Gate bridge (which was, obviously, designed by the same guy who did the larger Golden Gate). The last stop on the bus tour was the Granville Island Public Market
. Looked like a great place to shop for produce, art, and wine.

On the 9th, we had booked a trip up the Sea to Sky route to Whistler/Blackcombe. We took the
Whistler Mountaineer train up and bus back. That gave us about four hours in Whistler. Which turned out to be about three hours too many. The train trip up was great, took tons of pictures as the train wound up Howe Sound and then up into the mountains. In Whistler we wandered thru one art gallery where nothing was under several thousand dollars and a few souvenir shops. There were opportunities to go zip-lining or ride a ski lift gondola to the top of the mountain. Alice doesn't do heights well so those were pretty well out. So we had lunch at an Irish pub and bought a shirt and an Inukchuk (an Indian symbol of welcome that's being used as the mascot/symbol of the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held at Vancouver and Whistler).

After the bus ride back down to our hotel in Vancouver we cleaned up a bit and went out for some shopping on Robson Street and dinner at the Imperial Chinese Restaurant. The restaurant used to have a real nice view over the harbor but it's now blocked by construction.

Aug 7, Victoria to Vancouver

2007-08-16T07:39:00.000-07:00

Nothing very exciting this day but a day of contrasts.

We headed into Victoria with the intention of spending some time in the government / museum area. It was the first work day back from "BC Days" holiday for the city. Possibly because of that there was no parking to be found for blocks around the area. Neither one of us felt like walking much so we headed the rent car up towards the ferry to Tsawwassen. Long wait for the ferry there and lots of traffic from Tsawwassen up into Vancouver but all incident-free.

One afternoon at the B&B, we had chatted with a couple on vacation from Hawaii. Who knew the people who live in Hawaii needed to take vacations! They had just come from a few days in Vancouver and had turned up a magic code that got us rooms at the Hyatt downtown for less than half the rack rate.

The room was very nice and about as much of a contrast from the B&B as you can imagine. From 19th century antiques at the B&B to 21st century modern in the Hyatt.

We had been eating these multi-course. expensive, late meals up to this point and both needed something a little more basic. We had fish and chips and a beer in a food concourse across from Canada Place. Back at the hotel we had the concierge set us up for a bus tour of the city and a trip up to Whistler mountain. More on that later.