There are 243 posts filed in Travels (this is page 19 of 25).
I’m off to Chicago now for two days of training sessions. I’m looking forward to riding the rails into Chicago, the Mecca of train cities. I will also ride the rails to get around town as well as to the airport for the flight home.
While I can plug in my laptop and chat on my cellphone on the way, I won’t have Internet access. Blog atcha later.
Good news from Kelly this morning: they got on the morning flight to Raleigh! By the time I post this they should be “wheels up” and on their way home. Kelly said the kids got to meet the pilots and make the “welcome aboard” announcement, too.
Good to know their travel adventures will soon end. I suppose I can cut Northwest some slack after all.
Well, the travel gods were not smiling on Kelly and the kids. Northwest Airlines royally screwed up their only possible chance to get to Raleigh tonight. Northwest then went the extra mile, screwing up the family’s chance at tomorrow morning’s flight, too.
Right now the family will be lucky to take the 1:30 PM CDT flight which puts them into Raleigh after 4PM: twenty-one hours after they expected to be home! Is it any wonder Northwest Airlines ranks at the bottom of customer satisfaction surveys?
Just got word that Kelly and the kids missed their Northwest connecting flight to Raleigh, thanks to a ground stop in Detroit which kept their Milwaukee plane from taking off on time. As is typical, they were told their connecting flight would likely wait for them but it was not to be. Though they landed at 5:07, their Raleigh flight left the gate at 5:21 without them. Bah.
I hope they can get on another flight pronto so they don’t have to spend the night in Detroit.
Milwaukee’s city government is very tech-savvy, with its Google Maps transit integration and fresh, easy-to-navigate webpage and all. Turns out the city also has free municipal wifi in a few of its parks.
Its a model I’d like to see Raleigh emulate some day.
I saw the family off this morning for their trip from Milwaukee back to home. It was sad saying goodbye to them knowing I wouldn’t be home for another three days. I now sit in the room Kelly’s parents stayed in, surrounded by empty chairs that used to be full of wriggling children and laughing adults. Feels quite lonely here.
Continue reading
Remember when I was wishing Google Maps did more than driving? Through a visit to Milwaukee’s transit page I discovered Google Maps now covers public transit. Now Google Maps can tell you how to get where you’re going – without driving! Pretty cool.
Raleigh’s CAT system (or Triangle Transit, for that matter) isn’t listed on the page. Adding it seems to be a matter of setting up a feed of schedules and routes that Google periodically fetches. I don’t know if anyone at CAT is working on it so I might get started on it myself.
We’re in Milwaukee for the next few days for a family wedding. Its my first trip to Milwaukee. Nice place, from what I’ve seen so far.
Its been so long since I’ve flown that it seems to have lost any joy it once held, even when bringing my family along. We flew Northwest (as we didn’t have a choice) and I was dreading the experience, as NWA has one of the worst customer satisfaction ratings. In spite of my dread, the airline did a decent job. Employees overall were friendly, the plane was clean, and we arrived on time.
Sunday, we part ways as Kelly takes the kids home and I head to Chicago to conduct my first product training on Tuesday and Wednesday. I’ll rejoin the family Wednesday night.
Remember the Neuros Recorder2, the tiny MPEG4 recorder I’ve raved about?
Old and busted! The new hotness is the FlyCamOne2. It is a gadget with 640×480 video and audio recording, built-in camera, and an infrared motion sensor. It records straight to an SD card. Heck, it even charges from a USB port! And the whole thing is just 100 bucks!
This thing might be small enough to mount on my mythical weather balloon project.
Update: Nevermind….the FlyCamOne2 is old and busted, too. That didn’t take long. The new hotness is the Oregon Scientific Action Cam, which apparently has better video (and the upcoming 3K release supports 4GB SD cards). The 2K model can be had for $92 at Circuit City.
Check out the videos [warning: self-playing flash] from the ATC 2K, including this cool model rocket video.
Tomorrow I’m due in beautiful Greenville, SC to speak to Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group about the Zenoss open-source network management suite. I am now a former Zenossian but still consider myself a member of its community. I hope there’s a decent turnout and that everyone learns something (including me).
