Steve’s Weblog

we’re never going to get to Executive Platinum status this year!!

ABIA reports drop in number of travelers in March
3/13/2009 4:19 PM
By: News 8 Austin Staff

March is a busy month for travelers with South by Southwest, spring break and March Madness taking center stage there’s certainly enough to keep the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport a high traffic area.

ABIA officials said they’ve seen a slight decrease in the number of travelers this March compared to last year.

From News8 Austin

I’ve been on a travel binge, with literally hours at home between flights for what will wind up being nearly three weeks before it’s over.

I had a recruiting trip to UIUC on the 27th and 28th of February, where I participated in an IBM Information Session with other IBM managers on the 27th, and a career fair on the 28. I also attended a UIUC Pride meeting on the 28th to talk about the workplace climate at IBM for GLBT people.

After a long miserable day of travelling back home on March 1st, with weather related traffic delays in Champaign and Chicago, I finally made it home by around 11:00 PM, just in time to do some laundry and pack for my next trip out on March 2nd.

The good news is that the next trip was a snowboarding vacation to Banff and Lake Louise in Alberta, Canada. We met up with our friends from Toronto and Montreal, and had an awesome week of snowboarding. Nhut has all the pictures organized on his site, and I’m sure I’ll get around to that on my gallery eventually.

I think I was home for about 6 hours betwen flights, again, just long enough to unpack, do some laundry and pack again before heading off to Tokyo for the ACM ICPC World Finals. I’ll have one free day before work for some sightseeing and sushi .

Man, what the heck is the deal with so many of the holier than thou right wing blogs? As if none of them has ever written an angry tirade and dropped a couple of f-bombs? What-everrr! People who live in glass houses, etc… I have to admit that the overuse of expletives in a blog post can detract from the message the writer is trying to convey by turning the reader off so that they don’t finish reading your rant. Still, there is a certain level of outrageous disgust at the things the wingnuts do that may prompt the level of language that matches the anger you’re feeling. Well, anyway, I’m pretty sure I won’t be hired by any presidential campaign to blog on their site, so I’m not too worried.

Anyway, back to travelling again after almost a month off. I had to head up to New York for work this week, in part to be reminded what winter was really like. While the wind was whipping on the streets of Manhattan and the thermometer was stuck at 15 degrees, it was sunny and warm in Austin, with the high in the 70s. I was at a career fair at NYU, and happened to be in the front room, fairly close to the door. It was pretty blustery inside the building most of the day. The good part of the trip was being right on Mulberry Street, and heading into Little Italy, or what’s left of it, for dinner after the career fair. Luna, one of the restaurants on Mulberry St. that Nhut and I went to a few times, was closed for good, but I found another one, and enjoyed the Calamari Marinara. Oh, and I’m sure the cannoli I had for dessert was low fat.

Heading into the security checkpoint at American’s terminal 9 at JFK they have two lines, one for main cabin, and one for First Class, and elite level mileage awards customers. I guess the assumption is that the First Class/elite line will have less people in it and take less time to go through. Well, you know what happens when you assume. That line is also for crew, and vendors making deliveries, and special needs customers in wheelchairs, and… well, no time saved.

I did actually get to spend one night at home this week before heading back out again, this time on a short vacation. We’re headed up to Mont Tremblant, Canada for a couple days of snowboarding with our buddies from Toronto. This was a FF award trip, and for some reason when I made the reservation, there were no seats available that didn’t include one of us sitting in a middle seat between Austin and Chicago. Nhut was getting all grumpy with me about it, but hey, the miles were coming from my account, and I wasn’t gonna be sitting in the middle, !snap! Anyway, by the time they closed the door, nobody was sitting next to us, and we got to spread out a bit. phew! Don’t need to be dealing with an angry Nhut on a cold snowboarding weekend! We have a really short connection in Chicago, and we’re hoping our bags make it to Montreal with us. There’s not really going to be time for us to grab any food in Chicago, and they don’t feed you in coach on AA unless you want to buy a snack box, so we picked up some sandwiches from Schlotsky’s in Austin. Low blood sugar is bad, mkay? Especially for two.

I actually packed three snowboards this trip, two of mine, and one of Nhut’s and I will spend some time giving a lesson to one of the guys who will use my old board. I had some cold weather wax, and applied a coat to all three boards with the hot iron last night before we left. My snowboard bag is big enough to fit all three boards, two pair of boots and my hot wax iron and tools, although I did have to leave one set of bindings off the old board, and will assemble once we arrive.

Remember my Christmas rant at AA? Well, guess what arrived in the mail today? Two travel vouchers, good for travel on AA, just like they promised… face value of $100 each!

Having achieved Executive Platinum status, I suppose I should be used to the kind of shoddy treatment from AA that we experienced this holiday weekend… Nhut and I had made our flight arrangements over two months ahead of the Christmas holiday, knowing that we had family to visit on both the East and West Coast.

We scheduled a flight for early on Christmas day so that we could spend Christmas eve with my family in NJ, and Christmas day with his family in LA. I was majorly annoyed to find out on Christmas morning, as we were driving to Newark at 5:00 AM, that our flight from Newark to Los Angeles had been canceled, and we were re-booked on a much later flight that would get us in to LAX way too late on Christmas day. What was really annoying is having my itinerary completely rescheduled with no form of notification from AA, meanwhile they have every form of contact to reach either me or Nhut available, including cell phone numbers and e-mail addresses.

In order for us to make a flight that arrived in LA in time to see the family, we had to make a major switch, and get over to JFK to catch a flight that left 1/2 hour earlier than we were scheduled to fly out of Newark! Fortunately we figured this out just as we were about to get off I-80 and head south on I-287, and were able to just stay on I-80 and head through Manhattan and over to JFK.

Of course that meant we had to drive the additional distance, and incur the additional $10 in bridge tolls and somehow make up 1/2 hour to make sure we could check our bags and make the earlier flight. Fortunately, at that time of the morning, the roads were empty, and we made it to JFK with some time to spare. Everyone had said traveling on Christmas day was going to be nice because the planes would be empty, but that’s not what we found. The plane was just as full on this trip as it has been on every other flight we’ve been on over the past couple months. And once on board, we were annoyed to find that three of the five lavatories on board the 767-200 were out of service for the duration of the flight, making a restroom visit a hassle with a line at both of the functioning lavs for the entire flight.

Overall, a pretty miserable travel day for us.

Thanks AA.

There wasn’t any free or reasonably priced wireless internet access in Brussels, so we just didn’t bother getting online there. They wanted €15 a day for access at the hotel in Brussels. We did find an open WAP at the hotel in Amsterdam, so we could check email, and Nhut uploaded some of the pictures we took. In both cities, we stayed in the old city center.

When we arrived on Tuesday in Brussels, we got a room at the Best Western hotel, right next to Centraal Station. Since we arrived too early to actually check in to the room, we just stashed our bags and headed off to walk around the city. We stopped off at a café on the Grand Place, and had coffee and a waffle. We found the Manneken Pis statue and took a couple pictures before heading back to the hotel for a nap. (hello jet lag)

After napping we walked around again for a bit and saw the light show at the Grand Place, and checked out St. Michael’s Cathedral as well as getting dinner and another waffle.

We were up early to catch the train to Amsterdam, a 2 ½ hour ride. Once we got off the train in Amsterdam, we figured we should find a hotel. The service in the train station wanted €10 for a hotel booking, so we decided to pass, and see if we could find something on our own. The short answer is no, we couldn’t. We stopped in a small out of the way Hotel booking shop, which found us a room, and only charged €2.50 per person as a booking fee. He got us a room in the Nova Hotel, which was just behind Dam Square in the center of the city. We hung out in the room, and looked up places to eat in the city. After getting kind of bored with the food in Paris and Brussels, we were looking for something a little different. We checked out the Blonde Hollander for some traditional Dutch food. It was OK, but Nhut wasn’t really too impressed.

We booked two tours for Thursday and Friday in Amsterdam. The first was a combination of one we had been on before, to Volendam, Marken and a Windmill village, along with a city tour. It was fun; we toured a wooden shoe factory, walked around the windmills (where I dropped the camera last time) and a cheese farm before getting lunch in Volendam, which used to be a fishing village before they put up the dam. The tour guide wasn’t so great, and her city tour was pretty weak, but it was a fun tour that ended with a boat ride tour through the Amsterdam harbor and canals.

We decided to check out the Sea Palace, a floating Chinese Restaurant in the Amsterdam Harbor. The food was only OK, and overpriced. After dinner we walked through the red light district for laughs. Nhut was wondering where the equivalent gay area was. Of course there isn’t a gay district with hot guys hanging out behind glass doors, under red lights though… Still, there are a couple of areas in Amsterdam that have gay clubs and stuff, and as I mentioned before, GayMap lists all the places with descriptions. We were going to go to a bar or dance club, but wound up just sleeping early. (boring!)

The next morning we were up early again to catch the Grand Holland tour, which took us to an amazingly huge flower auction in Aalsmeer. Next stop was a pottery factory in Delft, followed by lunch, where we tried the small Dutch pancakes (yum). Then on to Rotterdam, which didn’t have an old city center like the other cities we’ve been in before because it was bombed out during World War II, and so all the buildings were relatively modern. The last city stop on the tour was Den Haag (the Hague), we had a photo stop at the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (where we should expect half of the criminal Bush Administration to be tried for war crimes and violating the Geneva convention). The other interesting thing about driving around Den Haag was how the driver pointed out all the various country embassies, and, as the guide pointed out, the US Embassy was the only one that had extra fencing and police surveillance. Oh, and then we checked out a park of miniatures before heading back to Amsterdam.

We dropped off our little souvenir photos at the hotel before heading out for dinner, we found a little Thai place that looked like something David Barnes would have recommended. The entire restaurant was all in one small room, on the ground floor, including the kitchen! There were about 16 seats for diners, and three or four Asian women cooking. Everything we ate there was really good, and you watched them put it all together before bringing it over to your table.

We walked around a bit again for a while; we did a lot of walking around this trip, before heading back over to the hotel. We decided we were going to go check out one of the gay clubs that night, but since there were a couple that didn’t open until 10 or 11 at night, we had some time to kill. We decided to go to Club Cockring, what is it with naming gay clubs anyway? This place was interesting, compared to clubs we’ve been in before. It was worth checking out.

We were supposed to get up early Saturday morning, and take a few last photos before catching the train back to Brussels, but as noted before, given the opportunity, Nhut will sleep late. We did manage to get out in time to take a few pictures in the early morning rain, including some shots in the Red Light district, where there are signs for “No Cameras” all over the place. Oh, and they had these portable outdoor urinals on the street, which was weird, of course Nhut snapped a couple of pictures while they were unoccupied…

It was time to catch the train back to Brussels, and we walked back over to Centraal Station in Amsterdam. We got about the same seats in both trains; it was comfortable, even if we were facing backwards

Anyway, we had reserved a room at the Best Western in Brussels before we left on Wednesday morning, which was a good thing because this time, the streets were packed with people, and lined with booths of vendors selling Christmas stuff, hot wine, waffles and other fried foods that are really bad for my cholesterol level, but we just had to try anyway. We checked out the lights and music at Grand Place, and Nhut captured a video there. We followed along to the park where they had set up an ice skating rink and a Ferris wheel. Oh, and we found another outdoor open air urinal, which was really nasty, but I guess when you gotta go… it was weird because it was literally on the side of the church at the end of this park. We caught a ride on the Ferris wheel which had a great view of the city. As we walked back to the hotel the streets were starting to thin out a bit, but there was still a band performing on the square in front of the hotel, but when I woke up and looked out the next morning, it was so weird, the square was totally empty, all the booths and tents were gone, and there was nobody around but one street sweeper, almost like it had never happened!

We caught an early train back to the Airport for our flight back to the US. The lines were really long, both at the airline check-in and security. We just barely made it out to the gate with about five minutes to spare before boarding started. We had thought it might be nice to upgrade, but business class checked in full, so we’re riding in coach. The flight was delayed leaving Brussels by about 20 minutes, which virtually guarantees we’ll miss our connection to Austin by the time we clear Customs and Immigration.

The interesting thing about these long flights is how really boring they can be. And so, they usually play a few movies and TV shows to keep you distracted from the eight hours of boredom. It’s fairly common practice for the flight attendants to ask all of the passengers to shut their window shades, especially on older planes like this one, a 767 with a single main screen where the glare from the sun shining in would prevent people from being able to see the screen, and watch the movies. Anyway, Nhut reclined his seat, and the window that was behind his seat, is now peeking over his shoulder, and it’s open… so he closes the shade, only to have the woman sitting in the seat behind him open it. After a while, he closes it again, at which point this woman exclaims that “It’s my window!”, and she insists that she wants to keep it open. (grow up, please) Nhut called the flight attendant, who set the woman straight…. sort of, she closed the shade half way so that the light would be blocked from coming over Nhut’s shoulder by the seat, but still be open to keep the woman happy.

Oh, and who has gas on this flight? It’s really kind of nasty, where’s Shari to light a match?

1. Given the opportunity, Nhut will sleep late.

I should have remembered this from the last time we stayed in Brussels, but we stayed in a hotel near Brussels Central Station. The last time we were here, we arrived on EuroStar from London, which terminates at Brussels Midi station. There’s a kiosk in the Midi station that can help with booking a hotel in Brussels, and doesn’t charge a booking fee. Also, the person in the booth was helpful in identifying which neighborhood was worth staying in. Again, we stayed near Brussels Central Station, a couple blocks away from Grand Place, and a few other tourist spots.

We arrived in Amsterdam by train, and didn’t find the same service for booking a hotel. There are lots of Hotel Info and booking businesses, but they all charge a booking fee. It’s a small price to pay, (€2-3) depending on which one you use. Planning ahead next time, it looks like booking.com has a pretty good selection of hotels in Amsterdam. Going directly to the hotel to get a room seems to get you a higher rate than booking on-line, or with one of the hotel booking businesses.

Buying train tickets in advance in Europe was cheaper than buying online. Since we were in Paris a few weeks ago, we picked up the Brussels to Amsterdam tickets while we were in Paris, and paid €16 each way for a reserved seat on Thalys. The trip took 2 1/2 hours each way.

The GayMap had some useful information on finding gay stuff in both Amsterdam and Brussels.

Um, here we go again. Leaving for Paris this morning.

because whoever it was over at TSA that decided on the 3oz size limit had to be a total moron. Try and find toothpaste that comes in a size smaller that 4.1 oz at most retail stores, go ahead.. I dare you.

And really, who decided on the quart sized ziploc bag thing? Somebody who works for Ziploc at S.C. Johnson? Or maybe someone at Proctor and Gamble who will sell more stuff since anything that is excluded from travel and gets tossed, has to be replaced.

Airports giving away ‘travel baggies’

By EMILY FREDRIX, AP Business Writer 1 hour, 54 minutes ago

MILWAUKEE – This Thanksgiving, leftover stuffing and turkey drumsticks aren’t all that will go into plastic bags.

Some 25 million passengers are expected in the nation’s airports during the 12-day Thanksgiving travel period, the busiest travel time of the year. That means some 25 million baggies filled with liquids and gels under new carryon regulations imposed by the TSA.

Just don’t get the leftovers mixed up with the carryons.

Thanksgiving will be the first major holiday since the Transportation Security Administration imposed new regulations that allow liquids and gels onto airliners only if they are in containers that are 3 ounces or less and in clear, 1-quart zip-top plastic bags.

The new rules are pushing toiletry makers to make more travel-sized items, said Marshal Cohen, chief analyst with The NPD Group Inc., a market research firm. That includes companies like Unilever, whose brands include Dove soap, and Procter & Gamble Co., which makes Pantene and other shampoos.

Roughly 10 percent of the industry now makes those sizes, said Cohen. He expects by the next holiday travel season that will reach 25 percent, driven by the new regulations.

Yahoo News

Somebody tell Brett, Lynne or Nancy to call me, I’m in town!

Update: posted details to EB blog.

We were in San Jose the end of last week, and took a weekend trip to Yosemite with the Extreme Blue crew from Almaden.

Pics here.