Adventures in Holiday Travel

Or Planes, Trains and Automobiles.

When we went to New York to spend Thanksgiving with my family we decided to do what we did last year, take the train there and fly back. The trip out went without a hitch. We were a little late into Chicago on the first leg. That was caused by track maintenance in central Wisconsin. The train from Chicago to New York had a few miscellaneous delays and was about 30-45 minutes behind when we hit the Albany-Rennselear station. The schedule allows for over an hour at that station because they need to get people and baggage to a split off train to Boston. I think they even took one of the coaches. We got out of there quickly enough to be back on time and with only a few slight delays in the 100 miles further south we needed to go we got in as close to on time as we ever have on that train. So far so good.

The adventure started yesterday. We specifically chose to fly on the Monday, not the Sunday, after Thanksgiving. Unfortunately for us it turned out to be a very foggy day at the Westchester County Airport. My brother dropped us off in time to check in with some time to spare. When we checked in the nice gentleman (and I really mean this, he helped us a lot later on) at the US Airways Express counter mentioned that the flight was "currently running about a half hour late but that shouldn't impact your connection." By the time Orbitz called with an update it was an hour late. Not long after that the airline posted the change and asked anyone with connections to check in with the agent inside the security area. By the time I got to the counter the flight had been canceled. Not the first flight canceled that day and certainly not the last. Since we checked our bags we needed to retrieve those and go back and stand in line to find out what our options were.

So for the second time in about an hour we are standing in the US Airways Express check in line. When we get to the front of the line the same agent helps us again. US Airways Express is right next to Northwest Airlines at the Westchester Airport. So our guy leans back and asks the Northwest guy if he has anything to Minneapolis. He does, we get booked on a flight leaving at 4:59PM direct to Minneapolis. With US Airways we would have gone through Philadelphia. So we get into the NWA line and try to check in. The NWA counter agent was very good at his job but he had no backup. So when we got to the front of the line he told us "we were really early and he needed to check in people for a flight to Detroit that was scheduled to leave soon." So we stood to the side. Basically it took three tries to recheck the bags with NWA. So we go to get lunch and watch flight after flight get delayed or canceled. After lunch we are finding someplace to "camp out" until closer to departure time. The area inside security at White Planes isn't very big and it was already crowded in there. The next thing you know NWA is paging Megan. We figure its because the agent didn't want to attempt Ungerleider. Cancellation number 2. We're back to US Airways.

Now the thing you need to know is that Megan got stuck for 3 days at that airport back in 2000. They had a possible flight to Minneapolis by way of Charlotte. The flight left a 6:20PM. Departure was iffy because the Airport was closed until at least 6PM because of the fog. While we're waiting for things to happen I'm working the BlackBerry. I had checked earlier and it looked like there were still seats on the train to Chicago, but none on the leg to St Paul. So this is where the adventure kicks into high gear. I tell the desk agent for US Airways to cash the ticket. I want a refund. She does what she can. Kudos to the US Airways folks at White Plains they did everything they could to get people where they needed to go.

I'm still working the BlackBerry and Megan gets us a van ride to the Croton-Harmon Amtrak station. In the van I get through to the automated telephone reservation system and get two coach seats, there are no sleepers available. I get the reservation number and as am about to purchase the tickets with my credit card the call drops. But I have the reservation number. We get to the Croton Amtrak station and I purchase the tickets from the machine they have there. At 4:45 we get on a packed train headed for Chicago.

When we stop at Albany to pick up the Boston part of the train I call Hertz Rental Car and reserve a car at Union Station in Chicago one-way to Minneapolis-St Paul with return at the Humphrey Terminal by 10:00PM. The train gets to Chicago about an hour late. Why you might ask??? Well around 11:30PM we stop at Rochester NY. A squad of at least 4 US Border Patrol agents board the train looking for someone or something. By the time it was all done we were over an hour late, we were about a half hour late getting to Rochester in the first place because the activity in Albany took longer than expected. Back to the roundup. At least three people, one in handcuffs, were removed from our coach along with several baggage items. Its possible others were removed from the other coaches. We don't know what the issue was. Someone said that the guy they handcuffed had outstanding warrants. I'll keep an eye on the Border Patrol's web site for a few days and see if anything shows up.

When we got to Chicago we went straight to Hertz where the agent was working "below desk" fixing her printer. Because they had no Economy cars we got a mid-size (Mazda 6 if you're keeping score) at the same price. Because we were going 400 miles on highways we hadn't been on for a while and didn't know what was out there, I took the insurance for $10.50, we didn't need it. About 6:30 this evening we pulled up in front of the house, we were home.

As it turns out Tuesday was a lovely day in New York and we might have made it out on the flights we were originally scheduled for. But that would have entailed playing the game Megan calls "airport roulette" with everybody else who got stranded on Monday and all those people who wanted to fly on Tuesday.

Moral: We'll take the train from now on - both ways.

Rant for a Monday Morning

A brief rant for a Monday morning. First of all I think the City of Boston and her beloved Red Sox should thank Fox Television and Major League Baseball for assisting in their World Series win. It used to be if you went 7 games in a League championship series you had 1 maybe 2 days off before the World Series. This schedule made sense. There should be some benefit to ending the LCS early. The last two years have shown that this idea is now backwards. You are better off taking 7 games to win your LCS, particularly if your eventual opponent sweeps their LCS. Enough of baseball, it is now officially the "off-season".

On to politics. Listening to Morning Edition on the way to work I heard that both parties in Iowa have now officially moved their caucuses to January 3rd. Is it me or have things gotten really silly. The Republican nominating process will be almost exactly 8 months long. Other democracies will run an entire election in less than 8 weeks. If the delegate selection process is starting so early why is the convention so late? Granted the Democrats aren't much better holding their convention the week before. Does anybody really believe there will be any mystery to the outcome of either convention? So for almost 6 months we will be in what amounts to the general election campaign but it won't be official until September 4th. If there is any mystery about the outcomes of the conventions I promise to link back to this post and say I
was a complete idiot.

Morning Rant Revisited

This morning I made a quick entry as much a reminder to me about the story on Morning Edition as anything else. So here I am 13 hours later with a little more detail.

The story that is linked in the previous post focuses on the fact that some schools have been rated as not making Adequate Yearly Progress in part due to the fact that students and tests could not be matched up. As a result the tests that couldn't be connected to students don't count. Most of the schools in the report received the rating due to insufficient participation. In one case the school was certain it had 96% participation, 95% is the threshold, but after all the dust settled they were told they didn't have enough students. One of the people quoted in the story mentioned that they received the list of errors earlier this summer. Corrected the errors. When the final report came it cited errors that had not previously been reported that the school had no chance to correct. Go read/listen to the story for all the details. So why did this trigger a need to rant?

The whole testing, AYP, NCLB thing smells like the work of a mediocre MBA. Trust me I've worked with/for several. They always want something that can be measured even when quantitative analysis is not really viable. But I promised the reason in the previous post and here it is. Vouchers. There is a cadre on the right that thinks all the woes of education can be solved by the market system. I mean look what its done for health care! Parents should have the right to take their money and spend where they want. Sounds good doesn't it. But the problem is if all the money that goes to a school for a given student is put into a voucher, then those parents are spending my money too. And I don't want them to! If we really want to provide the option of not having families pay twice for education then provide a tax credit. Then they can get their money back and not get my money. You see I pay taxes, state and property, that help fund the schools. We have no kids, so we have never been users of the school system. I don't demand a credit because I know its part of the public good that we as a society need to provide. But if you don't like the school system you pass laws and rules that make it look like the schools are failing, mostly because the paperwork has been screwed up and not necessarily by the schools.

Okay rant over. If you have something to say comment on it.

Morning Rant

During the next election cycle if one politician says "Things will be better if we just run government like a business" I might throw something.

This morning rant brought to you be the people who created No Child Left Behind. There was a story on Morning Edition today that makes you wonder what they are trying to accomplish. (Okay, I actually know the answer to this but I don't have time to deal with that now.)

Riding the Rails

I bought our tickets for NY yesterday at amtrak.com this will be the fourth time of taking the train to New York. Last year we flew back and we'll do that again. The decision for me is do blog here during the trip, via email and the BlackBerry or do I look at something like Jaiku and microblog the trip. I may end up doing a little of both.

Shout out for good customer service
In this day and age finding good customer service can be a chore. But today I had a good experience. The battery in the laptop stopped taking a charge a while ago and earlier this month I finally decided to replace it. After checking prices online I decided to go to a local BatteriesPlus and see if they had any in stock. They didn't but the price at the store was better than their website price and good enough compared to purely online shops. I like to buy hardware locally if I can, so I ordered the battery. They said "5 to 7 business days." Well I hadn't heard anything by the end of last week so I stopped in on Sunday, 2 weeks after the order had been placed, no information. But a suggestion that I call during the week and speak to Kevin. Well today I went over at lunch time and spoke to Kevin who found out that even though he had placed the order and his clearing house had pushed it to the vendor it fell through a crack somewhere and hadn't made it into the vendor's system. Kevin made three phone calls while I was standing there, updating me in between calls. He got the information to the vendor and even got them to drop ship it to the house. So hopefully I have it in a few days. It's nice sometimes to go in expecting the worst and walk away having had a good experience. Bravo, Kevin!

On Burn Out...

No not mine. This past week saw two high profile retirement announcements. One is in sports, the other is in politics. Last Thursday, Twins General Manager Terry Ryan announced he would be stepping down at the end of the season. Ryan isn't leaving the Twins just stepping away from being the top dog. He'll remain with the club doing talent evaluation. Basically he joins former manager Tom Kelly as one of the team's super scouts. Ryan's main reason, its just not fun anymore.

Tonight's news included the announcement of Rep. Jim Ramstad. When I first moved here the 3rd District seat was held by Bill Frenzel. I remember the billboards at election time. Simply the name Frenzel in sloping letters. The Congressman's first name squeezed in at the top and the words "for Congress" or similar at the bottom. When Frenzel retired Jim Ramstad ran for the seat, cut from the same moderate Republican cloth as Frenzel, he was an easy choice for that district for 9 terms. He even adopted Frenzel's billboard style. His announcement included mention of burnout.

So good luck gentleman. You'll be missed. Minnesota is a better place because of your work.

Thank you.

Accepting the Obvious

Disclaimer: I didn't listen to the President's speech last night or the Democratic response by Senator Jack Reed. I'm reacting to how it was reported on "liberally biased" NPR this morning.

The lead on the President's speech was, "I have decided to accept the recommendation of General Petraeus..." Most reports earlier this week, during analysis and "wait time" for the Petraeus/Crocker testimony before Congress noted that the troops that will be pulled out next year aren't being replaced because they can't be. The only way to keep the troop levels up is to have them stay in Iraq longer, or institute a draft. Which of course they'd have to do now in order to have soldiers drafted and trained in time. Between that and "the more successful we are the more troops we can bring home." The speech sounds like not much more than hot air and wasted time.

What I would have hoped to be the lead off the Democratic response was what you see in the above paragraph. The fact that more troops aren't coming home isn't what's important. They knew that going in. Reed should have simply left it at there was nothing new here and this isn't really a force reduction. Its the result of the tour extensions running their course.

So instead of anything enlightening the airtime was wasted stating the obvious and beating injured if not dead political horses. And people wonder why American elections have some of the lowest turnout levels in the world.

Crying Wolf?

When I find myself heading to Bloomington my route almost always takes me past the Minneapolis-St Paul Airport. Since 2002 I have been greeted with these messages on a flashing electronic sign:

Suspicious Activity? Call 9-1-1
Threat Level: Orange

I've often wondered if a sign asking me to call and report suspicious activity was itself a suspicious activity. In a sort of Orwellian way. But thing that gets me is that I don't remember the threat level ever being anything but orange. So either they don't know and want everyone to expect the worst or they do know but they don't want us to know. I just wonder what it would be like if the National Weather Service took the same approach.

In Minnesota we can get severe thunderstorms and/or tornadoes from Mid-May to Mid September. Imagine if they decided that every year on June 1st they would issue a Severe Weather Watch for all of Minnesota. It would stay in effect until August 31st no matter what the actual weather and threat was. For the Winter we would run from November 1st to March 31st with a standing winter weather warning. After all we've gotten lots of snow in early November and March used to be our snowiest month.

If NOAA did that people would never know when to be really concerned about a weather event. Isn't it the same with terror threats? If we don't have a specific threat should the level be Blue, A general risk of terror attacks? But what do I know? Only what they tell me.

Symbiotic Computing

Or how an old project comes back to life...

A couple of years ago I was approached by a gentleman with an idea. That idea was to come up with some way to get "personal computing" into the hands of kids who wouldn't otherwise have anything. (Rich if you see this send me an email.)

One idea we tossed around was loading up portable apps or something like that on a flash drive. At the time the U3 technology was new and the flash drives that support it expensive. Well that's not true anymore. This weekend I picked up a 2GB flash drive, with U3 support, for less than $20. It now is the home of a QEMU-Puppy installation. Once I figure out how to get it to autorun under Windows I'll have a "computer" that runs Linux that only needs Windows system as a "host". Its a little slow depending on the host configuration but its better than nothing.

More as I get a chance to play with it.

Hosting History

I promise that I'm going to do more blogging in the next year. Its Labor Day weekend, and in Minnesota that means the end of summer with the end of the State Fair. But next year it will be something all together different. Next year September 1-4 will be the Republican National Convention, right here in the Twin Cities. The Main Event will take place about 2 miles from the house at the Xcel Energy Center.

This convention will be historic for several reasons. First, it is one of the few times in the nation's history that neither the sitting President nor Vice President is seeking the nomination. (The last time was probably 1928.) Second, regardless of your political views, it is safe to say that the current administration will go down as one of the most controversial in history. The convention will signal the changing of the guard with respect to Republican leadership.

My personal goal is learn more about the history of my adopted state and home town. I want to be able to answer people's questions if they ask me. So don't be surprised to see comments on what I've learned. It doesn't hurt that 2008 is also the State of Minnesota's sesquicentennial. That should make state history a popular topic next year.

Zero to Website

When I was teaching Web Development students to use Zope and then Plone I used to have a lab called The Zero to Website Challenge. Students were given a weeks worth of class time minus enough time for them to present the site to me and the rest class, this was usually 4 and 5 hours of design and build time. They worked in teams of 2 to 4 students that I usually chose for them. In most cases the first hour was spent organizing the team and picking a topic. Invariably the good students made really good sites and the slackers made sites that were good enough. I often said that I was willing to take on any comer at that time (2003 - 2005) in a challenge match where they picked the theme, the operating system and most of the rules and still make a better site in less time. I'm not so sure I'd be willing to make that dare now.

That's the impetus for this entry. Tonight at the TCPC Web SIG meeting Curt built a new Drupal site in about an hour for his Word Boot Camp event at the end of March. Drupal and Joomla are as easy to setup as Zope/Plone and easier for people who are proficient in PHP and MySQL but not Zope.

And then there were...

While I'd like to end this with "one" there are at least two electronics chains left in the Twin Cities and that doesn't count Target and Wal-Mart. But let me back up and explain what I'm talking about.

Last week CompUSA announced it was closing all 4 of its Minnesota stores. While I wasn't surprised by this announcement, it is still disappointing. With CompUSA out that leaves Best Buy (more on them later) and Circuit City as the major electronics stores in the Twin Cities. While we have one MicroCenter store I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around. (This is of course unfounded speculation, for all I know they are doing very well.) There are a variety of local shops that also support the needs of the computer geek so its not like we now have to go online or go the Best Buy. Which might be a good thing.

First look at this cartoon. Then read this news article. Then read this commentary from the Head Lemur. Of course my opinion is that if you are going to the store to get a price you saw on the website then print out the page from the website to make sure you have the right product and price. But that's just me. If Best Buy is trying to get people to pay a "store price" vs. an "online price" just publish it that way. On the website have big disclaimers that say "The in-store price for any and all items may be different from the online price." (They might in fact have such a disclaimer for all I know.) Then when somebody comes into the store and complains that the price is not what they saw online the guy or gal in the blue/yellow/black shirt can simply point to a sign in the Customer Service area that says the same thing. But that would make sense. Having an intranet site with different prices must have been easier.

Will it keep me from shopping at Best Buy? Probably not. (see the above discussion about CompUSA) Its like vowing to not fly Northwest Airlines when living in the Twin Cities. Its a nice idea but it doesn't work. Also they might be a retail bully but they are our retail bully.

That's it for now.

If at first...

Once again this blog is starting over. I've removed all old, somewhat crusty posts to start like new in March of 2007. Why you might ask will it be different this time? I don't know that it will. But the incentive to use Blogger over the COREBlog2 blog I was running on my plone site is that I can email into blogger to add posts. You see I swapped my regular phone for a shiny new BlackBerry this week which means I can email from almost anywhere. In fact I've added the mobile Gmail client so I'll probably use that to email entries into the blog. I'd love to use some sort of quickie blog Firefox add-on but it doesn't look like there are to many out there that work at this point. I'll keep searching and if I find something you'll hear about it that's for sure.