Travel trivia

Just back from the next to last trip I plan to do for a while. I feel like I've been traveling since the beginning of the year and I'm tired of it (OK, I was tired of it after the first trip — I don't really enjoy being away from home). I figured I'd jot down some travel related bits from this trip. No goofy pilot statements this time around although the flight attendant that we'd pegged as having no sense of humor had me in stitches relating stories about jacket mishaps as we descended towards LAX. I think you had to be there.

Atlanta's Midtown Sheraton Hotel is an inexpensive (as these things go) place to stay, just don't eat there. I'd been warned but they don't even really know how to do breakfast (soggy canned peaches? whatever). It's a bit worn around the edges but it works. Three (tiny) bottles of water from room service is about thirteen bucks (better to buy it from the store downstairs if you can find it open, just under five dollars for the same quantity of water) and in my case, the delivery person decided to walk around my room and generally invite herself in (what is the proper etiquette under those a circumstances to kick someone out quickly?)

Their broadband access is free and quite fast (not entirely surprising, one of the techs I spoke to on Monday evening told me there were eight active connections which means a data consuming pig such as me has it basically all to myself), but quite annoying. The first night it wouldn't work, DHCP was constantly assigning me a non-routable address until I finally asked the technical support person (call number four) to just give me an address that wasn't in use (that cured things and I could at least finally check email). By the time I got back on Tuesday night, it was working, such as it is. Service seemed to have a very short time out and I couldn't figure out why I had to keep opening a browser page and going through a couple pages to reactivate service. Last night I finally realized that it was monitoring port 80 traffic and setup a cron task to wget a page from a server I knew wasn't going to mind. It worked and the gateway wasn't shutting me down on a five minute interval while I was doing lots of things that weren't HTTP related. Weird.

This is the third (maybe the fourth?) hotel that I've stayed in this year which has used Starwood technical support (not all appear to be Starwood hotels) and every single one of them has a different service activation mechanism (and the service itself feels different). I dunno why, but I find the idea intriguing. This was certainly the first that assigned me a 192.168.1.x address and had a web server running on 192.168.1.1 (with lots of interesting links to poke at).

Moving on...

Atlanta at this time of year is everything you might be looking for. As Jeff mentioned yesterday (and has said before); if you don't like the weather just wait five minutes. An exaggeration to be sure, but it was seventy (or so) on a lovely Monday evening just before sunset and about thirty five just after dark last night while it was hailing with twenty mile per hour winds. While eating some pretty good She Crab Soup (first time in a long while I've had that, it just not a west coast thing) we had a pretty interesting conversation about the whole bad weather leading to milk and bread shortages issue which always makes me laugh.

Electric razors suck. Considering what you pay for one, they don't hold up well at all. Being bearded, I've been slacking off and shaving every other day (or so) for a while. I shaved with a razor on Monday before leaving and took the electric (and its cord because the charge cycle had become negligible) with me. The damned thing was dead on Wednesday morning when I really needed it and no amount of fiddling would revive it. Disgusted, I threw the damned thing in the trash. I think my razor jumped the gun and fired its fools day salvo a wee bit ahead of time. It's time to consider alternatives because I don't think anyone at TSA is going to look kindly at shaving soap and a straight razor in my toiletry kit.

With today being April Fools, some stars had an interesting trick played on them. Jim and Kerri Caviezel were in the seats just in front of me and I'm pretty sure they weren't all that excited about it. It's bad enough to be recognized and pestered but in this case I didn't recognize him and when Saeid told me who it was I wasn't sure and then (more loudly than was appropriate) mumbled something like "Oh, you mean Jim <complete manglement of his last name>?" I still didn't believe it was him until later when I saw him reviewing some scripts (not too good I think, he was bored to sleep). When I mentioned my 'confirmation', Saeid was offended that I didn't trust his hollywood identification skills. As we were getting ready to depart the plane at LAX, Malcolm McDowell popped up behind us and was talking to the Caviezel family about their continuing travel plans (they're off to Monterey I think). There wasn't any sign of the security reported to be traveling with them early last month when The Passion of the Christ opened (including in the terminal, when Mrs. Caviezel ended up standing around the wrong baggage carousel with me and a bunch of other confused people — one more trick for all of us?), I guess that phase has passed.

Finally, the folks who operate the car service we normally use had some serious issues today with a relatively new car (an alternator was playing its own tricks) which led to some silly games at the airport. No real delays for us, but they have a lot of business today and tomorrow and this was the wrong time for a car to get sick.