Two pictures for you. This is what happens in Vegas when you're just a little bit of a badass:

And this is what happens when a company doesn't do proper quality assurance. Conveniently discovered when cropping the above.

Nice. Real nice.

¶ 94 Posted at 10.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( me | travel )

Every time I read an article like this one, it makes me want to go back to India. Then I remember that country wants to kill me, and the urge passes.

¶ 699 Posted at 01.57 PM ⇒ No Comments ( travel | india )

Totally sweet. Across from the hotel we are staying in is a large apartment high-rise. More than a few of its residents have wireless network access points, and at least one has it without a password or anything. Too sweet.

So far, Vancouver is really nice. When I travel to cities like Vancouver, I realize that Austin isn't a real city; it's just an over-grown town. Vancouver is in the midst of a massive building spree; there must be a dozen or more apartment high-rises under construction, adding to the roughly 100 that I've already counted. It feels like I imagine Hong Kong to be. The geography certainly looks like something out of Sim City, just like Hong Kong. And the food is just so much better and more diverse than Austin. I could see myself living here, if I wasn't so demanding and cheap and risk-averse.

Something I forget about travelling up north is that when you turn on a cold water tap, you get cold water. I'm so used to Texas's (yes, that's correct grammar) lukewarm "cold" that the bone-chilling glacier meltwater that comes out of faucets here is quite the shock.

An American tourist was staying in a hotel in Montreal and found himself flummoxed by the shower controls. He complained to the manager, "When I turn the faucet marked 'C', hot water comes out!" The manager replies, "That is French, for 'chaud.'" The tourist says, "But the other one is marked 'C' too!" Responds the manager, "Ah, you see, Montreal is a bilingual city."

Tomorrow we're heading up to Whistler. Thursday we go to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia on Vancouver Island. Then on Friday we return to Vancouver, hopefully to meet up with mute's kid sister, and then back home on Monday.

¶ 809 Posted at 10.46 PM ⇒ No Comments ( travel )

What, did you think I'd spend my honeymoon posting to my weblog*? How big of a geek do you think I... oh. Right. I see.

* Illicitly on the Internet again, incidentally. Orbitz lost our reservation; I'm sticking with Travelocity. I thought I'd encourage some competition in the online travel bookings market by using multiple agents; now I'm going to encourage competition by not using the crappy ones. Anyway, we got a bottom-of-the-barrel room at the hotel (i.e., no Interweb on this floor) upon our return to Vancouver. Luckily, yet again have access through some poor sap's unsecured wireless access point, although I have to practically dangle out the window. Just another advantage of living in a densely populated city, I guess.

¶ 811 Posted at 02.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( site | travel )

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming. And me to mine. Hmm... I'd better make sure my employer still exists.

¶ 812 Posted at 08.25 AM ⇒ No Comments ( travel )

Hmm... I still haven't posted anything Vancouver-related. I took notes and everything, so my sieve-like mind won't lose all the details. It's in the pipe, I swear, it's just that I've had... "other concerns" lately.

¶ 909 Posted at 02.32 PM ⇒ No Comments ( travel )

Someday, I would like to visit Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago located just south of 80° N latitude in the Arctic. The main habitation, Longyearbyen, is the northernmost place in the world with regular air service.

¶ 982 Posted at 12.01 PM ⇒ No Comments ( travel )

I wonder what global travel will be like in a post-oil future. Will gas-guzzling airplanes be replaced by more sedate, fuel-cell powered Zeppelins riding the jet stream to go from New York to London in a day? Maybe inter-continental voyagers will rediscover the romance of ocean liners, this time on nuclear-powered hydrofoils running from Sydney to Tokyo at 150 knots. Or there will be a bullet train from Tokyo to Los Angeles, skipping along the edge of the Pacific up Russia and over the Aleutians and down the West Coast. Or maybe we'll just learn to enjoy staying home, keeping in touch with fancy-schmancy video-conferencing and exploring with virtual reality, gobbling up the gigabytes, gigahertz, and gigawatts.

¶ 1333 Posted at 12.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( oil | travel | deep thoughts )

We're going to LA later this week. One of the things we're going to see is Griffith Park, which burned a few months ago. If deer had final words, I think I can guess what this one's were.

¶ 1504 Posted at 02.13 PM ⇒ No Comments ( pictures | us | travel )

I escaped Los Angeles and all I got was this stupid blog post. We have some pictures. Note especially the last few.

• If you get nervous at all driving on, say, I-35 in Austin, do not under any circumstances drive on the freeways in LA. That translates to "do not go to LA." people drive fast in LA. In Austin, you'll usually see a number of people driving 5-10 mph above the speed limit. In LA, the average speed is 10-15 mph above the speed limit. If you are uncomfortable doing that, don't get on the freeway. Someone driving 15 mph below the average speed of traffic is almost as much a danger as someone driving 15 mph above.
• If the guidebook entry for a restaurant names the chef, and (especially) describes him (always a him, it seems) as a "rising star," the portions will be tiny and the food over-priced.
• Don't stay downtown. Try Pasadena. Pasadena is nice.
• We saw them setting up for and cleaning up after a shoot for the show "Heroes." It turns out that the building with the sculpture in front of it that was supposedly in NYC is actually a block down from the hotel where we stayed.
• If you don't mind the freeways, driving on the 110 from Pasadena to downtown is fun, especially at night. Twisty and windy, zooming along at 60 mph, which is plenty fast for that road. It feels like a driving game.
• If you want to drive up the Pacific Coast Highway, do it in the morning.
• LA is not hot compared to Austin. I dunno about the valley, since we never went there, but the ocean seems to keep LA cool. At least, it did while we were there.
• I'm not one for art hanging on walls, but the Getty Center was super cool. The grounds, the architecture, and the setting were all impressive.
• The beach gets really crowded on weekends or holidays. I don't know if I liked Venice or Santa Monica beach better.
• Hollywood looks just as ugly as the rest of LA
• Few places in the LA area accept Discover
• Free parking in LA is nearly impossible. Metered parking is sometimes easy, sometimes hard; pay parking (valet or self-park) is ubiquitous
• Motorcycles ride between the lanes on the freeway in heavy traffic. It appears to be the major benefit of having one in LA. I didn't see a motorcycle not doing this.
• Gas costs barely more than in Austin
• Traffic is a little unpredictable (a traffic jam at 11:30pm?), but the system works surprisingly well. Maybe I just had low expectations.
• There's a buttload of Priuses in LA
• Few flat surfaces lack graffiti
• The Walt Disney Concert Hall is pretty cool, but it doesn't require a lot of time to appreciate it. Well, I could be wrong; we didn't have time to go inside.
• Unlike Austin, the streets don't change names every 5 miles. Wilshire is Wilshire is Wilshire.

¶ 1507 Posted at 12.24 PM ⇒ No Comments ( travel )