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October 21, 2006
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September 21, 2006

Back From Virginia

Dulles Airport's Swanky SignsI'm home again, having just returned from a four-day jaunt to the great state of Virginia. Like my trip to Arkansas, this was a first-time visit for me. (Product Planning should consider "Traveling the world ... so you don't have to!" as our unofficial motto.)

My (as per usual) random trip notes:

  • I caught my flight out on Monday and connected through Salt Lake City. We flew in under bright, gorgeous sunlight - and all I have to say is just ... wow. The city proper isn't much to look at, but the mountains are fantastic and the Great Salt Lake itself will take your breath away.
  • "Munich" is about a half-hour too long, but still a really, really excellent movie. Rent it.
  • Washington Dulles airport is big - three runways, a fourth under construction. The architecture is very much late-1960s-chic, what with the swooping, sloping roofs and big vertical windows. However, the thing that struck me as really funny was the airport signage: it all uses the same typeface, which is this all-caps, futuristic, Buck Rogers-esque thing (see photo, above). It's fantastically kitchy, and I bet it felt sooooo exotic back in 1977 or whenever it was put in. Today it looks, well, like Gil Gerard is going to battle the Draconians with the help of Twiki and Dr. Theopolis. (On his way to Atlanta, apparently.)
  • Oh, another Dulles bit - the guy who did the voice for the "Passengers should be aware of their bags at all times..." message on the overhead PA system sounds exactly like George W. Bush.
  • (Given that Dulles is the primary airport for Washington, DC, it might actually be him.)
  • (Wouldn't it be really funny if that was some kind of unpublicized Presidential tradition? Like, Bush I did it, then Clinton, and now W. I know the sitting President does a recording for their audio-animatronic figure at Disney World's "Hall of Presidents" - so there's precedent. Hm...)
  • It's super-disconcerting to see freeway signs for "Manassas." To us West-coasters, "Manassas" is one of those places where a battle got fought a loooong time ago. It's an eighth-grade-social-studies word. Seeing a freeway sign for it just freaks me out - kind of like when I was in Boston, and walked the Freedom Trail with Cintra. (The East coast: where the history comes from!)
  • The Hyatt people have really got this revenue-maximization thing down to a science. (Bastards.) In addition to their rooms being fairly spendy (even at corporate rates), they charge you for every damn thing they possibly can. Fitness Center? $5. Internet access? $10 a day for WiFi. Want to use the PC in the hotel business center? $0.79 a minute, with a $14 minimum. If I wasn't so shocked, I'd be outraged. As the old saying goes, at least they could kiss you first and buy ya dinner.
  • (I did shell out for the fitness center. A fella's gotta stay in shape on the road.)
  • I packed my Cingular GPRS card, and thank God for that. The hotel wireless was incredibly slow, so much so that they might have been using CPIP on their WAN. I don't mind paying for WiFi (well, I do, but that's another story), but I expect it to be of some quality when I'm paying my - er, Bill's hard-earned dollars for the priv. The Cingular card saved my bacon (which it seems to do a lot).
  • Gina and I were e-mailing, and she asked me how the weather was in Virginia. I explained that it was (apparently) nice outside, but in the hermetically-sealed, climate-controlled environ of the hotel, I really couldn't tell. Sad, but true: all my business happened in and around the hotel complex, so there was no need to go outside at all. I felt like one of the characters in "waydowntown" (bad flick, great idea) who realize that they don't need to go outside for life's essentials.
  • Coming home, I connected through Atlanta. I don't know what was going on in Atlanta today, but holy cow it was busy. Lines, lines, lines - people in lines to get in line, where they could wait for another line. That kind of thing.
  • I'll say this for the Atlanta airport: they've got cool vending machines. Coke is based in Atlanta, and the airport has these nifty "Coca-Cola Vend" stations - basically, five or six vending machines in a nook that sell just about anything and everything Coke makes. It's kind of a neat, you're-in-Atlanta thing.
  • They also have vending machines that sell iPods.
  • (I didn't see if they had the new Shuffle yet.)
  • Atlanta also has plentiful, available power plugs all over the airport. I'd love to think that this is because they've clued in to the laptop revolution, but instead I think it's to power their compacting trash cans. (Really. The trash cans compact their contents.)
  • Somebody - anybody - needs to tell the Delta people that their airplanes stink. You know that vaguely ooky airplane-bathroom chemical smell that you get toward the back of most planes? (The smell that the people in first-class pay so much money to stay away from?) Well, all of the Delta planes I was on this trip smelled like that. The. Whole. Damn. Plane. This, to put it politely, does not inspire any confidence in the overall hygienic condition of the aircraft. Get some Windex, guys.
  • "X-Men: The Last Stand" is crap. Total, utter, complete, purile, unwatchable crap. It's playing on both Delta and United these days, so it's hard for me to avoid, but - the first two "X-Men" flicks were wonderful, and then Brett Ratner - whose business card should just read, "Hack" - got involved when Bryan Singer went off to make Superman Returns. The result is a thrown-together, overfull, undercooked film that stars people we liked in the other two. I saw "Last Stand" in the theater and was OK with it, but the second viewing just ruined it for me. The picture blows. (Somebody stop Ratner before he kills again!)
  • Seattle - for all its faults, for its megalomaniacal, out-of-touch mayor, its lack of light rail - is a wonderful, wonderful city to come home to. I got off the plane, smelled the air, and felt the knots in my shoulders just let go.
  • (Of course, that could also be because the air didn't smell like vaguely ooky airplane-bathroom chemical.)

It's good to be back. But more travel soon.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at September 21, 2006 11:06 PM. Posted to MSFT | Travel.

Comments

Why are you baiting me Gav? You know I’m not a blind devotional fan of our Kill the Monorail Mayor BUT he’s NOT backing the tunnel because he’s egomaniacal or out of touch. He backing it because he sincerely believes it’s the best thing for the waterfront and Seattle as a whole. He’s looking long term and he’s trying to be practical. A Rebuilt viaduct will be the kind of shortsighted thinking that puts Seattle squarely (and forever) in the “Top Five Things Never To Do To Your City.� And while it’s easy for you to just disregard the port, the freight community and the jobs that might be lost if we shut down a la San Francisco, he doesn’t have that luxury. He’s trying to find a way to make it work for everyone. Yes the tunnel is very very expensive. Yes, it’s not even a perfect solution. Disagree with the Mayor all you want but do it for real reasons not buzzwords like egomaniacal or out of touch. Believe me when I say the City knows how much negativity there is out here regarding the tunnel. They (Nickels and the majority of the City Council) are “spending their political capital� because they think it’s worth it, because they are trying to do what’s right for the city long term. They aren’t just being pigheaded jerks. In fact, considering several of them are up for re-election it’s really pretty ballsy. The public as a whole hates change and often must be dragged kicking and screaming into doing what’s best for us. In theory, this is why we elect people to office – to give them the tools and resources to see long range and big picture and then make the appropriate choices for the group.* If you think they are doing a bad job, vote against them – or RUN against them but don’t just sit there and call them names.

And I return briefly to one of my old Pro-Monorail arguments – shit is expensive and only getting more so. And Public Works projects are big shit. To let price derail vision hurts everyone. We’ll find the money. We found it for Safeco and Qwest Fields. We’re finding it for Light Rail. We’ll find it for 520. And we can find it for the Tunnel. Thinking big is expensive but so is thinking small. Audentes fortuna iuvat. Audere est facere.

*I said in theory. I know it’s not always the case.

Posted by: Allie Author Profile Page at September 23, 2006 5:45 PM

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