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July 18, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 4: The Final

(Please see: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.) 

• The iPhone App Store is a godsend to travelers. There are trivial little helper apps, such as Beijing Subway (which displays the city subway map ... and that's all), language-and-translation apps (Lonely Planet's "Mandarin Phrasebook" is terrific) and even some incredibly handy tourist helpers, such as the Beijing Taxi Guide. This last is my favorite, both for utility and for cleverness; the utility comes from its long list of popular Beijing attractions and restaurants, and the cleverness comes from its "Taxi Card" mode, where you can tap a button that rotates the screen and displays the attraction's address and directions in Chinese. That way, you can simply show your iPhone to a taxi driver and they know where to take you. Super-cool, super-useful.
• Friday night's dinner and entertainment took place at the (famous) Lao She Tea House, which is right near Tiananmen Square. Built  just 20 years ago, the place is designed to look and feel like it's hundreds of years old. It's packed to the rafters with memorabilia, photographs of famous visitors, and has an almost EPCOT-esque quality to it (at one point, I seriously felt like I was wandering around the China pavilion in Florida). There are guided tours of the various private tea rooms (each a distinct size and style), a gift shop, and an integrated, 100-person theater. We saw a shadow puppet show during dinner ("Tortoise and Crane"), and were then moved to the theater, served fresh tea, and treated to the "Four Seasons" show which tells the story of the Monkey King. The servers do acrobatic tea service; there's face-changing and kung fu; a bit of Chinese opera. It's a definite cultural experience, and I found myself somewhat overloaded and disoriented during the show because I lacked so much cultural backstory. Eventually, I just leaned back and took in as much as I could. (Welcome to Asia, white boy.)
• The weekend was our big shot at some real tourism, a chance to get out of the office (and the city) and to see some of the sights that Beijing is famous for. Our Chinese colleagues had organized two different options - Group A would go to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City, with Group B heading off to see the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace. Since Brooke and I had seen the Great Wall on our last trip, we joined Group B ... and then found out there were just 5 of us. In a lot of ways, this turned out to be a blessing - everybody fit into one passenger car, and could pretty much set our own schedule.
• The Ming Tombs are incredible. Above ground, the place feels like an elaborate Chinese public park - trees, cobblestone footpaths, old buildings, concessionaires, a gift shop, and the like. However, when you actually descend into one of the Tombs, everything changes and it becomes something out of an as-yet-unmade Indiana Jones film. By the time you enter the first antechamber, you're 27 meters underground and gawking at the height of the cavern, the scope of the building work, the quality of the craftsmanship, and the fact that it was all built a looooong time ago. The whereabouts of the Tomb's entrances were unknown for quite some time, despite the government searching for them; our guide told us that they were found about 50 years ago, shortly after a hard rain caused a sinkhole and revealed them. Chinese archeologists had to figure out how to pick the elaborate, never-intended-to-open locks on the gigantic doors, excavate the site, and preserve its treasures. Over time, the sites were turned into a national exhibit.
• (It should be pointed out the Indiana Jones version of this experience likely involved some kind of curse, face-melting, and/or underground mining car chase; I doubt that this happened here.)
• In China, you can travel about 400 years in 5km or so; we had lunch at a gleaming, ultra-modern (and huge) mall, slurping down some delicious spicy noodles from a mass-market Japanese chain. After lunch, I noticed a coffee place ("Barista Coffee") near the foot of one of the escalators, and simply couldn't resist. The promise of a decent cup of java was too strong, and I was overdue.
• Barista Coffee could be a coffee bar at any newer mall anywhere in the US or Europe. Leather couches and chairs, swank decoration, free newspapers and fashion magazines, free WiFi. The only catch was that they didn't speak English and my Mandarin is pretty much limited to "Hello", "Thank you" and pointing at pictures of things on a menu. In this case, that worked out - the menu is a full-color, laminated jobby that has a very nice table listing drinks, sizes, and prices. Find the intersection of what you want, point at it, pay the nice lady some Yuan. I ordered two drinks - one for me, one for Brooke - and I was delighted to see that they had drink flavors at the bottom of the sheet. I pointed at the "Vanilla" item, at which point the woman behind the counter paused, and gave me the "are you sure?" look. Through mutual smiling and head-nodding, we establish that yes, I want the vanilla, and then our group goes to sit down.
• Punchline: they wind up bringing us four drinks. Two of them are the ones we thought we ordered, and the extra two I accidentally ordered with my oh-so-clever pointing routine. Turns out the "vanilla" bit at the bottom refers to vanilla-flavored beans, not extra syrup. She thought I wanted extra drinks for the rest of our group, and, well, now we have them. Turns out they're not so big on the flavored syrup; the flavor goes into the beans, instead. Live and learn.
• (I have to say, the coffee was pretty good.)
• We head to the Summer Palace, and holy cow is it packed. A weekend day, bright, sunny, hot, and the joint is swarming with tourists and locals alike. The signs at the front of the park say that it's 33 degrees (nearly 100, for those of you back home), and they're expecting 22,000 guests - slightly down from 26,700 the day before. (As a point of comparison, Disneyland does about 40,000 people a day.)
• The Palace is a jewel - a flat-out-wonderful public good. We stroll the grounds and watch families playing, old people fishing, Australian and German tourists snapping photos, people practicing English, vendors selling kites and souvenirs and ice cream, and everywhere is noise and laughter and the sound of birds and other wildlife. The fact that the site itself is a priceless historical relic seems beside the point - Beijingers use their city - but the sheer number of people and the delight with which they're enjoying the place makes it a vibrant and wonderful place to be. If I lived in Beijing, I'd spend a ton of time here.
• Hours later, we are sunburned, walked out, and totally pooped. We rendezvous with the A Group for dinner (Peking duck), and I find myself crashing hard as I hear their stories of the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, and crazy haggling with merchants.
• A handful of us take off on Sunday and do a bit of Western spelunking - which meant visiting McDonald's and Wal-Mart. We just had to know.
• I'd hit Mickey D's the last time I was in town, and, unsurprisingly, it seemed exactly the same. This one has 2 floors, is open 24 hours, offers home delivery by its battalion of scooter-driving, uniformed help and was totally packed. One of their folks saw us coming up the staircase and slid up with menus that had both Chinese and English translations on them. Everyone tried something new or unfamiliar - I did their chicken sandwich, which had a little too much mayo for my tastes - and, after everyone finished, we broke for Wal-Mart.
• Wal-Mart in China is, to borrow the Pulp Fiction-ism, "just a little bit different." They have all the same shit there that we have here, but it's just a little bit different. The store itself is big - three stories, with escalators to take you (and your cart) between floors. They sell the assortment of stuff you'd expect, too - clothes, toys, household items - alongside a full-service grocery store (complete with fresh produce, pre-made food, you name it) down on the ground level. The place is laid out like IKEA, guiding you from section to section in a logical way. We saw tons of American brands - and in many cases, the American logo is the only thing on the package in English. Wal-Mart seems to be spending a lot of energy to educate Chinese consumers about conveniences that Americans take for granted - complimentary parking, assistance getting the cart to the car, the ability to use bank cards. The store is also putting an emphasis on customer service - signs everywhere remind people to "send a letter to our President" with their thoughts. Despite how you might feel about Wal-Mart, it's all pretty impressive. And I wonder what the average Chinese citizen thinks of it - are they dazzled? Do they care? (I'll have to ask one of my colleagues.)
• Monday was strange - after a week of nonstop meetings and packed evenings, to find myself with a normal, freed-up work day was a bit of a shock. It quickly became routine, and as Monday turned to Tuesday, Wednesday, and, finally, Thursday morning, I found myself back in a hotel shuttle and heading for the airport.
• Yes, Beijing's airport has a Starbucks. And yes, I totally got my grande vanilla soy latte on before the flight. (And no, they didn't bring me two of them.)
• If you're so inclined, you can buy beer from the vending machine located next to the gate. (You can also get fruit juice, Coke Zero, and a handful of things I didn't recognize.) I can't decide if this is genius (chill out the passengers before takeoff) or just mean to the flight attendants (unruly drunk passengers!).
• We land in Japan. No crazy health screenings this time.
• "Frost/Nixon" is a fantastic movie. I didn't pay it much attention when it came out theatrically, but it looked reasonably strong against my other in-flight choices, so I gave it a spin. Blew me away. Smart, well-written, engaging, and with some spectacular performances - absolutely rent it.
• On the other hand, "Caddyshack" - a movie I've been nostalgically warm about since forever, but hadn't seen in at least 20 years - is not very good. I know it's directed by Harold Ramis and has a cast of people I adore, but ... (sigh). It just doesn't age well. I should have left it alone.
• We land in Seattle. Customs is a breeze, the bags are on the carousel in near-record time, and I'm suddenly in the back seat of a taxi heading home. I'm in sensory overload: the sky is fantastically blue, the plants and vegetation are overwhelmingly green, the mountains are gleamingly white-capped and the air is so! freakin'! clean!. I roll down the window, let in the rushing freeway breeze, and breathe deeply.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 18, 2009 1:39 AM.
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June 28, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 3

(If you're new to this thread, Part 1 is here, and Part 2 is here. Enjoy!)

• I woke up at 6:30 AM on Tuesday morning and felt ... great. I seemed to have put the jet lag behind me. It's always a good sign when you don't wake up and feel like your eyelids have 2-lb fishline anchors attached to them.
• One of the nice side-effects of traveling so many time zones away is getting a break from Microsoft e-mail madness. By the time I get to the Beijing office at 8, it's 5 PM in Redmond and the work day is pretty much over. Thus, I can pull out my MacBook, plug in to the network, and slurp down all of the previous day's e-mail traffic in one big gulp. This is incredibly nice: rather than being randomized during the work day with the continuous ping-ping-ping of new e-mail, I can take time, read a whole thread at length, and respond (where needed) with a little more thought. Once the mail's been dealt with, the rest of my work day is free for creative work. It's heavenly.
• (The dirty little secret of e-mail, I've found, is that many problems solve themselves when you're not looking.)
• For our Tuesday night outing, we did dinner and shopping at a local touristy hutong (as a point of reference, this place is the home of Plastered, the t-shirt place where I got my "Kung Pao Chicken" tee the previous year). There was a lot of pedestrian traffic, and the place was wall-to-wall with Westerners checking out the stores and each other. Our group walked the length of the district in a slow stroll, just enjoying the evening and marveling at the spectrum of goods and people that happened by us. It made me wish that we had more of these kinds of districts in Seattle; I'd certainly frequent them.
• A note on air quality: as you've undoubtedly heard, it's not great. We take our clean air in the US (and especially Seattle) for granted, and it isn't until you visit someplace with a serious pollution problem that you see how different things can be. Nighttime brings it out, too - as the dusk rolls in and the streetlights come online, you can see the air in the light beams, all the particulate matter swirling and churning and, ultimately, winding up in your lungs.
• (By the end of the week, a few of us had an ongoing tickle/irritation in the backs of our throats from all the gunk in the atmosphere.)
• Side note: most, if not all, of the streetlights I saw on the trip are using compact fluorescent bulbs.
• One thing not to miss in Beijing: foot massage. Brooke and I went for massage on our last trip, and had raved about it enough that the group wanted to give it a go on Wednesday night. We hit this swanky, gleaming, high-tech place - think Gene Juarez, but two or three notches higher. Ten of us are shuffled into one of the rooms, plopped down in reclining wicker chairs, and summarily have our feet dunked into wooden buckets that contain scalding hot water. After about 5 minutes of oohing and aahing and teeth-gritting, the pain receptors in the foot give up the ghost and in files this squad of masseuses who take their positions on small stools next to the feet of the recliners. They then proceed to spend the next 90 minutes warping, mangling, twisting, pulling and smacking (!) our feet into a substance resembling silly-putty, at which point they dunk said feet into a second wooden bucket of semi-warm water and smile kindly at us. During this process, I found myself twisting and writhing in my recliner, trying to remember to breathe and alternating between the feeling of "wow, that's great" and the unrelated feeling of "OH MY HOLY GOD PLEASE SAVE ME"
• (In all seriousness: it's fucking awesome.)
• "Lost In Translation" moment: after our feet were pulled from the scalding water (but before the crazy massage process), the group of us are trying to figure out what kind of entertainment we want shown on the room's oversized flatscreen TV. The entertainment catalog, the remote control, the TV and the people working in the room are all Chinese. The MacBU'ers, generally, are not, with the exception of our colleague Hao. Poor Hao is doing his best to translate for us about our options, and we finally settle on watching "The Dark Knight" ... only to note, as our feet are being pulled and pinched like taffy, that there is absolutely nothing relaxing about this movie. Each one of us us is getting more and more amped up, and we agree that it's got to stop. Hao steps in, we kill the movie, and then we try to find something mellow to listen to. The music selection is mostly Chinese pop standards and some classic American tunes - think Neil Diamond - at which point the cornball appeal of the English songs overwhelms all common sense and the MacBU'ers break into a spontaneous sing-along with whatever's on the stereo. (I swear I am not making this up.). We do a couple of rounds and get a resounding round of applause from our Chinese foot masters, all of whom are bemused beyond belief at how silly we are.
• (This really did happen. And it made perfect sense at the time.)
• Thursday was an all-day meeting for the Program Management team; we spent most of the morning in conference, and then took off and caught a boat to the Summer Palace. The weather wasn't very cooperative (gray and overcast and threatening to rain), but we did get a chance to walk the grounds, drink in the vibe, and snap a bunch of photos. It's experiences like this that remind me how young the United States really is.
• As the afternoon progresses, the weather gets worse, and eventually the small drops of water we'd been feeling for 20 minutes convert into a full-blown rain-out. Our group is near the north end of the Palace, so we head out the gates and see about grabbing a taxi. There's seven of us, and we quickly learn that the taxi situation isn't promising: the rain pretty much means that everyone wants a taxi; on top of that, we're in a part of the Palace where cars are discouraged and there are no parking or waiting spaces for taxis.
• There are, however, pedicabs.
• Pedicabs (or "Cycle Rickshaws") are basically bicycles with two back wheels and a passenger seat. They're everywhere in Beijing, and are generally one-man owner-operated businesses. You tell the guy where you want to go, he pedals, you pay. Pretty simple. They're not fast, sturdy, safe, or fashionable, but, at least at the moment, there's a half-dozen of them by the Summer Palace with tarps on the tops of their passenger sections.
• A bright idea is hatched: we will use the pedicabs to get to the nearest subway station ("very close", we're assured), at which point we will be able to easily meet up with the rest of MacBU for the evening's entertainment. Our Chinese colleagues quickly negotiate a deal with the pedicab guys, Yuan changes hands, and we're all split up into different vehicles. I have my own; other folks are doubled up. There's a lot of back-and-forth chatter that I don't understand, and then, suddenly, we're under way in the downpour.
• Things start off well enough - the pedicab moves at a fairly constant rate, and the guy pedaling clearly has Quads Of Steel to do this job all day long. We're hugging the right-hand side of the (narrow) road, and the occasional car zooms by with just a few inches of clearance. It occurs to me that I have zero protection in this thing - the cab is basically a cheap metal frame that's been attached to the bike, the rain protection is some tarps and plastic sheets that have been attached to the frame with twine, I'm sitting on a small bamboo mat that rests on the bare metal of the cab, and there's no gearing or anything to help the driver scoot out of danger if need be. It's about as bare-bones as it gets.
• The rain gets worse. It's coming down in sheets and buckets, and I'm watching the pedicab's wheels get increasingly covered in the water that's flowing down the street in a wide, flat river. I can no longer see or hear anyone else from MacBU; I send a couple of text messages to different colleagues, hear nothing. It's just me, the pedicab guy, the rain, and the roar of the now-increasing traffic next to us.
• The ride continues. It seems to be taking forever to get to the "nearby" subway and it suddenly dawns on me that I'm in the middle of some random part of Beijing, all alone, and completely incapable of communicating with the one guy who ostensibly knows where I need to be. I begin to wonder how this is going to end, and if I'm going to possess both my kidneys when it does.
• The pedicab makes an unexpected left, then a right, and suddenly we're thick in the middle of some very heavy traffic ... and I realize, in a flash, that we have a) entered a freeway of some kind, b) are going the wrong way down the one-way road, and c) because we're hugging the right curb, we are facing the fast lane. Trucks and buses are whooshing by us at 100km/hr, horns are honking like crazy, the displaced wind from oncoming traffic is shaking the pedicab, the rain is hammering us, the pedicab driver is as serene as a Hindu cow and meanwhile I'm about to have a full-on panic attack before, suddenly, it all becomes incredibly funny. (I think, at one point, actually giggled.)
• We bike this way for a good five minutes and then the driver decides to make a left-hand turn - across all five lanes of traffic - to get off at an exit. More horns, more crazy-fast drivers swerving around us. I'm so beyond caring at this point that I just try to snap good shots with my iPhone that I can share with Elaine, should I make it home.
• Two minutes later, we arrive. I've never been so happy to see a subway station in my entire life. A few of my team are already there, assure me that they, too, have seen their lives nearly end several times in the last half-hour, and the group of us huddles together under the subway shelter and keep vigil for the rest of our party, who arrive in dribs and drabs over the next ten minutes.
• It might be the stress talking, but the Beijing 10 line is the nicest, cleanest, sleekest, most modern, gorgeous subway on the planet. Really. I can't recommend you ride it more highly.
• The entertainment for the night is karaoke, and we're at a hip joint called Cashbox Party World. Beer is on the table when we arrive, and, after getting some food and a few pulls on the beer, we settle in for some serious (and seriously stress-relieving) singing. Everybody sang, and it didn't matter what - ABBA, Simom & Garfunkel, "Flashdance," Queen, you name it.
• And not that you asked, but: "Bizarre Love Triangle", "Mr. Brightside", "Hungry Like The Wolf", "1985" ... and Schwieb and I closed with "We Didn't Start The Fire".

All told, it was a hell of a day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 28, 2009 4:56 PM.
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June 15, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 2

(If you're just tuning in, Part 1 can be found here.)

• Given my late arrival and the wonders of jet lag, Sunday was pretty much lost. My trick with far-flung travel is to try and acclimate to the local clock as soon as possible, take the pain sooner instead of later. That said, the actual process of taking the pain routinely drops my IQ by a solid 30 points or so - I just feel slow, stupid, and thick. Hence: I hide out in the hotel.
• I've fallen in love with Skype. (Yes, I know I'm the last guy on Earth to use it.) After kicking 10 Euro into my SkypeOut account, I manage to reach Elaine on her cell through my MacBook. (Honestly, there's nothing nicer than hearing the voice of your wife when you're time-shifted by 15 hours.)
• Nifty Skype trick: set up an ad-hoc WiFi network in your hotel room, join it with your iPhone, and use Skype on your iPhone to call whoever you like. It's like the world's most high-tech cordless phone. If you're on a Mac (and you are, right?), just plug in to the hotel's Ethernet jack, open System Prefs, switch to the "Sharing" pane, and turn on Internet Sharing. Bingo! Instant DIY wireless network. Rock and roll.
• After dicking around all day, I go to bed at ~8 PM and proceed to sleep for 10+ hours. Glorious.
• Monday is the kickoff for a pretty busy week. There's a gaggle of MacBU'ers in town for the week, and, as is wont to happen with large groups, we're being managed and herded en masse. Our days are broken up into a variety of sessions and meetings and such, with regular breaks for lunch, tea, and so on. The evenings are generally dinner, entertainment, and a bit o' tourism. I glance at the schedule, notice how packed it is, and realize that any hope I'd had of getting ahead on a project or two is pretty much shot. It's 13-hour days, all the time.
• (On the other hand, they are taking us to karaoke on Thursday.)
• I am struck, as always, at how a Microsoft office is a Microsoft office is a Microsoft office. I've seen 'em in Redmond, California, London, Germany, China ... and they're all the same. Same basic desk/phone/chair aesthetic, same feel. It's comforting, in an "oh, hey, no problem, I can get my work done over here..." kind of way ... but it's also a little creepy.
• My coworkers start streaming in to the office. Everyone's got a good travel story, and a few have some really interesting swine flu anecdotes. Schwieb, for instance, had a guy on his flight with flu-like symptoms when they landed in Japan. The Japanese health squad marked all the seats five rows ahead of and behind the guy, held those passengers for advanced screening, and dismissed the rest of the plane. Yowza.
• We have Subway for lunch. Apart from the cheese (a little light on the lactose) and a few of the toppings (more veggies and pork than I'm used to), it's the same damn thing you'd get in the states.
• (Weirdly, I don't spot a single Subway restaurant for the entire rest of the trip. KFC, by contrast, is everywhere.)
• Monday-night dinner is at a pretty nice restaurant with an in-house variety show. There's a bit of Chinese opera, fan dances, a magic show. The magic show's kinda low-rent: the guy doing the magic is clearly still learning the ropes, and his bored female assistant came out in grungy street clothes (she wasn't listening to an iPod or chewing gum, thank God) to bring various props or hold this or that item. I felt a little bad for the guy.
• (By the way, I am now completely incapable of watching a magic show without hearing "The Final Countdown" in my head.)
• The evening entertainment did contain some AMAZING stuff, including a face-changing artist (totally incredible, must be seen in person), a hula-hoop master, some kung fu, and a balancing act (this tiny, 4' 11" woman manages to throw around a 400-lb pot with her feet).
• After dinner, we taxi over to the Olympic grounds to see the Bird's Nest, the Olympic Tower, and the Water Cube. The structures are incredible, of course, but what makes the night feel special is the wind, blowing and gusting, which brings out people flying kites (at 9 PM!), merchants selling kites (and Olympic tchotchkes), and people from all over the city just strolling and pointing and enjoying the mild weather.
• We subway home (and yes, it made my day). The government built a little, four-stop baby subway line (the 8) specifically to handle the Olympic traffic, and is now in the process of expanding it. It's totally modern, clean, and every bit as nice as any other major subway I've been on. It's on par with the 14 line in Paris: quiet, fast, and with glass walls separating the platform from the tracks (and keeping trash and debris from blowing down the tubes themselves).
• So there I am, waiting for the rest of the gang to get through subway security (all bags are x-rayed), when the 20-something security guard notices my "Kung Pao Chicken" t-shirt and immediately wants a picture. I'm flattered (I mean, I'm wearing it because the China team thinks it's hysterical), and agree. She asks me the same two questions everyone else does when they see the shirt: 1) "Do you know what that says?", followed by 2) "Can I get a picture with you?". This turns out to be something of a trend for the rest of the trip, and not just with me - one of my colleagues has long blond hair, which is also popular with photo-seeking locals. Crazy.

Back at the hotel, I drop into my bed, exhausted - and hopeful that I've paid my jet-lag taxes and can wake up reasonably refreshed (and time-zone-synched) in the morning.

(It's not gonna happen, but at least I've got 8 hours before I get the bad news.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2009 8:08 PM.
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June 7, 2009

13 Days In Asia, Part 1

My job took me to Beijing last year, which was cool enough at the time (Go to China? For work? Score!), but, as luck would have it, the plan calls for me to go back - and go back several times, in fact, over the balance of 2009.

Trip #1 happened during the last two weeks of May. As per usual, I took a few notes during the trip:

• The food at SeaTac is getting better. I've grown so accustomed to the traveler's standby (read: plastic wrapped sandwich) that I've come to subliminally associate airplanes with sad, flavorless and dry ham-and-cheese. However, I rolled the dice this time and tried this QDoba BBQ burrito thing that was damn tasty. Definite recommend.
• (The wisdom of trying a new food - and a burrito, no less - before getting on an airplane for 11 consecutive hours is a subject for another time.)
• The travel plan was the same trip as last time - take Northwest Airlines, fly from Seattle to Tokyo, and then on to Beijing. It's a long day. Unlike last time, I'm kicking it in coach instead of business class. It's not so bad - the food's good, and the seats even have electricity (sit north of Row 28, folks) - but the cramped seats really do get to you.
• As an aside, Northwest Air sells Skyy Vodka for $7. Depending on how badly you need to sleep, that's a smokin' deal.
• Just a quick plug for the laptop privacy screens: I have a PF15.4W from 3M, which fits perfectly on my 15" MacBook Pro. I bought one because I like to do my e-mail on the bus (or the plane), and I'm not so crazy about the guys to my right (and left) reading over my shoulder. The filter works like magic - once you're a few degrees off to the side, things get totally opaque. The one drawback is that you have to attach these janky little plastic tabs to the edges of your screen to keep the filter in place. (Steve Jobs would not approve.)
• Swine Flu Is Serious Business, Part 1: so we land in Japan and are told a) to remain in our seats, and b) that the Japanese Ministry of Health is coming aboard to do flu screening. Fine, I think, no big deal. Then the doors pop and about a dozen guys walk in wearing these blue Haz-Mat suits - the gloves, the face masks, the whole thing (think "Outbreak lite") - and wielding infrared thermometers. They then proceed to scan each and every one of us, and collect health questionnaires. The whole thing takes about 45 - 60 minutes, and, once we're let off the plane, we're all handed complimentary face masks as we tromp down the gangway.
• Roughly 70% of the people I see at Narita airport are wearing face masks.
• The connecting flight from Tokyo to Beijing was delayed from 7:15 PM to 10 PM (a consequence, I assume, of the Swine Flu screening), which is not, generally, the news you want to hear when you've been traveling for 13+ hours. I did what you're supposed to do in these cases, which is to go find something familiar and just ... chill. In Narita airport, that means McDonald's. Thank God for American consistency - that burger could have been served in Los Angeles, Seattle, Boise or New York. Exactly what I needed.
• So now it's an hour later, the burger's balled up at the bottom of my stomach, and I'm trying to keep myself awake and my attitude positive. All I can envision is Louis C.K.'s hysterical bit on Conan O'Brien ("Everything is amazing, nobody is happy") about air travel ("Delays? Really?"). It works.
• Apparently, Narita airport likes its WiFi like some people like their booze - on the down-low, in a quiet corner, and a little obscure. The good news is that there is a Boingo Wireless node in one of the concourses. Just do your best Egon Spengler impression: pull out your iPhone and walk around, refreshing the WiFi list. You'll get there.
• I slept - dozed, really - for most of the flight to Beijing. We touched down about 28 hours after I'd gotten up in Seattle the previous day. (It tried not to think about the fact that I still needed to get to the hotel.)
• Swine Flu Is Serious Business, Part 2: We land in China, taxi for-freakin'-ever to get to the gate, and are summarily informed that the Chinese Ministry of Health will be coming aboard to screen us for flu-like symptoms. The doors pop and these very chilled-out Chinese guys come aboard wearing button-down shirts, khakis, latex gloves and masks. (Compared to the Japanese, they're positively reckless.) They get the entire plane screened in 20 minutes and we're out the door, grabbing our bags, and walking toward customs. At one point, we turn down a long hall and see a "health inspection" station that we need to pass before we're allowed in to the country. The folks working the desk are very polite and businesslike ... and not terribly fast. It wasn't until I was through the screening and about 100 meters past the station that I realized the entire "inspection station" was being scanned by infrared cameras hooked up to digital temperature sensors. Every single person was being checked for body temperature while they stood at the station, and (I assume) the reason the inspectors were taking their time was to give the cameras a good chance to do their job.
• I later learn that if you've been in Mexico at all two weeks prior to your arrival in China, you will be a guest of the Chinese government for 7 days, no questions asked. They're terribly polite, but they're not screwing around, either.
• My iPhone works here. It's not really surprising - it worked last year - but it's still amazing, both from a "holy crap, the world is small" standpoint and from a "holy crap, tech standards are wonderful thing" standpoint. It's only after I get home that I see how much this technological freedom costs - $7.50 for 15 text messages, and $9.16 for four calls home. (Totally worth it, IMHO.)
• I finally arrive at the hotel registration desk at 2:45 AM, local time. I'm processed, handed a room card, and pointed in the direction of the elevators. I push "11", zip 110 feet into the air, slouch down the hall, and unlock my room. It's clean, and, for a guy who's been up for 30 hours straight, a sight for sore eyes. I unpack as little as I need to, and drop.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 7, 2009 9:17 PM.
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January 18, 2009

My Crazy Week In San Francisco

Macworld Expo was last week, which meant I spent the 4th through the 11th in beautiful (and sunny! and cold!) San Francisco working the show (and enjoying a bit of sightseeing toward the end of the week).

A few notes from the trip:

• Unlike my gig in Planning, Program Managers don't travel all that much, and it'd been a while since I'd spent time sitting at an airport gate. Turns out they're fantastic for getting caught up on a huge backlog of video podcasts (which may have built up while, say, the city of Seattle was buried under a blanket of snow).
• In addition to being a winged child-care center, Alaska 316 was a pretty bumpy ride. I'm generally relaxed about flying, but the plane was shuddering violently for protracted periods of time, and I found myself looking out the window, wondering if the damn wing was going to fall off.
• (Not to be too morbid, but it was one of those flights where I was glad I'd told Elaine I loved her before boarding.)
• After landing (safely!), I gathered my things, waited my turn, and exited the plane, only to be greeted by the overwhelming smell of bacon in the concourse. This is, I think, a good omen.
• Things That Make San Francisco Awesome, #4566: the mayor's first name is Gavin.
• The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) light rail system was expanded to the San Francisco Airport a few years ago, and I was excited to give it a try. BART's a bit different from other transit systems I've used. For starters, they don't use "zones" to determine fares (where travel inside one zone is one price, going between zones is another price, and so on). Rather, every BART stop has a table that lists all the stations, and shows you the price to get from your current station to your destination (in my case, it was $5.40 to get from SFO to downtown, one way). This is confusing and cumbersome.
• Second, BART tickets aren't single-use; they're stored-value, which means you buy a certain amount of credit from the machine, and the machine spits out a ticket with the credit encoded on it. Again, strange - it means you, the passenger, carry all the risk with the ticket. If you store your ticket too close to a magnet (or a cell phone!) which strips the encoding, well, you're out of luck. This wouldn't be so bad for a single-trip or day-use thing, but these are the same cheap cardboard tickets you get everywhere else (think "bake sale/raffle"), and they don't exactly hold up over time.
• Another note: when buying your ticket, the machine will want to sell you $20 of credit right off the bat. That's not such a hot deal if you're only using the system to get in and out of the city over the course of a week. Just buy what you need, when you need it.
• (Oh, and the damn machines don't take AmEx. Not so friendly for the business traveler.)
• The ride into the city was about as uneventful as you might imagine. Trains run every 15 minutes; the trip is almost exactly a half hour (we were under way at 7:42 PM; we arrived at my stop at 8:11 PM). Easy-peasy.
• (Reminder: Link Light Rail opens July 3 here in Seattle...)
• The Macworld people held a two-day "Power Tools" session on Monday and Tuesday, focused on helping people get more from their Macs. Microsoft agreed to participate, with Program Managers from each of the Mac Office applications giving a 60 - 90 minute talk about advanced or overlooked features. Stuart and I split the 90-minute Excel session on Monday afternoon, and it seemed to go fine - no major gaffes, no f-bombs from the podium, nothing caught fire. As I understand it, all the Power Tools sessions were videotaped and will be made available on YouTube sometime soon. I'll post a link when I get one.
• The big news from the Apple keynote on Tuesday was, to my mind, the end of Digital Rights Management in iTunes. The labels have, apparently, realized that DRM annoys legitimate customers, adds complexity to how people enjoy music, retards interoperability (and innovation), and, most damningly, doesn't do a thing to help stop piracy. They've finally hit stage 5. I never thought I'd see the day.
• (Since the announcement, I've dumped a good $50 stripping DRM from songs in my library, and will finish the process once Apple's entire back catalog is re-encoded.)
• Other keynote thoughts: the new iLife is incredible. I love the "Faces" stuff in iPhoto, but feel bad that Apple just shot FlickrExport in the head. iMovie, it seems, has long since abandoned any pretense of being an "entry level" application. I mean, yes, it's easy enough to use, but holy cow it's powerful. The stuff you can now do with the app - free with every Mac! - is astonishing. And finally, the new GarageBand is a classic example of what Apple does best. First, start with a great app. Then, identify the reason(s) people aren't using/can't use it (in this case, it's because people don't know how to play an instrument). Third, develop a slick system to teach people how to play, thus a) overcoming a market obstacle, and b) differentiating your offering from all of the other music apps out there. Finally, add a bit of sex appeal by having celebrity musicians teach you how to play the songs that made them famous. So cool.
• Overall, the Macworld show was much less trafficked than in previous years, seeming to run about at about 60% - 70% of last year's population. I wonder how much the down economy is driving this, or if enthusiasm is waning now that Apple isn't coming back.
• For all that, I love working the booth (the Excel kiosk, natch), and had some great conversations with people about Office, Excel, and Mac stuff at Microsoft generally. People are using Office 2008, and really like it - I was surprised at how sophisticated some of the questions were, and got some wonderful suggestions for ways we can improve future versions. Customers rock.
• Elaine flew down Wednesday night, so we could stay over a few extra days and enjoy a mini-vacation. (She was a sight for sore eyes, let me tell you.)
• We decided to use San Francisco MUNI for sightseeing. MUNI has a solid bus system, but it's a bit arcane to get used to. Bus stop information, for example, is spray-painted on light poles, which I'm sure saves the city money but a) is hard to see unless you know what you're looking for, and b) even when you do see them, they look fake. Grr.
• Thank God for Google Transit on the iPhone. The new iPhone Maps application (with the 2.2 firmware) introduced "transit" directions, which meant we could simply enter our starting point and destination, and Maps would tell us which buses (or other rail systems to take). Awesome, awesome, awesome.
• Another good resource: NextMuni.com, which is much like MyBus.org here in Seattle. Just tell the system which stop you're at, and it'll let you know how soon the next bus will be along.
• Operationally, the buses seem safe and well-thought-out; I counted 5 video cameras on the bus itself; each bus also has a nice digital reader board next to the driver that lists the next upcoming stop. Seattle Metro could learn from this.
• San Francisco is a really wonderful city to see from a bus. Packed with people, vibrant, something interesting happening every 10 feet. You miss it when driving. Trust me.
• One of our stops was the Palace of Fine Arts. It's gorgeous at 4:30 PM - the light is perfect - and it's got a nice small lake and running path. With all the strollers, joggers, and birds, it's got the same general feel as Greenlake (only smaller).
• The cafe in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes a damn good omelette.
• Our friends Kim and Steve took us up to Twin Peaks (by Sutro Tower) for some amazing views of the city, followed by a trip to the new California Academy of Sciences. The Academy is a recently-rebuilt science museum, and it's just incredible - modern, smart, wonderful. We only got a few hours in the place, but it's the sort of thing that's genuinely don't-miss.
• (Oh, and the fish and chips in the cafe are really yummy.)
• Our hotel had a pretty good selection of cable TV channels, including two I don't watch a lot: CurrentTV and BBC America. Current is a lot like watching YouTube - it's all user-submitted content - and its sheer randomness (you never know what's coming next) is hypnotic (Exhibit A: "Internet Porn & You", which I kind of can't believe made it on television). BBC America, on the other hand, was running a lot of the new Dr. Who, and, again, I got sucked in.
• The flights home were simple, fast, and easy. Which made me think about the crazy-bumpy ride down, and the damn wing falling off all over again. Grr.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 18, 2009 10:45 AM.
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September 12, 2008

Disneyland Trip Report

Elaine and I had our first anniversary this week, and, to celebrate, we decided to take a quickie jaunt down to The Happiest Place On Earth with a few good friends.

The trip was Friday-to-Tuesday, so we had plenty of time to see, well, everything at both Disneyland and California Adventure, plus do some sleepin' in and hangin' out.

A few notes:

• Just one weekend after Labor Day, and Disneyland's attendance was noticeably low. Most rides were walk-ons, with the occasional 10-minute wait. We managed to ride every major attraction (Space Mountain, Matterhorn, Indiana Jones, Splash Mountain, Tower Of Terror, California Screamin', etc.) in both of the parks on Saturday alone.
• The noticeable exception to the walk-on rule was Toy Story Mania, which sported 25-to-45-minute lines for the duration of the trip. Good reason, too: the ride is incredible. It's fun, engaging, wildly imaginative, competitive, and full of Easter Eggs and unlocks. Kids love the graphics and the "Toy Story" characters, adults love the games themselves, and the Type A's (that's, uh, me) love the thrill of beating their previous scores. Put that together and you'll have a long line on this puppy for a good while to come.
• We also tried the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, and, while I liked it fine, I wasn't blown away. Aside from the submarine-nostalgia factor for the adults, this one's really more for the kids (all of whom on our boat were shrieking and cheering for Nemo, Dori, etc.).
• The single best thing we did on the trip was "Cruzin' Disney's California Adventure", which is a private Disney tour that we found on the Disneyland Web site. It's a 2-hour, before-the-park-opens tour of California Adventure on Segways. And it rocks. There were 7 folks in our group; each person got their own Segway to tool around on. After spending the first hour or so getting familiar with the Segway and its operation (you do basic skills tests, like navigating tight corners and stopping on inclines), the group zoomed around DCA's various lands to get acquainted with the park and its history. The tour ends with a complimentary photo in front of Paradise Pier. This was easily the coolest thing I've ever done at Disneyland. If you're heading to Disneyland, don't miss it.
• At long last, we managed to get over to the Blue Bayou to try their (legendary) Monte Cristo sandwich. I've been hearing about these sandwiches for a long, long time now, and was pretty jazzed to finally see what all the fuss was about. My verdict? Well, it tastes like a super-heavyweight ham-and-cheese doughnut. Really. Battered, deep-fried, served with jelly ... I'm glad I had one, but it's not my taste. (And I'm now firmly convinced that "The Count Of Monte Cristo" refers to cholesterol.)
• A broader point about dining - one thing that disappointed me on this trip was the food. I don't mind paying top dollar for meals at the Disney parks (it's expected), but what I do mind is not being able to get anything tasty, even at some of the restaurants outside the parks. We hit a number of different places over our stay, and there's a kind of bland sameness to a lot of the meals. I don't remember this from previous trips, so I'm wondering if a gaggle of MBAs got their hands on the restaurant menus and started cutting costs. It's doubly disappointing given our recent (excellent) experience at Silverwood, whose food was not just tasty, but reasonably priced as well.
• Notable exception to my food complaint: Napa Rose, the high-end restaurant at the Grand Californian Hotel. We had our anniversary dinner there, and it was fantastic.
• The "Remember..." fireworks show at Disneyland is a can't-miss. Carve out a space on Main Street a good half-hour before the show, minimum.
• Having a bit more time in the parks meant that we finally made the effort to see some of the smaller, non-E-Ticket stuff that we'd missed in the past. We spent time in Fantasyland doing "Alice in Wonderland" and "Storybookland Canal Boats" (and yes, we did both the tortilla-making and bread-baking "attractions" at DCA). It was nice, relaxed ... I'm glad we took the time.
• We also ducked in to the new-and-improved "Innoventions" (featuring the Microsoft Home), which, I'm sad to say, is pretty terrible. There's lots of whizzy stuff to look at and walk past, but much of it is incomprehensible as a useful technology showcase. It's Das Blinkenlights with leather couches. Give it a miss.
• As I walked around the parks, I was very cognizant of the fact that DCA is about to be reborn. Golden Dreams shut down permanently on Saturday, and will be replaced by the new "Little Mermaid" attraction; the Wine Country Trattoria will soon be shuttered to house the new DCA Preview Center. It was strange to think that we were seeing the last days of the park before it's ripped up and rebuilt into something a lot, lot better.
• There is not one good cup of coffee to be found within 2 miles of Disneyland.
• Strange to say, but this place never gets old.

I don't know when we're heading back to Anaheim, but I suspect it will be a while. I can't wait to see what DCA looks like when we get there.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 12, 2008 9:38 AM.
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August 16, 2008

Feeling The Aftershock

Last weekend, Elaine and I headed out to Spokane to see family and ride roller coasters at Silverwood - specifically Aftershock (nee Deja Vu).

The trip was a blast - great company, great entertainment, great laughs - but I think all of us were surprised at just how much fun we had at the park that day.

A few trip notes (and Silverwood tips):

• Gate tickets are geting more expensive. Back in 2002, an adult single-day pass was $24.99; today, it's $40.99. The park's a much better value than it was back then (it's gained a water park and a kick-ass roller coaster, among other things), but if you want to save a few bucks, get your tickets at Costco: $30.99 per person. When you're getting four tickets (like we did), that amounts to a free admission for one of your party.
• We were there right after park open (11 AM), and our first order of business was to head to Boulder Beach. Northen Idaho was already a nice-n-toasty 72 degrees, so chilling in the lazy river ride for a half hour actually sounded pretty good. This also allowed us to get ahead of the guaranteed-insane crowds that stream in to the water park as the mercury climbs in the afternoon.
• Tip #1: When you first arrive at Silverwood, get a locker in the water park. The lockers work on an unlimited in-and-out system, so you have use of it all day long and you can stash your stuff as you change activities. Finally - and this is key - lockers sell out. Go early, unless you don't mind schelpping a duffel bag full of wet towels all over the park.
• Tip #2: Like the locker, rent an innertube when you arrive. Again, there's a limited supply of these things, and having an innertube lets you walk on to many of the rides instead of waiting at the base of a slide for one of the communal tubes. Innertubes can be exchanged throughout the day (e.g., single-rider for double-rider) for free.
• Tip #3: Tuck an extra $20 (and photo ID) in your swimsuit. The lazy river ride has a float-up bar that serves beer, wine, and mixed drinks. And lemme tell ya, there is nothing like a nice, lazy-river innertube ride with a frozen margarita in your hand. (I love it. Love.)
• The water park had expanded since my last trip in 2006; they've got a new, family-style slide called "Avalanche Mountain" that opened last year, and it rocks. You spin, slosh, shriek and then splash down - fantastic.
• The park has also added a second wave pool.
• (Observation: Bikinis, like automobiles, should only be available to licensed operators. I'm not trying to kill anyone's good time or anything, but there are children present, as well as people with good eyesight, for God's sake. Before you suit up, think of your obligation to the community. That's all I'm saying.)
• I was pleasantly surprised at how reasonable the prices are for food and snacks. We had a delicious lunch at Lindy's (try the "Train Burger" - gorgonzola cheese, dee-lish), and the ticket wasn't any different from any one of a zillion restaurants in Spokane. There's not much 'theme park premium' going on at Silverwood.
• The train ride is a pretty good after-lunch, don't-wanna-tempt-my-stomach-with-a-coaster activity. It takes about a half hour, you get to see a large chunk of the park, and the jokes aren't too corny. I personally enjoyed seeing just how much land the park occupies, and how much room they have to expand in the coming years. Given what they've done over the last 20 (Silverwood opened in '88), it should be pretty exciting.
• As the day wore on, my inner MBA started to slice-and-dice the park from an operational standpoint. I started trying to estimate things like attendance, ride capacities, souvenir revenues, headcount, and the like. This stuff is fascinating.
• (I swear, after I'm done with my tech career, I'm going to work in theme park operations somewhere. For today, though, it's Roller Coaster Tycoon for me.)
• Aftershock is awesome. Yes, it's the exact same Deja Vu coaster that you can ride at any handful of Six Flags parks. However, parked in the middle of Northern Idaho, a blue-and-green steel monstrosity, it's fabulous. The themeing around the ride is nice, the queues are nice, the attendees were in to everything. It's wonderful to have such a good coaster near Seattle.

My family was pretty excited about the whole day, and the Spokane folks are now talking season passes. Elaine and I will be back next year, for sure.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 16, 2008 3:36 PM.
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August 3, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 8, 9, & 10

My last three days in Beijing were rather more subdued than the previous 7; following our sightseeing weekend, it was back to work on Monday and Tuesday, with Wednesday being a (very long) travel day.

The remaining details:

• Monday was a shocking normal work day: wake up, brush, breakfast, walk to the office, unpack laptop, e-mail, an hour of creative work, meeting, e-mail, meeting, lunch, e-mail, snack, e-mail and then packing it up for dinner. The jet lag was largely behind me, so I wasn't fighting strange bouts of fatigue - in fact, the whole thing felt so overwhelming usual that it made me a little homesick. Rather than being a cool day in a new land, it was just another workday, but one where I wasn't going to see my girl at the end of it. It made me kind of sad.
• (On the other hand, I learned that acclimation takes, on average, five days.)
• Dinner was Schezuan with a gaggle of coworkers. They were eager to see how well Brooke and I would deal with super-spicy-hot food. We both love the stuff, and managed to navigate the sea of chili oil that came our way.
• Spicy food, apparently, knocks me out. Early bedtime.
• Tuesday was tinged with a bit of sadness, and a touch of frenzy. It was my last day in the office, so all the final face-to-face stuff I needed to get done had to be done now, before I left for the plane. I was also cognizant that this was my last chance for good, high-quality Internet access before I got back to Redmond. (Airport and hotel WiFi is usually fine, but you just can't trust that it'll work when you need it.)
• Brooke is staying on for a bit of vacation; his wife is flying in on Friday, so he'll be working the rest of the week in China and then the two of them are off for some much-needed R&R in Shanghai.
• Tuesday afternoon is also time for shopping. I promised some folks back home that I'd bring them Olympic souvenirs, and so we're off to one of the gadzillion Olympics shops to find appropriate stuff.
• While out, my curiosity finally gets the better of me and I drag Brooke and our colleague, Ray, to McDonald's. I'm eager to see what the local experience is like, and, as expected, it's pretty adapted to local tastes. I order the cheeseburger, and am surprised to find that the thing is wholly unlike what we get in the States - the meat is tastier; the cheese is different (lactose-free), and covered in paprika; it has the same special sauce as the Big Mac (but no ketchup or mustard); instead of pickles, it has raw cucumbers.
• (In all seriousness, if they sold this burger in the US, I'd buy it. It's really yummy.)
• The fries are perfect. There is no Diet Coke. And if you want your meal to go, a plastic bag is 0.2 Yuan.
• More souvenir shopping, this time on behalf of my colleague Stuart, who has asked me to bring him back some "authentically Chinese" alcohol ("Look, Russia has vodka, Ireland has whiskey, China's got their something. If you can locate a flask of whatever the heck that happens to be, that'll rock."). After conferring with Ray, we duck in to a convenience store and select a small, 100ml green glass bottle of something that Ray assures me is both "authentic" and "very popular". We also select a slightly-larger (200 ml) clear bottle of something else that is "not as authentic, but is also very popular." The combined price for the booze is 10 Yuan (about $1.50); the alcohol content of each bottle is 56%.
• (In the back of my mind, I'm praying that this stuff won't cause wood alcohol blindness.)
• Back at the hotel bar, Brooke and I both realize how badly we're missing our wives when, over successive rounds of drinks, we find ourselves engaging in an ever-escalating "argument" about which one of us managed to marry farther above his station.
• Wednesday comes, and I'm up early. My flight is at 8:55 AM, so I'm out the door of the hotel at 6. (Sigh)
• Once again, my taxi has no seatbelts. And, while this is something I managed to get used to while riding in the city, it's considerably less fun when we're going 120 km/hr on the aggressive Beijing freeway with less than a carlength between us and the vehicle in front of us.
• After arriving at the airport, I check in for my flight and spend a scant 15 minutes waiting in line at customs. I give my passport control person a "very satisfied" as I head to the gate.
• Walking to the gate, it becomes clear what a full-blown shopping mall the Beijing airport really us. Once again, I'm struck by how many American and international brands are offered for sale. If you need a Hugo Boss shirt with your Starbucks before that flight to Tokyo, you're good to go.
• On the four-hour leg between Beijing and Tokyo, I watch "The King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters", which is an incredible documentary about two guys competing for the world record in Donkey Kong. It's a funny, poignant, and totally gripping human drama, and I loved it.
• In Tokyo, I manage to snag some WiFi and find, to my delight, that Elaine is still up and heading to bed. We flirt shamelessly for a good 15 or 20 minutes before my flight starts boarding.
• "Be Kind, Rewind" is charming and totally disposable.
• The flight touches down in Seattle at 8:25 AM, Pacific Time.

Damn, it's good to be home.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 3, 2008 3:32 PM.
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July 22, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 7

We woke up on Sunday to our second day of official non-work in Beijing, so Brooke and I decided to go for the the Big One of sightseeing - The Great Wall Of China.

• Hao and Fara claim that the best place to see the Wall is from Mutianyu, which is about an hour and a half outside of Beijing. They arranged a car and driver, and the four of us were off shortly after breakfast.
• The weather was not terribly cooperative - foggy, misty, and wet. Our visibility never really got beyond a few hundred feet. Each of us kept waiting for the sun to break through, or for us to leave the weather behind - never happened.
• We arrive at the base of the Great Wall, and find ourselves at tourist central. The path to the Wall is one gigantic tourist trap, with small shacks lining the walkway and selling every kind of Great Wall paraphernalia you can imagine - postcards, t-shirts, photos, knickknacks, ponchos, umbrellas, you name it. There's also fruit stands, snack stands, places selling water and beer. The sellers are aggressive, too, calling out in English phrases to get your attention, then trying to haggle with you on whatever item they saw you glancing at.
• Arriving at the base of the Wall is one thing; getting to the Wall is another. The government has installed a gondola to get people from the base to the Wall itself, but there's also a walking/hiking path made of stone. We opt for the hike. The climb is steep, and takes a good 20 minutes; I am reminded of the sand stairs at Baker Beach during Alcatraz. The moist weather isn't helping, either - it's like walking in a cloud. We pause as needed.
• The Wall astounds. The Great Wall is something I'd read about, of course, in my eight-grade history class (thanks again, Mr. DuBois, wherever you are), but, like the Pyramids or any of the other Seven Wonders, the Great Wall was something that was safely tucked in the pages of a book, and not an actual object that I'd be stomping around on one day.
• (And yet, here I am, and here it is, and here I find myself shaking my head with wonder about how small the world really is these days.)
• The overwhelming physicality of the Wall is incredible. It is made entirely of rough brick, made smooth and sloping in places from the contours of the land (which it hugs) or the erosion of millions of footsteps (which is has undoubtedly endured).
• At its heart, the Wall is a 20-foot-wide brick roadway, built to a height of about 30 feet. It follows the line of the mountain on which it's built, and has periodic guard buildings placed for lookouts and shelter for the soldiers that manned it.
• The thing is about as far from an antiseptic, safe-for-tourists attraction as you can imagine. The Wall slants and slopes, is slippery, has loose bricks, and offers many places to twist an ankle or fall on your ass. The hills are high and steep; going up is hard, coming down is harder. We feel like mountain goats.
• At no point does anybody complain about anything. The walk might be hard (and capable of taking the wind out of you), but, for all that, some poor bastards had to actually build it, which boggles the mind. (Your job, Oh 21st-Century Western Tourist, does not suck as much as you imagine.)
• Admission to the cable car at the Great Wall: about $10. T-shirt from a vendor at the Great Wall: 3 for $1. International roaming charges for the 2 minutes you use to call your wife from the Great Wall to tell her you love her and miss her? Priceless.
• The Wall is dotted with locals who are selling snacks, fruit and beverages. They sell from small milk crates, from hot-dog carts, from whatever they have. A number of them lead with "cold beer!" in English, which I think is strange - with this kind of climb, who wants to drink beer?
• It's easy to get vertigo up here.
• We ultimately walk the Wall from our arrival point to the 20th guard house (the end point of the zone), turn around and go back, past our arrival, and to the gondola. All told, it takes us about four hours. We take the gondola down, survive the tourist gantlet, and head back to Beijing. We are all smiling.
• All told, Beijing is incredibly clean. We see very little litter, and very few homeless. I am told that the government has been cleaning things up in advance of the Olympics.
• Olympics stuff is everywhere - banners, flags, logos, the mascots, billboards, bus boards, street signs. The city is swept with Olympics mania, and everyone is very happy and proud about it.
• A surprising number of signs come in English and Chinese. We see lots of Engrish.
• Hao and Fara take us to an expat district, which spans a river and has a healthy number of bars and nightclubs. Many of them have sofas and lounge chairs on the sidewalk, and are aggressive about getting you to sit down. We find a place that looks good, grab a table, and order some great local beer. It's outrageously expensive by Beijing standards, but about half the price of something comparable in the States. We watch gaggles of tourists zip by in the backs of rickshaws, taking in the sights.
• I want to by a t-shirt for Elaine, so Hao takes us to Plastered, which is a Beijing staple of hipness. I find her a super-cute white tee with a sketch of a Beijing subway ticket on it; I get myself an attractive blue number with "Kung Pao Chicken" written on it in Chinese. Hao assures me this is very, very, very funny.
• (Given some of the looks I get, I wonder if the shirt really says, "I'm a silly white guy who can't read Chinese", but the shirt is great, regardless.)
• Taxis in Beijing are mostly Hyundais, blue-and-gold Elantras. 2 yuan per km, 10 yuan minimum.
• After tromping around the dusty alleys of the city all afternoon, dinner is full-on culture shock - we go two blocks and find ourselves at a state-of-the-art shopping mall, all gleaming steel and glass, Starbucks and KFC, eleven stories, full of teenagers and cell phones and you name it. We could be anywhere in the States. We have some fantastic Chinese for dinner, knock back a couple of Tsingtaos, and call it a night.
• I sleep very, very, very well.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 22, 2008 9:00 PM.
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July 14, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 6

After three days of hard work, the weekend arrived. Brooke and I decided to do a bit o' sightseeing.

• From The "Jet Lag Cries 'Uncle'" Department: I awoke on Saturday to a feeling that was wholly alien, bizarre, and unfamiliar - that is, I felt refreshed and happy. No horrible fatigue behind the eyes, no crazy dark circles, no slow-draggin' of my sorry self from the bed to the shower. Eyes opened, smile appeared, bounced out of bed. About. Freakin'. Time.
• A peek out the hotel windows reveals that the weather is cooperative. A bit of sun is breaking through the white Beijing fogginess; the city seems to be inviting us in.
• Two of our colleagues, Hao and Fara, generously agree to show us the city, to which Brooke and I readily agree. They prove to be fantastic guides.
• First stop: The Temple of Heaven, 600-year-old complex that is now a public park, much like the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. People are strolling down paths, playing modified games of hacky sack (with this crazy, badminton-esque shuttlecock thingy), taking pictures, gawking at the relics. The Temple grounds are walled off from the rest of Beijing, and go on (seemingly) forever. We take it all in, walking from the north end of the park to the south, then out to the east.
• My longstanding transit fetish is indulged with a quick trip on the Beijing Subway system; we take Subway Line #5 to a shopping district not too far from the Temple. The subway is thoroughly modern, clean, and quiet - stations of this design are typical of any Western city (frankly, we could be in London, for all anyone knows). The #5 uses glassed-in tubes, much like Line 14 on the Paris Metro.
• Tickets are 2 Yuan (about $0.30).
• For lunch, we hit this Brazilian BBQ buffet restaurant. It's apparently a very popular cuisine in town, and the waiters are forever visiting our table with skewers of this or that meat on them, trying to carve off pieces for us to try. Everything is delicious.
• After much moral dithering, I ask to try Starbucks. Fara and Hao crack smiles; Brooke looks vaguely relieved. Turns out that Starbucks in Beijing is pretty much Starbucks everywhere; apart from the Chinese on the menu, the items, options, and prices (adjusted for Yuan) are identical.
• (The place is full of Westerners. I hear more unaccented American English in 20 minutes than I've heard in the last 5 days.)
• Starbucks also has free WiFi, which allows me to take my iPhone out of airplane mode and send an "I miss you" e-mail to Elaine.
• We pop back to the subway and transfer to Line 1 (the oldest line), which ultimately takes us to the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square.
• Look, there's no real way to convey how huge these structures and places are in words, so I'll just say this: we emerged from the subway, strode a few steps, turned to the left, and ... the expanse just goes on. Tiananmen Square is a broad, sprawling expanse of concrete, brick and emptiness, bordered by the Forbidden City at one end and government buildings on the others. It's enormous. Standing alone on a football field at night might give you a sense of it, but just barely.
• There are tourists, citizens, and guards everywhere. The cameras-per-square-inch ratio goes up noticeably.
• We walk the square to the gates of the Forbidden City (adorned with a gigantic picture of Chairman Mao), and then walk in.
• Beijing is a city built on a series of concentric rings. The inner ring, Ring 1, is the oldest; subsequent rings represent later generations of the city's growth. The Forbidden City is, in a literal sense, Ring 1 - it's the original seat of power, the home to the emperors who ruled China for centuries. It's called "Forbidden" because you would be killed if you went in without permission. Today, about 50 Yuan does the trick.
• The emperors are gone, but the Forbidden City is preserved by the Chinese government as a public museum - a museum that runs 1km by .7km square. It's big.
• The City contains everything a city would expect to have - buildings for the people who lived there, for the various support functions (guards, priests, etc.), for ceremonies, for celebrations, for dining and you name it. The City is surrounded by a high brick wall, and that has a moat outside it for good measure.
• Hao and Fara have arranged for a guide to take us around the city, and they leave Brooke and me alone to head out to connect with her. I stand, just trying to drink it all in and ... failing. It's too much.
• The level of detail in this place is mind-blowing. I look at rooftops, and notice that the roofs are ornately adorned, hand-carved, hand-painted. Every surface has incredible detail, which means you can sit on a bench and stare at a wall and see something new just about every time you move your eyes. As I take this in, it dawns on me that all of it was built without the aid of robotics, computers, or mass-manufacturing techniques of any kind. It's just ... craftsmanship.
• Oh, yeah: no nails. Anywhere.
• The tour is about two hours. We walk and walk and walk, ducking down alleyways, taking in exhibits of concubine's quarters, seeing the temples and the seats of power. The guide is good; she knows her stuff. Very shortly, I'm in overload.
• The doors in this place are not built for white guys with high-protein diets. I duck a lot.
• The toilets are ... well, they're holes in the floor. Porcelain, yes, reasonably clean, yes, but you better have good knees and a sense of humor if you need to use the can.
• We wind up leaving as the City is closing, which makes hailing a cab a rather time-consuming activity.
• Dinner is Schezuan at a place off a hutong. As expected, the food is astoundingly good. We drink Tsingtao, a local Chinese beer that's light, refreshing, and not too booze-y.
• I woke up easy, but I go to bed hard - it's been a long day. (I'm still smiling, however.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 14, 2008 9:37 PM.
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July 9, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 4 & 5

(Sorry it's taking me so long to get to these entries; this being my first full week back at work, life's a bit hectic.)

More China notes:

• Thursday and Friday were both traditional work days, in the sense that I got up, brushed/showered/shaved/brokefast and then headed to the office. The fact that I was working from the Beijing office - rather than on West campus in Redmond - was not lost, exactly, but it didn't manifest itself very often - generally, only when I'd get away from my screen or campus. Seen one Microsoft office, seen most of 'em.
• (There's something surreal about being able to fly halfway around the world and live, essentially, as if you were still at home. Maybe Snow Crash is right, the future's just going to be a worldwide, smeared-out sameness.)
• Microsoft's Beijing office is pretty nice. It's a 6-story building, plus a sub-level; the main floor is for visitors (and has some additional retail tenants); the second floor on up is all for employees. The sublevel (the employees all call it "P1") is like a mini-mall for employees - a few food places (one of which serves a mean rice bowl), a health club (with swimming pool), a barbershop, that sort of thing. Convenient.
• After avoiding its deadly grasp for the past two days, jet lag finally stalked and caught me on Thursday afternoon. I was on deadline for a project (deliverable due 5 PM), cranking away, and suddenly just ... hit the wall. Brooke had it, too; I'm surprised we weren't drooling on ourselves. Walking around the halls seemed to help, but there wasn't enough Nescafe in the world to resuscitate me. I just had to hope for the second wind.
• Thursday dinner was a special treat - Peking duck. The restaurant was very high-end, very swanky, and dated from 1864; they even provided a 'certificate of authenticity' for the duck (now up on the wall of my office), which contained the duck's serial number (#77648, as in "we have served 77,648 ducks since we opened"). No fooling.
• Everyone here - on the street, in the office, in shops, taxis, etc. - is very friendly. A lot of people will immediately ask us where we're from, and many will try their English.
• (For some odd reason, they don't think two 6'+ pasty white-guy geeks look like natives.)
• Beijing weather is low-70s in the evening, mid-90s in the daytime. It's humid, too. It feels like Houston to me.
• There's an odd cultural thing I keep observing where people - friends - walk down the street holding hands. It's very common, and everyone seems to do it. One of my coworkers tells me that "it doens't mean what it means in the States", which makes me laugh.
• After dinner, four of us went out for a massage near our hotel. It was, without question, one of the best massages I have ever had in my life - one where they treat you like bread dough, pushing, pulling and dragging you into various shapes until you're just a puddle on the floor. The whole thing ran around 90 minutes, and cost about 90 Yuan (about $13) for each of us.
• One the way out, I asked one of my Beijing colleagues about the prices - and about the masseuses, all of whom were twentysomething women. He explained that each masseuse likely got 20 - 25 Yuan for each massage, and they probably did four or so per day. That may not seem like a lot to some (it didn't to me), but 80 - 100 Yuan a day is 400 - 500 a week, and 1600 - 2000 a month. In a town where ~900 Yuan/month is considered a good living wage (you can hire a combo cook/nanny/housekeeper for that), doing massage is considered a good job. And for many Chinese, it's incredibly attractive relative to staying in a village, where the prospects aren't nearly as bright - or the freedom as broad - as they are in the city.
• (I have to say, it's a little disconcerting to grok the economics of a place with such a huge labor pool, and such disparities between modern urban and old-country rural.)
• A lot of the city seems retrofitted - apartment buildings with AC systems bolted to the side of every unit, storefronts that are mostly facades against older buildings underneath. There's a citywide sensibility of re-use, of upgrade. It feels vaguely steampunk-ish. MAKE magazine would love this city.
• Friday was an early-morning arrival at the office (jet lag + more deliverables), and I got to walk the (semi-deserted) streets in the cool air. I was taken aback at how few people were out and about; Beijing is busy, full of people, and to see the place without too many bodies was jarring.
• Even at 6 AM, the city is covered in the same flat, fog-diffused light that you see at all hours. No variance at all.
• Microsoft Beijing cultural observation: the nighttime staff makes tea, using fresh leaves, and puts them in all the offices in these nifty glass carafes. It's delicious.
• 3:30 PM - Midway through a presentation, I do the jet-lag stall (it's 12:30 AM Pacific), and it's all I can do to keep focused. Following the preso, I begin mainlining Nescafe.
• Driving in Beijing is crazy. CRAZY. In the States, we tend to like our roads segmented - sidewalk, car lane, bike lane, crosswalk - each marked with its own line, its own rules, and we want our people to stay where they're supposed to be. Beijing is totally different. Nobody in Beijing gives a damn about lanes, lines, or anything else: cars mix with trucks mix with buses and pedestrians and cyclists and guys on mopeds and some other guy with a bicycle pulling a trailer with a 10 ft. x 10 ft. x 10 ft. bundle of empty plastic bottles he's taking to the recycler. People stroll out in the street when they want to, and, when confronted with the horn of an oncoming car/bus/etc. (moving at 20 - 25 mph, max), they pause, 2" from the side of the inbound vehicle, watch it slide by, and then continue.
• In its own way, it's actually beautiful. It makes me wonder, too, about throughput - is Beijing's road system packet-switched, compared to the circuit-switched system in the US? With so many people, maybe they need to work as packets to get anything done.
• American brands are everywhere. KFC is to the Beijing fast-food market what McDonald's is to the USA (but, it must be said, McDonald's is pretty commonplace). Wal-Mart is here. Bally Total Fitness is here. Starbucks is here. The list goes on.
• We close the evening - and the week - with karaoke (natch), at what is, easily, the nicest karaoke place on Earth. Private suites, leather couches, flatscreen monitors for the cheesy videos, great sound system, wireless mics, touch-screen jukebox, in-suite catering. Unbelievable. The place was busy, too - we walked down a couple long hallways of suites, each full of private parties.
• (Yes, Brooke and I sang - a little Tears for Fears, a little "Bust A Move", even "Never Gonna Give You Up". There are pictures. There is absolutely, positively no video or audio recording.)

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 9, 2008 8:31 PM.
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July 5, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 3

Wednesday, June 25:

• The hotel has, perhaps, the best breakfast buffet I've ever experienced. It's got a huge range of food choices - Chinese, Indian, western, you name it (likely necessary due to their expat clientele). You can get anything from pork-filled buns to curry to Cheerios to omelettes. The food's of good quality, too, and very tasty.
• (On the downside, the hotel insists on playing soft Western music (e.g., Wham!, the "Titanic" soundtrack) during breakfast, which, while initially earning points for kitch, gets old very, very quickly as the week continues.)
• The Microsoft office is about 1km from the hotel, so we walk.
• Beijing is enveloped in a white, cloudlike, foggy substance - visibility peters out about 1,000 feet away in any given direction. At first, I'm not sure if this is pollution or fog or what, but it doesn't have any appreciable smell, and doesn't irritate my eyes or lungs. It also never goes away for the duration of the trip. Huh.
• At 7:30 AM, the streets are full of people - people on foot, people on bikes, people on mopeds, people in cars, people in buses (the buses are packed), people streaming in and out of subway stations, people, people, people. Everyone has a bustle and a focus, and nobody seems to pay anyone else very much attention. It's got a fascinating rhythm to it; I feel like I could sit and watch the flow for hours.
• The Beijing Microsoft office is exactly like every other Microsoft office I've ever been to, except I can't read half the signs.
• Brooke and I, badly jet-lagging, grab coffee from a Nescafe machine in the shared kitchen. It turns out to be very, very, very yummy.
• Our first order of business is an 8 AM video conference call with some folks back home in Redmond, where it's still Tuesday, 5 PM. After yawning and blinking and drinking oceans of coffee to keep my focus, I now have a much greater degree of empathy for my Chinese colleagues.
• After the call, Brooke and I hole up in an empty office and focus on getting things done.
• Working remotely is actually pretty nice because you can focus. During my usual workday, I regularly shut off my e-mail and IM for periods of time to give myself unbroken stretches where I can concentrate and get in to flow. It's a deliberate effort, and one that can be controversial (people sometimes expect you to reply to email right. this. very. second.). When you're 15 hours ahead, your work day starts as the home office is closing down for the night (8 AM = 5 PM), so the majority of the e-mail that was going to be sent that day has already been sent. As such, when I arrive I slurp down all the mail that was sent during the day, process it, and ... that's it. Not much new comes in during my day, and the quiet is wonderful. I'm able to really crank on some of my projects.
• Around 2:38 PM, we get punchy enugh to start Rick Rolling one another. The Dramatic Prarie Dog also makes an apearance. More Nescafe does not seem to be helping.
• For dinner, our Microsoft colleagues take us out to a very nice, very modern Chinese restaurant. At one point, I went to set my napkin on my lap, and one of my fellows gently explains that this is considered rude - I was "taking the job" of the server at the restaurant who was supposed to do that. Hmm.
• The food is amazing.
• By the end of the day, I'm exhausted - deep-bone exhausted, everything-is-funny exhausted, walking-like-a-slightly-drunk-person exhausted. I return to my hotel room, brush my teeth, and call it a day.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 5, 2008 11:14 AM.
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July 2, 2008

Gavin’s Adventures In Beijing, Day 1 (& 2)

Last week, Microsoft sent me to Beijing (along with my fellow MacBU-er Brooke) on business. Our flight left Seattle on Monday, the 23rd; I got home this morning. This afternoon's been a bit brutal, energy-wise - my internal clock is still 15 hours ahead of Pacific time, so my 8:25 AM landing (it's the morning!) was 11:55 PM to me (it's time for bed!).

The last 10 days have been a total whirlwind. While very much a work trip, we managed to use our weekend stayover for a bit of sightseeing. Very exciting.

As usual, I took a few notes during the trip:

• During my Monday-morning suitcase-stuffing extravaganza, I peek at Dashboard, which says that Beijing has a low of 70 and a high of 95 all week. Yowza. Pack shorts.
• Brooke's wife gave us a lift to the airport, so on the way out of town we stopped by Vivace for one final cup of Seattle coffee. We then popped downtown so I could give Elaine a goodbye hug at her office. Mid-squeeze, I'm reminded of why I was glad when my insane Product Planning travel schedule came to a close last year.
• Since the time difference between Seattle and Beijing is so pronounced, it meant that our Monday afternoon departure wouldn't land in China until late Tuesday night. (Dude, where's my Tuesday?)
• We're on Northwest for this trip, living large in business class (Microsoft travel policy lets you go business if your flight is more than 7 hours). After clearing Seattle airport security, we head to the South terminal and check out the Northwest executive lounge. It's my first time there, and it's pretty excellent: plenty of windows (lots of natural light), tables (places to spread out and work), free soda and coffee, free WiFi, and lots of quiet.
• (Brooke and I are, I think, the most casually-dressed people in the lounge.)
• Business class is addictive: champagne before takeoff, a fresh Wall Street Journal, an appetizer of seared Ahi tuna skewers with ginger and cucumber. We remark to each other, many times, that we are forever ruined when it comes to future travel in coach.
• Northwest's Airbus A330s have AC power outlets in business. My initial feeling of joy ("Score!") gives way to mild annoyance as I realize the flight's AC power system is put together with baling wire and a couple of D batteries. The juice stops frequently, which makes it hard to sustain (or retain) a laptop charge. Our power manages to last the whole flight (and I have an outbox of queued up e-mail to prove it), but things feel very touch-and-go most of the time.
• Our flight connects through Tokyo. I've never been to Japan before, so as we're descending I'm peering out the window of the plane like a 5-year old in front of a toy store, nose pressed against the glass and trying to absorb everything I'm seeing. The country is unbelievably green - they have farms and fields laid out in grids as far as the eye can see, incredibly lush and gorgeous.
• We arrive in Tokyo at 4:15 PM, local time. We are pooped.
• My iPhone can't seem to lock on to a cellular provider in Japan. I had this fantasy that I'd be able to zip around the world and at least have the option of paying $4.99 a minute on foreign networks, but apparently the AT&T people aren't talking to their Japanese counterparts. Grr.
• The Tokyo airport has a McDonald's. Next to a sushi bar. I swear I am not making this up.
• On the flight from Tokyo to Beijing, I watch "Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man", which I find to be an insightful and balanced portrait of a very complicated and stubborn guy. It starts with his work in the 1960s and 1970s, and then proceeds up to his 2000 presidential bid. Truthfully, I'd been a bit mad at Nader over 2000, and had seen him as a spoiler for Gore. After the movie ... well, I'm not mad anymore; I think I have a good sense of where he's coming from. I don't necessarily agree with him, but I do think I understand him a bit better. Highly recommended.
• After the film, I manage to sleep for an hour.
• We touch down at 9:28 PM, local time (6:28 AM Pacific).
• Beijing's airport is gigantic, just enormous. It seems to go on forever. We taxi for a full 15 minutes after landing, and never run out of new things to look at - stretches of tarmac and clusters of buildings, going on and on and on.
• The plane's doors pop, and the weather hits us. Beijing feels a lot like Houston - humid and hot, almost menacingly so, as if the weather wants you to know that it can take things from "pretty warm" to "Crock-Pot cooking" whenever it feels like it.
• Inside, the airport looks like any other modern European airport, except with Chinese signage. Most signs and displays have English translations; international pictograms are used for bathrooms, exits, and the like. Navigating is not a problem.
• The Chinese customs people are friendly and polite. They also have a push-button customer-satisfaction poll on the customer's side of the counter; you push the smiley-face or frowny-face that matches your experience ("Very satisfied", "satisfied", "unsatisfied", "Very unsatisfied"). I give my guy a "very satisfied" and head off to get my bag.
• We are met at the airport by some of our fellow Microsofties. They meet us in front of ... the Starbucks. (I am a sad, sad Seattle cliche.)
• A taxi is procured to take us in to Beijing proper, and our hotel. I had been warned about the driving in China, but the reality of it is really quite striking - people change lanes whenever they want, drive at different speeds on the freeway (very fast, very slow), pass on the shoulder, you name it. For all the chaos, the drivers seem acclimated, alert, and ready for anything.
• (Brooke and I are both alarmed to find that our taxi doesn't have seatbelts in the rear seats. As we later learn, virtually none of them do.)
• Our taxi ride takes 45 minutes, and sets us back 75 Yuan. That's about $10 US.
• The hotel is very nice, very clean, and clearly caters to visiting Western businesspeople and tourists.
• After unpacking everything, I notice the small sign in the bathroom - "The tap water is not safe for drinking." The hotel has set out two 12-oz bottles of (privately branded) water for personal use. I'd been warned about the water situation before leaving, but being confronted with it still requires a shift in my thinking. I need to use these two bottles for pretty much everything - drinking, rinsing my toothbrush, taking vitamins, everything. Conserving water becomes something I think about a lot during the trip, and I find myself wondering whether this kind of water rationing is something humanity as a whole is going to have to get used to in the future.
• Slightly before midnight, I bomb out.

(If you're interested, I've posted a number of pictures from the trip to my Flickr Photostream.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 2, 2008 4:47 PM.
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June 23, 2008

A Few Random Notes From Our Quickie Weekend Trip To Sun Valley

Matt and Kari tied the knot this weekend, so Elaine and I got to fly to Sun Valley, Idaho to see them say "I do". A few notes from the trip:

• Neither of us had ever been to Sun Valley, and we were plenty excited to make the journey and see the place. You have two choices if you're flying from Seattle - go direct, or fly to Boise and drive (which adds about two hours). Seattle-Boise flights are a bit cheaper and quite a bit more frequent; Seattle-Sun Valley flights run just once a day. We elect to pay a bit more for the convenience, and fly direct.
• From the "Is Our Children Learning?" department: the Starbucks in SeaTac's main concourse was selling "Raisen Scones." Really.
• I'm one of those obnoxious people who insists on getting to the airport two hours ahead of the flight, which means, invariably, that there's plenty of time to kill once we clear security. As it happens, our gate was directly across from one of those airport massage bars, and, on a whim, I decided to try it.
• The place sells quick-hit massages (a "single shot" is 15 minutes; "double shot" is 30, and so on), but they also sell a 10-minute foot massage for $18, which pretty much sealed the deal. After signing in (and waiting a bit), they parked me in a super-comfy reclining chair, put a hot pillow around the back of my neck, rotated the chair so my back was parallel to the floor (and, thus, my feet were popped up), put a blackout cover over my eyes, and went to work.
• 10 minutes is not near enough time. And, truth be told, the massage was good enough that I completely forgot that I was in an airport.
• For some reason, I always forget that Horizon Airlines offers complimentary beer and wine on their flights. While this may speak to early Alzheimer's (or, perhaps, too much overall beer and wine consumption), it does allow me to experience that, "I love this airline!" feeling on a recurring basis. (Hooray for Horizon!)
• Our landing was bumpy - like, sparks-shoot-off-the-landing-gear-and-smoke-pours-off-the-wheels bumpy. Elaine and I are very, very glad once we're on the ground.
• Sun Valley, like a lot of Idaho, is gorgeous. Rolling green hills, dotted with trees and brush; wide-open expanses of blue sky; fast-moving, wide rivers. It all seems to go on forever.
• The Hertz people were terrific to work with; they gave us a brand-new (507 miles!) Subaru Outback to tool around in for the weekend. I'd never driven an Outback before, but wouldn't mind doing it again - it's peppy, roomy, very responsive. I don't know what I was expecting, but after renting that gawd-awful PT Cruiser in San Francisco in '06, I'm pretty much prepared for a kick in the shins at the rental counter.
• The Sun Valley airport is in Hailey, ID; "Sun Valley" is actually Ketchum, ID. They're about 12 miles from one another.
• We stayed at the Sun Valley Lodge, which is a very nice hotel. Friendly people, clean rooms, free parking. It's not exactly our style (it caters to the polo shirt and blue blazer crowd), but we really liked it.
• The Science Channel is running a hypnotic show called "How It's Made", which is crack for geeks. We caught one show about how to make golf balls, parking meters and cabinet handles - unbelievably cool. What makes the show work is learning both the anatomy of how things work (e.g., golf balls have rubber cores, cabinet handles start as zinc) as well as seeing the wicked industrial machinery, robotics, and processes that are responsible for synthesizing raw materials into something you see at Home Depot. So cool.
• There's a great little 1-mile-long trail from the Sun Valley Lodge that takes you to downtown Ketchum. On a nice, sunny day (of which Idaho seems to have in near-infinite supply), it's a terrific way to spend part of your morning.
• Don't miss the "Bowl of Soul" at Java on Fourth.
• For some reason, every time I put on a suit, I feel, at some vague level, like a 12-year-old playing in his dad's closet. I never can quite get used to suits.
• Kari and Matt could not have picked a better spot for their wedding - the setting was spectacular.
• Given that I met Matt in business school, the wedding was a bit of a UW MBA Class of '05 reunion. Chris Meyer and I wound up reflecting that this was, jointly, our fifth MBA wedding since graduation. How time flies.
• Getting out of Sun Valley got a little ... touchy. Turns out that Horizon oversold the Saturday flight to Seattle (as airlines are wont to do), and needed people to volunteer to get bumped. Problem is - this was the only flight that day, so nobody wanted to budge. Compounding the problem was that the carrot they were dangling - a free roundtrip ticket - wasn't very tasty (since you'd need to arrange a hotel stay, that pretty much cancelled the benefit). Unsurprisingly, nobody took the offer. And, unsurprisingly, the unlucky folks who got mandatorily bumped (a couple of poor Australian guys) were pissed off about it.
• (Note to self: I never, ever, ever, ever want to work at an airline counter.)
• The flight home was so bumpy that they had to stop the beverage service three times. I gave a silent prayer when we touched down - smoothly - in Seattle.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 23, 2008 8:08 AM.
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June 22, 2008

Escaping From Alcatraz, Days 4 & 5 - Sightseeing

A few more trip notes:

• Monday morning was, in every sense, The Morning After. I didn't bother to set the alarm the night before (I'd felt, for some strange reason, that I'd earned my right to sleep in), and consequently I didn't open my eyes until 9 or so. And then I didn't bother to get out of bed for a good half hour or so after that.
• Everything aches. Everything. My neck is sore, my back is sore, my legs are sore, my hip flexers are sore. I have slightly-sunburned parts of my skin competing with my fatigued muscles to see which can get more of my attention. (This is not a competition I'm pleased to have going on in my body.)
• Eventually, clothes are procured (the shower is skipped) and the four of us head downstairs to the hotel diner for some truly good, greasy-spoon omelette and french toast. The coffee's OK, but the potatoes rock. Jeff and I keep shooting sheepish, happy, can't-believe-its-over grins at one another across the table. If the ladies weren't with us, the other patrons would think we were a couple.
• By strange coincidence, today is the first day of Apple's weeklong World Wide Developer's Conference, also taking place here in San Francisco, and a number of my MacBU colleagues are in town for the event. Steve Jobs is giving the keynote at 10 AM, and thus, as of about 10:05 AM, I become one of those truly annoying table guests who obsessivly checks their phone every few seconds for news and information.
• (My verdict? The new iPhone is excellent, but the big news is the $199 price, not the 3G technology. Apple is going to take the market with these things. Near as I can tell, there are just three types of mobile phones now - free phones, BlackBerries, and iPhones. Everyone else is going to have to scramble to prove themselves.)
• The girls want to shop, so we head back up to the room, get showered and changed, and are off to H&M.
• As the day progresses, the four of us decide to split up. Elaine and I head out to meet Kim for lunch and some sightseeing.
• If you have the opportunity, be sure to get the Kickin' Chicken sandwich at Blue Barn Gourmet. It's about 18 types of deliciousness between two pieces of bread. Unbelievable.
• I generally dig shamelessly touristy activities - if you come to Seattle, I'm all about going to the Space Needle or Riding the Ducks. In keeping with this spirit, we decide to walk the Golden Gate Bridge from the south end to the midspan and back. (Given that Kim is planning to deliver her first child next week, this makes me seriously doubt which of us is in better physical condition. I'm giving the nod to her.)
• The Golden Gate, on foot, is exactly what you'd expect: majestic and awesome (and that's 'awesome' in the "Old Testament" sense, and not in the "Bill S. Preson, Esquire and Ted 'Theodore' Logan" sense).
• The weather is windy, gusty and blustery and threatening to throw us around if it gets much worse. We've all got lightweight jackets, and we're using 'em.
• Alcatraz looks very, very, very far away from shore. My ego inflates a bit.
• I might be the only person on Earth to be surprised by this, but the Golden Gate Gift Shop has pretty crappy service. If you find a decent t-shirt, you'll have to fight to be able to buy it. Be warned.
• San Francisco has some pretty incredible transit. Kim, Elaine and I manage to ride the cable cars, BART, and street-level light rail. The systems all interoperate smoothly, and I'm struck by how much SF has in common with Seattle - confusing geography, lots of different transit users, and distinct types of transit modes (bus, monorail, light rail, streetcar). Spending the day in San Francisco's transit system gives a glimpse of what Seattle will be like around 2020 or so.
• Cable cars, in particular, are astoundingly fun to ride in sunny weather. And if you have a chance, check out the free cable car museum; the exhibits are seriously interesting for any transit geek (and you get to see the actual machinery that drives the cable system in the city!).
• The commuter rail train station at 4th & King is also way cool - light, airy, and smoothly interconnecting heavy rail, light rail and buses. Plenty of bike lockers. We saw a gadzillion geek commuters disgorge from a Caltrain from San Jose and then stream in to the city. The closest thing we have in Seattle is King Street Station, but that's a few years/decades from seeing this kind of use.
• Tuesday morning, we had breakfast at Louis', overlooking the Sutro Bathhouse ruins. Better coffee, fantastic potatoes, cash only.
• Jeff and Barb had planned to take an extra day or two to drive through Napa and on to Washington, so the four of us parted ways (with much hugging). After loading my bike in the back of the Highlander, Lane and I headed for the airport.
• The new international concourse at SFO is gorgeous. Modern, clean, full of light, and, at least when we got there, totally deserted. I started wondering if we'd missed some kind of Homeland Security update.
• Our flight back to Seattle was on Virgin America; this was our first time flying the carrier. My colleague Stuart had raved about VA's service from Los Angeles, so we had high expectations. We were not disappointed: the plane was clean (and even had that 'new plane smell'), and each seat is equipped with a touchscreen entertainment system and a small game controller/keyboard in the arm. Elaine and I immediately discovered the plane-wide instant message system, and started flirting with one another over IM.
• Best. Airplane. Orientation. Video. Ever.
• You order drinks through the touchscreeen, and pay with your credit card (the plane does not accept cash). After placing your order, the attendant materializes over your shoulder with your beverage ready to go. It's about as slick as can be.
• After arriving at SeaTac, we noticed that there's a kick-ass Link Light Rail photo gallery on display in Concourse A. We were both pretty tired after the long weekend, but Elaine was kind enough to let me stand and study this sucker for a good 5 minutes. If you're in the airport and have a few minutes to kill, look for it.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 22, 2008 10:43 AM.
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June 21, 2008

Escaping From Alcatraz, Day 3 - Race!

At precisely 4:20 AM on Sunday, my iPhone's alarm went off (the first 20 seconds of "Clocks", if you're curious), and, despite being unable to get much sleep the night before, I sat bolt-upright in bed, 80% awake and climbing.

Race day.

Glancing across the room, Jeff is already up and climbing out of his bed. I stand up, grab a DoubleShot from the mini fridge, and manage to fire down a banana and a CLIF bar before my stomach nerves decide to get the better of me. (Better not push it.)

Jeff and I need to be at Marina Green by 5 AM, so we start pulling on clothes, zipping up our duffel bags, and basically getting ready to move out. Elaine, bless her heart, rouses herself to slather me in waterproof sunscreen; I pull on my swimsuit, warmup pants, t-shirt, reflective jacket, and bike helmet, meet Jeff at the door, and pose for photographs,

We're gone by a quarter to 5, heading down Van Ness on our bikes, duffel bags strapped to our backs and race numbers on our helmets.

Turns out that a quickie, two-mile ride at five in the morning is the perfect thing to do before a race. In my case, it gets my blood flowing, some cool wind in my face, and helps me feel comfortable and psyched for the race. We also aren't alone - we see a bunch of other cyclists on streets across the city, all converging on the race site. (Too cool.)

Marina Green is black black black, the only illumination being stretlights and the flashlights of hundreds of volunteers, all barking orders at racers and keeping us corralled and moving. Our mission is simple: find our designated slots in the transition area, park our bikes there, lay out our transition clothes and supplies, drop our post-swim bag at the truck, and then head for the bus that takes us to the boat.

I find the "682" slot on the bike rack, get my bike on the rack, and then proceed to flatten out my duffel on the wet grass underneath. I laid out everything I'd want before the ride segment - bike jersey, helmet, roadside repair stuff, water bottle, food. After gettting it arranged just so, we drop our post-swim bags at the loading truck, and board the shuttle bus to the boat. Once safely on the bus, Jeff and I turn, look at each other, and spontaneously start grinning.

(Dude, I can't believe we're doing this!)

The bus fills with triathletes and eventualy we're under way, heading north into the city and out to the piers just east of Coit Tower. Dawn is breaking, so there's daylight, and as the bus drops us off we're met by more volunteers, each of whom directs us to head toward the moored San Francisco Belle.

The pier is full of racers, with more are arriving as the morning progresses and additional buses arrive. Jeff and I wait in line to get bodymarked - our numbers written in black Sharpie on our biceps/thighs/hands, our ages written on our left calves - and then head over and grab seats on empty stretches of concrete pier. It's all waiting at this point - waiting to board the boat, waiting for the boat to get under way, waiting to travel out to Alcatraz, waiting to jump in the water.

We're both a bit jittery. Jeff tells corny jokes (the "Smell Mop" knock-knock makes an appearance); I practice my terrible Sean Connery impression ("Losers always whine about their best...").

I begin singing snippets of catchy, annoying songs - precisely the type that will stick in your head during an atheletic event - and Jeff threatens me with bodily harm if I continue.

Around 6:30, we board the Belle, and secure seats on the floor. The boat fills quickly, and the temperature begins rising with all the body heat.

At 7:05 AM, the boat engines roar to life, and everyone on board gives a cheer. Finally under way, we head out to the Bay.

The weather is astounding. The sun is out (but not warm), the fog is burning off, the water in the bay is gloriously calm. The city is bathed in this unbelievable warm orange light, and I am reminded of something that one of the race directors said during orientation the day before:

"No matter what God you believe in, the experience you're going to have tomorrow is life-changing. Chances are good that you're not one of the elites, so as long as you've already kissed the possibility of finishing first goodbye, I encourage you to pause a moment during your swim, turn over, float on your back, and just drink in the majesty of this beautiful city and this beautiful place, and really just give thanks for being fortunate enough to be alive."

I think about this - think about it a lot, actually - and my nerves leave me. Completely.

At 7:40, we're getting close to Alcatraz and are just 20 minutes from start. Jeff and I strip down to our swimsuits, strap our timing chips on to our left ankles, and wriggle in to our wetsuits. We keep our wetsuit hoods, official (lime-green!) Alcatraz swim caps, and goggles; all our other stuff (shoes, socks, t-shirt, etc.) goes in to a race bag with our respective numbers on them. (We'll leave them on the boat and get them after the race is all over.)

7:55. The Belle is in position, just off the Alcatraz shore. There are helicopters flying around, guys on jetskis, kayaks, police boats. Media is interviewing the top athletes, who are perched on the railings alongside the boat. It's controlled chaos, and the vibe among the hoi palloi on the Belle is approaching fever-pitch excitement. We're ready.

At 8:00 the gun goes off, and the elites are in the water, hauling ass for shore. The rest of us wait about two minutes and suddenly start moving for the thrown-open side doors of the Belle. The swim starts as simply as possibe - you jump in, and try not to land on the guy in front of you. At 8:05, I cross over the timing sensor, take two steps forward, and JERONIMO! into San Francisco Bay.

(Oh, so that's that 55-degree water feels like! Holy crap!)

The water is choppy with all the swimmers jumping in and thrashing around, and, for a brief while, we're all on top of each other like those poor crabs stacked three-high in the fishtank at the Chinese place down the street. People are bumping in to me, I'm bumping in to them; it's insane. Eventually, I find my stride (and a clear bit of water), and focus on getting to shore without killing myself. I settle in to a three-stroke-breathe pattern, and start to enjoy myself.

Swimming isn't a sport that's known for its great views, so if you want to simulate the experience of swimming in San Francisco Bay at home, here's what you do. First, get a bucket and fill it to the brim with chilled brownish saltwater. Second, get a desk lamp with a good 200-watt bulb in it. Set up the desk lamp to one side of the bucket. Now, put your face head-down in the bucket and blow bubbles for at least 15 seconds, and turn your head to the side when you need to breathe. Notice that every time you turn toward the desk lamp, your eyeballs are practically burned out of your skull (that's "the sun" in the real swim); notice, too, that the experience of putting your head in a bucket of cold, brownish saltwater is pretty monotonous after about, oh, 45 seconds.

(And if you want a really good simulation, have a friend or family member come bump you - hard - at random intervals, to simulate encounters with other swimmers. Trust me - you'll love it.)

Swimming in open water is a bit strange - your ability to gauge distance is all goofed up, because there are no landmarks that get recognizably closer. I pause after ten minutes or so, float on my back, drink in the view, give thanks, and suddenly wonder - am I actually going anywhere?. I mean, it looks like I am exactly where I was when I leaped off the boat, relative to the shore. I turn around, look at the Belle (yep, it's back there a fair bit), mentally shrug my shoulders, and get back to the swim.

The swim does have a compass, however, and it's called Sutro Tower. This tall, red radio tower is a stationary landmark that you can see from anywhere in the bay. If you're swimming from Alcatraz, keep Sutro at 12 o'clock and the strong bay currents will do the rest, sweeping you west as you swim north. My routine, then, is swim-swim-swim-swim-peek-adjust-swim-swim-swim-swim.

Suddenly, I'm at shore. And just as suddenly, I'm fighting with the surf to stand upright, unzipping my wetsuit, and trying to get to the swim transition area. I locate my bag, finish striping out of the wetsuit, towel off, pull on shoes and socks, stuff the suit back in the bag, and start jogging back to my bike in the transition area (roughly a mile away). I feel great - the swim was invigorating, I've got lots of energy, and the overwhelming feeling of doing this thing is carrying me forward.

(I don't learn this until later, but I finished the swim in 34 minutes - a fantastic time. I clearly caught some current, but, regardless I'm really proud of that number.)

It's about a quarter to nine at this point, and as I'm jogging back to my bike I'm shocked at how many people are lined up to cheer for us all. There are friends and families of athletes, of course, but there's a lot of local San Franciscans out with fair-trade, shade-grown morning coffee in hand, giving it up for the folks in the event. I will confess, freely, that it made me happy, and not just a little bit proud.

So I get to the transition area, run down the chute, find my bike, and am immediately trying to get geared up for my ride. I pull on my bike jersey (a Canadian-flag number that Elaine bought for me), strap on my helmet, switch in to the bike shoes, pop a handful of ClifShot into my mouth, and am gone, run/walking my bike toward the bike start line. I cross the line, throw a leg over, and am suddenly moving at 15 mph in the clear morning light, riding back against the stream of runners coming from the swim. I pass (and cheer to) Jeff, who has emerged from his swim and is heading for transition. We exchange white-guy high-fives.

The ride feels great. There's no wind, so I'm left to make my own as I pedal, getting in to the rhythm of the ride, letting my body get used to the idea of a new sport, a different kind of exertion.

Here's the thing with the Alcatraz ride segment: it giveth, and then it taketh away. The entire 18 miles is an up-and-down, out-and-back monstrosity; you go from Marina Green to the Presidio, then up to the Legion of Honor, then out to the Cliff House, down the hill on the 101 to ride along the ocean, and, finally, up and in to Golden Gate Park, at which point you turn around and go back. At that point, every hill you fought your way up to get to the park is now a downhill, and the downhills that gave you relief/exhiliration on the way to the park (Cliff House Hill, I'm looking at you) are now laying in wait for you, like some loanshark that loaned you $10k when you needed it most and now wants the cash back, with interest.

The ride is incredible. The hills are hard, but manageable; my body feels great; the views of the Golden Gate, the ocean, and some of San Francisco's best real estate are beyond amazing. I have two small mechanical bike issues (a brake thingy, a chain lockup), but neither is a problem. As the ride goes on, I find my groove and quickly start seeing the same riders over and over again; we share camaraderie as we trade positions and pass one another.

Jeff, for his part, passes me (with another white-guy high-five) in the first quarter of the ride. But an hour and 20 later, I'm flying back in to transition, putting my bike on the rack, switching out into my running shoes, and heading back out for the final, 8-mile run. As I hit transition, I hear Elaine cheering for me; I steal a (wonderful) kiss, and head out.

At this point it's 10:30, and the sun is starting to make its presence known. I give mental thanks to Elaine for the sunscreen, and focus on finding my rhythm.

The course is reasonably flat for the first two miles of the run; we're heading from Marina Green toward the Golden Gate Bridge, past Crissey Field and out (ultimately) to Baker Beach. As I hit the two-mile mark, I round the corner next to some restrooms and suddenly see that the run course goes straight up some very, very steep steps. And it is at this point that my body - which has done so well all morning with keeping me moving and feeling great - tells me to take it easy.

It's not muscle fatigue, or my quads throwing in the towel, or my legs converting to Jell-O; rather, this is about my heart and lungs hitting their limits, pushing as much blood and O2 as they can, and my body recognizing, at some primal level, that those limits do not include Olympic-speed performance while gaining 800 feet of elevation on some packed-earth stairs.

So I walk. And then I run, and then I walk, and then I run, which turns in to the pattern for the whole segment. I run down hills, jog on flats, and make the valiant attempt on the elevation to build and keep momentum. My results are mezzo-mezzo, but I keep at it, always moving.

I marvel at the terrain - concrete, asphalt, bricks, wet sand, dry sand, dirt, pebbles, vegatation, wood chips. Just about everything except snow and ice. Unbelievable.

The views are, as with the ride, jaw-dropping.

Baker Beach is a cruel and nasty turnaound point - it's dry sand, uneven and pock-marked from the thousand atheletes that have come before me. Even walking, it's all I can do to keep focused on not twisting an ankle. I hit the turnaround, and start heading back; I'm perhaps a quarter mile in before the sand ladder, which I take as carefully as I can. 5,223 steps later (or whatever), I'm at the top of the ladder next to the CLIF guys, who have a DJ and are playing some serious dance music. I move on.

The final two miles are the hardest. It's flat again, which, mentally, means "I have no excuse not to run", but my system is pretty tapped out. I breathe, remember the 'float on your back and enjoy it' line, and push on. As I get closer to Marina Green, the crowd re-materializes, and everyone seems to be cheering and giving an encouraging word. It helps.

Once the finish line is within sight, it's like the starting gun going off all over again. Whatever's left in the tank is put front and center, and I'm moving, heading down the street, into the chute, and across the finish line and the readout says 3:55:14 and I'm done, like done done done in a big way, gasping for breath and smiling and hoping, for all my life, that the professional race photos of me running down the chute don't look too dorky. 'Cause I'm really proud of that last bit, and I want 'em.

(Later, I learn that they are, indeed, dorky. But there's one of my on my bike that I love.)

And that's it. My final race time was 3:53 and change, which is about 10 minutes slower than my time back in 2000. I'm OK with that - losing 10 minutes after 8 years is just fine - and then I found out that Jeff, stud triathlete that he is, did it in 3:05. Which makes my head explode, just a little. (The dude amazes me.)

Elaine and Barb help us back to our hotel, where we shower, change, and then head out for some more In-N-Out Burger. During the meal, we talk about doing it again next year, if we can get in.

And then we go back to the hotel.
And then we sleep.
Well.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 21, 2008 7:46 PM.
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June 15, 2008

Escaping From Alcatraz, Day 2 - Orientation

More trip notes:

• Our hotel in San Francisco was the Broadway Manor. Located at the intersection of Van Ness and Broadway, it's like a lot of San Francisco - older, renovated, and central to just about everything. The hotel itself isn't much to look at, but they have free parking, clean rooms, good (basic) service and a diner on the ground floor.
• They also have super-comfortable beds - everyone slept unbelievably well.
• Saturday was a slow start - since we arrived after midnight, nobody was in any kind of hurry to get up and move around. As a result, we started flipping through cable TV and wound up watching Hillary's concession speech on MBSNC. I have to say, I think it was the best speech I've ever seen her deliver - gracious, loose, from the heart, poignant, classy (and no, I'm not just saying that because I liked the content).
• (Side note - why is it that some politicians only seem to do their best work at the end? I remember watching Al Gore give his concession speech in 2000 - he was loose, friendly, accessible, authentic - and thinking, "Where was that guy during the campaign?".)
• After rousing, we walked a couple blocks down Van Ness and got coffee at "Notes From Underground." The coffee's OK, but the breakfast - one it arrives - is to die for. Fantastic omelettes, great potatoes. You just need to budget an hour or so for the damn plates to arrive.
• Every coffee house in San Francisco has free WiFi. I love this.
• Ground Zero for all things Escape From Alcatraz is Marina Green, which is on the waterfront. We need to pick up our registration packets and attend an orientation at 1 PM. Since it's only about two miles from the hotel, we elect to walk.
• A bike shop across Van Ness has a banner up: "Welcome! Alcatraz Triathletes Good Luck!". Jeff and I start to get excited.
• Marina Green has been completely taken over with Escape stuff - vendor tents, the bike-transition area, orientation stage, finish line, signage, food stalls. The place is mobbed, too - Marina Green is a busy part of San Francisco on a given Saturday, but today it's crazy with pedestrians, triathletes (plus their families and friends), rollerbladers, bikers, kids selling lemonade, etc.
• Jeff and I get our registration packets (a duffel bag with our bib numbers, stickers, plastic bags for transition, mini-CLIF Bars, and goodies from other local businesses) and head over for orientation.
• Orientation takes about an hour, but there's only about 15 minutes worth of content. The organizers spend a bit more time than they need to in thanking sponsors and pointing out that you can take home souvenirs.
• For all that, the information is terrific. I am very impressed with how safety-oriented the event is: the swim, for instance, is planned to a T. In addition to swimming with the current, we'll be accompanied by kayaks, jetskis, boats, and a helicopter or two (just in case). The trick with the swim is to look for Sutro Tower, keep it at 12 o'clock, and swim toward it; the current will do the rest. Kayakers and others will make sure that you don't get too far off-course; if you do, they'll get you back in position.
• Headphones are not allowed on the run or the ride. (Back in my hotel room, my iPod Shuffle starts crying.)
• By the end of the orientation, the four of us are sunburned (the weather is spectacular) and a little tired.
• We head back to the hotel, jump in the car, and drive the bike course. As we're swooping up and down hills (Legion of Honor, I'm looking at YOU), I'm suddenly remembering just how frickin' crazy the ride actually is. Yowza. Thank God for training.
• Dinner is at Marnee Thai, which, if you're at all in to Thai food, is a must-try the next time you're in SF.
• We call it an early night; I want to be asleep by 9:30. After returning to the hotel, I prep my bike (pump the tires, get my number attached, fill the waterbottle) and then pack my various bags. There are three bags to worry about - one goes with you on the boat in the morning, one goes in your transition zone, and the third is available after you get out of the water from the swim. The post-swim bag gets my running shoes, socks, and a towel. The transition bag gets my bike helmet, bike jersey, and other bike stuff (e.g., puncture repair kit). The bag on the boat will contain all the stuff I will wear before I jump in the water (and will want later) like my fleece, warmup pants, and the like. I get all three bags put together, set out my clothing for the morning, and, ultimately call it a night.
• 10:30 PM. I'm staring at the ceiling. Still awake. Can't sleep.
• 11:30 PM. I'm staring at the ceiling. Still awake. Can't sleep.
• 12:30 AM. I'm staring at the ceiling. Still awake. Can't sleep.
• 1:30 AM. I'm staring at the ceiling. Still awake. Can't sleep.

2:30 AM. I'm staring at the ceiling. Still awake. Can't sleep.
(Sigh.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2008 11:40 AM.
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June 11, 2008

Escaping From Alcatraz, Day 1 - ROAD TRIP!

After months of training and prep, the Escape From Alcatraz triathlon finally happened on Sunday, June 8. My good friend Jeff and I both participated, and I'm proud to say that I am not a) dead, b) crippled, or c) in the belly of a shark somewhere in the San Francisco Bay.

In fact, the thing was a hell of a lot of fun.

As per usual, here are some trip notes - in this case, from Friday, the 6th (aka, "Day 1")

• The general plan is that Elaine, Jeff, Barb and I will drive down Friday with the bikes and the wetsuits and the gear and the hey hey hey, spend Saturday getting oriented, do the race Sunday morning, sleep Sunday afternoon, and then be all touristy-n'-shit for Monday/Tuesday. This means, of course, that we've got to actually get to San Francisco through that most time-honored of all American pastimes - ROAD TRIP!
• It's a long drive, and a long day, so we'd intended to be on the road by 6 AM sharp. Instead, after a few too many rounds of Mario Kart Wii the night before (where, it must be said, I got my ass handed to me), we elected to, uh delay by getting up 6, and had a strong plan to be out the door at 7.
• (We actually left the condo at 7:30.)
• You can't road trip on an empty stomach, so we headed to Zoka for coffee and heavenly, bacon-egg-cheese panini breakfast.
• Zoka is slow, so we got on the road - for realsies - by 8 AM. The good news is that this means we only have 12.5 hours to go if we don't stop for gas, bathroom breaks, or food.
• Both couples have passenger cars (read: not enough space for the four of us, plus bikes and other business), so Jeff rented a Toyota Highlander for the trip. It's a pretty sweet ride - great handling, great amenities, lots of cup holders, the usual. The Highlander also has an auxiliary jack for the stereo, so the four of us took turns hijacking the sound system with our own respective iPods.
• The weather was awful as we left Seattle - nasty, blattering, wet-to-the-bone rain that makes it hard to see much of anything. Ugh.
• 10 AM: We're telling knock knock jokes. My new favorite: "Knock knock?" "Who's there?" "Smell mop."
• (Say the punchline. You'll laugh.)
• We pass by the Great Wolf Lodge in Centralia, which appears out of nowhere like some kind of crazy casino/kid's wonderland (which is pretty much what it is). Imagine huge waterslides and a Northwest timber motif, and you've basically got it. All I can think is, "when did they put that in?"
• 10:45 AM: "Wish You Were Here" is fantastic road trip music.
• 11 AM: We hit Portland. The weather continues to be awful.
• An hour south of Portland, we see the Enchanted Forest theme park, which looks like a Park Time Forgot - run down, a rickety coaster, fading signage. The weather isn't helping, of course - who wants to go to a theme park in this kind of rain? - but I can't help wonder who the customers for the place are. What parents bring their kids here? Those "Funtastic" traveling carnivals in supermarket parking lots look like a better deal.
• 12:15 PM. We begin playing Tenacious D.
• Roughly 200 miles in to Oregon, it finally stops raining.
• Roughly 10 miles later, it starts again.
• We're hungry, and start using the iPhone to look for lunch recommendations. We get all excited about trying Burgerville in Albany, but miss the off-ramp as I dick around with the mapping application (the iPhone's "current location" always thinks I'm heading north on I-5, which leads to entertaining directions, to say the least.). We find an awesome wiki with restaurant recommendations for Eugene, and settle on the Cornucopia.
• Cornucopia is fantastic. The waitress says they're "known for their burgers" and she wasn't kidding - the BBQ bacon burger is to die for, and their beer selection is astounding. The three of us begin extolling the virtues of the open road, new restaurants, and Oregon in general.
• Another note on Oregon: everybody in Oregon - and I mean everybody is incredibly nice. The lady taking our order, the lady pumping our gas, the crazy homeless guy, everybody. It's not in a Stepford Wives kind of way, either; people just seem relaxed and happy.
• Traveling for any substantial distance on the interstate makes you realize that roads are really about trucks, not cars. I mean, we see lots of cars, sure, but mostly our fellow travelers are trucks going about their business, delivering trees/cookies/aluminum tubing/packages, you name it. It's like peeking behind the curtain of commerce, and seeing how the machinery really works.
• By the way, every trucking company is looking for drivers right now.
• We stopped at the Beanery in Ashland, Oregon, for a caffeine buzz. Maybe it was just because we'd been in the car all day (and were thus punchy), but the four of us could not stop giggling about two drinks - "Pooh's Picnic" and "Flavored Steamer" - followed one another on the readerboard.
• (I do recommend the mocha with Mexican chocolate. Fantastimo.)
• As we left Ashland, the rain stopped. (For good, this time, as it happens.)
• 5:42 PM - We enter California, and begin vigorous debate about the proper pronunciation of "Yreka".
• Dinner is at In-N-Out Burger.
• 9:57 PM. We're 60 miles from Sacramento. It's dark outside, and we're actively stopping at rest areas to jump around and keep our energy up.
• Howard Jones' "No One Is To Blame" comes on the stereo, and we all start singing along, like some cut scene from Reality Bites
• 11:35 PM: We zip through Berkeley, CA and find ourselves paying a $4 toll to cross in to San Francisco across the Bay Bridge.
• The city is beautiful at night - elegant, vibrant, sprawling, fantastic. It's the coolest thing we've seen all day.
• 11:55 PM: With a heavy, happy smile, Jeff pulls in to the hotel lot, parks, and kills the engine.

"We're here."

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2008 8:38 PM.
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May 7, 2008

Some Random Notes From The Not-Quite-24 Hours I Just Spent In Toronto

I'm back in Seattle after a quick jaunt to Toronto for a work event. It was one of those leave-Monday-morning, fly-home-Tuesday-evening kinds of things. I'm dehydrated, sick of plastic-wrapped airport sandwiches, and just plain beat.

As usual, the trip notes:

• This was my first time flying Northwest in a long, long time, and the early indication of the experience wasn't very encouraging. I got to Sea-Tac and found myself barked into a line that fed into another line that led to another line and, eventually, ended with my getting a boarding pass, achy feet, and relief from an overwhelming, fellow-passenger BO smell. As trip starts go, this wasn't auspicious.
• I will say that the woman who gave me the boarding pass and took my checked bag was really wonderful, but the people working the lines themselves shout orders like they've just retired from 40+ years in the correctional system. Memo to Northwest: your customer experience would improve if you'd just get it over already by putting tags in our ears and using cattle prods to move us along. Moooooo.
• I've learned to pack my own food on to the airplane these days; you never know if the airline will be serving anything, or even if they have those horrid $5 "snack boxes" for sale on the flight. My line-of-a-line-of-a-line experience being what it was, I was a bit behind the eight-ball on time and had to swoop in to a Starbucks for bottled water and a plastic-wrapped sandwich.
• (Mmmmmmm .... plastic-wrapped sandwich....)
• Sign That You Might Want To Choose Another Aircraft #22: The aircraft lavatory's under-sink paneling won't latch shut, meaning it swings open whenever the plane pitches up, closes rapidly when the plane pitches down, and smacks the holy hell out of your ankles in the process. Yikes.
• Before I left home, I'd used CosmoPod to grab a fantastic BBC documentary about the Gutenberg press off YouTube. It's in six parts, about an hour in total, and uttery wonderful. (Tip 'o the hat to Daring Fireball for the pointer.)
• My flight to Toronto had a short Minneapolis layover, which meant I was sprinting from my arrival to find the right departure gate. I eventually arrived, did a quick survey of the food options nearby, found the selection wanting, and settled on ... a plastic-wrapped ham and cheese sandwich. With a Diet Coke.
• (Mmmmmmm .... plastic-wrapped sandwich....)
• I had about 10 minutes before boarding, so I decided to do a quick bit of work on my laptop. So there I am, using Publishing Layout View in Word 2008, merrily zooming around my document, when the guy sitting three seats to my right finally breaks his not-remotely-subtle staring at my screen to ask - very politely - what software I'm working with. I explain that it's the new Word 2008, show him a bit about what it can do, and suddenly I'm Ron Popeil giving an 8-minute infomercial for Mac Office. The guy's asking questions, I'm showing off features, he's smiling, I'm smiling, and we're both really enjoying it. Then the boarding call goes off, we both get up, and that's that. A totally random moment of mutual-geek enthusiasm.
• (You know, I don't think I ever mentioned that I worked for Microsoft, either.)
• In contrast to the cattle-call experience of the Seattle-Minneapolis trip, the Minneapolis-Toronto leg was sparse. The flight attendants seemed beside themselves with such a small passenger list, and lavished tons of personal attention on everyone. It was like a free first-class upgrade, but without the booze, legroom, and warm cashews.
• (Which, I guess on the re-reading, means the flight wasn't like business class at all. Ah, well.)
• On the flight to Toronto, I was seated behind a couple of hipster-ish, late-twentysomething Canadian geek professionals who chattered on between themselves for the entire flight. And man, I gotta tell ya - and this from one who's married to a Canuck - Canadians say "eh" an awful lot.
• The Toronto airport is very nice, very clean, and the Canadian customs people are thorough and polite.
• One nice thing about in-n-out trips: no real jet lag, and no need to try to acclimate. Sure, you're up at 4 AM Pacific time or whatever on the morning of, but it's only for one day. It made me feel very Pacific Standard Tribal.
• We had a weird cab-related snafu on the way home - namely, the nice receptionist called one, it arrived, and then the driver informed us that he "didn't go to the airport" and was "local only." I confess to being totally baffled by this - whaaaat?, but the driver promised to radio for another cab that could take care of us. We said OK, the cab drives off, we wait 5, 10 minutes - no new cab. So we got reception to call for another one, which arrived very quickly, and, thankfully, wasn't afraid of going near aircraft. But still - WTF? Does Toronto have some crazy non-cabies that drive around and just punk people?
• I'd been making jokes for much of the trip about Tim Horton's - a Candian fast-food chain known for its yummy coffee - and implying that my Tuesday dinner choice was likely to be limited to the 'Tim Horton's at the airport.' Well, it turns out that there is one at the Toronto Airport (see photo). Problem is, it was on the other side of the security perimeter, which meant that I was unable to complete my passive-aggressive Canadian joke by, you know, actually getting a bite there.
• Fortunately, I was able to buy - you guessed it - a plastic-wrapped sandwich from a kiosk right next to the gate. I swear I am not making this up.
• White wine is a great thing at to drink when flying.
• After buying a few different magazines at the airport, I can confidently say that Esquire > GQ > Details. Details, in fact, has very little reason to live.
• When I was in Minneapolis, CNN reported that Barack Obama had won North Carolina. This made me happy.
• I found seat 38D on the Minneapolis-Seattle home stretch, sat down, and promptly managed to lose the Monster cable adapter that allows me plug my iPhone into regular headphones - which pretty much meant I was hosed in the "gee, I'd like to watch a movie in-flight" department. I don't know whether to blame Steve Jobs' design decision (a recessed headphone jack? Really?), my own butterfingered ineptitude, or the strange vortex that somehow magically spirited away the jack to the land of lost keys, ball-point pens, and tchotkes.
• We arrived in Seattle about a half-hour late, which put us really close to midnight. All "Pacific Standard Tribe" posturing aside, that's a really long day.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 7, 2008 8:38 AM.
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October 27, 2007

Notes From My Quickie Trip To Los Angeles

This week's work trip to Los Angeles was an in-and-out affair; I touched down at LAX Tuesday evening and was back at my desk by 2 PM Thursday. Fast, fast fast - a far cry from some of my more involved trips as a Planner.

The usual (but somewhat abbreviated) trip notes:

• It's damn exciting to see light rail going in at Sea-Tac. The station along 99 has been built, and the tracks are now being put in place from that station all the way to terminal. Opening Day 2009 is fast approaching, folks, and it's going to be great when it gets here.
• So there I am, sitting at Gate D2 and doing a bit of e-mail, when I look up and spy today's USA Today ... with an iPhone sitting on top of it. All by itself. I was so surprised that I actually did a double-take (did someone forget their iPhone?!?!?), and then had the "candid camera" moment. After deciding that it wasn't some kind of SeaTac police sting thingy, I decided to get the phone out of plain sight and see if the owner came back for it. Twenty minutes go by ... no owner. I'm beginning to wonder if the poor sod is on Flight 2300 to Singapore right now, cursing him/herself for forgettting the phone, and I'm also wondering where SeaTac's lost and found is. A bit later, a guy shows up with a slightly-distressed look in his eyes: "Seen an iPhone around here?"
• (I must say, witnessing their reunion was a bit touching.)
• I'm still amazed at what people will talk about - very publicly and loudly - in an airport while on a cell phone. I personally overheard product plans, the outcome of a rather contentious board meeting (the guy was swearing so much I thought I was in an episode of Deadwood), Google AdSense response rates, how hard someone was working (and how his boss better not give him any more work, thank you), how hard someone was not working (and how she thinks her boss is figuring it out), and sex.
• (Really.)
• I got to LAX, snagged the shuttle to the rental car center, and proceeded to have another suboptimal Avis experience. The poor folks were swamped with customers, so, by the time I get to the front of the line it's been a good wait. The lady behind the counter checks me in, and then fixes me in the eye to deliver some bad news.
  

  Her: "I've got, like, 10 or 12 cars in front of you for cleaning, washing and delivery."
  Me: "Uh ... how long is that going to take?"
  Her: (Unconvincingly) "Uh, 20 or 30 minutes."
  Me: (Looks at watch). "What else you got?"
  Her: "We have a sixteen-person passenger van."
  

  
  And thus it came to be that I was tooling along the 405 in something that could hold a soccer team or a church group - possibly at the same time. It's big, it's bulky, it's underpowered, it steers like the Titanic. It's also, as you might imagine, a nightmare to park and has horrible visibility.
• (But hey, at least I'm mobile.)
• Microsoft was kind enough to put me up in the W Hotel. Holy cow, it's nice. There you are, dear traveller, tired and exhausted from your recent trip. You've checked in, made your way to your hotel room. You slide the keycard into the slot, hear the "cheep cheep" to let you know the door is unlocked, and the door swings open. Inside, the room is lit, music is playing. Things feel tasteful and calm. You stand, slack-jawed, at how nice everything is. No fumbling for light switches, no smell of mold, no hunting for a remote control to turn on the TV for some background noise. You just step in to the environment, and you're home. Fantastic. Apple does "out of the box" experience better than anyone in electronics; W does "out of the box" better than anyone in the hotel business.
• The California wildfires are, if anything, bigger and scarier than the national news is conveying. Local news is dominated by it, and the sheer volume and scale of the thing is boggling.
• The W's hotel bar has super-tasty club sandwiches and fries.
• Back at LAX, I was again reminded of how people will talk about anything on their damn phones. This time, some blowhard was name-dropping Celebrities He Knows (George Clooney, etc.) to get something out of the person on the other end of the line. Sheesh.
• The Starbucks' at LAX don't offer iTunes integration just yet, which seems odd to me, given that LA is Ground Zero for the recording industry.
• With the exception of a few persistently cranky kids with generous lungs, the flight back to Seattle was one of the most pleasant I can remember taking in recent memory - fast, comfortable, courteous people. We even arrived 20 minutes early.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 27, 2007 11:22 AM.
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October 23, 2007

Off To LA

I'm heading to Los Angeles for some Microsoft business until Thursday; I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 23, 2007 1:55 PM.
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October 12, 2007

Notes On A Parisian Honeymoon

Whoa.

It's been two weeks since my "hey, we're home!" post, and, truthfully, I'm shocked at how quickly 14 days can pass a fella by. It feels like just a few days ago that we both stepped our jet-lagged selves off the plane, lollygagged our way down Concourse C, and, finally, returned to the warm, familiar environs of our home.

So imagine my shock to glance at the calendar this morning and see OCT 12 staring back at me with an accusatory stare, like I'd just shown up three hours late for an important dinner and no good excuse. I realized I was overdue (way overdue) for a blog post, and, well, here I am.

The break was nice - the reason for the break was nicer - and I'm pleased to report that we had a fantastic time in Paris.

A few notes (Flickr photostream available):

• We went Air France both ways, taking advantage of their new-since-June direct flight from Seattle to Charles de Gaulle. Two words about the flight: it rocks. We did Continental on last year's trip, which, while fine, involved a stop in Houston and a bit of a layover. Air France is a 10-hour commitment, a minty-fresh Airbus A330, good food and free inflight booze. (Read that again and tell me you'll ever fly Continental to France. Try it. You can't.)
• Our A330 was equipped with personal seat-back video monitors, which was cool enough, but what really pushed it over the geeky edge for me was that the plane also has a front-pointing video camera where you can watch takeoffs, landings, and the occasional migrating flock of birds. There's not much to see from 35,000 feet, but from the first (or last) 300 it's pretty damn cool.
• Our total stay was 12 days, and we split our time between two different "home bases" (don't ask why; long story) - a rented studio apartment and a hotel near the Louvre. The apartment was our first stop, and I was pleased to see that we were located reasonably close to where we stayed last time. (Elaine told me later that this was all part of her grand plan; I must have amused her to no end by saying things like, "Wow, that street looks familiar." Marry the smart ones, guys. Trust me.)
• Renting a place in Europe is the only way to go. It's inexpensive, easy, and it lets you "go native" by staying in the same neighborhoods where you might want to eat and shop and walk and hang out. Our place was a typical Parisian crash pad - small space, tiny appliances, everything looking sleek and modern and all enviro-aware and space-saving. It's like what Seattle places will be like in 10 years.
• Unlike last time, we managed to get a place with free cable TV and Internet. We also had the use of a complimentary cell phone (so great), which gave us mobile communications. Europe's cellular market is far more prepaid-oriented than in the US; we simply slipped in to a tobacco shop, dropped 15 Euro on a Mobicarte Orange, and activated our phone with the minutes. Easy, easy, easy.
• Toilets have two buttons here - one big, one small. (HINT: The small one sends less water ... so you figure out which one to use, and when.) Smart and efficient. I want one in my house.
• Jet lag sucks. We tried to do the 'ol "stay up and get synched to the local clock" trick, but only made it until 7 PM ... and then we slept 12 hours. And then 4 more. And then had a grumpy lunch, followed by a nap, and then more sleep.
• (Paris = no fun when cranky.)
• We did a bit of sightseeing on Tuesday afternoon. This involved searching for a fantastic little ice cream place (Martine Lambert ... their Quiberon (salted butter caramel) and Martinique (vanilla with chocolate chips and slivers of candied orange) are not to be missed), strolling the Champ de Mars, and, ultimately, hitting the Eiffel Tower ... only to be told that the staircase closes at 6 PM. Phooey.
• The United States is really missing the boat with our money. The 1- and 2-Euro coins are awesome - convenient and easy. I read a fascinating Slate article about why we've not adopted these coins in our country (it's the vending machine lobby vs. the paper lobby, basically), but the argument is dumb. Coins are better than bills in small amounts. Everything comes in a vending machine here.
• A note on local dining: eating sausage in Paris is a "don't ask, don't tell" kind of thing. (And if you don't ask me what was in the sausage I ate on Tuesday night, I won't tell you. It's better for both of us. Trust me.)
• On Wednesday, we did a kick-ass-cool walking tour of the city with Heather Stimmler-Hall of Secrets of Paris. Heather is an American expat who has been living in France for the last decade or so; she writes, she gives tours, she knows all. We had a fantastic time seeing the place as the locals do, getting the scoop on local markets, great restaurants, and where all the good shopping is. (And big, big thanks to my friend Laura, who gave us the tour as a wedding present. You rock, L!)
• Since the apartment had cable TV, we wound up watching a lot of CNN International and the BBC (hey, they're in English). Foreign news is really fascinating, if only because you get to see a) how these services see their world, and b) how they see the States. I find that news in the US doesn't pay all that much attention to the goings-on of other countries; in Europe, it's pretty much all they seem to do. Even the weather reports cover Europe, Asia, and the Middle East - I personally believe that if we did a bit more of that, US Americans might have an easier time finding The Iraq on a map, as per the Asian countries. Such as.
• Paris is a pretty clean city. They have trash cans all over the place - basically, basketball hoops with translucent green plastic garbage bags attached to the rims. I asked about why they don't use traditional garbage cans, and was told "terrorism."
• Paris has also rolled out this really cool "FlexBike" service for its citizens. There are rows and rows and rows of bikes all over the city; if you're a member, you can grab one near you, unlock it from its mooring, and ride it anywhere you like for up to 30 minutes. You leave the bike in another FlexBike station when you're done with it. The service is cheap to belong to (like, $80 a year), and it's booming - everybody was on these things. Such a great idea.
• Heather pointed us at some great shopping, and Elaine decided to go at it with a vengeance. We walked and walked and walked and walked ... and wound up with some real treasures. I'm not much of a shopper, but caught the bug midway through our adventure and wound up with a fabulous new coat. (Elaine wound up with, uh, more than one.) I never, ever thought I'd be one of those guys who wanted to go on the Quest For The Perfect Shirt, but slap me and call me Sally - I'm a believer.
• Elaine's favorite restaurant in Paris is called L'Ardoise. It's amazing, and you absolutely must go. You must also have the tiramisu, at which point you will realize that every other tiramisu you've ever had was, in some sense, pulling your leg.
• We saw the Luxembourg Gardens, which are incredible. It's like what I imagine New York's Central Park to be - a total oasis of calm in the middle of a world-class city. Seattle has nothing truly like it (my beloved Seattle Center is as close as we get, but doesn't do it). It's a totally vibrant and peaceful place, full of citizens sunning themselves, watching other people, playing bocce or chess, reading. Kids playing on the jungle gyms, tourists milling around, elderly guys arguing about what's in the newspaper. It's hypnotic; I could spend all my time here.
• I've written before about how utterly, totally and completely fabulous the Paris Metro is, and I won't repeat myself except to say that the Seattle area needs good in-city, rail-based transit, and we need it now.
• Yes, we went to Disneyland Paris. And yes, I rode Space Mountain: Mission 2 a few times, got to try Crush's Coaster over at the Walt Disney Studios Paris (if Mulholland Madness and Space Mountain had a kid, it would be this coaster), and just had a grand old time wandering around with Elaine and drinking in the Parisian Disney vibe.
• Disneyland Paris is actually home to three of the best versions of classic Disney attractions - Space Mountain, Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, and "it's a small world." "Small World" was a bit of a surprise to me - I mean, the theme of the ride is that you're in a boat, sailing through a number of countries and being exposed to different customs and languages. In the US, this is novel; in Europe, it's called "daily life." That said, "Small World" here is the cleanest, nicest, most modern rendition of the ride at any Disney park I've ever seen. We both loved it.
• We slept in a lot. Lunch was usually the first meal of the day. This is not a Bad Thing.
• Sometimes, a fella has to have his Starbucks, you know? Don't judge me.
• The Pompidou has an incredible rooftop bar and restaurant called Georges. We met our wedding photographer, Nick, for some watery drinks and just watched the beautiful people and the city for an hour. Fantastic.
• We switched to our hotel on Sunday - the Hotel Louvre Ste. Anne. Highly recommend - it's small, clean, friendly, perfect. Very centrally located, and next to the Japanese district.
• I finished five books: "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination", "Dreaming In Code", "The Perfect Thing", "Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows" and "Spook Country". They're all outstanding, but I loved "Dreaming In Code." If you're interested in how software gets built, it's a must-read.
• We finally made it back to the Eiffel Tower and, yes, climbed the staircase up to the second floor. It's not as physically taxing as it sounds, and the views are spectacular.
• I was forever having all these "I'm in Europe" moments, and they're really disorienting. As per Pulp Fiction: "They got all the same shit there that we got here, but it's just a little bit different." The clocks are 24-hour; most signs are bi- or tri-lingual (French, English, German), dates are Day-Month-Year instead of Month-Day-Year; everyone speaks different languages. At the end of a long day it can be really fatiguing and a little homesick-making.
• We didn't have the good luck with croissants this trip. Elaine finally found a good one, but it took most of our time. How crazy is that? It's like coming to Seattle and not getting a good cup of coffee. Isn't Paris known for this?
• Sacre Coeur is breathtaking. Another high point in an otherwise-flat city, and another spectacular view. We didn't spend any time inside the cathedral, but we walked all over the hillside, dodging the tourists (and their panhandlers) and just savoring the park and the neighborhood.
• I'm not much of an art guy (I generally love photos, not paintings or sculptures), but we toured the Pompidou for a few hours and I definitely enjoyed it. Some of the artwork was interesting, some of it inspiring, and a lot of it made me stare, slack-jawed, with a kind of "Are you kidding me?" look on my face. (There was one that was just a big, blue canvas. Really.) But the Pompidou facility itself is incredible, and worth the price of admission.
• During the course of our shopping adventures, we learned about DeTaxe - and it's great! Basically, if you're not an EU resident, and buy enough stuff, the EU will refund you about 12% in taxes. There's a form you can get from the boutique or store you're shopping from; you have to file it before you leave Europe. Since nobody really went out of their way to tell us about it, we figured it out later in the trip, and then went back to some of our shops and got the required paperwork. 12% adds up when the dollar is 1:1.42 against the Euro.
• One more plug for Air France and its direct-flight goodness: after a long vacation, when you're rested, relaxed, and ready to come home, the absolute last thing you want to deal with is some hokey-pokey routine with aircraft that stops in Chicago, Dulles, or Atlanta. Go direct, and go home happy. (Plus, uh, they have free booze.)
• We're already planning our next trip. Really.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 12, 2007 8:35 PM.
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August 10, 2007

Travel, Day Four: Phoenix, Seattle

Wednesday and Thursday were both travel days, and, thankfully, I'm now back in Seattle, back in my neighborhood, and, very shortly, back in my own damn bed.

It's still bizarre to think that this week is - more properly, has been - my last as a Planner, and that, come Monday morning, I'm starting the new new thing.

On the other hand, given some of the indignities suffered this week in the pursuit of customer feedback, well, I might be ready for the change.

The notes:

• Our second stab at getting the heck out of Pittsburgh was more successful than the first. We arrived at the airport, slid up to the ticket counter, were informed that our flight was on-time, and checked baggage. (I about fell over in shock.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 1: Our original tickets were on United, and, when United couldn't get us to Houston anytime before the Bejing Olympics or the second Clinton Administration, they were kind enough to book us on a rival airline - US Airways. On the plus side, US Airways has a direct-to-Phoenix flight (read: doesn't stop in Chicago), which meant that our chances of actually arriving seemed high. On the negative side, US Airways already had a pretty full plane when it took us, and they clearly knew they were dealing with people who hadn't chosen to do business with them in the first place. This meant we got, um, interesting seats - those fun middle jobbies that are situated somewhere behind the tail or just over an engine. I think my seat assignment was 26,000D. If we wanted out of town, it was going to hurt.
• (And, of course, my ability to upgrade - that little sliver of hope - was nil. US Air and United share a first letter in their names, but not frequent-flyer programs. Pity.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 2: Of course, we got picked for security screening. Of course we did. And not just the 'ol pat-down-and-wand routine, but the full-on bag search, replete with the chemically-treated paper, the turning on of the laptop, the works. TSA was totally professional and pleasant, but ... man.
• I'm convinced that the food contracts for every airport in the country are handled by the same company. I was strolling around the dining choices and saw, well, all the same stuff I saw at SeaTac or Chicago or Denver - Qdoba, Quiznos, McDonald's, Ben & Jerry's. And all of it was right next to the CNBC/Hudson News place, just down the way from the Rosetta Stone kiosks. I suddenly felt like Ed Norton from Fight Club. Seriously, the only way I know which airport I'm in half the time is by the school/pro sports team printed on the sweatshirts/mascots for sale at the gift shops.
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 3: And then, the storm came in. And not just any storm, but a fantastic, noisy, rainy, near-biblical-flood-inducing, thunder-and-lightning extravaganza that just shut down the airport, stalled flight loading at the gates, the works. It went on like that for 45 minutes, too. And I was honestly baffled/impressed - I mean, what else could happen?
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 4: Didn't have to wait long to find out. Lightning struck the plane next to ours. Both planes were parked at their gates, and when the bolt hit, it made a sound like God snapping His fingers, or something, and scared the holy bejeezus out of some poor woman who was near the other bird. The entire concourse shut up - silence fell very eerily and quickly - and when the US Air announcer came on, she announced that the plane was out of service pending mechanical inspection. (And some people headed for San Francisco were decidedly not happy to hear that.)
• Eventually (and filled with survivor's guilt), we boarded.
• US Air has this "calming" video they play on the airplane's video monitors while you board. It's unbelievably cheesy, too - think "scenes of nature set to music you might hear while getting massaged" and you're in the ballpark. We're talking waterfalls, helicopter shots of rock formations, microscopic views of crystals and/or plants, and - my favorite - some random computer graphics sequence that that looks like a laser show for Pink Floyd's The Wall. The intent is to keep us docile, but instead it made me giggle.
• (The CD and DVD are available for sale, too. I'm swear I'm not making this up.)
• God Will Make You Suffer If You Try To Leave Pennsylvania, Part 5: We get on the runway, and then - another storm! We're sitting around for 40 minutes or so, waiting for this squall to pass. I'm bouncing in my seat, obsessive-compulsively flicking through lists on the iPhone and hoping like hell we're not next in line for the lightning strike. US Air pops on the "calming" DVD like it's some sort of video Prozac. I start giggling again.
• Storm passes, engines start, we're airborne. It's bumpy - the air's full of pockets - and suddenly it occurs to me that I'm getting married exactly one month from now. Like, almost to the hour. <Keanu>Whoa</Keanu>.
• (Elaine, I miss ya, baby.)
• As luck would have it, I wound up sitting next to a fascinating guy, a Pittsburgh native who wanted to talk about software, Generation Y, finding good talent, the health care mess (he's in the industry), urban planning, national politics, and queuing theory. I was in heaven.
• During my fascinating conversation, US Air interrupted the "calming" video to play "Spider Man 3," whose plot, near as I can tell (no audio), was that a computer-generated sand monster and computer-generated black goo monster both had it in for Spider-Man, who himself was largely computer-generated. Stuff blew up, Tobey Maguire looked sad and lost, and James Franco clearly had his eye on a piece of land, or something, because he clearly had other things on his mind. Frankly, the whole thing was so CGI-slick, over-the-top and pointless that it made me yearn for the good old days of ASCII art.
• Phoenix, Arizona, was 102 degrees Fahrenheit when we landed. At 8 PM.
• Our reservations for the evening were at the Phoenix Hilton, which is - and I'm being totally honest here - a kick-ass hotel. Say what you will about the misadventures of Ms. Paris, but the Hilton hotel people have it together when it comes to building oases of air-conditioned, clean-white-linened, white-wine-equipped fantasticness. Holy crap, I needed that hotel.
• As suggested by the 102-degrees-at-8-PM thing, Phoenix during the day is hot. Hot, hot, hot. Really damn hot. People love to say things like, "Yeah, man, but it's a dry heat," to which the only appropriate response is: go stick your head in an oven.
• If you have ever have lunch in Phoenix, there's a pizza joint called Nello's ("In Crust We Trust") that's pretty damn good.
• Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix has the most over-the-top, overbuilt rental car center you can imagine. It's huge. I daresay you could fit two or three regional airports inside it, and still have room for your CD collection and a family of four. It's also really remote - I actually think we went in to Nevada to return the Impala to Avis. It's absolutely crazy.
• Yes, Avis really did give me an Impala. Stop laughing.
• Good news for geeks: Sky Harbor Airport has free WiFi and decent numbers of A/C power plugs. W00t!
• Our United flight back to Seattle (by way of San Francisco) was - yes- delayed. I'd have been more surprised if it hadn't been.
• Turns out our flight was on "Ted", which is United's low-cost hipster brand that's intended to compete with Southwest. The most interesting thing about Ted is that people who work for Ted talk about Ted in the third person, like Ted is a real person who has preferences. The airline safety video, for example, says, "Ted wants to remind you..." and "Ted hopes you enjoy your flight." (It's creeeeee-py.)
• Incidentally, the Ted safety video is the hippest safety video I've ever seen. It's got cuts, zooms, tons of greenscreen work, a hipster soundtrack. Crazy. Since when does Michael Bay do airplane videos?
• In the first break of the day, our United flight from SFO to SeaTac boarded ... on time. And the nice man behind the counter offered me ... an upgrade. I just about hugged him.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 10, 2007 1:43 AM.
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August 7, 2007

Travel Day One (And Two, And Three): Pittsburgh

I'm traveling this week, doing a string of customer visits in Pittsburgh, Houston and Phoenix (and if you guessed that I was careful to specify air conditioning in my rental cars, you'd be right). I took off from SeaTac yesterday afternoon, and am now safely ensconced in my second Pittsburgh hotel.

(There is a story here.)

The usual notes:

• It does seem somewhat fitting that my last week as a Planner would be spent in the field. I tend to think of air travel as one of the defining hallmarks of Planning, much like dirty fingernails on mechanics or overuse of "air quotes" for MBAs.
• Despite all the news hysteria about how bad it is to fly right now, I assumed (somehow) that I would be immune to the ill effects of the American airline industry, nature, and every other factor that could operate on me. Silly man. United loves Chicago, and when you fly United to Pittsburgh, you stop there. Chicago is, under good conditions, a busy airport ... and Monday did not offer good conditions. Weather was spotty, flights were late. In fact, by the time we arrived (an hour overdue) the "C" concourse looked like a refugee camp. I stood in line at Starbucks next to a woman who claimed to be on her 24th-straight hour of travel. (She looked like it, too.)
• Thankfully, the connecting flight from Chicago to Pittsburgh was delayed as well, so I had some time to charge the 'ol laptop before resuming air travel. Chicago, like LAX, has sprouted some wicked-cool, Verizon-sponsored banks o' power plugs in their concourses. Fantastic!
• I know I'm late to the mobile e-mail party and all, but can I just say how fabulous it is to have e-mail in the pocket at all times? I mean, it's not a big deal usually - at work or in Seattle, I'm never far from a browser - but when I'm sitting on an airplane, chilling out for that 10 minutes of dead time between "plane is docked" and "plane is actually unloading people," it's great to see what's been going on in my world.
• The O'Hare-Pittsburgh flight got under way about an hour and 15 minutes after scheduled departure, and then proceeded to sit on the tarmac for another hour. The United people were wonderful about everything - fetching beverages, letting people use the restrooms, that sort of thing - but after the 25(!) flights in front of us had taken off, we were still nearly 3 hours overdue from our original time of arrival.
• The "original time of arrival" was 11:30 PM Eastern.
• Yeah, I was tired.
• Magazines slayed: BusinessWeek (x2), MacWorld, Wired, Entertainment Weekly.
• The Avis people apparently read this blog. After hearing me rail on about the crappy minivans and Kia whateverthehecktheyares I've rented from them in the past, they decided to saddle me with a Mercury Grand Marquis this time around. This is a big 'ol hunk of American steel, with stylin' that's right out of a 70s Blacksploitation flick. This isn't a car you drive as much as a boat you sail. I think we got a good 4.5 gallons per mile.
• If there's a chunk of freeway in the Pittsburgh area that's not under construction, I'd like to know where it is.
• (Construction is doubly fun when you're dead tired and sailing your 1982 Pimpmobile of Death around unfamiliar freeways at 2:30 AM.)
• Pittsburgh really knows how to make an entrance. After 30 miles of freeway and general dead-of-night blackness, we shot through the Fort Pitt Tunnel, and were dazzled by the city's spires, light, buildings, and bridges. Truly a wonderful sight.
• (Of course, it could have just been the fatigue.)
• First words out of the hotel clerk's mouth when we appeared: "Wow, I'd given up on you guys. Usually 3 AM is the cutoff for people making good on their reservations."
• 6 hours later, we were visiting with customers. And drinking lots of coffee.
• If Portland (Oregon) and Dallas had a kid, it would look a lot like Pittsburgh - bridges and water everywhere, but muggy as hell and a little too hot. Ugh.
• Our business conducted, we were back at Pittsburgh International this afternoon and subsequently (cheerily) informed that our United flight to Houston (by way of - wait for it - Chicago) was delayed, which was going to screw up our connection. The time they could get us in to Houston would be (very) late Wednesday morning. Since our Houston meeting was now off the table (we had 'em for early Wednesday, and were going to Phoenix later that day), we elected to get new tickets direct to Phoenix, hole up at the Airport Sheraton and look for some local flavor.
• "Local flavor" in this neck of the state seems to be confined to strip malls. We found a chain steak place and downed some iced tea and an okay sirloin.
• There are no sidewalks anywhere.
• I'm officially feeling that special kind of punchy-tired I always get after a lot of flying and not enough sleep. (I couldn't sleep last night at all.) At least our flight cancellation means I can get some sleep tonight.

More later.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 7, 2007 5:34 PM.
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July 19, 2007

L.A. Story

(With a happy nod to Steve Martin's genius movie of the same name)

Work has brought me to Los Angeles for the past two days, which was much less in-n'-out than Oklahoma City (e.g., I was on the ground for more than 24 hours), but still didn't provide the kind of free time I need to see the sights, kick back, and enjoy a little vacation.

Plus, it's not like I'm ready to just run around like a frat boy at Daytona Beach: customer visits can be exhausting, mentally and physically, and by the end of a good half-day or day-long session, I've generally got a hard drive full of notes and a head full of cotton. Back to the hotel, sleep, repeat as necessary.

And yet, it was still a lot of fun. To wit:

• Our hotel was The Standard in downtown Los Angeles. It's a total hipster joint, all sly/snarky wall coverings, clean white formica, plastic chairs, huge televisions, fluffy pillows, Bang-and-Olufsen knock-off CD players, beds on the floor, that sort of thing. The hotel rooms themselves are One Big Room; the bathroom is one corner, and separated from everything else with floor-to-ceiling glass. This, coupled with the low bed, makes the room feel huge. It's Euro as hell, and I loved it.
  
  The Standard is also home to a hip-and-happening open-air bar/lounge/dance club/swimming pool (no, really) on the roof of the building. It's something you have to see to believe; there's nothing quite like being 130 feet in the air, smack-dab in the center of tall, twinkling, glass-and-concrete buildings at 10 at night, surrounded by the Beautiful People, listening to techno, and holding a glass of wine in your hand. (Big, big thanks to my friend - and native Angeleno - Adrian for the hotel recommendation!)
• The heat in Los Angeles makes me miss the endless gray of a Pacific Northwest February. I'm a mammal, not a reptile.
• I got to drop in and see Heidi for a while, who is doing fabulous, looking fabulous, and took me to a fabulous sushi place in Hollywood. Seeing good friends is just the thing a guy needs after getting off a plane a couple hours beforehand.
• LAX, the good: Los Angeles International unveiled fifty AC-power charging stations, salted around the airport in every terminal. This is, for obvious reasons, great news. Hopefully, someone at SeaTac will get a clue.
• LAX, the bad: the place still looks unbelievably run-down. And let's not even talk about the carpet or the baggage claim.
• Our appointment on Wednesday wrapped up earlier than expected, so the three of us found ourselves back downtown, blinking in the sunlight, and not too-terribly-shagged out. So we did what any three red-blooded American rejuveniles would do, and hit Disneyland.
• (Don't even try to look surprised.)
• We zoomed down I-5 to Anaheim (aside: I know it's passe to bitch about LA traffic, but, for the record, LA traffic really suuuuuuuuuuuuu-[breath goes here]-uuuuuuuuuuuucks), got parked at the garage, hooked up with Tony & Andrea, and proceeded to go on a full-on, full-throated, park-hoppin' rampage of the E-tickets: Soarin', Screamin', Tower of Terror, Space Mountain, Indy, and Buzz. It was a lot of walking, a lot of waiting, and a lot of fun. It was also phenomenally exhausting.
• In a strange quirk of the calendar, this Afternoon Of Disney Park Craziness took place two years and one day after Khan, Christine and I attended Disneyland's 50th anniversary.
• Obligatory iPhone reference: I sleep like the dead, but the iPhone's built-in alarm clock was loud enough to rouse my tired, dragging behind from an extremely comfortable bed and get rolling this morning. (And said alarm was considerably more reliable than the hotel wake-up service, which was 13 minutes late.)
• Starbucks' new breakfast sandwiches aren't rolled out broadly in Los Angeles yet. As one who's become addicted to them on busy mornings, I found that to be a real downer.
• My flight back to Seattle wasn't slated to fly until the evening, but I got to the airport soon enough that I hoped (prayed?) I might catch an earlier flight. No luck - United's Seattle-bound flights are booked solid, a function of overbooking and a cancellation somewhere else in the system. Thank God for widely-available AC Power (see above) and some T-mobile WiFi goodness.
• Rather than tell you about the actual flight home, I'll just ask: when did planes become airborne day-care centers? Inquiring minds want to know.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 19, 2007 11:33 PM.
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July 17, 2007

OK Is OK

This is a travel-for-work week, and I'm writing this while zooming across the country (and, regrettably, deepening my carbon footprint).

First stop? Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

As the presumptive soon-to-be home of the Sonics and Storm, I've been intensely curious to see what the local vibe is all about. Sadly, this one is in-and-out (next stop: Los Angeles!), so I won't have the opportunity. Pity.

As usual, a few notes:

• I've officially turned in to one of those travelers I used to mock – you know, those people, what with their Super Premier Frequent Flyer Pass, their special security lines, their early boarding, free in-flight wine and complimentary hot towels. You know something? I love it. If I have to fly (and Planners have to fly), I want to fly like this.
• (Despite this, I have no plans to start bitching about taxes or voting Republican.)
• SeaTac airport has a power problem. There – I've said it. The Port of Seattle needs to get themselves a calendar, figure out what year it is (it's uh, 2007, chaps), and install some freakin' AC power outlets in the concourses. Today, everyone with a laptop (at last count, 92.55% of the population) is forced to do the Chicken Walk, strutting up and down in the waiting areas, head jerking up and down and side to side, trying to spot the one column or wall with AC power. It's embarrassing. I propose we immediately move forward with a crash program to outfit all available walls with six-prong AC power jacks. In the meantime? Power strips with 10' cords. It's a start
• I always store up grunt work to do on the plane – processing notes, dealing with e-mail, things like that. I never feel very creative (I mean, you can't exactly sprawl out with some table space and put your papers everywhere), so I'm stuck doing data processing. In its own way, it's really satisfying because a) you get to tick things off your list and b) you use a different part of the brain.
• At 35,000 feet, I slay unread magazines by the dozens: a month's back issues of BusinessWeek, two Wireds, Entertainment Weekly,Business 2.0. Take that!, magazine backlog! Ha!
• More on being part of those people: I note with some interest that the first-class cabin has a passenger: attendant ratio of 3:1, which results in lovely service. The coach cabin, by contrast, appears to have a ratio of 3,000:1.
• This ratio bothers you less after two Jack Daniels and Diet Coke.
• Apparently, the point of flying first class is to get loaded. I actually didn't drink on my first leg (Seattle – Denver) because I wanted to get some work done. This seemed to puzzle the attendants, who gave me increasingly-funny looks as I asked for ice water or Diet Coke. I could almost hear them muttering “sucker” under their breath.
• Our flight from Denver to Oklahoma City was delayed an hour, so the group of us hit the Wolfgang Puck in DIA's B Concourse, and enjoyed a damn tasty BBQ chicken pizza. Definite recommend.
• The Oklahoma City Airport is a bit high on Oklahoma, in a “don't mess with Texas” kind of way. The place is festooned with banners, signs, and announcements talking about how great the state is, how beautiful it is, etc. It's sort of small-town-boosterism (I half-expected the Mayor to personally greet us at the taxi stand), and I find it totally charming.
• We walked out of the airport and straight in to good old-fashioned Southwest swelter. 79 degrees and high humidity at 11:30 PM. Mmmmmm…. Took me right back to living in Dallas in the summer of '97.
• Learn from my mistakes, please: don't ever, ever, ever let the Avis people foist off one of their crappy Kia minivans on you. They're big, they're clunky, they've got all the nuance of Richard Simmons in drag. Leave them be. Rent a taxi if you have to.
• Let us now praise the Hampton Inn, with its clean rooms, efficient counter people, free wireless and overall got-its-shit-together-ness. I loves me these hotels, and I stay at ‘em whenever I can.
• Playing Snow Patrol through the speaker of your iPhone is a great way to make your hotel room not feel as lonely at midnight, when you're a bit out of your time zone, can't sleep, and and replying to mail that's queued up over the last nine hours.
• 7 AM in Oklahoma City is like 4 PM on the hottest day of the year in Seattle. Air conditioning, anyone?
• Everyone is really, really, really friendly here.
• If you're going to get stuck at the airport, I recommend Oklahoma City's. It's nice, it's clean, it's modern. And they have lots of power plugs.

I'm off to Los Angeles. More soon.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 17, 2007 2:22 PM.
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February 20, 2007

Gav n' Lane's California Adventure

Elaine and I spent this past weekend (with chunks of Thursday and Friday thrown in for good measure) getting in touch with our inner 5-year-olds by goofing off at The Happiest Place On Earth.

(Yes, I'm talkin' about Disneyland.)

We're home now - and wiped out from the nonstop craziness - so I wanted to recap some of the highlights and goodness from the trip. To wit:

• We hooked up with some great friends while down in Los Angeles - Heidi, Tony and Andrea, Gina and Bryan, as well as Kim and Steve. Disneyland with good friends is waaaaay more fun than you think. Suddenly, long lines aren't a very big deal - you just stand around and crack inappropriate jokes all day long.
• If you're gonna fly to Disneyland, avoid LAX and fly in to Orange County (John Wayne Airport - SNA). It's only about 13 miles from the parks, which means that it's both faster and cheaper to get to/from your hotel by shuttle (and you don't have to deal as much with Los Angeles' famously bad traffic). SNA is also a smaller, less insane airport than LAX, which makes everything nicer - security screenings are quicker, the lounge is less packed, and so on.
• (Yes, John Wayne Airport has a Starbucks. It's not that small.)
• Unlike Walt Disney World, there's no real advantage to staying at a Disney hotel in Anaheim. I've stayed at both the Grand Californian and the Disneyland Hotel over the years, and, while nice, neither offers enough "oomph" to make them worth the extra money. This time around, we booked rooms at the Best Western Anaheim, right across Harbor Boulevard from the parks. It's a 5-minute walk, and the rates are substantially lower - $89 for Thursday, and $119 a night for the weekend, vs. $349 a night for the Grand Californian. Yes, the rooms aren't as nice as the higher-end hotels, but, seriously -- how much time do you spend in your hotel room when you're at Disneyland?
• Theme parkin' is tiring. We got back to the hotel late on Friday night and practically collapsed into bed. After some talking and reckoning with our friends the next morning, we figured that, in general, people walk about a mile every hour in a park - waiting in lines, strolling between attractions, and so forth. If that's true, Friday was basically a half-marathon walk. (No wonder I was so beat!)
• I got Elaine a copy of the "Unofficial Guide To Disneyland, 2007" as a Christmas present, and I have to say: the book is good. We used it to plan visits to attractions we might not have otherwise checked out, and weren't disappointed. If you're going to the parks for the first time (or the first time in a while), be sure to pick up a copy.
• I've commented before that California Adventure is a half-day park - it's got a handful of good attractions (to wit: California Screamin', Tower of Terror, and the exceptional Soarin' Over California), but the rest of the park feels like a fruit salad of attractions from other parks, tossed together by hurried Disney Imagineers who wanted to get the thing built on the cheap. That said, I must confess that we spent virtually all of our Friday at California Adventure and had a fabulous time. Part of this was our commitment to trying just about everything we could - "Screamin'" and "Soarin'", of course, but also stage shows like "Aladdin" new stuff like "Monsters, Inc." and original attractions I've never paid much attention to like "Golden Dreams". In total, it made for a great, great day of walking, laughing, and thrills. DCA was pretty busy, too (and remained so all weekend), which is an encouraging sign that the park might, at long last, be finding its groove. Good on ya, DCA.
• In-N-Out Burger is a fast-food delight. Elaine and I had been meaning to try them (they're a California chain) when we were at Marnie's wedding, but couldn't find a locale. This time, Tony took us to one in Fullerton, and we got a couple double-doubles, animal style. Mmmmmmmmmm.
• The "Rockin'" conversions of Space Mountain and California Screamin' are cool, but nothing much to write home about. Of the two, Space Mountain is more dramatic, with different effects and a more-synchronized soundtrack. They're worth checking out, but I wish Disney had decided to make the "Rockin'" conversions a night-time thing; I missed the "regular" Space Mountain on more than one occasion.
• Pirates Of The Caribbean recently got a refurbishment. It's gained some new effects (including a cool mist effect with Davy Jones) and Captain Jack Sparrow now makes an appearance at a few places in the ride. The touches are light, and fairly nice. Old-timers won't be offended; newcomers to the ride will feel a sense of harmony with the films.
• Daring Fireball readers are everywhere. I got a "nice shirt!" comment on Main Street, USA while strolling in my DF Tee. The Cult Of Gruber is growing!
• The Disneyland fireworks show is not to be missed under any circumstances.
• We spent our Sunday morning taking a guided tour of Disneyland. Called the "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" tour, it never goes backstage, but instead shows off various locations in the park that Walt was personally involved with building, or that had personal significance to him. I didn't learn a whole lot (most of the Disney trivia was stuff I already knew), but it was killer to get in to Club 33 and great to see the park through fresh eyes. The tour is $59 per person, and lunch is included. If you have the time, I'd recommend it.

If you're interested, my Flickr photostream is available. (And, yes, I really am trying to turn Elaine into the most-photographed woman in the world, this side of Princess Diana.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 20, 2007 10:32 PM.
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February 12, 2007

Notes On My Recent European Adventure

I'm back from Europe, and oh man was this an in-and-outer. Start to finish, I logged some 15,000 miles over the six days I was gone, jetting Seattle -> Washington, DC -> Munich, Germany -> Cologne -> Munich -> Basel, Switzerland -> Munich -> Chicago -> Seattle.

(Yeah, I was pretty pooped when I got home.)

The usual notes:

• Gavin's Secret To Surviving Air Travel #4,227: drink water. Lots of water. Plane air is dry air, and when you dehydrate it messes with your energy, your outlook, and your overall feeling of fatigue. I drank so much water on my cross-country United flight that I annoyed the stewardess.
• For some strange reason, Dulles was packed with people on Sunday. Lines were long for everything - bathrooms, food vendors, escalators - was something going on?
• If you do find yourself surviving a long, long line for the "California Tortilla" restaurant at Dulles, I recommend the wraps. I do not, however, recommend the salsa, which is the most weak-ass watered-down stuff you've ever tasted. Think "thin watery tomato sauce" (mmmmmmm) and you're in the ballpark.
• For some reason, the Wonderful United Crew that brought us to the East coast was replaced with the Evil United Crew for our leg to Munich. They were short-tempered, very brusque, and managed to do that "I will stare right by you, even though you are clearly trying to get my eye so you can have more water, you freakin' mutant camel" thing.
• (This may have been because I was seated in Economy, but still.)
• Gavin's Secret To Surviving Air Travel #684: booze helps knock ya out. It's true - a couple glasses of wine at 35,000 feet and I'm out like a light. Since booze dehydrates ya, be sure to observe Secret #4,227 and have water while you do it. NOTE: This may annoy the stewardesses.
• Long flights are awesome for getting caught up on the reading. I processed - no kidding - 3 inches of magazines that had been lurking on my shelf.
• It remains impossible to get anything approaching restful sleep in Economy, no matter how scrupulously you observe Secret #684. This is a real problem when your flight leaves Seattle at 8 AM one day, and arrives (with time shift) at 8 AM the next day in Germany.
• Munich is clean, cold (-1 Celsius) and gorgeous.
• I caught a taxi from the airport to my hotel. German taxis are very nice, very clean, late-model Mercedes with leather interior ... basically, nothing like American taxis. Everything is very understated: the taxis lack any kind of protective plexiglass or barrier between the driver and passenger, and the fare computer is integrated into the vehicle, with a read-out in the left-hand side of the rearview mirror. It all feels very cool and futuristic. Taxis also come with reading material - including Cosmo and Playboy(!).
• (Pity I couldn't enjoy the Playboy - being written in German, I couldn't understand the articles.)
• It's incredibly hard to keep your energy up and focus sharp when you're fighting jet lag. NOTE: focus and energy are critical for understanding the nuances of what customers are saying to you when English is not their first language.
• Jet lag is great for productivity. After being up for 27 hours straight (and subsequently crashing at the hotel), I woke up around 11:30 PM, local time, and crunched for the next three hours on a data-analysis project. (It's hard to imagine how I'd get such an uncluttered, non-interrupted time to work back home.)
• Note on late-night German TV: watching Urkel dubbed in to German is hysterical. And you know something? Family Matters is a lot better when you can't understand it. (I mean, you understand it just fine, but you don't know what the characters are saying.)
• Internet is expensive as hell here. The wireless is 5.95 Euro for 30 minutes, or 29.95 for 24 hours. To save a buck or two, I'm forever buying 30-minute sips, which means queueing up my mail and whatnot so I can be go-go-go once authenticated. A nice side benefit of this is that I'm not being distracted by a constant barrage of e-mail.
• It's hard to imagine how an overweight European would participate in society. Everything is tiny here - bathrooms, staircases, elevators, walkways, sinks, spaces in general. I'm not a big guy (tall, but not big), and yet I'm forever turning this way or that and finding myself a bit constrained - it almost approaches claustrophobic.
• Not to state the obvious, but German beer just rocks.
• (In other news: French wine is tasty, Italian cars go fast, and Americans enjoy hamburgers.)
• I met one of my International Product Planning colleagues and her husband for dinner on Tuesday night at the (world-famous) Wirsthaus in der Au. We had sausages, sauerkraut and beer - fantastic. Absolutely go if you get a chance.
• More notes on early-morning German cable TV: a local channel was running "space night" at 4 AM, which is basically, Earth satellite footage - the planet spinning in its blue glory - while set to funky mood music. It's utterly hypnotic, especially when you're not sleeping as much as you'd like. It was the sort of thing you'd see on the wall of a nightclub, but I found it to be completely captivating.
• Every German I met with was shockingly professional and polite. Taxi drivers, clerks, you name it - nary a trace of surliness or "I'm having a bad day"-ness. It's easy to chalk this up to "nice-hotel-itis", but it's everywhere - shops, restaurants, you name it. It almost feels like a national pride thing.
• Another thing about traveling in Europe is that you realize how insulated we Americans are from other cultures and languages. In Europe, everyone seems to speak (very good) English, in addition to their native tongues. As an example, one of the guys I work with at Microsoft Germany is a native German who speaks flawless English, has married a Brazillian girl and also speaks excellent Portugese. (Oh, and French.) There's nothing like being regularly confronted with the language, customs, and currencies of others to remind you that not everyone is like you.
• The introduction of the flatscreen monitor has, finally, made airports circa 2007 look like "the future" - go back and watch "Until The End Of The World" (set in a fictional 1999) to see what I'm talking about. It's about damn time.
• The Basel, Switzerland airport has two exits - one for France, one for Switzerland - just pick your country after you get your bags. (How cool is that?)
• Basel looks like Hollywood's Europe - the tiny, winding, cobblestone streets, the long, skinny windows and four-story buildings, the well-dressed Europeans strolling, the tiny Smart cars. If there's a film to be shot, here's where they're shooting it.
• The Swiss hotel gives out a complimentary transit pass when you check in. My inner transit geek just swooned ("You had me at 'light rail'.").
• Switzerland is the sort of place to make a fella feel massively underdressed.
• United charges 15,000 frequent-flyer miles to upgrade to Business Class. This is, without question, the best use of frequent-flyer miles in the history of the universe, especially after being nonstop for a week in a foreign country that's nine hours ahead of your native time zone.
• Inflight Entertainment Verdict, Pt. 1: "Man Of The Year" isn't very good.
• Inflight Entertainment Verdict, Pt. 2: "The Queen" is excellent.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 12, 2007 9:25 PM.
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February 4, 2007

Europa, Europa

I'm off to Europe for customer visits this week (I'm actually writing this from mid-air, having just passed over the Mississippi a few moments ago). The plan initially takes me to Munich (again), then zooming around Germany, staying in Switzerland for two nights, and finally coming home for the weekend. I'm hoping for some time to sightsee, but the odds are slim: it's the busy time at work, and I'm on deadline for a few projects. So, much as I'd love to grab some local cuisine, take a walking tour, and snap some local color, I suspect it'll be hotel room service, a bit o' jogging on a treadmill, and a full-tilt broadband connection.

Ah, well.

(The good news is that Elaine and I are taking much-needed time off at Disneyland shortly after I get back. That's a real light at the end of the tunnel, let me tell you.)

Should be a crazy week; I'll update when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated February 4, 2007 12:36 PM.
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December 26, 2006

Christmas In Canada

Elaine and I returned from Canada tonight, having spent the last three days and two nights up in Vancouver, visiting with her family for the holidays. On a lark, we elected to take the train to Vancouver, rather than driving. A few notes from the trip:

• Amtrak offers several trips each day from Seattle to Vancouver. Most of these, however, are actually bus service, which is both a) sneaky and b) pointless. Amtrak = train, as far as the world is concerned. If I want a bus, I can call Greyhound. Sheesh.
• Assuming you've worked past the bus sneakiness, the Amtrak 510 will get you to BC the old-school way. One catch: it departs at 7:40 AM, and they want you at the station a good hour before departure. Eagle-eyed readers (or, at least, those possessing a watch) have already deduced that we would therefore need to be at the station around 6:30 AM (aka, "O Dark Hundred") to catch our ride.
• Our departure time was made ever-more entertaining (from a sleep standpoint) by the fact that we needed to catch a bus to the station (unlike the airport, you can't leave your car), and December 24 was a Sunday this year. Metro, therefore, was operating on the most limited schedule possible, short of a snow day or something. Whee-ha.
• Despite this, Things Worked Out, and we found ourselves at King's Street Station in south Pioneer Square, a bit on the bleary-eyed side, but smiling and happy and looking forward to the prospect of a good 72 hours together.
• King's Street has been around better than a hundred years, and, for the most part, looks it. You don't have to work very hard to imagine what it must have been like in the heyday of rail transport, people bustling to and fro at all hours. The station is midway through a decade-long renovation, which has put it into a halfway state not unlike that fixer-upper house your buddy's been working on for the past three years. Parts of King's Street are immaculate; others are shabby. It should be breathtaking when it's all done. Can't wait.
• Riding the train in Seattle is not unlike taking a flight from a small regional airport in New York, Minnesota, or Arkansas (trust me, I've done it). Small regionals often have just a handful of flights each day - the flight times are so predictable that they're frequently just laser-printed on 8.5" x 11" paper, laminated, and then posted behind the counter. Therefore, folks working at small regionals know when the flights are coming, know when to expect the crowds, and have adapted their days around them. There's a small-town unhurriedness to it. King's Street Station has exactly this feel, in every regard. The 7:40 train will leave at 7:40. There's nuthin' else goin' on until then, and nuthin' goin' on for a while after it, either.
• We did see a good-sized crowd build for both both Portland (the southbound link) and Vancouver. I was happy to see rail being used in Seattle (Link is still three years away), but it may have just been the holiday.
• The train itself basically offers an airplane seat with a bit more legroom, a bit larger a tray table, and more freedom to move around the cabin. There are ceiling-mounted monitors that show in-transit movies ("The Polar Express", "Invincible") as well as the usual GPS-type stuff (current train location, current time, estimated time of arrival).
• One nice bonus: the seats all have A/C power. (Score!)
• Trains offer eye-level delights to their passengers (as opposed to the 35,000-foot view), and the Northwest has enough natural beauty to make you want to put away the laptop and just ... gaze. Amtrak runs up through Everett, Mount Vernon, and Bellingham, and hugs the water for the bulk of the journey. With a clear morning and the Olympic Mountains in the distance, it's quite something to see.
• It's also really cool to see a lot of towns up-close-and-personal as you roll through them. Seattle's included in this list -- you leave town by going along the waterfront, passing the various Piers. So awesome.
• All told, it took us about four hours on the rails to get to Vancouver. Not the speediest thing ever, and even less so with the "be at the station an hour ahead of time, and, oh yeah, take Metro on a Sunday" thing ... but the company was good. We did arrive on time, and kudos to the conductor.
• Elaine's brother, Stan, picked us up at the Vancouver terminal. At this point, Holiday Weekend kicked off in full force. Diet and restraint were out the window; instead, he and I kicked it on the couch with video games, DVDs and Cheetos while Elaine got caught up on her book club obligations. Sleeping in was about the most strenuous thing anyone attempted.
• (Stan and I even managed to start - and finish - Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows.)
• "Talladega Nights" came highly recommended (my father, among others, can't even mention the name of the movie without cracking up), and I must admit that it didn't disappoint. I laughed a lot, but mostly because a) I love seeing Will Farrell do his George W. Bush impression (seen White House West?), and b) the filmmakers throw a lot of funny stuff at you, and hope that some of it sticks. (It does.)
• "Clerks II" - Liked it, didn't love it. Which was surprising, because I usually giggle over Kevin Smith movies. Rosario Dawson's the best thing in it, bar none.
• (Oh, and thanks to "Clerks II" I now have "Goodbye Horses" - aka, "The Song They Played In The Silence Of The Lambs Where Buffalo Bill Gets All Made Up And Dances For The Camera" stuck in my freaking head.)
• Elaine's family has apparently heard that I'm taking singing lessons, because her mom got me an iKaraoke for Christmas (thanks again, Elaine's mom!). Yikes. Talk about giving a handgun to a three-year-old...
• (I'm totally looking forward to playing with it.)
• (In a soundproof room.)
• Stan, Elaine and I hit the mall today to see Canada's Boxing Day madness in all its consumerist glory. Pretty amazing, but not too different from our Day-After-Thanksgiving consume-a-thon.
• At one point, we strolled through a HMV and looked at the CDs and DVDs they had on the racks. You know something? It was strange. There I was, standing in the middle of a store that, say, 5 or 10 years ago I would have enjoyed browsing. And today? I've no use for it. NetFlix has pretty much killed off my desire to own DVDs (Why bother?), and I've stopped buying music on CD in favor of iTunes. Loading up on plastic discs just seems so twentieth-century, all of a sudden. It was bizarre (and a little overwhelming), like stepping into a buggy-whip store circa 1925. The world is changing, you know?
• The Amtrak experience home just about killed off any goodwill the service had earned on our way up. The line for customs was hellishly long; the train station's line-management facilities are poor-to-nonexistent, and the ride back to Seattle felt like were poking along at a leisurely 35 miles per hour. We were only 15 minutes late, all told and together, but the sum total of the time we invested in getting back made me feel like a chump for not taking the car.

It's great to be back in Seattle. Happy holidays, everyone.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 26, 2006 11:29 PM.
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December 4, 2006

Oh, Say - What Should We See?

Dad was in town this weekend, swooping in from Spokanistan to attend the 2006 International Motorcycle Show here in Seattle. It's a big, big event, taking the majority of the Qwest Field Event Center. Just about every big bike manufacturer is there - Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki, BMW, Harley, you name it. It's a trade show, so it's got a good blend of both these big companies and the small firms (glass cleaners, bike stand makers) and nonprofits (cycle clubs, lobbying organizations) that make the industry work.

We hit the show nice and early on Saturday morning, and proceeded to wander around in a daze for the next few hours.

Our visit to the show was precipitated, in no small part, by our upcoming 2008 road trip, which is getting more real by the day.

I'm on a bit of an equipment quest for my Shadow. Right now, it's not modified or encumbered by any non-standard equipment; the bike I ride is as Honda made it, in all its maroon glory. Problem is, that's not going to cut it on a 5-week road trip. I need places to store my clothes, shoes, tent, food, water, tools (and on and on), as well as some good, old-fashioned technology help (like a GPS with integrated map, so we don't get lost).

Oh, and an iPod connection kit.

To that end, the show was perfect, just perfect - lots of companies selling their wares, lots of knowledgeable people to talk to about cycling, lots of tips and tricks and warm, fuzzy vibes.

We're starting the mapping/planning process in earnest next month (um, er, next year), and this, dear reader, is where I need your help.

See, this trip isn't about getting from A to B; rather, it's about seeing the country, taking it in, meeting people and seeing great stuff from the vantage of two wheels at 55 mph.

(And yes, riding the occasional roller coaster.)

So we want to see the good stuff. The scenic byways, the long way 'round, the vistas (no, not that one - I see that at work) and views and the things that you think make your region, well, your region.

For instance. If someone were cycling through Seattle, I would want them to see the following:

• Drive on I-5 north. Start at the airport and head toward the city. As you round the bend just south of town, the entire downtown core makes this fantastic reveal and you see the Emerald City in all its resplendent glory. It's best at night.
• Check out the view of Mount Rainier from the I-90 floating bridge, eastbound, between Seattle and Mercer Island. Best at 8:30 AM on a sunny Sunday morning.
• The view of Puget Sound from the Viaduct (get it while you can, folks!) is spectacular as you head north from Safeco Field. Again, a sunny morning is best - you still get fog and mist on the water.
• Finally, there's an awesome view of the city and Mount Rainier from the Aurora Bridge (Highway 99) as you head south from 45th.

So, dear reader, what do you suggest? What should we see as we see the country? National monuments? Small, favorite winding roads? We're planning now, so use the comments thread to throw your suggestions in the hat!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 4, 2006 10:27 PM.
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November 21, 2006

Back From Detroit

I'm home from Detroit, the Motor City, where I had a quickie, out-and-back business trip (I left Sunday morning, and got back just after midnight this morning, so you do the math).

The usual:

• I'd never been to Detroit before, and was very much looking forward to seeing such an important American city for the first time.
• (I also half-expected to get shot while leaving the airport, waiting for the rental-car shuttle, driving on the freeway to the hotel, checking in to my room, getting breakfast the nex-, oh you get the point.)
• Owing to United's (retarded) service options to Detroit (I loves me the miles, but there is no way in hell I'm going from Seattle to Detroit by way of Washington, DC, folks), I took American. It was a great experience, and I'd recommend them to anyone.
• American Airlines Service Example #1: The first leg of my original flight got delayed, which screwed up my connection. American phoned me about an hour before I left my place to let me know, and promptly found me alternate service on a flight that ran through Dallas. While I'm not crazy about out-of-the-way connections (see United's "Washington, DC" strategy, above), the overall impact was less than 2 hours, and I went for it. They didn't need to call, and I appreciated the courtesy.
• American Airlines Service Example #2: I got placed in the forward bulkhead row on the flight to DFW, which meant I was sitting opposite one of the flight attendants in her strap-in-and-hope-we-don't-crash seat. We got to talking, and next thing I know I'm getting an audio tour of the best-selling "Flight Attendants Gone Wild!", where we learn the ins-and-outs of the business, which airlines get their 757s with the cheap options (hint: they're not in business any more), and how the hierarchy works (she's been in the business 21 years, and still isn't sure she'll get Christmas off, if that tells you something). She was great - super-nice, super-funny, super-friendly.
• I'll never be curt to a flight attendant ever again.
• (Not that I've ever really been curt - I'm not a curt kind of guy - but if you heard as much about some of the un-bee-lee-vah-bahl in-air asshat behavior as I did, you'd give up curtness, too.)
• I feel a strange, special affinity for DFW - probably because I lived in Dallas back in '97. I can't explain it, but I find something about the ticky-tacky cowboy-hat Texas tourist crap kind of endearing, and it makes me smile.
• I may like DFW, but the place needs a few more power plugs. Personally, I'm all in favor of a National Power Plug Program, not unlike our highway infrastructure programs from the '50s. Let's get a plug under every seat, and free WiFi in every concourse. Mobile travelers, unite!
• Detroit is COLD. Cold, cold, cold. Like, 30. It's better than the monsoon we've had going on in Seattle all month, but damn. Brr.
• Can I just say that every single person associated with the Avis rental car company in Detroit was incredibly friendly and helpful? I mean, they were enjoying their jobs in a nearly Children Of The Corn kind of way. I mean it, too - our shuttle driver, the counter check-in folks, the security guards. Everyone was smiling.
• (Surprise! Despite my crazy fear, I did not, at any point, see or hear gunshots. I gotta give up watching RoboCop reruns on late-night TV ("Old Detroit has a cancer. The cancer is crime...").
• I woke up at Oh-Dark-Hundred (Pacific Time - Detroit is EST) and turned on the TV to help get up. This was, in some regards, a mistake -- I found myself looking at Nickelodeon, which was playing some appalling cartoons and even-more appalling commercials. Boy, oh boy - kids' advertising is horrible -- it's pushy, it's loud, and they sell, basically, crap. It could be crap sugary cereal or crap plastic toys or crap video games, but it's all crap. I honestly see why parents feel under siege by the cereal, toy, and game makers.
• (That said, you couldn't have pulled me off the GI-Joe and Star Blazers cartoons when I was a kid. "Hurry, Star Force! There are only 48 days left!")
• Once on the road to our first appointment, we drove past the swankiest, coolest thing ever - a drive-through car wash that had been converted into a drive-through Starbucks. What was really great about it is that it had clearly been a double-barreled car wash at one time, but they only modified one half of the operation. This, among other things, lets you look at the cars going through the wash as you wait for your Americano. Why doesn't Seattle have this? We should add one to the Pink Elephant!
• Architecture: Seattle has the Space Needle, Chicago has the Sears Tower, and Detroit has the GM Tower - all cylindrical, metal, glass, shining, modern, and ass-kickingly cool.
• Detroit is a border town - 'cept the border is a river. It's kind of cool to be in a town where you can see Canada across the water.
• Note to Lame-Duck Congress: We should not, under any circumstances, build a 700-mile wall on the Detroit River.
• Detroit is actually a very clean city. We didn't see much trash, the drivers were reasonably polite, and, overall, I was impressed with the feel of the place.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 21, 2006 2:36 PM.
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November 6, 2006

Weekend By The Bay

Elaine and I spent a long weekend down in the San Francisco Bay Area, heading out to Napa on Friday afternoon for Marnie's wedding, and then going to the city proper to crash with our friends Kim and Steve.

(Kim knew we were coming, so she hustled out of town to attend her bridal shower in Los Angeles. That meant poor Elaine got a double-dose of me and Steve, with no extra estrogen to temper our juvenile highjinks. Poor girl.)

The usual notes:

• Early-morning flights are kinda brutal. Marnie's wedding was at 3 PM, so we zoomed out of SeaTac at 7:50 AM on Friday. On paper, these pre-9 AM'ers seem OK ("We'll get up at 4! Get coffee! We'll be fine!"), but when you're yawning over and over and over again during a two-hour flight, well, your bod is telling you something.
• The flight to SFO is just two hours - barely a blip, benchmarked against some of my recent trips. I actualy got a little distracted when the captain announced that we were starting our descent ("Huh? Really???").
• Playing Roller Coaster Tycoon at 35,000 feet is a ton 'o fun. It may even be my new John Grisham novel.
• The friendly folks at Dollar Rent-A-Car saddled us with a convertible PT Cruiser. Let me just say this about the 'ol convertible PT - the thing has the worst visibility of any car I have ever driven. Seriously. You have no peripheral vision at all, and turning your head won't help you, because the convertible top manages to blanket out your over-the-shoulder view of the cars, say, next to you. If you buy this car, be aware that it's very, very likely that you're going to hit something when you change a lane.
• (Fortunately, we didn't hit anything. My clever strategy there was to just, you know, drive with the top down all the damn time.)
• I'd never been to Napa before, and was very curious to see what it was all about. Marnie calls it home, as does Schelley, and Richard considers himself a NorCal guy. The fuss, as it turned out, was warranted: beautiful, rolling country, winery after winery after winery. Heck, I thought I saw Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church at one point.
• Starbucks are everywhere in Napa. If you can believe it, they actually seemed more prevalent than - wait for it - McDonald's. Both Elaine and I were starving after having taken such an early flight, and were looking for decent roadside food on our way along Highway 37. It seemed that every exit featured a Starbucks, surrounded by some dubious fast food joints.
• (We finally found a Thai place. Mmmmmmmm, Thai.)
• The wedding was fabulous. Marnie and Gary booked a winery in Calistoga, which is about 45 minutes from our hotel in Napa. The ceremony and reception were beautiful ... and a lot of fun.
• There are far, far worse things than a 45-minute drive back to your hotel at 10 PM along a winding, moonlit road, with the top down and the wind in your hair.
• Elaine, Steve and I had some killer late brunch on Saturday at The Elite Cafe in San Francisco. Their scones are amazing ... and they have the best homemade(!) ginger ale I've ever tasted.
• I've been to San Francisco dozens of times in the last few years, and for some odd reason the touristy activities - be it Ghirardelli square, taking photos of Alcatraz or the Golden Gate, or just walking Fisherman's Wharf - never get old for me.
• (Of course, I suppose they get really old for poor Kim and Steve, who seem to always be schlepping me around to said touristy activities. Good friends: they make life worth living.)
• We tried to see "Borat" on Saturday night, but it was sold out everywhere. Instead, we saw "Babel" and I reveled in how nice it is to come to a major city, where you can see most everything that's in limited release.
• Despite my hope for the film (the trailer's pretty good), "Babel" wasn't great - it's a moody, cross-cut story about the people whose lives are touched by a shooting in Morocco. I thought it would be much more forceful and dynamic than it actually is, and I felt somewhat let down. I didn't hate it - I just felt like it never really took off. Possible rental.
• If you want to get drinks and watch people flirt, fight, and go on that first date on a Saturday night, The Grove is a great place to do so.

This trip was the next-to-last one for me this year - we're doing some driving around the holidays, but, aside from a business trip later this month, my 2006 travel is all wrapped up. I must say that I'm soooooo ready to not be looking at the inside of an airplane for a while.

Damn, it's good to be home.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 6, 2006 6:44 PM.
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October 24, 2006

Paris, Day Ten: Departure

Today was a travel (read: lost) day.

We were up at 7 AM Paris time (which, if you're in to that kind of thing, is 10 PM Pacific ... the previous day), showered, did a coffee run, finished packing, did the last-minute straighten-and-clean of our flat and then waited for our landlord to show up for inspection. He arrived at 9, pronounced the place satisfactory, returned our deposit, shook our hands, and left.

We caught the Metro for Gare du Nord, switched to the RER, and headed out to the airport.

(Oh, if you're ever flying Continental out of Paris, you want Terminal B. This is the second and final stop at Charles de Gaulle on the RER "B" line. Nobody, uh, you know, told us, and we had an entertaining time finding out the hard way.)

The first leg of the flight home (Paris - Houston) departed at 12:55.

[Time passes.]

• John Grisham's "The Testament"? Done.
• Dan Brown's "Deception Point"? Done.
• A quick note on Dan Brown: I read (and enjoyed) "The Da Vinci Code", but actually liked "Demons and Angels" more. Based on the strength of these two books, I've since read "Deception Point" and "Digital Fortress." They're both fine, but I don't really recommend either one of them too highly. Brown has a very definite formula for how his books are put together - formula in the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer mode - and it makes reading anything more than one or two kinda painful. By about the 200th page of "Deception Point" I'd pretty well figured out whodunit, and from there it was just a matter of watching the dominos fall.
• (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

We arrived in Houston at 4:30 or so, local time. Our layover was a couple hours, so, after clearing customs, we had a quick bite (if you're gonna eat airport food, Panda Express is a pretty good choice), made calls, checked e-mail and then lined up to board our second/final leg back to Seattle. The flight departed at 7:05.

[Time passes]

• I am deeply, deeply tired of in-flight peanuts.
• Michael Crichton's "The Great Train Robbery"? Done. This is a really great read, by the way, a nifty blend of historical fact and conjectured fiction. I bought it at the grocery store on a lark (it was about $2 or $3), and found it well-written and delightful.

We touched down in Seattle at 9:40 PM (at this point, we'd been up for nearly 24 hours), retrieved our bags, and were picked up by the should-be-nominated-for-sainthood Richard, who bundled the both of us into his Jeep and got us back to the city. I think I was drooling on myself by the time I got back to my apartment.

It's good to be home. Bedtime.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 24, 2006 11:02 PM.
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October 23, 2006

Paris, Day Nine: Pompidou

Today's the day before we leave, so Elaine and I thought it would be fun to wallow in the vacation-y aspects of our trip by kicking back, sleeping in, and spending some time with friends.

In this case "time with friends" included a great lunch with newly-married Julie as well as Meikan, a mutual friend of Julie and Elaine's who'd flown in for the wedding from Tokyo(!). The four of us did the two-hour-Parisian-lunch thing, enjoyed some seafood, and then saw Meikan off to his hotel so he could get a lift to the airport.

One odd thing about food in Paris: a lot of it comes in its original packaging. This seems mostly true with ethnic Asian food - Chinese, for example - but it's not uncommon to order duck or fish or something and find that it's served with, well, the face still intact. This is a far cry from the homogenized, processed, pasteurized, plastic-wrapped way we like to get our food in America, where the slice of turkey on your Subway Club is as far removed from an actual living bird as you can get.

(The food-with-a-face thing is disconcerting.)

Other (totally random) food notes:

• There are a lot of American chains here, and they all seem to be doing well. We've spotted Starbucks, of course, but McDonald's is everywhere, as is KFC. We've even seen Subway, for Pete's sake - although I've no idea what they sell (I can't imagine their standard-fare sandwiches are very appetizing compared to the ubiquitous - and inexpensive - baguettes most people get on the street).
• Ordering a well-known item off the menu in in France may not result in what you expect. For example, a Vanilla Frappuccino is not a vanilla-flavored coffee drink; instead, it's a freakin' vanilla milkshake. I was, um, surprised.
• (Admittedly, my French isn't too sharp, so I admit that it might've been my fault.)
• Grocery stores aren't immune, either. Well-known product brands seem to cater to local tastes - so be careful. For instance, Skittles (a personal fave) in France taste totally different from those in the States. France seems to use more real fruit juice, or something (maybe a different sweetener?), which is off-putting, and the purple Skittles aren't grape - they're currant (ick).
• In the immortal words of George Michael: "You Can't Always Get What You Want."

Elaine and I rounded out the day with a trip to the Pompidou, which is both an excellent modern museum and an excellent way to spend your time. I'm not much of an art guy, but I loved the exhibits - they were a breath of fresh air after days of old-school busts, statues, and paintings. Don't get me wrong: the classics are cool, but sometimes they're too ... remote for me.

We're leaving tomorrow. The rest of tonight's all about cleaning the apartment, and getting a nice dinner in the neighborhood.

Vacation's almost over. (sigh)

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 23, 2006 8:00 PM.
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October 22, 2006

Paris, Day Eight: Wandering

When Elaine and I started planning this trip to Paris, we very consciously decided not to go the go-go-go fill-every-minute route. Rather, we thought it might be nicer to (of course) see some of the sights, but mostly we wanted to see where the days would take us. Some days we'd sightsee; others we'd wander.

Today was a wandering day.

(And when you wander with a girl, that usually calls for a fair bit o' shopping.)

One cool thing about wandering in Paris (aside from my previously-mentioned overwhelming sense of being in an adventure game, ala The Bard's Tale) is that you often stumble across incredibly cool things. In our case, we were wandering through various small neighborhoods and districts when we came upon the Bastille, and, a little later, the public gardens of Louis XIII.

(No, really.)

There's a billion little cute boutiques in Paris, and Elaine wanted to see a few of 'em, so as we'd stroll down this lane or that alley she'd duck in to a storefront here and there. For my part, I spent most of the day watching people - coming, going, meeting, kissing, and so on.

Truthfully, the crowds are getting to me a bit. Paris bustles, and there's no good reprieve aside from taking refuge at a cafe.

Ah, well. We probably walked a good 10 or 12 miles, total, swung by the grocer for dinner, and called it a day.

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 22, 2006 10:51 PM.
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October 21, 2006

Paris, Day Seven: Wedding

Today was the wedding of Elaine's friend Julie (the attending of which was the spark of this little trip, back in the summer), so we didn't have a full day to goof off and sightsee. Instead, we elected to do the touristy thing, taking a boat tour of the Seine to see the city.

We'd seen some tour companies operating over by Notre Dame, so we walked over to see what was what. There's an outfit, Bateaux Parisiens, that operates hour-long tours that depart every 70 minutes or so. We bought our tickets, settled in for a bit, and then boarded.

The experience was great, and, candidly, we should have done the tour on the first day or so. We saw many of the same sights we've been experiencing since arrival (Eiffel Tower, Louvre, and so on) but the guides add a lot to the understanding of Paris, its history, and its geography. Further, because so many great sights are located along the river, you get a good checklist of things to go do once you disembark.

After the cruise, we had lunch at a cafe and I realized just how not-cool I am with all the public smoking.

Back to the apartment, change, and then off and out the door to the far-flung reaches of the Metro system (three different lines!) to the suburbs (high-rise apartment buildings, at last!). Julie's French Chinese, so the wedding reception was huge - 400-some people - which meant we took over a restaurant for the evening.

There was a language barrier, to say the least. Many of the relatives and friends in attendance spoke Mandarin or French - but not English. I, of course, speak English, a little German, and can sometimes order a meal in French. Elaine speaks English, a little French, and can understand Mandarin. So many of our conversations with people at our table became these surreal, United-Nations-esque sessions where one person would say something in Chinese, Elaine would tell me what they said in English, I would ask a question in English, and one of the younger nieces or nephews (who spoke passable English) would repeat it to the original speaker.

(The German wasn't very helpful.)

One surprising thing? A lot of the folks in their twenties or thirties either had MBAs, were getting their MBAs, or wanted to get their MBAs. Many of them were studying, or wanted to study, in America.

The night's entertainment (aside from the incredibly gracious and happy bride and groom) was, predictably, Karaoke, which only kicked the cultural/language issue up a notch. If you want to see something truly interesting, I invite you to watch a group of roughly eight fairly-drunk Chinese nationals sing "We Are The World" when English is not their native tongue.

Really.

(FYI: they - and the audience - were having a blast.)

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 21, 2006 10:55 PM.
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October 20, 2006

Paris, Day Six: Bibliotheque

Internet service is a pain to obtain in this town. WiFi service is around, but spotty (O, Mr. "linksys", Where Art Thou?), and the few cafes or bars that offer it are often very subtle - or downright obtuse - about the service availability. We've been slumming it in the local Internet cafes (and dealing with the damn French keyboards), but today I needed to get my Mac online so I could blog, upload some photos, and generally geek out.

I found a place down the way - a nice restaurant - who, just after I ordered a cappuccino, slipped me a small piece of paper with a username and password good for 60 minutes' access on it. Log in, connect, and go.

And now, here I am, drinking coffee and watching Flickr receive my files.

Aaaaahhhhhhh.....

We had an awesome Italian lunch with a Microsoft colleague of mine, and then walked the city as a trio. Paris is composed, block after block, of restaurants and shops (clothing, books, cell phones) and little corner stores (tobacco, wine, fruit), stretching out miles without end. It makes the city incredibly pedestrian-friendly, and also ensures that most Parisians can get their necessities within a very short radius from their homes. (As a consequence, I suspect that Paris is probably a good town in which to be elderly.)

Of course, this endless sprawl produces some gems - a fantastic Japanese restaurant, or a wonderful tailor - and once word gets out, then people start taking the Metro to get to the favored establishment. It creates the impression that there's always one more thing around the corner, some new taste to try.

It's really pretty seductive.

Elaine's a biblio geek, so we capped the day with a trip out on Metro 14 to the national library - Francois-Mitterrand public facility. It's gorgeous, encompasses an entire city block, and from the outside appears to be four slender skyscrapers (these are, in fact, the stacks). Inside, you buy a 3-some Euro ticket to gain access to the archives you're interested in. We checked out a couple, and I caught up a bit with some American newspapers. From there, we walked home, across the Seine (past Notre Dame), and finally stopped for gelato at one of the local corners before calling it a night

Again - seductive.

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 20, 2006 11:52 PM.
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October 19, 2006

Paris, Day Five: Arc de Triomphe

The shameless, Ugly American™ sightseeing continued today with a visit to the Arc de Triomphe and long stroll along the Champs-Elysees.

The Arc is quite an amazing structure, and it's also your typical over-ambitious-politican-loses-his-funding story. Turns out the Parisians took a few years longer than they'd originally intended, but finally completed the thing about a hundred years ago. Today, it's situated at the center of 12(!) different roadways, and the view from the top offers a fantastic panorama of Paris. The spiral staircase up is a bit daunting, but it's not nearly as bad as feared from the ground.

One other thing the view offers is the unique sight of Parisian drivers trying to get around a 12-way intersection. There are no traffic lights or signs or anything, so people just do what they can, whether they're on a moped, Smart car, BMW or city bus. It's nutty. If you're interested, I shot video - take a look for yourself (107.3 MB, QuickTime required).

The Champs-Elysees is a long boulevard of shopping, shopping, and more shopping - think Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, and you've got the right idea. The Parisians bitch about it ("so commercial ... [drag on cigarette] ... so bourgeois"), but it's clearly a big see-and-be-seen center in the city. Elaine and I saw lots of Pretty People ™ standing around, looking at one another, and spending tons of Euro.

Oh, and the chocolate shops are astounding.

Some general thoughts on Paris, Day Five:

• There are public toilets everywhere in Paris, and, apparently, they're used frequently by ... everybody (including Yours Truly, who had to give one a try for curiosity's sake). Unlike most major cities (and even beloved Seattle), I've yet to encounter the Alley O' Urine here in Paris. It's nice, and speaks to the fact that people don't, you know, like urinating in public if they can help it. (Sadly, we in the States like to make you buy something before you can use a clean toilet.),
• The public-toilet program doesn't appear to cover canines. Dog poop is everywhere. Parisians love their dogs, and they (apparently) don't see the point of picking up after Fido. As such, most streets have little (ahem) presents (ahem) littering them, like small, stinky land mines. I've been told that things are dramatically better than they were a few short years ago - the new mayor started a cleanliness crackdown program, hired some street cleaners, and started fining people. Citizens were outraged at first, but have since begrudgingly admitted the city looks better.
• (I'm always fascinated by local politics.)
• I've seen very few homeless people. I've encountered exactly two beggars, and both of them were in highly-trafficked tourist areas. They're fairly aggressive and persistent, but, truthfully, rare. This is, I'm told, due to the French welfare system - people can get about 400 Euro a month, medical care, and assistance finding a job as part of their citizenship. This is, uh, different than what we're doing in the US.
• If you come to Europe, get a phone card. Be sure to get one that has a smart chip in it (and is probably from France Telecom). Most of the pay phones don't take coins, so you need to use a smartcard (or a toll-free number) to use the public booths. Public phones are well-used in France, too - everyone has a cell, it seems, but the booths are always busy, and seem to be used by a wide cross-section of the citizenry. Phone-card rates are pretty cheap, too - we've phoned the States a few times on a 7.5-Euro card, and still have money left over.
• Oh, one other thing - before you go, call your bank and let 'em know you're abroad. It can avoid some, shall we say, awkwardness, when your account gets flagged for unusual activity.
• (Not that I have any personal experience with that, or anything.)
• (I'm just saying.)
• The French may not like our President or our wars, but they do like our music - American pop is omnipresent. The grocery store played "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, for Pete's sake.
• Graffiti is everywhere, including places where you scratch your head and go, "how'd they paint that?" - like the too-tight underground metro tunnels. National monuments and treasures seem to have escaped the spray paint, however - it's alleys and boarded-up shops that have it the worst. There's so much of it that over time you go from shocked to annoyed to kind of astonished.

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 19, 2006 10:41 PM.
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October 18, 2006

Paris, Day Four: Musee d'Orsay

Our fourth day in town, and we decided to do some traditional Paris sightseeing. We walked all over this town, snapping photos and pointing at every old building we saw (and frankly, that's a lot of old buildings). A few notes:

• Nothing opens early in this town. Nothing. As a point of reference, Starbucks opens at 8:30(!).
• Most shops and essential services close between 5 and 8 PM. If you need something from the grocery store, better get it before 8.
• It's ridiculously easy to get lost in this city. Paris is a five-storey city (they've height-capped the buildings). One consequence of this decision is that you've got no real frames of reference for anything when wandering - no tall buildings to serve as landmarks, nothing. The buildings thus stretch out into infinity, and, since the streets loop, curve, and double back on themselves, you get turned around real quick. It's like Colossal Cave Adventure - "You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike."
• The food continues to dazzle. We had lunch at this fabulous place Elaine loves, called l'Ardoise, which is one of those restaurants where asking for ketchup will likely get you killed. They do a fixed-price lunch menu, and the place was half-full when we arrived. It was clear that the Parisians in attendance - businessmen, retirees, all of them - were enjoying the slower pace of life. Two hour lunches are, apparently, commonplace. After tasting the food, I can see why.
• Oh, the wine kicks ass, too. Their "house white" is this awesome stuff - Macon Villages, Domaine Valette, 2003. Whoa.
• Being tourists, we decided to hit a museum, and chose Musee d'Orsay. It's constructed in a former train station, and features a little bit of everything, from sculpture to impressionist paintings. I saw some Van Gough and Monet; I'm not much of an art person, but we got the walking-tour headset and I really enjoyed myself.
• Walking St. Germain calls for gawking and the drinking of coffee. We did both.
• Drinking wine at street-corner cafes while enjoying a light salad and listening to three young guys argue about philosophy from three tables over is one of those simple life pleasures, you know? We need more of that in the states.
• The people here are incredibly friendly - even the waiters. I feared the French reputation for rudeness, aloofness, and general, well, Frenchiness, but have been shocked at how nice everyone is. People are patient, smiling, willing to help - even though my French is terrible (Elaine tells me I speak the language with a German accent). We're making an effort, of course, and that helps, but it's a very warm city.
• Immersing yourself in a new place, with a new language for 96 hours will quickly attenuate you to the sound of your native tongue. People speaking Engligh within 30 feet of me will cause my head to involuntarily swivel their direction.

And that, dear friends, is Wednesday. (We have to jam if we're going to make it to the grocery store before it closes.)

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 18, 2006 7:35 PM.
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October 17, 2006

Paris, Day Three: Space Mountain: Mission 2

Today, we got to check out Disneyland Paris.

Getting to DLP is about the easiest thing ever - just take the RER "A" train to its Eastern terminus in Marnee-la-Vallee, get off, walk out of the station, and turn right. You're there.

Like Disneyland in Anaheim, Paris has two parks. The US has Disneyland and California Adventure. Paris has Disneyland and Walt Disney Studios. We'll get to Walt Disney Studios in a sec.

Disneyland Paris is very much modeled on Anaheim's Disneyland, and less on Orlando's Magic Kingdom. The park has a keenly Parisian feel that comes through in the art design, landscaping, painting, and attractions. For example, Paris' Sleeping Beauty Castle isn't as small as Aneheim's, or as large as Cinderella Castle in Orlando - instead, it takes a middle path, choosing iconography over landscape domination. Food, too, is different - in addition to the usual American-style stuff (burgers, fries, etc.), the food choices reflect local tastes, such as baguettes and Nescafe. (And yes, the restaurants all serve wine.)

But probably the best example of the park's Paris-ifcation is that Disneyland Paris doesn't have a "Tomorrowland" - rather, it has "Discoveryland", which is kinda what Tomorrowland might've been if the future envisioned by Jules Verne came to pass.

As a wicked example of what that means from a theming perspective, consider Space Mountain. Formally known as "Space Mountain: Mission 2", the ride is completely different from its predecessors in Orlando, Anaheim and Tokyo. Rather than the clean, white, futuristic lines and space-station motif of the other Space Mountains, Mission 2 uses an ornate, Victorian look; the idea is that you're being launched out of one of Verne's ancient "moon cannons" into the farthest reaches of the universe. What's killer about this is that you actually induction-launch at a steep angle along the outside of the building (with a big burst of steam), then arc and dive into Space Mountain proper from the top. (I shot a 30-second video of this with my camera; it's cool. 46.7 MB, QuickTime required.)

The music wasn't working when we rode (which kinda sucked), but the effects (planets, stars, supernovas) are done in a very Rock n' Roller Coaster-ish style. (Oh, yeah, and the ride has a couple loops in it.) If you like Rock n' Roller Coaster, Space Mountain: Mission 2 won't disappoint.

The entire park is done up for Halloween, with these "pumpkin guys" running around and causing mischief. (Check my photostream for details; suffice to say, Richard would love it.) It's a very cool, creative motif, and complemented with a "Disney Villains" parade every afternoon. Sadly, there's no "Haunted Mansion Holiday" in Paris.

Paris has some original rides, such as "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril" - a classic outdoor roller coaster, with some Indy-ish theming, and it's actually kinda cool. There's no clone of this ride at any Disney park that I know of.

Most of the other rides are Paris-local adaptations of the greatest hits from the other Disney parks - Pirates of the Caribbean, "it's a small world" (closed, sadly, for the holiday overlay), Big Thunder Mountain, and the Phantom Manor (aka the Haunted Mansion).

Without question, Big Thunder at Paris is the coolest, baddest version of the coaster, ever. Let's start with the great stuff: it's an island. Thunder Mountain sits smack-dab in the middle of the Thunder Mesa lagoon, so to get you out to the island they acutally run you under the lagoon. (How cool is that?) It's fast, it's smooth, it's fun, and just excellent. I'd say it beats Space Mountain: Mission 2 in terms of overall quality. It's that good, and that novel.

Overall, DLP isn't as dense as its cousin in Anaheim, but it's certainly worth a visit. I'm not sure, exactly, who the market for this park is. Local Parisians? Families from Spain, Italy, Germany and the UK? Disney fans from the States? The park's inability to make a profit is somewhat legendary, but there are good things, here. The local color is a nice change from Disney's usual strategy of cloning a successful ride and then transplanting it into all its other parks.

We wrapped up our Disneyland visit right as the Villains parade was getting under way, and popped over to the Walt Disney Studios park. I didn't know a whole lot about this one - I've visited Disney-MGM studios, of course, and have spent time in the Hollywood Backlot area of California Adventure. So to say that I was underwhelmed, well, would be kind. This puppy is barely a park, and it's clearly been built on the cheap. Disney Studios has exactly two(!) rides - Rock n' Roller Coaster and a "flying carpet ride". The rest are "ride experiences" like the behind-the-scenes tour, or some of the stuff you get at Universal Studios.

(Suddenly, California Adventure doesn't look so bad.)

They do have a Tower of Terror (very visibly) under construction, but I have no idea who would consider paying money to get in to this park. It's a second gate that shouldn't be one - we got in for free (the default ticket is a one-day park hopper), and I'm glad - if I'd spent an extra $5 for this, it'd have been too much. Really.

What am I talking about? Well, take a look at this photo that depicts the outside of the Rock n' Roller coaster at Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando. Note the giant guitar, the integrated lights, the festive feeling. Yes, it's just a roller coaster, but the ride feels like a place, an event, a happening. Now look at the companion entryway at Walt Disney Studios. We have a billboard. And a cheap one. Period. No theming, no nothing. It's actually tacky. This, um, efficiency manages to insinuate itself throughout the park. It's very un-Disneylike, and it's penny-wise, Euro-foolish, in my opinion.

Ah, well. We rode the coaster twice and called it a (happy) day.

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 17, 2006 8:39 PM.
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October 16, 2006

Paris, Day Two: Eiffel Tower

Travel takes it out of you. Or at least, that's what I'm telling myself to explain why I slept for 16 hours last night. Holy cow! (All I can say is : I clearly needed it.)

Elaine and I emerged from the apartment around 2 PM, blinking, well-rested, and wide-eyed, and started searching for food. The day was going to be spent getting to know the neighborhood.

We headed out the door and got some (typically) incredible sandwiches from a street vendor, then strolled along and just enjoyed the bustle and vibe of Paris. As we approached a very busy intersection, I spied the international symbol for coffee, in all its green, mermaided glory: Starbucks.

Yes, a Starbucks. Call me a corporate sellout; I don't care. I got my iced Americano on while we munched our sandwiches and watched people go by.

(Fun Fact #1: The "venti" size in France is not as big as the "venti" size in the US. Interpret this to mean whatever you like.)

There are a lot, lot, LOT of scooters and mototcycles here. I expected more bicycles, but there are relatively few to be found. People seem to walk, or hop on a scooter, moped, or 650-cc motorbike to go places. The guy who let us the apartment zoomed away on a 250-cc scooter, a very common model around here.

People do walk everywhere around here. Foot power is the dominant form of transport, even down to the late-thirtyish guy I saw in a full business suit, kicking his way through the crowd on a Razor scooter, cell phone to his ear. Nobody bat an eyelash at the dude.

After strolling for a bit (the weather was spectacular - sunny and crisp), we decided to hit the Eiffel Tower, which is one of those Parisian landmarks that, like the Space Needle, draws tourists like moths to flame. We bought ourselves a couple of week-long Metro passes (an amusing exercise when your lnaguage skills are marginal), hopped the train and popped out just in sight of the Tower.

(Fun Fact #2: where the Tube uses metal wheels - it's a full rail system - Paris' Metro uses rubber tires. Who'da thunk?)

If I can say anything at all about the Eiffel Tower, it's just this: wow. It's incredible. Forget the comparisons to the Space Needle or the Stratosphere or the CN Tower, or [insert name of famous tall building here]. The Eiffel Tower is so tall, so massive, so just ... brutal in its raw functionalism, in its wrought-ironness, that comparing it to other buildings is like comparing a Howitzer to a pea shooter. Really. It's that different.

We spent a few hours at the Tower, going all the way up to the top (the queues for the elevators are substantial), snapping pictures, talking to other Americans who happened to be in line (there were a lot), enjoying the sound of dozens of languages being spoken over (and to) one another.

Departed around half-past six and walked the river, swinging by another sandwich shop for dinner and then enjoying our catch in front of the Louvre. We strolled the rest of the way home, stopped for groceries and a quick 30-minute Internet session (of which, perhaps 4 minutes were actually productive - stupid keyboards), and then called it a night.

Tomorrow, we go to Disneyland Paris. Can. Not. Wait.

(Flickr photostream is available.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 16, 2006 11:32 PM.
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October 15, 2006

Paris, Day One: Arrival

We're here.

Our route took us from Seattle through Houston. The layover wasn't too bad; we had about four hours, which actually gave us enough time for a nice sit-down lunch and some book shopping at one of the mini-Borders they've got everywhere.

Notes:

• Continental's airplanes lack a 13th row. They go 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, just like fine hotels everywhere. Since when did the airline industry develop triskaidekaphobia?
• Continental is showing Poseidon as their inflight movie these days. The beauty of an airline showing a luxury-liner disaster movie (it's a sure bet no airline has shown, or ever will show, Flightplan, Turbulence or United 93) is that is serves to both entertain and to warn -- "See, this is what happens when you take that other mode of transportation from A to B!". I wonder if there's a trend, here, with boats showing car-crash or stranded-motorist movies (Breakdown?).
• The fact that Poseidon, Breakdown and Big Trouble In Little China (arguably, a car-breakdown-goes-bad movie) all star Kurt Russell is kinda funny. The guy's had a varied career, I guess.
• Inflight Grisham damage: The Chamber, The Last Juror, The Brethren.
• Keyword Assistant: awesome product. I was behind on tagging my photots, and, as anyone who uses iPhoto knows, the product's default keyword system was designed by drunk, retarded monkeys. This little plugin let me cruise through nearly a thousand new photos (I love my camera) in about an hour. Hands stay on the keyboard, smart integration with AddressBook. It totally, totally rocks.
• Before leaving, I bought a new game for the iPod - Zuma. It's totally addictive, and a nice break from the crazy-making, crack-like Vortex.
• My iPod battery doesn't go as far while playing games as it does while listening to music. The new ones are rumored to have better battery life. Hm...
• I'm tired of airplanes. Tired, tired, tired. Tired of the seats, the food, sitting on my ass for six-to-ten hours a shot. I've got a limited amount of travel between now and the end of the new year (Marnie's wedding, really) and that is it for me for a while.
• This is my fourth trip to Europe since April (!), and I have yet to be disappointed by the beauty of flying in to the sunrise. Dark, dark night over the Atlantic, giving way to small streaks of light and, ultimately, orange brilliance as the sun makes its appearance. It's dazzling, wonderful.
• Charles de Gaulle airport ocillates between bright/clean/modern and shabby/run-down/Heathrowish. It just depends on which 5-foot section you're in at the moment.
• I had an amazing sandwich at the airport - flavorful, soft, wonderful. Elaine assures me that the food here is going to blow my mind.
• The Paris Metro system is modeled heavily on the Tube in London, right down to the station designs, signage, you name it. I can't read a lick of French, but trains are trains. It's cool, and certainly makes it easy for us to get around.
• We have the cutest little loft. Rather than get a hotel, we opted to rent an apartment through an online service. It's cute, small, European in every way, and absolutely perfect for us. We've got a minifridge for supplies (so we hit the local mini-grocer and got sandwich fixin's), small kitchen, couch, you name it.
• What we don't have is Internet or phone service in the loft. And French keyboards are about fifteen times more frustrating than German keyboards when it comes to letter placement, etc. The local Internet cafe charges 1 Euro for 15 minutes, and I swear 10 of my 15 were spent looking for the "@" sign.

We're actually here. I can't believe it.

(Flickr photostream is available, if you're curious.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 15, 2006 11:21 PM.
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October 14, 2006

Off To Paris

I'm at gate B11 of SeaTac (didn't I just leave this place?), waiting with Elaine to board our flight to Houston, and then, eventually, Paris. We arrive Sunday morning, 11 AM, local time.

It may seem perverse to be traveling for fun on the heels of so much work travel, but I've been looking forward to this for the last couple months. Our plan is to sleep a lot, see the sights, eat some excellent food and just ... relax.

(Oh, and hit Disneyland Paris.)

I'll blog when I can. Vacation, baby! Whoo-hoo!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 14, 2006 7:48 AM.
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October 10, 2006

Travel Makes You Tired

I'm back. And, hoo boy, am I tired.

Allie phoned me at work today and harassed me about my profound Lack O' Blogging these past few weeks ("Um, there was this great blog I used to read before the author apparently disappeared off the face of planet Earth..."), and, of course, she was right. The blog's been, well, a little barren of late.

The reason? Travel.

Yeah, all that oh-so-sexy travel I was planning to do for work has now transpired, which took me 'round the globe, to places as disparate as Bentonville, Arkansas and Munich, Germany, with side trips to Virginia, New York, Minnesota, and (just to round out the mix a bit) Canada.

Continuously traveling for a month just wiped me out. I've had more packets of peanuts than I care to admit, have sat on my butt for far, far longer than I ever anticipated, suffered through (several) computer breakdowns and paid more than a few times for that magical $5 in-flight mini-bottle of Chardonnay.

Hence: no blogging. There's something creatively draining about sitting at the bar of the airport Holiday Inn in Rochester, New York at 11 PM, ordering whatever (greasy) food they're still serving, and trying to get your thoughts wrapped 'round your next day. (I felt like The Narrator from Fight Club on more than one occassion.)

That said, I'm home (and close to taking a much needed vacation in Paris with 'Lane), have finally caught up on my sleep, and am now rubbing my eyes and blinking at my computer monitor. Expect semi-regular updates as we go.

Oh, a few notes from the Germany trip. No particular order:

• When you fly internationally at LAX, you go to the Tom Bradley International Terminal. It's a building that's forever stuck in 1972, down to the tile on the walls and the brown carpet. It's not the most auspicious way to start your journey abroad.
• (Tom Bradley does have a handful of open WiFi networks, though, so it's not as 1972 as it appears.)
• Tom Bradley doesn't board flights directly. So a really cool thing they do is to gather up all the passengers at the gate and then load 'em on to a bus to ride along the tarmac to the plane itself. (I felt like an astronaut, or something!)
• One of my fellow passengers to Munich looked exactly like the evil German guy from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" whose face got melted. Exactly. Down to the handkerchief, and everything!
• Lufthansa is an awesome airline. They're very professional, the flight attendants speak six languages (!), they have in-flight WiFi (at least, for as long as Connexion stays up), good food, and serve complimentary cocktails.
• Unlike almost every other airline on Earth, I find it relatively easy to sleep on Lufthansa. (See "complimentary cocktails", above.)
• Munich is a very, very lush, very green city. The airport is clean, modern - very European. I fell instantly in love.
• It was totally cool to go back to Germany. I'd not been since '89, and my language skills were, um, rusty, to put it politely. It came back to me, though - I'd stare at a sign ("Geldautomat?") or overhear a conversation, and suddenly know what the heck was going on ("Cash machine!"). My speaking skills were undoubtedly embarrassing, but I was able to get around OK - ordering food, talking to cabbies, and so on. I loved it.
• The city of Munich itself is like something you'd see at EPCOT - lots of glass and steel and concrete. It's so clean, too - honestly, it's like a zoomed-up scale model of a city, rather than a gritty, dirty urban center.
• Everyone drives a BMW, Mercedes, or VW.
• (No, really.)
• Signs for just about everything were in a sort of Genericized International Pictogram, like reading IKEA furniture assembly instructions. (I half expected to be handed an Allen wrench.)
• I made it to Oktoberfest - twice. The first time was shortly after arrival on Sunday night, and the second was on Wednesday, after business wrapped up. The scope of the thing is just massive, and totally exceeded my expectations. They have roller coasters (!), and yes, the beer is wonderful.
• My PC died (again) on this trip. (I seem to have the worst luck with laptops right now.) As such, I spent a lot of time working in the hotel business center, banging away on their machines.
• Fun Fact: German keyboards are not standard QWERTY. The Z and the Y are transposed, for instance, while the "@" is hiding alongside the "Q" and the "/" is located above the "7". It makes for a fun exercise in touch-typing: I'd type "crazy", and wind up staring at some Chechnyan word.
• We had business in Frankfurt, so we rented a car and I finally got to fulfill my teenage-boy fantasy of driving on the Autobahn. It was excellent. German roads are well-designed and well-maintained, and the rental was a Mercedes (natch). So we cranked the car up to see what it could do, and I managed to set a personal land-speed record of slightly-better than 220 kph (or 138 mph, in local parlance).
• (It's worth pointing out that my previous, personal land-speed record of 125.4 mph was set at the Richard Petty Driving Experience at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida in 2002. I was in a NASCAR vehicle on a closed track, wearing a jumpsuit and crash helmet, and restrained by a 5-point safety harness.)
• Even at 138 mps, the Mercedes was like glass.
• I've become addicted to John Grisham novels as a way of passing the time on flights. I've read "The Broker", "The King of Torts", "The Summons", and "The Street Lawyer" - and am halfway through "The Chamber." I buy these things at the Hudson News outlets and just chew 'em up. Awesome.

Damn, it's good to be home.

UPDATE, December 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 10, 2006 9:20 PM.
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September 21, 2006

Back From Virginia

I'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. Last updated September 21, 2006 11:06 PM.
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September 17, 2006

Back From Bentonville

I'm traveling a lot over the next few weeks, zipping hither and yon in order to talk to customers about Visio. My most recent trip was an out-and-back on Thursday and Friday that took me to Bentonville, Arkansas.

The trip was my first-ever to the great state of Arkansas (I've been through Oklahoma and lived in Texas, but Arkansas has avoided my travel lists up to this point), and I wasn't sure what to expect. Some general notes from the trip:

• This was my first time flying with my shiny new United Premier card. Although the "Welcome!" kit that United sends you contains all kinds of whizzy-sounding benefits, the primary benefit - at least, at my paltry level of Premier-ness - is that you get to board the plane first and, if they have room, they're likely to bump you to Economy Plus. While this is nice, it's a far cry from the exclusive-nightclub feeling that the materials touted - I half-expected to arrive for the plane, have the big bouncer guy lift the velvet rope, and find myself with a martini, surrounded by supermodels, and mercilessly mocking the non-Premier people who can't see me and my Premier pals from behind the one-way glass.
• Not that I'm complaining.
• (Especially about the extra five or six inches of legroom.)
• This "no liquids, gels, or aerosols" policy is really annoying. I usually carry my overnight bag on to the flight with me, and, stupidly, forgot that I had toothpaste, shaving cream, and hair product in my kit. The (very) nice TSA people found the stuff, of course, and gave me the option of a) chucking it, or b) checking my bag with United by going out of line, back to the counter, and dealing with it there. I had enough time on Thursday morning to check the bag, but, in a twist of bad timing, arrived at the Fayetteville airport on Friday night about 30 minutes before my flight and United refused to take my bag. So I wound up chucking my stuff anyhow. (sigh).
• My new work PC laptop died on me while heading out to Arkansas. This is, if you work for Microsoft, the rough equivalent of having your vocal cords removed and then being told to go give a presentation to 10,000 people. Fortunately, I'm a believer in paper backup copies of every travel document, but it does mean that I'm losing my weekend to getting caught back up on stuff I didn't do while on the road.
• The untimely death of the laptop also means I'm back on my much-hated Tablet for the duration of my travels, at least until Microsoft IT fixes my now-dead laptop or buys me a MacBook Pro with Parallels on it.
• (Fingers crossed for the MacBook.)
• Douglas Coupland's new book, "jPod," is really good stuff. I'm a huge fan of Coupland's earlier work ("Shampoo Planet"), but his late-nineties material really started to lose me. jPod is a fine return to form, nailing the zeitgeist of bored, disaffected tech workers with a level of insight he's been unable to bring since "Microserfs." If you're in tech and under 35, read it.
• I bought one of Apple's new games for the iPod - Vortex - through the iTunes Store, and am now hopelessly addicted to it. It's a 3D "breakout" clone with terrific graphics, music and gameplay, and it makes excellent use of the iPod scroll wheel. I ran my iPod battery down to zero because I couldn't put it down.
• (Stupid Apple, making stupid addictive games.)
• Arkansas is really, really beautiful. I flew to Denver and transferred to a regional jet; the flight to Bentonville was at a nice, lower altitude, so I got a great look at how lush and green everything is. It's very much like flying in to Idaho - rural, but not desolate, with lots of shiny new shopping malls and hotels dotting the landscape. The people were very friendly as well. It feels like a nice place to visit for a week or so, especially if you have family or friends there.
• I always forget how shagged out I get when I fly. I got in about half-past midnight on Saturday, hoovered up a good eight hours of sleep, and still felt spooly all day yesterday. I do the usual travel best practices - lots of water, no booze, pack a sandwich, try to sleep - and it doesn't seem to matter. Sigh. The next few weeks are gonna be a marathon.

I'm leaving for Virginia this week, so I'll post when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 17, 2006 12:01 PM.
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September 3, 2006

Guten Tag!

Work is taking me to Munich later this month.

(Munich!)

It's been a while since I've been to Germany. I can hear the guy in the back of the room calling out, "How long has it been?", so I'll just say that the last time I was in Germany, there were, like, two of them. East and West. I was on a five-week bicycle tour of the country with my high school's German club in the summer of '89. We went to Frankfurt, Berlin, Austria, and Munich. I was all of 16, and loved it.

(In fact, I got drunk for the first time in my life in the Hofbrahaus - yes, that one - which, if you think about it, is a pretty killer way to do it.)

So I'm off, dear readers, and, as usual, since Uncle Bill's is paying my freight and, you know, expects me do do actual work while I'm there, I'm not going to have a lot of time for sightseeing or personal stuff. However, I've had good luck with suggestions from the apparently-well-traveled folks who scan this blog on Things To Do When Abroad, so I'm throwin' it to you all - got suggestions of great stuff to do in/around Munich?

(No need to suggest the Hofbrauhaus. That date's in the calendar already, marked in pen, highlighted, underlined, and has pre-empitve beer spills on the page.)

Got any recommendations?

(Nate and Jo: I'll be back in time - just in time - for your nuptials. No worries.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 3, 2006 8:59 PM.
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August 9, 2006

Orlando, MGX & Expedition Everest

Gina wrote me on Tuesday with the following:

When were you in Orlando? I was looking at your Flickr photos and it looks like you did expedition everest?

Short answer: yeah, I was in Orlando. And yes, I got to ride "Expedition Everest." But due to the loss of my hard drive, the post I'd worked on that was All About My Trip To Florida wound up getting lost.

So here we go, as best as can be reconstructed from that other storage system called "long term memory."

I went to Orlando on July 18 to attend the Microsoft Global Exchange, or MGX. MGX is a week-long conference for Microsoft's sales and marketing professionals; they fly in from all over the world to see executive presentations, hear about new products, watch demos (MGX is demos-a-go-go), and network with one another. Microsoft rented both the TD Waterhouse Centre and the Orange County Convention Center for the duration; TD Waterhouse is where all the executive sessions are held, while the interactive learning stuff is in the Convention Center breakout rooms.

The scale of the show is just crazy, and the whole thing tends to be a party! party! party! atmosphere (for instance, the closing-night party was at Universal Studios Florida - we got run of the place, including complementary food, drink, and booze).

(MGX has been known to get out of hand - rumor is that Microsoft isn't allowed to book another company function on Maui ever again after one particularly, um, "rowdy" year.)

So I fly down to Florida for the week and wind up staying in the Walt Disney World Dolphin hotel. I'm bunked down with Balu, a classmate from UW, and we're both pretty busy with sessions, meetings, and whatnot. For a Disney geek like me, this is a bit torture-ish: just outside my window I can see the top of the Contemporary Resort and Space Mountain, as well as the top of Everest over at Animal Kingdom. But, lacking time to do much of anything personal - let alone Theme Parkin' - I'm stuck with my nose to the glass, staring into the candy store from the sidewalk.

Ah, well.

So MGX wraps up on Saturday night, people are going crazy at Universal Studios, and I slip out around midnight to head back to the hotel. My flight leaves Sunday night at 6:30, and I've figured out that I've got an oasis of personal time - about five hours, tops - to get up in the morning, pack, and hit Animal Kindgom before I have to get back to the hotel and head for the airport.

And so, on Sunday morning at 11 AM, I'm in the single-rider line for "Expedition Everest", bypassing entirely the 60-minute wait. And, after about 20 minutes of anticipation, I'm through the line and sitting in the coaster, slightly disbelieving that the previous day I'd been watching Steve Balmer hold court in front of 14,500 people at a sports stadium.

Here's the verdict on "Everest": it's good. It's not the best thing I've ever ridden (and it's not the best coaster on property -that's still the "Rock n' Roller Coaster"), but it's a solid addition to a park that needs it.

In many ways, "Everest" is a cleaned up, modern version of Disneyland's "Matterhorn." Both rides have the same general motif (snowy mountain), gimmick (encounter with the Abominable Snowman and the Yeti, respectively), and ride mechanism (both are roller coasters). The difference, of course, is 50 years; where the Matterhorn is the first-ever steel-tube coaster in the United States (and looks it), "Everest" is a clean, smooth, well-balanced, modern thrill ride. Just not too thrilling.

And that's the point, I think, for Disney. This coaster is supposed to be fun enough for the teens, but not too scary or intense for Mom, Dad, and Little Gav. They've succeeded on that score - it's a coaster with street cred, but not too much attitude.

I rode it twice, and then I was done. With a few hours still remaining on my personal shot clock, I upgraded my ticket to a Park Hopper and zoomed over to Epcot to ride "Soarin'." A 75-minute (!) wait later, I was flying over California. (And grinning like a madman - I love that ride.)

That's my story, and I'm stickin' to it. And if you want the pictures, check out my Flickr photostream.

(PS - if you've ever got the opportunity, going to a theme park by yourself is a ton of fun. Single rider lines reduce your wait, and you feel like you've got run of the place. I'd forgotten how great it was when I did my day at Magic Mountain in 2004.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 9, 2006 11:25 PM.
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August 8, 2006

Paris! October! Woot!

Elaine and I are off to Paris in October for 10 days. She's got a friend who's tyin' the knot over there, and the two of us have decided to take some much-earned PTO and run around the city. I've never been to France before, so this is quite a treat for me - and it's all pleasure, no business. The work laptop stays in Redmond.

I bought the airline tickets today. And I feel all tingly!

Anyone got suggestions of things to do and see? (And no, I'm not going to Disneyland Paris...)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 8, 2006 10:53 PM.
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July 16, 2006

Sunday Drive

You know something? Going for a Sunday drive is a lot of fun.

Two weeks ago, I bought myself a 2006 Honda Shadow (I'll get to the buying experience in a second, but bear with me for the moment). The bike is a necessary part of my Grand Plan to ride the four corners of the United States with my father in 2008. I've had a motorcycle endorsement for better than 13 years now, but it's been nearly a decade since I owned my own two-wheeled deathtrap. So I thought it prudent to get the bike now, get comfortable on it, and figure out the quirks so I'm able to focus on the road (and not the machine) over the course of our 12,000-mile journey.

Now, I haven't owned any kind of motor vehicle since December '03, when my Jetta got totaled. Since then, I've been a committed (fanatical?) transit rider/walker, taking the bus to work and walking all over Seattle (this also makes me, according to Knute Berger, a mooch).

I don't want to use the Shadow for commuting: it's purely a recreational vehicle. This is partially because the bike is so frickin' impractical for work (when you get dressed up in all the protective gear and whatnot, you a) look like RoboCop and b) are guaranteed to have wrinkled anything you're wearing underneath), and also because the bus really is more convenient, especially when I'm heading downtown after work for a Storm game or to have dinner with friends.

With "recreation" in mind, I've been taking the bike out the past couple of Sunday mornings for rides around the city and the region - out to Woodinville on 520, say, or zooming around Mercer Island. Today, for instance, I spent a good hour or so riding north to Greenlake, around the lake, back down into the city core on the Viaduct, and finally around Cap Hill and home.

It's a total blast.

There's a wonderful, simple joy of taking an aimless, Sunday-morning drive around the city. Nowhere to be, nothing in particular to do, no errands to handle - just you, the road, and the machine. Want a coffee? Want to pull over to visit a park? Want to just take it a little easy and marvel at Mount Rainier on a sunny day? No problem; just do it.

(Oh, hey -- I'm looking for riding partners, too: Vaitkadamus has a bike, and he and I are talking about some good Sunday-morning excursions. If you're interested in joining me, let me know.)

So. The bike. It's a gorgeous (see photo) Honda Shadow Aero 750. I bought it from Mac's Cycle in Clarkston, Washington on Friday, the 30th. I packed my motorcycle helmet, flew to Spokane, hopped on the back of my dad's BMW at the airport, and we rode the 120 miles to the dealership.

(Math-oriented readers might suspect that "a flight to Spokane" plus "120 miles" is a long way from Seattle. You'd be right. If you want to know where Clarkston is, just imagine a point in space that's as far away from Seattle as you can get without being in Idaho or Oregon, and you're pretty much there. If you need more detail, Google Maps can help. Why'd we choose Mac's? Because my father likes the guy who runs it, and they gave me a great deal. Relationship selling strikes again!)

After doing the paperwork (and picking up the Kevlar-reinforced jacket, boots, and pants - you can't be too careful, kids), Dad and I hit the highway. We zoomed down SR 12, past Chief Timothy Park, switched on to the 260 and continued on to the 261. We called it a night after about 120 miles, packing it in at the M&M Motel in Connell, Washington.

The next morning we were up and off at 7 AM, riding up toward Moses Lake, past Ephrata and on to Waterville. We parted ways toward Wenatchee and I headed back to Seattle along Highway 2, riding through Leavenworth, Stevens Pass, Skykomish, Gold Bar, and Monroe, ultimately popping out on SR522. The total mileage was 394.5 miles - not too shabby for a weekend trip.

So. I've got the machine, I'm warming up to it, and I'm spending my Sundays in the saddle.

Anyone up for a ride?

(Oh: one final, funny, karmic bit: as it happens, June 30 was the last day of the taxable period for the now-defunct Monorail. And, yep - that means I paid it. Somehow, that seems fitting, doesn't it?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 16, 2006 12:57 PM.
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June 29, 2006

London, Reloaded: Day Five

Today was a travel day, which brings (as always) some general, take-'em-as-you-like-'em observations:

• Despite my careful planning and energy management, I simply could not sleep last night. I haven't the foggiest idea why this might be, but it's really annoying.
• The BBC 24-hour news service is a great thing to watch when you can't sleep. It's soothing and professional in a way that American televised news simply isn't. American news programs are all about the sensational, and they serve up fear by the truckload (e.g., "Police report that a serial killer may be on the loose - what you should be doing to protect your family!"). BBC anchors are more sedate, the segments are longer, the soundbites more complete. You feel like you're getting more of the story.
• BBC TV reporters also ask questions. I'd forgotten what the hell that looked like. I caught a segment around 4 AM with a reporter drilling a new politician in Ireland about the growing divide between rich and poor in that country - and how many of the policies she championed were responsible. The politician would weave, dodge, and defend a bit, but the reporter was having none of it - he just kept right on asking hard, impolite questions. It was awesome, especially compared to the softball crap that's peddled on ABC, NBC and CBS (to say nothing of the fact that you practically have to hose Bill O'Reilly's frothing, fawning saliva off Rumsfeld whenever he goes on Fox). Tim Russert should just pack it in.
• My previous, poor experience with the Heathrow Express has been shown to be an anomaly. I caught the 5:10 AM from Paddington, whizzed right to the airport, was off the train and walking to my gate just 15 minutes later. Fab. i don't know what was going on when I was here in April (the train took a looooong time), but whatever it was has been fixed.
• More props to T-Mobile: the 24-hour login I'd purchased at Starbucks yesterday was honored at the T-Mobile login system at Heathrow: no fuss, no mess ("You have 42 minutes remaining in your session..."). It was excellent to be able to get e-mail before boarding. My advice to future travelers? Get T-Mobile WiFi when you come to London, and don't dick around with hotel Internet.
• The United flight from Heathrow to Chicago was packed. I suspect that if United could have sold tickets to let people stand in the aisles, they would have.
• As a result of the full flight, I found myself in Economy. While I don't mind this, really, I do find it amazing to simply stroll from the first-class cabin, down past business class, into Economy Plus and finally to Economy. The seats become more numerous, are packed together more tightly, and have fewer amenities (frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if they charged you $10 for an Economy seat without an errant spring to stick you in the backside). They might just as well get it over with and start calling it "steerage." I can certainly see why the Hannibal Lecter treatment floated by AirBus would be considered a logical extension of what they're currently offering.
• (Anyone else find it ironic that first class gets free massage, but Economy passengers are the ones who actually need it?)
• The movie "Millions" is really good - just charming, offbeat, fun, wonderful. It may not look like your thing, but NetFlix it and give the first 20 minutes a shot. If you like it (obviously, I did), the rest'll be a treat. If it's not grabbing you, send it back - no harm, no foul.
• So, too is "Wimbledon" - it's not exactly mentally taxing (formula: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy keeps girl and overcomes personal obstacle), but it's light and fun and the leads have genuine chemistry.
• Packing books like "Understanding China" and "The Ecology Of Commerce" on long flight days is just silly: your brain won't be able to process them meaningfully after your fifth hour aloft. Instead, go with potboilers - you won't notice the time passing.

So now I'm back in Seattle, and headed for home. I'm beat, but it's great to be back. (And if my energy holds, I'll be doing "Confab" tonight ... but don't bet on it. A stiff drink and an early bedtime sound much better.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 29, 2006 4:25 PM.
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June 28, 2006

London, Reloaded: Day Four

The conference wrapped today, and, from my perspective, it's been a smashing success. I met some great folks, exchanged scads of cards, and have a thick notebook full of data and session notes. (I must confess that I'm not looking forward to prepping the trip report - it's gonna be incredibly time-consuming.)

My flight leaves Heathrow at 8 AM tomorrow, which means I need to be at the airport no later than 6. As it happens, the Tube doesn't open early enough to be of use, so I took the opportunity to walk the city in order to learn (and time) the route from my hotel to Paddington by foot. The plan is to get out the door, hoof it to Paddington, grab coffee, and jump the Heathrow Express to the airport no later than 5:30. (I'm not crazy about this option, having used the "Express" last time ... and found it wanting; however, I am not spending the exorbitant sums for a cab, and will just have to budget enough time to make it, even if the train is slow.)

Train stations in London (e.g., King's Cross, Paddington) are actually loads of fun. They're a lot like airports in the States, in that they cater to both the business traveler (quick bites, coffee, books, toothbrushes) and the tourist ("Underground" T-shirts, obnoxious postcards, photos of the Queen on coffee mugs). The street retail around a station also reflect this, so I spent a chunk of my afternoon doing some shopping for Elaine and Brian. In all, successful stuff - it's fun to shop for others when you're abroad.

The balance of today was pretty boring: I worked at Starbucks for a time, dealt with some e-mail, and got caught up on my news (the Storm won on Tuesday!). I'm off to bed now; it's going to be a long one tomorrow.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 28, 2006 12:35 PM.
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June 27, 2006

London, Reloaded: Day Three

My conference (aka "why I came to London") kicked off today. Unlike TechEd, which was a grueling five days, this is a quickie, in-and-out, two-day deal. (Yes, it feels a little gauche to fly to London for a two day conference, but I suspect the content will be worth it.)

A few notes:

• The audience chairs they're using are profoundly uncomfortable. I can't sit still, and so I keep fidgeting to get comfy. It's hell on my concentration, and totally crazy-making.
• The show itself has really, really high production value - better than TechEd, in some ways, which is really saying something. The art direction is superb, the technical systems are working flawlessly. Somebody behind the scenes really knows what they're doing with this stuff.
• The food is good - like, really, really good. They screwed up on the snacks a bit (coffee and weird, flavorless, European shortbread cookies), but the lunches are superb. They've also done a great job of helping facilitate networking and meeting others over the lunches and breaks.
• I'm feeling really, really underdressed. I'm in slacks and button-down shirt - a notch over business causal - and yet I'm sitting next to all these rail-thin European dudes who are in three-piece tailored suits that cost more than I make in a month. While I do see the occassional person in a t-shirt and jeans (hail, brother!), they're the exception. (Note to self: buy a good suit for your next European voyage.)
• The speakers are good, but this is a full-on GuruFest™, which amuses me to no end. There are three primary rules for Gurus™. First, you must be a strong presenter. Second, you must look - and act - as if everyone in the room should have heard of you (see if you can get an introduction that says, "and now, someone who needs no introduction..."). And third, you must pimp your book/DVD/consulting services/software/tape series.
• All the Gurus™ here are observing the rules to the letter.
• Conference Gurus™, in my experience, come in three primary flavors. (Sadly, we're only getting the first two at this show.) They are:

  a) The Wizened Academic. You can usually spot a Wizened Academic from across the room - he (and it's almost always a he) is of advanced years, weighs about 96 pounds, is wearing a slightly-beat-up suit, and has Coke bottle glasses and a big shock of white hair. He also is incredibly well-spoken, knows everybody on the academic side of his discipline, and will not hesitate to give you an F for talking or passing notes in class. This guy has published more papers than you can imagine, and pays for his place in the Hamptons by doing expert-witness work for a law firm he's done business with since 1872. Under no circumstances should you ever ask him a question that allows him to run down a tangent.

  b) The World-Weary Prometheus. Formerly a successful, middle-tier player in the business world (25 years' experience is a minimum, here), the World-Weary Prometheus is here to Tell You Something Important, and he's here to tell you that He's Seen It All Before. You have some excuse why your organization can't adopt methodology XYZ? He's heard it, doesn't buy it, and doesn't want to hear it. Think "Dr. Phil" (or, if female, Suze Orman), and you're getting the right picture - these guys are usually big men, usually bald, and usually have a recent book that they're going to pimp about four or five times in the first 30 minutes. Prometheus can produce an amazing number of folksy anecdotes on demand, usually involving football, cars, kids, a neighbor, or his mother. Also look out for consulting war stories involving "an unnamed company" that everybody in the audience will be able to identify from all the obvious, dropped hints ("It's a big financial services company whose name I can't say, but rhymes with Bitty Tank.").

  c) The Flamboyant Creative. This guy is the second coming of Jimmy Buffet, Wayne Newton and Dom DeLuise, all rolled in to one. He wears loud Hawaiian shirts, board shorts, flip-flops and carries the most expensive cell phone you've ever seen. Ponytail optional. He's very funny, very good in front of a room, and - here's the kicker - a total genius. For every 50,000 words that come out of his mouth, maybe 20 are worth something, but they're always priceless - the thing you remember from the conference after six months. Tends to be of the star-marquee-Guru™ type, too - if this person is at the show, their name and photo are right up at the front of the program guide, because everyone will want to attend the session.

• The Gurus™ at this show love to play the "language game". The "language game" is when you take a common phrase in business parlance (e.g., "close the books") and then proceed to explain that you know, while it's fine that some people use that phrase, you personally prefer to use Something Else (e.g., "continue the books") on account of some silly technical point (e.g., "because 'closing' implies the end") and then you justify it with some Jerry Maguire homily (e.g., "and really, shouldn't we think of business as a journey, and not a destination? How can we 'close' unless we end? No, I prefer "continue the books"...). And now that you've proven how frickin' smart you are, you get on to the rest of your presentation.
• I'm surprised (not offended, just surprised) at the number of jokes being made from the podium at the expense of Americans (e.g., "I normally don't show diagrams of this complexity to American audiences - they don't have the attention span."). And everybody is doing it.
• Jet lag sucks. I'm fighting my fatigue really hard right now - yawning, with a head full of mud. I got good sleep, but it's still 4 AM to my body.

After the show wrapped for the day, I wanted to clear my head and see more of the city. Edgware Road is a bit north of Hyde Park, so I decided to stroll down to the park and see what it was all about. As it happens, I walked through a fascinating, vibrant Lebanese ethnic district - native-language restaurants, grocery stores, newsagents', video joints and smoke shops (complete with three wizened old guys out front enjoying a Hookah).

(Naturally, it's capped by a multiplex Cinema where you can spend ten pounds to watch Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves making googly eyes at one an other. I love multiculturalism.)

Hyde park is beautiful. I walked a good portion of it, down to (and along) the Serpentine Lake. I grabbed a light bite for dinner at Dell Restaurant, strolled up and along and over the bridge, took in the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain (which was a very somber 20 minutes), and then headed to Wellington Arch and up to Speaker's Corner and Marble Arch.

I knew Hyde primarily by reputation - Douglas Adams wrote about it a lot in his "Hitchhikers'" books, and so was eager to see what all the fuss was about. It's very much London's answer to Boston Common or Central Park; the closest thing we have in Seattle is Greenlake. The park is vibrant, and heavily used by the local wildlife, rollerbladers, bikers, joggers, old couples, kids playing soccer, you name it. I could very easily see myself spending time here if I ever lived in London.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 27, 2006 2:00 PM.
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June 26, 2006

London, Reloaded: Day Two

My second day back in London kicked off with a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed wakeup - you know, the type that only seems to happen in the movies? Where the alarm goes off, Protagonist opens his eyes, sits up in bed, yawns, stretches his arms each direction, and then slides out of bed?

I had one of those. This never happens when you're supposed to be jet-lagged out of your mind. And yet - the wake-up ring came, my eyes flicked open, and I was ... ready. Astounding. Looks like the stay-up-as-late-as-you-can trick really works.

(Well, that, plus a good 10 hours' sleep after being up for 27 straight. That helps, too.)

So. The Internet. It's fantastically expensive here. Like, fantastically expensive. Like, 5 pounds (read: $9.25) for 30 minutes at one of the kiosks in the lobby. If you want in-room Internet, well, first you have to spend more to get one of those rooms ($37 more per night) and then you've got to get the Internet package (an additional $28 per day).

Look, I don't want to cast aspersions on anyone's right to make a profit (I do have an MBA, after all, and there's a part of me that's agape with sheer, slack-jawed admiration for the bastard in charge of pricing), but, as one who has, you know, sold Internet service in his life, I can simply, totally, and unequivocally tell you that this is highway robbery.

(Yes, I know Uncle Bill is paying for all this. Doesn't matter. It's offensive, no matter whose AmEx is ultimately getting hit.)

I'd also like to point out, as a matter of comparison, that when Elaine and I were in Decatur back in May, we stayed at this charming little hotel that not only had WiFi in all the rooms, but the access was free - and fast - and they had a complimentary Internet PC in the lobby (with printer!) to boot. (So take that, Big Greedy UK Hotel!)

I can't live without Internet access. Food I can go without for a bit, but not the Net. So I punted, and started looking for options. And you know what? There's a Starbucks about a half block away.

Starbucks, as you may know, has T-Mobile WiFi. 10 pounds ($18.75) for 24 hours' access.

Score.

Now, this is the part of my post when I give a big, big, big mea culpa to my b-school buddy Dave Bodmer, who works at T-Mobile (and worked, until recently, on their WiFi business). I used to hassle Dave incessantly about T-Mobile charging for WiFi at Starbucks ("Dude, it's free everywhere else!") and Dave would, patiently, explain to me that T-Mobile's customer is the business traveler who needs consistent, high-quality service - and is not the geeky loudmouth who wants fast, ubiquitous WiFi for free (aka, "the cheap bastard"). And then I'd be a jackass and roll my eyes at him.

So, here it is. Dave, buddy: you were right, I was wrong. Thank God you exist, and thank God you're in the UK.

So. A good night's sleep, some coffee, decent Internet. I spent the balance of my Monday working.

Starbucks, as it turns out, is a nice place to work for a few hours at a stretch. The coffee is good, they have food, and they've even got power plugs for the laptop. They don't hassle you about "moving along" if you're there for a few hours. And they're nonsmoking. (This last point is not trivial). While I wouldn't mind some larger tables (like the ones they have at the Starbucks on 42nd in the U District), it's a damn sight better than the uncomfortable chair and faux-desk in my hotel room.

One funny cultural thing: Starbucks in the UK doesn't do refills. In the States, you buy a grande drip coffee for $1.75 and refills are $0.55; in the UK, you just buy an all-new cup of coffee every time. A very nice barista smiled at me - and gave me a free, hey-you're-new-here refill - as he patiently explained their no-refill policy to the clueless Yank. (Bravo on the service, guys.)

One other thing: I've had no fewer than five different people comment on my "American accent." While I know we West-coasters talk funny relative to folks in the UK, I'd always imagined that we were much easier to understand because our accent is kind of a lack of accent. Turns out that was just me, kidding myself - apparently, I'm just as unintelligible to some of the folks over here as some of them are to me. Oscar Wilde's famous quip about England and the US being "two countries separated by a common language", it seems, is still true.

My evening was appropriately low-key - I hooked up with some of my Microsoft UK colleagues, went out for a few drinks and dinner, and then wound up in an English pub, watching Ukraine and Switzerland in the World Cup (Ukraine won in sudden-death). Stereotypically, the pub was packed, and not an eye in the house was focused anywhere but the flatscreen TVs. Cheers, jeers, gasps, you name it - it was all coming as one synchronized mass from the crowd.

It was a terrific capper to the day. I mean, what could be more quintessentially English than that?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 26, 2006 2:30 PM.
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June 25, 2006

London, Reloaded: Day One

Another day as a Planner, and another marathon session of airports, concourses, and locking your traytable and putting your seat in the fully-upright position. Yep, I'm back in the UK, and will be here through Thursday, the 29th.

Truth be told, getting here this time was far, far easier than last April. And I credit this entirely on my decision to fly business class.

Now, I'm not much of a big spender when it comes to airlines. Although I'm reasonably tall, I can handle cramped quarters for flights of four hours or so, and am therefore fine saving money by going coach. The tradeoff, it seems, is sleep: I can't crash in coach, which means that I can have a hard time adjusting to local time zones when making extended trips.

I've flown first class before (on an Alaskan flight from LA to Seattle), and it was nice but not spectacular. But with my need to be awake and alert when I hit the ground in London (I'm attending a conference, and we know how thrilling those can be), I decided to throw 30,000 frequent-flyer miles at United, go business class from O'Hare to Heathrow, and see what all the fuss was about.

Hoo, boy: I may not be able to go back. I'd previously equated "business class" with "more legroom", but man, was that an understatement. A few notes on the perks:

• First, they give you a reclining chair to sit in. I don't mean "reclining" in the sense of "tip your chair back a few inches" - I mean "reclining" in the sense that you're sitting in a frickin' Barcalounger. The footrest (footrest!) kicks forward. The back of the seat goes back 60 degrees. This is a seat one can sleep in.
• (Yes, I slept in it. Thank God.)
• You get constant attention from the airline staff. I'm somewhat used to the bored/disinterested flight attendant in coach that will, if prompted (and you're nice to them), bring you another Diet Pepsi. Here, they're practically feeding your fluids intravenously.
• Booze is free. I didn't partake (and was given an odd look - everyone else in the section was gettin' loaded), but the wine selection was impressive.
• Meals are excellent. It's still "airline food" but it's good airline food. I got couscous, potatoes, salad. Terrific stuff, brought in courses. They also do some tasty hot (as in heated) mixed nuts.
• Hot towels. You're given "refreshing" hot towels after takeoff and before landing. (They work, too!)
• Power. The seats have power plugs (!) for your laptop. I didn't have an adapter, but a few folks around me did. It's a cool thing to not have to worry about running out of juice midway over the Atlantic.
• Seats are also equipped with a "Relax and Refresh" kit. This contains earplugs, an eye-cover, socks, toothpaste, toothbrush, hand lotion and Kleenex.
• (Eye covers and earplugs help - a lot - when you're trying to sleep in your Barcalounger.)
• Upon arrival, you're given a "Fast Track" card that lets you cruise through immigration - basically, access to a special line at Heathrow. This didn't seem like a huge benefit at first, but after we'd landed and I saw the vast sea of people waiting in the regular lines, I was very, very grateful for the perk.

I may have to talk with 'ol Jeff about (ahem) changing our travel policy (ahem)...

Thanks to the in-flight nap, I was able to stay awake upon arrival in London. I took the Piccadilly line out of the airport, transferred, and made it to my hotel in good time. I was early enough that my room wasn't ready, so I dropped my bags and decided to cruise around town. Specifically, I wanted to hit the London Transport Museum and ride all the lines on the Tube. Turns out my timing couldn't have been worse for either - the Transport museum is closed for refurbishment, and large sections of the Tube system were closed for major engineering work. But I made do.

From my starting point (Edgware Road), here's what I did (you might want a map of the system - opens in a new window):

• Bakerloo to Baker Street.
• Metropolitan to Wembley Park.
• Jubilee to Green Park.
• Piccadilly to King's Cross.
• Northern to Bank.
• District to Whitechapel.
• East London to Canada Water.
• Jubilee to Canary Wharf.
• DLR to Greenwich, and back to Canary Wharf.
• Jubilee to Stratford.
• Central to Oxford Circus.
• Victoria to Victoria.
• Circle to Edgware Road.

(Sadly, the entire Hammersmith & City and Waterloo & City lines were closed for construction, and the original segment of the system - Metropolitan between Baker Street and King's Cross - was also shut down. Ah, well.)

The entire trip - with photos, lunches, sightseeing - took about 5 hours. And I have to say that it was an incredibly fun, interesting and cool way to spend an afternoon. I got to see all manner of different stations, from the original, cut-and-cover tunnels of the Metropolitan and District lines, to the new, sleek, state-of-the-art stuff of the Jubilee Line Extension (the mall at Canary Wharf, for instance, is modern and clean). The rail cars, too, change as they get newer: the original tracks use, effectively, electrified heavy rail; the newer lines use rounder, smaller and faster cars. In all, Transit Geek Heaven.

It's so cool to be back.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 25, 2006 10:30 AM.
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June 16, 2006

Boston, Day Six: Waiting To Fly

My final day in Boston is being spent, largely, at Logan Airport.

I don't know what I was expecting, exactly, with this whole getting-home business. My regular flight is scheduled to leave at 7:20 PM, delivering me home to Seattle (by way of Chicago) around half past midnight. Since I don't have any remaining business in town, I thought (naively) that I'd pop out to the airport, go standby, and slide in to something departing around 1 or 3 or something.

Uh ... no dice.

Silly me. I totally forgot that, you know, TechEd is ending for everybody, and, of the 12,000 people who came to the show, a good chunk of them work for Microsoft and are also trying to get back to Seattle. So the flights are, to put it mildly, clogged. Filled. Packed to the rafters. (Pick the cliche you like.)

Actually, I think the poor counter workers have it the worst - they keep announcing flights and then getting on the PA system to say, "United Flight XYZ to Chicago is completely full - there is no possibility of upgrade or standby..."

(Oh, and hey! If you could get on an earlier flight, United now charges $25 for the privilege. When the hell did that happen?)

So I'm sprawled out in the chairs here at the airport, getting caught up on e-mail (and clearly doing a bit 'o blogging). I've got the usual Travel Entertainment Kit - books, movies, yadda. I'm fine. But it's going to be a long, long day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 16, 2006 12:12 PM.
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June 15, 2006

Boston, Day Five: Half Day

I'm pleased to report that my Thursday was a heck of a lot better than Wednesday.

TechEd kicked off with a brutal 8 AM session (that's 5 AM back in the Real World) by my colleague Bill Morein, who bravely fought jet-lag fatigue to present on the wonder that is Visio 2007. I was late to the session, having woken up hard and then picked a shuttle bus that wanted to go to the Convention Center by way of Texas. (Bill admitted to me later that he'd caught a cab from his hotel to make sure he was on time. The shuttles have acquired a, shall we say, reputation among conference attendees for being, um, er, the slowest way to get between two points).

After catching a two more sessions (on SharePoint and InfoPath, respectively), I scanned the conference agenda for the day and saw ... nothing. All clear. The balance of the sessions were either repeats of stuff I'd already seen, deep-dive technical stuff on subjects I wasn't sufficiently grounded in, or (as was more often the case) stuff I didn't really care about.

So after given that it was lunchtime (and I really couldn't stomach any more conference food), Bill and I decided to cut out, find a pub, and watch England in the World Cup. This was followed by few hours of work back at the hotel, a run, and then dinner out. Bill's flight was scheduled to depart at 6 AM Friday, so we decided to get a late dinner and a drink or two. (We actually got seriously lost looking for Haymarket Pizza, a joint recommended by fellow Planner (and Boston native) Pete Card.)

It was a fitting, low-key end to a long, long week. My TechEd schedule tomorrow is similarly clean, so I'm hoping to sleep in a bit, get an early lunch and see if I can't get out to Logan and standby an earlier flight.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2006 8:45 PM.
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June 14, 2006

Boston, Day Four: Burnout

TechEd is too damn long. It's only Wednesday, and I'm already feeling burned out.

At some point, the steady consumption of all this information causes me to want to hole up for a week and just process. I've seen demos, taken notes, met speakers, and talked to folks at their trade show booths. Now I just need to take the time to find out how to schematicize all of this data so I can make use of it in my work.

(A break, kind sir?)

Nah. Instead, I'm got two more days of the same.

I do like the show, but it's like eating a favorite dinner - the first night is a treat, the second is a happy accident, the third feels vaguely indulgent and lazy. But by the time you've eaten the same thing for a month straight, you're ready to pull out your hair and swear the stuff off for the rest of your life.

(I'm sure there's some kind of Law Of Long Conferences or something that expresses 'attendee information retention' over time, or something - if so, conference organizers ought to design their shindigs so they end at the primary downward inflection point.)

To unwind, Cintra and I decided to walk around Boston and take in some of the local color. As it happens, this is the perfect antidote for a long day of conferencin'.

We started at my hotel and walked to (and through) the Boston Public Garden. It's lovely, picturesque - just a terrific civic amenity. If I lived in Boston, I know I'd spend a lot of time here - either gazing at the water, watching kids play on the swings, or simply seeing other citizens enjoy themselves.

A note on the associated photo: Boston has these painted cows everywhere at the moment, scattered throughout downtown as a form of public art (this is not unlike Seattle's "Pigs on Parade"). One of these, located at the Park Street Station (on the northeast point of the Garden), is the "MBTA Cow", painted with the various transit lines of the city. And, naturally, being the big transit geek that I am, I had to get my photo taken next to the thing. (Big thanks to Cintra, who kept her snickering to a minimum as she snapped it.)

After we dallied in the Garden, we walked north and east and hooked in to the Freedom Trail. This is a 2-mile-long strip of brick and red paint that re-creates the ride of Paul Revere. It's amazing. You walk past Boston's old City Hall (now, sadly, a Ruth's Chris Steak House), past the Old State House (where the Declaration of Independence was read publicly for the first time), the site of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere House, North Church (remember "one if by land, two if by sea?" This is where they hung the lanterns) and ultimately end at the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown.

Like my trip to London, this was amazing, overpowering, incredible stuff. It's a bit difficult for me to wrap my head around the enormity of the history (and its importance to our country) that occurred in this tiny piece of the world - and not that long ago. It also made me realize that I should have paid much better attention during history classes in 8th grade - there's lots here I know I'm missing.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 14, 2006 8:04 PM.
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June 13, 2006

Boston, Day Three: The Good, The Bad And The Funny

Tuesday was my third here in Boston, and I've now spent enough time at TechEd to be able to talk a bit about the conference. So, for your reading pleasure, I hereby present some observations/thoughts - the good, the bad, and the funny. In order:

The Good

• Professionalism. The conference is very well-run. The people who put this thing together have clearly done it a whole lotta times, and have taken pains to reduce the stress on the conference participants, in ways both big and small (and hey, when you're managing a six-day shindig for 12,000 people, that's a big deal). For instance, TechEd runs bus shuttles between the "official" hotels and the conference center on a continuous basis. This means attendees don't need to deal with taxis or private cars to get in and out - and is just more efficient, a smarter way to do it. On the other end of the spectrum, each attendee is given a pouch that can be slung around the neck. On the front is your attendee card and name (along with a nice pen); on the back is a "mini guide" to the conference sessions, a map of the halls, and so on. This saves people from looking too dazed and lost as the show goes on.
• Facilities. The Boston Convention Center itself is bright, airy, comfy, wonderful. It's very modern, very clean, well-laid-out, and, again, details are good. They've got lots of nice lounges, for instance, for ducking out and checking mail (or doing some networking); they've also invested in good chairs for the attendees in the conference sessions themselves (which, when you're spending a lot of quality time on your butt, is something to be very grateful for). There are PC kiosks everywhere - banks and banks and banks of them - that let attendees check in with their home office(s) between sessions.
• Sessions (Length). The sessions themselves are the right length - 75 minutes. This allows for the presentation of complex material without feeling rushed, but also keeps things close enough to an hour that attendees' attention spans don't get too tried.
• Breaks. There's a half-hour break between sessions. This is a Good Move, as it gives people time to rehydrate, check e-mail, chat with other attendees, use the facilities and stroll to their next session without feeling time pressure.
• Energy. The crowd energy is great. People are buzzing about the stuff they're learning.
• Sessions (Variety). The available sessions are on a very wide range of topics, from a focus on business problems to deep-dive technical. Since you can jump from one track to another without problem, there's always about three things I'd like to see in any given time slot.
• Diversity. We have lots of international attendees. This makes the conference center sound like the UN.
• Coffee. In addition to the free bottled water and Diet Pepsi, they're serving Starbucks. Thank God.

The Bad

• WiFi. The wireless Internet access sucks. I imagine the poor, poor network is being over-stressed by the digital denizens of the conference, but - geez. It takes my Tablet a good five minutes (five minutes!) to negotiate a connection and get an IP address, and once I'm up the service is sloooooow. Like, "you have time to meet someone, fall in love, start a family and die while waiting for your e-mail" kind of slow. (Did I mention it's slow? It's slow.)
• Food. The food selection is ... bad. Breakfasts and lunches seem to be catered by Satan's Conference Catering Company - inedible bits of overcharred, undercooked, over-boiled or over-oiled ... everything, from the veggies (they do have vegetarian options, which gets points) to the meats. As bad as the "real" food is, though, the between-session snacks are infintely worse - a dizying array of sugary crap that makes you believe Willy Wonka and Veruca Salt are lurking 'round the corner. We're talking brownies, of course, and cookies, but also candy bars and - get this - Hostess fruit pies. Remember those? The ones that have the bad, fake lemon and cherry flavor? Deep-fried and covered in frosting? 5,000 calories apiece? We've got em. And yes, there are one or two lonely apples in a barrel here and there, but c'mon ...
• Narrative. I don't know what it is, exactly, about Microsoft presentations, but we're frequently terrible about storytelling. Terrible, terrible, terrible. While there are some notable exceptions, I'm shocked at how many presentations I've seen so far that jump the shark in the middle. Look, it's not rocket science, right? When you're showing off product, you do the following:
  1. Start by explaining the Problem that faces the audience.
  2. Explain (or show) how the Problem has been solved in the past. This undoubtedly involves much groaning and eye-rolling from the audience, who have cut themselves on this particular piece of razor wire one too many times already, thank you.
  3. Explain (or show) how the Problem is now so much easier to solve with Version 15 of Microsoft XYZ For Enterprise Architects, or whatever. Audience gasps in surprise and squeals in delight as they see that they, too, might be able to pull cash out of their wallet and give it to you in exchange for repeating their previous razor-wire-fraught behavior.
  4. Say, "And now I'll walk you through the steps involved in doing this yourself" and begin the Demo. In the Demo, refer back to points 1 - 3, as needed, to keep the audience focused on what you're doing and why it is going to make them happy.
  5. Complete the Demo, recap 1 - 3, remind the audience that the Problem is no longer a Problem, and thank the audience for their time.
  6. Spread arms in an open-person gesture and say, "Any questions?"
  Without conscious effort and attention on 1 - 6, the presenter will likely skip through 1 - 3, jump right into 4, and begin Geeking Like Crazy, at which point the audience, already mildly lost, will furrow its collective brow and, after five minutes of trying to follow the indecipherable flurry of dialog boxes, Start menu summoning, and IE-window-resizing, will just say, "aw, the hell with it" and check out. Five minutes later, they've got a WiFi signal on their laptops and they're surfing.

  This is happening, way, way too much at this show.

The Funny

• Restrooms. There are a lot of guys at this show - plenty of women, of course, but the Y-chromosome skew is notable. What this means, in practical terms, is that there is always a line at the men's room - and it's pretty long, especially right before or after a session. Ladies, on the other hand, can just stroll in and out of their side of the loo. After years of listening to women friends of mine bitch - loudly - about having to wait in line to use the bathroom at rock concerts, sports games, theme parks (oh, hell - everywhere), I can say that a) I know what you're talking about, and b) it's pretty funny to see the tables turned on a bunch 'o geeks.
• Industry Cattiness. Most of the big tech names are exhibiting their wares here, from Cisco to HP to Intel and so on. Everyone at the booths is friendly and smiling, positive, and nary a bad word is spoken about competitors. The lunchroom, however, is another story - I wound up at a table alongside a couple of guys from Intel who were ragging on Microsoft (and Office specifically!) for a good five minutes or so, at which point one of them, having said his piece, paused, took a drink from his bottle of orange juice, turned his attention to me, and said, "So ... what do you do?" (Yeah, his reaction was pretty priceless.)
• Borg-ification. Every other person has a Treo and a Bluetooth headset to go with it. This makes TechEd look like some kind of Borg convention, and also makes it impossible to tell crazy people (loudly talking to themselves) from salespeople (loudly talking to someone else) at 20 feet.
• Penguins. Microsoft people are all wearing "the uniform" - dark blue shirt, light slacks. While this does add a certain kind of (good) consistency to the show (it looks professional, and makes it easy for attendees to know who to get help from), it also looks like a tech version of "March of the Penguins." We just need some Morgan Freeman narration, and we're good.

Did I mention my brain is full? (And it's only Tuesday? And the show runs 'til Friday?) Four sessions a day will do that to ya. Sheesh.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 13, 2006 7:13 PM.
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June 12, 2006

Boston, Day Two: Starting Work At 8:30 PM

It's 8:30 PM here in Boston, and I'm just now getting to work.

I don't mean that literally, of course - I've been working all day at TechEd, drinking in session after session after session. But now, for the first time, I'm able to sit down and deal with the e-mail, handwritten notes and other random to-do items that have accumulated on my list since I left work late Friday.

I departed the Convention Center around 6, traveled back to to the hotel, scrounged dinner, hit the treadmill for 5 miles (hey, I need some exercise after sitting on my butt all day), showered, and - boom. 8:30.

This may sound like I'm complaining, but honestly - I'm not. One great thing about travel is that it focuses the mind on work wonderfully - there just aren't that many distractions in your hotel room (provided, of course, you can forget the spicy new city just outside your window). Fortunately, one Westin looks pretty much like the other, so that's that.

The conference is great. It's larger than I thought, and produced to the max. Richard was surprised to learn that we've got thousands and thousands of attendees, pursuing seven or eight parallel tracks of material that encompasses presentations, hands-on labs, briefings, keynotes, and a trade show. For someone like me, whose tech background is off the Microsoft stack, it's a lot of new (valuable) information (e.g., what the hell does BizTalk Server do, anyhow?). I'm also meeting great people - other Microsofties, customers, partners. It's fun.

OK, back to work - I really, really want to get to sleep before midnight.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 12, 2006 5:44 PM.
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June 11, 2006

Boston, Day One: Arrival

After an incredibly long day of flying, I'm pleased to report that I've made it to Boston. As always, a few notes from the trip:

• The time zone thing is brutal. To be at the Boston Convention Center in time for the 7 PM keynote, I needed to fly in to Logan around 4 or 5 PM Eastern (that gives time to de-plane, get to the hotel, check in, drop bags, etc.). The only available flight left SeaTac at 6:10 AM, which, working backward, meant I arrived at the airport around 4:15, left my house at 3:45, and was up at 3 AM. Yeesh.
• Denver International (the site of my layover) is a big, big airport.
• The TCBY at Denver sells low-fat raspberry smoothies that are yummy. And perfect for a long flight.
• My connecting flight from Denver to Boston was delayed about two hours. One problem with long layovers is that you tend to spend a lot of time waiting in chairs with a lot of other people who, like you, are similarly delayed. It creates a very "hospital waiting room" feeling.
• Parents: one thing you should never, ever do - in hospital waiting rooms or, God forbid, at Denver International airport when your flight has been delayed two hours - is give your monster-ish three-year-old twins a handful of coins to play with as a way of keeping them occupied. 'Cause, you know, your kids will find the nearest metal surfaces (trash cans, window sills) and will bang the holy hell out of the coins on the metal. Which, when you're a) delayed two hours and b) have been up since 3 AM Pacific, is like having someone fire a nail gun into your head. Repeatedly.
• I'm just saying.
• I finished "The Subterranean Railway" (a book all about the creation and history of the London Underground) while mid-flight. It's awesome. One thing the book makes abundantly clear is that large urban transit projects have the same problems, whether it's the mid-1850s Victorian England or 2004 Seattle. Guess what? People will complain about the project and claim it's a boondoggle. NIMBY's will tell you they don't want it near their house. Nobody thinks it will relieve congestion. And economically, it's going to be a wash for the builder/operator/investor. The city, however, (and its citizens) will get incredible rewards for a long, long time. The other thing about the book is that it makes me want to ride every individual tube line when I'm in London at the end of the month, just to see all the differences in architecture and design.
• (Sound Transit Light Rail opens in 2009.)
• Another good book is "What Clients Love" which was a gift from my good friend Laura. It's a collection of common-sense business wisdom, compiled into a folksy, accessible volume. Some of the advice is the business equivalent of "wash your hands after using the bathroom" and "don't talk with your mouth full", but what makes the book good is its positive, can-do energy - not unlike Guerrilla Marketing (a book I adore, and a book that makes me fall in love with commerce every single time I read it). In this case, when you take out all the tautological The Sphinx stuff (think, "He who questions training only trains in asking questions") you're left with some gems that trigger all kinds of great ideas. (I've got a full notebook of stuff I want to check on and think about.)
• Boston has a light-rail system ("The 'T'"), and it works great. I was able to - wait for it - take the train from the airport to downtown. No, really. And I cost me $1.25. (I think this "train" thing might be catching on!)
• One other thing about Boston's light rail: the airport terminal isn't, you know, actually at the airport. (Gasp!) Instead, you have to take a shuttle bus a quarter mile or so to the "T" stop, at which point you catch the train. The shuttle bus is free, and comes about every 5 or 10 minutes. But you know something? Despite the inconvenience, the train thing still seems to be popular! Amazing.
• Boston feels a lot like London. Same mashup of old and new buildings, same winding, narrow roads, same cobblestone. It's cool.
• Boston pedestrians do not know about, or care about, the existence of pedestrian traffic lights. "Walk"/"Don't Walk"? Never heard of it. Peds are strolling into the streets around here like cows on some far-off rural road in Indiana. I'm amazed that people don't get hit more often. Maybe it's an East/West Coast thing, maybe it's a Seattle thing (Seattleites are famous for observing traffic signals past all reason), maybe it's a me thing (see the point about "Seattleites" and multiply by 3), but I'm astonished.
• After checking out the TechEd keynote, I hooked up with Cintra for pizza and beer at this cool Irish pub near the hotel. We had a great time laughing and catching up - which we'll do more of later this week.
• 3 AM Pacific - 11:30 PM Eastern is a long day.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2006 10:13 PM.
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Off To Boston

I'm off to Boston, and will be attending TechEd for the balance of this week. I've packed my camera, but must confess that my schedule is slammed - it's nonstop sessions (and, you know, my usual work) until I get back to SeaTac (on Saturday, the 17th at 12:23 AM, in case you're curious).

Good news: I do get to see Cintra on Wednesday, at least.

I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 11, 2006 3:18 AM.
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May 26, 2006

Chicago: Old Friends, Windy City

• My training sessions were held in the world-famous Sears Tower. Of course, I didn't figure this out until I was standing, slack-jawed, in front of the (massive) thing, comparing the address on my directions (233 South Wacker) to the address emblazoned on the front door.
• (Note to self: it's much, much easier to find your way around a new town if you know that your destination is a world-famous landmark.)
• The weather in Chicago was somewhat uncooperative while I was there, oscillating from warm/sunny to overcast/windy to blustery/rainy and back to warm/sunny, with a quick detour to thunderstorm/scary late on Wednesday night.
• I've never really understood the whole "I'm afraid of lightning" phobia (of course, this from a guy who was afraid of bathrooms as a kid). However, now that I've been to the Midwest and seen what lightning looks like over Chicago, I get it. I really, really do. Lightning in Seattle is nothing more than pretty flashes of light in the sky. Lightning in Chicago will beat you up, take your wallet, and then go after your family. It's angry lightning - violent, lashing out. Yikes.
• One more weather note: it kind of sucks to spend two days in the Sears Tower, and then not have enough clear sky to justify a trip to the observation deck.
• Training was interesting. My instructor looked like the long-lost identical twin brother Tim Robbins never knew he had, but talked with precisely the same vocal inflections and pacing as Agent Smith from The Matrix. I felt like I was watching one movie and listening to the soundtrack for another. Bizarre.
• We got to sit in Aeron chairs! Training is much, much better when your butt doesn't hurt at the end of the day.
• Chicago is a city that works. I've already talked about the transit system, but the place has a vibe, a bustle, a no-nonsense-ness to it that comes through in the way people walk, talk, and go about their day. Chicago seems to be all business, all the time. For that, the people were pretty friendly (certainly, they were efficient) and nice.
• If you come to Chicago, I recommend you go to a Greek-owned greasy spoon diner for lunch one day. We did this on Wednesday, at a place near the Sears Tower, and it rocked. They even had gum and candy bars under the glass counter at the cash register! It was like - poof! - instant 1955.
• Whoever gave Chicago the moniker "The Windy City" wasn't kidding around. Unlike Seattle, where "The Emerald" in "The Emerald City" is a metaphor, "The Wind" in "The Windy City" will knock you on your ass if you're not careful. I went to dinner with my old friend Sophie on Wednesday; her husband is a pastry chef at this great new restaurant, Copperblue. Copperblue is located on Lake Michigan, and by the time my cab arrived, the wind was going something fierce. I had to walk around the perimeter of the building, and practically got blown into the street. Twice.
• Oh, Copperblue is awesome - great food, great wine, great service. I strongly recommend it, especially for my foodie friends.
• Lake Michigan is so large that it looks like the ocean. No kidding. Think "ocean, but without the salty/fishy smell and aggressive seagulls" and you've got the right idea.
• Whenever possible, see old friends when you visit a new town. In addition to Sophie, I got to spend time with my friend Rich Barrett. Rich lives in Bloomington, but made the drive, regardless (I'm still not sure if the draw was my company or the free meal). We hung out most of Thursday night, enjoying some bona fide deep-dish Chicago pizza, then walked to Millennium Park and down the Magnificent Mile. A quick stop at the Apple Store (hands-on time with the MacBook - pant, pant), and then we continued up to (and walked along) Lake Michigan. We got caught in the rain on the way back (see my point, above, about weather), but had a wonderful time chatting and catching up and just experiencing Chicago on foot. So great.

Oh, I snapped the above photo on my walk with Rich (the tall building on the far-far left of the shot is where Copperblue is located). If you're interested, my Flickr Photostream can be found here.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2006 1:28 PM.
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O'Hare, Reloaded

I'm sitting in Chicago's O'Hare airport right now, and my flight back to Seattle is due to start boarding in about 5 minutes or so. The trip's been great (I'm planning to work on my post about that when I'm aloft), but I'm looking forward to Seattle.

Now I just have to get the damn Peter, Paul & Mary "Leaving On A Jet Plane" out of my head...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 26, 2006 5:44 AM.
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May 23, 2006

Real Cities Have Trains

I'm safely ensconced here in my Chicago hotel, and I have just four words to say.

Real cities have trains.

Wow, the El is cool. Like, wow, wow, wow. I landed at the airport, fetched my bag, and, for the princely sum of $2, was able to get a safe, stable and easy ride right into the heart of downtown (near the Sears Tower) in, like, 40 minutes.

(I can hear the collective disbelief in Seattle from two time zones away.)

So this is the second city I've been to in the last two months where the citizens have invested in fixed-rail systems. People freely admit that traffic sucks in both Chicago and London, but the big difference between these cities and Seattle is that Londoners and Chicagoans have options. If you want to get around, you can. (And, if you want to sit in traffic, you can do that, too.)

Traffic is inevitable. I think this is a critical part of the transit picture that a lot of people overlook. During the Monorail debate (with so many votes on that puppy, the specific time period escapes me...), a number of people would say things like, "The monorail is a waste of money - it isn't going to take a single car off the streets!"

Well, no kidding.

Traffic congestion is here to stay. If you've got any kind of density, you've got congestion. Congestion is the price cities pay for being popular places to live. And, given the 'natural equilibrium' of driving (when traffic levels drop for any length of time, congestion is only temporarily relieved - people notice fewer cars on the road and switch from transit back to private cars, and - boom! - congestion returns), it's a permanent state of affairs.

The transit debate needs to be about recognizing that you can't build enough freeways to relieve congestion (Exhibit A: Houston), so the trick instead is to give people alternatives. Let them ride the train, be it above ground, underground, whatever.

Seattle, to its credit, has figured this out, and light rail is being built right now to get from SeaTac to downtown. I'm getting bounce-in-my-seat excited for this thing to open ... even though it's still 3 years away. (On my way to the airport this morning, I was pretty pumped to see the under-construction stations and tracks in Georgetown and along the spur to the airport).

But airport-downtown light rail is just a first, delicate step into making Seattle a real city with a real transit system. We need more, and we need it now. And you know what? It's not going to relieve congestion at all. If you're in your car, you're still stuck in traffic. Sorry. Instead, trains will merely offer us the ability to keep growing beyond the limits of our clogged freeways.

Say it with me: Real cities have trains.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 23, 2006 7:12 PM.
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Globetrottin'

I'm out the door and off to Chicago (training) for the balance of this week. This kicks off a whirlwind world tour 'o (work) travel that's taking me to (in order): Boston (mid June), London (late June), and Orlando (mid July).

Since I'll be in each city for roughly a week, that means I'm out of town for nearly half of the next nine weeks. (Good thing I don't have a cat or anything.)

(Oh, and there's about a 100% chance I'll be riding "Expedition: Everest" while in Florida.)

I'm starting to feel like a jet-setter. Joanne assures me that I'll be hating the whole travel-for-work thing in about two months, guaranteed. So I'm enjoying it while I can. In the meantime, blogging might be light this week.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 23, 2006 5:15 AM.
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May 9, 2006

(Part Of) The World Is (Really Damn) Flat

I'm back from Illinois. Notes from the trip, in no particular order:

• Dan and Juli are now happily married. No mishaps, craziness, or last-minute romantic comedy behavior from former flames on either side of the aisle. (Way to go, you two!)
• The wedding rehearsal was Friday night. Since Niantic (the location of said rehearsal) is near Decatur, it's a good three-plus hours from O'Hare by car. Elaine had originally pushed for the red-eye flight on Thursday night, but, since I can't sleep on planes, I'd had the (naive) idea that we should fly out Friday morning. The rehearsal was at 5:30 PM, which meant we needed to be in Chicago around noon or so. That meant a 6 AM flight out of Sea-Tac, which in turn meant arriving at the airport around 4:30. So I was up at 3 and out the door at 4.
• AM.
• Apparently, it's possible to sleep on planes if you're tired enough.
• (Wine helps.)
• Illinois is flat as hell. Like, really, really, really flat. Like, "you can see why people thought Columbus was crazy" flat. I'm so used to living in Seattle and looking at mountains and whatnot all the time that I'd kind of internalized the belief that every part of the world had something geographically ... interesting to call their own (hey, Mount Rushmore is in South Dakota, right?). This is wrong.
• Decatur has a lot of chain restaurants (Applebee's!), and a handful of sketchy local restaurants. The one near the hotel is called "Skinny's." After eating the omelette (tasty enough), I strongly suspect that the restaurant is named ironically.
• Midwest people are super-friendly.
• Niantic is a very, very small town. It reminded me of visiting Cambridge, ID - quiet and farms and fields and nice people, all rolled into a part of the country we urbanites just don't think about very much. It's dismissive to call it "charming", but it's still pretty damn charming.
• Yes, we did visit a Wal-Mart (we were seeking beer, and naught else was open). And yes, it was as soul-crushing a retail experience as you might imagine.
• The Midwest has yet to discover microbrews.
• (I probably bitched about this a little too much.)
• One consequence of Decatur's small size is its profound lack of good coffee joints. If you go to Eastern Washington, you'll find indie espresso carts on the main street of virtually every small town you visit. Decatur has ... McDonald's. One of the other wedding guests, Shauna, dubbed Decatur "The Land Before Starbucks."
• Turns out there is a Starbucks. In the Target.
• Chicago people love to drive fast, change lanes abruptly, and honk. Ooooh, they love the honk. LOVE it.
• Elaine and I got up early on Sunday and drove back toward Chicago to hit Six Flags Great America in Gurnee, IL. The park rocked. Lines were short, the sun was out, and we had a total blast riding just about every coaster on the property (in order: Whizzer, Viper, Superman: Ultimate Flight, Batman (twice), Iron Wolf, American Eagle (both the red and blue sides!), Demon and Raging Bull (again, twice). Of these, Raging Bull is the hands-down, no-contest best).
• Anticipating a trip to Magic Mountain in September (or at least one to Wild Waves), I am now the proud owner of a Six Flags season pass.
• No matter how much I love travelling, there's something magical about the air when I step off the airplane. I love Seattle, and it's good to be home.

If you're interested, my Flickr photostream can be found here. (And be sure to check out an unbelievably cute shot of Elaine in front of the lagoon at Six Flags!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 9, 2006 10:17 PM.
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May 4, 2006

Advance To Illinois Avenue

Elaine and I are taking off this weekend to attend the wedding of some good friends. (They're tying the knot in tiny Niantic, Il). We're gone first thing tomorrow and are back Sunday night - if the scheduling works out, we might even be able to hit some hot midwest coaster action. I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 4, 2006 11:14 PM.
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April 7, 2006

Back To The States

God, it's early.

The first leg of my flight back to Seattle departs Heathrow at 8 AM. Working backward through the whole high-security International-man-of-mystery routine, I need to be to the airport by 6. And that, dear readers, means I'm out the door of my hotel at 5 AM, at the Piccadilly Circus Tube stop at 5:10 (when it opens, basically), and on the Heathrow Express departing Paddington Station at 5:40.

Crazy.

I don't know what kind of WiFi I'm going to find myself with between now and home (and I'm sure I'll be beat by the time I get in), so for now ... cheers!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 7, 2006 8:09 PM.
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London, Day Six: The Final

Today was my sixth - and final - day here in London, and after yesterday's fun, the agenda was back to All Business, All The Time: customer visits around town. Eric and I spent some very quality time with a few folks, deep-diving on ways we can make Visio better-suited to their needs. As you might imagine, it was super-interesting stuff. Customers are great - they tell you what they love about you, but they also tell you when your breath stinks. It's an honest relationship.

A big part of me is shocked that I'm outta here tomorrow morning. I've packed most of my stuff already, and need to be up in less than eight(!) hours to get out the door and back home in one piece. In the interim, I've got to figure out how to finish some other work (no sleep for the wicked ... or employees of Microsoft) before crashing, hard, in a short bit.

I've had an utter blast here, and am amazed/gratified that I've got the sort of job that affords me these opportunities. I'm coming back here - guaranteed. (And sooner instead of later.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 7, 2006 12:38 PM.
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April 6, 2006

London, Day Five: Sightseeing

I finally got in some sightseeing and touristy stuff today, zooming around some of London's better-known (and highly-recommended) attractions.

Eric, Richard and I kicked off our day with an English breakfast at a local diner, and then caught the Tube out to the Tower of London.

The Tower is amazing, just wonderful, this phenomenally ancient part of England where the history is so thick it almost suffocates you. We did a guided group tour with one of the Beefeaters (highly recommended), learning about who was interred where, who interred them, and who, ultimately, killed 'em. (The British Royal family, at least from a backstabbin', power-grabbin', do-what-it-takes-to-win standpoint, makes the Ewings from "Dallas" look like the wholesome family from "7th Heaven"). We did see the Crown Jewels, walked the grounds, snapped loads of photos, and finally exited on to the Thames river.

After crawling around (and photographing the hell out of) the Tower Bridge, we strolled down the Thames toward (and across) the Millennium Bridge. Crossing over to the Southside, we then headed for the London Eye.

The Eye is a truly unique experience. I'd heard it described as a "Ferris-wheel-like-thing" by folks, but that really fails to capture what it's all about. Yes, you do go around a circle, from the ground level to 135m above the ground, but you do so in an enclosed pod that holds about 20 people. The pods are comfortable and stable, and give you the ability to walk around inside them for the best view of the city. Since you're right on the river (and overlooking Parliament and Big Ben) you get some spectacular views of, well, everything. The total time to do one revolution on the Eye is about a half hour.

Heading back across the Thames, we got up-close-and-personal with Big Ben (and heard it go off!), then scurried into the Westminster Tube tunnel and zoomed over to Harrod's. If you've not been, Harrod's is a gi-normous department store, covering one entire city block and taking five stories. Inside that structure, they sell, well, just about everything: clothes, furniture, groceries, pets, electronics, you name it. Imagine everything you might find for sale at your local mall, and then put it inside a single business (done up with the level of department-store finishing you'd find at a high-end Macy's or Nordstrom), and you've basically got it. After checking out music, electronics (yes, they sell Macs), and a few other things, Eric split off to head back to the hotel, and Richard and I got a bite in the Harrod's Cafe (serving Harrod's bottled water and Harrod's Chardonnay. Really.).

Richard and I said our goodbyes not too much later, him off to his hotel (and Heathrow first thing in the morning) and me off to dinner with Eric and one of our Microsoft colleagues here in the UK (which was at the OXO Tower, and excellent).

Overall, Thursday was pretty magical. The weather was perfect, the company was stellar, and the people of London are genuinely friendly and helpful. I snapped several hundred photos with my Canon, and look forward to sifting through them on the way home.

Friday's back to customer visits, and Saturday I'm flying home.
(Is the week over already?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 6, 2006 11:31 PM.
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April 5, 2006

London, Day Four: Lost

I got lost in London today.

Well, "lost" is probably too strong a word (I knew where I was on the map), but certainly I spent a good hour of my time wandering around a section of town, looking for a hotel that, as it turns out, was miles away.

Breaks down like this: Richard is in town, having flown in from Italy early on Wednesday. The two of us wanted to hook up for dinner at a pub, so the plan was for me to head over and meet him where he was staying. I got the address, fed it into Google Local, saw the directions, and elected to stroll (it was just 1.2 miles East of my current location, and I was craving the walk).

So I walked down to Strand, and continued along to Fleet, enjoying the views of the Royal Courts of Justice, Old Bailey, and St. Paul's Cathedral. And the whole time, I'm looking around for my left turn, the one the map showed that takes me right to the hotel.

Didn't materialize.

I'm walking up and down the streets, trying to remember the exact layout of the Google map and getting more and more frustrated with the rabbit-warren-esque approach of London's side streets. Many of them look like alleys, and, as night was beginning to fall, I grew increasingly wary of walking down many of them.

So I stopped and asked directions from bike messengers, newspaperman, and others, each of whom (politely) looked at me blankly and (politely) shrugged.

Eventually, I happened upon a guy in a "SECURITY" slicker who was working a gate. I stopped and asked him if he'd heard of the hotel. He hadn't, but he asked his friend, a night watchman, to come over for a second.

The watchman, an older guy with a friendly smile, asked me for the name of the hotel. "Lancaster Gate," I told him.

"Lancaster Gate? Are you sure? That's miles from here!"

I wasn't sure of anything at that point, so I asked him if there was a phone somewhere I might get my hands on to see what was what. He kindly loaned me his cell phone (which was doubly nice, as I had no English coins on me), and I rang the hotel. Sho' 'nuff, it's near Hyde Park. Dammit!

Mr. Nice Watchman then pointed me in the direction of the Chancery Lane tube stop, which, he assured me, would take me straight to the Lancaster Gate tube stop. The hotel was about a 5- or 10-minute walk from there.

The lessons from all this?

• Yes, London is twisty and hard to figure out, especially when
• Google Local will lie to you, and
• Leaving your hotel room without a cell phone in a new town is kinda dumb, but
• Leaving your hotel room without coins for the phone is even dumber, and while
• English Night Watchmen are about the kindest people on Earth (thank you, Mr. Night Watchman!), their kindness goes farther because
• The London mass-transit system rocks.

This last point is the one I really came away with. I was able to get from Point A to Point B at 8:30 at night on an idle Wednesday because of the established, well-publicized transit system that knits the city together. Eric and I got a firsthand experience with that in the morning, too - we walked to a Tube stop, got aboard, popped out at Paddington Station and hopped a train to Reading that departed 10 minutes after we got there. The Reading trip was just 25 minutes, and we found ourselves a scant mile or two from the Microsoft offices (which are super cool, by the way), allowing us to take a cab the rest of the way.

I've been able to get around some pretty vast distances on public transport in this town. What's amazing, too, is the sheer number of London citizens that use it. People in Seattle treat the bus like it's something for other people to use, but here in London the Tube was packed at 11 PM with people going about their business.

The other cool thing about the Tube is that, having seen it (and seen all the stations, and whatnot), I have a much better appreciation for the mood Neil Gaiman was creating in "Neverwhere." I have to re-read that book.

It all ended happily, which is to say, with pints.

(Oh, and the pub Richard and I drank in was founded in 1721.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 5, 2006 10:43 PM.
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April 4, 2006

London, Day Three

Today was the second (and final) day of the Visio conference, which ran until 4 or so. Following wrap-up, a group of us adjourned to a (different) pub (London's economy seems to be composed largely of pubs - the businesses on a given street seem to go pub, pub, hotel, book shop, pub, sandwich shop, pub...), where we unwound and caught up for a few hours.

Speaking of pubs, I've had several people write me to tell me that my <Keanu>Whoa!</Keanu> moment about finding a pub dating from 1727 is not, in fact, any kind of big deal. Jeff e-mailed me (title of the e-mail: "1727? P'shaw"):

Screw that, 1727. That's like a modernist Olive Garden in the Mall. You're in frickin' England, dude.

Danika (who hails from Boston) was similarly unimpressed:

Oh - you Northwestern mods. I've got a haunt back home that dates from 1757.

I'm reminded of that great line in "L.A. Story" where Angeleno Steve Martin is giving a tour of Los Angeles to visiting London-dweller Victoria Tennant. Driving past a number of oversized houses, he quips, "Some of these houses are over twenty years old!".

So, yeah. I'm from a part of the world that's a mite ... newer. Shoot me.

One thing I can't get over is how it feels to walk the streets. This part of London seems to have a uniform building height of around four or five stories, which, combined with the twisty roads and whatnot, gives the whole place a bit of a maze feel ("You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"). Cities like Seattle or Vancouver have tall buildings alongside smaller ones, punctuating the skyline every few hundred feet or so. London, not so much. I'll see if I can't capture a few photos of what I'm talking about.

The rest of my week is customer visits, and - with luck - siteseeing on Thursday. It'll be great to fire up the 'ol camera.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 4, 2006 10:37 PM.
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April 3, 2006

London, Day Two

My Monday was spent at the first of a two-day Visio conference at the MSN offices here in London. I got to meet colleagues from the UK, Sweden, Germany, and other countries where Microsoft does business, and the group quickly got down to business.

Conferences - especially ones where you spend most of your time sitting - are hard. They're doubly hard when you've just flown in from the US, are jet-lagged out of your mind, and need something (anything!) keep your attention focused away from how freakin' tired you are.

Some of my American colleagues started dropping/dozing toward the later afternoon, so Eric and I elected to duck out a bit before things formally wrapped up. We didn't know the exact route back to the hotel, so, in a moment of raw inspiration we elected to go with the Zen Navigation System and see where it took us. The fresh air helped a lot, and not too much later we found ourselves in Trafalgar Square (which, by all appearances, is inhabited entirely by pigeons and tourists). Strolling a few more blocks took us back to the hotel ... and to a nearby pub, which opened in 1727(!).

1727!

You have to drink in a bar that's been open since 1727. It's like a rule, or something. (So we did.)

The place was pretty much exactly what you'd expect from a British pub (except the fries are actually good, contrary to rumor). The beer was great, the ambiance was all wood-paneled-charming, the tables were small and intimate. Service was awesome (whenever a bartender calls me "love", I melt).

Hopefully I'll be able to get out an explore a bit more this week. Tomorrow's more conference, but Wednesday looks promising.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 3, 2006 10:23 PM.
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April 2, 2006

Lagging

It's 2:30 AM local time, and I'm up.

I slept a ton last night, but my body finally hit the breaking point and gave me the "enough already!" signal. So now I'm sitting at my desk, cranking on some of the work I wanted to get done this weekend (and couldn't on the plane). I'm meeting some of my fellow Microsofties at 8 AM in the lobby, so I've got five-some hours of productive time and then we're off and running for the day.

Hopefully, I'll be able to last until things wrap up this evening.

(And: thank God for 24-hour room service. The coffee is helping.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 2, 2006 6:25 PM.
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On The Other Side Of The Pond

I've arrived in London, and am at my hotel. A few notes, in no particular order:

• I am very tired.
• Building on that point, London is eight hours ahead of Seattle. That means I've been up almost 23 hours straight as of this writing. I plan to see if I can go a few more.
• Dan Savage's "The Commitment" is a really good book, a personal meditation on marriage (gay, straight), families, and American society.
• The Colbert Report will make you laugh out loud on a 737 (and when you do, people notice and look at you funny). I'll hand it to 'ol Steven - he's polished his right-wing blowhard routine to a high shine, and it's hysterical.
• Despite its terrific trailer, "The Weather Man" isn't a very interesting movie. Pity.
• "Satisfaction: The Science Of Finding True Fulfillment" is also a really good book.
• The latest issue of Business 2.0 has a mention of a kick-ass new Cingular phone, the 8125, that I may have to buy for myself.
• The Boeing 777 is a hell of an aircraft - just a monster widebody thing with loads of room for everything. The bathrooms, for instance, were the largest I've ever seen on an airplane. Ever wondered how there was enough space in an aircraft lavatory for the "Mile High Club"? Wonder no longer. On the 777, you could fit an entire boy scout troop into the bathroom and still have room for a few more.
• United's "Economy Plus" is a godsend to those of us who are six feet or better.
• The United crew on our 777 was super, super, super cool, professional, and helpful. This is a marked contrast to the nasty experience I had with them a few Novembers ago. Mad props to United!
• "Snakes on a Plane" is funny, but becomes somewhat less funny when you're tired, punchy with lack of sleep, and begin wondering if that shadowy shape you see out of the corner of your eye ... IS A SNAKE ON YOUR PLANE!
• Flying into the sunrise - especially after hours upon hours of utter, blackest dark, 7 miles above the Atlantic - is magical.
• Heathrow airport is kinda shabby. Like, c'mon, guys ... spring for some new carpet and a few buckets of paint. The kids'll love it.
• The London Underground is awesome for a transit geek like me. It's not light rail - instead, it's old-school heavy rail. The Piccadilly line took me right from the airport to the Covent Garden stop (a few blocks from my hotel). Total transit time: 36 minutes. Imagine: a rail system to the airport! Unbelievable!
• London's traffic planners have never heard of a "grid." Ever. Or if they've heard of it, they have decided they don't like the look of it - too straight and logical. Instead, the streets here seem to have been inspired by a crayon drawing by some retarded three-year-old who went crazy on a menu at IHOP.
• Which cost me 25 minutes, on foot, trying to find my hotel.
• NOTE: It took me 36 minutes to get within a few blocks of my hotel from the airport.
• My hotel is very hip. My room is like that swank loft on the Haight you always wanted, but could never afford.
• It's also a smoking room ... cause, you know, I'm in Europe.
• London streets are very, very empty at 10:30 on a Sunday morning.
• I am very tired.
• It's now raining outside, which pretty much hoses my naive sightseeing plans. I may sleep sooner instead of later.
• I'm really, really excited to be here.

More as it develops...

UPDATE, June 2, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 2, 2006 4:31 AM.
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April 1, 2006

Off To The UK

I'm heading out the door for the UK, and it feels surreal.

Since I'm gone for a week, I've been doing a lot of the obsessive-compulsive stuff around the apartment ("Am I sure the oven is off? What about the fan in the bathroom?"). I've got a very full suitcase as well as a carry-on bag. With the former, I had to anticipate attire and weather issues for the next several days; the latter is all about not being bored on the 12-some hours I'm in the air.

I feel pretty well-equipped on that end: Daily Show and Colbert Report on the iPod, some DVDs, magazines, and a few books - including a London travel guide.

My flight leaves in 3 hours, and arrives at Heathrow around 8 AM local time. I'm going to try to stay up until "tomorrow" night to get synched with the local clock. Hopefully, I'll have the energy to tool around town and see a few things.

I don't know what my Internet situation is going to be like for the next few days, but I've got my camera and I'll post as I can.

Have a great week, folks!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 1, 2006 8:32 AM.
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March 26, 2006

Bellingham Weekend

I spent the weekend stomping around Bellingham with my good friends Jeff and Barb.

The ostensible reason for my trip was a couch-for-labor trade: I was to help Jeff tear down his old-and-busted garage so he could get a contractor in to replace it with some new hotness. Instead, when I arrived on Friday I found out that Jeff had played Mr. Home Depot during the week and demolished the garage on his own. My portion of "the work" was to help him chop down a small tree and take it to the dump.

No, really.

As a result, the three of us spent the weekend giggling about "Snakes on a Plane", watching "Hustle and Flow" (amazing film), driving around town so I could scope out all the new developments and changes, and, most importantly, drinking wine on the couch while catching up.

I'd seriously underestimated how exhausted I was. I slept until noon on Saturday. Noon! (I don't think I've done that since I was 15 ... but God, it felt good.)

So. I'm home, I'm rested, I'm relaxed, and I'm ready for the week - and then, London. It's gonna be a crazy two weeks.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated March 26, 2006 7:38 PM.
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January 29, 2006

2008: Road Trip!

My father is a motorcycle nut, and has been for many, many years. He owned bikes for a good chunk of my early childhood, and used to take me tooling around Seattle with him when I was three or four. (I even had this cute little yellow helmet. It'd melt your heart.)

Flash forward 30 years. Dad's had this urge to ride the "four corners" of the United States on his motorcycle. Effectively, this means you start in Seattle (or, in his case, Spokane) and, in one consecutive ride, you hit Blaine, Washington, San Diego, California, Key West, Florida and Madawaska, Maine - the four extremities of the continental US. The trip totals out to roughly 11,000 miles.

As you might imagine, this is not a light undertaking. Rather, it's a five-to-six week Tour de United States, with all manner of logistical and planning issues. My dad's been lobbying my stepmom for a few years now to let him go on this thing, and she finally acquiesced last year.

He then asked me if I wanted to go. And, of course, I said yes.

Look, I know I don't own a motorcycle (yet). But this is clearly the opportunity of a lifetime: see the country, spend time with dad, camp, stop in greasy diners, snap lots of pictures, meet people. Live out of your saddle bags for six weeks or so. It's gonna be really cool.

So without boring you with some of the planning issues (e.g., finding a time to go when the weather is good, making sure I've saved up enough vacation at work, being permitted to take off a huge chunk of time, etc. etc. etc.), the plan is to depart on Saturday, August 23, 2008 and return on Wednesday, October 1, 2008. (Incidentally, August 22, 2008 will be my three-year anniversary with Microsoft, so the trip's a nice anniversary marker.)

I spent a chunk of today playing with Streets and Trips 2006 to plan out routes and make sure that the necessary landmarks are in the system. Dad is focused on finding routes that are scenic and winding: we're not big fans of riding on the interstate, so you'll find us on winding country roads and two-lane state highways. For my part, I was plugging in the can't-miss stuff, like the other four corners (where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado all touch), Mount Rushmore, the Grand Canyon ... and the theme parks we're going to hit on the way.

(Did I say theme parks? Oh, yeah.)

This is an incredible opportunity for a coaster fanatic like me. We're going to be riding through a lot of country that I've never seen before, and, well, that country's got a lot of coasters. Dad's agreed to indulge my enthusiasm (or, if ya like, enable my habit), and I've agreed not to pull us too far off track to ride some small county-fair woodie.

We're going to ride clockwise around the country, so the list of theme parks is, in order:

1. Valleyfair! - Shakopee, Minnesota.
2. Mt. Olympus Theme Park - Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin.
3. Paramount's Kings Island - Kings Mills, Ohio.
4. Cedar Point - Sandusky, Ohio.
5. Darien Lake - Darien Center, New York.
6. Six Flags New England - Agawam, Massachusetts (This is the oldest theme park in the US!).
7. Six Flags Great Adventure - Jackson, New Jersey.
8. Knoebel's - Elysburg, Pennsylvania.
9. Dorney Park - Allentown, Pennsylvania.
10. Six Flags Over Georgia - Austell, Georgia.
11. Busch Gardens Tampa - Tampa, Florida.
12. Universal Studios Islands Of Adventure - Orlando, Florida.
13. Six Flags Over Texas - Arlington, Texas.
14. Disneyland - Anaheim, California.
15. Six Flags Magic Mountain - Valencia, California.
16. Six Flags Marine World - Vallejo, California.

Unbelievable. The ride is two-plus years out, and I'm already bouncing up and down with excitement.

(Now I just have to buy a motorcycle...)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 29, 2006 6:53 PM.
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January 9, 2006

Back In PST

I'm home.

The flight was uneventful (long, though - six hours on your butt is a bit too long, if you ask me) and I'm all caught up on my magazines and movies. I'm tired - travel takes it out of me.

Damn, it's good to be back. I always love the smell of Seattle when I get off the plane - the clean, cold, refreshing smell of rain and the Pacific Northwest.

I'm up early for work tomorrow, so I gotta run. Did I mention I had a lot of fun?

(I had a lot of fun.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 9, 2006 11:59 PM.
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Stuck In Orlando

Augh! We're stuck in the Orlando airport.

Our 5:50 flight has been delayed until 8 PM, and this place is a madhouse. People looking tired and stressed, unhappy kids, and the usual travel grumps are grousing more loudly. The one good thing is that they've got free (but slow as hell) WiFi here in the concourse.

(sigh) Not exactly the ending I'd hoped for today, but as long as I get back in one piece, right? At least I can (finally) check my e-mail...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 9, 2006 2:45 PM.
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January 8, 2006

Day Six: Segways Rock!

We're leaving tomorrow, so today was the get-it-done-before-you-go day, handling the few things we thought might be fun to do (once), and a few others we wanted to do again. (But no rush.)

We headed off to Epcot (Got the Soarin' FastPass? ... check!) for lunch at the UK, and then strolled around Innoventions for a bit.

Innoventions is a series of exhibits and interactive games that help people "visualize the future" - but, since the future has this bad habit of actually happening, the exhibits tend to be three to 10 years out of date. When we were here last, some of the Innoventions stuff was laughable ("One day, people may use their computers to listen to music!" ... at which point I walked off the ride and spun up my iPod), and a lot of the exhibits seem driven more by what product a given corporate sponsor (e.g., IBM) wants to push, and less about engaging the imagination or educating people about new trends and tech.

This time, though, we both saw something that really blew us away - the Segway.

Look, I know the Segway is old news. Gob drives one on Arrested Development partly as a way of mocking them. I've read the book about its creation, seen one or two in passing (a guy in my building at work has one), and so on. But watching the demo, where the Disney employee was, well, dancing with the silly thing, my jaw hit the floor. They're amazing in person.

So it turns out that Disney offers Segway rentals. And it further turns out that they have two options - an inexpensive, hour-long classroom thing, and a more-expensive, two-hour long thing where you get to drive the Segway around Epcot's World Showcase before the park opens. We quickly hit the Guest Relations booth, only to be told that they were all booked up for the morning of Monday, the 9th.

Phooey.

Gregg's Greenlake Cycle allegedly rents Segways, though, and now we're all hot to try them. Richard gets pretty excited with shiny new tech, and I swear to God that if they took AmEx at the Innoventions booth, we'd be shipping one home by now. He practically drooled on the floor model.

So we strolled. Strolled over to Norway and rode "Maelstrom." Strolled to France and watched the French film about French things that was clearly made in the 80s. We then hit Soarin' (yes!), and caught the boat over to MGM to ride Rock n' Roller Coaster one ... last ... time ... before the park closed (made it by 5 minutes, too!).

For our final act, we thought we'd pop over to the Magic Kingdom and ride a few classics. The park formally closed at 8, but folks staying on Disney property (that's us) can take advantage of "Extra Magic Hours" - basically, the park stays open an extra three hours for resort guests.

What they don't tell you about Extra Magic Hours is that they only operate a subset of the park's attractions. Richard wanted to do the Jungle Cruise - but it wasn't open. "it's a small world" was running, but a good chunk of the other rides were shuttered. So we did Small World, a final run through in Space Mountain, and called it a day.

Our flight leaves tomorrow at 5:50 PM, but hotel checkout's at 11. (Travel days suck for trying to squeeze in that one extra thing anyhow, so that's likely for the better.) That means the vacation's over. Six days seems like the perfect number for relaxing, partying, and riding a good buncha stuff. (Heck, my Flickr photostream is sporting 329 shots!)

I've had a blast, but I'm excited to get back. (Frankly, I feel like I've been gone a month or so!)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 8, 2006 2:41 PM.
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January 7, 2006

Day Five: Minigolf Smackdown!

Today was a sleep-in day.

Of course, "sleeping in" in Orlando isn't quite the same as "sleeping in" in Seattle; with the three-hour time shift, getting up at 11 AM here means we're really getting up at 8 AM back home. So while 11 AM feels luxurious and indulgent at first blush ... it's not so much. Ah, well.

The fourth (and final) Disney park on our list was Animal Kingdom. Animal Kingdom is the newest, smallest, and - frankly - weakest park among the four; its attractions are pretty lightweight, and the place lacks a "killer ride", ala "Rock n' Roller Coaster" to get people through the turnstiles. On the plus side, Animal Kingdom does have a lot of animals (natch) for you to look at, so it appeals as a zoo. It's a half-day park, tops. Thus, we hit a few rides, had some lunch, visited the petting zoo and called it an afternoon.

(One distinct bummer about timing: Animal Kingdom is about to open their killer ride, called "Expedition Everest", in a few weeks' time. It's rumored to be the biggest and best roller coaster on the property. Cast members are currently able to participate in test rides, but it's not open to park guests at all. Which, for a coaster guy like me, really sucks.)

During our time at Animal Kingdom, Richard and I ha d begun arguing about who was the better minigolfer - aka the 'ol "Don't Make Me Kick Your Ass On The Putting Green And Embarrass You In Front Of Everyone" conversation. I mean, I'd won the first round handily at Winter Summerland, and then he'd gone and had a good day at Fantasia Gardens two days later. But now we were stuck - Richard's mouth was clearly on a trajectory to get the rest of him in trouble, so we had to take our action back to the green and get this matter settled.

We returned to Winter Summerland, loaded up with putters, two cans of Foster's, and a scorecard, and hit the "winter" half of the course.

The game was close. I was ahead for the first few shots, but Huff pulled away after I had a disastrous Hole 8. Two of my famed holes-in-one put us within one point of one another, but then I got shafted with two bad short-game putts in a row on #16 and #17. In the end, he took me by four points. Bastard. As you might imagine, it's going to be a looooooooong flight home. And I swear, if I have to hear "boo-yah!" one more time, I'm going to murder somebody.

Our evening entertainment was the Adventurer's Club (again) - we wanted to be able to spend a few hours soaking in the environment, participating in games in the Mask Room and the Treasure Room, as well as the final evening sing-a-long.

Two funny notes.

First, Richard purchased a maroon sweatshirt at the Epcot Canada pavilion a few days ago. It says "ROOTS" across the front, and has a small Canadian flag at the bottom. Ever since he bought it, people have been stopping him to ask a) for directions and b) if he's Canadian. It's very funny.

So we get to the Adventurer's Club and Richard is randomly picked by one of the actors for harassment. He's hauled to his feet and asked if he's Canadian ... and he elects to play along. He tells them he's from Vancouver, and then proceeds to answer all kinds of questions about Grouse Mountain, Stanley Park, you name it.

And then they make him (and another guy) do this dance in the club. Now, I have this dance captured in a crappy video format on my mobile phone. It's, um, hysterical. And no, I'm not sharing it. But you know, if someone decides to mouth off a bit too much about the minigolf thing ... well, payback's a bitch, huh?

Second, I apparently look like Zach Braff. I'm sitting in the Treasure Room and one of the actors is doing his spiel. Suddenly, he stops, puts his hand on my shoulder, leans in, and says, "I love you on Scrubs." Huge laugh.

(I've heard this before from other friends, but candidly - I don't see it. Do I really look like Zach Braff???)

We partied late, crashed hard. I don't even remember when we got back to the room.

The Flickr photostream is now up to 304 images!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 7, 2006 2:09 PM.
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January 6, 2006

Day Four: Rock n' Roller Coaster (At Last)

When it comes to rides at Disney World, there's only one that's really worth talking about. I'm speaking, of course, of the Rock 'n Roller Coaster at the Disney-MGM Studios.

Like Space Mountain, Rock n' Roller Coaster is a steel coaster inside a darkened building. Unlike Space Mountain, Rock n' Roller Coaster has a zero-to-sixty launch time of 2.8 seconds, loops, corkscrews, hard turns, and a kick-ass soundtrack provided by Aerosmith. It's fast, fun, intense, and something I can ride over and over and over and over and over again.

So today, we hit Disney-MGM, and I got on this sucker twice. Wahoo!

MGM is different from the other Disney Parks in its tight focus on staged entertainment. MGM has stunt shows, musicals, and other performances that the audience can sit back and watch. It's not so big on rides. That said, aside from the aforementioned Rock n' Roller, it's also home to a fantastic drop ride - "The Twilight Zone Tower Of Terror".

Like Rock n' Roller, I can ride Tower of Terror all day long. Unlike Rock n' Roller, however, Richard has steadfastly refused to step foot on the thing. Ever. He wasn't having and part of it when we were here in 2002, and he wasn't having any part of the one they built at California Adventure when we were there in November.

The ride's fun, and it's harmless. You do, you know, drop 13 stories and all, and it's creepy-fun with the whole Twilight Zone thing, but it's not queasy-inducing or dangerous or anything. In fact, it's much less scary than those straight-drop rides you see at most Six Flags parks.

And so, with much arm-twisting and cajoling ... I got him to go. He didn't exactly rave about the experience, but he certainly grumbles less about it. Which is something, right?

Our final event at MGM was a staged show called "Lights, Motors, Action!" which is an import from Disneyland Paris. It's a 30-minute stunt show with cars, motorcycles, jumps, fireballs, jetskis and guys falling off buildings. Pretty astoundingly cool, and very entertaining. A definite thumbs-up.

After having such a blast at Winter Summerland minigolf on Wednesday, we thought it might be fun to hit Fantasia Gardens and do a round there. The route from MGM to Fantasia Gardens is quite walkable (it's about 2 miles), so we elected to hoof it.

The golf round was a lot of fun. Fantasia Gardens is a harder, more elaborate course than Winter Summerland - more gimmicks (water spouts, trick shots, and so on), steeper banking, more skill. We worked our way around the 18 holes, each scoring a couple holes-in-one. Richard took this round by a narrow, 2-point margin.

With our evening in front of us, we thought it might be fun to hit Epcot and do some of the stuff we didn't get to last time. We continued along the path from MGM (it runs to the Boardwalk, and, ultimately, Epcot, popping out right next to France and the UK in World Showcase). We caught "Journey Into Imagination" (which sucks, by the way, unless you have reeeeeeeally small children), found out that "Soarin'" was all sold out for the evening (dammit!), but managed to slip on to "Mission: SPACE" again.

And then, one of the guests in our car barfed during the ride.

(They provide barf bags, just like an airline, so I assume this happens a lot.)

Actually, the popularity of Mission: SPACE is something of a hot topic between the two of us. Richard loves the ride, the same way I love Soarin' or Rock n' Roller Coaster. The lines for Space aren't too bad, though - usually, they're 20 or 30 minutes, as opposed to Soarin's perpetual 80-minute-wait-and-all-the-FastPasses-are-gone scenario. Some of this can be explained by the fact that Soarin' is just newer, but I think it goes beyond that. I think people are actually scared of Mission: SPACE; its intensity puts people off. Interestingly, we did some research on this, and it turns out that Rock n' Roller coaster pulls far more G-forces than Space does. But still, nobody has died after going on Rock n' Roller Coaster. (And hopefully, it'll stay that way.)

We rounded off our Epcot evening with dinner and a run on "Test Track". All in all, an excellent day.

(The Flickr photostream is now up to 245 images.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 6, 2006 2:05 PM.
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January 5, 2006

Day Three: Mine Trains, Parasailing & Hathaway Browne

Today was a long day.

We were up and out the door fairly early to head over to the Magic Kingdom. While we'd hit some rides on our first night here, there were a handful of other attractions, like Splash Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean that needed our attention. So off we went, doing Pirates, Big Thunder, Splash Mountain and the Carousel of Progress. Sadly, "it's a small world" was too painful a ride for Richard to bear, so we skipped it. (sigh)

I get asked a lot by people who have never been to Disney World if it's "like Disneyland." The answer is a qualified yes - many of the same attractions exist in both places, along with other theme park-y things like $5 bottled water and tacky t-shirts. But the thing about Florida is that it has space. Disney took 28,000 acres of swampland and terraformed it, engineering lakes and beaches along with the hotels, parks, rides, roads, and the rest.

All of this is a long-winded way of saying that, after lunch, we strolled over to the watersports section of the Contemporary Resort to go parasailing.

No, really. The Magic Kingdom is on the north shore of a large body of water called the Seven Seas Lagoon. The lagoon feeds in to another, larger body of water - Bay Lake - just to the east of it. The Contemporary resort straddles the two bodies of water; they have boat rental services, among other things. And if you're so inclined, you can go parasailing over Bay Lake for 10 minutes or so.

It was fabulous. Florida's pretty damn flat, so when you're 450 feet in the air you can see - well, not forever, exactly, but you can certainly survey the park. It's easy to pick out landmarks (Epcot! Tower of Terror!), and you also get a sense of just how huge Disney World really is.

Both Richard and I went up in the air - and I have to say, I think he enjoyed it more than he expected to. If you're so inclined, you can see a video of Richard's return to the boat (115 MB, AVI format); notice the huge smile on his face.

Freshly pumped up on adrenaline, we caught the monorail to Epcot (hmmm, a monorail as a way of getting around ... I wonder if something like that would work for Seattle...), and promptly shot over to get FastPasses for Soarin'. It was only 3 PM, but the ride was dispensing passes for 8 PM. With 5 hours to kill, we elected to go wait in line for Mission: SPACE. And, hoo, boy - does that ride blast your hair back.

"SPACE" is an astronaut flight simulator. You're on a manned mission to Mars, going through the process of Earth liftoff, negotiating a lunar slingshot, and finally finagling a Martian landing. The ride is incredible - it uses a centrifuge to provide some extraordinary G-forces. (The liftoff, in particular, has to be experienced to be believed.) And yes, barf bags are included. This is easily Richard's favorite ride on the property, and with good reason. I've never done anything quite like it.

The next few hours were spent walking around World Showcase, checking out the CircleVision movies in the China and Canada pavilions, shopping, eating, and mostly hanging out. We rode Soarin' at 8 (it's a direct clone of the ride from California Adventure), and then caught the bus over to Downtown Disney and Pleasure Island.

Pleasure Island is a "grownup" section of Disney World, composed of dance and comedy clubs. The audience is decidedly younger, sort of a Spring Break crowd on the make. Depending on your tastes, you can dance to 70s and 80s, listen to jazz, or watch improv comedy. But we both came for the Adventurer's Club.

The Adventurer's Club is an improv comedy club done in the style of a 30s country club. The host, Hathaway Browne, is a blowhard who has traveled the world and brought back all manner of artifacts to decorate the place. He is accompanied by other members of the club, each of whom walks around and interacts with each of the (increasingly) drunk members of the audience. The jokes are pretty ribald, with more double entendres than a Bond film. The last performance of the evening pulls everyone into the library for a hysterical song-and-dance number. We got to the club too late to hang out as long as we'd like, so we'll be going back later this week.

(The Flickr photostream is now up to 182 images.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 5, 2006 11:55 PM.
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January 4, 2006

Day Two: Blizzard Beach Birthday

For our second day here at Disney World, we decided to go play at a water park.

(Oh, and happy birthday to me - 33 years on the planet!)

Blizzard Beach is one of two themed (natch) water parks here in the World (the other is Typhoon Lagoon). I'd never been to Blizzard Beach; the last few times I'd come to the World, it had been closed for refurbishment. But this time 'round, Typhoon was the one being renovated. Score.

The Blizzard Beach gimmick story is that Florida was hit by a freak snowstorm a while back, and a ski resort was built to take advantage of it. Then the sun came out, and now the whole thing is sitting here, melting in the snow. The park has a working chairlift (!) and loads of long-run, high-speed slides, including the "Summit Plummet" which shoots you out at 55 mph(!).

Richard and I had a blast. Blizzard Beach has a bunch 'o competitive rides, like toboggans and timed-innertube races, so we wound up trash talkin' and doing a whole lotta racing against one another - laughing and being obnoxious the entire time. (Oh, and generally Richard got spanked.)

After a few hours in the sun, we hoofed it out of the park and over to the Winter Summerland minigolf course. I'm a minigolf freak - if there's a dancing hippo and a putting green within about two miles, I'm generally able to sniff it out. So we spent an hour or so maneuvering the ball around Santa and his elves. And, as the cherry on top, it was an under-par game for the both of us.

Quick trip to the hotel, change of clothes, and off to Downtown Disney to see the resident Cirque du Soleil show - "La Nouba". The Cirque folks have a permanent installation in the "Westside" section, so the plan was to get dinner at the Bongos Cuban restaurant at 7, and then head over to the show ... until Bongos lost our reservation and was totally unhelpful about doing anything about it. (Fortunately, the day was saved by the World's Best Waiter at Wolfgang Puck, who got us in and out in 30 minutes flat.)

If you've never seen Cirque du Soleil, go. Seriously. I can't recommend it enough. It's kind of a strange thing to explain - I'm forever telling people what it's not ("OK, so it's like a circus, but they don't use animals, right? And they have clowns, but they're not, like, creepy or skanky or anything. And they use acrobats, too, and other kinds of physical artists, but it's not all Barnum and Bailey or anything..."), but that's because it's such a unique experience that there's no good baseline for comparison. So let me just say this: Cirque du Soleil is one of those experiences that gives you a renewed appreciation for the human body, training, art, and music. It's incredible.

Now, I'd seen "La Nouba" back in 2002 (Richard hadn't caught that show, being that he was prepping for the marathon at the time), and was so impressed that I'd gone on to see "O" and "Mystere" in Las Vegas later that year. I've also seen the traveling shows that come to Seattle now and again (e.g., "Dralion"). So I can say with authority that "La Nouba" is the best of the lot. Astounding, astounding stuff.

(My Flickr photostream is up to 74 images.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 4, 2006 11:47 PM.
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Day One: My Tomorrowland Can Beat Up Your Tomorrowland

Richard and I arrived in Orlando around 5, and, after much fooling around with shuttles, buses, and the lines, lines, lines to get checked in to the hotel, we dropped our crap on the floor of the room and hoofed it over to Magic Kingdom.

We got to the park 'round 8:30, with a parade going full-blast down Main Street. Fireworks were scheduled for 9; the park closed at 10. We looked at one another and said, "Tomorrowland."

And thus began the fun task of threading through throngs of slow-moving tourists, each of whom had a 50% chance of stopping, pointing, and going, "ooooh, look!" as some parade float went by. At which point they'd stop. Grr.

We made it through in one piece.

Tomorrowland was busy, but not packed; the parade n' fireworks were siphoning off large numbers of people. So we hit Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin, Space Mountain, and the Tomorrowland Transit Authority. And then, with just minutes to spare before closing, we slid in under the wire at The Haunted Mansion.

With my recent Disneyland trips so fresh in memory, I was struck by a lot of the differences between the Magic Kingdom's Tomorrowland and the Real Thing back in Anaheim. Without being too blunt, lemme just say: Anaheim is better. Period, full stop, end of argument.

The California version of Buzz Lightyear, for example, is a markedly better ride. The ray guns you use are on flexible tubes, letting you point them every which way; in Orlando, they're firmly welded to the dashboard of your vehicle (making for a semi-frustrating experience). In Orlando, when you shoot a bad guy, the target doesn't light up to let you know you've scored. When you leave Orlando's version, you're not even given a freebie, e-mail-able photo of yourself and your friend, with your score embedded. Instead, you have to buy a score-free old-school picture. Bleh. (And the ride is dirtier, grungier - that sounds like a nit, but it's not.)

And then there's Space Mountain.

The Anaheim Space Mountain is a brand-spanking-new, modern coaster with kick-ass effects and music that's synchronized to the ride. The Orlando Space Mountain is a 35-year-old roller coaster in the dark. There's no comparison between the two. At all. Anaheim makes Orlando look old n' busted. Disney really ought to rebuild the Orlando version as soon as possible. We're talking potential brand damage, here, people.

One thing for Orlando, though, is the Tomorrowland Transit Authority. The Disneyland version, the PeopleMover, was discontinued back in the '90s and replaced, eventually, with the RocketRods, which broke down too often and were themselves shuttered. As a result, Orlando has a cool, five-minute arial tour of Tomorrowland (and you get to go through Space Mountain, which rocks); Anaheim has, uh, defunct track. Yeah. Point goes to Orlando.

So we're here, and we're in one piece, and we're having a ball.

But don't let anybody fool you: the Tomorrowland you want is the Tomorrowland in California. Seriously.

(Oh, and my Flickr photostream can be found here.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 4, 2006 3:25 PM.
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January 3, 2006

Off To Orlando

VACATION! Richard and I are off to Walt Disney World for the next week. We'll be riding the "Rock n' Roller Coaster", catching Cirque du Soleil, and chilling out in the Adventurer's Club. I also got Richard a gift certificate to go parasailing on Bay Lake, so I assume one of the two of us will be a good 450 feet in the air at some point.

I've no idea if I get in-room Internet (we're staying at "Disney's Screaming Children Resort"), but if so, I'll try to upload my photostream as we go.

I'm off to catch transit to the airport. Have a great week, everybody!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 3, 2006 5:23 AM.
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December 27, 2005

Canadian Christmas

My Vancouver Christmas trip was a smashing success.

Elaine, Richard and I took off for Canada on Friday afternoon. Elaine's someone who knows people, so we scored a pretty astounding deal at the Four Seasons hotel, right downtown. It's an amazingly nice hotel, and it's even more amazing when you've got an executive suite on the 19th floor.

The weather wasn't terribly cooperative (rain, rain, rain), so we busied ourselves playing around in the underground mall, watching IMAX movies ("Magnificent Desolation" - thumbs up), and, of course, riding SkyTrain. (The photo you're seeing is Richard and Elaine buying SkyTrain tickets on the night of our arrival - I'm a huge transit dork, and they played along.)

Our friends Keith and Angela arrived on Saturday, and we had dinner at the Sequoia Grill in Stanley Park. A-frickin'-mazing food.

And Sunday night - Christmas Day - we spent with Elaine's extended family at a Chinese restaurant (that's a rented restaurant - the family's really extended), getting served course after course of interesting delicacies like jellyfish. Poor Richard got caught in the cultural crossfire - to most Chinese restaurants, "vegetarian" means "eats seafood" ... which is a somewhat more lax interpretation than Richard uses. They rushed some special, veggie-friendly dishes into production, and all was well.

(In the meantime, Richard had to console himself with Cabernet and chocolate. Poor fella.)

In-between our evening events, we walked the city (note to travelers: Vancouver panhandlers are aggressive), browsed in stores, laughed, and just hung out. It was easily one of the most unconventional - and memorable - holidays in recent memory.

I love Seattle, but I may start to love Vancouver more.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 27, 2005 11:39 AM.
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December 23, 2005

Off To Vancouver

I'm off to Vancouver, BC for the holiday weekend, so posting will be light over the next few days.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated December 23, 2005 11:46 AM.
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November 25, 2005

Disneyland Trip Report (At Last)

My family trip to Disneyland on the 4th was a total blast.(I know I've taken my own sweet time getting this post up, and for that I apologize.)

The four of us (dad, stepmom, Richard, and me) arrived on Friday afternoon, and flew back at around the same time on Sunday. That gave us a quick-run-around-and-do-fun-stuff Friday night, one entire, leisurely day in the parks (Saturday), with a catch-anything-else-if-we-feel-like-it Sunday morning to boot.

People often ask me why I'm so enamored of Disneyland and Walt Disney World. It's true that I find a lot of Disney product cheesy or tepid (those direct-to-video sequels of the classic films, for example, were clearly art-directed by some soulless MBA, and have the smell of evil money on them), but I think the parks are special, existing as these fantastic, amazing environments where every single thing you're seeing and experiencing was consciously designed, sculpted, built, and maintained by creative folks. In that way, the parks are art. And I love them.

What am I talking about? Well, let's compare a Disney park with a typical amusement park like Six Flags.

At a Six Flags, the ride is king. The experience of riding a given ride - the acceleration, the drop, the G-forces, whatever - is the point of the park. The typical Six Flags ride is a coaster, which is all about the bigger/faster/longer value proposition. The more extreme the coaster, the better - go from 0 to 105 mph in 4 seconds! Zoom through four loops instead of two! Shoot 420 feet straight up! Pull some serious G's!

Apart from the appeal of the bigger/faster/longer, Six Flags parks don't offer much. The rides themselves are painted, but not themed; the mechanical underpinnings of the rides (chains, brakes, levers, cables, oil) are out in the breeze, for all to see. In some cases, such as the Wild Thing coaster at Enchanted Village, this is taken to an aggressive, odious extreme - the obnoxious green paint job aside, Wild Thing is surrounded by unadorned chain-link fence; the ground beneath the ride is nothing more that patches of grass, crushed rock, and weeds, spotted with nice patches of oil and grease. "The point of this ride is the corkscrew loops," it seems to be saying, "and you better like it, because we're not spending a nickel on anything else."

In comparison to monster Six Flags rides, Disney park rides are physically tame. A good example is one of my favorite Disneyland rides: Space Mountain. Space Mountain is a roller coaster that's been enclosed inside a building. The ride isn't particularly fast - about 40mph at its peak - and it lacks loops, mag-lev takeoff, high G-forces, or anything that might make it attractive to the Six Flags jet set.

So what's the attraction?

Well, Space Mountain, like most Disney rides, carries a big aspect of make-believe. The gimmick is that you're a "space traveller" about to launch on a galactic journey. As such, the entire ride is designed around this storyline: the building, the paint job, the props, the video clips you watch while waiting in line, and the experience of riding the ride all come together to create, if not a compelling illusion (it's still a roller coaster in the dark, and everyone knows it), then at least the sensation that the ride is more than the sum of its parts.

In other words, I'll take a slow-moving, loop-free roller coster in the dark as long as there's a good reason, something to believe in. Six Flags is about the ride; Disney is about the story.

This "about the story" piece manifests itself throughout the parks. The themeing inside Disneyland is outrageously good - Frontierland is much different than Tomorrowland, which is itself much different than New Orleans Square. This level of detail and imagination becomes, in effect, the attraction of the park, and, if you're in to that sort of thing (which I clearly am), you'll quickly find yourself paying attention to the puns, the inside jokes, the flourishes. You see something new every time. Heck, there's a whole series of "Hidden Mickeys" that are designed into the topiary, the buildings, the pathways, you name it. (And if you ever go to Disney World, take the "Backstage Magic" tour. Your eyes will pop.)

So. The family had a fabulous time. The park wasn't too crowded, and we breezed through lines. We hooked up with friends - Tony, Heidi, Chris and Todd - joking and laughing all night. Saw fireworks, rode the monorail, snapped photos. (And I almost bought an annual pass, but decided that I'd better stick with one season pass at a time.)

If you've not been to Disneyland in a while, go. If you've got kids, four years old or better seems to be a good number (and check the height requirements for the rides before you pony up for the admission). And when you're there, pay attention to the details - you won't be disappointed.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2005 5:48 PM.
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Back In Seattle

After too much food, plenty of sleep, and lots of laughs, we're back in the Emerald City.

I ran a few errands after getting dropped downtown by the 194, picking up my Half Marathon packet, a copy of "The Search" from the library, and my annual holiday cards. Now I'm back in my apartment, scrounging leftovers in the fridge and planning on a fun night of relaxation.

Happy holidays, everybody!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 25, 2005 4:46 PM.
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November 23, 2005

Off To Spokane

I'm up early and out the door this morning for Spokane, where I'll be chillin' with the family for Thanksgiving. I'll blog when I can.

Have a safe and happy holiday, everybody!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 23, 2005 5:24 AM.
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October 30, 2005

Unwound

What is it about a day away that can take all the knots out of your rope?

My trip to Westport was ... perfect. Just perfect. I sat around with my grandmother, mom, and stepfather, swapping stories, drinking Chardonnay and watching "The Daily Show" (my grandma is Jon Stewart's #1 fan). Today was a sleep-in kinda thing, with late breakfast and French-press coffee. And I headed for home around 1 PM, stepping in to the Zen-like bliss of driving 65 on remote state highways, three hours in the car, alone.

I feel wonderful.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 30, 2005 6:59 PM.
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October 29, 2005

Off To The Ocean

I'm out of town for the rest of the weekend, off to the ocean to see family. My mom claims there are WiFi cafes in Westport, but, well, we'll see.

Expect light updates, if at all.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 29, 2005 10:14 AM.
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October 4, 2005

Off To The Bay Area

I'm typing this from Gate D9 at SeaTac, where I'm waiting for a flight down to San Francisco. (And thank God for wireless in the airport; I'm actually able to get work done.)

As I blogged earlier in the week, I'm off to the Web 2.0 Conference. It's a three-day extravaganza of ideas and energy, with some big-time speakers from the industry (such as Terry Semel, Kim Polese, Barry Diller, Joe Kraus, Pierre Omidyar) as well as from Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Yusuf Mehdi). Candidly, I'm expecting it to be awesome.

Being able to go to Web 2.0 has become another one of those "big company/small company" moments for me. Not to reduce things to price, but Web 2.0 is spendy - almost $3,000 for admission alone. When you add hotel, airfare, and incidentals, well, Microsoft is investing a chunk of change, here.

Back in the Media Access/Pacific Rim days, it would have been hard to justify this kind of outlay - not because it would have been a frivolous investment (given the quality of the information, it's clearly not), but instead because we operated in a continuous, cash-is-precious, near-term-revenue-is-critical frame of mind. You spend a lot of time keeping small companies alive, and, despite our successes with each business, none of us partners ever relaxed enough to really feel comfortable spending thousands on long-term items like conferences when there were new machines to be bought, printers to be replaced, and payroll to meet.

(Actually, along the "keep the company alive" vibe, I remember taking a trip to Disney World in 1999 with Khan and Richard; the contingency planning surrounding an 8-day vacation for the three of us - "What happens if the server room catches fire? What do we do if we're invaded by aliens? Do we have network monitoring going to all three of our cell phones?" yadda yadda - took on D-Day-esque proportions.)

I'm very much looking forward to the next few days.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated October 4, 2005 7:44 PM.
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August 19, 2005

Daily Ride: Priest Lake

Dad and I took an awesome, five-plus-hour ride yesterday, heading back to Newport, on to Sandpoint (we had killer nachos at a Mexican place called "Jalapenos"), and finally up to a town called Coolin, on the southern shore of Priest Lake.

Riding double tends to make my hips hurt (I'm a reasonably tall guy, which means a lot of me is leg ... and they've gotta go somewhere), but I didn't mind so much. I was distracted by the scenery (farms to towns to rolling hills to trees to lakes), by the endless, relentless wind, and that wonderful feeling you get on a motorcycle - the intoxicating blend of speed, open-air, and the potential to go anywhere your heart takes you.

I've toyed with the idea of buying a motorcycle, but had always resisted. I'm not much of a "stuff" person, and I suspect the idea of owning a bike would remain much better than the reality. (It's like that old saying about boats: "The two best days in a sailor's life are the day he buys it, and the day he sells it"). That said, I am always captivated by motorcycles when I ride them, and that gives me pause.

The Honda Shadow 750 is a nice, inexpensive, reliable machine. Hm...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 19, 2005 4:24 PM.
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August 17, 2005

Out And Back

Dad and I got out for a ride on his new BMW yesterday afternoon, heading East into Idaho along Blanchard Road, past Mt. Spokane State Park, out to 41 and up to Newport, Washington.

The weather was spectacular - warm and dry, with high temperatures that were "invisible" to us as long as the motorcycle was in motion (stand still very long, and you heat up real quick). In fact, I'd dressed in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt to guard against exposure; nothing sucks worse than getting off a fabulous ride, only to find that your skin has turned a deep, dark red from the sun.

Newport's a classic small town - one-way streets, a brick downtown business district, zillions of espresso stands and hardware stores, and the obligatory Bank of America. We stopped at a small general store with a bona-fide 1950s soda counter; dad had a handmade chocolate milkshake (reports were that it was excellent), and I went with the customary triple Americano (which, all told, was fine).

It's raining this morning, so we've scrapped our plans for golf and a day ride; instead, we're going to head out to Priest Lake tomorrow, weather permitting.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 17, 2005 9:06 AM.
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August 12, 2005

Spokanistan

I'm back in Spokane, visiting family and planning to do some motorcyclin' with my father over the next week. Our schedule is pretty loose, all told - mostly, we're going to go where the days take us.

One thing I'm pretty excited about is my long run tomorrow morning. Hal says I have to put in 15 miles, which will be a personal distance record. My dad took some quality time with MapSource and mapped out a loop that takes me from his house, out, around, and finally back to the front door. He'll be on the motorcycle, providing water and the occasional CLIF bar.

Should be great.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 12, 2005 4:01 PM.
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July 30, 2005

At Last, A Run

Running has been a source of frustration for me over the past couple of days. I've got the marathon coming up in a little more than two months, and Hal says I should be doing a 13-miler this weekend to stick to my training.

Yeah, right.

Trouble is, I'm in a new town and I don't have the first clue about where the "good" running places are (e.g., relatively safe, bathrooms and water fountains available). My original intent had been to run for a bit along US 95 ... but, as it happens, there's no sidewalk, and the traffic is moving waaaay too fast for me to feel like that's a good idea. Plus, nobody looks for pedestrians.

Plan B, then, was to run on the hotel treadmill. But it turns out they don't have one. Grr.

So last night, we're all out at the Rehearsal Dinner, drinking wine and chatting and I'm whining about my profound Lack Of Run to Chris, who blinked at me, took a step back, and semi-stammered (in that, "how on Earth did you get in to an MBA program, again?" voice), "Uh, the Centennial Trail is just a few blocks from here..."

Oh.
Musta missed that in the tourist guide.

Coeur d'Alene's Centennial Trail is a bike/run trail that, much like Seattle's Burke-Gilman, stretches for more than 25 miles. In this case, you can go from Riverfront Park in Spokane to downtown CDA, and beyond. Astounding.

So at 7:15 this morning, Matt Minas and I put in a good 6.5-mile run along the Centennial. It was glorious. Sunshine, mild temperature, good shade from time to time, and a SPECTACULAR view of the lake. We made it from downtown to Steamer Point, and then did a U-turn and came back to the car.

I feel about a bazillion times better than I did 24 hours ago. (What is that with exercise, anyway?)

The long run is scheduled for Monday. It seemed ... silly to shag myself out with 13 miles when I need to be on my game for tonight.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 30, 2005 10:00 AM.
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July 29, 2005

Coasters, At Last

Cintra and I made it to Silverwood yesterday, and - guess what? - we had a lot of fun.

Our first stop was Tremors, which is the best damn roller coaster in the Pacific Northwest (sorry, TimberHawk). It's fast, it's wooden, it's got a great 110-foot drop and some killer banking. Cintra claimed she'd not been on a coaster for, like, 16 years or something, so the whole "lift-hill experience" was inducing some anxiety.

She liked it anyway.

We then were off to the Timber Terror, which is a classic out-and-back ride. Close in speed to Tremors (55 mph, instead of 60), it nevertheless feels a bit leisurely. It's also the "signature" coaster for the park, because it runs alongside US 95.

After a quick lunch we jumped on the River Rafting ride. Big mistake - we got soaked. After debating what else to ride (Corkscrew?) we decided to relax in the sun and headed over to Boulder Beach.

This was, perhaps, my favorite part of the day. "Elkhorn Creek" is a lazy river ride; just grab an innertube and make a leisurely loop around the park. The best bit is that there's a full, operating bar in a nook just off the main drag. So we grabbed a couple of margaritas and ... chilled. Sunshine, a few splashing kids, and a drink in-hand ... perfect.

Oh, and the wave pool was cool, too.

UPDATE, January 1, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 29, 2005 12:06 PM.
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July 28, 2005

Thursday, 10:30 AM

Yesterday's road trip was great. Aside from getting stuck in several miles of construction traffic over the pass (and the obligatory stop in Ellensburg for lunch and gasoline), Cintra and I made great time from Seattle to CDA, ultimately arriving around 4.

The hotel is nice and clean, with great amenities: in-room high-speed Internet, pool, hot tub, workout room, etc. One funny note is that our room looks out on the "Wild Waters" waterpark (the photo above is taken from our window), which meant we got to hear screaming kids until the place closed at 9.

One funny note: there are no sidewalks here. No, really. We were pretty pooped by the time we got in, so elected to go out for pizza instead of hitting Silverwood. The pizza joint is about a half mile from the hotel, so no worries, right? We'll hoof it, stretch our legs.

Well, we'd no sooner left the hotel and rounded the corner than we realized there was no place for us to walk. The pizza place is on the other side of I-90; the bridge has no sidewalks, bike lanes, or shoulder of any kind.

(sigh)

Back to the car, I guess. Chalk this up to culture shock.

We're off to ride coasters ... the park opens in 30 minutes. More later!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 28, 2005 10:30 AM.
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July 27, 2005

Gentlemen, Start Your Engines!

OK, headin' east for the wedding. Cintra and I should be in Coeur d'Alene around 2 or 3 PM ... and Silverwood is open until 9.

The good news is that my hotel claims "Free high-speed Internet access in every guestroom!" (And thank God for that. I was sorta afraid I was gonna have to wardrive CDA to find a WiFi signal I could share.)

We're off!

UPDATE, January 1, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 27, 2005 9:58 AM.
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July 21, 2005

Learning To Fly

I've just returned home from the most amazing Thursday.

My friend Guy recently earned his pilot's license. A few weeks back, he generously offered to take me up to the San Juan Islands for dinner (he'd handle the plane if I handled the food). And tonight, I took him up on his offer.

Wow. Just wow.

Three of us - me, Guy, and his friend Tammy - rented a Cessna at Paine Field, and headed due north to Orcas Island. After landing, we strolled to downtown Eastsound and had (average, overpriced) Mexican food while sitting out in the sun - and enjoying great conversation.

Back to the Cessna, and we're airborne, heading south - to the city, this time, by way of Mount Vernon and the Skagit Valley. It's amazing how visible Seattle's skyline is from miles and miles away - even shrouded in haze, you can see the Bank of America Tower poking its snout up through the clouds, and the cluster of other, smaller buildings around it. (I know we're no Gotham, but compared to the landscape surrounding the city, it sure seemed like it.)

So we orbited. We flew above Greenlake, the Ship Canal, Seattle Center, the Locks. We glided over the University of Washington, hit Capitol Hill (spotted my apartment building!), and then, finally, elected to go north and east, along the shore of Lake Washington.

We eventually ended up in Woodinville, floating over Woodinville High (where both Guy and I spent time), Leota Junior High (we spent time there, too), and played the "spot the landmarks of your youth" game. We finally located the houses where we grew up, and headed to Redmond so Tammy could spot her place.

In short, it was a total blast. We were cracking each other up the whole time.

It's hard to capture the feeling of being aloft in the Cessna. Small planes don't feel like jumbo jets - they're smoother, snappier. We were going about 120 mph, but never felt it; instead, I would have sworn we were doing 40 or so. And cruising at 2,500 feet you can see an awful lot of ground detail - bridges, cars, etc. - that you never get to see from seat 23A of Alaska Airlines #261. Takeoff is easy. Landing is scarier.

Guy was a total pro.

After drinking in the scenery and topography on a sunny, wonderful day, I'm fully in love with Washington. And I can't wait to go again. Guy is talking about the "Hundred Dollar Hamburger" site, which is a little club for pilots that need to get food when they're out, about, and landing at little dinky airstrips around the country. Guy's talking about Leavenworth as a next stop, or maybe flying east to Chicago to see friends.

I note with some interest that there's a cute airstrip in Athol, Idaho ... which is right next to Silverwood...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 21, 2005 11:07 PM.
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July 18, 2005

Disneyland's 50th: The Report

Disneyland's 50th birthday was amazing.

The post-Storm/Sparks gang had been out kind of late on Friday, so I didn't get to bed until 1. My original plan had been to hit the park at 6 AM, which necessitated my being out the door at a quarter past five. Since that would have given me a scant four hours of sleep in front of a very busy day, I elected to take an extra hour.

Khan, it seems, was right about the $14.50. Mea culpa.

In some ways, I was relaxed about the crowds. Despite my suspicion of record morning crowds and insane lines (fueled, in no small part, by buzz on the Disney fan sites), I wondered how many people were actually going to show up more than an hour ahead of the park opening to be in line. I suspected I'd see people, but it wouldn't be that bad.

So I woke up with a start at 5:48, showered, and hit the road. I parked at the Mickey & Friends garage in Anaheim, and noted there were already a number of cars in the garage. Hm.

I walked down the garage escalator and caught the tram to Downtown Disney. I noticed that the tram filled with people. And then we were away, pulling up to Downtown Disney just three or four minutes later.

And then I saw the lines.
Holy crap.

At 6:45 in the morning, there were easily 30,000 people in line. Easily. The line snaked from the tram drop-off, around a corner, and then down the entire length of Downtown Disney, only to make a U-turn at the Lego Store (next to the Monorail station) and head back to the security booths in front of the Esplanade.

In addition to these 30,000 folks, an additional 20,000 had spent the night at Disney's California Adventure. (Call me cynical about DCA, but this might be the largest crowd ever in that park.)

The net effect was that, despite the fact that the park gates were opened at 7 AM - a whole hour ahead of schedule - I spent an hour and 45 minutes just waiting to get in to Disneyland.

This was not, by any means, a bad time. In fact, as you might imagine, I had a few things in common with the 29,999 other folks in line. People were swapping stories, talking about where they were from, how many times they'd been to the park, favorite memories, favorite rides, you name it. Some couples had proposed to one another in the park (as my friends Cale and Rosheen did, for example); others were returning for the first time in a decade. It was truly amazing.

So the lines moved (this is Disney, after all, and they know queueing theory), and I finally entered the park around 8:30. Every guest got free, gold-colored mouse ears with "July 17, 2005" stitched on the back, as well as commemorative park maps for Disneyland and California Adventure. Cast members were also dispensing free cupcakes to guests all day long.

Khan and Christine, as guests of the Disneyland Hotel, had managed to finagle primo slots in line, and were already having breakfast at the Plaza Inn when we hooked up around 8:45. I checked in with them and booked over to Space Mountain for a FastPass; my return time was already 12:20. Satisfied that I'd get to ride the coaster at least once, I headed back to the Plaza to chat with Khan & Chris.

The "big events" for the day included a formal park birthday announcement at 10 AM, and a replay of Walt's historic dedication of the park at 4:45 PM - 50 years, to the day and time, of when it was originally delivered. The birthday announcement was to be held in front of Sleeping Beauty Castle, but Disneyland management had set up Jumbotron monitors all over the park that were covering the live broadcast.

I can't stress enough how large the crowds were. Photos simply don't capture the scale of the thing; I used the video feature of my Canon to take a tracking shot of the mob in front of the castle around 9 AM . Remember, this is an hour before the actual ceremony; these people are just getting in line to watch. And more are arriving every second. (34.5 MB, QuickTime required.)

With the crowds in front of the castle growing to insane levels, the three of us elected to go to Tomorrowland to watch the broadcast (the photo at the top of this post is Khan and me in Tomorrowland, waiting for the broadcast - you can see Space Mountain and the Jumbotron in the background). Tomorrowland has always been my favorite Disney "land", and it seemed somehow fitting to watch the ceremony from the part of the park that had, ostensibly, been most concerned with trying to forecast what our lives would be like in 2005. (Sadly, the flying cars never came to be.)

When 10 AM rolled around, you could sense the outrageous energy from the crowd. Art Linkletter, who hosted the original Disneyland ceremony in 1955, is still alive and kicking (at 93!), and was on hand to both reminisce about the old days and talk about how excited he was to be here today. He introduced Bob Iger, who introduced Michael Eisner, and who in turn introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger. Diane Disney Miller (Walt's daughter) was on hand to represent the family. All told, it was a touching - and appropriate - 45 minutes.

After the ceremony, Khan and Christine headed back to their hotel to swim in the pool (they had an early flight back to Seattle, and wanted to unwind first), which meant I was on my own for the balance of the day. Despite the crowds, lines moved well - I got on Space Mountain, of course, but also Buzz Lightyear's Astro Blasters, The Enchanted Tiki Room, Haunted Mansion, and visited the "Disneyland: The First 50 Magical Years" exhibit. I even made it over to California Adventure and hit Tower of Terror, California Screamin' (twice!), Soarin' Over California, and "Turtle Talk with Crush" in the Animation pavilion (if you have kids who liked "Finding Nemo", take 'em to "Turtle Talk." Trust me on this one...). After seeing the 4:45 rededication from Main Street, I called it a day.

I could not have planned - or hoped - for a better time. Yes, it was crowded, and yes, it was crazy-busy. It was a hot day, and the lines for everything - rides, food, bathrooms, you name it - were omnipresent. That said, there was a lot of fun to be had, along with a deep and abiding sense of being there for something that was unique and special. Khan and Christine are Disney maniacs, so being able to experience the morning with them was a treat - like going to a concert of a band you love with a few friends who know the music as well as you do.

I'm going back to Disneyland in early November - three days, this time - to experience the holidays with friends and family. It will be great to slow down and drink the parks in with a little more time and a little less frenzy. But there's just no replicating the 17th. The golden mouse ears - as well as my ticket, and the maps - are on my bookshelf.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 18, 2005 8:56 PM.
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July 16, 2005

La-La Land

I'm off to Los Angeles! I'll blog when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 16, 2005 6:52 AM.
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July 11, 2005

MousePlanet On Disneyland's Birthday

This morning's MousePlanet Disneyland Update has some bits and pieces about what to expect on Disneyland's 50th:

"The most frequent question we've been getting at MousePlanet lately is, “What will the crowds be like on the 17th, will I get in?” It is going to be very crowded on the 17th and there is no guarantee that you'll get into the park. It is very likely you will, but the only guests with guaranteed access are participants in the merchandise event who will be inside the park before it opens. Beyond that, if the fire marshal decides the park is at capacity (likely somewhere between 70,000 and 80,000 people), then there is no guarantee for anybody. Being a guest at one of the three on-property hotels will get you preferential entry, but if the gates are closed they are closed completely."

Sounds like a party!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 11, 2005 10:23 PM.
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Khan Is My Hero

Arranging tickets for this weekend's Disneyland sojourn has become something of a logistical nightmare.

As I expect a horde of people to be in line when the park opens on the 17th (8 AM, donchaknow), getting my ticket when the park (and, by extension, the box office) opens strikes me as a form of admission suicide - waiting in one line to just go the back of another (longer) line is a recipe for not gettin' in. Securing advance tickets seemed to be proper.

Tony had generously offered to swing by Anaheim and grab me a one-day park hopper pass, but, owing to circumstances beyond our mutual control, that's not gonna work. He phoned me tonight to give me the lowdown, and a ray of hope: "Dude, the Disney Stores sell park tickets. Just swing by up there and grab one!"

Excellent.

So I phoned Northgate and spoke with a very friendly person who informed me that yes, they did sell tickets, and yes, they had lots, but, gee, the smallest ticket they sell is the two-day park hopper pass.

Price of one-day "park hopper" pass: $76.
Price of two-day "park hopper" pass: $105.
Difference: $29.
(Value of MBA education: Priceless.)

This afforded me much hang-wringing ("It's vacation! spend the money!" vs. "Oh, hell. The line thing is overblown. Buy it on Sunday and chill out."), until I remembered one small detail: Khan is in LA on Thursday night.

And he's staying at the Disneyland Hotel.
And they, like, sell tickets and stuff at the Disney hotels.
Score!

I rang Khan to ask him for a "tennsy, tiny" favor. "Can you buy me a one-day pass when you check in?"

"Let me get this straight," he said. "How much are the two-day hoppers?"
"A hundred and five."
"And the one-day?"
"Seventy-six."
"Ok, dude, you're in line at - what? - six in the morning? On a Sunday? I have a better idea: you get your ass up to Northgate and get that two-day pass, and I'll pay you back the difference from my pocket. I value my sleep."

After further conversation where I pointed out that I did not, in fact, require him to be in line with me at 6:00:00 AM, but rather, to simply hand the ticket off to my person sometime before 7:59:59 AM, and, in fact, would be willing to hold a place in line for him and Christine (thus allowing him to sleep and get in the park), we came to terms.

So Khan's pickin' me a one-day park hopper. (You are my hero, dude.)

And now I'm curious: is an hour of sleep on a Sunday morning really priced at $14.50 these days?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 11, 2005 7:25 PM.
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July 7, 2005

Khan's Goin' To Disneyland!

Fellow Disney-maniac Khan phoned me today with some excellent news - turns out his employer is sending him down to Los Angeles next weekend for some bid'ness, and that means he'll be running around Disneyland on the 17th - 50th Birthday! - with me and Tony. Whoo-hoo!

('cause, you know, Disneyland needs another person to show up that day, right? I'm sure attendance will be real light.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated July 7, 2005 8:26 PM.
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June 26, 2005

City Of Glass

Vancouver, BC is one of the prettiest cities on Earth.

Chris' bachelor party took us all over the city, from our hotel (on the northwest side) to Granville Island (the southern part of the city), and out to Chinatown (northeast). We checked out nightclubs and restaurants and brewpubs. And we walked, taking aqua taxies to get across the channel.

Everywhere we went, I was amazed at how beautiful the buildings were, how good the urban design was (aided by Chris' running commentary; he's an urban planning geek), and just how ... livable the place is. It's vibrant, thriving.

I've been to Vancouver before, of course, both as a kid (Expo '86, anyone?) and when I was living in Bellingham (we'd jaunt up for trips to Gastown and the IMAX theater at Canada Place). One of my favorite authors, Douglas Coupland, lives in Vancouver and praises it constantly. And my good friend Ted keeps promising me he's going to move there, one day, really soon ... honest.

But with the last 24 hours still burning brightly on my frontal lobes, I can truly say that I "get" what Ted (and Douglas) have been raving about. And it makes me want to spend more time there.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 26, 2005 6:40 PM.
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June 25, 2005

What Happens In Canada ... Stays In Canada

I'm off to Vancouver, B.C. this morning for my friend Chris's bachelor party. I'll be back tomorrow.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 25, 2005 8:31 AM.
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June 24, 2005

Al Lutz On Disneyland's Birthday

Al Lutz's column in MiceAge this morning talks about how Disneyland's management is starting to freak out a bit about the expected crowds on July 17:

"What has longtime Disneyland-watchers worried is that TDA seems to have severely underestimated the emotional attachment many Disney fans have to July 17th. There is currently no plan to hold a line of thousands of overnight campers, like when they naively believed 50,000 or more people would show up for DCA's grand opening and the actual number came in under 5,000. If the Disney fans of the world descend on Anaheim en masse as they keep promising to do, it could be an event that quickly devolves into mayhem due to poor planning."

My friend Paul in Santa Monica thinks I'm nuts to come down for the event:

"Dude no offense, but you must be out of your mind to come to Disneyland on it's 50th birthday. It is bad enough going to that hell hole in the Summer.....I just took my kids a few weeks back on a rainy day, and it was a nightmare!"

I have to say that the crowds don't bother me - I look at them the same way I look at the long lines on the opening day of an "event" movie, or like waiting to see a band you love. Other people's energy is part of the experience.

That said, I'm not gonna camp out, but the park opens at 8 AM ... so Tony and I might be in line around 6.

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 24, 2005 10:06 AM.
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June 22, 2005

Rattlesnake Lake

I was up and out the door this morning at 8 AM to go hiking at Rattlesnake Lake with some of my MBA pals. (That's Jen Carter, Nathan Burger and Nate's brother, Phil in the photo).

The lake itself is a good 32 miles due east of Seattle, just outside North Bend. The hike starts at the lake and then wends through the forest for a good two miles, gaining about 1,000 feet in the process. On a clear day, you can see forever (or a reasonable approximation thereof) from the top.

Today was not a clear day. In fact, it was raining in Seattle when we left, but Jo assured us the "Doppler Radar showed it was only raining in the city."

Uh, yeah. Didn't happen. But drizzle is a fact of life here in the Pacific Northwest, so despite the rain when we got to the lake, we decided to suck it up. The picture was taken at the summit, and, as you can see from the background, we were in the middle of a cloud.

It was a spectacular, beautiful way to spend the morning. Now I'm back in my apartment, hot shower under my belt, and am trying to get "stuff" done. Instead, I keep looking at all the photos I shot on the trail.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 22, 2005 1:35 PM.
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June 21, 2005

Gavin's (2005) California Adventure!

Lately, I've been toying with the idea of going to a Storm away game. The only time I've seen the team outside of Key Arena was last year, when they did a "home" game during HoopFest in Spokane.

As I started researching all this, two things popped out. First, if I'm going to go to an away game, my best choices for proximity are either the Sacramento Monarchs or the Los Angeles Sparks (I mean, given the flight time, I'm not too keen to cheer in Connecticut, you know?). And second, if I'm going to California, I'm going to want to hang out with friends for at least part of my trip. As Ah-nuld and I are on the outs right now, that means Los Angeles.

So looking over the summer schedule, I notice that my two choices for games against the Sparks are July 16 or July 31. I've got a wedding to go to in late July, which kicks the 31st out of the pool. So I flip over to check my calendar about the 16th ...

... and notice that, Disneyland's 50th birthday is the very next day (the park opened July 17, 1955).

Oh, yeah, baby! Could this be more perfect?

(It got even better when I saw that Space Mountain is re-launching on July 15th.)

My airline tickets are bought, couch-crash arrangements made (thanks, Heidi!) and I'm gathering a group of folks to hit Staples Center on Saturday, the 16th. Tony and I are planning to run around Disneyland (along with, in all probability, every Disney maniac for 1,000 miles) all day on Sunday. Lines will be, undoubtedly, off the charts.

So so so so cool. I can't believe it came together like this!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 21, 2005 9:04 AM.
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June 15, 2005

Maybe Cedar Point Wasn't Such A Hot Idea, Anyway...

In what appears to be a response to the chronic problems being experienced by Kingda Ka at Six Flags Great Adventure, Cedar Point announced this morning that they have closed Top Thrill Dragster. No word right now as to how long it will be down, or what the specific concern might be.

Top Thrill Dragster and Kingda Ka are, essentially, the same ride - hyper-acceleration at launch, go straight up, over the top, and back to the launch area in ~18 seconds. Hopefully, there isn't a design flaw that will impact them both. Dragster has been running since '03, so I assume Kingda is having teething problems, and Cedar Point management is just being cautious (and bravo to them for that).

Still - it would really suck to go to Cedar Point and not be able to ride that puppy. Staying in Seattle this summer is looking better all the time...

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated June 15, 2005 9:05 AM.
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May 31, 2005

Cedar Point? Maybe In '06

As most of my friends know, I'm a roller-coaster maniac.

Last year, following the conclusion of my Microsoft internship, I went to Six Flags Magic Mountain in Los Angeles and screamed my lungs out. It was wonderful.

It's not exactly coaster country up here in Seattle. I mean, we have Silverwood (with two excellent coasters) and Enchanted Village (with one OK coaster), but that's about it. (No, the little coaster we have at the Seattle Center doesn't count.) And pretty much all year, I've been thinking how much fun it would be to do it again.

If you're a coaster person, the two places you want to go are Magic Mountain (obviously) and Cedar Point, which is in Ohio. These two parks have been in a long-running contest to see who can offer the biggest, the fastest or the most coasters. To give you a sense of what I'm talking about, check out this list of what Cedar Point is offering (and these are just the coasters):

• Top Thrill Dragster
• Wicked Twister
• Millennium Force
• Blue Streak
• Cedar Creek Mine Ride
• Corkscrew (does every park have a ride called "Corkscrew" or what?)
• Disaster Transport
• Gemini
• Iron Dragon
• Magnum XL-200
• Mantis
• Mean Streak
• Raptor
• WildCat

I had planned to visit Cedar Point this summer as a graduation present to myself.

Sadly, that's not gonna happen.

Ultimately, everything boiled down to economics and cost/benfit trade-offs (hey, I'm an MBA, right?). I found out that I couldn't use my air miles to get to Cleveland, which meant tickets, at $630 per person, suddenly entered the picture. Hotel for three nights ($500), admission to the parks for two days ($130), rental car, food, commemorative T-shirt ... well, suddenly I'm looking at $1500 to go to Ohio for two days in mid-July and wait in lines. By myself. It's just not worth it. (I mean, crap, you can go to Europe for a week on that kind of money!)

I'm sad, of course, but I learned my lesson at Magic Mountain last year. I got there right after Labor Day, and the place was deserted. School had just started, so I had run of the park. I was able to get on every coaster they had in a single day. Compare-and-contrast that with the (non)appeal of two-hour-plus lines in July heat, and, well, I'd wager I'll be at Cedar Point on or around September 6, 2006.

In the meantime, I still need to get a coaster fix this summer (and I'm already hitting Silverwood in late July, when I'm out in Idaho for Chris' wedding).

Suggestions?

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated May 31, 2005 9:31 AM.
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April 10, 2005

WANTED: A Vacation From My Vacation

We're back in Seattle. The bags are unpacked, the laundry is running, and I'm finding myself fantastically unmotivated to get much of anything done tonight. I'd had hopes that I might make progress on this or that side project, but here I am, at 5 PM, pooped and ready to call it a day.

(In my defense, I was up at 5 AM to get my limit.)

Fortunately, the third disc of Arrested Development's first season came on Friday. Time to veg out!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 10, 2005 5:02 PM.
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April 9, 2005

Dig Dug

Mary and I got up this morning at o'dark hundred to go clam digging with her family. I'd never been before. It's a lot of fun!

(For information about the razor clam, check out the Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife.)

We drove a few miles from our hotel in Copalis to the beach. Despite it being 6 AM, the place was packed, with rows and rows of cars parked (and more arriving behind us). By 7 AM, there were literally thousands of people (I called it "Clamstock") on the beach, each trying to "get their limit" (WAC 220-56-310: 15 clams).

The first trick with clamdigging is to find the clam. This is easy in concept, but kind of a pain in practice. Clams bury themselves in the sand, and don't like being discovered. Their kryptonite is that they do need to eat, so they leave little holes in the sand where plankton (their food source) can come down to them. So if you can spot the hole, you can get the clam.

Sometimes, in wet ground (such as fresh surf), you tap the ground with a stick in order to get the clam to reveal itself. On drier sand, the hole is more obvious.

Once you spot the clam, you have to get it out. If you're using a shovel, you pick a spot about three inches (toward the water) from the clam's hole, and dig. Fast. After extracting two shovelfuls, you drop to your knees and start rooting around with your hand. The clam knows your'e there, and is quickly burrowing away from you as fast as possible (and those suckers are fast). Often, you get a wet, cold, sandy hand (and forearm) ... and no clam.

The alternative method - and my favorite, 'cause it's cool - is to use a t-shaped tube to dig. Imagine a three-foot length of PVC pipe, 6" in diameter, and sealed at one end. The sealed end has a crossbar on it. You grab the pipe by the crossbar and plunge the un-sealed end straight down on the clam's hole, like you're taking a core sample. After you've plunged all three feet of PVC into the sand, you pressurize the PVC by plugging an air hole, and pull it out. You then extract the sand from the PVC (shaking works great), and grab the clam, which is flopping around on the sand, helpless.

It was a beautiful morning. The weather was cold, but the sun came out and the ocean was just gorgeous.

We're going back tomorrow. Given how early we have to get up for this (and how rare good coffee is out here), I'm glad I packed some triple-shot espresso goodness from TJ's.

UPDATE, May 13, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 9, 2005 1:00 PM.
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April 8, 2005

Off To The Ocean

Mary and I are off to the ocean for the weekend, flying kites and digging clams with her family. I kind of doubt that I'll be blogging much. (grin)

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated April 8, 2005 12:33 PM.
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January 3, 2005

Woodinville Is Wine Country

I grew up in Woodinville. So when I found out my Mom and stepfather were in town and staying with old friends of the family, we naturally all set aside time to have breakfast together.

That was yesterday morning.

Breakfast quickly turned in to a walk along the Sammamish River Trail, and the walk into a winery tour. While most people know the St. Michelle or Columbia wineries, (or, for that matter, the Red Hook if your tastes run to brew), Mom instead took us to some places I'd never heard of - Facelli and DiStefano. Tastings were conduced, and bottles acquired.

As such, we've now got some good stuff in our wine rack.

Two special points about the experience. First, the weather was spectacular. It was clear and cold and sunny, and the crispness in the air seemed particularly conducive to good thinking and good conversation. From time to time I found myself feeling like I was in a film or something - no pauses, smart comebacks, good insights. (Given the wine content of the afternoon, the film would have to be a sequel to Sideways). I regret not having my digital camera with me to snap a few shots for the blog.

Second, Woodinville surprised me. I have fallen head-over-heels in love with living in Seattle proper, and somewhat pooh-pooh the 'burbs. (The fact that I grew up out in the middle of tract houses and Zip markets doesn't much help). And, indeed, these wineries aren't much to look at - they're in industrial office parks, for Pete's sake - but the wines were excellent and the people genuinely warm. Maybe there's more to the Eastside than Borders and Bed, Bath and Beyond after all...

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated January 3, 2005 8:56 AM.
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November 27, 2004

There And Back Again

Like everyone else in the country, I went traveling for Thanksgiving. In my case, I flew out to Spokane to spend time with my Dad, and returned just a few hours ago. It was great to spend time with family, glass of wine in hand, swapping stories and just catching up. Mary and I are heading out again in December.

Anyhow. I have an enormous pile of work to get through in the next couple of days, as I have finals coming up, along with end-of-quarter projects for Management and Market Research. So if I'm a little silent on the blog in the next two weeks, I apologize. I'll post when I can.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated November 27, 2004 4:22 PM.
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September 15, 2004

Day Nine: Austin, Texas

The final day of the Ad-Hoc Austin Film Festival came together with three pictures: Criminal, Kill Bill, Volume 1, and Session 9.

Of these three, Session 9 gets special mention. It's a creepy-as-hell psych thriller/horror flick about five guys hired to remove asbestos from an abandoned mental hospital (Danvers, in Massachussets -and the film is shot on location). Released in 2001, the film did virtually no business (just 30 screens and about $400,000 in domestic grosses), which is a shame - it's a gem. Like The Blair Witch Project, Sesssion 9 makes outstanding use of atmosphere and menacing situations. Rent it.

So, tomorrow (Wednesday) is a travel day (my flight leaves reeeeeeeally early in the morning, CST). And then the Storm play Phoenix at Key Arena at 7 PM Pacific. It's going to be a long (good) day.

MBA, year two starts on Thursday.
(Looks like the vacation is over.)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 15, 2004 5:32 AM.
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September 14, 2004

Day Eight: Austin, Texas

Film festival, day three - we saw Michael Mann's "Collateral" and were totally, utterly and completely blown away. It's the anti-"Spider Man 2". Made for adults, with textured characters, strong acting, and without a single frame of fat in the picture. A lot of ink has been spilled about Tom Cruise playing a bad guy, but the movie belongs to Jamie Foxx (who has come a long, long, long way from "In Living Color").

Mann has, once again, proven that he is one of the few directors with the chops to make a fresh, engrossing film about two characters in tension. If you need further proof, check out Exhibit A: 1995's Heat ... one of the best movies ever made.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 14, 2004 11:43 AM.
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September 13, 2004

Day Seven: Austin, Texas

After my post about Starbucks Hear Music (and the "Isn't the CD dying?" crack), Benny took me to one of Austin's coolest record stores: Waterloo.

The CD is certainly not dead.

Imagine the coolest, hippest music shop you can. Staff it with friendly people. Give it a deep inventory (including the now-in-my-possession New Order box set, "Retro"), and do some innovative things (like using iPods as listening stations). Then throw in some great books, DVDs, posters and bumper stickers for good measure.

(It was all I could do to leave the Duran Duran DVD on the shelf.)

In keeping with the film festival mood, we (finally) caught Spider Man 2. The picture was, to put it mildly, disappointing. Ebert gave it a rave ("Now this is what a superhero movie should be"), and I'd heard lots of great things from other folks. Sadly, I found it too long (by about 20 minutes), ham-handed, and not that thrilling. I know it's a "comic book movie", but X-Men proved that you can do one of those without making it boring.

On the other hand, we also rented Aqua Teen Hunger Force on DVD, and spent most of the night cracking up ("No! It is the FARgate! It is not the same as that device from the movie I have never seen!"). Awesome, awesome, awesome...

UPDATE, September 4, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 13, 2004 10:20 AM.
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Day Six: Austin, Texas

Gavin's California Adventure took an 1,100 mile detour East today. I'm spending the balance of my vacation visiting my good friend Benny in Austin, Texas.

Benny and I are both raging movie fanatics, so the plan is to catch a boatload of pictures that we've been too busy to see on our own. We kicked off the film festival with "Hero" at the DraftHouse, a very cool, very funky local chain that serves a full food menu to moviegoers.

Seattle tried something like this a few years back with the now-defunct Cinema Grill. There was something of an argument at the time between my friends as to whether these businesses are movies with food service, or restaurants that show movies. The distinction isn't academic, because if you're a restaurant then the food quality is critical. Conversely, if you're really a theater, then the moviegoing experience is what you've got to pay attention to. Sadly, Cinema Grill was pretty bad on both counts (bad pizza, lame ambience), so my first trip was also my last.

DraftHouse doesn't seem to have this problem. The food was great, the seats were comfortable, and the value was pretty good. If I lived in Austin, I'd come here all the time. The theater management also seems to do a great job of soliciting community input - they show Rocky Horror every week, and are planning to screen the Red vs. Blue movie. (The custom trailer is hysterical.)

(Oh, and a funny postscript: for my official Los Angeles famous-person-sighting, I saw Tom Green chatting with Dave Thomas (he of SCTV/Bob and Doug MacKenzie fame) while waiting for my flight. Pretty fitting way to leave Los Angeles, huh?)

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 13, 2004 9:47 AM.
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Day Five: Santa Monica

After the nail-biting excitement (and bone-tired exhaustion) of Thursday's Magic Mountain escapades, Friday got off to a very, very relaxed start. I'd crashed with Chris and Todd, so after rolling out of bed I took Chris out for coffee to catch up, post-wedding.

(She's still glowing.)

After coffee, I headed out to Santa Monica to check out Starbucks Hear Music. This store is a prototype of Starbucks' fledgling music efforts. It's a traditional music store (it stocks CDs), but it adds a digital twist by allowing patrons to listen to anything the store carries. Hear Music listening stations are basically flat-screen, wall-mount PCs with headphones and a bar code scanner. Grab a CD you're interested in, slap on some headphones, and pass the CD UPC under the listening station's optical scanner. From there, you'll be able to rock out to any and every track on the disc.

Cooler still are the custom CD burners (you can see a guy sitting at one in my photo, above). These stations allow you to browse and choose from over 150,000 songs in the Hear Music library. You can build a custom playlist right at the station, and then have a CD burned while you wait. You pay a basic cost for the CD, plus a per-track fee. It's slick.

The burner is the thing that Starbucks is most interested in. As music goes increasingly digital, music stores are becoming less and less vital to the music-buying public. Starbucks is essentially trying to leverage its steady volume of affluent and loyal customers into a new line of business for the coffee chain. I think it's an interesting strategy, provided they can get the merchandising issues worked out, but I'm curious as to how long-lived the value of these burners can be. The way I see it, Hear Music is competing with iTunes (catalog: 1,000,000 and counting), Rhapsody, Napster, Launch (Todd would kill me if I left them off this list), and, of course, MSN music. This means that Starbucks' music effort is really targeting coffee customers that don't have access to (or don't know how to use) these other services. And, to me, that number seems small ... and dwindling. Plus, the burners don't support portable players (I can't, for instance, buy a song at Starbucks, plug in my iPod, and have it copied over).

Isn't the CD dying?

Starbucks is rolling out the burners across 10 stores here in Seattle over the next few months. I'll be watching with great interest.

(And finally, a big shout out to Paul Skikne, a great guy and former client of mine. Paul: you made the blog!)

UPDATE, June 5, 2006: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 13, 2004 9:38 AM.
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September 10, 2004

Day Four: Six Flags Magic Mountain

It's playtime.

(For best results as you read this, you may want to download and play "We Like To Party" by the Venga Boys (iTunes has it for $0.99). Alternately, you can visit this link and play the thing in the background.)

Magic Mountain is, without question, the best theme park I've ever been to. It's like Mecca for coaster enthusiasts.

I arrived right as the park opened, and met a couple of very nice women from the Bay area while waiting to pay. Turns out that Sophia is a fellow coaster maniac, and Meetha is a good friend of hers who is "undecided" about the coaster thing. Since they had the same idea I did - get on everything they possibly could, all day long - we joined forces.

Our first stop was X, the world's first "four dimensional" coaster (and, truth be told, the best thing I've ridden. Ever.). X is hard to explain without visual aids, so just imagine a traditional roller coaster - the rails are below, with the car on top and the people in the car. On X, the car straddles the rails (two people each side), and the seats are mounted on a pole that runs through the car. The pole rotates with 180 degrees of motion. So, as the coaster runs, you're being rotated forward and backward so you're viewing things from the most optimal position. It's the damndest thing.

From there, we went on (in order) Viper, Revolution, Goliath, Colossus, Scream (twice!), Batman: The Ride, Riddler's Revenge, Gold Rusher, Superman: The Escape, Deja Vu, Psyclone, Ninja, and back to X. With stops for the Tidal Wave and Freefall.

There were no lines. Ever. X had a small wait (10 - 20 minutes), but that was mostly due to the fact that they were only running one train, and the load/unload cycle takes some time. In one day, we literally managed to ride every coaster that was open and operational. During the summer, with crowds and 2-hour lines, you might do a third or a fourth of what we pulled off.

As I write this, Friday morning, I'm kicking myself for not having made the trip here before now. Magic Mountain is amazing (and given how coasters-a-go-go Cedar Point is, I'll be off to Ohio sooner instead of later). If you like thrill rides, come here.

If you come to Magic Mountain with a limited amount of time, ride X, Scream, Goliath (I almost blacked out on it - the G-forces are incredible), and Riddler's Revenge. If you have time, hit Deja Vu and Superman: The Escape. And the rest are gravy.

Small observation about parks. Los Angeles is an interesting microcosm of theme park audiences. On the one hand, there's Disneyland. Disneyland is all about little kids (and adults like me that are in touch with their inner 5-year-old). On the other, there's Knott's Berry Farm, which caters to 45-year-olds and the pre-teen audience, very Midwest and wholesome. And then there's Magic Mountain, which is an all-coaster, all-the-time thrill park. It's for adrenaline-seekers of all ages ... but caters mostly to that "18 - 34 year old boy" demographic.

So the day ended, Sophia and Meetha said our goodbyes, and I retreated for the safety of my air-conditioned rental car. I was hot, sticky and sweaty, my camera was almost full, and I was pooped. But right now, the whole trip is officially Worth It.

UPDATE, September 10, 2005: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 10, 2004 9:39 AM.
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September 8, 2004

Day Three: Knott's Berry Farm

The coasterin' started in earnest today with a visit to Knott's Berry Farm.

I haven't been to Knott's for nearly twenty years. My parents brought my sister and me here in '85 as part of a Disneyland vacation. At the time, I was absolutely terrified of the coasters - Montezooma's Revenge (which is still here), and the Corkscrew (which moved out to Silverwood a few years ago. Funny sidebar: I finally conquered my fear of the Corkscrew in 2002 when Dad and I took a motorcycle trip out to Idaho. Took me 17 years to work up my nerve, I guess...).

Tastes change, of course, Today was all about the coasters.

Flat out, the best thing on the property is Xcelerator. It's the younger brother of Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster (Cedar Fair, LLP owns both Knott's and Cedar Point). You are catapult-launched from a flat surface out to a huge, vertical horseshoe. The apex of the horseshoe is better than 200 feet up. From there, it's free fall (smile for the cameras!) and a few banking turns, and that's it.

An UNBELIEVABLE rush.

The park was deserted. Asking around, it turns out that LA schools started on Tuesday, so all the kids are gone for the summer. I literally walked from the ticket booth to the Xcelerator and sat down in the car - no waiting, no lines. No kidding.

(I also rode it three times today - very front, very back, and in the middle).

Knott's coaster selection isn't as strong as I'd hoped. The big wooden coaster, Ghost Rider, was offline; the others were either very tame (Jaguar!) or very lame (Boomerang, which is a clone of a ride at Six Flags Fiesta Texas).

Making it worse is that Knott's is clearly building a new, inverted monster called Silver Bullet. It opens next year. There were guys working on it - moving earth, welding, painting, etc. You can see the tracks from almost everywhere in the park. It's going to be a long, fast, kick-butt signature coaster. I may have to make a quick detour back here when Mary and I come down for Disneyland's 50th next year.

Tomorrow: Magic Mountain! At last!

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 8, 2004 3:12 PM.
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September 7, 2004

Day Two: Hollywood

Heidi lives in Hollywood, and works for Paramount. I drove up here from Huntington Beach first thing this morning to have breakfast and check in with her. MapQuest says it's 30 miles; my commute was 1 hour and 15 minutes.

Welcome to Los Angeles. =)

There's a super-cute little diner a few blocks from her place (good omelette), next to the "Hollywoodland" arch and across from the "Hollywoodland Realty." As you might expect, the Hollywood sign (see above) is pretty visible.

She's at work for the day, so I'm holed up in her apartment, finishing my column for the PSBJ on the 17th. After that I'm going to do a walking tour of the neighborhood and see if I can find a WiFi cafe.

This place is really quaint and beautiful. Very Italian, very '30s and '40s. Heidi told me that there's an 80% chance of a Minnie Driver sighting. Fingers crossed...

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 7, 2004 11:55 AM.
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Day One: Huntington Beach

The first thing that struck me about Los Angeles was how grungy the airport is. The walkways, concourses, public art, baggage claim - all of it - just feels like some 1960's, future-is-now thing gone to seed.

It's an odd juxtaposition. LAX has been romanticized in all these movies as the gateway to the world - it's where couples go to see one another off, where the cops chase down the bad guy, where the immigrants get their first taste of free air. And here it is, with badly-stained conveyor belts and some seriously out-of-date (and out of fashion) signs.

I was staying with Tony and Sandy in Huntington Beach, so after I took delivery of the rental car (and got lawyered up with some extra insurance) I was off, down the 405 to find their place. The three of us decided to get some dinner and check out the pier.

And suddenly, I "got" what the Living In Los Angeles thing is all about.

If you visit the ocean in Washington, you likely go to Westport or Ocean Shores. The weather on the coast is cold and blustery, with a constant wind and a wetness that will chill you if you're not wearing some kind of Helly Hansen layer. The Ocean becomes a destination, something that you Go To For A Purpose, such as to See It While Eating Overpriced Fish And Chips (this encapsulates Mary's and my last trip to Westport).

Here, the weather is warm and sunny and inviting. It's a constant party at the beach. The ocean is an active character in the narrative of your day, rather than being the MacGuffin that keeps the movie moving forward. People were fishing, laughing, doing political activism, drinking Frappuccino Light, surfing, kissing, you name it. It felt very much like the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, but without the coasters.

(Pity about the coasters. But I suspect I can fix that. ).

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated September 7, 2004 11:49 AM.
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August 13, 2004

Go East, Young Man

Mare and I are heading East this weekend. Our destinations are both Spokane (visiting family) and Athol, Idaho ... home of Silverwood Theme Park.

Silverwood is the largest theme park in Washington, Idaho, or Oregon. They've got three great coasters, including the first-ever inverted coaster (they bought it from Knott's a few years back). For a coaster fanatic like me, Silverwood is a great way to get my fix without having to hit Six Flags. (And yes, I know that Six Flags bought Enchanted Village, but their coasters are kind of underwhelming.)

The other cool thing about this weekend (in addition to seeing my Dad, which is always great) is that our hotel is in downtown Spokane. That means we'll be able to finally check out the much-ballyhooed Spokane HotZone free wireless network. Essentially, Spokane has invested in a WiFi infrastructure that covers 100 square blocks. Can you believe it? Spokane. In Seattle, I'm forever scampering around, trying to see which coffee shops have free WiFi.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 13, 2004 11:32 AM.
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August 3, 2004

Bridgetown Weekend

I'm back.

I'll blog in a different entry about my focus group experience in San Francisco (the volatile variable there is how much red wine I'm going to sip before I finish this post), but first I wanted to touch a bit on some cool stuff from this last weekend.

Mare and I went down to Portland late Friday night and spent the weekend hanging out. This was a quasi-getaway, quasi-family thing: her sister, Lynn, lives in Portland, and is a big runner (as is Mary). Together, they were slated to do the Nike Run Hit Wonder on Sunday morning. Further, Lynn's SO, Zach, was coordinating the Soapbox Derby Race (the link is cached from Google; their server wasn't responding) in Portland on Saturday.

Let's start with the Soapbox Derby thing.

First of all, the people who do this are crazy. No, really. Not "crazy" in that they mutter to themselves and talk about "The Man" and whatnot, but crazy in that, "Oh, my God, this is a person who cannot see their own mortality or visualize pain in any regard, because if they could they simply would not be doing THAT" kind of way.

Caveat: I've gone bungy jumping. Naked. It was great. It was safe. It had nothing on Soapbox Derby for sheer machismo and stupidity.

Soapbox Derby contestants are allowed only $300 to build a machine that they will race in. The machine can only be powered by gravity. You do get a push at the beginning of the race, but the push is carefully constrained in terms of its length and whatnot. The machine, once pushed, races other machines down a hilly, twisting park just outside of Portland called Mount Tabor. Soapbox Derby cars can hit 40mph. They are often built out of plywood and bicycle tires. The brakes are, shall we say, primitive. I've seen better steering assemblies on 1978 Honda Accords.

It's totally insane.

It also draws a crowd. In fact, I ran in to some of my fellow B-school folks (shout out to Chris, Summer, Alan and Whit!) while strolling the length of the course. The crowd came to drink, and stayed to cheer. It was fabulous.

Next morning the girls got up for the Run Hit Wonder. The conceit of this is pretty genius - hold a simultaneous 5K and a 10K in downtown Portland, and then get old 80s bands to play along the way. They had Tommy Tutone, Tone-Loc, Flock of Seagulls, General Public and - wait for it - Devo. 10,000 people run the course, and stop/dance in front of acts they like. Mary, who normally can bang out a 10K in well under an hour, took 90 minutes to do the thing. And then Devo played Portland's Pioneer Square for a good hour. Excellent, excellent times.

One amazing thing about Portland is that it's bordered (bisected?) by the Willamette river. As such, the city has a handful of bridges that span the river so citizens (along with their cars, bicycles, and light rail) can get across. There's a fabulous walking path around the river that gives great insights in to when the various bridges were built, and their respective drawbridge mechanisms. If you come to town, split off an hour and take the tour.

UPDATE, October 7, 2007: One or more of the original hyperlinks on this page expired, and has been dereferenced. The hyperlinked text is now underlined.

Posted by Gavin Shearer. Last updated August 3, 2004 8:42 PM.
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