smackfu

So, not in 2008 because because I couldn't find the flights, but I am going to Asia in Feb 2009! Woo.

The ultimate goal is to get to Thailand on this trip, but I'm going to Singapore first because that's the closest I could get for free. There are virtually no reward flights on Northwest to Bangkok, Thailand. But Singapore sounds cool, eh? And the flight goes through Tokyo. And the flights around Asia are super-cheap.

How did I get 60,000 miles, considering I don't travel on Northwest that much? It was pretty tricky...

25,000 miles for getting a Northwest Worldperks Visa

20,000 points for getting a Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) Amex

10,000 SPG points for opening an Ameritrade account and keeping it open for 9 months

3,000 points or so from using my SPG Amex

5,000 miles as a bonus for transferring 20,000+ points to Northwest from SPG

Oh drat! My grand plans to get a free ticket to Asia on Northwest by signing up for various promos, and moving points around, and such, just hit a major snag since the 6000 mile bonus I was going to use is only for domestic flights. Damn fine print. Boo. And it's like $235 to buy those miles, so that's not a very attractive option.

Edit: Oh wait!  I forgot I didn't transfer all my Starwood Points... and I have 5801 of them.  Which brings me to a grand total of 59823.  So as long as I spend $177 on my card this month, I should be there.  Crazy!

A tale of two Mexicos:

A 7 hour 2nd-class ordinario bus-trip from Oaxaca to Pochutla = 80 pesos ($8)

A 20 minute taxi ride from a posh hotel in Mexico City to the airport with an English speaking driver= 240 pesos ($24)

Mexico was awesome.  My photos are nothing special. It was that kind of trip.

Mexico City: Frightfully unsafe apparently. Didn't really feel like it. I successfully passed as an indigent backpacker, so I wasn't kidnapped, robbed, etc.  I even took the Metro, which I have since learned is a BAD IDEA according to the EXPERTS.  Oh well.  It felt like there were only about 50 non-Mexican tourists -- in a city of 20 million.  No one speaks English.  It was great.

Oaxaca: Demonstrations everywhere.    And no one knows why.  Maybe a teacher's strike, maybe something else today.  Doesn't really matter.  Good food, even at the hostel. Great mole. Saw the same tourists as in Mexico City.  Everyone is following the same route. Except most aren't going to the beach next...

Puerto Escondido:  Hot. Humid.  No, really. The kind of weather that makes you go "oh, that's why no one is wearing shirts". The kind of place you need to go to last because all your possessions will attain a general dampness that can only be solved by some serious dryer time.  My Lonely Planet warped like a board, and it was just sitting on a table. Most laid back place ever, that I didn't even notice at first when someone sold me fake board shorts.

I cut out of work for a bit today and took the tour of the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT. It's an amazing piece of architecture that fits in perfectly with a bit of carefully orchestrated New England forest. It all looks natural, but it took a lot of work to look that good. It really makes you understand the whole minimalist "thing".

It's too bad it's so hard to get on a tour. There's only five tours of 10 people a day, and I booked mine in June 2007. Yes, 11 months ago, the day I heard a story about it on NPR. It's crazy.

The answer. I love this photo so much. I'm going to try that look in future photos.

I love the Pilot G2 pen.  I didn't realize I could love a pen, but there you go.  It's all I use now, and I hate using regular ballpoints.

Given that, I heard fine praise on random blogs for their Ultra-Fine version.  "World's greatest pen" and such.  It's a 0.38 tip vs the 0.7 of the regular Fine.  So I bought a box of 10 because they are relatively hard to find.   So... anyone want to buy some pens?  I really don't like it.  It does work well on better paper like a Moleskin or parchment, and you can write really tiny, if that's your thing.  And it doesn't puddle up on good paper like the regular G2 does, where you get ink dots on the facing page if you don't use a blotter page.  On the other hand, it's annoying to use on cheap paper, like printouts or copier paper.  It's scratchy, not smooth, which makes it no fun.  It feels like dragging a knife across the page.  And it's fairly easy to go from "really thin" to "broken up" on lines, which is no good at all.  I think I'll stick with my regular pen.

My local BMW dealer is running radio ads with a voice-over by a guy with a posh English accent.  It's pretty effective until you really think about it.

A lot of people were bitching about the new version of iMovie, but I thought it was really easy to use to just stick a bunch of videos together with some titles and background music. Whiners! BTW, I completely fail at remembering to hold my camera right-side-up for videos. At least iMovie can fix that now.

My post-apocalyptic vacation in Spain:

$246 + $358 taxes & fees = $604 per person

Really??? That's madness. The bizarre thing is that's the lowest price flight to Barcelona from Newark, even with the fees.

Edit: JFK was cheaper and non-stop, so that will be the one. Bizarrely, it was even cheaper to fly out of Hartford and connect through JFK (under an hour flight), but that's just silly and adds unneeded complications.

I bought a new keyboard, and it doesn't have a sleep button.  I liked the sleep button on my old one.  Instead I get a useless internet buttons.  The amazing thing was that the sleep button actually worked on my Mac and my PC. Rare, that.

This keyboard (Microsoft something 2000) is pretty weird in general.  The keytops are almost flush with the top surface of the keyboard, for some odd reason.  Probably so you don't get carpal tunnel, but it's kind of annoying, like a laptop keyboard.  Especially bad since the wrist rest I have is positioning my hands for a normal keyboard.   We'll see whether I get used to it.

Well, I'm doomed.  I'm a sucker for remaindered hardcovers, especially when they're cheaper than the paperback.  Well, they have them at Amazon now.  I just bought a bunch.  I think I need to buy a new bookcase. Another one.

(I will say that Amazon is smart though... it's very hard to stay in the bargain side of the store.  You go from pages of 70% off books to pages of 20% books with no notice. And the links are often just the general category links.  Crafty.)

UPS is killing me. It's like all my packages are just in limbo.

Like look at this one. It's 2nd day air, it shipped on the 17th, and today is the 21st.  More than two days.  And it's not here yet.  And it doesn't even show as going out for delivery today???

And I have another one that was out for delivery on the 18th, but "THE PACKAGE WAS MISSED AT THE UPS FACILITY, UPS WILL DELIVER ON THE NEXT BUSINESS DAY."  Happened twice, then they just stopped updating it.  I know they're busy, but this is just stupid.

Edit: Yay! Everything showed up just now. The power of complaining.

Good things:

1. Entering addresses is really easy.
2. I love being able to go off-course while I'm driving somewhere, and then have it steer you back on track.  With my old paper directions, if I left the course, I'd be in trouble.
   
3. The British voice is neat-o.
4. Using it to get around traffic jams makes it completely worthwhile.
5. You can tell it when you want to arrive, and then it will tell you exactly how late you'll be at all times.
   

Bad things:

1. It doesn't tell you about some turns, because it has it labeled as the same road, even though it's not.  And it tells you about some turns that aren't turns at all.  You have to look at the screen to see what's going on sometimes.
2. Some of the wacky NY/NJ crazy interstate intersections confuse the hell out of it. 
3. It thinks there is a toll going from CT to NY.  There is not.  One-way tolls aren't that complicated, are they?
4. Its estimates for driving speeds are too low, and I'm not sure how to change them.
   
5. It's got a battery (for some reason), so you have to remember to turn it off when you leave the car.  I wish it would shut off when the car power cuts.

"Dream Weaver" is the most disappointing song ever.  Whenever it comes on the radio, I think it's something interesting.   It has this nifty foreboding intro (that reminds me of "Thriller"), then a spoken bit, then... it's "Dream Weaver".

My local newspaper calls me about once a week in an attempt to get me to subscribe to the Sunday paper.  I really don't want the Sunday paper.  My biggest problem with getting a daily paper is disposing of the actual "paper", and the Sunday one is the size of the other six combined.  And I don't read it half the time.  And it costs almost as much too.  So I always say no.

The interesting bit is that they still deliver the Sunday paper every week.  The one that I don't pay for, and that they spend a lot of effort trying to get me to subscribe to.

There is snow on the ground.  WTF.

Amsterdam and Belgium (Brussels and Brugge) were awesome. This trip was just a week so I tried out the whole proper solo backpacking thing, hostels and trains and all. It worked really well. I met a bunch of cool people from around the world, always had someone to go to dinner with, and didn't spend that much money. Although if you added up all of my bar bill, I'm sure it would be shocking. Because Belgium has great, unique beer. I never appreciated that before. The kind of beer that makes you not laugh at the people who compare its complexity with wine.

Only negative was that I lost my camera on the 3rd day. Or had it stolen... I'm not quite sure. I had it in my quite shallow pants pocket at a very crowded bar, and then I didn't. Oh well. It was a few years old, so I'm not crying over the camera, though I will miss those photos I lost.

They make Samoa-flavored ice cream now. Like the Girl Scout cookies. It's awesome, and, ironically, it's low fat, which makes it a bit healthier than the cookies themselves.

Wow, another day, another stupid programming bug that wastes an hour or two of my time and ends up being incredibly stupid. I am on a roll. Thank God it's a three day weekend. And I'm going to the US Open on Monday.

Anyways, for the record, "'value'" is different from "value", even though they look almost the same in whatever font our debugger uses.