Fun and Games Dept

And I’m off to Minneapolis on Delta flight 3340. This is my first flight ever as a first-class passenger. This is a weekend of new experiences, and I figured this was a good way to kick it off.

As you can see in the photo above, I took a photo during takeoff, because we can now. At least we can do it legally now. Yay!

I have only one thing definitely planned for this weekend but there’s a lot that I am looking forward to doing in the greater Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Today is my only day with a rental car, as I’m going to be one of those mass transit types Friday-Sunday, so I’m going to drive out of the city limits and see what’s in the surrounding area today. One stop will be at American Time and Signal Company, a company that still makes clocks like the school clock/master-slave clock system collection that I have wired throughout the house. I tried to tell the folks at my alma mater that I could have used ATS to help fix the clocks in my elementary school, but they went with a whole new system 12 or 13 years ago. The one clock that was left intact (and that I got from the school) still works beautifully even though it’s nearly 80 years old.

First class is a wonderful experience. I am drinking diet pop out of a real glass. Lovely. Syracuse Airport did not have potable water this morning so there is no coffee or tea for economy class, but they were able to get two pots of coffee from the airport terminal before we left. Coffee and tea for first class. Since I’m enjoying a diet coke perhaps someone in economy can have a cup of coffee.

It is a gorgeous flight thus far. We are currently flying over Hamilton, Ontario. I can see the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area off in the distance. I’m waving to friends on both sides of the border.

Because this is an adventure I elected to wear my Dad’s flight jacket to keep warm in the chilly Minnesota autumn weather this weekend. Dad always liked hearing about our travel adventures, this is a good way to share new experiences with him.

Earl is off to Chicago this weekend to visit Jamie and then next week he is on to Memphis for work. We have another little getaway planned for December (let’s hear it for frequent flyer miles!) and then we’ll be home for the holidays.

Life is good.

So I’m an avid listener of the Michael Smerconish ( smerconish.com ) program on Sirius/XM POTUS 124. I usually end up listening on demand, but driving around the evening afforded me the opportunity to listen to the replay at “6 East” or as I like to think of it, 1800 ET.

One of the interviews during the last hour was with Jim Koch, founder of Sam Adams. They discussed a beer that I have never heard of, Sam Adams Utopias.

From the way they described it, it’s like the Cognac of beer. Michael said that he really felt that it would have been appropriate to enjoy a cigar with this beer.

Very interesting.

I’m always looking for different beers to try and I have to admit that this Sam Adams Utopias has me intrigued. It doesn’t sound like your typical beer experience. I understand that it is quite pricey, as it is produced in very limited quantities each year. I haven’t looked into where to get it yet.

I am curious to hear if anyone has an experience with Sam Adams Utopias. Is it worth the price? Does it still taste like beer?

Jim said that once opened it should still be drinkable five years later, much like a fine wine. I understand that it is best enjoyed a room temperature.

I’d love to have others weigh in on Sam Adams Utopias. I think a trip to Boston might be in order.

Photo used without permission from uncrate.com

So today I had a half day off from work. It’s been a while since I’ve had a day where I didn’t really have something planned so I decided to take the opportunity to go on a little road trip. My destination was the Southern Tier of New York State.

As a certified road geek scholar, I am proud of the fact that I have driven every mile of Interstate highway in Upstate New York. Technically this was true when I awoke this morning, however, a few weeks ago, the New York State Department of Transportation opened up the final six miles of US Route 15 south of Corning, linking the existing freeway in New York to the US 15 Freeway in Pennsylvania. Though I have made trips to the area on several occasions to see how construction was coming along, it wasn’t until today that I had the opportunity to drive the new route. When all is said and done, the US Route 15 designation will be removed and it will be known as Interstate 99. That’s still a ways off (Pennsylvania still has a lot to do), but nevertheless, my curiosity was getting the best of me so I made the trek down to Corning.

The final six miles of this route has some impressive scenery along the way and unfortunately my iPhone didn’t capture the moment as well as I would have liked it to. Once into Pennsylvania, I exited at the first interchange, did a U-turn and came back into the Empire State.

The new US Route 15 freeway doesn’t follow the valley like its predecessor did. If you enbiggen this photo and look closely, the roadway on the very right edge of the photo is the original US 15.

After getting back to Corning, I drove up the very quaint Market Street and then made my way over to Horseheads. From there it was my intention to go to Elmira, but I needed to make a quick stop and snap this photo when my eye caught this…

A fully intact Ames sign for an old Ames Department Store!

As an honest-to-goodness certified geek, it only took a quick glance at the old Ames store to deduce that at one time it was a Hills. (The green Ames sign gives that away too, actually). The sign on the store and the sign outside are still in remarkably good shape, despite the fact that the Ames chain went out of business a decade ago (and things in small town retail haven’t been the same since).

I miss Ames.

Even though it was then getting dark I still made my way to Elmira, where I intended to visit a barbershop I hadn’t been to in a number of years for a haircut and a barbershop shave. Even though it’s only been a week or so since my last barbershop shave (in San Clemente, California), I thought that since I was on an adventure I would indulge myself. I got to the shop, which has huge windows and noticed that it was busy and there was even a guy in the chair getting a shave. When I got to the door, however, the blinds were drawn and the door was locked, they apparently had enough customers to take them well beyond closing time and therefore I would not be able to enjoy this manly luxury.

Oh well, better luck next time.

Since it was after 5 p.m. I figured I should start the trek home, so I made my way along the Southern Tier Expressway to Apalachin (which isn’t pronounced the way you think it’s pronounced, by the way) and went to a favorite diner of ours, the Blue Dolphin.

It was there that I enjoyed dinner for one in the corner of the restaurant that had other guys enjoying a dinner for one. The food was excellent and I had a nice conversation with my waitress, Sara (no “h”), where she told me about her busy day and her new tattoo (it was a word written in what I call “tattoo script” but it was in red and not in black or dark green. For the life of me I can’t remember what the word was but I know that it was spelled correctly.)

From the Blue Dolphin I made my way home. All told, I was on the road for 9 1/2 hours today, and I feel fantastic.

Many don’t understand why I would want to drive all over creation to look at a road, get a shave and eat at a diner, but the truth of the matter is, it’s very, very relaxing to me. This gives me a chance to people watch without people knowing who I am. The change of scenery is distracting enough that I don’t obsess about work or other little stressful things. Adventures like this make me feel much the same as I do when I’m riding my bike on a long-distance ride, I feel free. Honestly, I miss Earl terribly when I’m on these adventures, as he’s really the only one that could come along with me and I’d still enjoy myself to the same capacity, but aside from missing him today, I feel fantastic.

But my chin is still a little rough.

So this weekend has been an on-call weekend for me. After traveling for the past four consecutive weekends, it felt a little odd to spend the weekend at home. We were antsy and we wanted to do something.

The rule of an on-call weekend is that the computer goes along, there must be some sort of cell signal and we don’t go to a movie, because the idea of sitting in the theatre for two consecutive hours is just tempting whatever deity controls the on-call situation. So we decided to go for a ride.

We made our way down to Hamilton, New York, the home of Cornell University. We drove around the village area a bit and then headed out of town in an eastward direction using a road that had no number. I felt adventurous and was happy when we came across a road with this sign.

It has been way too long since Earl and I purposely went off the road in the Jeep. I usually partake in this activity after a hectic day at the office but since we were nowhere near the office, or home for that matter, I had no idea where this road would take us.

And we didn’t care

We ended up navigating about 10 miles of unimproved roads in the woods of Madison County and did so at a good pace, we never went over 15 miles an hour. It’s always better to crawl the Jeep over rocks instead of flying over them. I didn’t know where we’d end up, heck, the only sign of life we saw in the woods was a huge group of turkeys and a couple of hunters. The hunters and the turkeys were headed in opposite directions. We took it slow, we bounced around and we enjoyed the peaceful ambience of the woods.

As the keeper of The Upstate New York Roads website I often get requests for maps containing roads such as the roads we explored in the Jeep yesterday. I have never been able to locate such a map.

Sometimes you just have to get out there and go exploring.

So I have been in San Clemente, California since Sunday night. I am here for a training class for work and I am learning lots of nifty things. The class is a mix of in-person and online students. Luckily the teacher is also here in San Clemente. I am looking forward to using these learned skills in the next big project at work.

San Clemente is a beautiful city. I’ve driven through here on Interstate 5, the last time was way back in 1998, but I’ve never spent anytime in San Clemente. I have enjoyed walking the downtown area streets and I have also enjoyed the Pier and the Beach.

Last night I ate at the Fisherman’s Restaurant and Bar on the Pier. Alex was a very friendly waiter and the food was delicious.

Tonight I ate at a downtown restaurant at Nick’s San Clemente. My server was Nicki. She was very sweet.

At both dining experiences, neither Alex nor Nicki made me feel uncomfortable in any way because I was dining alone. I opted not to sit at the bar at either restaurant and just went with my own table. I enjoyed the people watching.

After dinner I walked off the slight beer buzz I had going on and ended up walking about five miles as I made my way around the downtown area. I feel very comfortable here with the mix of different people here. I am looking forward to coming back here on vacation. We have put it on the bucket list.

This very large seagull asked me to tell the seagulls that fly around the Jeep back home at lunch time, “we don’t need handouts from Burger King”. He then flew off in search of fish.

All in all it’s been a lovely trip. Tomorrow I head to San Diego for the night so I can catch an early plane on Thursday.

Dinner at sunset. There are two things that would make this better: a bear and a cub.

*Siri*

I’ve been trying really hard to use Siri on my iPhone more often, especially with all of the improvements that came along with the new iOS 7. For those unfamiliar with a Siri, it is the voice controlled “personal assistant” that is suppose to do some nifty things like play music, read your tweets and launch apps, all with voice commands.

I just asked Siri to read me my appointments tomorrow. She started out good, reading my calendar up until lunch time. However, at lunch she paused and asked, “shall I continue?” I responded in the affirmative. And she started up again, but from the beginning of the day, reading me the appointments she had just told me about.

I went through this fun loop four times before I realized she just couldn’t get beyond lunch.

Earlier this evening, when using her voice to call out directions from Apple Maps, she developed a new trick: on two separate occasions on the NJ 17 freeway near Mahwah she had us exit the roadway, go to the end of the exit ramp, do a U-turn around the median and then head back up the ramp to resume right where we left off on NJ 17. The frustration level in the Jeep leaped exponentially and when I pulled over to see what she was drinking and to make sure we were headed the right way (we,were), she then had us weave across the NJ-NY state line a few times and go northeast when we should have been going southeast before she was dismissed and replaced by Google Maps, who took us the 1.7 miles to Earl’s hotel for the evening.

This prompted an outburst of my frustration on Twitter where I declared that Apple sucks, the whole “it just works” mantra is a fallacy and any sort of quality control from Apple died with Steve Jobs. Angry Apple fanboys bombarded me with messages and I gave them the finger.

Apple just ain’t cutting it anymore. I have to beg and plead with Siri every morning to give me the weather. She only takes requests about 40% of the time. I think it’s something to do with the networking, but our home is pure Apple and if Apple can’t get their devices to do what they’re suppose to do on their own hardware and under their own software, then all the gold Kardashian phones out there polluting up good sensibilities is nothing more than lipstick on a pig.

Right now I want to jump ship to something else but I can’t because Android is more schizophrenic than Congress with the varying devices and versions and the like. God knows what Microsoft is doing these days but I suspect they’re trying to affix a mouse to the side of a phone because that’s the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

The fact of the matter is that quality control in the tech world is dropping like a guy with cement shoes in the Hudson and I don’t see it coming up for air anytime soon.

I want something that works reliably. I want something that is production ready. I want something that is easy to use, uses technology in a smart way and is available to me without pleading, cajoling or having to give the damn thing a biscuit.

Maybe I’m too much of a perfectionist. I won’t apologize for that, though. I refuse to subscribe to mediocrity.

Someone tell me about their perfect mobile computing experience. Quick.

So Earl and I are sitting at TPA awaiting our return flight from our weekend in the greater Tampa area. We are flying to LaGuardia today; I will then be leaving Earl in Jersey for work meetings he has tomorrow and I’ll be making the drive home solo. Luckily he’ll be home tomorrow night.

While our long weekend in Tampa has been quite enjoyable, Earl and I have decided that it wasn’t quite long enough for our tastes. Oh well, our next adventure is just around the corner. We were in town for my cousin’s wedding. It was great to see family we haven’t seen in a long while.

I brought the “real camera” along for this weekend and I had a good time taking photos, other than when the camera decided to fog up on the inside for a bit. I need to bring my camera along more often.

We decided to rent a Dodge Challenger because we were in the mood for some muscle. My camera was being foggy.

Here are some shots from the resort where the festivities took place, the Magnuson Hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida.