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Lately I've been going to Los Angeles for work, but recently Alison and I decided to go for fun and to visit my grandma on the 11th-14th. We took advantage of benefits from both our jobs, tried to keep the cost down, and still have a lot of fun. If you have benefits, use them! It's part of your salary and if you are not using them it's almost as if you're agreeing to work for them for less. We started our trip using my travel benefits, of course. Alison and I can travel together almost anywhere in the world for almost free. Starting 2009 I can get other people reduced fares but you will have to travel low-priority standby. Anyways we were lucky enough to score two first class tickets for the 3 hour flight to LAX. This was the first time I had ever gone first class, and it was quite impressive! The seats were very comfortable and reclined fully. We had breakfast served, drinks served in an actual glass, pillows, blankets, great service, etc.. It was amazing. I felt very out of place as the only one there without a Wall Street Journal newspaper. Once we got to LA, it was Alison's turn. She works here in Dallas at the Hyatt Regency as a cook if you didn't know. She booked the Hyatt Century Plaza using her benefits, and they bumped us up to....the penthouse floor! They were so nice and courteous there, I couldn't believe it. I go to a lot of hotels when flying and this was a super nice place. They gave us free room and 50% off the restaurant. So we enjoyed a very nice fillet dinner there. We are trying to save money for a sofa bed in the living room, but it's been a while since we dressed up and went to a fancy restaurant. And for 50% off you just can't beat it. The free hotel was great, but it wasn't terribly close to Arcadia, CA; an LA suburb. So we had to take a bus to go to the metro station and ride to the end of the line where we could get picked up by my grandma. All in all the trip to Arcadia took about 2 hours each way. It was great to see my grandma and I know she can't drive all the way out to where we were staying, but 4 hours commuting a day really took it out on us. We tried to take a taxi instead of the bus one way, but it didn't save more than 10 min and cost us three times as much to get there (then having to pay metro fare anyways for the train). The day before we left, the 13th we had to ourselves. We contemplated going to disneyland and universal studios but they are soo expensive. We ended up sightseeing and visiting a cool farmer's market with some really great food. We got cheesecake and eclairs for treats and it was awesome to have something more homemade and not mass produced. Walked around downtown after that, and we visited Hollywood too. It is not the glamorous place it seems. We spent the last evening in Santa Monica at the beach watching the sunset and just being together. It was the best part of the trip for me. When travelling standby you need to give yourself as many chances to get home as possible, since you only get a seat if there are any left over. So we got to LAX for the first flight out, at 6:00am. Luckily for us we got on the plane, even first class again for the flight home! Now I'm going to be spoiled forever... All in all, a great time. 
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These days it's getting hard to tell the days that I work from the days I don't. I'm enjoying being on reserve, or "On Call" for an airplane Eagle doesn't fly anymore. I've gotten called into the airport once out of 6 or 7 days and it doesn't look probable for many more days. The way to tell my days off from my days on are that I can travel on my days off. I did just that on Saturday, traveling back to Cleveland for a LAN Party hosted by one of Jo's coworkers, Caleb (Not sure exactly what his handle is, ma shtie or something). It was a fun time, a great minilan. Caleb provided bawls, hamburgers, and good amish sweet bread or something. It was pretty much pure sugar. The network had some small hiccups, but I got to play some good Quake 3, and UT2k4. I have to say I am not a UT fan when playing with all those mods. I think it was an RTS mod where you get experience points which can be traded in for powerups. The whole reason I play FPS instead of RTS is to avoid that. It's no fun to jump in a game and be pummeled by someone with a ton of points. Most FPS set everyone pretty much the same so it's a game of skill. The highlight of the day though was definitely ET:Quakewars. Finally! This game has been out for a while but no one wanted to play it with me, due to WoW and xboxes. It really doesn't take too much to run, I was playing decently on my macbook pro. Being the only person who really knew the maps and gameplay, I took the role of the leader as a medic. I didn't think it would be fun for everyone else if I just ran through the levels completing the objectives myself. I shouted out what needed to be done, what classes were needed and where, revived teammates, and showed how all the different classes worked. I think everyone enjoyed that. We ended up playing pretty late into the night. I want to keep it up, but no one else has actually bought the game, so we can't play online. It was good to see Jo and Tim, and wish Dan would have stopped by. The party broke up about 1am eastern. Crashed for about 4 hours on Jo's couch, before waking back up to jumpseat back to Dallas. Big thanks to Jo for picking me up, dropping me off, and letting me stay at his place even with work in the morning. The flight out of CLE was delayed by a flap issue or something. The captain boarded and we sat on the plane for 90 minutes before finally departing. I don't think there's been a cloud in the sky since Ike rolled through, but it was raining monday. I had planned to go to the "Big Tex" Texas State Fair with Alison, but it was looking like we couldn't go. By the time I got home though, the rain was clearing up, and although there were some short showers, we did go to the fair and had a pretty good time. The fair was pretty much a game of "how much $ can we take from you before you start to notice". After paying $14 for admission and $10 for parking, you had to buy a bunch of tickets to do anything. We walked around the free stuff, shops, and the auto show was pretty nice (one of few free things there). The food is always really popular there, even though it's not good for you at all! I got a turkey leg and a fried snickers bar. We walked everywhere to find that one place with the fried snickers bar, and it was something else, that's for sure! Very hard to describe, and it was good..but not really $4 good.. Alison and I both agreed just a normal snickers would have been better and cheaper. But by all means you should try one if you get the chance. It's not bad. We didn't want to ride a lot of the spinny fair rides since that's where you hear about people getting killed on in the news, but we rode on the big ferris wheel and the carousel. The wheel was $6 each and the carousel was $3, and most of the rides were 2-4 bucks. I didn't really like that approach, although I guess we saved money compared to an amusement park. I don't want it so seem like I didn't have fun either because I had a lot of fun and it's great to hang out with Alison. We have our routines and stuff we do together a lot, but this was special :D Tuesday I spent working on my website again on the friends page. From 1.4.2 to 1.5, this is a very big change, although it doesn't look like anything changed from the initial look. It's largely a backend change where instead of copying the code several times and editing it for each person, I created a multidimensional array of friends and their website data, and I run a loop of the same code until it runs out of people. This means one day I should be able to sort by post date instead of person if I choose, and it's far easier to edit overall. Also, and this is a big one: You can now control the image on the friends page yourself! RSS feeds can contain a link to an image if you set one, and my page will use whatever you select. If none is set in the feed, it defaults to an image saved on my site. LJ uses your default pic I believe.. Anyways if you're not sure if the image is yours or mine, click "History" and see if it displays a pic in the title. If it does, that's the pic I'm also using on the friends page. So now if you don't like the pic there you have nothing to complain about. The last thing is that "Tweets for Today" doesn't light up, you actually have to write something constructive.
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How do you make it rain in Dallas, Texas? Buy a convertible. Well technically I leased it, but its still freakin awesome. For a long, long time I wanted a manual transmission 4 seater convertible. Of course, living in Ohio it's kinda pointless, but that's one of the great things about living down here now. I had been looking at the Chrysler Sebring Convertible for a while, but the only manual transmission they had was on a GTC version for like 2002-2004. Needless to say they are rare and rarer in good condition. But enter the Volkswagen Eos! Basically a replacement to the VW Cabrio, its essentially a hardtop convertible version of the Jetta. It's a 4 cyl, 200 hp turbocharged engine 6 speed manual and it looks really classy in black. I got both black exterior and interior. It's basically a two-seater but it's not terrible in the back. So why get rid of the mighty Saturn? I didn't really want to, but I have to get Texas plates before the Ohio ones expired. To do that, I had to get the equivalent of an e-check so I took it to a shop and they told me it would cost more to fix than it was worth. Bummer. But as a last gift to me, the VW place gave me $3000 for it, far more than I was expecting. You just can't help but love the old saturns (pre-2001). So today I'm supposed to pick it up at noon so we go and they don't have it yet. Also the 2 salesmen I worked with aren't there. Come back in an hour they say. So Alison and I go shopping and do some errands. We come back at 2. Oh it'll be done in a few moments! 40 minutes later...Oh it's just getting gassed up! 20 minutes later I'm mad and they let me go back to see it and finally send me to another guy to do the paperwork and get the keys. By the time I actually get behind the wheel it's rush hour and raining a lot, so I don't really get to have fun with it like I want. And hence the pics below aren't the greatest... It's T-storms all week here but Friday morning I should get the chance to take it out and have some fun and get some good pics. Anyways, I really like the car so far. With the top up it's quiet and there's no leaks and it has a huge sunroof. Enough to make you forget the top is still up. The sound system sounds great. (I have an aux in instead of my ipod line-in but it still sounds good) The engine is way stronger than my old saturns, the clutch feels great, leather seats and steering wheel... I really like it so far.
On with the pics! Click more |
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As I begin packing up for Dallas, I'm finding things that aren't trash but I don't want to take them. Comment to claim things. Pics if requested. First come first serve.
2x Mac Classics, with one keyboard/mouse setup I'll be adding more throughout the week.
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