Having wrote all of my trip experiences out I went and emailed them to Northwest Customer Service. It surprised me how quickly they got back to me, but they did. In the email they gave me codes for 2 travel vouchers worth 75 dollars a piece. One in my name and one in Bekah’s name. I suppose this is a decent way to try and make amends but really all it did was point out that there really isn’t a way to make amends for all the lost time and frustration. Especially with ticket prices being so high.

The best part was the apology they sent, which was actually very well written. This was my favorite paragraph:

We have taken your complaint very seriously. In spite of thorough
training programs and comprehensive supervision, our challenge is to
motivate all employees to perform to our high standards on every
occasion. We have an ambitious and penetrating quality training program.
As you may realize, performance deficiencies are not necessarily a
consequence of a “corporate standard” but rather of other influences
such as job skill, experience, and personal motivation of individual
employees.

Just one question….what, exactly, is a penetrating quality training program?

Vacations are something my family really doesn’t do. We occasionally will go for a weekend to someplace nearby but usually it’s nothing fancy. It’s not a VACATION it’s a vacation. It’s not TRIP it’s a trip. So I was exceptionally excited when my dad offered to fly Bekah and myself to Virgina Beach for a full week of awesomeness.

And the trip was awesome….but no one wants to hear about how I sat on the dock/beach drinking cold beer and reading/listening to music for a week. They want to hear me bitch about Northwest Airlines. Who am I to question the pressure of my peers?

When we arrive at Norfolk everyone picks up their luggage….everyone but Bekah and I. This is particularly annoying since my contact solution was in my bag. Now before I hear this carry on business I just want to put this out here right now. Target did not carry my brand in the 3 oz, F U sized bottle. Not to mention the whole idea behind needing to do that is ridiculous. You shell out that much money to get on a plane you’d think they could handle your luggage. Moving on….

We report our bags missing, get our travel vouchers and crappy Skyteam toiletry bag and head to the vacation house. After about 30 minutes of driving we get a call. Turns out our luggage was just on the wrong luggage carousal. Awesome, right? Well at least they could deliver it before noon tomorrow!

I got my swimming trunks at 6 PM the next day.

The rest of the week passes uneventfully until it’s time to return home. We get to the airport early like good sheep and stand in line. Northewest is cute and makes you use a computer terminal to self check in at first. So I did, it told me to talk to a person. So I did that instead. He spent an HOUR AND A HALF trying to figure out how to print my boarding pass. Eventually giving us a phone number for the Northwest automated phone line and telling us that we needed to call them and figure this out. That’s the point that my father had a small meltdown. Eventually they did get our passes printed (10 minutes before departure) and we somehow got on our plane.

When we got home….our luggage had been lost again. When we talked to the lady at the counter about it, “Oh it looks like you were a late check in. This doesn’t happen if you show up when you’re supposed to” I shit you not. My loving girlfriend decided she didn’t want me to make a scene and kindly explained our situation to the counter girl who’s only response was, “Well it wasn’t me” to which she responded, “I know….that’s why I’m not screaming at you”

Now for the “What the Christ” moment. We eventually get our luggage delivered to her apartment and everything is looking good. Thats when I get a call on my cellphone from NorthWest. They have my luggage and would like for me to pick it up in Cedar rapids. ….”In the quiet words of the virgin mary….come again?”
“We have your luggage, can you pick it up tonight?”
“Actually you don’t. We have it. You already delivered it to us”
“uh no we didn’t. It’s in my back room here”
“Well…not to burst your bubble but it’s in my backseat and I’m wearing the shorts that were in there….”
“Oh….well I’ll take your name off the list. ”
“You mean you don’t check this stuff before calling people”
“Have a nice day sir”

And that, is how you bracket a vacation with suck.

A friend of mine was asking how to make sweet tea and so I decided to post the method I use to make it.

• Decide how much tea you want to make and put half of the water on the stove and bring to a boil.
• Put the the rest of the room temperature water in the container you’re going to use, add ice to this water.
• Put the tea in the boiling water, remove from heat and let it steep for 4 minutes

The key to this is you are going to add the tea to the cool water, this to the water before adding the tea. You can use as much or as much more as you want.

Really that’s it. Just tea and water but just remember, hot tea to cold water, and use a simple syrup for the sweetener.

It didn’t take long for it to happen to my glorious state but it eventually did. And I want to talk to you, boys and girls about the smoking ban. 

Come July 1, there will be no smoking in any public place….oh yeah except casino floors.   Some would argue that a smoking ban should be just that a ban.  Especially if you’re crusading against smoking on the grounds that it is truly the workers in those establishments who are the ones who suffer.  But how much more would they suffer if our State wasn’t getting obscene amounts of money from the casinos….right guys?!….right?….yeah it’s all about the children.  But I’m going to ignore that whole can of crap here for a while. 

What I’m more interested in is what brought us here and how I really don’t care.  The idea of the smoking ban is absolutely appalling to me.  Not because I enjoy cigars and pipes, not because I’m addicted to nicotine…which I’m not (caffeine is another story), but because this happens to be the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in a while.  I find the arguments for it utterly laughable and the way that it is being applied and enforced utterly typical.  My personal opinion is it’s insulting to me and any other person who feels that they have free will and ability to make their own grown up decisions.  But that is once again not really what I care about.

The target of this kind of ban is clearly aimed at cigarette smokers who are by far the most numerous of all smokers.  There also seems to be a feeling among them, most likely because of their numbers, that their smoke doesn’t stink.  I obviously don’t mean that in an empirical way but more figuratively.  I have been asked by cigarette smokers at a bar (actively puffing away) to put out my cigar because it stinks.  Restaurants/bars that allow smoking often ban cigars and pipes.

Many who enjoy the more expensive tobacco in cigars and pipes have been living in a kind of ban like this for years and it hasn’t been an issue.  Most likely owing to the fact that we aren’t usually addicted to our vice.  So why am I indifferent about this ban?  On the one hand I’ve said I despise it but on the other hand I am a bitter person.  The kind of bitter person that would take great pleasure in seeing cigarette smokers having to live in a world where they can’t smoke in public.  What do you know guys?  It looks like your smoke does stink like the rest ours.

As many of you know Grand Theft Auto 4 came out a few days ago. In preparation for its release I offered up the proper adorations to Deity in hopes that the game would be as good as my heart dared to hope it would be. Well….God is a wrathful god. I’m not sure what part of GTA he disagrees with (all of it) but he felt that he should smite my projector. I had been using this projector for about a year as my TV in my living room. It was a beast.

When I began looking at replacement bulbs I realized that this would run some cash and honestly it just wasn’t worth it. So I made the trek over to Best Buy to look at new TVs. I’m not exactly sure when TVs became really flipping expensive but I must have been asleep.

After about an hour I was walking out of the store with a new TV, which can be seen here….I think. It’s beautiful. I always thought people were just making crap up when they said that there was a huge difference between this and regular TV sets. I was wrong, oh lord was I wrong. Some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen is moving from one xbox menu to another….followed closely by stealing a car and running over a drug dealer….you know….the usual….

So on recommendation of a friend I decided to check out a shop not too far from me called Bootleggin’ Barzini’s.  I give them 5 points for the name.  But I would probably still be loyal to this store if they were called Dull McDullsville And We Don’t Sell Beer.  The service at this place is excellent and the staff is friendly and knowledgeable.  I went in not really knowing what I was looking for, talked to the guy working there for a while and left with a 6 pack of Golden Leaf’s Pale Ale and then latter this week with a 6 pack of O’Fallon’s 5 Day IPA.

The Golden Leaf is brewed at City Brewery and has a fantastic hoppy quality to it.  The flavor is crisp and very citric.  I think this will be a much better beer to drink in the hot summer.  However, if you like hoppy ales or pale ales give this a shot.  Not to mention you can usually get a 6 pack at a very decent price of right around 7 dollars give or take a little.

O’Fallon 5 day IPA is brewed in Missouri and comes in 12 oz bottles.  The first thing I noticed about this IPA is that there are a ton of hops in this as well.  I can definitely see why they recommended that I try this as well.  And while this is an excellent beer I have to agree with some of the criticisms of it on Beer Advocate saying that the body is rather on the light side.  I prefer my IPAs to have a bit more body than this but maybe that’s what makes this such a contender with the Golden Leaf.

I definitely recommend both beers.  Very decently priced and really delicious if you like hops.

This link is old, as far as the internet is concerned, but none the less I still felt like mentioning it.  Some wonderful folks at Princeton have published a paper about about using cold boot attacks against full drive encryption.  The idea being that the data in the DRAM does not disappear right away but gradually decays.   When you bring the temperature of those chips down using something like an upside down can of air you can keep the data on those chips for several minutes.  In the right situation, an attacker with physical access to your computer could dump the contents of the ram and find the keys.

There are many arguments over this paper and a lot of people making a lot of talk.  I find the paper very interesting and I think people are too quick to discard the information in it.  An attacker gaining physical access to a machine with sensitive data on it is becoming more and more likely with the increasing prevalence of laptops and smart phones.  There will always be a user who leaves their laptop on the table at starbucks to use the bathroom.  And while full drive encryption is a great idea,I fear too many people look at it as a pass to be less responsible.

It’s just another example of how responsible computing habits is the most important thing.

The site with video explanation can be found here.

In the interests of expanding those things that make me an old man with strange tastes I decided to look into some new music.  More especially, blues.   I’ve always like some kinds of blues but never really took the time to find out what kinds there were, the history, the big players, or anything of that nature.  The most effort I had put into it in the past was to not complain about it when over at a friends house.  Quite a feat.

That all changed this weekend when I decided that I would like to listen to some music while cleaning. And since I can stream music to my living room through my xbox it was time to put my zune music subscription to work.  But first I needed to do googling to find out what I like.  It was during these searches that I found an Essential Blues Album List.  I started with Chicago style blues since I had vaguely heard of that.  I am now safely entrenched into some of Muddy Water’s work and Howlin’ Wolf.  I haven’t started on the "General Gotta Have" list but I certainly will soon.  The question I will be searching for now is, What else do I need to add to my collection?

For a long time I have lived without a laptop.  My first real and last laptop was a Dell Inspiron 8200.  My father got this for me when I graduated from high school and it was a beast of a machine with a massive 20 gig hard drive.  I used this thing forever and definitely got my money back from that service plan.  But lately I’ve been feeling the call of having some kind of mobile computing device.  Between my frequent trips to NW Iowa and my desire to compute from the couch and the fact that the video card in my ancient desktop crapped out….it all pointed to the fact that I needed a new computer.  More specifically a laptop.

Now this was about the time a part of me begins thinking about getting a mac?   Why?  I’m not overly sure.   Up until mac world I probably would have.  I was that close to buying a Macbook.  Then Macworld happen and apple revealed the Macbook Air.  I laughed and laughed wondering how in the world a company could be so daft.  And with that, I purchased a Lenovo ThinkPad.

The ThinkPad has turned out to be an amazing choice.  I find myself wondering how I ever got by without the scroll button and many of the other features.  Only time will tell if this works out to be truly great or just rocks my small self centered world.  

For those of you who wetshave, which I think is one of you, I really feel I need to let you in on this small discovery. First let me tell you how I have been shaving in the morning. When I wake up in the morning I fill up the sink with hot water and put my mug, brush and occasionally the container holding the soap I’m going to use for that morning in there as well. Then I take my shower, get out, and shave. The problem is by the time I’m out of the shower the water is lukewarm or just slightly warm. I want a hot shave so this is less than optimal. So I did some digging around the B&B site and found the fix…..

Yes. I have moved an electric kettle into my bathroom. Now in the morning instead of filling up the sink, I put water in the kettle. I flip it on, take my shower, and by the time it’s done I have boiling water. I let that cool a bit and then I put my brush in my mug and fill that with hot water while I start my preshave. I find that when i lather with that mug and brush I have a comfortably hot shave in the morning. It. Is. Fantastic.

Geeky, and odd? Yes. But worth it to actually enjoy a really close shave.