Category: Travel

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Katie and I seem to do vacations in pairs. We’ll go somewhere on a trip, then a year or two later come back and do all of the things we discovered but couldn’t find time for the first time around. Last April we went to Las Vegas for an extended weekend, did some sightseeing, saw some shows. This year we came back mainly for the shows, and did the trip during the last week of March, driving out on Monday and returning Friday evening.

Standard Rio RoomWe stayed at the Rio, which has very nice, huge rooms—even if we didn’t spend much time there. The casino floor is also surprisingly easy to navigate, unlike some of the mazes on the Strip. We’re probably the only people to stay there four nights and not to see the “Show in the Sky” (some vaguely Mardi Gras-ish production they do with floats that run on tracks in the ceiling).

Of course, it is a bit off the Strip:

View of the Strip from our hotel room

But at least it wasn’t as far off as the last hotel we stayed at.

We managed to catch Spamalot (which replaced Avenue Q at the Wynn), Cirque du Soleil’s O (the one with the water), Penn & Teller’s magic show, and Jubilee! (a traditional-style Vegas extravaganza, and yes, the exclamation point is part of the title). Continue reading →

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It took an hour and four minutes, but I managed to book a hotel for Comic-Con International this morning. (Yes, it’s not until July. And I still want to call it San Diego Comic Con.) Last year I was unable to get through online or by phone, but had no problems faxing the reservation request.

Reservations went on sale at 9:00 AM. I hit the website, started calling, and started faxing.

Phone: I couldn’t get through for the entire ~50 minutes of redialing. Just “no answer” over and over again.

Fax: Busy signal, over and over again. Occasionally the circuit would connect, and it would start making fax tones, but it never actually completed the handshake.

Web: The convention website loaded, very slowly, just enough to get me the link to the Travel Planners site. I could get that first page to load—again, very slowly—and occasionally I could get into the second page, where I selected the check-in and check-out dates and preferred hotel. From that point on, it was timeouts, and a bogus error page about how either I had been inactive for 12 minutes or my browser was not accepting cookies (neither of which was true), and I should hit refresh to start over.

Around 9:50 I finally managed to get to the hotel availability page.* My first choice wasn’t available, so I went back and selected All Hotels (which I should have done in the first place). My second choice wasn’t available either. In fact, there were only about three hotels in the downtown area that had rooms left for the full length of the convention.** Continue reading →

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I set up a slide-show screen saver on one of my computers at work. To start, I dropped in some of my wallpapers, including several from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, then snagged some photos from my website to add a little variety.

Of course, 800×600 (or smaller) images don’t look so great blown up to 1400×1050, so last weekend I grabbed some higher-res copies from home.

What surprised me was how blurry the older photos were. Most of the digital photos I have older than 2003 are scanned in from 3½×5″ or 4×6″ prints. And half of those were done with a point and shoot camera. Even the photos that I scanned at a higher resolution tended to be much blurrier than the 5-megapixel images I’ve been taking since we went digital.

It also pointed up a problem with the point-and-shoot camera and lighting. Compare the following photos from my American Southwest page:

Moon over Springdale, Utah (SLR) Looking Back at Laughlin

The one on the left (of the moon above a rock ridge) was taken with an old SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was maybe 12 or so. It was entirely manual except for a built-in light meter. I loved the control and the photo quality I could get out of it, but it was big and bulky, and eventually I stopped carrying it.

The second photo (with the one tall building sticking up out of nowhere) was taken with the point-and-shoot camera I picked up during high school and used right up through that first Hawaii trip. Notice the difference in the sky? The sky does vary in color—you only need to walk outside on a clear day to see that—but something about that camera just collected less light from the corners of the image. The Laughlin picture is a good example because you can see the circle continue across the lower half of the frame as well.

The ones from the 2003 Hawaii trip are actually not too bad, even though they were done on the cheap camera, because they were scanned straight from the negatives by Kodak. I suspect they have a slightly better scanner than I do! 😀

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Here’s the latest round of strange sights from San Diego.

[Outhouse on a crane]We stayed at the Radisson Harbor View. The end of the hallway had a view of the harbor, but our room had a view of the construction across the street. When we first stepped onto the balcony, we saw a crane lifting an outhouse up to the topmost floor of the site. There’s something inherently absurd about a port-a-potty flying through the air.

We walked up and down Cedar Ave. from the hotel to the Little Italy trolley stop at least once a day, stopping at the same It’s a Grind coffee house we frequented two years ago. Strangely, we didn’t notice this message on the street until our last day in town:

No SBC to India

Now, it may look like a tagger’s commentary on outsourcing, but it makes more sense if you happen to know that India Street is just a block away.

Apartment high-rise with identical balconies... and one red umbrella.There were quite a few high-rise buildings that looked very much like this one. Sort of the skyscraper equivalent of clone homes, I suppose. This one had one difference: One of the tenants had set up a large, red umbrella on their balcony.

Moving on to the Gaslamp Quarter, we saw—but didn’t photograph—a club called Tsunami Beach. I don’t know about you, but if there’s a tsunami, the last place I want to be is on the beach!

This next one was actually pretty neat. The window boxes outside Dussini (a Mediterranean restaurant on Fifth Avenue) are full of low-water plants. Practical, low-maintenance, and still decorative.

Windows box with low-water plants

Finally, here’s a sign from somewhere along the 5, elsewhere in San Diego:

Fish and Richardson

I think it’s pretty safe to say that Richardson isn’t a fish…

Next: con-specific weirdness.

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I mentioned that on Saturday, we left Comic-Con for a few hours to check out the ships at the Maritime Museum of San Diego. We saw five:

  • The Star of India, billed as “the world’s oldest active ship”
  • The HMS Surprise, a replica of an 18th century British ship.
  • The Berkeley, an 1898 steam ferry
  • The Medea, a 1904 yacht
  • A B-39 Soviet submarine.

The big attractions, of course, were the Star of India and the HMS Surprise. Naturally, the Star of India was closed when we got there.

Star of India as seen from a porthole in the Surprise
The Star of India seen from the Surprise

The Surprise was fun, though. It turns out it was built in the 1970s as a replica of an 18th century British Royal Navy vessel, the HMS Rose. It was sold to 20th Century Fox in 2001 and used to film Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. After filming was complete, the museum bought the ship and renamed it the HMS Surprise in honor of the fictional vessel.

Continue reading →

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Neither of us spent more than an hour or so on the floor on Saturday, in part out of self-defense. Comic-Con is usually the most crowded on Saturdays, though we didn’t see much difference from Friday this year.

After the Flash panel, I went back to my back issue hunt. Found quite a few in the $150-500 range. Unfortunately I’m looking in the $50-100 range. Dealers just haven’t brought their low-grade Golden Age books, so it looks like it’ll be back to eBay.

Quick Draw was, as promised, lots of fun. I missed the first 20 minutes or so (I’d been planning to go to the One Year Later panel, but changed my mind at the last minute—no regrets there!), but Katie caught the whole thing. Sergio Aragonés, Scott Shaw!, and Kyle Baker were directed by Mark Evanier to draw ever crazier things, sometimes competing to convey a “secret word” in a Pictionary-style game.

The Narnia/Pirates panel, expected to be the highlight of the day, turned out to be a big disappointment. Last year, the Narnia presentation was fascinating, despite the delay from the satellite link-up, because things were completely new, and because the people involved knew what fans were interested in seeing. This time they basically sent the marketing guy out to talk about the special edition DVD.

As for Pirates of the Caribbean… the talk by John Knoll was a fascinating insight into the technology that they used to animate Davy Jones, but the first half was out of place at a Comic-Con. It would have done much better with a highly technical audience—maybe at a Cal Tech Seminar Day or something. Once he started showing the before-and-after shots, and the test footage, the audience warmed up to him. And some of the joke footage, like the giant Krispy Kreme donut rolling out into the surf, or Elizabeth Swann cutting a swath through the Dutchman’s crew with a pair of lightsabers, was great.

After that fiasco, we decided to clear out instead of staying for the Spider-Man panel. Neither of us had anything we were looking at for the rest of the afternoon, so we decided to go out to see the Star of India (the ship, not the restaurant) and the other ships out by the bay. Among other things, Katie wanted to get some pictures while still in her pirate costume. Unfortunately it took us so long to get around the insanely long line for Spider-Man—which was a big surprise, since we’d just walked into the hall earlier—that we missed our trolley. Literally, we were up to the gate on the opposite side of the tracks when it pulled away. We ended up postponing our dinner reservations to make sure we had enough time.

As it turned out, the Star of India itself was closed, but the HMS Surprise (used for filming Master and Commander) was open, along with the HMS Berkeley, a ferry, and a pleasure boat called the Medea. The Berkeley had mostly been turned into the Maritime Museum, but the engine rooms were open for view. We skipped the Soviet submarine. Bulky costumes and full backpacks don’t go well in confined spaces.

Absolutely no climbing in the rigging!

We had enough time to drop stuff off at our hotel room and lie down for a few minutes, then went back to the Gaslamp district and dinner at Dussini, a Mediterranean place that replaced the old Spaghetti Factory. Once again, a great restaurant. We also saw a great demonstration of why you should make reservations: The walk-in couple in front of us had a 45-minute wait. We were shown to our table immediately.