Monthly Archives: September 2005

Love stinks?

I'm definitely happy to be back in Mexico, although I've been having routing issues to our servers in Toronto. I've called a couple friends and I'm the only person that I've talked to that hasn't been able to access the site this afternoon, but I'm sure it's affecting others as well. To the best of my knowledge this is related to Katrina damage but I'm not sure.


I was pretty weirded out to see that the baggage carts all had “Love Stinks, Wright is Right” written on them. I pointed it out to Rachel, thinking maybe we were seeing some strange lover's quarrel of airline workers, but she told me it was actually about Dallas Love Field and the Wright Ammendment (more) or something else that went over my head.
 

I sure do like clouds though.

Best consistant clouds that I've seen are in Africa, followed closely by the Carribbean (but that's more of a package deal than just the clouds).

 

We got in late on Saturday so rather than drive across Mexico in the dark we stayed in Cabo for the night. The Hilton there sure is a lot nicer than the Krasnopolsky in Amsterdam or the shit-hole Aristocrat we stayed at in Dallas, so that was good news.

I also wanted to mention that I read BLINK on this vacation, and wow, it's really amazing. Highly recommended.

Anyway, I'm working on getting caught up on BMEvideo now, so probably tomorrow you can expect a nice update there assuming that the routing issues get fixed.

Aristocrat Holiday Inn review, Dallas TX

Three word hotel review: This hotel sucks.

Ignoring the fact that they have no bathtubs (only showers), their staff seem to be dimwits, and it's currently filled with looters evacuees from New Orleans that insist on being extremely loud at all hours, partying in the halls, and sounding like they're trashing the rooms adjoined to ours, today the hotel ran out of water. There's a certain ironic humor to moving people from shelters with no water into this hotel, but it's definitely not cool if you're paying for it.

Yesterday (Friday) morning they slipped a zero-notice note under the door that there would be a water interruption for the day (as in on Friday). This morning — Saturday — we discovered that we had no water. No running toilet, no running shower, no pressure from the taps. Called the front desk and asked them when it would be back up and they told us 4 PM, long after checkout time. “They were supposed to slip a note under your door last night, I guess you didn't get it.”

Now, I'm not convinced that slipping a note under the door at 3 AM the night before a seven hour water blackout the next morning is acceptable given that the hotel surely has people who have business meetings and commitments that they're going to need showers for, to say nothing of the need to use the toilet. I asked the hotel what refund we could expect and they told us we could have “half off” for the affected day. Yeah, I'd have to say that no water pretty much makes a hotel valueless.

Anyway, don't stay at the Aristocrat Holiday Inn in Dallas, Texas.

Calm logo sweater

I recently posted an entry in ModBlog on “extreme knitting” — I have to add here a picture of a sweater that namesofthedead (who's doing the suspension) made of the BME calm logo. I'm pretty sure she sells them, so if you want one (or something similar), she has my permission to make them with the official logos and you'll need to contact her directly if you're interested.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it, but ModBlog is now over a month old! (And Needled is something like three and a half months old now too, so there's an increasing set of modification blogs for people to read).

Bad habits

I think Avid believes that my entry on shrooms was not quite inspired enough in terms of my choice of picture, so he sent me this improvement.

Grrr…

Sorry about the downtime, that should be all for now — still having some tech problems but with CT's help a complete scan and rebuild of the filesystem was done… I'm still very nervous about some things, and I think in October I'm going to fly up and deal with some hardware issues in person, but I feel secure enough that I'm not going to cancel my vacation (which very nearly happened).

Tattoo below by David at Waterproof Tattoos in Orebro, Sweden.

Please, God, just let me take a vacation without something terrible happening, just this once. I know I take your name in vain, oh, pretty much every single day, but seriously, lighten up with me or I'm making a full-on pledge to burn down Vatican City with the red dude down below… because I need to smoke me some pot in Amsterdam or I'm gonna go seriously crazy.