Yellowstone - July 2008

We got back from Yellowstone/Big Sky last Monday. Had a good 9 day vacation and finally caught up on sleep over the weekend and can post this. The agenda was:

Saturday - arrived and drove to Lake Yellowstone Hotel
Sunday

• Ranch' Dinner via horse buggy short distance into the park
• Stayed at Mammoth Hot springs

Monday/Tue/Wed

• Big Sky Montana: water rafting, horseback riding, pool for the kids.
• Interesting being in a ski resort off season. Place is empty.
• Took lift to the top and walked down

Thursday

• Caught up with my parents and my sister Deb along with my two nieces
• Stayed at the Old Yellowstone Snow Lodge

Friday/Saturday

• My other sister Laura, her husband and Deb's husband drove up from Denver
• They all stated at a campground, we stayed nearby at the Jackson Lake Lodge in the Grand Teatons

Sunday - returned on a long series of flights

Photos can be found here

Airplane Travel enjoyment

Got back from vacation in Yellowstone last Monday and somehow lost all of last week to 'stuff'.

I think it had to do with loosing the sleep at the start of the week due to Delta. Somehow we left on time out of Jackson Hole, then had a 1 hour connection in Salt Lake that also left on time. Headed to Cincinnati for another 1 hour layover and then got hosed on a 2+ hour delay while they found a crew for the plane that was sitting at the gate the entire time. By the time we got home and to sleep it was 230am and I had to get up at 6am to head into the office.

As to why we would have booked a return with 3 segments - we did not. Thanks to all the cancellations this was how Delta rebooked us. All that said, somehow we landed at LaGuardia fine and our bags all made it through the connections.

That said - I was sitting next to two ~19 year olds on the flight from Salt Lake -> Cincinnati who were all cheerful about traveling. He stated he did not travel much at all, and she was heading out on her first business trip and was looking forward to the hotel and the expense report.

I found myself just shutting up and listening. I don't mind the trips, but wonder when in the 1.4M miles I've got with American I lost the enjoyment of it all...

Heading off for a week

Heading to Yellowstone for the next week, should be a good trip.

The Jamaica trip a few weeks back was one of those last minute trips due to excess vacation time I had to use by the end of June. This vacation is our 'real' vacation of this year that we actually planned ahead for.

Hoping Delta does not completely mess us up. American on the last flights was less than great. Actually spoke to someone this morning that was in Jamaica the week after we were and had pretty much the same experience. Except he was in the airport far longer than we were

Moved email

Few years ago gave up on running email at home except for forwarding to gmail/yahoo accounts. As of last night finally bit the bullet and retired the old forwarding setup and just setup google apps account for kortekaas.com.

Pretty cool, worked quickly.

The only thing I really don't understand is one can't have a domain hosted with google apps that points to an existing gmail account? I ended up having to pull all the data out of the 'old' gmail account via pop to the new one. Then put a forward on the gmail account over to my personal account.

All works, except these pitas
- lost tags and chat contacts
- 2x the storage at google given I didn't delete old data out of paranoia
- still have to have the gmail account setup as a forward as have used both over the years
- still have to have the gmail account for non-apps services (analytics, reader, photos, etc).

Jamaica Trip Over *sigh*

We've gotten back from our last-minute Jamaica Trip. Had a bunch of last year's vacation time that expired on June 30th so took the last week off, Marina found out we could actually use some of the ungodly number of frequent flier miles and get free airfare.

Stayed at the Half Moon resort (halfmoon.com), and we had a great time. The fact that it was off season was, IMHO, a good thing in that the place was fairly empty. No worries about dining reservations, space at the pool, etc. Granted, it was June so hurricane season isn't as much of a worry as it would be in August.

Other than finding out the hard way that the American flight we were on has a historical record of being on time only 27% of the time that is... Turns out our 4pm flight ended up departing at close to 2am the next morning. But what's 10 hours between friends right ;-) Thankfully the hotel let us stay the extra hours in the room, otherwise we would have been stuck

Pics can be found here

Course going back to work on Monday is going to be painful. Our "real" vacation this summer is actually in a few weeks to Yellowstone, so the kids are excited we are traveling around

Power Outage

Lost power yesterday afternoon at home, still down as of now, some 18 hours later. Forget how much is tied to electricity these days, and how much we count on that to keep the kids busy.

First time in 2+ years that I actually spun up the generator for more than it's monthly power up. Found out that my reworking of the panels a few years back worked like a charm, but I missed too many lighting circuits. Guess it's good that it worked.

Would not have guessed this would have been in early summer and not the middle of winter, which is why I really have the generator in the first place.

How Software is Built

I talked recently with the guys that are running 'How Software is Built'. Interesting set of topics they have been talking about with a number of technology folks - take a look at my interview here