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I left Seattle 16 hours ago, but I’m still not in Milwaukee. My first flight arrived on time, I enjoyed my first visit to Minneapolis. Second flight took off on time, but then we started circling. We spent about 45 minutes circling above madison Wisconsin, only to find out that we can’t land in Milwaukee. It was too foggy there, and the transponder on the ground was, well, broken. So they fired up the engines, and we headed to Detroit. We landed in Detroit around 11:30pm (EST at this point). Luckily, they are going to turn the plan around at 8:30 am and try again for Milwaukee. With the time difference, we should get there just after 8:30am.
Now, I just have to see if the shuttle agency honors my reservation and payment from last night. And, more importantly, see if my luggage arrives. I was forced to check my luggage at the last minute due to the overhead bins being full. I just want to put this out there for the airlines: I would give up the privilege of carrying on a bag, if you let me check it for free. Just saying.
And now to McDonald’s. Delta gave out meal vouchers, good for $7 towards breakfast at the airport. McDonald’s was the first to open this morning, so I went there. I ordered a meal that should have been about $5. After getting my food, and looking at the receipt, I saw that they had upsized my meal to get it as close to $7 as possible. They made my meal a large and added an extra hash brown. I don’t know if they do this to everyone, but one or all, it is unethical. Sorry McDonald’s, I’ll be calling your corporate office and Delta’s corporate office when I get a chance. This behavior is not truthful and is not ethical. If it is a one time thing, great, now you know it happened. It it is systematic, then I hope you will address it.
Ok – back to setting in the airport.
For the last 15 or so months, I’ve been the Webmaster for SIGCSE 2010 (http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2010). SIGCSE stands for the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education. Most of my publications are in the computer science education area, so I’m excited to be able to go. I’ve never actually had a publication at SIGCSE, but have had 2 conference papers at ITICSE 2007 (associated conference) and have had a publication in the SIGCSE bulletin.
Since I do hope to shift my career back to academics at some point, I’m also going to be on the look out for CS departments that are hiring. Maybe there is a need for someone with my background
Being the Webmaster for a conference is a lot of work. Requests for updates come from a lot of different people, and there is just a lot of information to collect, parse, format, and post (all at the right times). Apparently I enjoyed doing it, because I am performing the same role next year. I’ve already go the 2011 site up and running, http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2011.
I’ve got a full Yoga schedule tonight, but I’ll be flying out tomorrow and enjoying the west of the week at the symposium! I’ve even found a Yoga class to check out when I’m in Milwaukee.
We had a wonderful time in Disneyland last weekend. The parks are very manageable (compared to the size of Disney World). So, it was nice to be able to do everything we wanted to do in just two days (including riding a lot of rides twice: space mountain, big thunder mountain, the matterhorn, haunted mansion, and buzz lightyear).
The lines were ok. Saturday early evening was a little crazy, but other than that it was ok. We saw the Fireworks both nights (9:25, but the park was open until midnight). And then Sunday morning, the park wasn’t supposed to open until 10am, but it was open early… So we went in and knocked out a few rides early.
Also, on Saturday, we had 6 free Fastpasses (Disney’s system that lets you head to the front of the line). This helped a lot! We were able to avoid a lot of line waiting.
Fun time! great weather. All pictures are here -> http://picasaweb.google.com/mike.helmick/Disneyland#
Not my brithday… Cortny’s birthday is coming up (Sunday)! Happy Birthday!
We’ve got a very exciting and fun filled birthday weekend planned…. Disneyland! We’ll be spending 2 short days in California with Mickey and the gang.
That’s all for now – I’m sure we’ll have more to say after we actually go.
This post may get lengthy, and will contain a bunch of pictures. That is the way it goes, when you are giving a photo tour. Click continue reading to see the tour. I also wanted to get this out earlier, but it is better late than never.
Read the rest of this entry »
Canada, eh?
So all non-US-flagged ships have to stop in Canada when transporting passengers from the US to the US. Therefore, we made a port call in Victoria, B.C., Canada. This was actually the third time we have visited Victoria (in the last year for that matter). We went once with my parents and once when I attended a conference there. Originally, we were planning on staying on the ship and enjoying it while other people were ashore. Well, it turns out that this was totally unnecessary. The ship NEVER felt crowded, Celebrity does a really good job on this front. And it was a beautiful day in Victoria, so we had to walk around a bit. (All pictures from Day 7)
We started the day with a galley tour (we were very lucky to get this tour, it is not often given). I’ll have pictures of this in my next post. After lunch we both had massages (that we scheduled the first night). I had the 4 hands massage (2 massage therapists). Since they are working at the same time, for the same length as a regular massage, you get double the massage! Totally awesome. Since it was a port day, our massage treatments were discounted. It makes a lot of sense to save your spa treatments for the port days.
Ok, so Day six was a lot of fun, but it doesn’t have a lot of pictures to go with it. We left Juneau around 6pm the day before, and day 6 was spent cruising in the open water. It was a long way from from Juneau to Victoria, we didn’t really hit the Canadian inside passage until day 7. (All day 6 pictures - http://picasaweb.google.com/mike.helmick/AlaskaCruise2009InsidePassageDay6)
There was some beautiful scenery along the coast, but mostly we just enjoyed the ship. Day 6 was the day that we made reservations for our 2010 trip to the Galapagos, and also the day that we took our photo tour of the ship (a future blog post).
In the afternoon, I participated in the ship’s version of The Weakest Link. I did pretty good, making it to the finals, but I lost (got second, whatever).
This day was also our second formal night. It was fun to get all dressed up, since it is something we don’t do very often. So not much to say, but we had fun.
One more day left to write about, and then I’ll have to find something else to say.
Short delay between posts, but here we go. After our at sea visit to Hubbard Glacier, we docked the next morning in Juneau, Alaska. Alaska’s capital city is a pretty small town, only 30,000 residents. Our highlight here was visiting the Sled Dog Musher’s Camp. As usual, if you just want to jump to the pictures, they are all just below this sentence, or viewable on picasaweb.
The skyline of Juneau is quite similar to the skyline of Ketchikan. Old west looking storefronts that cater to tourists. Lots of jewelry stores again, so we just bypassed those again.
Cortny in front of Sarah's house.
Our sled dog excursion was about 2 hours after we docked, so we did our walking around the town first. Shortly after debarking in Juneau, we saw a sign for the state capital and the governor’s house, so we decided to head up there. To prove it, here is Cortny in front of the Alaska governor’s mansion. Of course, nobody was home.
On the way back to the pier (to catch our excursion) we went by a Subway. You know Subway, the home of the 5, 5 dollar, 5 dollar footlong. Well in Alaska, that would be a 7 dollar footlong. Now, I’m not surprised that subs cost 40% more in Alaska (everything has to arrive in Juneau on a weekly barge), but the advertising is funny. They still have the same picture, a guy holding out is hand with 5 fingers extended… and a 7 in the middle. Well, being form the lower 48, thought it was funny.
After arriving back at the pier, we met up with our excursion group (2 other people). We took a short ride to the musher’s camp. It was a nice little bus ride, very scenic.
Immediately on arrival, we boarded the wheeled cart and were pulled through the woods for about 10 minutes by a team of 16 dogs. The cart weighted 500 pounds and was holding 6 people. These dogs are strong and use these summer tours as their training for winder sled dog races.
Rather than blabbing on about it – I will say that it was awesome! The dogs are amazing, and it was cool to see a real training camp, and not some commercial tourist trap (they didn’t even have a gift shop). I put together this view to show how cool it was!
I scanned the daily newsletter, “Celebrity Today”, from our cruise. Each night, they publish a newsletter for the next day that contains all kinds of fun information. Anyways – here they are. I will try and get back to describing the trip and sharing pictures tomorrow.
Download the PDF (15mb-ish)
After leaving Ketchikan, we headed further north to view Hubbard Glacier. So, technically, this was a “sea day” since we didn’t dock, but the glacier is a major attraction of the cruise. It is impossible to describe in words, so I will just lead in with a picture.
Hubbard Glacier from the Infinity
This is just one of the many pictures we took on glacier day. All of the pictures are available on picasaweb.
The glacier as well as the approach to the glacier are simply amazing. The bay is surrounded by snow covered mountains, and at least one other glacier stuck in there. As we got closer to the glacier, we entered a huge ice field (ice that dropped off the glacier). The captain brought the ship within 3/4 of a mile of the face of Hubbard Glacier. This allowed for spectacular viewing from right in the middle of the ice field! It was totally awesome. I’ve put together the below video, made up of clips that we took over a period of about 4 hours while near the glacier. Enjoy!
