Archive for category Travel
On the way home from Brownsville
I just spent the last couple of days crawling around a ship that is being prepared to be sunk as part of an artificial reef program. I had to measure the holes that were cut and verify the arrangements to create some drawings that show bulkheads, ladders, openings, etc. so the State of Texas can help with rescues if any diver gets trapped in the future.
I’ll be home tonight, then to work all day tomorrow, then off to Cabo for a nice vacation with my wife. Thanks to my wonderful wife and Party Lite for that upcoming vacation, which I really need since work has been CRAZY!
UPDATE: Well, I thought I was on the way home, but was delayed 3 hours in Brownsville and have now been in Houston for about 3 hours with no certain departure time in sight. I NEED to get home tonight or tomorrow for my trip to Mexico and kick myself for not bringing my passport when I could have just traveled over to Cabo from here. I’ll never travel anywhere without my passport again!
Now in Madrid, thanks to Nokia
Posted by palmsolo in Series 60, Smartphone, Travel on April 23, 2007
The S60 team at Nokia sent me a last minute invite to Madrid for the S60 Summit and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. I then paid for a ticket for my wife to come along and added a couple of days to the trip for some R&R. We have been to a bull fight and to Toledo so far and plan to finish our sightseeing tomorrow before I go attend and cover the S60 Summit on my ZDNet blog. Stay tuned for S60 news.
Off on another marine salvage trip
I just received a call last night and will be flying out tonight to North Carolina where a dredge that was being towed started sinking and then flipped over. It is now upside down with a small portion still floating on the surface. This will definitely be a very challenging engineering problem as we need to pump off the fuel and lube oil and then try to refloat her upside down. Then she will be towed into port and parbuckled (flipped right side up). It is a dredge with a large excavator mounted on one end so it will probably be one of my most challenging and difficult salvage jobs.
I can only stay until next Thursday and will be relieved by a coworker because I have a trip to Spain that I will blurb about later.
Sometimes I really enjoy my day job
I received a call last night that a 225 meter bulk carrier fully loaded with coal ran aground in Maryland and I was being asked to use my salvage engineering skills to develop a salvage plan to help refloat her. Check out one news article about the situation. Groundings are kind of my speciality and I have been very successful in performing calculations and coming up with ways to refloat vessels in the past 10 years. There is a possibility I will have to fly out to Maryland and if my wife wasn’t out of town in Texas for a Party Lite leader training conference then I would most likely already be there. It has been a crazy day trying to balance taking care of the girls and respond to calls from the salvage team while running calcs and coming up with a plan to offload coal and refloat the vessel.
I LOVE this type of engineering though where you perform calcs and see almost immediate results. Oftentimes when an engineer performs calcs you don’t see results or you see results years down the road. Salvage can be stressful, but I am pretty experienced and have some incredible tools at my disposal so I personally have a great time with it and if I wasn’t a father of three young daughters I may even want to do it full time.
Switched from DSL to cable
I have been using DSL for over 5 years since I was first able to get it at my house in Washington. When I first signed up DSL was the only option and I liked the fact that my ISP had dial-up access for when I was on the road. Many things have changed over the years and after getting one of those special offers in the mail I looked at my options and saw I could get much faster access for a cheaper price. Yesterday Comcast installed cable in my house and I am seeing 6 to 10 times faster download speeds over my DSL service. I am in an area that cannot get the faster DSL so getting faster access at a cheaper price was a real no-brainer. Surfing is now even faster than before and I am happy to save a few bucks off of my monthly fees.
Home from CES and busy, cold weekend
I finally arrived home on Thursday night after staying in a dump hotel that Alaska put me up in for 5 hours. I almost missed the shuttle back to the airport thanks to the excellent staff at this high quality hotel (yeah right). It was good to get home, but boy was it cold. I then went to work on Friday and spent Saturday and Sunday going to very cold soccer games that my middle daughter was playing in.
The Seahawks lost to Chicago in overtime, but they actually looked pretty dang good today. If we didn’t have the rookie defensive back in for an injured player then things may have gone a bit differently, but hopefully we have a healthy team next year and can go all the way. Nice job today Seahawks.
Trying to get home from CES, NOT!
I have been in Vegas for the last several days providing as much coverage as I could for Geek.com this year. I had a flight out for Wednesday scheduled to depart at 9:58 pm and it is now 11:33 pm with news that the flight is now scheduled to depart at about 3:00 am. There is snow falling in Seattle that is delaying all plans departing there which will come here and then fly back to Seattle. And since tomorrow is Thursday a ton of people are leaving CES for home so all flights tomorrow are full as well.
UPDATE: Well, now it is 2:00 am and we have been issued hotel and breakfast vouchers for some cheap hotel here by the airport. The revised flight is for 11:00 in the morning, which would be fine except we have been waiting now for 30 minutes for our luggage and it could be about 30 minutes more.
Back from London, finishing up Christmas shopping
London was great and if you want to hear a bit more about it you can check out my ZDNet writeup and see lots of photos on my Flickr set. I am on the hunt for a couple of final items for my girls and look forward to a couple days off for Christmas.
Enjoying the sights and sounds of London
My friend, Rafe, came into the city yesterday and took me all over town to places like London Bridge, London Eye, Westminster Abbey, House of Parliament, Buckingham Palace, the Science Museum and Game On exhibit (I played lots of Donkey Kong and Tron), and Oxford Street. He then invited me to go with him and his parents on a river dinner cruise that was being held for his Dad’s office Christmas party. It was a wonderful way to see London at night from a different perspective and I took some great photos and some video. I’ll be posting the photos on Flickr soon.
I then woke up early this morning and went to take a flight on the London Eye (the lines (queue) were too long yesterday). I then headed to Tower of London (which is actually several towers in one location) and learned a ton about the history of England as well as having a chance to see the Crown Jewels. I then took the Tube down to the Cutty Sark and the National Maritime Museum (how could a naval architect pass this up?) that is on the grounds of the Royal Naval College. The Cutty Sark actually was having major work down and the entire topsides were removed.
Probably the most interesting visit today though was the Royal Observatory overlooking the Royal Naval College since that is where the Greenwich (Prime) Meridian is located and I stood on both the Eastern and Western Hemisphere at the same time. I have a couple photos of me standing on the center of the Earth and as a previous sailor it is a very important reference line and I personally found it quite thrilling to be standing there.
Oh yeah, I did do a geeky thing on the way back to the hotel too. I saw a sign for a Computer Show and just could not resist. I wasn’t expecting to buy anything, but I found one of those flexible keyboards and a small USB camera to use with Qbacca and it only cost me about $25 for both.
Chelsea FC beats Newcastle United, captured with a Nokia N93
Posted by palmsolo in Nokia, Personal, Smartphone, Travel on December 13, 2006
If you have seen the movie, Goal, then you are familiar with the Newcastle United team. I had the opportunity to visit Stamford Bridge and watch the Chelsea FC take on Newcastle United tonight. Chelsea is currently in 2nd place behind Manchester United for the Premiership cup.
The crowd was loud and there were something over 41,000 people at the match. It was an awesome experience and worth the 53 pound ticket cost. Check out the video I shot with the Nokia N93 of the only score of the game.
