Alpharetta Day 1

So it's that time of year again, although earlier than last year. And this year, I have a computer to actually keep in touch with, so I can post what's going on at least daily.

The morning started early, as you might expect. The flight was scheduled to leave at 1015, which means get there around 815 or 830 to get all checked in and settled before boarding at 945. Unlike last year's, this year I didn't have a direct connect flight. Instead, it jumped through Dallas and onto Atlanta from there. The first flight was really really short. The itenerary says an hour and ten minutes, but they include the entire from taxi out to taxi in. I was hoping to watch most of a movie, but all told, I got maybe 30 minutes of view time out of that 70 minutes, if that. Yeah, leave it to me to complain that the flight was too short for me.

Anyway, something interesting on that flight was that I think I was sitting over or near the landing gear. Now, if you've been on a plane, you know when the landing gear goes up and down. It's that load clunk noise that makes you think the bottom has fallen out of the airplane. When the landing gear went down this time though, I heard the loud rush of air outside as the plane was descending. That was a bit wild.

I would also like to add that this flight did not have the standard stewardess intro where they show off the seat belts and try on the oxygen mask. No, we got to watch a video showing that. That was different. We also had a celebrity pilot. Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was the captain on my first flight.

When we hit Dallas (I was traveling with 4 others from my office in Tulsa), we had time to get something to eat before heading onto the connecting flight at 1245 (read, 1215 to board). I did not have a lot of cash to bring for food and such, so when I saw a McDonald's in the airport, I figured I'd get off cheap there if I hit the dollar menu and got a water to drink. Hm... Well, the McDouble from my local dollar menu was 1.39 there and the "small fries" is actually a medium because they don't have small. ?! The medium fries cost more than the sandwich and they hit me for 3.77 for a McDouble, medium fries and a water. I glanced at the prices of the value meals and figured I did pay less for my overpriced burger.

On the second flight, I had a little bit of a problem. You see, the overhead bins are sized to be about as deep as the maximum carryon size or the height of a rolling suitcase. This also happens to be the width of three seats...or thereabouts by my observations. Well, apparently, when there are only two seats on one side of the plane, the overhead bins are resized accordingly, though they should theoretically hold two of these rolling cases end to end, and that would work...if there was one overhead bin per seat set. In fact, it works out to maybe one per one and a half rows.

What does all this mean? Well, they wisely set up the boarding in seating groups, starting at the back of the plane and working their way to the front. I was in seat 8B, exactly one row in on the coach section. This means out of six groups, I was in group six. This also meant that everyone else who wasn't sitting in my row has taken the space in my row's overhead bin. My suitcase was in the overhead bin on row 26. It took me a little while to disembark.

And how about the prices of food on the plane? Wow, do they not want to sell that stuff or what? Seriously. I think they had Grandma's chocolate chip cookies (that you buy at Wal-Mart for 50 cents) for $3, and a bag of Cheese nips (also 50 cents at Wal-Mart) for $4! Yeah, no one else saw anyone buy cookies either. But we did have our second celebrity pilot. The first officer was our second president, John Adams. Still flying after over two hundred years...of being dead. He didn't say much...

After we landed in Atlanta, we grabbed the checked luggage for those that checked and headed out to get the rental. Since there are five of us, we were getting a van. Now, I asked about getting some corvettes (it would take three, and I would drive the third one myself if I had to) or maybe a Hummer, but in the end, we got the van (of course). Now, it's a nice little Honda Odyssey, so it's not like we got a Bum-V (Butt Ugly Mini Van...yeah, I made that up on the spot while we were talking about the vehicle), but it also isn't the coolest rig on the lot.

Now what I'd really like at this point is for my network cable to stay plugged in. I grabbed a cable from home before I left, but what I failed to notice is that this cable is missing the tabs to keep it plugged in. So it doesn't lock in place. This means that it unplugs itself if I type for too long and shake the laptop slightly here and there. It's a pretty stable laptop, so it isn't shaking much. But I've had to fix it three times while typing this post. This means that the Skype session with the Queen later will be really interesting.

Anyway, while heading out in the bum-v, we only got lost once (as I understand it...I was watching a movie and killing my iPod's battery). And it was only once because the person riding shotgun pulled out her iPhone and got the GPS going to get us where we needed to go.

We got to Alpharetta somewhere in the vicinity of one person's hotel. For some reason 4 of us are in one hotel and 1 loner is in another. She knew we were close to her hotel, so we had dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. I had a burger. I also learned that I'm not alone in my picky, plain and dry palette. Someone else in our group oreder one plain and dry. Not only that, he says the phrase hoity toity in reference to food with lots of "decoration" on it. When I said it, he was surprised. I wasn't aware it wasn't a common phrase.

Leaving the restaurant, we needed to find person 1's hotel, so we drove the wrong way out of the mall area where the Ruby Tuesday's was, and did a u-turn in a parking before heading back out. Following the GPS, they found the La Quinta Inn...it was the parking lot we'd u-turned in only moments before. We had entered it from the back. D'oh...

We got her unloaded and headed over to our place of residence until Thursday. The story gets shorter from here. We checked and I got the internet working, Skype installed, and here I am.

The only final comment is in regards to logging into the hotel's net connection. This was funny. Everything I'd read said the connection was free in the rooms. Even the flyer next to the modem here says it's free. When you sign in, it implies that there is a cost to use...although it doesn't say how much. I signed in and all is well for now. We'll see about the one day free thing later. Maybe it refreshes daily or something. The funny part was this: I decided to pull up my virtual box to see how Linux would behave. After all, it was a different amchine logging into the same connection. Linux went right to the net without going through the hotel's splashpage website.

I can think of two explanations for this. Either the connection is driven from the central server that assigns addresses to each room and once I agree to the connection, it was agree for the room regardless of the computer that logs in. Or the connection is assuming that most people will use Windows (or even Mac) and doesn't have a Linux provision.

After considering it, it is probably the former, and loading Linux tomorrow will yield their little splash screen asking me to agree to the terms. They probably reset nightly. If I get the screen to agree to the terms tomorrow, though, I'll it the Linux machine first...just to see.