Tripping: Denver/PNW

What would this blog be without random travel observations?

Denver

• Denver International Airport strikes me as a larger-scale, updated repetition of the Dulles model — right down to its location miles away from anything.  Driving Peña Boulevard must be what the Access Road felt like 40 years ago, before development transformed northwest Fairfax County.
• That said, every terminal at DIA is nicer than even Terminal B at Dulles.  Starting from scratch in the modern era helped DIA do terminal design right, baggage systems aside.
• False economy, thy name is Advantage Rent-A-Car — and the TV blaring Nancy Grace to the line didn’t help my opinion. Nor did the Dodge Caliber we received with a nasty gouge in the roof and an unreliable fuel gauge. Yes, all the rental car agencies are on the same loop and require a shuttle bus. But had I rented from Hertz with my (free) #1 Club Gold membership, we’d have been 3/4 of the way to our hotel by the time we got our Advantage car.
• The RTD light rail is well-designed, but their operations after the Rockies game and Friday night’s storms demonstrated why Americans flee mass transit when they have any other choice. One track’s overhead wires were down south of the I-25/Broadway station, so they single-tracked that stretch, and a backlog on the northbound side needed to be cleared. The logical choice would have been to hold our packed southbound train on the three-track Broadway platform, where we had options (up to and including ad hoc taxi pairings, like I’ve done from the Yellow Line in Pentagon City) if the wait got too long. Instead, they moved us a hundred yards south onto an incline, then announced the problem and stopped with no departure estimate. Trapped, we cursed the RTD until the train started moving again 10 minutes later. Dumb decision, angry customers, bad rep for mass transit. Customer focus matters, and they showed none.
• Special demerits to the on-airport Circle K for charging 44c/gal over the local average for regular unleaded. Don’t reward this behavior. Instead, take the last pre-airport exit from I-70 East onto Chambers Road, turn left (northbound), choose one of several gas stations there, and just be sure to top off to cover the ~10 miles you have left.  Continue on northbound Chambers until it T’s out at 56th, turn right, then continue to a left onto the Peña Blvd/Airport onramp.

Read More »

What's really wrong with Obama in Berlin

American presidential candidates leave the country for subtle small-audience campaigning surprisingly often. John McCain went to Ottawa and London in March with minimal fuss. But Barack Obama’s planned speech Thursday in Berlin is raising quite a bit more ire.

The iconography is one thing — the proto-Soviet sensibility of much of the Obama campaign’s graphic design (skilled as it is) is more jarring when presented in a foreign language. That goes double when the event is in a country noted historically for a cult of personality gone horrifically wrong.

But the real problem is the public nature of the event. It’s not being marketed to American voters in Berlin — you don’t need a German-language poster for that. It’s a mass event designed to simultaneously appeal to the German public and demonstrate Obama’s European popularity to Americans who can actually cast a vote for him.

What if he loses, though? Then Obama’s European campaigning has the consequence of further driving the political wedge between his mass support there and the rubes back home who — once again — had the temerity to elect someone not approved by their trans-Atlantic betters. It poisons the well overseas for anybody not on his side, and American politicians are doing too much of that already.

It could have benefits if he wins, sure. But he doesn’t have to pay up if his gamble fails. The country does.

Treo 700p, T+3 weeks

I’m only catching this train two years late, but as my Twitter readers know, I picked up a used Palm Treo 700p about three weeks ago to give myself a smartphone upgrade while keeping my Sprint plan and avoiding a contract extension. Some observations seem appropriate.

• Once you do the maintenance release 1.10 upgrade, the difference between the 700p, 755p and Centro is essentially form factor. The antenna nub on the 700p is slightly aggravating, but the full-sized SD card slot is great (as opposed to miniSD on the 755p and microSD on the Centro) — I can swap cards between camera and Treo to upload photos straight to Flickr on the go.
• As such, there are several applications/upgrades that Sprint/Palm may claim are only available for 755p or Centro, but which work fine on the 700p anyway. The highlights: VersaMail, Google Maps and Facebook. The VersaMail upgrade is an absolute necessity to access GMail via IMAP, which you want to do if you have a home machine running POP due to GMail’s slightly odd handling of POP message availability. Google Maps won’t do aGPS location (because Palm didn’t include those APIs in the OS build, unlike the Centro), but otherwise works fine. Facebook is just fun.
• Blazer is only tolerable as a web/WAP browser, but Opera Mini is darn near unusable. I suspect the primary issue is between Palm OS and the Java VM, but the end result is too aggravating to deal with on a regular basis. I’ll start Opera if I have to reach a particular site that Blazer can’t handle, but that’s it.
• MoTwit is a great little app. I only wish its writer would have coded it to pass the client name with updates, so it could advertise its awesomeness rather than just say updates are “from web.”
• Only notable instance of FAIL: US/Eastern time zone management between Missing Sync and iCal. Mark/space claims it’s an Apple problem, but if they know it’s an Apple problem that only affects their software, they could at least code an internal workaround. And no, editing the time zone manually on each event for my entire calendar (several thousand events dating back close to ten years) is not practical. My personal workaround, creating a DST-less location to match what Missing Sync sends me from iCal/SyncServices and turning off tower-set time zones, breaks World Clock and displays VersaMail timestamps an hour off during DST, but shows me accurate appointments in Calendar, which is the most important part.

Overall report: quality, at the right price, and no nasty contract extension to get in the way of something Android-tastic if/when that becomes ready for prime time. I’ll give it a WIN.

Get used to it

I’m no Needham with a high-tech StanSpeak translator to interpret the latest out of South Capitol Street, but even I can tell you what this means.

• The team is profitable, and will therefore continue to suck. All the Lerners care about is raking off the cash.
• The Lerners have no public ego. They obviously don’t give a rip about bad press where a few bucks are concerned, and the losing doesn’t appear to bother them either.
• Once the profits go down, they’ll spend a little money, and with a few wins, Washington will forgive everything. Truth is, they’re probably right. It’s a front-running town.

Thankfully, being two hours away, very little of my money has gone to support this abomination. The on-field performance hasn’t merited the drive, that’s for sure.