Photo by Pat Raabe

It’s the weekend, so of course we had to go take in some sights. After some consideration, we decided to drive to Prague (or Praha), in the Czech Republic. This city is incredibly beautiful. The US dollar goes a long way here, the people are rightly proud of their heritage, the architecture is awesome, nearly everyone speaks English, the food is wonderful, and OMG the beer! I’m now a fan of Pilsner Urquell. But best of all, Prague has way more of its fair share of tall, beautiful women. Imagine walking around and every block you see another Famke Janssen or Milla Jovovich. That’s Prague.

If my company ever decides to open an office here, I’ll be bashing heads to get the assignment. I don’t care how hard it is supposed to be to learn the language, I’d do it.

Current meatspace coordinates: 50.085°, 14.413°

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Posted by Greg as Travel at 20:06 PST

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Ok, I’m going to cheat again a little with timestamps. I have to document my Europe trip with a little order, and I was entirely too busy while it happened to keep up.

Photo by Greg R. Perry

It took a long time, but I finally got from Kansas City, Missouri, to Frankfurt, Germany, yesterday. Today I drove to Ansbach, in the middle of Bavaria, where I’ll be working for the next two weeks.

Current meatspace coordinates: 49.303°, 10.571°

Ansbach, Germany

Posted by Greg as Travel at 19:49 PST

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Last night, a few colleagues and I had dinner together, then went to watch the local fireworks, which didn’t start until midnight. When they started, it was after sunset, but it was still light enough to easily distinguish different colors. I’ve always liked the Muslim definitions of dawn and sunset – being able to distinguish a white thread from a black one – for their practicality; although technically, this would be dusk, not sunset. (While researching this simple assertion I discovered the difference between sunset and dusk – and that there are three different definitions of dusk. Further reasons for respecting Islamic pragmatism.)

I had only been in Alaska for a day before I started questioning the usefulness of Daylight Savings Time in Alaska. If there’s only about five hours’ difference between sunset and sunrise, and as far as I can tell, only about an hour or two of anything close to real darkness, where are the energy savings and public safety benefits that so many proponents of DST claim? I confess that I am not a fan of DST. I have a simple solution for those that say they like having more daylight in the summer – go to bed earlier and get up earlier. But I expect this solution, which I have implemented myself so simply, is as at odds with public sentimentality as is my opposition to using the word “gender” as a polite reference to the word “sex”.

It turns out that I am not alone. Hawai’i, Arizona, Puerto Rico and parts of Indiana refuse to use DST, and there is a movement to get it abolished in Alaska as well. The explanation for using both a single time zone in Alaska and DST seems to be a political expediency.

Current meatspace coordinates: 61.189°, -149.869°
Local appellation: Anchorage, Alaska

Anchorage, Alaska
“>Anchorage, Alaska

I had a lot of trouble getting here. My travel plans called for departing home in Kansas City on Sunday around 11:00 AM and getting to Anchorage about midnight (plus a three hour time change); going Kansas City – Dallas/Fort Worth – San Francisco – Anchorage. But when my first leg arrived at the DFW area, severe weather kept us from landing, and we had to divert to Oklahoma City for fuel. There were no gates available, so we spent about three hours on the tarmac waiting for more fuel, clearance to proceed to DFW, and a new flight plan. By the time I got to Dallas, it was too late to proceed and I had to spend the night there. On Monday I tried again, going DFW – Denver – Seattle – Anchorage, so it was no great surprise that only one of my bags arrived. The missing bag contained all my test equipment. By coincidence, my fellow engineer, who had used a different airline and was coming from San Diego, also lost his bag containing test equipment, but at least he got here on time. Both of our bags showed up a day after we arrived.

Posted by Greg as Travel at 15:49 PST

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I got done in Killeen, Texas on Tuesday. I got really lucky – the storms have been hanging around, but I just managed to get my work in without having to spend more time. I drove from Texas to Missouri on Wednesday and had a few days to try to catch up with everything – I had planned on having the whole week, and figured I could get at least two reports done. Tomorrow I’m going to Anchorage, Alaska, for two weeks. I guess I’ll be writing on the plane!

I finally figured out some very elementary things that had, until now, escaped my notice. Many people come to my blog from a search engine result that uses my old www.gregrperry.com/blog format, and some come from links that I had previously seeded in technical message boards. They’ve all been getting an error page! No wonder my traffic is down. I have thrown up a hasty explanation and workaround on my standard error page, but I should really write something smarter – a PHP page that takes the sought link and rewrites it to the blog.gregrperry.com format and then uses a redirect. But it’s been a long time since I’ve done any coding, and just writing has been tough to keep up with.

I knew that some of my images weren’t showing because I had hard-coded the source of the images instead of using relative ones, but what I didn’t realize is just how extensively my own internal links, referencing other posts, are nearly all screwed up. Well, a smart error page might fix that problem for now, too. Still, it’s going to take a lot of work to make everything right. *Sigh*

Posted by Greg as My Website, Travel at 10:22 PST

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I’m cheating. I had every intention of posting this right away; but travel, work, and a general malaise associated with personal events kept me from doing so. But I’m going to change the time stamp on this post to reflect the time that it happened.

Today is a travel day. I finished up my work in Alamogordo yesterday, but we got a late start this morning because last night my coworker and I stopped in at VFW Post 7686, and it turned out to be karaoke night. This was my first experience with karaoke. My coworker, an exuberant young Texan, entertained fewer reservations about the prospect than I, and he was wily, for after hearing me spoof the situation from the safety of my bar stool and waiting for just the right time, he volunteered me to get up and sing Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire. It just went (sober perspective:) downhill/(inebriated perspective:) uphill from there. Alamogordo has got to be one of the friendliest places on Earth, so the reception that I got was no indication of the quality of my singing. Thankfully, the VFW pays for cab rides home.

Yeah. I was a little slow this morning.

My coworker is going on vacation from here, and I had already offered to take him with me back to Killeen, Texas. But there’s a weekend to fill before I can get back to work, and he enticed me into partying the night in Austin and tubing down the Guadalupe River tomorrow. However, our crash-for-the-night plans have fallen through, and rumors of tightened law enforcement on the river have changed our plans, so we’re heading for Houston.

On the way, we decided to stop in and see the Alamo in San Antonio. As a history buff, I couldn’t resist. However, you can see from the following photos that I am still a little hung over.

Posted by Greg as History, Travel at 22:46 PST

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Just checking in. I’ve missed so many good things to write about, and here I am coughing up the banal.

Current meatspace coordinates: 32.8791, -105.9609
I can’t even remember how to plug in the Google map, or the xhtml code for the degree sign.

I went through a major life event two weeks ago, and I’ve just been stumbling through since then. Thank the gods that there’s work and travel. I got to see an old friend and meet his wife and children, I snagged a trip to Alaska for July (a place I’ve been want to go to since I was a teenager), and I had the eighteenth anniversary of my US citizenship. And that’s just since then – there were a lot of noteworthy events preceding.

It might be cathartic for me to write about my divorce, but it’s just too personal to do so in a public place. There’s only one thing I can be sure of – life will go on.

Posted by Greg as Posts About Me, Travel at 22:02 PST

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Working in the Las Cruces, New Mexico, area for the last two weeks, I got one significant side benefit: a personal tour of the Trinity test site – the location of the world’s first nuclear explosion, and the McDonald Ranch House, where the bomb was assembled. Here’s a picture of me standing in the crater at ground zero:

Photo by George Baird

I’ve been working a lot in the American Southwest lately – Arizona, New Mexico and Texas – and one of the few things I’ve taken time out for is stopping in to visit places of historical significance, like Fort Craig, Picacho Peak, Glorieta Pass, and the place where Billy the Kid died. Trinity was a major coup, as the site is only open to the public on two days a year, and I got to skip the crowd. Since I’m a dilettante, not a history buff, I’m sure I’ve been driving right by places that I would find fascinating if I had known about them.

Posted by Greg as History, Travel at 08:38 PST

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It seemed like I just couldn’t get to sleep early – I’ve never really been good at that – but I got up at 0300 and officially pulled out at 0400 CDT, with only three and a half hours of sleep. I got in to Las Cruces, NM at 1910 MDT, just over 16 hours, and the trip was exactly 1500 km (932 miles) – I took a huge shortcut. Instead of following the interstates, I picked up US Highway 54 in Wichita, Kansas and stayed on it all the way to Alamagordo, New Mexico. I shaved an hour off the drive and more than 300 km, and would have done even better if I hadn’t been misinformed that they had reopened the main road through Greensburg.

Driving this way, slowing down to go through each town, is much less mind-numbing. I didn’t get any extra sleep last night, but I’m feeling fine this morning. Usually after long drives I’m like a zombie the following day. Plus, every now and then I pull over when I see a historical marker sign, so I got to see the place where Billy the Kid was killed.

Posted by Greg as Posts About Me, Travel at 05:17 PST

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“Well, he will be soon. He’s very ill.”

I’ve been very busy handling a lot of important personal stuff. I did get I little bit of enjoyment recently, though – I went to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to attend a graduation. The son of one of my old Army buddies had chosen to follow us and become a combat engineer. In my day, that was MOS 12B, but nowadays it’s 21B. Turns out he had been staying in my old building – Delta Company, 35th Engineer Battalion. I was very proud of him, and looking around, I found myself wishing I could do the whole Army thing all over again, even if it meant starting from scratch at Basic training.

I also got myself a cool Sapper hat to show off my tab.

I’m going to bed early tonight, and am planning on hitting the road around 3 A.M. I aim to make Las Cruces, New Mexico, before it gets too late. It’s about 1800 km (1100+ miles) in one day. I should have left today and made it a two-day drive.

I’m going to be extremely busy for at least the next two weeks, and probably won’t get to blog.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, Posts About Me, Travel at 18:37 PST

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Because I dallied in booking my hotel in Hawai’i, the place that had been recommended to me by one of our other engineers, Derek, told me that they were full on the Friday and Saturday night in the middle of my planned two weeks.

So yesterday morning I checked out, went to work at MCBH Kaneohe Bay, and last evening, checked into the place I had found for the intervening two nights. This place is just a little more expensive, but the last place was charging an extra ten US dollars for parking, plus I needed to tip the valets. I think it breaks out even, maybe a tad cheaper. I was unprepared for the elevator – glass walls, running up and down the exterior of the building. I’m still afraid of heights, but I used the determination that got me through jumping out of airplanes and rappelling – trust in your equipment, remember the favorable statistics, and don’t give in to the fear.

When I got into my new room, I immediately starting thinking about how I could cancel my reservation for next week and finding out if I could stay here instead. My new room is a cozy little studio with a small refrigerator, microwave, two burners and even a dishwasher. The cupboards contained an adequate set of cookware and eating ware. The view of the Pacific is spectacular. And the internet is hard-wired.

However, this is a non-smoking hotel, and my room is on the thirty-second floor. Although my window cracks open, it faces the ocean and the breeze flows into the room.

When I checked in, I asked for a smoking room, but the clerk told me that smoking in hotels in Hawai’i was prohibited by the new anti-smoking law, called by many one of the nation’s strictest. I protested that the hotel that I had stayed in the night before had let me smoke in my room, and she responded with surprise, sawing that they would be fined if anyone found out. I asked if it was law or hotel policy, and she insisted that it was law.

Well, she had either been duped or was lying to me. I thought that is was very strange that the last hotel would have deliberately violated the law to let me smoke in my room, especially when they had been strict about enforcing regulations in the bar and lobby, so I had to look it up. The law does not prohibit smoking in hotel rooms, but limits smoking rooms to 20% of capacity. I think this sounds reasonable, because it’s fairly aligned with the percentage of American adults who smoke.

But apparently, many hotels are using the crackdown as an excuse to ban smoking entirely. I was able to find a listing of these hotels at Travel-Hawaii.com, and several major chains are starting the policy nation-wide.

It’s hard for me to understand the business sense of this move. Smoking is down, but despite the trend towards outrageous taxes on cigarettes and restrictions, there is still a significant portion of hard-core smokers that are not giving it up. Why would any business want to deliberately exclude 20% of their market? Tolerance towards second-hand smoke by non-smokers is way down, and I understand that, and don’t condemn it, but how does it affect whether someone can smoke in the privacy of their own room? I find it hard to imagine that it’s done out of sympathy by management towards the traditionally underpaid hotel cleaning staff, who have to empty dirty ashtrays and endure the lingering odor. The only thing that makes sense is bigotry on the part of hotel management.

I have to balance my avarice – how much money I could save from my per diem by cooking in my own room – against the inconvenience of submitting to my addiction. I’ve already had to take a break from writing to run downstairs for a smoke break (writing about it puts it front and center in my mind.)

Posted by Greg as Current Events, Travel at 12:37 PST

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