Category: Travels

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How Weird Is Denver International Airport

I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Portland Oregon on short trips several times this year. There is very rarely a direct flight from the Sunport to anywhere except a state directly next to New Mexico. This time I went through Denver International Airport for the first time. I was pretty interested to fly through Denver this time because of the conspiracy theories associated with it.

Denver Airport

Lets start with the murals. I didn’t get a chance to see them, I wasn’t sure if they were past the security area and if I had time get to where they are. I’ve read about them and there many pictures up on Flickr. When you see the giant picture of the nazi dude with the dead children, well that’s just disturbing. There is another mural showing different people of the world bringing down this nazi dude. I think the point of which is to show what happens if the people of the world don’t come together to eliminate the bad guys. Still, this is pretty odd. It doesn’t help the rest of the conspiracy theories.

anomalies-unlimited.com is the main source for the conspiracy theories. As I read through the sites, its easy to dismiss many of their claims. First one being that “Denver already had what everyone said was a perfectly fine airport – Stapleton.”According to Wikipedia, Stapleton was serious too small and poorly designed to be the 4th busiest airport in the US, which is what DIA is now. I believe Wikipedia’s explanation more then anomalies-unlimited.

I won’t go through all the things that anomalies-unlimited points out. Some of it just doesn’t make sense that it’s part of a conspiracy. However there are some odd things they do warrant future inspection. Such as the fact that DIA was 2 Billion (with a “B”) over budget. Where did that money go? anomalies-unlimited seems to suggest that it went to a vast underground military complex that exists under the airport and that the purpose of the airport was really just to build this complex. Seems to me that one would build such a complex under a less busy airport.

My limited experience at the airport indicates that the airport is pretty well designed and huge. I think the A gates went from 1 to 99. Although I generally dismiss the conspiracy theories, I did note something strange at the A gates. There are these mosaic tile images of people standing and walking through the terminals located on the floor. They are kinda weird in that they are top views and you can only make them out if you get up high (there is a higher level one can view them). In between these mosaics are a border and on these boarders are words like “North America”, “Europe” and “Antarctica”. Next to these words are random symbols that seem to have no purpose at all. These are all mosaics which are pretty easy to make out, with continent names in upper case. Near some of these content names are other words in lower case and the tile colors are really close to the back ground making it hard to figure out what they say. The symbols kinda look like random characters from the Zapf Dingbats font. Perhaps these are codes to the Aliens that come through DIA to tell them which continents they need to go through when they arrive.

anomalies-unlimited.com does have one final item that I agree is strange, the odd tablet with a masonic symbol on it. Above that tablet is what appears to be a keypad. What the heck is this thing and why are there no better pictures of this thing than the poor quality ones on their website?

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Bizarre TSA Freeze Command

Boing Boing had this today

I walked from the arrival gate towards baggage claim, and when I was about halfway there, all of a sudden about a dozen or more TSA personnel and private security staff appeared, shouting STOP WHERE YOU ARE. FREEZE. DO NOT MOVE. Not just at me, but all of the travelers who happened to be wandering through the hallway at that moment.

I made a comment on that post that the exact same thing happened to me.

This happened to me when i was in PDX a few weeks ago. I was leaving the secured area after getting off a plane, i was near the screeners but not yet through. The TSA people started yelling and did the same thing you described and had everyone freeze.

It only lasted a few minutes for me.

My tax dollars at work. Whatever.

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X Prize Cup Countdown Event

It was a cold and rainy day in Albuquerque on Sunday. Las Cruces wasn’t much better. Having drove from Arizona the day before, i wasn’t in a mood for another drive. I eventually got my act together and made it to the event by 3 PM. It cost $6 to get in and about $80 in gas to drive there.

Don’t be fooled by the name of the Las Cruces International Airport. It’s a dinky little airport and they were able to completely close it down for this event. They had us park several miles down the highway at the fairgrounds and bussed us to the airport. The area was set up like a fair, with some dubious businesses in the tents. This makes me think this is for real and private space flight will happen for sure.

I missed Armadillo Areospace’s launch of their craft. Despite the 20 mph winds, they were able to launch and control the craft. However on landing it 2 of it’s 3 feet landed off the landing pad and it tipped over. It didn’t explode but was damaged. Carmack and crew were out in the crowd showing off bits and pieces of their rocket. It’s an impressive machine for sure, they are clearly thinking out of the box with their design.

I did get to see XCOR Aerospace fly their rocketplane, which I have on video. It’s a impressive little craft and was flown as if there was no wind. There was lots of wind, the fact that it was blowing parallel with the runway helped.

Starchaser showed off it’s rocked engine. I think it blew up after it was ignited since there was a big boom, but there was no announcement either way.

When I was leaving the event about 5, they only had 2X and 3X t-shirts. Have I mentioned the wind yet, the winds had picked up quite a bit by this time. There’s nothing like 50 mph blowing sand getting in every orifice of your body. I had a handful of sand in my pockets!

I have pictures of the event on Flickr, and will post a video at some point.

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South Mountain, Phoenix, az

Here I present to you a approximately 3 minute video made with some photos I took at South Mountain Park in Phoenix last week. It is a shortened version, with some of the personal photos removed.

I have been using Still Life for this sort of thing but have found Photo To Movie superior. Especially since it allowed me to export a dv file in the 16:9 aspect ration (which is how all my movies are since iMovie HD came out). I also really liked the quality of the titles and are looking for a way to duplicate them in iMovie when doing regular movies.

This movie is a MP4 encoded with H.264, which allowed a decent quality movie that has a 869 x 480 resolution but only be 7.1 MB in size. But you will need the latest and greatest version of Quicktime to view it.

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Skiing in Santa Fe

Here’s some video I captured while Skiing in Santa Fe. Turns out, it’s not so easy to ski and film. Most of the video was too shaky to use. In any case I will keep trying. Let me know what you think. 9.9MB Quicktime Video, 5:26 minutes, 240×128 (in widescreen).

Note: I may re-upload a larger MP4 depending on how well I can get the quality and size.

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The Winchester House 2001

The “Winchester Mystery House” is the house built by the heiress of the Winchester Gun fortune. It was started in 1884 in northern california. She built the house continuously for 38 years with stair wells that go no where, windows with walls on the other side, all kids of weird stuff. Basically she did it so appease the ghosts of all the people that were killed by the gun.

I went there 3 times.

You can view the entire photo set on Flickr.

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Skiing Weekend

On Friday I left for Taos. Mapopolis said it should only take about 3 hours to get to Taos from Albuquerque. Friends tell me I could get there in 2. It actually took me a little over 4 hours. I should have got up at 5am, which would allowed me to leave at 6. Instead I got up at 6 (darn snooze button) and left a little after 7. This meant I was stuck in Albuquerque traffic and there didn’t see t be a single road that lead to the freeway that didn’t have a accident on it.
Between Santa Fe and Espanola there’s construction building a nice new road. Unfortunately it’s not done and there was only 1 lane. I finally arrived in Taos sometime after 11. The good news is lift tickets were only 20 bucks, and rentals were only 11. Cheap! I skied for about 3 1/2 hours. To be honest I was getting sore so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get there when they opened. Plus my right boot wasn’t fitting right, it was pretty uncomfortable and was cutting off circulation to my right foot at times. The track file (read at the bottom on how it was made) shows I reached about 38mph at points. Not bad. You can also see they have some very long runs. Once they get some more snow the skiing should be awesome, it wasn’t bad but wasn’t the best.
I left after 3:30 and began the trip home, which didn’t take quite as long as it did to get there. Next time I go I will probably plan on staying there overnight. It doesn’t seem worth it for the length of the trip.

On Saturday I went up to Santa Fe with some friends from work. Santa Fe will the primary location of skiing this winter since I purchased the Millennium pass. This pass is one step down from the Season Pass, yet is more than $500 cheaper. It gets you $10 off lift tickets, except in January where lift tickets are free. Guess where I will be in January? By the way, I picked up my pass which is a ID card with my picture, It’s the worse possible picture they could have taken.
RIght now lift tickets are $34, so it cost me $24. They also got new rental equipment, which cost $18 to rent for the day. I was very happy with the boots, they fit perfectly and are probably the most comfortable boots I have ever worn. I think I will be doing enough skiing this year that I really need to invest in my own gear.
One of the best part about skiing at Santa Fe is stopping at the little restaurant/bar located just up slope. A nice (and expensive) lunch just hits the spot about 11. Then come back every hour or two for a break and have a delicious Hot Buttered Rum. It’s not enough to get you drunk, but enough to get a buzz and warm you up.
I have to admit that I was still kind of sore from the previous day when we started and the pain continued though out the day. It wasn’t enough to keep me from skiing but was enough to keep me from really hitting the bumpy parts. Thats when you really put your leg muscles to work. The pain in my thighs did start to go away as the day went on. But even today I’m still feeling it. A few more times on the slopes and it won’t bother me anymore.
The right back was less comfortable since my legs were sore and I sat in the back of my friends Honda Pilot. It’s a nice enough SUV, just pretty cramped in the back seats for a long trip like that.
Santa Fe had 80% of the mountain open and I could tell they needed some more snow in parts. Hopefully the weather will cooperate because, well, you know where I will be every weekend.

If you’re interested in how I generated the speed tracking maps, click here. 

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The Westin Kierland Resort and Spa

Since I will be starting school next week I thought it would be a good idea to make a another trip back home before it starts. As my Girlfriend and I were planning the trip we got a “invitation” in the mail to The Weston in Scottsdale for about $250 for 3 nights. Their rooms usally go for around $300 a night. What was the catch? We had to listen to a 90 minute time share sales pitch.

Westin Resort, Scottsdale, Az

The Westin isn’t just a Hotel it’s a double fancy hotel, full name is “The Westin Kierland Resort and Spa”, located in the center of fancyville Scottsdale. Putting the “Resort and Spa” at the end of their name means that they can charge for everything and charge a lot. For example there was a refrigerator with booze and soda in it. They also had a little basket with snack foods (and no vending machines anywhere in the hotel). The Snickers bar in that basket was $4.00. They left a list of all these things so we could check off what we used and at the bottom the not only wanted us to included Arizona’s 8.1% tax but a 21% gratuity. We choose not to use any of their stuff. The whole hotel was pretty much like this. The spa was overpriced, the restaurants were over priced. We ended up not spending much time a the hotel for this reason.

The hotel was huge, we were on the 7th floor. Our room wasn’t very big was never the less very comfortable. The bathroom was very nice, the shower was separate from the bathtub and there was plenty of water pressure. The shower was clogged but they came and fixed it quickly after we called them. They also have what the call their “Heavenly Bead”, it’s the most comfortable hotel bed I’ve ever slept on and it’s almost as good as our own bed. Apparently you can buy this bed online but I couldn’t find the link.

If your in to golfing (which I’m not) they have a massive golf course. It’s very green and pretty. They also had a bike trail if we do ever stay there again we may find a way to bring our bikes.

Now for the sales pitch. I have to say that they had very compelling offer. The time share is sold by the hotel, they call it “vacation ownership“.

Here’s how it works:

  • You purchase a condo style room at a home site, in this case it’s the Scottsdale Westin.
  • You purchase so many days a year (in our case they were trying to sell us 7 days)
  • Since it’s with the Starwood resorts you can use the days you bought at any other Starwood resort or
  • You can trade the time with a service that deals with this sort of thing and use your time at a non Starwood resort, the cost the quoted us was about $150 to do this or
  • You can buy hotel time at any Starwood per night for $99 per night. That includes any of their properties including the W Hotels where presidents and other famous people stay. I can say it costs much more than $99 a night at these places though it wasn’t clear which rooms we would get.
  • You get a deed to your property and you pay a mortgage. That means you can write it off as a second home and once it’s paid off your done.
  • The cost for our “deal” was about $10,000, 10% interest and about $150 a month for 120 months.

The cost was certainly some we could afford but had I been in the market for such a thing (as I told the sales guys right at the start that we were not) although I would have talked them down on the interest rate and some of the other details. But lets face it, we went for the cheap hotel room when we were already going to spend that money somewhere on a hotel and for the chance to stay at a fancy hotel.

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It Hurts

I’m tired and I’m in pain. My butt and my arms hurt. Despite my pain I had a good time because today I made a feeble attempt at snow boarding. I already know how to ski, more of a advanced beginner – no where near a professional, I thought I could use that experience to snowboard. It turns out that the experience of each foot having a board strapped to it is far different then having a bigger board strapped to both feet at the same time.

When I first learned to ski I fell down a lot. Having to pick yourself up a couple of hundred dozen times in less then 8 hours with muscles that don’t get used a couple of hundred dozen times in less then 8 hours is where the pain comes from. I suppose if I exercised more (or fell less) that wouldn’t be a problem.

Speed equals control, more or less. The faster you go the more you can control your skis. But if you do loose control your going really fast into a tree or something. When your first learning to ski it’s scary to go fast because you (or at least me) are afraid of loosing control, so you want to try to take is slow. Then there’s that whole balance thing, however I believe that you only get good at that with practice. So your slow and you have no balance. You fall a lot. It’s the same deal with snow-boarding. But balancing on a snowboard is different from balancing on skis (as I learned the hard way). I had no balance and was afraid to go fast. And I fell a lot.

I went out with a good friend from work who is also learning to snowboard. He’s a bit farther along then me as in he doesn’t fall nearly as much. He has been going out with his 7 year old son who also went with us today. Since we spent our time on the bunny hill we didn’t need to buy a lift ticket because you can hike up the hill in snow board boots with relative ease (relative being the key word). His son did get a lift ticket and as he passed me up while I was lying on my back he said if I need help just holler. Uh that’s ok, I’m nice and comfortable here.

Ski Santa Fe was the location of this trip and it costs $32 to rent the snow board and boots.