Wyszdom

Earlier today, I was scouring the Internet for cheap deals on Vegas hotel rooms so I could hop in and see a show. I even considered just arriving in the evening and leaving in the early morning so I wouldn’t even have to pay for a hotel room.

But tonight, when I got back to my apartment, I remembered that back in October, during a spontaneous trip to see Blue Man Group, I got pretty lucky in the casino and was able to put a lot of cash through the system in one fun night. After a couple of hours of fun, I left with about $100 more than I walked in with. And the whole time I recorded each play on my Player’s Card.

I logged into my account to see if I could get some sort of discount for being a member. I saw a bunch of offer codes, but didn’t understand what they meant. So, I called the Bellagio because they have a cool fountain, and asked if I could get any promotional deals on an upcoming Saturday. The representative asked for my account number.

Bellagio: “So you want to stay on that Saturday?”
Me: “Sure.”
Bellagio: “Just the one night? You can stay for three.”
Me: “Oh, umm, I’ll call you back.”

Now I’m not going to worry about booking the cheapest flight.

I’ll have to make the most of this experience. Unless I get really lucky again, I don’t think I’ll be able  to impress them enough to get invited back.

According to the marketing department at Philips, “ultimate.”

I’m pretty bad at planning ahead for long weekends and end up utilizing them for boring things like catching up on laundry or going to the eye doctor. Let’s see if I can change that this year. The next long weekend is President’s Day weekend. I have Monday, February 16th off, and no idea how to take advantage of it. So, what should I do? Please post your ideas in the comments! Something to drive to and explore in Northern California would be great, but I’m also open to flying since it seems like I get on a plane at least once a month anyway.

After that, I’ll need ideas for Memorial Day.

Telluride, Colorado is one of my favorite places to ski. It’s now also home of one of my favorite blogs, Dave’s Blog (no, not Dave’s Blog), written by Dave Riley, the CEO of Telluride Ski and Golf Resort.

It’s not a press release feed that’s simply mislabeled as a blog. It’s written by a real person who communicates with his readers. My mom introduced it to me prior to our New Year’s trip, and it looks like Dave’s been publishing it since July 2007, shortly after becoming CEO. For a corporate blog, it feels very personal, and I look forward to each entry.

I like the content and style of the posts, because they’re obviously written by Dave himself, and he even takes the pictures. Of course there are nice shots of the mountains and the trails (which I drool over in between trips), but he goes beyond the “postcard” shots and includes cool construction photos and pictures of the Howitzers, yes, Howitzers leased from the U.S. Army, used for avalanche control. Most resorts would probably be too scared to post so much “behind the scenes” material, so I think it’s extra cool that the CEO is doing it at Telluride. The blog is timely too, with captions like “this is what the trail looked like today when I skied it,” rather than “this is something from our marketing department that a professional photographer took last season.”

Dave’s participation doesn’t end after he clicks “publish.” The blog has comments turned on, and Dave replies to many of them. And even with a good number of comments, it’s obvious that there’s some healthy moderation going on, as indicated by the spam/stupidity-free messages. My kind of blog.

And, on top of participating in the comments, Dave publicizes his email address at the bottom of many posts, encouraging people to contact him with questions. At a certain level this becomes unfeasible, but as long as he can keep up with the volume, I think it’s pretty cool that he shares his address.

Just don’t tell too many of your friends about it. I like that Telluride is still able to avoid the crowds.

When I was in elementary school, my mom told me that my friend’s parents’ car was broken into. I don’t remember exactly when I figured out that it wasn’t split into two pieces, but I do remember it took me longer than it should have.

I often remember my dreams when I first wake up (or at least the last part of them), but it’s rare that I’m still thinking about it on the way to work. Here are some highlights from last night’s epic dream:

• I’m home in Pennsylvania late at night and it’s snowing. Reid is there too, and we agree that when the sun comes up we should go outside and take pictures while everything is pristine.
• I’m witnessing a burglary somehow (two burglars in one house), and then as often happens in my dreams, at some point my point of view changes and I’m actually one of the burglars, and am breaking things out of frustration. Then I have to go out the window and onto the roof, which is kind of cool.
• A drunk woman breaks my car window in a parking lot and I follow her and call 911, after first misdialing the number, getting someone else, and asking, “Umm, is this 911?”
• I’m inside the Jeep that I used to drive (in PA), and it’s really clean.
• It’s Christmas (or around that time) and my extended family is around. My grandfather is wearing his father’s Christmas sweater that he just recently found in storage.
• I get chickenpox.

Want to watch Obama get sworn in live on Tuesday but won’t have access to a TV? Here’s a listing of some places you can watch online. I’m listing a bunch of options, since some of them may not properly anticipate demand and you may have to try multiple sites before you get a working feed. All of these streams require Flash, unless otherwise noted. If you don’t know what Flash is, you probably have it.

Obama will be sworn in around noon Eastern time on January 20th, but the broadcasts will begin hours before that, so tune in whenever you want.

If you’re reading this after the event and are looking for archived video, I’m sure you can find it on many of the same sites listed below. Obama’s YouTube channel is also probably a good place to look.

The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies
This feed will be closed captioned.

Hulu

CNN
Their player wanted me to install some Octoshape plugin when I tested it; it took a while and even crashed Safari on my Mac. It did work after restarting my browser though. There’s no direct link to the feed available yet, so I’d recommend going to their video page and then clicking on “Live Video” at the top of the screen.

Ustream.TV
You can also watch on your iPhone. (requires WiFi)

Joost

C-SPAN
Windows Media (Flip4Mac works)
RealPlayer

Current

MSNBC

Thanks to CNET for a bunch of the links.

My plan? I’ll be bringing in my antenna to work and hauling our game room’s HDTV into a larger conference room so we can watch in HD from one of the local networks. In case the antenna doesn’t cooperate, I’ll have my laptop connected to the TV as well, ready to turn to one of the above sites as a backup.

I’ve been in my current apartment for a year and a half now. As I’ve complained before, I’m not a huge fan of the management’s seemingly endless reasons reasons to enter my apartment, turn off my water, make me move my car, or otherwise remind me that I am not in control of my home. These inconveniences occur at least once a month. Recently, they informed everyone that they had to inspect the bathroom fixtures in every apartment, including the medicine cabinets. I knew my apartment didn’t have a medicine cabinet, but maybe that part of the letter applied to pre-renovation tenants.

Tonight, I found a new letter on my door explaining that they had identified my medicine cabinet as one of the units that needed replaced, because the mirror attached to it was in danger of falling off. Huh? But I don’t have one! Ugh, stupid management… right? I walked into my bathroom and looked at the mirror. It’s right up against the wall, so there can’t be a cabinet behind it. I pulled a little anyway, and WOW, I HAVE A MEDICINE CABINET! It’s just built in to the wall. Man, if I had recessed lighting I’d probably assume my apartment had no light bulbs. I totally see what they mean about the mirror, though. It’s held on with those adhesive circles that you pick up at Target when you want to hang up something light like a postcard. Not that I hang postcards. Matt does with Mariya’s, though. Okay, turning into a rambling post… need sleep.

I wonder if my last apartment had a medicine cabinet. Or the one before that.

Here we go, another impression of a coworker.

I love it when David leaves at the end of the day. He’s always wearing his backpack and a baseball hat (I didn’t have one, so I went with Google since it was black), and approaches with a slightly concerned face and his eyes darting around, looking for who knows what. Snipers, maybe. He then stops and looks into the cube as if he’s just witnessed some traumatic event, and in a nearly out-of-breath half-whisper, says, “See you guys,” before walking off to wrestle a bear or whatever it is he does after work. Here’s my attempt at an impression:

As far as I know, he doesn’t visit my site. Let’s keep it that way.

I’m waiting for my copy of iLife ’09 to arrive with the new iMovie, and I couldn’t find any junk HDV tapes to use for this, so I’m still rockin’ the Quick Capture feature on YouTube.

I recently searched for [riedel crystal cloth] on Amazon. Since I’m a member of Amazon.com Prime, I decided to filter the results to only items eligible for Prime’s free shipping, and clicked on the link shown below:

As you would expect, the list of results was filtered down to one item (from a list of one, actually, but that’s not important). However, the item listed didn’t have the comforting Prime logo in the description. I clicked through to the product page, and sure enough, I saw the following text:

This item is not eligible for Amazon Prime when purchased from CentralChef. See more buying choices

Confused, and convinced that Amazon had a bug (hey, I understand that generating high-quality search results is hard), I sent them a message. Surprisingly, I got a non-canned reply just a few hours later, on a Saturday night. They explained that the item is in fact sold by not only CentralChef (not Prime eligible), but also by Amazon.com itself. In order to buy from Amazon, I needed to click on the “See more buying choices” link. From there, I was able to choose Amazon as the merchant.

So there you go. If you come across an item that at first doesn’t seem to be eligible for Prime, always double-check by clicking on that “buying choices” link.