There are a few things that hotel executives should remember:
The airport Holiday Inn I’m staying in doesn’t have all of these issues, but some seem to crop up everywhere I stay.
If a hotel can get all of these right consistently, they’ve got a happy guest.
About 7:30 tonight, I grabbed the camera and decided to explore my old neighborhood on the south side of Charlotte. I’d driven by my old house once or twice, so its nothing new to see it. This time, though, I happened to be out front when the “new” owners drove up (“new” isn’t entirely accurate since they’ve lived there 14 years).
What does one say to the owners of the house you used to live in twenty years ago? I mean, I’m a total stranger to them but not the house. Fortunately, they were really very cool and happy to meet a “plankowner” of the house. After talking to John and Lynn for a few moments, they invited me in for a tour! I was so happy I didn’t know what to do with myself!
For the next hour, John and Lynn walked me through the house. The owners prior to them had done a bit of remodeling: some for the better, some …eh, not so much. A few rooms, like the den, looked just like it did when we lived there.
My room was now their daughter’s and was painted in a very tasteful pink and green. John installed some recessed lighting in the room that looked really nice. Standing there, I could imagine my twin bed facing the door. I saw the desk where I too often neglected my homework. Ah, the memories!
The house has held up remarkably well in its twenty-three years. The original roof lasted up until last year, the downstairs air conditioner is original, and some of the heavy appliances are still in place. The huge ash tree in the front yard is healthy and thriving, which really warms my heart.
Other things are not so good. The windows need replacing as they’re nearly painted shut. The front dormer window is rotting (though nearly every dormer rots eventually, it seems). The electrical wiring is very strange, with some circuits wired incorrectly. I marveled at how I could recall all the other little quirks of the house, twenty years after we moved out. The leak under the master bath, the settling in the front bedroom. How does that stupid stuff take up brain cells?
I would have loved to get pictures of the inside, but that is asking a little too much of total strangers. Still, they were very friendly and welcoming. Lynn joked that she felt she should have made cookies for me for my visit! I hope we can stay in touch because they seem like really neat people.
John and Lynn had bought the house from a couple who was in the midst of a divorce and who moved out so quickly they didn’t even empty the attic of all their belongings. Lynn half-jokingly told me this caused them to worry a little about the house’s karma.
“Don’t worry,” I reassured them. “This has always been a very good house.”
Yes, the house is like an old friend. Its nice to see that its aged so well.
I’m in Charlotte now for my training. It’s been an event-filled day to say the least.
I left Raleigh a little later than expected in an effort to get Kelly’s PC working before I walked out for three days. Mission accomplished, I hit the road going west. On the way, I took a break from driving by exploring the North Carolina Transportation Museum in Spencer, checking out the impressive collection of rail cars (and automotive cars, too). At Charlotte at last, I worked with my coworker Wes to set up the classroom. Things went pretty smoothly there, too. Then I got a tour of my old house (more on that in the next post) and stopped over at my friend and former coworker, Mike B’s house.
Mike and his wife Kelly are the proud parents of a 14 month old son, Bryson. Bryson is a handsome young man who seems quite good natured. He didn’t seem to mind greeting a guest at 9:30 at night and kept his eyes open through most of my visit.
Mike and I used to work together well over 12 years ago. He had moved to Charlotte years ago but is now considering a move back to Raleigh. Some lucky local company is going to get a top-notch network adminstrator. I’ve taken it upon myself to find Mike a job here. He’s awesome.
We spent some time visiting and catching up before I could no longer go without dinner (yes, it was 10:30 PM already). I took a Jack-In-The-Box chicken salad for a tour around Charlotte and returned to my hotel around 11.
Its an early morning as I continue getting the classroom ready, but things will go smoothly. It will take a lot to top this kind of day, though. Wow.
I’m off to Charlotte Monday morning for two days of reseller product training. It will be the first overnight visit I’ve made to Charlotte in, oh, 15 years or more. Lucky for me the hotel I’ll be staying in is not too far from my old neighborhood. I fully intend to sneak out and take pictures of the old ‘hood and take stock of where Charlotte has gone since I left it way back when.
Its the end of an incredibly fun weekend.
Friday, we went over to our friends’ house for dinner. Saturday we went to my parents’ house to swim and have lunch. My Aunt Nancy and Aunt Linda were visiting so we got to spend some good time with them. After our swim and lunch, Kelly took Hallie next door to our neighbor’s birthday party. Hallie had a ball on the Slip-‘N-Slide. We topped the day off with nicely grilled steaks, wine, and Movie Night.
Today we slept past eight o’clock (!!!) and enjoyed a good breakfast before piling on the bicycles and going for a 4 mile family bike ride. It felt good to be pedaling, but then again it always feels good to be pedaling. I’ve ridden at least twice a week since the end of April and LOVE it.
Anyhow, the kids napped before Aunts Linda and Nancy came for a nice visit. We showed them the house and caught up until Hallie awoke and came down to play. It was nice to see my aunts and the kids really enjoyed seeing them.
We went for another family exercise after dinner, picking up our neighbors Frank and Brea and their kids along the way. After handfulls of rocks were thrown into our local creek, we happily made our way back to the house. Smooth kiddie bedtimes followed.
Then I got to focus on my geek task for this weekend: upgrading the hard drive in Kelly’s laptop. I could have just put a new drive in and reinstalled Windows XP, but I decided to put the “recovery” partition back on the system, since I’d messed it up last time I switched drives. Its now, uh, recovering itself and I’m ready to head to bed.
Pretty good weekend, all things considered.
An inside joke between me and my geek friends involves a conversation I began ten years ago that began “wouldn’t it be great if you could build a device to detect eye movememts that would replace your mouse?” Over the years the “device to detect” phrase became a running gag, useful for knocking the wind out of a hyper geek like myself.
Hey, you had to be there.
Anyway, someone has built a device to detect eye movements called OpenEyes. And its open source, too. So step off, you doubters!
I’m ripping another one of my CDs using Grip, the Linux open-source ripping tool. Ocne again I’m blown away by the exhaustive list of music genres I get to choose from. While variety is a good thing, I find it annoying that there are dozens of varieties of club music represented: house, trance, club, club-house, darkwave, electronic, Euro-dance, Euro-techno, Euro-techno clubhouse trance. I mean, WTF is all this stuff?
Don’t get me wrong. I tune in to Afterhours on WKNC and love the music. I think its some of the best on the radio. But I still wouldn’t know club if it, uh, hit me upside the head.
Somebody help me out here.
When news broke about Warren Buffett donating billions to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I sent a tongue-in-cheek email to the Foundation:
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:21:25 -0400
From: Mark Turner
To: info at gatesfoundation dot org
Subject: what about donating?Savvy investors often follow Warren Buffett’s moves. How may *I* donate
to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation?Regards,
Mark
To my surprise, I actually got a response:
Subject: RE: what about donating?
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 13:43:24 -0700
From: “Info”
To: “Mark Turner”Dear Mark,
Thank you for writing to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
I appreciate your generous offer of a financial contribution to support
the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. However, the foundation
is not set up to receive financial contributions from the general
public. There are many strong non-profit organizations that are in a
better position to receive this type of contribution and who do work
that is consistent with the goals of this foundation. I invite you to
visit our Web site at www.gatesfoundation.org for information
about some of our grantees.Thanks again for your interest and your kind offer. We wish you all the
best.Sincerely,
Stephanie Jones
Grants Inquiry Administrator
Very nice of them to respond to my ridiculous request.
(Note: Should you be willing to actually donate, here’s a partial list of grantees the Gates Foundation supports).
I was dismayed to learn this morning that Cheviot Hills, the neighborhood golf course, has been sold to car salesmen. The new owners are MLC Automotive of Raleigh and Crossroads Holdings, the companies which control land holdings of the Leith and Crossroads dealerships, respectively. One can assume that the links will soon be paved over and loaded up with shiny new cars.
Isn’t it wonderful? Capital Boulevard has sorely needed a car dealership or two and then this old golf course comes up for sale. Now we have everything!
I think I’d rather let crazy ol’ Parker Edwards take out a few dozen more deer than to have yet another lot full of cars blot the landscape. Besides, isn’t there some kind of law about used car salesmen being too close to neighborhoods? Like they have to register with the state or something?
I hope the new owners have done their homework, as this isn’t the best place to put a dealership. You see, when it rains the way it did a two weeks ago most of this property is underwater. Imagine a fleet of shiny new cars here.
Oops.
(this post’s title shamelessly stolen from the N&O’s Jack Hagel.)
Over my time off I’ve spent some time messing around with my Linksys WRT54G access point. It had been collecting dust in my bedroom while I focused on other ways in which to waste time. As I mentioned a few posts back, I had been looking into what it would take to create a neighborhood-wide network. The WRT54G seems ideally suited for such a task.
A while ago I installed OpenWRT on the access point as I wanted to see how Linux worked on the box. What I didn’t find out until yesterday is how truly powerful this little box is when Linux is under the hood. For instance, one thing I need to do is to have it be my home internet gateway and split the internet connection into a trusted segment (the LAN) and an untrusted segment (WiFi). When I first read that the wireless connection was bridged to the ethernet switch, I thought this wasn’t possible. I found out yesterday that – while the wireless is bridged to the switch, it is configurable with vlans! Thus, I can treat each port on the switch as if they were independent, meaning that splitting traffic can be easily done with firewall rules.
Its truly amazing to know that a $50 box can do all of this. Linux rules!
