Travel Archive
These posts are all in this one category.
Photos from Day 1 are here!
- 10 hour flight from Newark, NJ to Tel Aviv, Israel. I caught up on Lost and started watching V for Vendetta.
- Arrive at our hotel - Mount Zion Hotel, a converted Turkish mansion.
- Explore the Old City - the ancient part of Jerusalem.
- Walk around Jerusalem, Ben Yehuda street, and other surrounding areas.
I'm in New York till Wednesday at 7.
Anybody want to meet for an early dinner Wednesday, say 5pm?
Hurricane Wilma did little or no damage in Tampa where I was staying. In fact I wanted to watch it pass, but I slept right through it. The pool had some leaves blown in it, and it was a bit colder today than usual, but it was a typical beautiful sunny cloudless day by the time I was awake.
I'm typing this from the Tampa airport - free wifi - what a nice idea.
I'm in Tampa for a 30th birthday party with a bunch of friends. Mike, who's birthday we are be celebrating, maintains parties.DABU.com which has some details and photos as the days progress. Over 18 people are expected to be staying at the house.
Hurricane Wilma seems to be a safe distance away.
The weekend of September 11th, 2005, my dad and I drove up to New York City for a memorable weekend of sight seeing and biking.
The bike ride was the NYC Century Bike Tour, presented by Transportation Alternatives, an advocate for safety in bike riding. There were four tours available: 100 miles, 75 miles, 55 miles, and 35 miles. The tours all started in Central Park.
We did the 55 mile tour, which took us through New York City, over the Brooklyn Bridge, around Brooklyn, past Cony Island, up through Queens, over the Triborough Bridge, and back to Central Park.
This was my first time in most of these parts of New York. Riding over the Brooklyn Bridge was absolutely spectacular, especially with perfect weather and thousands of other bike riders on the bridge around us. My favorite part of the ride was through and around traffic in the city, passing familiar landmarks like the Lincoln Center, and cautiously zooming through traffic lights in packs of 15 or so riders.
My dad has a rule about going to New York - he can't leave without seeing a show. We saw two excellent shows - The Pillowman, staring Billy Crudup and Jeff Goldbum, and The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
We stayed in Jersey City and took the train in each day, which dropped us off at the makeshift World Trade Center station. On September 11th, it was powerful and emotional to be at the footsteps of the remains of the rubble as hundreds of people had gathered to lay flowers, cry, and pray for their missing loved ones.
I'm leaving in a few minutes for Seattle for Gnomedex.
Today I picked up business cards, as you can see in the photo. What is DABU? Meet me at the conference and I'll give you a demo. You might be pleasantly surprised.
There's a Gnomedex Wiki - a web site about Gnomedex that anybody can edit. I added my hotel information, created the Ride Share page, and a topic on Post-Gnomedex Weekend Plans.
I'm also beta testing RSS and Podcasting inventor Dave Winer's new OPML Editor - a group outline program which he will probably announce at Gnomedex and has great potential.
Just two weeks until Gnomedex, the annual meeting of geeks lead by the lockergnome himself, Chris Pirillo. The subject matter is blogging and everything that revolves around it.
Some cool things:
- It's sold out!
- Over half the audience blogs (the list)
- Presenters include Dave Winer, Steve Gilmore, Steve Rubel, Phillip Torrone, Robert Scoble, Marc Canter, John Battelle, Dan Gilmor, and may other A-list bloggers, editors, writers, and inventors. It's like the superbowl of blogging.
For people going:
- The .NET Guy is getting people together for dinner on Thursday. Contact him if you are interested.
- Robert Scoble may be hosting a camping trip after Gnomedex.
- I'll be staying at the Sixth Avenue Inn.
- I'll be in Seattle June 22 till Tuesday, June 28.
- On Monday and/or Tuesday, I'll be visiting friends at Microsoft. Major Nelson, John Porcaro, Dennis, Dave, etc - I expect cool demos that I can't talk about here! <g>
Image is from the great Podbat Blog.
![SpamArtsm[1].jpg](http://www.dylangreene.com/custom/image/blog1/SpamArtsm[1].jpg)
I'm on my way to New York to see Monty Python's Spamalot with my family.
Spamalot stars David Hyde Pierce ("Fraiser"), Tim Curry (The Rocky Horror Picture Show), and Hank Azaria (Moe Szyslak, Chief Wiggum, Apu, Comic Book Guy, Cletus, Prof. Frink, and other voices in Simpsons) .
I just got tickets to Vegas, baby! I'm going to the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show!
Yeah, I'm that big of a geek that for vacations, instead of going the beach or skiing, I go to a consumer electronic show. What can I say, it's what I really enjoy, and I'm going with close friends Chris and Dennis (if he gets his plane ticket).
Basically think of Best Buy, but full of devices that wont be in stores for a another year, and often times not affordable for many more years to come. Also there'll about 100,000 people there. It should be fun!
The 2005 CES is January 5th to January 9th. Bill Gates is giving the keynote - there are rumors that he use this opportunity to announce XBOX 2, but we'll wait and see.
I'll do my best to blog the conference, and there will be lots of photos on this site.
I'm in Denver for the next two days for a work project. I'm staying at the Luna Hotel which is this ultra-modern uber-trendy hotel in the young, hip Wazze district of downtown Denver.
They say that since the city is a mile up, it's harder to breath but I haven't noticed it yet.
I slept well except I didn't have my pillow with me. I've very picky about pillow. The fancy overstuffed ones give me a sore neck.
Tomorrow morning... oops, nevermind... Start over... Six hours from now I fly from Washington, D.C. to Washington, T.S. - The State. I'm going for work, to integrate my current project with another team's project.
Since my work is closed on Monday for Presidents' Day, I'll be stopping by Microsoft to visit some friends and old co-workers. If you're one of those people, fire me an IM so we can all meet in one place for lunch or something. Otherwise I might just sneak into your office when you least expect it.
It seems fitting that I'll be in both Washingtons this Presidents' Day weekend.
Today I went downtown to deposit some checks, and there were people everywhere... Tourist Season has begun. It's still weird to me that a place I go on a whim to run an errand is the same place others select as their vacation destination. That's not to put down DC - I highly recommend it to everybody, politics and history interests are not required.
- More about Washington, D.C. [Encarta]
- More about Washington, The State [Encarta]
- The Myth and Lies behind Presidents' Day [Snopes.com]
I also just learned that Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione Italia, two major non-Starbucks coffee stores/brands up in the Northwest (and quickly spreading elsewhere), happen to be owned by Starbucks. That would almost be like if Microsoft happened to own Apple and Sun, but they let the companies operate independently and didn't make a big fuss about it.
Well, Washington is the only state named after a president, so they probably throw some bitchin' Presidents' Day parties over there. I better get some sleep.
This is it ladies and gentlemen, this is the last of the Seattle photos. It has taken us over a month to post them, but we guarantee you will love these as much or as little as the rest! Click on the vacations tab for the preceding seven days.
On the Seventh Day, we didn't rest. Instead we had the most strenuous workouts on the vacation. We started by driving a whiles north of Seattle to tour the Boeing Everett plant, which we explored the largest building in the world (the Pentagon is the largest office building). After that, we trekked south of Seattle to Mount Rainier, where we climbed as far as our limited water supply and lack of oxygen containers could take us. Along the way we had some fun taking photos...
Our second day in the San Juan Islands was spent at Deer Harbor on Orca Island. The Today Show was filming "cool getaways from Seattle" and the local Kayak adventures group needed some people so we got a free Kayaking trip. We aren't sure when we will be on the Today Show, but it's supposedly some Thursday because that's when they do the travel segment.