Sickles Insight

Yeah that’s right, Google recently made Google Maps even better by adding Street Views to some popular places. Today you can look at San Francisco CA, Las Vegas NV, Denver CO, Miami FL, and New York NY at the street level. You can zoom right down as if you were standing on the street and then pan around the streets at your whim. You can also advance yourself down the street in either direction. In addition, Google estimates the address you are standing in front of while you circle around the streets and displays it on the screen. This is a really cool feature that holds great possibilities and potential for the future. Here’s a screenshot - doesn’t that make you want to go try it out yourself?

I can’t wait until I have some more time to play with this and take a look at some places I’ve been, and even some of the places I haven’t been. First impressions - the response is a little slow, but gee - for what you get - it’s awesome! Perhaps after the freshness wears off a little, the servers will respond a little better and provide a more seamless session when on the street level. I can’t wait to see more cities loaded up. You never know when the camera truck might be driving by, so keep your eyes open. And when you do see one - go wave, it will be a good laugh when you find yourself waving on Google maps! (NOTE: For best results, stand still with arm in air; actually waving may appear blurry and look pathetic)

After my trip to Detroit last week, I have officially had it up to HERE :points to neck: with the airlines, airports, pilots, flight attendants, gate attendants, luggage handlers, check-in staff, courtesy individuals, airport transportation, and the transportation security administration staff, also known as a TSO or transportation security officer. I’m not fed-up because Northwest is no longer offering pretzels on their domestic flights. Yeah that’s right, beginning June 9 you will only be offered a beverage. You can read more here about the removal of pretzels from the airlines if you’d like. It’s not because I lost my luggage, in fact - my luggage actually arrived to the airport before I did - on the flight I should have been aboard.

I will no longer utilize airlines for domestic flights because of (1) the cost and (2) the time. This isn’t a sudden reaction, this has been building for months on end and has finally taken its toll. This last flight was just the frosting on the cake, so to speak. You see - I spent $160 dollars for the flights and $250 for the change fee associated to the tickets to travel a mere 672 miles (road distance). This is $410 for the trip, which isn’t a bad price - but that’s because this was just the cost to change the tickets. If you count the original cost of the canceled tickets, the total charge for this trip would be more like $750. The drive time would have been a total of 22 hours round trip according to google maps (probably less in reality, sometimes I speed) making a one way trip less than 11 hours.

The quick weekend started out something like this: Driving to the vicinity of the airport at 3:30pm Thursday evening in order to avoid rush-hour traffic and to ensure we would arrive at the gate on time for our 6pm flight. We arrived promptly at 4:20 and went to Friendly’s Restaurant for dinner - that’s really not important. After finishing dinner and being glad to have beat the traffic we arrived at the airport at 4:45 - 1 hour before the flight as recommended by airports around the world. With our bags checked in we arrived at the gate only to find our plane not prepared. I won’t go through every step, but in the next few hours I was happy to learn that United Airlines has switched from Pepsi back to Coke. I was told that they still have a lot of Pepsi in stock, so it’s a toss-up as to which you’ll receive on your next flight, assuming you still take one by the time you are done with this article. Did I mention my trip originated in Hartford, CT out of BDL Bradley International Airport and was destined for DTW - the Detroit-Metro Airport. Quick side note, I often fly from BDL to GRR (Grand Rapids, MI) and get routed through Detroit as one of the stops. However, it never fails, when I fly to DTW direct I get routed through some nonsense place like Chicago. For those of you unfamiliar with US Geography, or if you are just lazy and don’t want to think about compass directions, Chicago is further west of Detroit - I should have brought my parachute to jump out when we passed over Detroit!

Anyway, to make a long day short and concise, we ultimately arrived in Detroit at 12:18am. Proceeding to baggage claim we were greeted by the kind folks that picked us up so late in the night. Waiting for what felt like eternity, our bags finally came tumbling around the conveyor belt and we were on our way. Another half hour drive to our ultimate destination and we had “arrived” at 1:10am. Total travel time is now 10 hours. Not bad, the airlines saved an hour versus traveling by car. Of course, I rarely follow the speed-limits, so the time is probably about equal. In addition to that - the food, magazines, and eye drops bought while in transportation with airlines is far more expensive than would be by car. If you think this isn’t much to complain about - you are right. I’m not really complaining about the first leg of the trip. It’s the return flight on Sunday that really kills me. Read on..

One wedding and a few quick hours later, Sunday morning arrives and it’s time for our purposely scheduled quick flight back to Hartford, CT. Because of the location we were Saturday night (near to Canada which, by the way, provides easy access back to CT) we had to drive an hour to get to the airport. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 9:30am and arrive in CT at 1:30pm with a quick stop in Washington Dulles International Airport. We leave the house at 7:30am in efforts to arrive at the airport the suggested hour beforehand. We arrive in time, one of the bags is a pound over-weight this time. The kind lady lets it pass and we head to our gate. We sit, and we sit, and we sit some more. The time to depart has come and gone and we still don’t see a pilot or stewardess - not to mention our bags aren’t being loaded. It’s 8:45 in the morning, but the Quiznos across the way is staring me down like no tomorrow and there is no other restaurant in site. I end up purchasing a sandwich - it’s the worst sandwich I’ve ever had, must not be a true Quiznos I remember muttering to myself. Finally we get on the plane and the pilot ensures us that we will make up time in the air and arrive early. We don’t. In-fact, we arrive at the gate and there is a fuel truck in the way forcing us to wait even longer to pull up to the gate. Our next flight now departs in 20 minutes.

We finally deplane and run like no tomorrow through an airport with very poorly marked concourse. Eight gates later we finally arrive at some television monitors and discover that our gate is 31 gates away in the opposite direction we had just run. Running like their were bombs chasing us through the concourse, dodging those people-vehicles and hoping that my luggage was moving at the same speed, we finally arrive at our gate only to find the door closed and no one, I repeat - no one at the desk to help us. We were at the gate 11 minutes before departure with no chance of getting on the plane. The planes close their doors 10 minutes to departure as required by law, but we had 60 whole seconds to spare - which is a lot given the circumstances.

Angry without a plane I sulked back to the customer service desk to inquire about later flights bound for CT. I was suppose to be home in just one hour, but the chances of that happening looked quite grim. It took the agents a good 20 minutes to reroute our tickets. The conversation began with “I’m sorry, we have no more available flights going to Hartford today.” I’m sorry..what? Wouldn’t that indicate that the gate agent would have waited to the last possible moment for us to arrive. Knowing that our originiating plane had landed, learning that there were no other available flights, could she have waited one more minute just in case we were running? To top it all of, I later learned that our baggage DID make it on that flight and made it to Hartford before we did - 7 hours before we did!

To make a long afternoon more discouraging we were routed through North Carolina and back to Hartford with an arrival time of 7:30 through a different airline - US Airways. After claiming our bags from customer service and driving back home our quick weekend trip came to a frustrating end at 8:30pm Sunday.

Total travel time on the return trip was 13 hours. This puts the total trip travel time at 23 hours. By car we should have been under 22 hours. Total cost by plane - $750 + Really expensive food, no control, and uncomfortable chairs. Total would have been cost for car - $201.60 assuming the given mileage and $3/gallon. Not to mention, we wouldn’t have to borrow a car during our time there - we’d have one to drive around!

So, hopefully now you’ve understand my position. I congratulate you if you’ve read all the previous text, I’m not sure I would have. Lesson learned - Could have saved $600+ dollars, several hours, and lots of frustration by driving. I like to have freedom to pull over, listen to music, or watch a movie with ease. These options do not exist on the plane. I will highly consider driving to any destination that does not cross an ocean in future trips. What else can I do?

A Bad Day at Coca-Cola: It looks to me like someone was having an off day at the Coke plant today. Photograph courtesy of my brother.

This is kind of a repost. Becky reminded me that people like images and not text. In fact, you probably aren’t even reading this. I should have remembered that earlier. So this is kind of a repost of previous material but with more captivating links! Click at will:

Remember the experimental psychology post I made a short while back - where you had to count the number of times the basketball was passed? Well, this is not the same thing, but it did bring together certain elements that reminded me of the video. Regardless, Watch the magic of changing the color of the playing card right in front of your eyes - everybody loves a good card trick! And before you tell me how the trick is done (which is what I wanted to do as soon as I saw it), watch the entire video. Then tell me your thoughts in the comments.

Well, what do you think? My favorite part is the gorilla! Maybe that is what made me think of the other video. You did see the gorilla, right?

This is just absolutely crazy. I had no idea that Connecticut could experience weather situations that begin to mimic hurricanes, or tornadoes. I’m not really sure on the difference between the two, I guess my high school science teachers would be disappointed in me. I am however certain that this is not the result of a typhoon! Anyway, my brother was in Waterbury, CT the other day for work and came across this phenomenon. With his cell phone never out of reach he was quick to capture a few seconds of natures art including some guy pretending to get sucked up into the force. Cool stuff, take a look:

So, I’ve seen a lot of “geek” shirts as I walk around, and more often online. A recent digg victory prompted me to look at a few more selections and I found two that really made me laugh. I thought I would pass the thought to you. To me the first one looks like it might have been run through photoshop, but either way - it’s quite funny! You may have seen them already, here they are:

I wanted to make a quick note that I will be out of town again this weekend beginning now. Again? Well yes, I was gone last weekend too. I don’t mean to bring dimsay, but unlike last weekend - there will be no new articles this time around. For the past few months I’ve employed the auto post feature built in automaticaly to Wordpress. (infact - at this very moment I’m on an airplane)

The auto post is a great tool for individuals that are not around continually or on a regular basis to post articles, I’ve relied on this method countless times. The only problem with this process is it requires the content creator to have previously made the content. That’s my subtle way of telling you that I have not prepared any content for this weekend and thus SicklesInsight will seemingly sit void of updates throughout the entire weekend. I hope that you do not disappear over the next few days, check back next week!

This brings me to a second point. Do you have any content you wish to prepare for display on SicklesInsight? I suppose you could think it’s a little odd to share your thoughts here if your last name isn’t Sickles, but it’s not really that odd. If you look closely, several articles on SicklesInsight are posted by entities outside of the Sickles name.

I know that a number of readers here have their own sites they keep up and running and don’t have the time to create anything else anyway. In addition, these individuals already have their own venue to display created content - so why share it here. Two thoughts to put out there - if you already run a blog or other venue for displaying this information, you can now have a second venue to reach people and potentially drive traffic back to your own site.

Anyone who doesn’t currently have this opportunity can select a topic or run about various topics on which to offer thoughts, insight, or advice. I will gladly display your articles with full recognition to your name as author. I am looking for people that might want to write once a week or even once a month. You can contact me with the link at the top of this page if you are interested. I’m not immediately ruling out any topics - so think of something you enjoy or a topic on which you have some background, and come share things with others!