Unhurriedly

We’ve had conflicting reports on the amount of snow that has fallen over the last 24 hours, but the sidewalks had at least a foot of dense, wet snow and some drifts were 18 inches or more. The street isn’t even close to being clear.

And to think that just a week ago we were on a beach in the Caribbean.

We are back in Milwaukee and onto the grind. We came back to snow and the cold. While it is warmer now than when we originally left, it still feels very cold having been on the beach for a week. I can feel your sympathy.

I have two posts for the end of the trip that I’ll back post as I get a chance to finish them and plan on annotating the others with some cross links and such. I have over 1700 photos to go through and 3GB of video as well. Between four cameras I had an interesting time keeping track of everything. I just spent a solid hour or so weeding through some errant duplicates and doing a little color enhancement. I’ve got to get them cleaned up and posted on Flickr as well*. Unfortunately, I had a heavy deadline waiting for me when I got back so I don’t know when I’ll be able to finish all of that.

In the mean time, expect a little of the usual darkness.

*On that note, I almost didn’t pay for a Flickr Pro account for worries of Microsoft’s intended hostile takeover of Yahoo!. I did break down and get it with the hope that it would take at least a year for the deal to pass through the FTC and DoJ. Google’s DoubleClick deal took them nine month for the US and the EU is still evaluating it. At this point, Picasa Web is just not as strong and lacks some features that I like, though Picasa’s lack of Flash makes it much more iPhone compatible. We’ll just have to wait and see.

This day goes out to Mikey:

Sadly there was no sleeping in today. In our favor we knew what our day had in store. Waking up at 7AM (6AM EST/5AM CST), all of us flopped out of bed and barely got out of the door on time. From our resort, we piled into taxis which took us out of Costambar and to the “highway” to catch the tour bus that was waiting for us. From there, the bus took us west along the coast. During the ride, which lasted more than an hour, a guide on the bus gave us some history and perspective on the country. It turned out that he was a somewhat famous soccer player at one point in his youth and several British passengers recognized him once he told us his name.

Sleeping in again today made me very happy. Between my love of having my head on a pillow and the excessive amount of drinking done last night (the final grande el Presidente is was really did me in) the extra few hours of sleep are just what the doctor ordered.

Bethany made a breakfast of eggs, tomato and cheese. We’ve been using essentially one spice when we cook, an adobo concoction of salt, garlic and oregano that we bought at one of the local markets. So, last night’s linguine tasted like today’s eggs.

Sleeping in was very nice… We woke up late and they were still making breakfast. After some tasty food, I was able to get online for the first time and make my previous post.

We made a trip via taxi into Puerto Plata to get some more cash from the bank and see the sights a little bit. Our taxi driver, Yovany (like Giovanni) was a gruff but nice older man who gave us a little impromptu tour on the way, pointing out bits of the city. Yovany cautioned us about not walking in the streets and dropped us off at Banco Popular which was recommended by out concierge at the resort.

<a href=’http://glennkauffman.com/2008/01/27/the-first-few-days/vip-resort-in-the-dr/’ rel=’attachment wp-att-81’ title=’VIP Resort in the DR‘><img src=’http://glennkauffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/image76.jpg’ alt=’VIP Resort in the DR’ />Well, we made it. While our first flight was fine, despite having to to drive to Chicago from Milwaukee and the guy in the aisle next to us who order three Budweisers right off of the bat and then had to yell to hear himself over his own iPod. No, it was our second flight that really was the issue.

It turns out that the Miami airport is a complete shit-hole. Most of it is under construction and there are almost no worthwhile restaurants available. Getting from gateway to another was a trek. After wandering around, we ate at the only restaurant on our gateway, which while good, was nothing more than a sandwich.

With two hours to kill before our flight to the Dominican Republic, I wandered around until the boarding time. Each time we came back to the gate, the departure time was pushed back by ten more minutes. An hour late, we got to board and the locals were getting restless.

We’ve elected to leave our iPhones here in the good ol’ U. S. of A. For various reasons, mostly involving money, we thought it would be a bad idea to bring them, including; $1.99/min voice and $0.016/KB data (thats $16.384/MB!) and the potential replacement costs should something happen. Staying behind as well will my trusty MacBook Pro.

So, we are going on a bit of a technological camping trip. You know, deprived of modern conveniences and forced to rough it like the pioneers. Packed with me are; an old 3.2 meg Sony Cybershot with a whopping 128 MB card, an ailing 4th Gen 20GB iPod, a 1st Gen 1GB iPod Shuffle as a backup and a 3+ year old Dell Latitude C400 running Debian Etch loaded with Picassa and Gimp for photos. I’m also lugging around my non-iPhone work cell, a rugged Motorola ic502 and my Nintendo DS with a few games. Oh, and a book, Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren which I’ve read a few times through.

I know, talk about a rough time… It will only get up to the mid 80’s while we’re there too!

Bethany is taking her new Kodak Z812 and her video iPod to pull photos with, so she is not slumming it as much as I am for a change.

There are claims of internet access, so hopefully I’ll be able to update while I’m down there. It’s not going to be a live-blog by any means, but I want to at least post some twitter and a photo or two.

See you there!

I have an iPhone, and a have found it to be nearly perfect. I had held out as long as I could, but it is the perfect storm of handheld consumer electronics. Sure, there are others out there with better features, faster connections and better service providers but no other device pulls it all together like the iPhone. IMAP for my Gmail (I don’t have all of my personal accounts on the iPhone as it chews up too much bandwidth. Yes, I have that many.) and for my work email (Exchange IMAP works just fine, people!). The latest updates make the Map.app even more useful with GPS-like wifi trilateration. Hahlo for my Twitter and NewsGator’s mobile site to sync with NetNewsWire (All of NewsGator’s personal products including NetNewsWire and their service are now free! I was willing to pay for it, and did, but this is even better! Get it!) to get my RSS. As a Mac user, no other device will even sync properly without the use of third party software like missing sync! I even get my iPhoto pics on my iPhone, smartly scaled down for its screen to take up less space.

We don’t have a tree, and we don’t have any decorations, but we do have a little cheer. We’ve been able to spend a little time with friends and some of our family. Not having many days off and our self imposed “busy” made it difficult to have my mother out this year, but we’ll visit her for Easter.

I didn’t grow up with much tradition, especially around the holidays. Scrooged has been my favorite holiday movies for a long time, but since using it as a vehicle for my proposal Bethany and I have made it a point to watch it around this time of year. This is one of my favorite of Murray’s post-Ghostbusters movies until Lost In Translation.

If you haven’t seen it in a while Netflix it or get it at the bargain bin of Evil-Mart like I did.

So, you know how much time I devote to my various websites out there. Much like those endeavors, my Second Life project has fallen by the wayside. As has been my mood for the past few weeks, I’ve logged in and dusted off the, well, dust.

There are a few paintings up on the walls and a video screen in the back. Plans were put into place to have streaming audio and video in place to allow bands to perform live both is real life and to an audience in SL simultaneously.

If you happen to have to have Second Life loaded log in and visit.