Leaving On A Jet Plane

By now many of you have heard the news. Our Alaska adventure is coming to an end.

I have accepted a position with a start-up company in Chicago, Illinois and we will be reporting there to begin our Illinois adventure 06 JUL 2015. Needless to say, this is going to be quite the shift from Dillingham to Chicago.

Boy, will it ever be a shift.

You really don't know what quiet is until you hit Dillingham. You just think you know what quiet is. When you get up at 5 a.m. and the only sound anywhere in the town is the gentle thrum of the diesel generators, then you will know what quiet is.

I am not likely to see many moose, elk, reindeer, foxes, or porcupines there either. There are a lot of things I am going to miss about Dillingham, but too many people and too much noise are not among them.

Amazon's Game Changer

Ok, I have to admit I am impressed.

Amazon introduced a real game changer called Amazon Prime Music. If you have an Amazon Prime account, the promise is simple : about 1, 000, 000 songs you can listen to for free. As in free beer. As in ad-free. The kicker : you can download the music to your smartphone or tablet to listen to it offline (for when you have no internet connection).

There are, of course, some restrictions : four devices total per Prime account. Only one can stream or download at a time. If you try to stream from two devices using one account, Amazon simply asks what device you want to cut off.

This would be fantastic - one could almost say nearly perfect - for listening to music... except for the pathetically small data caps we have here in Dillingham. If we didn't have caps here, I would probably have already filled up the memory in my iPhone with songs I want to hear.

Even so... Apple is in real trouble here. They are going to have to come up with something to counter. I am thinking an iCloud subscription service for backup / data storage / music would flatten Amazon. I guess we will have to wait and see what the future holds.

ASTE 2014 in Anchorage

So I am in Anchorage for the ASTE conference again this year. I am staying on the 11th floor of the Hotel Captain Cook, which is in tower 2. The stay has been very healthy for me, because with only one working elevator it's faster to hoof it up the stairs than wait for the elevator.

Turns out while I wasn't looking, someone advanced the hell out of automobiles while I wasn't looking. I present to you the 2014 Ford Fusion :

It has more knobs, dials and switches to adjust than a woman.

Aaaaaaaaand, of course, it took Microsoft to screw it up. There is no doubt this could have been a great interface to the car; naturally, Ford went to the anti-professionals at Microsoft to design it instead of Apple. Do you see that screen on the right? The one with four quarters? Yeah, you can't actually touch any of those stupidly large buttons to do anything. The actual touch interface is limited to a box about 2 inches long, and 1/2 inch high tucked in the corners of the screen. Half the time, even when sitting in Park you can't get the slivers to actually recognize you touched it.

Now stop and think about that for a minute. You are piloting a two-ton-plus vehicle at speeds up to 65 MPH. Which makes more sense :

a) taking the driver's eyes off the road for a split-second to find a stupidly large button, or

b) taking the diver's eyes off the road for several seconds to find a tiny sliver of a button?

If you said "a", then you have proven you are completely unfit to work at either Ford or Microsoft, you idiot. What the hell were you thinking?

Even so, Anchorage and the surrounding area continue to be spectacular. Here a kinda-panorama from my hotel window :

No visit to the big city would be complete without stopping at Fred Meyer. The old joke goes that Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a convenience store, not a government agency. Well, Fred Meyer lives up to that, and more. By God, you can buy guns, groceries, diamond rings, furniture and more under that one cavernous roof. You can also buy things like this :

Holy Art Deco, Batman !

Huh. If I could have found a way to stuff that in my luggage, I would have taken that bad boy home. I would have made space for it back home. I don't need it, but it's just so cool it's almost a crime to not buy it.

Also decided to take in a couple of movies while in Anchorage. One was the RoboCop reboot, and the other was the Lego Movie. I was surprised at RoboCop. I went in expecting they had screwed it up like every reboot that has come down the pike. I was very shocked and pleasantly surprised they had not totally screwed it up. To be sure, they came at the movie from the opposite direction from the original. They more or less ended up in the same parking lot as the original if not the ballpark itself.

Then again... maybe my opinion was influenced by this on the way into the theatre :

To give you a sense of scale, that podium came

up to my waist.

The Lego Movie was another surprise. It has been decades since I have seen a movie this much fun, this entertaining to watch. The kids are too taken in by the eye candy to get the jokes aimed squarely at the adults, but that's their loss. This is a stupidly funny movie that has no reason to exist except to over-deliver and under-promise entertainment.

The running gag throughout the movie is time. Whenever a character tells another to  - for example - meet up downstairs in the oddly-specific timeframe of 10 seconds in the future, then the screen is always taken over by a placard that reads "downstairs, 10 seconds later", then immediately cuts to the downstairs scene. It shouldn't be funny, it should be repetitive. But in this movie, in this context, it works so that kids and adults are laughing their asses off. Each. And. Every. Time. I can't wait to get the DVD or download it. This one is a keeper for sure.

So I went out exploring Anchorage a little bit and then it happened. The Holy Mecca of Outdoors anything came into my view :

Imagine Handel's Messiah as the background music. It's what I was hearing.

But then all hope was lost as quick as it came. The sign draped across the front stated it was opening April 10.

Crap.

Oh, well. I suppose we can make the pilgrimage sometime after that. In the meantime it's back to work for me.

Leaving on a Jet Plane, Part II

Here are couple of more pictures :

The queen couldn't be interested less in aircraft, and wished us a bon voyage when we went out to the airport. Turns out she and Brittany were making brownies and pumpkin muffins while the guys were off doing 'guy stuff'.

I can't say who the pilot is or what he is doing here, but just put it this way : think of anyone famous you have ever heard of in the last 20 years, and he has probably been their pilot.

Yep. Him too. Uh huh. Him too. Yes, her many times. Them, too.

So we have been killing him with kindness at the Thai Inn, so he invited me out to give it a tour. If you think the outside is something, you should have seen the inside. Wish I could have taken pictures.

UPDATE : They are gone. What a beautiful, picture perfect take-off. Now I can post something that shows mere mortals are not cut out to pilot these things :

Piece of cake.

Don't forget : there are even more knobs, dials and switches above that didn't make it into the picture.

Leaving on a Jet Plane

More to come later, but this is what I got a tour of last night :

If you think the outside is incredible, you should see the inside.

Filmed in Panorama-vision

There is a panoramic picture of wet, drizzly Dillingham, Alaska taken from the impressive camera of my new iPhone 5. You cannot imagine how much I appreciate 50's and rain as opposed to the Iowa norm of 80s to 90s and 100% humidity without rain.

As the saying goes, you never have to pay for air conditioning as long as you live in Alaska. ;-)

I should mention that is Little Airport Road. It is called Little Airport Road for two reasons : it's not very big, and it used to be the airport runway for Dillingham back in the day. I wouldn't want to try it today, unless you had hella shock absorbers with about three feet of travel on the plane. Hell, I won't do more than 10 MPH on it in a car.

Pothole-O-Rama!

That brings up another thought. The Dillingham Police are really, really good at spotting drunk drivers. They have to be. They have had years of practice honing that skill by picking out the true drunks from the people swerving to avoid potholes in the road. After all, why fill potholes when nature is going to pack them with snow and ice in another month or so?

Amazon This!

Well, as you may know by now there are only two ways to get in or out of Dillingham. One is by boat, and the other by airplane. Necessarily, this means anything you want to ship here - like items from Amazon - have to arrive in like fashion. I have noticed recently that Amazon is becoming more and more selective about what they will, or perhaps more importantly WILL NOT ship to Alaska. 

At first I understood this, because the US Postal Service is the ONLY way any package gets to Dillingham. It stands to reason if the USPS gets uptight about shipping things like explosives, firearms, or alcohol then retailers who sell those goods will not be able to get them to Dillingham. Again, this is perfectly understandable. I have no beef with the retailers, because the USPS sets the rules.

But this :

I mean, what the hell Amazon? Why in the world can't you ship me a friggin' dust mop? Look, there is no post office restriction against mailing dust mops. I checked. It's not made of lead, so it won't cost $100 to ship it. If it is a matter of shipping costs, I would pay a little more for a Prime account and get it here.

It's not just this item. More and more I am finding the goofiest stuff is now verboten for us at Amazon. In fact, I am pretty sure I could get a lead brick shipped here by Amazon. Sure enough. I just checked. I can get a lead brick shipped here - FOR FREE!

So in light of this new information, Amazon, I am again inspired to ask you : what the hell?!