Archive for the 'General' Category
This pizza was lunch on Wednesday.
Dinner on the train was not so good. They were sold out of most things, I had to settle for some dry and flavorless salmon. Things were too hecktec for any pictures… Will try again today.
The train is about an hour and a half behind schedule – I hope they can make that up, since I don’t really want to be getting into San Antonio at 23:00 or later!
According to the trusty GPS, I’m south of Joliet Illinois. The train is rolling at sixty mph right now, and seems to max out around eighty.
The ride is a lot rougher than I thought it would be – so much for “riding on rails” referring to a smooth ride. It’s so bumpy and turbulent I’m having trouble typing. Here’s a picture of my laptop setup in my little room.
Lunch at Giordano’s was excellent. The small pizza was too much for this man to tackle, I had to leave some behind. It was only a five minute walk from the train station, almost right across the street from the Sears Tower. The weather was not at all pleasant, I didn’t take many pictures.
I can’t get my phone to roam on the EVDO network, so I’m stuck at 1x speeds … better than nothing at least!
I made this mistake of printing the schedule of stops for my train, the Texas Eagle. I’ve been reviewing the stops, seeing if there’s anything of interest that can be seen from the station. In Saint Louis, the gateway arch is very close – I hope the weather cooperates so I can snap a few photos.
However, I’ve developed the habit of looking at the track mileage between stops, and the time Amtrak claims it takes the train to travel that distance.
So far the worst stops I’ve found are between Dallas and Forth Worth. The train is scheduled to arrive at noon in Dallas, departing twenty minutes later for Forth Worth. The track distance between the two stops is thirty-one miles. However, the train is not scheduled to arrive at Forth Worth until 13:55. So that means Amtrak estimates the train to take roughly an hour and a a half to cover that thirty-one miles. The train then takes a leisurely fifty minute stop in Forth Worth before rumbling south-westerly for Central Texas. Luckily I’m not traveling all the way to Los Angeles on this train. After arriving in San Antonio at 22:25, the train does not depart until 5:40 the next morning!
I continue to remind myself, taking the train is not about getting someplace quickly.
Wow, it seemed like the vacation was a long ways off, and it still feels that way, but I’m leaving Wednesday.
The train leaves at like 08:15 on Wednesday, so I’ll be leaving my house at about 05:00 so I can get there early and maybe have a quick breakfast. The Giordano’s a few blocks away on Jackson is still my plan for lunch during the ~3 hour layover in Chicago. According to my folks and the Amtrak website, people traveling with a room on the train have access to some sort of lounge with a concierge that will secure your baggage for you.
Once I’m on the train, I want to roll a lot of video of the view out the window. A little googling and I found some ideas for real-time transcoding of DV output from a firewire camera direct to mpeg4 xvid files. This setup will let me film for 100′s of hours using my little 160g portable usb drive. I’ll also shoot some footage of inside the train with my shooter – I imaging it’s pretty tight in there, and I don’t have a fisheye lens.
I got my ticket for the fair in the mail a few days ago – it’s not nearly as fancy as the passes to other technology conventions – just a plain paper ticket with multicolor printing on it, no holograms even!
If anyone going to the fair wants to contact me directly, shoot me a gmail @ gordonthree and I’ll give you my cell phone number. I plan to travel with two phones, one of which I’ve subscribed to EVDO internet service on. Maybe I can even blog during the train ride.
I just noticed my blog looks awful in IE7 and even worse in IE8. Are there any html gurus in the readership that would be kind enough to tell me whats wrong?
Update: I switched to the “classic” theme and then back to the theme I like and the site is now rendering properly in IE7. There appear to be a few icon images missing, I’ll have to dig those up from somewhere.