Whipped Cream Difficulties

My regular readers (and my irregular readers, too; come to think of it, “Whipped Cream Irregulars” would be a good name for a band) may have figured out by now that I’ve spent much of the past week on the road. Specifically, I was in Tucson for the annual convention of the Smith and Wesson Collectors Association. (You might have been able to guess that I also made a brief trip to the Phoenix/Scottsdale area so I could visit Taliesin West.)

I’m not going to talk much about what went on at that convention here, since it is a closed private convention, and I’m not comfortable discussing the organization’s affairs on a public blog. (Jay G. and the rest of the Vicious Circle gang might be amused to know that there was an actual S&W police bike, manufactured in Springfield, MA and complete with lights and siren, on display at the convention. I didn’t get a chance to take a photo.) I will say I had a great time at the convention, and in Tucson in general. Sadly, I didn’t have time to hit any used bookstores or gun stores in the area, but maybe next time.

This is the first extended road trip I’ve taken since last year’s DEFCON, so I thought it might be interesting to do some notes about what worked and didn’t work on this trip.

What worked well:

• Project e. When I first got the netbook, I stated one of the reasons I purchased it was to have a high-speed low drag machine for use in the primary. After taking Project e (now with Ubuntu 10.04!) on the road for nearly a week, I have to say; it worked great, and was a much lighter travel setup than the MacBook. I was able to pretty much everything I wanted to do with it, including check email, update the blog, play music off the iPod with Rhythmbox, and transfer photos from the Nikon D40X to the machine. The only two things I wasn’t able to do were:
  1. Transfer files from Project e to the iPod. Rhythmbox kept giving me “read-only file system” errors. It turns out that while I was on the road, No Starch Press shipped my copy of Ubuntu for Non-Geeks 4th Edition; I haven’t had a chance to go all the way through it yet, but this problem is discussed on page 285. (It looks like the fix is to disable journaling on the iPod.)
  2. Serious photo editing. This was actually a personal choice on my part, rather than a limitation of Project e; the F-Spot Photo Manager worked well for importing photos, and I did do some light editing on the photos I posted.
     (I had problems importing photos directly off the Nikon, but I think that was because I was using the wrong USB cable; I had the same problems with the MacBook and iPhoto until I dug up the right cable. Since Project e has a built-in SD card slot, and the Nikon uses SD cards, that wasn’t a real issue; I just popped the SD card out of the Nikon, into Project e, and Ubuntu mounted the card like a regular file system.)
     I just didn’t feel like doing a great deal of photo editing on the netbook, due to the small screen and a personal preference to spend more time hanging out with friends and looking at guns instead of photo editing.
• Nikon D40x. Speaking of the D40x, it worked exceptionally well for this trip. This is the first digital SLR I’ve owned, and I’m still learning how to use it; all of the photos you see were taken in full auto mode, using the kit 18-55 mm lens, and I think they came out decently. In full auto mode, the D40x takes better photos than I’m capable of. I do need to work some more on exploiting the camera’s capabilities; in particular, I need to figure out how to use aperture priority so I can get better depth of field on some of those landscape photos. I also need to work on my soft skills (composition, framing, etc.) but the best way to learn those skills is…to take more photos.
• 5.11 bug out bag. At the Austin gun show in June, there was a guy selling 5.11 bags; I bought one of the PUSH packs (which I’ve been calling a tactical man-purse, or TMURSE) and one of the bail out bags (or bug out bags; I’ve seen it called both).
  The TMURSE has been getting use as a weekend bag; it works out well for carrying day-to-day stuff, including my N800, accessories, and my concealed carry gun plus ammo. This was the first time I’ve put the bug out bag to any extended use, though, and it was another item that worked better than I expected. It turned out that I could use it as a day bag and carry Project e, the D40x (both together were not a perfect fit, but it would work), the 80-200 mm lens for the Nikon, my smaller digital camera (a Canon SD1000), some Cliff bars or Power Bars, business cards, and a few other items. Both 5.11 bags get a hearty Whipped Cream Difficulties endorsement; all I need to do now is get some Velcro backing put on my S&WCA patch.
• Pima Air and Space Museum/Titan Missile Museum. These two museums, as I understand it, are related (or at least run by the same parent organization), and I encourage you to visit both of them. Pima Air has what I believe is the third largest collection of aircraft in the United States (after the Smithsonian Air and Space museum and Wright-Patterson). The only problem I had there was a limitation of our schedule; I was on a group tour that was set to run a half-day, and included a bus tour around the museum grounds, along with another bus tour of the Boneyard. By the time we finished both of those tours, we had less than an hour to visit the rest of the museum. If you’re going to go, I suggest planning to be there for a full day.
  I got to the Titan Missile Museum so early that I ended up getting my own private tour, which was fun (if a little overwhelming). That museum can probably be done in a half day, including driving time from Tucson; the standard guided tour is a little over an hour. (They do offer longer tours, but none were scheduled while I was there; check the website for details.)
• The Doubletree Hotel Tucson at Reid Park. Free cookies. Free drinks in the lobby from 5:30 – 6:30 PM. Free wireless (I think that was part of the deal our group arranged with the hotel.) A patio off of my room, complete with patio furniture. Citrus trees growing around the property. Very friendly staff. I didn’t get a chance to try either of the hotel restaurants, but other than that, the Doubletree gets my endorsement.
• Tucson itself. The highest compliment I can pay to a city is “I could live here”. And if my Austin privileges are ever revoked, I think I could live in Tucson. I didn’t do a whole lot of driving, but traffic didn’t seem that bad in the little driving I did do. Yes, it was hot, but the combined heat and humidity didn’t seem any worse to me than an equivalent day in Austin. The Tucson airport is small enough that it’s almost pleasant to deal with; sort of like the old Robert Mueller or T.F. Green. I wish I had been able to see more of the city, but I was mostly happy with what I did see.

Things that didn’t work out that great:

• Southwest Airlines. I flew Southwest because I had some frequent flyer credits (which I wasn’t able to use for this trip and an upcoming trip; I ended up having to split both trips into four segments, and use one credit for the outbound segment of each trip). Flying Southwest reminds me of the old jokes about Latvian People’s Airlines, “your cattle car in the sky”. This particular trip was a series of annoyances; as I noted previously, they temporarily misplaced my checked bag, my flight out of Tucson was delayed over an hour, my flight out of San Diego was also delayed, and there was an excessively long line at the express check-in in Tucson.
  I know that most of these things are just the problems of travel in the modern age, and none of them really hurt that much. But I never really got what I felt like was a sincere apology from Southwest for any of these things, including the misplaced bag. That, combined with the cattle-call seating, leaves a really sour taste in my mouth. (Southwest has started offering an “early check-in” option for an extra $10, which is an interesting revenue raising strategy. If you don’t pay the extra $10 each way, you take your chances against the people who did, and end up competing against Southwest’s computer for a good boarding position. If you do, you end up in the same boarding position as everyone else who did. I wonder how Southwest’s computer assigns boarding positions to the people who pay the fee; first booked, best position?)
  The problem is, what other choices are there? I like Continental, but now that they’ve merged with United “Breaks Guitars” Airlines, I’m not sure I can trust them. Every other airline I’ve flown is even worse. So what can a poor boy do (except sing in a rock and roll band)?
• Dining in Tucson was hit and miss. I had two good meals at the local branch of the Claim Jumper (a regional chain) and two good meals at the local Bruegger’s Bagels (which seems to understand that they’re in business to sell bagels, not sweet crap, unlike certain bagel chains that no longer sell onion bagels, not that I’m bitter or anything.)
  (The second meal at the Claim Jumper was particularly noteworthy; I was part of a large group, and shortly after we sat down, the management brought us three different desserts to pass around. Including the largest slice of chocolate cake I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, 14 people could not finish this cake.)
  I also had really good breakfasts at The Good Egg and the Broadway Cafe. Unfortunately, I had some not terribly good meals at Sushi Garden and the Kon-Tiki tiki bar (which really is a tiki bar, especially in terms of decor; sadly, the food and service were not that good).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Apple, asus_eee, Endorsements, Food, Geek, Guns, linux, Museums, netbook, Photography, Planes, project_e, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.