I got back from spending almost a week in Chicago visiting my sister over thanksgiving. In my normal nerd fashion we spent most of the trip going to different museums in Chicago. The Museum of Science and Industry is a must see and takes a whole day to see everything. Upgrade from general admission to see the Smart Home (cool to see a lot of different green technologies come together) and take the tour of the U-505 (worth the extra 5 bucks.) We also went to the Field Museum, made me think of “Night at the Museum” but they have some cool exhibits and there is Sue, the fully intact t-rex on display.
The Lincoln park zoo is a great free thing to do in Chicago. This time of year they do “Zoo Lights” where the zoo is light up for the holidays and there ice sculptures and other fun for the kids. We took a bus tour that went all around the city and drops you off at the John Hancock building. The only way to see everything in the city and gets you as close as possible to see Obama’s house and you learn a little history and travel into parts of Chicago you wouldn’t want to go by yourself. ( just a little weird to be on a tour bus, a the driver says “to your right you will see one of the housing projects that the south side of Chicago is so famous for.”) All and all a good trip and I got to see some snow before heading back to Texas.
Here’s the quickly thrown together video I made of some of the cools things at Makerfaire. Quality isn’t that great and I shoot it on a Flip Ultra. Nonetheless enjoy.
I have been working the past several days on planning our trip to Seattle and I can’t wait. I already bought the airline tickets and have our hotel reservation made and I’m trying to use gCal to plan out everything in our schedule. I working on some stuff so that I can be blogging while out and about seattle and keep in touch with the folks who haven’t really gotten into the whole social networking thing. Come on April 4th.
So this weekend we were going to fly to Ohio to see family and leave my Dad so he could spend some time with his mom. Needless to say, we never got there. The snow that we had here thursday went there friday and caused alot of problems. We left and made it to columbus but never landed, just circled around until almost running out of fuel and having to divert to Detroit. American airlines then took all the luggage off the plane and quickly lost it. I had to scramble to reschedule everything and return to Dallas to try Saturday to get to Columbus on the dreaded flight 460. Saturday we get to the airport and 10 minutes after we check-in they cancel the flight. After one hour and three minutes on the phone with AA customer support I was able to get a refund for our tickets since they weren’t willing to reschedule the tickets for a time that works for us only the next day. I understand that it isn’t AA fault that the weather interfered with our flight but I shouldn’t be forced to take a flight days later when I can’t get off work or pay hundreds of dollars in fees to reschedule the tickets. AA is in the service industry and needs to remember what good customer service is about.
