Seattle Trip/Pax Prime 2012 Cont. – Thursday

No worries. The lack of length in this post will more than make up for the run on mess that was Wednesday of this trip.

Honestly there wasn’t anything of note until the afternoon when I checked into the Paramount Hotel. Not sure how I pulled it off, but I was able to book a room here Monday of this week! Someone must have cancelled their reservation. I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I am the guy that doesn’t plan anything and then rushes through everything at the last minute. I didn’t even pack until the night before my flight, which was at 6 am if you interested. Okay, back to Thursday. Found a suitable parking spot for a couple days (I didn’t plan on driving again until Saturday), ImPark #73 looked to be a good choice (much more on them in Friday’s post. I got up to my room and got everything set for an early start Friday morning. If you’ve ever been the Pax before you know if you want to avoid lines and such early you’ll need to stand in line.

After getting my room squared away I got a hold of friends to plan out our meeting place for the Seahawks vs. Raiders game that evening. I haven’t been to a Raiders game or a football game at CenturyLink Field before so I was pretty pumped. Just thought I add this pic in here, seems fitting:

Plan was to meet up about 6 pm. I caught a quick beer with one friend at King Street Bar & Oven. Who knew I could drink a PBR tallboy so fast? Caught up with two more friends I hadn’t seen in forever and headed in. I debated buying tickets for the hawks nest, but wearing Raiders from head to toe it wouldn’t have been safe for me over there. Mind you this was preseason, but the Raiders have seen better days. When Terrelle Pryor is the only one on the field making things happen you’re in bad shape. We (the Raiders if you didn’t know by now) didn’t score until I was on my way out of the game. Oh, here’s a plug for a buddy doing some ridiculous tailgating. If you’re ever at a Hawks game you should check them out. Tell Tony I said hello. Here’s a pic:

After the game I crashed knowing I had to be up quite early. It didn’t help I also had about 5 or 6 in me by the 3rd quarter.

Coming up next….Pax!

Seattle Trip/Pax Prime 2012 – Wednesday

So I’m thinking I will document my trip home this year. Be patient, this will be a boring read.

Wednesday:

Galaxy Nexus Rage –
Started off Tuesday afternoon finally getting my Galaxy Nexus in the mail. Transferring the old data from my G2 was simple and it looked like I was good to go with my new Android 4.1 device. Got everything packed up and headed out quite early Wednesday morning. Sitting at the airport getting acclimated to the new UI and everything is going great. Finish getting all my apps downloaded and updated and I’m off and rolling. Layover in ATL with no issues. Turned on airplane mode for my flight to Seattle and went to sleep. After sleeping through most of Battleship (you know you did too) I woke up just before landing. Once we touched down I switched off Airplane mode and text the fam that I landed with all my fingers and toes intact. As before, all was well. Since I’m the genius who forgot my MacBook charger I needed to pick another one up so I headed to the closest Apple store to pick one up. On the way I noticed my phone stopped working. I kept getting the following when I tried to connect to T-Mobile’s network, “error while searching for networks”. I tried everything including a factory refresh on the phone. I knew my sim card was a few years old so I headed into the nearest T-Mobile store to clone a new one. No help. Thanked Aaron (what an awesome name) for his help and headed to the nearest Panara Bread to steal some Wifi and get a hold of the Google Support folks and do some online research. Looks like this was an issue with the Galaxy Nexus when users upgraded to Jellybean prior to the OTA update. (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1514420) I brought my old G2 on the trip with me since I hadn’t transferred everything over yet (saved my ass). I gave Google Support a call was pleasantly surprised that they picked up the line, Keith was pretty new to the team at the time and actually was researching the issue on the same forums I had looked at. They also didn’t have any charged devices, or any with sim cards so he couldn’t replicate my issue. Long story short while talking with him I noticed that when I held down the power button to bring up the airplane mode option it would switch airplane mode off and on by itself every three seconds. After telling Keith this he forwarded me onto Samsung for a replacement. That process was easy enough except for being connected to three different people with Samsung to initiate the RMA process. Like I said, having my old phone really saved my ass.

UPDATE: New Galaxy Nexus waiting for me when I returned home after a week. Three days into it and all looks and works great.

National Car Rental Rage –

A little background on National. They’ve always been great. If done corrected you should never have to visit the counter, just go pick up a car and show the attendant your license on the way out. Easy as pie. Unfortunately that didn’t happen for me this time. Upon picking my Malibu from the fleet of Malibu’s on the lot I headed to the attendant at the exit and all my account info hadn’t updated since I last lived in Federal Way, Wa. Obviously that’s not good if your walking around with a Kentucky DL. That was why my credit didn’t work either, they had an expired one on file. I offered another card as payment and was directed to customer service so I drove back through and upon going to the customer service window I was first informed that the exit attendant could have done this while under her breath she said how lazy the attendant was. Yay, finally on my way.

Capital One Rage –

Well it looks like when National tried to run my Capital One card they did something that caused a hold on my account that required me to call and speak to someone. This took waiting on hold  about 20 minutes and explaining that yes, I was in Washington and yes, I am me.

What a way to start off vacation. Here I am off the plane by 10:30 am and by 3 pm I still haven’t enjoyed a single minute.

First things first, I headed back to my old stomping grounds to make sure my childhood home is still a parking lot. Wow, Eastside Tacoma has seen better days. Almost nobody has a green lawn, no kids playing anywhere and the park looks abandoned. Here’s a pick (look you can see my old room!).

Finally headed off to pick up my sister from work and head to dinner with our mom and younger sister. It had been a while so the Rock sounded good. As to be expected, good pizza and okay beer. Finished off the night having a few drinks with my sister at the new Ram in Felony Way.

Finally Done!

I finally completed watching TNG last week via Netflix streaming. Wow, so many memories from childhood. I grew up watching this show. This was one of the few shows that my whole family could get behind. As the years went one my sister and I became more fans of Voyager and DS9 respectively, but TNG was always my moms favorite. My sister like Voyager for the stronger women’s roles and I always like DS9 for it’s action, particularly the Dominion war.

One thing that stood out immediately for me was differences in special effects and the seasons went on as well as how many of the same actors came back on again and again in different supporting roles.

In the end I ended up wanting to watch DS9 over again. The bad part about that is that as far as I know DS9 won’t be on instant streaming until at least October. I begun watching voyager, but I doubt it will suffice.

Parting Is Such Sweet Sorrow

Today I noticed a dusty object under some paperwork on my desk. To my surprise it was my trusty old Dell XPS 1530. I Immediately powered it up and logged in (almost forgot my own password) and upon getting through the welcome screen in Vista I was greeted with a large amount of notification as basically everything was out of date. Since March I’ve been using a new Macbook Pro that I’ve also install Windows 7 on. I begin to update everything like a good little user and a thought comes to mind. “Why don’t you just get rid of this thing?” I’m currently going through the motions of finding all the manuals, chargers, software CD’s, and etc. for this thing and I’m beginning to feel a bit nostalgic. I had some really good times with this PC. I bought it back in 2007 and it’s taken me through some of the best games I’ve ever played (Portal, TF2, Oblivion, Demigod, MW1 & MW2, Sins, and many more), not to mention being an excellent travel companion. Although it’s not the lightest of laptop it always gave me great battery life and performed like a champ. I’ve also got some pretty sweet stickers on the back. It’ll be on Ebay/Craiglist sometime this week. I might shed a tear between now and then.