Well, hello again: Post-Haitus Update

Hello again,

It's been a couple months since I have posted anything on here, mainly due to a hectic work schedule and the fact that I haven't had very many exciting trips recently. Since Peru, I've been here in the states, except for a weekend in Sweden (tickets were less than $350 r/t) and Disney World (if you don't count that as the US). It's been pretty quiet and I rounded the year out with a total of 46,855 miles flown. That makes 2015 the most traveled year since 2011.

Over the next few months, travel will be limited to flights back up to Seattle, but this fall I have one major trip on the horizon: My honeymoon. Naturally, you don't get this excuse to travel every day and this is going to be on amazing trip. Over the course of two and half weeks, we'll visit the Aitutaki in the South Pacific, New Zealand, Singapore, and Bali. In all, we will make a big pacific loop and fly just shy of completely around the world.

This is Aitutaki

The total cost for airfare and hotels for this 19 day trip was $2,225 per person, or about $120 per person per day ($4,450 total for all hotels and flights). For a comparison, a seven day tour of Paris excluding airfare to Europe can set you back $2,000 per person. For just a little more, we will be doing the entire trip and some of the hotels we will be staying at are splurge hotels (~$325/night), such as the Marina Bay Sands in Singapore and a beach front cottage in Aitutaki. Over the next couple posts on the blog, I'll talk about how this happened and what goes into planning something like this.

On another side, this year is going to be very exciting in terms of photography. I just upgraded to a Canon G9X premium compact, and I have three specialty cameras ordered and (hopefully) on their way to me soon. You will start seeing full spherical photos on here, along with better quality as well. So far, I have been using the G9X and like it quite a bit. Here are some sample photos from the weekend:

Overall, I'm impressed with it. I could have gone with the G7X, but looking forward to the honeymoon trip I wanted something very compact and that had multiple options for charging. While I would have enjoyed the lens on the G7X better, being able to charge via USB like you can on the G9X will be exceedingly useful.

As for other cameras, I should have before the honeymoon a Narrative Clip 2, a 360cam, and a Panono. These are all specialty cameras. The Narrative Clip is wearable camera that snaps a photo every 30 seconds or so. This gives you a stream of moments that you can go back and look into later, without having to explicitly worry about snapping a photo. I am looking forward to using it for timelapses. Meanwhile, the 360cam is all about 360 degree video. This space is getting a little more crowded, but the 360cam looks like a pretty solid product: The video stitching is done on the camera and quality seems to be on par with something like the Nikon Key Mission 360.

However, those two gizmos are not as exciting as the last one: The Panono. The panono is a spherical camera that uses 36 cameras to create the shot. The main advantage? Quality and size. Most of the other cameras on the market use one or two sensors, plus fish eye lenses, to create the shot. As a result, you get distortion and blur at the seams/edges, plus low resolution. In other situations you can get "ghosting" or parallax errors, which don't look that great.

The Panono, on the other hand, spits out a 100MP image and avoids a lot of the pitfalls of other options. The 36 cameras fire off at the same time so the whole scene is captured at the same time, and the resolution is pretty great. Check out this example and be sure to zoom in. It will be a unique way to capture places and it is on the way to me right now. I am pretty excited.

And there you have it. Next time I'll go into how I planned the honeymoon and why it was so cheap.

Where've you been? A quick two months in review

The simplest way to summarize my April is this: Crazy. In addition to completing a rather large project at work (the documentation was 200 pages and I wrote it in four weeks), I also ended up having a very, very busy month of travel. In April, I visited Norway, Sweden, Mexico, and Seattle. That's over 15,000 miles in a month.

Naturally, I am only now starting to catch back up.

Puerto Vallarta, Mexico

Seattle, WA

Stockholm, Sweden

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Oslo, Norway

Oakland, CA

Should I be afraid of flying? Looking at risk in light of the Germanwings disaster

On March 24th, 2015, one of the worst possible scenarios in aviation happened: A co-pilot purposefully caused an aviation disaster. Even worse is that all signs point to a fifteen minute long descent where the co-pilot purposefully kept the pilot out of the cockpit and where the people on the plane knew what was happening. Crashing into a mountain is unfathomable in itself, but the feeling of helplessness that the pilot and others on board must have felt make it far worse.

Photo by Aero Icarus

Given this horror and the very bad year of commercial disasters in 2014, should we stop flying or be afraid of flying? My answer is no. While there is always a risk when getting on a plane, flying is still one of the safest ways to travel and safer than many things we do without a thought on a daily basis.

There are various sources that peg the odds of dying in a plane crash somewhere in the range of one in a couple million for any given flight, but perhaps the risk published by the national safety council tells a better story. They publish information about what the odds of dying from a particular cause over the course of a lifetime on their website here (helpfully, they note that the overall odds of dying by any cause is 1 in 1).

Odds of dying by "Air and Space Incidents": 1 in 8,357

Odds of dying by "Choking from Inhalation and Ingestion of Food": 1 in 3,649

Odds of dying by "Motor Vehicle Crash": 1 in 112

...and there you have it. Getting on a plane is objectively much safer than things we do every day, like drive to work or eat anything at all.

Of course, there is also the subjective experience, which is often feel that things we don't have control in (like being a passenger in a flying metal tube) are more dangerous than things that we feel we have control over (like pilot a metal cube on a highway with thousands of other metal cubes that act completely on their own). Hopefully, being able to look at the actual odds can help us more rationally judge the risk (and control our fear, if the recent news is bothering you) when we do need to take the next trip on a plane.

Bird Strike! Alaska Air Flight 349 on 2014-11-14

Well, that was interesting. Last Friday, I went back up to Seattle. Or at least I tried to do. Unfortunately for me, we ended up turning around due to our plane hitting a bird. Nothing serious happened, but it still was a potentially dangerous situation. Thankfully, our pilots were able to land the plane safely and get us to Seattle -eventually. Here's the story.

From the start, the flight looked like it would be a good one: The plane was on time, we left on time, and the estimate with the winds was that were going to arrive early. It was, sadly, not to be. As we were climbing over San Francisco there was a slight drop in power from the engines and the plane leveled off. At fist, I didn't think much of it since the bay area is a crowded airspace and maybe we needed to level off to allow for other traffic.

However, then we turned east and started heading to Sacramento, I started to have my doubts. Pretty soon we were headed towards San Jose and it was pretty clear that there was something wrong. After about 10 minutes, the captain came on and told us that we hit a bird and that his controls were not working correctly...

...but that the First Officer's controls were fine (Maybe lead with that next time!). The pilots had the plane under control and set us down in Oakland with about 20-30 minutes of total time in the air. Emergency responders were out ready to great us if something went wrong, but the landing was smooth and we taxied into the gate on our own power. Everyone on board was calm about the situation, if a little annoyed at having plans abruptly changed.

What actually happened is that the bird took out the Pitot tubes, which are important for a lot of different functions on the plane, including air speed indication and supplying information to the engine controller. The Air France crash in 2009 into the Atlantic was attributed to a malfunction in the Pitot tubes. Thankfully, there was another undamaged set on our plane that kept everything running smoothly.

The truth is that Alaska did a pretty good job handling the delay. As soon as we were down, they were ready to hand out a meal voucher ($12, but sadly limited options like Chili's Too) and an apology card. The card promised to be back in touch with a discount off of a future flight. In the end, that was a $300 voucher, which isn't bad considering I only paid $186 for the ticket to Seattle. They arranged for a replacement plane, which did get us to Seattle... but at 2AM the next morning. On the other hand, they told us about the replacement plane within 15 minutes of landing and disembarking the original damaged plane. Overall, good job of handling the situation!

200,000 Pageviews!

We hit 200,000 page views! Thanks for reading!

ExPatSeattleFlyerGuy - I am headed to California!

Well, it looks like I will soon be a Seattle expat. I am moving to California for a job and I leave, well, tomorrow. I am really, really, really going to miss Seattle, but this is a step in the right direction professionally. I have a lot to catch up on here on the blog that has been delayed thanks to the move and new job, so let me give a little taste of what is to come...

Touring while Local: The Seattle Tour Series

The Seattle that I see is usually quite different from what a visitor sees while staying in Seattle. As a local, I have a deep rooted knowledge of the area and it is usually only when a friend from out of town is visiting that I get the opportunity to experience a local tour. It's the paradox of being a local: When there is always the possibility of seeing one of the local attractions, then you tend to put it off until another day. As a result, sometimes visitors see things in your own city that you haven't seen or that you haven't done in awhile.

Of course, there are things that I do regularly here. I love the Pike Place Market. I visit at least once or twice a month and this year nearly all of my Christmas presents came from there. Riding the ferry to Bainbridge Island has an importance to me that goes beyond just the ride. Viewing the cherry trees in bloom on the quad is an annual tradition. These are all some of the things that make me love Seattle and living here. However, recently I have decided to take a look at some of our local tours and to see Seattle as others see it. So, for the next month or so, I will be touring while local.

We will take a look at Savor Seattle's Pike Place Market Tour, The Chocolate Box's Tour de Chocolate, and Argosy Cruise's Locks Tour (to start). Join me as we take a look around town through tours!

250 posts!

This is the 250th post on this blog! It's been a looong time since I my first post where I set forth a modest agenda of cataloging my flights and some of my trips. It's been over three years, in fact!

Let's see where we've been!

1. The very first post!
2. Istanbul!
3. Seattle!
4. Berlin!
5. Amsterdam! (and this post with one of my most popular pictures)
6. Oman!
7. Dubai!
8. Istanbul again!
9. Greece!
10. Russia!
11. Mongolia!
12. Vegas!
13. Portland, OR!
14. Bainbridge Island!
15. Los Angeles!
16. Chicago!
17. Rio de Janeiro!
18. Iguacu Falls!
19. Buenos Aires!
20. New York!
21. Sweden!

...and many more to come..

The 250 Dutch Gulden image is courtesy of Leftovercurrency.com

FAA Endorses Common Sense: New Rules Pave Way for Electronics

This photo will soon be allowed to be taken under the new rules

The FAA announced today what we all knew deep down: That game boy (or camera) isn't going to down the plane. The newly adopted rules allow airlines to control how electronics are policed on their aircraft, pending the submission of proof to the FAA that everything is safe. That means that the next time a member of the cabin crew tells you that you can't take a photo or read your Kindle, it will be because of rules that the airline set and not an edict from the FAA.

I expect that airlines will be quick to jump on this since this type of amenity and opportunity to differentiate yourself doesn't come by very often and this is a pretty cheap feature to add to an airline. The caveat at the moment is that the rules still stand until the airline decides to change it, so "follow" the rules... for now. You can read the press release here and see my general reaction to the right. Finally! No more having to hide my camera or wonder if they are going to get on my case...

There is now a Simple Choice for International Data: T-Mobile.

If you travel internationally (even if it is just to Canada or Mexico), the moment you cross over the border you start paying exorbitant prices for the basic functions of your smart phone. If you have planned ahead, you might get off paying $30 for 120MB. If you haven't, then you risk a bit of sticker shock when the bill comes back: A single e-mail with a photo? $20-$50. It's not pretty.

T-Mobile has stepped in with an offer that can hardly be refused by anyone looking to travel abroad: Free unlimited international data and texts in over 100 countries. If you are traveling anywhere that is pink below, then you can open up your e-mail and look at Google Maps without fear. It won't cost you anything extra.

There are a few caveats: The free texting is to US number only. No tethering. Speeds are limited to email and maps, so no 4G for free. You need to have an international phone. There is also some language that some places still charging if there are additional taxes, which is not well described on the website. You also need to sign up for their "Simple Choice" plans, which actually aren't bad at all: $50 is the entry point with unlimited talk, text, and data with no contract (You have to bring your own unlocked device or buy one from them at full price... which is often a better deal than the subsidized handsets you get from other companies). Still, this takes a lot of the pain out of international travel and staying in touch. A tablet, like the Nexus 7, combined with a plan like this would be an ideal solution for just about all of your travel needs.

FAA Plans to Implement Common Sense; Allow Electronics during Takeoff and Landings

The AP is reporting that the FAA has recommended that passengers be allowed to use personal electronics during takeoff and landing. The era of ridiculous rules against reading Kindles, listening to music, and taking photos during the best part of the flight may finally be drawing to a close. Electronics would be allowed to be used in airplane mode while the aircraft is under 10,000 feet. That's a great change.

This photo is strictly verboten under the current rules. Hopefully that will change soon!

So far, the recommendation is just that: A recommendation. The FAA still has to act on it. Hopefully, they can get it through whatever process and into action as soon as possible. The AP is reporting that the new rules could take effect by early 2014. It can't come soon enough.

[Source: AP]

Zinio Giveaway! 10 Free Digital Magazine Subscriptions!

The very first giveaway on the blog! You could be the winner of one of 10 absolutely free digital magazine subscriptions from Zinio by filling out this short, short form.  Sorry! The giveaway is done! Winners will be notified shortly.

Strings? There are none! Winners will be selected at random from the entries and the winner can pick any of the magazines that Zinio offers, including Conde Nast Traveler (12 issues, valued at $20), National Geographic Traveler Interactive (8 issues, valued at $16), and Architectural Digest (12 issues, valued at $30). After I get back from Sweden (7/20/2013), I will select 10 people at random from the entries and notify the winners! This giveaway is open to anyone in the world!

One Hundred Thousand Visitors!

We've hit 100,000 visitors! Wow!

When I started this blog three years ago, I had no idea that anyone would actually find and/or this blog. It's fantastic that people are enjoying the blog and I look forward to the next 100,000 visitors!

The New King Street Station in Seattle!

The King Street Station first opened its doors for the public in 1906, but the 107 year old station recently reopened the doors to the past. Seattle's main train station has undergone a fantastic renovation and restoration to its original splendor after a modernist refurbishment in the 1960s or 1970s. The results make the Kind Street Station Seattle's newest destinations for visitors and a place for locals to rediscover.

Situated south of Seattle' business district and adjacent to both the stadium district and Pioneer Square, the King Street Station has long served the traveling public. The station was designed by member of the team that designed Grand Central Station in New York and was a classic station. The station serves the Sounder commuter service that connects Everett, Seattle, and Tacoma; trains headed to Vancouver BC and Portland;  and destinations further afield such as Chicago via the Empire Builder Line or Los Angeles via the Coast Starlight. But things have not always been well for the station.

Take a look:

Photo: Joe Mabel via WikiMedia

Photo: Beaster725 via Flickr

The "modernization" in the 1960s or 1970s left the station looking miserable. These photos photo what it looked like just a few years ago. It was a step up from the greyhound bus station in town, but not by much. The dropped ceiling at the top hid the original detail of the building which has now been restored. That low rectangular window in the picture above is visible on the left of the photo below.