The old and new rail system

The old joke is that trains give you all the discomfort of airline travel, but in six times the time. The rail plan calls for trains to travel 100 miles per hour, so the joke should be revised to four times.

The fact is, trains are a great idea in a country the size of Japan, France or Britain, that you can backpack across in a day. They suck, just a little bit, for travel across a country 3000 miles wide. Why take a high-speed train that gets you from LA to NY in two days when you can fly and be there in 5 hours?

High-speed trains would be a better idea for high traffic commuter corridors. As an example, look closely at the map and you’ll notice you still can’t travel North. There is no connector between Oklahoma and Kansas City, or anywhere in Georgia up through Kentucky, Tennessee and into Indiana.

You can’t get from Albuquerque to Denver, Denver to Phoenix, Phoenix or Albuquerque to Salt Lake City, or any of those cities to anywhere in Texas.

If you are a salesman in the southwest, you can get to Chicago faster than you could run there, that’s true. Chances are most of your travel will still be by air, and flying short distances within your region, though.

It looks to me like someone went to Amtrak and said, “If you could go to all the same places using the same shitty routes, but do it marginally faster, what would that look like?”

Congrats, guys. You batted their answer out of the park.

CES was also better this year.

Don’t get me wrong. The number of booths pimping flash drives still outweighed the number of decent tech offerings about 3 to 1. That ratio is, however, significantly better than the 10 to 1 of last year.

And just in case you think I was joking about the wide variety of shapes and sizes of flash drives on display, the pic to the left is just one booth’s offering. This particular company has a 47 page catalog of options (my favorite is the goofy little sheik on page 13).

If you don’t see what you want (say a banana shaped flash drive to promote a fruit company), just call them, and they’ll crank one out for you. Personally, I think they should do more work with the porn awards that were also going on in Vegas. They could give away little donger shaped drives pre-loaded with clips of the nominees for best threesome and best oral.

As for the rest of the technology, I did find some cool stuff. I’ve shared a couple of the items related to broadband networks and TV via CableTechTalk.com. I really dig the PC Ride (video below). It’s a car shaped CPU that retails at $2,495. I’m not a big fan of the desktop case, so I was pleased to see someone making a different shape. I guess it’s only a matter of time before someone has a 47 page catalog of PC designs, though.

I also really dug the ultra-thin TVs that most of the manufacturers unveiled. Just in case you haven’t heard “Oh my god! It’s so small!” enough in your life, bring one of these home.

Some of the really cool finds I didn’t put up on the cable blog because they aren’t really broadband/connected home specific. For instance, I love little more than the ocean. Any time Mrs. Quip and I vacation, we generally head for a tropic island. While there, I like to snorkel, and often wish I had an underwater camera.

The dive mask to the right has a 5.0 MP digital camera built into the mask (I know, it’s a grainy picture). Push a red button on the top right (your left) to snap a picture.

I’d love to take this with me on my next trip to the Caribbean.

Another cool find (especially for parents with aspiring social media monsters for kids) is Crayola’s kid friendly video camera.

Now your toddlers can film themselves dropping mentos in diet coke and destroying your living room. When they’re done, you can use it to film them washing Diet Coke off the walls.

When the little critters grow up, and tire of tedious housecleaning, they’ll no doubt move on to killing copious amounts of brain cells by vegging out in front of the TV playing video games. By the staggering amount of controllers and promos for it, there’s a good chance Guitar Hero 12 or Rock Band 9 will be the game of the day.

If, however, they decide they’d like to learn to play an actual guitar, you should check out JamVox. JamVox is a software application and a mini-amp. Connect the amp to your PC and an actual guitar, and the software will strip out the guitar track of any song – allowing you to play along with your favorite music. Think of it as Guitar Hero on the extra, extra hard setting. The difference, however, is after your done some chicks will actually be impressed because you can play a real instrument.

I find London to be quite nice. The city itself is amazing and the countryside near Windsor (where we were staying for the conference) was beautiful. The campus at Royal Holloway and specifically Founder’s Hall was spectacular. It actually made me think about how much incredible architecture must have been lost in the war.

I found Londoners to be a very warm people, very friendly and engaging. Last night we were invited to attend a live webcast by the Liberal Democratic candidate for Mayor of London. The webcast was unremarkable other than being the first use of UStream by a politician in the UK.

However, Brian Paddick, a former beat cop who rose through the ranks, left the force, then wrote a book exposing corruption in its ranks, was a very inviting guy. I hope he does well in the election. I’ve not met the Tory candidate, but based on my experience with candidates I can say Paddick seems like a genuinely nice guy – something rare in those who want to get elected.

I had a chance to stroll through London on Wednesday and will share lots of pictures when I get home this evening.

I’m disappointed that I did not get a chance to see Windsor castle – especially since we were only two miles away. I’m sure I’ll be back, though and will have to see it then.

We did get a chance to visit The Monkey’s Forehead, a pub in Egham Hill. While it was more sports bar and less pub, it was a good time.

I’ve actually been surprised at how much American culture has extended to the UK. I turned on the TV and looked through the guide. BBC was showing The Office and I was excited thinking I would get to see the original UK version.

When it began, and Steve Carrell appeared on screen, I was surprised that I had come all the way to the UK, and found myself watching the American version of a show that we stole from the UK to begin with.

Anyway…. My flight’s about to board. I’ll post more later. Until then, ta-ta from London.

I’ve asked for her permission to strip the identifying details and share them with others, as I think they’re a really good read. The notes she sends are almost completely non-partisan, and rarely mention the political implications of the war or make an effort to “cheerlead”. They’re just her thoughts on her current situation, and they’re pretty interesting

I’ve posted the full text after the jump, but thought I’d highlight my favorite part of her most recent dispatch.

The unusual becomes commonplace and the completely bizarre becomes completely acceptable.

Even the interaction between people is different. Social norms do not apply. There is an intense need for human connection that drives relationships between people to form quickly and sometimes in unconventional ways. For example, at lunch the other day, I ran into a fellow passenger from my maiden rhino voyage into the IZ. I had not seen him since the morning of our arrival, but he recognized me and asked to join me at the table. Two hours later I found myself able to recite back the intimate details of his life: Where he has lived in the States over the past fifteen years; the names, ages and pursuits of his two sons; the circumstances of his divorce; and the people he most often calls back home.

A few evenings prior, I was dining with a co-worker when an army captain sat next to us, showed us pictures of his grand-daughter‚Äîhis “reason to get home”‚Äî told us all about his wife and children back in Indiana, gave us a full account of the last twenty years of his life, and shared with us his political affiliation and views on the 2008 primaries. He kept commenting on what a pleasure it was to carry on a normal conversation with two-young women.

There is Romanian special operations captain who I occasionally meet for coffee in the evening, simply because he tells me that I am the only person he speaks with outside the office and how he looks forward to it every day. I don’t know what he does here in Baghdad, but I do know all about his beautiful daughter, the reasons for his divorce, the grueling physical and psychological training he endured to obtain his commission, and the songs currently on his I-pod playlist.

It can take years to build relationships in the real world. Here, it may take only hours.

Click through to read more.

To: Michael Turk
Subj: The Zone, The New Normal, and Human Connection (Baghdad Dispatch 3)

Greetings friends,

I am now into my third week in Baghdad. I have adjusted to the heat, my stomach is now immune to the questionable bottled water, and I am finally sleeping through the night, despite the constant hum of air traffic above. As I have learned very quickly, any victory achieved here, however small, should be received with much exaltation. So I am rejoicing the fact that I have somewhat successfully acclimated to the strange new world I now call home, in what I am told is record time.

It has been quiet here these past few weeks. (I am ferociously knocking on my desk as I type this, of course.) Almost uncomfortably quiet. With the confluence of so many threat-inducing events (the Petraeus/Crocker testimony, the commencement of Ramadan, and now the tumult over the latest Blackwater incident), many people expected September to be a rough month. It seems, however, that the Madhi Army is abiding by Al Sadr’s command and is standing down for a period of time. But whether or not the relative quiet is only a temporary reprieve or a latent and hopefully lasting effect of the troop surge, it has put many people at ease and made the IZ a comfortable environment to ease into, if such a thing is possible.

Speaking of the IZ, I have mentioned it only in passing in the last two email updates, so I now owe you all a full account of what life is like in the strangest place that I have ever lived.

The Zone, The New Normal, and Human Connection

The IZ (International Zone) is the roughly three-and-one-half square mile patch of land located in the Karkh beladiyah (or district) of Baghdad. It is nestled in a curve of the Tigris River. (Imagine if you will that the Tigris is an arm bent at a ninety degree angle. The IZ is located inside the elbow.) The Embassy Compound (where I live, work and spend most of my time), is the smaller and more secure area immediately surrounding one of Saddam’s former palaces. The compound houses the palace, the gym, the DFAC (there is an obscene amount of food here, but that says nothing about its quality), the post office, the laundromat, and that’s about it.

The palace itself is an enormous concrete monstrosity that in a brilliant twist of irony is now home to the largest U.S . mission abroad. The interior has some spectacular rooms–one which houses a mural of Iraqi scud missiles shooting into the heavens. (It’s utterly bizarre.) There is a dimly lit rotunda beneath a blue dome off of which the two wings of the palace radiate that is quite impressive. And there are several atriums and gallery-type spaces with palatial ceilings and detailed tile work that are quite a sight to behold. But what Saddam possessed in power, he certainly lacked in taste, because the palace is also filled with some of the most heinous furniture, light fixtures and decorations that I have ever seen. These Saddam-era relics are now mingled with hundreds of computers, cheap plywood desks, file cabinets, and every other manner of office equipment, adding to the oddity of the environment. Yet, in walking any of the long marble halls, one can tell that in its prime, this was once a majestic residence.

Several thousand civilian, military and contract personnel spend their days busily typing away at their desks in the makeshift embassy offices. These personnel sleep and shower in the trailer communities surrounding the palace–communities with names like, “The Palms”, ” Riverside” and “Embassy Estates”–as if we could be fooled into thinking that we live in condos and not trailers. (Yes, I sleep in a trailer and work in a palace–I’m still trying to figure this one out.) Enormous palm trees sprout out of the dusty earth between the trailers, shading plastic lawn chairs and picnic tables where people gather to eat and relax on the evenings that we are not warned to stay indoors. And of course, there is the infamous palace pool‚Äîthe social hub of the compound‚Äîwhere you can not only swim laps and play water sports, but where the embassy social office organizes barbeques and outdoor movies.

In case you think for a moment that you have stumbled into a resort and not a combat zone, there are enough tanks, humvees and up-armored SUVs driving around to shock you back into reality. Equally as sobering are the concrete t-walls that enclose the entire compound itself, and also many of the structures within the IZ. They block the horizon and any view of the city, so that almost everything in sight is either dust or cement. In many ways, this place can feel somewhat like a prison.

Your world is very small if you limit your movement to the Embassy Compound, alone. If you have access to a car, you have the “freedom” to travel around IZ, which is also home to various military installations, the PX, shops where local Iraqi vendors sell their wares, a very shady liquor store, contractor compounds, the embassies of several other nations, several Iraqi ministry buildings and complexes, the Al Rasheed Hotel, and the remnants of Saddam-era Iraqi monuments. Traveling around the IZ is not necessarily easy and not always safe, but it is imperative if you want to work, attend meetings, and not go completely stir-crazy.

Since you can borrow a car and drive around, you can get a speeding ticket in the IZ. You can also play horseshoes or sunbathe by the pool, go rug shopping, take beginner salsa lessons, and even run a 5k with 200 other people zealous enough to go jogging at 6am. Meals are served four times a day, but you can drink coffee any time you like at the 24 hour coffee shop (the Green Bean), which will serve you up any imaginable coffee beverage a la Starbucks. If you need a drink and you are not in the military, you have several options that do not require a trip to the shady liquor store: there is the RSO bar, the OFF-Site bar, the FBI bar, and the British Embassy (which apparently throws a kicking happy hour every Thursday night). I will have a full report on this one next Friday morning.

In the IZ you are in the minority of you are: a woman; not carrying a weapon; wearing a suit or heels; not wearing a uniform; and not covered in dust.

There is constant noise. Helicopters (too often medivacs) and military planes roar above with regularity, and there are periodic distant booms that the seasoned resident will recognize immediately as car bombs or IEDs. But there is also the frequent sound of laughter and on weekends (which are Fridays and Saturdays), the sounds of makeshift garage bands—playing covers of every imaginable song—spilling over the concrete t-walls and filling the hot night air.

This is a place of striking contradictions. But over time, these are the things that become familiar and the things that become “normal”.

You soon fail to notice that the person beside you at dinner has a loaded beretta in their belt. The signs around the compound that say things like, “Alcohol consumption while armed is prohibited”, and “Deadly force authorized. Stay back 100 meters”, and “No sweaty PT gear in the DFAC”, cease to be so amusing.

As a female, you learn to not be uncomfortable because three tables of soldiers stop eating to gaze at you as you wait in the lunch line, or that the team of Iraqis filling sandbags outside your hooch, stop working to stare at you as you pass by in your tank top and shorts on the way to the gym. Counting the steps from your trailer to the nearest “duck and cover bunker” becomes routine. And it no longer seems morbid to display your blood-type on your body armor. In fact, it no longer feels odd to wear body armor.

The unusual becomes commonplace and the completely bizarre becomes completely acceptable.

Even the interaction between people is different. Social norms do not apply. There is an intense need for human connection that drives relationships between people to form quickly and sometimes in unconventional ways. For example, at lunch the other day, I ran into a fellow passenger from my maiden rhino voyage into the IZ. I had not seen him since the morning of our arrival, but he recognized me and asked to join me at the table. Two hours later I found myself able to recite back the intimate details of his life: Where he has lived in the States over the past fifteen years; the names, ages and pursuits of his two sons; the circumstances of his divorce; and the people he most often calls back home.

A few evenings prior, I was dining with a co-worker when an army captain sat next to us, showed us pictures of his grand-daughter‚Äîhis “reason to get home”‚Äî told us all about his wife and children back in Indiana, gave us a full account of the last twenty years of his life, and shared with us his political affiliation and views on the 2008 primaries. He kept commenting on what a pleasure it was to carry on a normal conversation with two-young women.

There is Romanian special operations captain who I occasionally meet for coffee in the evening, simply because he tells me that I am the only person he speaks with outside the office and how he looks forward to it every day. I don’t know what he does here in Baghdad, but I do know all about his beautiful daughter, the reasons for his divorce, the grueling physical and psychological training he endured to obtain his commission, and the songs currently on his I-pod playlist.

It can take years to build relationships in the real world. Here, it may take only hours.

While it seems strange to reveal the intimate details of one’s life in such a short period of time, it also feels necessary in a place like Baghdad. There is a visceral need to feel that you are surrounded by friends because you know that just beyond the t-walls, there are plenty of people who are your enemies.

I have never before lived in a war-zone and I realize that the world I have described is not typical of one. But there is nothing around here that is typical. It’s a new kind of normal that I have never known. Welcome to the IZ.

One of the benefits of the day job is I get to travel to different states and update our state associations on the latest happenings in Washington. I find it refreshing to get out of DC as often as humanly possible to talk to real people. Granted the conversations are still about politics. Just once it would be nice to spend a week outside DC and never have anyone mention Presidential campaigns, Congress or politics in general.

When you live in DC for longer than a week, you discover two universal truths. First, every conversation you have with a stranger involves the following three questions:

• Where are you from? (nobody is from DC)
• Where do you work?
• What do you do?

If the answers to those questions don’t indicate that the two of you can do anything for each other professionally, the conversation usually ends there.

The other universal truth is that when you leave DC, if you tell anybody that’s where you live, it will immediately begin a conversation about politics. When I’m not traveling for work, I’ve begun to tell strangers that I live in West Virginia and study insect feces for a living. At least I can occasionally have a conversation about something other than the failings of our elected officials.

So anyway, I’ve never been to the Pensacola/Alabama region, and it is actually quite nice. It actually reminds me of my trip to Turks and Caicos. The geography (at least near the beach) is fairly similar. Turks & Caicos didn’t have as many trees, and the houses a half mile inland were not as nice, but the overall feel is very similar.

I could do without the humidity. It was quite muggy the last couple of days, but that’s Florida in summer. You can’t build on swampland and not have humidity. I’ve come to accept that about DC as well.

The two downsides (which I am always looking for in every situation) were the age of the hotel (it was built in the late 70s or early 80s) and my breakfast this morning. The trouble with a hotel knocking on 30, is the lack of modern conveniences – especially if they have not done renovations to the infrastructure. For instance, the hotel had beautiful views of the Gulf, but it had no Internet at all (forget wi-fi, I would have taken a cable) in the rooms. There was free wi-fi in the lobby, but I’d rather not hang out in the lobby. It also had no OnDemand movies, no decent cable, and little in the way of amenities. They really need to do some work.

Breakfast this morning was sort of an oddity. I would not think it was possible to get bad orange juice in Florida. I don’t know why I would assume that, but I did. Village Inn proved me wrong. I had a small drink of the worst orange juice I’ve ever had. I would have asked them to replace it, but I always fear doing that. I assume they’ll either taint it or they’ll give me another glass just as bad. Fool me once, and all…

In the words of the immortal Franz Zedlacher:

The meal was great, and would have recieved [sic] a 10 if the roll was warm.

Well, yesterday I had to fly to Asheville, North Carolina for a conference. I was speaking at 9 AM this morning. My flight was supposed to leave Dulles at 4:00 yesterday, so I headed to the airport around 2:30.

I ended up leaving almost an hour late because the inbound flight was delayed leaving Dayton, OH. These things happen, so no big deal, right?

When I arrived in Charlotte for my connection, it too was delayed creating a 3 1/2 hour layover (even after my one-hour inbound delay. Since Asheville is only about 2 hours from Charlotte, I figured I’d simply rent a car and drive. I approached the gate agent and asked to have them pull my bag so I could grab a rental car.

Here’s where the story goes from simply pedestrian to tragically ironic.

The gate agent told me that my bag could not be taken out of the stream because it had already been routed to the holding area for my connecting flight. They assured me that doing so meant my bag would arrive at my destination.

See where this is going?

It didn’t… I arrived at my destination after 10:00pm (8 hours from DC to Asheville BY AIR – a new record). My bag however, went into some sort of luggage limbo. After a half-hour trying to explain the concept of a missing bag to the gate agent in Asheville, the guy next to me indicated he was also waiting for an errant bag – and had been since Wednesday (5 days).

I did without the bag, grabbed some new clothes for my meeting, and headed back to the airport at 10:00 AM this morning. upon check-in, I asked them to check the status of my bag. It had not been located, let alone routed to Asheville.

After a half hour flight delay leaving Asheville, and another hour delay due to a blown air conditioner in Charlotte, I was batting .1000 for late flights on this trip – and all of them were due to mechanical problems (nice reliable fleet, huh?)

The US air lost baggage tracking system tells me they have found my bag, but not where it is or when I can expect it.

Under most circumstances, I’d say this was an unbelievably bad trip, but it’s par for the course on US Air.

If you have ever flown AmericaWest, you know how bad they were pre-merger. It actually appears that they were so horrible they have actually sucked US Airways into the toilet with them.

On our flight to NM last week, they decided to sit me, Mrs. Quip, and baby Quip in three different rows, all in middle seats. Unfortunately, baby quip is 15 months old, so that presented a problem. Normally the gate agents would happily reassign the seats, or at the very least, ask the other passengers if they would help accommodate at least the mother and child… But not the new US Air. Nope. Their reply was, verbatim, “Well there’s nothing we can do for you.”

I could write that off, but then the flight back became even better. They cancelled our flight due to weather problems. No biggie. That happens all the time. But then the gate agent sent everyone back to the ticket counter to rebook… Except the ticket counter was closed, and nobody was available to help until they called in some agents from home.

So now I am waiting for my rebooked flight, and it’s delayed for 90 minutes because they have to bring in a crew from somewhere else. Fortunately my layover in Phoenix is better than 3 hours, so I should make my flight to DC.

Let my life serve as a cautionary tale. Never fly US Air…