Staying in Downtown San Diego? The Bristol Hotel could be your best bet

I recently had the pleasure of traveling to San Diego for meetings at a downtown office. My host for this trip booked me into The Bristol Hotel.

Being unfamiliar with this particular establishment, and a trifle miffed that I would not be earning points with one of the 2 hotel brands I normally choose (Hyatt and Marriott), I decided to check out the hotel online.

Nice website, nice pictures, and this view from Google Street View was reassuring (it's so cool that one can now wander the neighborhood around a destination using Street View). The locale was within a couple of blocks of the shops and movie theaters at Horton Plaza. In the other direction is Little Italy and the office I was visiting. All very promising, but the room rates at the Bristol seemed a tad low for an upmarket downtown hotel, so I was still a little wary.

Well, shame on me for doubting my host's taste, The Bristol is an excellent hotel, starting with the friendly staff in the very relaxing lobby. This is equipped with a basic PC workstation and a laser printer, handy for printing out things like boarding passes and last minute reading materials for meetings. BTW, I am not a fan of vast stretches of showy marble and huge shiny chandeliers in hotel lobbies. So when I say relaxing I mean things like comfy seating. Give me the soft and casual touch so I can feel at home.

On the way to my room I started to get a very good feeling--the corridor was wonderfully wide. This boosted my hopes that the room itself would offer what I call "business hotel gold." I'm talking, in hushed tones, about silence, which most frequent business travelers consider truly golden. The main thing I need from a hotel when I'm traveling on business, the thing that beats all manner of other amenities, is a good night's sleep.

Entering the room itself was a revelation: There was a lot of room! A lot more than in a typical cookie-cutter business hotel. This was tastefully decorated space and plenty of it. All behind a solid, sound-deadening door, with a number of nice touches: robes, slippers, lighted magnifying mirror in the well-appointed bathroom, flat-screen TV, big bay windows, and a desk with a proper writing chair (i.e. one that adjusted high enough for me to type in without hunching over).

A great night's sleep was followed by a fine breakfast (one of the best breakfast burritos ever--I confess I could only eat half of it and the staff happily packed the other half to go, which made for an inexpensive supper that evening).

So, I can definitely recommend the Bristol Hotel. Only later did I realize that the Bristol is part of a group of independent hotels, the Greystone Hotels. They have properties in San Diego, San Francisco, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, and Bend, Oregon. I look forward to staying at the Bristol again, and trying some of the other Greystone Hotels.

Road Trip Tip Number 17: "Holding Onto the Night"

Tired of the morning sun waking you up too early when you're staying in a hotel? Annoyed that you went to the trouble, before retiring for the night, of pulling the thick curtains together so that you wouldn't be woken up by the sun, only to find that the drapes didn't overlap enough to block that tall strip of morning glory now slanting across your face?

Welcome to my world, at least until I started making a habit of carrying a few binder clips in my travel bag. They work great for holding the drapes in a fully-overlapped, light-blocking configuration.

But recently I switched to an even simpler solution. Finding myself on the road without my trusty binder clips, I rotated one of the hotel's trouser/pant coat-hangers by ninety degrees: Problem solved. The clips on these hangers are usually padded in some way so that they don't damage your clothes, or the drapes. And I always make sure I take the hanger off the drapes and return it to the closet when I get up, that is: when I am ready to get up.

WARNING: This is a safe "use" of a hotel coat hanger. Do NOT hang any kind of anything from a hotel room sprinkler head. The consequences can be VERY costly. I saw this first hand recently when checking into one of the hotels I had been using for my visits to the new Monetate offices in Conshohocken, just north of Philadelphia, the Spring Hill Suites in Plymouth Meeting. This is a dependable hotel for the business traveler but sadly it is sometimes frequented by young--and occasionally foolish--persons; like the kids who hung up their swimming trunks to dry on a sprinkler head in a third floor room above the lobby, causing it to discharge a bunch of water that pretty much ruined the lobby. I arrived late on a Sunday evening to see carpets and wall coverings and ceilings, torn up, peeled back and generally in a mess.

In other travel news: At the end of August I'm embarking on a major road trip: 2,900 miles across our great land, from top right to lower left, towing a small U-Haul trailer. The Jeep is being prepped and I am packing in my spare time. I hope to share some more tips from the road.

My destination is San Diego, to take up a new position: Security Evangelist for ESET, the anti-virus, anti-cybercrime company.

One of the many things that appealed to me about this opportunity was the fact that ESET is truly a global company. Not only are ESET's information security products sold in more than 180 countries, the company itself is based in Bratislava, Slovakia, with offices in Buenos Aires, Prague, Krakow and Singapore, as well as the distribution center for the Americas in San Diego. Call me a traveling fool but I'm hoping to visit them all. Until then, this old trainspotter will always have the San Diego trolley to ride.

The Apartment With Everything, Now Available Everywhere (Irony Included)

So here's something way more ironic than anything in the Alanis Morissette song of the same name. My wife found a gorgeous apartment to rent in San Diego, for only $1,000 a month (I will explain why she was looking in a moment). The place looked great in the photos and it sounded great in the description on Craigslist:

"2 Bedroom, 2 Bath, fully furnished, modern kitchen and bath, cable TV, Internet wi-fi, electricity, water, local phone included. Nestled in a quiet, almost suburban-like setting, you're just a few minutes away from world-class dining, shopping and the verve of theaters, clubs and nightlife. Great location, great features. All at a location that's exactly right, exactly where you want to be."

All that for $1,000 in San Diego, California? Sounds fantastic, but hardly ironic. So let me add the most interesting thing about this place, something not immediately apparent: it is also for rent in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, and many other cities in America. But even that's not ironic, that's just another sick cyber-scam.

Let me add some more data points. My wife and I have spent many years working in the field of information security--where uncovering online scams and other cyber-crime was part of the job--and we are planning to move to San Diego next month, for my new job as Security Evangelist for ESET, a software company dedicated to fighting cyber-crime. We don't need a furnished apartment, but this place looked inviting (and it could lead one to think rent in downtown San Diego is very affordable).

So here's the irony: The apartment that I wanted to rent in order to facilitate my move to a new job fighting cyber-crime turned out to be a cyber-scam!

I was going to provide links to the scam pages (they were mainly on Craigslist) so you could check them out--they were quite professional with fewer typos than your average scam --but after my wife sent Craigslist a description of the scam they pulled it from all the cities mentioned above.

Of course, there may have been other complaints but my wife actually got the scammer to send her an email, which provided further details of the scam that she passed along to Craigslist. Apparently the scammer claims to be out of the country and seeks to get the prospective renter to send her a deposit, presumably before they find out that the whole thing is a fraud.

Notes: I say "her" only because the name most often associated with these fake apartment listings is Amanda Dawson (although I'm pretty sure that is not the scammer's real name). Also note that I think Alanis Morissette is a very good actor and singer, I just don't like the song  "Ironic" because most of it isn't. I don't know why I have a problem with errors in works of art, but I do. For example, the great big hole in Lord of the Flies--you can't use a short-sighted person's glasses to make fire--spoils that book for me (maybe it's because I've been myopic since I was 11 and tried using my glasses to burn paper on several occasions until my father sat me down and told me the facts of light).

My 2001 Jeep Turns 111111

Just a quick post to pay my respects to the vehicle that has faithfully carried me down the road for the past 5 years, the 6 cylinder 2001 Jeep Grand Cherokee 4x4 that I bought at CarMax. I missed the odometer turn over 100K, but somehow 111,111 miles looks even cooler.

White space rural broadband moves one step closer

"The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the organisation that helped ignite the Wi-Fi revolution nearly a decade ago, has published a new wireless standard that promises to bring broadband access to under-served rural areas.

Called IEEE 802.22, the new specification has been designed to take advantage of those portions of the radio frequency spectrum that are increasingly available as digital television switchover schemes make progress around the world.

With support for both VHF (very-high frequency) and UHF (ultra-high frequency) TV bands, sites as far as 100 kilometres away from a single transmitter could enjoy broadband speeds typical of more densely populated areas.

According to the IEEE, each transmitter will be capable of delivering up to 22 Mbit/s per channel “without interfering with reception of existing TV broadcast stations, using the so-called white spaces between the occupied TV channels”."

White space rural broadband moves one step closer

Blood Money: The economics of America's most common deadly genetic disorder

Blood costs money and I know where to get a lot of it, blood that is. Now that might sound callous but it's true and it could save a lot of lives as well as pump more than a billion dollars into the American economy. Please bear with me as I explain, and please pardon the pumping pun.

For several decades now, the supply of fresh human blood in America has been getting tighter, pushing the cost of blood-consuming medical procedures higher and higher. Expanding the nation's blood supply would not only reduce pain and suffering, it would have a positive economic impact. Taking a cold, hard, economic look at anything related to the health and well-being of our fellow beings is bound to bother some people, but the path to sustainable caring-giving within the boundaries of economic reality requires us to acknowledge that things like blood cost money.

While most of the blood supply in America is freely donated, the logistics of blood taking and storage are not free, indeed they are quite expensive. So the cost of a unit of blood is something like $150 or more. Why is that number so vague? Because the cost varies according to supply and demand and those vary by location. In the heartland of America, the supply is high relative to demand but the reverse tends to be true on the coasts. A fairly recent number quoted by a medical facility on the East coast is $175 per unit. That number goes down when supply goes up, but not all the way down since there are fixed costs like testing the blood (there's more detail here).

The extent to which an increase in the supply of blood would reduce the cost to those that need it is hard to determine and I have not yet found any research on that. So let's run with 20% of the $175 number ($35) and find out where the nation can save/make a whole bunch of money. There are probably at least 13 million Americans that have the potential for homozygous or compound heterozygous variations of the HFE gene. In English that means they are at risk of developing toxic levels of iron in their bodies due to "iron overloading" caused by something called hemochromatosis, the most common, potentially-fatal, genetic disorder in America.

The best defense against hemochromatosis is to give blood regularly. Let's say 6 times per year. Suppose that 45% of those 13 million people would become regular blood donors if they found out they had hemochromatosis (that's adjusting down from 100% for those that already know, those that already give blood, and those who have a hard time giving blood). According to my spreadsheet that comes out to $1.25 billion per year, $12.5 billion over the next decade. I can't resist saying that's quite a shot in the arm for our economy.

But that is just the beginning...encouraging more people to give blood in general could have a fantastic prophylactic effect IF blood banks would routinely run an iron panel on donors to screen for iron overload, the most telling sign of possible hemochromatosis. People found to have high iron levels could check in with their doctors and might also elect to get a genetic test to detect hereditary hemochromatosis ($99* from 23andMe). The iron panel is a relatively inexpensive blood test and before 1996 it was fairly routine.

(Don't get me started on the slimy corporate frauds whose greed caused iron to be dropped from the standard blood panel, leading to a significant drop in the rate of hemochromatosis detection and thus a tragically avoidable rise in human suffering.)

The fact is, early detection of hemochromatosis would save our economy billions in avoidable health care costs, disability costs, lost productivity and tax revenues. On top of that, early detection, combined with affordable genetic testing, awareness and counseling, could lead to the eventual disappearance of this condition.

The genetic form of iron overload probably occurred as a natural defense against a diet low in iron and the shift from a nomadic, hunting-based culture to city life made possible by the agrarian-revolution. Now, in a world of iron-rich diets and lifespans that extend past menopause, genetic hemochromatosis has become a life-threatening metabolic disorder. Let's get rid of it and save a lot of money, and a lot of human suffering.

Note:  Due to ignorance, many blood banks throw away blood from hemochromatosis patients or even charge them for “filtering.” This is infuriating, immoral, and should be illegal. The FDA is quite clear that the blood is good, and so is the NIH Clinical Center.

Broadband needs rural boost: Tennessee News

"Job opportunities will elude millions of mostly rural Americans because they lack access to high-speed Internet, according to a new report by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In Tennessee, more than 489,000 residents lack that access."

Broadband needs rural boost on NWTNTODAY.COM

Is Satellite the Answer for Rural Broadband? Free 20 page report

Does your rural community have questions about satellite Internet service? Wondering if satellite connections can fill in for cable, DSL, or fiber? What are the limits of satellite Internet service and how much does it cost? Is satellite the same as broadband?

Just a quick reminder that you can find answers to these questions and more in a free 20-page report from the Rural Mobile and Broadband Alliance or RuMBA, written by veteran information technology expert Stephen Cobb, CISSP.


You can get the report from this page.

FCC: Rural areas still lag in broadband speeds

"More than 28 percent of the rural population in the U.S. lack access to midrange 3Mbps broadband service, according to a new report from two U.S. agencies."

The gaps appear to be closing, but many rural residents "still lack access to the kind of broadband that most Americans take for granted," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said in a statement. "That is not acceptable..."

FCC: Rural areas still lag in broadband speeds

WK&T Selects Calix for Large FTTH Project in Kentucky and Tennessee

"The ambitious project will provide this rural region with a broadband infrastructure capable of delivering service speeds of up to 1 Gbps. It will deliver voice, data and IPTV services to 21,000 homes and 99 community anchor institutions across a nine-county service area."

Another example of people finding an alternative to traditional big telco.

WK&T Selects Calix for Large FTTH Project in Kentucky and Tennessee