Over the past few years, the best hotel experiences I’ve had have come from Holiday Inn Express. Well-appointed rooms, comfortable beds with pillows in an assortment of firmnesses, towels that haven’t had all the softness laundered out of them, a desk I can work at, decent cable tv and a DVD player, and solid, free high-speed Internet access. Some of them also have a decent free breakfast.

Last weekend, I decided to spend Saturday up in San Francisco, before heading to a friend’s house in Campbell on Sunday, so I booked a room in Redwood City for two nights. I’ve stayed in that particular HIE before, and gotten good service.

Unfortunately, Saturday morning, there was no hot water anywhere in the hotel. They were sorry about it, and had it fixed by mid-day, but by that time I was already up in SF, enjoying the taiko drumming in SF Japantown (part of a film and cultural festival I hadn’t known about). [side note: pretty girls banging on big drums appeals to me…]

Last night, my mailbox contained a Starbucks gift card, the hotel manager’s business card, and a humble apology for their failure to provide perfect service.

[oh, and the Holiday Inn membership rewards system feeds directly into the JAL membership rewards system, building up miles for a seat upgrade on a future trip to Japan]

Toshiba has abandoned HD-DVD, and Castro has stepped down. I wonder which one of these will get more attention over the next week.

When I went to Japan last year, I scrubbed my laptop of non-essential data and encrypted my home directory, to avoid any hassle if it got stolen. It sounds like I should have been more concerned about the boys working Customs.

Or perhaps not, since they just waved me through in both countries, without even a cursory inspection.

It’s obvious that the behavior described in the article can’t be extended to more than a tiny fraction of travelers, but without clear guidelines explaining what they can examine and for how long, I can understand why businesses would be very leery of allowing employees to take laptops across the border. I pity the fool who tries to separate Lucy from a laptop, though…

While a lot of folks are busy crying “police state”, I’m thinking more along the lines of “poorly-trained flunkies with no oversight”. Which is more dangerous, but less scary.

I mean, serious stupid.

...firefighters learned the woman’s boyfriend had given the children a jar of mercury as a gift about a month ago.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that mercury is fun to play with, and I can state from personal experience that it doesn’t taste like any other metal, but we were teenagers at the time, not little kids, and they managed to clean up the classroom without involving a hazmat team.

“Thank you for removing yourself from the gene pool.”

There are two possibilities in this story: either he was one of the dumbest people on the face of the Earth, or he was making a “goodbye cruel world” call on his cellphone as he ignored the flashing lights, walked around the lowered crossing gates, and stepped in front of a moving train.

Two guys working alone in an electronics factory at 1:30am, and one of them falls into an open vat of sulfuric acid?

It’s nice to hear that OSHA is investigating, but I can’t help but think that a company that lets unsupervised 18-year-olds work around a waist-deep vat of acid in the middle of the night should have been shut down a long time ago.

The English are once again free to use English units of measure.

(via Kim du Toit)

This morning, one of our executives sent email that her laptop crashed, and then refused to boot, asking for the original install media. Ordinarily, this would mean looking at it on Monday morning.

Unfortunately, she was at the airport, getting onto a plane for New York, for Very Important Business. So she took the dead laptop with her, and asked us to FedEx her the install CDs. That really wouldn’t have worked out very well for her, so we’re sending another laptop out there ASAP.

At least, we’re trying. It seems that no amount of money on our part will get any shipping company to let us use their same-day service. We’re not TSA-approved for such things, and having an established account doesn’t matter. The only way we could get it to her before Tuesday morning is to buy a ticket and fly it out there ourselves. Grrrr.

[yes, the dead machine is a Sony, but it’s not one of the BXs that have been causing us trouble.]

[Update: finally got details from her. It’s not dead dead, it’s giving up during the Windows startup, complaining about a missing or corrupt DLL, which it would be happy to retrieve from any Windows XP disc. So, we’re not looking at a major hardware failure, at least.]