Matt Holthe's Fleeting Thoughts

I'm beginning to think we picked the worst possible week to visit Disneyland. We booked this trip a long time ago for the first week of September. Our thought - we get the extra day (Labor Day) without having to use that day as vacation. Disneyland posts the park hours schedule about 45 days in advance. (Which is quite a bit different from Disney World, where things are around 180 days in advance). Two weeks before our visit, Disneyland is open 8:00 AM - 11:00 PM and has the Fantasmic show and Fireworks show at night. Sunday, August 25 is the last listed day for Fantasmic. Starting Monday, August 26, the park hours are 9:00 AM - 10:00 PM. Although Fantasmic is gone, the Fireworks are still there. Starting Tuesday, September 3, park hours are 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM, and they don't list either Fantasmic or Fireworks.

A lot of Las Vegas hotels (most, in fact) are now charging resort fees. This is an extra charge per night for stuff that used to be free - like newspapers, internet access, and so on. It basically makes the hotel nightly rates look better because those don't include the fees. Thanks to the Las Vegas Advisor web site, there's a list of current fees. The link is: Hotel Resort Fees . Some of the items that I might actually use included in these fees are boarding pass printing, bottles of water, and internet access. I'm never going to use the phone calls, fax service, or shoe shine service. The fitness center is doubtful, but might be used. Same with parking - I might rent a car once, but it's doubtful. The newspaper would probably be read, but isn't a necessity. Here's all the hotels that I might possibly stay at (basically, eliminating the ones in Henderson) and their resort fees and what you get as of July 17, 2013: Aria - $25.00 - In-Room Internet acces...

I was watching part of an NBA Summer League game tonight at dinner (it was on one of the bank of TV's - it's not like I was actively watching). It got me thinking... what about a Las Vegas trip next year during the NBA Summer League and watching a game? In 2013, the NBA Summer League in Las Vegas runs from July 12-22. There are 4 games (every 2 hours starting at 1:00 PM) Friday July 12 through Tuesday July 16 at COX Pavilion and 3 games (every 2 hours starting at 3:30 PM) Saturday July 13 through Tuesday July 16 at the Thomas & Mack center (a couple days have 4 games starting at 1:30 PM). Wednesday July 17 starts the tournament at both locations following a similar schedule to the round robin (3 or 4 games at each location). Saturday July 20 starts the final 8 teams at the Thomas & Mack center (4 games starting at 1:00 PM). Sunday the 21st is the final 4 (2 games starting at 3:00 PM), and Monday the 22nd is the final at 6:00 PM at the Thomas & Mack center. Ticke...

I haven't been to Las Vegas in a while, and there's many new things that I'd like to see and do on my next trip there. Secret Pizza restaurant at the Cosmopolitan. The last time I was in Vegas, the City Center was still under development. So, really, seeing the City Center is on my list. Mr. Lucky's 24/7 restaurant at the Hard Rock for the $7.77 unadvertised steak special. THE Steakhouse in Circus Circus. There's a food theme here, isn't there? High Roller Wheel at the Linq (still under development - scheduled to open in December). I want to see what happened to O'Sheas. more information Of course, there are the standby items that I'd like to revisit: Mirage Volcano Sirens of TI Fremont Street Experience Fountains of Bellagio Fall of Atlantis at Caesars Forum Shops

The first half of 2013 was a good pace for my Hilton and American status retention. I'm 70% of the way there with Hilton stays (21 out of 30) and I'm 68% of the way there on American segments (41 out of 60). But, as of right now, I have absolutely nothing on the schedule. Naturally, that won't hold out the rest of the year, but there's almost always something in the works - something out on the horizon. Hopefully business picks up a bit - I don't like scrambling at the end of the year to keep my status.

As an update to this post I'm now the Foursquare mayor for 12 places. I lost Denny's Diner, so now it's exclusively Bloomington, IL places. I also lost Schooner's pub. But I added three new ones: McDonald's (there's a bunch in town - the one closest to my house where I go for breakfast a few times a week) Jimmy John's (don't know how I got this one - we go there for lunch about twice a month) Suburban East Park (daughter's T-Ball practice is here. After that's over, someone else should be able to steal this one pretty quickly) It seems like Foursquare activity is starting to wane, however. Maybe the fad is over nationwide.

For those of you that don't know, foursquare is a "check-in" web site where you check-in to different locations as you go there. If you check in the most at a certain location, you become the "mayor" of that location. Currently, I'm the mayor of 11 locations on foursquare. I think that's the most I have owned at any time. One of the most unusual ones was one I got last week at Denny's Diner in Wisconsin Dells. We went there twice for breakfast and I became the mayor. Here's a current list of all the locations where I am mayor: Holthe Household (Bloomington, IL) Rob Knight's Swim America (Bloomington, IL) Schooners (Bloomington, IL) El Toro (Bloomington, IL) Eastland Mall Play Area (Bloomington, IL) Chesterbrook Academy (Bloomington, IL) IBM Bloomington (Bloomington, IL) Super Gyros Blm (Bloomington, IL) Kulb Chalian Leak Urologists (Bloomington, IL) Denny's Diner (Lake Delton, WI) Supreme Buffett (Bloomington, IL)

Last week my family and I took a trip to Wisconsin Dells, WI. It's the water park capital of the world - there are tons of them. We stayed at a resort hotel that includes water parks. There are 4 indoor and 4 outdoor water parks exclusively for people staying at the resort. On the one hand, that's good - the number of people in the water park is limited, you can walk or take a shuttle to the water parks if you want, and it's easy to get back to your room if needed. On the other hand, you're paying for water parks as part of your hotel stay. If you don't make use of the water parks, you're losing money. Luckily, we were at a water park every day of our stay, if only for an hour or two each day. It was a great vacation and I'm sure we'll be back there in a couple years as the little one gets older and braver (she didn't go down any of the tall water slides, and very few of the shorter slides).

I've been keeping track of how many states and how many airports I've visited since starting my current job several years ago. My definition of "visiting a state" is two-fold. There are states where I've stepped foot in (being at the airport is good enough) and states where I've spent the night in. This week, I added the Seattle Airport (SEA) for my first official time setting foot in the state of Washington. And I'll be spending the night here before flying home tomorrow. So I've now been to 43 out of 50 states. I'm missing Alaska (pretty typical), New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine (I could get all of those in 1 trip), North Dakota, Oregon, and (believe it or not) South Carolina. I could imagine getting a trip to Oregon at some point in the future of this job. The other states, it's most likely going to take a side trip or concerted effort to get there.

Oh, my... this was a horrible travel week. I was scheduled to fly Bloomington (BMI) to Chicago (ORD) to Pittsburgh (PIT) to Tuesday, then PIT to ORD on Wednesday and ORD to BMI on Thursday morning. (I couldn't get all the way back to BMI Wednesday because of flight timings). Tuesday morning I get an automated call that my 10AM BMI-ORD flight was canceled (which means I would miss my ORD-PIT flight). I was rescheduled on the 5PM BMI-ORD flight and 9:30PM ORD-PIT flight. So that's 1 cancel and 1 missed flight. Around noon, I got another call that my 5PM BMI-ORD flight was canceled. Since it was noon, I decided just to rent a one-way car and drive up to Chicago (about 3 hours) to catch my ORD-PIT flight. Turns out the ORD-PIT flight was delayed for various reasons for 2 1/2 hours. We took off at midnight. I finally got to the hotel and my head hit the pillow at 3:45 AM local time. 2 cancels and 1 missed flight and 1 delayed flight isn't horrible, but that was only the ou...

Again this year I picked the line and total on every NCAA tournament game. Tonight's the championship game, so there's been 132 picks (66 lines and 66 totals) so far. U-G-L-Y is the only word for it. I went 29-37 on the lines (43.9%) and the exact same on the totals. For the line bets, I seemed to do a little bit better picking the underdog (16-17) compared to picking the favorite (13-20).

The end results for the single pick every day weren't pretty. I fell off the cliff a little bit toward the end of the season. There were 2 days during the big conference tournaments were 2 picks were made in a day (I won 1 and lost 1 of the "2nd picks"). Overall, I won 63, lost 64, and pushed 2. A 49.6% winning percentage. On the other hand, I picked a whole bunch of games Saturday (the day before selection Sunday). I picked both the line and the total in 13 different games (26 total bets). I also did a 3 team parlay bet. For the straight bets, I went 17-9 (that's really good). And I won the parlay bet. If I was in Vegas betting real money (which there's no way I would have made that many bets for real, but still) I would have had a 33.7% ROI for the day.

I've been spending the past day (and will be spending several more) trying to get my work computer back up and running. The Windows 7 boot file became corrupt. There's very little hope of recovering from that when the hard drive is encrypted like mine is. So I had to wipe it out and start over. I had a backup (but from late November) of my data. So it's a matter now of reinstalling all my programs and getting everything back up and running. Ugh.

I've been picking college basketball games for the whole season. There's several different methods for my predictions. The first is my "1 pick every day" method. With this, I choose exactly 1 game every day to predict. So far this year I'm 30-22-2 (57.4%). Another method is picking games when I "feel good" about them. With this method I'm 55-43 (56.1%). The final method is using computers to pick the games. These started a week or so ago - I wait until around the turn of the calendar before I start ranking teams. There's a few different ways I make these predictions. One picks quite a few games each day and is 23-15-1 (60.3%). Another picks only games which the computer thinks the line is "way off". This computer program is only 6-5-1 (54.2%). Finally, I have one program that only picks totals. This one is doing very well this year at 13-5 (72.2%).

I just got back from my last trip of the year. So now's the time to look at the year end stats. Using last year as a reference, I've added a couple things this year: I added one new state: Arkansas. I added 7 new airports: CMI (Champaign, IL), CVG (Cincinnati, OH), IAH (Houston, TX), JAX (Jacksonville, FL), MCO (Orlando, FL), TLH (Tallahassee, FL), and XNA (Bentonville, AR) I also remembered that I had been to the COS (Colorado Springs, CO), but I don't remember exactly when - there was a trip that I was supposed to fly out of Denver but ended up at Colorado Springs and I never wrote down when that happened. So I've actually been to 64 unique airports since starting this job. There's an additional 11 airports that I've been to in my lifetime, but before starting my current job: AMS (Amsterdam, Netherlands), AUA (Oranjestad, Aruba), CZM (Cozumel, Mexico), GVA (Geneva, Switzerland), HNL (Honolulu, Hawaii), OGG (Maui, Hawaii), PHX (Phoenix, AZ), PSP (Palm Spri...

I've been picking a college basketball game every day since the start of the season. (So far, I'm 60% 18-12 with 1 push). Today, I log in to make my pick, and there's a grand total of 1 game to choose from - Seattle +5.5 at Eastern Washington. I went ahead and picked Seattle. The line has since moved to 4.5, so at least I know that I'm picking along with the "wise guys" in Vegas - there's been more money on Seattle, so Vegas is moving the line to promote more action on Eastern Washington.

Congratulations to Northern Illinois Huskies football team! They are going to be playing Florida St in the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day. What an awesome pay day for the program - it's really nice to see one of the smaller conference teams (non-BCS) getting a chance to play in a big bowl game.

The next step of rebuilding my SUSE Linux Domino server as a Ubuntu Domino server was installing and setting up Domino. Many of these steps were taken from another web site . Log on as my main user and create the "notes" user. Note that almost every command listed here needs the "sudo" prefix so it can run as root. To save space, that is removed and just the command is listed. useradd -d /local/notesdata notes passwd notes     -- then give the "notes" user a password mkdir /local mkdir /local/notesdata chown notes:notes /local/notesdata Change programs around as instructed: cd /bin rm -i sh     -- answer "yes" to the prompt ln -s bash sh cd /user/bin ln -s mawk gawk FTP Domino from the server where I was holding it. I put it into my home "Documents" folder. I also FTP'd the ID files needed to recreate the server to the same directory. Then I needed to unpack the TAR file and install Domino 8.5.3: tar xvf lotus_dom...

I decided to switch my SUSE Linux Domino server at home to Ubuntu. So today I started the process with phase 1 - getting the OS going. First, I downloaded an ISO of Ubuntu 12.10 from the Ubuntu web site, then made a boot DVD on my Windows 7 home computer. Next, I put the DVD into the computer and started it up. There were only a couple questions that needed to be answered to install Ubuntu on the machine. Once finished, there was a prompt to reboot. Ubuntu opened up the DVD drive and then just sat there. I figured out from trial and error that I was supposed to press ENTER (after removing the DVD, of course) to get the machine to reboot. Upon reboot, I got a "[drm:drm_crtc_helper_set_config] *ERROR* failed to set mode on [CRTC:10]" error. I found a very similar error -- CRTC:6 on the Ubuntu forums. That entry had a solution. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to bring up a text entry where you can enter in your user name and password. That logs you in, but you're in command mode. Then ...

It looks like that, yet again this year, I'm going to BARELY make keeping my status for 2013. (I wanted to make it with room to spare this year, as I mentioned last year ). I haven't quite hit it yet, but I'm scheduled for the 6 segments I need on American and the 4 hotel stays I need at Hilton properties. The 4 hotel stays is by far the more difficult to accomplish with just a few weeks left in the year, but I'm working the system to make it (assuming everything goes as planned).