Inelegant Solutions

photo credit: the_toe_stubber

Over the past year I have had the opportunity to do a great deal of traveling and I am eternally grateful for it. Nearly a dozen conferences have invited me to speak and most have been generous enough to provide me a hotel room to stay at. 

Though I have no complaints about my accommodations anywhere that I have been, it has given me a strange and unique opportunity to stay at a wide variety of hotels all over the world. From inexpensive chain hotels to b&bs to several very high-end establishments, I’ve probably stayed in them all within the past 12 months.

In this time, I’ve noticed something very unusual. There seems to be something of a paradox in the world of hotels. The nicer a hotel is, the less you actually get for your stay. Where there are some products where price paid has no effect on the quality of service, hotels seem to have taken the whole “You get what you pay for” cliche and turned it around, ensuring that you always pay for what you don’t get. 

It’s a frustrating kludge that has me wondering if, as customers, if we have gotten the whole idea of what makes a good hotel completely wrong and, rather than an abstract star system, its time we actually rate hotels based upon whether they actually provide what we need. 

I know it’s a radical idea, but I think it may be one whose time has come. (more…)

The Mortuary is the anti-thesis to the previously-reviewed Camber of Horrors. Where the CoH is a low-budget, high-heart affair, The Mortuary is a high-budget, low-heart one.

You can tell from the second you drive by the two-story buildings with its large columns and lighted facade that you entering into a haunt that has spent a great deal of money on their setup. As you tour through their winding corridors and narrow hallways, that belief is reaffirmed with their high-end animatronics and decorations.

This haunt cost a lot of money and it shows. However, money can not buy a great haunted house experience, only the toys to build it with. The question for The Mortuary isn’t whether they have neat stuff, but what they did with it.

It’s a tough question with a rather complicated answer. (more…)

photo credit: klwatts

Of all of the inventions man has released upon himself, I do not believe any is more despised than the alarm clock. Sure, nuclear warheads may take more of the heat in philosophical circles, but no one throws their shoes at a ballistic missile every morning (we might think twice if we did).

The simple truth is that this in an invention we created with the express intent of annoying ourselves. It is a trade off of, it waking us up from our beautiful sleep and, in return, we don’t get fired. Pretty simple.

Yet, clockmakers seem to be determined to increase the hatred hurled at their creations not just by making the alarms more annoying and harder to ignore, but by blessing them with a design flaw that practically guarantees they fail at least some of the time.

What is the flaw? The AM/PM issue. The one where you set the alarm for 6:30 AM only to be roused out of bed just in time for dinner at 6:30 PM. Why does it happen? Because clockmakers let it happen. (more…)

I don’t have a very nice phone. In fact, my phone is nothing short of dated. When my contract is up in a few months I’ll probably take the opportunity to upgrade networks and get a Blackberry or an iPhone. In the meantime, I’m stuck with my Fusic, a hybrid MP3 player/phone that does neither all that well

But despite my dissatisfaction with the Fusic, it does what I need it to for the most part. Call quality is good, battery life is within reason and it is capable of mobile broadband speeds. If it had a bigger screen and a full keyboard, I’d doubt I’d care too much about its flaws.

The truth is that, realistically, there are only a few apps that I use. However, the most important, by far, is the Gmail Mobile app. It is the one app I use multiple times a day and something I’ve come to rely upon.

The first version of the app was great, a flawed gem perhaps, but solid. I would use it whenever I had a few minutes to flip open, check my mail and close it back up. It was so simple to use, it almost became an obsession, causing me to check my mail any time I found myself idle for longer than five minutes.

When I heard that Google had released a second version of the app, I was excited. Already a Gmail junkie, I thought this was my chance to get an even more robust mobile experience.

Boy was I wrong.

Though most people seem to be singing the praises of the Gmail Mobile, I am singing the blues. For me and my phone, this app has been a total disaster. Maybe when I upgrade my handset my song will change, but right now there is simply no excuse for how bad Gmail Mobile has become.

What went wrong? Well, I’ll tell you? (more…)

photo credit: darkpatator

For many, it is a tradition to head to a haunted attraction sometime near Halloween. For us, the scare of going the a haunt is just part of the spooky season much the same as looking at lights is part of the Christmas one.

But haunts can be expensive. High-end attractions charge $20 or more per ticket and even “budget” haunts routinely charge $10 or more. This prices them higher than a trip to the movies and most nightclubs in terms of entertainment expense.

Yet, the way some people go through a haunt, they seem to sabotage their own chances of actually having a good time. They essentially throw away their ticket price and some then complain that the haunt was a waste of money.

If you don’t know how to go through a haunt, even the best attraction will be a waste of cash. As a serial haunt attendee, haunt actor and haunt operator, here are my tips for getting your money’s worth. (more…)

Mariner Software is one of the few Mac software development companies I really like.Their StoryMill product is easily the best novel management and writing software I have seen and I’ve been using it for some time on a work I’ve been tinkering with.

However, their MacJournal application is not one I’ve ever been able to understand. It has traditionally been a Journaling application, one that lets you keep a diary of sorts of your daily life. While that is a neat idea, I’ve often wondered how useful such an application is because few people seem to want to run to a computer to record their lives events.

Though the app is slick, letting you organize your life into journals, folders and more, I really didn’t see how this application would fit into my life or the life of anyone I know.

However, when Mariner announced its recent update to the application, I learned that it provides another tool, blogging. Though the blogging tool is far from new, when I learned that it was capable of helping me edit my sites, I was excited about the possibilities.

It truly had the potential to go from an offline journal editor for those with no lives, to a full fledged life organizer for bloggers with no lives.

But my excitement was short-lived. After downloading the app and giving it a test drive, I learned that this was no blog editor, but rather, was a journaling application with the blog editor shoehorned in. The result was that MacJournal remains a decent journaling app, but fails to fill my much-needed niche. (more…)

For better or worse, the New Orleans haunt scene is dominated by the House of Shock. Though it is great to have an internationally-recognized haunt in the city, it brought with it the high ticket prices and conga-line style walkthrough that sours many on the haunt experience.

With no Chinchuba’s, Blaine Kern’s or Scream Factory this year, The House of Shock and The Mortuary are the only two professional haunts in the metro area with House of Shock being by far the best known. This has left a strange void of inexpensive and creative haunts that span the gap between home haunters and high-end professional establishments.

Fortunately, just outside the city in LaPlace, there is a smaller, lesser-known haunt called the Chamber of Horrors that sits in that gap nicely. Though clearly a professional haunt, it is not the big-budget movie set style you see elsewhere in the city. It is a middle of the road haunt that is half the price of its competitors.

But is the Chamber of Horrors worth the trip? It really depends on the type of haunt that you want. (more…)

In less than 24 hours I am going to be engaging in one of my least favorite activities. Putting my body into a hollow tube and letting people I barely know navigate it at hundreds of miles per hour through the air.

Now, I joke, I’m not actually one of those white-knuckle fliers that have seen William Shatner’s episode of The Twilight Zone too many times, but I do genuinely hate flying.

It is one of the great paradoxes of my life. I love traveling, I hate flying. If I could teleport myself and my luggage where I needed to go, I would be a world traveler in no time, no matter what the expense.

But as it is, I am stuck with flying and the headaches that comes with it. Though I know no one is particularly fond of air travel, I seem to have an especially strong aversion to it.

Why do I hate flying? Well, the reason starts even before you get to the airport.

(more…)

I was in Wal-Mart the other day (please don’t ask) and decided to take a look at their Halloween section. Though I usually don’t have high expectations of these “big box” retailers when it comes to Halloween, I feel obligated to check and, sometimes at least, they do have some interesting stuff.

My wife and I began to look through the costume section. As we get closer in to opening our haunt (we open Halloween night), we are realizing we need some outfits to go with our Asylum theme and a few sets of scrubs are high on the list.

In the Halloween section we saw a set of costume scrubs for sixteen dollars. While that may not sound like a bad deal and is actually very cheap for a Halloween costume, the problem is that just 100 feet away Wal-Mart had a collection of real scrubs for just ten dollars.

The problem didn’t end there. You could buy a fake plastic broom for eight dollars or go to the cleaning section and get a real one for three or four. Likewise, you could by a “costume” sword for about six dollars but “toy” ones in the toy section were just two or three.

Everything in the Halloween section is marked up to insane amounts just because the the price tag is in orange and black. This is a huge headache for parents, who are buying something their kids will wear exactly once, home haunters, who have tight budgets, and even professional haunted houses.

So if you want to survive Halloween without breaking the bank, here are a few ways to cut corners and avoid getting gouged this haunting season. (more…)

As someone who enjoys going to and building haunted houses, I’ll be the first to say that the creative capital of the industry is running extremely low.

Currently, there seems to be just two kinds of haunted houses. The first are over-capitalized ones that have a budget that rivals a Hollywood movie. They spend all of their money on sets and animatronics and seem to forget about the scares. Coupled with high admission prices and long lines, they seem to disappoint every time.

The other kind is the low-budget haunt, usually done for charity. These tend to be more laser-focused on getting the scares. Staffed by volunteers, they spend every hour and every precious dollar on making the haunt scarier. Sometimes they’re great, the best being one I went to at a county fair many years ago, but usually the lack of experience or thought shows through. Though these haunts try hard, they quickly give into cliches as the lack of great planning takes over.

As someone who’s haunt budget barely breaks four digits, I can’t afford misses. In a small haunt with tight dollars, if a scare misses you might not get another good chance. Thus, I have to avoid cliches and expired ideas.

What are the worst of the worst? Well, that list is below. (more…)