NHL London Premiere 2007

It's official, the NHL season has started and I was in London U.K. for it. The event was very cool and I am glad that I had the chance to see it. The picture on the left is "The Big Guy" and me on the right. We were fortunate enough to get a pic with the Stanley Cup. The "handlers" of the cup stepped out of the room for a minute and we took advantage of the opportunity. After hearing all of the stories about England I was kind of apprehensive about this trip. First of all the food over there is different than I was expecting. The traditional "English Breakfast" consists of fried eggs, bacon and beans, a piece of back bacon, a blood sausage (pork I guess) and toast or crumpets. To look at it you wouldn't think "Yummy" being from the States. With this coming from a guy that has a pretty strong constitution that is bad. The second thing that I noticed the moment that I stepped off of the flight was the currency exchange. The British Pound is roughly 2-1 compared to the American Dollar. So in doing the math I realized that everything was going to be twice as expensive as the amount shown. This put a dent in the wallet while at the local pub because that is about all that there is do to when you go into work at 9 a.m. and get out around 11 that night.





Dealing with the Brits wasn't a bad experience at all. The local IT guys that helped us were very helpful and managed to get all of my things on my list done. Surprisingly, the two games (ANA @ LAK and LAK@ ANA) were sold out and were received very well. After the first game the scoring crew for ANA and both of us went to a place called Johnny Monaco's Love Burger. After seeing this place I figured that we would need to check it out. In the picture above is some of the "Love Sauce" that was on our table. Regardless of my initial reluctance to eat anything with the title "Love Sauce" it was pretty good. I am guessing after eating it that it consisted of BBQ sauce, ketchup and vinegar. I recommend it if you find yourself in the O2 arena in London. All in all it was a good trip with the occasional cavity search in the airports and two hour cab rides from here to there.






The picture on the left is the actual O2 (Millennium Dome) in London. Regardless of the weird looking things sticking out of the top of the place it was pretty nice. Everything that lights up changes color (colour for my UK friends) using different technology. The inside of the dome was equally as impressive as the outside.




This is the inside of the O2 center which is more like a shopping mall than an arena. There are bars, clubs and restaurants galore and they even have a Starbucks there as well. Everyone asks me if I saw anything like Buckingham Palace or The Tower of London and I say the same thing to everyone about that, no. It was only four stops from our hotel but after working that many hours and dealing with the late nights and walking no less than 15 miles in five days wearing dress shoes and a suit lugging 50 pound cases behind me, I was tired. The flight is long, the hotels are small, the food is dodgy and it can get expensive but the trip was well worth it. If you have a chance to get to London do it at least once in your life. No worries and cheers.

Banned!!!!!!!!!!!!

I recently had the privilege of visiting Canada a few weeks ago and thought that I would share something with you. We were driving from Edmonton to Calgary and we stopped at a few gas stations to get some liquid refreshments along the way. I had noticed that I had never seen a regular or diet Mt. Dew (with caffeine) available for purchase. I asked the clerks about this and they said that they do not sell caffeinated Mt. Dew let alone diet Mt. Dew. God forbid. Apparently the powers that be in Canada saw fit to ban my lovely caffeinated Diet Mt. Dew! The reasons for which Mt. Dew (with caffeine) was banned was because of the amount of caffeine and its classification as a soda. Every gas station from Ottawa to Vancouver has Red Bull, Full Throttle and Rock star but no Mt. Dew? This is yet another reason that the U.S. is better than Canada in regards to beverage consumption and availability. I thought that this was very peculiar and looked it up via the www. If Pepsi Co. would change its classification from a soda to energy drink it would be legal. The Canadian government doesn't want the people purchasing energy drinks that aren't classified as such but rather as soda. I know that the American people are getting fat and dying from diabetes and such but at least we know what we are doing to ourselves! Nonetheless, I will need to smuggle my Diet Mt. Dew into Canada next time that I get stuck up there. Happy travels!

From Canada with love

From Canada with love,

I recently had the pleasure of being stopped at the Canadian Customs inspection depot in the Edmonton airport flying in from San Jose. The lady behind the counter was, for the lack of a better term, a bitch. I have been to Canada for my job several times and never had I recieved such a hard time getting into this country. I have done work in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and now Edmonton but this was different I guess since the new immigration and border laws went into effect.

I found out that if you are going to Canada for work, you should always say that you are having a meeting or observing something in your field. They don't feel so threatened by this and will let you pass without needing a work permit, invoice or god forbid a visa. The lady behind the counter was in some kind of powertrip according to my project manager Jay. I just let him handle the situation and get her the paperwork that she was requesting for our work up there.

We left the nice sunny and warm weather of San Jose for Edmonton which froze the second night that we were there (in September). I don't even want to imagine how frickin cold that it gets up there if it is freezing there in early September. I am from Indiana so I know somewhat about cold weather and its effects on people. We went to do our work in the Edmonton Arena (Hail Gretzky) via Gretzky Blvd and Gretzky Lane. I think that they may have named a road for Messier but it wasn't near the arena. Jay said that it wasn't that cold and that I am just being a wimp about the weather but I pointed out that if the Canadian's that live here are wearing coats I should be as well. Did I mention that I did not bring ANY winter clothes on this trip? Anyway, I thought that since it is September 2nd it would be somewhat comfortable, brisk weather up there. I guess that I was correct in that assumption but I underestimated the degree of briskness. Jay was nice enough to stop by the Goodwill there so that I could pick through the Canadian junk there and find something to keep myself warm. I love going to the Goodwill stores but this was entirely different than the ones in Jacksonville or Indiana. There were so many hockey sweaters that they had their own section! I thought that was pretty cool but who really wants a "Rays Autoparts" hockey sweater? If I hadn't already purchased a Charlestown Chiefs sweater this year I might have picked one up. I bought a zip up hoodie and we were off to a very fine Thai restuarant named "Haong Long". This was probably the finest Thai food that I have ever had and I must recommend the coconut rice especially.

After this we were off to Calgary (3 hours away) after working until 4 in the afternoon the next day. We finished our work there but it was kind of scary to say the least.

As you can see from the pictures to the right I was working up in the rafters of the arena. That big thing on the right is a center hung scoreboard. This paticular one shoots fire out of itself since they are the Flames. I am not afraid of heights but for some reason I was getting dizzy when I was walking on this catwalk. I needed to have a seat somewhere else for a moment. On the long drive home I realized that I was just suspended about 150 feet above the ice and for some reason that bothered me. Imagine that. I got through the task just fine though, in fact I am kind of proud of myself for not wimping out of this situation. I don't know how many other people would have been doing what I was doing up there (testing equipment) and been fine with it. After this we got back into the car and drove back to edmonton (3 hours) at 9:15. This put us back into our warm beds at 12:15 am but I failed to mention that our departing flights were at 7:05. This meant that we would need to get out of bed at 4 to make our gates. All in all it was a good trip and even more so a learning experience in dealing with the Canadian border patrol upon entering. Take my advice to heart and happy travels.

Denver to Phoenix is a long drive...

During the end of August I was lucky enough to spend some time out in Denver, CO. It lived up to the hype that I had heard about it but something was very surprising to me. Denver is VERY VERY dry, the place has no humidity. That was surprising to me since this place gets a ton of snow and freezing rain. Apparently, after someone explained it to me that made sense. The humidity is in the form of snow or sleet or freezing rain and it doesn't hang around for the rest of us to enjoy. Since I live in Florida I have become use to the fact that if it is hot outside it is going to probably (99% of the time) be VERY humid. I walked out of the airport to meet my coworker and noticed that it was extremely dry. Anyway, from a Yankee such as myself living in the south can be expected I had to ask why. The people waiting for a porter to take their bags looked like they were stranded on a mountainside for a week without food or water standing next to me. I asked them if they had fallen into a crevice or had gotten lost during an excursion up the mountainside. They laughed with their dry cracked lips and said "No, no. It is just very dry up in the mountains out here and they have wind burn." I am pretty adventurous and like to get outdoors but these people looked like the dehydrated walking dead. After finding this out my partner showed up and we did what we were supposed to do for the Avalanche.

The next day I thought that we were going to fly to our next destination (Phoenix). It is only a 55 minute flight that costs around $80. It turns out that we are driving from Denver to Phoenix which is going to take about 12 hours. YEAH! After about 6 hours we were eventually in the desert which was surprisingly nice. I took a few photos of the drive from DEN to PHO.














I couldn't let the DRY BEAVER CREEK sign go, the guys that I was traveling with took the same picture as well. We drove past NORAD, if you don't know what that is you should watch the movie War games. That is the place the Matthew Broderick hacks into and were you can find the WOPR. If you have to ask, don't worry about it. We eventually get into Phoenix and it is very much as I expected, HOT. We stayed at the Camel back Inn, it was very cool and had a very nice pool and hot tub. One night my coworker and I encountered a very bizarre set of girls from Omaha Nebraska near the pool. They started talking to us which was fine except for the fact that they were 17 and vacationing with their family at this hotel. I can't recall either if the girls names but when they said the next line it caught my attention. "Omaha has a huge gang problem and my friends think that I'm ghetto." Jay and I looked at each other and started to smile after this comment. He looked at her and wanted to know more about this growing scourge in Omaha. She proceeded to tell us of the constant fighting and shootings that are happening at her old school. That is why she goes to a Christian school now but her classmates call her ghetto. So I asked her if she thought that she was ghetto and why they might think this. She wasn't sure why they thought this besides the fact that her school is very ghetto and stuff. After asking around when I got back into Jax I found that there actually is a problem with this type of stuff out there in the middle of nowhere. Who would have thought. Nonetheless it was entertaining to hear this and added some much needed comedy to this trip.

We got into the arena where the Phoenix Coyotes play and this was across the street. The University of Phoenix Stadium, it looked more like an inflatable temporary stadium to us. If I didn't already know what this thing was I would have been really shocked. This stadium is actually one of the most technologically advanced in the country. They dumped something like 10 million on just IT and networking for this place but I would not be lucky enough to get to go inside this one. I was stuck in the jobing.com arena for the day which isn't too shabby either. We were diligent in our efforts and finally got our work done after a very long couple of days. This was my first time in both of these cities and I was pleasantly surprised by both. I recommend that if you have the means you should give them a visit as well.

Nice drive

I recently had a nice long drive from Jacksonville FL to Toronto ON.

The purple line represents the driving route that was taken. This was a five day excursion for work that included stops in Atlanta Georgia, Raleigh North Carolina, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania and then onto Toronto Ontario. This was for the NHL arena installs that we do for work. The best part about this trip was flying from Buffalo New York to home. Of all of the cities that we stopped in Toronto was by far the most interesting. The pictures that I put in this posting are from left to right, Toronto's Air Canada Center, Atlanta's Turner Field (Braves) and The Igloo (Mellon Bank Arena) in Pittsburgh. Despite the very long trip and very very long hours of work the trip was uneventful. I did have the privelage of riding with the Michigander from work who did not drive one mile of the trip since he is not 25 or older. This made the trip feel a bit longer but atleast we made it without injury or crash. I don't know if I would be up for another one of these ironman trips any time soon.

Wrigley Field, Chicago / Blackhawks

I was in Chicago this week for the Blackhawks and the United Center. This was pretty cool but I was able to get really good tickets for the Cubs Game!! Thanks Turbo.. Chicago was nothing but a good time with the baseball game to the food. Chicago is one of my favorite towns to visit but it can get expensive. The pictures that I was able to get with my camera were great. I was able to get a pic with Michael Jordan (statue and the United Center) and a some great pics at Wrigley Field.

Minnesota Wild / Minnesota Twins / Bridge Collapse

I was very lucky this past week in my visit to Minneapolis St. Paul. I was in town to install equipment in St. Paul for the Minnesota Wild (NHL). This was the day before the bridge in downtown Minneapolis collapsed killing many. The coworker that I was with told me to take a picture of the city skyline on our way to the Twins game. The picture above was taken on the very bridge that collapsed. Travel has its bad days but if I would have been on that bridge it could have been one of my last. I am very thankful that I am able to type this blog and see my bed after that incident because there are many now that can't. The pictures below were taken also the day before the accident. From left to right, Me at the Minneapolis Airport acting goofy, next was the Twins game and the one on the right is the Minnesota Wild hockey ice being taken down. I had never seen this and found it interesting. They used everything from Zamboni's to four wheel drive trucks with scrapers to get rid of that pesky painted ice.