Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix

This weekend was the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix in Schenley Park. That's a 5 minute walk from my apartment, so I headed over to check it out. Not being a car junkie, I wasn't blown away, but it was still cool to see all the old (sorry, "vintage") racecars making hairpin turns in Schenley Park. Max speeds top out at around 100 mph.

You can see my photos of the event over on Flickr. You won't even have to look at any ads since, thanks to the largesse of Brett (my Extreme Blue roommate), I now have a Flickr Pro account.

The Tyranny of the Expense Account

My loyal readers may recall that a couple of weeks ago, I took a trip to Cupertino for work. For the business-related parts of the trip I was able to charge meals and other costs to an expense account. That's great, right? Expense accounts are gravy, aren't they? Well... no. Sure, it's nice to be able to stay in a nice hotel and eat nice meals without paying anything out of pocket, but expense accounts often lead to stupid purchasing behavior. This stupidity ends up hurting me when I'm engaged in personal travel, which is much more frequent (for me) than business travel.

Case in point: broadband Internet access. All major airports now have Wi-Fi available, and nearly all of them charge you at least $10 to use it. [1] This is stupid. First, if you are going to be charged for Wi-Fi, then it shouldn't be more than a couple bucks. Second, providing Wi-Fi is not that expensive, so airports should strongly consider free Wi-Fi, since it builds goodwill and makes people want to use your airport. So why is Wi-Fi $10? My hypothesis is: "because of expense accounts". Most companies will let you expense Wi-Fi. $10 isn't enough to worry about, and Internet access is genuinely useful. Thus, masses of business travelers pay the $10 for Wi-Fi, since they aren't spending their own money. This screws everyone who isn't on an expense account. Get rid of expense accounts and I bet airport Wi-Fi would drop to $2 or free pretty quickly.

The same is true for Wi-Fi in hotels and (probably) coffee shops. I've stayed in $40/night hotels with free Wi-Fi, but the $150/night Marriott I was at in San Jose charged $10/day as part of their "Wired for Business" package. Oooh, "Wired for Business"... sounds like something a serious businessman needs. Better expense that. And I bet that 70% of T-Mobile HotSpot subscriptions are subsidized by expense accounts.

So, yeah, it's nice to travel on an expense account, but I'm overall I'm ambivalent on them. Purchasing behavior might be a bit more rational if companies just gave travelers a certain amount of cash per day and let them keep what they didn't spend. I'm sure that wouldn't always work well, though. So, if you get to travel on an expense account, enjoy it, but try not to screw me too much. :-)

Notes

[1] Fortunately, PIT is an exception to the rule. Wi-Fi is free there.

Josh's Visit

Josh flew home from Raleigh for the week, and tonight he drove over to Pittsburgh to visit me. We had dinner at Rose Tea Cafe (colloquially known at the office as "Bubbles"). After dinner we walked next door to Rita's for dessert. I'd hadn't been to Rita's before, but I was eager to try it out since it seems to be an institution, and an extremely popular one at that. I had the gelati, which is a combination of their Italian ice and custard, and it was really tasty. Squirrel Hill has a ton of ice cream places (Coldstone, Baskin Robbins, Ben and Jerry's), but Rita's is my new favorite.

After dinner we went back to my apartment and talked for awhile, mainly about our super secret project. I talk to Josh quite a bit via IM and phone, but it was really nice to talk in person for the first time in 7 or 8 months.

California Trip

I was out in Cupertino last week, visiting Apple headquarters. I had meetings Monday through Wednesday, but fortunately I was able to fly out on Friday and spend the weekend visiting Jason . On Friday night Jason picked me up at SFO, then we drove into the city and had dinner at Firecracker , a nice Chinese restaurant recommended by one of Jason's coworkers. After that we headed back to Jason's apartment and I ogled Jason's roommate Andrew's big plasma TV. We ended up watching a 12 minute meatball eating competition in high definition .

Saturday morning Jason showed me his office at Apple, and then we walked to a place called BJ's (right in front of the main Apple campus) for lunch. After lunch we planned to visit the Computer History Museum . Andrew wanted to go too, so we stopped by the apartment to wait for him to get back from running the Double Dipsea Challenge . We managed to arrive at the museum in time for the final tour of the day. There were lots of interesting items in the museum's collection. Some of my favorites were the PDP-11, Cray 1, Apple Lisa, and IBM 7030 (a.k.a. " Stretch "). The exhibit on computer memories really put changes in computer technology in perspective. It's amazing that mercury delay lines even worked, and after seeing the memory from the MIT Whirlwind computer , I have a new appreciation for the phrase "dump core".

Saturday night we went to see Howl's Moving Castle in San Jose. It was a typical Miyazaki film, with a magical world and good integration of humor. The plot breaks down a bit near the end, but Miyaazaki's worlds are so fantastic that you are willing to forgive even large gaps in the story. After the movie we ate at a Mexican restaurant named El Burro that provided insanely large portions. Jason and I both had enough food for two full meals.

On Sunday we ate the second half of our El Burro meals, then played some Katamari Damacy while we waited for Jason's friend Ricci to come over. Once Ricci arrived, Jason, Andrew, and I all hopped in his car and went geocaching. This was my first time geocaching. It was a good way to get to see the area and get a little exercise. You can see some pictures of our trip here and here . Midway through our geocaching expedition we stopped at a Jamba Juice to get smoothies. I'm a big Jamba Juice fan, but unfortunately there aren't any locations near me, so that was great.

After geocaching, the four of us went to Dave and Buster's for dinner. They were running a promotion that included dinner and a $10 game card for $14. After dinner I played some Derby Owner's Club and Skee-Ball. Ricci and Andrew focused on getting tickets from the coin dropping games, and got enough to get a bunch of shot glasses. After that, Jason dropped me off at the San Jose Marriott, which is where I was staying for the rest of the week.

It was great to get to visit Jason (especially since I wasn't paying for the flights). Hopefully I'll have a chance to do it again soon.

(Jason also wrote an account of the weekend .)