Big Yellow Truck

Nicole and I both love Spain. We spent a week in Madrid on our honeymoon, and thought it was fantastic. We loved the food, the energy, the wine, the nightlife. Ever since, we talked about getting back to Spain.

So on Friday afternoon, when we found an amazing deal on fall airfare to Spain (one of those perks of working at Travelzoo), I called Nicole and asked her: "Want to go to Spain in November?" She said yes. And we're going.

We booked flights on Iberia, flying into Madrid on Nov. 8 and out of Barcelona on Nov. 16. I'm really excited because this time we're going to travel a bit and see more of the country, instead of just staying in Madrid. We're planning on spending 2 nights in Madrid, 1-2 in Valencia and then driving up the coast to Barcelona and staying there for 3-4 nights.

The best part? The airfare cost $550 total. For both of us. Roundtrip, with all taxes. We've paid more to get to California.

We've got 8 months to flesh out our itinerary, so if you have any suggestions, send them my way.

So a few days ago, I wrote a post about [. I had an ulterior motive: There was a piece of software I wanted (WebCamMax) to get AnnieCam working, and it cost $50. Being the cheapskate that I am, I wanted to find a way around that. And I did: The company gives you a free license for the software if you review it on your blog. Hence that post.

But I enjoyed writing it. So I'm inspired: It's time to bring back the blog.

There's a lot going on to write about in the next few weeks. Nicole and I just booked a trip to Spain in November (more about that in my next post). The Glimm NCAA Memorial Basketball Tournament begins one week from today, and it looks like Michigan will actually be in the 64-team field for the first time in over a decade. Baseball season kicks off in a few weeks, and the Mets will move to CitiField. We're in the middle of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and President Obama is attempting to use it to enact some pretty amazing liberal programs. All exciting stuff - and I will write about all of it.

The blog will touch on a bunch of things - our life, politics, sports. I'll even point out some great Travelzoo travel deals. So tune in.

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For the last seven months, we've had a pretty simple system with Annie, our dog: When we go to work, we'd put her in the bathroom behind a baby gate. We'd leave some toys, water and her bed, and she'd hang out in there all day. We have a dog walker who comes once a day in the afternoon to take her out. And it worked well.

Not anymore. For the last two days, Annie scaled the baby gate, roaming free in our apartment.

We've been considering giving her free reign of the apartment anyway. Now, she's taken the decision into her own paws.

Which brought me to my next project: AnnieCam. Since Annie's going to roam free throughout the apartment, we'd like to be able to keep a bit of an eye on her.  My laptop has a built-in webcam, and we have an older external webcam, so I can actually create a two-cam setup.

In my past life as an online editor for newspapers, I've experimented with several live-streaming web sites. My favorite is ustream.tv. So I created an AnnieCam channel on ustream.

Then I needed to decide what software I would use that would let me use 2 cameras. I've done some experimentation with this kind of thing before, too, in my newspaper life, exploring what programs could be used to join feeds from multiple cameras and make a feed look professional. I wanted to use one called WebCamMax - but new there wasn't a 64-bit Vista version of it.

But out of curiosity, I went to its site anyway, and discovered that there's an alpha of a 64-bit version of WebCamMax.

I wasn't sure what to expect from an alpha, but was pleasantly surprised - it seems to be a pretty full-featured program. It does all sorts of things to manipulate a webcam feed. I can add text, graphics, photos, a feed of my desktop, etc. And most importantly, I can take in feeds of two programs.

Knowing that Annie loves to hang out on our couch, I decided I'd set up the two cameras facing the couch, each covering a different part of it (yes, it's a very big couch). I then used the program's Picture-in-Picture functionality to display both feeds at once.

At first, the PiP was blocking a key part of the screen, which was a little problematic. Then I realized I could just move the PiP box around, so I put it in the upper left-hand corner of the screen, and voila - perfecto!

The software isn't perfect. There's one feature I'd really like -- the ability to rotate between feeds every X seconds. So I can set it to show one camera full-screen for 90 seconds, then switch to the other camera for 90 seconds, then back, etc.  So WebCamMax people, if you're reading this, please add that function!

Below is some video testing out AnnieCam. And I'll probably have AnnieCam running pretty much 8-6 on weekdays, so tune and see our cute cockapoo hanging out on the couch!

It's all falling into place. Not only do a have a job (see previous post), but we have an apartment. Nicole and I just signed a lease for a great two-bedroom apartment in Boerum Hill, an up-and-coming neighborhood in Brooklyn. The apartment is in an amazing location, on Smith Street, right in the heart of the neighborhood, with lots of restaurants, specialty food stores and bars just out the door.

It's a little smaller than our LA apartment and rent is literally twice the price, but it does have two huge things that our old apartment didn't have: one and a half bathrooms (as opposed to one), and a washer/dryer in unit.  It also has a killer kitchen, which makes Nicole very, very happy.

And no, I'm not driving a big yellow truck there. I'm flying. On a plane. I'm going for work.

Which means I have a job. Woo-hoo! I accepted a job earlier this week as editor of travelzoo.com, the travel deals company best known for its weekly Top 20 deals newsletter. If you don't subscribe, you should. 

We've got lots of ideas for building out the site, and I'm really excited about the job. I start next Thursday.  But right off the bat, I'm going to Tokyo for a conference with the editors of the international versions of the site, as well as the newsletter publishers.  I'm looking forward to some amazing sushi, and hopefully getting to a baseball game while I'm there. I'll be there from July 23-27, so check back here for updates on the trip.

My job search was really interesting. At first, I looked at newspapers. When I was in New York in April, I interviewed with a handful of newspapers and magazines, but they were mostly informational interviews without actual open positions. The only paper with an open position was Newsday, and they offered me a job as a local news editor. It was a lower position and less money than I had in Los Angeles, and it would have been an ugly commute to Long Island, so I turned it down.

When I got back to LA, I expanded my search to companies that were in the web publishing business but not necessarily journalism.  I saw the Travelzoo listing on Craigslist, I believe, and had a few phone interviews with them before I got here. My first week back here, I had interviews lined up my first week with Travelzoo, Kickapps (a social networking software company) and NBC. All very different jobs.

Travelzoo and NBC were at the top of the list, and Travelzoo solidified that position when I interviewed with Ralph Bartel, their CEO.  We had a great conversation, and I was excited about his vision for where the company is heading. 

NBC had a few positions open. They at first considered me for an online news editor job in their Local Media division, and then Managing Editor of WNBC.com. NBC is putting together a great team, and I love their digital strategy. Had they made a competitive offer against Travelzoo, I would've had to do some serious thinking. But the timing didn't work out - Travelzoo made the offer and needed an answer, and WNBC couldn't come back with an offer quickly enough.  That made the decision easy - the Travelzoo gig has so much potential, though, and I'm really, really excited about.

So two weeks of stress are over. I'm no longer unemployed.  And I'm going to have some damn good sushi..

Every now and then, you hear of something that is so good, so fantastic, that it amazes you that everybody's not talking about it. This is one of those situations

It's minor league baseball, Brooklyn Cyclones (Mets affliliate) vs. Staten Island Yankees. Ninth inning. The Yanks bring in a relief pitcher. But this isn't any relief pitcher. He's ambidextrous. That's right - the elusive switch-pitcher.

This guy was just drafted out of Creighton last week, so it must've been his first professional appearance. The Mets knew exactly what the situation called for - a switch-hitter

That's right - switch-pitcher versus switch-hitter. And hilarity ensues.

The pitcher puts the glove on his left hand.  The batter moves to the left-handed side of the plate. The pitcher then switches the glove to his right hand. The batter switches to the right-handed side of the plate. Repeat. The dance goes on.

And yes, we have video:

... but I finally got the pics up from the third and fourth days of the trip.  Sorry for the delay - no good excuse, really.

Photos from June 10 can be found here, and photos from June 11 are here.

The highlights (note the last picture - I was worried we had driven in one 2500-mile circle):

Nicole had her first day working at Yahoo's New York office yesterday, and I had an interview at KickApps, a social networking software company, two blocks away. So we decided to meet for lunch. We met about noon in Bryant Park, just in front of her office, and were walking to a Japanese place when a guy passing us says, 'Josh? Is that you?'

It took me a minute to place him: Jackson Bell, former reporter at the Glendale News-Press. Just about the last person I expected to run into. We worked together there about five years ago. He left a few years ago and moved to Paris, to go to culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. 

Turns out that he just moved to New York two weeks ago, and is starting today at a fancy New York restuarant, Oceana. Small world.

The interview was great, by the way. It went really well, and I really liked the people at KickApps, and I like what they do.  I have a few more interviews scheduled for this week, and I'll write more on the job search when I know more later this week.

So we've been back in New York for four full days now, and I've had some time to reflect on the five days we spent cramped in the cab of a truck making our way to a new life. Here are some final thoughts:

1) We were amazingly lucky. Everywhere we went, it seems, was hit by storms, floods and tornadoes either two days before we got there or two days after we left. As we drove out of Oklahoma City, we commented to each other about the storm clouds settling in over the city. We drove east into beautiful weather, then watched on the news that night about storms pounding Oklahoma.  It was the same thing in Illinois.  Seems like we missed swimming cross-country by an inch.

2) I'd like to do this again some day, just not in a truck.  Before we left, we made a plan.  We bought a book called Roadfood, which tells you good and interesting places to eat on a roadtrip. We picked out lunch and dinner spots for most days of the trip. That was going to be our motivation - a good, unique meal that will give us a taste of local flavor at each stop. 

There were two things I didn't really anticipate. First of all, I thought we'd be driving 8 to 10 hours a day, based on an average speed of about 70-75 miles per hour.  That was impossible in this truck. Our average speed was probably about 60. That tacked 2-3 hours onto each day, which means we were arriving at our destinations pretty late, and we were pretty exhausted. Often, we just wanted to curl up in our hotel room and not bother going out for a meal.

The second thing I didn't anticipate is how difficult the rig would be to park.  I've written about this in the past on this blog, but to be blunt, it was a bitch.  Everywhere we went, we had to think about the parking situation.  Is there truck parking? Would we be able to maneuver the truck and trailer?  More often than not, the answer was no.  One day, we saw a sign for Wendy's on the freeway, and thought that sounded good for lunch.  We called from our cells to ask if they have truck parking. This conversation ensued:

Wendy's woman: "You want what kind of burger?"
Me: "Truck parking. I want to know if you have truck parking."
WW: "Truck burger? I don't think we have that."
Me: "No. We're driving a truck. We want to know if we can park it. So we can come inside and eat."
WW: "Oh, no, we don't have that."

The Wendy's Woman (truck burger? seriously?) was probably the second-most-stupid woman I dealt with on the trip. No. 1 goes to Barb at the Flying J in western Pennsylvania. This was Wednesday night.  We wanted to put gas in our truck, as many people are want to do at a gas station. I went inside, handed my credit card to Barb, asked her to activate Pump 19, then went back outside. Waiting behind me in line was a woman attempting to return a $500 GPS unit.  I pumped about $130 worth of gas, then went inside to pay.  One problem - while I was outside, Barb had accidentally swiped my credit card, instead of the woman's, and credited it $500 for the GPS. And she couldn't figure out how to void the transition. So instead, she figured she'd just charge my card $500, off-setting the credit. Except Mastercard saw this crediting/charging as suspicious and declined my card, putting a fraud alert on it.  All of this happened while I was outside. I came in to find a perplexed Barb, trying to figure out what to do. She called her manager. She called Mastercard. Nobody could help her. All along, I was standing there waiting for her to give me my card back - nearly 30 minutes in all. Finally, I said, "Listen, I got to go. You've got the transaction info on the receipts, you should be able to void this. Just give me my card back." She did.

Anyway, I digress. This was all about not being able to get around on our stops. We only went to a few of our planned stops - In N Out in Arizona (the furthest east In N Out they have, so we could have one last double-double), Cattleman's Cafe in Oklahoma City, the Dairy in Ohio - that's about it.  I'd like to do this trip in a car, where we'd have the freedom to explore these places. And hopefully avoid Barb.