Let’s be honest with ourselves shopping for flights sucks. It may even suck and blow at the same time but that’s beyond me, I’m no physicist. There was a New York Times article that’s making the rounds on the internet pointing to a new airline fare tracking site at http://www.farecast.com/. Instead of just telling you what the fares are at this moment they are looking at past rates, looking at trends and tries to predict what rates will do in the near future. Another awesome feature is they will allow you to put in a date and it will check for the best price within 30 days of that date to allow people to say “I want to go to D.C. sometime this summer for a week, when will it be cheap to fly?”

Currently they’re only supporting flights out of Boston and Seattle but hopefully they’ll roll out service in SLC soon.

Edit: I just re-read this and realized it sounds like a big spam post… I really just think it sounds like a great idea.

I know it sounds really sad but I’ve realized just how dependent I am on having internet access. We’ve been completely cut off from the internet at home since Thursday or so, and all last week it was cutting out for hours at a time. It means that Amber and I had to spend some time at the office and Badass Coffee this weekend to get our homework done and posted. The worst thing though was we wanted to go see a movie on Saturday but we had no idea what time anything was playing… it’s odd how dependant we get on having information at our fingertips and then when it’s gone we don’t seem to know anything.

Amber and I spent the weekend in Milwaukee for a wedding. To be honest I was really not looking forward to this trip but it turned out to be a lot of fun.

We flew into Chicago-Midway on Friday and rented a car to drive up to Milwaukee. Toll roads are interesting phenomena; in theory I think they’re great. Those who use the roads pay for the roads, but when you forget that you’re getting on to a toll road and need to scramble for change to pay for the tolls they really suck.

Between the wedding and the reception we had a few hours to burn and since there were about a dozen of us with nothing to do we decided to go take the Miller Brewery tour. It was a free tour with free beer at the end, even if it was crappy Miller products it still doesn’t get any better than that.

On Sunday once everyone got to the airport(s) we headed to Gambill’s to hang out with him for a few hours. We went to his office in the Sears tower. He’s “only” on the 33rd floor but it’s still a heck of a view. We followed that up with a trip down to Millennium Park. It’s a gift to the people of the city of Chicago… bought by the people of Chicago :-). It’s a really nice park with some great features. The artistic center piece is a piece of art known locally as “the bean” which is a giant reflective bean that gives a whole new perspective on the city via its reflection. But stand underneath the sculpture and its reflective surface can definitely cause a bit of disorientation and I know for me at least it threw my equilibrium off for a few hours… but it’s really cool to see.  We followed this up with Pizza at Gino’s East.  MMM pizza.

Monday morning we found ourselves with a couple of hours to burn and ended up going to the Brookfield Zoo.  It’s absolutely HUGE and we saw maybe 1/4 of it.  Highly suggested if you find yourself in the area with a day or two to burn.

So that was our weekend.  Good times all around.

So Amber and I took Sunday morning off and went skiing up at Park City Moutain Resort. What an awesome day! I was thinking about my technique enough to keep myself from working too hard and thus I wasn’t working so hard to slow myself down. To top that off the snow was really damn fast so I was going really fast. It was great.

While we were there we were at the peak checking out the trail map trying to decide where the go next. Amber (I could just be remembering this wrong) said something along the lines of “Lets go down to Payday” (the major lift that’s in the middle of the resort and is the primary access for most of the resort) “and then on to this area”. I said something along the lines of “Ok, but I was thinking maybe we could go down to the town lift” (it starts on lower Main street in town and even has a bridge over another road to ski to it from the resort) “just because it seems like fun”. Amber to this says “ok, lets go”.

As we come down the mountain and get to the point where we would make the decision to go to the Town lift or Payday, there’s a ski patrol guy waving his arms and yelling towards us. “Payday is broken down, use Ski Team”. This was about 11:00 AM. When we left the resort at 1:00 they were still evacuating people from the lift, and today it was still down (along with another lift that they shut down to cannibalize for parts). I’m just glad we weren’t on the lift when it died 🙂

BTW there’s updates in the comments.