Denrael

I’m in Richmond, VA for a few days this week visiting existing customers. I’m staying out at the Doubletree by RIC airport, which is a fine hotel if you don’t mind very average breakfasts, and not being able to get into your room on an ongoing basis. Other than that, seems like a lovely place. I haven’t had time to check out the fitness center yet, but I walked by and it looked very nice.

The other night, I ended up at the recomendation of some people on twitter at the Capital Ale House. Suffice it to say it’s a suggestion I am very happy to have taken. Walking in the place was quite busy and remained so the entire time I was there. It has a true pub feel to it. One of the first things you notice is the immense number of taps and coolers behind the bar. When you sit down, an extremely friendly and knowledgeable staff presents you with the Ale & Lager Menu which is several pages long and puts some wine lists to shame with their very complete and well done descriptions of the beverages.

I tried several beers that night, including the Samual Adams Double Bock and the Allagash White Ale. I thought I had a winner for the night with the Allagash, being very similar to a Hoegaarden one of my favorite beers.That was right up until I tried the  Jefferson Reserve  Bourbon Barrel Stout. This was without a doubt one of the best and most unusual stouts I have ever had. There is no question that I will be heading back again tonight to give it another taste.

One other element of the Capital Ale House which I appreciated is the ice ring they have embedded into the bar. This serves to keep your beer very cold as you drink it. I’ve only seen this at one other bar in Dallas, TX. Twitter me if you know of other locations, or know the place in Dallas I’m talking about.

The food was good pub food. Nothing that will expand the culinary boundaries, but then you didn’t go to an ale house for the food now, did you?

Next week: Boston.

You all know I live on the road. I have far too many calendars in my life, and I finally decided today that I needed to get them all under control.

• Work - Standard Exchange Based Calendar
• Personal - Standard iCal Calendar
• Travel - TripIt Calendar Feed of Trips
• Events - Another iCal Calendar which has things of interest but not hard dates.

I decided that Google would be the common point for bringing all my calendars together. I already had a sync working between Google and Exchange for my work calendar, and having access to everything from the web is sort of nice. After trying several solutions, including Google’s own options, I landed with BusySync from BusyMac. It provides two way synchronization between Google and iCal for my local calendars. Further syncing to iPhone was done via MobileMe.

I now have all my calendars showing up on my iPhone. As an added benefit, I finally figured out how to control what the default calendar is on the iPhone.  Go to Settings, Calendars, and scroll all the way to the bottom. You’ll find it there.

I am doing the BusySync trial now, but if it works as well as it appears, this one is a keeper.

I’ve been back a week from New York and NRF, and am way behind on posting my thoughts and reviews. My appologies, but when I got home, I managed to find myself down for a week with whatever is going around.  Look for some upcoming notes on:

• Mesa Grill (always)
• Annisa
• Ben Ash Deli
• Dream Hotel
• Hooters of New York City

I thought I was done with travel for the season, but it turns out I have one more trip to Kansas City coming up. Thank you NWA (Now Delta) for forcing me to fly from Minneapolis to Dallas to Memphis to Kansas City in order to get a reasonable fare.

As I’ve continued to try to work over Denver International Airports free WIFI, I’ve found it even more annoying. Reponse time on any site is extremely sluggish. Further, I’ve had to close and restart my browser several times when links timed out waiting on ad refreshes. This ia a big thumbs down to DIA’s approach.

I’m sitting in concourse C at Denver International Airport after 20 minutes of trying to connect to their alleged “free” wifi. I absolutly could not get a connection working off of Internet Explorer from the perspective of getting the redirect to allow me to agree to behave. I fired up Firefox, and finally got that redirect so I could agree to the appropriate Terms & Conditions (legalese for fine, whatever, just let me in). It turns out that you are given free wifi following a 30 second advertisement. That’s cool, I can deal with that. The problem is that once you are in, they hijack your browser to use adjuggler to place a 1/5 frame across the top of the page to constantly show ads during your session. I’m noticing now that I’m in Tumblr, that everytime the add changes, it causes problems and delays on the text I’m typing in the tumblr frame. I don’t mind the up front ad, but the continual ones are more annoying than not having any wifi. More and more, I’m considering a wireless card for my laptop.

Denver International also has the Clear line at the TSA. I wrote earlier about my experiences with Registered Traveler programs, but I did end up renewing this year (as a convenience they renewed me before I got around to canceling). For those of you that don’t travel through DEN, there are two main security checkpoints for all gates; North and South. I went to the North checkpoint where I learned that that Clear checkpoint is only open Sun-Tues from 5am to 7pm. Since this is Wednesday I was redirected to the other end of the airport to the South checkpoint. First class checkin was wide open, so I could have taken that, but I wanted to see how Denver handled Clear. I walked to the other end of the airport, found the Clear line, and presented my ID, Clear Card, and Boarding Pass. I was then able to put my ID away, but kept the other items out. I walked down to a concierge, and presented my card. They put it into the machine, and I was then able to put that away. Following that, she gave me the bins, I uppacked my laptop, put that in a bin with my jacket and shoes and walked over to the security line where we cut in front of everyone to go through the actual checkpoint.

Overall, I saved no time over using the First Class line, at least at the time I was there. I’m sure at busy times, that changes. I still have to remove my shoes, and while the concierge carried the bins, I still took my own suitcase.  I find it very hard to justify this at $124 per year, but if it was available in Minneapolis where First Class lines are still 20-30 minutes, I might think differently.

Yesterday, I was in downtown Denver, and had lunch at the Rialto Cafe. I had a variation of a BLT with Mozzerella Cheese, and it was quite good. For dinner I decided to go to the Rockies game. Coors Field is just a fun ball park, and it is located in the heart of LoDo, meaning that there are plenty of places to stop in for a beer following the game. If you have a chance, I recommend Coors Field for a game.