Never Holiday With Sandals, Part Two

In the beginning, there was Sandals Travel Sucks (the first part).

Then we swam, ate, drank and generally had a merry time for a few days.

When it came time to leave though, we were pretty rightfully frightened considering the treatment Sandals had given us on the flight down. The Girl kept asking our butler (yes, we had a butler - but it's not really as swank as it sounds) to verify our schedule but we were continually told not to worry about it.

So I double checked the only flight information we had on hand - the original paper itinerary. This told us we needed to board around 9:45 and considering the amount of merry time we had the night before ... this proved somewhat difficult. We awoke and sloughed around 7 in the morning to shower, finish packing and harass the front desk. We were both in a state of pain from being hungover with very little sleep.

The front desk was certain we were to check out at 11, leave at 12 and board a plane at 2:35. This prompted a lot of questions from us. Were we still getting into Chicago at 7 if we were leaving half a day later than before? Were we going to have enough time in San Juan to make our connecting flight (without the use of a time machine)? Were we confirmed for this new flight out of San Juan?

The first story we got was the yes, we would still get to Chicago at 7:00. Yes, thirty minutes was enough time to exit the plane, get your luggage, get through customs and get to the other gate.

We were a bit skeptical of all this.

The second story we got was that we had about an hour in San Juan but we'd still get to Chicago later that night. We still didn't get any real confirmation on this phantom flight and never got confirmation that we were actually on that flight.

We were a bit skeptical of all this.

So noon rolls around and we're put into a cab and get sent off to the airport. We get to the American Airlines ticket counter.

We are told there has been a schedule change and there is no flight out of San Juan to Chicago. The best they can do is get us to Miami that night, hope we can get a hotel and then get to Chicago in the morning.

At this junction there are only three possibilities. Either Sandals is so woefully incompetent that they don't understand the difference between a plane being in existence and not being in existence, they know the difference but they were simply lying to us because they knew once we were off the resort we weren't their problem - or some combination of the two.

To make a long, painful, story short - we spent four hours in a Days Inn off Miami International. We made it into Chicago about 17 hours after we were supposed to originally. I missed a day of work and The Girl had no chance to clean or organize for our impending house guests. We've been in varying states of exhaustion ever since. Oddly being stuck for inside hotels, airports and airplanes for nearly a day cycle really throws the body out of whack.

Despite the fact that we had a plenty good time while on the island itself - our end summation is that there are plenty of resorts in the sea and we don't need to deal with one that treats its guest so carelessy from both a corporate and local level. The treatment was truly astonishing.

I've heard back from their odd, secret, internal customer service on the first part and the response was essentially a formal summary of their original stance. They process many flights like this and if a few customers fall through the cracks then well, shrug, ho hum and go sod off.

Which we would say to Sandals: the feeling is now mutual.

Update:
I sent a summary of this to the "internal customer service email" (whatever the hell that means). I had already sent the first post there and basically got a paraphrase of the same "this is our policy" nonsense that they gave us before.

This time I got nothing. Not even a "sorry for lying to" or, heck, even a sorry. Nothing at all. This is Sandals, people. Unless you're calling with your credit card in hand, they could really care less.

Christmas Loot Reviews

Brief rundown of what the Wii got for Xmas:

Geometry Wars
Played it for about it an hour. It's a solid port of the PC game, I can't really speak for the 360 version of course. The "galaxy" mechanic is solid enough to provide the kind of variation required for an actual purchase, but this title isn't going to win your heart or anything. It's an old school arcade shooter, it's fun and it has multiplayer modes (though not online).

Short version: If you have friends over every now and then, this is probably a solid afternoon time waster or something to leave on during a party. The lack of online is a bit of a shame - but not a dealbreaker.

Metroid Prime: Corruption
I've spent most of my time on Metroid. I think I'm like 10% through already. It has a beautiful frustration curve to it ... once you think you're fed up with a location you just start exploring some more and generally find your workaround. Exploration, as is proper with the Metroid franchise, is the key here. Corruption has a different style to it than nearly any other shooter outside of it's own predecessors. There's not a lot of over the top action ... instead the game swims in the environment. If other shooters steal anything, they should steal the scanning mechanic ... the closest I can think of right now is BioShock's photography schtick.

Simply put - it's one of the best shooters ever made. It has the foibles of the Metroid design - exploration and well, re-exploration - which might not be for everyone. But Metroid: Corruption kinda reminds me of when everyone was playing Doom and some people kept raving about Marathon. Except now everyone is playing Marathon's spiritual offspring Halo and some people keep raving about Metroid.

Super Mario Galaxy
The Girl and I whipped this out for a couple hours to give it a whirl, so I can't say I have anything extensive to say about it. I'll just say that it feels like the proper successor to the Super Mario 64 mantle. The planets/gravity mechanics give it enough of a twist that you don't feel like you're playing yesterday's game, the co-op mechanic is solid enough to make it worthwhile to coax someone else to help out and the graphics are just simply wonderful. In two hours, the title felt like one of those must-haves for the system.

Phantasy Star Online
The Gamecube edition offers up better graphics and a new split screen mode ... something I can't get if I just jack my Dreamcast into my PC monitor. Plus the edition The Brother found has the extra quests for the single player mode (and both episodes). So lots of content here. The only stumbling block for us was that the split screen "multimode" is hard to jump right into. You can't play the quests, so there's no safety net for new players. We tried a bit, The Girl's hunter died and was left with no weapons or money.

Still, not a hard thing to workaround - we'll just buff up characters in single mode and then meet back up in multimode. And I'm amazed as to how well this gameplay holds up. PSO set such a solid standard for an action RPG that it still makes me think of the Phantasy Star Universe for the PS2 and cry. Well, maybe not cry, but certainly shake my head. Here's a Gamecube game with tight mechanics, hours and hours of content and a split-screen offline mode, and there was a PS2 game I had in the tray for less than an hour.

PSO still rocks the kazbah. The Girl was saying I should walk the dog tonight so that she could catch up to my level 7. Oh yeah, level 7 in just one night. I still got it...

Days Of Christmas: Old Dog Vestibular

There are always the things unplanned.

It was about 3:00 in the morning that we got our dog, Goethe, to the ER vet here in Chicago. This was last Friday. I woke to the noise of her falling - which isn't that odd since she shifts around in her bed sometimes - but this was just continous. At first we thought something was wrong with her back hips ... her legs are splayed out and she couldn't stand without leaning on something.

Then The Girl noticed her eyes - flickering back and forth with rapid succession and her eyebrows dancing to keep up. My first thought was a stroke and my heart sank. Just earlier that day I had ran with her in the park. It was hard to think about how this was going to turn out.

The ER vet was across town but it is definately one of those things you're glad you live in the city to have. Expensive, sure, but we could just get in the car and talk to a real vet without trying to wake anyone up or hold on the phone for an emergency line. Once in Bloomington, my cat had a bad reaction to some of her shots and ended up running around the apartment with one leg kicking in fits of spasms. I ended up calling the emergency pager number five times. I never got a call back, even in the morning. I never went back to that vet again.

At the ER, we got what was definitely bad news ... but not as bad as we had feared. Goethe had what is commonly called old dog vestibular disease, or sometimes just old dog vestibular or old dog disease. It's not uncommon. It's idiopathic - which means they usually will never find a cause. Essentially something happens in the brain between the ear nerves and central processing which result in the poor dog's world turning into a combination of a merry go round and one of those evil spinning car on an arm things. And they can't get off.

As bad as this sounds, the silver lining is that it is generally self-recoverable. Treatment is rest, making sure the dog is hydrated, and trying to get them to stand and walk on their own so that the brain attempts to sort everything out. My instinct would have been to put a towel over her head and keep her in a dark room - but that's apparently precisely what you shouldn't do.

The problem here was that we had nothing to do but wait. The self-recovery bit is nothing but probabilities. Some dogs recover fully in 24 hours. Some recover partially in 72 hours. Some recover somewhat in three weeks. Some never really recover. And all you get to do is wait to see if you get your dog back or you'll be setting up the IV at home. We spent Friday afternoon at the vet's congratulating Goethe on standing and leaning. At one point Goethe tried to kiss The Girl on the cheek and ended up toppling to the ground.

Thankfully by Saturday her condition had gotten better and the vet was comfortable with releasing her. She had eaten some wet food from someone's hand - she was still to not able to navigate a bowl just yet. She could walk a little. The Girl was uneasy putting her in a car in this state, so our holiday weekend ended up getting split as I drove down to the homestead to catch my brother while he was still in town, and then looped back up with my dad the next day to pick her up, if she felt the puppy was up to the task.

Fortunately it seemed like time favored the good dog. Her recovery was in degrees, but we took every step we could get. Once down in Decatur, she was treated to a wide variety of holiday food and for a few days we were happy she was just eating anything at all. By the time we left on Tuesday, our concern was mainly that she wasn't drinking any proper water. My worry was that we had gotten this far only to need to worry about dehydration in a hurry.

The three and a half hour car ride seemed to convince Goethe that water was a good thing, though. She's back to drinking normally and eating pretty well at this point. Her head is usually at a slight tilt when she walks - and that might never go away. She's shy about stairs and when she's excited she forgets all about how to walk in a straight line. Yesterday, though, she chased down two squirrels in the park all on her own and gave them a good chase in the process. She can give puppy kisses any time she wants without so much as a stumble.

It's hard to keep a good dog down. And while our holiday week was strewn with worry and watching over her, I can only imagine the trip back that Goethe took to return home to us. Superstition says that one should take care of all leftover business before the new year. I think her timing seems like it will be pretty good.

Wii Shortage To Continue For Holidays

"I've never seen anything like this," says Michael Pachter, a videogame industry analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, about the overwhelming demand for Wiis. "Nintendo could not have expected this level of popularity."

So, why doesn't Nintendo just make more and cash in?

It's not that the company isn't trying. It's bumped up production from about 1 million to 1.8 million a month, says Nintendo Senior Vice President George Harrison, with roughly a third of them earmarked for North America. Last week was Nintendo's best since the Wii's launch, with 350,000 sold in the United States alone. In comparison, Microsoft sold about that many Xbox 360s last month. It's a remarkable triumph for a console focused on the kind of simple games skeptics originally wrote off as "thumb candy for dummies."

Since its launch a year ago, Nintendo's diminutive console has been perpetually sold out in North American stores. By the time you see Wiis advertised in the Sunday paper, they're already gone. Yet the company insists it's not creating artificial shortages, instead saying that demand -- from gamers young and old, and from eBay sellers looking to earn quick profits -- keeps increasing.

"Although we've made efforts over the year to increase the monthly production rate, we haven't been able to catch up with demand," admits Harrison.

-- Why You Can't Get Your Hands on a Wii

My tip is to wiibay a used one. It's what I did, it cut down the surcharge of going to an ebay scalper, I got some accessories tossed in to ease the pain and it's been working fine since I got it.

Wiishlist

Will the Wiipuns ever end? Is it too wiierd? Who cares.

One of the biggest concerns with the Wii is the library. I'm not sure how big of a concern it needs to be when I just got done with a two-day Thanksgiving Wiifest which largely consisted of either Wii Bowling or Wii Tennis - both which are included with the console itself.

And besides, November is turning out to be a killer month for the Wii. If you're new to the system, you have the standbys in the form of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime: 3, both of which I got a chance to preview at The Brother's over the turkey holiday and found them to be exactly what you might hope them to be - insanely well updated versions of games already classics on Nintendo's hardware. And if that wasn't enough of a no-brainer for you, Super Mario Galaxy becoming one of the highest rated games of all time sure should be.

If that's not enough Mario action for you, I keep being told that Mario Strikers Charged is the best game nobody is talking about for the system to date, which is odd since it apparently snuck in as one of the earliest examples of playing on NiWiFi with the Wii.

The brother also had Battalion Wars 2 via Gamefly, but we didn't get a chance to try it out with all the trash-talking turkey-dancing Wii Sports action that was going on. Still, makes my list.

Three suprise contenders include Zack and Wiki, which is apparently the other best game nobody is playing on the system, Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 which from the previews sounds like it might either surpass or round out Metroid for gameplay with online and arcade style modes, and finally Ghost Squad, if you happen to like over the top rails shooters which have unlock codes to replace knives with bananas.

And you know you do.

The Myth Of Cyber Monday

Being somewhat attached to the Internet professionally, the term "Cyber Monday" continues to gain some speed every year. For the record, Cyber Monday is marketing stunt pulled off by Shop.org, a prominent online retailer association. As Snopes points out, Cyber Monday is rarely a big day for online sales - the month of December alone pretty much eliminates any chance of that as procrastinators wait until the week before Christmas to get their last minute items shipped to them. Actually, I think Black Friday still regularly outsells Cyber Monday.

Still, I probably do about 90% of my holiday shopping online and honestly this year might be more like 100%.

Oh Happy Easter

The Girl and I have just returned from a few days on the homestead which ended with getting stuck in traffic for an hour or so - so I've been pretty incommunicado since Thursday and too tired to catch up now. Regular operations to return tomorrow.

Disturbing holiday pic via matallica's photostream.