Planning a Family Vacation

I don't know how we planned family vacations before the ubiquity of the Internet and sites like AirBnB or VRBO. With tools like these you can quickly research family vacations and get a rough idea of what is feasible and what is not. Recently I had someone pay back a sizeable loan and so I have a little coin ready to spend. I thought I would take my adult kids and their families on a nice family vacation.

The first thing I did was quickly check on places I know we like to visit and got an idea of cost. Next I set a reasonable budget. I got some money back but don't want to spend the whole amount. I am preparing for retirement and want to make sure there is plenty for my wife and me. Some ideas I had include going to Hawaii, taking the family on a cruise, renting a large home near a National Park, as well as a few others. I talked to each of my kids and shared my thoughts.

Everyone likes the idea of Dad footing the bill for a family vacation but everyone has different interests. That is where Internet research can help. Doing a generic search for "Family Vacations" returns way too many results. Besides, while a family with young kids wants to do something like Disney World, my daughters who are single want to do other activities. We keep throwing out ideas but are still trying to decide what people want to do.

The other issue we have is getting everyone's schedules to coordinate. While we all love instant gratification and would love to leave right now for Hawaii, that doesn't fit everyone's schedule. My wife says I have too many trips planned in the next 2 months with a work trip to Japan, another to New York, a personal trip to Disney World with a grand daughter, and an October trip to Ohio to see our youngest son. Normally that wouldn't be a lot of travel for her but she is coming with me to Japan and New York so now it is.

I have always been a scheduler and my kids are too. That means all of my children have the next year planned. I guess we just need to find a time that works for everyone and commit it to the calendar. It may not be for a year or so but at least it will be planned.  

Google Maps in Dead Zones

My wife and I just completed a lengthy road trip to Glacier National Park. I knew we would put a couple thousand miles on the car so we rented one instead of taking a vehicle of our own. Besides neither my wife nor I have cars that get very good gas mileage. We purchase cars more for snow driving than summer and that makes them less than ideal for long drives.

As long as you stay on an interstate road, you are pretty much guaranteed to have mobile service the whole trip. What happens when you venture off into less-traveled paths? Well I can assure you that we had hours of travel in Montana with absolutely no mobile coverage whatsoever. I wondered what would happen in Google Maps and now I know.

I often complain that some software applications were written by people that never got full credit on their homework assignments in college. There are two companies where that is not the case: Apple and Google. Generally those guys know their stuff and this road trip proved that. Most of the time we would lose service and the app kept plugging along seamlessly. This became impressive when we could still see our car on the map. My guess is that the Google Maps app caches a number of map tiles in the surrounding area before you drive into coverage-less areas.

No it was not perfect. There were several instances in Glacier where the car appeared to be driving significantly to the right of the road. We seemed close enough I didn't worry about it. We also drove into some areas where the map showed nothing. For the most part it worked pretty well.

Google Maps turned into a lifesaver when we drove into Canada. The Toyota Corolla did not have a dual-unit speedometer. It only showed the current speed in miles per hour. That doesn't do much good when the speed limit is posted in kilometers per hour. Fortunately the moment we hit Canada, the units in Google Maps switched to metric and showed us our speed as captured in the GPS. I could see that 80 kph actually works out to 51 mph. I also kept track of the appropriate speeds for 60 kph and 40 kph. Those are the speed limits we encountered on the curvy mountain roads in in Waterton National Park.

The one letdown of trying to use Google Maps in dead zones is having it inaccurately provide your estimated arrival time over a lengthy drive. We started the drive with phone service and it had us arriving at home around 6pm. We drove into a dead zone and that time shot up to 6:30pm. We got back in service range and it came back down to 6pm. That happened a few times on the drive and so the second time, it didn't surprise me as much.

Overall Google Maps is a great application. We used it constantly to get around and keep from missing the turn on the small road to our cabin we rented. Without it we would have made quite a few U-turns. Furthermore it impressed us with how it worked even without mobile phone coverage. 

Planning a Road Trip

Last year my wife and I headed to Mt. Rushmore on a road trip. We did a bit of planning before we left but really had no idea what the trip would be like. We made reservations to ride an old steam-engine train and made sure to have hotel reservations when we got to town. Otherwise we didn't stress about filling every second with activities. The trip turned out to be wonderful and we had a great time.

This year we decided to do another road trip and will head to Glacier National Park. We made our hotel reservations back in March and will be staying in some cabins right at the entrance. While visiting Dinosaur National Monument a few weeks ago, we picked up our annual National Parks pass so we already have that taken care of. Last night we sat down and did a bit more planning so we have some ideas of activities to keep us busy.

First I pulled out our National Geographic book with information about all of the National Parks in the United States. That is a great resource to get an idea of what there is to do in Glacier National Park. As can be expected with physically printed media, there is a lot that is out of date. Fortunately a lot of information is still valid.

Next we pulled out the laptop and brought up Google Maps. That is such a great tool for looking at driving distances and times. We mapped the route from our house to the park. It will take almost 10 hours and so we will break up the first day and only drive part way. As with our Mt. Rushmore trip, we won't worry about hotel reservations that first night as we don't know when we will decide to stop driving. I don't know if I want to try to make it to Butte or will stop early in Dillon. There are lots of options in either location.

I have a cousin living in Somers, Montana and so I sent her a text message letting her know that we may stop in on our second day of the trip as it is on the way. My wife has an aunt living in Eureka, Montana about an hour outside the park so we sent her a text as well. It is nice to be able to visit extended family on such a trip.

Lastly we looked at all of the things to do in the park. There is a lot to see and some of it can be done in a car but the majority requires hiking. Then there are the option of horseback and boat rides as well. We created a rough itinerary of interesting things to do. As the park is combined with Waterton Park in Canada we decided we want to bring our passports to facilitate a border crossing, should we decide to do that. We also looked at the weather to help us decide the clothing to bring. Right now, highs are in the mid 60's and so we will be sure to pack appropriate jackets and pants, not just shorts and t-shirts.

I now feel prepared for the trip we will take in the next week or so. While I still have a printed road atlas for the United States, I appreciate being able to use the Internet to plan road trips. Furthermore after looking up directions, Google Maps wanted to know if it should send directions to my phone. After all, once in the car, that is how we will navigate. We still have some time though so I will pass for now. 

Putting on the Pith Helmet

 

 

Early in my career I heard the story of a software developer that had the unique practice of putting on a pith helmet whenever forced to debug his own code. I'm not sure how true the story is but it evokes the image of an early explorer trudging through the jungles of a distant continent. In my current role, I am often asked to search for system problems and help resolve them.

Last Friday I received a cry for help and immediately looked into the issue. My manager didn't like how I responded as he wanted me to find the source of the problem before bothering the group that reported it. I saw it differently as I wanted them to know that we immediately started looking at the issue and wondered if they had any more information they could provide to help diagnose the issue. Ultimately the only thing I could do was log a bug with another group in the company and have them research the root cause of the issue.

We told the group that reported the issue that we would work to get the issue resolved by Monday. Such is the luxury of working for a world-wide company like Sony. I can go enjoy my weekend and hope another team working in Japan or India has enough time to find the issue and resolve it before Monday even starts in the United States. Unfortunately sometimes an issue can be more difficult to troubleshoot and so it is important to get as much information as possible on Friday so we don't have any back-and-forth with questions.

Fortunately one of our excellent engineers saw the problem on Saturday and worked through the weekend to get it fixed. The root cause boiled down to "too much data." As this means the problem may arise again we have a two-pronged approach to solving it: The first is to monitor for larger-than-normal data sets. That will alert the operations team before the system users get a hint that something has gone wrong. The second is to modify the architecture to handle larger volumes of data.

This morning I came in and saw everything that had taken place over the weekend and could report back to the system user who noticed the problem. I could also share the resolutions that we plan to implement so it doesn't happen again. The user confirmed the problem fixed and I closed the bug appropriately.

While I like the idea of wearing a pith helmet to signify that I am trudging into the jungles of code, I am glad I have not adopted the practice. First, I work out of my home office so nobody would have any idea of the significance other than my wife who would just laugh at me. Second, I would have gotten a lot of strange looks and questions wearing the unique hat through the weekend. 

Don't Use Disney's Genie+ To Plan Your Day

My wife and I recently returned from Disney World and learned a lot. We acted as tour guides for my wife's office trip. We took two couples that had never been to Disney World before and they appreciated our knowledge and help. One of the wives had refrained from going to Disney's Flagship park because of how large it is wanted someone who knew the parks to act as a guide.

One of my wife's coworkers has serious fear-of-missing-out or FOMO and did a lot of research on her own. That meant a constant barrage of questions as to if we would do things and if not, the reason why. We appreciated her thoroughness but it got old quickly. One of her suggestions included using Disney's Genie+ app to help us plan our day. Basically you enter all the rides and attractions you want to experience and it will string together a list of how you should attack them based on crowd predictions. Just to humor her, we entered all the things we wanted to do on our first day. It came back and said we wanted to do too much and would not be able to fit it all in. We assured everyone we would be able to get everything done before the park closed and did.

Ultimately we managed to get a lucky break or two and the projected crowds did not materialize as expected. It also helped to visit attractions close to the ones we just exited. Every day we started at the parks' openings and finished everything we wanted to by 7pm or earlier. At Animal Kingdom we finished everything by 3:30pm.

I am not sure what AI technology Genie+ uses to create your schedule but I do know AI is wrong 80% of the time. That is my personal metric and yours may be different. In the case of Genie+ it told us we would not be able to visit all of the attractions we wanted to experience, yet we did. Your best bet when visiting Disney World is to pick your must-do ride and head there right when the park opens. Build your itinerary from there by visiting the next ride on your list that is near to where you are. Doing that you should be able to get everything in that you want to do. Good luck! 

LLM Demos All Look the Same

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco. As you might imagine, AI played a huge part in the conference. During the product feature keynote speech, Snowflake told us the answer to every question is CoCo, or their form of AI that uses Large Language Models or LLMs.

AI is much more encompassing than just LLMs but that is what everyone thinks of when we talk about AI right now. The downside to LLMs is that all of the demos look exactly the same. Snowflake kept trying to show us new features in their product, would bring up a chat prompt and type in some sort of question. It would think about it for a bit and then spit out a text answer. Sure you didn't need to code or type SQL queries to the database but there really wasn't any difference from one demo to the next.

Last year I attended only 3 days of the conference as I had to get home and couldn't stay for the final day. I should have taken a page out of last year's playbook and only stuck around for 3 days instead of the 4 I did this year. By the last day, I lost all excitement and couldn't wait to get home. In fact, I left the conference at noon and tried to catch an earlier flight back to Salt Lake.

Ultimately I came away from the conference feeling like I wasted some of my time. When all you have to do is pull up a chat prompt and enter your question, there is no need to learn the intricacies of the product. Don't know the syntax to join data from two separate data sources, just let the AI figure it out for you. The conference can be reduced from days to hours.

When I left the conference, Snowflake asked me to fill out a survey. They provided dates for the event next year and asked if I would attend in San Francisco. Naturally I politely declined as it just doesn't interest me any more. Now if they held the conference in Hawaii, I'd be there but doubt I would spend any time at the actual Summit. When it came time to put together a trip report, I could always ask AI to do it for me. 

3D Printing Summer 2026

I had my whole family visiting over the Memorial-Day weekend and we all had a lot of fun. On Monday my oldest son brought over a bunch of fidget toys he printed with his 3D printer. All of the kids loved playing with them and it got me thinking about how far the technology has come since I purchased my 3D printer. The printers you can get today are much more advanced and can do many different things.

My oldest son had a neighbor who got into 3D printing as a business. Every time the neighbor upgrades his printer, he gives the old one to my son. While my printer can print a single color, my son's can print multiple in the same print. There are a number of ways to do that. My son's printer has a single print head (where the hot plastic comes out of) and so it creates purge blocks where it dumps the previous color while waiting for the new one to be ready. Sometimes those purge blocks can be larger than the object you are printing and so you want to be careful with how often you change colors. My son's neighbor has a more expensive printer with multiple print heads, lessening the need to use purge blocks on color changes.

The fidget toys my son brought to our Memorial-Day celebration had multiple different colors and looked very nice compared to what I can print. My younger son who also has a 3D printer also expressed praise for the print quality. This had me asking if I should upgrade to a higher quality printer.

Truth be told, I don't have a lot of use for a 3D printer. Mine sits idle most of the year. About the only time I use it is during the Christmas Holidays when we create ornaments or small and inexpensive gifts for neighbors. It does not make sense for me to upgrade something I rarely use. Would being able to print multiple colors change that? Not really. For me, there is not a compelling reason to upgrade. That being said, there are a number of people using their 3D printers all the time and newer technology will improve what they are making.