From congressional hearings earlier this week, former FEMA Director Michael Brown shows his snarl to Washington, D.C. and the world.

Two great ideas, courtesy of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com

I couldn’t agree more with this article…

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If Parks Offer Free Internet, Why Can’t Costly Hotels?

By JOE SHARKEY
The New York Times

I’m no cheapskate, but I watch costs carefully even when I’m traveling on the company dime. And I’m here to tell you, I am getting fed up with being charged $9.95 or more in an expensive hotel for broadband Internet service. Lots of business travelers tell me they feel the same.

Recently, my wife and I stayed at the Loews Hotel in Annapolis, Md., while spending a weekend visiting a favorite nephew who’s in his senior year at the Naval Academy. There was nothing especially wrong with the place, mind you, but it was just a run-of-the-mill four-star hotel that struck me as pretty overpriced at $310.60 a night – plus that annoying extra $9.95 charged each day for the high-speed Internet hookup.

I was still brooding about that recently as I sat retrieving e-mail messages from my laptop in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan on a glorious late-summer afternoon. Free! In a city park! In Bryant Park and in many other public and commercial places nationally, Wi-Fi Internet service is provided without charge to anyone who wants it.

Oddly enough, the pricier the hotel, the more likely you are to pay an extra fee to check your e-mail from your room, said Bjorn Hanson, the head of the hospitality and leisure division at PricewaterhouseCoopers. That is because three-star chains like Hilton’s Garden Inn, Hampton Inn and Homewood Suites and Marriott’s Courtyard, Residence Inn and Fairfield Inn cater to price-conscious travelers, while the swankier names figure you won’t much care about the extra few bucks.

Corporate travel managers are now trying to negotiate with four-star and five-star hotel brands to include Internet access in the room charge in future contracts, Mr. Hanson said

If the hotels are smart, they will concede the point. While baby boomers still outnumber them, Generation Xers spend more per capita on business travel, and have little patience for either dial-up connections or the general idea of paying for high-speed Internet access, which they have been accustomed to having free since college.

Moreover, with two-thirds of business travelers now using computers in their hotel rooms and with those in sales and training jobs often juggling big download files, the fees are becoming more of an irritant to just about everybody.

Besides, it isn’t as if hotels are struggling for survival the way airlines are. PricewaterhouseCoopers has forecast that the domestic hotel industry should post a 25 percent increase in profits this year over 2004, and a 21 percent increase next year to a record $25.2 billion in 2006.

On the other hand, as exasperating as the nickel-and-diming can be, most business travelers aren’t going to make an issue out of paying for a service they depend on. Despite the sharp growth in use of wireless BlackBerrys and other hand-held wireless communications devices, after all, the good old laptop or notebook computer remains a basic tool for them.

“Reliable high-speed Internet service is probably my No. 2 requirement in a hotel, right after hot water,” said Ian Campbell, the chief executive of Nucleus Research Inc. in Wellesley, Mass., who always takes his laptop along on his many flights in the United States and abroad.

On a recent trip to London, he joined a private club partly because it offered rooms with dependable high-speed Internet access and a technician on site in case of trouble. “If you have a problem, they’ll send a guy up to fix your settings, 24 hours a day,” he said.

He compared that experience with one in Edinburgh, where his hotel charged £15 (about $27) a day for an Internet hookup that proved to be spotty. “It worked for about an hour out of the 24 hours,” he said.

On a recent business trip to Palm Springs, Calif., he said, his hotel room Internet connection worked fine, but that didn’t appear to be the case throughout the hotel. “We were sitting around at dinner, and people were complaining that they didn’t have good Internet access in their rooms,” he said.

Like Mr. Campbell and most other business travelers, I regard reliability of the connection as more important than the $9.95 it might cost.

Even so, it galls me to have to pay it. When traveling, I spend most of my hotel nights in three-star brands where Internet reliability is generally good and the price (free) is right. But for travel-trade conventions and other big-city events, and for leisure travel, I’m sometimes in a four-star hotel paying top-shelf rates. And like a good number of the rest of you, I’m starting to balk at being banged for an extra $9.95 on a room that costs more than my first car did in 1967.

In fact, the next time an expensive hotel tries to jack me up with an Internet surcharge, I’m grabbing my laptop and heading for the park.

Did you know Google has its own blog? It’s true.

Say this five times fast: googleblog.blogspot.com

(1) College football on Saturdays.

(2) The smell of Matthew making homemade chicken salad and French onion soup.

(3) Turtle lattes that keep my hands warm.

(4) Sleeping sans the a/c.

(5) The smell of wood-burning fireplaces in the neighborhood at night.

(6) Flannel sheets (on my “to get” list sometime during the coming weeks).

(7) Halloween (perhaps my favorite holiday of the year).

(8) School supplies.

(9) Sweaters and corduroy pants.

(10) Electric blankets turned on an hour before bed.

Fin. For now.

FYI: On Monday, PBS will broadcast the Martin Scorsese documentary on singer/songwriter/American icon Bob Dylan.

Watch it, if you know what’s good for you.

And in other music news, Ryan Adams’ new album, “Jacksonville City Nights,” hits stores Tuesday. Of the CDs sold Tuesday, 15,000 DVDs will be included. “September,” the DVD, is a brief documentary on the writing and recording of Mr. Adams’ new album.

It’s Friday, which typically means a less than productive/energetic day at the office. But today, our typical full-house team of 10 employees is down to three and our intern. No joke. It’s as quiet as quiet can be today.

Hrumph. And it’s only 9 a.m.

Omaha celebrated the opening of its first Whole Foods Market yesterday. Never before have I experienced such an amazing grocery store. The produce: gorgeous. The breads: delicious. There were free samples everywhere. Whole Foods Market has a sushi bar, coffee kiosk and DIY meals from a number of deli stations.

Matthew and I made a few purchases: organic crunchy peanut butter and a loaf of organic wheat bread; a jug of organic cranberry-peach juice; and a loaf of freshly baked bread.

Matthew, who’s never met an olive he didn’t like, purchased a small tub of black pitted olives.

We’ve decided to go to Whole Foods in a few days and just eat lunch or dinner there. Treat it like a restuarat and explore everything.

The desserts I saw, by the way, were amazing. I sampled a warm molten chocolate cake.

I’m still drooling.

The temperature dropped an easy 30 degrees overnight. Fall is finally here, and I couldn’t be happier.

I was supposed to hear Anderson Cooper of CNN fame speak at a breakfast series earlier this year. But then the tsunamis struck, and his speaking engagement was cancelled. I was notified today that Cooper will speak Nov. 30 at UNO and previous tickets will be honored.

Hooray!