Category Archives: travel

James Kim family missing. Could they have taken the infamous Merlin / Galice road ?

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Most recent updates from this blog are HERE 

Update 6 is here and is later info than below

I heard about the missing Kim family [ more recent Kim family missing] over at Techmeme [police information is here], thinking it’s unlikely I could offer any reasonable insight but it appears they were heading from Portland to Gold Beach on the Southern Oregon coast, an area with which I’m very familiar.

Online and printed mapping is sometimes problematic here in Southern Oregon and there’s a road that appears on many maps as a “shortcut” to Gold Beach. But in fact in winter it can be treacherous and often closes with snow. It’s the Merlin to Galice to Gold Beach route. Cell phones don’t work in this mountainous remote area along the Rogue River valley and the coast. A few folks have been lost (many more just scared out of their wits in bad weather) along this tricky route through the Siskiyou National Forest.

The troopers are probably examining this possibility (I’d say likelihood), and hopefully they’ll find the Kim family soon safe and sound.

Update: I called the Galice USFS District Ranger office and it appears the news had not reached there yet. They are advising against that route due to snow drifts that may not be cleared and confirmed that the route is not regularly patrolled. I’m going to follow up more on this angle shortly.

Update II: I just called the Northern Police dispatch number listed below and they did not seem well informed about local road situation, but indicated that the (Southern?) dispatch is following up. I’m going to call the Gold Beach ranger district to make sure they are aware of the situation. TuTuTun lodge, where the Kim’s were staying, is along the route I’m talking about (Via Lobster Creek bridge to North Bank Road) making it even more likely they may have taken the dangerous Bear Camp Road “shortcut” which has many logging road turn offs.

Update III: Gold Beach district said they’d heard of this on the news but I could not reach the road engineer or District Ranger to find out if people had checked extensively up there.

I fear this is a case where spreading the word won’t help much – rather a search of the many logging roads off of the Merlin to Gold Beach route is called for here.

Update 4: Update: As of 9 a.m. PST Friday, investigators said they were narrowing their search to Oregon’s Highway 38 as the family’s most probable route to their destination of Gold Beach. The Kims last spoke to an innkeeper there by phone about five hours before they planned to arrive.

Highway 38 seems less likely to me than Merlin Galice road, but I don’t have enough info to know if the police are using more than just intuition about the route. 38 is not nearly as hazardous as Merlin Galice / Bear Camp route, is travelled regularly, and unless they drove into the river there’d be signs of a crash. Without local info Kim could have correctly concluded that I-5 to Merlin would be faster than going via 101, and could also have (wrongly) concluded that the Merlin Galice route was short and safe.

Update 5: Leslie at CNET tells me that the SF Police are aware of Bear Camp as a possible location and appear to be searching in that area as well, which is good. I’ve contacted a friend in Gold Beach who will help spread the word as well.

Update 6

From the news report:

James Kim is a senior editor at CNET and hosts the web site’s popular Crave blog.

Police said friends and family knew them to usually keep in daily contact.

According to Det. Angela Martin of the San Francisco Police Dept., the family had lunch with a friend in Portland on Saturday between 2-3 p.m., then left to travel to Gold Beach on the southern Oregon Coast.

According to San Francisco Police, the family made two phone calls to a Gold Beath hotel that afternoon, the second call at 5:45 p.m. On that second call, the family reportedly asked the hotel clerk to leave a key outside since they would be arriving late that night.

That phone call was the last reported contact with the family. The Gold Beach hotel did leave keys out for the Kim Family but the keys were still there the next morning.

According to the Kim’s cellular phone provider, the phone was last used after the lunch in Portland. Calls to the Kim’s cell phone later Saturday went straight to voice mail.

The Kims were driving a 2005 silver Saab station wagon with California personalized plates of DOESF.

Anyone with information is asked to contact Oregon State Police Northern Command Center Dispatch at 800-452-7888, or the San Francisco Police Department Missing Persons Unit at (415) 558-5508.

World Peace through Blog Evangelism

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Hey Matt, I think I’m becoming a WordPress Blog Evangelist.   I’m telling everybody with anything to say to get a WP blog going ASAP.   Oddly (or not?) they all want their hand held while setting it up rather than just logging on and following the excellent directions and support here (there?) at WordPress.

The good news is that while blogging in many technology sectors  is going strong now, in travel (in fact in almost all of the non-tech sectors) I think blogging has not even reached that powerful upward inflection point.

Thus my dream of creating a huge, unstructured global travel blogging network is still attainable.    In fact wouldn’t it be neat if people started getting specific travel advice from local bloggers who they’d then take out to dinner to say “thanks!”.    Friendships would blossom, tourism would bring prosperity to every corner of the globe, and we’d have world peace through blogging.     (insert violin holiday music here)

The Flamingo Hotel, in 1946. Bugsy Seigel’s Desert Dream

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The Flamingo Hotel, in 1946. Bugsy Seigel’s Desert Dream

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.

An image of early Las Vegas – the Flamingo Hotel – from pictures on the wall at the Tropicana. I was struck by how modest and small these original hotels seem by modern standards, especially those of Las Vegas where resort palaces like the Wynn and MGM now tower above the Flamingo and Tropicana, themselves huge versions of their original humbly gangsteresque Las Vegas beginnings.

Las Vegas – Bodies… The Exhibition

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The Las Vegas to Minnesota to home trip had two big “educational” highlights. The first was the Tropicana’s Bodies Exhibition in Las Vegas which showcases human bodies preserved using an advanced technique of injection and plastination. A similar exhibit called “Body Worlds” is touring many major cities and I’ve since learned that Body Worlds is actually the first such exhibit, with other copycat (or CopyHuman) exhibitions like the one I saw in Vegas. Nonetheless it was a fantastic exhibit, gazing as you did into dozens of hearts, brains, and bodies of amazingly preserved human cadavers.

The circulation system, injected and illuminated in all it’s full body glory, was the most stunning of the exhibits for me. Like a giant plant the arteries and veins extended throughout the body.

However in terms of intrigue I simply can’t get the little 3 pound brain exhibit out of my head. Or maybe I should say it’s so clear that you really CAN separate the 3 pound brain from the rest of the body. It would not work for long without the bodies supportive mechanisms but it’s reasonable to assert that it’s that little 3 pound organic computing mechanism where we find so much of the stuff that makes it fun to be a human.

Coming as I had from an Internet conference and very computerized sensibilities, it struck me how this little blob held all the answers to science’s elusive and exciting goal of conscious computing, or the creation of an artificial intellect that is aware of it’s own existence.

I’m using my own conscious computing mechanism to suggest that the debate over differences between our own brain and mechanized intelligences will eventually prove to be almost irrelevant to the issue of “consciousness”.

Clearly our organic computing mechanism, the brain, brings a lot more to the table than the current crop of silicon bretheren, but equally clearly the silicon versions have surpassed us in many respects such as mathematical computation, chess, etc, etc. In fact it’s hard to think of highly structured “intellectual” activity where computers can’t outshine humans. I’d predict that this superiority will increasingly move into the realms of arts, literature, and other abstract endeavors.

Leaving Las Vegas

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Pubcon has ended and probably won’t reappear in the USA until next year here in Las Vegas.   It was a nice conference and I really think Brett deserves a lot of credit for keeping this as the ‘affordable’ search conference, as well as the most technically advanced.   He told me 2100 attendees this year – almost double from last time.

Due to some flaky internet connectivity at the motel and during the conference I missed posting nearly as often as I would have liked to but I’m now at LAS Airport with superb and *free* WIFI.   I wrote about the free LAS Wifi last time I was here.   Aiports would be smart to adopt the ad supported model, especially as increasing numbers of frequent travelers use EVDO or just slow cell connectivity rather than pay 9.95 to pick up a few mails.

Ad supported free WIFI is a win win for a lot in the food chain, and I’m glad to see Google start this in Mountain View and MSN’s getting the idea for some WA locations.

Plane’s about to leave but I wanted to say thanks to Brett and Pubcon staff for a conference well done!

Pubcon blog roundup

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Here’s a list of sources of Pubcon information (aka the WebmasterWorld Conference) going on *right now* in Las Vegas. If you know of one not here please post it in the comments or email jhunkins@gmail.com

Dan Zarrella

Grey Wolf

Pubcon Blog (not much there)

SEO Roundtable Excellent coverage – how can you type so FAST Barry??

Lee at TopRankBlog

Technorati tagged “pubcon”

Google

Chris

Flickr Pix from me

Better late than … Orbitz ?

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Note to Orbitz: If the plane is on the ground and 2 hours away you can be pretty sure it won’t make it on time.

My Orbitz “plane is late” note came in about 8 minutes ago – approximately 15 minutes after scheduled departure but approximately 2 hours *after* somebody could have been certain the plane would be at least 2 hours late since it’s leaving from SFO and has not left yet. I don’t like to complain a lot about this type of thing, feeling it falls under my “Tell it to the Donner Party” category, but I am looking forward to a world where I could get the ‘late flight’ note within minutes of the time when it is certain that the flight will be late.

Billion dollar Video Conferencing Market? Maybe, but you’d have to charge a jaw dropping $299,000 per fancy station. Wait, Cisco IS charging $299,000 per station!

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This NYT Article (requires login) has Cisco seriously suggesting that companies are going to buy $299,000 video conferencing stations.   Wait…here’s the cheap version:  The basic TelePresence 1000 model, designed for one-on-one meetings, is priced at $79,000 per station.

Oh, OK then I’ll take TWO of those please.

Talk about out of touch and over technologized?  I suppose it’s possible that a brilliant sales effort will convince upper management of the big companies that this is worth it and that Cisco’s fancy pants model is the only way to go.  It’s certainly also true that even this exhorbitant cost for the units pales in comparison to sending people around in airplanes and putting them up in hotels (well, actually you can buy a lot of plane tix for $299,000 but true that if everybody actually used this approach, which has been around for many years now, it would save money over travel).

My point?  This totally misses the boat on how to get work done.   Efficient people use email and, if really needed and they like it they call on phones.  If they like to see people they can use existing, virtually free computer cam conferencing.

Efficient people also meet each other in real time and real space to have a beer or dinner and connect.  That’s a primate thing and it’s condusive to good biz, but can’t be replicated via even a high definition TV environment.   Nope, not even a $299,000 one.

Picasso’s “La Reve” $139,000,000. Hole in Picasso’s La Reve: Priceless.

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OK, so I’m not a fan of Picaso and really should not think it’s kind of funny that Las Vegas Mogul Steve Wynn wound up elbowing his own masterpiece, planting a large hole in the middle of one of the world’s most valuable paintings.

In fact one of the most enjoyable things I did in Las Vegas last year was tour Wynn’s Bellagio Museum of Art, at that time showing a fantastic impressionist collection with a nice audio tour covering the history of impressionist paintings.

Phew, lucky I kept my Elbows to myself.

Guerilla Travel Tips

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A great post by Paul K, who looks spookily like Adam L, with some travel tips. I liked the one about parking yourself outside of an airport lounges for a hit of WIFI access, though if you traveling in more enlighted places like PDX Portland Oregon or MFR Medford Oregon notice that there is WIFI throughout much of the Airport and is … free.

In a little known study – in fact unknown study – it was found that God actually blesses free WIFI Airports with fewer accidents, less terrorism, no crying babies, and happier travelers.