I’ve been attending the SAS Global Forum 2008 in San Antonio, Texas this week.  Things started on Sunday with a couple of pre-conference workshops and the opening night gala.

This is the first time I’ve attended a SAS Global Forum.  They’re held every year in a different city and are attended by thousands of people from around the world.  As of last Thursday, they were expecting something like 3750 people to attend and that didn’t include the walk-up registrations.

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I headed over to the convention centre to pick up my registration package for the SAS Global Forum.  On the way, I walked through La Villita Historic Arts Village, which was in full St. Patrick’s Day mode, and encountered a St. Patrick’s Day parade just starting to pass by.  I stopped to watch for a couple of minutes before continuing on my way.

The Convention Center is on the edge of HemisFair, which was built for the 1968 World’s Fair.  The park has a number of buildings, sculptures and other things, including the Tower of the Americas.

It also is home to a couple of geocaches.

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I got up at the extremely uncivilized hour of 4am this morning so that I could catch a 6am flight to San Antonio, Texas via Newark, New Jersey.  (Those of you who know me know that I am not a morning person so this was a major accomplishment in and of itself.)

We boarded the plane on-schedule and then spent about half an hour driving around the airport visiting the de-icing pad and then holding before taking position for take off in order to allow the engines to warm up since this was the first flight of the day.

Although we arrived about 20 minutes behind schedule, the flight to Newark was uneventful and I got a nice picture of sunrise above the clouds.  This made the connection to the flight to San Antonio was one of the tightest I’ve ever had in all the flights I’ve taken over the years.

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Without a doubt my favourite hotels are Westins.  I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels over the last few years and most of them have been decent hotels that I would stay at again.  But, there’s something about Westin hotels that set them apart from the rest.  Besides being part of the Starwood Preferred Guest program, which has been voted best in the industry on more than one occasion by travellers, the overall quality of the hotels is always very high, the facilities are top-notch and the staff always make you feel welcome and will bend over backwards to help make your stay as enjoyable as possible.

Case in point: I’m going to the upcoming SAS Global Forum in San Antonio, Texas in a couple of days’ time, so I’m staying at The Westin Riverwalk.  The conference is a popular one so I made my reservation through the Westin’s online booking system months ago.  Tuesday evening my phone rang and it was one of the managers at the hotel.  He was calling to confirm my reservation and see if I had any special requests.  I was interested in the weather and he told me that it’s going to be something like 90°F the day I fly in.  (This naturally lead to a discussion about the weather here.  I asked him how much snow he thought we had and he said "less than a foot?" and was staggered when I said we have had the better part of 14 feet, so far.  To be fair, I think most people in Ottawa are a bit staggered when they think about that amount of snow.) 

So, although they tend to be a little more expensive that most hotels (but not always — Edmonton’s a good example of this), they’re worth checking out next time you’re travelling.  You won’t be disappointed.

Only a few hours remain in 2007, so I thought I’d take a moment and look back at the last year as I experienced it.

I did a fair bit of travelling in 2007, most of it for work. During the year I visited Toronto a couple of times, Halifax (work), Sturgeon Falls (work), Sudbury (play) for a few hours on the Sturgeon Falls trip, Miami Beach (play), Winnipeg (work) and Edmonton (work). In fact, between mid-October and early-December I boarded 16 different flights, and passed through Toronto’s Pearson Airport (YYZ) four weeks in a row. I also passed through airports in Montreal and Calgary in the course of doing these trips. And, I think I’m missing a couple of trips from this list.

Work-wise, I was successful in a generic competition at work that saw me move from being in a technical position to that of a research analyst. This was a big move and I’m still getting used to it, even though I’ve had this new job for a couple of months now. Fortunately, though I changed jobs, I did not have to change the group of people I work with.

According to my records, I went geocaching 29 days in the year and in every month except March and August, with April and October being the two months with the highest number of finds. Overall, I found 119 caches, the most recent one yesterday evening. I went geocaching in Ontario, Quebec, Halifax, Winnipeg and Edmonton. (I was too busy lying on the beach in Miami Beach to do any caching.)

My friends Ken & Margaret got married in June and I was the best man at the wedding. The guys took Ken away for a weekend of golfing-and-other-activities-that-shall-not-be-spoken-of. The day of the wedding, we went trap shooting before taking Ken off to be married.

During the summer I did a lot (for me) of amateur radio. I spurred on the Manotick Amateur Radio Group to run special event station VC3R for a couple of months to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the Rideau Canal and its inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage Site List. We operated at several locks over the summer and had a lot of fun doing it.

I didn’t get out scuba diving this year, but I did join GoodLife Fitness through work and I’ve gone to the climbing gym about once a week and I’ve lost a fair bit of weight since the end of February. 🙂 I also took up golfing in 2007 and am looking forward to it in 2008.

To help offset the benefits of being less of a couch potato, I bought a Nintendo Wii a couple of months ago. It’s the first gaming system I’ve owned since the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) I was given years ago and I’m having a lot of fun with it. In addition to the games, it offers all sorts of nifty things.

Overall, 2007 was a positive year.

I flew from Ottawa to Edmonton via Toronto today (Wednesday) on Air Canada. Sometime in the last couple of years Air Canada changed their fare structure and stopped providing hot meals on the longer domestic flights. Instead, they have a snack cart from which you can buy things to munch on. For sale are chips, pretzels, chocolate bars, bags of carrot sticks, and apple slices with caramel dipping sauce. Also on the menu are things like little pizzas (though not always available), and a selection of three sandwiches from Quiznos. (There are also some breakfast things that are often available on flights that start before a certain time.) I’ve been watching my sodium intake since earlier this year and paying a lot of attention to the nutrition score boxes printed on almost every food item that’s for sale these days.

Sodium intake has been linked to hypertension (high blood pressure). Hypertension has been linked to all sorts of problems including heart disease, heart attack, congestive heart failure, stroke and other things, all of which tend to lead to premature death. Statistics Canada published results of the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) last April that revealed that most Canadian consume much more sodium than is necessary or recommended. The Statistics Canada report quotes the Institute of Medicine recommended daily adequate intakes for sodium as being 1500 mg for someone aged 9 to 50. Nationally, the typical Canadian consumes 3092 mg of sodium, with the provincial levels ranging from 3350 mg and 3300 mg in Quebec and British Columbia, respectively, to 2871 mg in Ontario, the only province significantly below the Canadian figure.

Because of the limited selection by the time the cart made it to me, I ended up buying a roast beef Quiznos sandwich. Reading the score box, I was appalled to discover that the small sandwich had 2000 mg of sodium in it. That’s one-third more than the recommended average daily intake for someone my age. It’s easy to see why Canadians have so much sodium in their diet.

Unfortunately, the elimination of meals on Air Canada, at least for economy class fares, means passengers no longer have the same selection of meals they once did. I’m not sure exactly how many meals you could choose from, but there were meals for almost everyone from Kosher to vegetarian to gluten-free to low-sodium. So, if I’m trying to keep my sodium intake below the recommended limit of 1500 mg, there’s very little on Air Canada’s snack cart that I can eat, particularly as I have yet to see the full selection available on any of the 14 flights I’ve taken in the last seven weeks.

My suitcase has finally arrived!

To be fair, it did arrive when the delivery company said it would (i.e. between 3pm and 7pm), but I wish it had arrived when the people at the airport last night said it would because I had to cancel going to the climbing gym.

I wonder if I can claim Aeroplan miles for it…