Georgian Terrace - Definitely not 3.5 Stars

The Georgian Terrace - 2 Stars, not 3.5 Stars...
I travel to Atlanta ever other week for a couple of days at a time. I'm usually by myself and travel as inexpensive as possible. Still I'm able to get some good deals through hotwire (www.hotwire.com).

Last week, my wife decided to join me so I decided to splurge and get a 3.5 star hotel, normally I book the 3 star Hyatt Place in Buckhead for $54 per night plus tax (through hotwire). Hyatt Place is fantastic, 42" plasma TV, granite, newly renovated, free parking, free continental breakfast.

So I splurged for a 3.5 star and got the Georgian Terrace in Midtown, from the website it's a great place and it's in walking distance to Piedmont Park and tons of good restaurants. The GT ended up being $89 per night, plus tax. But what they don't mention is that parking is an extra $25 for valet service, and that doesn't include tips.

We checked into our room and man it was tiny and featured a full sized bed (Hyatt Place included a King!). I didn't even know they still made these things. In addtion to my wife, I had my 3 month old son, Max, with us and opted not to haul the crib along, figuring we would either get a King or two Queens. Obviously if I left things as they were, I'd be spending the night on the floor.

I called the front desk and told them of our dilemma. No problem, the guy at the front desk said he'd hook me up as long as I "took care of him". There goes another Andrew Jackson!

So we get the new room with a King and a Kitchen. The bed was nice, but otherwise the place was small and depressing. Here's the bitch list:

1. Bathroom tub badly in need of caulk.
   


2. Bathroom sink had cigarette burns around the edges of the sink.



3. Old and damaged wall paper in kitchen. Notice the two tone paint around the light fixture.



4. Frayed carpet at transitions, stained carpet.
   
5. Here's my favorite, on the entrance door, they have that piece of hardware that replaced the old chain. Obviously someone had tried to force their way in with the bar in place. The result was the hardware was just hanging on and the door trim badly damaged.



6. Stippled ceiling - nice 70's touch


7. Old and deformed metal shades, that worked but that someone had removed the catch so that they had to remain down. Also notice the condition of the window ceil.
   

That said, there were some positives. The swimming pool on the roof was treated with saline chlorination from http://www.chlorking.com/. It was awesome, when you got out of the pool you didn't stink of chlorine and when you opened your eyes underwater, your eyes didn't sting. The pool appeared to be a 25 meter lap pool. Why don't they treat all pools this way?


What else? the elevators were fast and the employees very courteous.

The bottom line is this hotel while old, beautiful, elegant and geographically desireable is not maintained to 3.5 star standards. I'm glad I didn't pay full rate, and I doubt I'll be back.

Mac Slowdown - Cocktail to the rescue

I've had my Mac Mini for three years now. And during that time it got slower and slower. It got to the point where every time I clicked on Safari or itunes, I could grab a cup of coffee before the program loaded. I was considering upgrading to a newer Intel based Mac it was running so slow. We mainly use the Mac as a surfing box in the kitchen. We also use it as our main iTunes database and serve music to the house from it using a Apple Airport extreme.

I've been a PC guy for years and know about deleting the caches and defraging to keep a computer running cleanly. There on tons of utilities for the PC to keep it running clean. For the PC i like CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com). Theres are not as many choices for the Mac.

First of all on a Mac there is no reason to defrag the hard drive. From what I read it has to do with the way the OS handles files.

As for speeding up my slow Mac, I found a great utility called Cocktail. It's about $15 and worth every penny. Cocktail clear out a whole slew of caches (system caches, component caches, kernel caches, user caches, ColorSync caches, Dock caches, Java caches, QuickTime caches and font caches) that I never knew my Mac had.

Using a feature in Cocktail called Pilot, I scheduled Cocktail to clear all my caches and restart my PC every Tuesday morning at 6:00am. I also had to go into my system preferences and make sure to wake my computer prior to 6:00am so that the scheduler could run. I've found doing this keeps it clean and running fast all of the time. So it looks like i can put off my mac upgrade for a little while.

Google Organic Listings loaded with Spam...

When you're looking for products on google, you end up searching through ton's of garbage sites known as scraper sites that waste your time. These scraper sites typically are loaded with google adwords advertisements. Why google allows these site to move to the top of the list is beyond me. Maybe they enjoy the revenue created when you click one of the adwords links. But in the end, google is a directory of directories.

It drives me crazy, I search for something, click on a site and it's another list of sites - all fluff, no content. Froogle now called Google Product Search does work pretty well when you are searching for a particular product. But the regular listings aren't doing it for me anymore.

Adwords Rock... Actually I get better results with the google adwords advertisements than I do with the organic listings. You have to figure people paying for adwords don't want clicks that don't convert into sales, so they make sure to list words that are relevant.

Humidity Blues...no mo!

My POS Sears dehumidifier bit the dust a few weeks ago in my basement. I pretty much ignored it and went on with my life. After some time I noticed my floor was bowing upward. This is not good... Took the dehumidifier back to Sears for repair. Two weeks later, I got it back and it still didn't work. First of all, I don't know what they pay at Sears, but it's not enough. The people there were clueless. I think I could write a blog on the ineptuted of Sears employees, but I'll save that for another day.

This all got me thinking, I need a real dehumidifier, so I called a local HVAC company Air Craftsman for a quote. They quoted $2,500 for a real whole house unit. But after getting the quote I figured I could do it myself for less.

So I bought an Aprilaire 1700 from Westside Wholesale in Cali for $1,049 plus shipping. They had the best price out there and they shipped it the same day I ordered it. I give WestSide an A+ for fast service.

Aprilaire 1700 Review

The unit weighs about 100 lbs and is incredibly well built. I went to Home Depot for ductwork, and found they didn't have what I needed, but Lowes did. So I spent another $100 for ductwork and pvc pipe for drainage. Installation took about 4 hours. That included cutting two holes in the drywall and framing them out to install the vents. I stashed the dehumidifier under the steps in the basement and have two intake vents and one exhaust vent back into the main part of the basement.

I fired it up 2 days ago and my humidity has dropped from 71% to 43% and my floor is almost perfect. The bowing in the floor has relaxed and I'm a happy camper.

Noise level is low, but you can definitely hear the the movement of air, but it's slight and it's way quieter than my old Kenmore portable unit.

The cool thing about this unit is it has a dehumidistat built in and all you have to do is set it and forget it. I also bought a Aprilaire model 90 remote dehumidistat for it. I've yet to install it, but it will allow me to set the humidity level as well as power on/off without crawling into the crawl space.

I had my buddy Dennis (an electrician) come over and install a dedidicated 15A circuit for the unit.

Bottom line I saved $1,000 easy by doing it myself. The Aprilaire 1700 unit seems well built and functions as I would hope for it to.