Thursday, January 22, 2004

Blogging from Atlanta

So I'm in Atlanta this weekend. I've heard about southern hospitality, but I never thought I'd experience it first-hand right off the plane (this is my first time in the south). The people at Enterprise car rental were over-the-top nice. They had a person standing there with one of those boards with your name on it. I thought it was some kind of mistake. The guy on the shuttle to the cars was abnormally nice too. Maybe I've been in Chicago too long. Or Seattle. Or LA. Or D.C. Man, I've lived in a lot of places lately!

Another impressive part of Atlanta is Hartsfield-Jackson, the airport. It's arguably the busiest airport in the world (O'Hare in Chicago is usually considered the busiest, but apparently there's some dispute about this). It certainly seems bigger than O'Hare - there are 181 gates, beating O'Hare by about 15, and 6 big terminals shooting out from one side of the main terminal, rather than wrapping around it. The main terminal is really something - it has a big atrium shopping area, and was rather pleasant looking for an airport.

Also cool was Delta's "Compass" flight feature. It's this dynamic display on the plane's TV's during the last hour of the flight. It showed continually-updated gate information, information about Atlanta, trivia questions, and 3d views of the plane, telling us where it was compared to the airport while giving us data like how many miles away we were and how fast we were going. I know international flights commonly do this stuff, but it was fun to see it on a relative puddle-jump.

Anyway, anyone know what the must-do places are? Or, better yet, the cool stuff people don't know about? Utilize our new-fangled Haloscan commenting system and let me know.

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