Work Trip to Denver, Reno and LA

Thursday, 19 August 2010

This was as good as a work trip can get, 4 days 7 flights in 3 cities, Denver, Reno and Rancho Cucamonga California (yes i know it's a funny name). Denver was 95 degrees but the mountains and downtown were fun to see. Here's a walkway crossing over to downtown Denver.
In Reno i stayed downtown so at night i walked around the streets and the casino's.
In the morning after work i took the rental car up the mountains a few thousand feet and had a great view of the city below.
Reno can best be summed up as a Mini Las Vegas. Instead of lots of people there's only a few hundred, instead of lots of casino's there's only about 3, instead of a main street that takes forever to walk down, the street's only a couple of blocks. But there was the same number of old fat people riding around on those motorized scooters.

The only betting i did was put $10 on MSU and the Lions to win their first games. MSU ended up winning by 24 points. We'll see how the lions first game goes.
Next i flew over part of the Grand Canyon to Phoenix Arizona. It was a really clear day and i could see for at least a hundred miles.

Downtown Phoenix

That flight was great until we hit some turbulence before landing and the lady behind me "filled up" at least 2 barf bags. Once again my lack of a sense of smell payed off.

I had a 2 hour lay-over then flew to California. The next day they said the high temp was 107 although the whole day my car said it was 120 outside.
After working i had a few hours to kill until my 11pm flight home. I tried to go for a hike in the mountains. After about a quarter mile i realized that walking up hills when it's 110 degrees and sunny isn't a good idea, so i went back. It felt like i was breathing into a hair dryer on high. So i drove around some more, saw all the smog people talk about in California and realized how much i hate doing their mandatory U-turns at lights. I prefer "Michigan Left's."

But then i sat in the airport for a few hours, flew to Atlanta, had a 2 hour lay-over, then flew home and arrived at 9:30am the next morning. Except for the sitting around at airport terminals it was kind of fun.

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The PIR

Sunday, 20 June 2010

As i had said a few weeks ago, my buddy John and i were on the Price is Right in LA.
The reason why we didn't get to sit together is that we showed up at 8:30 and we were just about the last people in the studio, out of 316 people we were 309 and 310. We lucked out and barely made it. So when we walked in to the studio they split us up. John went to the right, got screwed and had to sit in the last row. I went to the left, somehow lucked out and sat right up front behind contestants row.



Here's me telling the contestants what to bid. If they would have listened to me they would have won every time but once. For example in this picture i was telling her to bid $1000. The winning bid...$1000.
Here was the funniest part of the show, when Roy got up there and bid $200 for a wicker chair. It ended up being $1400. It was the worst bid. Drew even joked around during the commercial with his family on how bad it was.
John in the back row surrounded by all the people in red shirts
Some quick things to know about the show:

• they film 2 shows a day but to be sure to get on the show you should probably get there before 7am. then in our case they said they had 50 empty seats for the second show and people could stay in their seats and see that too

• before you get to be in the audience you have to sit/stand for hours in 2 different lines, where you hold colored tickets with numbers on them. for example they might say "ok i need all the people with blue tickets, numbers 1-200 to line up here"

• they have a brief "interview" with people to decide on who to call up (ie. the sailor and the woman who's 60th birthday it is)

• no camera or cell phones allowed. you have to go through a metal detector and leave your phone in a cardboard box.

• the studio is way smaller then it looks on tv

• the stage is also a lot smaller then you think

• the announcer, Rich Fields, talks before the show and is really funny. he tries to tell you what to do and where to go when if you get called up

• Drew talks to the crowd between commercials, while they are setting up the games and he was also really funny.

• there are about 15 people and 3 cameras on the stage during the show, making it difficult to see what's going on from the audience

• it is almost IMPOSSIBLE to hear anything that drew or the announcer is saying. they want you to clap and cheer constantly and their microphones don't amplify out to the crowd so it's real confusing.

• when they say "Joe Smith, come on down..." you can't hear that at all so they have 2 people up on stage that hold up big signs with "Joe Smith" written on it.

• it did seem a lot more difficult when you're there compared to sitting on the couch at home. especially for the first two games it was weird, but by the end you got the hang of it.

• many of the people in the crowd were their for their 2nd or 3rd time. one guy in the crowd was from Hawaii and it was his 16th time on the show. but most of the repeat attendees are from the LA area. they said that the record was this guy who was on 69 times before he finally got called up to contestants row.

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