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View
of the beach from the lobby at the Ritz
Carlton Ft. Lauderdale Beach
T.R.A.F.F.I.C.
has reserved all of the cabanas at the Ritz
Carlton (above)
for their October 16-19, 2011
conference.
View
of the Atlantic Ocean from one of the Ritz
Carlton's cabanas. Both the cabanas and
the
hotel pool are located on the 6th floor giving
guests a spectacular elevated view of the beach.
(three photos above courtesy of Barbara Neu)
While
announcing the October show, Schwartz and Neu
also announced they had decided not to
proceed with a conference they had been
considering staging in San Francisco in March
on dates that would have been adjacent to the 40th
International ICANN meeting there.
Neu said, "We had a specific agenda, with a
specific goal that could only work at the proper
venue. After we held an exhaustive search and
then sent out a poll a few weeks ago to see what
most folks thought, it became clear that the
interest to connect domainers with ICANN was not
really there to have a meaningful and impactful
show and on the heals of the other shows, just
did not make sense."
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Elsewhere
today, ICANN Ombudsman Frank
Fowlie, who was involved in an ugly
flap aboard an Air Canada flight
in 2009, has had another
appeal to the Canadian
Transportation Agency rejected. The embarrassing
affair started when Fowlie (who will be leaving
ICANN this month) got into
an argument with first class cabin
flight attendants after his meal was
served late. That resulted in the
airline banning him from boarding a
connecting flight in Montreal. |
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Fowlie
filed a complaint with the CTA after
being forced to wait a day to travel,
but as Kevin Murphy of DomainIncite.com
reported last
February, the CTA dismissed
the complaint saying Fowlie failed
to provide enough evidence that he had
been mistreated. Fowlie then filed a new
complaint asking the CTA not to
publish his name in their public
report announcing the February decision.
That complaint was also
rejected last July.
Undeterred
Fowlie decided to swing for the fences one
more time and filed another
appeal of the original decision,
based on “new evidence” -
that being a statement from Mary Ann
Mulhern, who was described as Dr.
Fowlie's "traveling companion"
(a report
on the web indicates she
became his wife a few months
after the brouhaha on the Air Canada
flight (photo
of the couple).
As was the
case with his first two appeals, it was
another swing and a miss for
Fowlie as the CTA ruled that the new
"evidence" was not persuasive
enough for them to revisit their
original decision. The new ruling noted,
"The Agency finds it improbable that
Ms. Mulhern's witness statement was not
discoverable or available to Dr.
Fowlie with exercise of due
diligence on his part before the
Initial Decision was issued." Given
that his "traveling companion"
was a woman who would soon be his wife,
it certainly looks like the CTA got that
call right. Thanks
to George
Kirikos for
the heads up on the latest decision. |
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