My experience with dry ice is pretty much as follows:
In the late 1980s, an acquaintance (sp?) of mine, who was a graduate student in the field of studying ice, was put in charge of disposing of a penguine which had been shot and killed in Antarctica in the late 1950s or early 1960s and had been put in storage at a local ice cream factory nearly that long. The ice cream factory had been using it in their warehouse to keep track of inventory, and a health inspector had finally noticed and told them "Get rid of that! Its unsanitary!" Anyway, having one of the few functional cars in our group, and no job to take up my time, I got drafted into helping him pick up the penguin, mailing material, dry ice, and transporting the whole mess to FedEx. Things went pretty much without a hitch, including the photographs of a bunch of us in various poses with said penguin. Eventually, with the help of the contents of a beanbag chair for insulation, the penguin was packed up and taken to FedEx, who immediatelly told the grad student that the box needed to be specially packed and labelled due to the dry ice. The FedEx office then closed for the day. The next day the penguin finally got sent to a musuem in the Twin Cities, where it was put into long term storage.
My other experience with dry ice was mostly as a witness. That is to say, I was working on one side of a shelving unit when my daydreaming was interrupted by an explosion. Since dust was falling from the ceiling, I at first thought that the explosion had come from above. It was shortly determined that it had, in fact, come from the opposite side of the shelving unit, where a co-worker was standing, rather dazed, in the midst of a cloud of white stuff, with the remains of a Mountain Dew bottle scattered, well, probably more than one or two hundred yards around him. It seems that, while making deliveries in the hospital, he had come across a chunk of dry ice and decided he wanted to keep it. The container he had available was an empty 20oz. Mountain Dew bottle, so he slipped the chunk of dry ice into the bottle, and screwed the lid down good and tight. He then left the bottle on a cart in Central Services while he went about his job.
Later, he saw that the bottle was swollen almost to a sphere... and, thinking to show if off to another of my co-workers, had picked it up. I don't recall whether or not he got the "Hey Erich! Look at this!" out of his mouth or not before it exploded in his had. He was lucky in that he got off with a few friction burns to his hand and a temporary ringing in his ears!
The moral of the story is, obviously, if you stick a chunk of dry ice in a pop bottle and screw down the lid, you must quickly hide it under the desk of someone you don't like...

"Nothing is withheld from us which we have conceived to do.
Do things that have never been done."
--Russell Kirsch