Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Now that I switched this blog to WordPress just yesterday (not that you noticed), I’m happy to find a Text Filter that turns every post into Pirate-speak. Perhaps I’ll try Swedish Chef mode some time down the road.

Not a lot of blogging lately: too much going on. We went to see Luce play at the Mystic Theater in Petaluma the other day. Great show. They played both the singles (Good Day and Long Way Down), a bunch of stuff from the second album and an interesting rendition of Eleanor Rigby. We bought a CD afterwards and had it signed by the band. So here is a band with a couple of hits under their belt, and one of the guys we talked to still has to keep a day job.

In other news, I will be presenting at ApacheCon Europe 2006. Topic of discussion will be Apache HTTP Server Performance, with a new section on high-performance web site infrastructure set up ideas. I hear Dublin is awesome; it will be a fun week.

We saw Inside Man the other day. Good movie. Go see it. I mention this here because we were wondering what was the last good movie we saw in the theatre. We couldn’t remember. Now it’s this one.

Went ahead and got the RAZR. Not the ROKR or the SLVR because I really don’t care about the iTunes. I also really wanted a clamshell phone because I don’t want to dial my friends with my phone in my pants. That would be wrong. The RAZR doesn’t look as sturdy as the V60i it replaces, you know the one with the broken display. We’ll see. Hope it’s not a LEMN.

The display of my Motorola V60i has been flaky for the past couple of weeks, but it now seems completely dead. This means I have to get a new phone, and need it fairly quickly. Time to do some research…

Really. I promised a post on how I actually completed my outbound travel. Let’s start with the sweet tingling sensation of being whacked by a pack of bricks what was the realization that my ticket was an our one way, while my flight was 45 minutes the other way. Of course my first course of action was to talk to the American Airlines ground staff. Oops, just realized I do have a paper ticket, but I forgot to bring it. “You can reprint that, right? I’ll pay a reprinting fee???? I hopeful.

No, reprinting is not possible. This is a Swissair ticket, so you’ll have to talk to them. Swiss does not have a representation in Oakland. Or to your travel agent. By the way, you’re not going to be on this flight. Buh-bye. No-no, buh-bye now. Actually, they were very professional. Numerous calls to the travel agent and Swissair occur, and the latter eventually agrees to put me on standby for a flight from LAX to Zürich later that day. Oakland to LAX is served just about every hour by Southwest, who sell no-hassle one-way tickets through their website. This is a sizeable gamble, because the Swissair flights tend to be full of ski enthusiasts around this time of year. However, it’s the only feasible way to get going without buying a full-fare ticket (going rate about $3000, which I can not justify). I buy my Southwest ticket at 1:30PM for the 3PM flight, make my way to LAX and end up just about the last passenger called for standby on the Zürich flight… Aaaarrgh!

Moral of the story: E-tickets rule, because you get on flights by just telling the airline who you are. This reduces the amount of stuff you can’t fly without to an important extent. And if you happen to end up with a paper ticket, grasshopper, do not forget to bring it. Fold it in your passport (I did bring my passport) or something. The only reason I ended up in Amsterdam at all is that the Swissair ground staff was very, very nice to me and allowed me to fly out of a completely different city with a ticket that was absolutely non-changeable.

I guess it could be worse. It could be raining. Actually, it is raining here in the Netherlands. And hailing, and occasionally snowing. But there’s no earthly reason I could possibly be here. Let’s back up a bit.

Imagine you got up at 5:45AM in order to catch a flight. Actually, you woke up at five and were unable to go back to sleep so that’s when your day really started. Imagine arriving at the airport well in time for your flight because the airporter was late but arrived early, and like a fleck of dust on your should you carry around this feeling that there is something wrong with this trip, but you can’t figure out what. In fact, the day before you called the travel agency, the airline they booked you on and the codeshare partner you’ll actually be traveling with, and everyone told you yes, you are in the system, we can see your reservation, you’ll be fine. You are subsequently told that you cannot check in because you don’t have a ticket.

So, that’s what’s wrong. OK, no problem, you made all the checks yesterday, some disconnect for sure, couple phone calls should sort that out. Plenty of time, it’s a small airport and you only have a carry-on. “Didn’t you receive a paper ticket???? ask the ground staff and no, of course you don’t, you only use E-tickets. Then, the Ely hits you. Please do a text search here for ELY (n.). This is what’s weird about this reservation: there is a paper ticket, it arrived days after you made the reservation and you didn’t give it much thought. It’s probably in your bedside table. Your bedside table is an hour away, each way, and the flight leaves in forty-five minutes. There will be two connections.

Welcome to my day last Thursday. I did eventually make it to Amsterdam, and will blog later on how this came to pass, but suffice to say that there is no earthly reason this should have happened and a bunch of friendly airline people were really helpful when they really didn’t have to be.

I’m in Austin, where it’s over 100F most of the year. Tonight, it’s freezing and raining… a killer combination. It took me two hours to get to the hotel from the airport, usually a half hour trip.
The outside thermometer in my rental Corolla dropped from 30F to 26F along the way, and the car was covered with a layer of ice when I finally got to the hotel. Radio stations were telling people to stay the hell off the road, and I’ve been hearing sirens go by all night from my hotel room. Fortunately, I did not get into any skids. Stopped by Rudy’s, across the expressway, for some Brisket. And Barbecue sauce. After all, I’m in Texas.

Hong Kong is still hot, sticky, and intense. And full of high rise. It must help that I’m staying right in the middle of Tsim Sha Tsui, that most touristy of neighborhoods at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula. I ambled through the spelunks of the Chung King Mansions and the hostel on the top floor where I stayed the last time around is still there. I did not take the elevator up but instead fled back to the street and was dripped on by window air conditioners. There are definitely more nice looking high rise apartment buildings than there were ten years ago, but there are still a lot with unfinished dirty concrete façades. Hong Kong makes me think of the conditions described in the Cyberpunk novels of William Gibson et. al. Another impression that keeps crowding into my mind is the Cold Chisel song Khe Sanh, but that is mainly because I flew from Sydney to Hong Kong myself ten years ago. It’s one of those songs that turns out to be a lot nastier than it seems when you first hear it. Too bad it’s not on the iTMS.

Watching one of those Animal Cop shows tonight… an item about some neglected dogs: from neighbors, the cops learn that “the owner has spent the past several weeks in the hospital due to health problems.???

Someone wrote this. Then, an editor failed to catch it. Gotta love cable.