Smalltalk with James Robertson

I got a call from my daughter - her school basically closes down for a few days for the upcoming Jewish holidays, and she decided to come home - we looked into Greyhound. That's when the hilarity ensued, at least for some types of hilarity.

Try this: visit any airline website, or a site like Expedia. See if you can buy a ticket at any time of day. Gosh, it works. Now try looking into buying a Greyhound bus ticket at a time when one of the stations involved is closed for the day.

Not having noticed that the web is a 24x7 thing, they don't allow that. So... do they run little courier sacks between stations to handle the transactions? Do they have a teletype machine at the back of each station spewing out orders? Are they just stupid?

Technorati Tags: stupidity

Well, today's delay was a good two hours - and the excitement didn't end there. The plane stopped short of the runway, the flight deck door opened, and one of the attendants took up a blocking position while one of the crew came out to look at something. A few minutes later the captain announced that there was a bigger gap between the door and the outside than the attendants thought was normal, but he figured it was ok (nervous laughter throughout the plane) - so he said we were going to head out anyway.

That was strange enough, but then a guy walks past me (I was sitting in 8D) from the back, into first class, and goes into the bathroom. None of the attendants take any notice. Ok, fine - up in first, the attendant there is taking drink orders, when suddenly we start racing down the runway, taking her by surprise - she had to sprint back to her jumpseat.

All in all, kind of a strange trip...

Looks like it's one of those travel days. First, I finally had to deal with one of the new scanners. I opted out, of course - if TSA wants to run security theater, the only protest I can lodge is to waste their time. With that out of the way, I got onto an earlier flight headed to DCA instead of BWI (good news, since I forgot about my bifurcated flights this week and parked down near DCA).

That's pretty much when the good news ended though; now we have about 90 minutes of ground hold, due to T-Storms between here and DC. Joy :)

Even though it's the weekend, I'm on the road - it's time for the kid to start visiting colleges. That means a road trip instead of a good night's sleep for me :)

I had a fairly epic "if it can go wrong, it will" sort of day yesterday - here's what happened:

• Leave Vegas on a RedEye flight (I consider that to be a mistake I made)
• Leave Minneapolis (I was flying Delta) the next morning. Flight develops electrical trouble, diverts to Madison, Wisconsin
• Go to breakfast after Delta announces it's on them, down the corridor
• While I'm there, they rebook a few passengers who waited onto a flight to DCA. The rest of us end up on a 3:30 flight back to Minneapolis, connecting to a flight that arrives at BWI at 10:30
• Pull out the work laptop, thinking I'll get work done. Said laptop won't boot up
• Finally board flight back to Minneapolis, wait there for 2 hours. Fill one of them with a conference call
• Finally fly home
• Arrive home, remember that I emptied some extra supplies from my bag - one of which is a spare power supply. Discover that the thing that broke was the power supply I decided to take

It was that sort of day.

Apparently, taking the redeye from Las Vegas wasn't enough excitement. I was dozing off on my connection from Minneapolis to BWI when the flight attendant announced that the plane had "an electrical problem", and we were diverting to Madison. I wasn't worried, since there wasn't an obvious problem. When we got here there were emergency vehicles all down the runway, and they had us towed to the gate rather than using the plane's power. Then there were firemen meeting the plane, both outside and in the jetway. So.... I'm guessing that we won't just be hopping back on that same plane after a brief stop :)

Bottom line, I have no idea how long I'll be stuck here. My trip just got longer :/

Update: Well, things are defined, but not well. I'm catching a flight from here at 3:30, and then I get a 2 1/2 hour layover in Minneapolis, before I fly from there to Baltimore. That gets in at 10:30 PM. This day just keeps getting longer :)

I can't complain about the flight itself - it left on time, and arrived early. It's just that I had forgotten how painful overnight flights are :) Going through the day on the short sleep you manage on a 3 hour overnight flight just doesn't cut it :)

Today I'm getting the downside of using metro to get to DCA. I use it because parking at Greenbelt is much, much cheaper than parking in long term parking at DCA itself, but - metro closes before midnight on weeknights. Why does that matter? Well, I arranged a 6:30 pm flight tonight, and it was delayed for over an hour. So... I'll be arriving right around the time the system closes. Which means I have to cab it to the metro stop in order to fetch my car.

This is one of the many small annoyances surrounding transit solutions that transit advocates never really get around to noticing. Given the built environment we actually have, it's just not an ideal solution all of the time - and tonight seems to be one of those times. I gambled on the savings, and lost :)

Technorati Tags: dc metro

I had to sit back and ponder the state of my expectations today. We got up to 10,000 feet, and I turned wifi on - and nothing happened. Since I forgot to put Steam into offline mode before I left, that means no Steam games on the flight.

Just consider that for a second - it's not enough that I have power, now I expect to have network access up here, too :)