I'll be home for Christmas...I hope

The funny thing was, as I was packing to make my annual trip eastward, I had just been thinking about how lucky I'd been with air travel. How people were getting stranded by snowstorms in Detroit and missed the first day of winter quarter, or more recently how people were camping out in the Denver airport just a few days ago, but not me. I had even booked a flight from San Jose to Detroit with just a stop in Phoenix--cheaper than flying direct but I wouldn't have to change planes. MyForecast didn't predict any airport delays in any of the airports, so I went to bed the night before thinking I'd have smooth sailing. After all, Denver might just be asking for snow out there in the mountains, but when is there ever a snowstorm in Phoenix?

Dec 23, 9:30 AM. My first sign something was wrong was that the FAA's delays page showed a 90 minute delay out of Phoenix due to fog. Fog? WTF mate? But no matter, I thought; my flight doesn't leave till noon, so I'm sure this will clear up in time.

10:30 AM. I arrive at SJC the preordained 90 minutes before my flight to find a huge line at the America West counter, which I chalked up to being the day before Christmas Eve. I ran into Andy from Stanford, who it turns out is also on my flight to Phoenix, then connecting to Philly. The line doesn't move.

10:45 AM. After not getting anywhere, an America West agent comes out and asks everyone checking into our flight to come outside and check in with the skycap, because everyone inside is trying to rebook after the earlier flight to Phoenix got canceled.

11:00 AM. After not moving anywhere through the line outside, someone else informs us that our flight to Phoenix was being delayed, and would we please go back inside to see if we can reschedule our connections. There's no information on the flight board, and we have no idea what's going on.

11:30 AM. Again, not having really advanced far in the line, another agent comes out to tell us that our flight probably won't leave until 1:30 so it won't get to Phoenix until 4:45 [an hour and a half late], so anyone with connections before then a) probably won't make it, b) needs to rebook, and c) may well not get a flight out before Christmas because every single airline seat is apparently booked. Then she asked people who can still go to Phoenix to step to the front of the line and check in. Luckily, the plane to Phoenix was proceeding directly to Detroit, so it didn't matter how late it got there. Andy's still screwed, and I bid him a sympathetic 'good luck' and farewell. So I made my way to the front of the line.

11:40 AM. Now she announces that America West for some reason is changing planes and the Phoenix flight is not going to Detroit any more. Now I'm in the same boat as most everyone else in the terminal, who aren't happy. People are whipping out their laptops to check airline sites, and calling loved ones to tell them they're not going to make it. I finally make my way to the counter.

11:50 PM. My agent (who's in a considerably better mood than the last agent, all things considered) tries booking me on other airlines, and even considers shuttling me to Oakland to catch another flight. She even calls Southwest to see if they have open seats. Nearby, a stone-faced agent is telling someone he can't even fly standby on any of their flights because "the system can't handle it".

12:00 PM. The best she can do is let me onto the Phoenix flight, put me up in a hotel in Phoenix, then send me to Vegas the next night, then to Detroit, finally arriving at 6 AM Christmas morning. Sensing that this was my only hope of getting off the West Coast before Christmas, I agreed and thanked her for her help. Since I had more than 3 ounces of liquid as a Christmas gift for someone I checked my bag. She warned me that although my flight was planning to leave at 1:30, they'll "try" to leave earlier, so I should get to the gate as soon as possible. Sure enough, my boarding pass had that great mark of the beast SSSS: "selected for secondary security screening". I call my parents to let them know I won't be home that night after all.

12:20 PM. Making all haste to go directly to security without passing Go (or the food court, natch), I get up to the front of the line. Whereupon the TSA dude pulls me aside and asks me to wait for a screener, in line behind some other unfortunate chap (bless that "random" screening). Fearing that my flight might actually be thinking about taking off I try to plead for a little alacrity but to no avail. (Bam! a GRE word I still remember!)

1 PM. I rush to the gate, finding a long line of passengers, and...that my flight's been delayed till 3. Excellent. But I discover a text message from Dad: he found a flight for me from Phoenix the next morning on Southwest, amazingly enough.

2 PM. Andy shows up at the gate, with a similar new itinerary and hotel voucher. Meanwhile a crowd of increasingly irate would-be passengers begins to form for the next Phoenix flight, originally scheduled for 3:30.

3 PM. No plane. The gate staff has taken down any hint of when our flight might actually depart, signaling they have no clue either.

4 PM. We finally begin boarding our flight, only four hours late. At least she bumped me up to first class, figuring it was the least she could do. The guy next to me didn't pay for a first-class ticket either--he was supposed to fly out of SFO but his flight was oversold, so they shuttled him down to San Jose and told him he'd fly out at noon. If he'd only known...

4:15 PM. We leave the gate--with about 40 empty seats. Finally about to get underway, the captain explains, "I don't know what they told you," (always a great way to start..), but that our plane was headed to Phoenix that morning but diverted to Vegas because of the fog, then had to go to Phoenix to drop off the passengers when the fog lifted and that's why they were so late. Right.

7:15 PM. As we're taxiing to the gate, the pilot announces that this plane is continuing on to (surprise!) Detroit. That would've been nice to know too. I consider rushing to baggage claim and fighting my way back on the plane but decide that my parents probably wouldn't be too thrilled about picking me up in Detroit at 3 AM.

At least they put Andy, me, and a whole boatload of other America West refugees up in a nice hotel with free computers for Internet access and boarding pass printing, free breakfast, and free hourly shuttles to the airport. And a decent sushi restaurant across the street.

So I did make it back on Christmas Eve, about 2 PM--only 18 hours later than scheduled. And I was one of the lucky ones. Plenty of people either gave up in San Jose or were still waiting for flights in Phoenix, to say nothing of the poor saps still marooned in Denver. So here's what I learned:

• Don't trust America West or their parent USAir. Granted, this thing wasn't entirely their fault. But they still should've been more upfront on what was happening and been able to do faster rebooking. Once I found myself arriving early for a connection in Chicago and wandered over to a United counter--in the terminal, no less--and within five minutes was holding a rebooked ticket for a flight that left an hour earlier. America West has roughly six people serving all of San Jose, and rebooking with them is a painful process that can't be done over the phone and involves handwritten paper coupons and chanting mysterious voodoo hexes.
• Don't check your luggage and ask to fly standby. A whole bunch of people could've made it to Phoenix and even beyond, because the delays caused a ripple of no-shows throughout the country. Just because a flight looks full right now doesn't mean it will be three hours from now.
• Have someone try Southwest. Their flights don't show up in most ticket agents' systems cause they're just rebels that play by their own rules.
  

Ages 3 and up

"Keeps the kids entertained during Passover." Yes, you can actually buy a plush collection of all 10 plagues, complete with a little bag labeled "Plagues". Because you never know when you'll want to hurl "an icky boil on a piece of flesh" or a black locust at your friends.

Is it just me or is this a fairly disturbing thing to give to a kid? More disturbing than Latke Larry, that's for sure...

Link from Erika.

hisashiburi ne

Yes, it's been a while. So what's new, you might ask?
Well, the biggest (and heaviest, and most expensive) thing would be my (semi-)new CAR. Yes, after five years of carlessness, I've turned my back on my quasi-hippie who-needs-a-car-this-is-the-Bay-Area vow and bought a car off su.market. I've also committed what in Detroit would be a cardinal sin and bought a Japanese car. But that's OK. I'm just so thrilled to own a car that doesn't remember the first Gulf War and has such modern amenities as intermittent windshield wipers and power door locks. And... it can even do 0-60 in under 30 seconds, which is always a plus.

Also new, but weighing in at much less than two tons, are our new roommates from France. It's a tad weird having half your apartment speak a different language but I guess you get used to it. But yes, the Zone is no longer exclusively a den of CS geeks, which is sad in a way.

Almost as new, and weighing even less than two grown men, is my shiny new computer. Dave and I built our first machines over the summer in a true episode of geek bonding. As we sat there trying to figure out how to pop the faceplates off our new DVD drives, lesson learned: it never hurts to RTFM. Especially when the alternative is brute force... But as a result my old computer has been relegated to media server duty, and so the old photos are down for now.

In other news, I now have a newfound respect for the Roseville Police Department. You might remember my protracted four-month ordeal trying to repair my notebook. In August, portablecomputer.com went dark, but I was able to get the owner of portablecomputer.com on the phone. He claimed to have fixed my computer and that it was ready to ship, only he couldn't because of "server trouble". I tried to explain to him that he didn't need a server to drive to FedEx and ship my bloody computer back, and he promised to do so. Then he canceled his phone service and cell phone. Turned out that his "server trouble" was that the police actually raided his house and confiscated his server--along with 163 notebooks he had promised to repair. So now they're shipping it back to me, hopefully in some salvageable state, and maybe someday I might get my money back...once the DA files charges, and if he has money. We'll see.
 

Japanese TV is so cruel...

Wow. That's Morning Musume, Japan's version of the Spice Girls, who have their own weekly TV show. Apparently they have so little going on that they can face off with a giant lizard. (Maybe they're masochists--they also faced off with Bob Sapp.)

Speaking of which, they apparently like to sneak up on people and force them to speak English, like this choice clip:

Girl 1: Where is the restroom?

Girl 2: I go to elevator.

Girl 1 starts pantomiming either that she's about to puke or that she really needs to pee.

The great thing about this is it reminds me of my first day of Japanese class in sixth grade, when our teacher was teaching us how to ask if we could go to the bathroom:

It's toire wa ii desu ka, which literally means, "Toilet: is it OK?" But that's hard to learn so for the first week just toire will be enough. Or for the first day you can just do this: (points to sign reading "toire wa ii desuka" and jumps up and down holding her gut)

Fortunately, we did have one kid who did exactly that the first day.

latenight playtime

Last weekend was the first Friday Night Waltz DJ'd by Richard Powers in a while. It was soo crowded and so hot. But it was fun...and ended with us testing the kitchen's patience at the Cheesecake Factory till 1:30 AM...

Saturday night was The Game, sort of. It was on campus, and my first bike-powered Game. Which basically meant they could send us from Mirrielees to the modulars all the way on the west side back to the tennis stadium on the east side to the Mausoleum to the north to the Faculty Club to the south...it was exhausting. But we emerged victorious nevertheless.

Best clue ever: A CD labeled "Tunes 4 U", with 45 minutes of music on it. Each song has some random length of silence at the end, which you can find out by ripping the tracks and opening with an audio editor. Then you can take the seconds of silence and the seconds of each track...

...or you could listen to this suspicious quiet part in the middle of track 4, which contained a drumbeat that was spelling out GPS coordinates in binary.

...or you could listen to the song itself on track 4, which is "Bare Necessities" from The Jungle Book:

Don't pick the prickly pear by the paw
When you pick a pear
Try to use the claw
But you don't need to use the claw
When you pick a pear of the big pawpaw
Have I given you a clue?

And then the music fades out abruptly and mysteriously. Anyone know where on campus this was?

Worst clue ever: Ten bags of mini candy bars, meant to be arranged by the year they were first released, then interpreted as Morse code by their manufacturers (Mars or Nestle), yielding "370.21.O35". Now, being techies, we all thought this meant building 370's lecture hall, seat O35, and some useless 21. Maybe it's readily obvious to anyone who actually gets books out of the library that this is a call number. (Is it? My informal study of one fuzzie seems to say so.) But it turns out that if you go look this book up in Socrates you get:

The wilderness and the laurel tree; a guide for teachers and parents on the observation of children. O'Gorman, Ned. Holding in EDUCATION.

You might think that you're meant to go to the Education library, where the book resides, or perhaps Bing Nursery, where children are observed. Nope. Turns out there's a modular called Laurel that's waaay over here, nestled among other obscure, identical-looking modulars named Oak, Poplar, and Acacia in a "wilderness" of trailers.

No wonder that clue took us an hour and a half to get...

summer = lazy

to the tune of: Lay Me Down by Crosby Nash

Oh it's so tempting. The Marguerite now has a bus that stops right outside our complex and goes straight to Gates in six minutes flat. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but that's pretty sweet. Though I'll still get the exercise and bike into work, plowing over errant teenage campers on my way if need be. But on rainy days I can definitely see it coming in handy.

Or another thing it's useful for is going to the UPS store. Not that I do that that often, but I've been dealing with UPS a lot lately. See, I finally got my notebook back after it broke and I sent it in for repairs. Which originally "should only take a few days", but that turned into weeks, and then into...four months? I spent much of the past two weeks calling the place daily to nag them about it when they finally realized it was repaired and sitting in a box on a shelf somewhere ready to go, as it had been for nearly a week. Grr...

So then it takes a few tries for UPS to deliver it because we're all at work during the day and they shipped it home instead of to my office like I asked. But I finally got it, turned it on and...it booted! Once. Then it didn't start the next ten times. Uh oh. So I finally got it working long enough to back up the only important data on it...only now the screen flickers and turns off randomly. Excellent.

So now I have a firm deadline from this company, by when they'll have either fixed it or refunded my money. And all the data I care about on CD. Come to think of it, back up any of your important stuff now. It occurred to me since then that I have almost 3 GB of photos that exist only on my hard drive, which I'd be really sad to lose. (Well maybe I don't need all 5000 of them, but still...)

With the notebook (semi-)safely in the hands of the repair place, I've turned my attention to building a sweet desktop. It's exciting to watch the pieces come together as they inch their way across the country from warehousese in LA and Pennsylvania...no it's not! I want the pieces now! Now!

In other news, exciting discovery of the night: duck pizza! Surprisingly good...

a dry gulch

Last Thursday night I went with Laura and Andrew to a Rascal Flatts concert in Concord. It was a great show, and quite an experience. I'd been to country music concerts in Michigan before (in particular at the State Fair), and this was a tad different. First, rather than the redneck crowd who'd come to the State Fair to watch the tractor pull, these folks were I guess what you'd call fashionable rednecks. Never have I seen so many pink cowboy (cowgirl?) hats. I'm sorry, you just don't see that in the South. (Though you don't see too many Google shirts there either.) Opening act Blake Shelton teased the crowd:

They told me you Californians might not really appreciate country music. I dunno. Are y'all hardworkin'? Beer-drinkin'? In-breedin'? Oops, maybe not in-breedin'.

Yes, this was a California country concert, a fact Rascal Flatts made a point of reminding us no fewer than 24 times. And only in California would the putrid odor of pot waft across a country concert... And there were tons of teenage girls there, four of whom could not stop screaming every thirty seconds. You'd think their throats would get hoarse but no. They could've been getting stabbed and it'd sound much the same I imagine.

But Friday night we headed out "where the grass and the dirt and the gravel all meet": camping at Arroyo Seco with Guy, Helen, Dan, Laura, Andrew, and Nick. Google proved sadly impotent at locating this campsite, and the written directions we got were simple but they made me skeptical. Somehow even after having been let down by MSN Maps so many times, I still feel more comfortable having independent verification of where this place is, like a map. Especially because the exit listed in the directions didn't exist. So we didn't realize we'd gone past it until we got to a city that looked decidedly unlike the Ventana Wilderness. (Once again, a problem that would be solved if only California would number its bloody exits.) Fortunately Dan had old-fashioned paper maps in the car and we eventually found our way. But, despite our best efforts, not before dark.