Rants From The Plane

Dude, there's a parade outside

2010-06-03T10:25:00.000-07:00

I was at carnaval on the weekend and stopped to get a coffee.
Inside there were not one, not two, but at least three people ignoring
the festivities and working on their laptops.

I just wanted to scream
"There's a fucking parade outside on the first sunny
day in San Francisco in weeks! what are you doing !!"

But I didn't.

This Guy was even on a video chat with someone. I wanted him to at least spin the camera around so his friend could see the parade.

The Last Avatar

2010-05-05T15:07:00.000-07:00

I Saw 'Avatar'. I hated it. I edited it.

Now, don't get me wrong, it was visually and technically excellent.
There is no limit to the amount of praise you can lump on a shot like this:

But when it was 150 minutes long, and story that was just painful, no amount of
visual effects work was going to gloss over bad writing and a lack of desire to edit it
down to a palatable mouthful.

So instead of just complaining about the problem, I did something about it,
I re-edited it myself.

I set myself 2 goals :

Edit the film down to 90 minutes
Straighten out the story so it follows the monomyth better

Well, about a week later, and with a story that is now stuck in my head
forever, (thank you, James Cameron) you actually end up with something
that seems to make sense and, oddly enough, closely resembles that
other epic 'The Last Samurai', (but is much shorter):

The Last Avatar
1 hour, 30 minutes, mostly coherent

download the xmeml

Yes, there is a catch, I'm not going to post the actual movie, that's
your problem (copyright's a bitch like that). Instead I'm posting an
EDL that will let you cut your own copy. Here's what you need to do :

Go get a copy of Avatar (yes, you have to give James Cameron more
of your money, its a price we pay for art)
Get a copy of the xmeml, this is an edit list that will load up, I hope, into
Final Cut or similar tools. (I actually used 'iMovie' to do these edits, then
exported the XML edl. It is surprising how much you can do with a basic tool)
Find a way to import it into your editing tool of choice.
Sync your source. The edits won't work unless your source has cut points
at the same times that mine did. Read on...

This edit was created from the NTSC DVD (USA edition) which runs at ~30FPS.
The opening sequences contain a lot of cross fades, so it is hard to mark a good
cut point. however, to sync, you can use the following cues:

This is the first clean cut in the film

01:02:19	01:02:20

The next obvious one is here

01:42:28	01:42:29

And the end of the film is here

2:34:55:06	2:34:55:07

Then, if you can sync your source, you should be able to cut a new version
using the edl and enjoy a much more palatable version of the movie.

A few final points:

Check the edits, some of them were very close to an original cut and,
if you are out of sync, you may end up with an unwanted frame from the
next shot.
The same applies for the audio, some of the audio in/outs are designed
to overlap multiple shots.
There is 1 cross fade effect that may not make it into the edl, This was
just me trying to match the fade from the original. You may not notice it.
Yes, there are some continuity problems, I had to work with limited source
material, there is only so much you can re-arrange a story, just roll with it.
If you are working with 720p it can take a while to cut a new version
of the film.

My life in airline miles

2010-04-02T19:53:00.000-07:00

I know I fly a lot, so I mapped all my flights for the last 4 years. I
used make one of these a year, but this time I got curious and overlaid
all the data on one map. There are some really odd "open jaws" in Europe
because I would flip between cities on the train.

A visual history (pdf) of my life on a plane (as of Dec 2009)
There is probably some missing data.

A history of Tonight Shows

2010-01-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

It bugged me that there wasn't a timeline for this, so I made one,

A visual history (pdf) of the tonight show hosts (as of Dec 2009)
There is probably some missing data, the research was, well, interesting.

SAFETY WARNING

2009-03-09T10:16:00.000-07:00

--

2008-03-23T23:09:00.001-07:00

A Photo A Day

This one isn't working

2008-01-11T00:11:00.000-08:00

My typing ability is not as good as it could be as I'm currently sporting
a brace on my right hand. I'm somewhat aware of this device because today
I discovered that it (duh) had metal in in and I'm sure the TSA folks had
an amusing time reminding me of this fact as I went through security.

It, was of course just one of many things that didn't quite go right today
as I tried to fly to Seattle:

Not one, but two checkin kiosks were broken, I had to log into a third to
finally print my boarding pass. The first ATM I tried to use had broken
buttons so had to walk across the terminal to get enough cash to pay for
my cab.

I forgot my phone charger, so I had to purchase another one, at the
phone kiosk that was, of course, in the opposite direction from the gate
to the ATM I had just hiked to. All the power outlets were taken so I
couldn't charge my phone anyway.

My plane was delayed by one and a half hours because they had to replace
it not once but twice. Oh, and the mens room was fragrant with raw sewage
washing across the floor.

So it was not what you would call the most functional of days

Moment of Irony: my seat number was '4F'

A photo a day :

So since I can't type so well anyway, this year I'm doing something
different. Every day I'm going to take a photo. One Photo a day. I'm doing
this project with a friend of mine.

You can see them here

Shaken and Stirred

2007-11-27T22:30:00.000-08:00

Yes, for some mysterious whimsical reason I decided to try and get back on
a plane just after thanksgiving and foolishly thought it would be a
simple experience.

Ah, how soon one forgets.

I was also going to try and get creative and describe the various flights
in humorous and interesting terms, but suffice to say:

I got to the airport early yesterday hoping to fly standby only to
discover all the flights were delayed and I only got back an hour sooner
than originally planned.

I was woken at 6am this morning by my messages telling me that my 2pm
flight today was delayed by 4 hours (there goes that connection)

I called the airline and got moved to an earlier flight (so much for
lunch). That flight was delayed by 1 hour and when I tried to re-schedule
it, they offered to put me back on the original flight.

And, of course, I had to hustle to make my connection with minutes to
spare.

But, that is not the essence of the story. That was merely a lame
attempt to give this blurb a second act.

The more interesting event was somewhere over Salt Lake when we hit some
really bad turbulence.

I mean annoyingly bad.

And this wasn't the freaky, drop 200m and lose your lunch type thing.
This was the pick the plane up and keep shaking it around kind of thing.
All you could do was hold on to your drink and do your best to not to
cause grevious bodily harm to those around you.

Now, when this sort of thing happens I actually get curious and listen
to the Air Traffic Control channel. The only thing more amusing than
hearing a pilot trying to get out of a bad situation, is hearing lots of
them at the same time.

As soon as I plugged in the headset I was bombarded with a flurry of
planes trying to get out of the mess:

Pilot : We're getting some bumps here, what's the situation ?

ATC : Occasional to moderate chop and all levels 23 and above

Translated, that meant that there was no good air anywhere 23,000
feet or higher, aka, most of the usable airspace. After that
it just became a circus, If anyone had a slice of good air, everyone
wanted to fly at the same altitude

Flight XXX : We have low chop at 25

ATC : Roger that

Flight YYY : Request 25

Flight WWW : Also Request 25

Flight ZZZ : Also Request 25, please

Now I'm not going to bore you with ATC talk but the funniest part was
during all this, one pilot just lost all patience. This is what I
actually heard over the radio :

Flight AAA : It's still bumpy up here, what's 29 like ?

Flight ZZZ : 29 sucks !

ATC : Um, thank you flight ZZZ for that succinct update.

When we heard that, anyone who was listening to that channel just burst
out laughing. (which was most of my row and the row in front) The flight
attendant just looked at us with that "What was that" look on her face.
Once someone explained she also cracked up.

Finally our own pilot gave up trying to be nice

Pilot : Request course change so we can find some good air, please

Some time later I was finally able to finish my drink without causing
damage to anyone

Jammin' with the locals

2007-10-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

It is close to midnight, there are about only 30 people in the bar and I'm
getting my arse kicked in pool by a guy in a wheelchair.

I put this down to the fact that he's more relaxed as he gets to play the
whole game sitting down. I try to ignore that he has had a lot more
Guinness than I have.

But at least I'm getting a life, as I have been for the last year.

I moved apartments, stopped traveling so much. Got out of the house most
nights and realised that I just didn't have the same time nor motivation
to write the way I used to.

I think this is a good thing.

So here I am, out on a weekday night in a local bar in my home town
losing badly and enjoying myself. I'm drinking with the Sushi chef from
across the road because he told me that the drinks were cheap (mostly)
and the band rocked, which they do, And he occasionally plays bass.

This is what I like about San Francisco. This is a city where everyone
plays music. I've been to places where even the the most complete stoner
still got his 45 minutes of fame, even after playing a good 12 bars of one
number before he realised he was in the wrong key.

"Sorry dudes, I forgot what key that one was in."

This is also the kind of city where, while I'm watching this band play,
the guitarist stops and hands his guitar to someone else at the bar. That
person just picks up and keeps playing the same riff with perfect timing
and clarity.

It would be one thing if they were playing smoke on the water, but they
were jamming out some random blues funky thing that you either got or
you didn't. These guys did.

"Is it always like this ?" I asked my chef.

"No, sometimes he hands him the trumpet"

Of course, thanks to a city that spawned the tech boom, I'm also able to
go over to a guy in the corner who has a laptop and stack of blank CD's
and get a copy of the entire set at the end of the evening.

In this town, there are no big shows here, no headliners. Even some of
the biggest, popular venues only hold a few hundred people. This is a
city that overwhelms you with choices of music. Anything you want, any
night of the week.

Everyone gets ten feet of stage and an up close audience.

Why stay at home ?

Wish you were here

2006-12-21T17:57:00.000-08:00

I decided that my last post was just too dark and gloomy.
So I re-wrote it. The voyeuristic amongst you can now get a
glimpse into the creative process :

I always find bookstores somewhat unsettling. On one hand there is this
orgasmic mine of information, entertainment, raw thought and, womens
magazines. But on the other hand it is also a little overwhelming because
there is this endless towering amount of information, entertainment, raw
thought and, womens magazines.

Suffice to say that I can usually last about two hours before I have to
either purchase something or just get out and breathe.

The store I was just in was no exception. On the flight over I realised
that my current tome was nearing an end and if I wanted to make it through
the week (and the flight back) I needed a refill. So I rocked into an old
haunt near the university but the deathly palor that consumed the place
was quickly unbearable. The aisles were full of pasty faced vegetarians
fresh from the health food shop next door. They were all moving slowly
through the sociology section which is, unsurprisingly, right next to the
self help section and I just couldn't focus.

I should also point out that these sort of places smell just plain weird.
It is an odd combination of 'Old Person', the great unwashed, slightly
damp books and years of burning incense to hide all the other smells.

So, I took the default approach, grabbed some cheap detective novels and
got out of there before the guy behind me in the line started a long
painful diatribe with the checkout person on the effects of Derrida on the
working classes. His beret and cloak were a dead giveaway.

Then again, this could have just been a side effect of, for want of a
better term, 'High Rent Jet Lag'

I want to say that I was rewarding myself by getting a first class ticket
to Sydney for Christmas, but the truth is that is first class were only
tickets available, so I just had to suck it up and and enjoy the ride.

For the record, anyone who thinks that first class is some bacchanal romp
involving endless champagne, massages and fawning minions is not flying my
airline. (except for the endless bubbly, that much is true)

Instead you spend and an uncomfortable two hours in the first class lounge
where there are only three of you and the place is deathly quiet. It is
like some sort of old hotel, replete with the occasional rustling of
papers and the unmistakable sound of a cube of ice settling itself deeper
into the glass. I half expected to see a geriatric bell hop totter past
under the weight of far too many bags.

The First class Cabin was equally bereft of soul. For some unheard of
reason only half the seats were taken and everyone was so far apart that
there was no way or method for people to intercommunicate. Even the staff
did their best to leave you alone because you, presumably, were far too
important to be bothered.

So you do what everyone else does. You bury yourself in a book or a
movie, sleep when you can and hope that there are normal people at the
other end.

I ended the day waiting for my sister in a bar down by the beach, as she
had the keys to the house and rode out the evening doing my usual 'I'm not
homeless, just interesting' impersonation.

It was supposed to be a balmy summer evening with people filling the
streets celebrating the end of the year. But instead it was
uncharacteristically cold, the rain was beating down and everyone was in
hiding. About an hour ago I finished my book, and would be talking to the
bartender except he went out the back for a smoke.

Instead I thought back to the flight.

Somewhere over the Hawaii they had to reboot the entertainment system and
for about thirty minutes all we had to listen to was the Pink Floyd's
'Dark side of the moon'

"...There's someone in my head but it's not me..."

How I wish you were here

2006-12-20T19:05:00.000-08:00

It is sometime after dark. I'm sitting in a bar waiting for my sister to
meet me with the keys to her house. As a result I'm having a bit of a
existential crisis because I now feel truly homeless.

It it supposed to be a balmy summer evening with people filling the
streets celebrating the end of the year. But instead it is
uncharacteristically cold, the rain is beating down and everyone is in
hiding. About an hour ago I finished my book, and would be talking to the
bartender except that the staff have gone out the back for a smoke.

In my defense, I did try to be organised earlier today and find a
bookshop. I hit the one near the university but the deathly palor that
consumed the place was unbearable. I don't know what is it about these
sorts of shops but the place was full of pasty faced vegetarians fresh
from the health food shop next door. They were all moving slowly through
the sociology section which is, unsurprisingly, right next to the self
help section and I just couldn't focus. I should also point out that
these sort of places smell just plain weird. It is an odd combination of
'Old Person', the great unwashed, slightly damp books and years of burning
incense to hide all the other smells.

I needed real people, I needed just one good conversation.

The flight here probably didn't help. I can't think of a more solitary
experience.

I want to say that I was rewarding myself by getting a first class ticket
to Sydney for Christmas, but the truth is that is first class were only
tickets available, so I just had to suck it up and and enjoy the ride.

But I just couldn't. It was all too, well, odd.

I had to fly via LAX and spend an uncomfortable two hours in the first
class lounge. There were only three of us in there and the place was just
deathly quiet. It was actually like some sort of old hotel. There was
the occasional rustling of papers and the unmistakable sound of a cube of
ice settling itself deeper into the glass. I half expected to see a
geriatric bell hop totter past under the weight of far too many bags.

In the plane the First class Cabin was is equally bereft of soul. For
some unheard of reason only half the seats were taken and everyone was so
far apart that there was no way or method for people to intercommunicate.
Even the staff did their best to leave you alone because you, presumably,
were far too important to be bothered.

Anyone who thinks that first class is some bacchanal romp involving
endless champagne, massages and fawning minions is not flying my airline.
(except for the endless bubbly, that much is true)

Sometime later they had to reboot the entertainment system and for about
thirty minutes all we had to listen to was the Pink Floyd's 'Dark side of
the moon'

"...There's someone in my head but it's not me..."

I'm a Whore to my Airline.

2006-12-11T15:37:00.000-08:00

Seat 24C, the second worst seat on a Boeing 777. (The worst seat is just
behind it, in the exit aisle). I am, as usual, suffering for my art and
doing a long haul across the pond. I had hoped to get some sleep during
the ten hour ordeal. I had also hoped to get an upgrade.

Instead I'm enjoying the unenvious position of being a) Close enough to the
toilets to enjoy the usual water cooler conversations that seem to run too
loud and too late into the night. b) My seat actually sticks out into the
aisle so EVERYONE bumps my seat as they walk past. c) The couple at the
other end of the row have a baby that won't stop crying. And, as icing on
the cake, d) I'm stuck next to someone who has decided that they do not want
to sleep and would rather work all night on their powerpoint presentation
that, now that I've had all night to read it, looks like crap.

You would think that these people would be aware of the folks around them
and reconsider their actions. But there is nothing I can do about it, I
just have to suck it up and enjoy my time in the coach ghetto.

So, I could be feeling a lot of pain, but at least I'm not Bob.

Bob travels as much as I do and by some odd coincidence he is actually on
my flight. Bob is also, I've decided, insane. He is doing something that
is affectionately called a 'mileage run'. He is flying to from San
Francisco to London where, after knocking back a few pints in the
departure lounge, will then get back on the plane and fly back to The Bay

He is doing this to get an extra 20,000 miles which will bump his frequent
flyer status. His argument is that with his improved status he has a
better chance of getting upgraded on later flights. So he is feeling the
pain of slumming it in coach for 24 hours just so he doesn't have to
slum it later.

I tried to point out that if he just didn't fly so often, he wouldn't feel
the pain at all.

It is kinda like buying things on sale. Sure the item is cheap, but you
would also save a lot more money if you just didn't buy the damn thing.

However, this is not why he is insane, well not directly. What is dumb is
that he is taking luggage with him. Here is the perfect opportunity to
travel really light. All you would need is a clean shirt, passport and a
credit card. Even Indy Jones couldn't get this good, he still had to find
somewhere to hang his whip.

Instead Bob has four DVDs, three days worth of clothes, two laptops and,
probably, a partridge in a pear tree. He muttered something about 'having
to get some work done'.

My only response was to just be a smug bastard and tell him that I have
three days of clothes because I'm going to Barcelona.

Unfortunately this meant that I had to endure the extra security while
moving between terminals at Heathrow, the usual connecting flight delays,
discovering that trains in Barcelona do not have route maps (I guess
people just 'know' where they are going). I barely had enough Euros and
was mostly guessing as to where the hotel was. Maybe turning around at
Heathrow was the saner thing to do.

When I did finally stumble into my accommodations to check in, 'Hotel
California' was playing over the sound system.

"...You can check out any time you like..."

Crosseyed and Painless

2006-11-10T18:38:00.000-08:00

(Part 3 of something that happend to me some time ago)

Our good deal waiting tables on the largest city afloat (at the time)
supposedly extended to our hours.

As the managements way of saying thank you for helping them out as such
short notice, we were given light duties. We only had to serve breakfast
lunch and dinner. We were being excused from serving Afternoon Tea.

My idea of saying thank you would have been to let us off at the next port

However, once you were used to the routine the hours weren't that bad. Two
hours for breakfast, three for lunch, and say, four for dinner. So you got
some time off in the afternoon and between 11pm and 7am, your time was
your own.

"What do you do?" I asked,

I was curious as to the options, sunbake, swim, write?

"No mate" my roomie tells me.

"The pool is only open from 8pm. The only deck with seating and sun
is funnel deck, called so for obvious reasons, and the bar opens at 7pm"

He paused to take another drag from his cigarette.

"Do what everyone does, sleep"

And so the routine was set. Get up, work a bit, sleep, work some more,
get drunk, pass out, get up in time for breakfast. And don't get seasick.

Seasickness is not really a problem. The sea moves, you get sick, no
problem. But as Captain and Doctor alike will tell you, it is all in the
head. If your brain can see where your stomach is going, you'll be fine.

This, naturally, calls for fresh air and a window, two things that don't
exist for crew. So instead you just have to tell your brain to ignore
what your stomach is saying, assume your ears are faulty and plod on
regardless. It takes some time to get used to, but if you keep yourself
busy it works.

If it doesn't work and the hangover is just too much there are toilets
conveniently placed near all the danger zones with that reassuring wet,
slippery floor that tells you you are not the only one.

You are, I guess, all in the same boat.

Even now, many years later, I can still recall that one morning, after we'd
had a very nasty bender the night before, when one of our customers, the
bastard, decided that they wanted kippers for breakfast. We had to take
turns to go out there. We could only last 5 minutes before one of us
wanted to hurl.

Looking back now, I can, at best say, that it was an experience. I got
off lightly with just a taste of what i could have committed myself to.

A standard contract was 7 days a week for 3 months. Free room and board in
the finest post industrial steel spaces the Empire has to offer and
everything for sale is duty free.

If you need a free passage across the planet and can get used to the
unchanging routine and disgusting hours, the job is not particularly bad.
It's a cheap way to live.

If you actually care about your sanity, you should probably consider
driving a taxi.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programme.

The ship that shagged me

2006-11-05T22:29:00.000-08:00

At this point in time I would request that you don't ask how
it happened. I don't know.

Friday afternoon I was contemplating an eggplant foccacia and by lunchtime
Saturday I had checked in for 5 days hard labour and was contemplating
suicide.

I had signed on as a waiter, Sydney to Fremantle. Good money, huge tips,
excellent experience and street cred. 'You should do it', they said. I
should have trusted my first instincts and told them to get stuffed, but
no, I had had to say yes.

It was broken to us gently (of course). We were shown into the boardroom,
filled out forms etc, allowed to smoke, relax, get numb. Then we were
shown around the facilities. The two dining rooms that sat 500 each (this
was where we were to work).

We were shown the other more lucrative Princess and Queen's Grills, for
the full fare paying passengers. The penthouse suites, with direct access
to the Queen's grill so the folk never have to mix with the other
passengers. The casino (one day someone will explain to me how a roulette
wheel works on a ship), the bars, the theatre, TV studio, bank, night
club, gym, sauna, spas, pools, Harrods... I was just endless.

Then we were led to the staff quarters.

'Through here' our guide said, He opened a solid steel door and the carpet
stopped, the wallpaper stopped, the ceiling stopped, everything that was
not needed for ultimate survival had been removed, you know, chairs,
tables, windows. There were just Bare steel walls and bare steel floors.

On the back of the door were 2 signs:

Please wipe you feet before
entering passenger accommodation

and:

Please keep this door closed
to avoid the smell
entering passenger accommodation.

Our guide also chose this point to remind us that under no
circumstances were we allowed in passenger areas, except when
on duty

"Full facilities are available in the crew area", He said

Yeah, right. We had access to all the mod-cons including a crew mess and
a bar. The bar was, of course, showing all the signs of having never
been cleaned since the maiden voyage. Wood benches, linoleum on
the floor, complete with cigarette burns, and no windows. It was also the
most popular room on the ship because it supported the most popular
pastime : Getting Drunk.

'Fine' we said, 'OK' we said, 'we can handle this..'

Offshore employment, tax free, food and lodging included, duty free bar
prices, beer at 60c a can. Sure everything's in US dollars, but we can
handle that, our wages will cover us right?

Nope.

Apparently, we got the good deal. Apparently.

We were going to be paid $20 a day and, since we were on for such a short
time, another $38/day in assumed gratuity. The normal wage, we found out
later, was about $12 per day.

We, were of course, welcome to any tips we could make in the restaurant.
But, and the whole reason I was here in the first place, The bulk of the
guests were locals from Sydney who were jumping on the opportunity to
ride the great beauty on one of her first trips around the Antipodes.

The problem here is that on the QEII all meals are included so,
knowing myself and any other full blooded tight arsed Australian,
if I'd just forked over $1800 for 5 days 'First Class' travel only to
find that my cabin is two feet above the waterline, I'm stuck on
the one table in the dining room for the whole trip, and it's 50
feet from the nearest window, with nothing to do all day
but sit eat drink and read, I'd be bloody glad I didn't have to pay
for dinner (if you could call it that)

In fact I'd probably be pissed off at paying $25 for
a bottle of nasty white burgundy and buggered if I was going to leave a tip.

On a transatlantic crossing you can earn over $2000 in 5 days, But you are
also mostly dealing with Americans who 'respect your right to smoke', but
not your right to do it at your leisure. Those are the sort of people who
would tip you if you don't cough in their direction. Two Grand - easy.
But on the Australian leg of a world tour - Buckleys.

Poor, Tired and Starving, we made the best of our days.

I'll tell you more later.

Going down on Her Majesty

2006-11-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

Recently I had a conversation that digressed into the topic of Cruise liners.
This led me to recall an experience I once had...

Despite what people may tell you. Regardless of any advertisement
featuring happy smiling people enjoying a horn-o-plenty of earthly
delights on the high seas, Whatever they say, it is all lies. This is not
a luxury liner, this is not the greatest experience you can have in one
lifetime, it is, though words escape me when it comes to expressing the
true nature of the QEII - Hell Afloat.

The fact that it is not painted black with barbed wire on the gunwales,
flames spewing forth from every port-hole and a large sign painted on the
side in blood, saying 'this is not a good idea' only leads me to confirm
the sadistic nature of the management.

To be concise, in a way that only one of the bard's supporting characters
could be, If you wanted to create the ultimate prison, from which escape
was 100% impossible, where life was miserable beyond imagination, and
pestilence ran through the ranks to the point where to repent and confess
to all number of sins (both true and untrue) was the only means of
retaining ones sanity and certification of human existence. Well, just
try your average ocean going vessel.

I guess this is why the founders of my once great nation (Australia) ended
up where they were. If I was given the choice of six to nine months miles
from anywhere on a ship, followed by spending the rest of my life in an
unknown land with no known means of support or survival or, option number
two, just spending the rest of my life stick on a ship, miles from
anywhere (which, if you can't swim, means the middle of the Thames) on a
ship. I'd offer to tow the thing. (This also makes me suspect that to
let any Australian on a ship is just the English way of reminding us how
lucky we are). However I digress.

Many years ago, when I was stil young, foolish and in desperate need of
spare change, the QEII rocked into town. It arrived with the offer of
cheap passage and a call for extra crew. Foolishly I not only applied for
the job, I accepted it when I made the grade. I was not a waiter on the
worlds finest luxury liner.

Looking back, I can now offer this sage advice.

If you get a job on said ship, DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ACCEPT IT.

Don't even contemplate a passage, do not get on, do not think 'holiday',
do not think 'relaxing option', do not pass go and do not collect $200.

Think, (and burn this forever in your brain) 'Most disgusting example of
Eco-Terrorism and capitalist exploitation imaginable'. Better still
think, as a colleague so aptly surmised, "SURREAL".

Let my try and paint you a mental picture here.

On my few hours off when I wasn't seasick and there was still some
daylight, I Headed to the outdoor staff area on 2 deck (which was under
the passenger 1 deck, so tanning was a no go), I could hear what sounded
like recorded explosions. Being the curious sort I leaned over the edge,
resisting the temptation to just throw myself overboard, to see what was
going on above me.

What I saw were bright orange clay pigeons were being cast into the sea
whole. Having been shot at electronically, as some sort of sacrifice to
the resources that were being exploited to make this whole thing
possible, they cast into the depths.

Out to my left the horizon was lined with half a dozen of the Bass
Straight oil rigs, lighting up the sky as they burnt off excess gas as
some reminder of the consumption that was keeping this circus afloat.

Everywhere you go walk your nostrils are assaulted by a stale smelling
blend of Chanel #5 and sea salt. It would remind you of your
grandmother's house, if gran also happened to be first mate to the Dread
Pirate Roberts.

A feeling of death is always on the mind, like the ship is one huge
vampyric beast, I would lie awake at night wondering if the splashes I was
hearing were from the dessicated remains of the engineering crew being
cast overboard in the dead of night.

In the public areas it is deathly silent, even during the day, the staff
are moving through secret passages below the waterline. Not even Muzak
can survive. The life blood of everything is consumed by the dead and
dying who lie passed out on the leather lounges, exhausted from a hards
days breathing, desperate to make their final days become final weeks.

It would make a great retirement option for those not so loved ones you
can't wait to get rid of, if it wasn't for the fact that for every
bloated, dying passenger, there were two dead waiters.

Surreal indeed.

I'll tell you More in a few Days.

How to be a good waiter

2006-10-22T13:34:00.000-07:00

This was prompted by the musings that I occasionally read over at the
waiterrant (http://waiterrant.net/). and the fact that I've spent far too much
time in restaurants. This has made me a) A critical SoB, because I want good
service, and b) Self-righteous about it, since I can claim the whole 'Been
there, done that, paid off my education working tables for many years' angle.

So, If you think you know the industry, sit down and take notes.

Write it down.

You aren't a savant and we will have changes. I don't care if you think
you can remember three courses for three people, you also have a lot of
other crap on your mind (Did you check out the dress that girl was
wearing?) and you are going to forget something. (Did I mention I have
allergies ?). Get a pad, Get lots of pens and write it down.

Don't run away when asked a question.

We haven't got all day, and nothing is more annoying than having the
server disappear half way through the ordering to 'Ask the chef'. It also
doesn't sell your ability to remember our orders if you can't retain a
single question for three minutes. Write down the question, and move on
to the next customer.

Know who ordered what.

If you even dare come over here and ask "Who has the fish ?" I'm
sending the whole order back. Number the seats, clockwise, from the seat
closest to the kitchen. Write down the order and the seat number. (Did I
mention that you should write things down).

Learn the menu.

If I ask for a recommendation, be able to suggest something. Work out
what goes with what. When in doubt lie, If I knew what I wanted, I
wouldn't have asked you.

Don't suggest big meals.

Look at your customers and think about how much they can eat. If they
have room for dessert, they may actually order it. If you just stuffed
them with pasta, they'll have a small coffee, a small bill, and leave
before they pass out.

Make eye contact.

You don't want to be the waiter who walks around with their head up their
arse, There are customers who want your attention. They are easy to find,
they will be looking at you.

Learn to open a bottle of wine

Plunging the sharp end through the foil and battling for 10 minutes to get
the damn thing to give up the goods doesn't paint a picture of
professionalism. Get a good Waiters Friend, an empty bottle, a pile of
old corks and practice. Better yet, buy some of the wine that is on the
list, invite some friends over and get loaded actually tasting the stuff.

Don't bring my next course before I'm ready

This has so many problems. A) I'm here to enjoy my meal, not feel like I'm
being rushed through the experience, and B) Where do you think you're
going to put the dish ? There is already a plate in front of me, and I'm
using it.

Here's a Tip : No-one takes more than 15 minutes to eat a course. Even
with breaks it is possible to serve a 3 course meal in 45 minutes. (Trust
me, I've worked pre-show diners where we had to). Just get your timing
right.

There is no such thing as a Well-Done Steak.

Get the customer to describe how they want their meat ruined, let them
pick from the words: Rare , Medium-rare , Medium, and Not-pink. You can
always apologise later and get the meat cooked a bit longer.

The couple in the corner want to have sex

Do not take forever to bring them the bill. They do not want to be left
alone any longer. This is turning out to be a hot date, They have had
good food and wine, and if they can get home and get their clothes off
before they lose momentum they will tip you big time.

And Finally:

Bring all entrees at the same time.

Bring all starters at the same time.

Don't piss off the chef

Don't fuck up the order

Don't be late for your shift

Your guide to European Rail Stations

2006-09-15T14:48:00.000-07:00

Tips for the great unwashed

The ability to get around large amounts of the continent by simply jumping
on a train is, astounding. It is also good to know that no matter where
you go, European rail stations are always the same:

Fast Food. Don't panic, your saturated fat-laden diet is safe here. You
won't have to worry about mysterious herring salads anymore. Just keep
looking and you will find any or all of a McDonalds, Starbucks, Pizza Hut
and or Burger King.

Backpackers. They will always be there standing in line for a ticket or
washing their underwear in the water fountains. You get no points for
spotting them. They are in fact a piece by the artist in residence at
the Stockholm Institute of Anthropological studies. If you approach them,
carefully, they will be quite friendly and you can ask them for a guide to
the installation. They will never speak in your language.

Tickets. There will be a line, and the staff will continue hate you, just
get over it. In fact, ticket staff are a classic demonstration of the
difference between 'nice' and 'polite'. Only a seasoned station attendant
can perform their public role with such practiced disdain. How else can
they sell you a ticket and at the same time make perfectly clear that you
are ruining their day by not only asking them for something, but also
getting them to speak English.

Drink the water, It is good for you

Don't drink the coffee, it is made with that water you just drank.

Pee. Somewhere, when you least expect it, you will find yourself near a
corner that smells of rancid urine. I'm still not sure how the managers
of rail stations have not made the connection between making people pay to
use a toilet (or locking them completely) and why their buildings reek of
yesterdays beer.

Dogs, they run a close second to the 'packers. I don't know why it freaks
me out, but there is always someone leading their dog through the station.
I'm thinking is because they like the smell of pee.

Empty first class. I'm also perplexed as to why there is a first class
section of any train. As far as I can tell, the kind of people that can
afford first class are also the kind of people that would want to be as
far as possible from a place full of junk food, backpackers, dogs and
smells of pee. Yet there are all these nice and shiny carriages just
waiting for Madame DuPont to turn up with her three steamer trunks, furs
and personal assistant.

All I can assume is that first class is actually a form of purgatory, a
special hell reserved for self important upstarts who don't tip the valet
and feel it is important to send the room service back twice because it
isn't up to scratch. You want the first class treatment ? Be careful of
what you wish for.

Two tickets for Brussels, please.

Time for a good deed

2006-09-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

[ note : I haven't written anything for at least two months because I've
had a busy summer that has lacked the usual combination of boredom and
bitterness that drives me to write another five hundred words. ]

Travel, on the whole, Bites.

It is not getting any easier. Getting on planes is just more difficult
and, on the whole, People Suck.

This weekend, for example, I decided to try something completely different
and drive to my destination. What I hadn't factored was the inventive
level of hell that is 'Holiday Traffic' and the way it can put the most
even tempered person into a cursing, cat kicking funk that only years of
alcohol abuse can ever hope to temper.

In my case, a sequence of delays left me somewhere near Reno at about
11pm, exhausted and in desperate need of a hotel room. I had foolishly
thought that, being a casino town, this would be a piece of cake. I was
wrong. There was nothing, nada, zip. The whole town was booked out.

After driving past many ( I lost count after 10 ) no vacancy signs. I
started to just walk into places and ask if they knew of anything. They
didn't. This city was so closed that people had stopped caring.

This is where I need to point out just how bad people suck.

I actually stood in line at one hotel while the fool behind the counter
checked people in and then suddenly, AFTER WE WERE STANDING THERE FOR 15
MINUTES, he looked at all of us and said "Sorry we're full, I only had the
a few rooms in the first place".

Somehow, while most of my brain was thinking of inventive ways to tear him
a new one, a tiny rational collection of synapses kicked in and reminded
me that I had a 24 hour 1-800 number to my travel agency. (yes, you can
call me stupid now).

The conversation went like this :

"I'm on the 80, headed west from Reno. Find me the first room in my path"

"Ok, I'll call you back"

Less that 10 minutes later she called back and had found me a room that
was in the next town.

"Call this number and ask for Bob, he is expecting you"

A few short minutes later I fell into the hotel where the night manager
looked at me, looked at the line of people waiting for rooms and without
hesitation said

"Sorry, we're full"

"No," I replied, "I have a reservation"

So while I was feeling full of myself about being clever and organised I
had to be taken down a few notches by talking to another couple who were
in the line. They had been turned away, were even more tired than myself,
and were seriously considering sleeping in their car in the carpark.

But, I think the night manager knew what to do. As he was checking me in
he gave me the two keys for my room and said "All I have for you is a
suite". Sure enough, when I opened the door, I was faced with a palace of
two rooms, two bathrooms, a sofa bed and two room keys.

I didn't have to think for long before I ran out the carpark, found them
just as they were driving around the corner and thrust the spare room key
in their hands.

"Play nice, no snoring, we'll work put details in the morning"

I slept very soundly that night.

Re-inventing dullest blog on the planet

2006-07-23T22:59:00.000-07:00

By a bizzare twist of fate I mis-typed the URL of my blog today and found
myself at what can only be described ad the saddest blog on the planet.
At first I wasn't going to draw your attention to it, but there is
something about a train wreck that just makes you want to call all your
friends over

So here it is :

http://rtfp.blogspot.com/

Now before you bother clicking the link, I may as well point out that the
most interesting blog is reproduced in its entirety here:

"I got to watch the squirrel for a good 15 mins before it got scared off.
All the time it was feeding the birds tried to join in."

Now, this post could have just stayed as a draft forever, but, no someone
actually decided this was something the world needed to know about.

So, your first reaction might be something like 'why did they bother', or
why, since they went public with this, didn't they put their heart and
soul into it and make the damn thing exciting.

Now, I can't really throw too many rocks since I've been silent for the
last month ( It is summer, I blame the heat ). But on the flip side I
could just as easily summarise my life by saying :

"Checked into hotel, Watched CNN for 2 hours, apparently there is a war
going on, had a shower, crashed early."

But that is hardly interesting is it ? Anyone can write, anyone can say
something, you just have to put your mind to it. And this is what I was
really left thinking about this post.

'What a waste of good material'

There is a goldmine of stuff here. You've got the photo, the whole life
at home thing going on. You just have to fill in a few gaps :

--

"Mon July 19 2004

Saw a bird outside the window. This was especially odd because I live on
the 27th floor of a wasteland apartment block that was built in the 60;s
when no-one thought that people would want the mess and bother of things
like flora or fauna. oh, and the tree is plastic.

I thus had to assume that the bird was just another victim of the crack
addicts that seem to live in the stairwells and was going to spend an
indereterminate amount of time trying to get nutrition from the
unresponsive tree until it either dropped dead from its earlier snack or
just fainted from starvation.

I've started to track the crackheads because the elevator stopped working
about 6 months ago ( and the homeless keep using it as a toilet ) and I
need to know when it is safe to descend.

I stared at the bird for a good 15 minutes because I still couldn't find
my feet and I was contunally baffled as to how that tree got there in the
first place. I last saw the tree on the roof around christmas when the
Russians on the 17 floor put it there and had some sort of party.

I don't recall much of the events, something about it being very cold,
something about death by mis adventure, a faulty railing or something, and
the police who were searching the courtyard for days looking for body parts

Suffice to say I woke up about three days later and this tree was taking
up most of my balcony.

I was going to move it but well, it added some colour, and blocked the
view of the land fill across the way.

So, on closer inspection then I realised that it wasn't a bird, but
actually a squirrel and I was right, it was dead. it had probably
overdosed on the crack like the rest of the mice that live in the
cupboards, and keep me awake with their constant talking"

..."

Anyway. You get my point.

Life is only as boring as you want it to be, And remember you may not be
the only one trying to turn nothing into something

http://reambrad.blogspot.com/

Where do you start

2006-06-23T23:35:00.000-07:00

Do you curse yourself by saying that all you ever need to survive is a
Passport, Credit Card and a Laptop.

Do you start with having your laptop die a horrible death one day onto a
three week trip through Europe.

Perhaps you start with heading to the nearest geek store only to discover
that laptops in Paris are configured with funky keyboards that make it
hard to spell even the most simplest of words like 'Merde'.

Or do you start with your journey out of hell? Do you try and describe
what it is like to spend eleven hours in coach in a middle seat on your
way back from Germany.

Do you start with giving up your window seat so that a wife can sit next
to her husband, who is not feeling so well, and may need special
attention. Do you take the time to mention that the old man next to you
was close to death that you just had to believe them.

Do you start with the senior flight attendant, about half way through the
flight making that breathtaking announcement and begins with :

"If there is a medical practitioner on board..."

Do you start with being stuck in Belgium for two days because there were
'issues' with getting as new visa and you had to wait out the time in a
hotel in downtown Brussels.

Do you go on to mention that when it was all fixed, there were no flights
out of town for another two or three days.

Or do you go back even further in time and start with realising that women
in France actually know how to wear perfume.

Do you take the time to point out that they just plain smell nice, instead
of resembling the aftermath of some sort of comical escapade involving a
40 litre display of Chanel #3, a a bull and a lot of broken glass.

Do you start with the rental car, no map of Paris and trying to determine
which is the correct exit for the freeway before you do your third lap of
the Arch De Triomphe.

Do you start with attempting to drive a Small French Car on the authbahn
and the looks you get from the Porsche Drivers when they over take your
sewing machine on wheels at twice your current speed

Do you start by noticing that all caravans on European highways are being
towed by the Dutch

Do you bother to mention that the average toll on a French highway is
about $3 per mile.

Do you just segway in to driving through Champagne country and never
actually seeing a vineyard

Do you go on to mention having one of the best meals in your life in a
simple Brasserie and try to find ways to describe that a 'Trio of Creme
Brulees' is really like.

Do you start with then drinking too much Bordeaux on a Friday night and
spending an unknown number of hours listening to MP3s of bands playing
nothing but covers of other bands songs.

Do you start with trying to sober up the next day in a fairly nice cafe
while the two old men next to you polish off a bottle of Burgundy in less
than 30 minutes.

Or do you just start by saying that the world is a very strange place.

You'll never notice unless you get out and see it.

Been there, Done that

2006-06-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Things I do not need to do before I die :

Go somewhere because it just 'seems like a good idea'.

Buy a cheap novel from an airport newsstand.

Get a table for one in a restaurant.

Order room service.

Fly first class on an international trip.

Sit in with the band.

Drive a rental car in the USA.

Ask for directions.

Go somewhere with just the shirt on my back and a toothbrush.

Eat an airline meal.

Drive a rental car in Europe.

Chat with a member of the local law enforcement.

Order off the menu.

Drink airline coffee.

Catch a train through Europe.

Eat in the smoking section.

Rent a convertable.

Get a free upgrade, for anything.

Go to Las Vegas, stay more than a week.

Lie about my age, profession, or nationality.

Fly standby.

Switch hotel rooms.

Drink whatever comes out of the tap.

Eat in the best restaurant in town.

Fly a red-eye.

Fly to another country with no notice.

Miss a connection.

Use my phone to get internet access.

Spend more than four hours in an airport lounge.

Leave the 'do not disturb' sign on all day.

Hang out with the chef.

Travel on an expense account.

Ride the london tube.

Check my email from the beach.

Sleep overnight in an airport lounge.

Go to Scandanivia in winter.

Sleep in a youth hostel.

Ride the BART.

Get SSSS on a boarding pass.

And,

Book my own travel.

Back in the saddle

2006-05-22T20:18:00.000-07:00

It is a Monday, 10 am, and I'm in the airport. I've just spend an hour on
the a conference call ( taking a break to get through security ) and still
have 3 calls and 40 emails to catch up on before the plane takes off.

It is also the week before the Memorial Day long weekend and everything is
booked solid. Foolishly I tried to get a coast to coast non-stop and
wrangle an upgrade with one of the infinite free vouchers I have that are
due to expire. Of course the gate agents just announced that the flight
is full and there will be no upgrades. I'm lucky I brought my own lunch.

I guess you can say that I'm back at work.

I was beginning to enjoy the break I gave myself. I took a week with no
phone or email, toured the wine country, tried to recall what a normal
life looked like and generally decompressed.

Of course, that didn't stop me noticing that some things, with
the right set of glasses ( e.g. my tired, stressed, bitter and twisted
pair) are interesting, annoying and or bizzare.

My Saturday was spent playing 'spot the tourist'. I was in the local dive
bar where an R&B band was cranking out classics like 'Dock of the Bay' and
'Mustang Sally'.

The locals were easy to locate, dirty jeans, grape skins under the
fingernails and drinking , well, either, domestic beer, margaritas,
tequila shots, or arguing the points of some new bottle of Cabernet
someone found.

The tourists: clean jeans, clean fingernails and drinking , well, either,
domestic beer, margaritas, tequila shots, or arguing the points of some
new bottle of Cabernet some found.

Ok, so maybe not so easy to spot.

It is easier to just wait a few hours, let the alcohol kick in and see what
happens. The locals just get a bit more belligerent or run away then the
tourists get rowdy.

the tourists, not only get rowdy, but, set free from their environment,
reveal wonderful examples of human behavior such as the group of desperate
housewives who were burning a hole in the dancefloor, and making eyes at
the drummer who had the whole shirtless, tattooed, cap on backwards thing
going for him.

I can only assume that this sort of thing happens all the time because the
next day I definitely got the hint that they wanted us to all leave.

It was Sunday, after 9pm, and all the restaurants were closing their
kitchens. So I was stuck at the only place still open and being
entertained by some swarthy latin wannabee playing smooth jazz. It is
almost beyond description and I'm not sure where to start.

His outfit was classic Banana Republic and would be predictably
non-threatinng except that he was enjoying his work beyond a point that
made me comfortable. He was actually humming along to the tunes, and had
this whole head bobbing 'In the groove' thing going for him. It was
really quite scary.

It didn't help that he was sporting a textbook accountant haircut and had
matching black glasses. This was not buddy holly thing , this was like
the High School Dweeb had a secret job as a musician but forgot to change
into the uniform.

To make matters worse he had a wireless receiver and was trolling the room
serenading the diners. I felt like I was trapped in a version of hell
where the only entertainment was Al Jarreau, if he was white, five foot
one and had put on about 20 pounds.

I accidentally made eye contact at one point (big mistake). He looked
back at me and nodded with an unsettling "I'm cool eh?" type smile,
changed key and tried out a solo I'm sure he had been practicing in his
bedroom for the last four weeks.

I guess I probably shouldn't mention he also had drum machine.

It almost made me want to go back to work.

I blame the Dutch

2006-05-15T00:10:00.000-07:00

When asked to describe the Dutch I usually rant about the fact that they
are a bunch of windmill turning, clog wearing, dike stuffing, tulip
eaters... and go downhill from there.

The second thing that crosses my mind is a scene from 'Goldmember':

GOLDMEMBER

Can I paint his yoo-hoo gold now? It's kind of my thing, you know...

DR EVIL crosses the room in his moving chair and comes in close to the
camera. He pauses, working up to the answer.

DR. EVIL

How 'bout no, you crazy Dutch bastard.

Either way, I'm convinced that the Dutch are weird and don't do things in
a conventional manner. This includes the practical things like getting
around.

I was supposed to be in Amsterdam for 1 or 2 meetings. So we had all
planned to come up the night before, have an extra diner meeting that
evening and get back to the regular business the following day.

But at about 4pm on the night before I got a message from the Dutch rep
that the next day's meetings were not in fact in Amsterdam but in a town,
Maassluis, that was, not only 1.5 hours from Amsterdam but 1/2 way between
where I was at present and the meeting that night.

Sucking up my two steps forward, one step back. I got up at the crack of
dawn the next morning, fell out of my overpriced single bed downtown, and
trudged to the rail station.

After standing in line for 10 minutes I found out that the station didn't
take credit cards, none of the vending machines did, and unless you had
cash you were S.O.L.

Handing over the last of my notes, I sat in the train for the first leg
of the journey, got off at the correct station, then tried to find a cab
for the last portion.

Simple, you may think, but no. Not only did the cab driver have no idea
where the address was, but he didn't take credit cards, and neither did
any of the others.

Now you may be thinking that this was just an isolated case but I was
when I mentioned this to someone who lived in Amsterdam, they had this to
say :

"...Been there, done that, have the T-shirt. This is Dutch service and
hospitality at its best. To give you a hint:

While having a nice dinner, the waiters start vacuuming and ask the
guests to lift there feet so that they can vacuum under the table.

My father was visiting, and asked the waiter for bread with his gambas.
The waiter said no and left.

I was going to a meeting outside of The Hague. Once I got to the train
station I called for a taxi. After 30min there taxi still hadn't arrived
and I called back. It was freezing, I might add. After a lot of back and
forth, it turned out that this taxi company did not pick up passengers
in this area and no other company in the area either. So the people
where I had the meeting had to pick me up. "

Oh yeah, and I'm never drinking Heiniken again.

Eating with the Locals

2006-04-30T20:52:00.000-07:00

In my endless search to find a decent hotel room in a decent part of
town, I've made astute use of online restaurant reviews to try and get a
feel for the area.

Everyone has their own opinion and the gauge swings wildly. But you can
always tell, and know to ignore, any review by an American of a European
restaurant.

"...service was terrible, we had to wait 30 minutes for our drinks..."

Well, firstly, In some parts of the world people consider a meal to be a
social event that is to be enjoyed, instead of a personal curse that you
must get over with a quickly as possible. You are meant to take the time
to chat with friends and family and discuss the events of the day. What
you don't want is a waiter hovering over you learning about your personal
life.

Secondly, I often wonder if all the bad service is really just a clever
plan to annoy Americans.

"Our service is slow, but it keeps the Yankees away."

Thinking about this, I thought it was worth making a list of the many
other ways Europeans can make Americans feel out of place :

Drink alcohol at any hour of the day or night.

No, they are not alcoholics, they are just social. Contrary to popular
belief it is not crime to have a beer at lunch, you are allowed to order a
bottle of wine for yourself and, as you are not going to eat until 9pm,
you can have a Martini on the way home from work. But don't confuse this
with an excuse to do endless tequila shots or drink a 5th of Jack, Spring
break is so 'last year'.

Smoke everywhere.

It won't matter where you sit, or what you do or say. You can even try
and ask for a table in the non-smoking section. All you have to do is
wait about five minutes and then two people will turn up, sit right next
to you and start chain smoking. Eventually they actually bother to find
an ashtray. After you leave, they will go back to the bar and wait for
their next mission.

Not make you wait for your table.

Nope, no waiting here. They will take one look at those plaid pants
you're sporting and put you at the rickety table behind the pot plant near
the toilets, the one that is used for the staff meals. Go on, just try
and ask for 'that one by the window, when it is free'. Get back to me
when they stop laughing at you.

Foreign language menus.

If you can hold you liquor and beat a path through the smoke to the table,
the floor staff will stall you by giving you the menu in the local
language. Don't try and bluff them, they know you can't read it, that
camera bag was a dead giveaway. You can ask for the English version, but
the prices will be different.

Speak a foreign language.

You may have faked your way past the menu but they will then ambush you
by sending every bus boy, trainee waiter and the hostess past to ask you
a different question in a different accent. If you're adventurous just say
'no' to everything. You may end up there sitting there for a while and
your fish won't have any sides, but you won't ever see the bill.

Speak French.

This deserves a special mention because it annoys just about everyone.

Staff who actually have a clue about the menu.

In some of these places the same staff have been working here all their
lives. (They have to, Mum owns the place). So don't try and be clever
and ask them if they know how the duck is prepared. Not only will they
tell you, but they will also entertain you with a long and arduous story
about how it was raised and exactly which side of the valley the carrots
came from.

Detailed and incomprehensible wine lists.

Think you know what a Chardonnay is ? think again.

Expensive prices.

All that truffle oil and a a wine list thats puts just about any liquor
store to shame can only be attained through a carefully crafted art of
manipulating exchange rates, fleecing tourists and outrageous percentages.
It really won't help the experience if you convert the price of that steak
into dollars, just ask for another bottle and enjoy the ride.

No substitutions.

You don't want what's on the menu ? Try the place next door.

The only thing you should ever deep fry is bits of potato.

The Calamari is not undercooked. Yes, those are raw onions, and that is what
real Brie looks like.

Call 'fries', 'Frites'.

'Creme Fraiche', 'Moules', 'Au Gratin', they have a polite name for just
about everything, don't even think of asking for 'plain bread'.

'Sandoux' means lard.

It may sound exotic, but should you actually interrogate your server
about the interesting eel dish, don't be surprised when he says :

"It is, er, how you say, pork fat ?'

Not be fat.

Yes, the menu may be a minefield of butter, cream, starches, carbs and
Sandoux, and every table may be polishing of bottles of Bordeaux, but the
locals have this disgusting tendency to look mostly fit and healthy.
That's when happens when you are forced to walk to the railway station
twice a day and use the stairs. Bastards aren't they ?

Use the metric system.

Do you know how much 70cc is ?

Serve an entree the way it was meant to be served.

It is a 'Starter'. Your actual meal won't be here for another hour. It
is thus meant to be a small simple thing that doesn't require too much of
your attention so you can still talk, line your stomach against the next
bottle of red wine, and not die of hunger.

Cheese.

It's for desert, can you deal with that ?

Hide the bathroom.

Did you make it through the meal ? Did you just have too much wine ?
Well you had better be prepared ask. The bathroom is usually upstairs
behind an unmarked door and it is a 'unisex toilet'. Take note of those
two words. Unisex means that people aren't afraid to see a bloke whip out
the tackle and water a wall, and you don't have separate bathrooms at
home, so why should it be any different here ? Also, they aren't afraid
to call it a toilet.

Hide the restaurant.

So, you think you can handle everything they can throw at you ? Do you
honestly think you can pass yourself off as a local ? Well you stil have
to find the place. Bad directions from the concierge and lack of street
signs are only part of it. These places are hidden down alleys, above hat
shops or behind an unmarked door below street level. You won't find any
neon signs saying 'Drink Bud' here.

If you really want to eat, here's what you do.

Walk down the street until you find the first menu that looks interesting.
Present yourself to the waiter and everyone else inside and, in your
loudest and clearest english say the following :

"Your Restaurant looks wonderful. I want the finest your chef has to
offer and I have lots of money"

You'll be just fine.

I'm still friends with the band

2006-04-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

Another country, another town, another restaurant,
and another basement with a band.

The difference is that this is a more up market place. The waiter was
telling me about it. It was in the old bank vault and still had all the
safe deposit boxes around the walls. The management decided to turn it
into a martini and cigar type venue, with the occasional live band,
thinking that the walls were thick enough to keep the sound under control.

I ended up down there because it was still early and I knew I could get a
comfortable chair, a coffee and relax for a few hours after dinner. I had
to agree with the waiter. This wasn't the going to attract the starving
students and they wouldn't have got past the bouncer anyway.

So as I settled in, and the band set up, I noted the arrival of the usual
suspects, namely family and friends. Well, more family really. The
people drifting in seemed to well dressed and over fifty. By the way the
place filled up I had to assume that the parents and extended family of
every band member was here.

You know it is a sign of your success when your parents give up telling
you and your dead beat friends to stop making that racket in the garage
and actually come out to watch you play. That or it is just resignation
that since you've survived to this age, then this must be more than
passing fad and probably even pays the rent. ( Although they still
secretly wish you'd dump that bass player boyfriend and put on some makeup
for once )

Also, the gig was nicely timed to be late enough for the folks to have
dinner, catch the opera and then go watch the kids play.

So they are out for the night and having fun. They get to drink in front
of the kids and not give a damn because it isn't their party, for once
they are the ones doing the crashing. They have cred because they know
the headline act, and they they get to tell the bouncer that 'they're
friends of the band'.

I'm willing to bet they will be respectfully quiet during the set but up
and dancing by the end of the night.

Some time later, when dad had finally made his way in after, presumably,
driving around for an hour looking for a safe place to park, the band
stopped tuning up, put down most of their drinks, and played music that
didn't actually suck.

They played a lot of old favorites from the R&B catalog and derivations
therein, including a deceptive funk version of 'all blues', which actually
works if you can keep it on the one, and you know what I'm talking about.
I saw the few strangers who didn't, and were expecting a sat night DJ and
house music, finish their drinks and leave.

Still, the band kept playing, there was an audience who cared, and fun was
had by all. Highlight of the night was when the singer thanked her
friends for showing up before one of the songs.

You just can't do better than someone in a breathy French voice saying
something from the heart and then banging out a version of 'Lady Marmalade'.

You know you're in another country when that happens.

Vive la difference

Sorry, we're closed

2006-04-20T06:36:00.000-07:00

I'm in Copenhagen and I have just finished my book.

I hadn't expected to get through it so quickly, as I had cleverly
purchased a very dense 700 page novel that I had assumed would last me a
bit more than a week. But I had also assumed that Copenhagen would
actually be open on a Sunday and there would be lots of interesting things
to see and do. I had also assumed that my hotel was somewhere useful.

I made a lot of wrong assumptions

Getting into Denmark was fairly simple, once you got past the mad rumpus
that was a lot of Belgians and Danes hustling to get on the plane (orderly
queue is not in their vocabulary it seems) and I even managed to find a
train that went in the right direction and dumped me at the central
station

What wasn't so simple was that today was Sunday, on the easter weekend,
and everything was shut. Including Tourist Information.

So, unable to wrangle something as simple as a map, or even (gasp) ask
directions, I had to suck it up and jump in a taxi.

"Do you know where the hotel is ?"

"Yes."

"Is it far ?"

"Not far."

"Do you take credit cards ?"

"Yes."

As the taxi pulled out I suddenly remembered the important fourth question

"Is it close enough to walk ?"

"Probably,yes."

Damn

A very short cab ride later we pulled up at the hotel and I remembered the
other important question to ask all taxi drivers.

"Where is downtown ?"

"Back across the river where we came from ?"

"And this hotel is the closest ?"

"Mostly."

Not knowing what else I could add to the conversation I checked into the
hotel.

The room was, of course, another example of Danish design from hell that
would put an Ikea catalog to shame, so I got out of there as quickly as
possible. (Oddly enough, I've been to Sweden and all the offices looked
like hospital rooms from the 70s. Any clever design skills Ikea might
have, they are keeping for export)

So, armed with a map confirming that I needed to go back to the station,
and went for a brief walk. And brief it was.

You see, as I may have mentioned earlier, everything was closed. So while
wandering the streets looking at locked buildings may have its
architectural merits, it is not the black hole of time I was looking for.
Instead I ferreted out the cafe with the most comfortable couch, ordered a
coffee in the best Danglish I could muster and promptly finished my book.

Well, there were brief interludes where I had the adventure of navigating
a menu that seemed to consist of a lot of words that looked like 'bork'
(although 'burger' is spelled the same in every language it seems)

But even that could not detain me from getting to the last page of my less
than worthy tome sometime around sunset and leaving me in limbo for the
rest of the evening. Even if I could find a bookstore, it was now past
closing time and, as I may have mentioned earlier, it was easter Sunday so
closing time was, oh, yesterday.

Now the thought of a lazy Sunday afternoon in front of the television
loses its appeal when you add in the hotel room component and I did humour
the idea of going and checking my email for a brief second before my
sanity kicked back in and made me consider other alternatives. I thought
about measuring how long it would take to do a lap of the city and even
considered flagging down one of the boats in the canal and bribing the
owner for a tour of the islands. But I still had to fill in parts of
tomorrow so I didn't want to blow all my options on the first day

Instead I just found another cafe and spent some time watching the world
go by and taking notes about how the universe operates.

I'll give you three guesses where I wrote this.

Could you hurry up and leave

2006-04-16T13:15:00.000-07:00

I almost got stuck in Dusseldorf.

The problem was that in theory I could go anywhere and I had a few days
to myself. However, any whimsical fantasies I had about spending a few
days in the south of France, or getting lost in the Alps, were rapidly
being shattered by the reality that I hadn't made any bookings, it was
already 5pm and the start of the Easter long weekend.

So I was under the gun. The last train to either Brussels or Amsterdam
was leaving in less than an hour and I couldn't commit to anything.

Booking travel at the last minute is, frankly, a pain the arse. All those
web sites for last minute travel are designed to (hopefully) optimise the
cheapest flight to the cheapest hotel. Unfortunately, they are usually
only bound to one or the other or worse, to some fly by night package
operator who wants to send you to some forsaken town, that looks nothing
like the photos in the brochure, where their brother owns the local
taverna.

So what do you do if can only work one of these at a time or have a
particular destination in mind. Do you book your hotel first, then find
transport, or do you do it the other way around ?

You obviously don't want to get to your city to find that it there is no
room at the inn. Well, I don't anyway. But you also don't want to lose
the flight booking it took you thirty minutes to track down and risk
paying last minute rates just to get into dodge.

Location is also important. Just because you can get a hotel room, there
is no guarantee it is actually some where useful.

Be wary of anything that is 'close to the airport'. It may be convenient
for your flight but there will be nothing for miles, and the only 'good'
restaurants are in the local mall with the rest of the homeless. (I have
a first account of someone who was pointed to the local soup kitchen). If
you are lucky the airport will be close to the city like Alexandria and
Washington-Reagan or London city airport. But you still have to find the
room.

If you go down the path of getting transport you have to process the
matrix of airline flight offering, multiple airports per city, and then
factor in peripherals like 'do you need a rental car?', 'can you get a
train from the airport?' or will you have to resort to the local mule and
hitchhiking?

Then you have the commitment factor. If you are lucky to find a flight to
the right location, there is the fundamental problem that airlines are
bastards and can count in five dimensions. Cancellation fees, change
fees, and the fact that the price changes hourly make 'shopping around'
something from mythology. (hint: travel agents have magical powers of
cancellation that us mere mortals can only dream of)

So what should you do ?

Well here's a tip:

Hotels let you cancel at the last minute. So go crazy, book rooms
everywhere. Hell, order some room service, since you'll be getting in
late, and while you're at it, get them to put a bottle of champagne on ice
and turn down the bed. To them this is all just on paper. If you show
they make money, if you don't they can probably re-sell the room.

Then, try and wrangle some transport.

I went to Brussels. They had hotels.

Too many timezones

2006-04-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

Not enough days.

San Francisco, London, Stockholm.

The problem with not understanding foreign languages is that you can't
easedrop on a conversation, it just never registers with the consciousness
in the right way. I realised this in the restaurant last night when I
suddenly heard someone in the crowd speaking English and noticed that
everything else was just line noise.

Still, while I started to work on a mental thesis about why lack of
sensory input is probably quite isolating and may explain why travelers
sometimes behave the way they do (like work on a mental thesis about their
lifestyle), I was at least out of the hotel. I had finally recovered from
jetlag limbo and I was, at least, taking in the sights.

I was even motivated enough to take photos, but my new digital camera was
still stuck in shipping and never made it to me before I got on the plane.

I should have taken this as a sign, never fly an airline in receivership.

After spending about 2 hours on the phone with the travel agent trying to
assemble my magical mystery tour of Europe into some sort of coherency. I
got off to a bad start by actually attempting to fly. Now I'm
not going to bitch and whine about the fact that my business class seat was a
'middle bulkhead' (if you know what this means, you know why you'd hate
it) as it is hard to argue with a free upgrade. But the seat wasn't the
problem.

It was just one of those flights.

It started with one of the staff demanding that I hand over my pillow and
shoes as they were blocking the aisle, veered into her not wanting to
close the overhead bin (that she opened), to stash said pillow, because it
was too heavy to close, rapidly careened downhill as, for the Nth time,
the only movie worth watching had random lines of static and audio
dropouts, blew past dehydration caused by the staff ignoring any call
button from anyone, ran over the the guy next to me who insisted on
reading all night with both lights on and finished with a bang when they
ran out of fast track immigration cards for Heathrow ( and I you know what
that means, you will know why you want one ).

Yeah, poor me, I hear you cry, but if you were actually paying for
International business Class Service, you'd be a tad pissed off as well.

Suffice to say the whole visceral experience just sent me over the
edge and messed with my ability to deal with my jetlag. I got about 3
hours sleep that night and the next twenty four hours were a blur. What I
do recall was finding myself in the railway station with more than nine
hours to kill before it was safe to sleep, a flu like pain in my muscles
and a relentless desire to just lie down and have a nap.

I seriously thought about finding a park bench under a tree somewhere but
that really would have made me just a homeless guy with a laptop.

So instead I just rode it out and somehow ended up at another airport with
the most uncomfortable lounge chairs ever, squeezed myself into a plane
with absolutely no leg room and sometime later found myself in a taxi with
no idea where I was going, except that there was a hotel and a bed at the
end of the ride.

I nearly got rumbled at Swedish Immigration where I was so incoherent I
couldn't clearly express the address of my hotel and had to fumble for
my PDA and try to sound intelligent.

It was only by the end of the next day that I started to resemble myself
again and finally had a couple of hours to relax in the lobby with the
local team. Of course, this meant that we also made phone calls and had
to check email.

So a few hours became three hours and then my PDA decided to have time
zone synchronisation issues and shifted all my appointments by an unknown
number of hours. As this included critical things like flight times, I
then had to be a geek and not only correct all the errors but also
diagnose the problem and ensure that it never happened again.

Sometime after dark I finally made it to the restaurant.

I would have gotten out of there earlier but, hey, the last thing you want
to do is miss a flight.

It's not the destination...

2006-04-06T21:11:00.000-07:00

It's the journey.

I may have, on occasion, mentioned that I don't always have a clear idea of
what I am doing or where I am going. While this is par for the course, and
the odd change to the schedule is to be expected, This week was the gold
medal of diversions.

If you were to sum up all the the standard problems I bitch about, twist
them into some sort of artistic representation of what this whole road
warrior thing looks like and, say, to turn it into a movie, you
would come up with something close to what I experienced.

See it wasn't just one bad experience. That sort of plot device is too
short and kills the character in the first act. Instead this was just a
slow decline of one bad vignette after another where, if I was writing
this, the hero would either defeat the gorgons for the third and final

In the background we can see that all the flights are delayed and he is
waiting standby for anything that will make his connection.

Cut to : The usual cramped seat in the back of coach and the comical farce
that is people trying to fit supersized bags in undersized overheads.

Cut to : Arriving at the far end of a terminal in Chicago, the
connecting flight is leaving from the far end of another terminal. Begin
the Long Walk.

Cut to : The toilets. Focus on the intermittent fluorescent light
overhead. Pan down to the Old Guy at the sink. He has had one of those
operations that leave him with a hole at the base of his neck. He is
hacking badly and doing his best to clear the hole and his throat.

Cut to : Waiting at the gate, all the flights are delayed again.

Cut to : Drinks service on the next plane. He has free drink vouchers.
Just as the Flight Attendants get to him, the plane hits turbulence and
they seat the staff for the duration of the flight.

Cut to : The Hero getting out of the plane after midnight and walking down the
long terminal. He is at the last gate. The terminal is a ghost town.

Cut to : Him trying to get past other passengers to old and deaf to get
out of the way.

Cut to : Those same passengers overtaking him later in a golf cart.

Cut to : Waiting outside for the rental car shuttle. Standing right next
to him is a Businessmen, smoking a cigar. Our hero is downwind from the
smoke. Pull back to reveal that the area is completely empty. There is
no-one else around.

Cut to : Arriving at the rental lot, It is windy and cold. His car is
a convertible mustang.

Cut to : The clock in the car says 1am. He is on a deserted country
road. The driving directions seem meaningless.

Cut to : The hotel. He is looking down a very long corridor. The room he
is given is at the far end of the building.

Cut to : The next morning, there is no breakfast on the hotel.

Cut to : He is back in the car, A coffee shop can be seen in the
distance. But the road is blocked by sequential 'no left turn signs'. No
matter how much he turns, the cafe is getting no closer.

Cut To : The cafe parking lot, as seen from inside The Mustang. Focus
on the BMW parked diagonally. It is taking the only 2 parking spots left

Cut to : The dashboard of the mustang. A coffee is in the cup holder. The
clock shows that he is late, He is speeding.

Cut to : The lobby of an office. He meets The Customer.

CUSTOMER
You're 8 hours early, we aren't doing anything until 6pm.

Cut to : Back in the hotel room, the hero is reading email :

MSP may catch fire again.

Need you back there next week for a few days

Need to delay trip to UK by 1 or 2 weeks

Cut to : A chain restaurant in a mall, around it is nothing but carpark
and cars. It is late evening, his work is done for the day. Our hero
parks in an empty spot miles from anything. It is still cold and windy.
He gets out of the convertible. The restaurant is called the 'Bahama
Breeze'.

Cut to : The Hero, he is sitting at the bar, reading the menu. He speaks
to the barman.

HERO
What do people do here ?

BARMAN
Drink

Fade out.

Tags travel,philly,hotel,restaurant,bar

Viral Marketing

2006-04-04T19:06:00.000-07:00

Apparently, more than one person reads this blog.

So I want to try an experiment in Viral Marketing. The process is fairly
simple. It is like a chain letter, but without the guilt or any hope of
making large amounts of money.

I want you to find 3 other people and tell them about the blog. If they
like it, get them to tell 3 other people. If you have a really short
attention span you could just cut and paste the following:


Dear <fellow-surfer-of-the-net>,

I found this blog from some
<fool|guy|dot-com-victim|frequent-flyer> who seems to spend a
lot of time on the road and finds the <odd|interesting|bizzare|humorous>
side of what it takes to bounce around the country.

http://rftp.blogspot.com/

I thought you might find it
<interesting|useful-research|worth-plagarising|good-for-blackmail>.  If
you like it feel free to spam your friends and get them to read it as
well.

Share and enjoy.

Actually come to think about it, Tell as many people as possible, I'm
curious to see how far this can spread.

Can someone wake the man in the corner ?

2006-04-02T16:42:00.000-07:00

Detroit, or Ferndale, or Troy, or wherever the hell this place is.

All I know is we are doing about 90 miles per hour on the freeway in the
general direction of somewhere civilized while I try and make a hotel
reservation over the phone. However, as we have no real idea where we are
at present I'm playing a geographically oriented version of '20 Questions'
with the reservation agent :

"We have a hotel in Troy"

"How far is that from here ?"

"Where are you ?"

"Um, Plymouth. No. Northville. I think. We just passed the 96."

"Ok, let me look"

"Oh. No. We're actually on the 96. I think we passed the 275. We're
heading east..."

And on it went.

We were only doing this because all the hotels in Ann Arbor were full.
There was something interesting going on in town, but they wern't going
to tell us what it was and we weren't allowed to sleep there. So we had to
try our luck in the suburbs of Detroit.

Eventually we just cut our losses, got some hand waving directions from
the agent and, an indeterminate time later, checked into a motel in the
middle of nowhere and went to get something to eat.

That's when we found The Party.

Walking into the first most decent place we could find we decided that we
would just settle down for one drink and a nice meal. We were sitting in
what was, at the time, the quiet end of the bar area debating what to
eat when we noticed that it was getting increasingly more crowded. Almost
unpleasantly so. After we had moved our table about three feet and the
waitress had tried to squeeze her way past for the fourth time, we finally
bailed her up and asked what was going on.

Oh, yeah, sorry about that. You see tonight is kind of special"

"How so ?" I asked.

"Well, one of the regulars here died the other day.

"He died ?"

"Yes. He was a really nice guy. He used to come in all the time and would
always sit here at the end of the bar. He was often in my section.

"Really ?"

"He was like only 40 or something, it was really sudden. So all his
friends are here to, well, say good bye."

Now I was honestly curious, I had to ask.

"So, how did he die ?"

"Oh," She said. "Liver failure."

WTF ?

On the inside I know we were both screaming to say something like "What,
liver failure? Are you out of your minds ? Are you having any guilt
issues right now ?". But on the outside, we did our best to keep our
composure.

My sales guy nearly sprayed his drink all over the table and tried not to
laugh. I tried keep a straight face and change the subject as
quickly as possible. I think we ordered more water for the table just to
make her go away.

As I watched them order another round of tequilas, I wanted to be
incredibly cynical and ask something like if any of these guys were in a
gun club. I wanted to know if when someone accidentally killed themselves
did they celebrate by getting together and shooting each other
in the foot.

"This might have killed Frank, but look, I can still walk."

But I figured that might get me thrown out. Instead, we ate as quickly as
possible and got out of there before either of us said something
embarrassing or offensive.

I guess you just have to get back in the saddle.

Tags travel,detroit,hotel,restaurant

No, I said 'Punt'.

2006-03-27T13:58:00.000-08:00

Todays ramble comes from Dr Language Person, who is spending the weekend
in Cambridge:

The word 'Punt' ( apart from just sounding rude ) has many different and interesting meanings.

The most common one is the football term, to punt the ball. I'm not sure how this is considered different from just kicking the ball, as one can punt in all sorts of situations, but I believe it generally means that you hand ( well, boot, actually ) said leather object to the other team, who are hopefully a long way away.

This then makes more sense of the next meaning , 'to punt', that is often used in the business world, where one would hand off something to another person. ( "The project was so screwed that jack punted it over to operations" )

Now, where I come from - a good British colony, punt has another meaning and it is a gambling term. 'To have a punt' means to place a bet on something. It can also mean to just 'take a chance', and is just yet another word that can be used to add colour to a conversation, "I'm punting that she will call back".

If you end up at a place where there are a lot of people all gambling, like at a racetrack, you can also use the collective plural term the gambling community and refer to them as 'the punters' , or just a bunch of fools.

This close association between foolishness and taking a chance is no coincidence and the word 'punter' can often be used to describe anyone stupid or desperate enough for anything. ( "Did the alligator wrestling night attract any punters ?" )

Now lastly, the word 'punt' can also be used to describe a boat, or more specifically a water borne form of transport. 'Punting along' usually means to move so slowly that the boat leaves no wake and that there is no general plan in the direction or timing of the journey. So one can rightly assume that to 'go for a bit of a punt (on the river)' is just another term for a pointless meandering waste
of time. It is also fairly easy to follow the evolutionary path of the terms
'punting along', 'punting about', 'Farting about' 'Piss Farting about' and
'screwing around'

Curiously enough, in the college town of Cambridge, punting on the river Cam has become so popular that the wooden, flat bottomed boats are themselves called 'Punts'. The fact that this gives a fairly formal association between one of the worlds great universities and a bunch of people screwing around wasting time is something best left unexplored. But I'm sure some scholars out there who are dying to tell me that the boats were called punts first and that the term 'punting' was invented because no-one wanted to admit that they were just 'farting around in the punts' ( actually, I'm punting on it )

It is more interesting to conclude that the many variations of the word mean that you can assemble some truly bizzare sentences indeed, such as this one :

"I'm punting that it will stay sunny when the race is on so we can grab a punt and have a punt with the punters, unless the weather changes and they punt the event to next week"

Fresh Brains

2006-03-22T22:59:00.000-08:00

It is 6am, I'm on a plane (again) and I feel like a zombie. Forever
banished to stagger the earth's airport terminals in search of a gate and
intelligent conversation.

There is a excellent scene in "Sean of the Dead" where he is sitting on
the bus hungover and half awake and on his way to his dead end job. The
funny thing is that he doesn't notice he is surrounded by zombies. They
all just look as tired and bored as he is.

So that's how I feel.

A friend called me and asked me how I was doing. All I could respond with
was

"I've spent two weeks on the road living in strange hotels, eating alone
and having business meetings with people I will never see again."

"If I don't have a real conversation soon I'm going to kill someone. What
I need, my friend, is fresh brains..."

Not only am I a mental train wreck, but physically I'm not much better. I
picked up a cold on the flight back from London. So for the two days I
actually had at home I spent most of then limping and sniffling and
moaning around the house searching for more kleenex. My head felt about
two sizes too small and the last thing I wanted to do was get on another
plane and fly back across the country.

Compound that with the jet lag from London and all the cold wanted to
make me do was sleep, so my internal clock was totally out of whack.

Thus clogged, tired, mentally under-fed, and as usual, cranky, I had to
drag my arse out of bed at 5am this morning to spend the day flying to a
mysterious tropical island. To add insult to injury, there was no hot
water at home so I had to debate the benefits of a cold shower whilst
nursing a cold or spending fourteen hours on aircraft with the rest of
the great unwashed.

Somehow I made it to the airport and continued the zombie shuffle: Wait in
line for check in, kick bag forward, wait in line for coffee, kick bag
forward, wait in line for security, kick bag forward, wait in line for
xray, dump bag on conveyor, wait in line for bagels, kick bag forward,
wait in line at the gate, kick bag forward.

When I finally did get on the plane it was totally empty, there were
about ten of us in there. It just added to the whole 'last humans
alive' thing I was experiencing.

As my plane lands I find out that not only do I have change terminals in
Denver but there are no staff around so we have to hold at the gate for
20 minutes. This means that I have to do the unthinkable and run for my
next flight, which, unfortunately, I reach, gasping and wheezing, in
enough time to have no overhead space. As icing in the cake ( literally )
we are 'this close' to take off before we have to turn around to hold on a
de-icing pad.

Of course, none of this factors in the added detail that my last leg is on
a different airline, so I still have to go through a second check in in
Miami. This is something you really never want to do.

So, after landing late, we do the shuffle again: check in, security, gate,
lather, rinse, repeat. Except as an additional bonus I got 'SSSS' on an
interim boarding pass and told.

"You'll have to go to the gate for a seat assignment."

Suddenly my two hour layover became negative 10 mins and I was going to be
bounced because the plane was too full. I also ran into some colleagues
who almost missed the flight because they didn't realise they needed
passports. So we all just stood around looking stupid waiting for someone
to tell us where to go. Eventually they let us on the plane where we sat
for some indeterminate amount of time without actually going anywhere. I
was sure the handlers were debating which heavy bags they could 'just
leave behind'.

I knew things were really bad when the pilot left the cockpit, looked at
me, and the chaos around us, and said "What a fiasco."

Not having had time to stop and eat. All I had for a response was to groan
un-intelligibly and say "brains, we need brains."

Sometime late in the evening I got to the hotel, having never seen
daylight.

I'm hoping for the day that someone perfects teleportation. Ill gladly
pay for any technology that can get me there in an instant, sober me up
and remove a few kilos in the process.

Travel smarter.

Tags travel,bahamas,hotel,airline,restaurant,bar

"I'm with the band"

2006-03-12T13:57:00.000-08:00

It is sometime after 11pm. After much research and investigation I have
finally been able to locate the mandatory Bar, cafe, restaurant, Internet
aware, book exchange, and Laundromat that every university town requires.
I was here under the pretext of looking for a comfortable couch and a
decent espresso, but it was probably just my desire to get bandwidth that
kept me here.

Fortunately the sound of deep thumping from somewhere below me pulled me
out of my self absorbed obsession with email and made me go for a wander
into the basement.

What I found was surprising not only because there was an entire
subterranean level to this place that I hadn't discovered, but it also
explained why people kept disappearing downstairs. I thought that they
were just going to the toilet, but my subconscious head count wasn't
adding up. Luckily I was right :

There was a band playing in the basement.

And this really was a basement. A standard household basement that could
barely hold 20 people and was thus causing a certain amount of discomfort
for the 30 or so people who were in there.

Not being one to shy away from adventure I paid my dues at the bar ( yes
there was a bar down there ), decided against squeezing myself between two
broken chairs and a patch of carpet and instead stood in the corner with
my head at an uncomfortable angle so I could see what was actually going
on.

Well, yes there was a band, but this wasn't exactly a stadium gig we were
dealing with here. It was definitely the ad-hoc hand built set up that we
have all grown to know and respect from our struggling student days. The
guys had a second hand missing desk, some borrowed music stands, the
keyboard player also had to do the mix and they had one acoustic pickup to
share between them.

"We need to take a break now while Darren rebuilds his guitar"

I'm also sure that one of the two speakers wasn't working, but no one
cared. They were all friends anyway, this was just a chance to play some
music without the neighbours sending around the constabulary to 'turn
that music down!' at one minute before midnight.

After the second set, the writer of the music then settled in to talk, in
an apologetic way about his home produced EP and how it had taken him a
year to produce, he still felt that it needed some changes, but, '...If
you don't mind the few mistakes, you may want to listen to it more than
once'

Inside my head I found the daemons screaming the harsh reality to this
poor fellow : 'Your music is just fine, the only reason it you don't like
it is because you, like every other consumptive artist out there, are a
chronic perfectionist and can't leave well enough alone !!'

If he's just laid down the tracks, done a rough mix and then handed it off
to some friends to clean it up, he could have had the whole thing done in
less than a day.

Thats the problem with all these 'desktop publishing tools' they give you
too much time and not enough feedback. If he'd been paying an hourly rate
for the studio and had a Sound engineer shaking his head and reaching for
the Jack Daniels every time he said 'Can I just do that bit again' he
would have nailed it by the second take.

Never publish your own stuff. Everyone needs an editor, even me.

As I settled back and pondered this, I watched them play with their
no-frills setup and noticed how the guitarist kept tripping over his cord
that was obviously too short. It made me wonder at what point in your in
your success path do you finally go to your agent and say

"I'm not doing this again without a wireless amp."

It also made me wonder, that in this day and age when people are bent out
of shape about the health aspects of wireless equipment, why has this
never been a problem for the rock and roll industry.

And why, and this is food for thought, is it that, of all the wireless
equipment that exists in the world, mobile phones never interfere with
musical instruments ?

Then again, perhaps here are some things that aren't worth worrying about.

Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,music

Where am I going, and who am I meeting ?

2006-03-09T13:55:00.000-08:00

Sunny London, England, United Kingdom, Great Britain, or whatever the
name of this crazy island is.

Either way, this is where I'm to make my home for the next week or so.
For some reason all my friends are jealous of the exercise but I keep
trying to explain to them that I'm not actually whooping it up in the posh
part of Kensington, I'm not spending my time at the Tate Gallery, nor am I
rubbing shoulders movie stars or billionaires.

Instead I'm stuck in a town on the edge of the city that bears the scars
of the soulless town planning of the 1960's and unless I want to spend the
evening in the local bowling alley, or hang out in the pub, there is sod
all else here to do. A friend of mine pinged me, and when I told them I
was at dinner the response was,

"How's the food ?"

There was really only one possible reply :

"English"

Pub Grub: You can have anything you like as long as it comes with mash and
a beer. Breakfast of Champions. And don't get me started about the
coffee. Frankly when it comes to the fine art of a well balanced
combination of freshly ground beans and just the right amount of water,
the English make a very good cup of Tea.

Still, I have noticed that I tend to write better when I'm all bitter and
twisted, my sarcasm has more room to maneuver. So I'm certainly getting
creative value out of the exercise. I have no hesitation in saying that
I'm in the kind of place that you only see in movies, where someone gets
murdered in the first reel and the rest of the cast are working class
dropouts living in housing developments.

My bitchiness is also because I've really had no idea what I was doing on
a day to day basis and have had to play it by ear. I found I kept asking
the local sales team if "...I'll be close to London, so I can find a hotel
that doesn't smell and get rid of this expensive rental car."

Not only was I adverse to being stuck in another Village of the Damned,
but I was also trying to get myself over to Italy for the weekend or
anywhere else that would get me the hell out of dodge. I had even heard
of a 3 hour meeting in New York on Friday that I was supposed to attend.
I had not only considered going back across the pond for the weekend, but
had even booked the flights before my calendar was magically filled.

I got the phone call about an hour after speaking to my travel agent and
suddenly I was supposed to be in London on both Friday afternoon and
early Monday morning. This blew my trip to New York out of the water and
also screwed my plans for Italy, all the flights on Saturday were booked.

Meanwhile my friends were asking me when I was going to be back on town
so we could go out and, you know, have a social life. Well, my kind of
lifestyle not only doesn't offer that sort of luxury, but I also found
out that my company wanted to thank me for all the hard work by flying me
to the Bahamas for 2 days. Next Week. This was just what I needed,

"Thank you for all the hard work and travel, why don't you jump on a plane,
again, and fly on a Sunday, again, for 2 more days away from home"

They even said I could bring a guest, where was I going to find one at
such short notice. Thanks guys.

Still I was finally able to get rid of the car, ( Although, doing 70 miles
per hour on the motorway, on the wrong side of the road, in the rain and
fog, with a stick shift, is an interesting experience ). I also found a
really nice hotel in London by the river. It was actually a yacht, with
large rooms, a large bed, internet access and nothing outside my window
but the water and a few ducks. I even get to stay here for 5 days.

So, somewhat grounded, I'm now stuck on a train, with no leg room, nowhere
to comfortably put my laptop, my left leg going numb and a strange pain
developing my right elbow. I'll be here for 2-3 hours while I head to
the south-west of this island for, presumably, a 1 hour meeting. I will
then turn around and head back again.

C'est La Vie. I did sign on for this mission.

It looks like next month I'll be going to japan as well.

Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,train airline

Virtual Postcards

2006-03-06T07:18:00.000-08:00

Cambridge, UK. Home of Isaac newton and scores of other great thinkers.
This it the one place where one would, presumably, expect to find every
corner and alcove jam packed with bookish types madly scratching away at
their ideas.

Well, if they are doing this, they are doing it all in private.

I'm in a coffee shop for the afternoon, taking some personal time and
writing all this down, but I'm the only one here with a laptop. I'm
actually getting strange looks from people. It seems that I'm supposed to
be doing this back in my room, or in a cloister somewhere.

Which is, I realise, how the place was designed. I took some time this
morning to wander the gardens at the back of one of the colleges and they
are exceptionally peaceful and quiet. I just sat there, and relaxed, it
was very Zen. This is just the sort of place where someone could settle
down with a small note pad and solve one of the worlds great problems.

So I guess when people come out, they do it to be social, to participate,
not sit in a corner, like I am, and just spectate.

However, aside from the few times I've forcibly shipwrecked myself on a
tropical island where there is no mobile phone reception, I'm very much in
real time contact with the rest of the world. So I end up having this
strange virtual experience where I'm in many places at once.

So currently, although I'm sitting here periodically writing this down
and reading a book, I'm also managing parallel conversations with my
friends all over the world, all in different time zones.

The conversations always start out the same :

> What are you up to ?

< Well, I'm in the UK actually, Cambridge, Cafe

> Cool, what are you eating ?

And thus we enter into the world of the virtual experience. Years ago you
would just send someone a postcard with a photo of some breathtaking vista
and the usual 'wish you were here.' on the back. Now, aside from the fact
that it is less of a request and more of a way of showing off, ( we all
the know the card really says 'I'm here, and you're not!' ) nothing has
really changed. We're still writing and sending the postcards, but we're
doing them in realtime.

At one point the waitress saw the book I was reading and asked me,

"What's happening ?"

"Well," I replied "Our Young protagonist has just been declared king. But
You may also want to know that one of my friends is about to fly to a
funeral, another is having trouble deciding between the chicken or the
fish. The water is still warm in Sydney, but my friends email server is
broken. And I'm expected to be in Boston in two weeks"

So we are all here living life through our mobile devices. I suppose it
is just a matter of time before we have we can all send real-time video
to whomever we want. I can see it being the start of a whole new industry:

Travel Porn, Be There Now !. See live backpackers as they make their way
through Europe. Choose your destination, more than 50 cities online right
now! Laugh as you watch them order Tapas in broken spanglish ( "you
ordered the tripe and bulls testicles, Senior, no ?" ). Upgrade to the
'Five Star Experience' and see extreme closeups of your Mai Tais and personal
massage.

However, I digress.

Somewhere this afternoon there are to be boat races. The Lent Bumps.
Apparently the river is somewhat narrow and interesting things happen. So
I think I shall don a blazer and join the punters having a punt on the
punters.

After all, we are all just going to see who crashes.

P=mv

International Man of Mystery

2006-02-26T16:59:00.000-08:00

It is ten pm and I'm in a bar, again.

Now I've been getting comments about the amount of time I spend on bars,
but when you consider that the alternative is to hide in your hotel room
watching CNN, getting out and being social is a much better option. Also,
if you look at the frequency of these posts, you'll realise that it isn't
really that often.

However, I digress. I was stuck in downtown Milwaukee and rapidly
discovering that it isn't the most happening place in the middle of
winter. Fortunately, just around the corner from the hotel was a watering
hole that purported to be the headquarters of the Press Club. Now I've
worked in newspapers for a few years and know that journalists have the
best stories, So I figured I had nothing to lose by hanging around for a
while.

I was wrong.

Instead of walking into a plush smoky den with old school wood furniture
and a Chesterfield in the corner, I found myself somewhere that was
decorated like a Mexican cantina, it was Karaoke Night, and they had
declared Open Season on classic R&B numbers.

While a pair of twenty-somethings gracelessly murdered a Wilson Pickett
number, I asked the waitress if there was 'somewhere quieter'. She told
me to head to the back and turn right.

Two turns later I was not only in a back room, but a real 'hidden back
room' that was much larger than the original pub and was one giant homage
to the world of 'spy-craft and Espionage'. Actually It was many rooms and
as I settled in I got the history from the bartender and a harsh dose of
reality. While he made me a drink he filled me on on when were the busy
times and what kind of people came here.

'We occasionally get real agent types here." He said "The secret service
were in here the other week for the President's visit, for some reason
they like the place. But mostly all we get here is tourists and guys on
business."

Unfortunately I knew what the next question would be. But I let him ask.

"So, what brings you here ?"

"Oh, I'm here on business." Damn.

So we talked some more, I checked a few emails, made a few calls and then
we got to the point when the bartender had to ask the next most
uncomfortable question of the evening. It's not that the answer is hard,
but if you aren't in my line of business the details are just too
difficult to explain in a short answer. Fortunately my phone rang at just
the right time and well, given where I was, I couldn't help myself.

"So, What do you do anyway ?"

"Um. well, I travel a lot, I guess I could say I'm a consultant. Excuse
me, that will me my agent on the phone confirming my flight to London next
week."

I resisted the temptation to order a vodka martini and made a mental map
of all the exits.

And, yes, it really was my travel Agent. Next week I'll be in the UK.

Tags travel,london,hotel,restaurant,milwaukee airline

I'm not alone

2006-02-24T17:14:00.000-08:00

It seems that I'm not the only one who has bad experiences in Chicago. Gridskipper reported this article from a columnist for the St Louis Post-Dispatch

I particularly liked this line :

"Airport bars are strange places. They're the only bars in the world where nobody has any fun. Drinking at an airport bar is like trying to start 'the wave' in a graveyard."

Night Of The Beautiful People

2006-02-13T14:53:00.000-08:00

Sydney, Summer, Sunday, Sunset

Sooner or layer you will find yourself alone in a bar killing time. This
is a perfect opportunity to make the most of your environment and observe
your surroundings. Find a good seat, either at the bar or somewhere you
have a good view and settle in.

Then, get to know the bartender, he is the source to any number of
discounts and special favours. Better still, if it is a quality
establishment, get to know the waitress. She will ensure that you never
actually have to wait for a drink or risk losing your good seat by
stepping near the bar.

Sufficient bribery will also get you a reserved sign for your space. This
not only gives you freedom to roam occasionally, but also let's you be
selective about who sits next to you.

Now that you are settled in it is time to observe what people do, it is
very interesting. Australia is the land of the cafe society and the great
unwashed. And one thing we do (mostly) well is go out and have a drink.

The 'Friday afternoon booze-up', 'Beer O'Clock', 'Working Lunch', whatever
you want to call it, best example I've found is the 'Sunday Afternoon at
the Pub'. This is the magic hour of Australian society. It is something
you evolve into and never forget.

It probably started from a protestant work ethic that made sure you
'downed tools' on the seventh day. But then it was then mixed with the
general European migrant mentality that meant if it was too hot to do
anything else, you took a siesta or caught up with friends.

Either way, on Sunday afternoons, as the sun sets and the beaches start to
cool off we do the sensible thing and go out drinking and socialising. We
get out of the house, get some fresh air and down a few beers before the
work week kicks back in.

Unfortunately, we do it in surprisingly odd ways.

Sydney is a very insular society. Maybe it takes stepping away for a few
years to notice, but people live in very small worlds here.

Firstly, everyone is in a big group, four at a minimum. They go out, but
always with the same group of friends and their social universe never seem
to expand. They meet the same friends, they tell the same stories and,
well, don't get any variety.

Secondly, They also never make eye contact, with anyone.

Thirdly, they all dress alike. Exactly alike. It is as if they all share
the same brain.

The girls, the poor things, only seem to wear clothes that they saw on
famous people, regardless of how well it fits them ( Paris Hilton seems
to be to blame for todays melange ). And it all looks mostly the same. It
really must take incredible co-ordination to wear things that look so
alike, yet nothing is exactly identical.

It is, however, harshly sobering to then notice that the guys dress even
worse. They don't try to be different. I swear that they must all call
each other up to check on the dress code :

"Mate what are you wearing ?"

"Distressed jeans, deck shoes, and a dress shirt untucked, with the
collar turned up, saw Brad Pitt wearing it last year"

"Cool. I'll wear the same. Stripes or spots on the shirt ?"

"Spots"

The good thing is that it makes it easy to identify the groups, gangland
uniforms have more variety and colour.

It is like no one wants to trust their own judgment. They are one big
race of people blindly following whatever is in the lead.

Lastly, and here's where I get really bitter and twisted, everyone
smokes. They really still do. I have not seen a woman under twenty five
here who didn't, at some point, light up a cigarette. Again, I'm sure
peer group pressure is to blame.

Still, everyone is happy and the place of full of laughter. I guess folk
just like staying inside their boundaries.

Hasta luego

Good Bye Yellow Brick Road

2006-02-06T00:54:00.000-08:00

I'm foolishly trying something simple, All I need to do is get on a plane
and fly back Australia. Of course, as we all know, finding the road to OZ
isn't that easy.

In my case, the Wicked Witch of the West as actually the Goddess of
Time, and she was doing her best to screw with everything.

Being the good, environmentally conscious guy that I am, I thought I could
take my time in a quiet Saturday afternoon and get the train to the
airport. The last time is did this I rapidly got frustrated when I
discovered that the air-train missed the connections with the normal train
by about 20 minutes and it, in general, took far too long and too much
frustration to make this a practical exercise.

So I did my due diligence and actually checked the timetables this time
and found that, for once, they had synchronised things, and it was,
theoretically, possible to make the journey.

Of course, this small fact also depended on everything running on time.

Now it's not so much that I was worried about being late, but my frequent
flyer status entitles me to free champagne in the club lounge. And I hate
things to get in the way of that.

So, naturally, it all went rapidly downhill from the moment I left the
house.

I decided that a leisurely thirty minute walk to the station was
tolerable and actually had the ticket in my hand before I realised that I
had forgotten the power supply to my laptop. So I had to hot foot it into
a cab, swing back to my house, and abandon plans for dinner.

A short time later I was at the station a second time when my phone rang.
It was my B-Plan. This was a friend that I was going to convince to drive
me the the airport, but had failed to answer his phone ( twice ) and so I
actually had to commit the the whole public transport exercise.

"Yeah, you rang, you want to join us for dinner ?"

Now, instead of thinking through this alternative, I fobbed him off with
lame excuses, and found myself at the station staring at a very bright
digital sign that was telling my to 'stay off the tracks'. This was not
entirely helpful because what it wasn't telling me was why the train was
15 minutes late. I actually had to call them to find out that there was
engine trouble.

Dorothy never had it so bad.

Eventually we were on the train but I don't think we'd gone more than 3
miles before we ground to a halt and were informed that there would be
another slight delay because there was a Car overturned on the tracks.
The announcer actually said,

"...How it got there, we don't know"

How ? I'll tell you how. Because people in California can't drive their
cars. In fact I'd be willing to believe that it is actually a requirement
to be able to do something that stupid just to get a license.

"...Now, one last question before you pass the test. If you tried really
hard, could you over turn this monster on the railroad tracks ?"

"Um, Yes, I think I could."

"Good, you pass, here's your license."

(Actually, all it really takes is a pair of teenagers and some alcohol but
this story is already getting too long). So suitably frustrated, late,
unfed, cranky, and waiting for the flying monkeys, I did my best to endure
the ride while sitting behind the kind of mentally ill person who thinks
that humming to themselves off key is perfectly acceptable.

"I'm the Tin Man, He calls himself the scarecrow, and the guy in the
corner is a Lion with no courage"

Yeah, Sure you are.

When I got to the airport, the Club lounge was out of champagne.

Next time I'm taking a cab.

Please don't get blood on the equipment.

2006-02-03T17:18:00.000-08:00

I've been at a customer site for 3 days trying my best to sane. It isn't
working.

It is now the afternoon before we're due to go live and we're running
around chasing down a cabling problem. Of course we've been doing this
for the last 3 hours. What was supposed to be a simple "lets just run
down to the server room and install the devices before lunch" has become
an ordeal. It is not helped by the fact that none of us have eaten and
our blood sugar is so low we're probably not thinking clearly.

We actually moved the stuff around 3 times before we were actually able to
make it fit and I was in such a rush to get the crap in place that I cut
my hand in 2 places and can now only type with about 3 fingers.

People who think that this whole 'geeks and sodas' think is just some weird
cultural throwback haven't had to endure this kind of life.

So I know that we will be here all night and there is no way we're getting
out of here by Beer O'Clock.

Luckily, last night, we anticipated such a debacle and planned
accordingly. Being stuck in a hotel in the 'Burbs was just too much to
endure for another night so we piled into my car and headed downtown in
search of food, booze and gross denial.

Switching into our usual 'lost and a long way from home' mode, we stumbled
into the first place that had a decent menu to discover that it was
actually a live band venue. We spent the bulk of the meal fighting off
the waitress who kept asking if we wanted to pay to see the show. Only
around desert were we were finally able to explain that we had no clue who
the acts were and we really wanted a sample before we committed to
anything as solid as actually paying for our entertainment.

She didn't help the sales pitch by saying that the second act was was a girl
who did acoustic numbers, was very popular with the locals, and "wasn't to
whiney". Yeah right.

In the end we just paid her off and got special dispensation to stay for
the evening. We had a job to do the next day and we need to pretend that
we had a social life for at least a few hours.

Well, the bands didn't actually suck, the girl wasn't too whiney and she
was popular with what I think was the entire lesbian community of the
town.

Carpe diem.

Leave Northern California Before You Get Soft

2006-01-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

For a brief moment I'm actually back in my home town, where, like anywhere else, I had to deal with the usual debacle of the airport shuttle and finding somewhere to eat.

Tonight, for some cruel and unusual reason, I was stuck with a bunch of guys who were just so clueless it was actually surprising. They were returning from some sort of Astrophysics seminar and I should have recognised the smell of 'Absent Minded Professor' much sooner and just waited for the next ride.

We were somewhere close to this guys destination when he suddenly realised what was happening and just blurted out,

"Hey, take this intersection, here, the one you just passed,
that's my turn! Sorry, I wasn't paying attention..."

He then proceed to navigate us the rest of the way by saying things like "I think it is around here somewhere..." and giving instructions a few seconds too late to actually make any use of them. And this guy was giving directions to his house.

I've never met an astrophysicist who knew which way was North.

Suitably frustrated and still in need of a feed. I did what I normally do anywhere else. I heades for the local bar and spent time chatting with the staff while watching the world go by.

I ended up at a Cuban/South American watering hole that actually had a kitchen open after 9pm, and was settling into some late night tapas when the band arrived. I asked Renaldo, the waiter, about tonight's entertainment and he said,

"Well, He's a flamenco guitarist, that tall guy with the pony tail, he's really good"

'Ponytail', eh ? That set off my alarm bells.

Fortunately, He didn't wear the pony tail. Instead he let his hair out and was sporting the requisite goatee and scruffy shoes that just had 'Hippy Street Performer' written all over him. (If you ever saw the movie "Real Genius" He looked just like Laslo) He had also brought with him half of the West African Hand Drum Ensemble and proceed to play songs with drum solos that ran way too long.

To make things even worse, he also added some guy blowing his nut on the jazz flute ( I wish I'd had my camera ), occasionally swapped out the guitar for a 5 string bass to 'accompany' the rhythm guitarist, oh, and there was some 50 year-old in a tie-dye skirt shaking her booty to the whole thing. It was like some time-warp back to the Montreaux Festival. It was so bizzare it was actually interesting.

So I just kept drinking Mojitos.

Later on that night I got to meet the booty shaker, who, like everyone else in Nor-Cal, turned out to be a graphic designer by day, Multi-Dimensional Channeler by night and went by the name of "The Rev. Roxanne"

Welcome Home.

How to get through security without being an idiot

2006-01-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

Nobody trusts you. Get used to it.

Don't try and fight the system, you will just make things worse for yourself and everyone around you.
Be nice to TSA and they will be nice to you. Remember, they have to deal with idiots like you all day.
Wear a shirt with a pocket. Keep your boarding pass in it at all times.
Your COSTCO card is not photo identification.
That big archway is a magnetometer. This is a special kind of METAL DETECTOR. Anything you weren't born with will set it off.
Are you carrying anything man-made ? Good, then take it off and put it in the damn x-ray.
That includes your watch, you dumbass.
Your shoes are made from explosives. Take them off and stop bitching about it.
No, your laptop is not special, it must be x-rayed separately.
Your phone is made from metal, trust me on this, put in in the damn x-ray.
Never try and hold up the line, for any reason. Step to one side and finish your phone call.
Your coat can hide a weapon. Take it off and put it in the x-ray.
Don't try and be neat. Just shove your crap in the bins and keep the line moving.
Your jewelry is made from metal. It goes through the x-ray. If you think it's too valuable, you should have left it at home.
A gift, that 'someone else' gave you, to take on the plane ? That's a bomb. It will get x-rayed, twice.
Don't block the x-ray. Load your stuff at the beginning of the table and unload at the end of the table. Don't block the line waiting for your crap, it isn't going anywhere else.
It's a METAL belt buckle. What part of the word "metal-detector", don't you understand ?
Never travel with pets or children. Fluffy is made from explosive, she will have to be x-rayed.
Don't put your shoes on as soon as you get them, there are seats in the corner for that.
If your ticket has "SSSS" in the bottom corner turn around, go home and start planning your next trip.

Comply, obey, behave.

Off, in, out

2006-01-05T07:43:00.000-08:00

The security line

It should be so simple. Actually, it is simple.

You just do what everyone else does. Pay attention to all the signs,
remove ALL metallic objects, and step through the portal.

So I don't understand why this is so painfully difficult. Every time I'm
stuck in line I'm always behind some yahoo who just exceptionally clueless
about the process. They always seem to have one more bag ( I know, don't
go there ) to dump on the conveyor. Or they take forever to remove their
shoes, or they have 4 kids in tow, or, and this is my favorite, they seem
to think that their metal is different to everyone else's :

"No, sir, please remove ALL metallic objects."

"What ? This Rolex as well ?"

"Yes, sir, and the gold chains, that large bracelet and I would suggest
removing your large belt buckle as well "

BEEEEEEEEEP !!!

"Sir, do you have a mobile phone in your pocket ?"

"Yes. Why do you ask ? ... "

Clueless

What surprises me is just how many of these sort of people there are. It
is quite enlightening to realise that there are so many people out there
that have just never been on a plane before. The whole process is new to
them. These are probably the same people who don't think you need a
passport to go to Europe. I would have thought that with the number of
flights per day we would have cycled through the population at least twice
by now. But I guess not.

My mother was in town a few months ago and I almost entertained the idea
of taking her on a few trips with me, go to Manhattan for the weekend,
that sort of thing. But when I noticed all the jewelry she wears and
thought about her dealing with security, I realised would have killed her
before she got to the metal detector.

Every now and again I get there at the magic hour when there are nothing
but business travelers in the line and for once it is a well oiled machine.
We aren't scared, we know how the system works and we don't try and fight
it. Pockets are emptied, laptops come out, jackets and shoes are removed.
We are in and out in seconds.

Of course, on my first flight of the new year I went through the metal
detector with my phone still in my pocket.

Is this a nightclub or an aircraft ?

2005-12-16T11:50:00.000-08:00

There are many unwritten rules in life. We know about them, they exist
but they are never written down.
There are some things that you should just be aware of.

"Look both ways before you cross the street" is one such rule. It has
appeared in writing at times, but not so much as a warning, but instead
as a posthumous statement, usually by a close relative when they were
asked by the authorities questions like "Did you offer him any advice ?"

Like most things we tend to encounter in the day to day, they happen so
often there is no point in writing them down. It is also worth noting
that the same rules are broken in the same ways by the same people.

Like red-eye etiquite.

If you are, as I have been on too many occasions, stuck on a plane for
more than 5 hours in the middle of the night; the thing you most want to
do is sleep.

So the the most important thing that you MUST do is shut the fuck up and
let the people around you sleep.

You should not, and this brings us back to the reason such unwritten
rules exist, transgress these boundaries and do something unthinkable like
spend all night talking very loudly to the attractive woman next to you in
the hopes of getting a second date. ( We will ignore for the moment that
the first one is under duress )

I have been victim to this twice and it is always the same.

A guy ( it is always the males that instigate this ) finds himself
sitting next to the most attractive women he has ever met, this week. He
realises that he has only the duration of this flight to impress her and get a
phone number.

He thus weighs up his options, reaches for the unwritten rule book,
promptly throws it out the metaphorical window, and forges any attempt
at sleep in deference to trying to 'Pick up the hot chick in seat 16D'

As a result those of us within earshot ( i.e. most of the plane ) have to
suffer through the night as he tries his to sound intelligent and
interested in the face of a woman who is, mostly, just being polite.

It never works, he never gets her address and in the mean time the rest
if us can't sleep.

Earplugs, a business class upgrade and a pillow over the head were still
not enough.

More than once I considered getting up and telling the poor sap that
there was "no hope, you aren't getting in her pants". But fear of
situations like 'Making a Scene' and 'We had to find an Air Marshall'
made me change my mind

In the end I just had to ride it out and wait for that final point in the
evening where the poor victim ( her ) decided enough was enough and she (
and the rest of us ) also needed sleep.

So, should you ever think that a seat by the exit aisle has lots of leg
room and is worth fighting for, I would like to point out that this seat
is also right by the toilets and will usually result in 'jenny' the
dancer meeting 'frank' the idiot and you end up learning far too much
about why a dancer needs to do her stretches and why a horny male thinks
this is interesting.

Take a seat in the back of the bus. It is quieter there.

And so it begins.

2005-11-22T16:58:00.000-08:00

Despite my prolific attempt to garner an audience six months ago, I
was rapidly overcome by a bad case of writers block.

For a while I put it down to just being too busy. Then I foolishly read
some article ( probably a blog ) that put forward the point that people
who wrote blogs were just on a catharsis trip and using it as some form
of therapy.

So I stopped for fear of being labeled a self indulgent looney.

Then I got all caught up in the facts that my rants were "too long" but
brevity didn't give me the literary freedom that I required.

But recently I realised that it is because that just not a lot of
interesting crap happens in late summer. Fall, autumn, beltane or whatever
you want call this time of year. It is a quiet time where we all just get
shit done and don't bitch about it.

Of course, I'm realising all this in hindsight. Silly season is kicking
in and I'm in the middle of it

Tonight, I'm doing my best to stay one step ahead of a bartender who plans
to keep me liquored up, while outside the rain has stopped, the
temperature has dropped and the forecast is for snow. ( Sounds like a
line from a country and western song)

Tomorrow is the day before thanksgiving and I have to fly ( sounds like
the chorus ). So I've had to deal all day with people saying things like

"Hope you get out before the blizzard comes"

Fokkers

This is going to suck. I know it is. Tomorrow I well get up to three feet
of snow, dig myself out of the hotel and spend all day in a departure
lounge next some loser from Michigan who has had a personality bypass
and a screaming case of halitosis. He will try to keep me entertained
with stories of his hockey days while I make every possible phone call I
can in the hopes of getting the fuck out of dodge

Then, just as the sky clears and our ground-hold is lifted, I will be
unable to get the phone number of the supermodel who has being trying to
get my attention all afternoon because my PDA has tanked and my phone is
sans battery.

Been there, done that, still have the scars.

But at least I'm prepared. Start low, finish high.

You may now ransack my room.

2005-11-22T13:39:00.000-08:00

In case you hadn't noticed I tend to travel a bit, a lot actually.

It tends to make me a tad high maintenance about my hotel room. This is
understandable since I could be on the one place for more than a week but
I get particular about a few things: too close to the elevator, too noisy.
Too far, too far to walk. is the bathroom big enough? Are there enough
towels ? etc etc.

So I expect things to be in a certain order, and I don't expect my
hotel to fight me or cause me stress. Unfortunately I also don't take
much luggage, and I'm very neat. This has, on occasion, led the hotel to
believe that I've actually checked out.

Mostly this is amusing, you get the odd phone call "Sir, would you mind
paying your bill", or your key no longer works. But last night, things
got a little out of hand.

I came back to my room and discovered that all my stuff was gone. My key
still worked, but there was no evidence that I'd ever been there.

Somewhat panicked and angry I called reception and they did their best
to track down the problem. In the mean time I did a quick inventory and
realised I was missing a few shirts and all my toiletries. You'd be
surprised how annoying this is.

They called back a few minutes later with the bad news

"Housekeeping thought you had left and threw all your stuff out"

Gone, no lost property, no note, just straight into the dumpster.

As my eyes clouded over and I was filled with visions of lurching around
town trying to find a toothbrush and a clean shirt, I spent a few minutes
at being a very irate customer

"... you don't quite get it, that was an expensive, badger fur shaving
brush your minions just absconded with, you can't just get those at the
corner pharmacy..."

And the hotel decided that it was in their best interests to replace my
items. ( and pay cash for the receipts )

But they left me with the actual exercise of getting the stuff. So about
an hour later I had surprisingly found substitutes for almost everything
and was somewhat back on track, but late for dinner.

This morning, on the way out, I left my newspaper on the bed as an 'experiment'

When I came back tonight, it was gone.

And yes, from now on, the shaving brush stays at home.

Keep the engine running...

2005-11-16T16:06:00.000-08:00

The conversation finished like this :

"... And if you pay me cash now I can keep the car here on the street. "

Respect the valet, For they are God.

I've lost count of the number of times I've sat in a car while someone
drove around the block sixteen times looking for a parking space. It
strikes me as insane. It really does.

I just don't have the patience for it anymore. For me, a simple
transaction and a modest tip ensured that my car was taken care of. It
could be because I live in California (when I'm actually home) but I have
really come to depend on valet parking.

It is so simple. You get out of the car. Do what you need to do and get
on with your life.

Don't park - valet.

Perhaps I should get a bumper sticker...

You can't touch this.

2005-08-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'm getting concerned about the number of places where I have seen
people, in the service industry, wearing latex gloves. I mostly see it
in restaurant kitchens, but it is also appearing in the corner deli, and,
on a recent flight to San Diego, on the hands of the flight
attendants.

I'm casually asking for a beverage, and the next thing I see is this
plastic wrapped hand thrusting a package of peanuts towards me.

Have we evolved so much in the last ten years they we have now developed a
sensitivity to bad food ? Or is it just one too many yahoos with a weak
immune system and a need for vengance. One fool has eaten some salsa
that's been in the sun too long and suddenly the Great Chefs of Europe are
poisoning us.

What really bothers me is that these gloves aren't really going to help.
When you look at all the culinary horror stories out there, they usually
involve things like poorly prepared rats or misplaced fingers. A latex
glove isn't going to offer much protection when you use 12 inches of
surgical steel to take the end off your left index. Sooner or later it is
still getting into the salad.

So this is more a philosophical approach to what were doing. We think
those white frocked fools can't touch the food, so we think everything is
kosher. But, and let's all just agree on this, gloves aren't stopping a
pube getting into the lobster bisque.

It is all about perceived risk.

I was in a supermarket recently and saw two things that disturbed me. The
first was that I could now buy Hand Sanitising Soap in 1 Gallon Bottles.
Apparently people are drinking this stuff. The second one was that just
near all the shopping carts was a dispenser of hand sanitiser.

At first I thought this was some sort of effort to keep all the fresh
produce clean. But after a doing a bit of research I found that there had
been a report produced that stated the dirtiest part of a supermarket was
the shopping cart. So now there was sanitiser for the users convenience.

I feel I should point out that the research was sponsored by a company
that makes soap and hand sanitiser.

Statistically, it can't be that bad. If it was : (a) we would all be dead
by how and (b) we wouldn't have survived the last thousands of years
without refrigeration.

Me ? well I'm going to go out and eat some dirt.

Put down the bag, Lady.

2005-07-30T13:35:00.000-07:00

The Roll-Aboard.

OK, I've tried by best, I've sucked it up, I said I wouldn't do it, but
I've cracked. I really need to vent about hand luggage.

Flying standby finally did it. I was one of the last on the plane and had
do to the walk of the homeless as I tried to find somewhere, anywhere to
stash my one carry-on.

Boarding a plane late sucks. There is a reason the frequent flyers get to
board first and it isn't for the free drinks. Airlines can make rules all
they want but by the time that tin can is 50% full all the overheads are
overfilled with oversized oversuffed roll-aboards packed in a completely
inefficient way.

And this is what really irks me - I don't honestly believe that all these
people are flying for the first time. Some of them must know that their
bag doesn't fit but still they continue to bang and push and twist and
hammer and generally act in denial about what they are doing. I actually
had to sit there and watch while a flight attendant repeatedly asked "Who
owns this ?" while everyone pretended not to notice a roll-aboard the size
of a small coffin sticking out of the overhead. Sisyphus (he was the dude
with the rock) had it easy.

So I admit it, I'm a bastard when it comes to the carry-on. I'm a baggage
Nazi and proud of it. I have one carry-on. It fits over my shoulder, it
will take my laptop and is designed to fit in both 'the overhead bin' and
'underneath the seat in front of me'.

I'm also numb to the excuses of "I need all this stuff" or "It's the only
thing that holds my laptop" blah blah blah. It's all bullshit. If I can
fit a weeks worth of stuff in one bag, then everyone can. If you have
more crap than that, check the bag, sit down and shut up.

These days I just deal. I don't complain, I don't get all huffy. I know
my bag will fit under the seat, but that doesn't mean all those other
selfish bastards get to hog the overhead. I will move things around,
rearrange bags and do the unthinkable of actually rotating a roll-aboard
90 degrees so it takes less room.

Thus, being reminded again about how dumb people are, I found myself at
the back of the plane dealing with a square peg and a round hole. I had
just cleared enough space for a few more bags and was about to sit down
when it happened.

'She' came down the aisle.

She had the apprehensive look that can only spell trouble and baggage to
match. She turned at me like I'm someone who might care and said those
drop dead words :

"I Hope there is still room for this."

I looked down to see that she was lugging not just a full sized
roll-aboard but also a big honking backpack. Inside my head the voices
were screaming "WHAT PART OF THE PHRASE 'ONE PIECE OF CARRY-ON' DON'T YOU
UNDERSTAND!". But I held my tongue and took the passive aggressive
approach. I just stood there and let her deal with the problem herself.
As she struggled to lift the behemoth I noticed that it had 'HEAVY' tag on
it.

She tried for a whole 3 seconds before turning to me like I was the
hotel porter.

"I'm sorry I can't lift it"

Justice. I'm thinking of all the ways she will be punished in what I hope
is the special part of hell they reserve for these people when I harp on
an idea. I grab the bag and just shove it in the overhead. Not only will
she go away, but she will now have to endure the pain of getting it out
again and I get to be a smug bastard.

I turn to her and, fighting the urge to say something very rude, simply
say :

"You really need to get some smaller hand luggage."

A skeleton walks into a bar...

2005-07-28T19:50:00.000-07:00

...And says "I'll have a beer, and a mop".

I have just witnessed the most amazing rain in DC. The kind of
stuff I haven't seen since the tropics. Big honking buckets that chose to
wait until I had started walking from my hotel to the bar before dumping
all over me and my silk shirts.

Fortunately the waitress took pity on my wet dog look and has been
supplying me with free margaritas and a towel to dry off. That, or she
just appreciated the big tip I left at lunch.

So, soaked to the bone and slowly getting hammered, I do my best to
recover from another abortive effort of flying through Chicago. This time
my airline cursed me by offering the most insane promotion of the summer :

"If your flight is delayed leaving Chicago, we'll give you 500 miles"

So, naturally, I was well and truly delayed. Not only do I feel I know
the layout of what is normally a transit point far too well, but this is
getting boring to the point that I'm having trouble finding the humour
anymore.

Not only was the plane delayed getting into San Jose (as usual), but we
were again delayed getting out of SJC (as usual). The Pilot was kind
enough to let us know that we were on a ground hold because of (no points
for guessing) storms in Chicago. Now, although we were assured that this
would mean that all the other flights out of Chicago would also be
delayed, they neglected, as usual, to mention that a large number of
planes would never make it to the airport at all. So it was just one big
timetable crap shoot.

Making up a surprising amount of time, We landed in time to discover that
my connection was delayed indefinitely - Mechanical issues it seems.

As the weather cleared and everyone else took off, we stood around
for two hours waiting for our drop dead time. Eventually they gave up
screwing around with duct tape and found us another plane.

But by this time we were so hopelessly late that I arrived in DC
at 2 am with no rental car and no taxis. I had to go back the next
morning and get my ride.

Then, well, it was just work, rain and margaritas.

At some point I'm going to have to seriously wake up and consider using a
different airport that gets me direct flights. The trouble is that I'm
never given enough notice the plan my flights so I can never get seats on
a direct.

Ironically, on this particular return journey I actually HAD to stay in
Chicago for a few days. Coming through security there I was relieved to
hear that there would be major disruptions because of storms.

Waiter, this wine is corked

2005-07-23T17:48:00.000-07:00

Calistoga. I've been here 2 days and already I'm a wine snob. In fact everyone here is a wine snob. I can't spit around the restaurant here without hearing someone say things like

“Can I get something with more oak ?”

“This is very dry”

“Yes, that would be a good season for the pinot”

Who are we fooling. Just because we have all spent the last few hours bouncing between wineries trying to grasp the finer differences between zinfandel and syrah doesn't make us an instant wine expert. Two weeks from now we will all be back at the supermarket buying five dollar bottles of no-name brand wine and convincing ourseleves that is “better than any of that overpriced crap you get in Napa”

Sigh. When in rome.

So instead of admiting out weaknesses, we feel overwhelmed by the wine lists in these places (which are very good, by the way) and hide our inadequaecy by doing dumb things like sniffing the cork, tasting things twice and pretending like we actually know what we are doing. In my case, I had to send back the wine.

I'm my own defence, I did get stuck with the dumbest barman in town. The dead giveway was when someone started a tab.

The guy handed the barman his credit card :

“Start a tab please.”

“And what name is that in ?”

“The name on the card perhaps ?”

“Oh”

I was victim to his style when I ordered said glass of wine. After tasting something nice, I ordered a glass of it. So he pours me the glass, I take a mouthfull, and it tastes completey different. It tastes bad, odd. It is just not the same.

Suddenly I'm torn. I mean , I know that this is not the same wine, but have my two days here suddenly turned me into a stupid wine expert. But I have to know. This wine is different and I need to know if it is the glass, the bottle, or just me smoking crack.

I consider doing nothing and dealing with it, but the glass I have is terrible, so I have to ask.

“Um, are you sure this is the same wine ?”

He just shrugs. “Yes”

“Really sure ? Perhaps this glass wasn't washed properly ?”

“I'm sure it was, but how about I just pour you another glass”

So he reaches into the fridge and pulls out a completely different bottle. I point this out to him.

“Oh, then I gave you a glass of the Pinot grigio”

At that point we are both exonerated. He screwed up and I can't tell when I've been given a completely different glass of wine

La dolche vita.

Wl spl 4 k'pad

2005-07-18T13:34:00.000-07:00

What is with this whole 'wr R. U' crap that my friends keep sending me on
my phone ?

Some sort of revolution has occurred and it seems that people are actually
aware that their phone is capable of more than just telling them they have
voicemail. But now I have to endure messages in a half baked language
that reflects the fact that we can only type with our thumbs.

None of us are 13 anymore and, frankly, it's embarrasing.

I'm not even buying the "texting is NU" horseshit. It's not my fault the
USA finally woke up and discovered GSM. That makes it even worse, now you
have no excuses. Even if it is on a paris hilton signature edition
sidekick. You have a full keyboard, Use it.

If this was 10 years ago and we all had Motorolas the size of a briefcase
I might look the other way. But his is the 21st century and we've had
years of reasearch in to making a keypad as useful as a keyboard.

If I can write this blog on my mobile phone,
the rest of you can catch up.

C U LTr

Apparently, manhattan has art

2005-07-09T14:13:00.000-07:00

I'm in Manhattan for 3 days and it is just one gallery opening after the
next.

The trouble is that I kinda dislike most of it and I'm not sure how to
react. There's the occasional snippet that will attract my interest, but
a lot of the stuff just doesn't grab me. It isn't interesting. I'll rip
through most places in the first five minutes looking for something I
like.

Now I don't know why people get all bothered by not liking all art.
Especially in this town. You just have to look around at the diversity of
cultures to realise that not everything is going to be to everyones
taste.

So why should art be any different.

My theory is that its just a plan to distract the art critics and keep
the safely off the streets. If we were all just ok with our opinions they
might have to get real jobs with the rest of us.

Instead they are banging away telling us what to think and I'm trying to
make sense of an exhibition of works by people who are famous, but not
for their art. And it mostly shows.

I'm still not sure what to make from the placing of a photo by rudy
guiliani next to a painting by congo the chimp. But I know I should be
concerned by stars whose only contribution is a self portrait.

Sometime later, fueled with alcohol, I pour myself into a cab and head
back to my hotel which is an artform all to its own. Like most hotels
you'll either love it or hate it. I think mine is working on the niche
"18 to 30 all style, no substance" market. But, despite the
velvet rope and bouncers at the bar, I'm a guest here and I know where
the pool table is hidden.

Maybe I can find an art critic who wants to play a few games.

Did I mention the Rum ?

2005-06-02T22:23:00.000-07:00

Pirates log :


9:00 am  - Shiver me timbers
10:00 am  - Drink Rum
11:00 am  - Swash me buckle
12:00 am  - Drink Rum
1:00 pm  - Force Scurvy dogs off plank
2:00 pm  - Drink Rum
3:00 pm  - Bury Treasure
4:00 pm  - Drink Rum
5:00 pm  - Avast me hearties
6:00 pm  - Drink Rum
7:00 pm  - Try to remember where
          treasure is buried
8:00 pm  - DRINK RUM

Last time I checked it was more than 30 degrees (Celsius) in the shade and
just standing around made you break out in a sweat. Very few people are
actually on the beach here. Instead they are all out where the water is
about five feet deep and standing with just their heads above the waves.

So I'm not sure how the British Navy ever survived out here, all those
wool uniforms and ruffles and stockings. You'd die of heat exhaustion in
about 10 minutes. I'm guessing that's where the rum comes into play.
Being drunk or hangover gives you other things to worry about.

In my case it was the three days of the music festival with, you guessed
it, more reggae. The music wasn't the problem as much as the fact that it
was constant and loud from lunchtime until 2am. Oh, and the hotel room
was right behind the stage. The best workaround was to get so hammered
that you just eventually passed out and hope you left the air-conditioner
on.

So I've been alternating between finding places to swim and places to
drink, and thus I'm now well informed about all the bars in a 10 mile
radius (which is most of the island).

For The curious, they can all mostly fit into the same review of "Offered
variations of rum cocktails in a decor inspired by driftwood shacks and
beer promoters". The one exception to this was a bar at the end of a dirt
track on the edge of the island (and thus didn't get many tourists). It
had the best cocktail collection around and offered ambient and trip hop
instead of reggae.

Of course it also suffered from not being walking distance to anywhere.
But that was a minor price to pay when you realise that it also was too
far away for the cruise ship jetsam to find.

The peace and quiet only lasted for so long before, on the last day
fortunately, the beach was overrun with tourists from the dark side again.
One minute there were about ten of as and a few stray dogs. The next it
was all bahama shorts and too much skin that should never see the light of
day.

It was time to get out when some yahoo completely ignored the rest of us
in the shop and demanded immediate service, even after the shopkeeper
explained that hew was out of stock of the required item.

On the way back the plane was delayed getting into Chicago.

No, I don't care who shot the Sheriff.

2005-05-30T13:32:00.000-07:00

For the record: I am sick of reggae music.

(and Eric Clapton for that matter) It all sounds the same to me. And I'm
not just being a music snob here, it really does sound the same. I know
this because the the guy who is renting me my deckchair has been playing
the same damn song on repeat all day. The one CD, the one long song, the
repeat button.

And this is not an isolated case, every beach bar has their one CD, and
they keep them all on repeat. It is worse than Christmas shopping. If I
hear one more person waxing lyrical about "his brothers" I'm going to have
to kill someone. What I don't know is if this is revenge on the tourists, or
just a scam the get people like me to give them money to turn the music
off. ( I considered this option more than once ). I figure it can't be a
revenge plan because the locals have to endure it as much as we do. Or at
least I hope that's the case.

Then again, it could just be the whole "Things aren't quite right
here, but that's the way we like it" setup they have going on.

Renting a car is, for example, an experience. The car I have must be very
old. I say this because it has 30,000 miles on it and in the last 2 days
I've added about 10 miles to the clock and won't need to refill the gas
tank when i return it. When i was collecting the car the guy had only 1
word of advice 'use first gear'. He was right. If you just leave the
thing in 1st all the time you get the joy of Caribbean cruise control.
It's like being at Disneyland, you just turn the engine on, get in and
steer.

But after two days of driving around in the heat I'd decided that I had
enough of avoiding dogs, chickens, goats, garbage and young children and
needed to get back to the beach for some serious drinking. I also was a
bit worried by the fact the local boat rental guy had five boats in the
water but at least ten rotting away up on blocks in a back street.

Either way it is probably a gentle reminder that you don't want to stray
too far from the beach, you might see the ugly underside of your tourist
bliss.

Besides it is still too hot to do anything useful. A few bars down I
can get "Mikes Hard Lemonade" for $1.

A bottle of water will cost me $1.50.

Ditch your laptop.

2005-05-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

I just found out that I can post to this page directly from my
mobile phone.

Great, now I have no excuses. Before I had to wait until I had an hour or
two to focus and get some of this down in writing. Now this page is
going to be riddled with random missives everytime something curls my
interest.

I'm just lucky my phone doesn't have a camera.

Please settle your tab at the end of the week

2005-05-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

Jost Van Dyke, I'm still here

I've been drinking at a place called something like "Ivan's stress free
bar". According to a regular, this place started out 15 years ago as a
guy with a cooler, and now it is a ramshackle collection of driftwood and
shells with at least 2 working fridges. In this place, that's significant
progress.

However, what keeps me coming back to this establishment is not the
decor but their method of service, or more correctly the complete absence
of it. Most of the time there isn't even a bartender. Instead there is a
book and a simple process :

You make your own drink
You write it in the book
When you leave you add it up yourself and pay what you owe.

It is deceptively simple. You can't blame anyone else if the drinks are
bad, you can't complain about the rate of service and you can't really
skip out on the bill. You see, you're kinda stuck on this island. There
is not really that much to it and there is not that far you can go.
Everyone basicly knows everyone else so if you cause trouble you won't
last that long. Instead you do your best not to overdose on alcohol and
just enjoy what you have.

At one point, while I was mixing something deadly involving rum and an
unknown fruit juice, I noticed that there was a 'TIP' jar at the end of the
bar. This didn't make much sense since I couldn't see the point in leaving
myself a tip, but there wasn't anything else you could call it. If you
named it the 'Building Improvement Fund' I don't think it would attract
any more attention. Perhaps they should have just left it there with a
note

"Help keep things the way they are"

Or perhaps it should have said "Help keep away the cruises".

No matter how cool they look in the advertisements, you do not want to go
near a cruise. We had one invade the island during the week and it was
not a pretty event.

One minute it was a quiet morning of rum and skittles, the next we're
being invaded by a stream of fat suburbanites with nothing better to do
than sing too loudly, yell too loudly and generally cause a nuisance for
themselves. And this was one of the small ships. It was a nice
four-masted, wooden decked, sailing number that probably tries to attract
the hippies by putting ads in the outdoor magazines. The thought of being
stuck on a boat with them for seven days makes my skin crawl.

It was perhaps good that this happened on the last day and I was able to
use it as an excuse to get out of dodge before everything went to crap.

To put me in my place I was given the royal treatment on the way to the
ferry. The taxi was not only late because the driver fell asleep, but the
doors were held closed with old seat belts (probably from the drivers
seat) he dodn't go faster than about 10 miles an hour and he took pains to
stop along the way and have a chat with some friends. Meanwhile I'm in
the back sweating about missing the last ferry for the day.

The taxi got to the dock with 15 minutes to spare.

I wouldn't want to change a thing.

"Is it hot, or is it Just me ?"

2005-05-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

Jost Van Dyke, The British Virgin Islands.

Should you ever end up here, as I have, you only really need to remember
one thing - what you want for dinner.

You see, you not only have to make all evening reservations before 4pm but
you also have to select what you want from the menu as well. Given that I
was on an island with a population of about 200 and there is little to do
here but sleep, swim, drink and eat, this initially struck me as far too
stressful a decision to make so early in the day.

But it didn't take long to realise that this is not weird behavior by the
locals but a clever design driven by selfish laziness. If no-one makes a
reservation, the restaurant doesn't open and the local can all go do
something else. It actually makes a lot of sense. I'd rather know that I
have a free evening earlier in the day, then finding out half way into the
night.

As to the problem of choosing from the menu, well you'll just have to
trust me when I say that any combination of BBQ chicken, Ribs, fish or
lobster is going to be ideal. And make sure that you get lots of BBQ
Corn.

So, plan your meals. Oh, and get bug spray. The really good stuff, make
sure it has lots of DEET. The insects here show no mercy. Not only are
the flies and mosquitos a force to be reckoned with, but there are these
insatiable sand fleas that, unfortunately, make it almost impossible to
sit on the sand after dark.

So don't say I didn't warn you. Oh, and did I mention the heat ? Or the
humidity ? It is really, really hot here. I'm not sure how hot because
no-one had a thermometer, so I never sound out (I think this was
deliberate to avoid putting the tourists in shock). But it is really hot.
The only way to deal with it is to go as deep into the water as possible
and just stand there with a cold drink.

So, yes. I'm stuck on an island wasting away my time with nothing to do
but drink rum, read a book and go for the occasional long swim.

I couldn't be happier.

"Don't ask about my divorce"

2005-05-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

I'm at a payphone in Philadelphia. The person at the other end, who does
not want me to know about her divorce, is Gina. I only know this because
I happened to be walking past the payphone when it rang.

I wasn't going to answer it, but someone else on the street also gave the
phone a second glance, so my competitive side got the better of me. That,
and it had already been a strange night.

I started in the hotel bar where I was doing my best to explain, without
much success, to the waitress the difference between a "Vodka, Lime and
Soda" , and a "Vodka tonic". As a result, the whole exchange tweaked the
interest of the person next to me and I thus met Anna, who was from
Brazil, I think.

I don't recall a lot about her, not because the conversation wasn't
interesting, but because of what happened about 20 minutes later. You see,
she was waiting at the bar to meet a friend from work - Mike or someone
like that. Mike worked in a remote office and was staying at the hotel.

So Mike showed up after a while, and we made the usual polite conversation
that strangers are forced to do. But eventually Anna and Mike had to go
off to their next appointment. So they did. They said good bye, crossed
the lobby, got into an elevator and went, presumably, straight back to
Mike's room. From the on the night only got stranger.

Looking for somewhere to eat I later found myself at some South
American-Cuban fusion bar offering mojitos and ceviche. I ended up
staying there longer than I expected because the kids at the end of the
bar were having the an incredibly interesting, and not very quiet,
conversation about their whole on-again/off-again relationship. The
bartender and I were taking turns to keep them plied with alcohol just so
we could get more dirt.

However they eventually had to go home, or find a hotel room, I'm not sure
which. So I paid up and went for a walk. I vaguely recall passing a a
jazz bar in the theatre district where Lou Rawls was playing, but I can't
be sure because that's also around the time I walked past the payphone.

Gina had called me, or, more correctly, the number for the phone. Now she
sounded like a Heavy Chain smoker, or a Drag Queen, or both and before I
could get a word in beyond "Hello ?" She started asking me a few too many
personal questions. "How tall are you?", "How old are you?", "What do you
weigh ?". and then the drop dead question :

"Are you well hung ?"

"Um, What ? " I asked.

She replied with another question..

"Will you tell me to rub my bits ?"

Paydirt - I'd hit on a mis-dialed phone sex callback. So with nothing
better to do I decided to mess with the protocol and started asking her
all the same questions. I'd got as far as finding out basic personal
statistics, the fact that she lived with her cousin, and her general
mental welfare before the conversation came around to her divorce.

As soon as I asked her about that she hung up on me. I guess I hit
a sore spot.

The night was still early, so I found another bar that was playing hip hop bar
with a live percussion act.

Who says Philly is dull ?

"I hope you realise this is Your Fault"

2005-05-20T16:59:00.000-07:00

The passenger sitting next to me just picked up his mobile phone and had
the following conversation :

"Tom, I'm in still stuck in Boston, and it is all your fault"

"Well, apparently there are thunderstorms in Chicago, or storms near
Chicago. Or somewhere within 3000 miles of Chicago there is a
thunderstorm and, as you know, this has a tendency to cause
problems..."

Never fly at the last minute, The tickets are expensive and you can never
get the good routes. So I'm stuck here, where we've been sitting for the
for the last 3 hours, waiting for the rain to stop. All this because my
route takes me through Chicago.

Now, while this incident was just the usual a case of (a) me getting to the airport to find that all my flights had been delayed, (b) all the flights on alternate routes were booked out and, (c) I had to play the shell game of picking a flight that might actually leave tonight, You have to consider the bigger picture :
my last 3 days of travel were like this.

On my way to the east coast I was also routed through Chicago. Of my 3
nights away I have managed to spend 2 of them in Chicago airport hotels.

Simply trying to get out of San Jose turned out to be a problem when I
discovered that my airline has an inability to realise what 'special
assistance' means and decided to board the 2 wheel-chairs last. At a gate
that had no jet-way.

So we were entertained for the first few minutes as we watched a very
chipper young man crawl around on his knees and very slowly prepare his
wheelchair for flight. But after about 20 minutes, when he was finally cranked
up the stairs and we took off 45 minutes late most of us had lost our
sense of humour.

When the pilot got on the horn and explained that there were 'headwinds' it became abundantly clear that I was not going to make my connection - the last for the day. So we bombed into Chicago during in that terrible limbo period where I had about 20 minutes to get to my connection but had to endure the longest taxi ever and then discovered that my connection was at the furthest gate possible. Despite what anyone may tell you :

NEVER RUN FOR YOUR CONNECTION

You won't make it, you never will, the airline already gave up on you,
sold your seat and closed the doors way before you ever landed.

When I did finally reach the gate I had to wait for a pair of sweaty and
wheezing customers take great pains to explain to the agent how it was
"their fault" and the "airline was hopeless" and generally do everything
possible to try an make someone (who did not cause the delay) feel they
had to do something (which they could not do) to get them on a plane (that
had already left)

I merely showed the agent my worthless boarding pass, and he apologised
and gave me a free hotel room for the night. Sitting in the hotel bar
making phone calls I watched as the rest of the people on my flight slowly
trickled in.

So, Thinking that I'd done my time already, I really wasn't mentally prepared for the failures of the return journey.

We probably spent about 3 hours sitting at the gate, and another hour or
more at the end of the runway waiting for the green light to get the hell
out of dodge. Every time we seemed close the pilot would offer another
snippet of Chicago weather

"..Apparently that storm left the airport, but now it is in our fight
path.."

"...There is now a second storm at Chicago..."

"...Golf ball sized hail stones..."

I was wondering where they were getting all this useful information before
they opened the cockpit door and I saw one pilot showing another the
latest weather.com map on his TREO. Technology, gotta love it.

When we did finally land, 5 hours late, the airport was so closed there weren't even agents to even handle re-bookings. There was just a very tired manager at the customer service centre handing out a 1-800 number for hotels, knowing full well that everything was booked. I also realise, in hindsight, that she failed to mention that the arrivals area was in chaos and there was a 45 minute wait for a taxi.

I had spent so much time in transit I had killed the battery on my mobile, my iPod and most of my laptop, so I had to scrounge for change and a payphone to find a hotel. Luckily (thanks to a corporate travel 24 hour number) I found one and legged it over to the international terminal where the cab line was much shorter.

Sometime later (i think it was 2 am) I crashed in my hotel room, left a few voicemails for people and failed completely to charge either my laptop or my phone - it seems the power outlet was connected to the light switch.

As I write this I have less than 5% left.

Next time, I'm booking in advance and getting a direct flight.

The joy of disk images

2005-04-19T21:23:00.000-07:00

I've recently become an addict to MACOSX disk images.

We've all seen and felt disk images, those .dmg files that most software
comes as, but until I started playing around with them I didn't realise
how powerful they were. It all started with trying to burn an ISO format
CD and has degenerated to using images to backup data to my IPOD.

Allow me to explain.

I had downloaded a Linux distro for a friend and wanted to burn it to a
CD. So doing what I thought was the right thing I tried to drag the ISO
image into a blank CD (that I'd just inserted into the CD drive). But, to
my surprise, I got a "This is too big to fit" error.

So I tried the next most obvious thing: I double clicked on the ISO
image. Now, instead of bringing up some sort of CD burning tool,

MACOSX MOUNTED THE ISO IMAGE AS A DISK !.

I was able to browse the filesystem, look at the contents of the ISO and
generally treat it like a mounted file system.

Not being a virgin to things like loopfs I wasn't really shocked, but I
had to dig into how far apple had gone with automounting image files.
After a fair amount of googling I learnt learnt a lot of scary stuff
about disk images.

So what ? Well, what we're talking about is a REAL FILESYSTEM that can
live anywhere, In any format you like. Just like tarballs, all the
permissions and other stuff are stored in the image. But unlike a tarball
you can add and delete data by mounting the image and using normal
commands like 'cp' and 'mv'

I also found that the tool I really needed was the "Disk Utility" (you can
find it in the Utilities folder). This is the motherlode of all things
image wise and it has a CLI. From here you can burn images to CD, create
images and do all sorts of other neat things...

If you want to burn and ISO image you just DRAG the ISO into the pane on
the left and select 'Burn'. This almost makes sense.

But you can also create disk images (those .dmg files). Select
'Images->new->Blank Image...' And you can create a .dmg in any size and
format you want. From then on you can mount that image and add stuff into
it.

If you already have some files, you can create a custom sized image.
Select 'Images->new->Image from Folder...' And you'll have .dmg of that
data. Packaging made simple.

Trust me, it gets better.

Digging further I found that "Disk Utility" has a command line version
that is more powerful, its called "hdiutil" (man hdiutil) and has the all
important 'SPARSE' feature. A SPARSE image is a disk image that only uses
up as much disk space as the contents, not the actual size of the disk.
So you can create a 4GB disk image, but if there is nothing in it, it will
be a lot smaller (like ~10Mb).

You can try this yourself, want a journalled HFS+ filesystem ?

hdiutil create -type SPARSE -size 4g -fs HFS+J ~/Desktop/tmp.dmg

Then mount the file that gets created on your desktop (tmp.dmg.sparseimage)

So now we're really getting somewhere. For me this is very useful because
my IPOD is windows format,

This is a deliberate choice because it means I can mount the disk anywhere
and get at the data, but VFAT doesn't really handle permissions very
well. As I have some data that will really only work on a MAC and I'd
like to keep its permissions. Solution : create a sparse disk image on
the IPOD and copy the files into that. I can also use things like rsync
to keep the data up to date with the originals (this is a tad harder with
'tar')

What about encryption ?

Well, it is probably a good idea to encrypt your whole disk, but
something about that concept scares me - do I really want to boot from an
encrypted kernel ? Instead, I can just keep some of my data on an
encrypted disk image:

  hdiutil create -encryption -size 50m e.dmg -fs HFS+J

I can mount it when I need to, and just leave it sitting there when I
don't.

The list of features is really endless, but I'll finish the way I started,
with that ISO image. It turns out I CAN burn a CD from the commandline :

  hdiutil burn myImage.iso

Oh, and I enjoyed this snippet from the hdiutil manpage :


    Image from folder (new-style):
          hdiutil create -srcfolder mydir mydir.dmg

    Image from folder (10.1-style; of historical interest):
          du -s myFolder             # du(1) will count resource forks
          10542
          hdiutil create -sectors 10642 folder     # add ~1% for filesytem
          hdid -nomount folder.dmg
          ...
          /dev/disk1s2            Apple_HFS
          newfs_hfs -v myFolderImage /dev/rdisk1s2
          hdiutil detach disk1
          hdid folder.dmg
          ...
          /dev/disk1s2            Apple_HFS /Volumes/myFolderImage
          sudo mount -u -t hfs -o perm /dev/disk1s2 /Volumes/myFolderImage
          # optionally enable owners; sudo unneeded if manually mounted

          ditto -rsrcFork myFolder /Volumes/myFolderImage
          hdiutil detach disk1s2               # when you are all done
          hdiutil convert -format UDZO -o folder.z.dmg folder.dmg # compress

"Will give up seat for voltage"

2005-03-20T17:15:00.000-08:00

We are all just shameless power whores. I've been wandering around the
terminal for the last 10 mins trying to find a seat near a power outlet so
I can charge my laptop.

When it comes to laptop power we have no shame. we will unplug fax
machines, disconnect illuminated signs, and sit down on the floor just to
get to the precious juice. I think that we'd give our left nut for
wireless laptop power even when you see the irony that the radiation would
eventually fry our nads.

And while I'm on the subject of whoring I think it is worth discussing
those poor junkies (myself included) who will rack up frequent flyer miles
just to get upgrades. Really, this makes no sense. We will willingly sit
for long periods of time inside these tin cans just so that we don't have
to sit at the back of the plane. However, for those of us who don't have
a choice in the matter, we suck it up and become upgrade whores. We lurk
on the empty flights, fly at times that give us the best opportunity and
have no problem bumping some poor sap with lower mileage credit just so we
can get the free drinks and the bigger seat.

What really sucks is the demographic of my peers. Flying First class in
United is some sort of bizzare mens club. It seems to be the domain of
the male over 35 set, at least it is on the routes I take.

This fight is no exception. There are 24 seats in first, we're full, and
there are only 2 women in this section. One is 80+ and flying with her
grandson and the other looks is 55+ and either retired or has just been
in the biz a long time. While flying to Chicago the other week, someone
had turned up the stereotype dial and the only female on board was toting
a fur coat, heels, and a custom chrry red Powerbook. (she also spent more
time doing email that I did and was reading 'Semiconductor Weekly'). I
don't know where they find these people. I feel obligated to wear my
grungiest city clothes and a five o'clock shadow whenever I get on board
these days.

But why so many males ? Not that I'm asking for this to be some sort of
"Meet the Chicks" club, but it just plain bizzare. It makes you ask all
sorts of pertinent questions like

"Is the business world this male biased, and there just aren't
that many women who get to fly first class ?"

Or is it something more benign like that they don't want to fly in first
because, frankly, it is a scary boring mens club.

I'd go with either answer, but it is still a poor reflection of society.

I'll have mine with salsa

2005-02-18T17:14:00.000-08:00

I recommend listening to salsa music while watching the crows gather
around the gate. they are all have that expectant look on their faces
like the poor saps at the edge of the dance floor waiting for someone to
ask them to dance. As soon as the gate opens it gets even better - find a
good Tito Puente number and imagine them in a large conga line on their
way to the seats. Perfection.

It is the weekend before Presidents Day and I'm in Chicago. Things are
not going well. They switched gates on me while I was in the terminal so
I've just shlepped my arse half way across the world to have to turn
around again.

We are delayed about an hour waiting for our plane and the crowds are getting
restless. There is stil no aircraft at the gate. Just before boarding
time a jet finally decides to roll in and unloads some other poor saps
who are also late. My Blackberry permanently thinks it has voicemail and
I can't get any calls out.

Finally they open the flood gates and let us roll onto the plans with 5
mins to go before our scheduled departure. Fat chance we're ever getting
out of here. Every yahoo and his mother has decided the haul in about 3
pieces of carry on and they are, of course, all roll-aboards.

A friend of mine has a sewing machine. I know this because I asked him
about it one day and he told me that after his divorce he decided to
follow a bedouin tradition and only take what you could fit on a camel.
"A sewing machine fits on a camel" He said. I think that is an excellent
policy - You can only carry into the aircraft what will fit on a camel.

Averting my eyes from the circus I look out of the window to see a
tow-truck pull up to the plane and talk to the guy driving the luggage
conveyor. This can't be good. Oh and there is a maintenance guys in the
cockpit. We're never getting out of here

Google Maps

2005-02-13T17:16:00.000-08:00

Google maps is potentially the greatest thing to kick the arse of mapquest. It has one of the cleanest interfaces as well as being fast and efficient. Someone really thought about this and realised that re-drawing a web-page everytime you wanted to zoom, pan or scan was, well, just plain dumb.

Of course, we had to put it to the test and see if it would tell us where to get crack in San Francisco.

Stuck in Newark

2005-01-23T12:44:00.000-08:00

I should have realised things were going to be bad when I met friends at
the MOMA for an experience of 'performance art' that was so bad we had to
go out drinking for a long time to recover from it.

So I got up yesterday morning with a hangover.

Even though there was a storm warning for that night, I had to go to the
customer and fulfill my duties rather than cut and run. I was officially
expected to be there from 10am to Midday, or later if there were problems.

I also got paged in the morning telling me that my flight was canceled
and I was rebooked on another one at 5pm, so there seemed no need to
panic. I had to assume that they canceled flights in anticipation of
running a reduced capacity airport and runways.

At this point is is best to chronicle the incidents by timestamp (which I
did, by mining my mobile phone logs)


9:15 Staggered into starbucks for coffee.

9:30 Trundled down the the PATH to find that all the trains were
     delayed because of the cold.  It seemed pointless to wait
     another 20 mins.

9:35 Walked the mile in below freezing temperatures to their office

9:45 Get to office, My palm has died, I don't have the phone number
     I have to call Charlie and get it from him.

10:00 We begin the cutover.

11:40 Watched as the snow came in at midday and painted the carpark white

12:00 There are problems with forwarding mail, mail used to be handled by
      the old DNS server, we have to hang around.

12:30 Watched some more as the carpark got whiter.

12:43 Get paged, EWR to DEN canceled, re-booked on EWR to ORD at 5:20

1:20 Tried to call airline, couldn't get through, even in the premium lines,
     Tried to call again many times during the day, realiesd in horror
     as I was sucking through my only battery charge.

2:00 Get paged, EWR to ORD leaving on time

2:30 Finally cut my losses and headed for the airport
     The trip should normally take about 40 mins, so
     I was giving myself some lead time.

2:32 There was no hope of getting a cab, and the roads were humped anyway,
     Headed to PATH Train

2:40 get to PATH, trains delayed, but run every 15 mins

2:58 PATH train arrives

3:10 Get paged, EWR to ORD canceled, told to call reservations
     All lines busy, mobile battery getting flatter.

3:19 Get paged, Flight changed, told to call reservation
     I assume they have re-booked me
     All lines busy, mobile battery getting flatter.

     Getting to the airport is my only hope of finding someone who
     can get me on a plane out of here.

3:20 Get to Newark Penn station, trains to airport are delayed

3:40 train leaves Penn Station for EWR

3:45 Arrive at monorail interchange, get in monorail car

3:49 Doors to monorail are closed, train isn't moving, I can't get out.

4:10 Get out of Monorail after going nowhere, All Monorail
     Trains are now out of service. As this is the airport interchange
     there is no where to go and no taxi stand.

4:20 Indicator board says all United flights are canceled
     Continental still have lots of flights but none to
     the West Coast.

4:30 Busses are being sent, we are herded down a fire exit to the Ground.

4:31 We are stopped in the stairwell. The buses aren't here yet.

4:55 the Buses finally arrive,
     Mad panic as we all try to get on the first bus
     We have been stuck here for an hour

4:59 The bus is stopped at a gate that won't open, the driver finally
     rams it, cheers are heard from the back of the bus.

5:10 Arrive at terminal to find the United desks closed and empty.
     I use the easy checkin phone to find an agent and after much
     negotiation she has me on standby for flights tomorrow
     and standby for an America West flight in at 6pm

5:20 Get to AM West desk to discover that my flight is canceled

5:22 There are staff at the united desk, I need them to yank my ticket
     Back from AM West. Agent does that but says I have no standby
     I have to come back tomorrow, I was lied to by the first agent.

     I'm also told that no fights have left the airport since midday,
     and there won't be any until about 2-3pm tomorrow

5:31 Call Airport Marriott
     After organising a room, tne clerk asks me for my Hilton #.
     WTF ? I've been transferred to the Airport Hilton.

5:33 Decide to WALK across the airport to the Marriott to demand a room
     But step outside to realise that it is snowing so much I can't see
     the damn building (and I know it is only 100M away).  A gust of wind
     clears the falling snow and I see the lights of the hotel.  I take a
     bearing off the control tower and start walking.

     About 1/2 way there my shoes are filled with show, it is below
     freezing and I realise that this is a really bad idea. I suddenly
     visualise them finding my cold dead body in spring after the
     snowdrifts have thawed.

5:41 Get to Marriott, they have rooms ( I don't believe it ) and the
     room rate is only $119 !

5:49 I'm in the hotel room, start calling family.

IRONY :

5:52 Get paged, ORD to SJC leaving on time (fokkers)

Day 3 - The first day of the show

2002-03-05T18:26:00.000-08:00

I get in nice and early because, as usual, I'm expecting to find the
network lying in a smoking ruin at the bottom of a dark pit in the middle
of the NOC. Some people might say that I was being overly paranoid, but
I still can't believe that is has all gone so smoothly. Unfortunately my
stress is unwarranted and we are still forwarding packets to the outside
world. So we kick back, wait for the show to open and monitor the radio
for any trouble.

This is fortunate because I happen to overhear Show Management trying
to deal with a 'situation' and still be polite about it over the airwaves.

"...Um there seems to be someone at the front entrance who
is preaching to the attendees"

"Could you repeat that ?"

"Well, apparently there is a Guru at the front, you should
probably call security, they are, well, I'm not sure exactly, but
the report is that they are preaching or something..."

I'm sure what they really wanted to say was "There is a religious nutter
out here wearing robes and a dead animal performing all manner of street
theater and you had better get the rubber van before he hurts someone".

James decided that this was probably as good a reason as any to try
and gather some photo documentation of the days proceedings (Actually ,
i think what he really said was "Photos of booth babes", but we'll give
him his moment of denial) and ran off into the throng.

Moment of irony would have to be that the one booth that was drawing the
largest crowd, was asked to stop what they were doing by show management
because their Penthouse Pet booth babes were not allowed to handout
flyers on the show floor. There were many disappointed geeks when that
news got around.

The day thus became a quiet one. We watched the network, watched the
floor, waited for the show to close and crashed the Worldcom shmooze
and booze hour. People were met, cards were exchanged, hands were shaken
and then we realised that Extreme were going to buy us all dinner so a
restaurant booking was quickly made.

This was when things turned ugly. I'm not sure who was captain of the
SS Extreme that evening, but I'm do recall all the bills went to some
guy called BJ. He had the good taste to invite us all to the Sydney W
hotel for dinner and more drinking but beyond that it was all a bit of
a blur. The trouble is that since so much business in Australia uses
beer as a valid currency (you may laugh, but I refer the skeptics to
do their homework and look up something called the 'Rum Rebellion'),
sales and marketing folks are thus a heavy drinking bunch and any major
tradeshow experience is an exercise in liver collapse.

I vaguely recall a nice Japanese restaurant, a lot of beer and wine,
a table that kept growing ("Another table your highness, I have more
clients on the way...") and then at some point we all poured ourselves
into the lobby bar and kept falling off the funky furniture (all cleverly
designed, I'm sure, to keep the beautiful people on their toes). Bernard
eventually gave up even trying to look comfortable on the weird mushroom
shaped seat he was left to deal with, and just started dancing with
some very scary looking locals. It was very amusing to watch, and we
have the photos to prove it.

Sometime later, after drinking some very nice cognac, it was time to go
home, it was way past Beer O'Clock.

Day 2 - The Move in Begins

2002-03-04T18:26:00.000-08:00

I am as usual, probably due to residual jetlag, the first person in the
morning. I foolishly expected to find the NOC locked, but instead the door
was wide open and there were a couple of contractors helping themselves to
the contents of the water cooler. It has apparently transpired that this
is precisely the reason the door was open in the first place and mostly
due to the fact that on leaving last night the security guard requested
that we leave things in such a way as to allow him to have a drink.

Now although I'm never one to give a security individual a hard time,
over here I'm even more inclined than usual to help them out. The security
here is much more relaxed. In the USA they'd usually shoot you before
they asked you what you were doing (Except for the fact that the average
security guard is, for various personal legal reasons that I don't really
want to think about but they tell me anyway, no longer allowed to own a
gun). Over here The guards stop you from doing things not because you
are breaking the rules, but because you have inconvenienced them by
making them go to the effort of stopping you.

Bernard was stopped from riding his bike in the center because the guard
"...Just got hassled by his boss over the radio to go and stop him
(they've got cameras everywhere)". Later we get bailed up for going
through the wrong door "Er, please don't do that again" The guard says
"Because now I have to go over to you to tell you to not do that again..."

It's not so much the security that stops you as the guilt trip they lay
on you afterwards.

I'm also in early because I eagerly await the arrival of the helpdesk
system by our sponsor 'Commander'. The system seems to be shrouded in
secrecy since it hasn't as yet managed to make it onto the show floor.
I have to assume that is is locked in a lab somewhere going through some
vigorous beta testing. Finally, around 9am one of the commander team drops
by to tell me that "There system is on its way, but it has been delayed,
Glenn is still building it". Ah the joys of the temporary life we live.

The actual presence of the helpdesk system, when it does finally arrive,
is in many ways moot. Not because the system doesn't work, because it
did, and it tracked all our tickets and who had them out at the time,
and who was going to resolve the problem and who was their first born etc
etc. However since most of the tickets related to people who were just
too damn lazy to configure their PC's, we don't really have any data
that possibly suggests our network is, in any way, disfunctional. The
damn thing just keeps working. Even with Sanjeev and Paul rewriting the
router configs every 10 minutes, we're still forwarding frames and people
are none the wiser.

Moment of irony would have to be that the most difficult ticket we had
to work on was to get the ticketing system actually connected to the
correct network.

This does lead us nicely into to today's lesson in swearing, which
comes to us via an a random ex TAC engineer, who mostly described his
customers as "Complete Fuckwits". You should be warned that as much as
Australian Society tends to breed familiarity through contempt, this
is not a way you would ever describe a friend. If you use these words,
you had better be right, and prepared for a fight.

Although I'm convinced that someone has made a pact with the devil for
all this success, I'm reasonably sure that it isn't going to be me so I
decide that we all need to go out for a long lunch. The NOC never had
phones to begin with (we all used our mobiles) so our slightly remote
absence isn't going to affect things much.

As we're being seated Bernard points out that for some strange reason
the noodle bar we're in is offering free neck and shoulder massages to
its patrons. I can only imagine that this because at some point the hippy
in the owner kicked in and they felt that they needed to offset the, as
I now discovered looking at the menu, outrageous prices. Hardly being
one to not saver all that is on offer we partake in the pleasure and,
Feeling No Guilt At All, we return some indeterminate time later relaxed,
fed and still wondering what and when it will all go horribly wrong.

I casually place all my chips on wireless, this is usually a safe bet.
We're still in setup mode and only about one third of the exhibitors are
here but a brief survey reveals that there are more than ten wireless
access points on the show floor and people haven't been clever about how
they distributing the frequencies. This is also when I discover that one
exhibitor has yet to install their 6 wireless devices but they hope to be
operational before the end of the day. I'd nonrmally panic at this point
however, although there are a lot of base stations, I can't see that there
are actually any clients connected to them so most of this infrastructure
is seemingly pointless. Since I can't really do anything about at this
time I decide that I'll just have to wait for it all to fail.

Returning from my survey I find that our lunchtime massage ("Er, 2 steaks,
a beer and a shiatsu, please") has had the desired effect and the NOC has
become very relaxed indeed. The stereo is cranking out lounge music back
beats, everyone is quietly hacking away on their pet project (today's
winner is Bernard and his code that walked every router interface we
have and is now collecting statistics on them) and we're slowly eating
away at the day feeling functional without being stressed. Of course,
at this time we're only dimly aware that our reticence is primarily due
to the hot humid weather that we're all working under and that it will
eventually bite us in the arse.

Late in the afternoon the NOC becomes unbearable. Since we're right
against the west wall of the hall, it transpires that we're been slowly
roasting as the wall heats up in the afternoon. This is compounded by
our nice black walled NOC and the the new halogen lights that just got
installed (although I now notice that someone has unplugged them). It is a
subtle process but after a while you realise that the sweat running down
your armpits at that rate is not normal and you don't really recall your
clothes sticking to you quite that badly earlier in the day. Although the
work isn't stressing us, the atmosphere is but we only need to hang around
for a few more minutes before the helpdesk closes, so the end is near.

For some reason Glenn thinks that this would be a good time to go an
play a few games of tennis. We think that it is just too damn hot,
it's Beer O'Clock.

Day 1 - Continue the reserach

2002-03-03T18:25:00.000-08:00

This is, surprisingly, an extremely comfortable project. It's not
like we're idle, or that we don't have anything to do. but I'm this
strange twilight zone where there always seems to be someone to do
whatever needs to be done. Probably the most difficult part of the day
was organising Lunch. In Sydney, and especially in Chinatown, which is
where the convention center is mostly located, it has become a traditional
pastime to have Yum Cha (Dim Sum) for a Sunday lunch/brunch we were well
aware of this and had planned to make the day worthwhile by finding a
Good restaurant, but somewhere between overwork and apathy we didn't
actually book anywhere and instead just wandered our way into Chinatown
roughly around lunchtime looking for a feed.

Unfortunately either a misdirected desire to not offend the fellow
workers or just sheer ignorance meant that not only did we not know
where to go, but no-one really wanted to take charge and just pick a
place. The fascist in me kicked in early, but my out of date lack of
knowledge meant that our first choice was closed, so I waved my arms
and deferred tot the team. Glen, the Worldcom systems guy "Had a plan"
but somehow this reverted to 10 people squeezed into an elevator where
we quickly concluded that there was "no fucking way there is fucking
Yum Cha joint on the 5th floor of this place...". Glen admitted out of
date knowledge (or a complete lack of spatial orientation) and finally
we ended up in somewhere that actually a) sold food and b) sold beer.

Getting back to the real work for a moment, we had another productive
day. The sparkie who had promised me power the night before hadn't
followed through but assured me he would do it right now. I went back to
the NOC to check on the status of the racks and realised that we probably
needed to optimise our hardware inventory and rather than keep all these
extra UPS's in boxes we could put them out in the racks. Of course this
meant that needed to go back to the sparkie and now tell him that I needed
2 circuits and not one. Karma being what it was, as I passed one of the
rack locations I noticed that he had actually given me 2 circuits so,
as usual, the real work had actually been done.

However, with real power we were able to roll out the peds onto the
show floor and try our luck at patching the whole shooting match into a
functional network. Some time earlier Glenn and I attempted to try and
test our fibre links, but the fibre test kit we'd been given had a few
personal problems. Since we seemed to be unable to set any reference other
than "Really Dark" there was this wonderful moment of self realisation
where (after about a 15 second silence) we both concluded that we should
"Bugger the fibre test, lets just patch the bastards in and see what
happens".

I only thought of this a long time later when casually asked if we'd
patched in the peds. "Yes," was the reply, "All the links came up
just fine".

Glenn and I tried to focus and turn our addressing/patching data into some
sort of reality. Extreme, because they wanted to try this new 'Super VLAN'
technology required us to develop a stable list of IP address to Port
matchup. so I had to find some way to resolve my hacked up addressing
programme with the patching spreadsheet and still keep our sanity. This
mostly was resolved by a lot of silence by Glenn as he wrestled the data
into submission. But he emerged at the end with a coherent patching list
and sent the team off to ping the bejesus out of the network.

Our moment of irony was when the ONE booth we actually required fluke
tools for was, of course, the Fluke booth.

Extreme 1, NOC 0.

At about 4pm we re-convened for a state of the nation and decided
that since "The damn thing just works" we should deliver addressing
sheets and, thus, the network. This was when Paul (extreme) chimed in
and reminded us that he hadn't actually dropped in the final configs
(with the Super VLANS) and that would probably be in our best interests
to re-ping all the drops. I made a mental note to inform Paul about my
plans in advance and admitted that, yes, we should re-test the entire
network if we respected our handiwork.

So while the team was out pinging away and delivering drop sheets we
distracted ourselves with the finishing touches. Sanjeev explained how
the two external routers failed over:

"I couldn't get VRRP stable enough for my liking" He started "So
what you do is disconnect this yellow cable, here and re-patch it
into the second router, here..."

And Bernard decided that he couldn't wait until the morning and would
the fix our NOC door. The Actual fixing was not really the amusing part
(mostly a lot of grunting and shaking of the booth). What was more
entertaining was watching everyone work out the problem for themselves

"What's wrong with it ?" They'd ask
"Try and lock the door"
"Yeah, it has lock, I can see that"
"No," We'd all chant, "Try and LOCK the door"

This was when they finally discovered that we could very easily and
securely lock ourselves INTO the NOC, but anyone from the outside could
just turn the latch.

Safe with the knowledge that the outside world could be kept behind
locked doors, it was Beer O'Clock.

Day 0 - We get the Hall

2002-03-02T18:24:00.000-08:00

I arrive at 8am in a slight state of panic. Because all the carpet was
laid yesterday, the decorator got a jump start and more that half the gem
structures are already built. And we were supposed to pull through all
the drops, so stressing that we have to do some emergency pit
work. However as I walk around I notice that not only have all the drops
already been pulled from the pits, but Gary has terminated tagged and
tested them.

When I bailed up Gary later for the test reports he said

"I gave them to you. "
"Where ?"
"On the fluke you loaned me, I saved all the reports on the DSP"

The NOC was so far progressed I had to get them to remove a panel so I
could get the racks in. There was, however, no power so I track down
the foreman who points me to the sparkies. We walks over to the booth
looks at the situation and says "Wait a sec" he walks over to the next
pit, grabs the distribution panel and plugs it into my pit. "Will that
work for you ?" "Yes" I sigh. For some reason I was expecting this to
be a wearisome 4 hour waiting game, but instead Everyone Here Is Your
Mate and "No worries, I'll do it in just a sec" is the mantra

At around 9:30 the team starts to arrive, Gary is there finishing up
some of the aerial runs, Worldcom are wrangling a rack from their CO to
the show floor, Glenn, Bernard and the usual suspects are wandering in,
and a small team of volunteers are also making their way towards the
NOC. I'm about to start to wonder if we have too many people, when a
truck arrives with all the APC equipment. SO I'm able to get the boys
racking and stacking while another few teams walk the floor and check
that the contractors aren't doing something stupid with my drops. We
quickly become a busy little team.

Colorful lexicon.

It is nice to be back in a country where we're not afraid to call a spade
a spade and a friend a bastard. Australia has what can only be described
as a colourful lexicon and is really not afraid to use it. Over here you
can safely interchange the word "Damn" with "Bugger" and still be
considered a member of polite society. "Bugger it", "Oh Bugger", "Bugger
him, and the horse he rode in on" and my favorite, "Full of Buggery", Are
the kinds of words that I often heard coming from the mouth of the
receptionist.

Of course, once you get onto a building site, like the show floor, that's
when the contractors and their years of hard swearing experience truly
come into form. Long working days and hard drinking nights can bring out
the poet in some people, so I was priveliged to overhear this masterpiece:

" Oh for fucks sake Harry, you've gone and fucked the fucker.
Now I'll have to get my fucking tools and fuckin un-fuck it. "

Once we get the NOC stabilised the team sits down for the mandatory 3M
fibre termination class, questionable only in the fact that the the
terminations I'm demonstrating are also the first ones I've ever done.
But we're working on the assumption that I only need one of my 3 pairs so
we can afford to make a few mistakes. The VF45 termination seems to be so
easy that we leave the last PED to a random pair of volunteers to finish
up the work and test all the links.

Worldcom have made the final install and patch - like all telco racks all
the cable is Very Neat And Tidy and every end has been polished and
attenuated to the Specified Range. But this also means that WE have
externals - blindingly fast, watching one download we were pretty sure
that what was slowing down the 60meg of data was not the pipe, but the
slow disk drive.

Paul From extreme has been madly trying to hot stage his network. He's
been patching like a man possessed and has configs coming out if his ears.
Muttering 'EAPS!' like a proclamation he emerges sometime later and
proudly presents an unlabeled clusterfuck of 3 peds, 6 routers and a
LOT of Gig backbone. "But look, the ring fails over...". We decide to
leave him with the cleanup, it's Beer O'Clock.

Day (-1) - Still Early Install

2002-03-01T18:23:00.000-08:00

Both halls are empty and the electricians are installing power. Gary has
made some sort of pact with the devil and got ALL the cable installed
last night. "I was only able to test about 80% of them before I told the
boys to knock off and get some sleep. We'll get the rest done tonight". He
then nudges me and says, "Since the halls are empty we'll probably sneak
back here at about 9pm and finish up"

Worldcom have managed to fix their backhoe problem and have gotten me
a circuit, they really weren't sure how much bandwidth we required so
they've given me an STM-4 stub, which was, last time I checked, an OC-12
(622Mbit). Unfortunately that had to be terminated onto a breakout unit
that was lacking a few interfaces so the we were only able to peel off
a single OC3 for the NOC.

Anyway, we left the telcos to play with their special IR glasses and
OTDR and work their magic and went off to examine the floor

Early Install

2002-02-28T18:22:00.000-08:00

We've found a cabler at the last minute, Gary from compulec, and we
picked him because he was one third the cost of the other quotes. He
supposedly has been briefed on the project and is waiting for me to give
him the final work order. However, as the The Venue has told us that
we can only install the cable from 11pm to 7am on Thursday and Friday
we have this bizzare rendezvous at 11pm in the carpark where I hand him
the work order and plans, he shakes my hand and says "We'll be done by
tomorrow morning"

"The moon flies backward at midnight" I say and wander off to have a
drink to steady my nerves

Arrival

2002-02-27T18:21:00.000-08:00

If it is Wednesday, this must be Sydney.

I'm sitting in the plane trying to fill out my customs and immigration
form as creatively as possible. I was already thrown by the first
question that asked me if if I was either a) Resident returning to
Australia, b) Visitor to Australia or c) Non-resident Emigrating to
Australia, but the really curly ones were the quarantine rules.

While I didn't have any endangered species taped to the inside of my
trousers, I've flown here with an awful lot of strange equipment that I
really don't know the value of. So naturally the only thing I have to
declare is that I don't know what I'm doing.

The last question does become a problem. "Have you been to South America
or Africa in the last 6 days ?" A quick calculation reveals that I was in
Sao Paulo last week so I tick the box.

When I arrive at immigration I'm welcomed to back to Australia

"DO you have your Yellow Fever card, it says here you've
been to South America"

"No, I left it at home"

"Well I guess we have to give you you another needle before
you can enter the country" (pause) "I was only joking, welcome
home, Have a seat over there, a quarantine officer will be
with you shortly."

Naturally when the man does arrive a few seconds later, He just writes my
name and passport number on a fresh new page that says "Yellow fever",
so I can now safely assume that when there is an outbreak of the virus in
Sydney, it will be my passport photo that appears on the evening news with
some appropriate caption like "Dickhead brings ebola to modern world..."

There is probably some sort of irony about the fact that Australia
invited the world to come with us to the land down under, but we didn't
want any of the germs that came along with it.

For some unknown reason quarantine doesn't even choke when they x-ray ALL
my bags, move along sir, have a good day.