Just over a week has passed since I was RIF’d from my most recent job at AMD. It is taking some getting used to waking up in the morning with no structured day or firm place to go. On the plus side, I am using substantially less fuel than I was just a few weeks ago, so that must be good I guess. In the meantime I continue to look around for what my next gig will be.
Next on the list of things to be worried about is my flying or lack thereof. I’m at a point in my training where I must complete a written test before I can get any closer to getting my pilot’s license. It’s a bear, since it is an array of questions, numbers, arithmetic and other stuff that I have to know cold before I go in and take the test. I’m getting better, but rote memorization has never been my strong point.
Finally, I’ve used my abundance of spare time to go around the house and fix just about everything that is doable by myself. With that complete I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Liberty City (in GTA4) and Turkfrackistan (in BF: Bad Company). Sadly, neither of these locations helps me either exercise, meet women or get a tan. I do get to meet new and interesting people, then shoot them, so it does have some perks.
Getting stuffed into an airplane like sardines in a can. Sweltering heat and humidity during the day with little respite at night. Eating enough bar-b-que’d animals to cause a meat coma. Encountering more trucks than the entire population of some small countries. Bouffant hair. Strange looks from the country folk when driving a minivan. Lots of NASCAR loving yahoos. A crazy amount of turnpikes and toll roads. Gas prices below $3.40 a gallon. The worst B.O. ever on the cramped plane ride home.
What else could all of this be but a trip to Texas?
Current Mood:
Angry
I took one of the last flights home last night from Austin. As is AA’s custom, they placed two rows of children around me on this journey. Normally I just put in the headphones and deal with the problem, however on this flight some of the children decided they needed to be rowdy and play up and down the aisles during most of the flight. This left me and most of the passengers near the front of the plane (no business class for me) to be forever vigilant about our arms, elbows, and any items we had on our trays.
What really made this flight tough (at 3 1/2 hours long) was not just the playing kids (and by playing I mean obnoxious running around, tearing papers and pulling things off trays) but the screaming kids that simply wouldn’t pipe down no matter what their mothers offered them. If ever there was a advertisement for why birth control is needed, this flight was it.
I must restate my request that some airline flights should really be reserved for business people, or at least give us the option to pay a bit more to keep the kids off some routes. By the end of the flight I wanted to see how much it would cost to fly myself home as I really didn’t like the torture that I received from this flight.
I have just about recovered from the ordeal that is getting ready for, staging, shipping, demonstrating, and tearing down a full show load out for CES. I can’t say that I enjoyed it, or that I’d volunteer to do as much work again, but I’m glad its all done.
Severe pain came from the logistics of getting people (namely me) and equipment (some 80+ boxes of it) to and from the show. As the largest single event in Las Vegas, CES is uniquely positioned to stress out every part of the infrastructure needed to travel, house, transport, and sustain a group of nearly 200,000 people for a week. As much as I dislike the driving situation in the Bay Area, I now have to thank Las Vegas and their elegant street construction planning for reminding me of how much fun driving 5 MPH for an hour can be.
I now get to start planning for the next series of events, customer contacts, and traveling. One can only hope that things go smoother the next time around. A little less smoky smell and a lot more sleep per day can’t hurt, either.
Recently I went through a setup related exercise for work where I needed to get a Windows Media Center PC to talk to a Media Center Extender. An extender in Microsoft’s view is a device that attaches to a TV and enables interacting with a Media Center UI without the PC actually having to be in the same room as the TV. There have been a few of these devices shipping for a couple of years so I thought this would be a cakewalk. Boy was I wrong, really wrong.
I spend nearly two hours hooking up the Media Center PCs to my home network, getting them to see each other, display on the TV, then share content amongst themselves. Once that got done I added the Xbox 360 as my “extender” and had it talk to both Media Centers, as well as my home server PC. And next thing I knew another three hours was gone. I had very little to show for this time warp, other than a lot of cabling, noisy boxes, and a rather sore backside (me with the hardwood floors and all). In the end, I did get music, photos, and video up and running on the Xbox 360, but only from one Media Center PC at a time.
It seems that the Xbox 360 can only talk to one version of Media Center at a time. Trying to get two of them to cooperate, both an XP and the Vista version, met with utter failure or a host of “go to this web site, download some stuff, then come back and try again” messages. It was painful and I think I know why no one tries this at home. If I had to buy this stuff on my own I certainly would have taken it back for a refund by now.
It all works now, and I’m on my way to understanding how the different boxes work (or don’t) together. But my quick lessons are: one Media Center is all you need, sharing is tough, and PC’s don’t always love TV displays. Oh, and that the Xbox 360 is the noisiest thing I’ve ever heard in the living room.
I have finally returned from my whirlwind tour of Europe and NYC. Although my body isn’t sure which time zone it’s in, I am sure that I’m home again. Where else can you say that the taxi drivers speak less English than they do in other countries?
I’ll be travelling again later this week, but hopefully this stop will be long enough for some clothes washing and a little sleep. Yawn is the order of the day, for sure.
On stop 2 of my long work trip I managed to get seriously lost driving from Amsterdam to Eindhoven in the Netherlands. This seems to be a pattern with me and going places for work stuff these days: get off the plane, get in a rental car, drive around lost for hours.
In this case the rental car was a super crappy Mercedes A class mini-econo-box with a stick shift and a top speed of 130kph. I did eventually make it to my hotel around midnight for a meeting the next morning at 9am. But I proceeded to get lost searching for the next hotel in Amsterdam, so it seems that my navigation skills are sadly lacking. Ditto on reading Norse road signs.
This week I took a series of flights from San Jose to Austin, Texas, then on to Denver, Colorado, and back to San Jose again. I shouldn’t be surprised at it any more, but the terrible conditions that now exist in airports is quite appalling.
Previously I would almost never check my bag. Now, because I’d like to have toothpaste and shampoo available when I fly I must check bags in. This leads to more time in line, more chances for missed flights, and of course, lost or severely delayed luggage. Going through Denver, I experienced the severe delay and ended up leaving the airport far later than planned (1 hour later to be exact).
On the trip back I witnessed a conversation between a TSA agent and a weary traveler in the screening line. In short, the agent told the passenger that if he had only limited his carry-on fluids to 4 ounces (or thereabouts) he could have gotten them on the plane. In fact, the agent said that the TSA would have allowed the passenger to take on more than one container, perhaps shampoo, mouthwash, and toothpaste, if the passenger had been more smart about the packing. In the end, the passenger departed with no toiletries.
At Denver I was given the choice to fly on my scheduled flight, but have my baggage arrive on a much later flight, or wait around for the later flight and go with the same plane that had my bag. I took the later, and that was a huge mistake. Nearly 3 hours late and a nearly unbearable wait later, I finally got on a plane an headed home.
The moral of these stories is to fly without toothpaste, shampoo, or any of the other comforts of home. Give up trying to make things work the way they once did (and should again) and demand that hotels start providing these goods for the traveler. Only then will some sanity return to commercial air travel.
Again today I had to take a flight somewhere for just the day, then return home. And again the wonderful TSA had to find a way to make it miserable. In San Jose they have so few checkpoints that the line to get into the waiting area was out the door. They also had only small paper signs telling people what could or couldn’t be taken on planes, so of course many people missed those signs and then got combatitive at the checkpoints.
On the way back, in Burbank’s airport, for an unknown reason all TSA checkpoints were shut down for at least 30 mins. The national guard was on hand to randomly pick people for extra searches. No explanation was given, but eventually the lines moved again, but not soon enough for a group of people to completly miss their flights to Phoenix, then get angry at the gate agent.
Thanks again TSA! You’re the reason why we’ll all be traveling by bus in the not so distant future.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (and again): adding lots of features to a product because your competitors do isn’t a smart strategy. You end up being a follower all the time and you don’t have a good, rational argument for adding the feature (did the customer tell you they wanted it???).
But don’t take my word for it, go read this story that makes it clear (again) that adding features for features (or competitors) sake is just a dead-end deal. Nice graphs on the subject there too.