Wednesday. Woke up REALLY early to leave for airport in anticipation of the impending doom predicted by Super Ultra Dopple 2000, version 2.1. When I left, the onslaught had not begun. Apparently it started when I got to the airport, as the deicing trucks were in full force. So I have two funny (in a funny sort of way) stories for today. The first deals with flying.



So if any of you are scared of flying, I implore you to skip to the next paragraph. So I get on the plane today, and having super-special elite status due to my long hours in the air this year, I take my seat in first class. The guy next to me wants hot tea. The flight attendant says "I'm sorry, sir, but I don't have any water heated, but I'll get it to you as soon as we take off". So the guy hangs in there, we get de-iced, and go immediately to the runway. This semester in Human Factors we did a case study on an airliner crash where the cause was widely believed to be too wide an interval between deicing and takeoff, which allowed the wings to ice back up in the interim. Naturally, I was thinking these positive thoughts as we started to careen down the runway. The plane took off, and at about 500 feet, the air vents stop blowing air, and the seatbelt sign flicker. We leveled off at about 1,000 feet (thats an estimate), and the captain comes on the intercom (which was weird, as it seemed all electrical devices were non-functioning), and informed us that they had lost power to the right engine, and they needed to try to restart it in midair (which I didn't know was possible). So we go into this holding pattern thing, and they restart the engine. The air comes back on, the lights come on, and we start to climb. The guy next to me turns to me and says "Well, thats good. I thought I wasn't going to get my tea". Hilarious. The captain doesn't come on again until the "we're cruising at 35,000 feet" message, and he doesn't even mention what happened. Hmm.



So the second story is about car washes. I have been trying to get the cars washed for a week. So I go to these gas stations where you get a discount on the wash if you buy gas. I proceed to Car Wash A. The wash is open, and there is only one car in line. I get 5 dollars worth of gas, tell the pump I want a car wash, and it blankly replies "Car Wash Error. See attendant". I enter the gas station, explain my problem, and the attendant says "Do you have an SUV or van?" and I said "Yes, I do.". She then proceeds to tell me that the door doesn't go up that far. Well, damn. How do it know? I proceed to car wash B. I get another five dollars of gas, and select the super-duper car wash option. I drive around to the car wash. It is closed. Of course its closed. At this point I am both perturbed and determined. I go to Gas Station C. I don't buy the perfunctory $5 of gas, but instead go straight for the counter, ask if the wash is open and if my SUV can fit in. The lady at the counter gives me a strange look and says yes. Code in hand, I drive around to the car wash. I can see a car getting washed. There is one car ahead of me. The car in the wash exits, and the car ahead of me moves to the terminal. A lady reaches out her hand and punches in her code. Nothing happens. She gets out of her car, and in the strongest Pittsburghese I've ever heard, says "How minny numbers do you's hayve on yer ticket?". I tell her five. She has five too. She goes into the gas station. The lady behind the counter comes out to inspect. The car wash was just broken by the car that was in there. I give up for the day. The next day, I have my sports car, which also needs to be washed. I think, hey, back at Car Wash A, they couldn't fit the SUV, but they can fit this one. I hurry over there, buy the $5 bucks of gas, drive around the back towards the entrance of the car wash, and its closed. They're fixing the door. The car washes never were never closed or broken in Florida. Sigh.
posted by Rich at 6:27 PM Comments

 
DONE! DONE DONE DONE! What a feeling. The joy that used to accompany selling back books at the end of the semester in undergrad has now been replaced with that of not having to sell them back because I still have some cash for food and gas. But still, I don't foresee picking up Beyer and Holtzblatt for some light reading any time soon. So let me tell you all about my plans for the next month. This week I am going to balmy Minneapolis to deliver a portable lab to Honeywell. Abby was gracious enough to offer to come over and walk Bilbo during the day. What a gal! Mental note: Bake something tasty, give to Abby. This weekend I will be doing absolutely nothing of consequence, except writing the code for a new project for Ovo which I can't talk about due to nondisclosure. Then next week I will be doing some .NET work with my sister's boyfriend, Nathan, as he tries to hit a December 20th deadline for a client. Then, Wednesday night, Michelle and I drop Billy off at the Hilton of shelters. Its actually called a pet resort, and it seems he will get pretty well pampered there. Then its off to Cleveland, where on Thursday morning we will begin our rapid tour of Southeast Asia. It goes something like this. We leave at 7AM from Cleveland, and fly to Newark. Then we hop a flight to Tokyo, direct. That takes us to 6PM Friday. I'm not even sure how long that is with the time change. Then we have a four hour layover in Tokyo, and then its another 10 hour flight to Singapore, which gets us in Saturday morning around 12:30 local time. We'll limo it over to the Four Seasons, and sleep all day Saturday. We've got massages in-room at 5, and dinner reservations at 8. Sunday we are heading over to Sentosa, which is a coastal island theme park resort thing. They have zoos and botanical gardens and forts and amusement parks, etc. Sunday night we check out of the Four Seasons and go over to the Fullerton, which is right on the water and was historically the Post Office for all of Singapore. Its got a mall in the courtyard, and our balcony overlooks that. Should be great. Monday is all about shopping on Orchard Road. I'm gonna look for cheap electronics, so if anyone wants something, buck up some cash! :). We have dinner Monday night at the really nice restaurant at the Fullerton, and then we leave Tuesday morning at like 6 am. We fly the same route back, but through Houston instead of Newark. We get in at 11:30 on Christmas Eve. The fun doesn't stop there. Michelle's best friend from childhood, Jackie, is getting married out on Long Island. On Christmas day, we are going to drive back to Pittsburgh and try to get on some semblance of time schedule. Early the morning of the 26th, we'll retrieve Billy from the pet resort, and drive to NYC. We'll be staying with her sister and her boyfriend Russell, who just got engaged. The wedding is on Saturday, and then we come back. Mich's busy season with Ernst and Young starts, and I go out to San Jose for a few days to move Veritas' lab from point A to point B. Fun. Thats the update. Oh, the final wasn't bad at all. Nobody I have talked to seem to have the same answers, so I figure the grading will have to be either very subjective or very curved. We'll see. Wow, what a long blog.
posted by Rich at 2:08 PM Comments

 
Sunday morning. Very much heavier after a hearty Mexican meal cooked up by Mich's sister, Brooke. I'm only a little bit further along on the paper, but its flowing nicely now, so its just a matter of time. The studying for the final, however, screeched to a halt when I gave up looking for my copy of Nielsen. Not that I really had a strong inclination to read it anyway. So I guess the point of this blogger thing is to share cool things we've seen on the web, news stories, and such. My first addition would be www.zefrank.com, a site recently given some credence on the UTEST website. The next would be this comical, yet factual, account about the president of Turkmenistan. One can only aspire to the levels of ego this guy has. So I sent the official "release notice" out yesterday for this web site, and my classmates loved it, and my parents and family hated it, mostly because of the foul language. I'll try to keep that to a minimum, I guess. OK, I'm off to read a paper on interaction relabelling that I probably should have read during the semester.
posted by Rich at 10:30 AM Comments