Flying to LA

8 PM EST:
We're sitting in the lounge at Dulles, waiting for our flight to board. There are three wireless networks my laptop can detect, but not one serving an IP address. Bastards.

Our flight is supposed to be rather full so there should be a lot more people seated near our gate. At the very least, I expected better looking people near our gate but we'll have to do.

While scavenging for food at the terminal shops, I walked past the smoking lounge, a glassed in room with an isolated ventilation system. The smokers looked like puppies in the window. Hacking, wheezing puppies.


cuyahogarvr returned with bounty from his food hunting expedition: a grilled cheese sandwich. Panini's called it something in Italian with many more syllables and the price of a New York governor's hooker, but I can't remember it anymore 'cause I wasn't that interested in the first place --after all, it's just a grilled cheese sandwich.


9:30 PM EST:
We're flying Virgin America on an Airbus 320, seats 22D thru 22F. My god, what a sweet ride! Comfortable faux leather seats, a real headrest, a stylish interior, eletrical outlets for one's personal toys, personal video screens at each seat including a cute little hand remote for playing the built-in video games, selecting radio stations, music videos, audio recordings, television programs, pay-per-view movies & TV shows, texting other seats in chat rooms and even swiping credit cards for ordering meals from one's seat. (The food ordering button has an icon of a slice of pie so I'm sure this will meet with approval by devldog and Jeff M.)

It's all Red Hat Linux --we got to watch it the system boot just before we left the gate at Dulles. I have to admit that it's a bit disconcerting watching your aircraft boot up. I suppose it's really not any worse than booting our clothes washer & dryer at home, but I'm usually not inside those devices when it happens.

The first feature I played with --at great length-- was a Google map showing the location of our plane as we cruised at 33,656 feet and 535 mph through an air temperature of -53 Fahrenheit, counting down the miles to go until we landed at LAX. It was very neat looking out the window at various cities and being able to associate them with the map. BTW, the town of Lancaster, OH, looks lovely from up here.

kent4str and I were texting each other for a while, even though we had only cuyahogarvr between us. What the hell... it was a free service. The keyboard is Crackberry-sized so typing was difficult, and unlike the remote buttons on the reverse, the alpha keyboard wasn't backlit so we needed reading lights to find the letters. I checked the plane's chatrooms but there were no other participants, probably (a) so many folks were over 50 and therefore didn't know or care about these new-fangled toys and (b) most folks just fell asleep as soon as they could.

Sadly, the plane's Internet access service isn't functioning yet. While there was a selection of some 25 Dish Network satellite channels, only six were functioning so we couldn't get, say, news, Cartoon Network, BET or Oxygen, but we could get SciFi and Disney. Bonus points for giving me a range of music to listen to (sorted by genre or artist --and you could assemble your own playlist), minus points for not having enough Bach but major bonus points for not having Garth Brooks available anywhere.

The one very odd thing about this display is what it doesn't provide: the local time & date. If it can give me my GPS coordinates, it can surely tell me what the local time is 34,000 feet below wherever I happent to be that moment.


10:45 PM EST:
The online menu doesn't include cheeseburgers. Pity... I could really go for one right now. And a chocolate sundae. If we had functioning Internet connectivity, I'd send a memo to Sir Richard Branson with a recommendation. The menu does include an antipasto salad ($9), turkey bacon wrap ($9), Half caprese sandwich & salad 9$8.50) and a fruit & chese plate ($12). Miller Genuine Draft & Miller Lite are $5, Heineken is $6. There is chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon available for $6, as well as Absolut, Bombay Sapphire, Jack Daniels, Barcardi, Glenlivet, Bailey's and Dewars White Label; thanks to the insidious effects of marketing, I don't even need to tell you what types of booze those brands are.

And did I mention the crew doesn't handle cash? Any food or service purchase is done by swiping a credit card in a slot on the monitor or the game handset. Neat!


12:35 AM EST:
To the citizens of Pueblo, CO: You might look lovely from 33,714 feet... there's a cloud cover so I can't tell, sorry. 844 miles to go. U2 and I are getting reacquainted while cuyahogarvr watches Eureka on SciFi and kent4str reads a non-electronic dead-tree book. Luddite.


12:42 AM EST:
The engines just throttled back and we felt a sudden drop in altitude... did someone reboot the Linux box? 793 miles to go.


12:50 AM EST:
The skies have cleared. I can see snowy mountain tops dimly in the moonlight from 35,739 feet. Beautiful but sadly unphotographable. Colorado is on my right, New Mexico on my left and Utah/Arizona dead ahead 786 miles to go. Pagosa Springs, CO, is lovely, blah, blah, blah...

3 AM EST:
We've landed. Yay!

4 AM EST:
The hotel shuttle bus was packed so we (and Clark Baker) were bumped. We got a later shuttle in about 30 minutes. The room is fine and we crashed quickly. Tomorrow is a new day --even if it's already here.

Flying to LA

8 PM EST:
We're sitting in the lounge at Dulles, waiting for our flight to board. There are three wireless networks my laptop can detect, but not one serving an IP address. Bastards.

Our flight is supposed to be rather full so there should be a lot more people seated near our gate. At the very least, I expected better looking people near our gate but we'll have to do.

While scavenging for food at the terminal shops, I walked past the smoking lounge, a glassed in room with an isolated ventilation system. The smokers looked like puppies in the window. Hacking, wheezing puppies.


cuyahogarvr returned with bounty from his food hunting expedition: a grilled cheese sandwich. Panini's called it something in Italian with many more syllables and the price of a New York governor's hooker, but I can't remember it anymore 'cause I wasn't that interested in the first place --after all, it's just a grilled cheese sandwich.


9:30 PM EST:
We're flying Virgin America on an Airbus 320, seats 22D thru 22F. My god, what a sweet ride! Comfortable faux leather seats, a real headrest, a stylish interior, eletrical outlets for one's personal toys, personal video screens at each seat including a cute little hand remote for playing the built-in video games, selecting radio stations, music videos, audio recordings, television programs, pay-per-view movies & TV shows, texting other seats in chat rooms and even swiping credit cards for ordering meals from one's seat. (The food ordering button has an icon of a slice of pie so I'm sure this will meet with approval by devldog and Jeff M.)

It's all Red Hat Linux --we got to watch it the system boot just before we left the gate at Dulles. I have to admit that it's a bit disconcerting watching your aircraft boot up. I suppose it's really not any worse than booting our clothes washer & dryer at home, but I'm usually not inside those devices when it happens.

The first feature I played with --at great length-- was a Google map showing the location of our plane as we cruised at 33,656 feet and 535 mph through an air temperature of -53 Fahrenheit, counting down the miles to go until we landed at LAX. It was very neat looking out the window at various cities and being able to associate them with the map. BTW, the town of Lancaster, OH, looks lovely from up here.

kent4str and I were texting each other for a while, even though we had only cuyahogarvr between us. What the hell... it was a free service. The keyboard is Crackberry-sized so typing was difficult, and unlike the remote buttons on the reverse, the alpha keyboard wasn't backlit so we needed reading lights to find the letters. I checked the plane's chatrooms but there were no other participants, probably (a) so many folks were over 50 and therefore didn't know or care about these new-fangled toys and (b) most folks just fell asleep as soon as they could.

Sadly, the plane's Internet access service isn't functioning yet. While there was a selection of some 25 Dish Network satellite channels, only six were functioning so we couldn't get, say, news, Cartoon Network, BET or Oxygen, but we could get SciFi and Disney. Bonus points for giving me a range of music to listen to (sorted by genre or artist --and you could assemble your own playlist), minus points for not having enough Bach but major bonus points for not having Garth Brooks available anywhere.

The one very odd thing about this display is what it doesn't provide: the local time & date. If it can give me my GPS coordinates, it can surely tell me what the local time is 34,000 feet below wherever I happent to be that moment.


10:45 PM EST:
The online menu doesn't include cheeseburgers. Pity... I could really go for one right now. And a chocolate sundae. If we had functioning Internet connectivity, I'd send a memo to Sir Richard Branson with a recommendation. The menu does include an antipasto salad ($9), turkey bacon wrap ($9), Half caprese sandwich & salad 9$8.50) and a fruit & chese plate ($12). Miller Genuine Draft & Miller Lite are $5, Heineken is $6. There is chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon available for $6, as well as Absolut, Bombay Sapphire, Jack Daniels, Barcardi, Glenlivet, Bailey's and Dewars White Label; thanks to the insidious effects of marketing, I don't even need to tell you what types of booze those brands are.

And did I mention the crew doesn't handle cash? Any food or service purchase is done by swiping a credit card in a slot on the monitor or the game handset. Neat!


12:35 AM EST:
To the citizens of Pueblo, CO: You might look lovely from 33,714 feet... there's a cloud cover so I can't tell, sorry. 844 miles to go. U2 and I are getting reacquainted while cuyahogarvr watches Eureka on SciFi and kent4str reads a non-electronic dead-tree book. Luddite.


12:42 AM EST:
The engines just throttled back and we felt a sudden drop in altitude... did someone reboot the Linux box? 793 miles to go.


12:50 AM EST:
The skies have cleared. I can see snowy mountain tops dimly in the moonlight from 35,739 feet. Beautiful but sadly unphotographable. Colorado is on my right, New Mexico on my left and Utah/Arizona dead ahead 786 miles to go. Pagosa Springs, CO, is lovely, blah, blah, blah...

3 AM EST:
We've landed. Yay!

4 AM EST:
The hotel shuttle bus was packed so we (and Clark Baker) were bumped. We got a later shuttle in about 30 minutes. The room is fine and we crashed quickly. Tomorrow is a new day --even if it's already here.

LA, Day #1

We slept in a little this morning. Not a lot, but it was such a late bedtime last night that it was more or less inevitable. Good thing it was a comfortable bed & room, not that we really cared when we were that tired.

Once dressed, we popped down to the lobby to check out the surroundings and seek out coffee for cuyahogarvr --you don't want to be around him in the morning until he's had his first gallon of high octane. Immediately, we ran into Roy Gotta and canseefour, joined soon thereafter by Barry Clasper, Betsy Gotta and Mary Hutchinson.

Roy gave us great advice on where to graze in the area of the hotel: as expected, the restaurants inside the facility are fabulously expensive but he pointed us to a Denny's down the street. Denny's also had the advantage of free wireless, whereas the hotel is charging $12.95/day for cabled 10baseT Internet access. Marriott bastards.

Once fed, e-mail read and LJ updated, we stopped at our hotel room to drop off our bags and collect our cameras. cuyahogarvr conferred with the concierge who gave us superb directions and travel tips to get ourselves to the pier in Santa Monica for an afternoon of photography and site-seeing.


I took nearly as many photos of hotties in the area as I did of the sites themselves. God, it's fun being shallow. I'll do a mega-posting of those later when we return to DC next week.

The beachfront and pier visit were... interesting. There was an incredibly powerful wind blowing off the ocean such that I had to brace myself multiple times to take stable photographs. My beard was being blown sideways and I was whacked twice by bits of tree flying through the air. Worse, as we walked out on the pier, the wind was picking up the sand from the beach and effectively sandblasting all exposed skin. I'm still tasting mineral salts and sea salt in my moustache.

LA or Riyhad? Who can tell?

Once we got past the duststorms, the ocean was indeed lovely.


After spending some time mosying around the pier and its amusement park, we headed a couple of blocks inland (and sheltered from the wind) to walk along the 3rd Street Concourse before stopping for a drink and rest. When we were ready, we boarded the Big Blue Bus #3 (only $0.75 fare!) to head back to our hotel where we napped lightly and watched a little TV while attempting to make telephone contact with misc local friends Peter & rexsteed.

There has been a conference for accessibility technology & the disabled in our Marriott the past few days and was in the process of wrapping up. Rumour has it that Stevie Wonder was attending although we didn't see him. Hell, I thought he died several years ago so what do I know? And I haven't seen so many dogs in one spot in years!

As much as I wanted to pet & play with the lot, they were all working dogs on duty so I --and they-- behaved themselves appropriately.

We had a small appetizer at the sports bar in the hotel, then spent at least two hours chatting with Betsy & Roy Gotta, John Marshall, Mary Hutchinson, Barry Clasper & canseefour before we all calld it a night and headed back to our respective rooms.

LA, Day #1

We slept in a little this morning. Not a lot, but it was such a late bedtime last night that it was more or less inevitable. Good thing it was a comfortable bed & room, not that we really cared when we were that tired.

Once dressed, we popped down to the lobby to check out the surroundings and seek out coffee for cuyahogarvr --you don't want to be around him in the morning until he's had his first gallon of high octane. Immediately, we ran into Roy Gotta and canseefour, joined soon thereafter by Barry Clasper, Betsy Gotta and Mary Hutchinson.

Roy gave us great advice on where to graze in the area of the hotel: as expected, the restaurants inside the facility are fabulously expensive but he pointed us to a Denny's down the street. Denny's also had the advantage of free wireless, whereas the hotel is charging $12.95/day for cabled 10baseT Internet access. Marriott bastards.

Once fed, e-mail read and LJ updated, we stopped at our hotel room to drop off our bags and collect our cameras. cuyahogarvr conferred with the concierge who gave us superb directions and travel tips to get ourselves to the pier in Santa Monica for an afternoon of photography and site-seeing.


I took nearly as many photos of hotties in the area as I did of the sites themselves. God, it's fun being shallow. I'll do a mega-posting of those later when we return to DC next week.

The beachfront and pier visit were... interesting. There was an incredibly powerful wind blowing off the ocean such that I had to brace myself multiple times to take stable photographs. My beard was being blown sideways and I was whacked twice by bits of tree flying through the air. Worse, as we walked out on the pier, the wind was picking up the sand from the beach and effectively sandblasting all exposed skin. I'm still tasting mineral salts and sea salt in my moustache.

LA or Riyhad? Who can tell?

Once we got past the duststorms, the ocean was indeed lovely.


After spending some time mosying around the pier and its amusement park, we headed a couple of blocks inland (and sheltered from the wind) to walk along the 3rd Street Concourse before stopping for a drink and rest. When we were ready, we boarded the Big Blue Bus #3 (only $0.75 fare!) to head back to our hotel where we napped lightly and watched a little TV while attempting to make telephone contact with misc local friends Peter & rexsteed.

There has been a conference for accessibility technology & the disabled in our Marriott the past few days and was in the process of wrapping up. Rumour has it that Stevie Wonder was attending although we didn't see him. Hell, I thought he died several years ago so what do I know? And I haven't seen so many dogs in one spot in years!

As much as I wanted to pet & play with the lot, they were all working dogs on duty so I --and they-- behaved themselves appropriately.

We had a small appetizer at the sports bar in the hotel, then spent at least two hours chatting with Betsy & Roy Gotta, John Marshall, Mary Hutchinson, Barry Clasper & canseefour before we all calld it a night and headed back to our respective rooms.