Last night I had the strangest dream I ever dreamed before.
Well, not exactly. But I dreamt that Yahoo bought Google.
That's funny for a lot of reasons. But it was pretty cool in the dream.
I'm still on West Coast time. I managed to sleep until roughly 11:30am this morning. Grr.
For a long time, I was a loyal patron of the Northwest, Continental, America West family of airlines. I started flying with them for my old job (Columbus to Houston maybe 8 times), flew to Japan in 1999, various trips to the east cost on Continental and generally managed to accumulate frequent flyer miles. It was good. I was happy.
I have enough miles now to go anywhere in the US, round-trip. Twice. I should really use them one of these days. But for the last 2 years, all I've flown is American Airlines. Let me tell you why.
American (and American Eagle) flies where I want to go. Most of my flying now is from San Jose to either San Diego (OSCON for 2 years) and Toledo, Ohio (family visits a few times a year). When I used to fly Continental out of San Jose, I had to fly into either Detroit (via Northwest) or Columbus on Continental. That sucks. It means a 1 or 2 hour trek to Toledo from there. By flying into Toledo, my parents can fetch me at the airport in about 10 minutes.
More room in coach. It's not just a gimmick. There really is more room in the coach seats. It makes a difference, especially when you're using a laptop. When you're sitting in the same little seat for more than 3 or 4 hours, it's really nice to be able to stretch your legs a bit.
Laptop power at the seats. Every American flight I've been on has laptop power available (via a standard automotive-style cigarette jack) in most rows. In the front of the plane, nearly every row has them. As you go back they're a bit less frequent. But I never seem to have much trouble getting into a row with power. It has been a problem only once.
With power at the seat, I can work on my book or magazine articles, code, blog, listen to CDs or MP3s, and so on. I could tolerate an 8 hour flight with a decent power supply. I can't imagine why the other airlines haven't caught on yet. This is the only way for a geek to travel.
On a related note, it's supposed to hit 75 degrees today in Santa Clara. I have a feeling it'll be in the 30s or 40s when I land in Chicago and again in Toledo.
I had forgotten how COMPLETELY INSANE my life is on the day before a trip. Wow. Non-stop crazyness. I've got a ton of crap to do tonight when I get home. Luckily, I can skimp on sleep and snooze on the 5-6 hours of plane rides that I'm in for.
Sigh. For most of the day I thought it was Saturday, only to eventually realize that tomorrow is Monday, so today must be Sunday. I hate it when that happens.
Ah, well. It'll be a short week for me, work-wise. I'm at Yahoo on Monday and then it's off to Ohio for a week starting really early on Tuesday morning. It's the normal San Jose to Chicago to Toledo route I'm so familiar with on American Airlines.
In other news, I'm weird. According to my sister, who recently said this in e-mail: "Why do you have something about your trip to the dentist on your web site?? You are weird!"
At least little has changed since I was ten years old. :-)
I guess that means she discovered my weblog. The big question is whether to bother trying to explain it over the holiday. If I do, I'll probably also end up having to explaining it to my Mom as well. And it'll mean having to answer the "who would ever want to read about that?!" questions.
Is it just me, or does the Free Software Foundation not get the web? I've seen amateur projects hosted on SourceForge that do better than the FSF sometimes.
Here's an example. I'm having problems building some software. I suspect that I need a newer (or older) version of GNU Bison. So I find the main page for it here. Does it tell me what the most recent version is? No. Does it tell me when it was released? No. Does it tell me what the recent changes in the last few releases were? No.
What the heck?
Okay, it does tell me that I can find alpha/beta releases at [some url] but they don't even bother to make the URL a hyperlink! That's right, I'm supposed to cut and paste it into my browser's address/url input box. All of the help related e-mail addresses on the page have been obfuscated. Really. Go look.
Yes, these are the same people who want Linux to be called GNU/Linux.
There's a reason that most project web sites have certain pieces of critical information on the main page--project news/announcements, releases, screen shots (if applicable), features, e-mail, bug tracking, etc. This isn't rocket science anymore, it's well-traveled ground.