End of year observations
Coming up on end of year. In no particular order:
My hindquarters have spent more than 50,000 but less than 100,000
miles in an airline seat on United during calendar year 2007. That sets my
2008 status at 1P. There were
33 days this year in which I stepped on a plane -- that's one travel day
every 11.06 days.
Along the lines of travel: Most severe delay for original flight
booking: 4 days (the February winter storm). Most severe departure delay:
the 3:59 ground hold in PHL this September. Favourite airport this year:
YVR. Least favourite
airport: PHL (IAD fought hard for the latter
position).
My cellphone decided to give up on life in DFW a couple of weeks ago. I now have a new
cellphone whose Verizon interface is severely impaired -- I can disable
voice mail reminder beeps, but not missed call reminder beeps -- cute,
considering if I have a voice mail reminder, I probably also have a
missed call reminder. So that phone's going back and for the first time
ever I will probably have to acquire a non-Motorola cellphone. Sigh. For
the record, I've pulled the Motorola documentation and have confirmed that
this limitation is peculiar to the Verizon firmware.
My laptop now has (and can use) 2GB of RAM, after several painful
kernel compiles that started out as simple ventures to
enable high memory and ended with the need to be on exactly 2.6.21.x --
later kernels hang for 2 minutes at a time (at boot and at other times) on
an apparent RTC problem. Turns out the vmware kernel modules don't compile
cleanly with modern gcc (just for extra fun), so I had to hack the installer
package (which requires me to reconfigure everything just to rebuild the
modules -- why?). Are we having fun yet?
Because my credit card bill for the month already looks pretty
miserable, I went ahead and acquired a shiny new digital SLR camera that I
am very quickly falling in love with. It's clear that I have a lot to learn
in amateur photography, but my early attempts are already producing
better-quality photographs than I've been able to achieve on a
point-and-shoot. Alas, it looks like I'll have to start toting two carryon
bags now to accommodate both laptop and camera when travelling :(
All is mostly well at this point. I hope the holidays are going well
for everyone!