journal for 2003-10-16
road trip
We have begun our road trip—or at least we’ve begun to get ourselves in position to have a road trip. I got up around 0630 this morning and stumbled out of bed. Gloria had been up for two hours, already, and breakfast was served. We had the breakfast thingers from Hot Pockets and I had some juice. It was good.
I had put the things I needed to bring onto the coffee table, and I threw those in my gym bag, along with some random cruft that I thought might be useful. Unfortunately, I forgot to do a few things that would’ve been really useful. I didn’t bring my iPod-to-FW cable, so I can’t charge my iPod until we’ve got it in car. I also didn’t swap out the music on my iPod, so it’s still loaded with my “Rating Queue” playlist. That’s not so awful, but it means I don’t have the stuff I’ve already rated, much of which is good music for driving.
Anyway, we have the fifth Harry Potter book on tape, borrowed from Barbara the Ice Cream Lady, so it shouldn’t be such a big deal, in the end.
My mom picked us up and took us to the LVIP, where we got tickets and waited around for the bus. The bus ride was unexciting. I half-dozed and listened to my iPod, rating about twenty or thirty more songs. Gloria read; she’s reading Moving Pictures (of the Discworld series), and has been making pretty serious progress in it through the day. I brought Children of Dune and The Hobbit, but I haven’t taken them out of my bag yet.
We got to the airport without incident and checked in, and wandered around just a little before taking a seat at the gate. Security wasn’t a big deal; I beeped and they wanded me, but they didn’t have any questions about the pile of electronics in my bag, so that was nice. We ate some mini oreo cookies.
Our gate was changed, and then it was announced that there was some kind of problem with the AirTran computers. It seemed like a lot of people had been issued generic boarding passes because of it, and didn’t have assigned seats. Since we’d been early enough to get normal boarding passes, we got on and got seated. Everyone with stock passes had to find their own seats.
It’s almost noon, now, and we just took off a few minutes ago. Our ascent seemed particularly steep to me, but everything is normal, now.
I was flipping through the SkyMall magazine and I saw more ads for the Juice thing that lets you plug your laptop into a “standard airline power jack.” I don’t fly a lot, but I fly enough to wonder whether those power jacks even exist. My father says he’s seen them, but I haven’t. Maybe it’s because I always fly coach. It sure seems like a useful thing to have.
John C. picked up a PowerBook yesterday, succumbing to the collective Apple-mongering of our IRC channel. I think there are only one or two Mac-less people left there, and I think one of them is not likely to switch. I hope the new iBooks are out soon, so any insane rush for them can get over with.
I also wouldn’t mind it if it could hurry up and be October 24th. I started playing with Xcode, but when I compile Apple’s example code for “Hello World,” it doesn’t work. It works under Project Builder, but compared to Xcode, Project Builder is crap. Xcode and the related tools actually seem to be pretty a pretty nice IDE toolset, if you’re into that sort of thing. While I might investigate using Vim instead of the Xcode editor, it seems fine. I’m not sure I’d want to manage a large GUI project without something like it. Then again, I don’t have a lot of experience writing GUI applications. I think that I’ll start playing around with them more once I have a stable Xcode release that will at least compile Hello World. [[s2 …later… It’s 1424, and I’m sitting on the floor in the Atlanta airport while Gloria has a walk around. We just ate some Popeye’s chicken, which was pretty good, assuming you start out only expecting Popeye’s chicken. Our flight won’t leave Atlanta for hours, so there’s plenty of time to kill. I watched a few episodes of Farscape on the plane, and I’m watching another now. I don’t think I’ll work through all the episodes I brought with me, which is a good thing, since it means I won’t run out and go back to staring at the seat in front of me. I haven’t felt like doing any reading, and I don’t think I will.
Also: why doesn’t ATL have a wireless network?