Category: Weblog

Tomorrow will be Fair and Balanced day. Please take part.

I returned home after the plane ride, walked into the house and began sweating.
My assumption was the that the air conditioning was off, but when I looked at the panel, it was running.
After much investigation, I finally found that the entire chiller coil was frozen over with ice. Solid ice. I just spent the last 2 hours trying to defrost it.
The fan needs to run all night and probably all day to get all the ice melted and the water cleared out before I can turn on the AC again.
What a welcome home. Time for bed.

As I type this, I’m somewhere over the middle of America in the plane heading home. Unfortunately, I put the computer into standby and most of the battery drained.
Here’s a bit of randoms thoughts on my last five days in New York.
Friends
On Saturday night I arrived into town, checked into the hotel, and promptly found my self with nothing to do. I checked my email and saw a note from Keith at Unrelated News about Wifi access in the city. I gave Keith a call and we decided to go out and have some drinks.
The different thing about going out with Keith is that we had never meet before or even talked on the phone. Keith was the old room mate of James, my wife’s cousin. We had been reading each others weblogs for a while and exchanging occasional emails.
I took a cab downtown and met up with Keith in front of a bar. We grabbed some drinks and started chatting. It was like talking with an old friend. We knew what was going on in each others lives and were able to talk about past events. I had a good time. The fact that the internet had allowed us to get us to know each other fairly well before actually meeting was fairly amazing.
TIme to shutdown the computer due to battery issues. More later.

Busy day. Several different meetings in several parts of town. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in nice places around town.
New York is one expensive town.
OK, time to go out and smoke cigars.

WiFi access at the Starbucks at Central Park West is good. I’m sitting here with a coffee and obviously typing away. There isn’t much for me to do today, so I am going to wander around NY a bit.
Michele asked me to pick up some fabric for her down in the Village, but the store isn’t open yet. Perhaps they are closed on Sunday. So until I figure out what to do, I’ll just sit, surf, and drink my coffee.
My location and how to reference it in NYC is a bit of mystery to me. Supposedly this area is called ‘midtown’. I don’t know the zip code. Are zip codes important in NY? How will I find a movie?
There are three young Italian women sitting nearby. One of them has been ranting nonstop about something for 15 minutes. Every couple of minutes she pauses and says, ‘eh?’ waiting for the others to acknowledge here. They murmur something and then the rant continues. I wish I spoke Italian so at least I knew what her problem was. It’s really bugging her.

Currently I’m at 41,000 feet in a private jet. It’s 12:50PM PDT.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m flying to New York today. Yesterday I got a phone call from the company travel group and they asked if I wanted to fly out on the company’s private jet instead of on United. What else could I say but “Yes!”
This is one of the kick ass perks of being inside on the evil trans-national corporation.
I think the plane is a Gulfstream something. There’s about 10 seats and a galley. The chairs are more like Lazy-Boy recliners than aircraft seats. Each seat has a personal monitor jack for watching DVDs, music channels and even 110 AC power outlets. Everything is made of wood and leather. There are only 5 passengers, 4 adults and 1 child. It is quite a luxurious way to travel.
America is scrolling by beneath me, a patchwork of farms, desert, highways, rivers and mountains. This flight is not making me want to take more flights, it’s making me want to drive across the country and see all the things I’m flying over.

I’m leaving an hour for New York. I’ve got a business trip and I’ll be in NYC for a few days.
Hopefully the hotels and local hot spots will allow me to blog from Manhattan.
I hope my liver can take four days in The City That Doesn’t Sleep.

Wandering the net I stumbled onto a story about raising the Tricolor from the English Channel on Critical Section The Tricolor was a huge car carrier ship that sunk last December loaded with expensive European cars.
The way they are solving it is pretty damn cool.
Be sure to check out the whole Critical Section site. It’s a pretty cool weblog.

I finished my most recent book a few days ago and am ready to start a new one. On my nightstand is Illium, the new book by Dan Simmons. It’s a big book around 600 pages that will take me a while to read. I’m not sure I feel like a reading another long novel right now.
I am looking forward to the Tivo Hacks book, but it’s not out yet. I’ve looked over the table of contents and it appears to be chock full of cool stuff for me to play with. There’s another two books coming out, Hacking the Tivo and Hacking Tivo, but neither of them are out yet either.
I guess I could pick up the Google Hacks book, it’s out. But the Windows XP Hacks book, is you guessed it, not out yet.
Maybe it’s time to go off the normal path and finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, supposedly a great book on history.
What to do, what to do? Perhaps a trip to the library is in order.
Any suggestions?

I stumbled onto this at BBSpot. It’s amazingly funny.
That’s all for now. Back to surfing the web aimlessly for you.