greetings from texas!

whenever i'm in texas on business, my first dinner is at pappadeaux. boston may be known for seafood, but for those of us who grew up on gulf coast seafood, boston seafood is crap. i start with a bowl of shrimp gumbo, followed by blackened mahi-mahi with a shrimp and crawfish cream sauce. can't get anything like it in boston.. (there are places that try, but as far as i can tell, they all fail miserably.. "blackened" is a novelty in boston. it's a base assumption here.)

of course, i wouldn't recommend ordering clam chowder in texas, either...

it's been a few years since i've been on a flight to nowhere. my last flight to nowhere was in 2004, and it went somewhere a few hours later. so, i guess i was overdue.

i just got off of air canada flight 7688 to nowhere, by way of a 20 minute holding pattern off the coast of massachusetts. it took an hour and 51 minutes from takeoff on runway 28 at montreal to landing on runway 24L at montreal. thanks to US preclearance, this lovely trip involved two stops at customs -- US customs before boarding, and canadian customs on my way out again.

the pilot cleverly flew halfway back to montreal before telling us what was going on, so we were starting our descent before we really had a chance to beg for free alcohol.

tomorrow, i get to fly home by way of toronto.

on the bright side, i get an extra starwood stay out of this.

after my last half dozen trips to montreal, walking a block and a half in bitter cold to work, then walking a block and a half back to hole up in my hotel, it finally feels like summer in montreal! i took an hour walk this evening, from my hotel near the bell centre up to the parks northwest of town and back. the streets were crowded, preparations for the jazz festival were well underway, and the restaurants had their outdoor seating open. on the way back, i took advantage, stopping near st catherine st for dinner, beer, people-watching, and a nice view up mcgill college ave toward the mountain.

why can't it be summer year-round in montreal?

finally ended up on a flight with gogo wifi. i paid for it more for the novelty than anything.. ($9.95 for flights up to 3 hours, $12.95 for anything longer -- so $9.95 for the flight from atlanta to boston)

i could see 3 other people on it from where i was sitting. the network quality was surprisingly good -- far better than the crappy wifi at the atlanta airport. no hiccups, quick response time.. someone in the row in front of me was watching streaming video sports highlights. i was just thrilled to be able to reload flightaware and see where i was, and keep a few things plodding along at work.

nobody was on skype. :-) they say "no voice calls" in their description of the service, but i don't know if they're actively blocked.

i'd definitely use it again. good day all around on delta, even tho i have no status there. clean planes, on time flights, exit row seats, and one of two flights had wifi. (aim for the MD88's -- they're "days away" from completing wifi installation on the MD88 fleet..)

there's something to be said for walking into a bar, and being offered the usual..

but i'm in canada! là où tout le monde sait votre nom, i guess.....

doesn't happen to me often, but this trip, i got sent to secondary inspection at montreal immigration. (this isn't customs, where they go rooting thru my bag -- knock on wood, i've never had that happen -- this is immigration, where they question your eligibility for entry.)

i've been there a couple of times before, and they're always professional, but very thorough. my visit took only about five minutes, but i was third in line, which cost me half an hour. i was behind a refugee and a couple of consultants in need of work permits. (i'm a consultant who doesn't require a work permit, which is why i get sent to secondary from time to time.) this has me considering nexus again. i'm going to be in montreal 10ish times next year..

i suppose i should also try to learn some french.

there are times i wish i was a photographer, and the first real snow of the season will usually do it.

i'm in a 22nd floor room at the marriott in montreal, looking west through blowing snow. there's a rooftop outside, about six floors down, playing host to a large canadian flag. it's a classic rooftop, in front of the modern bell centre, and it's a large, proud flag. words just don't work.

this is the first time i can ever remember that i can say i haven't had a caffeinated beverage in 10 days. i don't particularly miss it at this point.

- I got my 100th ACBL masterpoint
- my parents got their power back

i'm heading out of town tomorrow. i decided to print my hotel confirmation -- that's more effort than i usually take, but i'm not at my normal hotel. i printed it, looked at it, and noticed that it was for checkin yesterday. doh!

of course, there's a convention in montreal this week, and everything is sold out, so i'm at a holiday inn express 16 blocks away for $200+/night. i'll count my blessings, tho, the kind people at the marriott refunded my deposit. so, when in montreal, the folks at the marriott near the bell center (centre?) are really nice. :-)

i had a customer meeting in st louis today. i spent some time in the evening walking around near the riverfront -- the mississippi river crested here today. the flooding on the missouri side is restricted to the river road and about half a block up from there, because those last couple of blocks leading to the river are on a reasonable incline. the gateway arch is open, as are many of the businesses near the waterfront. but most of the people walking around were snapping pictures of street signs sticking out of the river. (i took a few myself..) but get a few blocks away from the river, and you'd never know anything unusual was going on.

i can't imagine what it's like in cities in iowa that took the brunt of the flooding. the sheer volume of water even here was stunning. (of course, the mississippi is impressive when it's not flooding..) the riverfront road is under a few feet of water, and it's fast-moving water. this riverboat casino floats normally on the water, but the landside building and parts of the loading bridges are in the river.

ahh, the airlines are getting fee-crazy... i'll miss most of them thanks to elite status (united 1K, here i come!), but at checkin today, the agent asked if i wanted to pay $50 to get on a flight an hour and a half earlier. i declined, on the grounds that i'd be better off enjoying an extra hour and a half of free alcohol in their lounge.

i'm now happier than i should be to see that earlier flight delayed.

once again, american has grounded its entire MD80 fleet. fortunately, thanks to a meeting in indy that ended up not happening anyway, i booked usair to indy instead of american to champaign/urbana this week.. flying usair means i actually got home today..

anyway, as i read it, american did some work related to an airworthiness directive. they complied with the directive, except that the method they used to fasten a bundle of wires wasn't exactly as described in the technical specification for the fix. they did this in 2006. it worked fine. it would have been perfectly reasonable to fix it overnight over the course of the next few days. but no, the entire fleet gets grounded on a tuesday afternoon... (at least american is clever enough to discover these problems on tuesdays, when passenger loads are lightest..)

the FAA is trying to make the TSA look good! i wish there was a way to get the FAA and the TSA in a match to the death. the only problem with this plan is that one of them would live....

saw something at bridge today that i've never seen before...

with no one vulnerable, and your partner dealing, you hold: (S) AQxxxxx (H) x (D) Ax (C) Txx

your parter takes his time making a bid. as you're busy thinking "hmm, do i open this at the 1, 2, or 3 level?", your parter sets a 2S bid on the table.. a 13 card fit!!

ok, i'm an obama supporter, but mostly, the coverage is just fun.

best quote of the night, from fox news: "if hillary wins texas and ohio, the democrats are going to need a trainload of aspirin and a shrink."

dumbest quote of the night, from cnn: "you can't win without winning."

best wine of the night: st supery sauvignon blanc

at the end of 2007, i was in a pretty regular exercise routine. kvarko turned me onto a couch to 5k program, and i was trying to keep with it. it took me longer than the program suggests, but i built up to week five, which involves running two miles. then i spent three weeks flying around the world, and completely killed the momentum.

today, i went to the gym, and week 2 kicked my ass. yikes.

i have never owned a digital camera, or even a camera phone. and there are very few times when i say to myself "man, i wish i had a camera right now". but i had one of those moments yesterday, walking around washington national airport. there was a gift shop there that had "obama for president", "clinton for president", and "mccain for president" t-shirts sharing a rack. on the next rack over, with a sign on top that said "clearance $2.99" were the "giuliani for president" shirts.

just got back (to southeast asia) from four days in china. i was amused by the stuff that wasn't available through the great firewall of china (livejournal, bbc) and the stuff that was (cnn, youtube). my vpn connection worked, so i *could* see anything i wanted, but it was slow, so i decided just to be amused.

the shanghai maglev was fun. the train leaves the airport every 15 minutes. mine was at 1:02pm. it accelerates. and accelerates. and accelerates. at 1:05pm, it's pegged on 430 km/h. there's a loud popping sound that lasts the fraction of a second it takes the train going the other way to pass. at 1:06, it starts to slow down. at 1:09, it arrives at longyang road station, 30 km from the airport. from there, it's 20 minutes on the subway into town. oddly, the train doesn't feel *that* fast at 430 km/h, until it slows down to about 200 km/h, and you feel like it's crawling....

the hotel we stayed at had a six-lane bowling alley, which we had to ourselves one evening. i played for real on one lane, and practiced lefty bowling on the other. i did eventually manage to roll a strike lefty, but i think if you try long enough, it will come randomly. the chinese in the group decided to play their own game. one would roll a slow ball down the lane, then another would send a rocket after it, and try to get them to reach the pins at the same time. sometimes it worked, and it was amusing. but more often than not, they failed, and the pinsetter gate would come down and take the force of one of the balls hitting it. if it was the fast ball, it was really loud. any US bowling alley would have kicked us out much faster than this one did....

ate lunch today at a KFC in shanghai. ahhhh, i needed a fix of greasy western food. by far the most crowded KFC i've ever been in. both floors. and there were more KFC's within a block or two in all directions.

i just spent three days in bangalore. it's dirty, the infrastructure is terrible, the people are aggressive, the traffic is the worst i've ever seen, and the poverty is always visible. so, after that, i scheduled myself to go someplace less like that than anyplace i've ever been. singapore! this is truly the anti-bangalore. clean, orderly, polite, convenient, and it's almost disney-fake at times. but going for a 15 minute walk in search of dinner is a perfectly pleasant experience, even if it does feel like june in houston outside....

Rush hour in Bangalore!

Everything shares the roads -- cars, three-wheel rickshaws, motorcycles, bicycles, pedestrians, fruit carts, dogs, cows... and they're all aggressive (except the pedestrians, who for the most part are not stupid, and the cows, who just want to graze). This city was really not ready for what the technology boom has done to it.

Many technology companies (including the one i'm visiting) are in walled-in campuses with heavy security. Right outside these campuses are people living in some of the poorest conditions i've seen in my limited travels.. I have a driver taking me from my hotel in the center of Bangalore to work and back. the hotel is in a compound, and the office is in a compound. and i'm not going to be here long enough to get outside of the compounds other than sitting in traffic.

and yes, there are signs around advertising immediate interviews for call center positions...