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...

i was handed a cool toy today. apparently HP sent us some rubik's cube knockoffs. one face has the HP logo on all 9 pieces, and the other faces all have black numbers on white background:

1 2 3
4 5 6
7 8 9

this breaks the solutions i've seen, which all consider the center squares to be static pivot points. but when the "5" needs to be lined up correctly on five faces, things change. i'd get to a good state on the top two layers, then work on some of the bottom pieces, only to find a middle-layer "5" had turned upside down. fortunately, repetition got me by, but has anyone heard of a directional-design-friendly solution to the cube?

i withdrew $100 at an ATM at the Montreal airport this morning. here's how that hit my US bank account:

10/17/2007 ATM Withdrawal DDA DEBIT $102.45

and the foreign currency transaction fee hasn't even hit yet!

I was talking to a coworker yesterday about his car. the inspection sticker expired last month, and he'd have to put more work into it than he wants to to pass inspection. anyway, on the way home, it occurred to me to wonder when my inspection expired. 6/2007. oops.

so i'm driving home in mid-september, panicking about my june sticker, looking for an open inspection station, and getting annoyed because they're all closed. it hasn't been a problem for the last 2.5 months, but of course, i was convinced i was going to get nabbed on the remaining ten minutes of my drive home....

this morning, i got my sticker. the guy who inspected my car said he saw a january sticker last week......

wow, it's august 18. the last time i was on a plane was a flight home from sarasota on july 18. yes, for the first time since years started with "1", i've gone a month without getting on an airplane!

as much as i travel, it's pretty impressive that i've gone about three years without getting stuck at a connection airport. i've had some hideous rebooks, but i haven't had to find that last hotel room near the airport at midnight in years. the streak ends today, tho -- usair stranded me overnight in charlotte. the experience proves my longstanding opinion of usair: they've got great frontline people who want to make your travel experience not suck, but to call the set of flights they run each day a "schedule" is really pushing it -- the operation is a disaster.

watching sports on TV today, and noticing how much better it is than watching sports on TV a few years ago. HDTV is obvious, and I've become more of a sports watcher since I bought an LCD. But a few other interesting technologies provide new looks at the same old stuff.

Wimbledon (and all of the grand slams) now have "Hawkeye", which uses calibrated cameras to track each shot, and compute the exact landing location -- in or out. It's considered accurate enough that the players themselves are allowed to challenge three calls per set, and the ruling is made by Hawkeye. In today's (incredible) men's final, Rafael Nadal won several challenges on some very close shots, including one that he probably challenged just to annoy Roger Federer. It worked -- Federer begged the chair umpire to turn the system off for the rest of the match...

This afternoon, there are a couple of golf events on, but I'm watching the one on CBS, because they've got SwingVision, a 1000+ frame per second slow motion camera focused on the players' swings. A single swing takes as much as ten seconds to replay, with telestrator commentary.

the spurs just won the NBA playoffs. i don't particularly care, but i happen to be in san antonio this week, which means i've been listening to car horns for the last three hours. why do people insist on driving around downtown san antonio honking their horns at 1am??

wow, sanjaya was terrible this week. and i can't get through the busy signals to vote for him! DialIdol suggests that he's having a bad week, tho.

it's kind of a backwards week -- lakisha was kinda blah, and phil stacy rocked. country week does weird things to the contestants, which is a good thing. at some point, they have to sing something out of their element. except sanjaya, who just has to prove that he can do something else with his hair. i liked the bandana, but he's going to have a hard time topping the ponyhawk.

meanwhile, i just bought a ticket to montreal for a daytrip on thursday. the ticket was a bit over $1000 round trip, for the privelege of flying 254 miles in the back of a regional jet. after picking my flights, aircanada.com offered me a $4 discount for not checking luggage. i'm not even staying the night, so i clearly don't need to check luggage, but i was torn between taking the $4 and checking in a bag full of bricks.