Perpendiculous Programming, Personal Finance, and Personal musings

2008.06.09

Congratulation!

Filed under: Personal — cwright @ 4:38 am

(Title intentionally left singular) Every now and then, a person experiences a day that stands apart from the rest. While trekking to San Francisco for WWDC, I have had to opportunity to have such a day. And I’m only in Denver (and will be for at least the next 4 hours!).

The trip started as any other. On a plane, departing from Columbus and heading to Denver, to ultimately connect to San Fran. At the Columbus airport, I had the privilege of waiting in line to get my boarding pass. Somehow, I’ve been lucky enough to never really need to do that before. Not the most exciting way to spend time, but it works in a pinch I guess. We also learned that our Denver-to-SF flight was delayed a bit. No big deal, we’d cross that bridge when we came to it.

En Route, we encountered a massive storm. Weather radar indicated that it was a very large storm, sweeping from Minnesota to Oklahoma. Our flight was right through the middle of it. We played chicken for a bit, and tried to stare it down, but ultimately we had to change our course. So much time was spent trying to trick the storm into moving out of our way that we exhausted most of our fuel, and had to chill in Dallas for a while to regroup, and wait it out. An hour and a half or so on the runway there, and we were refueled, restocked, and ready to resume our trip to Denver. By that time, we were over 2 hours late, and missed even our delayed flight.

Inside the plane was equally bizarre. Anyone who remembers way back to Youth Conference will remember that I _Always_ got stuck in the middle of the back seat, squished between two other people. Airplanes are no different, and I earned the middle seat in our group of 3. On my right was smokris, and on my left was a guy heading home to Denver after visiting Columbus for his brother’s graduation. This guy was nice, but a bit clumsy. While I was putting some finishing touches on a hybrid Kineme3D/ParticlePatch combination, he managed to spill water and ginger ale on my laptop. The Left-hand side of the keyboard is still a bit sticky from this mistake, but I don’t think any long-term harm was done. Somehow I lucked out and actually got a TankBook: I’ve dropped it from waist-height onto concrete, I’ve stepped on it, sat on it, carried it in the rain, and now this, and it’s never complained. But that’s only half of it. Later on in the flight, while I was chilling to some newly-obtained Infected Mushroom tunes, he managed to spill his drink all over my pants. That’s right, he spilled his drink on me _Twice_ on one flight. I didn’t mind (it was kind of nice to have a cool splash after being in a stuffy plane for so long), but I think he was exceptionally embarrassed.

After missing our flight and landing around midnight, we had to leave the security-cleared area to go to Customer Service to get our boarding passes reissued. I discovered that due to the hour, my bags were being held hostage, and I couldn’t get any snacks or new clothes because of that. That was discovered only after waiting in line for over an hour, of course. We were given a chance at leaving at 6:00am (4.5 hours later, by that time), and a certain departure time at a bit after 2:00pm. Looks like we might be spending 12 hours in Denver on layover. New personal record.

Once our passes were renewed, we needed to go back through security. There was only one lane open, and no line, so that was nice. But I got yet another surprise:

“Congratulations Mr. Wright, you’ve been randomly selected to go through Additional Security Checks!”

Thankfully, I had packed my laptop and some other small gear in smokris’ carry-on so there was less gear to inspect. I managed to sneak through the metal detector with my cellphone in my pocket (but not my belt), but yielded it to them for inspection as well, just to play it safe. I was groped by a gloved mystery man, and had to walk all over to watch another gloved man wipe white noxema-like pads all over my gear to pass through an IonScan or something to sniff for exciting chemicals. Unfortunately, nothing exciting was found, and my stuff was returned to me posthaste.

That’s about it thus far. It’s 2:36 (MST, so something like 4:36 EST), and we’re going to whip up some releases tonight to kill time. Hopefully we’ll be out by 6, but if not, I’m sure there will be more excitement to be had from living in an airport for half a day. Stay Tuned!

2 Comments »

  1. Shit. I guess that means you’re missing the keynote about Cocoa Touch and iphone apps. 🙁

    Sorry.

    Comment by mradcliffe — 2008.06.09 @ 1:43 pm

  2. We made it. Just in time. Luckily, the keynote was way more boring than the following sessions, so even if we had missed it, we wouldn’t have missed much 😉

    (in other news, kineme is once again dead. Just like when Leopard came out…)

    Comment by cwright — 2008.06.09 @ 7:57 pm

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