Gessel On…

The Eat Vulva meme continues at the SFO RCC.

Inexplicably, flight 505 was moved from one empty gate in Denver to another empty gate a little further down.
And the herd said “Moo.”

SAME SEATS! Different plane. That was a new one: we got aboot 100 meters down the runway and slammed on the breaks. The check engine light had come on. So, back to the gate, new plane, same seats…. Try, try again.

One good thing about air Canada, they’ve figured out what to put in a seat back: AC power, USB power, and an in-flight entertainment system with good movies! Who doesn’t love Canadian movies?

The lovely Maria met me at me YYZ ORD gate and walked me to my ORD SFO flight. Alas she did not offer her number. Global Services is really easy to get used to.

Every week. Uh oh! Maybe the common thread in all my retarded flights is me?

First, UAL has done two things that are quite good:

• The ORD RCC’s former smoking room is now the “quiet room” with big barred out cell phone logos. It is quiet, and very pleasant.
• T-Mobile is FREE at the RCC. FREE! Finally. I’ve been hassling UAL through 1kvoice etc. and the RCC comment cards since about 2001 - long before they even had T-Mobile - to provide free 802.11 to their members. Other clubs do. They got into this big provisioning contract with T-Mobile (or something) and years of comments went no where. It has been about 5 years, maybe the contract is up, but for whatever reason finally there is free WiFi at the RCC. Yay!

Truecrypt 5.1a supports sleep mode! YAY! 5.0 did not, it would crash entering sleep mode. It’s a cool thing, but crashing isn’t. I like the idea that if my laptop is stolen, my info is very likely secure, but not so much so that I can live without sleep mode, even risking a freezy RAM-cicle recovery. I sleep it getting on and off planes all the time and now I can. I’m very happy with this release.

I’ve been going to Toronto every week. And every week it snows. Usually my flights are delayed, many times I get to the airport and it is clear and while I’m waiting the storm moves in and the cancellations cascade.
So far there has been 189.6 cm of snow here, putting this winter in 4th place in Toronto history. But tonight it snowed again, at least a cm, and that’d put us in 3rd place overtaking 190.6cm. The record was set in the winter of 1938-39: 207.4cm.

My job takes me to Canada every week lately. It’s always an adventure in the winter, but I haven’t been here absent a snow storm in weeks. Apparently this is the snowiest February in 117 years. Yay.

Back at yyz and yet another snowstorm.