Monthly Archives: August 2009

Back home, all safe

Posted on by
Reply

I’ve finally made it home after spending the past six months in an aeroplane (or so it felt, really, I can’t quite put the memories together in a sensible way any more). My experiments into sleep deprivation ended after 30 hours when I fell asleep on my bed while trying to read a book.

After arriving in Frankfurt we walked most of the length of the airport, escaping many long lines of people actually trying to get into Germany and ended up in a line of our own. Once again I was security scanned and my stuff x-rayed just to make sure I’d not slipped anything naughty into my hand luggage between getting scanned in the US and sitting on a sealed plane for seven hours.

Then we went to the gate where I was once again security scanned to, once again make sure I’d not somehow constructed illegal fireworks from the contents of the duty free shops. This laptop has been X-rayed so many times I probably shouldn’t sit with it on my lap ;)

The flight to Birmingham was quite easy with free food and an irritating child sat behind me. Curiously to enter the UK they didn’t want to security scan me again, and merely stared at me, stared at my passport, stared at me again, scanned my passport and let me back in.

The best bit was that despite being a day late, the carpark didn’t charge me any extra, so we got into the car and drove back to Rob (my cousin)’s house just outside Derby. After a break I then set off to get back home.

I arrived home (after stopping at a services due to me going cross-eyed and filling up on coke and sugar, and then making an emergency pit-stop at the local Sainsbury’s for a pee) and found everything as I left it, with the added bonus of all my plants still alive and no bad smells.

Got to use next week to get sorted for work the week after, but since tomorrow is a Bank Holiday, it can wait.

Boredom at 10,000ft

Posted on by
Reply

I’m sat on the plane to Frankfurt, which has been in the air about four hours. Due to fantastic luck, not only are we on a large, ‘real’ plane, but me and Rob have managed to score front row seats for our section. I have tons of leg room and the toilet is right in front of me. As far as air travel goes, this is pretty good. If I had the right shaped thing, I could also power my laptop from the seat, and if I was loaded I could use the plane’s sat phone to ring an ISP and get online.

The plane has in-flight entertainment in the seats, but predictably, it’s broken. It comes on for a bit, then it crashes and switches off. Last time I tried I was given a Microsoft OLE DB error that looked suspiciously like the type of error you get on a webserver. I think the plane has a Windows server in it somewhere that the in-seat entertainment units stream data from using some crap embedded version of Internet Explorer. I’m sure it works very well in the test labs, but on a plane it just doesn’t work. When it does work it’s so laggy and slow there’s no point in trying to do anything with it.

For entertainment I resorted to trying to phone people using the sat phone in my seat. It sort of almost worked, right up to the point where it went *clang* and disconnected me. I didn’t swipe my VISA card through it because I’m not insane, but it did also let me ring the number directly.

Nearer to home

Posted on by
Reply

So, I am sat in Philly airport (gate A2 for the interested) waiting for my connecting flight to Frankfurt. Why Frankfurt? Because it’s the only flight going that way which has spare seats. Then we get a flight to Birmingham, and I pay more money for the extra day of parking.

Yes, about that extra day… Originally my flight from Philly to Birmingham direct was going to get in at 6:25am UK time. According to the new itinerary that someone invented for me, my Frankfurt to Birmingham flight would get me in at 9:20 on the same day. Despite me setting off a whole day later.

Last night I was sat in bed trying to work this out, and it made no sense. It made even less sense to the checkin desk people who found it quite amusing. The automated checkin machine printed to parts of my journey off and then shut down, evidently thinking I was insane. It seems that whoever invented my new flight schedule forgot the small fact that days are 24 hours long, and at some point you need to go onto the next one. So yeah, I would be flying to Philly at 6:45am US time, and five hours earlier at the same time I would be flying from Frankfurt to Birmingham. Then, later today I would catch another flight from Philly to Frankfurt.

I don’t think they managed to mess the space-time continuum up that badly in Star Trek.

Only pain in the arse is that I don’t have an European travel adaptor for my laptop, so when I arrive in Frankfurt I’ll have nothing to do. Maybe then would be a good time to go insane? I will get home at some point…