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walbournSo my flights sucked. Todd's flight blew. His flight actually left Newark about 50 minutes after it was originally scheduled to arrive in San Antonio. I picked him up at the airport around 3:40am. Yaaaaay! (in the tone of Rejected) Thankfully my timezone shift combined with a nap meant I was plenty awake to drive. Getting up this morning, on the other hand, was a pain.
A piece of advice: if you can't avoid flying on the holidays, book as early a flight as you can. My first flight of the day was late getting in, and I'm sure that screwed up flights all day long. Getting up before 5am sucks, but at least you get there without so many oppourtunities for late equipment, incompetent airline scheduling and overbooking, maintainence problems, and screaming babies way past their bedtime.
In a break with my usual tradition of going to Austin for a few days, this year I headed to Houston. I hadn't seen![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hdan and Christy in some time, and cuddlyeconomist invited me to a Soltice party for Saturday night. The drive was long, but I was reminded just how long it had been since I visited with Mr hDan: last time I saw Jake he was a baby preventing Christy from finishing a meal. Now he's seven. Jebus does time fly.
While I was in Houston, I picked up a present from Ikea for my dad. He was interested in something up in Seattle, but shipping from Dallas or Houston was as expensive as the item. Since I had borrowed their truck for the trip, it worked out. The parents didn't get anyone a list this year, so it's been a challenge to figure out what the hell to get them. They also bought Todd and I a stupid-expensive gift each for our respective houses, so I didn't want to be too cheap in return.
I still hope to get at least a day-trip in to Austin and maybe stay Wednesday night (hi,maggiemaepisces!) before returning to SA for the flight home Thursday afternoon. I managed to get my Chuy's on while in Houston and we are doing Blanco in SA today, but Trudy's still needs to happen this trip. Migas!
PS: The modern Internet has become effectively useless without broadband. My folks have crappy country lines and their modem gets at best a 26 Kbps connection--you can find out what a telephone has to do with Internet access by searching Wikipedia's historic entries. Trying to get their computer updated with Windows update is a futile exercise. I gave up on it when even the dumbass Windows Genuine Advantage ActiveX control required update made zero progress in installing after 15 minutes. I'll have to wait until XP Service Pack 3 comes out to efficently get all these updates onto shiny media and ship it to them. On the other hand, at 26 Kbps, no botnet would want to p0wn this machine. Heck, it wouldn't respond before they timed out and assumed the IP address was dead.
Update: Huh. After 30 minutes I got WGA installed and it turns out their computer is up-to-date except for the monster Office 2003 SP3 (110 MB). I guess BITS (Background Internet Transfer Service) did it's job given that they don't leave it logged in overnight for Automatic Updates to work. That will be easy to grab when I get real Internet access.
A piece of advice: if you can't avoid flying on the holidays, book as early a flight as you can. My first flight of the day was late getting in, and I'm sure that screwed up flights all day long. Getting up before 5am sucks, but at least you get there without so many oppourtunities for late equipment, incompetent airline scheduling and overbooking, maintainence problems, and screaming babies way past their bedtime.
In a break with my usual tradition of going to Austin for a few days, this year I headed to Houston. I hadn't seen
hdan and Christy in some time, and cuddlyeconomist invited me to a Soltice party for Saturday night. The drive was long, but I was reminded just how long it had been since I visited with Mr hDan: last time I saw Jake he was a baby preventing Christy from finishing a meal. Now he's seven. Jebus does time fly.While I was in Houston, I picked up a present from Ikea for my dad. He was interested in something up in Seattle, but shipping from Dallas or Houston was as expensive as the item. Since I had borrowed their truck for the trip, it worked out. The parents didn't get anyone a list this year, so it's been a challenge to figure out what the hell to get them. They also bought Todd and I a stupid-expensive gift each for our respective houses, so I didn't want to be too cheap in return.
I still hope to get at least a day-trip in to Austin and maybe stay Wednesday night (hi,
maggiemaepisces!) before returning to SA for the flight home Thursday afternoon. I managed to get my Chuy's on while in Houston and we are doing Blanco in SA today, but Trudy's still needs to happen this trip. Migas!PS: The modern Internet has become effectively useless without broadband. My folks have crappy country lines and their modem gets at best a 26 Kbps connection--you can find out what a telephone has to do with Internet access by searching Wikipedia's historic entries. Trying to get their computer updated with Windows update is a futile exercise. I gave up on it when even the dumbass Windows Genuine Advantage ActiveX control required update made zero progress in installing after 15 minutes. I'll have to wait until XP Service Pack 3 comes out to efficently get all these updates onto shiny media and ship it to them. On the other hand, at 26 Kbps, no botnet would want to p0wn this machine. Heck, it wouldn't respond before they timed out and assumed the IP address was dead.
Update: Huh. After 30 minutes I got WGA installed and it turns out their computer is up-to-date except for the monster Office 2003 SP3 (110 MB). I guess BITS (Background Internet Transfer Service) did it's job given that they don't leave it logged in overnight for Automatic Updates to work. That will be easy to grab when I get real Internet access.
