A few weeks ago I took a business trip to Japan. The trip itself was grueling and incredibly tiring but the food was good. What really burned me up though, was the air travel. This was mostly on account of my fellow travelers more than anything else. If I hadn’t been sick immediately after the trip, first with food poisoning (which I blame on the airline) and then with some form of the flu, I would have posted about this sooner. Here are some rant-filled bullet points:

• Roll-aboard suit cases are exactly that. Do not assume, ladies and gentlemen, that they are also roll-while-on-board as well. It really sucks when you persist in rolling your suitcase around inside the plane. If you are physically unable to carry your “carry-on” suitcase all the way to your seat, then maybe you should rethink your choice to bring it. Next time pick it up or check it in! Argh!
• I get the feeling that some people still think airplanes are some sort of “experience”. By that I mean some passengers seem to really like to kick back, take off their shoes, and put all of their belongings in the overhead compartment. News flash “Bryce”, we can’t put all of our crap up there or there won’t be space for everyone else. This isn’t a damn bed and breakfast, it’s a metal tube full of people who want to get to their destination. Since you decided to put your suitcase, jacket, toiletry bag (separate for some reason), headphone case, and latest issue of Men’s Health up there, I have to put my one suitcase all the way in row 99. Thanks a lot, douchebag!
• Hey man, don’t think that just because you’re “really tired” I have so much sympathy for you that I’ll forgive the fact that you decided to take a whole bench in the terminal to lie down. Listen here “Bill” with the ‘Bama sweater and nylon pants, I don’t care. I’m tired too, but I’m trying to be considerate of the other 500 passengers waiting to get on the plane by taking up only one seat on the bench instead of 5 (and part of the aisle, since your “full figure” protrudes a little bit).

  When you wake up 5 minutes before boarding, I’m sure you’ll wheel your roll-aboard suitcase right to your seat, place it and your 3 other belongings in the overhead compartment, kick back, and have a relaxing trip. Until then, learn to sleep sitting up or take a walk around the terminal to stay awake!

Oh and yes, my pockets were full of Yen since all the change I got on the trip came in 10 Yen coins which can’t be exchanged anywhere. I’ve got to use more vending machines when I’m over there next time.

I had a hell of a weekend a few weeks back. 14 members of Fort Awesome (the alias friends from college go by, for those not in the know) visited Austin, and the Austin City Limits festival was in full swing as well. I had so much fun that weekend that my body took it out on me the following week. My plans for a post about ACL kind of derailed as a result, but here is where I set things straight. Without further ado, my ACL playlist:

• What Made Milwaukee Famous - only got a brief listen of these guys, but I did come to the realization that their sound is a lot more varied than I thought.
• Vampire Weekend - they basically played their entire album, and were a lot fun.
• Delta Spirit - my ACL buddies and I kind of wandered by the stage but we were pretty impressed with these guys. I definitely plan on taking another listen sometime.
• Gogol Bordello - I only managed to hold out for 15 minutes before I couldn’t take it anymore. These guys are just not for me.
• Hot Chip - they look like a pretty nerdy group of guys (we were joking half the time at how one guy looked like John Hodgman and another like Peter Jackson), but they rocked.
• N.E.R.D. - awesome show. These guys were every bit as great as all the hype. I won’t discuss the whole teenage girls on the stage thing (it was a bit creepy).
• Silversun Pickups - also awesome, although I think they turned up the noise factor more than usual. They also basically played their entire album (they’re only one, I think).
• Okkervil River - just caught a brief listen, but I did like what I heard. I also have to check out more stuff from these guys.
• The Raconteurs - I heard Gnarls Barkley rocked, but I was too busy having a blast listening to the Raconteurs.
• Foo Fighters - these guys did not disappoint. The perfect cap on a great weekend of music.

Overall, I managed to listen to quite a bit despite the busy weekend. I missed all of the second day of ACL, but to be honest nothing really grabbed me on that day anyway. This was my first time at the festival, but I don’t think it’ll be my last.

It’s been a few days, but I wanted to post something about my time at Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) last weekend with Riad, Gautham, and George. To sum it up, I had an absolute blast.

Being a fan of the web comic, all of the panels headed up by Mike and Jerry (or Gabe and Tycho, if you prefer) were a lot of fun, but I think the convention has so much to offer that even those who don’t really read Penny Arcade have plenty to do and see.

Highlights for me were:

• The keynote speech by Ken Lavine where he admitted to having a teenage crush on the Scarlet Witch (kind of an interesting statement in these post House of M days)
• The “make a strip” panel where they drew this past Mondays comic live
• Our pitch of Eco-Slayer in the “pitch your game idea” panel which really got the crowd going and scored us three honorable mentions. George wrote more about the experience on his blog here.
• Awesome concert performances; most notably the OneUps, MC Frontalot, and the Minibosses.

I also saw some cool games:

• Project Origin (which made me forget the ridiculous number of keyboard commands I needed to play it’s prequel: F.E.A.R.)
• Little Big Planet
• InFamous
• Resistance 2 (well, the multiplayer part of it )
• Gears of War 2 (cool, even though I don’t own an Xbox 360 (yet…?)
• Tom Clancy’s HAWX looks like the first cool flight game I’ve seen in a long time (no, I’m not counting Warhawk in that category)
• Mirror’s Edge (I actually managed not to barf while watching someone else play)

I also got to try Brawndo and now have a better understanding of why plants crave it so much. I think I’ll probably head back next year too and in 2010 there’s going to be a PAX East in Boston which would make for a pretty awesome time as well.

Sometimes I hear theme music or soundtracks for anime series re-purposed or played in odd places. This time it was at the Olympics. Watching the swimming events tonight I heard a snippet from the Naruto soundtrack, a song called “The Raising Fighting Spirit”. It was weird to hear that on NBC…

You can listen to the song here.

I just returned (a little while back) from a week-long trip to Spain with the family. In summary, we had a good time! This was actually my second trip to Spain. Even though I saw some things for the second time, things seemed altogether more interesting this time around. Maybe it’s because I’m a little older, I don’t know.

The grave of Christopher Columbus
(inside the metal “casket” held up by the statues).

We started off in Madrid then headed to Granada with a quick half-day stop in Toledo (where everyone tries to sell you a sword). From Granada, where the famed Alhambra stands, we headed towards Torremolinos. Torremolinos is a beach town on the “Costa del Sol”. Our hotel there was almost right on the beach.

On our second day in Torremolinos, we decided to head to the UK! Well, Gibraltar to be exact. Contrary to popular opinion though, Gibraltar is more then just the rock, there’s a pretty interesting town built around it. There’s quite the friendly group of Barbary Macaques there, who won’t hesitate to jump on the backs of tourists and invade cars for food. My time on “The Rock” was probably my favorite part of the trip.

From Torremolinos we headed up to Seville where we saw a Flamenco show and enjoyed other typically Andalusian sights and sounds. We then headed back to Madrid where we spent the last day of the trip.

Photos should be up soon, although I have several panoramic ones that I need to stitch together. Look for those later on.

Owning a home has presented quite a few challenges for me since I moved in last year. Some have been small like replacing bathroom fixtures while others have been tough enough that I need to call in the cavalry. In particular, I always see to be fighting the local fauna like it’s some damned post-apocalyptic nightmare!

Here’s the body count from 2007:

• Qty. 1 Scorpion who greeted me on my first night in the place - Saved by my naive mercy
• Qty. 1 bee colony of over a thousand bees - DEAD (required hiring people in bee suits)
• Qty. 4 wasp nests in the attic and periphery of the house - DEAD

For 2008

• Qty. 1 baby rabbit - DEAD/DECAPITATED, by the sharp edge of my lawn mower blades (relax, it was an accident)
• Qty. 1 bird rotting inside the wall outtake for my dryer - DEAD & BLOATED

The bird thing happened today, while the unfortunate rabbit incident of 2008 happened a couple of months ago. Fall and winter tend to bring out more critters in my neck of the woods so we’ll see what the year-end body count will be.

What’s the worst email exchange you’ve ever had with a colleague or co-worker? Today, I think I might have hit an all-time low in that category. Essentially, I traded 6 emails with someone this morning who argued semantics with me about a statement I made in another email.

In the end, and what really made the whole thing ridiculous, is that the person didn’t actually read the entire email in question. They picked out one snippet (actually a grand-total of 3 ASCII characters; without the all-important words before and after it), and then tried to verbally beat me with it for the better part of the morning. Ugh.

After doing some polite maneuvering to get the person to realize what a bonehead they were being, I felt completely dead by 10am. Not only that, but I got no apology, retraction, etc. whatsoever after the fact.

I was so bewildered, I walked around the halls near my office like a ghost for like 5 minutes this morning contemplating how crazy the last hour had been. What a waste.

For pretty much all of my life I’ve been able to “re-pressurize” my ears. For example, when I’m on an airplane or SUBA diving. I thought it was something similar to being able to wiggle your ears, except you can’t tell from the outside that I’m doing anything. I never thought much of it, but I got curious and started doing a little research a few weeks ago. (using the perennial favorite Wikipedia).

Well, I actually started with Google, since I had no grasp of the vocabulary needed to find out what’s going on when I “re-pressurize my ears”. In the end, it all comes down to a part of the ear called the Eustachian tube. Each ear has one, and they are responsible for equalizing ear pressure. They tend to do this naturally through muscle movements in the neck during yawning or swallowing.

The cool part is that some people can move these neck muscles voluntarily, allowing them to re-pressurize at will, like me.

My mom on the other hand has always had a hard time on airplanes because of the long time it takes her ears to re-pressurize in the air or even when she finally gets off the plane. A little further research shows that there are two popular ways to do a “manual override” of sorts for people to re-pressurize more quickly. One is called the Valsalva maneuver (the good old “pinch your nose and blow” move).

The other is much cooler, called the Frenzel maneuver. The Frenzel is totally hands free, safer to perform, and also has no outward signs of your re-pressurization. The history on it is pretty interesting too, the Wikipedia article on it is here. I can’t wait to show my mom!

Some lessons I learned over the last couple of laptop iterations (avalanche and rockslide):

• Size and portability are probably the highest priority
• I can sacrifice a little bit on the portability side if the hardware performance is a bit better
• Linux compatibility is quickly becoming a bigger deal for me. I don’t quite have the patience anymore to put in tons of effort to get my damn card reader to work
• Glossy screens have a lot of “pop” but the glare is really annoying (a universal truth at this point, I think)
• No one should be afraid of running 64-bit linux. It works like a charm.
• You don’t need a 32-bit chroot to use Flash
• Averatec laptops are cheap and on the surface that’s no big deal given the specs they tout, but they won’t last nearly as long as some of the more established brands.

Did I mention that rockslide is an “N Series” laptop? That is, I bought it with Ubuntu pre-installed. No Windows Vista!

A couple of months ago I noticed my laptop, called avalanche, was starting to behave erratically. That is, on wake-up from hibernation or just a cold boot-up the BIOS would randomly choose a different boot device.

I spent a chunk of time checking out my hard drive connection and making sure the guts of my system were doing all right through visual inspection and software tests (hdparm, SMART, etc.). In the end, I can pretty much chalk the problems with the thing up to the BIOS itself.

At this point, I thought to reflash it, but I was also coming to the realization that maybe it was time for this one to go. It wasn’t just the BIOS issue though. The built-in wireless has also been on the fritz for far longer than I’ve had the BIOS issue. In the end, I was upset at the useful lifespan of avalanche.

Avalanche is an Averatec 3715EH1. It’s definitely a budget laptop, but I got a lot of bang for my buck and it was compact. That being said, I did probably get exactly what I paid for in that it started exhibiting problems sooner than the old Dell I had before it (and which I still use in a backup sort-of role).

About a month ago, I bought a new Dell laptop to replace avalanche. I agonized a lot about what I wanted in a new laptop and ended up getting an XPS M1330. It’s not quite as a light as avalanche, but it is thin (not Macbook Air thin, but pretty thin).

I’m pretty satisfied so far, not to mention all of the hardware in it works pretty much out of the box with Debian. I’ll post more on some other laptop lessons I learned later. Oh yeah, I named the new one rockslide.