1. Eve6: "Rescue" (theme song for driving to the airport)
2. Death Cab for Cutie: "I will possess your heart"
3. Moby: "We are all made of stars"
4. The Decemberists: "Sleepless"
5. Enigma: "Mea culpa part II (orthodox version)" (theme song for Delhi)
6. Richard Strauss: "Also sprach Zarathusra"
7. The Beatles: "Love you too"
8. Paul McCartney: "Beautiful Night"
9. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Runaway"
10. Phoenix: "Love like a sunset (parts I and II)" (theme song for Guwahati)
11. Yanni: "In the morning light"
12. Third Eye Blind: "The Background"
13. Enigma: "The child in us" (theme song for Bagendoba)
14. The New Pornographers: "Adventures in solitude"
15. Neutral Milk Hotel: "The king of carrot flowers (part I)"
16. TV on the Radio: "Shout me out"
17. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: "Hysteric"
18. U2: "Where the streets have no name"
19. The Beatles: "The long and winding road" (theme song for Hill Cart Road)
20. Enigma: "Communion" (theme song for Darjeeling)
21. Heidi Enderson: "Reflections"
22. The Beatles: "Within you without you"
23. Claude Bolling: "Intime"
24. BT: "Content"
25. The Beatles: "Let it be"
26. "Clubbed to death", from the soundtrack for The Matrix
27. Alanis Morissette: "Still"
28. U2: "City of Blinding Lights" (second theme song for Delhi)
29. Enigma: "Following the Sun" (theme song for my flight home)
30. Alanis Morissette: "Thank U"
31. BT: "Satellite"
32. Robert Miles: "Red Zone"

The playlist isn't perfect -- some of the cuts are more abrupt than they should be, and I didn't spend any time trying to blend the transitions. (Had I actually edited any of the tracks to fit the playlist, rather than simply concatenating full songs, I would have chopped off the first ten seconds of "We are all made of stars" and the end of "The child in us".) Many of the songs on this list have deeper personal or historic meanings; "Rescue" instantly became my road-trip anthem when I first heard it in summer 2000, and my first experience with many of these songs date from the Commune Era a decade ago. "Beautiful Night" may have the strangest connection to India; I remember listening to Flaming Pie in the summer of 1998 while playing Civilization II, with the house closed and dark in the hot afternoon in a desperate attempt to keep the summer heat at bay, and hearing news reports on NPR of India and Pakistan's back-to-back nuclear tests as my mother prepared dinner.

I spent much of my free time this week working on the final preparations for my trip. On Wednesday, I made one last stop at REI to pick up chlorine dioxide water purification tablets, and beta-tested the tablets on Thursday. The water could have been worse, but it failed to live up to my high standards with its vague chemical taste. I figure if Willy can handle self-chlorinated water I can probably handle it too. I did laundry Thursday night and put Calvin to bed while Kiesa packed, then packed my own clothing and went shopping on my shelves for paperbacks to take for in-flight reading. On Friday, Kiesa and Calvin flew to Portland to visit Kiesa's mother; they'll return home the day before I do. I tried desperately to document my current state at work so my coworkers can take care of things in my absence and I can recover my state when I return. I bid my office farewell and headed home to finish packing and watch The Darjeeling Limited, which may not resemble India in any meaningful way, but it was amusing. I didn't get to bed as early as I had hoped, and slept fitfully before my alarm finally woke me up.

At least, that's the plan. I also know that no plan survives contact with the enemy.

I've now reached the point of diminishing returns in travel planning; there's only so much I can plan, especially when visiting a developing country on the other side of the planet. (Depending on the conditions on the ground, we may need to stay in Silurgi on Wednesday night and head up to Darjeeling on Thursday. If all goes well, we'll arrive in Silurgi at 16:55 local time, which may or may not give us enough time to get to Darjeeling all in one day. There are earlier trains, but it's not quite clear how long it'll take us to get to the train station in the morning, so caution seemed in order. Or maybe we'll find we get to the train station in Bongaigaon in time to catch an earlier train. A second-class sleeper berth -- which, I've been told, is the only authentic way to experience Indian rail travel -- runs about Rs. 108 for the 251 kilometers from New Bongaigaon to New Jalipurgi stations. That's about $2.34 at the current exchange rate. (I don't yet have a good idea what the purchasing power parity is, which would be useful for comparing prices relative to local wages, but is mostly meaningless for the actual mechanics of travel on the ground.)) There are a few gaps in my understanding that I need to fill (namely what to do for sleep at Indira Gandhi International Airport in the twelve and a half hours I have on Sunday night), but for the most part I think I know what I'm doing as well as I can before stepping off the airplane into the muggy Delhi night two weeks from today.

My major outstanding tasks involve planning my luggage (as little as possible) and buying the missing pieces in my surviving-a-developing-country kit. I'd like to pack everything in my Kelty daypack, which will barely fit into my carry-on luggage allowance, unless I fill it to capacity. I like the idea of not having to rely on checked luggage, especially while traveling internationally, and I especially like the idea of having a backpack as my primary luggage, but I'm not sure I can fit what I need into a scant 3100 cubic inches, and I'm afraid of subjecting my clothing to local dhobi-wallahs. India has its own exotic set of power plugs, requiring a new set of plugs to plug my dual-voltage hardware into. I also need to consider water purification (which basically boils down to iodine versus chlorine versus bottled water) and a set of locks for securing my luggage. (Call me paranoid if you like, but this is not the time when I want to use locks vulnerable to the TSA's skeleton keys.)

I finally got around to filling my anti-malarial prescription (Malarone), typhoid fever vaccine (featuring live, attenuated bacteria), and ciprofloxacin in case (when) I get traveler's diarrhea. (Eliciting an immune response and subsequent immunity from attenuated Salmonella Typhi is easier when not mixed with antibiotics. I read the detailed information, with footnotes, printed in eight-point font on the insert and was pleased to see that they didn't talk down to me, but I wondered whether I would have gotten more out of the text had it been targeted at an audience somewhat more general than graduate microbiologists.)

Jaeger's vast collection of Indian books

I've spent most of the rest of my free time cramming Indian history. With two weeks to go, I'm trying to add travel writing to my diet as I finish up Jaswant Singh's memoir A Call to Honour: In the Service of Emergent India, try to get back into the lengthy India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, and read next month's book club selection, The Dragons of Babel.

Thursday, 31 December 2009

My major accomplishment for the morning was getting up (after landing in Lincoln much later than I had planned) and eating breakfast. My major accomplishment for the afternoon was getting groceries. After breakfast, I recruited volunteers for meals and Yanthor solicited shopping lists from these volunteers before we set out in the cold for his nearby Hy-Vee. (It's a grocery store endemic in the American Midwest.) Lincoln was in the midst of a cold spell, with daytime highs barely creeping into the teens and piles of snow still on the ground from several weeks prior. We successfully navigated the snow-covered streets and icy parking lot and began trawling the aisles for fortifications.

I'm used to going grocery shopping with Kiesa, who has the layout of our local grocery stores memorized and sorts her shopping list in advance for optimal efficiency. Yanthor provided no such advantage, but we still managed to find the food we needed. (I also realized I had left my driver's license in my fleece, having used it to prove to the TSA that I wasn't a terrorist (because terrorists don't have state-issued photo identification) but not having identification didn't prove troublesome.)

Back at Yanthor's residence, I made coffee (having run out of coffee beans the day before) and set out to create my Dungeons and Dragons character. My brilliant idea was to hide the fact that I was an inexperienced roll-player by I creating a character who was inexperienced and impulsive. My rogue demon-hunter was loosely inspired by Wesley Windham-Pryce's first appearance in Angel. I created a noble-born third son who got bored with his position and decided to set out in search of adventure. He was impulsive and aggressive and not particularly perceptive.

Yanthor handed me a stack of D&D books and I figured out how to fill out my character sheet in the context of the game. My character became a level one human fighter with high intelligence and strength but low wisdom and charisma.

(Yanthor's stack of books were hardcover, and I stopped to wonder whether this was a cheap trick on the part of the publisher to extract more money from loyal fans for hardcover books, or whether it was a legitimate attempt to keep the books from falling apart under the stress of being stuffed into backpacks every week for years on end.)

As he was setting up his dungeon master paraphernalia, Yanthor realized he was forgetting one key thing: water-soluble markers for marking up his combat board so we knew where the walls and other terrain features were. I volunteered to find the markers he sought and headed out on the snow-covered streets in Yanthor's car. I visited Hy-Vee and Walgreens and failed to find suitable markers but did find them at the Super Walmart sitting in the middle of a field on the outskirts of town.

One thing I didn't anticipate was that Thax (my rogue demon-hunter; I couldn't come up with a better name on short notice) would become the leader of the band. Linknoid played a halfling and seemed to have even less of an idea what he was doing than I did. Humblik had far more role-playing experience but played a NPC-turned-player-character goblin who was more interested in mischief than adventure. Yanthor had the most role-playing experience but set out to be our dungeon-master. I tried to follow his guru lineage back to the source but it appeared that his guru had been playing D&D for decades.

Yanthor dungeon-masters at Megafest 8.2

We spent the remainder of the afternoon building our character sheets and set out to play after supper. Nemo arrived just in time to watch our modestly-multiplayer offline role-playing game. The adventure started slowly, as we settled into our roles and tried to figure out what we were supposed to be doing. As dungeon master, Yanthor wanted to do as much storytelling as combat but had the strange position of needing to shape the story to match what he had planned without constraining the players.

Humblik plays D&D at Megafest 8.2

The adventure finally came to our first fight as the clock crept inexorably towards midnight. Yanthor needed time to set up the combat, and there was a new year to count down to. (When the calendar on my desk runs out, I go buy a new one, rather than deciding the world is going to end.) I installed xdaliclock on Hobbes and watched the hypnotic numbers count down to midnight, central time.

Humblik and Amy at Megafest 8.2

(For the record, that's sparkling grape juice in the disposable plastic goblets, just in case anyone is wondering.)

With the new year properly welcomed, we turned back to the hard work of fighting the bandits haunting the road between two innocent communities enjoying an idealized version of medieval European life. Before entering combat, Linknoid's halfling set a trap on a path in an attempt to catch the bandits as they exited their camp. When they finally came into view (early morning, game time) my character awoke, drew his sword, and charged the bandits. Yanthor asked if my character was going to avoid the trap. I deadpanned, "The what-now?" And Thax entered his first in-game combat hanging up-side-down by his ankles from the nearest tree, perfectly in character.

We managed to vanquish the small band of bandits and take their leader captive, only to find out that he had further information to advance the plot, just in time to call the first segment of our adventure a success.

I still need to pick up my typhoid fever immunization pills and anti-malarial drugs, and get two more hepatitis A and B shots this month. (I originally scheduled the return visit next Monday, before I realized I'll be in San Diego for a brief two-day visit to the Mothership.) I still feel my tetanus shot two days later; I'm not optimistic that I'll be able to sleep on my left side tonight.

(In other vaccine-related news, yesterday The Lancet retracted a 1998 study linking the childhood MMR vaccine to autism due to a conflict of interest, lack of ethical approval, and misrepresentation. There's very little commentary I can add except to say that: (1) I'm an engineer, not a doctor or a celebrity; (2) in most if not all cases, I believe the available evidence unequivocally shows that the risk of contracting terrible diseases far outweighs the uncertain side effects; and (3) Calvin (and I) will be getting a full set of immunizations, even if I'm occasionally eight years late on my own tetanus booster. Please don't get me started on what I think about parents who choose not to vaccinate their children.)

Calvin topples the living room lamp

As Calvin became more mobile, he discovered the floor lamp in the living room and decided it would be a great post to use to pull himself up. Lacking a better way to illuminate the living room, and the time necessary to find an alternate lighting scheme, we left the lamp in place but tucked part of the base under the new entertainment cabinet, providing a bit of protection against Calvin pulling it down. At least, we thought it was keeping the lamp from falling over until Calvin pulled on the lamp enough to cause the base to crack. The lamp listed ominously for several days (barely propped up with the pack-and-play in the living room) until Saturday, when I pulled the lamp out to take a look and the base disintegrated. It looked like the base was built from an unreinforced concrete counterweight. I pulled a broken lamp out of the garage and managed to bolt its fully-functioning base onto the bottom of my otherwise-functioning lamp, then installed the lamp behind the couch where Calvin can't get to it. In general it works pretty well, but it doesn't provide quite enough light for our weekly videoconferences with Calvin's grandmothers.

On Sunday morning, Kiesa went to a baby shower, leaving me with Calvin. I had been thinking of trying to take Calvin on another hike (even though my last four attempts were less than spectacular), so as soon as Calvin woke up from his morning nap I strapped him into his carseat and headed to Rabbit Mountain. He was pretty happy at first but started fussing before I made it halfway to the Little Thompson Overlook. I pulled him out of the carrier, let him wiggle for a bit, and feed him a few cheerios (which he chewed and spat out; he did better with cheerios before he figured out he could push them out of his mouth after chewing on them) before putting him back in the carrier and pressing onward. This may not have been the right move; he started bawling by the time I'd covered half of the remaining distance. I thought my best option was to press on and try to feed him on the bench at the overlook. This proved far easier said than done; he drank only a few ounces of formula and continued bawling for fifteen minutes until a group of hikers with a dog arrived. Calvin was fascinated by the dog, distracting him from his suffering. (I quipped that Calvin wasn't enjoying hiking as much as I'd hoped, and the older woman in the group (whom I took to be the mother of the younger adult woman in the group) responded, "Give him twenty years.")

I wrapped Calvin in a blanket in hopes of providing a bit more protection against the cold and headed back to the trailhead. He fussed for a bit, then cheered up when I started bouncing him up and down, then fussed a bit more, and seemed to sleep for ten or fifteen minutes as I tried to hold him steady. He started fussing again when I put him back in his carseat but quieted down when I turned on the engine to head back home. (He was happy enough that I took a detour to wash Kiesa's car; he seemed sufficiently amused by the spectacle of being inside a car while it was being washed.)

Kiesa took Calvin for the rest of the afternoon, giving me the opportunity to finish the last half of the book club book, The Windup Girl. Overall I enjoyed the book, but I couldn't help but wonder if genetically-engineered megadonts would really be a better source of power than biofuels.

Kiesa gets up with Calvin every morning but Sunday, when I get up whenever Calvin decides it's time to get up, and Kiesa sleeps in. (He usually gets up between 06:00 and 07:00.) A month or two ago Calvin figured out how to take two-hour morning naps in his crib, and he'll often take an afternoon nap when he's at home. This gives Kiesa more time in the morning; she no longer takes Calvin to daycare before mid-day. (I still find that listening to the monitor keeps me slightly on edge; I'm still on call, noticing for any changes portending the end of Calvin's nap.) In the evening, Calvin gets a bath and a final bottle before going to bed by 19:00.

For most of the month of January, I felt like I was simply treading water, keeping pace but not really getting ahead with the things I wanted to be doing to keep myself grounded. It took me a week to decide that might be ok; Calvin gets easier to take care of every month, so if I'm keeping station now I might actually get traction next month, or the month after that. It doesn't help that I don't have a dominant winter sport; I hiked all three of Boulder's highest peaks in one day before Christmas, leaving little left to do in Boulder's mountain park. I can snowshoe, and I keep thinking about getting cross-country skis to let me cover a bit more ground. The snow that fell around Christmas never melted on the unpaved path I like to run on from work; it started as loose snow, then packed snow, and has now turned to ice. Elsewhere the dirt paths have turned to mud. On Tuesday I ran with my Yaktrax shoe chains, and today I abandoned running outside in favor of a treadmill.

Most of my available discretionary time is absorbed by my trip to India in five weeks. I'm working through a very long history of modern India (1947-present), and having actually purchased plane tickets, I need to start thinking about my actual schedule on the ground. I know I'm not going to make it through my reading list before departing, so I need to start triaging and picking out the more important books.

My day job continues to entertain, amuse, and occasionally frustrate me. I'm finally on the cusp of wrapping up a project I've spent a year on (an interim version is currently in use; I'll deploy the final version and hope I don't annoy too many stakeholders by the different design choices made in the final version). Today I spent much of the day looking at a strange bug that seemed to manifest itself as a heap corruption issue but turned out to be an uninitialized variable; the init function I was calling expected the variable to be zeroed, and my code didn't zero the variable first. (I knew it would be a stupid error but I wasn't quite sure where to find it.) The six-month review period officially ends tomorrow, so I spent some time today remembering what I did for the past six months and writing it all down in one place.

I'm never quite sure what each day will bring, and each week is an adventure, but the trend seems encouraging.

(Most countries I've traveled to never asked me to get a visa. My most complicated visa prior to India was Australia, where my corporate travel arranger applied online and e-mailed me something to stick in my passport. But no matter how complicated India is, it's nothing compared to the United States. I did not have to travel to the consulate, in person, for a face-to-face interview. Any further complaints I may have about the visa process are entirely hypocritical given my own government's xenophobic antagonism to visitors and immigration.)

(The more I learn about India the more I think I understand little bits and pieces of the country's reaction to the western world. India's colonial repression is still a recent memory, and India's stated goal of remaining non-aligned during the Cold War did not go over well with the "you're with us or you're against us" anti-Communist attitude permeating the United States. India wants to be a great power on its own terms, which means growing up and making its own mistakes without outside intervention. This means India doesn't care about whether I visit or not.)

I called Willy again on my Saturday night (his Sunday morning) and confirmed the dates. I had one more moving piece yet to nail down: whether I'd take a side trip to my employer's office in Hyderabad while I was in the neighborhood. (Where "in the neighborhood" means "on the same subcontinent", since the closest I'd get to Hyderabad would be Delhi.) This would confer one main advantage: If I could stretch my trip out through the next weekend, I could take advantage of the weekend-multiplier effect to get an additional two days to come home, rather than taking actual vacation days on the return flight. (I've also come to appreciate the benefits of visiting foreign offices to get a feeling for how people actually work on the ground, and seeing people face-to-face whom I would otherwise see only by e-mail is also useful.) The more I looked at my schedule and timing, the less this seemed like it would work, and I'd probably need to get a business visa. On Monday, I e-mailed my tech lead (to whom I had previously floated the possibility) my analysis and he agreed that it didn't look like it would work.

With everything resolved, I set out to look at flights on Monday evening. I had previously identified three direct flights from North America to India (on American Airlines, Continental, and Air India); most other possible flights involved a stop in Europe. For early March, the direct flights were the cheapest, and I had my pick of schedules at roughly the same price. American's polar flight from Chicago to Delhi looked like the best option for both schedule and price. I stared at the proposed flights for a few minutes while I contemplated my point of no return, then clicked "Go" and bought the ticket.

After buying the ticket, I had a bit of trouble navigating American Airlines' website to find my reservation info, and they didn't send me a confirmation e-mail, so I wasn't entirely sure I had a ticket. The credit card charge appeared by Tuesday morning, so I knew I hadn't totally lost the ticket, but I feared I'd need to call them to get the confirmation (as was Kiesa's experience with her concurrent airline reservation). I went back to the website on Tuesday evening and found the link I was looking for to find my reservation while logged into my brand-new frequent flyer account. (I finally got my e-mail confirmation late Tuesday night, twenty-four hours later.)

I have plenty of planning left to do on my trip to India (and plenty of reading to do); the tentative plan is to fly to Guwahati, swing by Willy's school in Meghalaya, and work my way back to Delhi via Kathmandu. I have less than six weeks before I fly halfway around the world, and it should be interesting.

Last Saturday I decided to label the forty-three unlabeled books in my collection, many of which joined my collection at Christmas. When I started printing LC labels, using 80-labels-per-sheet return address labels, I was so frustrated by OpenOffice.org's support for labels (especially my inability to import a long list of text to print on individual labels, or even copy-and-paste across multiple labels) that I set out on my own, using CSS to format my HTML to position text at the precise position on the printed page. This worked fine at first; I told my browser to suppress all headers and print at zero-inch margins and all was well. Last weekend it failed horribly; I couldn't get any of the browsers at my disposal to print zero-inch margins that were actual zero-inch margins, so I had to manually adjust the physical positions I gave in my CSS to match the arbitrary offsets given by my browser. This felt dirty but worked fine, but I knew I could do better.

Having rejected word processing systems for my label-printing needs (given the manual intervention required and the lack of accessible scriptability), I set out in search of something that I could generate from a Perl script and precisely control on-page formatting. I looked briefly at TeX, which seemed a bit overly-complicated for my needs, and realized I could do everything I needed to do in PostScript.

On evenings during the week, I downloaded and read PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook, then scanned PostScript Language Reference, third edition for specific information on picking page sizes and determining font metrics. (It's pretty cool that PostScript allows a single document to be reformatted to fit the media at hand, but my application requires prior knowledge of the page size.) I started banging out PostScript code, starting with a simple box and moving on to drawing a sequence of boxes outlining the labels on the page. (I don't want to outline the labels in practice, but it gives me a very useful way to see how well my printed output matches the sheet of labels.) I wrote a for loop in PostScript:

0 1 cols 1 sub {
  /x exch def
  0 1 rows 1 sub {
    /y exch def

    gsave
    left x hpitch mul add pageheight top sub y vpitch mul sub translate

    % Draw the bounding box
    newpath
    0 0 moveto
    width 0 rlineto
    0 height neg rlineto
    width neg 0 rlineto
    0 height rlineto
    closepath
    stroke

    grestore
  } for
} for

For those unfamiliar with PostScript, this may look like gibberish. PostScript is a stack-based language; each operation pops and pushes some values from and to the stack. The for loop takes a block of code, which it iterates through, leaving the value for the current iteration on top of the stack. Adapting to this way of thinking was an interesting exercise; I had to visualize what was on the stack at any given time, and I had the opportunity to write more complicated compound expressions than I might have otherwise attempted. (I'm also worried I ended up with under-documented write-only code; I haven't yet figured out the best way to format and document my code. Debugging was also tricky; I did find the operator to dump the current stack to the debugging console, which gave me enough information to figure out that I was drawing my box up from the current position rather than down as I had intended.)

To write the text, I added an array with the labels to print:

% Content to print on labels
/content [
(BL1130.A4 B472)
(DS406.B56 2009)
(DS406.B76 2008)
(DS407.G75 2008)
(DS436.T17 1999)

] def

Then added code inside my inner loop to index into the array, find the width of the string in the current font, and center the string horizontally and vertically inside the current box:

    % Write the text itself
    i content length lt {
      0 0 moveto
      content i get
      dup stringwidth pop
      width exch sub 2 div
      height fontsize add 2 neg div
      moveto
      show
    } if

    /i i 1 add def

That last line of code is the PostScript equivalent of "i++".

Those interested in reading my PostScript program for themselves may find my full code here: labels.ps. Further refinement is needed in the font selection, vertical centering, and automatic generation from the LibraryThing database, but I think it's a pretty impressive result for a few hours of work.

Wednesday, 30 December 2009

My day was dominated by my flight from Portland to Lincoln to begin Megafest 8.2, while Kiesa and Calvin stayed in Longview. After a leisurely breakfast (and my last hand-roasted coffee) at the Stone Estate in Longview, I managed to finish my packing. This involved a bit of negotiation and stuffing, since I wanted to pack exclusively carry-on luggage to save $45 in airline checked luggage fees.

The first leg of my flight to Lincoln was United flight 572, from Portland to Denver. (This time, it was mere coincidence that Denver happens to be my home airport; it was simply the most convenient way to get from Portland to Lincoln.) I ate supper and settled in to wait for my flight to Lincoln. I started out at the east end of Concourse B, then moved into the new regional jet terminal hanging off the south-east end of the concourse when my gate changed. We boarded quickly ahead of the 20:13 scheduled departure; the flight had only 22 people on board, giving us plenty of room to spread out across the CRJ-200. We taxied toward runway 8, then seemed to pull off to the side of the taxiway while other planes passed us. After a few minutes, the pilot came on the intercom to announce that an unspecified computer glitch was forcing us back to the gate for repairs.

I text-messaged Yanthor to let him know I would be delayed from my airport pickup as we headed back to the gate. We pulled up to a different gate than the one we left and stayed on the plane for a few minutes while maintainence arrived and started poking at the plane. They decided they needed more time, so around 20:45 we were ushered off the aircraft at gate B50 to wait for news on whether the plane could be repaired for our flight.

As we sat at the gate, United dispatch decided to update their flight schedule to show the flight as delayed, so their helpful automated system texted me updates on my flight delays. At least, the updates would have been helpful had they told me anything new; all I learned from the stream of text messages was that they didn't know anything either.

I charged my computer and had plenty of time to stretch while waiting for my flight. I thought about reading, but I had finished reading Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire as we returned to the gate and I wasn't really awake enough to parse very much text. The airport services closed down around us as the evening wore on. I contemplated my options; with Denver as my home airport, I had a car in the parking lot and I could drive home and come back the next morning, but the next flight to Lincoln was late in the morning and I didn't really want to go to the trouble unless they canceled my flight.

Maintainence took the aircraft out for a taxi to try to reproduce the original failure condition, but the results were inconclusive, so by 23:00, a new plan emerged: the flight crew would take the plane up for a quick spin around the neighborhood to see if the angry amber light reappeared, and if it didn't, they'd conclude it was safe to fly to Lincoln. (At one point, one of the pilots mentioned that he wouldn't time out until 05:00 the next morning, giving us plenty of time to get to Lincoln.) They left the gate and we continued waiting.

Around midnight, the airport started to look like a brightly-lit ghost town. All of the remaining United gate agents were clustered around our podium and looked busy, but it wasn't clear what they were doing. At 00:45 the news came in that we were going to fly to Lincoln after all. The plane returned, and after an orderly reboarding process we were off. Again.

Once we were in the air, we managed to avoid any further flight-related drama or delays. While landing in Lincoln, I saw the plane's shadow, cast by the light of the full moon, in the snow-covered fields.

We landed in Lincoln after 03:00 CST. I found Yanthor, who had fallen asleep waiting for me at the tiny airport, and waited for my gate-checked bag to make it through the luggage system. We headed to his house on the eastern edge of Lincoln, chatted for a bit, and went to bed. Kiesa's absence displaced me from my normally-scheduled basement guest bedroom; I ended up sleeping on the massive new couch encircling the entertainment center.

I didn't actually manage to call back until I was back at work last week. (Since we were out of town for Christmas and New Year's, we wouldn't have been able to accept delivery until last week anyway.) They had a Saturday delivery slot, which I accepted. Friday night I set out to clean out my old cabinet, consisting of a cabinet and a printer stand both picked up off the side of the road and a cheap Walmart bookshelf for storing DVDs.

The old entertainment cabinet

The new cabinet arrived Saturday morning just as I was sitting down for breakfast. One delivery guy noted how perfectly the cabinet fit in the space allocated for it, and the other delivery guy noted the straight shot into the house from the front door. I paid the balance on their hand-held point-of-sale terminal and wondered whether it was using a cellular network to verify my credit card.

(We configured the cabinet to match our existing living room furniture as much as possible, but once it was delivered I saw that the "wheat" stain was at least two shades lighter than the oak coffee table. In practice this shouldn't matter; the style is identical and it's close enough that it's hard to care.)

The newly-delivered entertainment cabinet

I set out to configure the cabinet, starting with the cable access ports. The salesguy told me the delivery guys would be able to cut my access ports, but I decided I'd rather do it myself once I had the opportunity to study the cabinet and how my A/V stack would fit in it. I visited my local hardware store to pick up a three-inch hole saw and returned home to modify my new cabinet. I cut one hole at the bottom of each cabinet and one additional hole in the middle of the left cabinet. I set up the printer in the right cabinet and the A/V stack (consisting only of my Mac Mini, a receiver, and a DVD player) in the left cabinet.

The new entertainment cabinet

I'm not totally satisfied with the placement of my speakers on the top of the cabinet (especially the subwoofer), but I'm not sure what my other options are. I was worried about the standing lamp, but it looks like there's enough clearance under the cabinet for the base of the lamp, and the cabinet may even keep Calvin from knocking the lamp over. I still need to tie the television onto the cabinet to keep it from falling over, though it's much harder for Calvin to reach in its current position.

I'm happy with the new cabinet. It raises the level of decorum in my living room and should serve us well for decades.

If you're already subscribed to my RSS feed, you shouldn't have to do anything for the new content to show up, though if your aggregator is caching old entries you won't see anything there. If you're not already subscribed to my feed, and you're into that sort of thing, look for the "RSS" links at the bottom of the page, or in whatever form your web browser displays the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" /> tags. Readers already subscribed to my entry feed may be interested in the brand-new comment feed, allowing you to keep up with what passes for discussion on this site.

If you're logged in while reading this page, and you look carefully at the RSS urls, you'll see an arbitrary 128-bit hex-encoded cookie in the url. (In this sentence, I'm using "cookie" in the generic sense of an arbitrary token, not an HTTP cookie.) This cookie allows my RSS feed to identify you and show your aggregator articles that might not be otherwise available to the public at large. This has its downsides: Certain RSS aggregators are known to have funny (and by "funny" I mean "broken") ideas of what a "private" RSS feed is. I spend a fair amount of effort making sure my online writings are targeted at the right audience, and all of this effort goes to waste when an aggregator decides to make my feeds searchable. (I rarely say anything about my job in public entries, but I say more where I'm fairly confident Google can't find it.) As a result, only world-readable entries (those one could read by visiting my site without logging in at all) are visible in their entirety in the RSS feed. Articles restricted to all logged-in users have their first paragraph included "above the fold" in the feed (up to the first blank line, which seemed close enough in practice) with a link to my site to log in and read more. Articles restricted to a subset of logged-in users have only a link back to my site.

(The same applies to comments. My "above-the-fold" parser isn't smart enough to find paragraph tags, but it'll find the first blank line and snip there for logged-in-user-only comments.)

Let me know if you run into any trouble with my feed. I hope this will portend a brave new era of RSS-based content aggregation.