…for a website to be as unreliable as United’s.
Imagine running airplanes with the same level of reliability.
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Here are the photos from the Zero-G flight I took today.
Years ago at a small event the give-away schwag was an insTand portable laptop tripod. We set it up once, couldn’t figure out how to break it down again, and put it the first of a series of storage closets. We’ve lived 9 places in 10 years, I’m sure it’s been transported between at least half of them.
Anyway, during this last trip back to Santa Barbara it occurred to me that this little stand would be ideal for my wife, who likes to use her laptop in the living room of the apartment we’re renting near Boston. So I finally figured out how to break it down and set it up again, then stuffed it in a bag that I carried here to Las Vegas, en route back East.
A few minutes ago I decided to use it here at my hotel, where, as always at hotels, the desk is uncomfortably high, and was giving me shoulder cramps.
Now I wish I had discovered this thing years ago. Yes, it’s a little shaky (it’s very light), but that’s my only quibble. Otherwise it does a great job serving as an artificial lap that stands between my knees while I sit upright in a comfortable chair. (This hotel has one of those, at least.) Since the flat part of the stand that supports the laptop is aluminum and open underneath, it makes a good heat sink and keeps the hot bottom of the laptop off my legs. And it can be adjusted not only for height but for angle as well. Pretty slick.
Even at the $99 list price, I’d say it’s worth it. And I’m betting that there are plenty of discounts out there.
In any case, the insTand may be the most useful piece of schwag I’ve received. Highly recommended.
| The powers that be at the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Administration (PHSMA) have determined that batteries are a potential fire risk. As a result, you will no longer be allowed to bring spare batteries in your checked luggage. |
| Batteries actually installed inside devices are OK, and most spare batteries in your carry-on are fine, too. But carry-on batteries are now governed by a complicated new set of rules. |
| You can carry batteries with 8 grams of lithium or less in them in your carry on bags. They now, however, must be carried now in plastic bags. Cell phone, PDA and other gadget batteries, plus most laptop batteries, contain less than 8 grams of lithium. |
I carry lots of batteries with me. Spare laptop batteries, rechargeables, and the usual disposable kind included. And I haven’t run across any trouble so far. But I haven’t flown since January 1, when Mike published this.
Gordon Haff unpacks the rules a bit more, saying,
| The “two-battery limit” applies only to lithium ion batteries with more than “8 grams of equivalent lithium content, (which) is approximately 100 watt-hours.” The Reader’s Digest version is that this limit roughly corresponds to the largest notebook batteries. |
| In other words, this limit shouldn’t much affect most travelers because there’s no limit on typical camera, cell phone, toy, and notebook batteries. So what is affected? Things like external notebook and professional videographer batteries. (I suspect that independent videographers will be one of the groups this new rule could inconvenience.) |
| One issue is that implementing the rule in the field is basically impossible, unless the screeners are just given some rule of thumb like “no limit on notebook batteries or anything smaller.”… |
| Finally, I think it’s worth noting that–much fevered commentary aside–this is not some new inane security rule. It’s a response to lithium batteries being suspected as the cause in at least one cargo plane fire. |
In practice, how will the TSA people know what the right size battery is? I guess we’ll see.
Anybody experience problems with this yet?
As it happens I don’t have any big spare laptop batteries with me, this time. But I do have a pile of little rechargeable ones. We’ll see how they do on Friday at LAX.
Every year I go on a pilgrimage to CES, on behalf of Linux Journal. Some examples are here, here, here and here. This year I don’t want to work solo. I’d rather to do it as a team. Or as a social network. Or as a set of overlapping social networks. Or graphs. Or whatever we’re calling them now. Toward that end I just posted Hunting Linux at CES. It lists some of the many companies that bother to mention that they’ve got a Linux story of some kind. There are many others too, I’m sure. Linux is so commonly used that I think we can use it to cast a pretty wide topical net.
What I’m thinking is that we can put together some docent tours of some of the halls, and hit not only my Linux targets, but some other fun booths, sites and events along the way. (The docent idea, by the way, is Dave’s. The Linux angle is mine.)
We have a wiki, which just got going. I’m sure we can get even more creative, and have fun in the process.
Looking forward to whatever we can do, whoever we happen to be.
I’ll be driving in the rain to Las Vegas today (it’s already 1:07am), but checking along the way. And I’ll be at the show through Thursday morning.
The SFO site is down, pretty much. It says,
| www.flysfo.com is currently unavailable. Please check back soon for our full site. |
| Due to current weather conditions many flights are delayed. Please contact your airline for flight status. |
That’s about it.
The FAA has every airport in the the southwest (California, Nevada, Arizona) marked orange, meaning, Traffic destined to this airport is being delayed at its departure point. Check your departure airport to see if your flight may be affected.
Specifically, it says this about SFO:
| Due to WEATHER / WIND, there is a Traffic Management Program in effect for traffic arriving San Francisco International Airport, San Francisco, CA (SFO). This is causing some arriving flights to be delayed an average of 2 hours and 5 minutes. To see if you may be affected, select your departure airport and check “Delays by Destination”. |
Dave Sifry piped together this storm info page. Ignore the map and click on the List view (which lacks its own URL, unfortunately).
Here’s the RSS feed. Helpful stuff there, including the Red Cross Chat blog‘s Super Storm in the West post, which pionts to the Red Cross Twitter channel (which isn’t being kept up, near as I can tell), among other places. Thanks to Dave Winer for tweeting help on that one too. Among other things, for the NOAA’s NWS RSS Library.
The storm hit Santa Barbara several hours go, and is quite impressive. I’m sure nothing is flying in or out, which is meaningful to me at the moment because in the morning the whole family is due to depart, some by plane and some by car. Should be a mess either or both ways.
That was the sunrise on New Year’s Day here in Santa Barbara. Here’s the sunset from the same day:
Both were harbingers of sorts. As I write this we’re having the worst rain of the new year. Huge storm happening.
We’ve been under snow in Boston for all of December; but in our case we missed the white Christmas there, opting instead to visit family and grandbaby in Baltimore, where it was a bit cold but not snowy. Christmas evening, however, we made up for that by hanging in Denver, waiting for a plane to Boise, where things were white again, and getting whiter.
The next morning, after a fabulous breakfast I wrote about on site, we hopped in the rented Subaru Forrester and headed toward Sun Valley. The roads were slick and the accidents were many, so I didn’t do any shooting until we were heading into Shoshone, and taking the Sawtooth Scenic Byway (Idaho 75) north into Sun Valley. That’s where this gallery came from, including the shot above, which was made by The Kid out a side window. Not bad.
We had fresh snow every day in Sun Valley, and even more up at Galena where I did the first cross-country skiing in my life. Beautiful place, with the best lodge food I’ve ever had. Amazingly good, especially considering the remote infrastructure-free location.
Anyway, things stayed white all the way until we were over California airspace yesterday. More pix of those after I get some sleep.
We kind of lucked into finding Goldy’s Breakfast Bistro in Boise. I just looked up best breakfast boise and there it was. The top result includes a review that says “Not only is Goldy’s the best breakfast place in Boise, it is one of the best I have experienced anywhere”. So we hopped in the rented Forrester and pushed three miles through the falling snow to get here, on the corner of Capitol and Main, a couple blocks from the Capitol building downtown.
The review: It may be the best breakfast we’ve had anywhere. Primo.
Now it’s off to Sun Valley. Long drive.
So we’re sitting at the airport in Denver, waiting for our delayed flight to Boise. Tomorrow we drive to Sun Valley.
The delay is caused by snow, which is all over the ground here, and occassionally falling from the sky. There is snow in Boise too. And plenty at Sun Valley, to which I have never been. In fact, I haven’t been in Idaho at all since 1963, and even then we were just driving through.
For some reason I still believe I can ski. It’ll be fun to test that theory.