US Airways fails it
News ·Thursday December 20, 2007 @ 23:33 EST (link)
20071218: Leave 0941 for Fonthill, Ontario, Canada, by way of SEA, SFO, CLT, and BUF; got up at 0530, left the house 0610, and were waiting for Shuttle Express in front of Microsoft's building 36 at 0640; Honey drove there but I parked so she could wait with the luggage out front.
I had an idea for co-authoring on the Shuttle Express on the way to the airport: when reading an updated document from the server, instead of completely leaving out paragraphs that we already think we have (which would require changes to merge), we can copy pieces ("PCDs") from the in-memory document's piece table (XReplace, which also gets us bookmarks etc.), which has the advantage of speeding up open but not requiring changes to other code, and it leverages code we already have to share pieces between documents.
Our flight to SFO was late leaving and was delayed due to bad weather in SFO (25 minutes), which made us late for our flight to CLT (originally scheduled to leave 1300, then it was delayed to 1330, but when we got to SFO the status monitors all said "On time", and eventually it left at 1400, an hour late). We chased around the airport, in and out of security2 to find United and then US Airways customer service; after several exhausting slogs (wearing winter coats and carrying backpacks and me my camera case too), we were told that the original flight had not in fact left and we needed to try to get on it; finally we staggered up to it. This was the longest leg (the others were both about 2 hour flights): about 5 hours, although we made good time and it was closer to 4, which made us able to make our last connection to BUF: fortunately this one was close, just a few gates down. Because we'd had to rush so much, we'd had nothing substantial to eat all day, just some snacks. Last leg wasn't too bad, and we were a little early; my parents met us at the baggage claim at about midnight.
We had no trouble at the border, although the Canadians always like to ask about my status. We went into the duty-free to get some food (sandwich at Tim Horton's) but there's no way out without going over the Peace Bridge again1, but a customs agent took pity on us and let us go through without going all the way around. To add insult to injury, US Airways lost our luggage and it had to be delivered the next day; they removed the caps from various toiletries and didn't replace them.
20071219: Got up around 1000; Dad made us breakfast, and we went shopping at the Pen Centre (1600; our luggage was delivered early afternoon) for gifts: this year us siblings (and SOs) are just doing a gift exchange and getting gifts for our parents. Went to That's Entertainment (new and used DVDs), stopped by Art Taylor's to pick up some turkeys (one for us, one we delivered for him). We still went to Tim Horton's, our treat, then came home. I helped Julia with her Who Has Seen the Wind homework and confused her online friends. Honey took a pill for her back that makes her sleepy, and I hacked a bit and watched an episode of M*A*S*H.
I worked on making recorded TV shows from home available to watch here, which meant setting up transcoding (Gentoo makes it easy: install the nuvexport and xvid packages, and some dependencies), exposing Cirith-Ungol (the MythTV box)'s web server to the Internet on a high port via iptables (naturally, with host IP and other access restrictions, since we really don't want random people deleting our saved recordings, thanks all the same). So, transferring a show involves:
- Run nuvexport, pick the show/episode, bitrate (settled on 720), and other options (I've concluded that noise filtering and multi-pass are worth the extra time), and have it emit an XViD-encoded AVI file.
- The file is already placed in a web-accessible directory, so download it via wget to my laptop.
That's it (now that I've streamlined it)! As part of the process, I set up a router that I'd brought to share my parents' upstairs Internet connection; last time I had to switch it out whenever I wanted to connect.
20071220: Up late, 11xx; showered, shaved, etc. (first time since arriving, due to luggage loss). Left at around noon to complete our shopping (Chapters and Future Shop at the Fairway Mall, and Costco, using our card, although only Dad bought anything), then Office Depot. Watched Zathura with Sharon.
1. "Never get out!" he yelled. "That's it. Of course. We shall never get out. What a fool I was to have thought they would let me go as easily as that. No, no, we shall never get out."
—Lord Rhoop, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, C. S. Lewis.
2. SFO is wretchedly designed: they make people leave the secure area and pass through security again when moving between terminals.
We had no trouble at the border, although the Canadians always like to ask about my status. We went into the duty-free to get some food (sandwich at Tim Horton's) but there's no way out without going over the Peace Bridge again1, but a customs agent took pity on us and let us go through without going all the way around. To add insult to injury, US Airways lost our luggage and it had to be delivered the next day; they removed the caps from various toiletries and didn't replace them.
That's it (now that I've streamlined it)! As part of the process, I set up a router that I'd brought to share my parents' upstairs Internet connection; last time I had to switch it out whenever I wanted to connect.