reesesWeb

I promised a recap of my trip to Dublin, and now that I have a little extra free time, I might as well make good.

I had mentioned before that we had trouble getting out of the US. We did manage to get to Dublin, obviously, but it took an extra day. Instead of arriving Saturday morning, we arrived Sunday morning. However, other than the one-day delay, our flights departed and arrived very close to schedule, much to our relief. I slept the entire flight, other than while eating and watching xXx 2, a movie I highly recommend if you are forcibly restrained in a chair at 35 000 feet over an ocean, even if it is a smaller, pansy ocean such as the Atlantic.

Software/check-url-update.el

As you may guess, something unfortunate has come to pass.

I logged onto continental.com to check in for our flights from IAD->EWR and EWR->DUB, and saw a melange of conflicting flights. From the summary page, it looked as if one of us to fly to Newark Friday, the other to fly to Newark Saturday around noon, and both of us to fly to Dublin Saturday around 8pm. Calling Continental's helpful phone staff (I am perpetually amazed how great Continental, Northwest, and Alaska Airlines customer service reps are, by the way) cleared up the situation -- after Toronto, the FAA wasn't taking any chances with the weather, and cancelled our flight to Newark six hours early because of a thunderstorm. I don't know if the cancellation was intended to soak up slack in other flight schedules or because the storm cell was too large to be gone by then, but regardless, our options were to pack in about thirty minutes and hop the train to Newark and hope that the flight took off, or wait until Saturday.

I had the opportunity to tussle with Oracle nested tables this week, because dealing with people who can't learn new things is so much fun. This is why, for the past ten years, I have had a huge disdain for people who don't use IDEs, debuggers, or profilers when working on code -- they think they're smart enough to reason things through, but it's amazing that it takes them longer to get things done, and when they do get things sorted, they suck. Proper tools are the robotic exoskeleton that enable decent programmers to lift cars and crush empty beer kegs against our foreheads.

I don't know what it is about Americans, but when we travel to foreign countries, we seem to think we're going on some major expedition into the wilds. To this day, I cannot feel prepared for a trip overseas without a visit to REI and/or a Patagonia store.

It's not as if I've spent much time scaling Kilimanjaro or making a solo trek across Antarctica. The roughest trip I've taken was when I was a kid and wandered around France, from Paris, to Normandy, down the Loire, to the Riviera and Monaco, and up to Brussels. Aside from trips to Mexico or Canada, which are little-known third-world border towns outside the USA, I can't recall having been to any place with a less developed technical infrastructure than Prague or Budapest, and both of those have better cell coverage than my hometown.