California Travel Notes

I had the good fortune of traveling to San Francisco this past week. Being places is great - going places sucks. It’s also a unique way to live and highlights some strange thing about life. Here are some highlights and observations:

I woke up in Charlottetown, had breakfast in Montreal, lunch in Chicago, and dinner in San Francisco. This is not in any way glamorous. Eating alone in an airport restaurant, surrounded by other people eating alone is a cruel and ironic type of isolation.
What do airport authorities bother getting logos? I suppose it must be the “mug effect”. All airport authority logos seem to consist of a few common elements: an abstract runway, take-off-flight-swoop, or a paper airplane. In th world of interface design, if you can’t come up with a good idea for an icon to represent some action or tool, it probably shouldn’t have an icon at all. I think the same goes for logos.
What’s with the terrible tin-can-sound-quality in-flight radio?
The in flight movie was better than my last lot (two Ashton Couture movies). The movie, Cinderella Man, had some bad acting, some terrible writing, and a lot more punching than I’m usually up for (it’s a boxing movie). That said, Russell Crowe was actually pretty good, and some of the fight scenes were actually quite gripping.
I suppose anything an become routine if you do it often enough, but how anyone can work on a powerpoint presentation on their laptop while we fly over the the rocky mountains at sunset is beyond me.
When Ben Goddard (sp?) sings “I Will Follow You Into The Dark”, I’m pretty sure he’s singing to me.
There’s an fscking in-flight version of Access Hollywood?!
Wifi was spotty or not available in th areas of both the Montreal and Chicago airports I was in.
Miles from Charlottetown to Montreal: 515
Miles from Montreal to Chicago: 747 (is that a coincidence?)
Miles from Chicago to San Francisco: 1846
I can’t help but think that travel of such great distances shouldn’t be this easy. It’s as though we’ve made some sort of deal with the devil.
I’m probably the only person in the world who actually enjoys those little bags of sesame snacks they server on the plane.
Toilet paper with at least enough strength to pull it’s own roll without tearing is a basic human right.
I took a tour of a vineyard and winery, had lunch at Google, spent a few days at the Mozilla offices, took in an NHL hockey game, and went to see Death Cab For Cutie and the White Stripes with Kevin and some others from the Digg/Revision3 crew. Who says the dot-com boom is over?
As a Canadian, it was a great shame that my first ever professional hockey game was between a team from San Jose, California, and a team from Florida.
Unfortunately, Death Cab for Cutie didn’t play “I Will Follow You Into The Dark” at the concert. Fortunately, this meant I didn’t have to hold hands with Daniel and cry.
On the return flight, they played a show called Three Wishes that consisted of Amy Grant singing to people, and buying them houses for going to war, or having their husbands die there. Giving a war widow a new home is fine, I suppose, but making entertainment out of it seems somehow evil.
Delays and missed connections suck
Hard
When I missed a connection in Montreal (my connecting flight was gone before I even got on the ground), I was told that the airline wouldn’t pay for a hotel, since the delay was weather-related. The Air Canada guy even told me where the best place to spend the night in the airport is, in case I didn’t want to pay for a hotel myself (not a bad tip, actually). I went for a hotel, and when I got there, there were other people from my same flight, with vouchers from the airline to pay for the hotel. Apparently the delay was not weather related. Now I get to “fax the refunds department” when I get home. Awesome.