In LA

An ashtray on the inner door of the minty-fresh new Airbus A330 aircraft that flew me to Tokyo. The happy icon is the ashtray’s way of saying “smoke, ply me with ashes, and I will feel a great sense of purpose”.

One foot and one generation away, a sign on the other half of the door makes it clear that crime does not pay, and that these door-halves have not been talking to each other for some time.

A few notes on yesterday, March 28, 2007, which for me was a 36-hour-long day containing a couple of geeky surprises (marked in bold below).

• Woke up at 5:50 AM to the alarm and message “Wake up!” I’d set as an entry in my Treo’s calendar.
• Sync’ed my iPod nano so that I could listen to the latest Diggnation podcast while on the plane.
• Went to the Beijing airport and caught my Northwest Airlines flight to Tokyo’s Narita airport.
• The plane was an Airbus 330, which meant that it not only had nicely designed bathroom sinks, but also featured an electrical outlet for each seat.
• I plugged in my Mac Book Pro (after removing the battery to reduce the machine’s power consumption to below the 75W provided by the outlet) and watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica season 3.
• Changed my Treo’s locale to Los Angeles, and time zone to Pacific. Its clock set itself to L.A. time.
• Landed, hung out at the Narita airport for an hour and circled the waiting areas near my next flight’s gate.
• Noticed an extremely strong positive correlation in the waiting area between people holding paper bags of McDonald’s take-out food and their weight and nationality (lots of morbidly obese Americans waiting for flights to the midwest guzzling cokes and munching on fries).
• Caught a flight to San Francisco.
• geeky surprise #1: Slept for a couple of hours, and was then woken up by the same “Wake up!” alarm on my Treo when 5:50AM Pacific rolled around. How crazy-cool to be woken up twice on the same day by the same alarm in two different time zones!
• Plugged in the computer (plane was another A330) and watched four more episodes of Battlestar, the best sci-fi TV show ever. Strangely enough, I editorialized about this show a while back in a similar post about the trans-pacific flight from my last U.S. visit. The last episode I watched felt like Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle set in space. Battlestar’s ever-ambitious and capable writers managed to make it all work. I suppose anyone who can ably cover issues such to torture, sexual-abuse, and post-traumatic stress disorder in fracking robots with fracking laser beams can pretty much make any complex story zing along.
• Landed in San Francisco, utilized SF’s awesome public transport system for a quick and no-fuss trip to Cupertino (BART subway from the airport one stop to Millbrae station, CalTrain South to Sunnyvale, number 55 bus to Cupertino).
• Had lunch with my pal Chris at Cafe Macs, said hello to a few other former coworkers of mine back at Apple.
• geeky surprise #2: Checked my email, noticed that internet luminary Odd Todd had posted a comment to my last blog post. A flush of geeky pride was in order –my very own blog had accrued a post from the creator of the great flash animation Laid-Off: A Day in the Life and other notable unemployment-related animated shorts. He also invented the very useful word “mep”. A brush with greatness.
• Hung out with my friends David and Ana. Chatted. Had some decent pizza and salad. Old friends, decent pizza, and quality salad are three things that are hard to come by in Beijing.
• geeky surprise #3: Got on my flight to LA. Walked toward my seat and saw someone who looked familiar. I realized that he was Alex Albrecht of the hilarious tech podcast Diggnation, but I was not absolutely certain and also wasn’t sure if he wanted to interact with a fan at that instant, so I tried to give him an out –instead of loudly calling out his name I subtly looked toward him and said “Diggnation?” (hmm, maybe it wasn’t that subtle, but the intention was sincere). He responded and we ended up chatting for a bit about the show. A few weeks ago I was surprised to listen to an episode and hear him talking about my friend Henri Lubatti, so we talked about Henri for a bit and about the pilot episode of Outsourced (”the worlds first weekly internet sitcom”), which Alex created and Henri starred in.
• I fell asleep almost as soon as I sat down in my seat, and slept for the entire hour-plus flight to LA. Woke up during the landing with that sort of pain in the ears that comes from sleeping through the flight without equalizing ear pressure.
• Henri picked me up at the Airport, I hung out at Chandler’s place for a bit, then went to sleep after a very long day.

Speaking of brushes with geeky greatness, I think the creator of the awesome Chinese language learning tools NewsInChinese and Adsotrans just left a comment on the post in which I decry the evils of streaming media. Cool. I feel a little silly sounding this excited over a few comments, but this blog gathers so few legit comments (20 in total since its genesis in January of 2005, not counting thousands of others advertising online poker or c1alis) that it’s kind of fun when a real post gets through, and it’s especially fun when the post is from someone I’ve never met but whose blog I’ve read or software I’ve used.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2007 at 11:35 pm and is filed under China, Geeky, PalmOS, Treo 600. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.