Snow: It snowed in philly. Not enough to impress a Subaru-bred Pennsylvanian such as myself, but enough to cause massive delays in air travel to KPHL, or Philly International for you non piloting civilians (I've found the one of the most arrogant things a person can do on the internet is to refer to other people as "civilians" in their blog, while themself having never been in a military). The second leg of my multi-plane journey that I had bought from Northwest airlines was repeatedly canceled. I was told I had to speak to an agent to rebook. I called Northwest well ahead of the time I needed to leave for the airport, but four hours later I was still listening to on-hold music while my first flight departed and while, more importantly, I really needed to use the bathroom. After giving up on my $400 I spent I booked a flight with U.S. Airways and sent Northwest a nastygram inquiring if I would be compensated. I received an automated reply, saying tickets would be credited or rebooked for this weather event, and directed to a webpage that did not mention the current weather at all but instead had lenghty H1N1 Swine Flu event information.
I arrived in Philly, though, after missing only a weekend of skiing that I'd been looking forward to. And with all of my stuff! I had checked a bag containing my super important work laptop. I have since learned that checking a laptop with a commercial airline is regarded by everyone else on the planet as one of the dumbest mistakes you can make. More on that later.
Fire: I did make it up to the cabin at Camelback. I missed Joe, my fellow accomplice of "thats what she said!" jokes, but I was in time to witness last few fireworks. Perhaps, ever. You see these fireworks were advertised as the kind that spin around and shoot up in the air. They were pretty cool even for a person normally desensitized to and unimpressed by pyrotechnic displays. This particular batch, though, seemed to be designed to shoot towards the nearest person. That was also interesting. Then one landed in a bush fragment. The first few seconds of fire were met with laughter. "Haha it started a little fire!" Then in the next few seconds, the fire increased in size, slightly. It was during these seconds that our laughter died off while we all tried to determine if this was going to be a problem. During a couple seconds after that, the fire jumped to the big bush and we began a mad dash to contain it. I grabbed a snow chunk on my way and dropped it onto the flame but that was ineffective.
We spent a lot of time with buckets of water and a dry chemical fire extinguisher. In fact you could call me a genuine bucketeer. The dry chemical part is relevant because Luke got it all over his hands, so we later had to look up the ingredients on wikipedia to see if they would make his hand fall off, or turn him into a zombie. The buckets of water is also relevant because we broke a faucet in the process. The bush may or may not make it. I'm pretty sure no one will ever be lighting fireworks at that cabin again.
Isabel the Impreza and the streets of Philadelphia: I stole my sister's (technically my mother's) car, a Subaru Impreza that I declared should be named Isabel. This Impreza is like an awesome, slightly slower version of my car. The all wheel drive kicked ass and granted me access to parking spots in philly that other people couldn't reach without a shovel. After parking it the first time, one girl asked from across the street what kind of car I had. That might have been simply because I had parked behind her, and she had been staring at my, worried I might hit her.
The entire time I was home I only saw 1 person that lived in philly. One out of like...more than twenty. An unfortunate habit that I'm unsure how to rectify. Perhaps Christmas isn't the best time to see all of your old buddies anyway, but it is frustrating to come 3000 miles and not even call people because you know you won't be able to see them.
Love Story: I performed my version of Taylor Swift's Love Story as best as I could with Kevin's guitar and a mangled, mutant, ginormous triangle guitar pick. Every time I am over at Kevin and Adam's place I harrass Kev for not owning any guitar picks for the guitar he never plays. Kev has repeatedly promised to buy some--this last time threatening to shower me with a hundred thousand of them. I doubt his sincerity, and so will be shipping a set of guitar picks to him. But I digress.
When I originally penned my version of Love Story, I thought it was hilarious. After hours of practicing it I have since realized that is it not funny at all but instead sad and depressing. However, when your audience actually believes that you are about to play the real version, and you start playing mine, it is hilarious. The key to the humor is explaining to your friends that you had to change a couple words because you are a guy, and the rest falls into place.
Sleeping under the stars: My mother has been dying to get me to stay at their place when I visit. I previously always stayed in the city and only made day trips out to visit them. This time, I stayed at home, in my old bed, under a bunch of glow in the dark stickers I slapped on the ceiling a very long time ago.
LEGOS!: Every year my family likes to do some kind of variation on the gifting giving thing. I think it is a mostly practical fix for the expensive and exhaustive task for buying stuff for each person -- what is that an n-squared minus n amount of gifts? I'm sure there is also a conceptual stand against commercialism as well. It kind of sucks when one group of people get all pissy about Christmas being a "Christian" holiday and make signs that say "happy holidays" instead of Merry Christmas, while at the same time malls start promoting an entirely santa-centric, money spending religion the day after halloween. I think we should split the holiday into two: the celebration of mass materialism and spoiled children can stay on the winter solstice, and the politically incorrect "real" or "true" version of Christmas can be swept under the covers sometime in March. All of the lazy people still have their trees up then anyway. The only question is what to do with all of the lame ass tv specials with the inoffensive but fuzzy and warm Christmas morals to preach. I'll leave this decision to others, since I hate watching them anyway. But I digress.
So some years we pick names out of a hat, and you only buy a gift for the person whose name you pulled. Some years we did some kind of thing where you bring a gift, and people take gifts from under the tree and have the option to keep it or steal one from someone else. Some years we do an under $20 variation, but that kind of sucks because its like admitting everyone is going to hate their presents, and we're just trimming our losses. Every year we do the variation where my mom buys almost all of the gifts destined for her granddaughters (my nieces) and I don't even remember what I allegedly bought them until they open it. Its a fun surprise.
This year the theme was you had to make the gifts (excepting members of the family under 10, they still got showered with expensive toys). I did not like this. I was stumped. I have an uncanny lack of knowledge about the other members of my family, and its hard enough to buy something for them, let alone restrict those possibilities to things I'm capable of creating with my hands. Fortunately, the night before the day before Christmas eve, Betsy's friend (whose nickname sounds like a class video game handle) suggested I make ornaments. Ornaments are amazing: they need serve no actual purpose, and its ok if they are ugly, so long as they still look half decent buried in a Christmas tree somewhere. So I made some ornaments out of Legos.
I've never really been a fan of Legos as art. They are quite blocky, and trying to figure out which pieces from my collection to sacrifice for the formation of a replica of some boring inanimate object boggled my mind. I much preferred to build things on the minifig scale which could be brought to life in my imagination: planes, boats, castles, docks, cities and spaceships. And pirates. So this very idea of using Legos to build some kind of non-Lego abomination was new to me.
I stopped at the Lego(TM) Store and found an ornament sized kit plane for my Dad. He was a navigator in the Navy and did a lot of flying on P-3s. The kit plane I got was one of those cheesy you-can-build-three-different-ugly-models kind, and the plane looked terrible. I wouldn't be able to do much better, however, especially not with something ornament sized, so I bought some super glue and added handle piece from my personal collection, and snapped it up:
The airline pilot character did not come with my kit. That was the first valuable piece I chose to sacrifice from my collection. I was going to list exactly which of my Lego sets the little guy could have come from, but wikipedia doesn't list pictures with the town set names, which are often meaningless. That compass is also a valuable piece of mine--probably from the pirates--but I removed it before the final gluing because that plane is just too ugly to be worth it.For my mom, who has been teaching beginner level piano lessons all of my life (giving me a considerable jumpstart into the world of music) I decided I would make a tiny baby grand piano. The biggest problem, I knew from the beginning, would be the keys. I sulked around the Lego store for quite a while trying to find a way to buy the pieces I needed, but the just weren't there, so I bought some other pieces I expected to need and spent hours late at night combing through the plastic bins containing my childhood lego collection for the elusive little black and white 1x2 tiles. The little bastards were so small they were mostly found at the bottom of the bins, which seemed to carry an inordinate amount of dirt, dist bunnies and decarying insect skeletons, as well as a few substances I didn't care to identify.
After hours of searching and then obsessively compuslively sorting just to enable further searching, I finally found enough tiles to use as keys. Then I figured out a way to arrange. This turned out to be an interesting excercise, because faithfully recreating the exact shape and arrangement of piano keys could not be done at my scale, so I instead opted to arrange the black and white keys in a symmetrical but uneven pattern, hoping it would simply look similar to piano pieces, and it actually worked. Why it worked is something I'm curious about, but I didn't stop to play around. I used a corder piece of an octogonal platform--the kind of thing normally used to construct space stations--as both the tilted lid thing and the base of the piano itself. An ancient looking fence made a music stand, and butchering some otherwise valuable hing pieces made for a good pedal effect, even though, as my father pointed out, I ended up with four pedals instead of the three that would be on a real piano. To which I retorted, I didn't get the keys right either. He may have been jealous that his ornament was ugly. I actually felt kind of bad, but I was really never good at making planes. Not sure why the piano turned out to well, but I certainly sacrificed to make it. If I ever elect to go back to my Lego collection and try to rebuild all of the sets I had, I'm going to be missing some key pieces.
Anyway, here are some pictures of the piano:
I finished it at six in the morning, which caused a little friction when I slept in through half of the next day. I think it was worth it though. My family seemed impressed. I really wanted to write instructions for it but I didn't have the time and, more importantly, I don't know how I made that. I didn't even put glue between all of the pieces because I didn't want to risk taking it apart and being unable to but it back together. Instead I just pulled things off and glued them back on until I was satisfied with its structural integrity.For my older sister and brother in law, I made a Lego picture frame. It turned out pretty cool, because I found these cool magnet pieces at the Lego store. My younger sister and I (who helped with the construction of the frame) tested it on our parents fridge and it works. Unfortunately I didn't remember to take a picture about this one.
Before we leave the subject of Legos, I am furiously interested in coming up with some business startup idea that would involve me making a lot of money playing with Legos. I thought about maybe selling directions for Legos (could even have Kindle versions!) or creating a picture blog of creations I make like icanhascheezburger. I thought about creating a website similar to MrWong's Soup'Parments but as a Lego city and more similar to The Map of Springfield. I've actually already started such a project, but have been procrastinating ever since I came up against the task of multiplying quaternions against LDRAW's lame ass rotation matrix, which I can never remember its left-handed vs right-handed 'ness. Selling Lego parts by the individual piece crossed my mind--I remember the Lego company trying to do that but backing down because the brick-and-mortar stores threw a hissy fit and threatened to stop selling Legos. This was probably a story on slashdot, though, the very same place wherein theories once abounded regarding an Amazon.com conspiracy against gay authors suffering from a particular brand of melodramatic hubris. So maybe its not true. I've also considered making Lego video games; almost every game can become a Lego game simply by adding Legos to it. I want to aim higher. I want to make Lego Batman but a version with much more depth, and more like Turtles 3, with much larger maps, and cooler ways to interact with the world. Lego movies, Lego comic books, or maybe a Lego tv serious have also crossed my mind, but the tools to do these properly are scare and I would probably have to solve that quaternion problem I just mentioned. Oh, and I also want to invent a programming (or just a markup) language for creating virtual Lego models. Imagine if instead of exhaustively listing each brick in a wall, you simply called a function called Wall() which took two locations and fabricated a lego wall between them. The only practical use for such a language is would probably be a Lego version of Turtle (a.k.a. Logo).
Suffice to say, if you can think of any way a person can make money playing with Legos, I would love to hear it.
Actually, all I really want is infinite resources to create the largest lego world possible, starting with one model the size of the Earth. If your curious, it would take 510.072 trillion Lego baseplates model the Earth to a 6' minifig scale. I'm fairly certain that number of baseplates does not, has not, and never will, exist. Also, I have proven (to myself) using a ball of string, masking tape, and a sharpie marker, that it is impossible to create a decent approximation of a sphere using exact squares (which is what baseplates are) without introducing about 8 enormous triangles to the mix. So that will have to be done virtually. Also, I'm tempted to use a torus instead of a sphere; most people won't know the difference, and most video games that allow seamless wrapping on two axis (such as Zelda and Alien Legacy) are actually torus-like (torrodial? torrodian?) anyway.
ON CALL: Family time was interrupted because I was paged into an emergency during my one on call shift that week (which I was supposed to be using to make up a day of work). They needed someone from my team to sit around and listen to people fret about some misfit database that kept causing problems; I may have been called upon to comment on whether or not my team's software was still running. It was. This "on call" business was the whole reason I had to bring my big clunky Amazon laptop hope. For the record, I hate being responsible for something important that like. In my last job I sleep well at night secure in the fact that if the government projects we were working on "leaked" to the Russians, Chinese, Commists, Terrorists, or whatever enemy of the day it was, that the only thing that would happen is some poor operative would get a massive headache from looking at our disgusting java code. In contrast, that Amazon laptop has information that is actually sensitive, something I do not appreciate. Other people routinely take their laptops home. I normally leave mine in the office (unless I have to take it for on call fun) because if it gets stolen from the office, there's pretty much no way it will be my fault. But I digress.
I get a lot of questions about what I do at Amazon and why I have to go on call. I'd like to share with you some "cool" things a person might be on call for:
- Hospital Helicopter Pilots
- Search and Rescue Pilots (Coast Guard, Civil Air Patrol)
- In case of Zombie Attacks
- Reporters that need to race to a disaster so they can be first to announce they're standing right in front of it
- Gundam Pilots
- Snowplow drivers
- EMTs and Paramedics
- Guy with dog that looks for disaster survivors
- The President
- Firefighters. Have you noticed no one hates firefighters? No one calls them pigs, or shows up at riots looking to fight them like with cops and army people.
Maybe arsonists hate them. Or Fire Elementals.
Uphill in the snow both ways: The people in charge of screwing up the belowed roads I used to zoom around on have continued their quest to make it as difficult and time consuming as possible to drive an automobile among the towns I grew up in. Perhaps an engineer somewhere fell out of his chair laughing when he realized how many cars would stack up behind a slow driver if they removed all of the extra lanes and passing zones from the road. Perhaps not. All I know is that there is a section that drags on for miles that does not afford a chance to get around slow people--slow as in driving close to the speed limit. When I had my bike I used a suicide lane to pass slow people out of some strange sense of entitlement: "I lived here when this was a passing lane!"
Commercial Aviation: I spent a lot of time fretting about how and what to pack for this trip, and I am seriously getting bored with writing this post, so lets just skip to where I'm standing in the C terminal with my backpack, my sleeping bag, and my suitcase. All carryons. Or so I thought. An announcement came repeatedly over the intercom explaining that according to Federal Aviation Regulations, passengers are only allowed one carryon and one personal item that had to fit under the seat. By the way: all aviation laws that actually matter are Federal Aviation Regulations. Contrast with laws made by the FCC, your local township, and things like seed patents, which are bullshit.
Anyway, I, technically, had three items. Being I good sport I say something to the U.S. Airways gatekeepers about checking my suitcase. I didn't want to check my sleeping bag because it was a bit small and odd shaped for something to be thrown into the cargo hold of an airplane. It would probably get lost. In case your curious, my sleeping bag cost about $120 at EMS, and replacing it is as simple as driving to EMS and buying another one. Or one like it. I'll skip the details, but I left my precious suitcase with my Amazon laptop inside just outside of the aircraft door, in full view of a stewardess. Distance between my "gate checked" bag with a hastily scribbled tag on it and the hull fo the airplane: less then 20 feet. There's no way this won't get to Philly right?
I was wrong. I slowly realized this as I stood resting one leg on the edge of the baggage belt watching the bags, and people collecting them, approach zero. In the process of filing a claim I learned that none of the gate checked bags made it, and it was a Good Thing I happened to know the exact number and color of American Apparel t-shirts in my suitcase, because a giant Dell laptop with a white stick in the corner that says "Amazon" is not a good enough identifier for them. Apparently the shirts were good enough--the guy stopped me before I could mention all of my dirty brown socks. I guess they don't want you to mention the electronics because the employee that finds your bag might happen to find it without the laptop inside. Like that joke "Did anyone lose a roll of money in a rubber band? We found the rubber band...."
Long story short, I got my laptop back the next day, but not before I had to tell my whole team that I had checked and lost my laptop with the airline, which, again, is apparrently the dumbest thing you can do.
This entire incident has further reinforced my desire to fly myself to Philly. Flying a small airplane coast to coast just to get somewhere is expensive and impractacle, however I've found a few factors that make it comparable to general aviation:
- Around the holidays, tickets to Philly get up to $1000 ($1400 for business class), especially if you are lazy like me and wait until a week before your trip to book your tickets.
- Once you book your tickets with commercial aviation, it is difficult to reschedule your flight and impossible to switch airlines without loosing the money you paid, even if you buy that worthless trip insurance. If you fly yourself out, you can leave whenever you damn well please.
- The 1 - 2 hours you allocate for security theatre at the airport are unecessary when flying yourself around. Also subtract at least half an hour for baggage claim on longer trips.
- If you remember to put your suitcase in the airplane and then take it out of the airplane, you don't have to worry about it somehow getting lost between Seattle and Philly. And if you forget to take it out of the airplane, you can go back to where you parked and take your suitcase out of the airplane. Furthermore, you can use whatever combination of bags and packing materials you like without worrying about overhead bins and under the seats. You could really just pile your clothes in the back seat if you wanted. The only new constraint is the weight and balance issues, which I solve by kicking out all of the fat passengers (during taking ground lessons for weight and balance, most sample problems involve a 350 lb passenger in the back seat of a Cessna, which always gaurantees you will need to remove some of the fuel).
- If Philly International gets shut down because of a bit of snow on the ground, you can still fly near Philly, with the possible options of driving the rest of the way, etc, instead of waiting the storm out in some city. Similarly, and in good weather, if there are ATC delays resulting from too much traffic, a private pilot can just go behind their back and fly under Visual Flight Rules (go around all the clouds).
- You can avoid Philly International on purpose and fly directly towards a smaller airport closer to your actual destination. This could save you a long trip down highway 95 in Philly or 5 in Seattle.
Writing: Oh, also, I was reading a lot of On Writing, by Stephen King. If you are serious about writing fiction, or interesting in being serious about writing fiction, or curious about getting interested in seriously writing fiction, I highly recommend reading the second half of that book. He presents an interesting approach to writing, which I have found solves a lot of the problems I've always experienced when I hit dead ends trying to invent a story. I actually spent most of the plane ride back to Seattle furiously scribbling a story into an expensive notebook from Borders that claimed to look just like the one used by some famous writer I don't plan on reading. I bought it because it was black. I didn't get to finish the story, thanks to the case of the missing luggage, but hopefully I will abstain from my computer, tv, guitar and video games to write the ending someday.
In Summary: I spent a lot of money and saw less than a quarter of the people I wanted to see and almost lost my work laptop. In short, I kind of suck at traveling. I get more vacation time next year though....
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