logo Ming the Mechanic - Category: Diary
An old rigid civilization is reluctantly dying. Something new, open, free and exciting is waking up.


Thursday, July 10, 2003day link 

 Los Angeles
picture So, 3 days left as a resident of Los Angeles. I sort of had in mind I'd have spent some more time appreciating it before leaving. Driving around taking pictures, taking a ride in the underground, etc. But these days are hectic so it doesn't seem like I get around to it this time.

When we got here 18 years ago it seemed like a huge and amazing place. A paradise with perpetual sunshine, blue sky, broad boulevards lined with palm trees and filled with luxury cars. I had never seen a 10 lane freeway before, let alone a city that seemed to stretch continuously for 60 miles in all directions. I soaked it all in with my eyes wide open.

But, well, the magic gradually rubbed off. We lived at first in a small apartment in Hollywood, which sounded like a glamorous thing to write home about. But the drug dealers on the street and the helicopters with search lights circling overhead all night sort of gave a different picture. And the sun and the palm trees stopped being very interesting once it was established that they were always the same. It was close to a year before it rained the first time.

After a few months my life was suddenly hectic like everybody else's. What at first looked like a perpetual vacation spot is really a lot of people who are in a terrible hurry, stressed about catching up with everything, working overtime, paying the mortgage, getting the right car, being dressed right for your bicycle ride along the beach. And everybody has some level of ADD. There so much going on, so many people to see, that you can't easily commit to very much, or remember what you committed to.

Various big events further eroded the image of paradise at different times. For a while the joke was that the four seasons in Los Angeles are: Fires, Floods, Riots and Earthquakes. Indeed. Once a brush fire was burning from close to here, all the way down to the beach in Malibu, more than 20 miles on each side. And, you know, the LA River is a strange thing to look at when one first gets here. It is all made out of concrete and with no water. But 2 or 3 times during our stay, we realized what it was about, as it was all full of raging water. As was Balboa Boulevard, and the local park was under 10 feet of water. The riots was probably the scariest time. Not that it got too close to where we live, but the air was still full of smoke from many large fires set by angry people.

And then there are earthquakes. If you look at the map of the disasterous 94 Northridge quake, we live in the middle of the red dot. It was measured as 8.2 on the richter scale in our particular zip code. Quite a mess. Freeway bridges falling down up to 20 miles from here. The epicenter was actually a couple of blocks from here, and luckily the shockwave was mostly going in the other direction, so our own damage could have been worse. But I got reminded of it when I was packing my books, many of which had been water damaged from a broken water pipe that fateful morning. Lots of stories to tell about that earthquake, which actually included many synchronistic and miraculous elements, but that will be another time. I actually kind of like earthquakes. They make me feel connected with the earth somehow.

But nothing much has happened recently. Life has just become a bit too much of a routine. I no longer go exploring parts of the town I don't know well. It all sort of seems to look the same in my eyes now. Wall-to-wall suburb with a 7-11, a McDonalds and a Mobil station on every corner. Of course I live in Van Nuys, which is a particularly unremarkable place.

But it is also an easy and pleasant place to live in many ways. And of course there are lots of things to do. Yes, you can go surfing by the beach and skiing in the mountains on the same day, and take a walk in the desert while you're at it. Not that I've gone surfing or skiing at all here.

I have many friends here. I'm sure that won't change. And maybe I'll appreciate the town again anew when I come visiting.
[ | 2003-07-10 20:37 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, July 9, 2003day link 

 Technology ups and downs
picture So, my computer is back up. I ended up having to do a complete reformat and reinstall OSX. Luckily I had that backup from the day before of all my personal stuff. And, luckily, I had kept copies of most programs that I'd need installed. So, it went remarkably smoothly.

But there seems to be loads of problems with technology this week. At least in my world. Server problems, connectivity problems, hardware failures. My airport base station keeps rebooting, covad was down most of the day in all of L.A., one of my client networks got locked out from the backbone, my car overheated on the freeway and is in the shop. And I don't really have time for any of it. People to see and places to go.

But it makes me philosophize about the fragility of technology that is designed with single points of failure. And thinking about how to arrange things so that it doesn't matter.

If you access your e-mail from hotmail or yahoo, it isn't important which computer you use. If one breaks down, you'll see the same thing from any other. If your browser isn't working, you can use another one. And the servers they use will by necessity have to be distributed, so it is fairly limited what will bring them down.

Accessing anything in a browser is a very fault-tolerant approach. Just like I can check my voicemail from any phone, and I can switch my SIM card to a different phone. Same principle.

However, creating fault tolerance at the other end is rather hard for regular humans. If I'd be accessing something at the other end that there's only one of, like my own server, there's still a problem with things that can go wrong. There are things I can do about that, through database replication and file sync'ing programs, but it still doesn't mean I'd easily recover from any big server crash. Seamless failure recovery is difficult and expensive.

I still wouldn't think of trusting my archived e-mail or any other important information store to some company's website. I put lots of my personal relations into sixdegrees.com, but then they wen't bankrupt and lost all of it. Policies change, management changes, economies change, people make mistakes, lose interest, etc. I do trust quite a bit to my own webserver, because I know where things are and what I'm doing about making it reasonably reliable.

I'm sort of looking for some keys to widespread fault tolerance. Having several redundant pieces of something is certainly one of them. If I have several cars standing outside, it doesn't matter too much if one isn't working.

Easy conversion between different storage formats, and widespread adherence to standards - that would be another. Address book sync'ing would be an example of that. I can have the same address book on my PDA as in my mail program without too much trouble. Same principle as being able to save a song in MP3 format, and put copies in several different places.

The way routing works on the net is sort of a mix of these. There's plenty of different ways of getting between two points, and they all speak the same language. So the net can route around failure. Mostly. That still doesn't apply to my website itself. If the server is down, people see nothing. If the name servers aren't working, they can't find it.

It would be nice if one could put one's website in an automatically distributed and redundant "place", so that access to it wouldn't depend on any particular server being up or not. Like one can do with shared download files with BitTorrent. But I'd like a way of distributing a whole website or a database that way.

I'd like my data to feel like it is ubiquitous and non-local. Being there when I need it, but without having to go around worrying about where you put it and whether that is safe enough. And next I'd like that with the hardware too of course. You know, just speak into the air like Captain Picard, and the technology will be there to listen and give you what you want.
[ | 2003-07-09 23:59 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Monday, July 7, 2003day link 

 Computer Troubles
Hm, looks like the harddisk is corrupted on my laptop. TechTool deluxe is taking forever to work its way through fixing it, and it didn't seem to succeed in the first try. Taking around 12 hours to run through it. Damn, I don't need that today. I had some important work I sort of needed to finish, like, yesterday. Luckily I just backed it up the day before, so if I have to reformat it, I don't lose anything other than time.

We're shipping most of our stuff to France in the morning. The essential stuff, but that is still a lot of boxes. And I've thrown away loads and loads of old papers I'm never going to look at. Feels really good to be done with that.
[ | 2003-07-07 23:59 | 13 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Friday, July 4, 2003day link 

 Server move
I moved most of the contents of my server yesterday. It went reasonably well. That is, however, always a time when thing can go horribly wrong very quickly. The configuration of a linux server usually consists of hundreds of little details that have been done at different times, and it is not easy to make sure the same environment will exist on a new server.

What went most wrong sofar was the mysql database for NCN. Since it is a community site with many facilities and there's always somebody there, I was trying to minimize the downtime, so I was planning on going for a replication scheme. See, because of the way DNS lookups work there will be a period of time where a visitor might be sent to either the old site or the new site, and there's not a good way of knowing which one. And no matter what they do on that site, there will be database records created. Now, mysql has some neat replication features which would allow the database in two locations to be closely in sync in real-time, and which in principle would allow that changes could be made in either place and nothing would be lost. But I failed to notice that the replication process had stopped sometime during the day. And I didn't get that fixed before some people had jumped from the old to the new site and become surprised that their newslog entries and comments and recent changes suddenly had disappeared, and after new stuff had been posted in the new location. So, when I then activated the replicatation process again, all the lost content for the day did indeed appear, but there were conflicts in id numbers for various records, so a few things ended up in the wrong place. Mostly comments that got applied in the wrong place it seems.

Could be worse. Most things work, including the many majordomo mailing lists. I just need to fix some things about webbased mail, upload of gif files, and java support.
[ | 2003-07-04 23:39 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Tuesday, June 24, 2003day link 

 Sandorian Groves
picture My good friend Max Sandor has a new weblog: The Sandorian Grove. Max and I have been talking philosophy and technology for many years, and he's a co-founder of NCN and ran this server here for years. Besides being a computer wiz and a scholar on buddhism and ancient lnguages, Max is now a babalao, an initiated priest in West African mystical traditions, specifically a teacher of IFA.

Max does these group process events called skycircles. It is sort of a re-alignment of archetypes and ancestors and other forces that might bear on a situation. The focus is normally on one person, and the people present will play the part of some person or ancestor or archetype that is involved. Last saturday I was the focal point, in regards to me and my family moving to France. Which was quite remarkable. I'm not going to say all that much, but the result was me being much more in harmony with the whole thing, being more clear on who I really am, and ready to flow with the language and everything.

And, well, I've been a bit out of touch with my more mystical sides the past couple of years. Just being a computer nerd. But, hey, I think that might be about to change.
[ | 2003-06-24 01:44 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, June 14, 2003day link 

 Panoramas
picture Greg Wright brought this one to my attention: panoramas.dk. Full screen 360 degree panoramas of great places on our planet. I just love 360 degree pictures. Requires a quicktime plugin if you don't have it. Try the lost city of Petra, or the view from the summit of Mt.Everest.
[ | 2003-06-14 23:57 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 Buy my car
picture Sob, I'll have to sell my car. Well, I don't HAVE to. I could ship it to France. But there's annoying bureaucratic paperwork in the way of doing that easily. And it is not like there aren't any big Mercedes cars in Europe, but in a lot of places it would be hell to park. City streets and parking spaces just tend to be made for smaller cars. Not that it can't be fun with a car that is extravagantly big. In Denmark I had a huge old American car, and it was sort of fun to fill the whole street, and have a 7 liter car when normal people had a 1.3 liter car. But at this point I think I'll more be in the mood for a normal size Citroen or something. So, my 1989 Mercedes 420SEL is for sale, and it kind of needs to happen quickly. I just put it in the papers for $6500 with that in mind. But for you, web special, how about $5500? Pretty excellent condition. V8, 4.2L, all power, all leather, airbags, ABS, blah, blah. And you can put your own last name on the license plate.
[ | 2003-06-14 18:11 | 11 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Tuesday, June 10, 2003day link 

 Cleaning Up
picture I'm going through stuff in my house, to get ready for moving, throwing away junk and finding important documents, etc. And, well, it is both refreshing to clear away crud, and it can be enjoyable to find old stuff that didn't get thrown away, and sometimes embarrassing to find what hides in the corners. I just found an unopened christmas present from several years ago. And I finally found our Danish driver's licenses which we'll need. Mine is valid for another 26 years. The picture there is from my international driver's license in 1981. Gee, I loved that fake fur coat. In the same box was a stack of old papers from Denmark. Report cards from high school, bus passes, etc. And old computer papers, which are amusingly nostalgic now. My member card for The Source, a reference card for DOS 2.0, for WordStar, MultiPlan. The manual for my 300baud modem. The ad for TurboPascal I tore out of Byte. 5 1/4" floppies with programs I wrote in Basic or Pascal on my IBM PC. A hand drawn map of Colossal Cave from Adventure.
[ | 2003-06-10 18:13 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, May 31, 2003day link 

 Personal Computer Archaeology
I'm shifting my personal computer activities from the Windows2000 PC I've worked on for the past couple of years to a Mac laptop. In part because I'm going to move soon, and I'll be shipping the bulkier computers. And in part because I feel way overdue about moving on to Mac OSX. My main machine used to be a Mac years ago, but it somehow seemed more practical to start working in Windows, as that's what I mostly did for money. And, I was sorry to admit at the time, Windows NT (and now Windows 2000) crashed less often than my Mac did. It has a lot of other annoyances, but the absence of crashing happens to be close to #1 on my list of requirements. I have lots of things open at the same time, and it takes me quite a while to get back to where I were if the machine goes down. Anyway, now MacOSX is the best of several worlds, allowing me to run cool server stuff under the hood, and having a graphical interface for dummies on the surface. And no crashes.

Now, switching platforms and copying all my stuff gives me the opportunity of having a lot of problems with differences in storage formats, and of discovering some things I had forgotten. For example, one reason my e-mail system is so clogged is that I've used it continuously since 1994 and there are lots of things I'm just ignoring because I no longer care about them. Such as mailing lists I'm still on, or programs I created at some point that are reporting things to me through e-mails that I no longer care about.

My clean-up efforts extend to my server as well. I've operated a bunch of mailing lists since 1994. You know, discussion groups of various kinds. Some of them I started and later lost interest in. But also I generously allowed a number of other people to set up mailing lists. So now there are a couple of hundreds lists on the server, in Majordomo. And I've paid very little attention to them for several years, because I now mostly live on the web, not in mailing lists. And I'm frankly not sure which lists are still active. But I still get loads of error messages, bounced deliveries, etc. from many of those lists. Which, again, I've mostly ignored. But I'll have to clean up and set up some fresh ways of dealing with these things. Does anybody know a good frontend for Majordomo? Oh, I just noticed MajorCool, so I'll check that out. Or maybe a good replacement list server, which handles bounced messages automatically, and which has a web interface?

As to the transfer of stuff on my own computer, here are some of the things I ran into:

I've been using Eudora for mail. I was considering switching to OSX Mail, because it handles spam well. But instead I settled on Eudora on the Mac, as I found a Bayesian spam plugin which seems to work. It is called Spam Sieve. It is already doing wonders. But also, just copying the e-mail mailboxes isn't all that straightforward. I got a good result by using a program called Emailchemy which is good at converting mailbox formats.

I didn't find a solution to copying my ICQ message archives from the Windows machine to the Mac. ICQ has a program called "ICQ Settings Importer", which I suppose might do it, but it crashes right away, so I'm stumped. My ICQ messages are possibly more important for me to archive than my e-mail messages, as that is where most of my to-do items would be found. I mostly deal with business customers through ICQ.

Aside from that I think I can get things done with Mozilla as browser, Interarchy for file transfer, Telnet Launcher for managing server sessions. I've got the Cisco VPN working fine, which I use for a bunch of servers I manage. The only thing I'm then really missing is a tabbed text editor. On Windows I use UltraEdit and I typically have 20 or 30 documents open at the same time. Which is no problem if they're tabs in the same window. But that many different open windows is totally useless. BBEdit on the Mac is nice I guess, but doesn't seem to do tabs. It has a zillion other features I wouldn't dream of using. Anybody knows a program text editor with tabs for multiple documents?
[ | 2003-05-31 01:44 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, May 24, 2003day link 

 Back from the Big Apple
picture Back from New York. Got some good work done with Britt Blaser on xpertweb, working through the steps of a functioning prototype. The picture there is from last night. Hanging out with Britt and Doc Searls, having a splendid time talking about geeky stuff and playing with computers. Doc mentions it here. He is in town to check out the state of publically available WiFi in New York. Which is pretty damned great. Wireless access in a number of parks, from many businesses who want to make customers feel at home, and from many individuals who've just left their networks open.

If you somehow don't know who Doc Searls is, he's co-author of Cluetrain Manifesto, senior editor of Linux Journal, and general Über-Blogger. I'm impressed by the effortlessness of his blogging approach. He just sort of wam-bam zips in and posts a few sentences, using an outliner for the content of the day, while he's on the phone and answering e-mail and having a conversation, all at the same time. I'm not sure I would be able to do it like that, but I can certainly see the point. Answer your e-mail in public, as he describes it. I personally tend to need to switch into some kind of Inspired Quest mode before it flows for me. But, hey, maybe his routine day every day IS an Inspired Quest, I don't know.
[ | 2003-05-24 23:14 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, May 22, 2003day link 

 New York
picture So, I'm a few days in New York to work with Britt Blaser on Xpertweb. Which is going well I think. One gets so much more done in a couple of days of concentrated creativity. And it is fun to see New York. I've actually only been here once before, long time ago. Such an enormously different atmosphere than L.A. I kind of like it. Lots of life on the street and in the subway. The Chrysler building is pretty at night with lights on from out of the window here on the 28th floor.

But my new Powerbook somehow didn't survive the journey and refused to turn back on again, even after a trip to the Apple store in Soho. And here I had meticulously transferred my whole life over to it. Hopefully it comes back from service with the disk contents intact.
[ | 2003-05-22 23:59 | 7 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Monday, May 19, 2003day link 

 Blogging
Hm, some days I don't seem to hit on anything I feel like blogging about. Not that I wouldn't be able to find material. But I'd much prefer to feel somewhat inspired when I pick out what to write about. And I'd prefer to believe there's some kind of useful thread that weaves through the items I pick, and the pieces I write. So, if I don't feel it, I can't honestly do it. OK, on many days I'm just picking out a few items from the news that flows by, without adding much of myself into it. But I still need to feel a minimal inspiration of some kind.

If I'm not in the mood, or when I'm out of my element, traveling for example, it also reveals that I don't necessarily write about just anything that happens to me. Some people do, but that is often boring. If I really was just writing about anything, without filtering it much, I should never have any problem. But I suppose I usually try to write from a slightly elevated place. Meaning, I'm at a broadband connection, and I've had a sufficiently leisurely time to idly browse around various news sources, or sit and philosophize about life. It might not work if I'm sick or stressed or my laptop takes forever just to download my mail at some hotel somewhere. Except for once in a while, I might even wake up in the middle of the night with something I just have to go write down to share. During some parts of my life, that would happen every day - that I'm just burning to write something. Recently it is only happening occasionally.
[ | 2003-05-19 14:28 | 4 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, May 17, 2003day link 

 Networking
picture I've gotten out of the habit of going to events. It used to be I had something almost every night to go to. But now I'm mostly just sitting here working. I didn't notice I missed the busy networking schedule. Went to a couple of things this evening, which was kind of refreshing. I need to get out more. Went to Frankie Lee Slater's 50 year birthday. Nice ritual, and met some good people, new and old faces.

And I went to Unite the Future, benefit event for Institute for Accelerating Change, held at Applied Effects' warehouse. Mostly aimed at supporting the Accelerating Change Conference coming up in September in Palo Alto, with a bunch of big futurist names. John Smart is the driving force. Anyway, this event was a blast. A wild futurist fetish techno Burning Man kind of thing. Everything from stilt walkers to belly dancers and laser lighted robot fashion. A lot of this curtesy of the Mutaytor troupe. Now, that's the kind of parties I wouldn't mind having. Not that my events are particularly dull.
[ | 2003-05-17 23:59 | 5 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Saturday, May 10, 2003day link 

 France
picture I'm still planning on moving. Mid-July. To somewhere in South Western France. Don't know exactly where, but around Toulouse somewhere.

It is a big deal to just move to another continent, of course. Its a hassle to move in the first place, but going to a different and new country with a different culture, different norms, different language - it's quite an adventure. And a family of five people, including teenagers, all with a mind of their own - that's a bit more involved than it was when we came to the U.S. from Denmark 18 years ago, just two young people and a little baby.

I have a bookshelf full of books about living in France. I'm frantically working on improving my French. More people are popping up with helpful hints and connections of various kinds. I'm sure it will all work out.
[ | 2003-05-10 01:17 | 17 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, May 8, 2003day link 

 Simple, explicit and redundant
My printer suddenly started to print, and spat out a page that contained only this:

# Keep this simple, explicit, and redundant
V8
Ou0
Og0
OL0
Oeq
OQ/tmp
I hadn't asked it to print anything. Has never happened before. Well, it is a network connected printer, with its own IP, so I suppose somebody could have initiated it from elsewhere. Except for that it has a password.

A quick search in Google showed me that this is part of the standard content of mail.cf, one of sendmail's configuration files. Could be from one of my servers, but it would still be a mystery how it ended up on my printer.

Or maybe it is just good advice from the ethers. Keep it simple, explicit, and redundant. I'll try to remember.
[ | 2003-05-08 23:59 | 10 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Sunday, May 4, 2003day link 

 Andrius
Andrius Kulikauskas came by today, visiting from Lithuania. He stopped by New York and met with Britt, and he's going with Tom Munnecke to the Uplift Academy workshop on Imagine Iraq.

We talked for a number of hours. Great to meet after knowing each other virtually for quite a while. We share many aims and activities and connections, and can probably talk philosophy for quite a while.

The other half of the reason we met is somewhat more sticky, though. Andrius is committed to doing all his work publically, which is why I even mention it here. Andrius met with Britt and me because he got involved in the Xpertweb project, and we made a contract with him for a short term paid engagement. Their meeting in New York didn't exactly go well. People approaching things from very drastically different angles, for one thing. And, well, Andrius is sort of difficult in a number of ways. I hadn't particularly realized or noticed, but he has a very firm set of norms and beliefs concerning how he's willing to work. He doesn't budge from these, and if pressed, he tends to form some strong opinions about the person who he feels is pushing him.

So, before we met, and while we were talking, I was sort of tending towards calling that whole thing off, and just sit and talk philosophy instead. But I changed my mind. I do think it will work, and that Andrius has some significant contributions to make to the project. He has indeed thought it through in a good deal of detail. The working relationships will be a little odd, but that might not matter at all if we get to where we need to go.
[ | 2003-05-04 23:59 | 1 comment | PermaLink ]  More >


Wednesday, April 30, 2003day link 

 Comments
I'm turning on public commenting to my weblog. Let's see how that works. It isn't that people had not been able to comment, but it required being a member of NCN and logging in first. Part of my reservation about public commenting is that, with the current software here, it means that one essentially can post anonymously. But, if too much junk happens, I guess I'll just have to make a more easy and quick way of registering.

Commenting works fine for a bunch of blogs I'm reading, and actually supports and expands on the subject matter. So, maybe there's nothing to be afraid of.
[ | 2003-04-30 13:12 | 10 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Thursday, April 24, 2003day link 

 Emerging Technology conference
Many people I know are at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara right now. Or rather, pretty much ALL the a-list tech bloggers are there. And I feel a bit left out, as they're talking about many things I'm into. But I just can't defend spending a couple of thousand dollars going to a conference for three days, even if I could squeeze it out of my budget. I'm sorry, I only make 100K per year. Well, last year, when my economy was looking better, I did set myself the target of going to a conference or so per month. And each time that would usually end up costing close to 1000 dollars total, including air plane tickets, hotels, etc. The typical conference I go to would, if it wasn't free, be $2-300. I just can't even wrap my mind around paying even $995 (the early bird, several months in advance price), let alone $1600, just for the conference itself. For sitting on a chair and listening to some people talk, and for the opportunity of meeting some people in the hallway. Oh, great talks and great people that I would like to hang out with, but it somehow doesn't add up. Of course my great visionary tech acquaintances mostly aren't paying for being there, because they're the speakers, or they're journalists. I suppose it is geared towards corporate folks who come to hear what these guys have to say. Anyway, other people seem to have something to say on the money thing too: here, here and here
[ | 2003-04-24 22:50 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >


Friday, April 11, 2003day link 

 Emergent Democracy Happening
Conference call and online chat today in the Joi Ito instigated group on Emergent Democracy. It is a multi-track thing where we're both talking on the phone and writing in a chat room, and organizing around some wiki pages. And in-between those events are mailing list discussions. Which I haven't gotten around to participating in much. On the table today was the potential of a Journal of Emergent Democracy for peer reviewed papers on the subject. The definition of 'Emergent Democracy' - a subgroup was put on that task. Kevin Marks' suggestion of 'vote links', web links that include a tag describing whether one recommends what one is linking at, or one recommends against it, or there is no judgement about it. Suggestions for a Social Software Alliance, to discuss possible new standards, from Pete Kaminski. And a few other subjects.
[ | 2003-04-11 23:59 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]


Thursday, April 3, 2003day link 

 Back in the U.S.S.A.
Always nice to be home and sleep in one's own bed. The journey back was pretty long. Because of the complexities of getting cheap airplane tickets we had to fly back to Toulouse from Copenhagen and spend the night there, and the jouney back from there had three jumps, because nothing better was available when I ordered it. But the Continental flight from Amsterdam to Houston (the middle leg) was almost empty, so we could each spread over a row and sleep. Nothing major went wrong. Missed a transfer flight in Paris and had to wait for the next one. My wife and I were sick at different times along the way, but got over it quickly. The taxi driver in Toulouse knocked over a mother with her kids in a stroller. They were all miraculously unscathed.

It was a short trip, but accomplished what it needed to - getting a sense of the South of France, and going to my mom's birthday in Denmark.

I always enjoy noticing the differences between people in different areas and in different groups, how people have different world views and act differently. Anyway, more on that some other time when I'm less jet lagged.
[ | 2003-04-03 20:54 | 0 comments | PermaLink ]



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