Category: Travel

I’m flying back to Boston tomorrow afternoon. When I made the reservation, United decided not to allow me to select my seats, so before going to bed this evening I decided to log in to their web site and see what the computer had chosen for me. 27E, a middle seat towards the rear. Ugh!

“I wonder if there’s any way to get to a seat selection screen,” I mused. “Perhaps via EasyCheckin?” I navigated through United’s awful maze of menus, and chose checkin. “Would you like to purchase an Economy Plus upgrade for $34?” Probably (holding my breath) – what seats are available? 14A?! A window! The last unclaimed window seat in the plane. Be still my beating heart! (Yes I know it’s an emergency exit row: that doesn’t bother me.) Selected, paid, confirmed. Oh joy!

Travelling again. I just flew from Boston to Denver, then drove over to Broomfield where Sun has a major campus. (The flight was full but uneventful; it was nice to fly United again so that I could listen in to channel 9.) As I set out from the airport, it turned very stormy and windy: I found myself driving through huge dust clouds, dodging tumbleweeds and construction marker cones, and holding my speed down below 45 so that I could stay in lane. I’m now in the Omni Interlocken hotel: as soon as I had checked in, someone offered me a glass of champagne. My kind of place… though I’m not sure why this complex was called “Interlocken”. It doesn’t look like Switzerland, and Google Maps doesn’t show any prominent lakes in the vicinity.

I’m in Silicon Valley this week for a variety of meetings. I flew in this morning, and I’ll be returning on the Friday night red-eye. Fortunately I had plenty of advance warning about this trip, so I was able to book window seats (F westbound, A eastbound) before the flight filled up – which it did. There was a large talkative guy in the middle seat next to me, and a shrill spread-sheet wizard behind me; thank goodness for my iPod with Bose noise-cancelling headphones. I dozed to Buddha Bar for the first half of the flight, then made notes for one of my Tuesday meetings on my Treo (attracting frustrated glares from the middle seat guy who was wrestling with his laptop). We got a smooth routing, and with minimal headwinds and light traffic we arrived 35 minutes ahead of schedule.

Having got in so early, I was all set to grab my bags*, jump in my rental car, and scoot down 101 to Sun’s Menlo Park campus in time to grab a bite to eat before my first meeting. I’d requested an Avis car, and I’m a member of their Rapid Rental program, so it should have been a no-brainer. Alas, no.

As I rode the Air Train to the SFO Rental Car Center, I re-read my itinerary. What’s this? Budget Rent A Car: Car pickup: San Francisco, CA. And I’m not a member of Budget’s (somewhat anemic) express program. Cursing our travel agency, as well as myself for not catching this, I got into the long line at the Budget desk to rent a car the old fashioned way. It was 45 minutes before I was on my way. So much for lunch….

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* I always check my bag – a probably vain effort to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

I was sorting through some old (paper) files this evening and came across some photographs from about 15 years ago. They were of an event that, as you can imagine, I’ve never forgotten: evacuating an airliner by going down the emergency chute. Since several people have bugged me about this over the years, I thought it was worth posting the pictures.

In brief, what happened was this. I was flying home from Paris on a wet and windy November day: CDG-BOS on a TWA L-1011. We taxied out and started the take-off run, but just below V1 we lost the #3 (starboard) engine in a sheet of flame. Maximum autobrake but no reverse thrust, of course; the runway was wet, the plane was heavy, and we barely stopped at the end of the runway. As we turned onto the taxiway, several passengers reported smoke coming from under the starboard wing. We’d blown several tires and they were smouldering. Fire in close proximity to a wingful of fuel is bad news, and we evacuated via the port slides. For some reason I was sent down first to help to catch people as they came off the slide. A fire truck (visible in the second picture) extinguished the smouldering undercarriage, and eventually we were bussed back to the terminal.

Before they could make alternative travel arrangements for us we had to retrieve our baggage and carry-on items. So we were bussed back to the plane, and were allowed to re-enter (in small groups, under the watchful eye of the airport police) to recover our things. It was after I’d got my briefcase (and two bottles of the nouveau Beaujolais), while I was waiting for the remaining passengers, that I remembered that I had a camera in my bag. Standing in the drizzle under the nose of the L-1011, I used my last bit of film to capture the scene.

The first five thumbnails are the pictures that I took. I scanned them in and used Arcsoft’s PanoramaMaker to stitch four of them into a composite. The original photos were a bit scratched up, but I hope you enjoy them.

My colleague Tim Bray posted a revealing little rant today about the first flight of the Airbus A380: “On this page there is a frightful lie, namely that the plane will seat 555 passengers with lots of room for lounges and shopping and so on. This claim is oblivious to the facts that most airlines are losing money and most travelers are highly price-sensitive; ergo, this turkey will carry 800-plus suffering souls packed in like sardines”

Now I always thought that Tim, as a Canadian, would be less prone to the typically American habit of assuming that “US = world”. If you check the current orders for the plane, you’ll see that the vast majority of the customers are non-American companies* that are not losing money. Furthermore it’s clear that many of the first A380s will be deployed on the routes between Europe and south-east Asia, which are much less price-sensitive than, say, BOS-SFO. Airlines like Singapore and Emirates aren’t going to emulate Ryanair any time soon; they’re going to compete on service and amenities. Just because the U.S. domestic airline industry is a shambles….

The bottom line: I expect that there will be plenty of 555 seater A380s with bars, shops, and casinos. Just not here, unfortunately.

* In fact the only U.S. customers for the A380 are FedEx and UPS; presumably their packages don’t mind being “packed in like sardines”….

The BBC reports that Air India is buying 50 Boeing 777 and 787 airliners. Apparently the 777s will be “a bit special”: Air India “also gained agreement from Boeing to include nine seats across in economy instead of the usual eight.” Ouch. No thanks.

No blog entries recently, because we’ve been down on Cape Cod for a few days R&R. I had planned to blog using my Treo, but every time I went online I found myself overwhelmed by trackback blogspam that needed cleaning up. (I’m writing this from the PC in the clubhouse of the time-share.)
Just got back from dinner in Harwichport; a fish restaurant overlooking the harbour. After eating, we went for a walk around the dock, and I saw my first-ever loon. (At least the first close enough to photograph.) I’ll post pics when I get home tomorrow.

As several of my colleagues have reported, we’ve just concluded the SEC (Sun Engineering Conference) down in Santa Clara. I don’t have a lot to add to what they said, except to note that it’s nice to attend as a participant rather than an organizer. (I ran a number of similar conferences over the last few years: it’s hard work.)
With SEC over, I’ve shifted hotels, from the Holiday Inn Express in Mountain View to the Hilton in San Francisco. Obviously the Hilton is a much nicer hotel – I have a spectacular view from my window, looking out over the bay towards Oakland – but it’s odd that the little $95/night Holiday Inn Express can give me high-speed Internet access for free while the Hilton wants to charge me an arm and a leg…. (And the Hilton’s connection feels a bit sluggish – but perhaps that’s because of the hundreds of Sun geeks who’ve just checked in and are getting a much-needed fix of raw TCP/IP.)
Tonight is the opening session of the CEC. If you read blogs.sun.com or PlanetSun, you’re going to see lots of blogging from this conference. I shall be here all Saturday and most of Sunday; I’m flying home on the red-eye on Sunday night. Even though I dodged an eight inch snowstorm last night back in Boston, the weatherman is promising more snow and ice for Monday.

As yet another coating of snow gets dumped on the Boston area, I have fled to warmer climes – California, as is my wont; Silicon Valley, to be more precise. I shall be down in Santa Clara for a few days, then move up to San Francisco for the CEC conference that a number of my colleagues have blogged about. I return to Boston on the Sunday night red-eye.
A few more or less random observations. First, my ticket today was on US Airways, but the flight was actually a United one – ah, the joys of code sharing. I found myself wondering if I could use United FF miles to upgrade, given that I wasn’t actually on a United ticket. Of course that would require that I talk to a human being, and these days things like checkin are handled by robots. (Kiosks plus unskilled baggage handlers.)
The flight was uneventful, but spoilt by the presence of a number of small children who had not yet reached the age at which they have any sense of personal space. I gave up trying to sleep after being elbowed in the ribs by a 6 year old girl for the seventh or eighth time. Her father didn’t help: this was clearly a custody transfer trip (it’s his ex-wife’s turn), and he wanted this to be Quality Time the whole way. His voice droned on all through the flight, reading to his daughter, helping her with math problems, playing games (educational, needless to day), reading again (this time some wretched story-book in which the Fibonacci series played a key role – almost as weird as that TV program “Numbers” last week, where the plot revolved around a failed attempt to prove Riemann’s Hypothesis). My nice Bose noise-cancelling headphones do a good job of blocking out the noise of a 757’s engines, but they were no match for this dutiful father’s insistent voice. And on top of this there was a 4 year old behind me who relieved his obvious boredom by kicking my seat every so often.
Two technical notes. First, I find that I can read both my Sun email and my ISP mail through my Treo. This is very cool; I have only to sort out access to Gmail and I’m all set. I picked up both a case and an SD Card for the Treo today. (Memo: PalmOne asks $99 for a 512MB SD card; Fry’s in Santa Clara had a 1GB SD card for $89. A gigabyte cellphone…. /me shakes head in disbelief) Secondly, this is the first trip for many years when I don’t have my Mac (iBook or PowerBook); I’m using my Acer Ferrari running Solaris 10. I miss all my blogging tools, not to mention a decent PDF toolset. (I’m not impressed by the Gnome PDF viewer. Font substitution isn’t that hard.)

Just got back from a day trip. Up at 4, head over to Logan, fly BOS-BWI on an American Eagle RJ, get rental car, drive to office park near DC for meeting. Then drive 90 miles up I-95 to Wilmington for another meeting. Drive from Wilmington to PHL, make good time, successfully switch to an earlier flight, eat, fly PHL-BOS on a US Air A320, and home by 10.

Driving up I-95 between DC and Philadelphia, I saw at least 25-30 state troopers from three different states, busy pulling people over. What’s going on? If I saw that many Massachusetts State Police cruisers in one day, it would be because I’d driven past a police funeral…